Truth or Dare (2018)

Well, I can't even say they've reached the bottom of the barrel for horror movies yet with a stupid plot about the game Truth or Dare. Because the moment I say that, we'll get a totally serious movie based on Hungry Hungry Hippos or Pogs, and then that will be the new bar for the barrel's bottom. But what I can tell you is that this movie is seriously rotten from the inside out.

Director: Jeff Wadlow

Starring: Lucy Hale, Violett Beane

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Truth or Dare, if you haven't seen the absolutely bonkers trailers that have been out for months, is about a bunch of kids who go to Mexico and contract a deadly spiritual curse that forces them to play the game Truth or Dare forever until they all die. Personally I would've rather had an STD.

It starts out with a bunch of models for a fancy skin cream solution – oh, I'm sorry, did I say that? I meant our main characters. Seriously, they look like they just came out of a fucking factory line for a commercial, only to be stuffed back in the box after it's over. Was there something wrong with having them look like they had ever been out of a locked laboratory room, or do physical imperfections scare Blumhouse Pictures more than anything?

They're all going to Mexico for Spring Break, and the biggest hurdle they had was convincing their Habitat for Humanity-loving friend Olivia to go, as she wanted to go build houses and other boring, stupid shit. What a dork! So they cancelled her trip to do that and instead now force her to go to Mexico. I guess they promise to help her out later, but eh, I wouldn't trust these people further than I could throw them.

In Mexico, you get some dumb shots of them partying and stuff. You know, the best part of any horror movie; the meaningless shots of hot people having fun. Truly essential. Olivia meets this guy Carter, who entices her to get all her friends to follow him to a creepy abandoned church in the middle of the fucking night for vague reasons. Honestly, my biggest question is how this girl made it to college if she was dumb enough to do this, because literally no sane person would meet some dude sitting alone at a bar, get an invite to come to some desolate broken-down-ass church at 2 a.m., and then think 'sounds like a fun vacation!' Even the most low-standards, base-level people would start to shy away from you if you suggested leaving the fucking bar.

But nope, they play Truth or Dare sitting in this filthy fucking hovel, like a bunch of idiots with no imagination. It's about what you'd expect, some lap dances and make-out scenes and other nonsense. But then Carter surprises them by saying he wanted to lure them all there to trap them in the supernatural curse and FORCE them to play! What a weirdo. Gee, it sure is bizarre that this stuff happens when you follow creepy strangers in the middle of the night.

I guess the rule is that if they DON'T do their truth or dare, they die. So it's kind of like It Follows, except it's terrible. When possessed by the game, the characters' faces turn into demonic, cartoonish Joker-ish grins, which is never explained and has no function outside of looking kinda spooky if you're under 15. I guess that's a weak nitpick. But I dunno, it's weird and doesn't make sense and the movie sucks overall, anyway.

So then they all go home and everything seems to be getting back to normal. Only then, they start seeing creepy things like 'Truth or Dare' etched into desks, fliers and even Olivia's car! She finally chooses truth, and ends up blurting out in the library that Markie, her best friend, has been cheating on her boyfriend. Wow, what a great scare – bullshit teeny-bopper drama! That's scarier than anything.

So from here on out, you get a bunch of just plain goofy scenes. The most annoying guy in the group gets dared to take his dick out at a bar. When he doesn't, the game kills him by making him fall off a pool table and break his neck! An equivalent punishment, at last!

Another guy, a gay dude, picks 'truth' and is forced to come out to his strict conservative father. Apparently it goes pretty well and things are alright. Wow. What a nuanced and surprisingly level-headed plot choice for a movie like this. I sure hope it doesn't get ruined later.

A few more of them die – this one guy, who seemed to be doing an Anthony Jeselnik impression, lies to his grad school interview about selling pills, so he then has to stab his eye out I guess.

