REVIEW: Fallen (1998)

There’s always a charm to movies like this. Fallen is a 1990s thriller movie starring Denzel Washington and John Goodman; isn’t that a kick-ass cast?

Director: Gregory Holblitt

Starring: Denzel Washington, John Goodman

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119099/

This is easily one of the better Denzel Washington movies, in which he plays a cocky detective who ends up on the trail of a body-jumping demon called Azazel. This is just one of those great bare-bones detective thrillers with a premise that is original enough to stand out without trying too hard to be anything it isn’t. All the tropes you would expect are in this movie – you have the stoic and serious main character slipping to the dark side. You have the hesitant and mysterious female lead who slowly opens up to the main character. You have a little kid character, in this case Washington’s nephew. You have a stern boss and a concerned sidekick character – the latter is Goodman’s role here.

The difference with Fallen is the quality with which it is executed and the great atmosphere it exudes. The pacing is really good and keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time. There are no real unexpected twists, and yet the story is told in such a way that you want to see what happens next anyway – that is an impressive feat. The events that transpire are carried out with a real seriousness and weight that make them compelling. It’s surprising how credible they make a body-jumping Biblical demon seem, too, and it never comes off as corny or anything. The scenes where you can’t quite tell who Azazel has possessed are the best ones in the film. Creepy and atmospheric, keeping you guessing.

Speaking of atmosphere, a word I have bandied about quite a lot already, this film is flooded with it – I especially like the use of the Rolling Stones song as a constant motif throughout. I don’t really know how Azazel knows a Rolling Stones song. But it works as a suitably eerie repeating theme throughout the film. And hearing John Goodman sing it at the end…that’s just great, man. A lot of the movie is set in crowded, urbanized city streets in the wintertime, which is good because the wintry setting bespeaks a cold, frigid feel, and the crowded and urban setting makes Azazel’s people-jumping skills all the more confusing and disorienting. It’s like he has a whole flock of unsuspecting, helpless chickens to feed on.

So Fallen is a kick ass thriller. It’s well written, well acted and professionally executed, with flair and style. There’s nothing about this movie that really speaks out as something transcendent of its genre, but sometimes all you need is a good, solid B-grade movie in the genre. Fallen adheres perfectly well to all the clichés of the detective thriller genre, and does them all beautifully.

That pic does not belong to me. All copyright to its original owners.

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----

----

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.

REVIEW: Deadgirl (2008)

Okay filmmakers, a lesson for you – if you want to make something grotesque and shocking, try actually writing your characters and story in a way that makes people, oh I don’t know, ACTUALLY BELIEVE what they’re seeing reflects real life in some way! That’s how you shock people! You get them invested in the story first! Because if you don’t, your movie just turns into a godawful laughing stock of terrible plot holes, inconsistent acting and characters who act like space aliens on their first day on Earth, they're so misguided and retarded. Basically if you don’t, you get Deadgirl, and why would you ever want this half-assed, poorly written sewer slime of a film?

Director: Marciel Sarmiento, Gadi Harel

Starring: Shiloh Fernandez, Noah Segan

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0896534/

Okay, so the film starts off with two idiots staring at each other like they’re high off their asses and exchanging boring dialogue. These two mutated Bill and Ted spawns are Ricky and JT, and unfortunately they are our main characters. Because they’re bored – you know, the motivation that every great film character starts out with – they go and wander around in an old abandoned mental hospital. There they smash up old chairs and desks for no reason at all until they find…

OH COME ON, ANOTHER DOG? WHY DOES EVERYTHING I REVIEW HAVE A DOG IN IT THESE DAYS? And they’re always so menacing, too! The Stuff, Hulk 2003, Omen III and now this! What’s up with all the vicious mutts in these movies? Can’t you people vary it up a little bit and put, I don’t know, a ferocious panther in there? Or maybe a Komodo dragon. Those are always cool. Just…ANYTHING but another growling dog for no reason! I’m really getting tired of it if you couldn’t tell.

But I digress. They also go into the basement of the place and find a dead girl (hmm, wonder where they got the title for this movie…) tied to some table. JT starts to grope her and his first thought is that they should have sex with her. Not “what the hell is she doing here?” or “maybe she’s been kidnapped and the kidnapper is still in the building and could kill us” (nobody in the whole movie EVER thinks about that second one…morons!), but “let’s have sex with her.” Okay, kid, just stay the hell away from me, whoever you are. I don’t want to be anywhere near you.

