It’s time for Horrorfest!

January 11th, 2009 • 3 comments chatter, movies

My favorite time of the year for movies, After Dark/Lionsgate Horrorfest. Albeit moved to January instead of the usual mid November showing, Horrorfest is here! It started yesterday but we couldn’t make it. Today was the airing of Slaughter. Unfortunately, the only thing that got slaughtered was my cash flow. This movie is a big budget horror flick that could’ve done so much but instead, decided to pander to predictability and transparency. The plot is ripped almost entirely from other movies, including After Dark’s own Lake Dead, which aired at last year’s Horrorfest. It’s a sad story about a backwoods/backwards/redneck family, crazy about incest and murder. And by sad, I don’t mean it’s a sob story, I mean it’s sad and hard to watch.

Unlike Lake Dead, the family aspect was practically unbelievable. The daughter, Lola, was supposed to be around 17 but looks like a dead ringer for a mid 20s girl (which Lucy Holt is). Her older brother in the movie, who I don’t even think was mentioned by name, had about two lines the whole time while her younger brother, Cort, ended up stealing the show. And her father, played by esteemed actor David Sterne, also barely spoke in the movie. Not a tight knit family at all, only Lola and Cort actually spoke to each other on screen. The major plot device for the family, and why what happens in the film happens, is almost blatantly spelled out for you around 30 minutes into the movie. That’s at least 20 or so minutes before it’s re-spelled out for you to realize what’s going on. If you see the movie, you’ll see what I mean. This whole movie was so one-dimensional. I’ve seen bad movies, I own bad movies, but this was about as bad as Screamplay from Troma, which is almost unwatchably bad. I found it hard to be drawn into the movie when I (and my girlfriend) knew what was coming. Almost How to Make a Horror Movie 101 predictable, the music certainly was no help. There’s no connection between the audience and the characters, the acting is just paper thin and the chemistry between Lola and Faith (the main protagonist) is almost non-existent as well. All of this is set on a farm on the outskirts of Atlanta (not that these farms actually exist), with cityscapes that look like European cities (because it is), and everyone drives cars with license plates from North Carolina. Maybe the director and producers thought no one would notice this. Are plates from Georgia harder to get than those from North Carolina? Literally every vehicle in the movie has the wrong plates. Or maybe Atlanta got relocated to North Carolina since I was last there in December.

Tomorrow is our other day to watch Horrorfest movies and I really hope they’re better than Slaughter. Last year’s biggest bust, for me, was Crazy 8s which at least had a discernible plot. Its plot may have been thin as well and very disconnected, but at least it had something to move the story along. Tonight’s movie was like watching a redneck movie train wreck in slow motion. Hopefully, things like Perkins 14, Autopsy, and The Broken can make up for it. I’ve got high hopes for Perkins 14 but after tonight, those hopes may be squashed.

If After Dark keeps putting out stuff like this, Horrorfest won’t last much longer. Which is sad given the very strong and entertaining round of movies they’ve had the last two years.

The latest into the fray

January 6th, 2008 • chatter, movies

Since my mother came down to visit this weekend, it’s cut my movie viewing by, well, almost an entirety. I’ve only managed to squeeze in half of The Royal Tenenbaums and watched About A Boy last night. Both great movies. Tonight we watched The Producers (2006) and For Your Consideration neither of which are a part of my collection. I’d never seen For Your Consideration but it was fantastic and had some great dialogue. I especially loved the latter half of the movie when Catherine O’Hara took some styling tips from Jennifer Coolidge’s days as Stifler’s Mom and had her face taped back to look younger. Great stuff. Classes start on Monday so I’ll have even less time to watch movies but I’ll somehow make watching all of this work but I’m going to guess it’ll take more than a year unless I cut out any series; I can’t logistically fit in three seasons of Entourage, three seasons of Nip/Tuck and years of Macross Saga along with everything else!

Tomorrow means class is almost here and I still need to change my car’s oil, air filter, and replace the valve cover gasket on the Focus! ARG! Need more time!

The choice of the night

January 3rd, 2008 • chatter, movies

Was Blood Diamond and only took 10 minutes to choose this time! Jess bought me the movie probably 2 months ago and it’s sat on the shelf until tonight, day 2 of the Never Ending Movie Stream. I’m really starting to regret wanting to do this as I realize picking a movie everyday will be tough and TV shows will be tougher.