And the great bitter rivalry between former best friends Olivia and Markie continues – oh the humanity! Markie gets dared to break Olivia's hand, I suppose. She does it when Olivia makes a crack about her dad, who committed suicide recently. This plotline, by the way, is just dropped randomly in our laps, like a piece of dried up dog shit.

Eventually they try and figure out what's going on. I can't imagine why; they've all been having such fun playing! They track down this girl who was dared to light a woman on fire earlier in the movie. I guess she was now dared to murder Olivia. I love the variety in the dares. Some people are dared to show their dick, while others are dared to murder people! Totally makes sense!

If you can believe it, the last 30 minutes actually try to get serious on you and start foisting a bunch of ludicrously over-dramatic plots. Like remember that plot about the gay kid coming out to his father? Well, it turns out the game dares that kid to steal his father's police gun and make him beg on his knees! And then the other cop comes and shoots the kid, thinking the dad is in trouble! Wow. With the current climate of police in this country, I'm glad this movie is bringing a sensible take on the issue.

Then we find out that Olivia actually had seen Markie's father right before he killed himself! And he tried to have sex with her and probably actually raped her! And she then told him he'd be better off if he died!

Movie, you know, it's not good to pretend you're something else than what you are. You're trying to shoehorn in these ultra-serious tragic plots, when really you're the kind of movie people watch when drunk off their asses at 2 a.m. while eating Cheetos. You're background noise. You're really not a serious film.

The climax is an over-long, ridiculous sequence involving a Mexican curse that “summoned” the game in the form of a demon. They find this out by going to visit a stereotypical old Mexican ex-nun now living secluded in the desert, a stereotype so cliche and redundant it almost feels new again. But instead it's just kinda racist hack-work. Then they learn they have to cut out that guy Carter's tongue from the beginning of the movie to stop the demon. This is so ridiculous that even the characters openly admit they have no clue how it's going to work.

I guess they try to, but the game, being a little bitch, cheats and makes them accidentally kill Carter instead. Then Olivia and Markie are forced to keep playing, so they broadcast a Youtube and make the entire world play, thus enacting Armageddon basically. I always knew the end times would come as a result of hot coeds and Youtube videos.

Truth or Dare is a garbage fire of a movie, and I DARE all of you to buy the DVDs and burn them in a mass grave. Am I doing it right?

Image copyright of its original owners, we don't own it.

The Fantastic Four (Unreleased, 1994)

With the impending release of Marvel's gargantuan Infinity War spectacle, it's kind of hard to believe there was a time when superhero movies weren't these million-dollar blockbuster productions with huge actors signed on for years at a time. But there was! And while the Tim Burton Batman and the 70s Superman were viable successes, they were outliers and didn't blow up into a huge trend like we have now. The Fantastic Four from 1994 is a film that was never even released and can be legally watched on YouTube just like you're searching for a Kendrick Lamar video or something. And it's, uh, really something.

Director: Oley Sassone

Starring: Alex Hyde-White, Rebecca Staub, Jay Underwood

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

The history behind this thing is that, apparently, Executive Producer Bernd Eichenger wanted to retain the rights to the characters before they expired, so he had to have this at the 11th hour in 1994. So he teamed up with famous producer and director Roger Corman and they ended up putting this movie together, full of a bunch of actors you've never heard of.

It wasn't required that it would be released, just that it existed. And though some people like Stan Lee claimed it was never intended to be released, Eichenger and Corman denied that and claimed that it was. But if you believe the myth, essentially, this is an entire movie with a full cast and crew made just so some guy could make other Fantastic Four movies. Wow. If you ever needed a reason to feel worthless... there you go.

The thing is, it's not even too bad of a movie! Sure, the budget looks pretty low and the effects are goofy as fuck, but it wasn't like this was the top of the crop in terms of that for 1994. The acting isn't bad at all and the story is honestly pretty standard for these kinds of movies.

