REVIEW: Hannibal (2001)

Okay, all bets are off, people. This is the big one. One of my most hated movies of all time. I did a short one paragraph thing for this movie the last time I saw it, but I really don’t think THAT did this heinous thing justice at all. So let’s dig into this virtual layered cake of everything wrong with cinema, Hannibal.

Director: Ridley Scott

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212985/

Where the first Hannibal Lecter movie with Anthony Hopkins, the great Silence of the Lambs, had characters, even the most minor ones, with depth and texture to them, a compelling story and a fascinating psychological undertone, this movie has phoned in joke characters, subplots that go nowhere and take up the majority of the film’s run-time and psychology that is mostly relegated to ‘playing classical music while showing montages of Anthony Hopkins doing things.’ Formula for a train wreck? You bet!

It starts off in the way I think everyone wanted a Hannibal Lecter movie to start, with a side character from the last movie talking to a diseased Muppet crack baby played by Gary Oldman:

You see this less than a minute into the film's runtime...isn't that just wonderful? Isn't that the best way possible to start off a sequel to one of the defining serial killer movies of the 90s?

…what, you didn’t think that would be a good set-up for one of these movies? Well then, you simply have no taste!

I guess the story is that this guy, Mason Verger, was once tricked by Lecter into doing hard drugs and savagely removing his own face with broken mirror shards, and that somehow made him paralyzed from the neck down as well. Probably just because this series loves having people bound so that they can’t move any part of their body below the neck. Are we seriously supposed to be invested in this? Oh, boo hoo, you did some drugs and did stupid things while on them? Cry me a goddamn river you whiny little freak.

What is his plan, anyway? We see that he “collects” Lecter memorabilia for some strange reason, but his main goal seems to be to torture and kill Lecter for revenge. However, THAT falls flat almost in the same scene when he admits that he’s “glad” Lecter did what he did to him, because it allowed him to awaken spiritually, or some bullshit like that. So which one is it? Is he obsessed with Lecter or does he hate him? MAKE UP YOUR MIND.

A drug fueled binge of madness? Yeah that sounds about right with how THIS movie was made...

Oh well. Oldman’s performance is deplorable and irritating, and the writing is just garish – this character is not an intimidating villain, he is Miss Piggy’s wart removed from the bottom of her foot. He’s pretty much only here to serve as a foil to Lecter to get him back into America.

He calls Clarice to his house because he saw on the news that she shot some drug dealer lady who had her baby strapped to her chest (just go with it…), and is now taking heat for it. There, he questions her about God and whether or not she has accepted Christ as her savior. This subplot is…never brought up again? What? Why? What was the point of bringing it up then?! It’s incredibly forced and contrived! Did the filmmakers just go “hey, we need something DEEP in this next scene! How about we have Verger ask Clarice about her opinion of Jesus Christ! That means our movie is SUPER INTELLIGENT!!!” Ugh.

But enough of that; we still have Clarice Starling’s character to butcher! In the original she was played by Jodie Foster, who gave an exceptional performance and really breathed life into the character. Here, and I can’t imagine why, she has not returned, making way for Julianne Moore, whose performance is about as bland as can be, but hey, at least she’s trying – it’s mostly the fault of the writing that she isn’t believable at all as Clarice. In a sensible sequel, the viewer would feel the weight of her years on the force and sympathize with her when she gets kicked off the force despite trying her best to follow orders. However, THIS movie just makes it all kinda ‘eh’ and presents it in a relatively bland way. How am I supposed to be invested in this Clarice? I know almost nothing about her. The atmosphere of the film and her personality are almost entirely different from that of Silence of the Lambs. With more insight into her inner character this could have been an arresting performance, but I guess that would have actually made the movie good, so the filmmakers couldn’t do that! Oh no.

We do however have stupid scenes set in Florence, Italy, where Hannibal himself is now residing, played by an Anthony Hopkins who I am betting got through this movie by smoking copious amounts of weed before each day of acting. He looks pretty zoned out:

"I'm sorry, I took more than my usual dose of Ritalin today..."

He’s…mostly OK, I guess, but the abysmal writing screws that up, too. He desperately wants to come out of retirement and start killing again, and yet he’s spending all his time, energy and resources applying for the position of curator of a museum? What the hell is stopping him? We clearly see later that he has no qualms with killing when provoked. Why doesn’t he just kill whenever he feels like it? Would that make too much sense? Does he just suffer from the fatal Plot Convenience Disease?

But never fear, for as soon as Clarice appears on the news for a relatively minor screw up, he writes her a letter all the way from Florence – because that makes sense how he would watch the American news all the way from there, right? Was he just doing that for 10 years straight just in case Clarice showed up in distress on the screen? Again, Plot Convenience Disease! It’s a killer!

There’s also Ray Liotta, who pretty much plays some horrible wretched douchebag put on Earth solely to torment poor Clarice. He’s a homophobe – he calls Hannibal gay because he enjoys classical music and tea time food – and he’s a sexist, as evidenced when he openly objectifies and harasses Clarice right to her face, with no shame whatsoever. Real great character guys! Maybe you should have him kick puppy dogs and tie girls to train tracks next!

"Hey, what, do you expect me to actually act like a human being that wouldn't have been beat up or killed in the real world yet? TOO BAD!"

But this is all really just window dressing for the movie’s real passion. You thought this was going to be a sequel continuing on the original’s premise of Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter in a mental battle of wits with a third plotline mostly in the background? No! THIS MOVIE’S main focus is one Detective Pazzi, a rude, fat, frumpy, pissed-off looking guy who smokes a lot and yet somehow has a hot, charming wife who begs him in a seductive voice to take her out to the opera…nope, sorry movie, I’m not buying that for a second. There’s NO WAY a guy this annoying, bad tempered and fat would get a woman like that. NO WAY.




