It Follows, or The Grand Unification Theory of Monsters

So It Follows, like the previous year's The Babadook, was 2014's hyperbolic horror indie critical darling, getting some ludicrous score on Rotten Tomatoes and with most educated people falling over themselves to tell us how horror films have TRULY ARRIVED.

And let's be fair, It Follows is in alot of metrics a good film.  The cinematography is both entertaining and highfalutin enough to appeal to that year in college I took a bunch of film courses, the acting is low-key and generally acceptable, and the obnoxious "hey look we're adolescents time to talk like a Diablo Cody" dialogue stops when danger actually starts, rather than increasing like these sorts of movies are wont to fall back on.  Alot of people raved about the music, and it's nice I guess, but I'm honestly getting tired of every high-profile horror film sounding like a mixtape crafted by a guy that heard Perturbator for the first time a week ago.

But is it a good horror movie?  Enh.  While there's alot to technically appreciate in It Follows, ultimately my enjoyment was heavily, heavily tempered by the fact that its monster, that nasty 'ole shape-shiftin' stalker,* is really not very scary or effective due to the movie fundamentally failing to understand how monsters operate.

(Warning: I'm just going to assume you saw this movie and so the rest of this review will be RELENTLESS SPOILERS so be warned ya chucklefucks)

From a purely thematic standpoint, I understand the love people had for the monster, especially within this paranoid political and moral age.  And I also understand that some people will read what I'm about to write and accuse me of being didactic, of being a slave to horror conventions and don't you get that the monster is a metaphor this isn't real life you Fangoria-reading jackass.  These people are probably right to some extent, as I am getting old and thus clutching to my horror conventions as a sailor clutches to a piece of balsam during a storm.  But breaking those conventions shouldn't mean your film's menace is possible only if your victims are somehow dumber than your average 80's slasher victim group.

What do I mean?  Basically, a movie monster's scariness and effectiveness depends on two separate parameters.  The first is self-evident, that being how strong the monster actually is.  Is it super strong, does it have chainsaws for hands, does it have horrible weaknesses?  At first glance, the creature in It Follows seems to be pretty scary.   Ooo, a silent, slow being of indeterminate origins that will eventually find you and...well, that scene wasn't very scary, was it.  It's invisible to anyone that isn't affected by its curse, and can impersonate anything.  It's not harmed by physical means, and it has some sort of rudimentary intelligence.

But then you start to think, and realize there are some issues.  First, while it's invisible and a shapeshifter, it still occupies some sort of physical space, as evidenced by the final pool scene where someone finally has the idea of just draping a towel over the monster to reveal where it is to the non-cursed.  It's strong, but not really, as it struggles with opening closed doors or merely brushes away wispy nerd boys.  It also doesn't seem capable of wanting to kill anyone that isn't cursed.  The most effective scene in the film is about a third of the way through, where the protagonist sees the monster in Creepy Tall Man mode standing behind her friends through an open door.  It's clear that that's one of the film's big money shots, but it also locks the monster into being basically harmless towards anyone that isn't cursed.

Now let's be clear, I'm not complaining about the weaknesses.  The most effective horror creatures are those that aren't onmipotent; horror icons that basically dictate how they want to be, such as Freddy Krueger, are entertaining, but can never really be properly scary due to how inherently unfair they are.  An audience needs to feel like a monster, once properly understood, they can be felled.  Sure, the It Follows demon is a bit on the weaker side, relatively speaking, but surely the characters don't have to understand all that, and can struggle to comprehend what they're dealing with, right?

Oh.

So here's the second parameter, and where It Follows stumbles into a trap of its own making: how much knowledge do the characters have of what they're dealing with?  That is to say, when encountering the monster, does your hero at least have a rudimentary idea of what that monster does?  Take vampires for example.  While Dracula and his children of the night have always been pretty goddamned strong, most movies take place in universes where at least some people have previously heard of vampires and are thus aware of their weaknesses.  This balances the playing field to some extent, as placing vampires in a setting where almost no one has heard of them leads to situations like Bram Stroker's Dracula (the book, not the film), where one pretty lazy vampire basically shits on all of London for months.

In the opposite end, a lack of knowledge about the creature can help make a relatively harmless monster scarier.  Imagine, for instance, that The Blob touched down in a earth where aliens weak to freezing temperatures were a suppressed, but still fairly common, occurrence.  You'd have a movie where the characters were completely brainless in order to have any sort of real conflict.  The tension in The Blob films are that the characters are completely clueless how to deal with this anomaly, the discovery of its weakness only accidentally discovered at the end.

You can probably see where I'm going with this.  Due to the fact that the monster in It Follows goes back up the chain of cursed people after killing the latest victim, it's always in the curser's best interest to essentially give the newest victim a pamphlet reading So You've Just Been Targetted by a Sort of Unstoppable Evil Force.  The protagonist of It Follows is given a pretty good rundown of how the monster operates almost immediately, even seeing it with her own eyes so there's no period of "oh maybe that guy was just crazy" in the film.  In a parallel universe, there's a cheesier version of It Follows where the protagonist discovers a spooky message board of cursed people called FollowChan.

Therein lies the problem.  In a film where you have a fairly weak monster versus a group of people that understand how that monster works, how do you create any sense of danger?  This movie's answer is "make everyone completely brainless," and holy shit did it take me out of the film.  I'm not saying that every horror movie needs to have the characters going You're Next on the monsters, but when the characters assiduously ignore every possible logical idea that both me and the person I was watching with independently thought up, it gets a lot harder to be affected by what's happening on the screen.  It's entirely possible that attempts to mark the creature with paint, or trapping it in a deep pit, would be failures, but based on what they know, all the characters do in this movie is a) run, b) transmit the curse to the most disbelieving friend who lives next door, c) shoot it, and d) lure the monster to a pool and shoot it again.  I suppose that's the reason there's only one death after the opening sequence, in that both sides of this conflict are really not good at their jobs.  It's the Extremely Moveable Object vs the Wall That's Just a Shower Curtain, and that's not really all that fun to watch.

