2021: Death Bat's Top 5 in Movies

 This was also a weird year for movies. For some regions such as the state in which I live (New Mexico), we didn't even have an opportunity to start going to theaters again until around June, as I recall. For much of this year theater-going actually felt safe enough, as hardly anyone was actually going to the movies. If you wanted to watch new films at home, many streaming platforms did simultaneous releases; HBO Max has been a very good deal, for example.

So what movies earned a top five place on my list? This was a tough year, because you not only had to watch films that had often been delayed a lot, this year saw a slew of late arrivals in the theaters that were heavily immersed in pig-slop-wallowing levels of nostalgia that were at times almost embarrassing.  Not a good year (for the most part) for creative effort in blockbusters! Still, I can think of five movies I quite enjoyed:

#5 Free Guy

Ryan Reynolds has an affable comedic charm about him that translates really well into certain films. Free Guy was the surprise movie of this year, a film I figured would be a relatively benign, no-punches-pulled comedy with lots of sappy moments. I wasn't entirely wrong....but wrapped up in a story of a non-player-character trapped in a persistent online video game world who attains sentience is a pretty good movie about what it means to be an AI, what a prospective realistic future online world might look like (with some caveats for the story), and a film that is surprisingly relevant and entertaining. Taika Waititi as the tech mogul bad guy was hysterical, and Free Guy quickly made my list of one of the most enjoyable and generally feel-good movies I had seen this year....and this is from a guy who normally shuns "feel-good" films like the plague!

#4 Spider-Man No Way Home

Okay so this one is pretty egregious on not only the nostalgia factor but also the "let's mix up our universe of franchise IP content into a big pot and see what comes out" approaches to film. Unlike many other movies that fell into the category of appealing to nostalgia and IP-smelting pots of content this third Tom Holland entry did a decent job of leaning hard into the tropes so common in comic book lore, and ended up making not only a decent third movie for the Holland Spider-Man, but gave some closure to the two prior Sony Spider-Man film series as well. It would have been very easy for this to have gone bad, quickly, but an exceptional cast and approach made it fresh and interesting, which is impressive. Ultimately, this movie, along with The Suicide Squad earlier in the year, both boldly drew their plots and focus from the weirder spectrum of comic book stories and pulled it off big time. 

#3 Censor

I'll admit, I am a total sucker for indie horror, and Censor is an amazing movie. Starring Niamh Algar as Enid Banes, who works for the British film industry censorship dept. during the mid eighties, a time when this was actually a thing and the British government was concerned about the enormous number of exploitation flicks and horror movies with the substantial gore that rose in the late sixties and seventies. Enid's job is to clinically analyze the films and indicate what must be cut to allow a British release, when she sees a video which reminds her suspiciously of the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of her sister in her youth. Beyond that, I will say no more, but this was a great movie. 

#2 The Suicide Squad

I don't know how James Gunn's take on DC's Suicide Squad ever got greenlit the way it did, or how it avoided studio meddling, but it's like watching an actual Suicide Squad comic book brought to disturbing life. It manages to hold to the story beats of a blockbuster summer film while also completely violating the core conceits of blockbusters with a disturbingly entertaining yet unlikeable cast of vile misfits, deliberately sets up audience expectations for sympathetic characters only to kill them off the second they get a payoff to their story arcs, and then grabs one of the zaniest villains of DC's long history (Starro the Conqueror) and makes it a genuinely interesting existential threat. Amazing film, but I feel like it was made specifically for me and other fans of the comic, and somehow people thought it would also be well received by general audiences....which it sort of was? And of course Margo Robbie was amazing in this movie, which is essentially part 3 in a trilogy of Harley Quinn tales. 

#1 Dune Part I

This movie broke the spell on Hollywood that you cannot take Frank Herbert's novel and make a good movie out of it. Although the film takes a few liberties, it does a dramatically better job of setting the mood, ambiance, and smart story telling of "show, don't tell" to recreate the first halfish of the novel and is well worth experiencing, especially on the big screen if possible. It is sufficiently amazing that it retroactively generated interest in the Lynch version of the movie from the 80's and the later SciFi Channel editions, just so people could analyze what about prior attempts fell short where this one excelled. Thankfully Part II has been greenlit, although I am shocked that they didn't have the chutzpah to just film both parts at once. 

Honorable Mention: The second Venom movie was a short (1 1/2 hour) and entertaining film that could have overstayed its welcome but did not, and in many ways improved on the formula of the first movie, with Woody Harrelson and Naomie Harris getting an opportunity to really ham up their villain roles while Tom Hardy did his thing. Fun! I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone other than comic fans or Venom fans (or fans of these actors) but I didn't leave the theater feeling regret (unlike some other recent movies).

I might also mention Eternals, but while this was a good movie, I think if asked to watch it or Venom II again I'd have to stick to Venom II, just because it was shorter and more amusing.

The Movie Walk of Shame: Lots of films disappointed this year. I talked about a few of them, including Ghostbusters: Afterlife (shameless pillaging of a comedy franchise corpse to appeal to Stranger Things contemporary nostalgia feels); Resident Evil Welcome to Raccoon City (by-the-numbers pandering attempt to make a video game franchise by people who forgot that you need to also care about what you are making); Matrix Resurrections (I, and everyone I have talked to, agree the movie was "just fine" but really didn't need to exist; I think the first thirty minutes were great and wish the film had gone hard into a subversive deconstruction of the original trilogy rather than tease us with the concept then veer away to a confusing medley of traditional beats); and both Black Widow and Shang Chi were perfectly serviceable Marvel movies that show that the standard formula is getting stale. 

I can't say that any particular movie I saw this year was terrible, though, which doesn't mean there weren't any...I just got lucky at dodging them. Even Ghostbusters: Afterlife was a perfectly watchable movie with some good moments, it was just tonally off from its franchise origins and too busy emulating a brand of nostalgia I was entirely out of tune with. 

A lot of the good stuff that did come out this year was actually on TV....perhaps a future column on that later!

Year in Review: Movies in 2019

This was a grotesque, weird year for movies. I personally think it all boils down to the nine-foot tall purple gorilla in the room: Avengers: Endgame came out this year (remember that movie?!?!?) and it overshadowed everything else before and after it. The rest of the year was, at best, a middling to average year for movies, with a vast number of serious duds in the mix.

So here are the high (and low) moments I noticed for 2019:

The MCU's Grand Finale Couldn't Be Beat

Avengers: Endgame dominated, so maybe other films knew they couldn't compete and dished out their subpar content instead? This argument doesn't really hold up; lots of movies this year clearly thought they had the chops to contend. No movie this year (not even Star Wars Rise of Skywalker) could possibly hold up to the 20-film long conclusion to the MCU juggernaut.

I think it is more likely that, outside of the sharp contrast of a monumental conclusion to a united film series in the final Avengers film, every other film this year suffered from a dearth of new content ideas; even the really good movies suffered from this simply by comparison; Shazam was great, but really just the Superman film we didn't get with Man of Steel. Terminator Dark Fate was an impressive film to the few people who saw it, but really just the Terminator 3 we wanted but didn't get back in the day. Spider-Man: Far From Home was proof a Marvel movie could be fun post-Endgame, but also still very much a continuation of the "let's fix Sony's horrible mistakes from the past" kind of movie.

The Duds Were Many And Prolific

Hollywood flooded the theaters this year with movies which couldn't hold a candle to the major blockbusters. If your movie wasn't a Disney film, then as a director, producer or distributor you were probably sweating in your boots this year. The list of distinct duds....movies which fell flat or failed to stand out in the crowd in a meaningful was way was shocking. In prior decades these were called "normal films," but today, anything lacking the clever polish of an MCU film when it comes to action blockbusters seems doomed to fail.

Examples I was subjected to (some I enjoyed, some not so much) were prolific: X-Men Dark Phoenix, Zombieland Double Tap, Hellboy, Men in Black International, Godzilla: King of the Monsters....all of these movies came out this year, and I ended up seeing them. Of these movies, each had something good, but some were grimly bad in weird ways. It could just be me; as I get older and more curmudgeonly (it's a horrible thing to feel your mind and body aging into something less pleasant, something which disdains fun in the conventional sense) but honestly....none of these films really "had it" regardless.

Streaming Got Complicated and Expensive

You can't just subscribe to Netflix anymore. Now you need to consider at minimum four or five streaming apps for your entertainment if you're serious about watching TV or have a family to entertain. It's annoying; we thought we were moving away from the cable companies, but in a sense we're right back where we started; too much money, spread too thin for the entertainment value.

