Mutant Vampire Zombies from the Hood

Mutant Vampire Zombies from the Hood.  Yes, that's the title.

If you have a fetish for topless one-armed women being chased by mutant vampire zombies, then THIS is the film for you!

As filler, I'm just going to post all the ridiculous stuff that was said.  Everything in quotes is from us, everything else is from the film.  It's a bit more....adult this time around.  I blame it on the perfect storm of terrible movie and hilarious foul-mouthed guests.

Special thanks to Rez, Black Chad, Joe Cam and Chad's lovely wife Louise.  Yes, Black Chad is black.  It's not an ironic title.  It's because we're all ridiculous.

-"STORMFRONT FILMS!  This movie brought to you by Hurricane Irene.  You're welcome, fuckers!"

-I've got flavor.  "Yeah, vanilla and ass."

-When I start doing Kung Fu, then you can call me homie.  "What, black people can't do kung fu? "

            "He must not like Wu Tang."

            "Word on the street is.....Wu Tang?....ain't nothing to fuck with."

-"At least it's a real shoot-out.  Nobody is hitting anything."

-Cop gets shot, and immediately:  "It was my last day!"

            " I'm getting too old for this shit!"

-"I came."

-"When Snoop said he had the purple, he wasn't kidding!"

-"This movie is so unrealistic.  Gangsters do not wear their pants up that high."

-"Did he just tell a black woman he was gonna put color in her cheeks?"

-"Hospital?  You ain't gonna find no hospital on Compton."

-"Burial by car?"

-"With Oscar Wilde wordplay like this, how can you go wrong?"

-"Fuckin' camper!  You stole my headshot!"

-"How is your daughter the hottest white woman in Santa Monica, and you're the blackest man in the film?"

-"Hey it's the Fresh Prince of Bel Air's house!"

-"If she ain't got some black in her, I'll give her some."

-"He's the color palette of the Asian community."

-"Zombie rape?"  "Looks like they still got their baser instincts!"

-"I'd hit it.....until it was unconscious, and then I'd have sex with it."

-"Well, shit ain't serious yet 'cause the guns aren't held sideways."

-"Get him, Coolio!"

-"It went sideways!"  "Shit just got real!"

-"He's black, he's allowed to talk about people this way."  "'Cause we all know Oscar Wilde was a big niggah."

-"How did nobody miss a single shot all of a sudden?  This is like House of the Dead."

-"This movie was cobbled together from parts of better movies."

-"If Mr. Miyagi did too much LSD in the 60's."  "I still say it's Egg Fu Young from Big Trouble in Little China."

-"It's so beautiful out here.  The stars, the weather, the grunting sounds."

-"If we're gonna die, can I put a finger in you?"

-"Here they come.....no, literally...here the come."

-"Trigger discipline motherfucker!  This ain't Call of Duty!"

-"This guy used to work with Coppola!  What the hell happened?"

-"Is that zombie Ray Lewis?"

The best part of the film, hands down, was when Black Chad's wife logged in to chat with us just in time to witness a scene where a zombie is making love to a severed head.  Much hilarity ensues as she jokingly chews him out.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark's Mostly Unnecessarily Long Title

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is NOT a horror movie in the current sense.  There is very little violence, almost no gore and very few 'BOO!' moments.  I would say that this is a less depressing Pan’s Labyrinth, but EVERY movie that involves weird little creatures is less depressing than Pan’s Labyrinth.  I’d put this somewhere between that one and The Dark Crystal on my list of movies that involve fantastical creatures that fuck with the main characters. This is a creepy movie with creepy critters and a cast that manages to play to their strengths. 

Yes, even Katie Holmes.

On to the review!

On its surface, I felt that this film was going to be a better take on the recent trend (that I approve of) of making a disturbing movie even more so by threatening kids.  Before you take out your internet baseball bats to beat me about the face and neck, I don’t mean I approve of kids being threatened.  I mean I approve of the tension that builds in a film when a child is in danger.  It’s a natural human response to want to keep kids and animals safe.  That’s why Stephen King has always been the ‘Master of Horror.’  He has never been afraid to harm a child or  pet in his stories if it meant he could ratchet up the unease.

Fortunately there is more to this film than just its surface appearance.  While I would have been entertained by a tense, frightful movie starring a decently talented child actress, this movie added enough unexpected features to make me enjoy it and want to recommend it.

