Funny Games (1997)

Let’s talk about stuff that hasn’t held up. Every decade has a few things that just end up seeming dated after it’s over and we’ve all had a chance to analyze the settling dust of said decade. Like the 60s had the whole Woodstock hippy thing, the 70s had prog rock and acid, and the 80s had Reaganomics and weird PRMC hearings trying to say anything fun was witchcraft. Well, I’ve recently found an interesting one from the 90s – movies that really, really wanted to be smart about how VIOLENT and DANGEROUS movies were making America. Like Funny Games.

Director: Michael Haneke

Starring: Arno Frisch, Frank Giering, Susanne Lothar

IMDb

This is kind of a weird social commentary type of movie where the villains break the fourth wall and talk to the audience occasionally. It’s not done much and not in very interesting ways – usually just a wink or a nod, or maybe a paltry bit of dialogue about how they want to make it to feature-length movie time or something. I guess it’s interesting but it’s hardly even all that obtrusive. I guess there’s some dialogue about reality perception and stuff, but that’s so on the nose it comes off as hokey. Without real character traits for these guys, it feels empty and gimmicky to me.

I have to give the movie props – it’s well made, and director Michael Haneke has a great command of putting together expert scenes and making this tense, sparse atmosphere, focusing on the pain of the victims of these two sociopathic killers. It’s more uncomfortable than a lot of thrillers at some points because they take their time to show the victims’ anguish in this very quiet, stark way, and don’t have any deus ex machina type shit to save them. So it does get its point across at least in the beginning.

However, the whole messaging and blunt “point” of the film is what ended up bothering me – oh, we’re complicit in violence because the killers can talk to us, and should we even be watching movies that have this kind of violence in them? It’s kind of condescending actually. It’s like the movie is the scolding parent wagging their finger, telling us not to watch violent films because they’re bad for us. Like, pretty sure we can make our own decisions there, bud. Natural Born Killers, another edgy 90s flick, is very similar in its messaging, and even goes further by totally un-subtly throwing the news media in there – that one is so obvious in its messaging you can see it from space. But I’m sure a lot of people thought this stuff was, like, so deep, man.

I mean it’s really just kind of a weird puritanical kind of thing. I know Haneke likely didn’t mean it that way – he wants to reflect on the violence and all that and it’s not like he’s literally running a Sunday school class. But come on. Violence in movies isn’t some insidious plot. It’s fucking fun. It’s entertainment and catharsis to escape whatever bullshit is going on in the real world – which, these days, is a fucking lot, if you’ve seen the news lately. Not everything is gonna be about knitting circles or a guy who finds a lost puppy or something. Occasionally we want to see a guy get stabbed with a bayonet on fire or something.

‘Movies are violent, we’re complicit in violence’ - yeah, it’s called escapism. It’s enjoyable. That’s been going on since, Jesus, like the dawn of civilization? It’s not like Hollywood was the first thing ever to invent violent made-up stories. The ancient Greeks had stories about guys fucking their moms and killing their dads. Shakespeare had violent disembowelments and all sorts of murders going on, some of them even via bears. Did they also contribute to the downfall of society? Maybe we never had a fucking chance.

And yeah there are movies that are in poor taste and are exploitative – no doubt about that. Some things are bad. But other times it’s just for fun. I think things have just changed in the last 20 years. Especially in these last few, with the ascension of Trump to the presidency and the surrounding chaos that seems to have enveloped everything in our public view. These days everything just seems so much more dire and serious than when we had the luxury of going ‘oh, isn’t our violent media consumption such an issue? Pass the caviar, Angelina.’ The stakes have all changed. So maybe that’s a part of why Funny Games didn’t strike me. That’s always funny about art; how it changes depending on an indefinite number of factors.

Maybe it’ll strike you different. For me this missed the mark. I might’ve found it really deep when I was 13 or so.

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

Us (2019)

SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE CONTAINED HEAVILY WITHIN THIS REVIEW.

Jordan Peele is now a first-rate horror director, it seems. Get Out was a great start, but I was curious where he could go from there. Fortunately, the answer seems to be into even more wild, pointed social commentary with his sophomore feature Us.

Director: Jordan Peele

Starring: Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke

IMDb

This is a movie so dense you’ll probably walk out of it wanting to see it again. There is a real breadth of ideas to be unpacked here, and the movie – aside from a few exposition scenes – doesn’t waste its time waiting for you to catch up, weaving its commentary into cat-and-mouse horror tribute and some slasher gore. Basically the premise is that this family is on vacation and runs into exact doppelgangers of themselves in the night - and from there everything just spirals.

It’s a wandering, free-form exploration of the political and social divides in America. There’s something to be said for a few wry winks about Trump/MAGA types – the doubles of everyone that pop up from the subterranean are wearing red, and the fact that they target rich liberal-types in Santa Fe is something I noticed for sure, for maximum dichotomy between them.

But the larger message is about poverty and classism. Lupita Nyong’o’s character Adelaide’s double, Red, talks with some real spite in her about how everything good Adelaide has has been duplicated in a worse way: “And the girl ate, her food was given to her warm and tasty. But when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit raw and bloody. On Christmas, the girl received wonderful toys; soft and cushy. But the shadow's toys were so sharp and cold they sliced through her fingers when she tried to play with them.”

And then, when asked who they are, an even more direct line: “We’re Americans.” Later she also has a line about how “we’re humans, too.” Individually these lines are pretty evident in meaning, but the thing about social commentary is that it’s more about consistency of messaging and how the message is woven into each scene, and the story overall. It’s all about the haves and the have-nots. The rage of the under-class, burbling up to the surface like a volcano. All that’s wrapped up in a fiery and exciting romp through a beach town. Gorgeous images of the shore and of a classic American amusement park serve both to make this look great as well as to amplify the message – this is an American problem.

