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.

Thankskilling (2009)

Thanksgiving is here, which means we can sit around the table with our families, enjoy good food and good company, and post condescending picture memes on Facebook about how sad it is that we took shit away from the Indians hundreds of years ago. But there’s also a dark side of Thanksgiving. A sinister side. A side full of bad puns, worse sexual humor and absolutely abhorrent comedy writing in general. You know I’m talking about Thankskilling. Though, perhaps that’s just because you read the title of this review before clicking on this.

Director: Jordan Downey

Starring: Lindsey Anderson, Lance Predmore

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle and Tony.

This is a horror comedy that needs heavily implied quotation marks around both of those things. It’s probably the only well known horror film to focus on Thanksgiving, which is sad. Halloween has Halloween, Christmas has Black Christmas, and Thanksgiving has this movie, where a talking turkey fucks a girl in the ass. Did that set the bar low enough yet? I think it did.

We start this off with a naked nun who looks like she’s straight out of a porn movie for Amish people. She’s on screen for a whole twenty seconds before dying, so you know this movie’s gonna have tons of character development. And that’s the last time I’ll be sarcastic about this, because it’s old hat and you know all the jokes anyway.

If this were porn, it wouldn't be worth even a dime or a bit of Internet space. But luckily it's just a shitty horror movie.

Instead, let’s talk about how awful these fucking characters are. It’s unrealistic from the start, because these people are coming out of a college, and I don’t believe they would be admitted into a college. These are the kinds of people who run outside for Thanksgiving break and rip their clothes off, excited like they just escaped from being war prisoners. Guys, it’s a fucking four day weekend, you’re not going to find the Holy Grail.

To top it off, the main girl tells her to pull down her shirt, it’s Thanksgiving, not TitsGiving. I just died typing that. I’m dead, and I’m a ghost now, and I’m still doing the review. This is Hell.

These characters are a laundry list of cliches - it’s the same cast as Cabin in the Woods basically, the jock, the pure virgin girl, the stoner, the nerd and the dumb hot girl. Only Cabin in the Woods at least tried to do something else besides say ‘hey, this is how horror movies are! Get it? Get it?!?!?’ Like they bully the nerdy kid a lot, and he still sticks around, because I guess he’s either a masochist or so retarded he can’t distinguish between friendship and vitriolic hatred. Anyway, he says, out loud to everyone, that he’s FINALLY going to have sex with one of them on this camping trip! That’s really how people talk, yeah, you got it.

Oh, by people I actually meant ax murderers. I don’t think I have any more sympathy for this character.

I’ve never thought a scene could be improved by the government randomly deciding to use the set for a nuclear bomb test site, but this movie is really pushing my expectations. Like this next scene where you see the sheriff character sipping his coffee and going “this tastes like shit,” then you see his wife actually did take a shit in the coffee. On the one hand, this is the absolute nadir of comedy, but on the other, you can easily tell who to kill first in a zombie apocalypse by whether they laugh at this.

This is actually just the special edition of the DVD.

The actual backstory behind this is revealed when our brain trust heroes go camping in the woods. Nerdy Guy tells them a story about a sorcerer who summoned an evil turkey five hundred years ago to kill white people, and now it’s coming back. Wow, with all the talk about how these politically correct people want to kill all white people, I guess this is the final nail in the coffin. Evil turkeys are the final frontier.

It turns out the turkey actually is real, as we find out when it scares the lead girl in the woods and she keeps screaming for way too long. Get it? Because most horror lead girls scream a lot? The humor in this is multi-layered, man! The turkey basically looks like a rubber sock puppet that got left in the oven for too long. Really strikes the fear in you, I'll tell you.

Somehow, they all get away, because the turkey is fucking terrible at its only purpose I guess. They drop off the dumb hot chick and the lead girl says her legs are harder to close than the Jon Benet Ramsey case, which is a great thing to say if you’re a wretched sack of flaming manure masquerading as a human. Seriously, what the fuck?

Later, we get a scene of the turkey coming across the dumb hot chick fucking her boyfriend, and the turkey kills the boyfriend and she doesn’t notice. I guess she’s just used to that happening during sex. Then the turkey starts fucking her, too, and this is the point where movies jumped the shark, guys. Movies were just never the same.

