Dark Spirits (2008)

Dark Spirits is a movie about a chick whose sister dies from some mysterious supernatural force and she has to figure out why it’s haunting her, too. The problem is that by the end, the audience still has no real clue. This was part of a box set of DVD movies from Walmart my friend found in his apartment, so you know it’ll be amazing!

Director: Huck Keppler

Starring: Milena Minichova

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

The movie starts essentially like the 2003 classic The Room – which is to say, exactly like a porno, with bad lighting and camerawork, and two people having sex, except unfortunately here mostly with their clothes on. There’s really no difference other than that, though. The main girl Eva calls her sister later, who is a totally random woman who the movie wants us to believe is super close with her. The reason is to tell her sister that she had a dream of her walking into some desolate country house, like a bargain bin Texas Chainsaw, and getting grabbed by a ghost! You know – normal sister stuff!

Her sister is understandably skeptical – like, she probably heard this stuff every week while the main chick was in college and friends with that weird gypsy girl who had all the tea leaves and tarot cards and she's kinda done with it after all these years.

Then, the next morning, her boyfriend walks up extremely slowly to let her know her sister is dead – boy, was that fast. She takes it about like anyone would, with some crying and sitting at a table and whatnot – your usual bland depictions of sorrow. The Store Brand Box depictions of sorrow, really. There’s nothing at all in terms of who she is as a character. All she does the entire movie, really, is sit around an impressively bland apartment and write in a notebook. Thrilling stuff! Her apartment is so un-adorned and bland that I suspect she might be a serial murderer using it as a patsy for unsuspecting victims. Unfortunately the movie does not seize on this potential plot goldmine.

But don’t worry – there are plenty of weird scenes of her interacting with her boyfriend talking about different dimensions. And talking with some girl and a random homeless man about the concept of death or something. It’s seriously like they just took pages from a Philosophy 101 textbook and threw it hodge-podge into a screenplay. It has nothing really to do with the story.

So what IS the story? Well, I guess she keeps seeing ghosts and some mildly weird stuff happens to her. A few scares in the dark. But it’s not too bad, considering all the stuff that happens to people in better horror movies. This is kind of like the white privilege of horror movies. I think maybe the worst part is when she gets chased through the park by the homeless guy. But the next day, no kidding, he apologizes to her. What a good turnout! I wish more movie conflicts ended that way!

That stuff is positively rosy compared to how she is with her boyfriend, though – watch as these two barely actually touch each other and act mostly like two awkward people who were asked to act like they’re in a relationship. Amazing! It’s like I’m inside of a high school prom. Real interactive content.

Also, some detective shows up a few times, with the actor clearly stoned on camera. Why can’t he solve this crime? What are they paying him? I have some legitimate questions. His story essentially goes nowhere and, near the end of the movie, he gets killed by a ghost. Or maybe it’s not a ghost – it’s not really all that clear.

The main girl comes home and she sees her own dead body on the floor of the apartment. Wow! She should’ve cleaned that up! Then, I guess, she dies too, and is able to meet her dead sister in the ghost world. Given that these two characters acted stiff and cold toward each other already as if they barely knew each other, my guess is it’ll be exactly like they’re used to. I wonder what wacky ghost adventures they’ll go on. Hopefully it’ll be more interesting than this movie.

This was mostly harmless. I actually do like seeing low budget stuff like this and watching how people try to construct something scary – at least, it’s not some calculated corporate garbage. There is that. But it’s just not very good. It’s too slow and lacks any kind of compelling characters. It was kind of fun to see where it went, but the payoff was lacking. See it if you’ve got a bottomless appetite for this kind of fun schlock.

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

Rest Stop: Don't Look Back (2008)

Due to the overwhelming critical response to the first Rest Stop, the demand for a sequel was through the roof. So now we have Rest Stop: Don’t Look Back, a sequel so good it doesn’t even have a “2” in the name to signify that it’s a sequel! Because not being able to tell if you’re getting the first one or the second one is the real way to make a good horror movie.

Director: Shawn Papazian

Starring: Richard Tillman, Jessie Ward

IMDb

We start this one off with a guy breaking down on the road and getting picked up by the family in the Winnebago from the last one. We get a couple of scenes of them being weird, but the thing that really throws me off is how these two Funny Games guys never stop drinking from their soda cups:

What they’re not showing you is the scenes of these two having to stop at every rest stop to take a piss that lasts about twenty minutes from how much they’re drinking.

So I guess the Winnebago has soundproof walls, as the family outside doesn’t notice the hitchhiker and the wife fucking inside, even though it would have been the easiest set-up in the world for anyone to notice if they’d just gone inside.

I guess it was just a set-up though, as we see the wife egging her husband on as he beats the shit out of the hitchhiker after he finds them. Then they tie him up out back and gouge out his eyes and bury him in the desert. Unfortunately for them, he doesn’t need eyes to survive as he comes back and slits their throats!

I'm surprised all the soda they're constantly drinking didn't leak out in place of blood.