Anyway, he catches onto Lecter’s real identity and starts to try and capture him to get the FBI bounty on his head. This would be OK if, oh, I don’t know, HALF THE GODDAMN MOVIE WASN’T SPENT WATCHING HIM DO THIS. I don’t know if you know this, movie, but this character is grating as hell. He’s really not a good character at all. And we literally sit here for like upwards of 45 minutes watching him blunder around Florence, acting like a jackass, getting innocent people killed and shrugging it off like it’s nothing and just generally being a despicable excuse for a human being…? Do you people know anything about how to entertain an audience? Do you have any concept of what it means to tell a story that people want to pay attention to? GOD.

Oh, except when we have Lecter giving pretentious speeches about sin and Dante Aligieri and Judas Iscariot…Christ, I don’t think I can make it through this. How is it even possible to make something this unenjoyable? The answer to everything isn’t just putting ominous classical music on in the background, you know. That doesn’t exactly make your movie deep or anything; just more annoying and pompous.

So, yeah, after god knows how long, Lecter finally kills Pazzi by hanging him from a tall window tower and slitting his belly open. It’s actually a good scene and beautifully shot, but how much do you want to bet they just cease to care about the Pazzi character, his friends and family and Florence altogether after this? If you put money on that, well, you’d be sitting pretty right now.

It is just incredible how asinine this is. “Hey, let’s take an hour of the movie’s runtime to establish the character of Pazzi and make him the focus of the film. But after he dies, there’s no real point in resolving the story or anything; no no! Just act like it never happened at all! Great filmmaking!” What is this, the third or fourth time I’ve used that joke of imitating the movie’s creators? I’m sorry, but there just isn’t much else to do with this one. There’s nothing else here!

But maybe the movie will redeem itself with its last act or so. Maybe I’m being too quick to condemn it. After all, there’s still the plot with Verger, who despite looking like something a cat puked up, actually does have sort of a main goal, even if it is incredibly confusing. Maybe he’ll surprise us and pull out a truly cunning and sinister plan…

Yeah, this is stupid. Look at those dumb sunglasses he's wearing. Look at the boars just running around out there waiting to eat people alive. He really thought this was the best plan he could do?

…OR he’ll just do the dumbest thing possible! I mean my God! You can’t seriously tell me THIS was his only option! “Hmm, I want revenge on this guy! I think I’ll feed him to a bunch of savage boars!” It doesn’t add up! There are a billion more dignified and cool ways to kill someone! How on Earth did Hannibal attract the one person in the entire world whose chosen method of killing and torture was BOARS? It’s so stupid it’s radioactive! You could see the asininity coming off this plot from outer space. Outer! Space!

On the bright side, though, it’s finally clear to me exactly much of a joke this movie was to its creators. I mean, there’s simply nothing else here but crappy one-shot jokes turned into elongated pseudo-serious plotlines. I feel sorry for a lot of these actors, actually – especially Gary Oldman; man that makeup must have taken a long time! And it wasn’t at all worth it.

So they kidnap Lecter and strap him to another board so he can’t move his body at all; told you this series had a fetish for that. Verger says “Bet you wish you had fed the rest of me to the dogs too, huh?” Because, you know, it’s not like Verger said earlier that he was glad that Lecter tricked him! Oh wait, he did. Is it really that hard to have a character even a little bit consistent in his motive and mental processes?

Clarice comes to save Lecter at the last minute and gets shot, so Lecter saves her and walks out. But not before convincing Verger’s butler to throw Verger into the boar pit and kill him! This could have been a compelling plot point – a sort of ‘servant turns on the master’ gig. But the way the movie plays it, the whole story just didn’t matter, as nothing is ever resolved of it and we learn nothing about Verger, his butler or any of the other villains that make this movie any more compelling. But at least we got to see a guy eaten by boars! Hur hur…

Ha ha ha...finally, I get to see this terrible character pushed off a ledge and eaten by boars! My oddly specific wants are satisfied!

Lecter stitches up her wound and dresses her up in the skimpiest dress he could find, which shows off as much of her tits as possible:

Yeah, at this rate, why don't you just go full stop and dress her in her underwear or something? I didn't know Lecter was this much of a lech.

She goes downstairs and finds they’re at Ray Liotta’s house, which Lecter…found somehow, I guess. He’s scalped Liotta and is, well…it’s too dumb to even write down, so I’ll post a picture:

"Goodfellas? Meh, that was alright. THIS is my true passion in acting!"

Yeah, our finale for this movie involves Julianne Moore’s tits and Anthony Hopkins eating Ray Liotta’s brain! You know, the biggest flaw with THIS scene is that Hopkins is indeed eating Ray Liotta's brain. Ray Liotta has a brain? I think this scene is factually inaccurate.

So long story short, Lecter escapes and feeds some brains to a little boy on a plane. The end! Was it worth it? I don’t think so.

I mean man, this is a heinous piece of work, a sorry excuse for a film, a sad attempt at a sequel to something good. It’s practically unwatchable in how dragging and directionless it is. Plots are brought up and dragged out for ungodly amounts of time, as if they’re actually important, but then they’re just dropped for no reason and never resolved at all. There are opportunities for character development and psychological intrigue, but they are shelved in favor of terrible one-off jokes and attempts at being gory.

