That Walking Dead Finale, Man

The season 6 finale of The Walking Dead, AMC's most popular show about undead shambling husks clinging to dear life and also about zombies, will no doubt have people talking. This season was supposed to introduce Negan, the next big bad character of the series who was infamous in the comics for reasons I don't need to spoil because you can find people talking about it on the shallowest surfaces of Google. It did that, but it also just created a whole new set of problems. Bad problems. Problems I'm going to talk about in here with SPOILERS attached!

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Okay. Are they all gone yet? Did the people who don't want spoilers leave the website yet? They did? Sweet.

Basically what happens is, Negan shows up after this frankly pretty good finale full of tension and suspense, and the audience is shitting their pants with fear. The atmosphere and anticipation of what's about to happen was really through the roof, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan did a pretty good job overall. This character has been hyped for a while and everyone wanted to see what he would do. So he shows up, talks for a bit, makes everyone fucking sweat, and he raises a bat and kills... someone. We don't see who. It's a total cliffhanger. For the finale of this whole thing, a cliffhanger, and now we have to wait like five months to see that they no doubt killed off a character who won't affect the story in any major way for more than two episodes.

It especially sucks because I liked a lot of this season up until now better than anything this show has done in years. A ton of the episodes this time around were awesomely action packed, suspenseful and cool. I really was hyped for this finale, as I figured they could finally keep the momentum going. But instead the finale makes me see the show as that really cool friend that you liked, who came to your birthday parties early and bought you an extra drink at happy hour when you were down, but then you find out that he posted a status on Facebook asking why can't HE use the "N word" if rappers can do it, while you were asleep. It's a buzzkill.

It's just such cheap hack work writing. What the hell am I supposed to say? It reeks of social media pandering and bullshit hash tags and planned, calculated and focus-tested art. They've basically been given a license to keep pulling this shit over and over again – more cliffhangers dangling the prospect of death in front of you, more tricks and gimmicks to get their social media team something to do. It's bullshit. The idea of AMC putting up stupid polls asking who we think got killed and the hash tags and the fake suspense is nauseating, because you know they've probably already started by the time this blog post is up. It's anti-storytelling. Drama sucked out with a liposuction and replaced with corporate marketing. It couldn't be more transparent about that if we were talking about Casper the Friendly Ghost.

The Walking Dead just feels desperate with how often it does these ridiculous cliffhangers and drawn out “suspense” parts with disappointing returns. We should've seen the writing on the wall way back in early season 5 when they kept splitting up the narrative between Beth's hospital story and the rest of the gang – it was evident back then. They did it twice this season with Glenn's dumpster hiding extravaganza and then with Daryl getting shot in the previous episode – a complete non-story now, since he barely showed up in the finale. It's like we've all been enabling a drug addict, just going okay, he's not too bad, he was lucid at dinner last night so let's just not say a word. But then he steals Mom's jewelry she inherited from her dead aunt to pawn off for another ounce, and we look like fools all the more for it. And I know it's ridiculously hyperbolic to compare a TV show ending I didn't care for to a drug addict, but come on, it's the Internet and that is what we do here.

This really is the final nail in the coffin of network TV. It's done. That battle's over and Netflix's “put everything up at once” model has clearly emerged the winner if shows as big as TWD are resorting to desperate pandering garbage like this. It just shows how little integrity the show has left. They needed a way to compete with Netflix's juggernaut shows that come out all at once and are usually pretty fucking amazing. Since they have to wait another six months for another season while Netflix just pops out shows like the Octomom, well, we get cliffhangers and gimmicks to keep the audience abuzz on social media. A good story would have done the same, but when has that ever been in style? Someone is having a very good day at AMC's media marketing relations department, seeing the stats go up and up. I guess I'm not helping in that regard.

If it seems rather dramatic that I'm ranting about this, well, it's because I like the show when it isn't pulling dumb shit like this. When it doesn't fall back on the goofy cliffhangers and the ludicrous drawn-out parts, the show has a lot of good stuff going for it – strong acting, good characters, some good drama here and there and some good action. It's well worth watching, or it has been in the past anyway. But it sucks that the people running it are more interested in gimmickry and fake-outs than in real storytelling. The Walking Dead will remain successful, I have no doubt about that, but I think the illusion is over and we're kind of beyond the pale now – people will see the difference between this and really great TV.

I think overall, it's telling that the most cynical part about the nihilistic zombie apocalypse show is not the malaise of the main characters, but instead the marketing team's chokehold over the narrative, strangling the life out of it with these trash tricks and tomfoolery. That's depressing.

So Let's Talk About The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead finished its midseason finale, "Start to Finish," and predictably, the Internet is full of a variety of colorful complaints. I've only really been watching this show for a year, but I've read all kinds of criticisms about it dating back to season 2 or so, and I think it's time to just sit down and talk candidly about this show. Can we do that? Let's give it a shot.

First, the midseason finale. SPOILERS if you haven't seen it, so don't read any further if that's not your bag.

The finale was mostly fine. It wasn't terrible or anything. Parts of it were quite blood pumping good - several cool action sequences and some solid tension between Carol and Morgan being the highlights for me. It moved along at a fairly brisk pace. But then it just kinda ended, way earlier than I thought it would. Maybe I was expecting a 90 minute episode or something - but even at the usual 45, they still could have resolved a few more of these plotlines. As is, it felt a bit like they just cut short before we got to a really climactic moment for any of the various storylines.