I guess this guy was supposed to be the rest stop killer, killed by these Winnebago people, who he killed in return – and now they’re all ghosts roaming the highway forever. And that’s your plot for the first film which wasn’t explained there, instead shoehorned awkwardly into this one. Magical. Some loser truck driver fucked another guy's wife and then came back to life as a zombie after they killed him for it. Well gee, if that doesn't sound worthy of a full length horror movie, I don't know what does!

We then switch to our real main characters, Five O’ Clock Shadow and Blonde Bimbo. I guess their names are really Tom and Marilyn, but who cares about that? Apparently they’re going on a road trip to track down Nicole and Jesse from the first movie, because they’re close family and friends. They also team up with this dorky loser named Jared, who comes along because he’s stalking Nicole or something – see, filmmaking is easy when you can just make up characters at your whimsy and say they knew the old characters not in the movie anymore! Totally not a cheap ass way to shoehorn in a story.

"Yeah, since I'm easily ten years older than you, it totally makes sense that we hang out!"

I guess I should be glad for one thing though, as at least this is trying to follow the original story, rather than just putting out some nonsense. Though as you’ll find, nonsense and Rest Stop are pretty much synonyms. For example, check out their awesome road trip set-up they have, where Tom and Marilyn ride in one car and Jared takes a completely different one and they speak via walkie-talkie.

The most convoluted way ever to say "I hate you but am too nice to NOT let you come along on our totally pointless road trip to the middle of nowhere." Also without the gas station man telling them in an overly long scene where to go, they really WOULD have been driving to nowhere. Brilliant.

Yeah because you know, THAT’S how people take road trips! Totally makes sense. Even though later on we see that they all get one hotel room just so Tom and Marilyn can have sex while Jared sleeps in the bathtub.

"Sex is so much better when that annoying guy I hate is sleeping in the bathroom just mere feet away from us!"

That’s also how you have a good road trip! If you just reversed these two – have them all in the same car, but in different hotel rooms – it would be perfectly normal, but I guess that’s not Rest Stop.

What is Rest Stop is watching a supposedly grown adult driving a car with headphones on and playing with dinosaur toys, complete with goofy voices, while driving. Those are excellent ways to get into a car accident and die. Please, keep doing them!

Are you five years old? What the hell? This is just glanced over and never mentioned again, making it just a WTF moment. Thanks for that, movie!

There IS a thing called car speakers and a CD player, you jackass. You can always wait to listen to the latest Lady Gaga album until you get to where you're going otherwise.

To complete the triage of annoyance, he also does nothing but fart while in the car. OK, I see why they didn’t want to drive with this guy now.

He stops at a porta-potty just randomly inserted on the side of the road, and is SO SURPRISED when it has no toilet paper:

Yeah, next you'll be telling me these porta-potties DON'T have proper sewage systems for good hygiene after using them! I am just so utterly shocked!

Fortunately the killer comes to rectify his shitty situation:

Every horror movie would be better with scenes of the main character swimming in his own shit. Ohhh yeah Rest Stop 2, keepin' it classy as fuck!

So is he just attacking random porta potties now? Should the movie title be changed to “Porta Potty”?

Meanwhile at the actual Rest Stop, Marilyn goes to the bathroom and hears some noises while in the stall, which she immediately assumes are Tom coming in and then begins asking if it’s him repeatedly. Because any activity in the girl’s bathroom MUST be him coming in. It could never be anyone else in that public restroom! I wonder if she pulls the same shit in the Walmart or Target bathrooms – just calling out Tom’s name while sitting on the toilet every time she hears someone new enter the bathroom. Oh horror movies, always playing to our most socially awkward moments of total idiocy.

We do get an actual scary bit when she hears Nicole crying in the stall, opens it to find no one there, and then goes outside only to hear whimpering and crying and shuffling from inside again – then goes back in to find that it’s now a decrepit hellhole and not at all the clean bathroom she thought she was in. It’s actually an effective scene, and perhaps the only remotely frightening one in either Rest Stop movie.

Unfortunately the film realized that it reached its "one scary moment per two films" quota, and then decided it didn’t have to try anymore.

We get Jared finding the ghost of Nicole in the woods, only she’s played by a different actress – the funniest part is that this actress is actually better than the girl who played Nicole in the other movie. They sit down and she tells him how she was tortured and stuff. Because that’s instant sexual ambrosia, they start having sex on the blanket he bought with him, but it turns out she wasn’t really there and he had just gotten naked all by himself there in the woods.

Hate it when that happens! Also, why did he bring two different types of underwear with him on this trip?

You mean you DON'T pack tighty whities and boxer shorts at the same time?! Loser.

Then he goes and finds Marilyn at the other rest stop and they talk about how they saw Nicole. Because he’s blushing, she instantly deduces that he slept with the ghost of Nicole – I guess Marilyn just has a lot of experience with the sexual politics of the undead and anticipated this happening, because otherwise I have no idea how you’d deduce that!