The characters are mostly indefensible, especially the awful Ray Liotta and the confusing mess that was Gary Oldman’s Mason Verger. The only good parts involve just Hannibal and Clarice together, only even they don’t seem terribly invested – hell, just look at the half-assed script they had to work with and you can completely sympathize. There’s just nothing good about this movie. There is simply no way they could have possibly screwed up a sequel to something good more…

Okay, well there’s that. But this is still terrible!

I guess some people like this movie for reasons I will never even begin to comprehend, but…yeah, keep this thing as far away from me as possible. Eugh. You know, why did I even bother elaborating on this? Looking back, my original review was fine and summed up everything I've said here except in about 1/10th the length! What was the point; what was the purpose?! Excuse me...I need to go meditate on my life.

All images copyright of their original owners. I do not own any of them.

REVIEW: The Unborn (2009)

The end of the year is nigh and I need to pick a really good movie to close us off for this review-season…something truly worthy and monumental enough to be the last review of 2011. It has to be a movie I truly hate with every fiber of my being, something that I would like nothing more than to crush into a billion pieces. Something generic and ridiculous to the max, with little redeeming value at all. Something that could have been released in a blank white DVD case with the word ‘Horror’ on it and lost nothing of its aesthetic worth at all.

Something like…The Unborn.

Director: David S. Goyer

Starring: Odette Annable, Gary Oldman

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1139668/

Why do movies about pregnancy or infants always seem to suck? It never fails. Grace. Nightmare on Elm Street 5. Nine Months. The list goes on – I mean, sure, you had Rosemary’s Baby once upon a time, but that was 40 years ago. These days we get festering loads of ass like this. The Unborn just reeks of phoned in, phony horror from people who wouldn’t know something scary if it came up and bit them. This movie is just horrible. And I can’t wait to get this over with, so let’s get started!

We open with Megan Fox Lite doing one of her morning jogs when she finds a glove on the ground; how exciting, right? Then she turns around and sees a dog with a weird mask on, which looks more like something out of a David Lynch movie – except a really lame David Lynch movie, as there’s really no poetry or mystique to this imagery. Megan Fox Lite follows the dog to a random spot in the woods where she finds a dead baby skeleton that opens its eyes and stares at her – well that’s just rude.

Wow, that looks like something you'd find on the underside of a table in some seedy bar. Sadly this will become a theme for the movie - awful, silly looking CGI fecal matter.

Of course it’s just a nightmare and she wakes up soon after. Then we get her talking to her friend Romy while babysitting, and because Romy is black, she knows all about dream interpretations, voodoo, the supernatural and everything else that will play prominently in the film’s flimsy plot. Because being black automatically equates to being African, which means knowing all about superstitions and magic spells and other stuff like that. How racially sensitive!

"I'm just your average black city girl who knows the whole dictionary of dream interpretations and magic spells. Call me?"

I’d like to note that this is the same chick from Venom who also had the random knowledge of the supernatural in that film too! Sad thing is, I actually think this movie is a step down compared to her last stint as a poorly written racial stereotype…in that movie, at least it made sense, being in the Louisiana swamps. This time it’s just ‘hey! We need a cheap way to shoehorn in bullshit explanations for the supernatural stuff in the movie; go hire a black actress!’

Anyway, Megan Fox Lite gets distracted when she has to go check on the kids, though, and finds the little boy she’s babysitting for holding a mirror shard over the face of his younger sister. He then smacks her across the face with it and says “Jumby is ready to be born,” because little kids are creepy and the filmmakers have zero other ideas.

So then we see that Megan Fox Lite is so excited to be at school that she gets hallucinations in the middle of class! God, how far are we into this again? 10 minutes? Holy crap, can’t you just slow down and tell a story? Is it that hard? We know NOTHING about this character except that she gets jump scared more than the protagonists of The Grudge, The Uninvited and The Ring combined! Not exactly a prideful accomplishment! Where’s the substance? Well, give Hollywood credit, though; they finally achieved their lifelong dream and cut out everything else in a horror movie beyond the retarded jump scares and hallucinations – it’s practically a producer’s wet dream, no effort at all except the most worthless, cheap, pandering garbage imaginable, but still guaranteed to scare legions of idiotic kids with no taste at all. Ka-ching!

We see that Megan Fox Lite goes to an eye doctor with her super-bland-milquetoast boyfriend and a half, and sees Dr. C.S. Lee of Dexter fame, who tells her that she’s been having weird dreams and seeing supernatural things because she needs an eye operation…well that’s stupid. It's even worse than the thing from Haunting of Molly Hartley where they tried to pass off every hallucination as a tumor in the main character's brain. But hey, at least we get to see some shots of her in her underwear later on when she’s at home! So it’s cool.

"Okay Miss Annable, look over here and give an ass shot to the camera to make sure people keep ignoring the ludicrous story and special effects...good! Man, I'm the best director EVER."

Hey, don’t you just love all those scenes in every modern horror movie ever where the heroine stands in front of one of those bathroom mirror cabinets and gets a jump scare? I don’t. But the movie does!

So it isn't in there the first time. Maybe they'll avoid the cliche and...

Nope! WTF is that thing anyway? It looks like that stretching-mouth guy from Legion! Hey, Legion was my first review this year and this is my last. I love tying everything together.

I'm sorry; I can't even find words to describe how bad this is! Hmm...

Yeah that sums it up.

So then Megan Fox Lite goes and sees her dad James Remar (seriously, what’s up with all the Dexter characters?), who tells her that she had a baby brother all along who died in the womb, who they called Jumby…because that’s a logical thing to nickname a baby before it’s born, right? What is that? A new Teletubbies character? Gumby’s half-retarded brother?