Like, really, we couldn't have had a cool climactic end to the situation between Carol, Morgan and the tied-up Wolf guy kidnapping Dr. Denise? We had to end Rick's story this year with him and the others just wandering out into the crowd of zombies? We know their deaths won't come from these things because that would have been the big emotional payoff, and that would have happened this year in this episode. The show obviously has something else planned. So what's the deal? It just feels like this was a placeholder, a stop-gap to move the show from one point to the next, utilitarian-style. Which is not a good way to do a show. The Carol and Morgan fight should have felt huge, and Rick getting to the armory should have been the climax of the episode, not some cliffhanger cut off in the middle.

Surely - predictably - they want to open up next February with a real bang in some new way. But why does the show have to sacrifice the midseason finale for that?

The show's real problem is inherently intertwined with its very nature. The show's intent isn't really to build toward some great epic climax or to have some big earth-shattering discovery for one character - it's to show the endless, droning life of a zombie apocalypse. That premise combined with the 'ooh, let's get a cliffhanger' nature of network TV inevitably leads to a lot of dead space in the show and a lot of diminished payoffs. I like the huge cast, but the number of characters inevitably leads to the show only developing them right when they're about to die in the same episode. That gets predictable fast.

Maybe it would have been better if it was an Orange is the New Black or House of Cards style show where every season is just released at once. Maybe a more out of the ordinary structure would have helped, one where all the episodes could focus on being self-contained and good, rather than several of them ending on dumb cliffhangers that end up taking weeks to resolve. The show often feels protracted to a fault, and while I like a lot of things about it, it seems like they could probably put more effort into some of the filler stuff in between 'big moments.'

Too much of the time now, The Walking Dead teases you with good build-ups and strong character acting, but then fails to deliver the real punchy moment, the zinger so to speak, until weeks later, when the moment is supposed to happen for the best ratings or some other evil reason. It'd be a better show if we could just get the good stuff quicker and keep the show rolling without losing the sense of pacing and build-up. The way it is, too many scenes and episodes feel like they came off a conveyor belt, as similar as they are to ones we've already seen before.

I do remember this show taking more risks in its earlier seasons. Things felt more dramatic, and there was a lot more blood pumping energetic action going on. The characters were livelier and showed more personality - though the show's way of showing how they adapt to the zombie apocalypse makes it fitting for them to seem so much grayer and quieter as the years go on. I don't mind the quiet moments in the show and I never have, though the dialogue could sometimes stand to be a bit more substantial and less hollow platitudes in the real sad moments. There have been a lot of critiques on dialogue in the show tending to mull incessantly over how life has changed in the apocalypse. I don't mind that aspect too much myself, as it's not like they can talk about fucking Gray's Anatomy or the newest issue of Sports Illustrated to pass the time. What do people expect?

But I get it. Is that really going to make for compelling TV season after season? Not if they don't introduce more interesting new characters. The show has had a lack of them for a while now. A few good ones here and there, but there are so many characters overall that they get lost in the shuffle, and none of them are really properly developed. And there hasn't been an awesome villain since The Governor died. But then, I hear this Negan character will be good. Here's hoping. This, I think, could really fix the show's problems.

In the end it's still a fine show for what it is. I like a lot of the main characters and there are enough good, dramatic moments going on for me to want to see what happens. But at this point, I just wonder if the show really has it in it to deliver something drastically more exciting and better. Can it really be better than it has been lately? I guess we'll see.

Beneath (2014)

As this is a brand new movie put on Netflix just a little while ago, I'd like to take this opportunity to say how thankful I am that I can review these movies and help a budding young start-up company like Netflix succeed in this harsh business climate. I'll be waiting for my check in the mail, guys. Just make it out to Cinema Freaks.

After the runaway successes of Mine Games in 2012 and Abandoned Mine in 2013, film producers thought they were really onto something with this whole mine thing. So this year we got the third installment to this epic trilogy with Beneath – a true-life story, apparently, about a bunch of miners that got stuck in a mine or some shit like that. I would try and put some effort into looking up about the true story that inspired this, but frankly that would be doing more work than the writers for this movie did. And I'm not about to do that.

Director: Ben Ketai

Starring: Kelly Noonan, Jeff Fahey

IMDb

We start this crap off with a bunch of bland white people hanging out in a shitty bar celebrating this girl Sam's dad's retirement from working in a mine. There's a bit of flirting, a little bit of back and forth banter, but really nothing substantial.

"Do you think this movie will seem better if we keep on drinking?"
"Probably not, but go ahead and try!"

The first twenty minutes of the movie are like this, in fact. Pretty much just bland people talking about bland things. I'll give it credit for not being complete asinine stupidity or cliché like the other two mine movies I've done, but it isn't replacing that with anything else. I guess the only thing of note that happens is when the guys dare Sam to come down in the mine with them because her whole college tuition was paid for by her father's mine job.

Being a complete idiot, she of course says yes. And to one up her on the idiocy scale, both her father and boyfriend have absolutely no problem with her coming down into the mine with them even though she'll probably just be a liability and will just be standing around doing nothing. I don't really know how I'm supposed to be invested in this – I mean, Bring Your Daughter to Work Day was awkward enough for the daughter of the town gynecologist. You don't really need to compete here, you jackasses.

"Dad, I miss the old days when you just neglected me all the time as opposed to dragging me down into a mine to die."

They have some more very bland, safe dialogue that mostly listens like they were just trying to fill the space. Because you know how it is – creating dialogue is kind of like filling in the cracks of cement on the sidewalk. It's just a utilitarian thing.

"So how much longer do we have to read the boring dialogue from this script? I could come up with better lines in my sleep!"
"Hell, I could come up with better lines drunk off my ass!"

You know what else is utilitarian? This crazy looking machine!

Chekhov's Gun? What's that?

Which I'm sure won't be used to kill anyone in this movie. Because that would just be foreshadowing if you showed THAT ahead of time!