I've personally continued to maintain my subscriptions to Netlix, DC Universe, Disney+, Shudder and Curiosity Stream....but five services is honestly too much for the actual amount of time spent watching TV in my "mostly gamer" house. 2-3 stations almost feels like too much! But such is the era we now live in.

Star Wars IX Ended an Era and The Mandalorian Started an Era

I've worked through my antipathy for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker; I may post more (like I haven't enough already) but I've decided it was totally fine, even if it's plot and pacing sucked, in terms of a Star Wars film. I recalled having similar feelinsg of antipathy for Return of the Jedi when it came out; in 1983 the RotJ movie felt like something for my younger self from age 7-10, not my 12-13 year old self; I had moved on from Star Wars (at the time). Now, decades later, I realize I was prepared to go in expecting the movie to be bad; actively looking for it. That Abrams accomodated with lots of obnoxious plot and pacing issues was a coincidence; I could have overlooked many of those, as I had in all the other movies. Honestly....I suspect that, except for Revenge of the Sith (which I loved), I think I just experience burnout with Star Wars periodically and it just so happens the release of this movie coincides with that period of burnout.

But what about The Mandalorian, which itself kicks off an era of streaming films for Star Wars? I totally love it....but also probably because it feels so different from the latest movies; Mandalorian is a thing unto itself; something which manages to get back to an old version and style of Star Wars I had forgotten I loved so much.

Crap! Writing about Star Wars again. Okay....enough of this for now....will dig up my predictions from the beginning of the year next to analyze for accuracy (or lack therof).

The Fisherman

Well worth watching, a fantastic short film:

Really Bad Movies: Oasis of the Zombies (1981)

It's back! After a long absence, I have new horror movie reviews on the way....focused like a lightning rod once more on The Really Awful Horror Movie!!!

Sit back and feast upon the corpse of many a film from yesteryear, oh doomed reader....starting with this maddeningly weird and pointless gem...

Oasis of the Zombies (1981...or maybe 1982)

I found this French zombie movie on a 12-pack of films titled "12 Film Flesh Fest: Zombies Unbrained," and picked Oasis of the Zombies to start with completely at random. The film quality was deplorable, with that "copied from a cam focused on an old TV" sort of resolution and jigginess to it. Despite--or perhaps because of--this poor quality the film actually seemed to benefit from it a bit. The box set says it's a 1981 film but wikipedia says it's from 1982.

The story tells three loose tales: after a scene in which two gals in short-shorts visit some desert oasis and get eaten by zombies, the film leads in to a fellow discovering the story of his dad in WWII. This is the first "coherent" narrative of a British soldier and his men who face off during WWII with a vile company of German soldiers in the desert known for their mercilessness. After some brief but fun shots of surplus WWII vehicles there's a classic 80's style gunfight at a remote desert oasis in which everyone dies. The sole surviving commander of the British forces is rescued by a local sheikh in the desert and hauled off for a speedy recovery, followed by a swift relationship with the lovely Ayesha who's exact relationship to the sheikh is  a bit suspect. He leaves her and comes back two years later to find out she is dead, the sheikh and his palace mysteriously ruined, and he has a lone infant son.

There's also the story of this gruff murderous treasure hunter who, along with a random menagerie of cohorts steals off decades later to find this oasis due to a rumor that the dead nazis at the location were hiding gold there before the British got the drop on them. He and his crew spend the night at the oasis and are promptly murdered by zombies. Only the treasure hunter escapes, long enough to arrive in a nearby city where he goes mad from a zombie bite.

The principle story tying the other two together is the son of the British officer, who now seeks to claim that lost gold for his own, something he gleaned from his father's own writings. So in classic 1981 style he, some chummy friends and a hot girl in shorts with a penchant for taking off her shirt all head off to Saudi Arabia to find the oasis. Naturally they arrive, have some weird encounters in the nearby city, then skip on off to the oasis where sure enough at sundown the zombies come out and try to devour most of them. THE END.

So I can't say it's completely pointless. They had a plot, just not a lot of "surprise" to it. For the limited special effects the zombie heads were kind of neat...

...but admittedly, watching a bad, grainy copy made that zombie look much cooler than he probably would have in HD. Still, someone took the time to liberally sprinkle worms on every zombie face, and they blend the use of the masks with the actual guys staggering around well enough to evoke that unique, creepy atmosphere typical of horror films from the period.

The acting in the film is (shockingly) a slight improvement over other typical films in the genre from that period, but this is sort of like comparing two rotten fruits and pointing out how one has mold and the other doesn't.

The music was a four note synthesizer. It "worked" in the sense that it fit the era of this sort of film, but it was tedious by any stretch of the imagination otherwise.

So, as the kick-off to the Return of 31 Days of Horror I will give Oasis of the Zombies a solid D+ (the plus being for the cool zombie heads, and the modicum of effort at depicting the oasis shootout during WWII). It does feel to me like one of those oddball films which sprang out of some unlikely combination of circumstances; one guy had access to surplus WWII vehicles, another guy had been making paper mache zombie heads, and a third guy really wanted an excuse to get some actress naked in a eurosleaze film. but then, so many of the films from this period actually are kind of slapdash and sleazy like that, so there you go...

D+ 

Movie Review: Evil Dead (the reboot)

Evil Dead (2013 reboot)

This movie had a real legacy to follow, so it was sort of inevitable that the Evil Dead reboot would fail on some level for some portion of the audience. Honestly, if you don't think of it as an Evil Dead film....or maybe as just some spin-off, it's not too bad. The problem comes when it draws comparisons to the original....or more specifically, to Evil Dead II, because this is definitely a reimagining of the original low budget Evil Dead, the very first one, and not the crazier and more extravagant remake, from a time when remakes weren't even officially branded as reboots. This is a shame, because as I recall, Evil Dead II was just Sam Raimi redoing the original movie the way he wanted it, so honoring the first without regard for the impact of the second is problematic.

Anyway, following Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi in their seminal camp horror-gorefest is tough. Trying to recreate the sense of the movie is apparently even harder in the current generation of horror films, as Evil Dead demonstrates amply over its hour and thirty one minutes of desperate efforts at maximum gore while sort of missing the point of the originals entirely.

As I said, this movie has some merits on its own. More a reimagining of Evil Dead than a continuation, it features the story of Mia (Jane Levy), her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez), his girlfriend and two other well-intended friends who decide to help Mia kick a nasty drug habit for the last time by heading out to the old family cabin in the woods. (FYI this movie fits in quite well with the Cabinverse). As Mia starts her cycle of withdrawal the crew, who had previously discovered that the cabin had been broken into, uncover distrurbing evidence something horrible happened in the basement. They also find the book...after which bad things soon start happening.

The book, which is never called the Necronomicon in the film, has been excised of Kandarian Demons and the undertones of some sort of camp take on the mythos lore. It's Sumerian text is replaced largely with more modern depictions, writing and other iconography that suggests a more satanic, acceptably evil Christian undertone; the forest demon has been replaced by some vague references to Shaitan. If one were to scrabble around looking for a way to fit this movie into the context of the originals....and I advise against it....you wouldn't be remiss in assuming that this tome is not, in fact, the same as the Necronomicon of the original three films.

The deadites are here....sort of, but scrubbed down a bit (despite being gorier than ever), replaced by more conventional images of demonically infused/possessed people. They spend more time growling and making zombie-like noises than they do actually...you know.. talking. That thing they did in the original that made them exceptionally weird and disturbing (and campily entertaining as the years wore on). The demon tree is here, too....but it's a bit more subdued, even if it now gets prime time front and center with kicking it all off with the demon tree rape scene. The demon in the woods....which may or may not be the demon tree as well....is now an evil demon girl, a mirror or cypher for Mia, in some ways, and her addiction.

Anyway, the film moves along at a modest pace for a while, then stuff starts happening, and before you know it things appear to be wrapping up, but since this is a typical modern horror film we know its just trying to lull us into a false sense of security before one final act. Then that act happens, things actually start feeling like a Real Evil Dead movie for a few minutes, and then it ends in what can only be described as a clear effort to leave room for a direct sequel. Wait around for the final ending credits for a brief cameo (as in three seconds) by Bruce Campbell saying groovy, to serve as a giant, unpleasant reminder that the entire movie failed to hit the mark, and that hiding away somewhere is the spark of a genuinely good Evil Dead movie....but not this one.

