Possessor (2020)

This one got a lot of good reviews, but man do I ever not like it! Apparently, this was a movie made by David Cronenberg’s son Brandon Cronenberg, who probably grew up surrounded by surreal body horror props and scenes and it bled into him, and this is what came in lieu of seeing a therapist.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Director: Brandon Cronenberg

Starring: Andrea Riseborough, Christopher Abbott, Jennifer Jason Leigh

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Possessor is the kind of movie I haven’t seen in a while, got to say. It’s the kind of thing that made my friends and I keep doing these blogs all those years ago, so inept and infuriating that there was nothing to do but crank up the snark. It was fun, and came with an easy outlet for creativity. In recent years we’ve fallen off a bit, sure, and the general premise seems dated now. But every once in a while – hoo, boy, sometimes something just comes along that reignites the fire.

This is about a weird alternate 2008 – according to Wikipedia; it’s never said in the movie. Why 2008? I can't think of that much interesting about that time period. But then, maybe that reflects the movie as well. Might as well be consistent with the uninteresting-ness of everything.

The main character is a dead-eyed weirdo of a woman who works as a professional assassin. The twist is, her company has this convoluted technology where she can jump into the body of someone else to carry out the kill! I seem to remember decades of time in which hits were carried out by the person themselves, who was unknown to the target. Those were better days.

There’s really no reason to do the body jumping, and also, nobody ever seems to acknowledge that they’re wrecking random peoples’ lives when they do it since those people get blamed for the crimes. The main character Tasya, never shows any conflict with this aspect, nor do any of the people she works with. This could be interesting with deft writing, it could show moral conflict or corporate soullessness and such. But guess what’s missing from this movie?!

I guess they try to sell you that Tasya misses her family who she separated from to do the job, and her boss wants her to cut off any human attachments. Tasya goes back and has sex with her husband and sees her kid again, too, before taking a new job. All of the “character development” is just stated blankly in the dialogue, while the movie and actors do nothing to actually convince you. It’s like the script is the shitty public defender for the most irredeemable defendant alive, the worst, guiltiest and least likable person imaginable.

The main plot is that they want Tasya to jump into the body of this guy Tate who is dating the daughter of some high-up business guy. The job is to kill the daughter and the business guy so the assassin company can buy the business guy’s company? Is that even possible? Sure does seem like a lot of nonsense to go through for this fucking goal, and there's no stated reason what the real endgame is or who's behind it all - just Jennifer Jason Leigh's mid-level management character who barely gets any real dimension to her. It’s like the 80s comedies where dorky scientists would invent these whole complex contraptions that just ended up like, making toast or some shit.

The whole movie is like that – I’m sure she could just get into this business asshole’s office somehow and shoot him and be done with it, but then we wouldn’t have a whole movie of art-school bullshit hallucinating scenes for no reason. Yeah – there are a lot of weird trippy scenes just shoved in seemingly whenever the movie was at risk of getting (more) boring, just eyes being pierced and odd hazy blue people screaming and colors flashing like an epileptic nightmare. They do this like half a dozen times in a less than two-hour movie. I guess it’s supposed to represent something. Really it just comes off as the movie equivalent of filling out your term paper with more white space and periods to inflate the character count.

But yeah – despite this being a fairly clear-cut assassination goal, they can’t just go and do that. There has to be this endless soul-sucking drag of random other shit. Tasya as Tate goes to some weird job where he has to look at curtains in peoples’ houses? It’s never really explained but is an excuse to throw some random sex in there. Then he goes to a party where they all have the worst inane conversations rejected from a Tarantino film. Then some more sex, this time with Tate and his girlfriend. If you really need to see this much sex and nudity in a thriller movie, why not just go watch porn? It's not cool, fun sex. It feels weird and gross in the context of this movie.

The party comes, and the idea is for Tasya as Tate to get thrown out of the party and then come back in and kill everyone. Why not just kill everyone right away? If you already went through the process of doing the whole body swap thing, do you need even more pointless rules? Oh, right, I forgot, padding is needed to give this thing a decent runtime. My bad, so silly of me.

If you like gore, I guess the scene of Tasya stabbing this dude in the mouth and wrenching teeth out is something. But I like gore when it's fun - this movie is about as fun as reading tax documents. It's dour and unpleasant. Everything from the sex to the gore is just lifeless, weird and lame.

I guess the story from here is that Tate fights back against Tasya possessing him and stabs himself to stop it – why was that a possibility? Seems like your tech sucks ass. Just go kill people regular next time. It's DIY. Small business, artisanal stuff. It's more all-American, classic style and we need some of that sometimes.

Anyway, it leads to a fragmented mind where he’s seeing a bunch of stuff from Tasya’s life and feeling like he’s going insane. He kills a few more random people as he tries to figure out what the fuck is happening. These scenes of him with his face twisted in agony, not knowing what’s going on and realizing he’s fucked up his life by being associated with what’s happening now are the only relatable scenes in the movie.

There’s at least thirty minutes of meandering nonsense left. It’s amazing how awful the pacing is in this thing. Everything is so slow and yet there’s not even the minimum attempt to endear you to any character or situation. If you wanted to simulate the feeling of being stuck in rush hour traffic, with the sun beating down as you move an inch every five minutes, and you’ve had to piss for the last twenty minutes, fantastic job.

With the whole mind-swapping thing, there’s a super long sequence of Tate taking some mold of Tasya’s face that looks like it was burned in a car accident. It’s not scary but it is weird and gross and makes me hate living a little more. I love that it's superimposed over scenes we already saw in the movie. This thing is less than two hours and we're reusing scenes. it's like being at a party and trying to avoid the annoying guy who won't quit talking to you. When does it end?

Somehow it ends with Tate finding his way to Tasya’s house and killing her husband brutally with a knife. No real reason for all this, but hey, gore! That’s something, right??? It also turns out the boss lady from Tasya’s job takes control of her son and gets him shot too. There’s a lot of screaming, guns firing and a little kid dies – is this an edgy adult dark movie yet? Please, this is all that’s left in life. It doesn’t matter if the motivations are unclear, there’s no discernible character development and the plot is fuzzier than an out-of-focus 1995 disposable camera. All that matters is that the movie is dark and edgy.

Finally it’s over, leaving me with the vague feeling that I’ve seen some weirdo’s school shooter manifesto translated somehow to the screen. It’s not that I’m against dark films, or avant garde shit. I spent quarantine last year watching every David Lynch and Gaspar Noe movie I could find. I’ve seen David Cronenberg’s old material several times. But Possessor is just so awful in every aspect, from the stiff, vague plot to the deadened, nonexistent characters and right down to the stale, too-cold settings and expressions on the character’s faces. It’s just unpleasant in every single way. I truly didn’t enjoy anything about this at all. No exaggeration.

And sure, in old reviews, as was the case in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it was en vogue to bash the creators and make all these hyperbolic statements, this is the worst thing ever, et cetera. And I’m not as about that anymore. Brandon Cronenberg is probably an OK guy and I like his dad’s movies. Nothing personal here. I just think Possessor is the void where any kind of hope goes to die, the thing that fills me with nothing but hate and misery towards everything. But nothing personal. You know how it is.

Friend Request (2016)

Friend Request is a horror movie about what happens when you turn down a friend request from a crazy witch on social media.

Director: Simon Verhoeven

Starring: Alycia Debnam-Carey, Connor Paolo

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

If you’ve seen Unfriended, you basically know what you’re gonna get here. It’s one of these ‘college’ movies written by someone who’s whole idea of college was shaped on like, 1990s cheesy sitcoms or whatever. The main characters are all the cool popular kids who have expensive parties, and they post dumb pictures on Facebook of them at the beach, kissing, eating and drinking and smiling!

It’s funny because, while I guess it’s accurate that they’d do this kind of stuff, the writing is bereft of any kind of character or personality. So the whole movie has the effect of being like a bunch of shallow Facebook profiles came to life. That’s pretty funny if it was intentional; but you know it fucking wasn’t.

I'd also like to point out how random the main group is... you've got the one blandly popular white chick, an overweight mixed-race-looking girl, a somewhat fat comedic relief guy, a blonde Karen type girl, and another dude that looks like a stereotype of a 'loner' with a weird haircut and tattoos. It's like a fucking focus group. Make them feel like real people! That might actually lend your movie some humanity.