If you think that’s bad though, just watch this scene where the sheriff answers the door wearing a turkey costume like it’s actually Halloween. The turkey is at the door, wearing a fake nose and mustache. They sit down at the table together. This is how evolution happens.

With two very much alike people sitting down at a table.

But frankly, I’m glad we at least know the sheriff deserves to die now. I sure wouldn’t want him protecting my town.

Then the kids show up, too, and the turkey is wearing the sheriff’s skinned face mask after killing him. Somehow, the kids confuse THAT for him being the sheriff. This is exactly why the comedy in this movie doesn’t work. You can’t just throw in any random joke that doesn’t make sense with any logic or reason. Why would they confuse that turkey for the sheriff? Are most sheriffs in their world two feet high? It doesn’t make sense, and it’s why the movie sucks.

Even the turkey tells them they’re retarded for not figuring it out. How stupid are you pricks?!

To be fair, this is far scarier than whoever else was riding the slow bus with these characters.

They eventually figure out they have to look in this book called Turkeyology (...I just can’t) to figure out how to kill it. Why did the sheriff have that book? Why is it even written down at all? Fuck it, it’s supposed to be funny! Laugh! Laugh!!!!!

There’s a whole bunch of stupid shit that happens left, like when the fat redneck guy dies, the nerd spends an agonizing several minutes imagining scenes of them skipping around in fields of flowers and shit. It’s just so stupid, and it goes on way too long. Yeah, I get the joke, but that doesn’t make it good. Just repeating something for longer isn’t a joke.

After they finally kill the thing, there’s a retarded ass epilogue scene where a family sitting around a Thanksgiving table gets attacked by their turkey, which it turns out is the same evil turkey we’ve had to suffer all movie long. Then it says “To be continued...in space!” on a black card.

That's not funny either! It's not funny just because it makes no sense! If that were the case, I could say purple lawnmower leprechaun assassins, and that would be enough to put my kids through college. These jokes just aren't even in the same galaxy as anything resembling quality humor. It's like they traveled through the wormhole from Interstellar and that's where they got the "comedic inspiration" to make this.

Only it doesn’t matter! The movie KNOWS it was bad, because it was trying to be a parody of bad horror movies, so it didn't have to try at all with any of its jokes. Therefore, the less you try, the better it is. Like this:

Or even better, this:

Genius!

Happy Thanksgiving, guys.

Images copyright of their original owners, except those two artistic masterpieces I made.

Splice (2009)

Science is pretty great, and has given us innumerable achievements. Plenty of great things were accomplished with science in the past and there are still new things happening every day. But in Splice, the only thing science is good for is, apparently, working out your dead mommy issues or just making your own horrific alien mutant to fuck in a shed somewhere. Both of those things really happen in the movie. I'd say sorry for the spoilers, but I think we deserve an apology for the movie as a whole.

Director: Vincenzo Natali

Starring: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley

IMDb

Co-written with Colin and Michelle.

This is a rotten film with almost nothing good about it. I can't really think of a better way to describe this other than just diving right in, so hey, let's do that.

The movie begins with a couple of scientists, Clive and Elsa, played by Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley. They are trying to create some sort of artificial life by combining a bunch of animals together, or some shit like that. I don't even know – it's barely even glossed over, what they're actually trying to do. I guess they just wanted to see two weird looking, vaguely penis-shaped worms do photosynthesis together or something:

"All my life, I have waited to see this."

I guess they're working for this big business suit guy, who tells them their experiments have been canceled by the company they work for because they don't want them to keep doing their weird ass experiments. What? Why not? Why can't we make an abomination that could potentially be the worst thing ever thought up by mankind???

But that doesn't stop them from doing it anyway and hiding their experiment away in some basement in the building. At home, they talk about moving in together and maybe having a child, which Elsa doesn't want to do. Okay, now it makes sense – creating a horrific scientific mutation is okay, but moving in together? Woah there, bucko, don’t get any crazy ideas!

"Before you touch my boobs, we have to create at least 50% of a completely amoral scientific abomination that most would call the living embodiment of Satan. I have spoken!"

But it's okay. After all, we can see their progress. Look, they made a gross thing in a tank that almost eats Elsa's arm! That's cool, right?

"Nope, still don't regret this!"

So, they made a living punching bag?

