Quick movie review

Cowboys & Aliens (2011).  So I just watched this tonight and thought it was pretty good.  Not something that really breaks any new ground or has any life-changing message, just a good flick.  So if you haven't seen it yet, I'll try to avoid any spoilers.

It's a mix, or mash-up, or whatever they call it these days, of two genres:  western and sci-fi.  There are several familiar western tropes that will give it the feel of many other westerns you've seen:  an outlaw trying to go good, an evil cattle baron and his family of bullies who dominate a poverty-stricken town, a meek bartender (who, in this case, is also the town's doctor), a washed-out gold mine, etc.

It turns out that there also extra-terrestrials in the area, and they aren't the friendly kind.  They're the kind that kill anyone and destroy anything that gets in their way, pretty much like the aliens from "Independence Day."  So there's a collision of realities between the extremely advanced aliens and humans from 1873 who have a hard time wrapping their heads around what the aliens really are.

It gets a little too feel-goody toward the end for my taste, but I guess you can't have everything.  I still say it's worth spending two hours on.

As for the guns.  I never heard anyone say the specific year during the movie; the best I could guess was that it was in the late 1860s or early 1870s, not long after the Civil War.  According to the official movie information, it was set in 1873.  Almost all the handguns I saw were cap-and-ball revolvers (a wide variety and I am not skilled enough to identify them all), which would be appropriate for this time period--the Colt Peacemaker (the stereotypical western movie handgun) didn't actually begin production until 1873, so it would be unlikely that anyone in this isolated frontier town would have one.  I did notice one Schofield revolver (which used a cartridge), which began production in 1870 and therefore is not an unreasonable handgun for 1873.  Long guns appeared to be mostly Henry rifles and maybe a few early Winchesters--nothing that was out of place (or rather, out of time).  The only specifically named firearm in the movie, which I recognized as correct, was the Spencer .56.  The Spencer (in case you don't know) was a cartridge-fed repeating rifle that began production in 1860 and there should have still been plenty to go around by 1873.  So, to the best of my knowledge, all the guns were correct!  One thing I especially liked was that the Spencer was the only gun they had that was capable of dropping an alien with a single shot--as long as it was a head shot.  The Spencer fired a very heavy 350-grain bullet, which to the best of my knowledge had a muzzle energy of almost twice any of the other rifles they had (which would have all been .44s of different sorts), and vastly more energy than any of the revolvers.  So the effectiveness of the Spencer made a lot of sense, in my opinion.

Some people always have something to say about the casting, but that's not something really ever interests me very much.  I was surprised to learn that the star was the same guy who's played the latest James Bond, and I think he played a very good western movie tough guy.  There's even an obligatory Carradine (Keith).  I must say that I am not looking forward to the day when a western movie is being made and there are no Carradines left to put in it.  Oh yeah, Harrison Ford is in it.  He played the cattle baron.  I think this is the first time I've seen him play a total bastard* and he was pretty good at it.**

So, in conclusion, if you haven't seen it, check it out.

*Saying anything more about his character would be a spoiler, so that's all you get.

** Has Harrison Ford made any other westerns besides this and The Frisco Kid?

Griff the Invisible (movie, 2010)

Australian, 2010, 90 minutes, PG-13 (for violence, I guess). I watched this movie today (Netflix streaming). A strange little tale of Griff, a socially crippled young man with super strength who, with his new and unexpected girlfriend Melody, tries to develop a suit of invisibility to further aid him in his crime-fighting endeavors.  Melody, meanwhile, is convinced that with the right frame of mind, she should be able to pass through solid walls.  Griff is also tormented by a bullying co-worker and aided in trying to live a normal life by his older brother.

Eventually, Griff is able to become invisible and Melody learns to pass through solid walls.

Or do they?

I gave it 4 stars.

Movie review: Subspecies

I watched this a few days ago.  It had pretty good ratings on Netflix and since I have a penchant for vampire movies, I thought I'd give it a go.

Oh man.  The acting was terrible.  It was made in 1991 but the little imp-things were about as cutting-edge as Jason and the Argonauts.  I realize that the Argonauts' special effects were cutting-edge for 1963, but 27 years later you'd of thought they could have improved slightly.

I had some hopes it would be a pretty good movie, because it was filmed on location in Romania and was produced by a bunch of guys whose last names all ended in "-escu."  The "bad" vampire looked good--I mean, bad, of course--his horrific appearance gave me hope right at the beginning, but when he ripped off his own fingertips and strewed them around so they could transform into those imp-things, I lost hope.  I fell asleep toward the end but I'm pretty sure the good vampire killed the bad vampire.  In any case, by that time I just didn't care.

Also the love interest was kind of creepy because it looked like the girl and the guy (who was the "good" vampire, of course) were brother and sister.  There were some nekkid br34sts, but frankly they weren't impressive enough to make up for the movie.