We’re at a fairly precarious, difficult time in our history right now, as anybody who lives here probably knows. Peele feeds off that like a vampire and creates a film that’s chaotic and off-kilter as the political climate here. Nobody understands each other in America right now. Suitably, the red-suited doppelgangers can only scream and howl – they’re unintelligible to those from the above-ground world. Violence becomes the only language common to them.

And I think what’s striking to me is that there’s really no resolution to it. Peele doesn’t pose a solution for the divide or the chaos. He just shows it as it is, this glorious miasma of violence and resentment. The red-suited doubles win in the end, unifying themselves in a literal hand-linked chain across the land, which is a pretty glaring commentary of its own. They were able to unify and come up to the surface.

At the end it’s also revealed that Adelaide is actually the real ‘Red,’ having switched places with the above-ground version as children when they met in a hall of mirrors. Both of them lived the others’ lives and now the fake Adelaide does whatever she has to to keep her status – every woman for herself. It becomes less of a monster movie, upon knowing this, and more of a struggle between two human beings. “We’re people too,” the real Adelaide, who’s spent her life underground as Red, says with biting venom and bile through every word. And maybe knowing that, then it’s a bit of an oversight for someone like me to have ever thought the other red-clad doubles were true monsters at all in the first place. Even the slasher-style murders start to make more sense. They’re fucking angry as hell.

A good twist is one that you can watch the whole movie again after knowing and the rest of the movie retroactively makes sense in a different way. This twist adds to the layers of the film and makes it more than just another monster flick. The fake Adelaide’s fear is for her own self-preservation. That’s as human as you can get.

It’s a weird-ass movie to be sure. Vague and metaphorical and not all of the in-universe world-building is explicitly explained. Why were there these shadow-doubles living in caves underground at all? We only get a few lines explaining that stuff and it’s not really a thorough explanation. I kinda like the vagueness, not gonna lie. I wouldn’t have wanted a bunch of long drawn out backstory scenes for the mechanical functions of this world – that would’ve just dragged it down and the exposition we got from Red, in character, made sense for how she sees things, adds context to the movie, and that was enough for me.

Horror, like any fantasy, is about feeling rather than mechanics. What we’re seeing on screen in Us has more resonance and meaning than a lot of movies in this genre try for. I think this is an evocative, mesmeric and hard-hitting piece of film. I haven’t been this fascinated by a movie in a while now. I’m sure there will be even more things to notice about this on future viewings. If you like classic horror and/or social commentary, Us is fucking profound and insanely engaging in its labyrinthine mirror-hall of layers.

PS: Here are some good pieces I’ve read about Us so far, which offer some views I didn’t know about or didn’t catch – I’m sure there are shitloads more, too.

https://twitter.com/kyalbr/status/1109984274114064385?s=19&fbclid=IwAR0trpsf-_PIpsflZZZLnIhOAuj_HXCYrtZXHYG4VooGwX9i1hGY6PVJjLI

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/us-was-movies-biggest-twist-hiding-plain-sight-1196584

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/03/us-meaning-costumes-kym-barrett-interview-red-jumpsuit/585793/?fbclid=IwAR0wCXNaXkRBJPQK9YBjwQEjXwN1EdWc7pl94T0K5epng003Cbjbs-aA7WI&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=5c9fe6f43ed3f00001723f9d_ta&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

Mother! (2017)

Darren Aronofsky's Mother! isn't a film I liked much at all, but one thing you have to give it is that it's worth talking about. At the very least, it's interesting – so I guess I'm saying this is the cinematic equivalent of a guy wearing a clown costume and alternately blowing a trumpet while screaming Bible verses on the street corner. It's annoying and pretentious, but at least it isn't boring.

And yeah – there are gonna be SPOILERS in this one!

To be fair, there are some decent parts to this... the directing is nice and can have a rather uncomfortable claustrophobic feel to it, and the acting is good. The first half or so is a decent enough curiosity, telling an odd story of a couple trying to keep up a perfect house and stalled writing career when a stranger (Ed Harris) comes to the door and ends up staying with them. Everything is creepy and foreboding enough that you want to see where it goes – though later on, when the guy's wife shows up, it turns out the scariest thing in the movie is really just marital insecurity over whether or not Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem are going to have kids.

Mostly, the tension in this comes from how much everyone treats Lawrence like shit – her character is just constantly stepped on in this. It's revealed that Ed Harris is a big fan of Bardem's poetry, I guess – and he's also dying of cancer.

Then things take a bizarre turn when Ed Harris's two psychotic sons come to the house and have no problem at all getting into a violent fist fight over their father's will, or some shit like that, and it ends as one of them kills the other. Bardem and the family go with him to the hospital while Lawrence cleans up the blood. What a good wife she is. I would have just fucking left.

And this is really where the movie starts to lose me and the problems start to become apparent. What happens next is a pretty crazy parade of people who know Ed Harris' character come and stay at the house to mourn the dead son while waiting for the funeral. They partake in all kinds of merry funeral activities like having sex in the bedroom, having sex on the stairs and trying to have sex on an unstable kitchen counter that explodes through the wall and rains sewer water everywhere – just good that these assholes are keeping things proper for the funeral mood. They have no logic or reason to it of course; they're just unrealistically nasty, because they have to be for this to work at all.

Lawrence, after like 20 minutes of screentime trying to get them to calm the fuck down and listen to her, finally melts down and screams for everyone to leave. I guess this was all it took. Why didn't she just lose her shit earlier then? Apparently that's the only thing these people will respond to. Not the dead guy they apparently knew – just a random woman losing her shit.