Eventually though, they make a baby that I'm sure the characters in Eraserhead would be happy to see, as it makes the baby in that movie look adorable by comparison. There are a fuckload of scenes in this film of these two taking care of their pet monster, and early on it’s mostly just the creature destroying things and vomiting.

Hooray for that!

We see her start to grow up and become an even uglier being, which they name Dren. There are a bunch of scenes of them playing with her in the lab, which would be touching if she didn't look like a human ass with eyes and a mouth.

Somehow, the fact that they put it in a dress makes it worse...

At one point, Dren gets sick and they try to bathe her in cold water. Clive gets the idea to push her head completely underwater, presumably trying to end the horror he brought into the world. However, that's the exact point she evolves to grow gills and is able to survive, miraculously coming out okay! Elsa congratulates Clive for his brilliant idea, and he grins weakly while thinking inside that he should have just shot Dren in the head.

"Uh, yeah, of COURSE I was trying to save her, and definitely not trying to kill her... heh heh heh...."

There is a scene where they present their two weird looking worm things in front of a live audience. But what they didn’t know is that one of them changed gender into a male! Now that both of the weird worm things are male, they stab the fuck out of each other with needle-like appendages and then knock the cage over, showering the audience in mutated worm blood. I guess that was exactly what Clive and Elsa were going for, so good job, guys!

The day will live on in infamy as the day Walgreens heavily reconsidered who it let do their pharmaceutical experiments for them.

Also, how did they not notice the thing changed genders? They must be bad scientists.

I guess they were busy, though, as they have kept raising Dren as their own child. They even move her into the creepy old abandoned farm barn that Elsa’s family used to own. There are some scenes that could have been affecting here, as the two become even more like parents raising a child. But it’s too little, too late - we’re almost halfway through the movie at this point, and we don’t know anything more about these characters or their relationship than we did at the beginning.

What DO we have, then? Scenes of Dren eating rabbits in the woods?

...okay. I guess if that’s what you want to show, go right the fuck ahead. Who am I to stop you?

This is really where the movie falls apart. There’s sort of a subplot about how Elsa was mistreated as a child, and is now taking out her inner anger on Dren. But the movie never details or explains what happened to Elsa, and it never resolves whatever she was trying to work out. Like, there’s one scene where Dren found a cat outside and Elsa takes it away, fearing Dren will kill it. Before leaving, she says “that’s part of growing up, you can’t always get what you want.”

What am I supposed to gain from that? Clearly she’s treating Dren like her mother treated her, in some fashion. But it’s never elaborated on. There’s no exploration of her character. The movie clearly wants us to glean something, some kind of point about who she is as a person, but it doesn’t bother to actually do any work on finishing that plot. It's like if you were reading a book, and then halfway through, the author stops midsentence and leaves the last 200 pages totally blank. It doesn't help anyone.

What do we get instead? Dancing scenes!

...whimsical?

In another horribly written plot, now Clive is actually sympathetic towards Dren, even though before he was obviously repulsed at what they’d done and how Elsa was acting. But now, he seems cool with her. Probably because she now looks like a fucking exotic supermodel or something. What can I say? Sometimes ugly children grow up into beautiful adults I guess!

He also finds out that Elsa put her own DNA into Dren. Oh wow, will this be expanded on at all? No. No it will not. This is the last we hear about it, actually.

The next day, Elsa goes to see Dren and Dren attacks her and tries to escape, wanting to go outside. Elsa subdues her and then does the sensible thing - straps her to a table and cuts off her tail, all the while talking like a scientist into a recorder with a smug look on her face. I like all of my scientists to do cruel things to their test subjects just to get out their own insecurities! So this scene is cool with me.

Ahh yes, now I see that they are catering to the market for people who like scenes that you're not sure you even want to watch, but can't quite turn away from.

There was… absolutely no build-up to this insane torture scene, and it isn’t talked about in depth by any of the characters later, which is becoming a running theme in this film. After all, so what if every single thing we do in the plot has no consequence? Fuck it, right?

In an apparent contest to see who can be the biggest douchebag in the film, Clive then comes into the barn, un-shackles Dren and then the two begin having steamy human-on-scientific-mutation sex... no, I'm not trying to make a joke, and yes, it does really happen in the movie.

