Accidental Exorcist (2016)

Accidental Exorcist, the final film Sector 5 Films sent me to review, is really just a wonder of a movie in that there's absolutely nothing appealing about it. Oftentimes, it feels more like some sort of strange hallucinatory drug dream, and not in a good way. This is a woeful film and after watching it, I just can't see much to recommend about it.

Director: Daniel Falicki

Starring: Daniel Falicki, Faye Sills

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

Check out that DVD cover! Never seen a screaming demonic girl with whited-out eyes on the DVD cover of a horror movie before! What a unique idea!

The whole thing, I guess, is about this lousy, drunk, sick-looking guy named Vanuk who is supposed to be some sort of exorcist. He's really just a sad sack, irritable and kind of a loser. He looks like he has a freezer full of severed heads at home, and I don't mean that as a compliment.

He goes around doing 'healing' on people apparently possessed by demons, which is immediately unbelievable, as I can't imagine these families letting some dude with fucking fingerless gloves and drinking out of a hip flask alone with their sick children. If someone's drinking from a hip flask and has fingerless gloves, they're probably living under the awning of a barber shop and stealing cash from church rectories. They shouldn't be trusted to perform an exorcism. Just go to the real Catholic church like everyone else in these kinds of films. I mean, come on, the economy isn't that bad these days.

I usually like to go into detail about scenes in chronological order, but I can't do that with this movie, as for one it's far too repetitive, and two, I usually had no idea what the fuck was happening at any point. From what I can gather, he heals people who are possessed, and then the demons sort of enter him, making him sick and depressed. But tonally, it's just all over the place – some scenes feel like they're trying to be a dark comedy, and others are more like a dark-tortured-soul-seeking-redemption thing. There's no consistency. This movie is the young child mixing peanut butter and mayonnaise of horror films – it's completely incongruous with anything that makes sense.

I'll go into depth on this one scene: he goes to this family who hired him because their clearly obese, mentally incompetent adult son won't eat anything, but apparently that was an indicator that he's possessed, and not just that you can't cook worth a damn and this is probably child abuse of some sort.

But their insane logic proves true, as he IS possessed. The guy has a harness around his head and when they take it off, he bites his teeth down over and over again like a chattering monkey doll. But for some reason, when they try to spoon-feed him, he closes his mouth and won't let it happen. I know all of these pointless details because the movie shows it to you and repeats it multiple times.

Watching this scene, I really just reconsider if making this blog was ever a good idea. Is this what my life has become? What a bizarre scene. I just don't know what to say about it, or what it was trying to accomplish.

The medical care guy watching the man makes a big fuss about not leaving like Vanuk wants, but then Vanuk basically goes “come onnnnnnn,” and they stare at each other and then the caregiver leaves. What a riveting conversation. And I'm sure that guy's job is so worth being smug over and protecting like he's watching after a fucking United States President, right? Why was he being so adamant about staying for like a whole two seconds?

"I'LL DEFEND MY JOB TO THE DEATH... until you stare at me for a few seconds."

What follows is basically an incomprehensible fight scene in which the movie rips off The Exorcist shamelessly by having the guy talk in Vanuk's mom's voice or something, and then they start throwing food at each other and wrestling. It's beyond bizarre. I can't even say it's so bad it's good – it's just weird and I don't know how to feel or what to say about it. Sometimes, art is good when you don't know how to feel immediately. This is not one of those times.

Oh, and the movie does rip off The Exorcist pretty hard. The opening credit scene even rips it off with as much shame as a slacker high schooler copying his friends' answers and forgetting to put his own name on the homework.

If he walks into the letters, I'd do a mea culpa and admit this is a good movie and I was wrong.