Then we switch over to Tom, who’s getting tortured in the Rest Stop Killer’s Magic Rainbow Bus. We get an entirely too long scene of him threatening the killer, because I’m sure after the twelfth time he says “YOU BETTER NOT HURT ME” the killer will go “Oh, you’re right, I’ll stop now. My bad. How could I be so rude? Let's instead sit down for tea and crumpets, and talk about Blackadder, Manchester United and the Queen.”

That doesn’t happen, but it’d be funnier and more worth putting on-screen than the torture garbage we do get:

Boy, the Magic School Bus reboot isn't as fun as I thought it'd be.

He escapes and finds his brother Jesse, played by the same actor from the first movie, locked up in a cage with no tongue. The two of them escape in Tom’s truck and drive for a while, just wasting screen-time with insipid dialogue, all leading to the punch-line that, whoops, Jesse was never really there anyway! He was a ghost the whole time!

How do ghosts even work in these movies? They’re corporeal until a certain time interval passes – never the same for any of them – and then they’re just revealed as ghosts? I don’t think the writer for this movie ever watched Ghostbusters as a kid. Clearly Slimer and inderdimensional portals of Gozer are the only ways to do a ghost movie right! Well, unless you have Patrick Swayze I guess.

They all find each other again, somehow, and go to the gas station from earlier, where they find the gas station man. He tells them the only way to kill the killer is by burning his eyeballs, which nobody knows where they are. Apparently this is all part of some Indian ritual or something, which is especially baffling because everyone involved is white and likely has no ties to Native American religion, and has probably never even heard of it. But whatever, who needs logic now?

Also, how would they even know which eyeballs belong to the killer if they DID happen across a bunch of eyeballs? I dunno. Fuck logic anyway. Didn't you hear me just a paragraph ago? Fuck logic in the ass. Just obey the movie’s subtitle and don’t look back at whatever plot you made up while high on meth in five minutes. Plots are just inconvenient anyway, and a tool for the weak and powerless!

The killer and gas station man (who was working for the killer, I guess) tie up Jared and Marilyn and take Marilyn’s shirt off for some reason – because the movie hadn’t reached its boob quota yet. They force Jared to drill into her thigh because she was, apparently, unfaithful to Tom while he was overseas in the military. How does the killer know that? Why did the gas station man tell them how to beat the killer if he was working with him?

...Didn't you hear me the other two times? FUCK LOGIC FOREVER! The end is right around the corner! Just show some boobs and gore and that’s all you need.

"We could have just killed both of our victims, and neither movie has shown us to do ANYTHING like this to our victims before, but hey, that wouldn't allow us this SUPER COOL climax coming up!"

Then we get the final battle, which is really riveting as now most of the characters are limping around:

Yes, the heroes hobbling on one gimp-ass leg each slowly to battle. You sure know how to get the blood pumping, movie!

They don’t even really find the killer’s eyes; they just kinda kick him around and then blow him up – glad the burning-eyes thing was in the film at all when it had zero relevance to anything.

We then switch to a scene some time later where Tom and Marilyn are in bed – but whoops, Marilyn’s actually a ghost the whole time and the killer apparently got her off screen! Tom is still completely fine somehow. How did the killer get HER alone and not him when they'd both been together the entire time? Maybe it's implied that she got killed by the drill back in the gas station, but I dunno, that seems like it'd be giving the movie too much credit for subtlety.

"It's okay, honey, you don't have to put Rest Stop: Don't Look Back on your resume. Just forget about it like I do: by drinking a lot of alcohol."

This whole movie was nonsense. It tried to have more of a plot than the first one did, and even attempted to explain a few things. Unfortunately, it didn’t even really do that very well – the whole story feels half-assed and unfinished. I really mean that, as the ways they try to explain the stuff from the first movie come off as rather hasty back-tracking – “look, we CAN explain the randomness from the last one, honest!” But very little actual importance or drama is attached to anything that goes on, so it's not like you get invested in the story, even when they do try to have one.

I really think they just had zero real ideas and wanted an excuse to show off boobs, gore and explosions. I think this would have been a more enjoyable movie had it simply stuck to the idiocy and complete unabashed randomness of the first movie, which, while technically a worse film, was also more entertaining than this. As is, while this has a couple funny scenes, it’s short-change compared to the first Rest Stop film. All in all, a disappointment. Shame on you Rest Stop, I expected better!

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

REVIEW: Red Mist (2008)

Several years ago, I reviewed a movie called Shrooms. It was one of my first reviews and helped shape the way I do things on this blog now. But little did I know that the director of Shrooms came out with another movie just a year later, and it is called Red Mist! Who am I, after all, to deprive you of the works of a man who gave you a film with a talking cow in it? Let’s see what ole Paddy Breathnach has been up to since the last time we caught up with him...