"Why is that? I'm just such a lovable guy!"

They find out she’s actually unable to be killed somehow – maybe she smoked bath salts or something. And no, that doesn’t stop them from just keeping her locked up down there, either; they could potentially be onto something that could CHANGE THE WORLD, but their only idea is to keep her a secret so they can have sex with her. Aren’t these characters just so riveting? It’s like this director wanted to outdo Red State for worthless assholes as characters! Even though Red State came out after this…shut up, it’s my review!

So the movie just moseys along for a while, being boring…JT and Ricky make some promise that the dead girl will be only THEIR secret, because you know, all best friends need a psychotic bloodthirsty near-catatonic girl tied to a table or else they’ll NEVER grow closer as friends! And then the next day JT breaks the promise anyway and invites this other jackass, Wheeler, to join them in the orgy of fun.

No…no…not that Wheeler…

And if you think there’s something strange about a bunch of guys in a dark room with their dicks hanging out giving each other bro-fists for fucking what is basically a corpse, well, then you’re at the wrong movie.

"Ohoh, I can put my finger in an infected bullet wound; I'm so cool!" Movie...you...you just have no shame. Not even one little inkling. In fact I'm probably going to Hell just for watching this scene. Thanks a lot, Deadgirl.

But Ricky is the moral center of the group, and apparently we should like him more because he DOESN’T want to lower his standards to zombie girls. Instead, he asks out the girlfriend of the one guy who is psychotic enough to beat the shit out of him in public later on just for talking to her. Wheeler gets involved, too, and then starts shouting at them that they don’t need the guy’s girlfriend because they already have a sex toy they keep in the old mental hospital! And then the bullies do the only sensible thing – they lock Ricky and Wheeler up in the trunk of their car and drive to the mental hospital to force them to show them the girl!

They actually shove them in the trunk of a car like some mafia movie...what is this, Mystic River? Get over yourself Deadgirl you stupid, stupid, STUPID movie!

How did they get them in the trunk in broad daylight at a public school without anyone noticing? Shhhh…you’re not supposed to ask questions like that in a movie THIS EDGY. That’d just be missing the point!

And then we get…oh, come on:

"I'm running a very delicate operation here. And you boys will NOT mess this up for me."

Ha ha, you know, I think somebody ought to tell this kid he’s taking this whole thing a little too seriously. He acts like he’s Citizen Kane or something! Look at him, sitting there like a miniature Hugh Hefner, or some botched Superman villain or something. All he needs is a fluffy fat cat to stroke and a cigar in his mouth and the caricature will be complete.

Then we get some high school stupidity as the lead jock guy decides to take a dare and put his dick in the girl’s mouth. Given that she’s completely insane…it’s no surprise that she takes a big bite and leaves him bleeding and infected, and the next day he runs from the classroom, goes to the bathroom and explodes from the inside, because…no, wait. There is no reason. My bad. And what's that, the other jock kid goes to the mental hospital to try and free the dead girl and take her away to the hospital and police? He gets killed off faster than you can say 'blueberry pie.' Why didn't he just bring the police with him FIRST; that would've been the sensible option, and it would have prevented the rest of this whole movie from happening! I'd really like that actually.

But yeah, apparently JT has figured out that by biting people, the dead girl can spread the zombie plague and turn people into immortal catatonic zombies just like her. So are we actually going to see either of the two jocks who she killed turn into zombies? Of course not! For a movie with such a creative premise, the whole zombie thing is really just glazed over, and it's one of the film's main problems. If they would just explain the exact workings of the zombie infection stuff in this movie, it would be a lot more plausible! It would actually make people a little bit invested in the rest of this shithouse story, too! Instead it's just like 'meh, zombies, skip over it; that's not why people are watching this. Let's have more scenes of that kid putting his finger in an infected bullet-hole! That's good cinema!'