First, it’s not really a horror in the current sense.  This is a very, very throwback movie where there is no huge body count, they didn’t fill the last hour with nothing but threats of violence and there are absolutely no meta-commentaries on the state of anything in today's society.  I dig that.  I enjoyed that about the first Jeepers Creepers and I enjoy it here.  There are still some elements of horror; there are certainly some good scares, but it doesn’t attempt to make you jump and shriek every five minutes.  Instead, this movie slowly ratchets up the tension.

Secondly, though Guilermo del Toro did not direct, you can still feel his influence.  The designs of the creepy little troll things are definitely straight off his drawing board and some of the elements feel vaguely familiar.  According to IMDB, my source for all nouns, this is director Troy Nixey’s first full-length feature, and I’ll say he did a pretty good job. 

Now, the acting....a quick search shows that Bailee Madison has been in more films that most kids three times her age, and it pays off.  As Sally, she actually sells the part of a depressed, possibly drugged-up (hooray Ritalin!) kid stuck in a shitty situation between two jackass parents.  Then, when terrible things start happening, she does a great job of looking just as curious/freaked out as I figure my 10-year-old self would be.  Guy Pearce is  the work-obsessed father, Alex, and plays the part fairly straightforward.  The film calls for a father who absolutely loves his daughter and his work, but doesn’t have the slightest clue as to how to balance the two.

Finally there is Katie Holmes, seemingly beloved of nobody outside the Cruise-Holmes compound.  You know what?  I don’t really have a problem with her.  I just don’t care for her too much as an actress.  She’s too saccharine in most roles.  However, in this one they let her play the ‘other woman’ and force her to be the third wheel between her boyfriend and his sullen child.  This actually works very well.  Her character is well thought out and when she starts reaching out to Sally you can see Mrs. Holmes channeling her motherhood and just being an actual, caring person.  In fact, her character is damn near the only ray of hope and sunshine in this entire film.  I like her more in this film than I do in any other, with the exception of The Gift.

As far as the design goes, they managed to take a huge, sprawling property-- complete with garden maze and giant mansion-- and make it both incredibly open and very claustrophobic at exactly the right times.  That really adds to all the effects, although the character design of the antagonists really is a fantastic cross between horror-movie creepy and Nightmare Before Christmas weird.

I really, really don’t want to go into the plot because that’s the entire reason to watch a film like this.  You’ve got a good idea from the trailer, so let’s leave it at that. 

Unlike Columbiana, I do recommend that you check this one out in theaters, unless you have a bad-ass surround sound at home.  Half the chills came from the film's use of sound when it came time for those creepy little gnome fucks to start talking. 

So do yourself a favor and check this one out. Even if you’re a horror-movie wuss, you can probably handle this during a matinee.  Just make sure to take your anxiety medication first.

Columbiana

Yesterday I did a movie double feature to make up for not having a Netflix'd review this week.  I saw Columbiana and Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.  They both had their ups and downs, but one of them sent me out of the theater in a rush of confusion, and that's the one I want to write up first.  Only one of these movies couldn't make up its mind as to whether or not it wanted to showcase a new, strong female action hero or be an incredibly misogynistic film.  Hollywood, you can't have it both ways, you know.

            On to the review!

            Columbiana is an action film about a woman named Cataleya, who happens to be a bad ass and, if I were a psychologist, probably clinically insane.  Now, in case you don't like beautiful women, let me fill you in.  This movie is a vehicle for Zoe Saldana.  Nerds may remember her as Uhura from the Star Trek reboot, and everyone else may 'recognize' her as the main blue alien female from Avatar.  Zoe Saldana is a decent actress and incredibly beautiful.  Director Olivier Megaton (Winner of 2011's Greatest Combination of Names That Don't Belong Together) knows this, and tries to take advantage of it.

            How does he 'take advantage' of a beautiful lead actress, you ask?  By over-emphasizing her curves at the most inappropriate moments, that's how!  Then they try to make her more relatable by giving her emotions just like us normal non-fearless-assassins have, but they overdo the shit out of it all.  After all is said and done, you end up with conflicting scenes and moments of intense action interspersed with confusing and disturbing bouts of crying, screaming, stubbornness and general WTF'ery.

            On top of all that, Mr. Megaton couldn't leave well enough alone and made sure that our Cataleya only wore the tightest, most form-fitting outfits she could get her hands on.  This is appropriate for approximately 30% of the missions she goes on throughout the film.  What you end up with is a movie that has her putting on a form-fitting outfit and kicking ass while the camera constantly finds excuses to linger on her ass and braless chest, then shows her creepily breaking into her 'boyfriend's' house for some loving and leaving.  Then it's off to another mission followed by some crying and freaking out.  Then another mission before random sexy dancing, etc. etc.  It's all very confusing.