Director: Paddy Breathnach

Starring: Arielle Kebbel, other people maybe

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1185264/

We start off with a bunch of medical students joking around and acting like jackasses, because hey, why bother having characters who are in any way likable or human at all? The lead girl is Arielle Kebbel, most famous for being in the holocaust of all things holy and good, The Uninvited – seriously, send this girl some flowers! She plays a girl named Cat. Her thing is that she’s independent and tough and doesn’t want a boyfriend, the last one being by far the most important aspect of her character, because 99% of women don’t have personalities outside of their boyfriends and relationships! So in this respect, Cat is a good character.

Really!

She and the rest of the jackasses go to some bar and exchange some dull dialogue trying to set her up with some guy, but she’s too tough to fall into a man’s arms right now, preferring instead to wait until the third act of the film to do that. This lasts until the crazy janitor guy, Kenneth, comes over and tells them that he knows they’re doing illegal drugs and threatens to go tell on them like a five year old, so they invite him back in and goad him into doing those drugs with them until he has a seizure from the blinking lights and goes into a coma!

Ah yes, don't YOU remember when YOU left comatose creepy janitors on the side of the road when you were in grad school? What, you don't? Oh...well I'll shut up then.

Then we get those tired scenes from every shitty-ass horror movie like this where the characters debate whether or not to tell the authorities – are we supposed to be invested or something? “Oh, I might actually have to face consequences for the stupid things I did? The horror!” Shut up Red Mist, you’re neither compelling nor relatable here. Oh, I forgot, and for some reason they all call him “Freakdog,” because that’s a sensible insult, right? You might as well have just called him “poopy pants,” like a proper two year old. But I guess this does serve as a poorly done way to shoehorn in a serial killer catchphrase, and it is better than anything My Soul to Take could come up with, so there is that.

Cat thinks about telling the authorities but eventually decides she doesn’t want to risk losing her scholarship either, and so she does the sensible thing and just starts pumping him full of illegal experimental drugs! Wait, what?

Yes, apparently that’s the conclusion this girl draws when she feels bad about something – just play God and use the person you feel bad for as a guinea pig. Truly a wonderful example of human decency this girl is! How do you even come to the conclusion to do this anyway?

Oh, and there’s also this guy:

He’s some kind of older doctor who works in the hospital and constantly acts like he’s a villain in a spy movie, constantly too serious and too over dramatic for this kind of performance. He’s supposed to be a doctor? Seems more like a disgruntled corporate lawyer than anything…

So yeah, if you can’t tell by the fact that I’m just rambling on now, the movie doesn’t have much substance. There are a lot of scenes of the characters talking about the same things over and over again. “Oh, we should tell the authorities, this is serious!” “No, we could lose our scholarships and reputations!” “Okay, but first let’s have this same conversation five more times!” AHHHHHHHHH!

What’s that? We’re in a horror movie, we’re forty minutes in and there aren’t any horror elements yet? That is completely asinine. Let’s fix that right away! So I guess the ghost of Kenneth the comatose tattletale janitor can possess peoples’ bodies for a few minutes now and make them kill other people, all because of Cat’s experimental drugs. He does this to the night security guard aaaaand one of the girls gets the axe:

Back up a minute though – he can jump into peoples’ bodies because Cat gave him a weird combination of drugs? What the hell? It’s very, very stupid and even worse because it’s so damn poorly explained! Is he some kind of supernatural voodoo person already? Or are the drugs supernatural? MAKE MORE SENSE YA DAMN MOVIE. Gosh. My whole week is just ruined because this movie doesn’t have a logical sequence of events!

So the one guy who has been a total jackass and the ringleader of the “protect our reputations by covering up the dead guy” club the whole movie…continues to be a total jackass! Surprised?! This whole character, and every other character like this in every other movie like this, is a plot-hole. I’m really supposed to believe that this guy, this heartless, petty whiner, is going to be a doctor someday? A doctor? Whose main priority is caring for patients and saving lives? I’ve met rocks with more affection for the human race!

Luckily for him, he gets killed off during a kinky sex scene in the janitor’s closet! Well, to be fair, that's how I'd want to go.

He thought he was just getting kinky bondage sex, but he got kinky bondage having-whisky-poured-down-his-throat...you gotta take what you can get, I guess.

What’s next, another scene of them standing around talking about how they have to keep the secret and blah blah blabbity blah? SKIP IT! We then get a Paddy Breathnach trademark from Shrooms in a death scene shown off screen, something not done as much here as in Shrooms, but annoying all the same, because it looks pretty damn gruesome and intriguing:

Uh, yeah, sorry to interrupt your candlelit slit wrists seance, but...you're kinda dead.

It’s the Paddy Breathnach way; just skip over anything that may have been interesting to watch and use the ‘what you don’t see is scarier!’ excuse. Because that’s good filmmaking, right?! Why are you running the other direction?!?

OK, so then we get some black-out where Cat wakes up in her underwear in a sleeping bag in the woods…? What…why…oh, screw it; if you expected this thing to start making sense now, you’re probably of the same descent as the director. We never get a real explanation for this scene, and even when she finds her clothes strewn around in the trees and her phone, with a convenient video on it to show her what happened…well, vaguely anyway. We don’t get to see much of it except that, apparently, SHE was possessed by Kenneth the tattletale janitor ghost guy! Which…mostly means nothing.