This just leaves me to ask: why even have the curser tell the protagonist about the monster in the first place?  I hate to suggest I know better than an actual artist, but if you're so focused on creating a film emulating a nightmare, wouldn't the notion of having sex and then being stalked by a silent, shape-shifting monster be closer to dream logic than having sex and being lectured about your imminent stalking by the monster?  Granted, I dream about being Max Payne and bursting into a courtroom only to argue with a judge for two hours about improper trial venues, so maybe I'm in the minority here.

Again, I didn't hate It Follows, and it was certainly better than The Babadook, in that at least It Follows didn't transform its effective monster into a shitty CGI version of Tasmanian Devil in tornado form for the third act.  It's just a shame that the core of a slickly made horror film is ultimately less consistent than your average creepypasta.

*:imagine this in a proper southern drawl

THE BIG REVIEW OF DOOM (2016)

I can admit it.  I thought Doom was going to be trash.

Every sign that overly serious nerd tea leave readers use in these sorts of scenarios was there.  The review copy embargo.  The awkward E3 presentations.  Bethesda.  Seeing the game in action on various preview videos certainly made it look more Doom-y than the eternally unfortunate Doom 3, but they still looked clunky, and that melee kill mechanic, talk about a buzzkill.  And all those fights, it's just some lame arena shooter!

On that last respect I was partially right, and I should be clear here:  if you're looking at Doom to be the revival of the original two title's gameplay style and NOTHING ELSE WILL DO, you're not going to be happy.  Doom is a straight up arena shooter, where 90% of your combat will be from entering a room that locks you in while fighting a bunch of monster men.  But, oh my brothers, what an arena shooter it is.  Doom is the fulfillment of a promise started by Serious Sam and Painkiller, a breathing mix of adrenaline, humor, and copious gore that works in almost every way.

Where Doom triumphs over previous games of this sort is in the beautifully designed nature of its fights.  The biggest weakness of these FPS experiences starting with Serious Sam has always been the developer's reliance on fights just being a constant influx of a bunch of fucking monsters spawning over and over in the same area, long after you've figured out the best plan of attack against them.  There's alot of good things in Serious Sam, but did you -really- enjoy those rooms where you had to kill like 400 Kleer Skeletons for about ten minutes?  Sure it's fun for a little bit, but eventually you're just doing the same sidestep on a charge over and over with no variety in that murder motion.

can i just say how happy i am they retained the cacodemon's original look

No fight in Doom tends to go longer than four minutes, which is the perfect time to determine whether you're able to stand up to whatever the game flings at you or if you're going to be looking at an imp pulling off your arm and beating you to death with it.  I can't emphasize how important this change is, considering how every game of this sort previously relied on just throwing legions of cannon fodder at you until you went OKAY I GET IT JESUS PLEASE LET ME LEAVE THIS PARKING GARAGE.  Doom's fights are nasty and short affairs, just long enough to put you in a state of stress and force you to utilize the environment and scattered items to the fullest right before you glory kill your last Revenant.  A couple of fights near the end actually had me whooping in excitement as the last enemy fell and the last heavy metal guitar lick twanged out.  That never happens, and it says alot about how the game knows exactly how long it can keep up a player's adrenaline before it starts to drop off.

Speaking of glory kills, I'm still on the fence.  For those not in the know, glory kills come from when you've battered a demon enough that they start glowing, allowing you to perform an execution move on them.  Generally this nets a tiny amount of health, but if you're near death, enemies literally explode into a pinata of tiny health packs.  From a gameplay perspective, they're absolutely essential to do, because any difficulty level above the default mode is going to feature you getting shit on by the sheer unrelenting aggression of your foes, and holy fuck do they hurt.  Nightmare, the highest difficulty, will have you getting two-shot by an imp's cough, to say nothing of what the bigger baddies can do to you.

As a result, fights are an exhilarating affair, forcing a straight up run and gun experience where you pray to god that that imp is going to get stunned by your shotgun blast before you get a fireball to the face.  Still, after about halfway through the game, some of the kills become rather stale, and it feels sort of gimmicky that the only way to survive sometimes is to take advantage of the invincibility frames during your execution move to dodge a certain death attack from another monster.  And of course, you will occasionally fuck up the timing of your kill, coming off of the canned animation to be immediately murdered by an undodgeable attack.  Thankfully, checkpoints in this game are generally pretty fair about depositing you right before MurderBrawl 2016 begins anew.

What I'm not on the fence about is the utter fucking brilliance of what they did about the chainsaw.  The person on Doom's dev team that thought up the new chainsaw deserves a raise and an infinite supply of oral sex, because holy fuck.  For those not in the know, they transformed the chainsaw from an awkward melee weapon used by ammo-conscious nerds to kill Pinkies into a vicious hammer of god that not only instantly kills any demon you use it on, but also showers the player with an absurd amount of ammo.  The limitation is that the chainsaw now has fuel as ammo, and larger monsters require more fuel for the blood-making.  This forces the player to choose between using the chainsaw to kill more fodder-y enemies for essentially infinite ammo, or to deal with that raging 14-foot-tall Baron of Hell immediately but risk running out of ammo for your favorite Gunny.  Not only does this place the player in an immediate tactical choice, but it also highly diminishes forcing the player to root around in the given Fight Room for more ammo.


Guns are also almost uniformly goddamned amazing.  No fucking two-item weapon limit here, assclowns.  All of the old favorites are here, along with a few new guys like an assault rifle which I'm sure has the purists crying all over again but whatever.  All of the base weapons have some sort of relevance, but what puts things over the top is the introduction of weapon mods.  Yes, that means the dreaded UPGRADE PATHS, but it's okay here really!  Throughout the game you'll run into upgrade robots that let you place one of two attachments to a weapon of your choice.  Each one drastically alters the way the weapon operates.  For instance, you can make your shotgun fire a handy grenade every few seconds, or after a short charge, make it fire three rounds in quick succession.  You can upgrade the capabilities of these add-ons further with upgrade points, which drop from just playing through levels, finding secrets, and completing various combat challenges.