Most of the whole movie is just like that one scene – gibberish, and much less coherent than the scene I described. I picked that scene because I could at least sort of tell what was supposed to be happening in a cogent sequence of events – not the case in the rest of the film. Most of it is a sloppy mish-mash of the guy drunk stumbling around and then some other acid-trip scenes of him performing “exorcisms.” There's no point in going through it like I usually would. The pacing is really off, too – the scenes vary in length so much that it gives the movie a kind of weird, off-balance feel, which could be good for a better movie. Here, it mostly just felt overlong and directionless.

Multiple times, the film fades to black on moments that seem sort of like the movie just ended, but then it comes back up with more, like the world's biggest cock tease. I was halfway convinced that the movie would never end and was being filmed on a live video feed somewhere, just going on and on as some sort of endurance test, maybe for prisoners of ISIS or something.

I was really just surprised it took over an hour for them to rip off The Exorcist in the most obvious way – having someone's head facing backward. That must have taken some restraint!

The film ends, and it doesn't really matter how – something about him going crazy, stripping naked and smashing everything in his apartment, then going to Hell. I don't really want or need to look much further into what this is supposed to mean. The movie didn't engage me on a level enough to try. Sorry, I guess.

People, I'm all for artists expressing themselves and all of that shit. This movie clearly wanted to do something kind of abstract and weird, but it didn't work at all. This was just nonsense, and there wasn't much to get from it at all. I appreciate any honest effort to make something good, but that's the only good thing I have to say about this movie.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

5 Years After The Fall (2016)

This is the second in my series of Sector 5 films that aren't out yet which they sent me for a promo. This one is about a weird dystopian future after some kind of catastrophic accident. There are cannibals and empty, spooky looking houses and gunfights and all kinds of stuff. You know, everything a movie like this needs, except for the replay value, interesting story or characters and any kind of excitement or energy. Fun!

There will be SPOILERS in here for this movie, as it hasn't officially been released as of this review.

Director: Brent Nurse

Starring: Zorba Dravillas, Nicole Garrett, Gabe Meacher

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle and Mohan.

The movie begins with scenes of disarray and chaos. The first thing you'll notice is that the coloring and lighting in this are pretty bad. I hate to make fun of that aspect too much, as this is a direct to video thing - it isn't like this thing was produced by fucking James Cameron or anything. But pretty much this whole movie looks dull and washed out like it was filmed on a dirty flip phone from six years ago. Not really a very attractive or interesting thing to look at, frankly.

We open with main character Jacobs and some other guy on a train talking about how they ruined everything, and the other guy says they don't have a phone or internet anymore to contact anyone – hell, they barely have two tin cans and a string, he says, which is oddly enough what I thought of the movie's budget when I saw it.

The train crashes and Jacobs escapes. He runs around mostly looking like Steve from Blues Clues in a horror movie, which isn't something I needed to see. The main plot is really pretty basic – he runs around in this wasteland world, like Mad Max set in the suburbs, from a bunch of second rate thugs killing people with machetes, mostly by forcing them to eat the blades slowly like lollipops. Uh, I'm really not sure they know how to use a sword actually.

He runs into a house and hides, but frankly, I'm not sure what he's hiding from. When he finds a bunch of people in the house with guns, armed and ready to kill, he very easily overpowers them and teams up with a girl there who was handcuffed. Makes sense to me – skinny dweebs in collared shirts are basically like the Hulk. He's stronger than he looks!

Oh, and have you ever bemoaned that you don't know what time it is during any other horror movie? Well, this one has you covered. For some fucking bizarre reason, the movie constantly shows you black cutscreens with the time of whatever's happening. I guess in some stories this could serve a point, but sorry if I don't care what's happening at 11:56 p.m. in 5 Years After The Fall.

Most of the rest of the movie is just kind of a tired slog. The guy and the girl hide out in the house and constantly act scared of everything, debating whether to stay there or make a run for it. I don't get why – it isn't like you can't just beat the fuck out of them. He does! Multiple fucking times in this movie, this guy gets attacked by people who look way stronger and more capable then him, but he overpowers them easily and retains his place as the clear King of the World now. But that never stops him from whining and being scared anyway, for some reason.