I guess the story is this girl Laura, basically a wax mannequin that talks, befriends this weird girl with a black hoodie always over her head! The girl, Marina, immediately gets weird as she starts commenting and liking everything Laura posts, sending her strange messages and all that – oh and she has zero other friends. Who the fuck has ZERO other friends? There was nobody else?

It would be easy just to press the ‘block’ button, but don’t tell the movie THAT… instead, they just have Laura unfriending Marina and then going to a big luxurious party that’s about as expensive looking as your average presidential candidate Wall Street fundraiser. Like holy shit. How are we supposed to care about these people? Not really leaning on sympathy here, movie. It’s like this was made by those jackasses that think $170K a year is “middle class.” “Oh, they’re so relatable, they only have TWO pontoon boats!” “You only drink $600 a bottle wine? You fucking pleb!”

But yeah, then the Marina girl kills herself on video after ripping up a picture of Laura! I guess the ghost of Marina posted the suicide video on Laura’s Facebook, too. This causes the police to investigate in the best way possible – by calling Laura into the principal’s office and interrogating her about it. The cops say the video posting thing means she should delete her account, which is the funniest thing in the movie bar none – just the cops officially ordering this college girl to delete her social media. I love that. I'll never write anything that funny.

They also inquire if she knows where Marina's body might be. Isn't that YOUR fucking job, you assholes?

Then all Laura’s friends start to die off. This one guy dies from banging his own head on an elevator wall. Another chick commits suicide in the basement of a hospital – oh, and here you get the requisite Creepy Hospital Scene (TM) that every fucking horror movie has to have, with dark halls and stuff. They all see weird zombie hallucinations and wasps and shit before they die, too. Wasn’t this a movie about a Facebook ghost? Were the writers drinking moonshine the whole time?

There is also this other guy, Kobe, who looks like some kind of weird tattooed drug addict with bad hair. This guy is the stereotypical hacker character who just types in nonsense on any computer and brings up a bunch of technological gibberish and then delivers monologues on how ominous it all is. What a deus ex machina of a character! He also learns about the occult as soon as it’s revealed that Marina is a witch using black magic. Boy, this guy is just a veritable swiss army knife.

Speaking of that, yeah, that’s the origin story for Marina! Her mother was apparently a witch who lived in an orphanage and burned it down – or some bullshit like that. I honestly don’t know. The movie goes through the process of telling us that her pregnant mother, burned to a crisp in the fire, was kept alive just to give birth to her! What a pleasant image for a throwaway back story in a shitty ghost movie!

Then when she was growing up, a bunch of young boys assaulted and attacked her for years. The voice-over says she was doing pretty well against them as it shows them punching her, which is kind of funny. Though apparently later, she had them mutilated or whatever. Good. Fuck those little twerps anyway.

In the real-time again, more of their friends die – including one girl who falls out a window just when Laura and her boyfriend are driving up in the car. Convenient. Nice and snappy. An efficient death... thumbs up on the app rating for the algorithm, for sure.

Oh and I love the gimmick this movie has of showing Laura's declining FB friend count as the ghost posts more things to her account without her consent. It does it even when the fucking camera shows Laura watching her friend in the hospital with broken bones, covered in fucking bandages. Priorities, ladies and gentlemen! Fuck the immense pain. HER FRIEND COUNT IS LOWERING!!!

Then they all have to go to the ruins of this orphanage or whatever, and do you really even care? These dumb ass movies always have the characters going to some erroneous journey to some foreboding looking place. It really just makes the places so much less cool, because now they’re associated with the nonsensical writing and mundane, rote plotting. It’s like the opposite of a travel guide.

One of the only interesting parts of the whole film is when that Kobe guy turns on Laura because the ghost only wants to kill all her friends, not Laura herself. Kobe tries to kill her, thinking it could save his life. This is mildly clever at least, and could have been a kind of subversion from the usual nonsense these movies always have – oh, look, an actual character with a motive that contradicts the protagonist’s! But really I think this was just like a dying gasp of intelligence before the script just goes totally senile; like a brief, painful moment of clarity that something better could have been possible.

I guess Laura then gets killed by the ghost, and the final shot is HER in a weird black hoodie now with a laptop! Implying that the whole thing was actually transferrable. I thought the first girl was just a witch on her own. Now I guess it’s a ghost/possession/transfer sort of thing. I don’t know. I am positive whoever made this just wanted to get it over with to get the money and go save his family from the mafia or whatever.

This movie is just nonsense. The whole thing is all the cliché you ever knew from movies like this, but somehow even more disoriented and droll, like a senile grandpa just wandering in the street. Help this movie get back to its nursing home. It doesn’t need to keep straining itself.

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

The Platform (2020)

The Platform is a Spanish horror comedy about a strange prison concept where food is distributed via a system where a giant platform (name drop!) lowers through hundreds of levels and people are supposed to be fair. Unfortunately, people are selfish! There. That’s the entire fucking movie. But they milked it for like an hour and a half, so I guess I have to review it.

Director: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia

Starring: Ivan Massagué, Antonia San Juan

IMDb

Co-written with Tony and Michelle.

This guy Goreng, the main character, apparently agreed to be part of this, as apparently it’s one way to get a degree. How does that work? Is there a university that’s like ‘well, you can take classes and educate yourself and prove you’re worthy, OR you can go be in jail in a filthy hole for a while!’ How does that make any fucking sense?

The main dude wakes up with some crazy old man. There are some scenes of them doing naked yoga together (???) and reading and bickering and whatnot – it’s all a big waste of time to eat up screentime.

The main meat of the film for the first act, the idea that this platform brings food down every day and they’re supposed to ration it out – but of course, human greed gets in the way and nobody does it that way. Every man for himself, etc. I’m not sure who’s benefiting from this. Is it a science experiment? If so, it’s gone on long enough, I am almost positive. Is it just the cruelty of an uncaring barbaric system? Nice social commentary I guess. But we got over an hour of movie left and I already get the idea! Uh oh!

The old dude ties Goreng up and tries to eat him. Wow – they went straight from honeymoon marriage right into the homicidal phase. They don’t waste time. The old dude reassures Goreng he won’t eat his genitals – well, that’s nice of him.

Where is security during this? And was it worth the degree yet??? I HAVE TO KNOW! But then a crazy lady, I suppose the physical manifestation of Deus ex Machina, comes and murders the old dude just in time. What a convenience.

Then Goreng gets stuck with this other lady who has a dog, who I guess was the administrator for this place who let him in in the first place? Why is she there? I have no idea and the movie doesn’t seem to care. Character development is never really a concern here. They don’t really explain anybody’s motives. This lady is mostly there for exposition we couldn’t get elsewhere, basically spoonfeeding the audience the whole plot about how the prisoners are supposed to ration out food and there should be enough for everyone if they do. We get it! The blinking garish neon sign of your “smart social commentary” is starting to hurt my eyes!

In between all of this, the ghost of the old man returns to haunt Goreng and, mostly, waste more screen time. 98% of the reason for this is wasting time!

I guess some type of a plot finally starts up as the lady and Goreng hatch a plot to try and regulate everything to help everyone eat. The lady just tries to ask nicely, but unfortunately, the kinds of people who exist in a prison like this don’t respond to asking nicely. Goreng then threatens to shit in their food if they don’t listen. Finally, character development! He doesn’t ever shit in the food that we see, though. That’s a shame as it would have made this movie better to me at least a little.

They spend an exorbitant amount of time trying to make this happen and it doesn’t work, so the lady ends up hanging herself, with the intention of letting Goreng eat her. This leads to more hallucinations of the old dude telling him to eat her. The old dude’s ghost also says he was more polite because he didn’t just stab anyone to death – instead he was nice about his homicide attempts. Man, I don’t know, I guess this word vomit is supposed to be a ‘moral gray area’ type of character thing for Goreng. It doesn’t work at all and is stupid as shit! Good job!

I guess then he ends up with this other guy who is sort of manic and crazy, trying to climb up each level to get to the hole. Goreng and this guy team up to make a ‘statement’ to the administration of this prison by stopping anyone from eating the food. This is actually a little bit of an interesting plot, which I assume is why they made us wait an hour before getting to it – because the writer/director/etc are sadistic fucks and want us to experience the movie the same way the characters do, starved for anything of substance.

