Noah (2014)

Starring: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson

Director: Darren Aronofsky

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1959490/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_(2014_film)

Back in the 1950s and 60s, Hollywood came out with a series of epics based on stories from the Bible. I admit to seeing only a handful of these, but I did watch "The Ten Commandments" (the 1956 Charleston Heston version) a little over a year ago and was very impressed with its grand scope and strong themes in regard to human freedom and faith in oneself. So while I did not exactly go out of my way to see the newest adaptation of Noah's Ark and I have mixed feelings on director Darren Aronofsky's previous works, I was at least a little hopeful that they would try to recreate the majestic feeling of these larger-than-life films.

Well, I did eventually see it. And it was...interesting...I'll give it that...

Before I get to the movie, a few housekeeping notes. First, this will be a full-film review, so there will be spoilers. Secondly, while this will mostly be in chronological order, I am going to jump around a bit to explain certain parts of it better. Thirdly, my knowledge of the Bible is very limited, so if I get some things wrong on that score, I apologize ahead of time even though I will not be talking about it much. This also means I am not going to nitpick at certain controversies that people have had about it, like the fact that they use the term "Creator" instead of "God."

Lastly, and in that same vein, I am not going to use this review as a forum for a theological discussion. It is outside the scope of this blog and this post would never get completed. Hell, it took me two years just to complete the "House of Wax" review! So it would be best to get this one out of the way. Now.

After a brief prologue, we are introduced to Noah, played by Russell Crowe. He and his family are basically nomads who wander a vast wasteland populated by now-decrepit cities. But when a flower all the sudden grows instantly from the ground and Noah starts having bad dreams, it appears that something is amiss. They decide to go find his grandfather to try and get an explanation for things. They also come across an orphaned girl named Ila, who they eventually decide to adopt. As they travel, they are chased by Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), a clan leader who had killed Noah's father decades earlier.

However, they are saved by holy hell what are these things...?

So, these things that lost out in meetings over the film's budget are the Watchers, who are fallen angels condemned by the Creator to life on Earth as weird stone creatures because they tried to help humans back in the day. Look, I get it, they are suppose to be ugly and unnatural. But seriously, these guys look like stop-motion monsters from a cheesy 1980s sci-fi movie. Are we really suppose to take them seriously?! Oh and two of them are played by Frank Langella and Nick Nolte. Whoopie-do.

Well, anyway Noah and his family get saved and they meet up with his grandfather, Methuselah, a powerful man who is shown in flashbacks to have defeated evil forces with mystical powers. So...if that is the case, why do they spend all their time wandering the desert hoping to avoid getting killed by savages? He seems like someone who would be handy to have around...and his place is a lot nicer too. Then again, once you get to know the character, you kind of question why they bothered going back to him...

In any case, because he is played by Anthony Hopkins, his first onscreen appearance consist of him standing awkwardly in the middle of a room just for the sake of being creepy.

"I am still waiting for my second Oscar, Clarice..."

His running gag - because, honestly, that is what it boils down to - is that he has not gotten out in a while and has a desire for the taste of blueberries (I guess human liver with fava beans and chianti are a little too exotic for someone his age). Anyway, he basically tells Noah that he should do what the visions tell him to do. So, why was his advice needed in the first place...?

Anyway, it turns out the Creator is going to wipe out humanity with a giant flood and an Ark needs to be built to house two of every animals plus a handful of human beings. I know, shocker, didn't that one coming! So Noah starts building the Ark over the course of several years and his kids grow up. Shem (Douglas Booth), the eldest, and Ila are now lovers, but it is a bittersweet romance since Ila cannot have children, a product of injures she sustained prior to being found by Noah's family. She is played by Emma Watson, who was Hermione in the Harry Potter series. So let's see how this adds up:

Gets attacked as a child. Becomes The Boy Who Lived. Later enables him to vanquish evil.

Gets attacked as a child. Becomes infertile. Feels she has nothing to offer for the future of humanity. 

Yep, seems fair. Hooray, feminism!

But whatever hurt she feels is nothing compared to that of Noah's second son, Ham (Logan Lerman, a.k.a. the "Percy Jackson" kid). Why? Because he doesn't have a girlfriend and has teenage angst! The horror! There is also a third son, Japheth (Leo McHugh Carroll), who is born during the construction of the Ark and...serves no practical purpose in this film. Well, he was in the Bible, so might as well just leave him in there...

