REVIEW: Skyline (2010)

Co-written with Tzeentch and Sol.

Since this movie was released, it has garnered seemingly nothing but vitriolic hatred. Being a curious nonbiased party, I decided to check it out and see what all the hate was about. And here is what resulted:

Director: The Brothers Strause

Starring: Eric Balfour, Scottie Thompson, David Zayas

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1564585/

The film starts off appropriately enough with a chick getting out of bed and vomiting into a toilet, which is the feeling we’ll all probably have after this is over. Notice that she’s vomiting, which means she’ll be our main character – as opposed to taking a shower, which would have simply meant she was gonna die first. It being a horror flick, and all.

Then we get her boyfriend looking into some blue lights and getting veins all over his face, a phenomenon which will surely not get him into the Fashion Club for Men, despite the fact that otherwise, he looks like a model. Because this whole scene made so much sense, the movie decides to pull us back ’15 hours earlier,’ when people could still ride in planes!

Ah the good old days *sniff*

They talk about some stupid shit and then we see that they’re arriving to party with people in bathing suits, as they meet Jarrod’s friend Terry – who I’m pretty sure is actually his secret gay lover. I mean, these two putzes act completely all over each other the entire flick. It’s borderline parody. Not to mention they both look like they could be on the cover of this month’s issue of a gay pride magazine. Add that to the fact that they pay more attention to each other than to their girlfriends and you have a silly, poorly written cast of characters.

Friends or more than friends? YOU DECIDE!

So it’s set up that Terry wants Jarrod to come work with him at…unspecified business…in LA. But Jarrod doesn’t want to, because his life back home sucks, and what would he do about his girlfriend? Uh…well, gee, you blithering idiot, how about MOVE TO LA AND TAKE THE DAMN JOB. YOU’LL MAKE MORE MONEY AND HAVE A BETTER LIFE. Why would you EVER choose living in a crappy, barely-getting-by lifestyle at home over a unique opportunity like this?! I mean…how can I spell this out any clearer??? Take the job!

But it’s OK, because this plot thread will never be brought up again. No, seriously. Oh well. Might as well just keep watching the half-assed 90210 rip-offs this movie seems to be addicted to.

Woohoo, partying and bikinis! Fun in real life. Not so much to watch in a supposed thriller.

So then Jarrod’s girlfriend reveals that she is pregnant, and they both partake in some boring dialogue that could have very well been an ad for contraceptives. Because…that’s what I want to see in a horror movie.

After that they all just kind of pass out, until they wake up to the blue lights, and the first scene is repeated all over again. Joy! Because the terrible acting, TV-movie picture quality and lack of tension works SO WELL when you just repeat the same damn scene twice in 20 minutes! This time we do get to see what happens afterwards, though, as Jarrod’s veiny eye thing is cured in a matter of seconds and he gets back to normal again. Then we get to see truly heartbreaking problems like Terry’s girlfriend finding out that he’s cheating on her! Gasp! Stop the alien invasions, WE CAN’T HAVE ANYONE CHEATING ON THEIR GIRLFRIENDS!

Oh man, look at those epic lights and those ominous dark clouds...this is some really serious stuff! Let's---wait, wait, wait...hold on...

HE WAS CHEATING ON HER? Well screw the aliens, THIS is clearly where we should be focusing our movie-watching.

So they all decide to make a break for it and run outside. Terry and the chick he was cheating with get into one car because Terry’s girlfriend won’t let them into hers…seriously, does this chick KNOW what’s going on? Does she even pay attention? YOUR LIVES ARE AT STAKE, YOU STUPID…ugh, forget it. Luckily Terry and the chick he was cheating with both get killed seconds later, so the whole plot thread was pointless. Yay!

I mean…uh…yeah, it was stupid. This movie is messing with my brain.

Also I give this movie the award for the quickest sub-plot ever introduced and subsequently dropped. They meet this other random couple in the parking lot who argue about whether or not to go with them. The guy doesn’t want to, and so the main characters move on without them. Five minutes later he gets eaten, and so the girl teams up with them…only for HER to get eaten too, once they’re outside! God. This movie is about as coherent as a splatter painting by the 8-armed goddess Shiva.

Then they meet Detective Angel Batista from Dexter, because lord knows HE didn’t have anything better to be doing at the time…must have been during Dexter’s off-season.

"Where's my dignity?!"

He plays the very important function of ‘guy to foil Jarrod’s idiotic plans for the rest of the movie, because none of the other idiots could do that even with this movie’s poor, flimsy writing. And once they get back to the hotel, they pretty much just go back to exactly what they were doing before they left – arguing, whining and moping, with the occasional break for looking out the window at the blue alien light thingys. Woohoo?