So then we get a few somewhat OK moments as Goreng and the guy try and stop anyone from eating in order to save food for the lowest levels and ‘make a statement’ - I’m not sure if both of those are the same goal, or if one contradicts the other; it’s not that clear. There are a few bloody ass fight scenes that are kinda entertaining, if exploitative and goofy. And at least Goreng finally has a fucking goal here. Imagine that – a character who wants something! It’s like finding an oasis after dying of thirst in a desert in this fucking movie.

They find a small child on one of the levels and end up saving her rather than finishing their mission. I guess children weren’t allowed in here which is why this is shocking. But as we’ve seen, this prison doesn’t care if inmates cannibalize each other or hang themselves! So it’s just whatever. They decide they’re fucked anyway and just stay down there, instead letting the little girl ride up on the platform, deciding SHE is now the ‘statement’ to the administration! Ooohhh!

...Nah, they’ll probably just give her to an orphanage and keep doing things the way they always did. Or was that cynicism and pointlessness the ‘message’ all along? If so, fuck this shit anyway.

No world-building to help us contextualize anything, and I hated all these characters actively throughout the movie. I sure hope ole Goreng felt good about his choices to do this to get a degree. Don’t watch this shit, man. This movie sucks and I'd prefer getting the coronavirus to watching this, which I'll regret writing if I do end up getting the virus.

Image copyright of its original owners.

The Pyramid (2014)

There have been a lot of good horror movies coming out. So many, in fact, that I occasionally go back and watch something fucking stupid to remind myself where I came from. You can’t forget your roots.

Director: Gregory Levasseur

Starring: Ashley Hinshaw, Denis O'Hare

IMDb

The Pyramid is a found footage movie – remember that stupid-ass form of horror? I mean sure, there were a few good ones. This isn’t one of them. I guess it’s about a bunch of archaeologists filming a documentary in Egypt as they’ve found this underground pyramid. The entire country is rioting because of this, by the way, because the discovery disturbed their old spiritual beliefs. You know what I always say; starting off a horror movie with mild racism and xenophobia is always a surefire good idea.

The main characters are all vapid as fuck and barely worth commenting on. There’s a documentary team who are, uh, doing a documentary I guess. Then there’s an archaeologist girl and her father, who argue a lot. Arguing is a good way to show character, right? That’s always a good sign when the bulk of your dialogue is just idiots screaming at one another, makes it real endearing. Oh but they do show a lot of close-ups of the blond archaeologist woman in her underwear – why watch pornography when you can watch movies like The Pyramid? Very minimal titillation followed by underwhelming horror; that’s the way to go.

Like all these movies, there are a bunch of shots of people screaming at them not to film, which adds tension because uh oh, they’re filming anyway! Those incorrigible rebels! They send a robot into the pyramid and it gets attacked by something and goes offline… like true geniuses, they go inside after it despite every indication that just leaving would be better. But hey, anything for science and/or documentary filmmaking – in shitty movies, a person’s job is always 100% of their identity and motivation and they have nothing else going on!

Inside it’s poorly lit and this is the rest of the movie; just these jackasses wandering around in the underground pyramid. There’s at least an hour of movie, if not more, set here, and it becomes apparent that it only has two things to offer: dialogue with the characters screaming at each other that they NEED TO GET OUT OF THIS PYRAMID (‘cause, you know, it wasn’t obvious before) and the two archaeologist characters randomly stopping to recite facts about Egyptian gods and mythology they got off Wikipedia. Seriously, I fucking took a Middle School history class and it was more in depth than this movie made by supposed adults.

So most of this is really just these idiots running around through dimly lit catacombs bickering. Why did they think this would be entertaining? Whose idea of a good time is ‘oh yeah, I’d love to watch a bunch of characters walk around in a dark tomb where I can’t see what’s happening’? Even when you get a brief glimpse of creatures running around in there, or when a character gets sucked into a dark hole by the monster, it’s not scary or interesting. It’s like the whole direction was ‘make sure none of this is compelling.’

It’s like the moments that should be scary aren’t given any more weight than the ones of them just arguing in the hallways. This is a problem common to these found footage things – they have to be real and gritty and so they can’t do any of that cool stuff like, ya know, actually having interesting, well-lit scenes that show you stuff. That isn’t real at all! All those classic horror movies with cool lighting and special effects and scary scenes were for drama club dorks. THIS is the real shit, man! I’m being sarcastic but it really seems like all of this was the mindset here.

Most of the characters die off in awful ways, but that doesn’t stop the archaeologist father and daughter from gawking dumbly at cave paintings and talking about Egyptian history. Wow, the writers can copy-paste from a textbook! Amazing! A few times characters died who I’d thought were already dead. Usually a good sign, when you can’t tell fucking anybody apart. The archaeologists certainly don’t give a fuck – these damn sociopaths wouldn’t notice their own mothers dying if they had a rock with some carvings on it in front of them. What awesome characters! Totally invested! I think The Shining or The Exorcist would’ve been better if they took notes from this movie’s character development, man, just have everyone be bland, soulless and barely act like a real human.

Finally, after what feels like an eternity, we get the climax, with Anubis himself making an appearance! Wow, didn’t think they had a real celebrity in the movie. It’s amazing how dumb he looks though. I can actually see why they kept everything so dark for the movie before now. Anubis looks like some kind of third-rate Resident Evil video game villain rip off. It’s like what a very uninspired artist would draw and then be like ‘nah, this is not my best work,’ but then whoops, here come the producers of The Pyramid to steal from your trash can and put it on screen anyway!

Holy fuck this was lame. I don’t think there was anything I’d need to see again. But in fairness, I’ll do the movie a solid and bury it underground so nobody discovers it for the next thousand or so years.

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

Holmes & Watson (2018)

Holmes & Watson is the kind of movie you make when you don't give a shit anymore, really. This is a woefully insane movie that had Tony and I just wondering what kind of gambling debts Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly had to settle that led them to do this shit. It's getting press as one of the worst movies of the year and had a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes at first – now it's gotten to the clandestined, unparalleled highs of 8%. Hallelujah!

But what exactly is it that makes it so godawful? Well, strap in, kids!

Director: Etan Cohen

Starring: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Ralph Fiennes

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

This thing starts off with a young Sherlock Holmes as a child going to a British boarding school, where all the kids are mean to him and force him to kiss the backside of a donkey by blindfolding him – hey, you little jackasses, what do you think this is, Bird Box? And they made fun of him because he did the thing THEY TRICKED HIM to do. What imagination! What candor! You really showed him by executing a planned trick and him falling for it! The height of comedy!

In response, young Holmes immediately, like as he’s standing there humiliated, becomes super smart, cold and detached – he even makes his tears recede back into his body, which is something I imagine alt-right assholes wish they could do to mask their own insecurities. Then he gets every other kid expelled from school for various things he immediately deduces they've done – I wonder what their parents think about this. BUT AT LEAST SHERLOCK GOT HIS EDUCATION, THE LITTLE NARC.

No, seriously; every teacher just teaches him alone for the rest of his time there, I guess. No other students were admitted? Nobody found this weird? OK then, movie.

Then we fast forward to years later as Sherlock Holmes and Watson are world-class detectives, ready to solve any case. Well, actually they’re complete idiots and weirdos, only Holmes occasionally has a burst of deduction to solve whatever hamfisted case they come across. I guess all that specialized education for Holmes didn’t bother to teach him even the most basic things about how to interact in the real world. They get drawn into some kind of mystery involving someone threatening to kill the queen, I guess, although personally I’d trust any random homeless man on the street a thousand times before I hired these obvious deviant maniacs. I’d be afraid of these guys murdering me in my sleep. They’re fucking bonkers.

I mean, a lot of the rest of the movie doesn’t even make enough sense to critique in my usual way - the plot is a lot of nonsense that’s silly on purpose, and the main issue is that it’s weird instead of funny like 99% of the time. These gags are so strange that you’d swear they were working off some ancient parchment full of things an alien civilization found funny hundreds of millennia ago - they’re certainly not funny now. There’s a lot of shots of characters eating raw onions for some reason? A lot of random vomiting? A scene where two characters exchange a romantic glance while performing an autopsy?