And now there's, what, five of these movies?  Good grief.  I would recommend dubbing them all onto an 8-hour videocassette and turning it on just as you go to bed.  That way if you're lucky it will all be over with by the time you wake up in the morning.

The Warrior's Way

Watched this movie yesterday.  I enjoyed it a lot and gave it 5 stars on Netflix.

It's about a 19th-century assassin (ninja) named Yang who has sworn to kill all members of an enemy family, which he does until he comes to the last survivor:  a baby girl.  He suddenly changes heart and refuses to kill her, instead taking custody of her and caring for her.  This makes him a renegade and enemy of his own clan.  He tries to escape them by leaving the Orient and coming to the American West.

He goes to the small, crumbling town of Lode, where a friend of his had previously emigrated to.  His friend has since died, so he takes over his friend's business of clothes washing.  The town is almost dead, in the middle of the desert and isolated much like the town of Lago in High Plains Drifter.  Lode is home to a dilapidated amusement park and is populated mostly by carnies and sideshow freaks.  And, like Lago, it is periodically visited by a gang of murderous villains who terrorize the townsfolk.

Also among the townsfolk is a young woman named Lynne whose entire family was murdered by the gang about 10 years previous, and in fact Lynne herself had appeared to be mortally wounded at the time but miraculously recovered and now wants to personally kill the gang's leader, known as "the Colonel," to get her revenge.  Lynne had been given some rudimentary sword training by Yang's old friend and Yang continues some further sword training with her after hearing her story.

Of course the Colonel's gang eventually reappears, leading to a climactic showdown.  However, a large squad of ninjas who have been searching for Yang and the baby girl also appears.  The climactic battle scene is quite the showdown.

Part Kung Fu (the TV series), part True Grit, part High Plains Drifter.  All live-action but combat was definitely imitating anime.  The far backgrounds (horizon, sky) appear to be CGI, giving it a somewhat fantastic feel.  Humor, violence, mercy, revenge, love, heartbreak...it's all in there.

Documentaries

First, I should say that I watched the entirety of Wyrd Sisters and enjoyed it very much.  The three witches are some of my favorite Discworld characters, especially the interactions of Granny Weatherwax and Magrat.  I had said before that the only actor I recognized was Christopher Lee, who played Death.  However, I then also noticed Annette Crosbie, who I know best as Margret Meldrew from One Foot in the Grave, who performed the voice of Granny Weatherwax.  A pleasant diversion, if you ever get a chance to watch it.

On the subject of documentaries, I watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre:  A Family Portrait.  It was made in 1988, so it's already somewhat old, and it consists entirely of interviews with the people who played the Chainsaw family, but not with any of the actors who played the victims.  It was still interesting, as they gave many details regarding the making of the movie, and I think the most interesting (and entertaining) interviewee was Edwin Neal, who played "the hitchhiker."  Also tacked onto the end was some very brief commentary by Forry (as in Forrest J.) Ackerman, who had something to do with it.  He wrote the original screenplay?  Anyway he's not officially credited on the movie itself, as far as I can tell.  Filming the movie was a very grueling experience, and some of them didn't finish it without injuries.  Neal was in two scenes which I thought should have been included but which were cut from the movie and which they showed brief clips of.  One funny thing I learned was that Tobe Hooper was trying to film it so that it would also look good on television, and Neal laughed about this because he knew it could never be shown on TV.  So if you're interested at all in this seminal horror flick, it should be interesting to you.  It runs 64 minutes.

The second documentary I watched was H.H. Holmes:  America's First Serial Killer, from 2004.  I thought it was odd that I had never heard of him because of the books I've read on serial killers in general, but there you go.  Holmes' real name was Herman Mudgett, and his story is amazing, because of what he got away with.  He was an actual physician who started out just being one of the world's best ever con men.  He built a "castle" in Chicago near the site of the 1893 World's Fair, and would offer lodging in his "castle" to tourists who were in town to attend the fair.  Since he focused so heavily on tourists, no one even knew they had gone missing.  He had numerous secret rooms and passages in his "castle," which was a combination of his own home, some offices and some alleged "hotel rooms" available for rent.  He built a secret system of gas pipes which he could control from his master room to asphyxiate people who rented rooms from him.  In the basement he had a veritable torture chamber.  He was able to afford building this huge place mostly by defrauding his contractors and suppliers, and rarely paid anyone for anything--and somehow got away with it.  And for a real kicker:  after he killed someone he would clean and mount the skeleton and sell it to medical schools and hospitals.  No one knows how many people he killed because of his method of choosing mostly tourists, but he was eventually caught and hanged.  Watch the show if you want to find out how, because I shouldn't give away everything.  It's a fascinating story of someone who was operating during the same time frame as Jack the Ripper, killed many times more people than the Ripper did, but today is almost unknown.  This one also runs 64 minutes.