As the Ark nears completion and the animals start arriving - scenes which are admittedly pretty cool - Noah heads out to find potential mates for Ham and Japheth so the human race can later be repopulated. Or maybe just to get Ham to shut up, I don't know. However, when he arrives at a human settlement, he is shocked by all the violence and depravity he sees and walks away empty-handed.

Ugh, worst grape-stomping competition ever.

Ham runs off and tries to take matters into his own hands by rescuing a girl from the settlement named Na'el (Madison Davenport). She gets killed in a stampede after only five minutes of screen time and we learn nothing about her, but I am sure she would have been a great character...*faceplam*

Anyway, as the rest of the family looks for Ham, Ila comes across Methuselah, who is still looking for those damn blueberries. He tells her that he has come to realize that he has had almost no contact with her during the building of the Ark. He apologizes by using his powers to make her fertile.

Wait...stop...

So let me get this straight...he has been living next to his adoptive great-granddaughter for roughly TEN YEARS without any real interaction with her. Why? Because he just never got around to it?! Did that take a lot of valuable time away from his normal routine of giving away obvious advice and blueberry hunting?! And his way of saying sorry is to make her able to have children, something that he could have done AT ANY TIME over the decade and spared her from all those brewing feelings of bitterness...???!!!

Well, at Ila seems to be cool with it because right after this happens, she finds Shem and they have sex right then and there. Yep, Ham has gone missing, they are surrounded by hoards of dangerous people, and the whole world is about to flood, but they are just going to take the "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus" approach: giving in to the slightest physical impulse for the sake of plot convenience! (Yes, I did just compare a Biblical film to "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus." Deal with it).

Anyway, eventually they do get everyone back together and they have this big fight with Tubal-cain's people. The stupid rock things, I mean Watchers, end up sacrificing themselves to save Noah's family and they ascend into Heaven for redeeming themselves. or just so we do not have to look at them anymore. Meanwhile, the flood comes in at full force and carries away the Ark, along with all its animal and human passengers.

The Biblical version of "Get in the choppa!"

Cool, Russell Crowe on a boat! You know what that means...! No, not "Master and Commander," I mean this:

Oh, and Methuselah gets left behind and dies. Or rather, he finally finds his goddamn berries (in a place not very far from his place that should not have taken a decade to find) and, apparently feeling perfectly content with how he has conducted himself over the years, willfully gets washed away by the waves. Normally I would question why there was no explanation for him staying behind, but frankly, given the nonsensical nature surrounding his character, I am willing just to send him off on his merry way. Believe me, we haven't even gotten to the "good" part of the movie yet...

Now, up until this point, I'm still sort of content with the film. It's not great and its flaws only get bigger the more you think about them, but it has decent special effects (other than the Watchers) and the plot still keeps me intrigued. But then Noah starts to lay out his game plan and this is where it really starts to lose me:

After Noah gives a monologue about...umm, Creationism?...forget it, not going to ask...he tells his family that the Creator is telling him that man has become too evil. So instead of trying to repopulate the planet, he tells his family that once they get back on land, they will live out the rest of their days with no more procreation before they die, effectively killing off the human race.

So...Noah is a religiously-inspired ecoterrorist now! But wait, it gets better! It is discovered that Ila is pregnant (I know, did not see that one coming either), so Noah, being the kind, gentle soul that he is, makes a deal: if she gives birth to a boy, he can live; if it is a girl that can procreate, she must be killed.

Who. Is. This. Psychopath?!!! Is he really that messed up in the head that he thinks his own family is not good enough to redeem mankind?! And as a result he is just going to basically hold them hostage, not knowing whether or not he might at some point kill one of them?! Wait, Russell Crowe plays a guy who takes direction from visions that only he can see and as a result endangers his family, including his wife played by Jennifer Crowley...

Huh...

Well, before I get any further with this, I should say that Tubal-cain is actually still alive at this point: despite being badly wounded before the flood hit, he managed to sneak onto the Ark while no one was looking. When Ham discovers him, he makes a deal with the boy to keep his presence a secret until he has healed enough to kill Noah. He then gathers his strength by eating the animals nearby. Remember, there are only two of each, so just killing one effectively causes an extinction!

Tubal-cain: the reason why we no longer have Jackalopes.