It’s just head-scratching. It’s gibberish. Even when the comedy isn’t outwardly terrible like in the first scene of him as a kid, it’s so confusing and bizarre that you don’t laugh anyway.

Then there are the scenes that take up the majority of the film where they just extend lame gags for long enough that they could call this a full length movie rather than a serial killer’s demo reel for SNL. There’s one segment where they break a bee hive conspicuously in Holmes’ apartment and spend several minutes messing around with that - there’s no reason why they have it there except for this gag and the plot doesn’t advance at all, so it’s pretty much a hollow thing and wastes all of our time. If you could fast forward past an entire comedy segment and your movie doesn’t lose much, maybe it sucks… well, maybe it’d be fine if it were legitimately funny, but we know that ship sailed when we saw the first scene.

The second one they do involves the queen coming over, you know, like she does. They end up knocking her unconscious, and then there’s a long sequence of them trying to hide her body, using an obviously fake voice that nobody catches onto, and finally almost chopping her body to pieces with a hacksaw! Wow! I wonder what repercussions there will be for that and what comedic reactions we’ll get! Oh, nothing at all and this was a non-sequitur? OK then.

Seriously - without some of these scenes this would probably be basically a short film. The padding is so much that you could heal a guy with horrific back pain by just lying them down on this movie’s rolls of fat. It’s like a cloud. No substance at all.

There’s really zero point in going into all the other random shit that happens… just to gloss over it, they meet two women from America who fall in love with them, because this is that kind of movie. Also there’s some really dumb dialogue about how America is so noble and has a democracy and a fair justice system. So, you know, if you were thinking this movie was gonna be the second coming of Sartre, you’re wrong about that.

I guess at the end of the movie, Holmes figures out the killer must be someone close to him who can predict what he’s going to do, and so with no real reason he suspects Watson, having him arrested and almost hanged. It turns out, through an overly-long, dragging sequence, that we figure out he’s really just upset because Watson was going to leave him and be with the American woman - so, great reason to do all this! What a stand-up guy! This movie doesn’t have the complexity to tackle stuff like this, and it’s somehow glossed over and done lazily even though they spend time on it.

Anyway, that’s Holmes and Watson. It’s a baffling piece of cinema. Some parts are so weird they border on avant garde, and then you just get other things that are fairly normal, dumb-ass comedy without much in the way of any humor. By the end of the movie it seriously slows down and becomes a more generic picture and this is where it pretty much lost me. Most of the things that happen are inconsequential, and so the movie as a whole tends to feel like a waste of time.

It’s not good, but for those curious like we were due to the awful reviews… well, don’t bother. It sucks. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

Image copyright of its original owners; we don't own it.

House of Cards Season 6: Chapters 68 / 69: The Insomnia Cure Episodes

Honestly, I had a hard time reviewing these episodes. They're pretty boring. The show has a tendency to fill up its runtimes with a lot of navel-gazing political back-channels and “drama” solely manufactured from everyone backstabbing each other and talking about how they want to backstab each other. I fell asleep during both of these episodes, and I don't think it was just me being tired. It's a dull slog of a time.

I guess there's the return of the Tom Hammerschmidt character, who has been in this since season 1 and trying and failing to put together any clues that could bring down the Underwoods. Buddy, if you've been at it this long and still can't do it, maybe this wasn't ever the job for you. This season we first see him losing his temper at his job over them not investigating Frank's death enough. He screams in the middle of the office that they're barely even doing journalism so much as “feeding pigs from the trough” with viral content. He's right, but man is it a hilarious outburst that would demand to go viral for how funny it is if it were real. I'd play that a few times.

Then there's also Cathy Durant, recovered from the time Frank pushed her down the stairs in the middle of the White House in broad daylight – which was pretty much the show's crown jewel of stupidity and one of the worst moments on TV I can think of lately. Claire, feeling that she's going to testify against her, wants Doug Stamper to have her killed. God, this shit is like a really poor mafia story these days. Like The Godfather, but written by a half-assed hack airport thriller writer.

You know, maybe it would be more interesting to have character development rather than just everyone constantly scheming to kill one another. Look at the wild characters we're dealing with in real life politics. Imagine all the neuroses and seething resentments and weird psychoses you could play with if you mirrored THAT. But nah better just stick to the same old soulless tricks! At least it's a decent sleep medication. I did need to catch up on that.

Meanwhile the Shepherds continue to try and manipulate Claire, mostly using Vice President Mark Usher, who is mostly dull here despite the guy's obvious acting chops. More angry people shouting! Greg Kinnear is way too good to be in this. They just didn't give him any interesting lines or character traits. There's some talk about a Supreme Court justice, and about a war in the Middle East, and none of it is more interesting than real life politics – the show's constant failure now.

There's also Janine Skorsky, another journalist character who used to be interesting but now gets like one episode per season. Her main role is looking like a terrified deer in headlights all the time, it seems like. She's driving around with Hammerschmidt and the two of them are talking about the coincidence of all these bodies piling up around the Underwoods, and how it all seems to connect. OH REALLY? DOES IT ALL CONNECT? TELL ME MORE, SHERLOCKS! REGALE ME WITH YOUR HYPOTHESES AND GUESSES ON WHETHER OR NOT THESE OBVIOUS CRIMINALS ARE ENGAGED IN CRIMINAL ACTIVITY.

It's revealed, I guess, that Cathy Durant isn't really dead after all! OOOoooOOOO! Only even that doesn't get me excited. These aren't characters so much as they are chess pieces and pawns. It's not engaging fiction.

I can't even describe accurately how boring these episodes were. I barely even got to make jokes. There was so little funny here. I guess I'll continue from here and hope that the boredom doesn't lower my heart rate to the point where I die.

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

The Happytime Murders (2018)

This movie fucking sucks. I might as well just put that on the table at the top here. I know, right? A movie that took 10 years to get out of development hell and is about a puppet police detective is bad? Stop the presses.

Director: Brian Henson

Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Bill Barretta

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

SPOILERS ahead!!!

It's just so, so bad. It's like a distillation of a bunch of horrible jokes you'd hear at a bad comedy open mic vomited onto the screen with a bunch of puppets saying them. It's the kind of humor you'd hear from a 14 year old just trying to be edgy by making a bunch of raunchy jokes with no context or talent to do so. It's every internet troll going 'oh, you don't think these jokes are funny? Stop being so offended, snowflake!'

Like, even from the start, you get a bunch of stupid perverted voice-overs in the main character, Phil's, head as he's investigating this case from a hot woman puppet who says she's being blackmailed. In the first five minutes, she's already promising Phil she'll have sex with him if he solves her case. Calm down, movie, god; we barely have characters defined yet. And they don't waste time getting to a puppet sex shop, either, which only leads to more embarrassingly bad jokes. Get it? It's puppets, but they're talking about super raunchy things! It's funny because puppets are usually for kids! Do you get it yet?

I guess Melissa McCarthy is playing this other detective who has bad blood with Phil. You can tell because they argue and fight like idiot children every time they're on screen, bringing the plot to a screeching halt several times, spitting terrible roast jokes and insults at each other. Some of the backstory is shoved obnoxiously in your face... apparently, years and years ago, Phil was the first and only puppet cop and he was unable to kill this guy who had captured McCarthy. Then everyone thought he did it on purpose because 'puppets don't shoot puppets.' And then puppets were forever banned, by law, from becoming cops anymore.

All of this shit just shows how bad the writers were at crafting a plot. Really, none of it makes sense. What parallels are there to real life at all? Why would they ban all puppets from being cops or think he did it on purpose? It's never really clarified, instead just made out to be some kind of hamfisted racism allegory, because people all hate puppets in this world for some undefined reason. I guess I can see why they didn't care about plot; I mean a bunch of bad puppet sex jokes probably took a long time for them to come up with. They were probably too tired to make a plot.

The plot, if you can call it that, is that someone is killing off the cast of this old show called the Happytime Gang. Though the movie barely focuses on that. Instead we get a super long scene in this biker bar where McCarthy does puppet coke and fires a gun off a few times, then gets mad at some guy for using the word 'bitches' and beating the shit out of him for that. It's cute that this movie is seriously trying to shoehorn in a feminist message when everything else about it is trashy and low-brow as fuck. It's like if someone took a giant steaming shit on your car window but then lectured you about how you shouldn't say 'cunt' because it's rude.