Oh, and I almost forgot.  I also watched Dracula:  The Vampire and the Voivode.  From 2008, running time 84 minutes.  It starts out with a biography of Bram Stoker, then has a lot of information about Vlad Tepes, then spends a lot of time showing how Tepes was not the inspiration for Stoker's Dracula except for the name.  It also tells about the discrepancies between Stoker's Dracula and the real Transylvania and finishes up with the modern day legacy of Dracula.  I already knew most of this stuff, but one thing that I was amused to learn was the Dracula was banned as "decadent Western literature" in communist Romania but was one of the first western books published after the death of Ceaușescu.  These days, modern Romania makes big tourist bucks because of that book.  Not a bad documentary, but it would probably be more interesting to someone who hadn't already spent a lot of time reading about this stuff.

Interesting article

6 Things the Film Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know About at Film School Rejects.

Dracula: Dead and Loving It

This morning I watched Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). I'm sure this isn't something new to most, and in fact I think I saw it myself once a long time ago, but I didn't remember anything about it except the part where Harker says, "But Lucy...I'm British!"

Was this the only movie that Mel Brooks and Leslie Nielsen made together? It's the only one I know of. Just wondering.

It didn't do well as far as making money goes, but I really enjoyed it. 4 stars.

Of course this is a send-up of classic vampire movies regarding Count Dracula himself. That skinny little guy who played Renfield was also great. I've seen him numerous times and I think this was his best performance ever.

This movie had sort of a kitchen sink approach to vampire characteristics.*

• Flight in human form: yes, or at least sort of a controlled glide.
• Shape change: yes, bat only, but keeps (miniaturized) human head. Can fly in bat form.
• Appearance: attractive/normal. Looks strange with high Oldman-style hairdo but then reveals that the apparent hairdo is actually a hat.
• Mind control: yes, limited. Has trouble separately controlling two people in the same room.
• Fangs: retractable.
• Fears/repelled by: garlic, cross.
• Killed by: stake (Lucy), sunlight (Dracula).
• Increased strength.
• Enters house without being invited.
• Sleeps in a coffin.
• Creates new vampire by killing (drinking blood to the death), but not all kills result in new vampire.

A halfway-decent knowledge of previous vampire movies help improve the humor; some jokes are related to more general vampire lore. Also, I was surprised by a brief appearance at the beginning by Avery Schreiber, who I best remember as Mister Evil from The Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine.

I also started re-watching a movie that I watched a few weeks ago and didn't mention in much detail so I could make notes on it. I'll get to that one again soon.

*I kept jotting down notes in a little notebook. My wife says, "What are you doing?" I answer, "Taking notes." Wife: "..." I guess that's just another odd little quirk of mine she's gotten used to.

A badfilm documentary

Today I watched The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made. It suffered from its compactness; running only 1 hour, they could only do about a minute per movie, and for some that just wasn't enough. For others, it was far too much. I think it would have benefited from running 2 hours or maybe even 3, in 1-hour episodes like a mini-series.

If you're a fan of badfilms, then it might be good just to check on some movies that you didn't know about. I'd recommend keeping a list and writing the titles down as you go. There are a few of those movies that I'd like to see. I might have to watch it again, in fact, just so I can actually make this list. (Future blog post!)

I must confess that it couldn't entirely hold my interest; I dozed off at about #15 and didn't wake up until #1.

In other news, Netflix now has available for streaming ST:TNG, ST:Voyager and ST:Enterprise. I'm pretty much burned out on ST:TNG by now. I sometimes turn it on at night when they're showing it on Syfy so I can have something familiar on while I go to sleep. I've seen all the Voyagers, I think, when it was extant but I am going to enjoy watching it again. I never saw all the Enterprise shows. I know it was hated by lots of fans but I never had any big problems with it, except possibly for the deus ex machina plots when the people from the distant future kept popping in to fix things. Actually, the time-travel plots from Voyager also annoyed me--it seems to me to be a lame excuse to fix a plot line gone awry. But, you know, Seven of Nine (and T'Pol).

Anyway, so far DS9 is not available for streaming, although it is available on DVD.

The Vampire's Ghost (1945)

For a while now I've been kind of paying attention to vampire variations in popular culture. Most vamps these days have pretty much gone oatmeal. I mean, they're all just about the same and there's really nothing new (except for the sparkling).

Today I watched a movie from 1945 called The Vampire's Ghost. It had some interesting quirks that you don't usually see nowadays. It didn't have anyone who I had ever heard of starring in it. However, I do want to show you a picture of the guy who played the vampire. By the way, I don't know where "the vampire's ghost" came from. He was just a normal vampire. Anyway, here he is:

John Abbott. He does look kinda like he could be a vampire, doesn't he? Especially when he does his mind-control stuff and his eyes bulge out. Freaky.