            Plot wise, they do a decent job of trying to establish WHY she's so fucked in the head.  A young Cataleya watches her drug-lord's second in command father and presumably mostly innocent mother get killed because they wanted out of the Columbian drug trade.  She goes to the embassy and gets herself a U.S. citizenship, finds her Uncle in Chicago and demands to be a trained killer.  There's a decent chase scene that made me want to play the 'favela' stage in Modern Warfare 2, but otherwise the 'young Cataleya' scenes go on for about ten minutes too long. 

            I honestly can't say anything about the rest of the cast because they fulfilled their contracts, nothing more and nothing less.  The drug lord is ineffective and kind of makes you wonder how the hell he got so powerful in the first place.  They never explain why he's protected by the CIA (oh yeah, apparently the CIA moves Columbian drug lords to New Orleans and lets them keep selling shit to kids), the FBI agent is damn ineffective, and everyone else is just there.  The only real cool cat in the film is the Uncle Emilio, who takes Cataleya in and lets this precocious young child become a crazed, revenge-fueled murderess.  Actor Cliff Curtis strikes the right pose between being an accomplished thug himself and still being a family man.

            All in all, Columbiana is a muddled mess with a barely coherent plot, poor camera angles during the fight scenes, boilerplate action, unimpressive dialog and random bouts of crying.  Some people are going to watch this film and be impressed by how badass Zoe Saldana gets to be, and others are going to watch this film and wonder if the director hates women and assumes they're always on their period.  Feel free to make your own decisions, but I recommend this as a Redbox rental or a late-night HBO flick.  The theater experience didn't add too much to it, and there's nothing so amazing that I'd encourage you to watch it on the big screen.  All in all, I doubt this is going to become anything huge on the scale of the Bourne films, but it's message is so confusing that it accidentally makes it better than your average non-martial-arts action flick.

Addendum:  Thanks to the trailers, I just learned that Straw Dogs is getting a remake.  I've never seen the Dustin Hoffman original, but now I think I need to seek it out.  After viewing the trailer for the new one and comparing it to the original, I encourage anyone who is interested in the remake to keep their expectations low.

Conan The Barbarian (2011)

The new Conan movie has a lot going for it.  Like, it exists.  It is a movie.  There are actors, and there are lines, and there was a special effects budget.  After those facts things get a little…..less good.

            Hahahahaha!  Who the hell am I kidding?  The new Conan movie has just won my award for Worst Film of The Summer (So Far).  Since summer is almost over, there’s a very good chance that I can drop the parenthesis very soon.

            I have not read the comics, so I cannot say whether or not the new movie hews closer to its source material, but it sure as hell does not follow the steps of the original film.  This one wastes nearly a third of the movie establishing Conan’s back story, and holy shit does nobody care.  You have to sit through an explanation of the world, then witness an unnecessarily brutal birth followed by twenty minutes of Conan’s youth.  Does anyone really give a shit about the fact that Conan was a badass kid?  If you saw the original, you just KNEW that Conan was a badass from the moment he was born.

            Nope, this time the studios have decided that you will care more about the character if you witness his happy childhood where he single-handedly slays a half-dozen adult warriors, trains with his father a bunch and then witness everyone he loves getting slaughtered at the hands of the big-bad meanie.  Personally, I think they were wrong.  I totally cared less.

I can only fault the actors so much, even if newcomer Jason Momoa does make a terrible adult Conan.  Size aside, he plays the role so seriously that it’s painful.  You could have a serious action flick if you at least made the lines halfway decent.

For example, say this out loud:  “You don’t have to do this I beg you.  Let us turn back.”

Congratulations!  I can guarantee, with every fiber of my being, that your reading was better than the film’s.  In fact, I like to imagine that this would actually make a decent, middle-of-the-pack videogame.  Conan watches his father die at the hands of the evil loser of a Madlibs contest, Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), his crazy witch daughter and his five generals.  I could totally see a game made where you have eight levels, the first being the tutorial where you learn how to fight and the level ends with you watching your village burn.  Then, for each successive level, you kill off a general, then the daughter, then the mastermind.  Simple hack and slash, plus it wouldn’t suck as hard as this film!

The part that really pisses me off is the amount of decent actors slumming it.  Rose McGowan plays the crazy witch daughter, Ron Perlman is Conan’s father, and shit, I actually liked Stephen Lang in other, less craptacular films.  At least in other movies they had more than just throwaway lines to deliver.  Although, I have to hand it to Miss McGowan, she did play a psycho witch who loves daddy a little bit too much (if you know what I mean) very convincingly.