But I digress: this does give JT and Wheeler the idea that they can have 'new' zombie sex slaves too, if they kidnap women and get them bit by the original dead girl; aren't these two just delightful? I'd want them around MY daughter any day! They don’t really know what will happen truthfully, since they weren’t there when the original girl got turned, and they have no idea what other side effects it will have…oh, who cares about this shit anyway? Just show the scene where they get the daylights beat out of them by a prostitute:

HA HA HA! Totally worth the price of admission! I'll give the movie one star for that alone, just because getting the shit beat out of them by a prostitute is exactly what these two anuses deserve.

And one ridiculously over the top scene later, they run into that chick whose boyfriend got his penis bitten off and infected and exploded, who…somehow found them at this abandoned gas station at the middle of the night? I don’t know. They kidnap Joann (yeah…that’s her name; couldn’t really fit it anywhere else) and tie her up back-to-back with the dead girl. How come they don’t just kill Joann now? How did they even take the dead girl off the table without her fighting back? I guess the answers to these questions would prevent our brilliant climax of having JT and Wheeler circle the two tied-up girls like cartoon Bugs Bunny villains twirling their mustaches.

Ricky comes in with a machete…seriously, a machete? Where did he get that? He cuts off Wheeler’s hand when he tries to touch Joann…

…and then the dead girl gets loose and starts killing everyone. JT stabs Joann (I guess because he wants Ricky to get the Deadgirl to bite her so Joann can be his undead sex slave...? I dunno) and somehow Ricky gets her to be undead like the dead girl even though we never see her get bit, putting her in some nice lingerie and everything. And we get some nice sunny-day shots of Ricky walking around clean of bruises and blood and just enjoying life! So I guess everything is all good then!

Comic books are the cure for anything, even necrophilia and losing all your best friends to a bloodthirsty uncontrollable zombie.

Except…how about that ZOMBIE on the loose?! What happened there?!? There’s no resolution! We see her running away into the night and…that’s it! What, so there’s a zombie running free and you’re just going to act like everything is completely normal? What the hell?

And for that matter, what about all the kids who went missing? We never hear about what happened to that jock kid who exploded in the school bathroom. And nobody ever asks about what happened to the other jock kid, JT, Wheeler or Joann, at all? Shouldn’t there be some kind of investigation going on? Anything?! If you’re going to rip off Shaun of the Dead, movie, DO IT BETTER THAN THIS HALF-ASSED NONSENSE!

So all in all, Deadgirl was totally worthless. I can’t even think of one redeeming factor. It tries to set itself up as a serious social commentary on gender roles and what not, but it totally fails due to the crapsack acting and the horribly godawful storyline and plot holes. There is just nothing about this movie that in any way makes it worth seeing. So why did I watch it? Frankly, I’d rather be dead than have to sit through this again!

However, if I had to choose between seeing this movie again and having someone have sex with my corpse…well, put the friggin’ movie back on. I think I’ve made my tough decision for the week. I feel better about myself now. Peace out.

These images were taken from the film on Netflix's instant player, and none of them belong to me. They are all under the copyright of their respective owners.

REVIEW: Identity (2003)

I’ve been debating recently as to whether the ending of a film can literally be so bad as to ruin the entire experience. If the rest of the film up until the third act has been a relatively pleasant and investing experience, can the ending really take it all away that fast? In Super, for example, it did kind of ruin the movie, as the ending undermined what the rest of the film was trying to do. In other movies, like today’s subject, however…it’s less complicated than that. In movies like Identity, the ending ruins the movie simply because it makes the whole thing completely suck while at the same time making you wish they hadn’t tried so damn hard to make something intellectual! Argh! But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s watch this stinker.

Director: James Mangold
Starring: John Cusack, Amanda Peet
Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0309698/

The movie begins with a bunch of cops preparing for a late night hearing the last night before a convicted murderer is about to get executed, and apparently the defense found some new evidence conveniently right before he was supposed to croak. What timely events!

Then we cut to a seedy looking motel where a family that looks like they should be in that god-awful Cape Fear remake is driving around. They run over a spiked heel in the middle of the road – weird, right? The movie thinks so, too, so it takes the time to flash back to a hooker played by Amanda Peet playing bondage birthday cake games with an old fat man, like something out of a horrible caption contest picture. Seriously, just look at this:

Anyway, she packs her stuff and then remembers she has to get something while driving later, so even though she’s all alone on a deserted road, she can’t just pull over and stop to look for it, no; she has to try and do it WHILE DRIVING. So she loses a bunch of stuff from her suitcase, including the shoe that the family ran over. Was this flashback…at all necessary to explain why a shoe was in the middle of the road? Actually yes, yes it was. I was actually hoping they would show MORE of that flashback, like why Amanda Peet became a hooker to begin with! Or what she ate for lunch the previous day. Or the first time she saw Two Girls One Cup.