So yeah, most of the rest of the movie is literally just these morons arguing about whether or not to go outside. I’m not even exaggerating, that’s pretty much all you get. It’s pretty much like this:

JERROD: Oh, I think we should go back outside, because even though like 3 people died last time, things CAN’T POSSIBLY go wrong again! This time we’ll…uh…well, just listen to me!

BATISTA: No, and you will listen to my raspy Spanish accent!

Oh, except when we get shots of the worst CGI since the Langoliers with the movie’s aliens:

Yeah, I really don't believe that's actually "there." Sorry movie.

So yeah, the military comes in and bombs the hell out of the alien ships, which does nothing, basically. But then later on when the humans confront them, the aliens are defeated with bricks and the humans’ own fists. This may seem like stupid writing, but…no, I got nothing. It is stupid writing.

The movie ends with humanity enslaved inside the alien ship and Jarrod becoming one of them, although betraying them to save his girlfriend and her baby. It’s very confusing, not explained much at all and mostly comes off as silly with horrible special effects…but thank God it’s over!

I hate to go along with everyone else’s opinion BUUUUT this movie just sucks. The characters are crap, the story is confusing and poorly explained, the special effects are awful and you just never buy it. You never really believe there’s any alien abduction happening; it’s just sloppy. The whole thing just feels like one of those SyFy channel original movies most of the time. But hey, what are we supposed to expect when the movie is directed by people known for special effects wizardry (as the Brothers Strause are mostly known for the effects of movies like Avatar and 300)? This is crap. If you have a chance to see it, don't, and that's really all there is to it.

REVIEW: The Machinist (2004)

Director: Brad Anderson

Starring: Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361862/

Christian Bale’s 2004 film is one most often noted for the actor’s choice to go so far into character, in order to make the movie the way the director envisioned, that he lost a ton of weight and looked like an anorexic ghoul for the whole thing. He really went all out, and I think that that’s worthy of respect. He’s devoted to his job. Everyone’s got what they’re good at, and all you have in life is the ability to do it and be respected for it by your peers – I think Bale is more than worthy of that respect.

But the film is notable for more than that, such as the directing of horror/thriller master Brad Anderson, who also directed the sublime Session 9 4 years prior. Anderson seems to be channeling Jacob’s Ladder with this, as there are a lot of similarities, but you know what? I welcome it. Jacob’s Ladder is an excellent film, and while at first The Machinist might look like a cheap knock-off, it uses the influences – psychological horror, the surreality, the fact that you never know what’s real – to comment on very real things and talk about an issue just like the original film did a decade prior. This is a film about a man racked with guilt. He cannot sleep and has been losing weight ever since his terrible ordeal (which I won’t spoil here). Far from a shallow brain exercise, this is an emotional and disturbing picture of a man on the edge of himself, starting to crumble.

It builds through discordant, jarring psychological twists even from the beginning, with Bale’s character Trevor immediately thrust into a host of mind bending situations. He meets a man named Ivan who claims to work for his company, but how come no one else has ever heard of him? He finds strange post-it notes on his refrigerator, on his walls. He forms relationships with two women, a prostitute (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and a waitress at an airport diner (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), both of which become entangled in the film’s morass of plot.

His personality becomes revealed to us through the subtle things. In the beginning of the film he costs a co-worker at his factory an arm when he becomes distracted and accidentally turns on a machine at the wrong time, and that’s the catalyst for the rest of the film’s decadent insanity. His physical and mental decay are linked together through his tragedy, his terrible mistake. Everything slowly starts to fall apart from his jobs to his relationships.

A lot of these kinds of movies turn out as shallow and vapid intellectual exercises with little real human depth, but Anderson’s directing lets the depth shine through all the macabre creepiness and seedy atmosphere. The Machinist is a movie about a long spiral of degradation and guilt, and it’s made relatable by the fact that this kind of thing happens in real life, if not quite to the same extreme extent. The human mind can only live with so much guilt until it breaks.

The power of the film lies in Bale’s performance and the unfurling but clear realization of exactly what happened to make him the way he is. We have to know, and although the film is obscure and odd from its onset, it takes no shame in clearing the clouds by the end, and yet without making the viewer feel stupid. Once we know, the film stops being a guessing game of ‘what’s real, what’s in his head’ and more of a statement on the human conscience and what we have to do to make things right, to achieve even the most base level of peace. Powerful, sad and unnerving, mostly for how long it took for Bale's character to do the right thing.