So what exactly is Tubal-cain's grand plan after he does away with Noah? In a nutshell, he is going to make the remaining females on the boat his brides, and he will repopulate the human race in his image. Okay, there are many things that can cause this idea to fall apart, but I am not going to bother listing them down. You know why? Because he cannot even get the first part right! His great idea on how to kill Noah: make him come down to where he is on the ark and then jump him. Yep, jump him. Oh, by the way, when he decides to launch this "attack," enough time has gone by that Ila goes into labor. So, in other words, he had NINE MONTHS to figure this out and he still screwed it up!!! Killing Noah in his sleep? NAH, let's given him the chance to fight back and see how that turns out. Well, as it does turn out, Ham changes his mind...for some reason...and ends up killing Tubal-cain himself. And so goes another useless character due to a complete failure to judge his basic surroundings...!!!

Honestly, was there really a need for a villain at all in this movie? Noah is pretty scary already! Which do you think is scarier? The guy who you know is bad and just need to find the right time and place to kill him? Or the guy who is suppose to be mankind's savior and yet he keeps his own family in a constant state of paranoia for nine months (hey, whatever happened to "40 days and 40 nights"... ah forget it...) and is willing to kill his own grandchild based on a hunch that only he knows about?!!!

*Deep breath* Moving on...

As I mentioned, Ila goes into labor and gives birth to...twin girls! Oh, the irony! The end result? Well, Noah looks into their eyes and sees good in them, so they and the rest of humanity get to live on after all. Umm...so he looks at them and sees goodness but not the other members of his family...you know what, we are almost done, so let's just get to it...

"So, that whole me going crazy and threatening your lives thing? We're cool, right?"

The family comes across land and start their new lives. Noah spends some time acting like a bum, feeling guilty that he did not fulfill the Creator's simple favor that he commit infanticide in order to wipe out his own species. But his family tells him to get over it, so he does. Ham goes off to be his own man or something. And...the movie ends.

Wait a minute. A guy who takes direction from visions that only he can see terrorizes his family in an isolated location, to the point where his son seeks the help of an outsider to help kill him, only for that said outsider to get killed really easily. Hey, this is not "A Beautiful Mind" at all, it's...

That's it! That is what it was all along! So that means...Stephen King wrote the Bible!!!

Or this movie is just weird, I don't know...

Wow, just...wow. You know one of the things about writing these reviews is that it gets you to think more about the movies you just saw, which can be both a good and a bad thing. With this movie, it is certainly the latter. The more I go into detail about it, the more I realize how bad it is. There are just so many plot holes, a number of supporting characters are useless, and the movie's namesake is such a despicable human being that you really cannot get behind him. Now I should say that making Noah a flawed character is not itself a problem; it should almost be encouraged because it makes him more relatable. But if you are going to make any story and you are going to purposely make a character with major flaws, you have to at least give a reason why your audience should still like him or her. Or at the very least give some rational reason why they are who they are, not take them so far into Walter White/Frank Underwood/Jack Torrance territory and then bring them back from the abyss, pretending they were a hero all along. It is disconcerting and ruins the whole point of what you are trying to get across. That is, if you had a point to begin with...

There is not much I can defend in this film, with a few exceptions. Some of the visuals are impressive, as I mentioned, and the acting is more or less decent. And I do not necessarily blame Aronofsky and the others for wanting to do something different with a story that has been told countless times and virtually everyone knows about. They could have easily have said "We have Russell Crowe and a multimillion dollar budget. Go see it." You can tell they were at least trying. But as I have said in the past, different is not always better, and this time it really did not work out. So let that be a warning to all those planning to see the upcoming "Exodus: Gods and Kings" movie coming out. It might be better than this film, but just be careful what you get yourself into.

As for this film...yeah, I do not recommend it.

Thanks, Yul Brynner. You know what, go see "The Ten Commandments" instead. It's 10,000 hours long, but it's all worth it. And it's not "Noah," so that's a bonus!

The pictures and videos in this post do not belong to me and are being used for entertainment purposes only. Please do not sue me; it says so in the Bible.

Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

In the 1980s, movie fans united as one as a voice to the ever-present and deafening winds of Hollywood, crying out for a crossover film between Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. Film studio executives, being perceptive as fuck, waited until 2003, long after both characters were past their primes, to give fans this crossover. And so now, for all the people too nerdy to watch pro-wrestling, we have Freddy vs. Jason.