He helped create her in a lab, but acts like her father, and she has DNA from Elsa, who is his girlfriend, so I don’t even know what angle to call this ridiculous from!

Adrien Brody like you've never seen him before!

I’d just like to point out that Adrien Brody won an Oscar in a movie about the Holocaust. I guess he really just wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again. But uh-oh, Elsa comes in and sees him right as he’s fucking Dren! That’s super-awkward!

"Nope, it's not cold out here guys, this is totally realistic!" He would be saying that, but you can't hear him over the sound of his chattering teeth and freezing bones crackling.

They both go back to their apartment and cry about how they both fucked up raising a genetic experiment gone wrong. Oh, boo hoo, you fucking drama queens. Everything that happened is your own fault, and clearly, given what we've seen, it's good that all you did was create a creature in a lab instead of, y'know, actually having a goddamned child. You clearly wouldn't be any good at that, so this was a useful test run of sorts.

"Shush, I'm still trying to think of a way I can justify this and blame you instead!"

I also love the part of this scene where Clive actually manages to turn the argument around on Elsa and make it seem like it’s her fault the whole thing is happening. I slept with a weird alien monstrosity in your family’s barn? Fuck that! IT’S YOUR FAULT! What guy hasn't had to use this kind of mental manipulation on a loved one after sleeping with a genetically engineered monster?

The movie loses all sense of where it’s going, though, and instead of any kind of character development, it just gives us goofy action scenes. They rush back to the farm, where Dren has died, so they go and bury her in the yard.

"Well, I think we both agree that this has been a most unorthodox time in our lives."
"Yup. Oh well, you want to go get Chinese food?"
"Sure."

Conveniently at the same time, the businessman guy shows up, demanding in a loud voice to see Dren. They’ve conveniently just finished burying her when he shows up, for an extra dose of hack writing. But I guess they didn’t check that well to make sure Dren was dead, as she comes back to life and kills that businessman guy. Whoops!

You know, the old "thought my child was dead" mistake. It happens!

Oh, and Dren is actually a male now, having changed like the two worm monsters did earlier. With his newfound male-ness, he does the worst thing possible and rapes Elsa in the woods.

Then he kills Clive. Boy, I wonder what Clive’s last thoughts were. I bet they were a real gem. “At least I died looking at the last thing I fucked”? “Boy, I sure am glad we created this thing in a lab now, because this is exactly what I wanted to accomplish with this experiment”? I guess we’ll never really know.

Man. Dren raped her mother and killed her father. It’s Shakespearean, if Shakespeare had ever written a play about a genetically engineered accident created in a lab... which I totally think he should have! There’s my contribution to the Shakeapearean criticism conversation!

HE IS PROUD OF ME!

In one final scene, we see that Elsa is pregnant now, presumably with Dren’s child.

Great! Now they can have genetically engineered mutant sequels. Just what nobody in the world ever wanted.

This movie is steaming manure. The premise could work, in a vintage Cronenberg kind of way, but they don't really do anything with it. They try to tell this whole story of these characters creating a surrogate child and then failing to raise it because of their own insecurities and flaws, but there's no exploration of either of their characters, even when the film looks like it's about to start giving you some. Like the hints at Elsa's backstory with her mother abusing her; where the fuck did that go? You can't just hint at that and then never develop it! Are you crazy? That's not being subtle or smart, that's just being lazy, as well as obnoxiously and willfully obtuse.

As the film goes on, the characters just become more and more unlikable as they make dumb decision after dumb decision. The movie is more interested in showing gratuitous gimmick scenes than actually telling a good story, and so the characters come off as obnoxiously moronic rather than realistic, and it is impossible to really get invested in them. There's no exploration of why Elsa suddenly starts torturing Dren, or why Clive has sex with her - it's all just random scenes thrown in there haphazardly with almost no context, and there is no bigger story to distract you from that. This is all you get, and it's no good.

There’s a really forced commentary on the state of science, too, delivered with all the subtlety of an atomic bomb blast. Like, yeah, THIS movie will make us all reconsider our ideas about where science is going! It warns us that if we don't check ourselves, random white people will create a monster and then have sex with it. Uh, astute observation?

The acting is fine, especially from Sarah Polley and Delphine Chanéac as Dren, but it can’t save the bad characters, idiotic story and lame writing. Characters make dumb choices for no reason other than to further the plot, plot lines are dropped unceremoniously with zero resolution... I'm starting to think the movie itself was created in a botched freak lab accident. Basically, it fucking sucks.