So why did it fail? I'm going to call spoilers here and now, so avert your eyes! Otherwise, read on:

First off, the gore is better than ever, and there are some genuinely distrubing/sickening/vile scenes in this movie. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the original Evil Dead films were well known for pushing the gore limit to new highs, it wasn't just this fact that made them stand out; rather, it was the insanely bizarre way in which they did it, Ash's descent into madness and the increasingly bizarre and vile humor of the deadites as they did everything from reanimate the body parts of his dead girlfriend to liquefying another victim, on down to destroying the canyon bridge, leaving it looking like a hideous claw. The new Evil Dead just doesn't seem to get this idea of camp gore and horror.....or how to implement it. It's going for some sort of weird mix of quasi-realism mixed with occasional moments of surprisingly modest attempts at extremism (such as the rain of blood toward the end, or the sawing-off-the-arm event).

It's missing the weird. technically it's got lots of weird, but only if you haven't watched a contemporary horror film in the last twenty five years. A few examples of great moments from the original that are utterly absent (or lacking any equivalent) from the original:

In 1987 the demon tree spirit is like some sort of insane invisible motorcycle ripping relentlessly through the woods in "Raimicam" mode. In 2013 it's a spooky girl being borrowed from countless other spooky girl horror films.

In 1987 the deadites loved levitating, twisting time, creating disturbing effects (everything from drowning Ash in an endless spray of blood to the laughing taxidermied animals). In 2013 they...ummm.....cut themselves a lot and groan a bit like zombies. Only Mia, as a deadite, gets any serious dialogue.

In 1987 Ash's hand becomes possessed and tries to kill him. He cuts it off and spends a fair amount of time engaged in hysterical yet horrific battle with his demon limb. In 2013 girlfriend Natalie gets the demon in her hand in the same way, and hacks it off with an electric meat cutter, but then she just sorta fades out and comes back possessed moments later with a nail gun because nobody in the 2013 movie can figure out that they shouldn't leave each other alone for even two seconds. She then dies of...blood loss I guess?....and that's it for her. These are really, really wimpy deadites in 2013. (Speaking of which, they are never actually called deadites in the movie; consider that: they made a reboot of a film that iconically coined the term deadite, with deadites that refer to themselves as deadites, and do very deadite-like things such as levitating, and they throw all of that out for what amount to possessed demon-zombies).

Not only do we have the aforementioned scene, but later on Mia loses her hand (or most of it) after it is trapped under a car. Apparently someone felt like it wouldn't be appropriately iconic for her to live to the end of the movie and not have a missing limb. Sigh.

It's been a long time since I saw the original 1981 Evil Dead so I don't entirely recall how it ended, but it's impossible to forget how Evil Dead II ended: Ash, sent back in time, after stopping the Tree Demon made manifest as it tries to punch through into our reality for an all out invasion of the mortal realm. Fantastic stuff. Cut to 2013: we end with a good chainsawing of the spooky girl demon, which apparently ends the threat (for now).

To their credit, the spooky girl demon does disintegrate into a puddle of goo much as the deadite did in the original (was that the end? I really do forget). Maybe this was true to the original, I guess I'll have to hunt it down. If so, then I hope they plan to do a proper remake of Evil Dead II. It deserves it.

One thing that bugged me: we saw a spooky well early on. Mia dumps her drugs down it as a symbol of her commitment to getting clean. We never see that well again. What the hell?!? What a lost opportunity.

The fact that they presented neither the bone knife nor the actual Necronomicon of the original films annoys me, if only because those two props are indelibly linked to the franchise, and have even appeared in other horror films. Would it have been too much to ask to have them in here? Apparently, yes, because this movie was repackaged as a "realistic" depiction of its low-key madness, focused exclusively on realistic gore and a moderate, underwhelming interpretation of its legacy. Hard to believe I would use those words to describe an Evil Dead film, even one that includes some remarkably realistic violence....but it's unfortunately true.

You know, I came out of the movie thinking it was a poor Evil Dead remake but would have been alright if it was represented as its own thing. It needs to be stated that Jane Levy's performance as Mia was great, even if (or because) she spent half the movie possessed. However, as I have thought about it in relation to the original (and especially the 1987 remake) I am at a loss as to why they thought this movie was going to go over so well. Maybe it will appeal to the younger horror fans, for whom Scream, Saw, Blair Witch and serial killer flicks are the norm. Despite this, I really think there's room out there for the over-the-top madness of a true Evil Dead movie. Maybe they'll get it right next time.

This movie had a few moments in which it was trying (and failing) to surprise the audience. Next time, they should try making a real Evil Dead movie, and that alone might be surprise enough!

C-


Addendum: I was thinking about this movie a bit more, and had a few more comments:

1st: my supposition that this movie would play well with a younger crowd that didn't have familiarity with the original Evil Dead films seems to be right. Every one of my younger cohorts I have spoken with is surprised to hear I didn't enjoy the movie. I, of course, look like a nostalgia-filled mad grognard as I tell them that they really need to check out the original two Evil Dead movies for contrast.

2nd: While I still believe that Jane Levy made this film bearable, I also realize she was badly underutilized in this movie. The entirety of the original films was effectively from one character's perspective (Ash) and all other characters were playing off of his madness. The remake tried too hard to mitigate the idea of one character as focus, even though we knew it was going to end up that way, to the extent that even Mia was possessed and locked in the basement for far too long.

3rd: Another reason I gave this movie a C- was because, ultimately, when it was over I left the theater feeling, well, bad. It wasn't a good movie to watch. There was no sense of resolution, triumph, or even admiration for the cunning and evil entities of the film...I just felt sort of washed out, like I had been subject too far too much pointless gore and excess without any redeeming qualities. This is something I have personally encountered in a lot of horror films that are more in line the the splatterpunk/serial killer/morbid death subgenre (or whatever you want to call it), films such as Final Destination or Saw, or much older movies such as Xombie and many other grindhouse films where it was the sheer excess that was the whole point of the movie. Evil Dead 2013 is in line with this style of film, but its predecessors weren't (in my estimation). Why? Because despite the over-the-top gore, Evil Dead 1 and 2 were more about the descent to madness, the struggle, and the sheer insanity of what was happening. When you get to the end of Evil Dead II you feel like you've hit a high moment of triumph even as Ash is faced with what appeared to be a horrific exile into the past....but he had mastered the art of killing deadites, y'see, and that was a good thing.

Because of the pacing in the remake, we just don't really get that from Mia. She wasn't given enough time to shine as the modern day rendering of the Ash role, instead coming off as yet another survivor who figures out that chainsaws are good at putting deadites down, and even then her access to a chainsaw happens in the last few minutes of the movie, unlike in Evil Dead II where it was Kind of a Big Deal. Plus....and I can't stress this enough....the lack of any sort of humor, dark or camp, was the real reason that in the end I left the theater feeling like maybe I should have waited for this to show up on Netflix, instead.

Movie Review: Iron Man 3

Iron Man 3

My second foray into the world of film while on mini-vacation was with Iron Man 3, a natural shoe-in given it just came out and its part of the expanding Marvel Cineverse line of interconnected superhero films that are managing to be consistently decent, and occasionally....as with Iron Man 3....downright amazing.

Iron Man 3 follows on the heels of both Iron Man 2 and Avengers, and manages to continue from where Tony Stark left off in both prior films. It's the first post-Avengers Marvel movie, too; more than a few references helped to convey that this was the same world in which New York had nearly been invaded by aliens, and Tony Stark is having a bit of anxiety and PTSD after the fact; it seems that thwarting an army of alien invaders and staring into the void of space at a vast star fleet that but for the limits of wormhole technology could easily conquer Earth was a sobering (sorta) event for him.

As Tony deals with his problems by not dealing with them (and building lots and lots of experimental Iron Man suits in the process) other things are afoot. A flashback to earlier days leads to a plot involving Aldrich Killian, another genius like Tony and the founder of Advanced Idea Mechanics (AIM)....means nothing to the average viewer I suppose, but to Marvel fans it's the first appearance of the evil organization on the big screen. No chance of a Modok on the horizon, I suppose...but who knows, they need lots of plot material for the future, I could see it happening in some fashion.