Unlike certain other severely overrated trash games, Doom does a really good job in giving you slightly more than enough points to let you experiment without fucking you over if you over-invested in a questionable upgrade path.  There's even strategic choice in that it costs more points each time you upgrade a specific attachment, but unlocking everything on an attachment opens a combat challenge which boosts that upgrade to an absurd degree.  For instance, for the shotgun's grenade, unlocking everything gives you the challenge to directly hit 30 imps with grenades, after which your grenades drop fuck-you clusterbombs after exploding.

However, there is a problem with weapons.  And that problem is named the Gauss Cannon.

The Gauss Cannon is one of the new weapons in Doom.  It is essentially a sniper railgun.  It hits like a goddamned truck.  Both upgrades for the cannon bring that absurdity further, one a chargeable scope that kills anything in two headshots, the other a siege mode attachment that forces you to stand still, but if fully charged will kill anything in one headshot, oh yeah and it also pieces through enemies.

I hesitate to call any enemy in Doom a bullet sponge because my definition of that term is something that is only hard to deal with due to its resilient nature, but most of the enemies in Doom do not go down easily, unless they're versus the Gauss Cannon.  It's obvious the developers tried to lessen the overpowered nature of the Gauss Cannon by forcing the player to limit his or her maneuverability while using it, but this just makes alot of fights a matter of getting enough distance between you and the Prime Bad, squeezing off a shot, then running away before everything in Hell hits you.  It's not that the Gauss Cannon is the only thing I used in the later stages of the game, but it certainly was my default "we are in a jam boys" option.

The other issue is that the Gauss Cannon shares ammo with the Plasma Rifle.  I was not a big fan of the plasma rifle in the original Doom games, but it had its place as the "I need to clear out a room of squishes as quickly as possible."  Here, the fact that the Gauss Cannon is a jealous and needy penis substitute undercuts the already questionable usefulness of the plasma rifle.  To put things nicely, the best way I can describe the plasma rifle's feel and power is "the water gun thing from Super Mario Sunshine."  Even imps require a thorough dousing in the supersoaker before going down.  Attachments don't help, since your options are some sort of area of effect blast that requires you to fire a bunch of rounds before becoming available, or a stun grenade that would be good if it wasn't for the fact that any fight in the game features about five deadly threats coming at you from any angle.  Still, for a game like this, one pretty overpowered gun and one pretty shit gun is pretty good.  And it's not like Doom 2 wasn't guilty of this shit (hello super shotgun, I love you but you're so goddamned stupid), so whatever.

I'm not going to discuss the enemies because part of the joy in this game is discovering each new baddy and how they're going to completely fuck you over, but I do want to talk about Imps.

Look at these fucks.  If they original Doom imps were annoying cannon fodder, and the Doom 3 imps were embarrassing cannon fodder (seriously, every time they blundered out of monster closets or summoning circles 2 inches from me and my shotgun I couldn't help but think of The Shockmaster), the new Doom's imps are unbelievably dangerous and obnoxious cannon fodder.  They're fast, they climb things, their fireballs are fast and hit like a truck, and they can even throw them over their shoulder while running away from you, like some sort of goddamned infernal banana peel.  The number of times I've been wrecking in a fight with full health and armor, only to be laid low by some imp that was hanging on a rafter above me and decided to scratch my butthole out is significant, always led to a GODDAMNIT, and always made me laugh.

Ultimately, that's what makes Doom work so well and why the accolades other critics have been giving it are not unwarranted for once.  It's a genuine joy to play, whether you're nailing the perfect Gauss Cannon headshot or getting hilarious murdered by some shit you didn't even seen because you were trying to dodge the 15 other stuffs guaranteed to kill you.  I've heard complaints about the game forcing you to look for secrets and complete challenges for weapon upgrades, but unless you're playing on Nightmare difficult or a total baddy, you don't have to deal with that, and what's the point of Doom if you're not taking some time out of murder to rub your face against the walls looking for secrets?

Likewise, I don't really want to discuss the plot aside from making fun of this awful Penny Arcade comic:

Ignoring the fact that somehow the art style has become even worse than when the comic started, actually yes the game is entirely about the increasingly inhumane nature of corporations, and a parody of the fps protagonist that blindly follows the commands of his establishment overseer.  Again, no spoilerinos, but one of the high points of joy in this game is Doom Guy's body language in contrast to how a player is supposed to react to the disembodied voice telling them to save the space whales.  It's not a perfect plot, but the fact that there's maybe ten minutes of unskippable plot sequences in a ten hour game forgives everything in this depressing day and age.

tl;dr: Doom is as good as Penny Arcade is wet shit

Holidays (2016)

okay guys how did I miss all these anthology horror films that have slipped down the pipe

I mean it.  There have been like four films released in the past year, and I've just been blithely ignoring them like small chickens, begging to be scooped into my mouth as I bellow "YEAH ITHZ OKAY I GUETHS."  I have a deep love for anthology horror, since it allows a person to experience the central core horror without all that pesky trappings or characterization.  There's the setup for about three minutes, then it's monster monster time yee-haw.  So, what happened?  The embarrassing answer is that I've had less time for horror movies since I've been experiencing social interactions, the thing that probably kills serious horror discussion, since it is a damn difficult balancing act to have deep thoughts about slasher weaponry in a psychosexual connotion while looking someone in the eye and telling you how much you love them.  But I'm trying my best here, guys!

At any rate while browsing through a completely legitimate film site for something for my girlfriend and I to watch, I saw Holidays, which billed itself as a collection of short horror films, each one related to a various holiday.*  That's just corny enough to work, I said, trying to ignore that one of the directors was fucking Kevin Smith.  After all, the guys that did Starry Eyes, the film that should have been considered the best horror of 2014 instead of the fucking Babadook, had a story in it!  It can't be that bad, right?