Sigh. The movie apparently thinks it's interesting to have the characters wandering around explaining things about the mine. If you really think that's a good idea, just stop watching this movie, drive to West Virginia and ask them what they think about climate change issues and carbon emissions, and you'll have a much better time.

It turns out even the mine itself is bored of them, as it falls asleep and collapses randomly. I guess it was just waiting for the right time to do that, as clearly it's an incredible coinky-dink that it happened when they were inside the mine for five minutes AND the only time they brought a “fish out of water” character in with them! How dramatically convenient!

I also love that they decided to bring her down into this mine that apparently was in danger of collapsing. Even disregarding the randomness of nature, you'd think they would've gone “hey, fragile young woman who has no experience in mines, maybe THIS isn't the right mine for you to come down into because it might collapse!” But that wouldn't have been as funny. Or, again, as dramatically convenient, because if real life can't imitate art, what can?

They all make their ways to this special emergency center thing where they can hide out and not die from a lack of oxygen. One of the guys, I guess, hurts his leg when a rock falls on it, and so he's pretty much confined there. They all demonstrate their Oscar-worthy scowls and looking worried skills, but really, unless this is going to be the mine version of The Thing, I just can't bring myself to care.

Just keep scowling at the floor. For inspiration, try thinking of how disappointing the final movie will be when you actually see it.

They eventually make the decision to go look for some of their buddies who might've gotten lost in the chaos of the collapse. One guy says he doesn't want to go wandering around out there, and the others get mad and start bullying him into coming. I don't even get it; if he doesn't want to come, who gives a shit? Just leave him there and go yourselves! Why would you even want someone with you who isn't into the idea? It'd just slow you down in the end! But I guess they're operating on “teenage girls going to the bathroom” rules and have to travel in a pack, you know, like all miners.

"You don't want to go with us? Well that is just unacceptable. You are now the new leader of this group!"
"But that means I could just call off the whole thing with my newfound leadership power!"
"Durrrrrrrr...."

Because this is a place some of these people have worked for years and should know it like the back of their hand, of course they get lost and spend a lot of the next half hour just stumbling around. If you aren't tired of scenes of characters wandering around in the dark shining flashlights at rocks, well, you will be after watching this shit for 25 minutes straight.

I guess one guy does finally get caught in that wacky death trap machine from earlier, but even then, it's not like the movie lets us see that. Like most great horror movies, it skimps out on the gore and instead just replaces it with a pitch black void of soul-sucking nothingness.

They just do more of the same shit again and again for the rest of the movie's second act. At one point, they're called back and end up losing the oxygen in their tank, which really stresses Sam's father out. He goes on a whole rant about how Sam wanted him to retire because she's a big shot lawyer now and her and her mother both were conspiring against him. It's really quite an insane temper tantrum and has nothing to do with anything in the rest of the movie, nor does it ever come up again. So...good job?

Somebody needs a nap. Or a swift decapitation - whichever's more your bag.

I just really want to see them get out of this alive, then Sam's dad comes to visit her at her lawyer job and the exact same thing happens. Like they get trapped inside a law office and have to navigate through the endless halls of litigation paperwork, manila folders and zombies in order to get out. That would be a good movie.

Because, yes, that’s what this movie has in its third act - zombie-like creatures.

I’m just so glad this based-on-a-true-story film is keepin’ it real for those of us who are really interested in mining accidents. The usual dangers are all here. Suffocation, dying of loneliness...zombies.

They have a battle with this one guy who gets possessed and lock him in a cage. He then turns back to normal and says he’s fine and doesn’t understand why he’s locked in a cage. This character, throughout the goddamn movie, has been consistently abrasive, assholeish and rude. So really, maybe he wasn’t possessed and the characters just finally pulled the wool off their eyes and realized he was a dick.

"Yeah, we know you weren't really a killer. We just really hate you."

They go back to the shelter and come up with the brilliant idea to blow up dynamite to try and make a hole so they can escape. They find the very old dynamite very easily, which looks exactly like they just took it out of a Roadrunner cartoon of course, and really why wouldn’t they have this unlit dynamite from a hundred years ago in a mine that people still use today? It just makes the most sense.

Then they light them and nothing but a small piece of paper with 'BANG' written on it pops out.

Unfortunately, before they can get to that, there are more zombies afoot who can magically change back to human whenever they want! For a movie trying to sell itself as ‘based on a true story,’ they sure are good at pulling these zombie rules straight out of their asses, because I’ve literally never heard of this being a thing at all.

Then they blow up the wall and of course escape the thunderous, fiery ball of destruction that ensues by hiding behind a wall a few feet away, and survive without a scratch on them. Realistic, just the way I like my horror movies.

Then they get saved and it turns out that, DUN DUN DUN, Sam has become a zombie too! Oh no! That will immediately get noticed and then they’ll quarantine or kill her to prevent the spread of it, and nothing will happen at all!

I don't even get it; how did nobody not notice this? Why are they able to transform back and forth at will? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!?! I guess we'll never know, because this movie is over. A door that should remain closed, I think.

This movie is boring. I mean, the least they could have done was just go all the way with the abject ridiculousness of the scenario and toss in giant slimy worm monsters in the mine, or characters having sex scenes set to ridiculous 2000s wannabe grunge music. No, those things wouldn’t have made it a better film, but at least it would have been kind of funny.