But seriously – this is one of the movie's problems, honestly. I just can't see the character or logic in what she's doing here. She's way too passive about everything. And I know – it's the metaphor of it all, about how she's supporting her husband even though it's tough. But that just doesn't make a good movie for me. Her actions, and the plot as a whole, only seem to exist to serve the metaphor. Everything is just about that message; there's no actual insight into the character. Lawrence is just moved around like a chess-piece so Aronofsky can say look at this message I have, and while all fiction is sorta like that, it really does come off as too transparent here. It's just too easy of a story when you can handwave away anything by saying it's the message! I just find stories more interesting when they're well-constructed around how people actually act in the modern civilized world around each other.

Then things get even worse and more insane when Bardem completes his work of poetry and then, without apparently sending it to anyone or advertising, people begin coming there on a pilgrimage to worship him for his art, even going so far as to set up churches and start treating him like a God. And before you get any crazy ideas, no, this has nothing to do with how Aronofsky sees his own art...

Things do get slightly out of hand when bombs start falling on the house randomly and people get lined up and executed like some kind of African jungle war prisoner ritual or something. Yes, I'm serious – you didn't click into another movie review. It's all very over the top and, while it's entertaining for how batshit crazy it is, you start to check your watch after a while. How long is this gonna go, anyway? I'm an American – we see this shit on TV all day.

Lawrence has the baby and Bardem insists on taking it from her to show to the raving hordes of religious nutballs who now worship him as a God. Within like, a few minutes, they tear the baby apart and eat it, which I am really curious if they got the anatomy right. We should consult some scientists. It would be a shame if the movie got this part wrong – would totally ruin its credibility.

Lawrence, after she gets the shit beaten out of her in a gruesome scene even I have to admit was effective, burns down the house and finally kills everyone except for herself and Bardem – curiously without a scratch on him. He carries her through the house burnt to a fucking crisp, and then takes her heart, the last thing she has left to give him.

Then it turns out Bardem is actually using her heart to restore his entire home to exactly how it was before - he is some kind of vampire or something, I guess, and while I get what the movie is saying here, about artists feeding on others' generosity, it is kind of funny, you have to admit. I think it's humorous that this is how this movie ended.

And I get it, okay – I get the message here. It's saying a lot about the tenets of marriage, especially to one so drawn to art, and the differences between how the archetypal Man and Woman act. Some of it is at least passably interesting commentary, not coming off as anything too dumb or base-level.

But there's just no real meat to this as a movie – all there is is the message. Everything is totally in service to that message. And that means basically nothing that actually happens in the movie has any significance. It's all just metaphoric, anyway; every bit of what happens. The rude people treating Lawrence like shit, the bombs falling, the execution, the eating of the child – it all just passes over with the airy, transparent feel of a ghost, because it doesn't matter. Nobody talks about the repercussions behind any of it, and the people don't act like real people, because they're all just chess-pieces and mouth-pieces for Aronofsky's message. It all exists only because Aronofsky needed to get a point across, which consequently comes off extremely heavy-handed.

I just find this a dull, almost immature way to write a movie. Personally it didn't gel with me. I know some people really liked it – such is the nature of taste. I like movies that treat the characters as more nuanced and complex beings. This one didn't do that for me.

Image copyright of its original owner; I don't own it.

The Purge: Election Year (2016) + BONUS! (SPOILERS)

Well, it's the time of year to be patriotic again, so of course there's another Purge movie to shit all over that and ruin it for everybody. This is Election Year!

And yes, there's SPOILERS for the movie in this review and the podcast. Beware! Or just read the spoilers and don't go see the fucking movie. I dunno. Do what you want. I'm still typing in bold and it makes this part of the review look important.

Director: James DeMonaco

Starring: Frank Grillo, Elizabeth Mitchell

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Here's a podcast Michelle and I did about it:

The both of us really, really fucking hated The Purge: Anarchy back in 2014. It was just so awful, from the over the top political message to the implication that all Americans really are just awful, shitty people. I feel secure in reinforcing that it's one of the worst movies I've ever seen. You know, so far as anyone claiming something is the worst ever on the internet can be taken seriously. Which isn't much – hyperbole is like 99-cent candy bars here. It's cheap currency and you can buy it at shitty, seedy gas stations from teenagers high on pot.

So, Election Year. I'll start off by showing this scene of the Lincoln Memorial covered in blood, gore and burning trash. I wonder who's going to clean that up? This is the most odious crime committed on Purge Night. I have no sympathy for litterbugs!

Throughout the movie they constantly say it's their American right to Purge and blather on about freedom, but then this happens and no one cares. Bull fucking shit. Americans are so zealously patriotic and symbol-obsessed that they'd murder someone who did this on a day that wasn't The Purge night.

We see the New Founding Fathers, apparently the totalitarian leaders of America in the future, plotting against this senator lady, Charlie Roan, played by Elizabeth Mitchell, who is running for president. She has the audacity to want to end the Purge because her family died in it 20 years ago. What an irrational bitch, am I right?

Stop your emotional liberal appeals in the face of our liberties! Wait, this is getting a bit too real.

These guys cackle like Halloween Jack O'Lanterns and speak in all the overemphasized cadence and exaggerated verbosity of a Saturday morning cartoon villain. Oh, wait, there are no Saturday morning cartoons anymore. Which means there is no God.

Anyway, the scenes of Senator Roan debating the other dude who wants to keep the Purge – who is some sort of ultraconservative preacher character who acts like a lost Bugs Bunny villain – are just the bottom of the barrel. The rest of the movie, then, is below the bottom of the barrel. It's underneath the fucking barrel.

The fact that it's such a controversy to stop making murder legal once a year, to the point where one candidate is laughing at another for suggesting it, is batshit crazy. I'm sure you could spin this into a decent satire of some sort, but the movie lacks the self awareness and the good writing to make it seem realistic.