"Please be intimidated of me!"

There just isn't a lot to say about most of the movie. They banter some more about whether to leave or not. Christ, they're more annoying and stubborn than an old married couple who's been arguing the same shit for the last 30 years. They do manage to take a hostage, so we get to see an old standard for this genre: the scene where the main character barters with the hostage by offering him some candy. But not too much candy – that would potentially give him cavities, and there's no toothpaste left five years after the fall!

There are some scenes of Jacobs shooting children after that, which I guess the logic here is that Jacobs and the chick are trying to win this 'turf war' of sorts with this rival gang outside – it isn't all that clear. It could have been a cool idea to have him distressed and conflicted about how he has to kill kids in this new postapocalyptic world, but I guess there was no time for THAT in this movie with all the other super important stuff going on. One of the big problems with this movie is that you never connect with the characters. There are no attempts to make you feel what they're feeling, so it all comes off as rather hollow.

Frankly, though, the other gang isn't that threatening. They basically just stand on the sidewalk like kids waiting for their mom to show up.

So I guess Jacobs' run as King of the Wasteland ends unceremoniously as he dies before the end of the movie. I didn't see that coming, but then again, I also don't care. So it's a bit of mixed emotions for me – mild surprise and also laconic boredom. It's on part with getting your name called early in a DMV waiting list.

Then we get a flashback sequence that tells us the story we really wanted: that of the chick who has been hiding in the house the whole time. Apparently she once had friends, and they were hiding from the gang across the street until all except for her decided to give up, go over there and let themselves be killed. Either that, or the gang across the house is emitting pheromones that incite people to do this – that would have been cool, but I'm almost positive it isn't what's going on. I just wish it was, because the idea of these people just going over there and letting themselves die is so obscurely strange.

Seriously, why not just take a few pills or hang yourself? Why let a bunch of cannibals eat you? I dunno – this whole sequence is so fucking long and almost hypnotic in tone. It's really very boring, and I almost fell asleep. But as I do need to sleep more, I consider this sequence one of the best in the movie.

The twist, if you can call it that, is that the chick joins up with them, apparently having been her plan all along. I don't know why, though – it seems like she was doing just fine hanging out with the Blues Clues guy, Jacobs, who seemed to just kill anyone he tried to fight with relative ease. He could've been some kind of superhero. But I guess if you like fat, gross cannibal biker-dudes, this is cool too.

The movie just isn't all that great. It's kind of a nothing-film. There wasn't anything terribly, glaringly offensive, and the story and plot maybe had potential, but there just wasn't much to latch onto in terms of engaging themes or nail-biting suspense. It wasn't exciting, and it seems like that's a fairly damning critique in terms of a post-apocalyptic action-horror movie. I'm struggling to think of anything to say about this, really. I mean, I guess you could do way worse? But there's also plenty of better movies out there too.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

2 Jennifer (2016)

2 Jennifer is a movie that will definitely get noticed very easily if you've got your DVD collection organized alphabetically. But other than that, I don't think it's good.

SPOILERS for the as-yet-unreleased movie in here!

Director: Hunter Johnson

Starring: Hunter Johnson, Lara Jean Mummert, David Coupe

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

This is a brand new movie that isn't out yet as of the time of this writing, from this company called Sector 5 Films, which they sent to me as a promo. I was flattered about that, but also confused. Don't they know what I do? Didn't they know this would happen?

So my friend Nathan and I set out on what would be a sordid quest to watch the movie, which begins with a Blair Witch-style “documentary” thing where a bunch of seeming random people are talking about how cool this in-universe made-up movie called “To Jennifer” is. Apparently it was filmed on an iPhone, and that is somehow not an indictment so damning even Lucifer would find it harsh. No, instead, it is a thing worthy of praise.

The script then goes into a bunch of shots of various people talking about the first movie. You can really see that these people are budding movie critics, like this guy with a cool hat who I can totally take seriously:

Not exactly Lemmy from Motorhead...