So...vampire characteristics:

• No reflection (can use mind power to shatter mirrors)
• No fangs
• Enjoys cigars
• Can go outside in daylight but has to wear sunglasses
• Was created by a curse (NOT by being bitten)
• Lead bullets go right through him as if he isn't there
• Severely injured by a spear point that had been dipped in molten silver*
• Can mind-control people into not squealing on him
• Appeared to fear the cross
• Extended lifespan (400 years)
• To create new vampire, had to use a special ritual involving an ancient forbidden temple, a symbol traced on his victim's forehead with earth from his original grave, and biting victim
• Was healed by lying with his head on a small box containing earth from his original grave and being exposed to moonlight (not clear if both moonlight and box are essential, but it appeared so)
• Killed by burning; also a large stone statue fell on him while he was burning

Not a bad movie, but at 55 minutes it seemed a little short and I think it could actually have used a little more thriller-related padding.

I liked it. 3 stars.

* Don't ask me how the African natives got a pot of molten silver to dip their spear points in. I never figured that one out.

Weekend update

Well, I've been sick. Got one of those bad head colds that started in the throat and worked its way up. I worked through it. I was supposed to be at a family reunion this weekend but decided yesterday that it was best if I stay home, recover, and more importantly, not make anyone else sick. So wife & kids are at the reunion, I'm at home taking cold medicine, drinking lots of fluids and trying to get well.

The Roku has come in quite handy, since I've been spending most of my time awake watching stuff on it, but only one movie so far. Yesterday afternoon I finally got around to watching Interview with a Vampire.

First of all, I'll just say that everything I've seen Christian Slater in (and that ain't much) has made me want to punch him. Except for The Name of the Rose. He just annoys me for some reason that I can't pin down, just like Helen Hunt.

I actually bought this book a long time ago, a year or two after it was released, but I never bothered getting around to reading it. I enjoyed the movie. It kept me occupied and I didn't ever check to see how much time was left, so that puts it well above a lot of other junk I've seen. However, I thought the ending was just a little trite. I'm getting tired of villains--vampires or otherwise--who can't be permanently killed. It was too Friday the 13th.

I liked Brad Pitt's character. I guess Antonio Banderas' character would have been okay too, if not for another of my personal biases. It's not that he annoys me. It's just every time I see him I start cracking up, thinking of that...how you say...SNL skit (I think it was SNL) where he keeps saying, "I, Antonio Banderas" all the time. I tried to find it on YouTube but can't. So if you've ever seen it, you probably know what I mean.

Xombie: Dead On Arrival

Another movie I watched yesterday. A strange little movie running 50 minutes and divided into ten 5-minute chapters. So looked it up and originally it was a Flash cartoon on the web. Xombie: DOA is the second of a trilogy (so far) of Xombie stories.

Nice little tale. The animation is not exactly artistic but the backgrounds are good at establishing atmosphere and mood. In fact the background animation reminded me a lot of how Samurai Jack looks.

The story is a post-zombie apocalypse tale about a little girl named Zoe who washes ashore on a beach (according to the website, near the ruins of Washington D.C. but I couldn't tell that from the movie). She can't remember anything but her name. She hears music playing in the distance and follows the sound until she reaches a cemetery where she is beset upon by a horde of zombies. She is rescued by a "good" zombie, or xombie called Dirge who uses a shovel like a sword. He also uses a long chain for a weapon sometimes. Dirge was the one listening to the music, in his home (which is a small tomb or mausoleum?). He decides to take her to the nearest settlement of living humans, which is the only place she can be relatively safe. Dirge is accompanied by a zombie (or xombie) dog named Cerberus who was once a police dog and still retains his training and develops an affection for Zoe. They run into another xombie named Nephthys who was a museum exhibit: an Egyptian mummy who was mummified with her organs still intact (leading her to assume in her previous life she was not Egyptian royalty, but probably a servant), and she helps them on their journey to the human city. She tells Dirge that they are both what are called "variants," that is, zombies whose brains did not completely die before the zombie virus reanimated their bodies. This is why they retain their humanity to some extent and are not simply mindless zombies like that vast majority of undead. She is accompanied by a zombie velociraptor (how's that for an unstoppable monster?) named Chimaera, which she can't completely control, and she is armed with a scythe.

I liked it. The official website link is below. Also, there's a Dirge action figure that is not available yet but can be pre-ordered. According to the website, Dreamworks is interested in turning the story into a real movie, which will be pretty cool in my opinion.

Xombie Online

In Search of Lovecraft (2008)

Spoilers appear below. If it's possible to spoil a movie like this.