REVIEW: It's Kind of a Funny Story (2011)

Director: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck

Starring: Keir Gilchrist, Emma Roberts, Zach Gilafianakis

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804497/

I remember seeing the trailer for this movie almost a year ago and thinking it looked good, so I was delighted to find that the film itself was about as enjoyable as I’d hoped. It’s Kind of a Funny Story, despite the cumbersome and indie-esque name, is a tight and well written film, and while it could have easily have fallen into the cracks of mediocre trashy modern rom-coms, it avoided the pitfalls by delivering a unique premise and some good, heartwarming scenarios that kept me interested. Of course, it also helped that I needed this kind of thing for my own catharsis…but this isn’t a blog about my personal feelings, it’s a blog about reviewing movies. Let’s dig in.

The main character is Craig (Keir Gilchrist), a 16 year old pressured on all sides who feels like he wants to kill himself. He checks himself into a mental hospital and makes friends with a troubled but caring older man named Bobby, played by Zack Gilafianakis. He also starts talking to a girl named Noelle (Emma Roberts), who is pretty much everything he could ask for in a girl – funny, open minded and a free thinker. There are other complications along the road, unfolding into the movie’s lotus-like web of problems, but the movie manages them all deftly, and I was never bored. I liked how well it managed every little subplot.

This is a good film by way of expert storytelling and the lighthearted bent it has to keep everything peppy and upbeat – although there are a few moments where things get dire, it’s never done too melodramatic or played like it’s less of a big deal than it is. Balance is the key word. Everything in this movie is balanced out to a nice, clever and level-headed crest that I rode pretty easily. There are funny parts, some romantic parts that come out pretty energetic and sensual actually and some serious and dramatic parts, all given their proper dues.

Acting is quite good, with Gilafianakis delivering a performance far greater than his goofy slapstick on The Hangover. He captivates in every scene, and goes from a deadpan, snarky monotone to a raging howl whenever he wants. I have a lot more respect for him after this. Emma Roberts is really good too, even though the script kind of sells her short with the fact that she doesn’t get many big scenes at all – but the ones she does get, she’s always fun to watch. And quite pretty. Gilchrist is a solid protagonist, and although he doesn’t really stand out, he does what needs to be done.

Mostly this is a film about getting help in tough situations and finding your place in the world. It’s aimed at a younger audience, sure, but it’s still relatable in general. The theme is a little generic – don’t buckle to the pressures of your parents and your peers and you’ll eventually get a hot chick and make friends with an amiable older comedian – but it’s air-tight, and delivered with conviction.

I will say the one flaw with this is that it was a bit short. What keeps It’s Kind of a Funny Story from becoming a real masterpiece is the fact that it doesn’t really do much outside of the conventions – it doesn’t go over and beyond our expectations like Whip It did, for instance. But it works with those conventions and creates a fun and likable film anyway, and remains far more engaging than tripe like Forgetting Sarah Marshall or Juno, if I have to point any fingers. It’s Kind of a Funny Story is a good film, honest and full of heart, and if you’re not completely stone-hearted, you’d do well to check it out. 

REVIEW: The Uninvited (2009)

Well now that we’re done with the Dracula movies, we can move onto…something even less likable and coherent.

Director: The Guard Brothers

Starring: Emily Browning, Arielle Kebbel, Elizabeth Banks

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0815245/

First, a little bit of history. The Uninvited is a remake of a Korean film called A Tale of Two Sisters, about a girl who returns home after an extended stay in a mental hospital following her mother’s death. She gets paranoid and sees things only to wind up at a shocking twist ending. It wasn’t anything great, but it was sure as hell better than this haphazard, half-assed cobble of regurgitated clichés, horrible writing and unbelievable characters. Someone get the hose ready for this review. You might need to use it on me.

Our film starts off with a girl named Anna at a party making out with some guy when suddenly she decides she doesn’t want to. Due to the rather bland narration, we see it’s actually her recounting a dream she had to her psychiatrist. In the dream she comes across a garbage bag with a dead body in it that tells her not to go home. Thinking dead bodies talking are passé, she decides not to listen, and goes home anyway. Apparently her mom is sick in bed or something, and so she picks up a watering can, goes to leave and then watches the boating house her mom is staying in explode randomly. I guess that boating house was copyright ACME corporation 2009…out of work in cartoons, they turn now to making horrendous psychological horror movies. It’s a dark time for them.

That doesn't even look like it would make the cover of a Goosebumps book. It's more like 'Hallmark card trying to be SUPER SCARY for Halloween this year, but not too much, cause there's kids that buy these!'

The psychiatrist apparently decides this crazy dream means that Anna is A-OK to go home now! Her dad picks her up and takes her back home, where we’re introduced to the stepmother Rachel. Rachel is such a good person that she delivers lines like this one: “You look so skinny! Maybe I should go spend some time in the mental hospital too!” Yeah, real “funny.” About as “funny” as terminal cancer, in fact.