Or this guy, who for some reason was filmed standing on a ledge on the roof of a building. Is he about to kill himself there? Did he just go “oh, well I better film that reaction to that low budget horror movie before I die, gotta check that off the bucket list”? Should we call an ambulance? No? Okay. I'll stop asking questions.

This next guy bashes the movie for "not being able to afford a real camera," and being shot on an iPhone, but I just love how he's just doing crunches with his legs around a punching bag suspended in midair. Can you not afford real exercise equipment?

Whoa there cowboy, don't blow us away too hard with this amazing camera quality you got on these shots! You might end moviemaking forever with how high you're setting the bar with this!

So anyway, now we have Spencer, a guy who likes to sit in the dark and make videos cackling creepily about how he's going to make the best movie ever when he makes his own iPhone-shot sequel to “To Jennifer.” He looks like every school shooter ever, totally just deranged and psychotic, but it's presented as this big “what if” question, like there's any doubt as to whether or not he's gonna be the villain. It would frankly be more surprising if he wasn't some psychopathic little fuck-stick.

This is actually Hunter Johnson, the movie's director, so I guess this is some sort of personal project or something.

That's really one of the big problems Nathan and I had with the movie – everything starts out as innocuously as a story like this should, with the implied threat of something horrific coming later. But unlike other movies where there would be some suspense, in this movie you basically know this guy is going to be the killer instantly just by looking at him and listening to him for a second. It's like buying a copy of Se7en, but your DVD comes with an unskippable opening scene spoiling the twist ending in bright, flashy letters, but it still presents the rest of the movie like you're supposed to be in suspense for some reason.

Another thing about this movie that didn't work is the sheer amount of time-wasting scenes that go on way longer than they should. In a very early scene, we see Spencer talking to his old high school friend Mack on the phone, who is a producer guy out in Hollywood. The conversation should be quick – “hey, I'm coming out there to film this movie.” “Okay, see you soon!” But instead, it goes on for several fucking minutes for no reason, just them repeating the same stuff over and over. What is wrong with you? Have you ever had a conversation? You know it's more than just words flying in empty space like lone drunk space ship pilots on a course to nowhere, right?

Great scene, and also, how are you filming yourself talking on the same phone you're supposed to be filming yourself with? It's like a Chinese puzzle box of confusion.

He then gets to California and meets with Mack, who expresses skepticism over the idea that anyone would watch this low-budget sequel to a cult horror film if it was filmed on an iPhone. But wait a second. Isn't the whole premise behind this that the original film was also filmed on an iPhone? Or did we already forget all about that, as if dialogue becomes meaningless and irrelevant five minutes after it's spoken, like the movie has Alzheimer's?

The following scenes, of Spencer meeting Mack' roommates, are filled with more utter nonsense, like a way-too-long scene of this Asian dude named Charles blathering on about how everything is atoms, which I guess he learned in science class or some shit. It really adds nothing to the story. I think this was just put in to a) pad out the runtime, and b) because the director's best friend probably just really needed to say some stuff about atoms, and why not kill two birds with one stone?

The weirdest part of all of this, and that's saying something, is Spencer's insistence that the lead actress of the film actually be named Jennifer, which is so bizarre that I have no idea how to even joke about it. Then we get a looooong sequence of these two chuckleheads auditioning various really hot girls for the part – oh, and the part consists of the girls pleading for their lives apparently from a killer, and talking about how they love the killer or some bullshit. I think Sigmund Freud would have an aneurysm if you showed him this. The mommy issues are just off the charts here! Even Norman Bates from Psycho would be like “dude, you're fucked up.”

"Yes, lean forward so we can see down your top and speak with even less boldness in your voice...that's what the audition needs...we sure are legitimate filmmakers!"

Our favorite was this one chick who just loses her mind and starts screaming at Spencer and Mack after they reject her. She is in the right to do that – they called her there from hours away, let her read one fucking line, and then Spencer said she wasn't good enough immediately. I just think it's funny the way she screams at them, mostly because they deserve to be screamed at. In real life I think way more people would react to these two shmucks this way.