You get Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom, the latter of whom surely had the most punchable name in school and got beat up all the time, driving him to science. They try this wacky experiment as a comet is passing by, but I guess their numbers were off and Victor gets horribly burned and electrocuted. Whoops! I hope the kid from Species III still gets to do his stupid experiments and the science lab isn't a martyr to this cause now.

Years later, Reed recruits these two random people who lived near him, Sue and Johnny Storm, to go into space and try to do the experiment again. Because they would totally let him do this after his first experiment left one guy maimed. How did he even get to do this at all? What coke-addled executive let this yoohoo go into space again? And it just makes sense to take two random, un-trained people in space, because why would I want ASTRONAUTS going on my super cool science mission? Fuck expertise! Give me amateurs!

But it doesn't work, because a hideously deformed man wearing a monocle and a fedora, called The Jeweler, breaks in and steals their magic jewel thing from the spaceship, which was apparently the only thing keeping them from being fried and their genes rearranged. He replaces it with a replica of the same jewel, you know, just the kind of thing you carry around!

So then they get shot out of the sky and crash-land in a random field, somehow coming out mostly unscathed and with no major injuries. They did get superpowers though, which Reed is mostly nonplussed about. He's just like “yeah, whatever, guess we'll see what happens.” Never even an iota of concern even as the other three are all freaking out. I guess the thought of taking Sue to bed is his main concern.

They get taken in by a lab run by Dr. Doom, who sits on a throne surrounded by flaming pyres and speaks in constant community-college-Shakespearean tones. It's pretty goddamn silly. It's obviously Victor, who was presumed dead by Reed but apparently spent his time after being burned turning into a supervillain with his whole lab and trying to blow stuff up. But Reed didn't know. It's crazy to me that these guys were friends and then after the accident, he's just like nah, I'm not telling anyone where I am, WORLD DOMINATION TIME!

Meanwhile, the Jeweler guy plots to kidnap this blind girl, because I guess he's so delusional that he thinks the reason he can't get a date is because of his looks. How silly! It's because of his shitty personality. I can't even believe they're doing a 'kidnapped woman forced to be a bride' plot. What is this, the fucking 1960s? They do it later with Dr. Doom, too. It's like why not make the same dumb, cliché mistake twice in a row?

And it's so surreal every time this Jeweler character is on screen, because the music gets all campy-goth-style like a musical and he talks like an even worse Shakespeare imitator than Doom does. It's really like they took this character out of a whole different movie and put him in this.

Ben gets mad and ends up leaving, fearing he'll never fit in, as back in the 90s, giant orange rock men just weren't accepted by society. He just kind of wanders the city and it doesn't take long for him to run into the Jeweler's weird underground society of deformed-looking people, feeling that this is the only way I guess. My favorite part is that the others don't even try to find him. They're in the middle of making up a name for themselves, the Fantastic Four, and making costumes! But finding one of their actual team members that make up the 'Four'? Nah, fuck that! Who cares if we have to turn it into 'Fantastic Three' and spend money doing that?

Through some more convoluted events, they find The Thing and then end up fighting Dr. Doom. Doom fires a laser to destroy New York City, motivated no doubt by its obscene rent prices. Johnny does the whole Human Torch thing and the CGI here is actually gorgeous in how silly it is – it turns basically into an early computer game animation, and it looks amazingly silly. But it is a bit endearing. I bet they put as much work into this as people nowadays do on Marvel movies.

Okay. That might not be true. But I'm sure it's true compared to the writing in a DC movie.

That's Fantastic Four, ending with a shot of all of them coming out of a church after a wedding – they're all married now! Or maybe just Reed and Sue. Oh, and Ben and the blind girl he saved from Doom/Jeweler, too. Because I guess saving a girl means she is yours as a prize! People can be prizes! Isn't that great?

That's the movie though. It's silly, it's utterly ridiculous, the budget was clearly low... but it ain't bad. I've seen worse. I mean, most of this is pretty average so far as writing goes. It may be full of cliches and dated bullshit, but I'll take it over any non-Wonder Woman DCEU flick any day.