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

My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009)

Valentine's Day is over and done. Did you have a good one? Did your special someone surprise you at work with a bouquet of flowers? Well, whatever you did, now that it's over, you can at least be satisfied that you didn't have a bloody valentine. That's the worst kind. I mean, if you had one of those, you'd probably be praying for a Valentine's day spent alone sulking in your room.

Director: Patrick Lussier

Starring: Jensen Ackles, Jamie King, Kerr Smith

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This movie is so cool that it comes with four pairs of 3D glasses so you can experience it in the glory that it was meant to be seen in.

And nothing says "cheap piece of crap" like glasses that you have to actually rip apart yourself by the seams.

Yeah, now that I have that, I'm definitely inviting three of my best friends over to watch My Bloody Valentine 3D! I probably won't have any friends after, but fuck it, it's worth it.

(As a side note, yes, the entire movie is 3D and ends up looking ridiculous if you don't have the glasses, hence the pictures in this review looking like a drunk person filmed the movie. In addition, they don't seem to work too well when watching on a computer screen, so it's doubly stupid.)

This is a movie with the distinction of having an entire slasher movie crammed into the first 10 minutes, as we see a killer breaking out of the hospital after a mining accident. But at least he stopped to let us know he really cared by drawing little hearts in the blood of his victims on the walls!

He also sent "sorry for your loss" Hallmark cards to all the victims' families! What a nice guy.

Then we get a bunch of dumb high schoolers hanging out in a mine, including this guy, who looks like they fished him out of a cubicle in Nebraska and stuck him in the clothes of a Texan kid who gets in fights after football games.

Unfortunately for them, a killer shows up to ruin the handjobs they weren't going to get anyway because they brought their dates to a fucking mine. He slaughters a bunch of them, but a few of them survive by virtue of being main characters. They manage to stay out of the killer's way for an absurdly long time considering he's walking around right around a corner.

That is, until this one dude comes out from nowhere and starts randomly calling out “Jason? JASON?!” at the killer for no apparent reason. He steps over several dead bodies and yet somehow doesn't seem to realize the guy he's calling at killed all of his friends. You could argue he was trying to call out to a friend of his, but I think he just got confused as to what movie he was in and thought he was in Friday the 13th.

His kills are similarly implausible though. Maybe that's why the kid got him confused with Jason.

Then the main characters leave the one guy, Tom, to die in the cave because they really have to high-tail it out of there and go fuck on a beach somewhere where the Creature from the Black Lagoon is all they have to worry about. The cops kill the killer, and Tom is saved.

Ten years later, the media just comes around, completely unwanted and uninvited, every year and obnoxiously films segments reminding everyone of the killer's massacre set against empty streets.

"Please give us a story so we don't have to keep reporting on the Kardashians and how cold it is this week! Please!"

The sheriff is played by Kerr Smith, who was in the original Final Destination film, so I guess his career really came full circle. The character's name is Axel, who has a ridiculously hot, loving wife who seems perfect, so of course he's screwing some 17-year-old on the side in sleazebag motels and laughing about it.

It's only jailbait if you get caught, right?

It's particularly asinine because this is the only time we ever see these two characters together – this subplot about them screwing on the side never comes up again. So really it's just to establish how much of an asshole Axel is. Peachy! She even says she's pregnant, which also never comes up again in the movie even though she still has scenes left in the movie and dies later on! Continuity and character development? Don't use those newfangled edumacational words down here, boy!

...aw, hell, just write whatever you want. Nobody is watching this anyway.

Later we get a scene of this one chick, having sex with some guy in a hotel, and then the guy reveals he was taping it all on camera. Wonderful...I love how indignant and offended the woman gets after she finds out it was filmed and he throws money at her like she's a whore. “Yeah, I'm not a whore! I just have sex with random dudes at truck stops! My morality is intact!” Then she runs outside, naked, to confront the guy as he's leaving. Because logic is for fuckin' morons.

"I'm really hoping this scene will land me a part in the next Quentin Tarantino movie! Boobs and a gun at the same time has to count for something, right?"