But anyway this now connects the dots, as it seems that the ghost of her unborn little brother is now haunting her. Well…that’s a pretty horrible and stupid plot – kind of like something you’d see on Are You Afraid of the Dark. Or rather, the outtakes of Are You Afraid of the Dark, not even good enough to make it onto that show. So I guess it fits with the theme of everything else in the movie being horrible and stupid just fine.

And now it’s time to spin the wheel of Horror Clichés again! We’ve already got ‘bland hot white girl with bland white boyfriend,’ and we ticked off the ‘jump scare involving a mirror cabinet in the bathroom’ twice even! We’re getting to the ‘dialogue that is really nothing more that cheap exposition’ quotient…so what’s left? How about ‘trite and played-out subplot involving the main character’s mother who is no longer around, but has something to do vaguely with the main plot’? Yeah that oughta do it.

Megan Fox Lite looks through some old crap in the attic and finds some pictures that somehow lead her to this old peoples’ home where she talks to an old lady who refuses to tell them anything at all – until about 10 minutes later into the film; spoilers! Until then, we can contend ourselves with stupid shit happening in the bathroom of a nightclub. Spooky!

Yeah that looks like most bathrooms in any big city.

Ugh, this is so horrendous; how much longer is it again? Like an hour? GOD THIS IS TORTURE.

So yeah, the old lady calls her at 2 in the morning or so and asks her to come back to the old peoples’ home to talk to her, and we find out that the old lady is actually her grandmother, who surprisingly never tried to contact her before now, I suppose. Stupid, but hey, it’s The Unborn. We then get a long, boring flashback that tells us this whole thing actually started back in the concentration camps of World War II, when her baby brother died in scientific occult experiments done by Nazi scientists. Because we really needed Nazis in this movie, right? Just give up, movie; you’re way beyond any ability to make us give a crap now.

Apparently a demon possessed his body and the old lady had to kill her brother in order to get rid of the demon. Only that backfired when the demon then decided to haunt the entire bloodline! That’s kind of like putting a band-aid on a small cut right before you realize you were supposed to keep your eyes on the road, and end up driving right off a goddamn cliff.

Being that she’s already spewed out all the worthless exposition the film needed her for, the old lady gets killed off in the middle of the night by a horrible CGI effect, but not before leaving a letter to Megan Fox Lite telling her to never give up and keep fighting and all sorts of other stuff that makes Megan Fox Lite’s eyes well up for some super-cinematic tears with melodramatic music in the background!

"That's right, Miss Annable, just cry your best cliche, over the top movie tears and we'll have the best scene ever. Man, my own directing makes me hot down below!"

And also, what the hell is the logic in this? How would she know to write this letter when she didn’t know she was going to die later? At least try to make sense, you damn movie!

So then she goes to see a guy that looks like Gary Oldman. We already have the Megan Fox look-alike, and now we have the…wait, what do you mean that IS Gary Oldman? He would never do a movie this ba---

Well, okay, one time, but…

Uh, well, maybe twice, but still…

OKAY! OKAY! This is really nothing new for him! Happy? He just has a knack for picking shit films once in a while and this is unfortunately another one he probably won’t want to put on his resume. He’s playing an interminably dull and boring priest who Megan Fox Lite hires to do an exorcism on her. They team up with the only basketball playing expert on exorcisms ever – it’s good to have multiple talents! – and sit around and talk about boring stuff some more.

"OOOOoooooh, look at my abstract weird imagery, aren't I the best and most edgy director ever? David Lynch eat your heart out! I got a dog with an upside down head! Sure it looks like a horrible Photoshop, but it's just so edgy, man!"

I’m all for scenes that establish the story through interesting character nuance, but…that isn’t what this is. This is crappy cheap-ass exposition written by people who have no earthly idea about how to write a story. Literally every bit of dialogue in this damn movie is exposition trying to make the dumbass plot more coherent! Where’s the character connection? I guess they just forgot to write that in! Most of these scenes are just window dressing – just backgrounds and people doing arbitrary things in front of them while they rattle off their hideously asinine exposition. Oh, please, explain the story to us some more, writers! Haven’t gotten enough of that yet! That’s truly the way to invest us!

Oh yeah, and the black chick dies when she gets stabbed by the little boy from across the street. I know, just go with it. Apparently the demon can possess people now! And I guess nobody noticed the little kid leaving his house with one of mommy’s kitchen knives…methinks better parental supervision would be a good idea, perhaps. Not to mention the silliness factor is only multiplied when the demon jumps out of the kid and into the dying girl – why he did that I do not know, as clearly she’s dying and will soon be of no use to him – and puts on his best Exorcist impression. By which I actually mean worst, and cheesiest, Exorcist impression. Sounds more like a castrated frog.

"Don't you ever try to imitate me! I will END YOU!"

The “climax” of the film is a big sloppy mess that pretty much has ‘try-hard’ written all over it. They didn’t have any actual atmosphere or scares, so they put in a nearly unwatchable miasma of people screaming, demonic faces, flashy lights and other stuff that makes the movie look like a little kid screaming for attention because his mom and dad wouldn’t buy him a damn Optimus Prime action figure. Seriously, this is wretched. You have to TRY to be this bad!

"Let it be known...that I...achieved my goal...to be...the blandest horror boyfriend...ever..."

Oh, the boyfriend died? What a Shakespearian tragedy! Seriously, they try to make this whole thing so tragic and whatnot, but really he was a complete cardboard cut-out of a character the whole movie, with no human traits and nothing to distinguish him from the nearest lamppost. So really I feel about as much emotion here as I did the last time I threw out a pair of socks.