Director: Ronny Yu

Starring: Robert Englund, Monica Keena, Jason Ritter

IMDb

Apparently the idea for this production goes all the way back to 1987, and possibly even before. Like all great films, this went through a rotating carnival circus of new production studios, script drafts, writers and everything else under the sun before finally surfacing as what we have before us now. Apparently one of the old script drafts involved Freddy at one point being a camp counselor at Camp Crystal Lake who molested Jason.

...I wonder how that would have gone. Freddy would be like "Hey, Jason, I once touched you in a bad place!" Jason would be like “....” and then would keep slashing. Only then the audience would just have a very uncomfortable picture in their head, which is important to avoid in a movie about two serial killers hacking up teenagers. So I guess they concluded that plot wouldn't have been very eventful.

Another draft included a cult called “Fredheads,” which sounds more like devotees of a bad 90s pop boy band member. In this draft, there would be a cult based around Freddy Krueger trying to sacrifice a little girl. Her older sister would put her dead boyfriend's heart in Jason's body so he could fight Freddy. This sounds better than the other idea, but it still raises a few problems. How would that whole 'dead boyfriend's heart' thing go? That's gotta be awkward.

“Kristy! What are you doing?!”

“Cutting John's heart out! It's okay; he got a stroke last week after eating too many Hot Pockets! I figured putting his heart in a serial killer would be the best way to honor his memory!”

“You need help!”

There was also an ending in which Pinhead made an appearance. I guess they ditched that one because they figured that while Freddy and Jason were washed up has-beens at the time, they were at least better than fucking Pinhead in terms of film quality. I mean even Jason X is better than most Hellraiser sequels.

Well, I think that about sums up everything I need to talk about in regards to this thing. I think it's clearly established now that the finished product is by far superior to all the other ideas that almost happened. So what now? Oh, I know. Let's actually do the really stupid part of all my blog posts where I go through what actually happens in the movie. Ugh. It's my least favorite part of every review, too. I feel your pain.

We start off with Freddy Krueger where he deserves to be, in hell – or rather, a metaphorical extension of the shitty scripts bin in Hollywood studios. He's angry because nobody remembers him anymore. It's okay, dude, you'll be played by Jackie Earle Haley in the remake a few years from now. That will really revive your character.

I know, dude. I, too, feel your pain.

He gets the idea to summon Jason back from the dead too, to go kill a few teenagers in Springwood to make them remember Freddy. Which is really kinda a stupid plan, when you think about it – I think if you have a big hulking abomination in a hockey mask cutting people in half, that will really only make them afraid of him and not you, you weirdo dream-monkey, you.

Then we get our main characters Lori and Kia, who think it's totally cool to talk in normal-volume voices about how much Lori hates the guy Kia is trying to set her up with, when he's right around the corner in the next room. I'm sure you guys are the catches of the century. I'm sure he won't be offended by this at all – which I guess he's not, seeing as he rather creepily puts his arm around her within like a second of meeting...

"Please, allow me to invade your personal space. PLEASE LOVE ME!!!"

Then two of the others, Gibb and Trey, go upstairs to have sex. Afterward, to prove he's hip to all the new fads for what to do after sex, Jason shows up and stabs the fuck out of him. Kind of a buzzkill, but hey, different strokes for different folks.

Kind of a turn off, according to 9 out of 10 victims. The 10th one was just a real freak.

Gibb, in the shower, doesn't see anything that unusual about the blood on the floor, but it's only when she actually sees him dead that she freaks the fuck out.

Lori, in the police station, falls asleep for a few minutes and then wakes up and is baffled at how she missed the fact that the police station was actually doubling as a stage for the fall production of Jacob's Ladder everyone was putting on:

So I guess the backstory here, if you want to call it that, is that when they were kids, Lori's boyfriend Will disappeared, and he hasn't been seen her since then. It turns out he's been put in the worst mental hospital since 12 Monkeys, as we clearly see when they just leave the TV on to the news when a grisly series of murders has just happened – not only would that make them agitated, but in this case, it's also the exact same case of murders that the hospital was trying to protect the kids from in the first place! Safety shmafety. Just let em run wild with firearms and knives if they fuckin' want to. They're all adults, after all!

Will and his friend break out, and go to the high school to try and find Lori. They just break in with no consequences, and Will's buddy tries to talk to them by doing the whole Freddy “one two coming for you” song – which of course freaks everyone out, because Will's buddy has the social skills of a drunk migrant worker on cocaine.