There are also multiple scenes of this corner store in a middle class/poor area of town. There's the owner, Joe Dixon, and a host of side characters like this Hispanic immigrant guy who works with him and a woman who is a regular customer and who drives a van on Purge night to help people. I just think all of these scenes are such a load of horse shit. They're all so fake-folksy, like a corporation trying to relate to the 'common people' by pretending to be idyllic and cute and all of that. It's like Coca Cola putting a rap song into a commercial - you're not fooling anyone.

Oh, but there is a scene of two crazy, psychotic middle school girls who try to steal one candy bar from the store. This becomes a central plot point for the first half of the movie. No, I'm not even kidding.

The big change to Purge night this year is that anyone can be targeted, even government officials, who previously you couldn't target. That should've been a whiff of bullshit so strong that even the dumbest “patriotic” rednecks would have cried foul and ended the whole thing years ago. But remember, in the universe of the Purge, Americans are all universally self-centered idiots who take Fox News as the gospel and swallow their bullshit like donuts at Free Donut Day. Definitely isn't the writers themselves projecting their own idiocy! Nope! It's all Americans that are like this!

So, yeah, we get reintroduced to the guy from the last movie, Barnes, played by Frank Grillo. He has as much character as the lamp I bought last week. He has no charisma on screen and adds so little to this movie or the last one that you could replace him in every scene with a Photoshopped picture of a duck playing the saxophone, and the movie would at least have something kind of endearing in it. This time, he's the Secret Service or something for Charlie Roan. How did he go from revolutionary lone wolf to a Secret Service member? This is making all those times real Secret Service got caught fucking Colombian hookers and letting crazy people onto the White House lawn look like premiere hiring, real career guys.

We see more of his expert prowess when they set up this whole security detail at Charlie Roan's house, protecting her from the Purge night. It doesn't last more than 20 minutes before it's revealed that almost every security guy they hired is corrupt and actually working for the New Founding Fathers to kill Charlie! Wow, maybe you should've spent more than twenty minutes vetting these security guys and not been multi-tasking on your phone playing Online Billiards or whatever the fuck.

So then they go and hide out conveniently in the folksy corner store from before – wow, you mean there was a reason they showed those two separate storylines earlier on? What expert level, Shakespearean storytelling! This leads to some truly masterful dialogue between Barnes and Joe Dixon, in which Dixon constantly assumes Barnes is being racist to him. Only the dialogue here isn't good enough to actually convey any tension, and so their constant bickering actually just makes the movie itself look subtly racist. Just because one of them's a black dude and the other isn't doesn't mean every conversation they have has to sound like Bruce Willis and Sam Jackson in Die Hard 3 – you fucking hacks. It isn't the early 1990s anymore, for one thing, and for another, your movie isn't as smart as Die Hard 3. Certainly not enough to pull this off.

Not to mention pretty much all the black characters come from some rough past in 'the streets.' And the one Hispanic guy is from a horrible war-torn part of Mexico that he compares the Purge to. You know, just because you graduated beyond writing black characters like Song of the South or something, doesn't mean you're not racist anyway.

Oh, and the foreigner characters who have vaguely non-denominational European accents (they're just "foreigners") are only in the movie because they've come from overseas to participate in Purge night. They're portrayed as bloodthirsty, remorseless serial killers. EVERYONE FROM ANOTHER CULTURE IS EVIL! HIDE IN YOUR HOMES! VOTE TRUMP!

"This'll sure look cool at the Halloween Horror Nights attraction!"

But fortunately you don't have long to think about that, as the psychotic high school girls arrive in a car covered with Christmas lights, dressed like dominatrixes and acting like literal wild animals would if they had a basic command of English. And yes, the main one is still after the one candy bar – that's her whole motivation. She's going to kill people just to get a fucking candy bar.

This is one of those scenes like from the last movie where I just can't suspend my disbelief. What did these girls do the other 364 days a year that weren't Purge night? How did they function normally in society? The movie implies that there doesn't need to be an answer, because humans are just shittier in the future for unspecified, vague reasons including the words 'moral decline.' Fuck that and fuck you, movie.

The girls do get run over though! So there is that, for some mildly okay gore. If that's all you need, then The Purge: Election Year has your dismal standards covered!

A lot of other shit happens after that. I don't care to get into all of it. It's mostly badly shot, poorly paced, boring action movie crap and it's not even exciting to look at, with everything being so dark and grimy all the time.

Walking around at night with shitty haunted house traps set up in the city and predictably coming out unscathed = drama and suspense, I guess.

The climax involves a plot by this rebel group to blow up a church where this group of rich 1%ers is having this sermon praising the Purge for letting them get their 'demons' out, or some bullshit. The rival Senator is leading the whole thing. Only then they kidnap Charlie Roan and tie her up and intend to murder her for their big sermon thing.

That means one candidate for president is kidnapping and attempting to murder the other. It's like if Donald Trump went to Hillary Clinton's house, held her at gunpoint and killed her, and then expected everyone else to just act like nothing happened the next day and continue the election without her later. It's utter lunacy. The fact that someone wrote this and another person greenlighted it as if to say “yes, this is a smart plotline” makes me convinced we're doomed and Trump is going to win.

Fortunately, through a series of contrivances, the villains move much too slowly to actually kill her, so the good guys can save her. So glad they spend a ton of time monologuing, and then when they go to slit her throat, they do it as poorly as possible. Then they have a big shoot out fight, punctuated with Joe Dixon inserting incredibly lame and unfunny “jokes” throughout every time there's a pause. They're seriously not funny at all. I've heard things said at funerals that were funnier.

He dies at the end anyway, taking a bullet for Charlie Roan in another slow, poorly drawn-out scene that she should've died from but the script wouldn't allow it. Because really, what good is a black character in a horror movie if he doesn't die tragically? Otherwise you might actually have to do crazy things like make them "likable" or give them "personalities."