The movie ends with Megan Fox Lite finding out she’s pregnant with twins!

Hey, the best actors in the movie have finally arrived!

Uh oh! Irony! That’s a good movie ending, right right? No.

I have spent way too much time already on this, but my god! What kind of festering brain tumor could possibly come up with this? It’s unbearable torture to watch; one of the worst I’ve ever reviewed on this site. There’s just nothing in it that I can describe as any kind of quality. It’s long, it’s stupid, it’s silly and most of all, IT’S BORING. The Unborn is just about everything wrong with 2000s horror wrapped up into one odorous package. I hate this movie and I hate anyone who likes it! Just scrap this crap; throw it in the garbage forever.

As for me, I’m going to go wash this down with some good old New Years celebrations. Happy 2012, folks. See you then!

All images copyright of their original owners. I do not own any of them.

The Month of Terror: Dracula 2000 (2000)

Amazing, a movie that actually manages to screw up the Dracula story even more than the 1991 version with that ridiculous Gary Oldman costume. I didn’t even think that was possible. Yes, Dracula 2000, brought to you by the genius minds that brought you sequels to White Noise, Pulse, Children of the Corn and Hollow Man, is another gem of a movie that you just can’t describe in a short review…so I made a really long one again, happy?

Director: Patrick Lussier

Starring: Gerard Butler, Jonny Lee Miller, Justine Waddell

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219653/

"Don't ever fuck with an antiques dealer!"

-Jordan Chase

Our movie begins quite beautifully with scenes of London in the 1800s, with a bunch of dead people on a ship. I’d say these scenes had a point, but really I just think the director wanted to take a vacation to London, as we flash forward unceremoniously to the present day, without any kind of transition. Then we see Christopher Plummer and Jordan Chase from Dexter talking about some stuff in a room. Chase proceeds to flirt with the token attractive woman in this unnamed and vague company, who turns him down like a bad grade on a math test. Burned, Chase! Burned!

Then we see that this attractive woman is actually a part of some gang of robbers planning to break in and steal stuff. They find a secret passageway, a dungeon full of skulls and smoke and a big coffin, and, being idiots of the highest order, think that Plummer decorated the place like that to scare off thieves:

Looks like a rejected Buffy the Vampire Slayer set.

Come to think of it, why did Plummer decorate the secret passageway like that anyway? He’s clearly keeping the Dracula-coffin down there to keep it safe, so what’s the logic in decorating the place like a cheap haunted house? Why go through the trouble of putting up all those skulls and everything when he could have just put it in a room and locked the door? Not like anyone would see it if he was just using it to keep the thing in. I guess he’s just got a flair for the most ridiculous and over the top drama.

So yeah, the robbers activate a bunch of traps that were rejected from Indiana Jones 17 and a couple of them get killed off and impaled on stuff, which shocks the surviving robbers about as much as getting a letter in the mail. They just kind of shrug it off, take the coffin and go. This gets Plummer and Jordan Chase mad, as you can clearly tell by the way they scream every other line as if they’re in a terrible soap opera. Because that makes it dramatic! About as dramatic as a bunch of kids fighting on a schoolyard anyway…

We also get introduced to Mary, who has dreams apparently directed by Rob Zombie, although I would also accept ‘dreams directed by Tim Burton’ if you please:

Stop tormenting me, strobe lights and quick cuts!

She lives with her friend Lucy, they talk about boys (because that’s all girls ever do when they’re alone, you know), and that’s pretty much it. BACK TO THE ROBBERS!

They’re on a plane transporting the coffin back to wherever the hell they came from, and they all pick on this one guy for no reason except that he’s white and has a dorky Jew-fro style haircut that just begs to be made fun of. He opens the coffin after whining and complaining to himself, and is suddenly engulfed in a cloud of pot-smoke that I think was used by the writers to create the script!

Look at that hair; it's practically its own meme.

Actually it’s Dracula, played by Gerard Butler. He then proceeds to hide and wait for more idiots to come out. Which they do, leading to several long, drawn out minutes of those terrible ‘stop kidding around man!’ scenes you get in every terrible horror movie. Joy. But then using his incredible 'appearing ominously in doorways' power (which is pretty much all he does throughout this movie), Dracula turns everyone into vampires and crashes the plane.

But the wonders don’t end there, as then we get one of the strangest hallucination scenes ever as Dracula and Mary see each other through the door of the plane somehow? But one side of the door is the cockpit of the plane, and the other side is her room…and then he goes into her room, and attacks her until Lucy walks through him like a ghost? It’s hard to describe, but that’s because it’s just visually confusing as hell! I get what they were going for, but seriously, what kind of insane brain-cobble produced this anyway?

Well, I guess David Lynch was called on set to direct a scene after all...

After that, we get the BEST NEWSCASTER EVER as she wears a skimpy dress and talks incredibly dramatically about the robbers’ plane, which crashed in a lake. I mean really, saying things like ‘this is a lake of death and doom today’ is just silly. And I love how the camera-man is drooling over her the whole damn time. “I’m just recording this for my own jerk-off sessions later tonight, thanks!” But then Dracula just kills them, although even THAT is rendered incredibly silly by the fact that you see it through the camera so you can’t actually see him doing it:

"And tonight on National Enquirer News, we have a newscaster who they probably picked up from a brothel down on the bad side of town..." 

"...and flying men propelled by their own farts (that are actually vampires killing them; but that's just a conspiracy theory)!"