And the truth is that it's not all bad, but holy shit the chaff to wheat ratio for this anthology is fucking grim.

The primary issue with the film is that there are a whole eight stories packed into a 105-minute running length.  Most of the stories feel truncated and slight as a result, which is more frustrating when the few good'uns ended pre-maturely, making me rage at the foolish producers for allowing the fool films to remain.  I kid, of course, as I'm mature enough to understand that balancing all these different directors and concepts into a cohesive settlement that made everyone happy is a feat unto itself, but still.  Eurgh.

So about the Starry Eyes guys, they get first dibs with Valentine's Day, which is basically a revenge murder story where a shy swimmer pines for her coach while being bullied by another girl.  Also the coach has to get a heart surgery and you see where this is going right.  The realistic eye towards social dynamics and swag camera shots from Starry Eyes  are there, but the level of setup required for a story like this with the allotted running time means the ultimate experience is like being shoved along very quickly by your parents through an interesting museum exhibit.

The second film, St. Patrick's Day, is similarly conflicting.  On one hand, the plotline, involving an Irish schoolteacher, her sinister charge, pagan rituals, and one aspect of St. Patrick's acts, is actually a fairly novel concept for how to make a horror short about this holiday (I expected something about fucking leprechauns or a monster with green blood ooooh fuck off).  On the other hand, the girlfriend and I agreed it was a fucking mess, with neither the horror or comedy elements coming off right, leaving a tepid, confusing mess with special effects that sabotaged any real creepiness.

Easter comes next, and it's basically a clever bit of creature work that no doubt spawned from someone snickering about the dictomy of the holiday existing around both Jesus and a magical rabbit.  It's creepy I guess, but really I barely remember it because it was too close to the orbit of the worst and best entries of the film.

The worst easily belongs to Mother's Day, which was a lazy mess in every sense of the word.  The plot barely relates to the actual holiday, being about some woman who gets pregnant super easily, who for some reason takes the advice of her doctor to visit a new-age fertility clinic in the desert that are (get ready) not quite on the up and up.  The unending barrage of pointless scenes filmed in "wow look at me" camera angles couldn't distract me from the fact that this plot has been done multiple times already, most notably with V/H/S2's Safe Haven.  The whole experience feels like a homework assignment done the night before, complete with the hilariously awful final sequence, which is the pregnant woman giving birth, except OH NO IT'S A BLOODY ARM COMING UP FROM THE DRESS the end d minus see me after class please.

you also might notice that the bloody hand is so evil that it's coming out of her left thigh, jesus christ

Washing off the stink slightly is Father's Day, the best of the bunch, a sentiment echoed by my significant other so it's OFFICIAL DEAL WITH IT.  It concerns a young woman receiving a tape cassette from her missing father, detailing to her how she can find him again.  It's an honestly really effective film for several reasons: the locations and shots evoke a steadily rising sense of dread, the plot is simple enough to peaceably co-exist within its time limit, and the fact that said father is voiced by Michael Gross, who depending on your cultural background, you probably know as the dad from Family Ties or the crazy survivalist guy from Tremors.  His voice through the tape's filter is a perfect mixture of fatherly love and "oh god no don't do that" creepiness.  The only real criticism is that the ending is maybe a bit too ambiguous, but with stories like this I tend to prefer creating mystery over the "you see the truck was Dracula all along" plot poop bubble burst that occasionally appears in films like this.

It says alot about the level of quality in Holidays that the film done by Kevin Fucking Smith is arguably the second best.  I mean, oh sure, Halloween basically has nothing really to do with Halloween, and yeah Kevin Smith's meathanded attempts at tacking girl power and online harassment still reeking of white duder viewpoints could be discussed ad nauseam, but it's filmed well, and there's some admittedly clever lines.  You win, Kevin.  Fuck.

Christmas wins the "biggest waste of potential reward," featuring Seth Green as a beleaguered husband stealing the holiday's primo toy, a VR machine that shows you what's inside your head or something, from the hands of a dying man.  Unsurprisingly, he begins to see things from the perspective of the dead guy, and I settled in, expecting a serviceable, maybe even clever, techno-rehash of the "guy gets X transplant from mystery donor, things go to shit."  But for some reason, perhaps due to the running length, the story goes in a totally different, absolutely absurd direction before just deciding to abruptly end.

New Year's Eve is about a serial killer who finds a vulnerable date for the big ball drop and if you aren't able to figure out the twist already you haven't seen enough horror films.  This one exists, and it does not offend me, but I cannot sense its being either.

So, Holidays.  I could barely partake in it as a giant anthology horror nerdlord, and my slightly less irradiated girlfriend thought it was ass.  Ultimately it's something to watch, but I wouldn't mark it on your calanGORE eheheheheheeeeeahhhhh.

*: a weird coincidence is that two of the other anthology horror films last year were also holiday related, though focusing on a single holiday instead of the golden HORRORAL experience, make of that what you will

Sex and the City (2008), Sex and the City 2 (2010)

You might be wondering what is going on.  I understand.  The reason I am reviewing these movies, as a white male cultural critic who is only at home discussing the pacing of an 80's slasher kill, is that alot of nerdy stuff is just getting tiring to me as a solo venture.

I should put a big old pulsating emphasis on the world "solo venture" because I am still enjoying games and nerd movie shit as a social venture.  I've slowly rediscovered enjoyment of Left 4 Dead 2 even if I'm a Normal Difficulty scumbag.  I even resubbed to World of Warcraft after having not played the game in 2009, when mono basically killed my attempts to kiss the Lich King and make me the Homecoming Raid King.  But it's only enjoyable with others.  A few days ago, I loaded the game and played with a Special Person without having a method to communicate besides in-game chat.  Do you know what that's like?  Utter agony, like being trapped in a glass jar and having to lick the same 3 by 3 inch space over and over again.  With communication, you can at least say "man this space really sucks to lick" to the other person.