While AIM seems to be up to no good there's the Mandarin hacking into satellites and terrorizing the US with mysterious bombing incidents. The Mandarin is portrayed very much as an Osama Bin Laden type, and the videos presented do such a good job of evoking that disturbing menace of modern terrorism I actually found it a bit uncomfortable. This is a good thing because....well. Lets just say that like Oblivion, Iron Man 3 has some fantastic reveals that I would not want to spoil. Long story short: the Mandarin is a great villain, and you'll see why. (Given the ticket sales to date, you probably already know why, but hey, someone in some cave out there probably would like to see for themselves, I figure!)

Oh, and Pepper Potts gets to have a bit of fun in this movie. It's well worth watching for this alone. Pepper, to contrast with Oblivion, is an example of a female support character done well. She is relevant, she contributes and she and Tony complement each other. It is entirely possible to have a strong male lead and strong female support/lead without making their roles nothing more than "the gals Tom Cruise sleeps with and ponders life about."

Ultimately this film is, like its predecessors, about Tony's personal ongoing battle to succeed despite his self-destructive tendencies, and to continue like a roller coaster on the hero's journey. Unlike the other two films, this one actually pulls it off better than before, which is pretty hard to do, considering the first two Iron Man films were great.

Iron Man 3 has more plot, focus, heart and effort than the prior two Iron Man films combined, and manages to take the series in a direction only made possible by virtue of the fact that Marvel's team of directors and writers are really, really trying to do this well. It's got a few flaws....very, very minor flaws. So minor that all I can really point out is: way to do some product placement for a range of Iron Man action toys, guys. But all told it's a fantastic A+++ movie.

Buy us, kids! You know you want to. Go get your dad's credit card out of his wallet, he won't mind.

Movie Review: Oblivion

Today! The first of three reviews of recent movies, all seen by old Dad thanks to the fact that he's stuck in Albuquerque while Marcus and Mom are down babysitting grandma's house for the week.

I saw Oblivion first, and let me tell you how disappointing it was to see that this had nothing to do with the Elder Scrolls. I kid! It was an awesome movie, but with some caveats. Then I saw Iron Man 3, which is pretty much a given in terms of entertainment value, but as a third movie in the series it did the rare feat of actually being better than the first two. Finally there's the 2013 reboot of Evil Dead, which was...well....let's just say two out of three ain't bad.

I'll review Oblivion first:

Oblivion

I went in to Oblivion knowing it was allegedly a halfway decent original SF film, but also aware of the fact that it had Tom Cruise as the lead character, Jack Harper. I think it took me about twenty minutes to overcome my natural dislike of the man and start really enjoying the film....right around the time I realized that this was a decidedly good old-school SF story, the kind they might have written in the late sixties and early seventies, during the first real "new wave" of SF. Why? Because it's all about Jack, who's the quintessential man's man....had this film actually been done in 1970 we'd probably have seen Charleton Heston in the same role. Seriously.

The plot in a nutshell: Jack Harper, along with his mission aide and significant other Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are assigned to a monitoring post on ruined Earth, where they oversee the safety of massive water collectors/purifiers that refine what is left of Earth's post-apocalyptic oceans and ship it off to Titan, where humanity has (or will be) migrating via the great ship Tet (for tetrahedral). It's about sixty some years after an alien invasion was thwarted, but not before the aliens blew up the moon, and the nuclear retaliation from humanity amid the ensuing chaos of a Lunar death rendered Earth a wasteland.

Amidst all this, Jack serves as a technician, keeping military drones that protect the massive water refineries safe from the "scavs," survivors of the alien army that still live in the radioactive wastelands. Needless to say, Jack has an attachment to Earth, and even as their tour of duty is two weeks from ending, something keeps him from wanting to leave, including strange memories of the world before his time.

This movie is spoiler-laden, but I will divulge none of it; the film is best enjoyed if you go in blind like I did, and you'll definitely get the most out of it that way. That said, here are the pros and cons of the movie without any specific context that would affect your enjoyment of the film:

First, the pros: it's a great looking movie and really brings its world to life. There are lots of little things that help contribute to the mystery underlying the plot, which is exposed gradually to both the audience and Jack in a satisfactory way, and it eventually adds up rather nicely. There are some minor (easily explained/waived) plot holes....and a lot of what seem initially to be plot holes but aren't. Maybe I'll do a spoiler-laden blog about it in detail later.

Jack Reaper, despite being Tom Cruise, still managed to become a decent character in his own right. I was able at some point to forget it was Tom, and that's not easy with his one-act performance.

Morgan Freeman shows up and manages to kick some serious ass. Good stuff.

The film was overall well-paced and surprisingly coherent. They did a good job of creating a future Earth devastated by the loss of the Moon, subject to some very unpleasant stuff.

The Cons: This movie feels like seventies sci fi for a reason; it's very much a male ego trip. Two primary female leads show up in the course of the movie, and both are there to revolve around Tom...er, Jack's story. Ordinarily this might not be unusual for Summer Hollywood fare, but the truth is that at some point it got a little too obvious that these women were just cyphers for Cruise's...ah., Reaper's masculine destiny. The fact that they were each well-realized but poorly represented characters, waiting for Jack to save them (or not) just got a bit too obvious before the end. On the one hand, I was cool with this....I'm a guy, after all....but on the other hand, this is the twenty-first century, Hollywood. Are you seriously telling me that these two women, one a technically savvy support/comms specialist, and the other a bloody astronaut, had nothing better to do than stand around waiting for Tom to save them? Yeah....right....

Despite the cons, this was a great movie and worth seeing. If you love Tom Cruise then you'll be delighted. Oblivion is a solid A.

Post-Mayan Non-Apocalyptic Blog Day

Okay, it's a week late but I just wanted to say, "hey, look, that was a whole lot of nothing. Hope some film makers and book writers got a decent profit out of that one." So I guess the next big event...which ironically is actually something worth noting, unlike the entirely fictitious non-event we just breezed through, will be the 2037 near-miss from asteroid Apophis. I predict many more book and movie deals in the future, culminating in a more interesting level of mass hysteria if the History Channel gets lucky.

I've taken a break from blogging for the last week or so. In a nice change of pace I've been relaxing at home, but that's only half true; it's been a bear of a week at my place of employment as I do an office move, which has been an interesting and time-consuming task, with a lot of overtime in the mix. Hopefully by next week things will be back on track, though.

I did manage two minor accomplishments this week: I watched the movie Salt, and I finally got finishing achievements on all campaigns in Left 4 Dead 2. I don't feel a lot of compulsion to continue playing L4D2, which means I need to find a new game to play for the Holidays (it's been a tradition now for a couple years that I played marathon L4D and L4D2 campaigns during all major holidays). Hmmm....I think I might start focusing more on Arma II soon (although I am still holding off on Day Z until the official edition comes out next year).



I also watched Salt, the Angelina Jolie action film from a year or two back. It was actually a lot of fun, and I got to see the extended edition, which means I have no idea what was cut from the theatrical release but it held together just fine. The film did an admirable job of focusing on a character (Evelina Salt) without necessarily giving away her character's motivations. It had a few "unpleasant" moments in it, the sort of stuff that European and Hong Kong cinema don't bat an eyelash at, but which most Summer time American audiences cringe over, so I wonder how well it did when it was fresh on the scene.

Anyway, it was a good movie, had fewer "suspension of disbelief being tested" moments than is normal for an Angelina Jolie movie, and a compelling narrative with more than a few plot twists. Worth watching if you are into action and espionage films.

Amidst all of this, I would like to thank my son, Marcus, for being such a good sport while dad tried to watch a movie, as he only made a mad dash to turn the TV off once, and otherwise played with his ball with dad, the cats, and anything he could bounce it off of for close to an hour and a half before mom arrived to put him to bed.

Bad Movie Monday: Vicious Lips

Vicious Lips (1986)

Free of the need to review only horror films (or films that are allegedly horror) I have turned my attention to more random Netflix goodness...or, ah, badness in this case!

Vicious Lips is the tale of a young woman's dreams realized as she becomes a glam-rock singer in an all-girl band about to go big time. Judy Jetson is a fine singer, and is on open mike night at some random dive when she is "discovered" by band agent Matty Asher, who is looking for a new singer for his band the Vicious Lips, after the late lead singer Ace Lucas (amusingly called Ape Lucas in the IMDB credits but I'm pretty sure throughout the film they were calling her Ace) gets hit by a bus or something (wipes out on her motorcycle? Not sure...it all happens off-camera). Oh, and this is all happening somewhere in Spaaaaaace. You see, it's the postmodern retropunk future, the world of the future as imagined through the grainy lens and poor quality set pieces of a 1980's adventure flick.