Then we get her sister Alex, who seems nice at first and just wants to talk about old times. That is until Anna asks when Rachel moved in with their dad, and then she turns into a moody, self-pitying, rude little whiner and stomps off angrily. Great character writing! Real people totally just change moods at the drop of a hat and no reason at all for doing so! And seriously, why didn’t Alex have to go to the mental hospital too? That’s pretty silly.

Whine whine whine cry cry cry...boring AND stupid!

After that we meet Matt, or rather, Generic White Boyfriend with No Personality. He tells Anna that he really knows what happened that night her mom died, only he gets stopped by Rachel, who tells him to leave. She suddenly acts all evil and secretive now for absolutely no reason at all and removes all doubt that she has something to do with whatever it was that happened – being that the writers couldn’t think of any other way to work suspicion into the story, they just threw all subtlety to the wind and said, ‘screw it! Just make her act all evil at random! Not disjointed or idiotic at all!’ Well I find that distasteful!

Pretty much after this the movie takes a huge nosedive into complete WTF territory as nothing makes any sense and the characters are reduced to devices to make the plot move forward. Writing so bad it makes your average internet fan fiction look good, and acting equal to that which you’d find on any given English dub of a German movie, oh my! Let’s go over some of the highlights:

There’s one part where Matt tells Anna to meet her at the Rock at 11 PM that night. She and Alex go up there and the way it’s shot makes it look like they wait for about a second before leaving, because right after they stop walking, the shot ends and goes to them in their room later. Geez. Impatient. Or terrible directing; either one fits.

But it’s OK, because Matt shows up in Anna’s room and tells her he fell off the rock and hit his back or something. So…get him to a hospital? Then he says he can’t feel his back, so of course the logical thing to do is start making out, right? Getting him to a hospital would be silly. Also, if he just fell off the rock, why didn’t he just climb back up and call to them for help? God, how many questions can a two minute scene like this raise? What are they doing?

Ha ha Anna, you made out with a dead guy! You so cool.

Whoops, turns out he’s a ghost anyway and his body is found the next day! This tragic event is so heartbreaking that they spend no time grieving for him and instead start conspiring to uncover Rachel as the killer. They go online and look up some random nonsense that they somehow twist around to mean that she isn’t who she says she is. Apparently there’s no record at all of her being a registered nurse. So what’s the logical thing to do? Apparently for Anna it’s to confront Rachel in her room. But Anna doesn’t just do it standing in the doorway, oh no. She actually SITS DOWN and LETS RACHEL CORNER HER before saying anything! That’s…that’s so stupid I can’t even articulate how stupid it is! YOU’RE PLAYING INTO THE ENEMY’S HANDS. SHE HAS YOU RIGHT WHERE SHE WANTS YOU. How dumb are you???

Dumb dumb dumb dumb, you're so dumb...

So yeah, after that Rachel continues to act completely two-faced and gives us no reason to doubt that she is indeed the murderer. There’s this whole scene in the kitchen where she’s preparing a turkey roast and stabbing it suggestively with sharp knives, and a bunch of silly jump scare hallucinations under the sink and…I don’t know. Just slap ‘GENERIC MODERN HORROR MOVIE SCENE #2751’ overtop a black screen and you’d have a similar effect.

You know, horror movie ghosts are stupid. They constantly jump out menacingly at the protagonist to try and get her attention to go do something to avenge them, but really when you think about it, why don't they just tell them calmly? Things would get done much faster that way.

And oh no, the dad won’t listen to his own daughters and dismisses everything they say without even thinking about it? Oh what a great character type; not like we haven’t seen this in a hundred other movies! And it’s not at all unrealistic and retarded, either…

So their dad leaves, leaving both girls with just Rachel to be rude to them and act like a creepy, evil serial killer. She snaps at them to wear something nice to Matt’s funeral…implying that they would just go in their pajamas otherwise? I don’t know. But it doesn’t stop Anna from just wandering off in the middle of the service to chase more hallucination ghosts! It’s not like Matt was her boyfriend or anything, right? Oh wait, he was. And this whole thing just got even dumber. I don’t even care that she went off to find an important plot element – if your movie can’t move a scene forward without making your characters look like insensitive jackasses, YOU NEED TO QUIT FILMMAKING. NOW.

The truest and most loyal girlfriend EVER, people!

So Alex and Anna go online again and I guess Google is great for finding out convenient murder histories, because they find the answers in like 2 seconds! Rachel is Mildred Kemp, a nanny who murdered a whole family just to win a father’s affections. It’s one thing if she had some kind of elaborate plan to make it look like an accident, but according to the movie she SEDATED AND STABBED THE KIDS SEVERAL TIMES. How was that supposed to work? Was the father just supposed to go “Oh, my kids went missing and are probably dead? LET’S HOOK UP AND GET MARRIED! WOOHOO!” Y’know, movie, using ‘crazy’ as an excuse for every plot-hole and vague, un-thought-out aspect of your story you have…isn’t exactly smart writing.