Let’s see…plot….Zym kills Conan’s father to get the last piece of a mask that will let him control the dead, and then he spends the next 20 years searching for the last member of the necromancer bloodline.  Conan swears vengeance and stumbles upon the last member of the necromancer bloodline 20 years after Zym kills his family.  Coincidence!  Then lots of blood happens and it’s all surprisingly boring for an action movie.

Now, I know that this is supposed to be a summer action flick, but the suspension of belief is too much.  You literally have to believe that everyone in the movie is functionally retarded in order to enjoy the action.  At one point a group of slaves pull a boat through a city wall.  That is not a typo.  There was no pitched battle beforehand, and no lookouts or soldiers or anyone happened to notice a hundred slaves slowly pull a fucking BOAT up to and then through a wall.  Although, you gotta hand it to those slaves for having some serious muscle.  After that, everything gets dumber and I would hate to spoil it for you.

I know the movie is going to be a dud because the studio knew it was going to be a dud.  It looks like they’re trying to recoup their money by selling about 45 minutes worth of advertisement space prior to the film.  I counted the number of trailers prior to the flick and came out with seven.  Seven movies that will all do better than Conan The Barbarian are will play their trailers for the 30 people that will go see Conan The Barbarian after opening weekend.  Surprisingly enough, only two people left the theater during the movie, but that did make up about 5% of the crowd.  I would have left too if I thought I could make this shit up.

So do yourself a favor and go watch the original, super-cheesy Schwarzenegger original, or the sequel, or Red Sonja.  Sadly enough, this may actually be better than the Clash of the Titans, but that’s like saying it’s better to have blood in your stool rather than in your urine.

Netflix'd: ThanksKilling

Moments after the very first thanksgiving…..tits and a murder!

Unfortunately, things get a little whole lot more boring after that.  For a 66 minute flick, it’s unfortunate that we have to spend just enough time getting to know the future victims so that we can (supposedly) care when they are murdered…by a turkey.  Also for a 66 minute movie, it does an amazing job of being a by-the-numbers horror film.  If nothing else, ThanksKilling proves that you can still have a moderately entertaining horror movie on your hands even after deleting most of the plot, acting and scenes that most other films contain.  Actually, I really appreciate how little wasted time each scene contains.  After Birdemic’s amazingly long camera pans and silent scene watching, it was nice to view a movie that didn’t lovingly linger on every tree for several excruciating minutes.

The plot of this one is pretty easy, and I’m pretty sure you’ve guessed it by now.  There’s a turkey, and it kills people.  The long form explanation is that the turkey is really a possessed demon put there by angry Native Americans and rises every 505 years to kill all the white people.

There now, don’t you feel educated?

Here are your potential future victims:  Biff, the quarterback.  JoeBoge, the dumb fat kid.  Slut, the funniest one of the group.  Randall, the brainiac and The Other Girl…the other girl.  I really have no idea if these are supposed to be high school or college aged kids.  Most of them look like they could pass for late teens or early twenties, Randall looks much younger than the rest and the quarterback appears to be an over-tanned 35 year-old.  Yeah, that’s all I have to say about that.

As far as the scenes go, every one where the killer turkey ‘hides’ is predicated on everybody else being too stupid to know it’s a turkey in disguise.  This is necessary for the sort of horror-comedy that this movie is aiming for, but it’s still really, really dumb.  Granted, there are some genuinely funny moments but they only serve to apologize for all the rampant stupid. 

            There’s self-aware, and then there’s ‘Haahaha look we’re totally making a movie and shit!’ You can guess which camp I place ThanksKilling in.

            Look, this isn’t a terrible flick.  It’s not a hackneyed attempt at anything, it isn’t delivering a message and it isn’t a fucked up studio film that was raped by the executives before it even had a chance to succeed.  This is obviously a movie made by a bunch of guys who just wanted to be funny on camera, show off some special FX skills and entertain.  That’s totally cool.  I can get behind DIY movies that don’t take themselves seriously, and there are plenty of well-known directors out there who started with a handicam and a dream. 

            With that being said, it doesn’t mean I have to like everything about ThanksKilling.  Even at just over an hour long, some scenes were painfully slow.  I can only forgive amateur acting so much, and a few parts were definitely too much for the main characters’ chops.  Finally, while Birdemic suffered from not having the actors speak until the camera had been rolling for mind numbingly long seconds, ThanksKilling could have benefited from getting the actors to slow the hell down once in awhile.