Where Radioactive Dreams Are Made

Here's the crazy plot of this in a nutshell. This movie is from 1986 so spoilers and all that, in case you care:

Judy Jetson's singing talent is picked up by the Vicious Lips when their cooky trouble-making, double-dealing talent agent discovers her. The rest of the band is like any other 80's era Poofy-hair glam-rock girl band from the 80's....transposed into the 2180's, that is! Or sometime in the future, anyway.

Shortly after their first gig (the music, for 80's style stuff, is pretty good and the segments where they play are done like live-filmed music videos) Matty the agent gets a call from the space-godmistress of rock, a woman who is established in the opening shot of the film to be ruthless and either so influential she can make a man shoot himself or, possibly, she's psychic and can mind control or telekinetically manipulate people. Either way we never see this parlor trick again. Anyway, she has a big event and an opening, so she calls in the Vicious Lips.

With hair like that....I'd stay away from open flames; Ironically everyone in this movie is smoking, constantly

The place for the gig is across SPACE which means a ship is needed, and Matty decides its cheaper to steal a spaceship rather than pay for one. So they do. Coincidentally it's the ship that a serial killer who was known to have "killed 5,000 women" is stowed on board. A serial killer who, as it turns out, looks like a cannibal ape man from Planet of the Apes.

Anyway, the ship is underway, the girls do their thing in classic meandering 80's style fashion (what I have come to realize is "running out the film" or something) when Matty, also a bad pilot, fails to notice his snarky computer screen warnings about an asteroid collision. Bam! Down they go, crash-landing on a desert world.

Matty goes for help....and wanders away to be found, delirious and dehydrated, by to sexy robo-women (I think this is the spot where someone realized that they needed a bit more nudity in the film or something...it being an 80's production and all; up to this point the only nudity has been a triple-breasted alien chick, showcasing several years before Total Recall. Who knew?!?!?

Anyway, the girls hang out on the wrecked ship waiting for help until they get goofy and somehow almost let out the serial killer by accident, before coming to their senses. But too late! He's figured out an escape anyway.

The ship is resting on a dune precipice, and the merry dash to avoid being caught and killed (or eaten) leads to it sliding down the dunes and crashing into an old buried ruin....of the Pleasure Planet complex, apparently. Now the girls escape into this complex, haunted by their mysterious patron, a variety of retropunk undead guys--not retro for the time, mind you; contemporary for 1986, which says a lot about what the 80's thought would survive to the future, culturally, and how it would look; ah, how I don't miss the decade...much!

A lot of nonsense goes on involving zombie punksters, a sudden appearance of the late Ace Lucas, more ape-man serial killer madness and then finally we get to the end when it turns out that Judy Jetson had passed out during her much more normal and uneventful visit to the place where they will be performing for the big time, and a "you were there...and you were there...and even YOU were there, mister Ape Man!" moment essentially transpires. And they all live happily ever after.

It can be hard to tell how much of the plot was intended or accidental when the movie is full of no-name actors, poor quality sound, bad acting, and a muddy plot that starts off as a "girl band gets discovered" tale, quickly migrates to a "road trip in space becomes disaster film meets serial killer" adventure and then ends up being an allegorical tale of Oz. I was genuinely perplexed if they were making this all up as they went along, or if they were actually sticking to a plan.

The Vicious Lips

See this movie if you:

1. Love HUGE FRIZZY HAIR everywhere

2. Like badly rendered derivative "Oz" films

3. Have a fetishistic taste for the wacky glam-rock vs. punk scene of the mid eighties. Like me.

4. Would like to hear a couple decent songs amidst all the carnage.

5. Love watching movies with classic-era badly done shaky starships-on-strings effects.

6. Want to see a triple-breasted woman in a movie several years BEFORE Total Recall.

A perfectly good C for the 80's, although I'd rate this a D- if something like it was spewed out today. It's the kind of film that could only have been made when it came out....any attempt to make a movie like this today would be missing practically every oozing chunk of 80's culture and pseudo-movie-logic necessary for it to work.

Pleasurebots of the Desert World

Thirty One Days of Horror: Silent Hill - Revelation

Day Thirty One: Silent Hill - Revelation

Holy cow, I made it. Blogging random topical stuff related to one's particular interests is one thing. Setting out to specifically meet a quota (for fun and not profit, admittedly) is something else. Still, it was worth it, and the fun in reviewing films for a month has taught me that I ought to do this more often. It's fun to analyze movies, to wonder about what they did right as well as how and why things might have gone horribly wrong.

Speaking of which, Silent Hill Revelation is up next! I ponied up for a 3D matinee showing (so, about $11) and saw it today. I was the only one in the theater on a 5:10 PM showing. Pity horror movies don't scare me anymore, that could have been cool.

In fair disclosure, I forgot to mention that my review of Resident Evil: Retribution was for a standard (non 3D) version and I saw it in a discount theater for $2. By contrast, Silent Hill Revelations was full (matinee) price and was in 3D. As usual, no movie I've seen in 3D since Avatar has been worth the extra few bucks. Also, I would have been less annoyed at this movie if I'd waited to see it for $2 as well....my bad. Wife and kid are out of town for a few days again, had to seize the opportunity while I could!



Watching all these Resident Evil movies as well as Silent Hill Revelations has made me realize what might be going on in the development cycle of game-to-film design. I think it starts something like this:

Studio lands a deal for using the game IP. Marketing howls in triumph.

Early on, game studio hands over the game, the art assets and script used to develop said game. The people picked for set design, costuming and FX go hog wild with the amazing assets laid out for them. This wasn't always so; there was a time (when games still looked like ass and our imaginations filled in the cracks) that the team poo-poo'd the assets and did their own thing, enraging the fans.

The script writers are handed copies of the game and maybe the development script and assets used for the "story" part of the game. It's not in a format that they can assimilate from their screenwriting experience, and they chuck it. Someone is tasked with playing the game, but he's not really one of those "gamers" so he hands the game off to his son, who plays it and when his dad asks for a summary he copies and pastes the summary of the plot from Wikipedia. Second possibility: no one bothers to play the game because it requires too much attention for hopped-up Hollywood to bother so they just cut straight to Wikipedia.

Someone reads the Wiki and culls out all the stuff that makes no sense without context. Then they paste in the stuff that generations of film writing have burned into their heads must be in any film for a perceived demographic.

"This has monsters in it that look sort of like Pinhead. Oh, look at all the pictures of rusted metal and torture instruments, maybe its more of a Saw movie. Hey, the Wiki says there's a cult in town, lets get a metric ass ton of extras to run around populating this place as cultists. What's with the fog? I dunno, the wiki doesn't say much. Let's explain it as ash coming down from a burning coal mine, like that story I read about on Cracked.com. Yeah, that's the ticket."

"What's that fog horn noise? Hey, it must be a fog horn because, you know--fog. Or better yet, one of those old air raid alarms. Who's this triangle-headed dude? Oh, he's...um...pyramid head. The wiki doesn't say much about him. These nurse monsters? I dunno, but wouldn't it be cool if they were all, like, twitchy and stuff when they sensed movement? And it gives the FX guy a chance to hobnob with those models for, like, hours while they slather on that makeup."

The end of development gets close. "Will this appeal to the fans? Sure, we've gotten all the characters named in the game to look like they do in the art stills. But will it appeal to the millions of people who've never even heard of a Silent Hill game? Yeah, we've added in a love interest, and this game's pure gold because its protagonist is an 18 year old girl who's all about being an outcast, so we've got the Twilight crowd element in there. And we've got the father figure for all the old farts who played this game when it was new. Oh, and we've got lots of sudden shocks and spooks and thrills, because we heard that was really big in the game. What...that was Resident Evil? This game was all about psychological horror and shared purgatories? What does that even mean? Hell, it's not like we've got David Lynch directing, anyway! Well, doesn't matter, and it's also not like we're filming hours of someone walking around in fog, right? Bwah hah hah!!!"




And on it goes. The end result is someone who has parsed out a Cliff's Notes version of their target product, glued on art assets to make it look cool, and then filmed the thing. Meanwhile, no one has noticed or tried to understand what anyone who's played and enjoyed the original games are talking about when they refer to psychological horror. There's no connection between the imagery, the monsters, and the subtle underpinnings of deep psychological trauma made manifest in a dark purgatory that is a shadowy mirror of the minds of its trapped victims made real.