"I didn't get enough Likes on Facebook! Sob!"

We then see that Kenneth the tattletale janitor ghost is a pervert as he makes this other girl strip down to her underwear and cut herself with broken mirror shards! I wonder what Keifer Sutherland has to say about that!

She tried so hard but they just wouldn't pick her to be the extra in Marilyn Manson's new video...

Then Cat gets arrested for the murder of her kinda-sorta-boyfriend whatever guy, and the cop doesn’t seem to see anything weird about the fact that this girl and everyone she knows have been killing each other off lately…I guess he graduated from the Barney Fife school of police work. She splashes hot coffee on him and then runs away.

She ends up going to the hospital to kill Kenneth by turning on strobe lights to activate his epilepsy – which somehow still works even though he’s comatose… - and also strangling him and unhooking him from his life support. Uh, bit of an overkill there, girl – you coulda just unhooked him from the life support you know! Would have been easier and you wouldn’t have wasted so much energy. I mean sheesh. From the way this chick is going on, you’d think she was actually just a figment of Emily Browning’s imagination the whole time.

And ironically enough, this movie ends with Arielle Kebbel back where she belongs in a mental hospital, just like in The Uninvited! And because she was in that movie that I hated so damn much, I HATE THIS ONE TOO! Grrrrrr, hatred! There were maybe one or two scenes that worked in this thing, but most of it was just boring, and seriously confusing as to what the hell its premise was supposed to be about. None of the characters are likable and at no point do you really feel much empathy for them, so it just falls flat. All in all, would have been better with a talking cow in it; that’s my final verdict.

All images are copyright of their original owners and I do not own any of them. Also, all talking cows are copyright of their original owners, especially ones that are hallucinations brought on from bad 'shroom trips.

REVIEW: Deadgirl (2008)

Okay filmmakers, a lesson for you – if you want to make something grotesque and shocking, try actually writing your characters and story in a way that makes people, oh I don’t know, ACTUALLY BELIEVE what they’re seeing reflects real life in some way! That’s how you shock people! You get them invested in the story first! Because if you don’t, your movie just turns into a godawful laughing stock of terrible plot holes, inconsistent acting and characters who act like space aliens on their first day on Earth, they're so misguided and retarded. Basically if you don’t, you get Deadgirl, and why would you ever want this half-assed, poorly written sewer slime of a film?

Director: Marciel Sarmiento, Gadi Harel

Starring: Shiloh Fernandez, Noah Segan

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0896534/

Okay, so the film starts off with two idiots staring at each other like they’re high off their asses and exchanging boring dialogue. These two mutated Bill and Ted spawns are Ricky and JT, and unfortunately they are our main characters. Because they’re bored – you know, the motivation that every great film character starts out with – they go and wander around in an old abandoned mental hospital. There they smash up old chairs and desks for no reason at all until they find…

OH COME ON, ANOTHER DOG? WHY DOES EVERYTHING I REVIEW HAVE A DOG IN IT THESE DAYS? And they’re always so menacing, too! The Stuff, Hulk 2003, Omen III and now this! What’s up with all the vicious mutts in these movies? Can’t you people vary it up a little bit and put, I don’t know, a ferocious panther in there? Or maybe a Komodo dragon. Those are always cool. Just…ANYTHING but another growling dog for no reason! I’m really getting tired of it if you couldn’t tell.

But I digress. They also go into the basement of the place and find a dead girl (hmm, wonder where they got the title for this movie…) tied to some table. JT starts to grope her and his first thought is that they should have sex with her. Not “what the hell is she doing here?” or “maybe she’s been kidnapped and the kidnapper is still in the building and could kill us” (nobody in the whole movie EVER thinks about that second one…morons!), but “let’s have sex with her.” Okay, kid, just stay the hell away from me, whoever you are. I don’t want to be anywhere near you.

"Why is that? I'm just such a lovable guy!"

They find out she’s actually unable to be killed somehow – maybe she smoked bath salts or something. And no, that doesn’t stop them from just keeping her locked up down there, either; they could potentially be onto something that could CHANGE THE WORLD, but their only idea is to keep her a secret so they can have sex with her. Aren’t these characters just so riveting? It’s like this director wanted to outdo Red State for worthless assholes as characters! Even though Red State came out after this…shut up, it’s my review!

So the movie just moseys along for a while, being boring…JT and Ricky make some promise that the dead girl will be only THEIR secret, because you know, all best friends need a psychotic bloodthirsty near-catatonic girl tied to a table or else they’ll NEVER grow closer as friends! And then the next day JT breaks the promise anyway and invites this other jackass, Wheeler, to join them in the orgy of fun.

No…no…not that Wheeler…

And if you think there’s something strange about a bunch of guys in a dark room with their dicks hanging out giving each other bro-fists for fucking what is basically a corpse, well, then you’re at the wrong movie.