Oh, and there's a hacky romance scene between Phil and his old girlfriend played by Elizabeth Banks where they talk about what could've been. Every fucking thing in this movie is playing the most rancid, tired detective movie cliches straight, without even trying to be satire. It's pretty amazing that I can't even tell if this movie is even a little bit self-aware. It seems to think it qualifies as 'satire' since they're trying to make jokes in the movie, but how does that make sense? Just having eggs and flour separately doesn't mean you've made a fucking cake.

Perhaps the real low point, though it's hard to choose, is the sex scene between Phil and the lady he accepted the case from, in which there's an extended scene of Phil ejaculating Silly String all over the place for far, far too long... I think Silly String should really reconsider how their product is used in media from now on.

I just can't believe any functioning adult wanted to put this in a movie. There are a bunch of people watching, too, including Phil's secretary Bubbles and a bunch of cops, and none of them seem to make much of a big deal out of it. Bubbles even grabs a bunch of cleaning supplies like this happens all the time. That's really why so much of this is such bad comedy – why would she stay around after the first time her boss jizzed all over his own office and made her clean it up? Just because it's a comedy doesn't mean you can just stop making any logical sense. Part of good comedy is people's reactions to bizarre or over the top situations. Here, this gross, weird nonsense is just treated like an every day thing.

The rest of the movie doesn't improve at all. More bad sex puppet jokes, and they throw in some physical gags about McCarthy's appearance for good measure, which is weird since I thought the movie was trying to be all feminist or whatever. But because it's comedy, it apparently doesn't have to make sense, so I guess I'm the jackass here.

Oh, and did you want to see a children's puppet portrayed as a strung out dying drug addict in a grimy, dark hellhole? You're in luck. The movie provides this soul-killing image with the exact amount of tact you've come to expect, which is none. Seriously, what reason would anyone have to want to see that image?

I guess they find out the real killer was that hot puppet lady from the very beginning, because the bullet Phil fired while trying to kill the guy who'd captured McCarthy accidentally killed her father all those years ago. It's a real stretch. But they make it work by not trying to give this character a personality in any way. Phew! That solves that problem!

The movie ends, finally and mercifully, with Phil asking out his secretary Bubbles, despite there being no romantic connection between the two at all for the entire movie. Does she even want to go out with him after she's had to literally clean up his jizz at the office multiple times? I guess it's consistent in that it's totally unfunny garbage just like literally every single other frame of the movie.

The jokes were bad, the story was bad, I really didn't see even one thing to like here. It's been a while since that happened. The humor in this is solely based on stupid juvenile shock value shit that is bad even by that standard. There's basically one joke idea: puppets swearing and talking about dirty things = funny. And it can't even do that remotely well. Everything in this is overly simplistic low-brow crap and doesn't try to use its creativity for anything but the easiest, lamest jokes possible.

It's actually kind of amazing how truly worthless this movie is, and I really doubt there will be anything worse this year. But if you like terrible jokes and no plot or character, go nuts with The Happytime Murders!

Image copyright of its original owners, we don't own this.

Fantastic Four (2015)

The creation of new Fantastic Four films is like some sort of mind-bending thriller plot where they do the same thing over and over again in some bizarre torture-loop. Like, when they become aware of the awful hell they've been subjected to, a switch is flipped and then it's like 'go back to the start, make another origin story, show again how they got their powers. You won't remember any of this when it's over.' Then the screams are drowned out by forcefully canned, "triumphant" opening credits music and the sound of Reed Richards trying to coerce his friends into space again.

This one is the worst one. And probably one of the worst superhero movies ever made at that. Josh Trank, who made the excellent Chronicle, directed this, which is a shame as he deserved more than the studio meddling he got here.

Director: Josh Trank

Starring: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

I mean, hell, it's barely even a superhero flick to begin with. Calling it a movie is even a bit of a stretch. You start off with like, 20 minutes of Reed Richards as a kid. Apparently he's a creepy little fuck in this who spends all his time making a doorway to another dimension. I love how even the teacher in his class is sarcastic at him and doesn't even support him a little bit. Dude, you're teaching 5th graders, quit acting like you're Simon fucking Cowell, you weirdo.

But to be fair, Reed is the kind of kid who waits in a car at night like a horror movie villain outside the junkyard, where his classmate Ben lives. Ben, being a total idiot, apparently considers this to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. They begin that night using parts from the junkyard to make Reed's science thingy.

Oh and Ben, by the way, is apparently just bullied by his big brother, who says “It's clobberin' time” to him as he's hitting him. That's where that catchphrase came from, kids!

Reed and Ben then go back to Reed's garage and put the finishing touches on the whole dimensional gateway machine that every kid had in their garage back in the 90s – oh the nostalgia. I love that there's really no explanation of why he wanted to make this or, really, what it even does. He could be trying to become the new Adolph Hitler for all Ben knows. Maybe the door to dimensions opens up the door to the DC Film Universe, which would at least explain why this sucks so bad.

Oh, and they shut off power in the entire neighborhood. You would think this would be enough for people to ask questions as to what he was doing. Or for his parents to keep a closer eye on him from then on to make sure he doesn't burn down the house or isn't torturing anybody in their garage. This could almost be an interesting plot point or character moment... WHICH IS WHY WE THEN SKIP SEVEN YEARS AHEAD!

Yup. Seven year skip just out of nowhere. Reed is now closer to college and still making the same dumb dimension door thing, and Ben is still helping, because why would anything change in your life in the most formative years of said life? Everything always remains the same during that time of your life.

Incidentally, a dimensional door, huh? I guess this is how Stranger Things happened... either that, or it's just bland chopped-up sci fi cliché stew, delivered lukewarm, and with a few mysterious hairs in it that make you question whether you're hungry at all.

There's a scene where Victor Von Doom, who is portrayed here as a greasy neckbeard weirdo with a fascination with Sue Storm, and the other dudes all decide to go into the door and fuck around in the other dimension. It goes horribly and they blow everything up. All hail white dude mediocrity, right? I love that they don't even bring Sue with them, but she gets hit by radiation anyway even just sitting back in the regular world. I'd be so pissed. I'd be like 'goddammit, motherfuckers.'

Most of the rest of this sinks into an insufferable muck of boring crap. It's trying to be all dark and “mature,” in the way that only a kid listening to Nine Inch Nails and death metal while mad at their mom at age 15 can be. I guess director Josh Trank had this whole vision that was ruined due to re-shoots, since honestly, all art is always improved by constant last minute tinkering by guys who wear sandals with socks. YOU KNOW BEST, CORPORATIONS!

But it really just comes off as silly. They have a bunch of scenes with them strapped to tables in dark, creepy lab rooms with scientist guys in dark glasses not answering their question. It's like if Stephen King wrote a Firestarter spec script while drunk off his ass. How do you like these scenes for your kids, parents? Don't you love that the happy-go-lucky Fantastic Four have been turned into this vague, dark pile of bullshit? Wasn't THIS how you always pictured these iconic heroes?!

Then they just skip ahead a year again without really exploring the characters or the world. This whole movie is like they just filmed the Wikipedia summary of a plot. There's really just zero character development. They don't bother to explore even the littlest parts of who these people are or why we should care. I know that's like expecting a McDonalds to carry high-class cuisine at this point, but eh fuck it, I'm already critiquing everything else anyway.

They find Victor Von Doom in the other dimension, who got lost there before. He's now turned into some kind of weird fantasy monster, like a shitty D&D creature made by the kid your mom forced you to play with because he didn't have anyone else. He comes back and tries to, I dunno, destroy the world or something? He says some vague things about 'sucking the world into his own dimension and making a new dimension.' This is all a bunch of gobbledegook and the kind of thing a 10 year old would find too lame to even play with his action figures.

They beat him, I guess, and they're really only acting as a whole team for like, what, 10 minutes of the super goofy, lame CGI-fest climax? Otherwise, this isn't a Fantastic Four movie. It's a 'random dark action movie where people have strange, silly powers for no reason.' Hooray for that? Meh.

This movie sucks and anyone who likes it, I strongly think is a foreign agent against their own government. Be suspicious of them.

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Truth or Dare (2018)

Well, I can't even say they've reached the bottom of the barrel for horror movies yet with a stupid plot about the game Truth or Dare. Because the moment I say that, we'll get a totally serious movie based on Hungry Hungry Hippos or Pogs, and then that will be the new bar for the barrel's bottom. But what I can tell you is that this movie is seriously rotten from the inside out.