So I watched this movie today. Apparently, at first, they intended it to be in that style where they're filming a documentary, a lot like REC/Quarantine or The Blair Witch Project. It's the story of a rookie reporter named Rebecca Marsh (Marsh, that is), her camera man Mike, and their intern, a high school girl named Amber. Rebecca fills the role as the driven, career-obsessed reporter. Mike is a camera man who compulsively films everything--everything, including Rebecca waking up in her apartment--I mean, seriously, after 30 minutes I would not have been surprised if he had walked in on her while she was sitting on the toilet. Also Mike served in combat in Iraq and is apparently suffering from PTSD or something. Anyway, he's haunted. Not to belittle anyone who actually has PTSD--not in any way. It's just that our "Mike" was such a terrible actor that I just couldn't believe him. He looked more like some kind of poseur who only acted (cough) "haunted" to pick up chicks.

Amber was the comic relief, the young girl who only wanted to have fun and had a sweet, bubbly personality. This was so you would feel real bad when she was the first one to be carried away to her screaming doom.

So Rebecca is assigned what she considers a fluff piece for Halloween, and she goes to this big Halloween thing--I don't know, it was outside and she remarked to her editor-in-chief that about 300,000 people were there. Anyway it was this big Halloween thing and she was asking the people questions about their costumes, what they liked about the season and so forth, and someone mentioned H.P. Lovecraft. So she asked some other people there about Lovecraft and got a variety of answers, only a few of which included actual usable information.

She complains to her boss that she should be doing something more valid, but he tells her that before she can do that, she has to be able to make a minor story such as this "great." So she starts doing further investigation on Lovecraft and runs into a professor who tells her that there are some people who think it's all real. He points her to an "expert on the occult" named Dr. D'Souza who clues her into activity that points to an actual existence of an actual cult.

Somewhere along in here Rebecca and Mike discover the records of a pair of anthropologists (a man and a woman) from the 1930s who claimed to have uncovered cult activity, and they somehow manage to find some old film footage that these two shot during their investigations. The film footage of course shows that it's all real. Later on some of this footage somehow shows the woman anthropologist has become a devotee of Nyarlathotep and she kills her partner.

After about 45 minutes they abandoned their documentary style, apparently having run out of excuses for Mike to constantly keep his camera rolling, and it became a normal movie. Well, not normal...it's still pretty stupid but I mean normal movie style.

Dr. D'Souza warns them that their lives are in danger if they keep investigating, but Rebecca is so obsessed with her big story and inspired by the old film footage she found that she ignores him. So she, Mike and Amber go out to meet Dr. D'Souza at some old house that he has set aside for fighting unspeakable horrors from beyond mortal ken, but they get lost. While they're sitting in their car checking a map, they're attacked by something with big wings that makes a big wing flapping sound.

At this point there is what I consider the funniest part of the movie. The thing with big wings is shaking their car around, but their effects for it are transparently lame. They are obviously just wobbling themselves back and forth to attempt to create the illusion of their car rocking. It becomes even more obvious when the camera switches angles to show Mike and Amber sitting perfectly still but Rebecca continuing to rock back and forth like mad.

So the thing with big wings smashed through the back windshield and seizes Amber. She disappears into the sky and that's the end of her.

Later Mike and Rebecca are talking to Dr. D'Souza in a public place during daylight (the only way they can be safe, for now) and some spastic weirdo homeless guy comes up and shoves a bloody package into Rebecca's hand. It turns out that it's Amber's ear. They know it's hers because her ear ring is still attached to it. I screamed right out loud. Really, I did.

Mike and Rebecca do eventually find the house where Dr. D'Souza is. It had previously belonged to some cult members and they had allegedly done some vile, unspeakable things there. Also, Dr. D'Souza had enlisted the aid of a witch (good, apparently) named Keja to help them fight the cultists and their monsters or whatever.

By the way, the woman who played Keja is named Rachael Robbins and I thought she was unusually good-looking for a movie of this caliber. Rebecca (Renee Sweet) is also attractive, but in a more normal girl-in-the-next-cubicle kind of way. Turns out Robbins has appeared in Playboy.

Well, Keja tries to do a Tarot card reading of Rebecca to determine her past lives, but all the cards suddenly start turning black as she flips them over, which was one of the things I thought was actually kind of cool about this movie. But then she was using a Rider-Waite deck, which is so passé.

Somewhere around in here we learn that Mike is carrying a gun--a semi-auto pistol of some sort, which he plans on using to "banish the evil." D'Souza tells him it won't do him any good, but he won't listen. Apparently all one has to do to banish the demons or whatever is to trace a pentagram (Elder Sign) in the air with one's finger.

Also they're looking for a rock of some sort, which is supposed to be key in summoning Nyarlathotep's avatar The Haunter of the Dark, so I guess they're talking about the shining trapezohedron. If they can get the rock, they can stop Nyarlathotep's coming, I think.