They're best hope now is that the movie, which they are already sure will be picked apart by its pedantic, obsessive fans, will instead grab the actual casual movie-going crowd that wants to see a scary movie.

To help this crowd understand, Silent Hill Revelations front-loads a metric ton of plot exposition in the first twenty or thirty minutes. You will not have to guess about what's going on or why. The absolutely bizarre and disturbing elements of the game series in which the player can often make it through the entire game and still not be entirely sure of what happened on that first play through is gone here; it's spelled out so plainly that they might as well have shown a 3D mallet beating it into our skulls. The plot, by the way, is fairly similar to (based on) Silent Hill 3, and in principle it is a fair modeling of said plot....with the caveat that the depiction of said plot was derived entirely from the screen writers using the Wiki to summarize it.

I tried to think about whether this movie was enjoyable from the angle of someone who had no familiarity with the games. It was kind of hard to tell, to be honest; the horror was there, but they periodically threw in hapless victims that Heather, the lead character, stumbles across specifically so she can see them get dismembered. Heather is a decent character here, and I do feel that they nailed, fairly accurately, the onscreen version of the same protagonist from Silent Hill 3. But everyone around her? Horribly two dimensional, put in specifically because the people making this film appear to understand shock horror and splatterpunk gore far better than they understand the more subtle and disturbing undercurrent of gnosticism that powers the Silent Hill universe.




The movie throws a couple fun bones out at the end....if fun means "painful teasers for the small chunk of the audience that actually played all the games," with a quick introduction of the truck driver Travis Grady (from Silent Hill: Origins) and a quick shot of a prison transport that is no doubt transporting Murphy Pendleton from Silent Hill Downpour on board. Surprised we didn't see a lone war vet heading home at the same time, or a guy sitting in a room somewhere, for good measure. The movie also keeps Harry Mason alive all the way to the end, where he stays in Silent Hill to look for his lost wife. A vague, half-hearted allusion to Silent Hill 2? Maybe.

Unfortunately this movie was just more annoying than funny, unlike the hysterical Resident Evil films which won out by virtue of sheer audacity. It was sort of fun to watch, but just not as much as a better film with more effort would have been.  I give it a C-, because it clearly had so much potential, but the only way that a good Silent Hill film will be made is if someone were to talk Guillermo del Toro or David Lynch into doing it. Then, maybe....just maybe....we might get a movie worth seeing.

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Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil: Retribution

Day Thirty: Resident Evil: Retribution

Oh my Zombie Gods but do I have a lot to say about this movie! I'll get this out of the way real quick: SPOILER ALERT. Spoilers all over the place. Spoilers, Spoilers, Spoilers. SPOILERS!

You know what the difference is between bad movies thirty years ago and bad movies today? Bad movies today can (and often do) look like damned good movies, and are often still fun to watch, especially if you watch them drunk, or while suffering a mild concussion or something.

Resident Evil: Retribution manages to be a movie that infuriated, annoyed, confused, irritated, excited and thrilled me all at the same time. I was simultaneously flabbergasted at the movie's brazen and highly tenuous train of logic (yes, even after marathoning the first four last September! Even after watching Deep Space!) and still enjoying this movie like the action movie porn it truly is. Resident Evil: Retribution, despite a couple brilliantly horror-like moments, has all but shed its horror roots and embraced a world of high-tech post-apocalyptic zombie action super hero adventures. It is arguably beating the video games in terms of sheer, unadulterated brazenness. And I just finished the Leon Kennedy campaign for Resident Evil 6, too.....

I remember a time when video game inspired films were pathetic in their poor embrace of the admittedly loose source material. Now we have video game inspired films which make the video game designers look like boring, unimaginative people who need to learn to think outside the box.

(That might be a bit harsh...RE 6 has some moments that make the movie logic look downright spotless comparatively, but more on that in the RE 6 review...heh....)

Okay, enough general exposition! Time to talk about this movie and it's...uhhh....plot?

When we left Alice at the end of RE: Afterlife she had liberated a secret Umbrella ship called Arcadia from the tyrranical grip of Evil Wesker, with the help of Chris and Claire Redfield. Then a literal army of VTOL attack craft loaded with umbrella goons led by a mind-controlled Jill Valentine show up to crash the party.

Cut to RE: Retribution! We open with a slow-motion reverse of the first minute of the conflict, followed by a lengthy and rather elaborate narration by Alice which serves little purpose other than to remind the casual viewer of what the hell happened in the last four movies and how it may or may not relate to what the viewing audience, like test rats, are about to be exposed to. Then it opens up on the neighborhood from Dawn of the Dead (the remake) complete with fast zombies and everything. In fact, I have to say that the zombies get faster and faster with every RE movie. Alice is apparently waking from a bad dream in Raccoon City Suburbia, married to the Umbrella agent from Resident Evil: Apocalypse and with a daughter who is deaf. Then zombies attack and Alice does a fairly good job of escaping, aided by her friend who appears to be a civilian version of Michelle Rodriguez's character Rain from the first movie. Then Alice wakes up, sort of, in a very large and extravagant Umbrella torture/interrogation chamber.

We're about ten or fifteen minutes in here, just so ya know.

So Jill Valentine, still being controlled by a red gem-thing on her chest (which, for what it's worth, is as inexplicable in the games as it is in this film) interrogates and tortures Alice. Actually, I think she's trying to brainwash her into being an Umbrella agent again. Actually, I am not sure what they want from Alice, but I do know that the real purpose of this scene was to demonstrate yet another semi-nude scene of Alice in a two-piece smock just like she wore in the first two films.

Rule 34 dictates that somewhere someone is selling "Resident Evil Umbrella Medical Gowns" online and people like me are risking dismemberment by asking their wives and/or girlfriends to wear them

So after a bit something odd happens; security goes down, Alice's weapons and black body stocking Death Agent of Umbrella uniform appears, and she finds herself escaping...first from yet another reprisal of the laser grid trap from the first movie. My complaints about how in the hell this trap works in the review of that film seem quaint compared to the Escher painting logic that subsequent movies have taught me to expect. But that's neither here nor there....she escapes and finds herself in Tokyo, right before the imminent zombie apocalypse is about to trip, exactly as it appeared at the start of RE: Afterlife. Then of course the zombie apocalypse hits and Alice gets a'killin.

Before long, the game...er, the movie throws its first major twist in: it may not seem like a huge twist to people who have not played the game, but trust me, if you're a fan of the games this is HUGE: Ada Wong shows up! That's not the twist, though. Nope, the twist is: Ada Wong explain everything. Well, almost everything....but she effectively outlines exactly what's going on and why; she provides more plot dialogue, exposition and explanation in a few minutes on film than she has ever done in in 15 years of video games. In fact, Ada's main job in the game universe has been to show up and confound the plot. Here she serves primarily to help make sense of things. Holy crap!

Macho Women With Guns

Ada explains she's here to bust Alice out of Umbrella's aquatic kingdom of evil ruled by the evil computer the Red Queen herself (or maybe a copy of her, since she did blow up in a nuclear firestorm in RE: Apocalypse). It seems Alice is once again very important....and Ada's external ally is ...get ready for it!.....Evil Wesker!!!!! Except maybe he's not evil now. I miss evil Wesker (fear not, he's just feigning not-evilness, luckily). Instead, the Red Queen is the evil one, engaged in endless experiments on clones with monsters to find increasingly more devious ways of destroying all humanity.

So Ada, directed by Wesker (who's video-phoning in his part of the plot) explain that an ancient aquatic North Pole Soviet Military station that was purchased and repurposed by Umbrella Corp. as a distributor of biowarfare weapons as well as a place to demonstrate them by....wow, I can't believe I'm not making this up....by cloning armies of civilians, populating entire replica domes of major cities across the world with said clones, and then breeding and releasing various monsters that are then used to test their overall effectiveness on these vast numbers of clones (that are embedded with flash memories) in the simulated cities. You know- to help establish product placement for out-of-control biogenic weapons that do everything from create zombies to spontaneously mutate said zombies into tyrant super soldiers and more. That's hard to demonstrate without a super-secret James Bondian underwater super lab, apparently. Hoo yah.

I apologize to the mad scientist from RE: Extinction at this point; clearly he was more in tune with the Red Queen's goals than the rest of Umbrella.