Then it turns out Charlie Roan actually wins the fucking election that year. It would have been hilarious if she lost. Wouldn't that have been a dark twist? Too bad, sometimes the progressive light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel candidate just can't win? Would've been salt in the wounds for Bernie supporters watching this anyway.

But yeah, she wins and ends the Purge, I guess. I don't understand how. If people wanted the Purge night to change this badly, why did it go on for so long? 20 fucking years of that before people finally decided to change it? Really? The only implication I can see is that there was no candidate advocating for the end of the Purge that whole time. The whole fucking 20 years of legal murder, and not one candidate until this Charlie Roan lady even breached the subject. Wow. That's a lot of bullshit to swallow!

This movie is awful just like the last one. The whole political message just makes no sense – it's a skewering of the American right wing through the lens of this far left view, but the way all the poor and homeless and minorities are depicted – as degenerates or very broadly drawn, unflattering stereotypes – swings it right back to more of a right wing view, like the caricatures of Fox News-style fearmongering. It's a confusing, poorly thought out message.

Mostly, the movie implies that Americans are just a bunch of stupid, assholeish simpletons who would allow their country to get this far gone. The proof I have of this is that at no point during these Purge movies do you see people trying to really help those under attack. Only the worst of society is ever shown. The whole point is that medical services and ambulances and police don't have to do their jobs. So you're telling me that out of all those doctors and cops and well-meaning citizens who actually have souls, none of them are willing to go help out anyway? All of them are really that selfish and shitty? It's really just every man for himself? That's perhaps the biggest load of bullshit in the movie, and that's not a small feat.

People are better than this movie or the other piece of trash that precluded it think. People would help out where they could, form tons of organized coalitions to save people on Purge night, and they really would not let this stuff go on for like 20 years before saying hey, we need to stop this.

I know this is just a bullshit fictional universe, but come on – you need to have a plausible, believable fantasy. This movie doesn't. And it would be more interesting with more characters fighting back against the Purge, helping people and generally not rolling over and playing dead and letting us only see the worst people in the world on screen. But I guess the movie really needed to push that 'Americans are shitty people' message!

Even aside from that, it's a boring, shitty action movie with no good characters or scenes. There's no suspense and every part of the plot is poorly written cliché. There's nothing to like about this. It's all hack work trash, and I don't have any qualms with saying so. Fuck The Purge: Election Year.

BONUS: WHY THE PURGE IS A STUPID FUCKING IDEA IN GENERAL

As a bonus, Michelle and I were talking the other night about this movie some more, and really, the whole idea of the Purge in general gets more insane the more you think about it - i.e. even thinking a tiny, little bit at all crumbles the entire concept. Let's go over some of the implications of this world:

• Can prisoners rise up and kill the guards and break out of jail on Purge night? That seems like something that should be addressed. There's certainly enough prisoners to do so, like at least 400 against, what, 80 guards at most? Seems like that would be a mess to clean up the next day.

• What about crimes that have nothing to do with murder? Remember, all crime is legal. What if a stockbroker steals a bunch of money from his trading company and throws the world economy off balance?

• I guess rape is legal now on Purge night, so any number of horrible things could happen. If the point of Purge night is reducing crime – well, I'm pretty sure the victims of rape wouldn't be thanking you, jackasses.

• I wonder what it's like for people to have to live with ramifications of the Purge after it happens. Like if a boss kills a competitor – is that looked upon as a legitimate transaction later? Like 'oh, I guess it's okay cause of Purge night'? “Gee, it really sucks that Mike killed our boss last night. He was about to give me that raise and help me feed my starving children.”

• What about when one of your co-workers brutally murders another co-worker? How does the rest of the office look that first co-worker in the eye the rest of the year? Someone's not getting invited to the office party. I'm picturing it like that scene from Office Space where they all pass over Milton and don't let him have any cake. That seems like what would happen.

• Are American territories included in the Purge? Do people on the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico get to participate? What if some rogue state official wanted to bomb another country and had the keys to the nuclear weapons? Would the whole world have to just shrug their shoulders and forget about it because oh, those goofy Americans and their all-crime-is-legal holiday?!

Holy fuck. They really didn't think any of this through. This is what happens when you don't do enough world-building for your fictional world. The Purge just gets worse and worse the more you actually look at the logic behind it. This has to be among the worst bullshit in modern cinema!

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them and are making no money off this.

Orange Is The New Black's Season Four & the Viewer's Prism - SPOILERS

The new Orange is the New Black season is probably the show's most audacious and challenging yet. I say that because there were parts of this that were awful and gut-wrenching to watch. This is challenging, forward thinking TV, and yeah, there are going to be some SPOILERS in this thing, so if you don't want that, go back on Netflix and finish the show.

I guess I'll just address the elephant in the room immediately, with Poussey Washington's death in Episode 12, “The Animals.” It's a horrible thing to watch, her being suffocated on the floor, and notably by Bayley, who was the most harmless looking, innocent seeming guy prior to this – that's really, really something, I think.

The thing for me was that I didn't know how to feel – Poussey's death was a tragedy, and Bayley was responsible yet is not some kind of evil psychotic monster like some of the other guards. That's important. Several characters on the show in the last episode – Caputo and Coates most notably – talk about how prison changes you, how Bayley is ruined after that. And obviously, that's the complete wrong reaction to have – like in the case of the Stanford rapist, talking about his life when another person has died (or in the Stanford case, been raped) because of him is unspeakably shitty. But Bayley isn't portrayed as some kind of evil monster either. His actions are awful and what happened is awful, because he's a moron who wasn't good at his job. He feels bad and he should fucking feel bad. But he isn't written as some kind of cartoon villain monster like he would be in other shows. It would be cheaper if he was written that way. He had to be a fully fleshed out character.