Another thing that would have made me say "you can't do that" if anyone else had been around to hear me, was that the old house they were in didn't have any electricity, but they still managed to watch more of the old film footage because Mike was somehow able to run a 110-volt AC projector from his 12-volt DC car battery. Yes, I know it's possible if you have a transverter, but there was no indication of that. Mike just said, "I was able to wire it up to the car battery." But I guess in a world where Nyarlathotep is actually real, you can run projectors from car batteries.

Then suddenly Keja, or what appears to be Keja, comes to D'Souza dressed only in her bra and panties (the high point of the movie) and seems to attempt a seduction. He realizes something isn't right, traces a star in the air with his finger, and she (or it) vanishes.

They go to sleep and there's this acid-trip montage. When they wake up, D'Souza is sitting dead in his easy chair for some reason. Then a "dimensional hound" comes out of the door (not through the door, but out of the actual door itself) and tries to eat them, but Keja traces a pentagram in the air with her finger and says something, I think it must have been ancient Sumerian for "bad dog!" and it disappears. Keja tells them that dimensional hounds exist in another plane of existence (or something like that) and can enter our dimension only through spaces that are not curved (i.e., flat). This completely ruined the movie for me. Everyone knows that a Hound of Tindalos can enter our dimension only through corners, not flat walls or doors. However, this bit of special effects was really cool in my opinion and probably constituted 80% of their budget all on its own.

Then a zombie D'Souza appears and Mike puts him down with a double-tap. Then Mike goes away to sulk, leaving Rebecca and Keja alone for some l*sb**n witch sex.

Just kidding. That didn't happen, although I would not have been particularly surprised if it had. Rebecca and Keja talk about Lovecraft mythos stuff for a while, while Mike goes into another room to sulk and brood. Rebecca eventually goes after him only to see him kill himself with a shot to the head.

So some indeterminate time passes and Keja starts making a magic circle to protect her and Rebecca from the monsters. She does some kind of occult tai-chi or possibly some kind of interpretive dance and the circle is complete. Then zombie D'Souza (who apparently only went to sleep for a few hours when he got shot before) and zombie Amber come for them, but Keja makes a star in the air with her finger and they disappear. Then some old boyfriend or something of Rebecca's appears and tries to talk her out of the circle. I'm not sure, but I think this was actually supposed to be Nyarlathotep himself. Keja makes him go away by drawing a star in the air with her finger.

Let's see...I think I'm getting out of sequence here but it doesn't really matter. In fact, I think that may give you a better feel for what it was like to actually watch the movie. Zombie Mike also comes for them while they're in their circle, so Keja tells Rebecca to "take this sword..." Wait. Where did a sword come from? I can only assume Keja had it concealed in her cleavage, but that's only a guess. She tells Rebecca to use it to banish the monsters by--in case you haven't figured it out already--tracing a pentagram in the air with it and saying some secret word which she only whispers in Rebecca's ear so we can't hear it. We never hear it. Rebecca never uses it. She cuts off zombie Mike's forearm with the sword, he collapses just outside the circle, and she realizes some blueprints are still in his back pocket. Rebecca retrieves the blueprints but unfortunately breaks the circle in doing so. A tentacle comes out of the darkness and grabs Keja, dragging her screaming away to her doom. The tentacle was another bit of special effects that probably took up the other 20% of their budget.

Rebecca looks at the blueprints and suddenly somehow realizes where the rock is. Remember the rock? So she runs away to get it. She finds it quite quickly, even though she had to travel all the way back to the city and stuff. This really bright light shines in her face and the scene ends.

Rebecca wakes up in an asylum, wearing a straitjacket with one eye bandaged. Two orderlies are standing over her talking about what a shame it is for such a good-looking young woman to have gone totally nuts like this, and that she had tried to claw her own eyes out. Then one mentions that she is also pregnant. Rebecca, although gagged, attempts to scream, and that's the end.

I probably missed some details, but I think that pretty much covers it. Terrible movie. Not really bad enough to be good except in certain parts. Horrible acting, jarring discontinuities, and occasional rote regurgitation of random Lovecraftian phrases.

You can stream this movie from Netflix or get it from Amazon, although I don't know why you'd want to. It took me two days to watch the whole thing, and after 30 minutes I kept checking to see how much time was left before I would find the sweet peace of oblivion. If you watch it, roll percentile dice against INTx5 and permanently lose 1d4 INT if you fail. Fortunately, I succeeded. I think.

A couple more movies

I forgot to mention these because I didn't like them so much and I was still kind of buzzing from seeing the two that I really liked.

Well, Netflix does have some badfilms, for example Redneck Zombies which is one of my favorites, and it looks like they also have just about everything Troma ever did. By the way, I watched the original The Toxic Avenger a few weeks ago, the first time I've seen it since it was released to video in the 80s. It's still just as great and stupid as ever (I forgot to rate it; I think I'll give it 4 stars). One of the movies I recently tried to watch was called Zombiethon. Here's the storyline from imdb: "A compilation of trailers and previews from films having to do with zombies."