"You can also find me in the drunk tank at 3 a.m. or outside my next serial killing victim's window at 5 a.m."

Will, not to be outdone, merely shows his face and causes Lori to faint and lose consciousness. Wow. What a guy.

He's a real ladykiller.

The police decide now is a good time to act, springing up and chasing the two intruders off the premises. They hide in their super-cool van, which I'm sure they had plenty of fucking time to decorate while doing all this other important shit:

The next ten or fifteen minutes is all about discovering the backstory to Freddy and how the town covered it all up. One of my favorite dumb plot points in this is how all the kids apparently “heard the cops mention” Freddy's name after the first murders. Yeah, real good job there, guys – you spent years specifically trying to make everyone forget Freddy so he couldn't kill anymore, then at the first sign of trouble, you're blabbing his name all over the place like teenage girls gossiping about who they slept with. Come on. At least put in a little effort.

Aside from that, it's pretty much the same kind of stuff in every movie – they discover that Freddy is America's favorite pedophile, who was burnt alive years ago and now comes back to haunt peoples' dreams. Yawn. 3/10 for storytelling factor by way of the fact that I've heard it all before.

Another prominent main character is Linderman, a nerdy, skinny guy whose apparent mission in life is to get Lori to notice his existence. That's difficult, though, because Lori's friend Kia is apparently the ultimate cock-blocker. She compares Linderman to “one of those frou-frou dogs that keeps humping your leg,” because having tact and politeness is her strong suit. I guess, to be fair, she IS right though – the kid's pretty desperate.

The first real action scene of the film comes when the students do the most logical thing when it comes to mourning the deaths of their murdered friends – have a corn-maze rave in their honor. You know, the traditional middle-America send off. It's the Viking Funeral of...well, funerals.

"So are you really just the compilation of every nerdy geek stereotype in the world?"
"Yeah, I guess so."
"That really sucks."
"You're still not going to have sex with me even out of pity, are you?"
"Not a chance in Hell."

At the rave, Gibb gets really drunk to mourn her dead boyfriend and then goes and passes out in the cornfield. She wakes up in a dream, finding Freddy's boiler room in the windmill – you know, the windmill. Where all boiler rooms are located, really. She wanders around for a bit, gets chased around by Freddy, and then locks herself in a locker. I think it really shows my age, though, that when I watch this now, the scariest part of the scene is the glow-stick wearing fuckwad trying to rape her in the real world:

Without the glow-sticks it would be tragic and despicable. But WITH them it's now hilarious I guess...or maybe not. Maybe it's still despicable.

Fortunately he gets shiskebab'd by Jason shortly after. Freddy is angry because Jason stole his kill and Freddy needs those kills to come back to life! I guess it was kind of a dumb idea to let another serial killer loose in your town, then, huh genius? Really not sure what you expected to happen otherwise. I guess this is the reason Freddy Krueger isn't a shining example of entrepreneurship. Maybe he was in that bargain-bin hell for a fuckin' reason after all.

What follows after this is the only true example of the Burning Man festival:

It's not your parents' Burning Man - though, your parents were the same generation that gave us Jason Voorhees to begin with...hmmm....

He kills a bunch of people, but the main characters get away. They just kind of drive home, without any of the shock, awe or reverent fear-of-God terror you'd normally have after seeing a seven-foot tall psychopath in a hockey mask slaughter several of your classmates. Seriously guys – I don't think you really fully comprehend what just happened! But it's okay. I'll assume you're just in shock.

Lori's father is apparently an older, fatter version of Liam Neeson, who gets mad when Lori is driven home by Will, and promptly has to hold back any speeches about how he has a very particular set of skills and will find and kill him.

Here we finally get some of the backstory, as Will tells Lori that he saw her dad kill her mom years and years ago, and that's why he got shipped off to that mental hospital. Lori's dad tries to keep her from leaving, but she runs to join Will. They make it over to his friend's house just in time to see his friend get murdered by Freddy. What a cheery scene indeed. We also see Freddy has been working on his tattoo artwork since we last saw him. I sure am glad he's taken up that hobby.

He loses points for using a Comic Sans-ish font though.