Anyway, Ada has allies. It turns out one is Barry (lifted from Resident Evil 1....I still can't say for sure if he is canonically alive in the video games or not), another Luther West, one of the survivors from RE: Afterlife (but in keeping with tradition all characters not directly taken from the movie except for Alice die in the second film they appear in), and then there's Leon Kennedy (not that I figured this out until late in the movie when I heard him called Leon). So Leon's Mirror-Alice-Universe twin finally gets some screen time. At least he's in a film with both Jill (who he doesn't seem to know here) and Ada (whom he's got a thing for).

Take note that at no point do we find out where Chris and Claire Redfield went at the end of the last film. So Luther West somehow survived and made buddies with Leon, Barry and "unnamed destined to die" guys, but Chris and Claire? Who knows.

The movie proceeds to burn along at a fearsome pace as Ada and Alice try to escape one simulated city full of clone victims and monsters after another, while the guys (some of whom are unfortunate enough to be there only to die, of course) do the same, including having an encounter with the Las Plagas. The tentacle-faced monstrosities, you say? No! The Las Plagas, as if their existence wasn't already muddied by RE: Afterlife's inexplicable introduction of the tentacle-claw face-sprouting zombies (as well as the Really Big Dude with an Axe) wasn't confusing enough, these Las Plagas are actually an army of zombie-soviet-Nazi-soldiers complete with suits, armor and gear that looks like more Soviet-purchased surplus. Or something.

Luckily I have very, very little hair or it would be easier to pull out. Oh my god. Seriously. Here they had a chance to explain or at least rationalize the existence of the Los Plagas and the unmentioned G Virus in the RE-Mirror Aliceverse and instead somebody says, "We need something that can have a cool shoot-out with Leon, Barry and Luther. How about umbrella goons? Naw, we've been shooting a hell of a lot of them, and they're the ones duking it out with Ada and Alice over here...I know! Zombie soldiers with guns!"

Indeed, not only has Alice found the simulated Raccoon City zone (because on the list of major locales to simulate for purposes of bioweapon sales I'd put Raccoon City right next to New York, Moscow and Tokyo) but she's found yet another victim clone of herself, and a daughter she never had but now decides to fiercely protect. Actually this is a pretty good plot twist, second only to dropping Ada in as a center of plot exposition.

Cloned versions of the entire Umbrella crew from the first movie then show up, led by Evil Jill, and a lengthy shoot-out ensues. At this point I am loathe to spoil too much more, if only because the majority of the film at this point is one long scene-changing gunfight, mixed with a few bizarre moments (which I will happily point out!). In order:

A major Resident Evil monster reappears, this time in a deluxe super-size edition: the licker is back, and he's damned big.

Barry dies toward the end, so in the Aliceverse we know he's dead. That makes Barry the first official "named" character to be extracted messily from the games who is actually dead in Aliceverse.

Alice finds yet another clone processing plant, and this time it's not just mass-generating clones of her, but of her brand new deaf foster daughter and 48 other flash-cloned souls that I guess the Red Queen took a liking to. Luckily the super-licker chases Alice here and she is forced to blow it and all the clones up with official Umbrella grenades. Not so luckily I kept wondering why the goal of the movie was the assisted escape of Alice when siezing the facility and freeing a vast number of clones who, while still clones, could in theory do a fine job of rebooting the decimated world popuation....but as I've learned from the other movies one does not overthink how the Aliceverse works.

Next time Jill should avoid shopping at Jared's of Umbrella Corp. for jewelry

We do finally get A showdown between Jill and Alice. Alice almost loses this one, sort of. Jill is finally released from the control of the Red Queen, which is a good thing I guess, although I have to admit, Jill's relevance to the plot outside of just sorta "being there" is a bit difficult to fathom.

We also get a showdown between Leon and Luther vs. whatever clone edition of Rain this is....this is a clone of Rain from the first movie who's much more effective at being an Umbrella goon. She pulls out an injector with a Las Plagas parasite (bwuh?!?!?!?!) and injects it (an impressive feat since the needle looked kinda small to inject the bug in the syringe.) As is traditional in both the game universe and the Aliceverse the virus works near-instantaneously, except here it just makes Rain really, really badass.

What....

Michelle looked and acted like she was here for the money throughout this movie

Okay, so everyone fights a lot and in the end Alice and crew escape, to live happily ever after, right? Hah!

 The real surprise at the end is just how they close it out with whatever new, spanky insane ending will set the stage for the next film. If you still want some semblance of surprise, stop reading, because I have absolutely got to spoil it:

They fly to Washington D.C. to a White House under siege (looks like the one in Modern Warfare 2...or was it 3?) and Alice is allowed to enter the Oval Office. At this moment I was expecting them to rip off Resident Evil 6 with an appearance by Zombie President, but No! They did one better! It's EVIL Wesker!!!! He's the president now....or something....and he injects Alice with the T-virus, again, explaining that he needs her hopped up on T-Virus mojo so she can help deal with the last stand of humanity. Cut to the scene outside, as Wesker, Jill, Leon, Luther, little girl and Alice all gather to look out on an insane scene of full military action as the US Army barricades the White House in against a vast, unending army of darkness, led by the Red Queen to exterminate all humanity. RE: Extinction apparently exaggerated how far long the extinction process was, I guess.

The forty-one year old Me was simultaneously apoplectic at how nonsensical this movie was while the thirteen year old Me was ready to drop golden bricks in sheer excitement at how Freakin' Awesome this movie was.

I don't even know what the hell to make of this series anymore, and I can't even think about the plot or the point of it all without feeling like I bruised my brain. I do know that I will see the next one, and I do plan to be mildly inebriated when I do so I can enjoy it a bit more without wanting to wave my fists like a lunatic madman at the screen!

B+ for the sheer spectacle and over-the-top action porn. Giant freaking F for coherence, but who cares anymore? This movie's Alice is well and truly down the zombie rabbit hole!

Thirty One Days of Horror: Death Valley

Day Twenty Eight: Death Valley (season one)

While everyone else was watching high profile stuff like The Walking Dead, or Game of Thrones, or even....I dunno....Breaking Bad (or whatever), MTV was quietly doing this hysterical horror-comedy series called Death Valley. The first season is available on Netflix right now; if you're looking for something suitably horror-ish yet also hysterically funny to play during a Halloween party, I would definitely suggest this series.

I've been told by other people (i.e. my wife and pretty much everyone else) that Death Valley borrows a bit, thematically, from shows like Reno 911 and Super Troopers, then sticks it in a blender with a mix of werewolf, vampire and horror films, a dose of Tarantino's sensibilities, then adds in a dollop of Reality TV and Cops for good measure. This is a pretty succinct summary of how Death Valley feels: like you're watching a humorous spin on cops where all the guys in wifebeaters are zombies, all the pimps are vampires, all the domestic disputes involve werewolves, and all the cops know they're on a reality show filmed by Quentin Tarantino. It is frankly amazing no one else thought of trying this first....pure formula gold!

Death Valley follows the exploits of the recently formed UTF (Undead Task Force) in Los Angeles, about a year after something weird happened and one day people started popping up as vampires, werewolves and zombies. L.A. being what it is, the net effect was simply to make it slightly more entertaining when dealing with criminals....now mostly supernatural criminals, of course.



The UTF is composed of Captain Dashell (Bryan Callen), an ambiguously gay blowhard (and absolutely my favorite character), followed by the rookie cop officer landry (Caity Lotz), along with old vets Stubeck, Rinaldi, Pierce and Johnson. Everyone fits a role, has their schtick that makes them stand out, and has interweaving bits that play in and out from episode to episode.

Running gags can be found through all twelve episodes, from the persistent habit of the poor boom-mike guy to get bitten by zombies to the habitually gang/elitist focus of the vampires (the douchebags of the supernatural set) to the rules and regulations that require werewolves to have suitable "safe room" accommodations for nights of the full moon (and of course the UTF has to follow-up and make sure each registered werewolf is compliant with city ordnance). The net effect is a fantastic lineup of episodes, both hysterical and exciting at the same time.

Despite being both a horror and a comedy series, two genres that traditionally don't mesh well with "reality" in any sense, Death Valley manages to do a pretty good job of making a monster-infested L.A. work and feel surprisingly organic. L.A. was a good choice for this; plenty of other cities would have felt a bit contrived; L.A. is already halfway there in terms of chaos...and its got the monsters, just needs a few more supernatural beasts in the mix....!



So far there's only one season of Death Valley, and what news bits I found revealed that MTV apparently didn't renew it, though the show creator is looking for a new channel to take over. I really hope someone grabs it; this is absolutely one of the best horror-comedies I've seen in a long time (Suck being the other awesomeness of this special genre) and really would like to see more.