Instead we got the tired “based on a true story” crap, which apparently for this movie meant making it as dull and bland as they could, with little memorable dialogue, no good characters and really only like one or two half-decent scares. Oh, and zombies and stuff, which totally round out this whole thing as a credible true story. I apologize for continually repeating that sarcastic quip about the movie’s realism, but honestly it’s just baffling to me that these movies even try to pass off that “true story” crap as a legit story device...when you confront them about it, a lot of them will say “oh, well it’s only based on a true story, but we took some creative artistic licenses with it and made it better!”

If you’re really trying to tell a true story, why bother fabricating ridiculous horror cliche tropes around it? Why not just make your own fictional, fantastical story if you want to throw in zombies? You have to pick one - either it’s a true story, in which case you stick to realistic horror (which can’t be that hard to do in a claustrophobic, dark-ass mine), or you just ditch the “based on a true story” angle and tell a goofy fantastical horror tale. But you won’t, because saying it’s based on a true story is an easy shortcut to cover up for crap writing.

Sigh. On second thought, doing these mine movies was a terrible idea. Why didn’t anyone stop me? The only pervading lesson throughout all of them was, don’t ever go in a fucking mine.

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

REVIEW: World War Z (2013)

When I hear "zombie movie," I usually expect some things. I expect a story with some degree of social commentary, characters scrambling to survive and lots of bloody action. What I do not expect is for the filmmakers to take the "zombie" part so literally as to make a movie so dead inside and decrepit as World War Z.

Director: Marc Forster

Starring: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos

IMDb

Apparently this movie was based on a book. I haven’t read the book, so this will be about the only mention of it in the review. From what I’ve read though, apparently the book was a collection of interviews and fake documents about what happened after a zombie apocalypse. I haven’t really read up much on it, so take what you will from this, but honestly that sounds really interesting and cool. So how did director Marc Forster (who made fucking Stranger than Fiction, one of my favorite movies of all time, what is he doing with this shit?!) go from that concept to such an asinine collection of soulless cliché?

I dunno. Let’s find out.

We start off with Brad Pitt and his wife Mireille Enos living out a perfectly idyllic Stepford Wives-style fantasy with two little girls who have a debilitating disease: they have no personalities. I guess it was contagious, though, since Pitt and Enos don’t have them either. Pitt says he doesn’t want to go back to his “old job.” I guess that makes sense too:

Anyway, they hear some stuff on the news about “martial law,” and Pitt decides it’s still a good idea to take the girls out for a drive. While they’re stuck in traffic, some guy on a motorcycle breaks off the side mirror on Pitt’s car. His response is about what you’d expect…he just sits there and blankly stares. When they get out of the car and an explosion happens, his reaction is similarly blase. Seriously, did Pitt just take a double dose of Valium before filming? YOUR FAMILY IS IN DANGER, MAN. THE WORLD IS AT STAKE. HAVE AN EMOTION.

Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave!

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

"Gee, I sure do like driving..."

On the one hand, I do like how he is seemingly trying to remain calm for his kids – sometimes it comes off as pretty genuine parenting. But it’s not that often, and it really doesn’t come up again for most of the rest of the film. And Pitt still keeps that same boring, generic monotone the whole time, never raising his voice or even ditching that pretty-boy expression on his face. Is this really the same guy who starred in Se7en, Twelve Monkeys and Fight Club? Dude, you’re a great actor! What happened?

Oh. Oh, that explains it…

So they all go on some tirade through the city, running from these zombies, and honestly I have to level with you guys here: whose idea was it to make this scene like something out of a fucking video game? The whole thing is about as nauseating as you can get away with in a movie, with the cameras shaking like the cameraman had a vibrator down his pants the whole time. And the action is constantly jerky and hard to watch – you will seriously have a hard time making out what is going on at any point during this sequence.

Nice lighting; did you steal that from one of the kill scenes in Horsemen?

And that’s one of the main problems with this. So much of the action – which is supposed to be the focal point here – is more like video-game action than movie-action. It’s like I’m watching someone play the latest Call of Duty game, and if I wanted to be bored that much, I’d just go back to my college’s game room and hang out there for an hour. There has to be a certain kind of narrative structure to your action. It has to feel like a movie and have that kind of flow to it – so you can see and understand what’s going on, and so it fits into the whole of what’s going on with the rest of the story. With this movie, it’s just like they stop everything else to throw in a shitty video-game wannabe action scene. I won’t harp along too much about this, but I’ll just say I am glad Pacific Rim came out a little while after this and reaffirmed my faith in action movies. God bless Pacific Rim.

So I guess after that nonsense is over, Pitt thinks he’s been turned and so he stands on the edge of the roof and counts to 12 – the movie’s magic number I guess – and sees if he’s about to turn into a zombie. While this could have been a very touching scene, the movie sees fit to suck it dry of any life whatsoever. Then they go to this military survival compound where the leader, who fits the role of Helpful Black Man for the movie to a tee, tells him the president is dead and the world is in ruins.

"Did I get something that kind of resembles depth and development if you squint? Yes? Okay. We're good for the entire movie now."

Wait a minute. So the president is dead and all we’ve been focusing on is these idiots running around in a shitty building? What the hell? Wouldn’t the president dying of a zombie apocalypse be a little more interesting? I guess not. I also have to applaud the secret service for being so incompetent as to do directly the opposite of what was best for the country – let the president be the first one to die in any situation. They truly are the country’s finest.

"How do I work this computer again?!"

Anyway, so the guys at the military base want Pitt to come back and help them, as apparently he used to work for them or something. He doesn’t want to, but they remind him that they are helping his family. Pitt gives in without any more hesitation and any drama that could have come from this with his wife is safely done away with. Phew. We almost had some character-building moments there. Thank goodness that won’t be happening.