Anyway, then the mother who was in the car gets hit by another car driven by everyone’s favorite limo driver, John Cusack, who was in 2012 several years later where he also played a limo driver. Amanda Peet was also in 2012. I SMELL CONSPIRACY! Anyway Cusack wants to go help the woman he just ran over, but the bitchy actress he’s driving around says no, because…well, there is no reason. She’s just a callous and horrible person.

Cusack, being a decent person, helps them anyway and they all go into a motel run by this guy, who was in Winter’s Bone and…yeah, he was certainly in that…anyway, in this movie he's just really prejudiced against Amanda Peet's hooker character. This unnecessary and senseless bias makes up the core of his character.

"I'm the highest class of cheap seedy motel owners!" Seriously you dumbass, don't prostitutes come in there all the time? Look at the place you run! Must be hard to get what very little business you get if you're selective about your customers!

And yeah, Amanda Peet is back. She drives back by the place where she lost her stuff – hours later? Really? What was she doing that whole time? Did she just reach her destination and then think, “gee, I really liked that one shoe I lost! Better go get it!”? That…just seems strange to me. Anyway, she gets stuck, too, and picked up by the Cusack. They find this other couple driving around, Lou and Gina, who don’t have a cell phone for them to use. What? Don’t have a cell phone? In this day and age? Pfft…it’s like this was made in 2003 or something…

Meanwhile, since this movie had too much dignity before, Ray Liotta shows up as a cop transporting a murderer to add his own input to the movie. He’s a short-tempered gun-crazy lunatic of a cop, but he’s still better than his character from Hannibal.

"Allow me to prevent you from ever finding me likable at all...mmmm...sleaze..."

His convict is played by Jake Busey from Starship Troopers, rounding out the cast of B-level actors you know you've seen in other movies, but can't remember exactly which ones. Joyous.

Then we see that Cusack apparently has the magical main character powers that every hero in these movies has as he manages to stitch up that George guy’s wife who he hit with the car earlier – oh, did you not even remember that with all the other nonsense going on in this movie? My bad. Allow me to never correct this convoluted insanity. But I digress – you know how in all of these poorly written films, the protagonist is a guy with a shit job who can somehow, almost magically, do unexpected things like fix wounds and take charge in tense situations? Cusack is like the poster child for that in this movie.

John Cusack is God! He can do ANYTHING!

Meanwhile in the courthouse, people shout because apparently that’s what this movie thinks is dramatic. Don’t have any actual depth? Try HAVING ALL YOUR CHARACTERS SHOUT ALL THE TIME AND LOOK SERIOUS. Screenwriting 101!

So before you start to think this whole thing is the set-up for a horrible Nancy Drew book, things get hairy as the actress Cusack was driving around is found murdered in the washing machine, because I guess she wasn’t clean enough! This of course sends everyone into a panic, especially when they find out that the convict Ray Liotta was transporting has escaped. This causes Lou and Gina to go have a sporadic fight for no apparent reason. Apparently, Gina lied about being pregnant to get Lou to marry her because her best friend told her that she saw him talking to some girl at a bar and…oh, do you care? Just put it on Jerry Springer. The whole thing ends with Lou gutted in the corner:

Well that's a LITTLE bloodier than most couple fights get...

Then they find out that Liotta's convict, who has been tied up to prevent him from doing anything crazy, has been murdered - SO WHO WAS THE KILLER? They get their answer when they find out that Larry has a dead body in his freezer. He tries to drive away but actually just hits and smashes George against a wall like a cartoon character turned to a pancake, killing him instantly. So they tie him up and he tells them the story of how he was broke and strapped for cash and came across the motel and found the owner dead, so he just started acting like he was the motel owner.

Then all the dead bodies start disappearing without a trace, like they were cleaned up by Samuel L. Jackson in Cleaner!