Head over to Netflix and check it out. Another A+++ from the Death Bat!

Thirty One Days of Horror: Monsters

Day Twenty Seven: Monsters

I'm about 48 minutes into this movie when a monster finally shows up, in the flesh, and not hinted at in some newscast...it's a good thing, too, because the last time we actually saw one it was the opener to the film, with a brief image of a large floating daikaiju-sized cephalopod monster getting hit by a tactical missile strike. With a name like Monsters you'd expect more...monsters, yeah?

Monsters was a 2010 film that I decided to skip in the theaters after it received lukewarm reviews. Now, available in all its glory on Netflix in the middle of my horror movie marathon, it seemed like a shoe-in for reviewing. The movie features the story of two people trapped in the middle of southern Mexico and trying to make good an escape. One is Samantha Wynden (Whitney Able), daughter of the man who owns the media empire that Andrew Caulder (Scoot McNairy) works for. Andrew's down trying to secure some hard footage of the mysterious alien monsters, giant floating cephalopods which have invaded much of Central America in a region now known as the "infection zone." He's derailed when his boss, Samantha's father, orders him to find her and get her home. She's on a walkabout of sorts....apparently having chosen the incredibly dangerous region where an alien invasion is underway to think hard about her future marriage plans (or something).



Monsters' monsters aren't really invaders, though. They're more like what rabbits were to Australia, or the tumbleweed was to the American Southwest....foreign visitors introduced, unchecked, into an environment ill-equipped to deal with them. The giant cephalopods grow and thrive in Central America, and apparently this has been happening for six or so years, as the giant beasts (brought back by a NASA probe in some vague fashion hinted at in a news report and a bit of text in the prologue) play cat and mouse with the US and Mexican military.

That all sounds really cool, right? Well unfortunately its a great setup but the follow-through is really, really slow. Most of the first forty five minutes of the film is a sort of travelogue, focused on life for two American tourists trying to get out of a strife-torn region of Central America. It could just as easily have dealt with a guerrilla uprising for all one knew, and only the occasional sign of "infected zone" or periodic newscasts with footage of the military fighting giant flying octopi suggest otherwise. It also tries to be a sort of "two strangers cast together might fall in love" story but really falls flat on its love story ass for a variety of reasons.

Ignoring the fact that the aliens don't really, truly show up in a meaningful way until an hour into the film, this movie's slow, methodical pace is punctuated by some beautiful scenery of the Yucatan region, and in terms of travel films its actually really quite good, if you are willing to overlook the sci-fi survival horror injected sporadically into the movie.



Scoot McNairy has something going for him, too. Throughout the movie I kept feeling like I was watching a movie with David Duchovny in it, because Scoot is a dead-wringer for his voice. This actually was critical to my ability to slog through this movie, as it was so unbelievably slow at times that only by imagining this as some sort of stealth X-Files riff could I find the energy to enjoy it.

Monsters makes a big mistake, probably a necessary one I imagine as it seems to me this film was overly ambitious for whatever budget it had: it adopts the fairly common technique of trying to make the extraordinary seem plausible through underplaying everything. By trying to make the story slower, the reactions of people more muted and less dramatic, the presentation ultimately nothing more than a travelogue of two people in a very screwed up place, it attempted to invoke a sense that this could, indeed be happening, or could at least happen in the way depicted. But for some reason it just doesn't manage to pull it off. Other films (i.e. District 9) did the same thing masterfully.

Somehow, for such a gorgeous and technically proficient film Monsters feels just sort of...lifeless. Still a better film than some of the abyssmal 80's dreck I've been watching, but it really could have used a bit more....pacing, and story, I suppose; and maybe two characters who were just a bit more interesting; the movie rides on their stories, their performances....and that just didn't cut it, unfortunately.

If you survive to the very end, around the 1:24 mark in the film (the tail end) it suddenly gets really, really interesting, providing a tantalizing hint of how much more it could have been. It's too little, too late....and mostly just a hint of what sort of movie Monsters could have been (hint: not a sci fi horror flick, maybe something more akin to real sci fi, a Jurassic Park meets Avatar deal, perhaps) but did make me wonder if someone down the road might not see this, realize the same, and then try to it all right next time.

This movie hovers around a C+ for effort and despite being a very slow travelogue/love story mischaracterized as a monster movie, jumping to an A in the last few minutes with the tantalizing suggestion of so much more about the actual monsters that we never got to see.

Thirty One Days of Horror: Deep Space

Day Twenty Six: Deep Space

Continuing a trend with horror themes containing the word "Space" in it, we have an obscure 1988 horror special starring Charles Napier as Detective Ian McLemore, a rogue cop who --wait for it!-- plays by his own rules. He's paired with his partner Det. Jerry Merris (Ron Glass), who serves as his slightly less rogue-cop foil. The two are doing all the things you'd expect of a couple detectives in an 80's action flick with a captain ready to bust a vein at their antics (they're introduced with a furious and dubious gunfight that leads to the death of a guy smuggling around....halloween costumes???) when something from space crashes into a remote section of town, unleashing...well...basically a close cousin to the tree demon from Evil Dead, at least at first.

Seems that some secretive government-funded military lab has fired off a bio-weapon into space for some special but not entirely obvious reason, and somehow lose control of it. The overly buff, poorly acted not at all science-y dudes manning the control stations using technical language even a beach bum could grasp might be part of the problem here...

While the massively incompetent government officials try to figure out what happened to their rogue space capsule, the "big brown thing" has started hatching and eating people in short order, culminating in a very alienesque monstrosity escaping from the morgue.

Actually, it's hardly fair to say the monster looks suspiciously like the Alien xenomorph. It might be more accurate to say that this monster bears traits of pretty much every Alien-inspired movie monster to appear since Alien came out:

I'm in ur movie eatin ur plot

Anyway, McLemore wrestles with mutant invaders, a potent psychic who wants to help at all costs (played by Julie Newmar no less!) a new relationship that he wants to foster into something meaningful (with Elisabeth Brooks) -- by luring her into getting naked with bagpipes, no less....yes, McLemore is a busy manly man, a pure and unadulterated product of 1980s cinema.

This movie is full of some awesomely bad dialogue, delivered with shockingly, awesomely bad acting. I can't tell if the actors are playing it straightly....and badly....because they're simply nonplussed by the insane script they're stuck with, or because none of them can quite believe they're reduced to making such a hideously bad movie as this. The strongest actor in this movie is Napier, who plays the role of the dangerously rogue detective to the hilt; Napier plays McLemore just about like you'd expect (or even hope): as a conventional made-for-TV cop drama star who somehow accidentally stumbled into a monster movie and can't quite come to terms with the fact that he's forced to trade up Columbian drug lords for mutant space monsters. Everyone else....well, they're all just a foil for this intensely by-the-numbers schlock horror flick, except for Elizabeth Brooks, who's an old hand at this sort of film (and it shows); she's got a more than exemplary performance as McLemore's main squeeze.

Giant Roach Egg???

Despite the utterly tired, worn and terribly cliched mess that this movie is right from the get-go, it had some sort of weird charm that kept me watching. I think the idea that McLemore was actually somehow peering through the fourth wall, fully aware he had been accidentally placed in a horror film when he was really supposed to be doing some sort of Starsky and Hutch or Lethal Weapon rip-off instead made it slightly more amusing to me. Perhaps it was when the captain sends the detectives off to investigate the crashed pod on Innsmouth Road. Maybe it was the way everyone unrelentingly delivered their lines in the most plebian, unremarkable and utterly fake way they possibly could. Somehow, it made this movie work, despite the fact that it really doesn't...!

Just like The Terror Within, Deep Space can't resist ripping off some of the scenes from Alien. When the old security guard chasing the cat in a warehouse with a rooftop leak problem meets the alien...er, giant mutant cockroach thingy, well....lets just say the scene escapes being a blatant rip off only because when the security guard throws his flashlight at the monster it handily catches it before actually eating the man with its extending jaws...er, I mean, tentacle-like things.

I dunno....I'll give this one a D...for derivative!

This movie reminded me of another bad cops vs. monsters movie from the early nineties called Split Second and starring Rutger Hauer. Tragically not on Netflix, but one which I need to find again....there's something about cops vs. alien films I kinda like...

"It'll be a few more years before Predator 2 shows us how to do a good cops and aliens movie, sweetheart."