I don't know why I ever bothered to add this one my instant queue. I watched about 5 minutes of it and gave up. Gave it 1 star ("Hated it!") So I guess if you want a random collection of scenes of zombie gore, this is for you. If you like to watch something with a bit of a plot, or at least some slight indication of coherence, then it's not for you.

The other one was The Lost Boys: The Tribe. This was a 2008 sequel to the original. Corey Feldman reprises his role as Edgar Frog, who now lives in a tiny trailer and shapes surf boards for a living. Of course, he's still a vampire hunter. The other Corey (Haim), turns up only in a stinger added on to the end after the first bit of credits roll, and I'll not say more about that in case you want to see it sometime. So anyway, this older-teenage guy and his younger-teenage sister move to town to live in an old house on their aunt's place because their parents have both died. And...it's about the same as the first movie. The girl gets turned into one of those half-vampires like the guy did in the original and her brother teams up with Edgar to save her. Not nearly as good as the original, in my opinion. I gave it a "meh" rating of 3 stars, mostly for nostalgia's sake. I haven't yet watched the the next sequel, The Lost Boys: The Thirst of 2010, but it's in my queue. I don't expect a whole lot from it, either.

P.S. Netflix now has another favorite badfilm: Shriek of the Mutilated. I checked on this one last year and they didn't have it yet at that time. They also now have The Legend of Bigfoot, which I remember seeing in the theater when I was a kid. Sweet.

A couple of movies

I had today scheduled off so I could rest & recuperate from the weekend, and I had planned on just sitting around watching movies all day--the kind of movies I probably wouldn't watch with the kids around.

Well, I did do that, but with Netflix going at full blast I also caught up on a bunch of TV shows that I like but don't want to sit through commercials. Spoilers might possibly follow but I'll try not to give away too much.

So one of them was Wristcutters, an indie film made for only(!) a million dollars, released 2006. Wikipedia calls it a "comedy-fantasy-romance." It's about this guy named Zia who kills himself by slitting his wrists because his girlfriend had just dumped him...by the way, a good indicator of the kind of comedy in this movie is, before Zia kills himself he completely cleans up his messy apartment until it's sparkling. Then as he is lying on the floor bleeding to death, the last thing he sees is a big dust bunny he missed. So anyway, Zia goes to a sort of Limbo that is neither Heaven nor Hell which is reserved for people who have committed suicide. There he meets up with a Russian emigré named Eugene: a really bad rock musician who killed himself by electrocuting himself with his own guitar; and a girl named Mikal who died accidentally from an overdose. Mikal is convinced that she shouldn't be there because her death was accidental. Zia runs into someone he knew from before he died who tells him that his ex-girlfriend also committed suicide about a month after he did. So he goes on a road trip trying to find her, accompanied by Mikal, who is trying to find the "people in charge" so she can go back to her real life, and Eugene.

City scenes were filmed around L.A., but most of the scenes were shot in the bleak wilderness areas of (apparently) the American southwest. Life in their new world is about the same as it was in the living world, but bleaker. There are no stars, and no one ever smiles. Eventually Zia finds his ex but realizes that she is kind of a whackjob and he's no longer interested in her, having fallen in love with Mikal.

It had a cool soundtrack, with one song by Tom Waits who also played another of the main characters. I did enjoy the humor and laughed out loud a couple of times (like at the dust bunny). I guess that's all I should say about it except: happy ending. Since Netflix keeps track of your viewing and rating history to provide recommendations, I decided to start rating movies. I gave this one 4 stars. Netflix average rating: 3.7.

The other movie was Dead Snow, from 2009. I heard about this one a long time ago and in fact had added it to my queue when I first subscribed to Netflix, but kept bumping it down the list to keep getting more family-friendly DVDs. When I finally got high-speed internet I saw that it was available for streaming.

Dead Snow is a Norwegian comedy-horror movie about Nazi zombies. These are not American-style zombies, which are assumed to be caused by some kind of pathogen and which is actually a highly contagious disease, but instead are zombies created by some kind of mostly unexplained evil satanic Nazi magic. The explanation, of sorts, is given by a mysterious stranger that reminded me of that scene from Jaws--you know the one. One of the big things I really liked about this movie was that, instead of hiding in a house and boarding up the windows until they're all dead, well...

Actually when they first discovered something monstrous was outside killing their friends, they did board up the house. But as soon as they discovered it was Nazi zombies, they immediately loaded up with everything they could find to use as weapons and began killing the sh*t out of them. The Norwegians really hate Nazis. The fact that these were Nazi zombies didn't really mean much to them.