The gang ends up breaking into that mental hospital to steal some drugs that can prevent them from dreaming and, by extension, prevent Freddy from killing them. We see the hospital is engaged in some truly legal things like this, where they have a bunch of patients catatonic hooked up to machines after experimenting with drugs:

They get the drugs, but the problem is, the random stoner character they brought along for no reason gets possessed by Freddy somehow – did he fall asleep while walking? I guess the conservatives were right: marijuana is evil. Anyway, he dumps the drugs down the drain after seeing a vision of a talking slug, and then gets cut in half by Jason. What a way to go, I tell you. My grandfather went the same way.

And no I don't feel like going through the convoluted explanation for all of these seemingly random events.

They then drug Jason with tranquilizers and load him into the Mystery Machine (yes, that's what it's called, even if it's just something I made up). I guess their plan is to wake him up once they drag Freddy into the real world and let them fight. Why do I get the idea the movie's producers were devil-whispering in their ears? “This is the reason you've been put on this Earth...to make this ridiculous match-up fight happen and MAKE US MONEY!”

Insidious.

So then we get the big fight. It's actually pretty fucking awesome. It's full of machete-slashing, throwing each other into walls and cutting off limbs – it's pretty much like what you'd expect from a Freddy and Jason mash-up, and why wouldn't it be cool? For all the flaws these characters' worst films have, this fight is pretty damn entertaining.

It is. It features moments such as Freddy taking cues from the Knights of Ni:

...to Freddy's terrible aim as he tries to impale Jason with a bunch of strategically-placed construction objects and still can't seem to get the big lunk to stay down:

...to Jason's triumphant Rocky-esque rise from the water after Freddy's discrimination. All it needs is Eye of the Tiger and it's complete.

In the course of this fight, all of their friends die. Afterward, Will and Lori just sort of go off and it's supposed to be a happy ending. I assume the next day they wake up and realize 90% of their class including most of their friends are now dead and that they watched them horribly murdered the night before. Then they probably get sent back to that mental asylum Will was trying to escape from in the first place and spend the rest of their young lives on an alphabetically organized lexicon of prescription drugs.

Yup. Sounds like a happy ending!

Freddy vs. Jason is a modern day epic on-par with the best adventure stories of all time. It is a timeless struggle and conflict in the mode of many Greek tragedies. That must have been why most of the characters died at the end, as it's clearly trying to emulate the bittersweet and bizarre nature of a Greek tragedy. Freddy and Jason, to that end, are obviously homages to the great gods of Greek mythology. If superheroes are our new mythological figures, well, obviously slasher villains are our new mythological monsters. But it's better, because it's Freddy and Jason, and they had twenty years before this to set up their characters and what not. So it has to be better, and my logic is infallible. Don't challenge me!

Well, maybe I was exaggerating about all those parallels to Greek myth. Except I wasn't.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

The Nun (2005)

A horror movie about an undead ghost nun killing people. If that isn't the worst idea you've heard all month, I'm really quite afraid to ask what could possibly be less dignified, scary or interesting.

Director: Luis de la Madrid

Starring: Anita Briem, Manu Fallola

IMDb

This review is a personal thing for me. I rented this movie years and years ago and tried to watch it twice, failing both times to even make it halfway through. In the course of doing this I also ruined the rental DVD case the movie came in – by water, nonetheless; which is how the killer in the movie kills its victims, which makes this whole thing extra poetic. It was as if the movie was cursed, and I was the unwitting victim of that curse. Eventually, I gave up and decided never to touch its toxic exterior again.

Until now.

We start off with a bunch of girls at boarding school being taught by a nun who likes to shove paper in girls' mouths and turn into a horrific hell-demon in the middle of class. The second one is expected, but the shoving paper in their mouths is a bit much. Maybe someone ought to tell the head nun about this.

But it turns out that was just a dream. Next we get a party scene where a jackass with a camera talks to some people at a party about going to Spain for no reason other than to get killed by this movie's ludicrously over-thought and simultaneously under-written plot devices.

Why is he filming this? We clearly saw in the previous scene this guy had his own girlfriend he could've been spending time with, but I guess being a weirdo stalker is cool too.

Oh, did I spoil that last part? I'm so sorry. I just can't seem to get this review right. I just know you were all on the edge of your seat about whether or not they'd die in this horror movie.

So I guess tragedy strikes as main girl Eve's mom – the woman from the opening – has some serious plumbing problems as her sink is overflowing.

"I will find the Mushroom Kingdom down here if I flood my whole house doing it!"