Pitt teams up with the military dumbasses and they have this guy, a doctor who seems to have some rather interesting theories about how nature works…

“Mother Nature is a serial killer. No one's better, or more creative. Like all serial killers, she can't help but have the urge to get caught or what good would all those brilliant crimes do if no one takes the credit? So she leaves crumbs. Now the hard part, is seeing the crumbs, the clues there. Sometimes it's in your thoughts where the most brutal part of a virus is. Turns out to be the chink in its armor. And she loves disguising her weaknesses as strengths. She's a bitch.”

Uh huh. Yeah. And a second later he talks about how long he spent in school – just return your diploma, buddy; you won't need it after all. You can probably still get your money back.

Then they run into some more zombies outside. You know what would be a good twist? If this whole thing was just a big, incredibly elaborate game of that “zombie tag” people play on college campuses. That would be pretty funny. The scientist guy, Mr. Mother Nature is a Serial Killer Guy, is so good with his gun that he runs and trips and somehow shoots himself in the head.

Well buddy, I guess you were right – Mother Nature is indeed a serial killer. Brilliant observation. And you are Mother Nature's most recent victim, in the Darwinian sense anyway.

Pitt and the rest of the morons end up hiding out in this abandoned base type place, where they lament the fall of their idiotic comrade who shot himself. How stupid do you have to be to be in the middle of a fucking zombie war and die not by the zombies eating your brains, but by tripping and shooting yourself? I sure hope they don’t write that on his epitaph. Even the angels would be laughing.

Then as they’re about to leave, they come across a CIA guy who got arrested for selling guns to the enemy. The soldiers tell Pitt to pay no attention to him, but Pitt thinks he could have some useful info. So he sits down and talks with the CIA guy, who tells him that Israel was the first country to know about the zombies somehow, and they have put up a giant wall to protect their city from the zombies. So wait a minute, why did these soldiers even have that CIA guy locked up still? Why weren’t they listening to him? I get it, he was aiding and abetting the enemy with guns – but it’s the fucking end of the world! The enemy he was selling to is probably a rotting living dead corpse by now! I really don’t think the enemies need his guns anymore, guys!

So basically if Pitt didn't have a second thought, that guy would have been left in there and no one would have even thought to ask him about the information he clearly has - wow.

Sigh. This is just another example of what is wrong with this movie – clearly the writers just didn’t give a crap. Because this shit right here? This goes beyond a matter of taste. If you like this, if you can overlook it – fine; I have no problem with that. But it’s shitty-ass writing. It’s the kind of writing that shows that the people making this movie didn’t care enough to give their viewers a good script. They didn't care that they were just serving up the lowest kind of base slop there is. While that may sound harsh, I don't see a reason not to be. There is a difference between a plothole or two and simply not caring about what you write because, hey, nobody really pays attention to the plots in these movies anyway, right? Wrong. You should always try to write the best script you can for whatever medium it is you're writing for. Which these hacks clearly did not, and I cite this scene as well as...well, pretty much everything that follows plot-wise, as evidence.

Now, it may sound like I’m making a mountain out of a molehill here. It’s just one plot hole, right? Well, the rest of the movie has about as many more as there are craters on the moon.

For another example of how the writers just don’t care, take a look at the next scene. Pitt is flying in a helicopter above Israel and he and the pilot see a huge explosion break through the clouds. His reaction is to stare blankly and never acknowledge it again. Why start having wonder and excitement now? His wife calls and basically just cries over the fact that he’s in a plane and going to a country without America’s Next Top Model.

I think this is the most dialogue she has in the whole thing - just crying on the phone wondering if he's okay. That...is really weak.

Seriously, SHE HAS NO PERSONALITY. How is this not incredibly offensive to every woman who ever lived past 1970? It’s one thing to have a generally passive wife who takes care of the kids and sometimes cries, but come on – this is 2013 here! Give her a personality! Because as of right now, she has none. She doesn’t even do anything. This whole movie I was like “well, okay, that scene was a bit weak for her, but maybe in the end she’ll…” Nope. She never does a goddamn thing. To pull a character like this off, you need to take a cue from something like Breaking Bad – even if you have a female character who generally doesn’t contribute much, give her some spark, some personality, some kind of stake in what happens. Do not make her just some stock, one-note character there to cry and look beautiful and hug the main character.

To be fair Brad Pitt’s character is just as boring in a stock, generic male character way. But really I’m just disheartened, to say the least, that they took a great actress like Mireille Enos and put her into a role this lame.

So yeah, they get into Israel, where the leader of the country compares concentration camps to the Olympics while trying to explain how they figured out zombies were coming. I thought these Middle Eastern countries were supposed to be the ones chastising us for making low-brow comments about sensitive issues, not the other way around. Then the guy takes Pitt outside and shows him how they open the gates to this big wall they’ve built around the city to let random people in. Apparently it’s because “every person we let in is one less zombie we have to kill.”

Nice stinkeye there, pal. And you're not really the leader of Israel; you're a Borat extra and you know it!

….

Except for the infected ones who make their ways in in desperate moments of panic, you dumbasses! There are so many ways this plan could easily fail! God, this is making Land of the Dead look like Night of the Living Dead in comparison. All that’s missing in this shit-pile is for the zombies to literally do a human pyramid stretching up the entire length of the wall and catapulting over with very little effort…

I love how they're just falling from the sky like lead bricks. So resourceful, yet so clumsy. Also, notice how I can't seem to get any good stills of the action in this film. That's because no shot lasts long enough for the cinematography - which actually features some rather gorgeous scenes - to have any effect on the viewer. Every shot is hyperactive and is gone after just a few seconds. Like a video game, the camera work is jerky and way too angular - giving the viewers really no time to appreciate what's going on. Pretty lame, movie.