Also, you wanna know how the girls KNOW FOR SURE that Rachel is Mildred Kemp? They saw a picture of the wife of this dead family with a similar necklace to the one Rachel has. Yeah. Because lord knows a generic looking pearl necklace couldn’t possibly be obtained by any other means than murdering a woman and taking them from her, right? I’m glad you make so much sense, The Uninvited. Next you’ll be telling me everyone who has the same favorite cereal as the Zodiac Killer could have been him. Maybe David Fincher should make a movie about that. Maybe he should learn from this movie’s groundbreaking intellect, right?

So it can’t get worse than that, right? Oh please, of course it can. Rachel confronts the girls and almost drugs Anna, but she gets away. Alex however, has already been drugged, so Anna does the logical thing and just leaves her in the house with a crazy murderer. Oh what a great bond these sisters have. She goes and finds the sheriff, who seems to believe her, and leaves the room for a moment. This gives Anna ample time to…

Oh, is it naptime? I didn't know the actors were falling asleep during this crap-fest too!

…FALL ASLEEP? Oh yeah, I mean you’re only on the run from a crazed murderer with your sister left defenseless with her. Perfect time to take a nap! I bet sleep came as easy as pie to her!

She wakes up and sees her mother, but then it turns out to be Rachel instead, who sedates her and carries her back to the house. At the house she puts Anna on a bed, strips her to her underwear and puts her in a short white dress. I’d say this scene had a point, and that I knew what it was going for, but really I have no idea. You’d have just about as logical a scene if you switched to a scene of a monkey bathing a cat.

Then she passes out, wakes up later and finds a trail of blood and gore leading to a dumpster, where it turns out Rachel has been murdered. Alex appears covered in blood and holding a knife. The car pulls up just in time for this Kodak moment, and we get the crowning moment of the film’s awfulness as Anna tries to convince her father, with the two of them standing there covered in blood and holding a knife, that Rachel was bad and that they did the right thing. Because, you know, the fact that they murdered his fiancée would be such a powerful motivator for him to listen to them. You know, I’m actually starting to side with the dad when he just ignores everything his daughters tell him. It seems like he had no reason to listen to them after all.

"Yes, listen to us, because we're so credible and believable right now!"

The movie pretty much ends with the SHOCKING TWIST that Alex is dead, and that Anna has been killing everyone all along. She’s put back in the mental hospital and it’s revealed that Rachel got a name change NOT because she was a crazy serial killer on the run, but because she had an abusive boyfriend once – so glad the father could have cleared up that confusion at any time and saved everyone, but didn’t do so!

Also it’s revealed that the real Mildred Kemp is actually right across the room from Anna at the mental hospital…which means this hospital keeps mass murderers and traumatized, harmless teens in the same wing of the building. Think about that one for a second. And on that one last note of insane, brainless attempts at plot-writing, the movie is over.

I mean it; this despicable crap is up there with American Psycho II and Blackout for movies where literally every single scene had something going wrong, whether it was the godawful abortion of the writing or the painful cliché of the jump scares. There’s nothing good about it, at all. It’s one of those movies like Memento, The Machinist, Jacob’s Ladder or the original Tale of Two Sisters where everything makes sense at the end, and I can get behind that general idea, but The Uninvited just botches it up big time. Just because you have a twist ending explaining everything doesn’t mean the rest of your movie can be totally illogical, incomprehensible gibberish. There should still be, you know, SOME KIND OF SENSE BEING MADE.

It’s hard to even describe how much I hate this movie. I mean…it’s so bad! Who came up with this? I can’t even find information on the directors, who go only by the name ‘The Guard Brothers.’ If you’re that ashamed of your movie that you can’t even reveal your name, what’s the point? This isn’t some kind of Islamic terrorist state where you get killed for making movies like this – although I certainly wish it was now. The only name I can find info for on Wikipedia is Doug Miro, who along with one of the other writers, helped out with The Sorceror’s Apprentice the very next year. These men are dangerous to the film industry! Someone make them stop!

The Month of Terror FINALE: The Devil's Advocate (1997)

Director: Taylor Hackford

Starring: Al Pacino, Keanu Reeves, Charlize Theron

“I'm here on the ground with my nose in it since the whole thing began. I've nurtured every sensation man's been inspired to have. I cared about what he wanted and I never judged him. Why? Because I never rejected him. In spite of all his imperfections, I'm a fan of man! I'm a humanist. Maybe the last humanist.”

-Milton

This isn’t so much a straight-up horror movie in the traditional sense, but I thought it appropriate to review anyway, because really, how can you have Halloween without the lord of all darkness himself in the mix? You can’t. So let’s dig right into the Al Pacino classic The Devil’s Advocate.