Also, if they're filming all of this on an iPhone, where are all these different camera angles coming from? How are they filming themselves sitting there filming with an iPhone? And more importantly, why would you do something so asinine? This behavior is the reason God brought down the plagues upon Egypt, you know.

They do this shit multiple times. How? Why? What is going on? Just fucking film your movie without the found footage thing then, if you're just gonna make it convoluted and confusing as fuck!

They finally settle on this hot black-haired chick who is an amazing actress. Her real name in real life is Lara Jean Mummert, though; not Jennifer, so I guess they still failed.

Yes, film the girl who you made act vulnerable and scared with the camera up in her face - not weird or pervy at all....

Mack falls in love with her and starts acting less like a movie producer and more like a prepubescent boy with his first crush. It's really weird, and this whole character is weird, actually. He constantly flies off the handle and screams his head off for no reason when a normal person would maybe be mildly annoyed. It's really awkwardly funny to watch, actually, and reminds me a bit of how characters in something like The Room might act. Either way, somebody get him some Xanax or something, stat. He needs a big IV in his arm of it.

Then things get weird as Spencer and Mack crash this party where the director of the original To Jennifer movie is hanging out. He recognizes Spencer and then immediately starts a fist fight in the party, which is the appropriate response. Don't worry, kid; lots of great horror directors got their start this way. I heard John Carpenter had to go pick a fight with Bela Lugosi to win the horror crown and start making movies, and why would I make something like that up?

"Glad we brought the camera to see ourselves getting beat the fuck up!"

Then, hilariously, Mack screams and blows up on Spencer, crying that his job is now ruined because they got kicked out of some party. I'm not sure what Mack's job is, it's never clearly explained – nor is how it's “ruined” by working on some underground horror movie with a friend that no one will see. But apparently it does, and his life is now ruined forever. I'd feel worse for him, but his decision making skills are worse than a baby who licks an electrical socket, so frankly, fuck this guy anyway.

Spencer responds in the reasonable way: knocking Mack out with chloroform, and then going crazily over to Jennifer's house, where she's with her boyfriend. He kills the boyfriend and then beats her with a blunt object. Then he strips her naked, ties her up and kills her as well as Mack when he somehow shows up at the right time, and it's revealed that he was some kind of crazy person who had a crush on his old buddy Mack. And THAT'S why this all happened!

Wow, aren't you glad you saw all of that unpleasantness? Wasn't there so much rich character and plot subtext to soak in? Like... some people are crazy, and they do violent things to women. Wow! What a fucking message! That's so worth hearing! I'm being sarcastic as fuck as right if you for some reason couldn't tell! I'm really ruining this joke right now and I'm also probably annoying readers with this meta shit and the onrush of exclamation points!

So, yeah, Nathan and I weren't fans. We found the whole thing mostly dull, with tons of waste-of-time scenes that added nothing to the plot. Later on it just got too dark and unpleasant without reason. It's one thing to be really scary or dark in a compelling way, but this movie came off as needlessly nasty. It came off more like a weird snuff porn revenge film than anything resembling real horror. I guess it was trying to be like some sort of 'realistic serial killer story' or something like that, but the goofy, weird moments took you out of that, and there weren't enough scary moments or tense ones to pull you back in. So really, all you get is a weird, somewhat perverted mess of nothing. Pretty shitty.

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

Watchmen (2009)

I am almost sure director Zack Snyder's favorite part of making Watchmen was when he got to show four blue dicks on screen at the same time.

When he heard Dr. Manhattan constantly walked around either naked or in a speedo, Zack Snyder, the man responsible for the other ultra-masculine man-movie 300 and so many others like it since, said 'finally! A story that I can really relate to and appreciate! I will adapt this into the greatest slideshow of hypermasculine beefcakes ever made!'