Director: Jeff Wadlow

Starring: Lucy Hale, Violett Beane

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Truth or Dare, if you haven't seen the absolutely bonkers trailers that have been out for months, is about a bunch of kids who go to Mexico and contract a deadly spiritual curse that forces them to play the game Truth or Dare forever until they all die. Personally I would've rather had an STD.

It starts out with a bunch of models for a fancy skin cream solution – oh, I'm sorry, did I say that? I meant our main characters. Seriously, they look like they just came out of a fucking factory line for a commercial, only to be stuffed back in the box after it's over. Was there something wrong with having them look like they had ever been out of a locked laboratory room, or do physical imperfections scare Blumhouse Pictures more than anything?

They're all going to Mexico for Spring Break, and the biggest hurdle they had was convincing their Habitat for Humanity-loving friend Olivia to go, as she wanted to go build houses and other boring, stupid shit. What a dork! So they cancelled her trip to do that and instead now force her to go to Mexico. I guess they promise to help her out later, but eh, I wouldn't trust these people further than I could throw them.

In Mexico, you get some dumb shots of them partying and stuff. You know, the best part of any horror movie; the meaningless shots of hot people having fun. Truly essential. Olivia meets this guy Carter, who entices her to get all her friends to follow him to a creepy abandoned church in the middle of the fucking night for vague reasons. Honestly, my biggest question is how this girl made it to college if she was dumb enough to do this, because literally no sane person would meet some dude sitting alone at a bar, get an invite to come to some desolate broken-down-ass church at 2 a.m., and then think 'sounds like a fun vacation!' Even the most low-standards, base-level people would start to shy away from you if you suggested leaving the fucking bar.

But nope, they play Truth or Dare sitting in this filthy fucking hovel, like a bunch of idiots with no imagination. It's about what you'd expect, some lap dances and make-out scenes and other nonsense. But then Carter surprises them by saying he wanted to lure them all there to trap them in the supernatural curse and FORCE them to play! What a weirdo. Gee, it sure is bizarre that this stuff happens when you follow creepy strangers in the middle of the night.

I guess the rule is that if they DON'T do their truth or dare, they die. So it's kind of like It Follows, except it's terrible. When possessed by the game, the characters' faces turn into demonic, cartoonish Joker-ish grins, which is never explained and has no function outside of looking kinda spooky if you're under 15. I guess that's a weak nitpick. But I dunno, it's weird and doesn't make sense and the movie sucks overall, anyway.

So then they all go home and everything seems to be getting back to normal. Only then, they start seeing creepy things like 'Truth or Dare' etched into desks, fliers and even Olivia's car! She finally chooses truth, and ends up blurting out in the library that Markie, her best friend, has been cheating on her boyfriend. Wow, what a great scare – bullshit teeny-bopper drama! That's scarier than anything.

So from here on out, you get a bunch of just plain goofy scenes. The most annoying guy in the group gets dared to take his dick out at a bar. When he doesn't, the game kills him by making him fall off a pool table and break his neck! An equivalent punishment, at last!

Another guy, a gay dude, picks 'truth' and is forced to come out to his strict conservative father. Apparently it goes pretty well and things are alright. Wow. What a nuanced and surprisingly level-headed plot choice for a movie like this. I sure hope it doesn't get ruined later.

A few more of them die – this one guy, who seemed to be doing an Anthony Jeselnik impression, lies to his grad school interview about selling pills, so he then has to stab his eye out I guess.

And the great bitter rivalry between former best friends Olivia and Markie continues – oh the humanity! Markie gets dared to break Olivia's hand, I suppose. She does it when Olivia makes a crack about her dad, who committed suicide recently. This plotline, by the way, is just dropped randomly in our laps, like a piece of dried up dog shit.

Eventually they try and figure out what's going on. I can't imagine why; they've all been having such fun playing! They track down this girl who was dared to light a woman on fire earlier in the movie. I guess she was now dared to murder Olivia. I love the variety in the dares. Some people are dared to show their dick, while others are dared to murder people! Totally makes sense!

If you can believe it, the last 30 minutes actually try to get serious on you and start foisting a bunch of ludicrously over-dramatic plots. Like remember that plot about the gay kid coming out to his father? Well, it turns out the game dares that kid to steal his father's police gun and make him beg on his knees! And then the other cop comes and shoots the kid, thinking the dad is in trouble! Wow. With the current climate of police in this country, I'm glad this movie is bringing a sensible take on the issue.

Then we find out that Olivia actually had seen Markie's father right before he killed himself! And he tried to have sex with her and probably actually raped her! And she then told him he'd be better off if he died!

Movie, you know, it's not good to pretend you're something else than what you are. You're trying to shoehorn in these ultra-serious tragic plots, when really you're the kind of movie people watch when drunk off their asses at 2 a.m. while eating Cheetos. You're background noise. You're really not a serious film.

The climax is an over-long, ridiculous sequence involving a Mexican curse that “summoned” the game in the form of a demon. They find this out by going to visit a stereotypical old Mexican ex-nun now living secluded in the desert, a stereotype so cliche and redundant it almost feels new again. But instead it's just kinda racist hack-work. Then they learn they have to cut out that guy Carter's tongue from the beginning of the movie to stop the demon. This is so ridiculous that even the characters openly admit they have no clue how it's going to work.

I guess they try to, but the game, being a little bitch, cheats and makes them accidentally kill Carter instead. Then Olivia and Markie are forced to keep playing, so they broadcast a Youtube and make the entire world play, thus enacting Armageddon basically. I always knew the end times would come as a result of hot coeds and Youtube videos.

Truth or Dare is a garbage fire of a movie, and I DARE all of you to buy the DVDs and burn them in a mass grave. Am I doing it right?

Image copyright of its original owners, we don't own it.

Species III (2004)

It's been a few years since I did a Species review. After I did the last one, way back in 2015, my entire life changed and I didn't get around to doing the third one. But fortunately I still had this lying around! So that's great and it makes up for all the other things that have happened between then and now. I thought about saying this was just how long it took for me to work up the nerve to review another Species movie. But the truth is that this was destined to happen. It has to happen.

Director: Brad Turner

Starring: Robin Dunne, Robert Knepper, Sunny Mabrey

IMDb

Co-written with Colin.

This one starts out with a truck ride with a dying Eve from the other movies. She has a baby before she dies, which the driver goes rogue and steals for unknown reasons, fleeing into the woods as the military pursues him. Apparently he's good at hiding, because they don't catch him.

Then, at an unspecified later time, a cocky college science lab geek is showing people around his fancy lab, talking about mumbo jumbo and science that nobody cares about. Something about a power plant? Who knows. He questions his professor, who is the same guy who ran away from that truck and I guess is now working at a college? I dunno. The professor, aggravated at the kid's science projects, tells him that “who are you to decide who lives and dies?” Which, you know, is just how professors are; constantly wanting to crush the spirits of their students, subjugating them to their will.

Then that kid, Dean, finds out his science projects have been cancelled by the college dean, who proclaims that he can “do whatever he wants” and acts about as insane and power-hungry as a third world dictator. Is every faculty member at this fucking college an egomaniac seeking validation for their shriveled soul?

Meanwhile, college professor/military truck driver, whose name is apparently Abbott, on the run is actually hiding the alien at his house, who is a little girl right now obsessed with Red Lobster. Literally, they show a Red Lobster commercial on TV and the professor dude, I guess, has to go spend his hard earned money on fucking lobster for this alien brat, as if he just has money falling out his GODDAMN EARS!

I guess Abbott is approached later by the other alien who'd been in the truck, who has now grown up to look like a bloated Comic Con attendee with a swollen head. The alien tells him he's a halfbreed and, as such, is dying. And that there are others like him out there. This prompts Abbott to want to save these aliens... for some goddamn reason. Weren't they killing people in the other movies? Oh well. Anything to distract from actual HUMAN causes he could more easily be helping, right?

Meanwhile the girl alien grows up into a gorgeous woman, physically perfect in every way of course. I guess she's like the last true full-breed alien, or some shit like that. Hmm. The only perfect specimen to this movie is white, blonde people. Where have I heard that before? Nah, probably nothing important.