Except that was actually pretty good.

Then it's wacky fun escaping time as that Gina chick and the little kid, Timmy, try to drive away, but unfortunately the car has other plans for them, as it's tired of being in this movie and wants a quick out:

Then things get even WACKIER as everyone realizes they all have the same birthday and that their names are all named after states, like Ed Dakota, Larry Washington and so on, so forth. What relevance does this have to anything? Well, just wait a few minutes - you're about to be horribly disappointed.

And then time just unravels as John Cusack wakes up and gets told by Shakespearean actor Alfred Molina – yes, they got a guy who was in The Tempest to be in this garbage – that he (Cusack) is actually just one of this serial killer’s split personalities, of which there are 10 in total (i.e. all the main characters in the film), and one of them has been “killing” the other personalities inside his mind at the motel for the entire movie up until now.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet THE ONLY REAL CHARACTER IN THE MOVIE!

So yes. This movie just basically did a ‘none of it really happened’ trick on us. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I’m not even going to be able to review the rest of this in a linear fashion – it’s bullet point time!

+ First off, I must repeat – ARE YOU KIDDING ME? This is the worst ending twist I’ve maybe ever seen! How do you even DO something like this…you have a relatively good story going on and then you just completely BOTCH it with one of the outright stupidest ending twists ever! Couldn’t these idiots have just stuck to the motel story? That actually wasn’t bad! Sure, it was hammy, ridiculous and over the top, but it was at least an interesting story! The characters had some depth and they were getting kind of interesting. Why would I even WANT to watch a movie about some fat POS in a chair about to be electrocuted with multiple personalities? The movie has clearly picked the wrong plot to come out on the forefront.

+ So what, all of these characters are inside his mind, right? So Amanda Peet, John Cusack, Ray Liotta and that Winter’s Bone guy all live in the head of an overweight version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy? Somehow I don’t think that’s going to hold up. And since this guy was actually ‘acting out’ the whole movie in his head all along, just picture him doing that scene with the prostitute and the guy handcuffed to the bed with the birthday cake on his chest. Isn’t that a pretty picture?

Eugh.

+ Third, the premise behind this is that the multiple personalities this guy has are the characters we’ve been watching this whole time, and they are killing each other off in a mental “battle” for a dominant personality to emerge. This could possibly be interesting if it were handled in a better way (more on that in the next bullet point), like in some kind of really artsy film, but for what is supposed to be a grounded, semi-realistic psychological thriller? It’s beyond bad. The whole premise is that the defense lawyer for the guy is trying to get the court to overturn his execution by proving that the “killer” personality is gone. How are they supposed to prove that? Are they just going to point at him and say “Look, he’s cured now”?

There is NO WAY this would ever fly in any actual US courtroom. He would be sent to the killing chair the second that idiotic psychologist brought up the concept that his multiple personalities were literally killing each other off in his mind like a bad Friday the 13th sequel. I mean really, you might as well just use the South Park Imaginationland argument and argue that leprechauns are real even though they’re imaginary – in fact that argument was much better handled than the one THIS crockpot of a lawyer is suggesting!

+ And FOURTH and finally, this story is handled in a crapsack, hamfisted, clumsy-ass way! There’s no subtlety to this! Oh, it’s raining all the time because his mind is in chaos! Oh, the characters all have the same birthday because it’s really HIS birthday! SUCH SUBTLE CLUES! Why don’t you just slap a B-roll on the bottom of the screen explaining how we’re supposed to be SO AMAZED at this movie’s intellect the entire runtime? You might as well.

To sum it up, this plot twist is total, complete and utter ass!

Phew. So let’s wrap it up – Liotta is revealed to be an escaped prisoner who just disguised himself as a cop. He kills off Larry and eventually shoots John Cusack, too, who is a saint for actually giving a crap about his performance in this thing – seriously, acting like he cared about any of this must have been an exercise in sheer mastery of will – and then Amanda Peet kills him, too, escaping to an orange grove in Florida, a plot point which was explained somewhere while you were marveling over how stupid the end plot twist was.