The movie was great, I can see why it got all the award nods it did and why Houson got so many damned awards to take home. I thought it was quite well written even given the holes here and there or continuity issues, I can look past those. I never realized that Rhodesia is now called Zimbabwe, I found that interesting. Personally I think they should’ve picked someone other than Jennifer Connelly for the female lead, I kept flashing back to Requiem For A Dream whenever she showed up. I hope Leo does more serious movies like this and not boring cruft like that stinking sinking boat movie that an ex of mine loved. The movie had great cinematography, excellent performances, but a horrible soundtrack. I don’t think the people of Sierra Leone wanted their war-torn story set to Mac 10 and Nas. That really threw me off throughout the movie, such odd choices for music.

Tomorrow, though technically tonight, will be a tougher choice since my mother is dropping by on Friday and we need to tidy up a bit. Hopefully it’ll be something funny.

So Horrorfest’s over for us

November 11th, 2007 • chatter, movies
Tags: horrorfest, movies

And today wasn’t a total disappointment. We saw the last two movies we had on the list: Tooth & NailNightmare Man. Boy, was Tooth & Nail a let down. It had a somewhat star-laden of Robert Carradine, Michael Madsen, Vinny Jones, and Rider Strong (who died, again). It was a post apocalyptic movie set in Philadelphia and there are two kinds of people: foragers and rovers. Rovers are cannibals — and looked like any actor from a medieval movie — and foragers who were everyone else. It was 94 minutes of slow moving story and very little interest in the characters. all of whom except one had no back story. The only character with a back story was Neon (all the foragers are named after car models) and even then, hers was not terribly interesting. I want my $9.25 back for the movie.

Nightmare Man was, much to our surprise, the campy cheesy horror movie that I thought was missing from the line-up (Horrorfest 2006 didn’t have any) and it delivered on all levels. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, start to finish. It was very campy and cheesy and even had Tiffany Shepis of Troma fame as a somewhat major role in the movie. I’ll be buying this on DVD because it was that enjoyable. The story is a possession/revenge story that has a good twist at the end (and a cameo from Richard Moll!).

Top 3 favorite movies:

Borderland

Nightmare Man

Mulberry Street

Horrorfest, day 1

November 10th, 2007 • 1 comment chatter, movies
Tags: horror, horrorfest

We trudged up to West Palm Beach today for the first day of Horrorfest, the second annual weekend of horror movies “too scary to show in theaters”. We’d planned to see three movies: Unearthed, Deaths of Ian Stone, and Borderland. Unfortunately due to traffic, we missed Unearthed (the one I was really looking forward to). We walked right in as the lights were dimming for Deaths of Ian Stone which was kind of like Groundhog Day meets the Boogeyman. Ian Stone lives his current life one day at a time until his friends — really brood mates — come to kill him. See, Ian isn’t a human, he’s a “harvester” who feeds off the fear of humans. The movie starts out with utterly horrible camera work, enough to start churning my stomach, something that really hasn’t happened since g-force tests at Space Camp when I was 12. It got better about 15 minutes in thankfully, it was god awful. Almost as if they didn’t rent a steadycam on the first few scenes of the film. It turned into love-ghost-story but was well done overall, we both enjoyed it.

After that was the gory Borderland about a Santeria cult trying to relink Santeria with some ancient African practices to raise a demon. It’s got enough good stuff to make up for a fairly thin story, by “stuff” I mean dismembered limbs and assorted lopped off animal parts. I commented, more than once, that Sean Astin looked like he hadn’t showered since he left the shire years ago, he just grew facial hair in the meantime. See the movie and you’ll know what I mean. I loved this movie because it really fulfilled what I look for in a basic, dirty horror movie: animals and people dying, typically through losing body parts. It was awesome when “Papa” severed Rider Strong’s achilles tendon with a rusty machete and then bit out his tongue. Lots of blood and gore, thumbs up from me — not so much from Jess.

Tomorrow and Sunday bring 6 more movies and more money on gas. Hey, it’s only one time a year right?

Iraq’s “only” heavy metal band

September 11th, 2007 • chatter, metal, movies

Now, I’m doubting the fact that they’re the only metal band in the entire country but this movie looks pretty sweet: Heavy Metal In Baghdad. Spike Jonze is an executive producer? I do not expect suckage.

It was More Than Meets The Eye

July 3rd, 2007 • movies

Last night we saw the Transformers movie. Being a lifelong fan, I thoroughly enjoyed it. While I don’t have all the action figures like I did when I was a kid, I do have the Generation 1 series DVDs and thought that Michael Bay and Spielberg did a fine job bringing these ‘bots to life. The CGI was unreal, all the robots looked very realistic which is what Bay was going for. My girlfriend loved the movie even with vague memories of the TV being the only link she has to the franchise. The movie should please almost anyone on all fronts. It’s got tons of actions for the plebeians who can’t pay attention to a story, a fairly easy to follow — if convoluted — storyline for fans and the one thing everyone wants: transforming action sequences.