"Ohoh, I can put my finger in an infected bullet wound; I'm so cool!" Movie...you...you just have no shame. Not even one little inkling. In fact I'm probably going to Hell just for watching this scene. Thanks a lot, Deadgirl.

But Ricky is the moral center of the group, and apparently we should like him more because he DOESN’T want to lower his standards to zombie girls. Instead, he asks out the girlfriend of the one guy who is psychotic enough to beat the shit out of him in public later on just for talking to her. Wheeler gets involved, too, and then starts shouting at them that they don’t need the guy’s girlfriend because they already have a sex toy they keep in the old mental hospital! And then the bullies do the only sensible thing – they lock Ricky and Wheeler up in the trunk of their car and drive to the mental hospital to force them to show them the girl!

They actually shove them in the trunk of a car like some mafia movie...what is this, Mystic River? Get over yourself Deadgirl you stupid, stupid, STUPID movie!

How did they get them in the trunk in broad daylight at a public school without anyone noticing? Shhhh…you’re not supposed to ask questions like that in a movie THIS EDGY. That’d just be missing the point!

And then we get…oh, come on:

"I'm running a very delicate operation here. And you boys will NOT mess this up for me."

Ha ha, you know, I think somebody ought to tell this kid he’s taking this whole thing a little too seriously. He acts like he’s Citizen Kane or something! Look at him, sitting there like a miniature Hugh Hefner, or some botched Superman villain or something. All he needs is a fluffy fat cat to stroke and a cigar in his mouth and the caricature will be complete.

Then we get some high school stupidity as the lead jock guy decides to take a dare and put his dick in the girl’s mouth. Given that she’s completely insane…it’s no surprise that she takes a big bite and leaves him bleeding and infected, and the next day he runs from the classroom, goes to the bathroom and explodes from the inside, because…no, wait. There is no reason. My bad. And what's that, the other jock kid goes to the mental hospital to try and free the dead girl and take her away to the hospital and police? He gets killed off faster than you can say 'blueberry pie.' Why didn't he just bring the police with him FIRST; that would've been the sensible option, and it would have prevented the rest of this whole movie from happening! I'd really like that actually.

But yeah, apparently JT has figured out that by biting people, the dead girl can spread the zombie plague and turn people into immortal catatonic zombies just like her. So are we actually going to see either of the two jocks who she killed turn into zombies? Of course not! For a movie with such a creative premise, the whole zombie thing is really just glazed over, and it's one of the film's main problems. If they would just explain the exact workings of the zombie infection stuff in this movie, it would be a lot more plausible! It would actually make people a little bit invested in the rest of this shithouse story, too! Instead it's just like 'meh, zombies, skip over it; that's not why people are watching this. Let's have more scenes of that kid putting his finger in an infected bullet-hole! That's good cinema!'

But I digress: this does give JT and Wheeler the idea that they can have 'new' zombie sex slaves too, if they kidnap women and get them bit by the original dead girl; aren't these two just delightful? I'd want them around MY daughter any day! They don’t really know what will happen truthfully, since they weren’t there when the original girl got turned, and they have no idea what other side effects it will have…oh, who cares about this shit anyway? Just show the scene where they get the daylights beat out of them by a prostitute:

HA HA HA! Totally worth the price of admission! I'll give the movie one star for that alone, just because getting the shit beat out of them by a prostitute is exactly what these two anuses deserve.

And one ridiculously over the top scene later, they run into that chick whose boyfriend got his penis bitten off and infected and exploded, who…somehow found them at this abandoned gas station at the middle of the night? I don’t know. They kidnap Joann (yeah…that’s her name; couldn’t really fit it anywhere else) and tie her up back-to-back with the dead girl. How come they don’t just kill Joann now? How did they even take the dead girl off the table without her fighting back? I guess the answers to these questions would prevent our brilliant climax of having JT and Wheeler circle the two tied-up girls like cartoon Bugs Bunny villains twirling their mustaches.

Ricky comes in with a machete…seriously, a machete? Where did he get that? He cuts off Wheeler’s hand when he tries to touch Joann…

…and then the dead girl gets loose and starts killing everyone. JT stabs Joann (I guess because he wants Ricky to get the Deadgirl to bite her so Joann can be his undead sex slave...? I dunno) and somehow Ricky gets her to be undead like the dead girl even though we never see her get bit, putting her in some nice lingerie and everything. And we get some nice sunny-day shots of Ricky walking around clean of bruises and blood and just enjoying life! So I guess everything is all good then!

Comic books are the cure for anything, even necrophilia and losing all your best friends to a bloodthirsty uncontrollable zombie.

Except…how about that ZOMBIE on the loose?! What happened there?!? There’s no resolution! We see her running away into the night and…that’s it! What, so there’s a zombie running free and you’re just going to act like everything is completely normal? What the hell?