It's just a shitty situation. And the show does well at testing your moral compass and then smashing it up and throwing it into a blender.

The flashbacks in the episode are about Bayley basically going through life as this moron slacker kid. Getting thrown in jail for drinking on top of a water tower, getting fired from a job for giving free ice cream to girls. It's all inconsequential goofy petty bullshit that happens and none of it means a thing, because he's an upper-middle-class white kid and the world's his oyster. Even when asked why he's working at the prison, his answer is to shrug and say he's here “until the next thing.” Nothing has any meaning and he's just this aimless loser who gets by because he was born in a pretty privileged area and had a decent life up to now. He doesn't look like the kind of guy who'd kill someone, so when he does without meaning to, its his future and well being that are worried about – not that of Poussey or her friends, family, or the general injustice of it all. Infuriating shit. It's supposed to be – you're supposed to be mad at this.

The finale is even more gut wrenching – we see Caputo and the MCC PR people floundering desperately, Poussey's body left for hours on the kitchen floor while they try to spin it their way. Caputo, who has talked a big game all season about really helping these inmates and being there for them, can't do anything – he's paralyzed and his actions come off as cowardly. He's a fairweather friend of sorts, with good, charitable intentions during the good times, but then unable to do a thing during the bad solely from his own incompetence. And then again, how can we blame him? Any major insurrection against MCC would lose him his job and then nothing would ever change at all. He's doing what he can. But as in real life, doing what one can isn't always enough and it won't always matter a damn.

The show excels at creating these situations that are so morally complex that there is no right answer and people will view them through different lens. It's easy and valid to say that Caputo's a piece of shit and Bayley is trash and the flashbacks about him are unnecessary, because a person died, a black person, who are so often victimized by police in real life. It's also easy to say that they're all doing their best and things are fucked either way and nothing is simple. That's valid, too.

The show is a sort of reflective mirror-prism for how you look at any number of situations in life. Not everyone is supposed to find this season pleasant or easy to watch. I think that is what makes it great art, and what puts this show up there with Breaking Bad and The Wire for groundbreaking TV that portrays the human experience. I've read a handful of editorials from black viewers who absolutely hated this season:

http://jawnbaejaeger.tumblr.com/post/146175495753/every-white-person-talking-about-how-poussey

http://wearyourvoicemag.com/more/entertainment/orange-is-the-new-black-trauma-porn-written-white-people

http://verysmartbrothas.com/yeah-im-finished-with-the-black-suffering-trauma-porn-of-orange-is-the-new-black/

They are perfectly justified in doing so. Why wouldn't they? It more directly affects their community. It talks about a problem they deal with every day and which is so much more real to them. Expecting them to react to Poussey's fictional death in the same way as someone like me is farcicial. It's never going to happen. I don't know shit compared to them.

So, like I said – the mirror-prism thing. Your view of this sequence of events in OITNB is solely dependent on your view of the real life things going on. Some people won't like this stuff because it's uncomfortable or it comes off as exploitative, and that's fine, they are perfectly justified. I would never try and patronize them by acting like I know better. I don't. I have no idea what they go through and wouldn't dream of trying to push my worldview on theirs. I'm just a guy myself, seeing this show and I like it because I'm into real life news, and seeing art that portrays things in this manner interests me. But other people have different experiences and they may find this to be offputting. I don't think the show really wanted to please everyone anyway. What it wanted was to show this stuff – to open the window a bit. Let us gaze out.

But as sad as this all is, what you should be taking away is that young black people die at the hands of the law way too often in real life. This is a fiction, but what's happening mirrors things that the black community has faced for real. This is nothing compared to real life. Black lives do matter, and the show's portrayal of these current events is maybe not even necessary when there's so much real evidence of this kind of thing happening. That's the one flaw here. It's ugly, sad and horrific, and there are no punches pulled. Maybe it doesn't need to exist or be shown. I don't know - but it is here. And so I'm writing this.

The show pulls this trick, of testing your morals, over and over again. Sam Healy is an odious man, a racist and a misogynist who uses his position in power at the prison to work out his mommy issues. But he has other dimensions to him and we see the show's portrayals of him as sympathetic in his attempts to find real human connection, to feel good at his job, to help out. He doesn't often succeed, because of his own limitations as a person. Not everyone gets a happy ending. That's realistic. The point of portraying him this way is that even terrible people have dimensions and complexities. Lots of movies and shows don't have anywhere near this kind of insight. Should art only humanize and explore those that are widely considered good and respectful people? It's all fiction at the end of the day. We should use it to challenge ourselves a bit.

Likewise with the perhaps even worse Coates, who raped Pennsatucky last year. He was widely reviled last season. But this year, we see that he feels confused and starts to regret what he did after he learns what Pennsatucky thinks of him – you know, that she isn't just avoiding him to play coy. The fact that a show with such a feminist message and written by so many women is doing this is pretty key here. For one, it's the same thing as Healy, this humanization of a rapist, showing that he's still a person at the end of the day with his own complexities. You don't have to like him. In fact you're probably not supposed to. But his characterization, his humanization shows a different point – rapists are not the shadowy monster in the bushes, and they aren't somehow less human than us, and it isn't okay to feel vindicated or different if you've done something to someone without their consent just because you aren't that old stereotype. Rapists are guys who appear pretty normal from far away. That's what Coates shows.

The fact that the show gets these reactions is what makes it great to me though. I don't think art needs to be likable or palatable to everyone. Better if it's not, even. I want art to surprise and challenge me and make me consider things in ways I hadn't. OITNB does that big time here. That should be the whole purpose of art. People not liking something is fine. With a show like this, it'll be a given. You shouldn't want art to be easily palatable and accessible to everyone, because what's going on then? You're not taking a real stance, you aren't saying anything controversial or exciting or electrifying, and it's harder to come out with something really great if you're just taking the middle of the road and not trying to push any buttons. Does all art have to be likable first and foremost, over any other quality? I don't think it does.