This is a very big, sprawling film that reminds me of something like a John Grisham novel by way of Rosemary’s Baby or maybe Angel Heart or something. It’s a classic, slow-burning tale of getting what you wish for, of messing with things you can’t comprehend and of the temptations to evil that people in power straddle the line of so dearly. Keanu Reeves stars as Kevin Lomax, a hot shot lawyer who gets a chance to come to New York and defend high profile clients. He has a hot wife (Charlize Theron) and a doting Christian mother (Judith Ivey). His boss is Milton (Al Pacino), a wily, slick and egregious old fox who seems to have everything under control…but when things go wrong, who is really to blame?

Really this is a great movie for its huge epic scope. It pays a lot of attention to detail and builds every scene off the one before it, allowing for a real sense of completion once it ends. Each scene adds to the story, and the arc of the characters is nice and palpable. The scares are blended in seamlessly so they actually surprise you when they show up – the movie is so low-key that you don’t expect to see a nasty, Satanic face jeering at you out of a mirror or something, but then it does show up, and it works. There are no cheap thrills here or pandering moments at all; you just get a good, solid story unfolding over a long run-time – long enough, perhaps, to really dig into it.

Cinematography is excellent; check out the scene where Reeves and Pacino are standing on the odd water-top roof at the beginning, or when Reeves walks out into the street at the end to go confront Pacino, with the buildings framing him and the wind howling. Not to mention the numerous awesome, fiery shots in the climax. All of these shots really add to the overall effect of the film, like icing on the cake. Excellent stuff.

The acting is OK, with Pacino probably doing the best job. He just seems to be having so much fun that you can’t deny him at all. He’s constantly got this carefree smile on his face and this merry twinkle in his eyes, and his lines are just excellent. “In spite of all his flaws I’M A FAN OF MAN!” Great stuff. Reeves does a pretty decent job for his standards, although for the most part he’s still pretty goofy. But he does get better later on, and when the movie really calls for it, he delivers OK. Theron is decent too, although sometimes she gets a bit too over the top too fast – if she’s really that much of a spaz, the movie should’ve built it up more that way. It just seems like she loses it too quickly into the film.

And I’m gonna talk about Theron’s character for a bit now. Her arc is actually one of the more interesting ones in here – sort of a reverse Rosemary’s Baby situation, where she buckles to the pressure much faster than the heroine of that film did, and the focus is not on her but on Reeves instead. We never get to see her worst moments – we only see her telling us about what happened for the most part. One of the best scenes in the film is with her and Reeves in the church when she tells him about her afternoon rendezvous with Milton. “He was with me in court ALL AFTERNOON,” Reeves shouts – and then she reveals the bloody scars on her body…

The other main talking point of the film is Milton and Reeves spouting off at the end. It’s got great cinematography, some excellent special effects and of course the awesome dialogue between the two, which touches on many religious subjects I’m sure will piss some people off. But they’re really quite well done for a theatrical effect, which is really all I’m looking for with this, just theatrical, big and epic fun. Both actors really go at it, give it their all, and hey, you even get some naked chicks and moving statues and such to boot. I’m not going to spoil too much of this scene – go see it for yourself.

In fact, go see the whole movie. This is just awesome. It’s not the most groundbreaking ever and it won’t really change your perspective on its genre, but The Devil’s Advocate is a ton of fun to watch, and kept me hooked for a solid 2.5 hours with its sleek visual hooks, snappy dialogue and clever pacing. I couldn’t turn it off. It might not be as artful as Near Dark or as depraved as Session 9, but it is a great, hammering beast of a film that will entertain and captivate. And that’s all I really need sometimes. Happy Halloween.

The Month of Terror: Dracula III: Legacy (2005)

Alright, I did the other two Dracula borefests with all their illogical plots and ridiculous acting, what’s one more? I might as well finish off this horrific waste of time series so I never have to deal with it ever again! Then I will be RID OF THIS CRAP FOREVER! Hallelujah! I cannot wait for the day! Let’s get this monkey excrement over with for good.

Director: Patrick Lussier

Starring: Jason Scott Lee, Jason London

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303929/

The film begins with superfluous and idiotic opening credits interspliced with flashbacks from the second film, which aren’t even in the chronological order the movie played them in. Amazing attention to detail there you goddamn idiotic mongrels. Then we get to see our two favorite characters ever, the wimpy guy from the last movie and the Slow Walking Priest! Wimpy Guy gets knocked over by a few vampires and pinned down when Slow Walker appears and…walks slowly.

At least his character is consistent. More than you can say for anything else in this damn series.