And for that matter, what about all the kids who went missing? We never hear about what happened to that jock kid who exploded in the school bathroom. And nobody ever asks about what happened to the other jock kid, JT, Wheeler or Joann, at all? Shouldn’t there be some kind of investigation going on? Anything?! If you’re going to rip off Shaun of the Dead, movie, DO IT BETTER THAN THIS HALF-ASSED NONSENSE!

So all in all, Deadgirl was totally worthless. I can’t even think of one redeeming factor. It tries to set itself up as a serious social commentary on gender roles and what not, but it totally fails due to the crapsack acting and the horribly godawful storyline and plot holes. There is just nothing about this movie that in any way makes it worth seeing. So why did I watch it? Frankly, I’d rather be dead than have to sit through this again!

However, if I had to choose between seeing this movie again and having someone have sex with my corpse…well, put the friggin’ movie back on. I think I’ve made my tough decision for the week. I feel better about myself now. Peace out.

These images were taken from the film on Netflix's instant player, and none of them belong to me. They are all under the copyright of their respective owners.

Repo! A Musical Review (Repo the Genetic Opera, 2008 review)

Due to the fact that this is a musical, I’m going to do a lyrical review. That’s right, get ready for something different!

Director: Darren Lynn Bousman

Starring: Anthony Stewart Head, Alexa Vega, Sarah Brightman

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963194/

Darren Lynn Bousman, creator of the better SAW sequels, made this film

Which is kind of like saying that the better half of a horse’s ass was in charge

It’s really silly and really over the top by large.

And if I had a choice I’d rather watch Dr. Horrible again, or any other musical in the world.

But since I’m not that lucky I guess I’ll keep trucking

And give this thing a whirl.

The film starts off blaring like the sirens uncaring

Without any subtlety they launch into song with this guy

Who looks like The Crow, without much to show

For why we should care about his ridiculous shiny hair.

Oh pish posh! It's a Tim Burton tea party!
I might as well put it out there now,
It's no better than anything he's been a part of.

Apparently we’re in a world that uses cheap-ass comic panels for a trite backstory

And it's quite gory, but that doesn't mean it's got any class.

There’s some stuff about humans falling prey to organ failure, what a plot device!

And this demented Newt Gingrich sells them new organs at a price:

If they can’t pay their taxes then he sends a guy to cut them up again!

Oh how I hope this isn’t what he has in store if in 2012 he wins…

Political jokes might be passe,
But I can't help it, what can I say?
He looks too much like him
For me not to take a stab or two at my whim.

Then we get some girl who’s outside for the first time in a while

Running around a graveyard, because that’s the best place for a child

And she meets the Crow-lite, who sings some unmemorable tunes

Which do nothing but attract the police – you buffoon!

And instead of trying to hide, like a sane person would,

He just screams louder and louder; would probably wake the dead if he could!

Dude, you’re doing it wrong; you’re not supposed to scream when you’re being chased

That will just alert the cops to your whereabouts. You think you’re some kind of ace?

How retarded are you; were you dropped on your head? But hey!

I guess I shouldn’t expect much from a guy who looks like he was rejected from KISS, killed himself and then was resurrected from the dead!

Then the girl is taken home where we see that her father is Giles from Buffy.

Oh how lovely.

He’s too good an actor for so silly a flick

How did they even get him to sign on for this?

Did they give him a really big check?
Did they beg and insist,
Until they pushed him to a boiling point like a time bomb ticking?

Apparently the daughter is surprised she saw dead bodies

In a graveyard…truly he has not educated her spotlessly at all.

"Hey, don't go outside."
"Okay, I'll obey you and never lie!"
Seriously, that would be unrealistic.
The movie's got teenage rebellion right in my eyes.

He sings some songs about his dead wife,

Who he had to kill because she was poisoned

The lyrics are crap, but hey, compared to the SAW movies it deserves at least a clap.

Giles keeps his daughter locked up because he’s actually the REPO Man

Who cuts out peoples’ organs if they don’t pay their taxes!

Character motivations? Consistency in actions? What are those?
You can tell lots of weed was what these writers chose.

Wait, what?

This is a real plot thread? Not a farce?

He takes too much enjoyment in this by far

For such an otherwise passive character,

This writing makes no sense

I am filled with no suspense.

So Newt Gingrich is dying and one of his crazy children will have to take the throne

Will it be the Leatherface ripoff? The neurotic Jim Carrey?

Or Paris Hilton? That last one is not a joke – it really is her!

How could a film sink so low? My brain hurts!

She plays a character addicted to plastic surgery

What a fitting fit, what a perfect stupid story!

Am I really going to go so low
As to make a Paris Hilton and political joke
In the same review? I don't know.
(PS, I feel sorry for those guys in the rear,
I'm not sure this is what they had planned for their careers!)

These characters, they’re really grating

They sing about brains and blood and copulating

With all the grace of a box of rocks.

Bill Moseley plays one, always a stock

Who can never ever play anyone who isn’t a stark mad raving lunatic.

The other guy wears peoples’ skins over his face, and boasts about getting laid.