Images copyright of their original owners. I don't own any of them.

Watchmen (2009)

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

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

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

Director: Zack Snyder

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

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nah, must just be coincidence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fitting metaphor, finally!

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

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

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

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

V/H/S Viral (2014)

Lots of things go viral now. The Internet has become a sort of do-it-yourself paradise for people who aren't talented enough to get famous any other way. Hell, look at my own blog for a perfect example.

...I think I need to go re-evaluate my life choices. In the meantime, here's a review of V/H/S Viral I had previously written and will now somehow play back to you even though this is a text-based blog post and that makes no sense.

Director: Various

Starring: Justin Welborn, Emmy Argo

IMDb

Co-written with Tony and Michelle.

Yes.

We start this off with one of the most realistic things ever according to modern horror filmmakers – people playing around with cameras and filming their girlfriends' cleavage:

What amazing cinematography and lighting.

I'm sorry, I gotta break character so early in the review but really...who acts like this? Who in real life ever plays with a fucking camera like this? Nobody does! Absolutely nobody in the world ever uses a video camera this much and just follows their girlfriend or friends around filming all day! You'd probably be slapped with harassment fines if you filmed your significant other this much! They'd leave you in a second! But the way these movies tell it, no, filming your loved ones is the highest mark of respect! Truly it signifies decency and respect, and doesn't at all mean they're about to cut you up into little pieces and store your body parts in a freezer while masturbating to the video later.

Sigh. I dunno. At least this time we get a sort of story here with Camera Boy seeing a car chase going on outside. I guess the idea is that it's actually a rogue ice cream truck going mad, which to me sounds like the kind of thing Stephen King could only dream of writing.

Anyway, a cop stands in the road telling Camera Boy to stop filming, because I guess the cop just feels insecure about his looks today. The ice cream truck hits him and immediately kills him, severing an arm in the process – I'm so glad we're letting our kids buy ice cream from these trucks which can kill a man in a second!

Dante the Great

Then we get the first of the anthology stories – this one is a documentary about a magician called Dante the Great. Apparently Dante used to be trailer trash up until he randomly found a magic cloak that used to belong to Houdini. Then he started being able to do cool things like pull rabbits from his cloak.

"Holy crap, I forgot I had left this in my back pocket for so long! Now I get why my clothes smelled like rabbit shit for months!"

After that it was apparently a fast ticket to success, as he gets huge sold-out exclusive shows in big cities and seems to be wowing the entire world. I love some of the people interviewed...like this one couple who say Dante the Great teleported them across the country during his act, from New York to San Francisco. Gee, honey, that magic show sure was worth the hundreds of dollars for a plane ticket back to our home and missing work the next day!

"Dude, he teleported us to the Antarctic Circle! I'm so in awe of the power of stage magicians!"

Another guy says Dante the Great picked his pocket on stage. Well that's great. You really spellbound me on the art of magic now! He stole money from you after you already paid for a ticket. The guy doesn't elaborate if Dante ever gave him his money back, but given the rest of the story, I'm inclined to think he didn't. Boy, Dante's kind of an ass, huh?

As the documentary goes on, it chronicles how Dante went slowly insane because of the cape. This magician's assistant tells most of the story, about how he made friends with her (though really he's just trying to get in her pants). He does creepy things like tie up her hands with rope without warning her first:

"Next I'll use X-Ray vision to see through your already skimpy clothing...isn't that amazing?"

And also beating the shit out of her abusive boyfriend, Chronicle-style!

Assault and eventual murder? Whimsical!

Though not all of his super macho-aggro fighting exploits are so noble – for example, I really don't think killing random women who you conned into sleeping with you is kosher.

I just love the amount of logic this guy has...hey, I'll try and get this hot magician's assistant to be my girlfriend! Oh, but I'd probably have a fucking girlfriend if I didn't keep murdering every woman who came home with me! Eh, what can you say but, magical cloaks turn you into a giant dildo of a human being.

Then we see more of his logic as the cops find out he's been killing people and arrest him. He escapes and gets into a huge fight with them, apparently figuring that will persuade them. Hey, maybe if I kill the cops, they'll leave me alone and I can go back to selling out theaters to perform magic! Yeah! And maybe if you try hard enough, you can also pull a rabbit out of your ass next time.

"This is great publicity for my shows!"

Assistant chick, meanwhile, is sitting in some cop's office and the cop is telling her magic doesn't exist. Then to prove her wrong, she gets magically sucked through a portal in her chair to where Dante is:

"Hmm, my sense of irony and comedic timing tell me this moment means something..."

In the fight she has with Dante, she of course never even has any dust on her face, and doesn't have a single hair out of place or makeup smudge. What can I say about this? Clearly it's important for women to look good while fighting for their lives.

Also, why isn't he just killing her? He's clearly an omnipotent super-god of a man; why not just kill her and get it over with? Or is it really still a possibility in his mind that he could get together with her if he just beats her into submission? Really proving how different you are from the abusive jackass that you saved her from before, guy! But whatever. Clearly he's just crazy now, so that excuses everything.

The guy can teleport anything he wants and rip open bunny rabbits without touching them, but his best recourse here is just strangling her with one hand. Brilliant combat strategy.

He gets sucked into his own cloak like it's a giant vacuum cleaner, and she goes home and uses a webcam so she can show off her own ass:

"Oh, I had an extra cloak after all!"

Then she gets sucked into the cloak too, and that's the end of that!