Seriously, man? YOUR PARTNER’S LIFE IS AT STAKE. RUN FASTER. HOW HARD IS IT? His flair for the dramatic is reaching parodic levels. He kills the vampires unfortunately before they kill Wimpy Guy. And I say unfortunately because Wimpy Guy’s dialogue in the rest of the movie is, shall we say, special. Not to mention his acting is about as convincing as a camel with syphilis.

Slow Walking Priest talks to Roy Scheider from Jaws, reprising his amazing role as the father of whatever random church they worship at, and is told he cannot be a priest any longer because he’s trying too hard to be Bruce Lee I guess. So now he’s not even a priest anymore. He’s just a slow walking idiot.

Then we get some witty banter from our two main piss-stains that basically amounts to this:

WIMPY GUY: Blah blah blah, I’m trying to lighten the mood but failing horribly!

SLOW WALKING IDIOT: Blah blah blah, having my sunglasses on all the time means I don’t actually have to emote at all, because I’m just that cool!

They start driving to the border of this military sanctioned area I guess, where they’re then told they have to wait for the captain. He pulls up in a jeep with some stuff obviously covered up for a reason, and so instead of doing the logical thing and talking to him like normal human beings, Slow Walking Idiot just walks right up and looks at the dead bodies in the jeep. Doesn’t that breach some kind of security protocol? To hell with that! Slow Walking Idiot does what he wants!

Some guy does try to stop them, but then the weirdest thing happens…Slow Walking Idiot turns around to face him and then the guy shoots himself in the head? I really don’t get what this is supposed to be, and since it’s never brought up again, I’ll just assume they needed to pad out the running time – because that’s what you’ll be seeing a lot of in the next few scenes too.

It's never explained, does he have psychic powers? Was the other guy just suicidal? Ugh forget it.

They come across some burning crosses with pumpkin heads on them, cool! Might as well have just put signs on ‘em saying ‘WE DIDN’T HAVE ANY IDEAS.’

Then they find a bunch of terrorists taking some people hostage and stop despite Slow Walking Idiot’s better judgment. Look at the leader; it’s like a combination between Harvey Keitel and Fabio by way of Gary Oldman:

And more slightly obscure pop culture/cinema references!

Some more pointless stuff happens and through a truly weird chain of events, their car gets blown up! And the terrorists get away…well, glad that was in the movie. Seriously, what was the purpose? They didn’t meet any new characters to take with them, the story wasn’t advanced in any way…it was totally pointless! Dracula III, you are a complete failure on every level.

After that, our two morons come across a circus that has been burnt to the ground and everyone in it slaughtered. They also meet this chick named Julia, who doesn’t really do anything and who the filmmakers apparently think is important. She’s a journalist, and her companion, who should probably be in a comedy flick instead of this. But sadly he ended up in Dracula III, so all we can do is have him kidnapped by vampires and turned.

While that boring garbage is going on, we see Slow Walking Idiot fighting against…

Vampire clowns. You’re seriously giving us VAMPIRE CLOWNS.

No! Don't kill Snooki!

My God that’s silly. I don’t even know what to say about it other than I’m glad we’ve finally returned to the ridiculous corniness from the last two movies. I was really getting bored. I’d talk about how stupid it is that he kills the first one by sheer luck when its stilt-leg gets caught in a sewer grate, but frankly I don’t want to complain too much right now. Beggars can’t be choosers.

But since the film actually catered to what any normal human being would want out of their entertainment – i.e. something entertaining – they decide to backpedal fully after that and deliver nothing of worth. Like the very next scene of the characters trying to act romantic and coming off more like a bunch of socially awkward Big Bang Theory rejects.

Actually Big Bang Theory is miles better than this tripe even at its most pandering and low-brow comedy...

Seriously, it’s bad. I love how Julia goes back and forth between these two morons like the writers couldn’t decide whose love interest she was. I love how she tells Slow Walking Idiot off for saying good morning (because the previous night was so hellish) but then is perfectly fine with Wimpy Guy’s terrible horse-spewing jokes that sound like lines even Dane Cook would fine puerile. I love how they kiss and then she takes off his sunglasses and just says sorry. Then he should have said, “Whoops, forgot to mention if we kiss then you turn into a vampire too!” It didn’t happen. And the movie was all the duller for it.

So they split up. Then we get another wonderfully plot-advancing scene where Slow Walking Idiot lets Wimpy Guy drive and – surprise – he stops at the side of the road to help a woman with a baby. God, this guy is stupid. You might as well just staple ‘IT’S A TRAP’ in bright red lettering to the top of that woman’s head. And whaddya know, it IS a trap, as she throws him the baby and it turns out to be a bomb. Slow Walking Idiot knocks it away just in time and mercifully, Wimpy Guy’s life is saved. I’m so glad…oh wait no I’m not. Then they both get kidnapped by the terrorists from earlier! Oh the humanity!