With all the shots of musclebound men with clearly defined asses and bulging biceps and six-packs being so prominent in this and every other fucking movie he's ever done, it really does show that he is the manliest man ever in the history of the world. His movies are all unquestioning love-letters to manliness. The ultimate expressions of testosterone's glory. No shadow of doubt, nor any shadow of any other kind, will be cast on Zack Snyder's undeniable heterosexuality.

Director: Zack Snyder

Starring: Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup, Malin Akerman

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

If you took all the slow-mo scenes out of this, it really would be about 40 minutes shorter. The fight scene at the beginning where the Comedian dies and is thrown out a window is so long and dragged out. It's really not a good sign if your fight scene is like a long, pointless guitar solo in a bad 80s song – if it's just distracting from the story, then it's a shitty fight scene. If I wanted to watch a pointless fight scene, I'd go the gym and bump into a 'roided-up frat guy and then blame that on the guy next to him, and watch the fireworks.

The slow-mo is so silly in all of this. In the scene where the Comedian falls out the window, he falls so slowly that I think he could've survived the fall. It isn't like he would've hit the ground at a lethal speed with that slow mo going on!

"I sure am glad gravity bends to my will!"

Then we get a bunch of scenes you know from the book. It's hard to make fun of this, because all Snyder did was copy-paste scenes from the book and vomit them up on his movie, like he just stumbled back in the door after a night of binge drinking.

The real problem with all these scenes – of Rorschach investigating shit, Dan and Laurie hanging out, Dr. Manhattan being weird as fuck – is that it just feels like they're cut-and-pasted to check off a list of scenes, rather than further a story. I don't know why, but even though I love the Watchmen book, these scenes all fall terribly flat for me, and I can't get into the movie's arc or emotional scenes at all. The lighting and coloring look perfect for the book, but everything just has this digitized, overly slick, sexy kind of sheen on it that makes it impossible to feel like anything is really happening. I just don't like the "look" of the whole movie. I'm constantly aware that this is a movie when I'm watching it – rather than be immersed in its world, I'm pulled out of the story by the over the top visuals and reminded that it's all fake and rehearsed, which shouldn't happen.

The actors all sound bored as fuck and deliver their lines in a monotone – they sound like kids reading off cue cards. The philosophical and insightful dialogue from the comics comes off as just meaningless prattle here. It's like, yup, you sure got those words from the comics in your movie! Thumbs up! I know some of these actors could do very well, but the whole attitude of 'we HAVE to stick EXACTLY to how the book looked' just limits what they can really do with the characters in terms of making the performances their own.

He looks like the book! Even if he is soulless and boring as a character in this. But he looks like the guy from the book, and that's all that matters.

Michelle and I just didn't care about these characters. When Laurie finds out The Comedian is her biological father, that should be the big scene - it was in the book, in terms of her character anyway. But in the movie it just gets lost at sea in the middle of all the other crap. There's just too much going on.

The real problem is that the numerous flashbacks and side-stories that worked so well in the book just come off as overly cluttered and confusing in the movie, jumping around more than Super Mario on cocaine. In the book, you could read at your own pace, and in books that kind of time jumping and complicated narrative is expected. I don't think Snyder translated it well to film at all. The lack of direction in this movie is kind of like a broken GPS – it just takes you all over the place and you never get where you want to go. It's hard to tell what's a flashback and what isn't in this movie, with all the endless rolls of fat.

There's one scene of Laurie and her mother talking in the apartment about the Comedian – it comes off like some kind of weird, awkward one-room stage play. It feels very stiff and awkward.

"I definitely have breast cancer. So when are you and Dr. Manhattan going to get back together?"
"Mom, I told you, I don't love Dr. Manhattan anymore. I love Nite Owl now."

In fact, it kind of reminds me of something...

Nah, must just be coincidence.