Image copyright of its original owner, we don't own it.

Species III (2004)

It's been a few years since I did a Species review. After I did the last one, way back in 2015, my entire life changed and I didn't get around to doing the third one. But fortunately I still had this lying around! So that's great and it makes up for all the other things that have happened between then and now. I thought about saying this was just how long it took for me to work up the nerve to review another Species movie. But the truth is that this was destined to happen. It has to happen.

Director: Brad Turner

Starring: Robin Dunne, Robert Knepper, Sunny Mabrey

IMDb

Co-written with Colin.

This one starts out with a truck ride with a dying Eve from the other movies. She has a baby before she dies, which the driver goes rogue and steals for unknown reasons, fleeing into the woods as the military pursues him. Apparently he's good at hiding, because they don't catch him.

Then, at an unspecified later time, a cocky college science lab geek is showing people around his fancy lab, talking about mumbo jumbo and science that nobody cares about. Something about a power plant? Who knows. He questions his professor, who is the same guy who ran away from that truck and I guess is now working at a college? I dunno. The professor, aggravated at the kid's science projects, tells him that “who are you to decide who lives and dies?” Which, you know, is just how professors are; constantly wanting to crush the spirits of their students, subjugating them to their will.

Then that kid, Dean, finds out his science projects have been cancelled by the college dean, who proclaims that he can “do whatever he wants” and acts about as insane and power-hungry as a third world dictator. Is every faculty member at this fucking college an egomaniac seeking validation for their shriveled soul?

Meanwhile, college professor/military truck driver, whose name is apparently Abbott, on the run is actually hiding the alien at his house, who is a little girl right now obsessed with Red Lobster. Literally, they show a Red Lobster commercial on TV and the professor dude, I guess, has to go spend his hard earned money on fucking lobster for this alien brat, as if he just has money falling out his GODDAMN EARS!

I guess Abbott is approached later by the other alien who'd been in the truck, who has now grown up to look like a bloated Comic Con attendee with a swollen head. The alien tells him he's a halfbreed and, as such, is dying. And that there are others like him out there. This prompts Abbott to want to save these aliens... for some goddamn reason. Weren't they killing people in the other movies? Oh well. Anything to distract from actual HUMAN causes he could more easily be helping, right?

Meanwhile the girl alien grows up into a gorgeous woman, physically perfect in every way of course. I guess she's like the last true full-breed alien, or some shit like that. Hmm. The only perfect specimen to this movie is white, blonde people. Where have I heard that before? Nah, probably nothing important.

If that troubling allusion isn't your cup of tea, how about the series' tried and true theme of the aliens being sex toys? I mean, the alien girl in this never grows up past her early 20s with a flawless body, even though the aliens are supposed to like, keep growing at a very fast rate. Eve, from the other movies, was always physically perfect and young, too. I'm SURE there's a reason for this that isn't sex appeal! I'm sure it's a deeply entrenched plot point.

The dean of the school shows up at Abbott's house, for some reason having access to get in, and finds the alien chick, naked of course. He abandons every other reason he came there when she seems to want to have sex with him. I guess it's not suspicious at all if some random woman answers the door at a house you're going to and tries to have sex. I'm sure that'll end up fine... actually she kills him, which is fine as he was an asinine character.

I love that Abbott's reaction is just to shrug and be like “he had it coming” to the dean's death. Oh really? Tell us more about who ELSE deserves to die, crazy professor man. How did you even get this job anyway? Weren't you on the run from the US government? I guess the college just doesn't have very high standards.

I guess somewhere else in the movie's rolls of corpulent fat, we get one of the other half-breed aliens trying to fuck everyone to stay alive. So we get scenes of this physically perfect brunette woman wearing very scant clothes going around to have sex with dirty losers at biker bars and such. This is totally a legit plot point. It's not at all a thinly veiled way for the writer to get out his own fantasies about what women should do to regular average Joes. NO. THIS IS A REAL PLOT THREAD DONE FOR STORY AND NOT SHAMELESS NUDITY. WHY WOULD ANYONE THINK OTHERWISE???