So this is what happens to toys rejected from the Toy Story series for malfunctions...they get put in crap Z-grade horror flicks with bombs strapped to them. What a shame.

Because explosions always make a movie good!

But seriously, what was the idea behind this plan? Did they…anticipate him knocking the bomb away in time to save his friend, or was the kidnapping just plan B? This makes no sense! They try to kill them first and it fails, so they kidnap them? It’s like a plan hatched by people in different rooms.

Anyway they get taken to some ridiculous underground lair that looks more like something you’d see on a Looney Tunes Halloween special or something. Some stuff happens but frankly, it’s not that exciting. We find out that Julia betrayed them to get a story, although this will never be brought up again and has no relevance to the actual plot. Must be more of that padding this movie is so good at! And by good at, I mean terrible at.

Our lovely main characters all escape unharmed. God! Does anything in this movie have any connection to anything else? I mean, at least they managed to keep the basic plot consistent with the previous film this time, unlike the transition from the first to the second movie, but in doing that they’ve uncovered a whole new level of sucking! This whole movie is just a collection of random scenes that have nothing to do with the previous ones. It’s a new record for padding! Half of the movie is just filler!

Oh, and don’t you just love how we’re an HOUR INTO THIS DAMN MOVIE AND WE HAVEN’T SEEN HIDE NOR HAIR OF DRACULA??? I mean it’s in the title! How would you feel if in the new Avengers movie, you don’t get to see any of the Avengers until the 45-minute mark, spending most of the runtime with accountants and lawyers? Yeah, ripped off, right?

We do eventually see that Dracula is played by Rutger Hauer in this movie…what a waste of talent. Some more stupid long drawn-out bullshit happens, and the movie even manages to make an orgy of half-naked vampire chicks uninteresting with its very poor editing and writing:

That takes TALENT man.

Then we get the end of the movie where they cut Dracula’s head off unceremoniously (because the best way to end a trilogy is killing off your main bad guy in an unimpressive and anti-climactic one-second death scene) and the Slow Walking Idiot becomes the new Lord of Evil, through more poorly explained plotlines.

And that’s it, the LAST Dracula movie in the series. It leaves the ending open for more sequels, but I’m going to go ahead and speak for the world when I say PLEASE don’t make another one of these! This movie is horrible. It’s not even funny like the other two were at times; it’s just horrible. It’s trash-cinema, people; the kind of scum you only find in the lowest, most despicable nether regions of SyFy. It’s seriously up there with movies like Croc and Bear for purely low-rate garbage with nothing redeemable. The only legacy Dracula III will leave behind is one of shame and disgrace to mankind’s creative powers!

The Month of Terror: Scanners (1981)

Director: David Cronenberg

Starring: Stephen Lack, Jennifer O'Neill, Michael Ironside

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081455/

Scanners isn’t so much a horror film as a sci-fi one, but it’s really just splitting hairs as it’s a pretty decent movie all the same. Directed by the ever-idiosyncratic David Cronenberg, this is one of those movies that you don’t get every day. The concept is about a race of psychics called Scanners, who are in some kind of underground war as a deranged leader tries to either assimilate them to his dark cause or kill them off. The main character is a guy named Cameron Vale, who doesn’t know he’s a Scanner until he accidentally makes a woman break out into a fit in the middle of a populated mall. Seeing potential in him, a doctor sends him out to try and stop the evil Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), who is growing in power every day.

First off, I’d like to thank Scanners for providing the Internet with a timeless meme and a useful expression for those moments that quite frankly blow your mind:

This happens, out of nowhere, like 15 minutes in; maybe less. It's seriously a shocking moment and really starts things off with a bang, getting you really excited for the movie to follow. What's gonna happen next? How can they follow THAT?

Sadly I really think this is a bit of an uneven film. The first half is absolutely wonderful, with a great build up, an intriguing sci-fi world which draws the viewer in and tons of suspense. Watching Vale go on this fantastic adventure is just great, as he meets several characters and discovers new plot elements with every scene. The whole thing just unravels, though, with the second half, which is just slow and weird. I guess it’s not actively bad or anything, but it’s just so lackluster and so meandering that it just doesn’t work. Protip, guys: A climax with two guys just staring at each other and screaming didn’t work for Dragonball Z, either.

Third, the acting is a bit wacky. Stephen Lack is not a very good actor at all, as he has precious little charisma or emotional range at all, and mostly just sticks to a cardboard monotone the entire time. They really couldn’t have gotten anyone better for this role? The main chick is alright I guess, at least compared to Lack. Michael Ironside is fun, but he doesn’t get much screentime. What gives?

So yeah, a great premise and build-up soiled by a lackluster climax and third act in general. Scanners is an OK movie, and it’s definitely got its good points, but I’d recommend going for Videodrome instead.