Maybe she should reconsider using a plunger in the sink and instead just call the fucking plumber. But while she's doing that she should also call the exorcist – these are supernatural plumbing problems that mean a ghost nun is coming to kill her. 

"How are you taking me seeeerrrrriooooouuuuussssllllyyyyy?!?"

Man, if only she'd have just fixed the pipes when she had a chance, and then a watery nun-ghost wouldn't have been able to get in. That's really the #1 danger when it comes to pipes and plumbing.

Eve comes home and finds out that a clearly hungover cop tells her her mom committed suicide, even though Eve actually saw the nun ghost kill her and she slashed her throat, which isn't a very common way of doing that. But whatever. Investigation shmvestigation.

"Whatever...can I go back to drinking vodka in my car yet?"

At the funeral, Eve meets an older woman who says she knew Eve's mom from a long time ago at boarding school. She talks about what's going on a little bit, but later on I guess the ghost nun didn't like that, because she also gets plumbing problems, followed by a swift arm-decapitation by elevator. Well I dunno about you, but this was the kind of kill I expected when coming into this movie about a ghost nun.

What? It's not weird at all!

Eve and her friends go to Spain because why wouldn't you after a horrific death in your family that left you an orphan? It just seems the most logical. I also love how the friend is constantly so flippant about Eve's mom dying – she continually tells her to cheer up, wonders why she's acting kind of weird, etc. Jesus. With friends like this who even NEEDS a phantasmagorical watery ghost-nun killing off everyone you know? I mean they're kinda one in the same.

"I know your mom just died, but cheer up, we're on a vacation to Spain!" Also I just realized they don't even do anything there besides the plot of the movie. What was their plan? Go to Spain and just stare at the walls of their hotel room? Good thing Eve's mom died and gave them a mission, then.

Then we get a scene at the library where Eve is researching the old boarding school. Some doofy looking dude who says he's training to be a priest comes up and offers to translate it all for her. She says yes and then later on he meets them at some night club to give it back to her. They bond over the fact that he killed his last girlfriend by running her over with a car. Yes, really. I guess that's just what Eve is into. I don't even have to make jokes here – the movie itself is just one big punchline. How did anyone keep a straight face when working on this? I know I fucking couldn't.

I mean, when you really get down to it, this movie fails at even the most basic tenet of scary movies – setting an atmosphere in which to be scared later. It can't even get that right. Every kill scene starts off with the unsuspecting victim in the bathroom or kitchen when water starts filling up the sink, tub or whatever. When you really get down to it, as an adult, you aren't scared by this – you're just annoyed because in real life, you'd have to clean up all that overflowing, leaking water. How is the movie supposed to scare you when THAT'S the only reaction most of your audience will get out of it?

"Aw, dammit, now I have to clean all this up..."

They leave the club to go do their real passion, which of course is playing detective and finding dead bodies all over the place. They see the one lady's body and then immediately decide they can't call the cops, because there are still two more victims who don't know about the nun-ghost yet and they have to warn them. Uh, so how about calling the cops while you're going to warn the others? Nope, then we couldn't have a movie!

This whole 'not calling the cops' thing goes so far that Eve actually throws the other guy, Joel, out of the car for wanting to do so. Eve persuades Priest Boy that they shouldn't do it because 'she just wants to find our what happened to her mother.' So because you need to chase around some ridiculous story about an old boarding school, that woman's friends and family don't get to know what happened to her when she's lying dead on the floor of her own bathroom. You little asshole.

She also brings up the fact that they are a lot alike, as no one believes HER about the watery ghost-nun, just like no one believed HIM when he said he wasn't drinking when he killed his girlfriend. They really are like peas in a pod!

I also love the scene where Joel is just standing out there in the rain. “Wait! I forgot it was raining out here! Let me back in! No, I can't relent! I have to preserve my manhood and dignity! CURSE MY OWN IMPULSIVE DECISIONS!!!”

"Curse the heavens!"

They make it to the old boarding school and meet up with the other two stock characters who we haven't seen until now, so obviously they have a lot to contribute, by which I mean they only exist to shovel exposition in our faces like melting snow off a driveway in March. We learn that apparently back in their boarding school days, they came across the nun shooting a shower head up Eve's mom's vagina.

Never mind that this is a serious situation we could get her fired for; we need to re-enact I Know What You Did Last Summer!

As this is a horrific abusive situation, they accidentally kill her – you know, like you do.