If that troubling allusion isn't your cup of tea, how about the series' tried and true theme of the aliens being sex toys? I mean, the alien girl in this never grows up past her early 20s with a flawless body, even though the aliens are supposed to like, keep growing at a very fast rate. Eve, from the other movies, was always physically perfect and young, too. I'm SURE there's a reason for this that isn't sex appeal! I'm sure it's a deeply entrenched plot point.

The dean of the school shows up at Abbott's house, for some reason having access to get in, and finds the alien chick, naked of course. He abandons every other reason he came there when she seems to want to have sex with him. I guess it's not suspicious at all if some random woman answers the door at a house you're going to and tries to have sex. I'm sure that'll end up fine... actually she kills him, which is fine as he was an asinine character.

I love that Abbott's reaction is just to shrug and be like “he had it coming” to the dean's death. Oh really? Tell us more about who ELSE deserves to die, crazy professor man. How did you even get this job anyway? Weren't you on the run from the US government? I guess the college just doesn't have very high standards.

I guess somewhere else in the movie's rolls of corpulent fat, we get one of the other half-breed aliens trying to fuck everyone to stay alive. So we get scenes of this physically perfect brunette woman wearing very scant clothes going around to have sex with dirty losers at biker bars and such. This is totally a legit plot point. It's not at all a thinly veiled way for the writer to get out his own fantasies about what women should do to regular average Joes. NO. THIS IS A REAL PLOT THREAD DONE FOR STORY AND NOT SHAMELESS NUDITY. WHY WOULD ANYONE THINK OTHERWISE???

Like I'd love to get a window into some of these actress's stories. I bet she held a dream deep inside her heart for years to be an actor. Ever since she was a child, she'd wanted to be one. In school she was in all the productions, every play, working her way up to a starring role. A Midsummer Night's Dream, in middle school. Then in high school she was in A Streetcar Named Desire, playing the Stella role, and all her friends and family came out and it was the greatest night of her life. I bet she wanted to be an actor because it gave her the opportunity to explore the richness of life and the complex minds of other people and various characters. I bet she wanted to become famous and one day inspire OTHER little girls like she once had been, showing them that with hard work and determination, THEY TOO can do anything they want...

Anyway, then she landed her first “big role” and it was for this, and the director told her to take her clothes off and pretend to fuck some hairy guy in a gas station bathroom. Such is life I guess. Fucking tragic.

Oh, and somewhere in all this, Abbott dies – what a tragedy that this ridiculous character is gone. Eh, fuck it, sarcasm's a bit passe anyway.

The roommate of the main dude gets involved, because apparently he REALLY wanted to be a character too even this late in the film. He gets suckered in by this other alien chick, who ends up kidnapping him and making him do some science mumbo jumbo for her, I guess trying to further the species with more science – honestly, the science here matters almost none at all and it's pointless to explain it.

Fortunately, though, the heroes get there – well, it's just the main kid Dean and this random-ass detective who's done nothing all movie. The final battle scene is somewhere between a Star Wars and Terminator ripoff with the scenery. I guess it's OK since nobody associated with those franchises knew Species existed at this point...

Man these Species movies are just exhausting and hilarious. It's horrible filmmaking but it's also funny to watch and even funnier to make fun OF. They fill me with such complex emotions. And for as bad as they are, you have to give these movies credit for finding a way to basically make pornography marketable as a legitimate horror movie not found in some special interest section. They hid it in plain sight! It's genius!

Image copyright of its original owners if they even give a shit.

The Snowman (2017)

This has to be a record for the least amount of reasons I actually wanted to review a movie, and that's just down to the name of the main character: Michael Fassbender IS... Detective Harry Hole. That name is so insane that I had to see this shit to see if it was as goofy.

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

And it wasn't. Seriously. This is an insanely boring piece of shit with no point to it. If you wanted to stop reading now, you wouldn't be missing out on much – except for my razor-sharp trademarked wit, anyway. I guess the director has said the reason this was so botched up was because they didn't have time to shoot 10-15 percent of the script, and had to start unexpectedly early. And I get that. But at the same time, I'm just not that sure this would've been that much better anyway.

It starts off with a flashback of this kid trying to learn schoolwork and whenever he gets it wrong, his asshole stepfather (or whatever the character is supposed to be) smacks his mother in the face. Not sure that's part of the accepted curriculum. Then after finding out the stepfather is sleeping with someone else, the mother and the kid go on a drive when the mother gives up and tries to kill them both on thin ice! The kid escapes, but the mother dies – what a cheerful opening that also reveals so much about the movie we're about to see.

Then we're introduced to Detective Harry Hole, a complete lazy degenerate who somehow keeps his job even in spite of constantly drinking after work and falling asleep in snowy alleyways that should probably kill him. He's just a fucking loser, and Michael Fassbender's talents are wasted. Hell, he barely even has any fucking dialogue. There are scenes where he just walks up to people wordlessly staring at them, and we're just kind of supposed to dissect and analyze what that means even with zero real clues.

I guess she's his ex girlfriend and has a kid who isn't even his, but for some reason he's still involved. And there's a new guy in the mix who acts subtly snooty but isn't really a bad guy. Wow! Disconnected family drama! What a new, exciting thing!

Oh, okay, that was sarcasm. But you know what IS super fresh? A younger, motivated partner who joins the force and starts really trying to idealistically solve crimes that her jaded older partner thinks are impossible! Oh wait, shit, that's cliché hack garbage too. Fuck. Maybe this movie isn't so good.

The story is quite amazingly, infuriatingly directionless. It just seems to ramble on and not get to the point at all. I guess there's some scraps of a story when a woman goes missing and there's a mysterious snowman in the yard. But that should've been like, the first scene. Instead, it sort of just lazily drools through the film over the first half hour and there isn't much resolution or drive to solving it. There's a bunch of other fucking bullshit about Hole's ex-girlfriend's family, some camping trip, a hockey game, honestly, it's all just shit and we don't need to focus on it. The movie does enough time-wasting so I don't have to.

At least the young woman detective has pertinent theories about why the killer is doing stuff, saying the snow probably sets him off. That's fucking stupid because there's literally no evidence to support it – and the movie seems to agree with me, as it proves to be false anyway.

Oh, and got to love how it's set in Norway but every single character exclusively speaks perfect English in a British accent. You know, the usual lazy way to show a foreign country. Just have everyone be British! I mean why wouldn't I ever want to see a different culture or anything like that?

Eventually, after like 45 minutes of film – near half the runtime – we FINALLY get a real story starting to emerge, which is so asinine I'd throw the movie into a ravine if I hadn't rented it from Redbox. Some lady is reported missing, to which Harry Hole and his partner go and try to figure it out. But she's actually just fine, chopping off chicken heads in the dead of winter, like you do. Then they leave and before they even get very far in the car, they get ANOTHER call about the same lady, missing again! How inconsiderate to waste resources like that. Don't you know gas is expensive now?

I guess Harry Hole wanders around a bit, with Fassbender wearing a permanent expression of zombielike uncaring, and he finds a hole to look down in! Hey, Harry Hole is looking down a hole! Yeah, that's about all the humor I can mine from this dead, dried up well. But you do get to see a woman's severed head on top of a snowman! It's too bad that isn't as funny as it sounds. A better movie would've played it for campy laughs. But not The Snowman. This is mercifully free of any entertainment.

The movie sluggishly slogs on, with some other random story about JK Simmons playing some creepy doctor who takes pictures of women without tops on to blackmail them, or some shit like that. I dunno. I was falling asleep during most of this plotline and was only woken up when something fell off the refrigerator in my apartment and loudly made noise as it hit the floor. That's really how I finished the rest of this movie, because that happened.

A lot of other very dull things happen, and then it's revealed that the bad guy is actually Harry Hole's ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend! DUN DUN DUN! What a nonsensical twist! It turns out HE was the kid in the beginning of the movie with the jackass stepfather or whoever that was. And he says he's been killing women because he's judged them for getting abortions, not knowing who their kids' fathers were, and other things. I'm sure a better movie could've made this compelling, developed his character or added social commentary, but The Snowman was just like “fuck that!” and didn't do it at all. And seriously, 'guy who was totally inconspicuous and nice the whole movie is actually the killer'? That was the BEST you could do? Even people in comas for the last 30 years would find that trite and overdone.