So, with apologies to Joe Bob Briggs, there was shotgun fu, chainsaw fu. snowmobile fu, tree limb fu, sledge hammer fu, hatchet and axe fu, fire fu, (snowmobile-mounted) machine gun fu and even avalanche fu. One of the characters was a movie nerd, and kept quoting various American movies, which was funny because the whole movie was in Norwegian with subtitles and this guy would suddenly spout off something from some American movie, like "yippie-ki-yay motherf*ckers" and "Fortune and glory, kid...fortune and glory." Also one guy got a bad wound on his throat, so he sewed himself up with a fish hook and some monofilament (reminded me of that scene in Roadhouse) and then finished the job by wrapping duct tape around his throat to hold himself together. Another funny scene had another guy cursing Nokia (which is a Finnish company) for his cell phone's battery going dead at a critical moment.

I had originally given this one 4 stars, but in writing this up and still laughing about it, I changed it to 5 stars. A great zombie movie that I would consider non-traditional compared to most American zombie flicks. Apparently most Netflixers don't get this kind of humor and their average rating is only 3.4.

Well, no happy ending in this one, but I'm not sure you can have a happy ending in any zombie movie. I guess Zombieland comes closest to that, which by the way I watched some time ago and also enjoyed.

Got a Roku today

Roku, in case you've never heard of the device. Spent a while going through it and figuring out what I can watch for free or minimal cost. Already have a Netflix account, so I set that up so now I can watch some of the not-so-safe-for-kids stuff on my TV instead of the big TV in the living room where the Wii is. When I upgraded out internet to high speed, the first thing I did was set up the Wii to stream from Netflix. Man, what a ridiculous luxury that is.

Anyhow, I haven't actually watched anything on it yet, but I probably will later tonight. I'm still trying to talk my wife into dumping DishNetwork. Especially since one whole year of Amazon Prime costs only slightly more than one month of our DishNetwork bill.

My daughter is spending the night at a friend's and my wife is at work, but my son and I streamed Toy Story 3 from Netflix tonight. I thought it was quite good.

Weird movie

I just watched Paul McCartney Really Is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison. When I see a movie like this, I always wonder: what did this guy hope to accomplish with this movie? He couldn't have made any money on it. He couldn't possibly have believed all that stuff. I kept expecting it to be satire, but it never got funny.

I guess if you want a 97-minute exhaustive account of the whole "Paul is Dead" conspiracy theory, this is your movie. Otherwise, just watch The Rutles, which actually is funny and entertaining.

New benchmark for determing if you are "emotionally dead inside"

I was checking out Crackle.com yesterday (been thinking about buying one of them Roku boxes and cancelling satellite TV--seriously) and this was one of the flash movie ads that slid across the top of the page.

click to enlarge

Yes, folks, if you fail to be emotionally affected by this (ahem) "flick," you are emotionally dead inside. I now fear to watch it, lest I learn something terrible about myself.

Red Dawn remake changes enemy from China to North Korea

No kidding. At LA Times:

When MGM decided a few years ago to remake "Red Dawn," a 1984 Cold War drama about a bunch of American farm kids repelling a Soviet invasion, the studio needed new villains, since the U.S.S.R. had collapsed in 1991. The producers substituted Chinese aggressors for the Soviets and filmed the movie in Michigan in 2009.

But potential distributors are nervous about becoming associated with the finished film, concerned that doing so would harm their ability to do business with the rising Asian superpower, one of the fastest-growing and potentially most lucrative markets for American movies, not to mention other U.S. products.

As a result, the filmmakers now are digitally erasing Chinese flags and military symbols from "Red Dawn," substituting dialogue and altering the film to depict much of the invading force as being from North Korea, an isolated country where American media companies have no dollars at stake.

Chinese invaders would have added some ("some") level of realism to the movie. But North Korea? Gimme a break.

I guess I should also point out that in the original movie the kids didn't repel any invaders. They were only moderately successful guerilla fighters in the opening weeks of World War 3.

Screen grabs from Viva Max!

I'm not going to try and write a review of this movie or anything, but here are a few screen caps. You can't get this on DVD, but I recommend watching it if you can catch it on a cable movie channel sometime. I might post more pix in the future if I get around to it.

A late-60s vintage Alamo brochure. I used to have one of these as a souvenir when I was a kid.

Downtown San Antonio, across the street from the Alamo. Probably about the same place that they have all those tourista places now.

Inside the "Alamo." This was a stage set, however. Filming was not allowed inside those hallowed grounds. Inside shots like this were (to my knowledge) filmed on stage sets in Italy.

Not sure exactly how they did this one. Inside the grounds scenes were filmed at the Alamo Village near Bracketville. The buildings in the background were dubbed in with filming tricks, I guess.

And...the Alamo itself, with lots of tourists.

A Boy Scout troop that winds their way around the cenotaph.

I'll post more of these soon, I think. There are lots of other interesting shots.

My 2¢ movie review: Death Sentence

Death Sentence: This is the stupidest vigilante movie I have ever seen. It's so bad, I'm not going to waste any more of my time telling you why. Just take my word for it.