Like I'd love to get a window into some of these actress's stories. I bet she held a dream deep inside her heart for years to be an actor. Ever since she was a child, she'd wanted to be one. In school she was in all the productions, every play, working her way up to a starring role. A Midsummer Night's Dream, in middle school. Then in high school she was in A Streetcar Named Desire, playing the Stella role, and all her friends and family came out and it was the greatest night of her life. I bet she wanted to be an actor because it gave her the opportunity to explore the richness of life and the complex minds of other people and various characters. I bet she wanted to become famous and one day inspire OTHER little girls like she once had been, showing them that with hard work and determination, THEY TOO can do anything they want...

Anyway, then she landed her first “big role” and it was for this, and the director told her to take her clothes off and pretend to fuck some hairy guy in a gas station bathroom. Such is life I guess. Fucking tragic.

Oh, and somewhere in all this, Abbott dies – what a tragedy that this ridiculous character is gone. Eh, fuck it, sarcasm's a bit passe anyway.

The roommate of the main dude gets involved, because apparently he REALLY wanted to be a character too even this late in the film. He gets suckered in by this other alien chick, who ends up kidnapping him and making him do some science mumbo jumbo for her, I guess trying to further the species with more science – honestly, the science here matters almost none at all and it's pointless to explain it.

Fortunately, though, the heroes get there – well, it's just the main kid Dean and this random-ass detective who's done nothing all movie. The final battle scene is somewhere between a Star Wars and Terminator ripoff with the scenery. I guess it's OK since nobody associated with those franchises knew Species existed at this point...

Man these Species movies are just exhausting and hilarious. It's horrible filmmaking but it's also funny to watch and even funnier to make fun OF. They fill me with such complex emotions. And for as bad as they are, you have to give these movies credit for finding a way to basically make pornography marketable as a legitimate horror movie not found in some special interest section. They hid it in plain sight! It's genius!

Image copyright of its original owners if they even give a shit.

The Snowman (2017)

This has to be a record for the least amount of reasons I actually wanted to review a movie, and that's just down to the name of the main character: Michael Fassbender IS... Detective Harry Hole. That name is so insane that I had to see this shit to see if it was as goofy.

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

And it wasn't. Seriously. This is an insanely boring piece of shit with no point to it. If you wanted to stop reading now, you wouldn't be missing out on much – except for my razor-sharp trademarked wit, anyway. I guess the director has said the reason this was so botched up was because they didn't have time to shoot 10-15 percent of the script, and had to start unexpectedly early. And I get that. But at the same time, I'm just not that sure this would've been that much better anyway.

It starts off with a flashback of this kid trying to learn schoolwork and whenever he gets it wrong, his asshole stepfather (or whatever the character is supposed to be) smacks his mother in the face. Not sure that's part of the accepted curriculum. Then after finding out the stepfather is sleeping with someone else, the mother and the kid go on a drive when the mother gives up and tries to kill them both on thin ice! The kid escapes, but the mother dies – what a cheerful opening that also reveals so much about the movie we're about to see.

Then we're introduced to Detective Harry Hole, a complete lazy degenerate who somehow keeps his job even in spite of constantly drinking after work and falling asleep in snowy alleyways that should probably kill him. He's just a fucking loser, and Michael Fassbender's talents are wasted. Hell, he barely even has any fucking dialogue. There are scenes where he just walks up to people wordlessly staring at them, and we're just kind of supposed to dissect and analyze what that means even with zero real clues.

I guess she's his ex girlfriend and has a kid who isn't even his, but for some reason he's still involved. And there's a new guy in the mix who acts subtly snooty but isn't really a bad guy. Wow! Disconnected family drama! What a new, exciting thing!