So then we get some exposition from Plummer on why Dracula is so evil: he hates Christianity. Yup, that’s it; just like any common acne-ridden 14 year old internet troll! Dracula’s just angsty! Oh, and apparently Christopher Plummer is actually the real Van Helsing, who kept himself alive by injecting himself with Dracula’s blood over the years just to make sure he doesn’t get out of his prison. And while doing THAT, he apparently also had time to father a daughter! And that daughter was Mary! See? It all makes sense now…except it really, really doesn’t. Let’s take a closer look at this ridiculous subplot:

First of all, how did he know that Dracula’s blood would give him any kind of special powers anyway? He’s counting on them to let him live forever, but how can he possibly tell that would work without some kind of problem occurring? Second of all, how did he know he wouldn’t run out sometime in the 100 years since he killed Dracula? What would’ve happened if he came in one day and tried to drain the blood but found out there wasn’t enough? “Whoops, my bad! Guess I should have just left it to my descendants or something, like any other sane person would have!” Third of all, he really had time to father a daughter? So much for devotion to the cause. You’d THINK a guy smart enough to figure out a way to live forever would be smart enough NOT to have sex with someone with that demonic blood in his veins! But I guess stupidity is necessary to move the plot forward!

Also I really like the Michael Jackson dance moves the hot vampire chick does in the science lab where she’s being held:

You could have at least put in "Thriller" or "Smooth Criminal" at this point...might have made the movie better...

And then we get another fight scene with some of Dracula’s goons, full of Matrix-style wire-jumping, terrible one-liners and implausible set-ups…and where are they supposed to be, anyway? Could they just not afford a real morgue, and so they had to film in a high school auditorium-slash-gymnasium?

After that, we see Dracula approaching Lucy at the video store where I’m sure they have much better movies than this one available. She decides to take him home, because I guess the creepy guy in the black trench coat who approached her in the video store is a good enough catch for her standards, and surprise surprise, he kills her soon after. Mary discovers that Lucy went off with some guy, and, jumping to the most bizarre conclusion possible, she of course automatically suspects that it’s Dracula at work. Because a hot blonde girl like this:

…couldn’t POSSIBLY have gotten a date otherwise, right?

Christopher Plummer goes to Mary’s house too and gets killed off easily by Dracula. So much for the great Van Helsing, right? Ho hum. So then we see some more of those wonderful schizophrenic editing in the Rob Zombie style as Mary returns and starts seeing things in the house. She fights some of Dracula’s posse, including the news-lady for some reason, and then runs away only to find Jordan Chase outside! They run away and go to a church, because…I guess the director felt like he hadn’t ripped off The Crow enough with all the shots of Gerard Butler wearing black perched on top of roofs, and had to compensate for his own insecurities.

Through more fight scenes that not even 4^th graders who like The Matrix would find endearing and lines so stupid that I’m surprised the actors willingly said them, the movie pretty much gets nowhere. However, there is one line so over the top and so silly that it actually makes the movie worth it…for a few seconds, anyhow. It’s when Jordan Chase is fighting off the vampire chicks. He beats them down and then screams “DON’T EVER FUCK WITH AN ANTIQUES DEALER!” at the top of his lungs, like some kind of battle cry. Yes. I believe we have a new indictment into the hall of absolute AWESOMENESS. No other line in this movie touches this level of over the top cheese.

But yeah, after that it pretty much produces nothing of worth, and I’m almost positive the writers ran out of ideas after that too, because the movie can’t even hold my interest for two seconds anymore. Jordan Chase chases the vamp-chicks around and Mary is kidnapped by Dracula and blah blah blah. They fight on the roof until it’s revealed that…DUN DUN DUN

Somebody call Mel Gibson, I think we have a new movie idea: Dracula and Jesus Christ!

No. No, you can’t be doing this, movie. You seriously can’t!

No, what are you thinking, movie? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Dracula is Judas? What? Why? What was wrong with the original story so much that you had to add this religious crap into it? It makes zero sense at all and just turns the whole thing into an even bigger joke. This isn’t Dogma or some nonsense where you can just make stuff like that up! At least in that movie it was played for comedy and satire. Here’s it’s supposed to be serious! Ugh. Let’s just finish the damn review.

So Dracula turns Mary into a vampire and tells her to bite Jordan Chase, but in a VERY SURPRISING TWIST she fakes it – didn’t see that one coming, did you? It’s only been used in EVERY OTHER MOVIE EVER MADE after all! Then he throws her off the building but she wraps some wire around his neck before she falls…and wait a minute, wouldn’t the fall barely hurt her anyway? I mean it’s been shown in this movie itself that vampires are almost invincible, so…what? Dracula burns up, Mary turns back into a human somehow, becomes a Buffy the Vampire Slayer rip-off and then we mercifully get the credits!

Phew. So in case you couldn’t tell…this was stupid as hell. It made as much sense as the ramblings of a fever-ridden fourth grader on a sugar high, the acting AND writing was terribly over-done and over-dramatic, the story was a pile of clichéd horse crap and the characters weren’t very interesting. I will say it was at least entertaining, but it was entertaining in spite of itself rather than for any actual merit. And that’s never the way to go.

So are you guys ready for the sequel?!?!? I am!

REVIEW: Air Force One (1997)

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Starring: Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118571/

"Get off my plane!"

-President Harrison Ford the Almighty

So it’s Memorial Day. The sun is shining, the flags are raised and we’re all remembering exactly what it means to be an American. And what am I doing? Well, I figured I’d do my part by reviewing a movie like Air Force One, so imbued with that good old presidential spirit that it casts Indiana Jones himself in the role.