Then we flash back to the real world again where the courts, probably because they were just tired of being in this piece of shit movie, have decided that the killer’s execution will be stayed, since they apparently DID believe that Liotta was the “killer personality” and that now that the Ray Liotta portion of his brain has been removed, he is no longer a danger to anyone. But since Ray Liotta has no brain, what does this really mean? Is it a statement on how little our minds actually see that’s true? Or is it saying that you should have spent your money on a different movie? I’m going with the second one.

Really, the only thing that could possibly make this movie any worse is if the little kid, who disappeared earlier, turned out to be the killer all alo---

Don't f*ck with little kids!

AW, GODDAMN, YOU JUST HAD TO DO IT, DIDN’T YOU?! You morons! Were you just trying for the worst possible ass-fest of twists you could think of? The Sixth Sense and Signs were still pretty recent; were you just trying to outdo those for worst ending twists ever put on screen? It’s made more insulting when they actually put in horrible over the top flashbacks from the kid’s point of view that explain how he killed everyone, like we couldn’t “get” it otherwise. Ugh! I don’t even care. This review is over. I don’t even have to explain why this one sucks, do I? Just don’t watch it. You’ll have a better day.

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Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Starring: Matthew Modine, Vincent O'onofrio, R. Lee Ermey

Director: Stanley Kubrick

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093058/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Metal_Jacket

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: Did your parents have any children that lived?
Private Gomer Pyle: Sir, yes, sir.
Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: I bet they regret that. You're so ugly you could be a modern art masterpiece! 

Well, it is Memorial Day, so it is time once again to commemorate the day by reviewing a classic war film. Granted, it is a film that shows a group of Marines as they are psychologically traumatized in boot camp before heading over to be further traumatized by an actual war, so I cannot say it is the most patriotic of films to spotlight. That being said...it is a war film and it is by Stanley Kubrick and awesome, so I am going to do it anyway!

Based on the novel "The Short-Timers" by Gustav Hasford, the movie follows a soldier nicknamed Private Joker (Matthew Modine) who in the first half of the picture attends the Parris Island boot camp, under the command of the tyrannical and profanity-laced Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey). The drill sergeant is particularly cruel toward a sub par recruit whom he names Gomer Pyle (Vincent O'onofrio). Joker nervously watches as Pyle morphs into what Hartman wants them all to be: lean, mean, killing machines. The second half shows Joker in Vietnam as he heads to the front lines and witnesses the horrors of war and the effects it has on himself and his fellow Marines.

Like "The Deer Hunter," the film is intriguing in how it follows people as they go through the different stages of the Vietnam war. The boot camp is meant to be a training ground, a safe place for soldiers to hone their skills. Instead it seems more like the first phase of the conflict as they struggle to survive their commanding officer's wrath. Ermey does an outstanding job as Hartman, the iconic character who has come to epitomize the angry military authority figures we see in many of today's movies, television shows, and commercials (remember that GEICO commercial where Ermey is a therapist? Yeah, I liked that one too...). While it is likely that Hartman gets a bit of a sadistic pleasure out of torturing his cadets (for a supposedly model citizen and Christian, he sure does have a sexual-explicit vocabulary), it does seem to serve a twisted purpose, which is wear them down until they ready to release their fury upon the enemy when they face them. It should be noted that Ermey himself is a Vietnam veteran who was also a drill instructor while serving in the Marine Corps and he improvised a lot of his now infamous lines. Must have been pretty disturbing for the other actors! Another standout is Pyle, who is overweight and is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but seems to be a nice guy. However, the camp takes a toll on him and while he becomes a much better soldier, his mental well-being worsens, resulting in a disastrous conclusion. His struggles symbolize the destruction of innocence being inflicted on Joker and the rest of the men heading off to fight. 

When the troops are finally sent off to Vietnam, things really start to go downhill for them. They are caught in the middle of the Tet Offensive, putting them in the path of danger and destroying their morality. This is made clear when witnessing the actions and personality of Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin), a courageous but dangerously unbalanced Marine who you would not want to meet in a bar...or anywhere else for that matter. Except maybe the battle field, but ONLY if he was on your side (though I have to admit, along with Hartman, he is one of my favorite characters)! He basically replaces Pyle as the movie's poster boy representing what constant exposure to combat can lead to: effectiveness, but also to a loss of humanity.