To lighten the mood a bit, the killer shows up and chases her around a bit. I don't know how exactly we end up with her hiding behind a bedframe against a wall and thinks that will somehow save her. But it happens, and you're probably a bit dumber just for sitting through it.

"You know, maybe I would have been better off making a run for it rather than trapping myself back here....eh, nah, it's fine."

After this, the movie basically gives up like a dumb sixth grader on a long division question. So I guess Tom has come to town because his father used to own the mine that all those kids died in, and Tom is selling it because he wants to move on with his life after a traumatic event. This makes people so angry they try to punch him when he so much as enters a bar. Because you know, that will really fix the problem.

Oh yeah, getting punched by an old man is how I want all my horror movie heroes to act. You got it right, movie!

Then it's Cliche Scenes 101 as Sarah and Tom have a conversation about why he's really back and how he's a coward for wanting to sell the mine and move on with his life. It's very hollow and I think both actors cared very little while writing this. We then see exactly what Sarah's advice was worth as Tom goes back to the mine like she said and some guy ends up dying while he's in there. Great advice, lady! Maybe this is why you never got that job at the psychiatric institute.

This woman in 10 years as a therapist: "You have PTSD after getting your leg blown off in Iraq? GET BACK OVER THERE AND FIGHT, PUSSY!" 

This wasn't even the fault of the killer. That guy was just really clumsy.

We get a really boring chase scene set in a supermarket, which is the prime location for slasher chase scenes. The scene ends with the one chick Axel was cheating on Sarah with getting killed, and of course it happened off screen and the killer had time to do this whole elaborate setup in the five seconds before anyone found the body.

Required: suspension of disbelief even greater than understanding a Holocaust-denier.

Then after that we get a sequence of scenes that pretty much put me to sleep. Some of them are about Axel and Tom fighting over Sarah in the same way they fight over who's killing all these people, because priorities schmiorities. I really fucking hate the “drama” in this movie – watching any of these characters pine after old high school sweethearts like some awful 1990s sitcom is about as endearing as day-old cat puke on your rug.

Other scenes are about Sarah conflicted as to who the killer is – either Tom, who has no alibi and showed up right when the murders started, or Axel, who has some weird stuff in their house that makes her suspicious. It's kind of like a dating show, except written by Ted Bundy. I'd really be drawn into all of this if I didn't already want to kill both of these characters by slow bludgeoning death with a foam baseball bat. But needless to say... Hitchcock, these writers certainly were not.

It turns out it was Tom who was the killer, as he starts screaming about the killer being in the room when really there's nobody there. It's actually kind of a good scene and, handled by better people, could have made this a better film. But this is just his evil switch flipping on, and he goes nuts after and they have to shoot him.

LOOK AT HOW COOL OUR 3D EFFECTS ARE! LOOOOOOOOKKKKKK! As a side note, I've done you all a favor by leaving out the several other really dumb, gratuitous shots like this all throughout this movie. You can leave your thank-you cards, gifts and free booze at the door on the way out.

Because, you know, that's how mental illness and PTSD works – you just turn into a serial killer automatically when your delusions are confronted. Thanks for being a complete worthless hack-work piece of shit with zero redeeming value to society, movie!

Eh, that's what I see every time I look in the mirror too.

Oh, and really? We're ending on a cliché “killer gets out by pretending to be a worker and covering his face with a mask” thing? I get the idea you could probably find babies with better imaginations than the writers of this movie. Seriously – fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck you, My Bloody Valentine 2009.

Writers in this scene: "Oh yeah, nobody has EVER seen that trick before! We're geniuses!"

No talented writing, no good acting, no good scares – this was just awful; the complete collective void of thought of a thousand brain farts sent to die in the area where no neurons light up anymore. You could literally just make a list of slasher cliches while watching Friday the 13th Part 3 while high on pot and make a home movie in your basement and it'd be better than this.

...and wait a minute; now that I think of it...what the ever-loving fuck did this have to do with Valentine's Day?! There was no connection made, at all! Maybe the original 1980s version made more of a connection, I dunno; but in this, there was absolutely no reason for the film to be Valentine's Day themed.

I've never been so insulted in all three dimensions at once. Frankly, this is the worst thing associated with valentines since the St. Valentine's massacre. I think I'll keep the glasses, though.

Nailed it.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them except for the ones I took of the glasses. I do own those.