Now, spoilers are all over the net already so I’m not divulging anything new. I could have done without some of the extra Decepticons they tossed in for the sake of the storyline because they butchered them. There’s an Abrahms tank called Devastator and is a single Decepticon. In the Generation 1 story (the only one I, and many fans, consider canonical. This includes the late 80s Japanese arcs) Devastator was a combiner, not a singular robot. He was comprised of the Constructicons to become a larger Decepticon a la Voltron-esque combining (this lead to a lot of different characters and confusion in other story arcs). So when I saw Devastator as a singular Decepticon, I was a bit let down but most viewers won’t know the difference. This causes problems in the canon because he’s fighting alongside Bonecrusher, who actually makes up part of Devastator (his leg, IIRC) so this is another discontinuity with G1. I can let it slide a bit because Bonecrusher was still a military vehicle that had some constructional use so it lended itself to his original form in the G1 cartoons. It seems more liberties were taken with the Deceptions than with the Autobots in terms of appearance and function. Sure, Optimus Prime is not a pimped out Peterbilt in the G1 show (he is in fact a Cab-over-Engine Mack truck) but this was actually a body he used in later series and some comics. Since Optimus has had no less than probably 20 different bodies through all the different story arcs, this is understandable. The other Autobots were fairly true to their original forms but obviously modernized. Jazz was a hot mouthed sports car, Bumblebee was still a yellow car (although, he was a Beetle, not a muscle car), Ratchet got a pretty sweet Hummer search-and-rescue makeover, and Ironhide was still a truck although a much cooler truck in this movie. The alternate modes for all the Autobots are understandable since GM was the sole vehicle provider for the Autobots. Some fans are crying because there are too many liberties taken with the robot modes and alternate modes but seriously, get over yourself. It’s 2007, 23 years after the original cartoon first aired. Kids these days do not want to look at boring vehicles and Catepillar construction vehicles that beat each other up. They want to see time-appropriate representations.

I think the two main changes to robots that I seriously hated was Megatron was a jet — mysteriously similar to a closed-wing X Fighter from Star Wars — and Soundwave (the boombox) was replaced with Frenzy who was also a boombox. In the G1 cartoon, Frenzy was one of Soundwave’s cassette tapes and had a symbiotic relationship with Soundwave. Instead, Bay made Frenzy this impish, Pan-esque juvenile Decepticon that in essence replaces Soundwave’s original function entirely. Megatron was by far the biggest disappointment to me. In robot form, he looks like a giant robotic exoskeleton on steroids. He had no true robotic body, just a skeleton. His alternate mode was a shock especially given the fact that it looks like a jet from Star Wars. I understand no one wants to see a 70 foot tall robot transform into a Walther P38 (with scope) handgun. That lacks a lot of realism honestly but still, a jet? Not all Decepticons are military robots in the canonical story arcs, Megatron was one of these. And I didn’t like his personality one bit. The writers made Megatron a very spiteful and very evil leader, far more so than he was in the G1 cartoon. Originally, Megatron spent more time being conniving and scheming against Optimus than he did fighting on the frontline in serial killer-like fashion. I understand the liberties that were taken with characters and the personalities pulled from the last 23 years worth of comics but this was probably the worst liberty I saw in the movie.

Dreamworks has already green lit Transformers 2 and 3 but the second movie is a given based not only on the end of the movie but the fact that it’s a ‘duh’ business-wise. Many characters will be introduced and a producer has hinted at the Dinobots and Constructicons showing up and this will cause some serious story discontinuity with the first movie given the fact that Devastator and Bonecrusher were both already introduced and vanquished, not to mention how are they going to tie in the fact that Bonecrusher was a part of Devastator when the latter was a full fledged robot in the first movie? There are some serious gaping holes that will have to be dealt with if there is to be sequels of this movie, more than I’ve mentioned here.

I know, it sounds like I’m bitching and moaning but really, these are things they should have thought of beforehand realizing that even before the movie was out — or out of production — the sequels would be planned and they should have re-written accordingly to try and avoid story pitfalls. I really did like the movie despite anything else and at the end of the movie, I told my girlfriend there would be a sequel because Bay makes it insanely obvious.

And he’s a crappy picture of my ticket:

And we’re off!

May 24th, 2007 • movies, pirates

…to see Pirates 3! Both my girlfriend and I have been eagerly anticipating this movie since we saw the premier of Pirates 2 last year and were expectedly left hanging. Now, we get to see the amazing conclusion to the Pirates series!@#! Also, we don’t have to see it at the NOISY theater with all the twelve year olds, thank Satan!