It sounds like I am not paying much attention to Joker in this review. This is mainly because, even though he narrates the story and the plot is basically about what he did during the war, he is not really the main star. In reality, it is the actual atmosphere that is the real attraction of the film. There is relatively little use of music, but when there is, it is usually a low humming sound or drum beat that indicates impending danger, giving it a very chilling quality. Okay, the "Surfin' Bird" scene was a little weird, but hey, Kubrick always had a dark sense of humor. This can clearly be shown in various instances involving prostitutes, bigotry, and frank talk about the politics of the war. Needless, to say it also has a good amount of violence and heavy moments to pass around. The movie is a real psychological event to behold. Obviously, I cannot say how accurately this portrays the mindset of a soldier during Vietnam, or any war for that matter. From an entertainment standpoint, however, it certainly succeeds.

It is a classic for a reason and if you have not seen it already, I definitely recommend it.

I do not own the rights to the image and links in this post; they are the property of their respective owners and are being used here for entertainment purposes only.

My Thought Process While Watching "Super" (2011)

Director: James Gunn

Starring: Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1512235/

This is the best representation of my thought process while watching Super. I hope you enjoy it.

I was excited for this one, as it looked sort of like Kick-Ass except even weirder and darker, which is always something I like. But man, was this a disappointment. I haven’t seen an ending ruin a movie like this in…well, since Identity, pretty much. The basic premise is that this dorky, socially awkward man (Rainn Wilson) who most likely has a mental illness loses his girlfriend to a drug dealer (Kevin Bacon), so he decides to put on a costume and start “fighting crime,” or rather, going up to drug dealers and, wait for it, people who cut in line, and bludgeoning their skulls with a wrench. He teams up with an even crazier, more morbid soul in Ellen Page’s character, who laughs cutely while cutting open peoples’ chests with hand-made Wolverine-style claws.

…sound charming yet? This is a really screwed up movie, and I liked that for most of the runtime. In fact, my exact thoughts – the exact post I made on Facebook while watching the first half hour – was as follows:

so far Super is an incredibly disturbing film about a mentally ill man who puts on a costume and beats people savagely with a wrench. If that's it's intention I like it. Weird little...social commentary sort of thing.

Yeah, this movie wasn’t exactly clear on its real intention at first, which made me think “Oh, good, a film that is morally ambiguous while also having a really dark sense of humor – good!” Like a couple of scenes where Rainn Wilson is preparing to become a superhero, praying to God to let him save his wife – a rather chillingly pathetic and revealing scene. But then you get this image right afterwards:

Confusing, right? Oh well. Most of the movie is still pretty good so far. The scene where he brutally bludgeons a man and cracks his skull – like you actually see blood coming out of the split in his head up close – for CUTTING IN LINE kind of rubbed me the wrong way, but hey, it’s a dark comedy. The fact that this guy actually thinks he’s doing good, and doling out some kind of “justice,” should make for some really macabre humor later on, right?

Oh, and Ellen Page is in the movie now! She is way too excited about her new position as Wilson’s sidekick. She persuades him to go over to this guy’s house where they beat him up for, supposedly, messing up one of her friend’s cars. Then after Wilson nearly beats him to death in his own home, with almost no provocation, Page blurts out “I THINK this is the guy who did it!” Gee. This movie is actually getting really disturbing now. Where can it possibly go from here? What crazy things will Ellen Page do next?

The final battle comes around where we get to see Kevin Bacon and his minions in their big country ranch mansion. Wilson and Page ambush them from outside and slowly kill off the guards like it’s a slasher movie – note here how Page kills one guy in cold blood, quite happily, with some Wolverine claws. Note her apparent lack of any kind of empathy or human emotion at all – what kind of psychological disorder does she have? What was her past like? Well, we’ll never find out because she gets killed off and Wilson never even mentions her again. Another of his own mental failings? Maybe.

So he saves his wife and…I’m not going to lie; the ending is complete, total horseshit. You will be insulted beyond your wildest dreams. What transpires, in so many words, is this – Wilson takes his wife, who has had maybe 4 lines in the whole movie, back home where she of course instantaneously gets clean, and the epilogue is basically his revelation that he was “working” under God’s plan the whole time to save his wife, who apparently goes on to have a normal and productive life. What about the struggle of getting clean from drugs? What about Ellen Page? She’s never even mentioned again! What the hell were these writers smoking? This whole thing is played off so moralistic and cutesy that it’s like they forgot what movie they were making! I mean, hello, THIS IS THE MOVIE WITH BRUTAL BLUDGEONINGS FROM A CRAZY MAN IN A SUPERHERO OUTFIT.