Bonus – there's a documentary scene where it shows his mom after his disappearance, still living in the same trailer park as before. So even when Dante the Great got all that money and fame, he didn't help his own mother move out of a trailer park. That is just the epitome of class!

Parallel Monsters

The next story is about this guy who builds a dimensional portal in his bedroom. You know, like you do. He meets up with himself from another dimension, which is super cool!

“Hey, Me from Another Dimension, I totally trust you even though you're acting suspicious as fuck and I don't know what kinds of dark secrets or fucked up shit are in this other world! Let's trade lives and explore each other's dimensions!”

“Okay!”

In the parallel universe, main dude meets up with a double of his wife, who apparently finds it fun to invite two wannabe porn stars over to sit on the couch and watch reruns of The Wicker Man.

"What? They don't do this in your dimension?"

He sits on the couch with his parallel-dimension wife, who complains that he ignores her too much. To alleviate her worries, he looks out the window and ignores her some more. What a class act, man.

Then some noises sound outside and he goes outside to find that the two porn stars from before actually have worm monsters in place of dicks, which is totally what I wanted to see. This movie is really hitting all the right notes! I don't think their porn careers would be very fruitful though – they have labor unions for shit like this now.

Hey, his facial expression is the same one all the viewers of the entire movie had after it was over!

Back in the real world, the alternate reality version of the main guy pulls out his own monster-worm-dick in front of the real-world wife. I thought he raped her the first time I saw this, but really we see her again later, and she doesn't look like she got violated by a worm monster...I mean, so far as my eyes can tell on the other side of this computer screen. So maybe he just wanted to show it off. Truly, the lesson learned here is just to use protection when you enter a parallel dimension. Always play on the safe side.

It's also never explained WTF that is, or why they have them - it's just, hey, this is weird alien shit!

I also wonder what her reaction was...

“I've been married to you for 6 years! How did I not notice this?!?”

Yeah that sounds about right. Anyway, both of the wives, in both universes, kill their husbands, which ends this time travel story on a bit of a sour note. I mean, it really isn't much of a selling point for interdimensional travel, is it? I mean, double homicide on both ends probably isn't going to have NASA barging into the basement of the next weirdo who makes a portal.

Wrap-Around Land

In the wrap-around segment, more teenagers try to film the car chase with the demonic ice cream truck, which is a sentence that really makes me question what I do here. Don't I have anything else I could review? No, probably not. Am I having a conversation with myself in the middle of a review? Yes. Yes I am...

We get some dumb enlightening, powerful plays on filmmaking like a shot from the prospective of a kid being dragged along on the back of a truck. KEEP FILMING, BRAVE SOUL!

Bloody feet? No problem! KEEP FILMING!!!

Or this masterful one, which shows from the perspective of a kid falling off a bridge to his death:

Truly this is the commentary on suicide we've been waiting for. Nobody will want to kill themselves now that they've seen what it looks like from this perspective!

Ugh. Okay, I'm done talking about this part.

Bonestorm

The last actual full-length story is about kids skateboarding and making literally everyone they come across mad. I'm not shitting you here. They skateboard on a roof and make the owner of the roof shout at them. They're on the sidewalk and one kid runs into a guy's jeep and damages it, and that guy gets mad at them. What kind of ingenious recourse do they have against all these angry squares who just don't get it? Well, they mostly just flip them off and keep going.

Nothing to do with what I described just now, but funny all the same just for causing these three morons pain.

Also, filming everything is TOTALLY radical, dude. I dunno, just show me the scene where they fight Scott Pilgrim and get exploded into a handful of coins.

They then decide the United States just can't handle their douchiness, so they go to a remote, desolate part of Tijuana, where I'm sure they will be in good company with the drug dealers and slum lords in the area!

"In America they just have photos of Kim Kardashian and Sarah Palin at their skate park ritual religious temples!"

Frankly, though, the dangers of drug cartels are nowhere near as perilous compared to the dangers of Satanic voodoo ritual cults. I can see why so many of them are eager to cross the border to the States now.

Fortunately for them, though, skateboarding means you get superpowers – again, Scott Pilgrim. Read up on it. So the skater-douches go to town on the cult members, even though they're violently outnumbered and smaller, and somehow turn into Sylvester Stallone mini-me's.

Wrap Around...Again

There's a short story in between the main ones about some girl taking off her clothes in a cab for a camera and then pulling a gun on the sleazebag making her do it, saying something about revenge porn. Unfortunately she doesn't kill him before a truck slams into the cab and presumably just kills all three of them. It's kinda just an excuse for boobs, which every V/H/S movie has some sort of insane quota of that I guess this one hadn't met yet.

Will this drive up my site traffic more? I think so. That's why I put it here.

After that we get the conclusion of the main story, where Camera Boy finds the ice cream truck in some abandoned field and finds inside it...well, look:

Hey, you found the neighborhood child predator's hideout!

What were they originally doing in that truck before the apocalypse? I mean, I can't imagine the demonic truck putting all those TVs in there by itself. So that means that, before all this crazy shit started happening, somebody else put all that shit in there...people really need to ask more questions of the ice cream man.

Then what happens next is...honestly kind of hard to describe. Camera Boy sees his girlfriend on the screen bashing her own head into a wall unless he takes his own picture and “goes viral,” I guess – maybe the whole thing is some weird-ass allegory for what technology and “viral” video culture do to us. I dunno, it really isn't elaborated on much.

A new way to take a selfie.

So that's V/H/S Viral. I honestly don't know what they were thinking with most of this, but it was a bit entertaining at least – certainly moreso than the lame second installment, which felt recycled and like an afterthought to the first one. This one, while dumb and mostly nonsensical, did at least keep you guessing and wondering what was going to happen next. I wouldn't go so far as to call it good, but it entertained me more than I thought it would.

Now, my minions, go and spread this review and make it...VIRAL!

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