Don't pretend you've never had a night end up this way...oh, wait, is it really only me and the girls in this movie? Weird.

They somehow haul her body outside without being noticed. Are they the only people in the entire fucking school? How did they not get caught? Then they dump her in the water outside.

"If she ever comes back to life as a ghost through our plumbing, we'll be ready...well, on second thought, that sounds really stupid."

Uh...wait a fuckin' second here. What happened next? How did no one notice she was dead? How did she never get found in that pool of water? Was it just a bottomless ocean made possible by the mystical powers of Christ to kill off his most odious of followers? Did the girls just get to go home when their teacher was missing the next day and never have to come back to Catholic school? “Oh, sorry girls, your teacher went missing mysteriously. I'm going to ignore the shifty-eyed, sweaty-faced looks you all have and just send you home. We won't be investigating the disappearance of that nun, either. Have a nice life forgetting all our dogmatic Catholic teachings!”

In the present day again, they go hunting through the old boarding house and find a bunch of paintings that they determine are actually the ways all their friends have been getting killed, because apparently nun ghosts really like to base their killings off of old paintings in boarding schools that no one can see.

And yeah, really; hands decapitated by an elevator sure was an easy thing for those classical psychic prophets to paint back in the day when elevators didn't exist. What a bunch of geniuses they must have been.

Also, to up the stupidity from “eating paint chips while smoking dirt-weed and watching Kim Kardashian videos” to “permanent cranial damage,” we also see that apparently the nun put up a portrait of how to kill her – a harpoon through the heart. I guess she forgot to take that one down in the incredibly rare occasion someone comes in there looking for clues on what's going on, huh?

One of the two women from the boarding school sees that her painting is being decapitated. So logically she locks herself in a room away from everyone else and then somehow, through an overly long sequence, gets her head lopped off by a broken glass door.

That looks like a baby with vampire teeth dressed up in grandma's old nun habit. What the hell am I even supposed to be watching?

We get some flashbacks which reveal Eve's mom had sex with a priest named Miguel, which is why that nun was trying to wash out her ovaries like your dad washing your car for you on Thanksgiving weekend home from college. Because you know how the Catholic Church feels about abortions. They love 'em!

Isn't this like being against gun control by eviscerating gun-control-proponents with a Bowie knife?

Then somehow they flood the place, apparently because that's the only way the nun can't kill them. Even though she apparently comes from water to kill people, having a whole room flooded apparently negates the entire thing and means she can't kill? Why not just go for complete abject randomness and say she can't kill people in rooms with three windows instead of two, or can't kill people on Tuesday nights while Glee reruns are on? Just stop even trying at all. We'll all be better for it.

They split up a bunch of times, which just seems to prove the characters have never watched a horror movie in their lives. If there was any logical reason for splitting up it'd be one thing, but no, really; they just leave one person behind when they go and do things for no reason but “WE NEED MORE PEOPLE IN RANDOM ROOMS FOR SCARES!”

A lot of other random, boring things happen, which lead up to the big twist of Eve being the real killer all along. Yes, apparently instead of the watery ghost-nun killing people, it was Eve being possessed by the nun. Which really doesn't make sense, because of...well, the entire fucking movie before this. Why try to shoehorn in a twist? Did you lose a bet? Did the previous writer die in a plane crash and so the director replaced him with an M. Night Shyamalan devotee?

Actually, really, even a Shyamalan twist would be better than this. At least his are entertaining in that you have no idea what the fuck he was thinking. This is just the kind of “the main character was the killer all along, ooooooh!” crap that you'd get in a Freshman writing class.

There was no logic here – from the idiotic plot to the acting, which was made up of a bunch of exaggerated Spanish accents and all the actors seeming like they were confused at all times. Which doesn't surprise me at all given this movie's abysmal script-writing. All in all, I learned from this movie that plumbing is serious business, and if you don't fix your bathroom or sink pipes, a vengeful ghost of someone you killed will come back and kill your mom's friends. Yeah, that about sums it up.

I also am grateful to finally be able to finally put to rest my curiosities about The Nun, which I started many years ago and never finished. Now I'm kinda just wondering, honestly, why I bothered renting this in the first place all those years ago. Was I just a serious masochist back then? I guess that would explain how I turned out the way I am today; watching these movies and so desensitized nothing in them even remotely surprises me anymore. Such is life.

Eh, whatever. This sums up my opinion on the movie:



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