What I'm trying to say is that at the moment, my finger has been hovering over the Steam play button for Dragon Age: Origins, a game I have tried to play three times, each on the same origin story and class (Human Noble, two handed warrior), each time basically failing when I reach the first hub town and realize everyone around me is awful and going to incrementally wear me down until I'm nothing but stats and bones.  Bones that you cannot sell to a vendor for three silvers.  Which is also to say I'm slowly moving from nerdy things into applying my horrible critical habits from reviewing nerdy things towards not nerdy things.

Hence, Sex and the City.

I had no particular bias for Sex and the City before watching the movie.  My primary knowledge of the show came from reading short synopsis of episodes in my paper's tv guide, and jokes about Sarah Jessica Parker's horseface.  To be fair, Sarah doesn't have a horseface.  It's more like she has a sinister otherworldly creature inhabiting her skin, so that if you pay close enough attention, you can see it pushing against her face.  I knew it was about four friends in New York, in an episodic and seasonal structure, and that nothing important ever actually happens with them.  Alot of times the snippets in the tv guide mentioned a "Mr. Big," who was a fascinating mystery to my teenage brain.  Why was he called Mr. Big?  Did he have a monster dong, or was he some sort of shadowy power broker bang lord?

One of the nice things about the start of Sex and the City is that, likely to help those helpless boyfriends in the theater being dragged through the cinematic vagina dentata, is that there's a actually pretty well done breakdown of the television series events that sort of mattered:  all four of the women are sort of terrible in their own complementary ways, now they're all sort of domestic, and Mr. Big was just some rich British guy that Sarah Jessica Parker decided to make her final bang target.

The only thing not really covered, though mentioned by the Special Person and made abundantly clear by the film, is that the three girls that are not Parker's Carrie are basically in thrall to her.  Those three, the hard-edged and let's try not to use any sexist meanwords Miranda, the basically inconsequential Charlotte, and the likeable because all she wants to do is fuck Samantha, all have their own plotlines, but ultimately their existence is secondary to Carrie.  It's never clearly explained why this is the case; Entourage had the same issue, but it was more believable since the main character was actually successful, while his rat-faced companions were human polyps.  Here, it's true that Carrie is a Big Important Writer, but Miranda and Samantha both have high impact jobs too, so who even knows.  Perhaps a subconscious genetic control where the three other girls recognize that Carrie has the least destructive sexual instinct from a conventional societal viewpoint?

The first movie indeed doesn't really stray from its television format: at two and a half hours, it's basically three fifty-minute episodes, each with its own arc, cliffhanger, and advancement.  The first deals with Carrie's imminent marriage with Mr. Big, which after fifty minutes of characters going "this wedding is going to be amazing and the talk of New York City!" concludes with the not at all contrived sort of kind of jilting at the altar by Mr. Big.  This leads to the second part, which is fifty minutes of Carrie acting sad at a super expensive resort that no normal person could hope to enjoy, but that's okay because Carrie isn't enjoying it either until a dysentery joke occurs.

The conclusion is the inevitable "struggle then rise" bullshit, with Carrie becoming Her Own Woman before realizing "nah lol I want 2 get married."  This is helped along by Carrie hiring a spunky black woman, whose defining character traits are that 1) she is poor and 2) she is dedicated to subsuming her own desires for Carrie's, at least until asked.  I guess it's nice of the show to acknowledge there are black people in New York City, and as sad as it is to say, the fact that even has independent goals and wants puts her in the upper quartile of black people in these sorts of movies (ie, the sorts of movies where the only time someone cares about minorities is trying to determine if they can get any sort of market share from the Tyler Perry demographic).  Naturally, by the end of the film she's loaded onto the space capsule and blasted off into St. Louis, because jesus christ.

Naturally the three other girls have their own problems that Carrie occasionally deigns to interlope upon.  Charlotte is pregnant!  Samantha has been in a dedicated monogamous relationship for too long!  Miranda's husband had an affair, and her reaction to this for the entire film is to rip his skin from his scalp like a b-list Cenobite!  The Miranda plotline is given by far the most screentime of the secondaries, and holy shit it is tiresome.  Not because of how Miranda acts (obviously if you cheat then you are basically throwing yourself at the mercy of the other person), but because it felt like there was a dozen scenes of her husband appearing and going "hey i'm sorry let's go back" and Miranda replies with "no h8 u 4ver," and a dozen other scenes where one of the other girls goes "hey Miranda stop being mean he only cheated once" and Miranda removes her face and reveals her otherworldly demon form because she will not forgive him.

(spoiler at the end of the movie she forgives him)

Honestly, I sort of liked Sex and the City.  It's not a good film by any standard, but it's honestly entertaining if you're willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.  The plotline moves forward with a greater speed than most movies designed for nerds, and some of the gags, if clearly not remotely meant for me, were still sort of funny.  Also noticeable was the relative kindness given to the male characters.  If they're sort of dopey and not truly understanding of the DIVINE SISTERHOOD, the boyfriends/husbands of the main characters seem to at least be trying their best and acting like real people would, which is better than could be said for Entourage, where every female I saw was either an enormous whore or an enormous bitch (which I guess is how the target audience of that show views women).  There's a certain kind diplomacy I felt while watching the movie, as though it was saying "hey, I know this isn't your normal thing, but give me a chance, I promise you won't completely hate yourself by the end of things."  And it was the truth.

So here I am at the door, spruced up and ready to give the sequel a fair shake, still skeptical but more open hearted to what this film can achieve.  The door flies open, and I feel a sharp pain in my chest.  I look down, and I see a sword hilt sticking out of chest.  As I slowly collapse, I can only ask "why?"  In a slurred, surly tone, I hear "WHY DON'T YOU RESPECT WOMEN LIFE IS HARD POOR PEOPLE SHUT UP."