Yes, this is the movie with Harrison Ford as the president, and I have to say the concept intrigued me. Hell, it's what they were banking on - just look at the cover; right under Ford's name they put "...is the president of the United States." It’s a shame they just didn’t really do a whole lot with it. His character is rarely ever elaborated upon and mostly his only trait seems to be that he cares about his family more than he cares about domestic politics, as is evidenced by several decisions he makes in this movie. Mostly I just never really bought that he was the president. He was just acting like Harrison Ford here, and although that's always a plus...I was hoping for a little more immersion into the presidential life. We see him do a few president-like things, but never anything that really comes out and screams I AM THE PRESIDENT. And so we're mostly just left with another great Ford performance, which is nothing to sneeze at anyway. But it could have been more.

Another thing that bugs me about him is that HE’S BARELY IN THIS. For the first hour or so you barely see him at all! It mostly focuses on the businessmen and Gary Oldman and, well, pretty much everyone else but him! There’s one particularly annoying scene at about 45 minutes in where there’s something really important and gripping going on and the film keeps cutting back to Ford, in hiding, trying to figure out how a computer works. It’s meant to be funny, but mostly just comes off as trite.

As for the plot; well it’s an action flick. It’s pretty much set solidly in the Die Hard mold, and it doesn’t have any ambition to get out. The titular jet is hijacked by a bunch of terrorists led by Gary Oldman, who wants a jailed political leader released from prison to do more of the good anti-American work. There are lots of nasty things said about America by the terrorists, but it’s OK, since Ford and his band of political businessmen are pretty clearly the good guys. I have to say this is mostly pretty transparent and not really dealt with in a very interesting way. A lot of the middle part of the movie just kind of slags along with self-important talking and rather plodding action scenes in the cramped plane, usually involving someone creeping around with a gun, shooting at doors. Gary Oldman does a good job, but like in The Professional, the writing for him just isn’t very good, and although he injects some venom into the proceeding, his character gets old pretty fast. Was this just a trend for him in the 90s?

I did like the Vice President, played by Glenn Close – she had some very nice intensity to her performance. And Harrison Ford was pretty cool when he finally got some screentime in the second half of the movie, with some solid action scenes. Mostly this movie is just worth watching at all for the climax, which involves some really great build ups and some truly terrifying moments where Ford ends up dangling hundreds of feet in the air as the Air Force One goes down in smoke. That’s just awesome, and I wish the rest of the movie could have matched it. It is pleasant, though, and there's just something charming about it that prevents me from actually disliking it. So maybe that's a good sign.

P.S...this movie was directed by a German? That's some great national intermixing we've got going. A German filmmaker telling a story about Americans and Russians. That's just wonderful. I love the modern age of communication, where everyone knows what's up with everyone else. It does strike me as a little less appropriate for a Memorial Day review now, but...hey, it's still about America; shut up.

Review: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103874/

In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola directed a movie called Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That seems like a winning formula, doesn’t it? The director of classic movies like the Godfather and the Godfather II making a new movie based off a legendary horror classic. What could go wrong?

…Well, I’ll tell you.

The movie begins with a hokey narration spoken in just about the silliest English accent you could possibly imagine. I mean it; it’s like they hired a narrator from the Monty Python team to do it. It’s just so unfitting of the serious material that it’s unbelievable. And speaking of Monty Python, the montage of battle scenes that follows isn’t much more believable. It just looks so fake. It’s just silly, and that’s not how I want to start off a film adaptation of an all time literary classic.

Then we get a sob story that details why Dracula is a sympathetic villain. Apparently some guy shot a fake notification of Dracula’s death in battle into the castle by arrow. His fiancée apparently just straight up believes that Dracula really did die, and then she kills herself instantly, after writing a suicide note. Uh...so she didn't ask QUESTIONS or anything? She didn't even ask anyone else and confirm that he was really dead? She just believed a piece of paper shot through a window and decided that she had to KILL HERSELF because of it? Well, I guess Darwinian natural selection wins again. Dracula of course is not really dead, and flies into a rage after a priest tells him that his fiancée's soul is damned for eternity because she killed herself. He drinks blood, saying that he will become immortal and avenge her death!

…Dracula is a pretty extreme guy. His highs are high and his lows are low.

No, seriously, where was any of this in the original book? If you’re going to title a movie ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula,’ at least try to keep it close to the source material. You could at least attempt to build up the same kind of suspicion and fright that the original novel did. But nope, this movie just throws it all out the window and spoils the villain for us right at the start. That’s wonderful. Just wonderful, movie.

But if you think that was a treat, just wait until the movie introduces us to Jonathon Harker, the main character, played by the only guy to ever be out-acted by an actual brick, Keanu Reeves. Who is probably the very last person I would ever have picked to be in a Dracula movie. Seriously, he's basically just doing Bill and Ted in this movie again - the lost sequel, Bill and Ted's Blood Sucking Fun Time; he's just about as silly in this role. Luckily they barely give him any lines anyway. His girlfriend Mina (Winona Ryder) is sad because he’s leaving. But it's OK, honey, just get the Keanu Reeves life-size cardboard cutout. You won't even notice the difference!

So the next ten minutes play out like the novel: he travels up a dark, strange mountain pathway to meet the mysterious Count Dracula and sell him real estate in the city, going through many odd things in the process. But it’s all out the window when you see…

I think that thing is eating his head.