It’s almost like this movie is a TCM 2 reunion! Oh, what a dreadful proposition!

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was not good at all.
I hope these idiots realize that Bill Moseley's not a star
And his character in that movie will not get him far
Please, oh please, don't go down that road!

But Gingrich has some brains, he doesn’t trust any of them even a grain

And so he picks Giles’s daughter Shiloh, whose mother was his ex-lover

Who Giles stole away from her, so he poisoned her and killed her

And made Giles think it was his own fault…gee, this is sounding like a soap opera.

And what am I supposed to do

With all the random singing in this?

I know it’s a musical but the songs have no flow and no sense

And they just sing at random whenever they want

I’ve seen more coherence from random bums on the street.

So then Gingrich entices Shiloh to come out with him

Where they partake in ridiculous song and dance

Like something you’d see on a drugged out Vaudeville show.

It’s really kind of boorish, just a little corny

There’s no rhyme to these songs so why should I rhyme in this?

Paris Hilton threatens to sing and she’s already singing when she says that

Does anyone who made this have any brains?

I think not.

Then we see this guy again:

I think they forgot about this guy,
It's really quite a shame.
His character had no purpose
Who will take the blame?

Did you forget he was in the movie yet?

I almost did…

So then we get this lady who sings for their silly carnivals

Because she was too stupid to read between the lines

When they offered her a cure for blindness!

There would be no story if these characters were even a little ornery

And just once did the smart thing and read the fine print. What a sham!

And she was Shiloh’s mother’s best friend, which makes her Shiloh’s godmother

Oh what a coinky-dink! Does everyone in this film know everyone else?

So of course Blind Mag (that’s her name indeed) goes to the house

And breaks the careful illusion that her father put up

Which really could have happened any time…and hey, here’s a drinking game!

Have a shot every time someone in this film mentions Shiloh’s mom!

That’d have you in a coma by the time the dawn came.

Sarah Brightman sings well
But can she save this sinking ship?
It's too early to tell, but she's got more makeup on her lips than most actresses wear in a lifetime.

So Giles gets mad and won’t tell Shiloh why he can’t help Mag.

And she sings about how she’s a teenage rebel at seventeen years long

After which he hits her, which I would do too if any child of mine

Ever sung such a poor and terrible song!

Gingrich wants Giles to help him kill Mag because she wants to break contract

And because I guess we don’t have enough stories in this movie already,

Seriously, it feels like it’s going to overflow any second!

There’s another overblown opera that night and Shiloh’s invited

Gingrich is plotting to kill her father too, because he won’t kill Mag

The whole thing is so convoluted even the actors have no idea what’s going on!

But it’s OK; we have more ear-raping, eye-gouging fun to engage in!

No literally…eye gouging.

Eyes, gouged out.
I guess Brightman was tired and really wanted out.
Can't blame her at all for that, she's done enough
Getting through this flick must have been tough.

After that Giles is captured, and on stage they pretend it’s part of the act.

Giles reveals that he made Shiloh sick on purpose,

Poisoning her blood so he could keep her to himself.

What a shitty parent! I think he deserves what he gets!

In a Hamlet-esque ending everyone dies,

Gingrich has a heart attack and never again will he rise.

Giles lies dying in his own blood

And they try to portray him as a noble father doing what he could.

NO! I shout, NO! He’s an awful father, no matter his intention.

He deserves nothing but scorn and lifelong detention.

But I guess we need some kind of heartwarming final scene,

For afterwards we get nothing but the reveal that the bad guys took over; how obscene!

And more sequels could result now! Oh, I don’t want to be sober.

Phew! That was tougher than I thought. Okay, I might as well expound on this rambling thing before people lynch me, because I do know a lot of people enjoy this film. I actually did not hate Repo! The Genetic Opera. It was silly as hell and some parts of it were pretty bad, but overall the dramatic arc was halfway decent, and in the mode of Sin City and Sucker Punch it was pretty OK. Some of the singing was truly excellent, especially Anthony Head’s and Sarah Brightman’s, which should be no surprise. Paul Sorvino was excellent too and young Alexa Vega was damn good herself.

But the bad is just as prominent. The songs aren’t catchy at all and they’re forced so awkwardly into this thing that it just becomes downright embarrassing to watch. Like one scene they’re in this limo and Paul Sorvino’s character is singing about how he got the daughter into the limo – you really need a song for that? I mean, they sing everything! They sing when they’re just making casual greetings and pointless banter, and segue into normal talking without any rhyme or reason to it! It’s completely haphazard and all over the place. And some of the visuals are just awful. I mean really awful. Like the bowels of Hot Topic, Spencer’s and the Goth kids from South Park spewed out their worst possible creation ever and it actually made a movie – that would still be more dignified than this movie sometimes.

So some parts are good, some parts are bad, and the whole thing just comes out kind of jumbled and directionless. It’s really not for me and I don’t enjoy it too much, but I guess I can see how people would. So with that said, this is the perfect Valentine’s Day movie.

Wait, what?