It's as though all the preconceptions that my most cynical aspect believed the first film would contain somehow escaped from my body and infected a film strip.  Sex and the City 2 is obnoxious, loud without saying anything, completely unfunny, and utterly contemptuous of anyone that is not a rich old white lady.  This awfulness is understandable: while it's likely that some people not completely indoctrinated in the Gospel of Sassy would have seen the original Sex and the City, the sequel assumes anyone watching at this point would probably also watch Carrie apply hemorrhoid cream for three hours, so why try anymore?

The best thing I can say about Sex and the City 2 is that it does not waste its time making this attitude abundantly clear.  The first thirty minutes of the film take place at the ~~~GAY WEDDING~~~ of the two gay guys of the series.  People who would call themselves "sensibly liberal" and view minority struggles with the same degree of concern as they would with their cat's health problems might view the ensuing proceedings as "really progressive, wow they're showing a gay marriage!"  Anyone else is going to view this as "something you would see in a Lucio Fulci film, except fruitier."  Needless to say we are smack dab in the middle of positive stereotyping of gay people: they're loud and obnoxious and incapable of restraining themselves from fucking everything that moves, but they're also super witty and totally willing to convert themselves into being a support system for the breeders.  The ceremony feels as though it was transmitted from the collective nightmare of every board member for the National Organization for Marriage, culminating in a sequence with Liza Minnelli strutting across a stage like a 16-year-old cat in heat while younger clones of her dance around.

After the nightmare ends, it's revealed that all these sassy gals have troubles again!  But instead of troubles from the first film, which while strictly first world, were still problems a person in the audience might empathize with, the second movie dispenses of this little problem.  Instead, we get issues that only the most capitalist cock sucking hoe bags could experience, done in a way that still assumes we're bad people for not caring about it:

For instance, Charlotte's issue is that she now has to worry about the fact that her nanny has big boobs, a fact that is demonstrated several times as some sort of misguided concession to the males in the audience.  Miranda decides to leave her firm because of a cartoonishly sexist senior partner, which never appears to be an issue since the only effect seems to be a shot of her complaining about her increasingly difficult life while their maid is putting stuff away.  Samantha's problem is just "getting old," which would be understandable if not for the fact that her method of dealing with it is buying dresses priced at thousands of dollars (leading to her running into Miley Cyrus wearing the same dress ah ha ha fucking kill me) and spending thousands of more dollars on organic anti-aging treatments.

The real lion's share of screentime, of course, belongs to Carrie.  Her problem is, without under or overstatement, that her husband is occasionally wanting to spend time eating take-out food and watching tv rather than going to parties.  Carrie's reaction is to go to her own apartment for a week (in a really stunning moment that explains everything wrong with her movie, she offhandedly mentions the 2008 housing crisis as the rather inconvenient reason she never sold it), and when she returns, Mr. Big says that maybe that could be a regular "take time off from each other" concept.  Somehow, this is a crisis akin to being jilted at the altar, because Carrie's self-created dilemma means it's time for another trip...to Abu Dhabi!

Yeah so everything about this aspect of the movie is an utter fucking mess.  There's a palpable terror by the screenwriters at actually tackling anything vaguely controversial, so the entire affair comes off like watching some middle aged woman type out the details of her exotic trip on facebook.  The film has basically two modes of portrayal, 1) "wow this place is so beautiful and there's so many good deals and friendly people," and 2) "hmm these women are kind of oppressed and maybe these hotel servants are basically well-dressed slaves that's kind of sad :("  It's a constant and nausating flip-flop between these attitudes for most of the film, shifting between Carrie being super excited about how cheap shoes are at the bazaar, then an awkward as fuck discussion between her and her hotel servant about how he hasn't seen his wife in six months.  And then we're back to camel rides and Samantha meeting a dashing  man (who is European, because ha ha did you really think they were going to have romance between a white woman and a brown man in a wide release film)!

Unfortunately this meeting leads to another nadir, where Samantha deep throats a hookah in front of the mystery man and we're supposed to be like "whoo grrl power" but instead you just end up cheering for the angry conservative Arab couple who want this ridiculous shit to end.  This display eventually forces the girls to escape from Planet Islam, though as they're trying to get through the city streets, Samantha's suitcase opens and out spills condoms.  This leads Samantha to, I guess in another misguided attempt to make us root for her, shout "YEAH THEY'RE CONDOMS, CONDOMS BECAUSE I HAVE SEEEEEXXXXXX"  Thankfully, just as the swarthy hordes are about to find them, the girls are rescued by a group of Arab women.

But these just aren't any normal Arab women...

Yes, in a scene that I knew about beforehand but still couldn't believe when I actually saw it happen, our protagonists are saved by a group of Arab women that are hiding designer dresses under their restrictive outfits.  This, along with the reveal shortly after that Carrie left a few Ben Franklins for her hotel boy, seem to signal the film merging its two viewpoints about the Middle East into one: "shit is pretty bad I guess, but capitalism will eventually solve everything!"  There's also a subplot where Carrie reconnects with an old flame also in Abu Dhabi, but it's such an absolute afterthought at trying to inject something resembling real drama that I refuse to talk about it.

At any rate, the girls return home and all their issues are magically solved (oh silly me the nanny was actually a lesbian oh ha ha mega funny), culminating with Carrie and Mr. Big coalescing themselves into one vibrating ball of flesh, hissing and gagging as their shed skin slowly drips off the side of the bed.

I mean they watch TV in bed.  TV.  Say it.  TV.

Battledogs (2013)

In a desperate attempt to start writing again, I've started to get back to the roots of this blog, which is to say I've been watching alot of terrible Syfy original films that no one cares about the quality of.  Let's face it, one only watches the Syfy Originals if there is basically nothing else on.  You will either sit there, seeing the bad actors try to determine how to beat the rubber cgi shitlord, or you will realize there is an outside and/or books and turn off the television.  And yet, I feel the need to analyze these films, since god know the general reviews of these films are "here is a summary, I thought it was a good try, thank you dread central for giving me this life."