Oh, okay, that was sarcasm. But you know what IS super fresh? A younger, motivated partner who joins the force and starts really trying to idealistically solve crimes that her jaded older partner thinks are impossible! Oh wait, shit, that's cliché hack garbage too. Fuck. Maybe this movie isn't so good.

The story is quite amazingly, infuriatingly directionless. It just seems to ramble on and not get to the point at all. I guess there's some scraps of a story when a woman goes missing and there's a mysterious snowman in the yard. But that should've been like, the first scene. Instead, it sort of just lazily drools through the film over the first half hour and there isn't much resolution or drive to solving it. There's a bunch of other fucking bullshit about Hole's ex-girlfriend's family, some camping trip, a hockey game, honestly, it's all just shit and we don't need to focus on it. The movie does enough time-wasting so I don't have to.

At least the young woman detective has pertinent theories about why the killer is doing stuff, saying the snow probably sets him off. That's fucking stupid because there's literally no evidence to support it – and the movie seems to agree with me, as it proves to be false anyway.

Oh, and got to love how it's set in Norway but every single character exclusively speaks perfect English in a British accent. You know, the usual lazy way to show a foreign country. Just have everyone be British! I mean why wouldn't I ever want to see a different culture or anything like that?

Eventually, after like 45 minutes of film – near half the runtime – we FINALLY get a real story starting to emerge, which is so asinine I'd throw the movie into a ravine if I hadn't rented it from Redbox. Some lady is reported missing, to which Harry Hole and his partner go and try to figure it out. But she's actually just fine, chopping off chicken heads in the dead of winter, like you do. Then they leave and before they even get very far in the car, they get ANOTHER call about the same lady, missing again! How inconsiderate to waste resources like that. Don't you know gas is expensive now?

I guess Harry Hole wanders around a bit, with Fassbender wearing a permanent expression of zombielike uncaring, and he finds a hole to look down in! Hey, Harry Hole is looking down a hole! Yeah, that's about all the humor I can mine from this dead, dried up well. But you do get to see a woman's severed head on top of a snowman! It's too bad that isn't as funny as it sounds. A better movie would've played it for campy laughs. But not The Snowman. This is mercifully free of any entertainment.

The movie sluggishly slogs on, with some other random story about JK Simmons playing some creepy doctor who takes pictures of women without tops on to blackmail them, or some shit like that. I dunno. I was falling asleep during most of this plotline and was only woken up when something fell off the refrigerator in my apartment and loudly made noise as it hit the floor. That's really how I finished the rest of this movie, because that happened.

A lot of other very dull things happen, and then it's revealed that the bad guy is actually Harry Hole's ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend! DUN DUN DUN! What a nonsensical twist! It turns out HE was the kid in the beginning of the movie with the jackass stepfather or whoever that was. And he says he's been killing women because he's judged them for getting abortions, not knowing who their kids' fathers were, and other things. I'm sure a better movie could've made this compelling, developed his character or added social commentary, but The Snowman was just like “fuck that!” and didn't do it at all. And seriously, 'guy who was totally inconspicuous and nice the whole movie is actually the killer'? That was the BEST you could do? Even people in comas for the last 30 years would find that trite and overdone.

So instead we just get a dumb final battle scene where Harry Hole chases the killer out into the wide-open icy field. When he loses track of him somehow – there doesn't seem to be many places to hide out there – Harry just stands in place and screams for the killer to come face him. Real badass! Except the guy instead just shoots him from far away. Man, people just have no honor anymore.

Then the killer comes close, making some bullshit speech no doubt, and falls through a hole in the ice, dying instantly in the freezing cold. So really, Harry Hole didn't do all that much of anything to stop the guy. If this had been happening in the summertime, he would've just been murdered point blank. What a hero!

There wasn't really anything worth watching in this. Two hours of complete bullshit, nonsense time-wasting. In the interest of ending this review and not wasting YOUR time anymore, avoid the movie. There. Done!

Image copyright of its original owners; we don't own it.