So instead we just get a dumb final battle scene where Harry Hole chases the killer out into the wide-open icy field. When he loses track of him somehow – there doesn't seem to be many places to hide out there – Harry just stands in place and screams for the killer to come face him. Real badass! Except the guy instead just shoots him from far away. Man, people just have no honor anymore.

Then the killer comes close, making some bullshit speech no doubt, and falls through a hole in the ice, dying instantly in the freezing cold. So really, Harry Hole didn't do all that much of anything to stop the guy. If this had been happening in the summertime, he would've just been murdered point blank. What a hero!

There wasn't really anything worth watching in this. Two hours of complete bullshit, nonsense time-wasting. In the interest of ending this review and not wasting YOUR time anymore, avoid the movie. There. Done!

Image copyright of its original owners; we don't own it.

The Open House (2018)

Today's movie is The Open House, a film that seems to pose the question 'how can we take out everything that people would like in a horror movie and still have a movie?' You may not want to stay for long, but come and see the open house tour of... the movie The Open House. I also accept it if you hated that joke and never come back.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE AHEAD!

Directors: Matt Angel, Suzanne Coote

Starring: Dylan Mynnette, Piercey Dalton

IMDb

Co-written with Tony, Nathan and Michelle.

I guess this thing is a Netflix original that they put up for anyone to see – which honestly makes me wonder who at Netflix was mad that day and why he felt the need to take it out on us.

This thing is just puzzling because, for much of its duration, it's kinda hard to tell even what it's supposed to be about. Is it a supernatural ghost story? A serial killer slasher? There are really no clues. Hearing that without seeing it, I'd hope there was just enough ambiguity and subtlety to keep you guessing. In reality, it's more like they lost the script during production and just winged it for most of the time while an underpaid intern was dispatched to go find the script. Clearly he never did...

The basic plot of the movie is that this kid Logan, played by 13 Reasons Why's Dylan Mynnette, is at the gas station with his father when a car hits and kills the father within the first five minutes. Wait, stop – we barely had a chance to be annoyed at the shallow writing of that character! At a funeral later, the mom's sister comes over and barely wastes a second on condolences before offering them to come stay in the empty mountain house she's trying to sell. Wow. How saintly of her to come down from her gold palace in the mountains to spend time with these fucking peasants. I just love how sudden it is – she barely says two words before going into that pitch. Like she only came there just to offer them that and not actually to grieve for her brother-in-law, and it was just convenient that the funeral was going on and gave her an excuse.

So I guess they're off to the mountain house now... I guess the reasoning was that it would help them heal or whatever, but they never attempt to talk about the father or anything, and never look like they're even trying to deal with their grief. Logan just grouses a lot about how he's missing school. GEE, I'm SORRY you're missing out on the mundane school classes to come stay at a COOL MOUNTAIN HOUSE, Prince Persnickety! What a travesty! Somehow I doubt this kid was ever gonna be a fucking surgeon or the President anyway. I doubt he's missing much.

Perhaps the greatest character in this movie or in any movie is Martha, the sweet old lady who speaks solely in cryptic, ominous horror movie quotes with a smile on her face while the characters just look at her dumbfounded. It's seriously the best thing ever. Her first appearance has her recognizing Logan and his mom without ever seeing them before. It takes a few more lines of dialogue for them to figure out that, apparently, the aunt sent along a picture and their names ahead of time so Martha would know them. That's not weird at all... and that's how real people talk, right? In awkward cryptic dialogs that are stretched out for no reason?

Then Martha starts talking about her dead husband and says every day she feels the eternal void of darkness – you know, just regular gas station chat for a Wednesday night!

THEN she closes the conversation by saying how they're “never really alone” out there and the silence “can get loud” out there, which is either pleasant talk from a neighbor or the words whispered by a serial killer right before your car goes off the road and then you're knifed in the woods a few minutes later. I mean, I can barely tell the difference now.

Most of the movie after this is just this numb slog through absolutely nothing. They mope around in the house and don't really do any kind of healing or character development or even anything remotely interesting. They have a whole secluded mountain house that's nicer than anything I ever stayed in. And they use it for, what, just sitting there staring at the walls? That makes me so angry. What small minded boring clod actually thought the best things he could do with his movie was have Logan prowling around in the basement playing with the power switches for most of the movie? Oh, he also jogs a bit – my bad, wouldn't want to misrepresent the insane levels of drama here. But those things are really the bulk of the film. I think the director probably finds waiting in line at the DMV to be titillating. He watches the DVD menus of movies and that's entertaining enough for him. I mean who needs any actual scares in a fucking horror movie?

Oh, but don't let me deprive you of the bizarre dialogue between those scenes. Like the one dude at the store who for some reason feels the need to say this line talking about how the mom is pretty, which I'll just copy and paste whole: “I just mean the mountain folk can get a little, uh... scruffy at times. And I am not talking about the men.”

Thanks for that tidbit, dude! You truly are a bastion of poetic thought. A real Keats for this generation. What would we ever do without your witty, quaint observations on modern small-town life, your flippant yet honest quips that reveal as much about you as they do the audience?

Then we get Logan's treatise on the idea of an “open house” in general: “I mean, you give your keys to someone you hardly know, they stand in one room and welcome in a bunch of complete strangers, and those people just roam around the house. And the realtor doesn't check the house when it's done, right? They just... turn the lights off and go?”

Wow! What a revelatory insight! Are you going to walk us through airplane food next? I mean, while you're working on that Tight Five.

Then we get a big fight between Logan and his mom that seemingly erupts out of nowhere after over an hour of screentime with no other such developments. She says the dad had been irresponsible with money and left them nothing when he died. He says he hates her and wishes SHE had died. Wonderful! My favorite part is how this never comes up again! Yup – it was never brought up before, and this is the last time we hear about any of it. Character development by masters, clearly. Why didn't Vince Gilligan sign these writers up to help with Better Call Saul?

The climax seemingly comes out of nowhere – while the open house is going on, apparently someone broke in or something. The cops weren't called by the realtors, because they're the real estate company that doesn't care about their properties! Instead, the mom has to call them – only, typical of small town cops, they don't really do anything.

Later on, the killer just sneaks in and starts fucking with them. I guess 'killer' isn't really the right word. He knocks Logan out when Logan finds a dead body outside, and then pours gasoline or water or something all over him... and then just leaves him outside. Then he finds the mom and lies in her bed for several minutes without her noticing. She even gets up and goes to the bathroom, comes back and looks at a picture of her dead husband... and doesn't notice the guy! Wow! That can't even really be HIS fault anymore after a point. Not to victim blame – but he's not so much an intruder as a very weird roommate at this point. He was probably feeling dejected that she didn't notice him faster.

Then again maybe she just has a rare disease where she can't feel anything and the world in general is just numb – I like to call it 'the feeling of watching this fucking movie.'

Anyway, he ties her up and breaks her fingers! He doesn't kill her or anything... just breaks her fingers. You know, I'm starting to think this guy has no plan and is just an especially aggressive prankster. Lame.

Then Logan goes down to the basement and stabs who he THINKS is the killer, but it turns out, whoops, it's his own mom he just stabbed by accident! Silly Logan. Just one of those common mistakes for clumsy people! Also it's a complete dog-shit, run into the ground cliché and I think anyone doing this in a movie should be BANNED FOR LIFE FROM MAKING MOVIES. Or, you know, just made fun of for being cliché. Do what you feel is appropriate.

Logan then runs around in the woods for a while aimlessly. Martha shows back up for one more hurrah and the final good moment of the film, where she just stares blankly ahead and smiles like she thinks she's at a tropical island resort, which, honestly, this character probably does really think. Oh if only...

Then the morning comes and the killer finds Logan and unceremoniously strangles and kills him. Why did he wait that long? Logan could've easily found some cops or another person and alerted the authorities – it was only by the sheer grace and immensity of his idiocy that he didn't. Either way, what an underwhelming and shitty garbage-ass final kill!

This movie is an amazing cobble of ridiculous and bizarre choices. It's so ludicrous in its slow pace and lack of anything happening, and the silly dialogue on top of all of that makes me actually kinda like it. This is basically cut from the same cloth as The Room or Troll 2. And by God did we need another like that! Hats off to The Open House!

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