Aw, fuck. Oh well, it’s not like I had any hope for this movie at all. Maybe the Israelis should have spent less time letting everyone under the sun into their supposed hallowed fortress, and more time making that wall bigger. Also, who knew zombies were such good cheerleaders? They can really make a human pyramid. Maybe they can cheer on the other zombies as they eat the brains of the last surviving humans…hmmm…

Nah.

Pitt survives in a plane with this one chick whose hand got cut off. He comforts her and what not, and it maybe could have been done well, but again – they skimp on anything even remotely resembling development for these characters. They have a scene with zombies on a plane, which sadly is not an Asylum film starring some cheap Samuel L. Jackson knock-off, but instead a scene where Brad Pitt fires a gun inside a plane and the zombies fly out like a bag of marbles poured off the Empire State Building.

"I knew I should have gone for Shaun of the Dead instead! Nooooooooo!" Oh well. Maybe some of them were professional skydivers in their former lives.

Amazing how boring and lame this movie can make even a scene that silly. Yeah, you keep on doing shitty video game-style action scenes…ya stupid piece of shit.

Then the plane ends up crashing. Pitt somehow survives, along with one-handed chick, and they go find this secret lab place where these scientists are who can, I dunno, help them stop the virus, or something like that. Apparently while on the plane, Pitt was spacing out while a bunch of flashbacks played in front of him, which told him that people who are already sick don’t get infected by the zombie virus. Decent enough explanation I guess, and I do like the way he figured it out – see, I can say good things about this after all!

But the soul crushing disappointment of that revelation comes when we get to this lab place and we hear the scientists’ brilliant idea for how to stop this virus: make people sick with something else and so the zombies won’t notice them. Great, and what about when you run out of that virus for a few days and have to wait for more to be shipped to you? I guess whoever didn’t make that initial run is just fucked. Also, what if the virus just causes more harm to humanity? You’d end up with half of humanity dead and the other half lying in sickbeds waiting to die. Not exactly the most well thought out plan!

And speaking of which, how are the doctors who came up with this plan doing?

This movie really has something against doctors. Every time we see one they're either the first to be turned into zombies or the first to shoot themselves in the head by accident. What's up with the anti-doctor sentiments? Maybe the makers of the film don't agree with the conventions of modern medicine? Or maybe I thought about this way more than the makers of the film did.

I thought so.

So this becomes an excuse for a long, boring sequence of nothing but Pitt and a bunch of nobodies wandering around in the dark. There is literally nothing to say about these scenes – they are about as dry as you can get outside of the bowels of the Sahara Desert. I guess eventually they come across the place where the virus is and Pitt goes in and infects himself with it. Rather than fall down and start convulsing, which I would’ve preferred, he just walks right past the zombie outside, which doesn’t even seem to notice him at all.

Urrrrrrrrrggggg....Mr. Pitt....can I have...your autograph? Urrrrrggggg...

Now wait a minute – who says that means a thing? Maybe that zombie was just a huge Brad Pitt fan in real life.

But no, he gets past them all, and even has time to slip in a quick Pepsi ad:

Yeah, because if you didn’t think this movie was a soulless plastic corporate tool yet, they just go ahead and throw all doubt to the wind by putting in a Pepsi ad; a fucking Pepsi ad, as one of the last impressions your movie leaves on the audience. You couldn’t be more of a sellout if you just plastered the Pepsi logo on the front of your DVD box cover. Or, hell, let me just fix that scene for you:

So they go back to the military base, Pitt reunites with his family and they pose for a greeting card, because that’s all women and children are good for, don’t you know?

Just empty, smiling cardboard cut-outs to embrace when you feel like it and then leave behind whenever something slightly more important, like the zombie apocalypse, comes up. What an awesome message.

Then to close out, we get a voice-over by Pitt that sounds like he was forced to do it at gunpoint. Apparently the world never finds out what caused the zombies but keeps fighting anyway. Gee, isn’t that…basically every end of the world story ever? Humanity keeps fighting? It's kind of like saying "Grass keeps growing" or "The seasons keep changing." While it is an admirable sentiment to say that humanity keeps fighting, it's not really anything new or interesting, and as the last line in the film? Gee, what a bland way to end such a bland movie.

Where do I even start? Oh yeah, this was a fuckin’ piece of shit. Everything about this was painful. The characters are barely characters at all, the story is riddled with holes and clichés and the zombies are so lame – they’re seriously just awful. They make noises that sound more like a hole poked in a Coke can in the middle of a hurricane, and they mostly just stumble around like drunk idiots when they’re not falling over one another like a plague of insane locusts – okay, that last bit sounded cooler than it really is.

Zombies across the globe are writing angry letters to Marc Forster and the movie’s writers and producers every day, complaining about their poor treatment in this film. How could you do this to us, they cry. How could you make us look like such fools; such imbeciles? What did we zombies ever do to you?

But who cares what they say anyway? This movie is the absolute pits. It’s not the most offensive or unwatchable thing you’ll see (well except for the camerawork on the action scenes; that's pretty garish), but for pure unimaginative tripe, this is about the best example I’ve seen in a while. Everything has been done before and there is nothing at all interesting or surprising being done here. If you like this kind of crap, fine; I have no problem. But I think movies are important, and I think caring about quality is important. It’s not about liking or disliking a certain type of film, or about making some ironclad list of what is “acceptable” to like. You can like whatever you want. But don’t tell other people they should lower their standards. Don’t you blame me for thinking the creative process can yield so much more interesting things than horseshit like World War Z.

This whole thing has gotten me worked up - the state of modern horror/thriller movies is dire! Something must be done! But what? Well, tune in next week to find out.