Battledogs was an Asylum release from 2013.  Interestingly, it was put out around the cusp of The Asylum transitioning from "shit incoherent ripoffs of popular films" to "shit incoherent mockups of overplayed concepts."  That is to say, Sharknado came out three months after Battledogs, and from that point onward The Asylum realized they could make 20x more money by just distributing movies about stripper zombies and ninja dinosaurs.  Perhaps as a result of this transition, Battledogs is an interesting  divergence from typical Asylum fare.  It's not even remotely good, but there's no obvious movie it's ripping off, and I think we can all agree werewolves were pretty passe in 2013.  Are they still?  Comment on the space below and sound off!

please note this tagline is a fucking lie

My first problem with Battledogs is that when I started watching it, I was expecting something far cooler.  I've always been a fan of "enhanced killer dog" films, such as Man's Best Friend and The Pack, hell, even Pet Semetary 2.  So my initial vision of hearing "Battledogs" was something along the line of SNL's Action Cats.  Instead, we got...

we got...

okay so the second and way bigger problem with Battledogs is that it's honestly kind of impossible to describe the plot.  While much criticism has been justifiably levelled at The Asylum's hackneyed plotlines, that only describes half of the problem.  The real issue is that, at least for dumb horror/science fiction nonsense, Battledogs has the biggest issue with plot shifts I have ever seen.

What do I mean by plot shifts?  Basically, when a film moves of goalposts of what various characters are trying to achieve.  Obviously a film's plot can and probably have twists and surprises, but when you have to guess which characters, subplots, and motivations will matter in a movie that is about werewolves, you have a problem.

The movie begins with a wildlife photographer, Donna (Ariana Richards, who was the girl from Juarassic Park and whose last movie was Tremors 3 in 2001) turning into a werewolf in JFK airport, which raises a big ole' ruckus and leads to a shitton of people also being latent werewolves, leading to them being detained in WEREWOLF JAIL.  On the side of good is some military CDC guy (Craig Sheffer, or "that guy from Hellraiser Inferno that I actually really liked what are you doing here mang").  On the other side are bad military guys, led by the general in charge of the facility (Dennis Haysbert, that black guy from 24), whose initial plan is to turn the werewolves into the ultimate anti-insurgent military force.

After reading that last sentence, you might be thinking "hey that doesn't sound like a very good idea," it isn't, but surprisingly after an hour of Evil General ranting and raving about the genius of his plan, he just sort of...abandons it after a couple of test runs don't work.  This is the most obvious example of what I was talking about before.  There's no scenes of him questioning his plan, he just suddenly shifts from trying to create an army of Battledogs to him trying to find Donna because she is Patient Zero and he's seen all the movies about killer diseases and therefore she has the cure.  What is he wanting with the cure?  Fuck if I know, but he never talks about his ultimate plan ever again.

this was legitmately too good not to add

There's just so many scenes and plot points that ultimately have no point.  For instance, there's a three minute scene of some asshole guy being processed into the facility, with him talking about how he's going to get everyone if he possibly can.  A secondary antagonist, you think?  Instead, the next time we see him he's being herded into an interrogation room by Evil General to fight with another werewolf to test "combat capability" which would almost make sense, except that after asshole guy wins and reverts to his human form, Evil General orders a soldier to shoot the asshole in the head.  When the good scientist goes back to the airport to try to figure out who Patient Zero is (this is after he talked to Donn who point blank told him she was Patient Zero), the airport security coordinator shows him the airport's HOLOGRAM SNAPSHOTS, which serve no purpose except to remind our retarded hero that that photographer existed and is never used for any purpose again.

Really, the
dumbest plot point is what I referred to my ladyfriend as "Chekhov's Wolf."  See, Donna reveals later on that she was bitten by a giant wolf while in Canada.  This wolf is constantly referred to and described by various characters.  Obviously, since this is a Syfy/The Asylum production, there is never any travel to Canada to confront the giant wolf, nor do you even get to see the wolf.  Instead, the only purpose this story has is after it's revealed that the woman's blood is not an antibody to the werewolf virus, someone looks at an x-ray and see that there's the wolf's fang in her arm, and that -is- the cure!  If your immediate reaction to that is "then why even bother having all that shit about Patient Zero and antibodies," then why haven't you been paying attention to this review at all?

If you ignore the fact that the film basically spends half of its running time on plotlines that resort to absolutely nothing, it's not an altogether terrible film in relation to most Syfy pictures.  That is to say, you can actually see the monsters (don't get me wrong, the cgi is absolutely terrible but if you're complaining about that how many Syfy movies have you seen before you FUCKING POSER) and the moments of action can distract you sufficiently from your terrible life.  All of the main players are sufficient for the source material.  Special mention goes to Bill Duke (the chaingun guy from Predator and the cocky Green Beret from Commando) who plays the President, and who has an agent that was smart enough to demand that all of his scenes be filmed separately, so every so often the movie is interrupted by a scene of Bill Duke sitting in a chair/car/podium and saying "oh yes the werewolf situation is getting worse you don't say well keep me posted."

The only issue I have with the cast, and one that I am sort of loath to mention this because every other review of Battledogs I skimmed didn't mention this.  For the life of me, I cannot tell the goddamned difference between Donna and the token female doctor.  I'm not sure if it's face blindness or some sort of latent blonde racism, but I could not recognize them solely by their face/voice/breasts/horrifying female aura.  For the most part, this problem was negated by the fact that the doctor wore a labcoat, but this was no longer a protection in the final part of the movie, which is really a perfect summation of everything good/bad/whatever about Battledogs so let's just discuss it.  SPOILERS obviously.

In a HUGE SURPRISE all of the werewolf people escape after Donna has a big old freakout because that is a thing I guess.  They proceed to rampage through New York, and by rampage I mean "two scenes of them attack people standing in front of greenscreens of New York landmarks."  Donna, the doctor who has lost her labcoat oh no I am thinking what do I do I can't tell them apart anymore, and Worthless Protagonist escape into a helicopter, which is immediately hijacked by Evil General, who is now also a werewolf.  Evil General captures one of the women but oh god which one, which prompts Our Hero I Guess to stab himself with Chekhov's Wolf's tooth and have a horrible CGI wolf battle.  This is thankfully resolved by one of the women shooting the bad wolf with a rocket launcher.