Oh, god dammit, movie. God dammit. Really? This is what you’re making Dracula look like now? I think the real question is how Gary Oldman’s career survived this streak of lame 90s movies. I think there must have been some kind of personal vendetta against the guy in the agent industry. It’s practically reaching levels that look like a conspiracy theory. He does a good job, sure, but how convincing can you possibly be when you look like that?! It’s ridiculous! How could anyone have thought that was a good costume? He looks like he has a nest of spiders in his hair.

So he engages in all manner of scenery-chewing with Keanu Reeves, who mostly just sits there with a blank look on his face the entire time. Get used to that look, people. It’s going to be on his face for the whole goddamn movie. I especially love this one scene where we get this fade-out as he’s looking around him after Dracula invites him to stay for a while longer. He just looks so clueless that it’s absolutely hilarious. Every look he has in this entire movie makes me wonder if he even knew he was in a movie. Like they just filmed him while he was eating Cheerios or watching Lost and then edited everything else in around him. "Hey guys, can you move the camera so I can see the end of this episode?"

Come to think of it, that would explain a lot of the editing in this movie, too.

We then establish the characters of Mina, who is the quiet girl who just wants one guy alone, and her best friend Lucy, who is the total opposite and loves flirting with lots of men at the same time. She has three guys trying to court her all at the same time – kind of like a roulette of guys to pick and drain of their souls. But we all know her true passion:

...well, we all need to get off somehow, I guess.

Meanwhile, Keanu Reeves is getting his own wild sex fantasy fulfilled as we see him drawn mysteriously to a bed where three vampiric succubi rise up out of the cloth and start seducing him, biting at him and trying to suck his blood. They’re stopped by Dracula, who pulls them away only to…let them have him later on when he needs to keep him bound. As for Dracula, he’s off to seduce Mina, who apparently looks exactly like his old wife who killed herself all those years ago. This is where the movie really starts to lose me and become too stylized for its own good. I mean it is seriously like a drunk, half-asleep David Lynch took over the director’s chair and started doing acid, or something. There are so many constantly overlapping images fading in and out and so many zoom shots where the camera runs up to whatever it wants to focus on that it’s like a roller coaster. Yes, this movie is just a big roller coaster ride, one big old advertisement for the Universal Studios tie-in. Can’t you idiots tell a story correctly?!

It just keeps going on like this. For like 20 minutes all we get are montages and overlapping images and pretentiously goofy camera shots, winding themselves up so tight that they’ll make you lose your lunch. At first, like with the succubi scene, it’s entertaining, and adds to the dark and mystical atmosphere. But after a few minutes of nothing but these kinds of scenes, it just becomes tiresome, and lame. Really lame.

So eventually, after much deliberation, they FINALLY get their heads out of their anuses and start trying to tell the story right. Alright, yeah. This is good. You’re back on track, movie. Now just get back to telling the story of how Dracula crept his way into the unsuspecting lives of…

The prince of darkness, people!

Fuck you, movie. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. This sympathetic Dracula crap has got to stop. Right now! It’s one thing to have it done subtly in a way, to make it sort of an undercurrent…but when you actually shove it in our faces that this cold-blooded killer is actually just a poor little hopeless romantic who got his love taken away from him, you’re crossing a line that you can’t step back over. This isn’t just ‘Dracula,’ it’s BRAM STOKER’S Dracula, people! That should indicate that it’s at least mostly true to the source material! This is like the complete opposite of that! Dracula is a cold-blooded, heartless monster. He may have had a shred or two of humanity a long time ago, and he may have certain traits to him that inspire some degree of sympathy, but for the most part, he’s just the embodiment of evil. To treat him like this forlorn romantic dark hero makes the good guys look irrational and even downright crazy when Van Helsing starts raving about how he’s the devil. That could possibly make for an interesting psychological twist in a better movie, but in this movie, they mostly spend too much time on the special effects for any effort to be put into anything else.

Oh, yeah, Lucy died! That…was hardly even noticeable with all the special effects masturbation going on! I’m so glad we got to get to know her character in this movie…oh, wait, she comes back as this:

"I'm ready for my close up!"

By this point, it's clear to the characters that they need to do something drastic. Van Helsing tells them about the history of vampires, informing them of all the usual cliches: they live forever, they can turn into bats and wolves and other creatures of the night and they need blood to survive. Pfft, don't listen to this amateur. You need Edgar Frog to come to the rescue! TRULY COMIC BOOKS ARE THE ONLY WAY TO KNOW ABOUT VAMPIRES!

Yeah, I think it pretty much shot its load with that succubi scene, no pun intended. The rest of the movie just can’t hold up. There are some good scenes here and there and the final climax does have a few alright moments, but for the most part, it’s just really overdramatic tripe fronted by a really overt missing of the point of the whole thing (you know, the sympathetic Dracula angle). And it just kind of…ends, no real resolution whatsoever besides Mina getting released from Dracula’s spell.

Oh, whatever, I’ll accept any crap you throw at me as long as I never have to watch this again. My guess is the only reason this was popular was because of all the big stars in it; nothing else. Nobody would have ever noticed this movie had it not been basically a vehicle for these big names. This movie is just a mess all around. The directing is all over the place and the whole thing has about as much flow as one of those pasted-together ransom notes from twelve different magazines; it’s just so un-entertaining that it’s unbelievable. I mean it’s Dracula for Pete’s sake; the job of writing the damn story is already done for you. Added to the silly costume designs, unconvincing acting and all around weak transitions between scenes and you have a bona fide crap festival of a film. Just buy your ticket, swallow your dignity and strap your seatbelts, because this is two hours of showboating how cool Francis Ford Coppola thinks he is. I spit on this movie.