I’m sorry; this movie is just so frustratingly inconsistent. The ending doesn’t fit at all with how it started or what the tone was throughout the film. These two characters, Rainn Wilson’s and Ellen Page’s, are deeply disturbed. They need help. The movie trying to play it off like they’re just quirky and silly DOESN’T WORK. You can’t have a happy, fluffy ending with characters like this – these are people who have no problem with cracking someone’s skull just because he was mildly rude to them. I want to see some psychological character development here! I want to delve into their psyches! Hell, I at least want some kind of more morbid humor in here than what we ended up with! And this movie actually has the gall to try and teach us a lesson with THIS SHIT in it?

Get real. Super is crap, and I can’t think of a worse missed opportunity in a film in recent times. It has no idea what it wants to be and fails horribly at absolutely everything it tries. Kevin Bacon is great and Rainn Wilson is actually very good himself, but even they can't save this mismatched pile of confusing nonsense in the end. Go watch Kick-Ass instead; at least that movie is actually good.

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REVIEW: The Caller (2011)

I did not really expect anything from this film, The Caller, but it turned out to be one of the more inventive horror movies of the last year, with a really creative premise that, while outlandish, actually works in the movie’s favor to create some real tension, drama and atmosphere. Does that sound surprising to you for a 2010s horror movie? Well, let’s dig into The Caller and see why it’s so good.

Director: Matthew Parkhill

Starring: Rachelle Lefevre, Stephen Moyer, Luis Guzman

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1525890/

The Caller is a film about a young woman, Mary, who has just moved to a new town. She starts getting mysterious, unsettling phone calls that it turns out are from a woman in the 70s. The woman keeps getting crazier and crazier when Mary tries to break off the phone calls, and looks for revenge in a way that I think many horror fans will just find delightful, it’s so creative and chilling.

Now, something this film requires that a lot of people do not have anymore is suspension of disbelief, that age-old creed that allows a film to go into uncharted territory with its plot and still retain the audience’s willing participation. Basically all one really needs to attain suspension of disbelief is to craft an air-tight story in spite of whatever oddities and unrealistic elements the plot harbors. This is a time travel movie, so some suspension of disbelief is granted there by its very nature, but the problem is that some people really won’t even watch movies like this simply because the premise is so goofy. I welcome a “goofy” premise like this! The Caller is one of the more original horror plots I’ve seen lately. Give me something outlandish, something ghoulish, something horrific! Give me something with imagination.

Okay, I digress – The Caller is a really well done horror film. The acting is solid, with Rachelle Lefevre giving a pretty good performance as the lead; nothing spectacular, but she gets the job done. That pretty much goes for everyone in this thing – no standout performances exactly, just enough to get you to believe they are who they say they are. The lighting is grimy and dark, and helps out with the seedy atmosphere the film creates. A lot of the movie is staged in Mary’s apartment, so the atmosphere had to be really good to make up for that, and it is. There is always a dark, dirty pall over everything in this film, even in the daylight. Nothing ever looks too nice or clean.

But mostly the draw of the film is just the batshit crazy story. At first I was like, man, this is just going to be another droll ‘phone stalker’ thing without much to redeem it, but once it was revealed that the mysterious and deranged caller on the other line is actually calling from over thirty years in the past, things get more interesting fast. Who is this nut of a woman? How is she making phone calls to the future? We don’t know, and that’s part of why it’s so bizarre and chilling. Apparently the woman was supposed to kill herself – the gardener tells Mary this, as he was the one who found herself. However, once Mary intervenes and incidentally changes the past…well, things start to get interesting fast.

The Caller is just a great flick. I don’t even want to spoil it too much; that’s how cool it is. This is in the unique position of being a horror flick that’s also a time-travel science fiction in its own way, and that gives it a unique flavor, but the strong writing, believable acting and creative, imaginative scares jettison The Caller into actual A-list quality horror. If you haven’t heard of this, well, here’s me telling you – go see it, and you won’t be able to sleep for a week.

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