But wait, due to the werewolf attack, the president is planning to launch a nuke on New York!  Captain Garbage finds a radio and manages to get the president to stop the order just in time, except the pilot launching the nuke accidentally brushes his hand on the wrong lever and drops a nuke anyway.  Puddle of Military manages to escape with one of the girls, since I guess the other died after launching the rocket launcher.

srsly who is this please help

But that's okay, since the two that survived get to make out since all that a nuke did was catch a few buildings on fire.

 I don't think you really need to say anything more about a movie like this, do you?

Overthinking Terrible: Mothman (2010)

There's a rule in horror filmmaking that your creations should follow their self-made rules.  I'm not talking about the shit like "the last girl" or "the bad guy always gets up one last time" shit that we've seen interminably mocked in shit like Scream and Cabin in the Woods.  I'm referring to the notion that, when you've created something out of the ordinary, it's still bound by the rules set out for it.  This is the shit that has been around since mythology began, from the Hydra's regenerative capacity removed by fire to its necks, to vampire's lethal aversion to light, to Chester Cheetah being unable to remain in a state of uncoolness for over 4 seconds.  It is what allows us to retain an aura of believability and safety to monsters and demons.  Even if they're capable of feats that can awaken our greatest fears, they're still bound to some sort of physical or spiritual law.

I say this to preface the fact that I have never seen a movie with less respect and/or understanding of this requirement than Mothman, a Syfy Original not to be mistaken with the Mothman Prophesies, which was a ghost conspiracy theory with Richard Gere.  Instead of Gere, our primary star draw is Jewel Staite, who apparently was on Firefly and a bunch of other television shows I never bothered to watch, so all I can really say about her is that she looks about ten years older than the rest of the actors.  She and her friends accidentally offed a dude and covered it up ten years ago, which led to her leaving West Virginia, but now she's back as an important journalist...who is on assignment to cover the Mothman Festival in that town.  This triggers the appearance of our titular monster, who despite being described as a "relentless demon of evil who punishes those doing wrong," apparently was okay chilling for a decade waiting for one dumb broad to come back.

So, you ask, how does Mothman work?  Why, with the well known affinity of moths towards mirrors, he is able to poke himself out of any reflective surface to getcha!  I wish I was kidding!  The first death immediately nullifies any potential creepiness of the concept, where the reflective surface is the side of a metal mobile home.  Still, it might have been a sort of intriguing concept if not for the fact that the film makes it impossible to understand the limits of Mothman's power.  In one death, Mothman murders via a car's rear view mirror, but later on is flummoxed by not being able to fit through a 24-inch television screen.  In some cases, shattering the mirror slows down the monster, but in another part all that destroying the mirror does is have the shards magically come to life and stab into the person.  Sometimes Mothman is able to punch through a car, sometimes he can be batted away by a slender woman.  

The monster's motivations and weaknesses are similarly impossible to figure out.  We're told that the monster only punishes those that pervert justice, but in the film's "climax" scene, he's just flitting around killing random people at the fair, including cops (I'm not willing to believe this is social commentary, sorry).  In a flashback we're shown that he was responsible for a bridge collapse that killed three ne'erdowells, but it also killed a score of other people.*  So is Mothman just a dick?  As for weaknesses, who in the fuck even knows.  Sometimes guns are capable of scaring Mothman away, sometimes he doesn't give a shit, sometimes he's caught in an explosion and just walks away.  We're told Mothman is repelled by sunlight, despite the number of scenes before and after this where he's attacking in the middle of the day.

Perhaps the reason for this mess is that alot of the info for this comes from the stereotypical Crazy Old Man, played by Jerry Leggio.  Ignoring the fact that despite living in the town for most of their lives, none of the cast has ever even heard of COM, they still immediately rely on him for information.  One of the two inadvertently hilarious images of the film is the lead actress looking through his handbook on the Mothman, which is supposed to be full of creepy imagery but instead is nothing but vague scribblings of the sort seen in coloring books where someone refused to obey the lines.**  

I suppose I should warn of SPOILERS when saying that in a shocking twist, he's sort of on the side of Mothman because of the guilt he feels for his own crimes (leading him to put out his eyes because apparently you have to see the Mothman to die from him, though needless to say like every other rule that's ALSO proven wrong later on).  He gives the protagonists the means to "banish" the Mothman, but this turns out to actually summon him fulltime.  But then he also gives the heroine some knife that actually does kill the Mothman.  But then it turns out in one of the stupidest TWIZT endings even among Syfy Originals, the heroine is possessed maybe by the Mothman?  So was the COM a double agent? END SPOILERS BUT YOU SHOULD READ THEM ANYWAY

Of course, even if there was anything approaching internal logic, the movie would be fucking terrible.  One notable difference of Mothman from some other Syfy originals is that they actually were willing to show our monster man pretty early.  This isn't a good thing, since Mothman looks like a garbage bag with red flesh light eyes and $5 wal-mart monster hands.  The deaths are similarly boring, since all Mothman does is grab people and turn them into spilled chili or spill strawberry sauce on them.

Ultimately, I don't regret watching Mothman, since it's rare to see a movie this internally mindfucked.  I'm not going to shittalk the writers, since imdb revealed they're generally staff writers for television (including It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia), so the more likely story is meddling from on high, especially considering the climax is a fucking attack at a carnival, which is roughly half of the climaxes in Syfy originals.  But, jesus christ, what a mess.

*: It should be noted that the actual Mothman attack is just it swooping down at the victims in a convertible, so it's really unclear how this caused a bridge collapse.  No doubt Mirror Powers were involved, though.

**: the second inadvertantly hilarious scene is a shot of the heroine throwing her rear view mirror out of the car, to which he see Mothman sullenly waving its claws out of.  Truly, the high point of modern horror.