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

REVIEW: Ozombie (2012)

This review could not have been possible without the help of Aaron, whose knowledge of weapons was instrumental in understanding the colossal wrongness of much of the film.

I was away on vacation last week, and from my excursions I’ve brought you all a special treat…

Director: John Lyde
Starring: Corey Sevier, Eve Mauro
Website: N/A....

"I had a Pokemon problem."

-A very obvious Digimon fan in the Special Forces group in the movie

Yes, a movie about a zombie Osama Bin Laden coming back from the dead; I really can’t even make this shit up. Although they do now have a movie about Abraham Lincoln killing vampires, but then again, that’s a major Hollywood production based on a comic book. This is probably the worst zombie movie have ever seen in my life. It’s got awful acting, awful characters, awful storytelling…it’s just awful! But then again, I haven’t seen a better candidate for one of my reviews in a while.

As an added bonus, this isn't even released in the U.S. yet, and I found it in London. So you Americans are getting an extra early treat for this sucker! Aren't you feeling special right now? Let’s dig into this crapsack void of anything worth watching and lose what's left of our sanity!

We start off with a trailer for the new Call of Duty game:

They kill Osama Bin Laden and take him back in their helicopter, although I guess they didn’t plan this out too well as he comes back to life as a zombie and makes the helicopter crash into the Arabian Sea! I’m so glad this movie is historically accurate. Then we see a few magazine models getting undressed and going for a nice swim in the ocean at the sunset. These sunset shots are quite nice, so I’ll give the movie a score of one star.

However…

Yes, that’s the zombie makeup we’re going for in this movie. It looks like something you’d see in Party City’s discount $3 bin, but hey, at least the movie has great insightful writing and compelling characters to make up for that!

…heh…heh heh heh…

Okay, so we then meet our gang of Special Forces Task Members. There’s one guy who likes to fight with his shirt off, because hey, if it makes you more vulnerable AND a bigger target to your enemies, it’s TOTALLY a good idea. And then there’s this chick, who fights with a katana, because…well, I guess she just thinks having a hand-combat weapon is more efficient than using those pesky guns and killing her enemies from far away…oh, wait, it doesn’t do that at all! Man, these guys are morons! What kind of special task force is this? The literal Special Ed task force from the short bus?

What are you, an idiot? Put a goddamn shirt on! You're not tanning at the beach, you're fighting in a war!

THIS! IS! AFGHANISTAN! Also, when the bombs explode in this movie, how come they never have a blast radius of more than half a centimeter? Yeah, because explosions don't do any damage to anything but the one thing they actually hit, right? Realism at its finest!

One of them gets bit by a zombie that sneaks up behind him, even though everyone else on the team facing him should have been able to see it, so it’s just stupid. Then it bites him and he just sort of brushes it off like a mosquito bite, not appearing to be in much pain at all. Yeah, it’s only a zombie bite! Wouldn’t have you screaming in pain at all, would it? It’s just like being pinched in the neck a little.

Katana girl does not use her katana to kill him but an actual gun! So I guess she does just choose to use the sword because she thinks it looks cool. I’m not usually one to discriminate based on gender, but…yyyyeeeeaaaahhhh…this chick should’ve been kept in the kitchen.

Hahahahahaha.....ehhh, no.

So after that we see some girl dressed like she’s ready for a tour of Antarctica sitting with a stereotypical Muslim man talking about how she wants to find her brother, who was some nutbar who came to see if Osama Bin Laden was dead or not, and if not, wanted to kill him. Like idiots they can’t hear the zombies as they sneak up on them. The Muslim man dies and the woman lives to become a main character – this scene was entirely pointless except as a juvenile exposition dump. Yay!

The girl teams up with the Idiot Special Forces team after they kill all the zombies, and they all bitch and moan about having to bring her along, yet do it anyway I guess. Then we get some more exposition from the Idiot Special Forces as they explain to the girl that the Taliban are making zombies – only instead of just saying that, we get like a five minute dragging and slow scene of them overexplaining it! I’m so invested I could just crap rainbows!

And then there’s a scene of her and Mr. Shirtless getting to know each other and flirting? Color me delighted; this movie knows how to keep an audience interested! Because when I watch a movie with a zombified Osama Bin Laden on the cover, what I wanted to see was people flirting. Good job!

Then we see the girl’s crazy Bin Laden hunting brother, Woody Harrelson stunt double, as he teams up with some little Arab kid who has been separated from his family. They try to talk a little although they speak different languages. Then the brother sees some Arab people and gives the little kid to them, and…that’s really about it. What was the purpose of this scene? Did that kid’s story really merit inclusion in the film? It was barely even three minutes long! Maybe they didn’t even script this part and just literally found a kid in the desert and helped him go home. I don’t know. But it did serve the purpose of making the movie 90 minutes, so I guess that was the only criteria.

Aaaand you've just witnessed the happy ending to a completely different movie!

And okay, this next scene is pretty friggin’ bad. It’s another attempt at a ‘zombie invasion fight’ that this movie keeps trying and utterly failing at every time. And it’s just awful in so many ways! Like how about how the guy has this huge sniper rifle-looking thing that can literally just make the zombies disintegrate on contact? I didn’t know zombies were made of elastic balloon like material that just pops and explodes! And also, why is the guy holding that thing like a regular gun when he should be just setting it down to use its scope? I’m not even a weapons expert and even I know better than these people! Doing at least the minimal amount of research isn’t going to kill you, you hacks!

Also, this line: “Haven’t seen a group this big since they opened a Wal-Mart in my town.” That speaks for itself. Movie, stop trying to write funny dialogue. YOU’RE REALLY NOT GOOD AT IT. See, you even made me use all caps again!