Or this other scene of Ozymandias talking to reporters or something, with the over the top ominous music behind it and him constantly with that cold smirk on his face. I'm sure he's not the bad guy! Really, he isn't! But I dunno, maybe this is a faithful adaptation – maybe Alan Moore, when he wrote that scene in the book, also had that same ominous music in mind playing constantly behind Ozymandias, and Zack Snyder wasn't just a hack-ass director with no understanding of storytelling.

Don't bother turning on the light. All interviews should be done in dark rooms on very cloudy days to make sure things look as obviously sinister as possible!

The movie would also be way shorter if we didn't have scenes of Rorschach monologuing over a montage of him walking around in a graveyard or opening cabinets! I know it was in the fucking comic book, but that doesn't mean you have to include it in the movie! I think Zack Snyder hears the word self restraint and thinks it's some kind of mumbo jumbo foreign type of yoga.

This is like the Stephen King's IT movie in a way – it's just so bloated and they focused too much on putting in the material from the book, rather than delivering a good movie. But I'll give IT this – it was never even half as pretentious or up its own ass as Watchmen. This movie is like a college student's 2 a.m. drunken philosophical Facebook notes mutated after exposure to radiation into a horrible monster. Holy shit. I mean, this whole thing just radiates the flannel shirts and the PBR-stench of someone who just read Nietzsche for the first time. The book had a lot of this, too, but Alan Moore's clear talent and knowledge of storytelling made it work. The movie's slow pace and bloated runtime just makes the philsophical stuff unbearable and annoying.

"Life is meaningless. Life is only pain." = him in this movie, condensed version.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the excruciating slog of the last 25 minutes, in which the film goes through the climax. If you don't know, it's where Ozymandias, revealed SO SURPRISINGLY IN THIS MOVIE as the bad guy, says he's blown up half of New York and that's his crazy plan to bring about world peace. The characters all react with shock and horror in very rote, boring, scripted ways, and none of it is exciting. Rorschach then dies in a way that almost evokes a pulse of excitement, but then remembers it's this shitty ass movie and quits doing that.

Amazing how the biology of his blood when he explodes is so in tune with irony. I guess nature is funny sometimes.

I've had my car broken down in the dead of winter before and still gotten somewhere faster than Watchmen's climax does. A snail could get to the other side of town in the time this takes to get anywhere. If I had to listen to any more of Ozymandias's dead-eyed speechifying in this movie, I think I'd be praying to be in New York when that bomb went off, too. Just to save myself the pain.

A fitting metaphor, finally!

I remember being a bit younger, back when I first saw this movie seven years ago. I remember seeing all the people complaining about book-to-movie adaptations never being faithful to the source material. These days, we have good adaptations like the Hunger Games series or Gone Girl that tell a good story independent of what they were based on. But with Watchmen, it stuck too close to the book and was somehow worse off for it. I remember seeing this when it came out and thought "yeah, this is exactly like the book," but I just wasn't crazy about it, because “looking exactly like the book” isn't synonymous with good movie.

Overall, the movie is just proof that film and books are fundamentally different mediums. You can't just assume everything done in one of those mediums will fit the other. You have to adapt them – that's why it's called adaptations. If you just take everything in a book and throw it on screen with zero context or changes minding the fact that movies and books are different, it looks clumsy and awkward. If Snyder had any ingenuity or cleverness, he could have taken the massive pages and pages of dialogue that worked in the comic, and the complex flashbacks and differing storylines that also worked in the comic, and worked all that into a compelling film by moving things around and changing things and, y'know, adapting them. But nope – he just threw it all directly from the comic to the page, no changes at all! This movie is the fat kid eating too much cake at a birthday party and passing out before the party's even over. There's just zero restraint or filter here.

Maybe under a better director this could've been good. I thought while watching it that this could've been a good Netflix TV show – all the flashbacks and different storylines might lend themselves better to that, with the long-winded, oft-complex nature of it all being more easily digestible as hour-long increments. Maybe it'd have more room to breathe as a story. As a movie though, Watchmen too much; it's bloated and over-stuffed to the point that it's barely watchable.

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