            So check this out if you need a few quick laughs and don’t mind every third or fourth joke falling flat.  Check it out if you love wise-cracking, foul-mouthed animals as your killer.  If you hate the fourth wall or would like to see how to make decent special effects with a tiny budget, then you will not waste 66 minutes.  It’s far better than Birdemic and had a better use of FX than Avatar: The Last Airbender.  It’s a very amateur movie, but it doesn’t apologize for it.  I appreciate it for making me laugh a few times and trying to be clever.  Unfortunately, nothing special happens and too many of the jokes can be seen coming from a mile away.  In the end it’s just too forgettable for it to go on my recommend list.

Note:  The quotes below are obnoxious and juvenile.  I really have no problem with that, because so was this movie.  Thanks again to Joe Cam and Rez for their company.

 “It looks like she’s 47…but those titties look 20!”

“So….the turkey is an African American Viking from the hood?”

“Judging by the names, this entire movie was filmed and funded by crack dealers.”

“This is the pilot for ‘The Pennsylvania Shore…that dude’s name is ‘The Inflamation.”

“Oh man…Ted Nugent’s dog died.”

“I am more dedicated to killing you than I am to not brushing my teeth!”

“She can’t die.  She hasn’t even shown her tits yet.”

“The physics of a turkey driving a car make my head hurt.”  “As opposed to wielding an axe and firing a shotgun?”

“Everybody wants Biff.”

“Fuck Ohio!  This all makes sense now!”

“And THAT is how you prevent unwanted pregnancy.”

“At least there weren’t two turkeys to spit-roast her.”

“FUCK YEAH!  BOOKS!”
“Crawl into that tauntaun, Randall!”

“Gay predator vision engaged.”

For the inside jokes:

“Joe, put your cleavage back in!”

JoeBoge is based on two of my best friends who happen to be larger gentlemen, and one of them also has a habit of partying to the extreme.

“This is Gobbleskat if he were smaller and couldn’t stop swearing.”

Also:  Gravy-flavored condoms?

30 Minutes or Less

            This movie was….funny.  It wasn’t brilliant, it wasn’t one of the best comedies I had ever seen, and it wasn’t particularly memorable.  However, I was entertained for almost 90 minutes.  For once that's all I wanted. 

            Maybe it’s because my standards for new cinema has fallen over the last six months.  Maybe it’s just because everyone in the packed theater was really into the film and I got that nice psychological boost from the group laughter.  Whatever the reason, I’m willing to say that, so far, this was the best comedy of the summer.  This is high, low praise for a film that made me laugh often enough but whose lines I can’t recall at all less than 24 hours later.

            This isn’t going to be the next Super Troopers or even the next Zombieland, but I think most audiences are going to walk out of this movie with a smile on their faces.  Thanks to the resurgence of ‘adult comedy’ that The Hangover started, we have yet another R-Rated comedy that at least strives to be something slightly different.  Starring Jesse Eisenberg as our pizza delivery boy slacker Nick, and his best friend Chet (Aziz Ansari, a comedian who I will admit cracks me up 95% of the time) we get a little taste of what it would be like to be kind of an idiot trapped in a plot concocted by really big idiots.

            Those two ‘big idiots’ are Dwayne and Travis, ably played by two guys who are pretty much hired solely to play idiots, Danny McBride and Nick Swardson.  I like them both, but Danny McBride is definitely funnier in smaller doses, like the way he is used here, rather than as the star of a movie such as the little-loved Your Highness.  If you have seen a single trailer, you of course know that Dwayne and Travis strap a bomb to Nick’s chest and force him to rob a bank in a matter of hours or face blowing the hell up.

            What the trailer doesn’t tell you is that for a film that is hyped as a bank-robbery-comedy, the entire plot is far more convoluted and better than advertised.  Nick is actually forced to rob a bank so that Dwayne can get the money he needs to turn around and pay off someone else to do something that could result in his receiving over twenty times the amount of money Nick could possibly deliver.  The convoluted plot doesn’t always work, but it at least offers a few funny moments from the four primary stars and several bit players throughout the movie.

            Unfortunately there isn’t really much else to say about it.  I don’t want to go into the plot in any more detail for fear of ruining some of the refreshing surprises, and the acting was perfectly passable.  There’s still too much emphasis on McBride’s part in his attempt to equate swearing with humor, and Eisenberg’s character, while endearingly goofy, is still largely unchanged from when I saw in him Roger Dodger a decade ago.

            So go see this film if you want to laugh and aren’t concerned about finding this year’s super-quotable ‘everybody’s gonna be buzzing about this flick’ movie.  It’s far better than Your Highness and Bad Teacher, even slightly better (in my estimation) than Horrible Bosses, but it’s no future classic.