And finally, when one of the guys gets bit, he makes the decision to go in and blow himself up with a grenade to kill the zombies. However, before he can let the grenade go, he turns into a zombie and starts running toward the group. The katana girl takes a few shots at the big group of zombies but somehow misses all of them – what, is she blind? Then as a last resort, I guess, they finally decide to use the big gun that can blow up zombies like Angry Birds when they hit something. Because I guess THAT wouldn’t have been their FIRST option, would it? Ozombie, you are making my head hurt. I need some Ibuprofen.

Oh no, he's turning into the Lizardman!

This makes katana girl, who was romantically involved with that guy who just died, go and do a bunch of swordplay stunts against a sunny back-drop that makes the scene look like a commercial. I’m expecting the Capri Sun logo to pop up any second:

Then they all go walking up a mountain with music even more over the top than a Lord of the Rings movie. You know, movie, you’re not exactly a stirring serious epic. This music really doesn’t fit.

Katana girl then goes and kills a whole team of drunken stumbling “zombies” (more like rejected “Thriller” dancers, really) to work off her anger while the other two jackasses talk about the TV show “Intervention,” because…well, I have no idea. The movie brilliantly chooses to focus on that instead of the girl with a sword killing a bunch of zombies, because I guess even the filmmakers knew they had no budget for zombie effects and didn’t even bother trying. It still sucks, though, because the dialogue they’re focusing on from the other two guys is about as well written as a kindergartener’s scribbles on the back of a McDonalds napkin while his mother is smoking crack in the bathroom.

And I just love the choreography for these katana scenes! Yeah, lady, keep on swinging it around in circles! That’s good swordsmanship!

Sword fighting is actually easy if you just twirl the blade around like a cheap little baton that a five year old would use!

Oh well, this scene was a bust, but maybe the other characters will have something at least marginally more interesting for us! We see the girl asking this one dude who the lady is whose name he screams in his sleep. He then goes on a long, long, loooooong rambling tangent about how she’s his ex-girlfriend who he still loves because she used to buy him juice boxes when he didn’t have any money because he spent it all on Pokemon stuff. No, seriously, the actual line is “I had a Pokemon problem.” I…really just do not understand this movie. Who cares about this guy’s stupid-ass life story and Pokemon cards? What’s the appeal? This is a ZOMBIE MOVIE set in the MIDDLE EAST, which could actually be pretty cool, and what are we focusing on? Some stupid shmuck and his stupid ex girlfriend and his stupid Pokemon problems. THAT IS SHIT.

And he just keeps on going, too! It’s probably the longest dialogue in the whole movie, even! It’d be one thing if this was supposed to be some kind of really campy, silly flick, but the silliest it gets is the Osama Bin Laden as a zombie angle, the rest of the movie is a pretty normal zombie movie, so dialogue this absurd and ridiculous is just unredeemable. Go back to the drawing board movie, you failed completely!

You are a LOSER!

So if you actually kept watching after that, we get some more silly fights with the very unconvincing zombies. These guys look more like extras in a Rob Zombie video. Then they run into the girl’s brother, who has a truck they can use, so of course they do only for one guy to constantly patronize and make fun of the brother for trying to kill Bin Laden. They’re on the same side, AND he has a vehicle to get them places faster, but apparently that isn’t good enough for the Idiot Special Forces team! They’re the team with the highest standards.

They reach the Taliban stronghold and, imagine this: they look for Osama Bin Laden in a cave! Pretty weird, huh?!

But unfortunately all they find is a bunch of Taliban guys making a video to tell the United States that Bin Laden is still alive. The brother guy and Mr. Shirtless Man try to stop them, but somehow they get ambushed by zombies instead, saving the two heroes the trouble. Outside, the team’s resident Che Guevara lookalike gets killed and makes a stupid joke right with his last few breaths on Earth – it’s the Ozombie formula, every bit of dialogue HAS to be completely putrid and stale attempts at humor. Otherwise how would we be endeared to the characters?!? Ugh.

Inside, the brother is fighting off the zombies and comes face to face with Bin Laden himself, you know, the guy on the cover! Funny that he hasn’t been in the movie for more than four combined minutes until now! Tell me this doesn’t look like a godawful Halloween mask:

Ah R.L. Stine would be proud.

Then outside some planes come and firebomb the whole place! Look at these special effects. Don’t they just look like they were made in five minutes in Photoshop? You could get better effects from video games.

I didn't know the US military had resorted to firing green jello at its enemies...

OK, 80s video games even!

And miraculously, the only survivors are our main heroes, who make it out without a scratch on them or even any kind of damage to their clothes. And what’s more, the brother makes it out okay too, even though he had the added peril of almost being buried under rubble after the bombs. No explanation, no nothing, just pure stupidity. Hooray for Ozombie!

Uh, yeah, planes don't fly that close to the ground, unless we're supposed to take it that the perspective on that shot is from REALLY far away, which I don't think it is...yeah, just one final slap in the face to logic, I suppose. God this movie sucks.

What am I even supposed to say about this one? It’s so bad it makes other bad movies look pretty mild in comparison. This is the kind of bad movie that will be talked about in legends, in hushed, reverent whispers, like Troll 2 or The Room. Everything about it is uniquely and specially horrendous, covering almost every possible aspect of filmmaking you can think of. But hey, it did give us a shocking insight into what’s really going on in the Middle East! We can’t trust the government to tell us the truth, but we can trust horrible zombie movies to tell us that the Taliban are creating zombies over there to wipe out our special forces! Now we know the truth.

And with this information I will----

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This review has been detained by the United States Government due to too much information given. Forget what you've read here.

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