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

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?

Felt (2014)

Throughout watching Felt, the indie quasi-horror by Jason Baker, a mental image came to mind.  Not of horrifying male oppression through the ages of history, nor of evil ball-breaking women committing their dutiful boyfriends and husbands to the gas chambers of cuckdom.  No, I thought about the cartoon image of those rabbit traps that are just a box held up by a jointed stick connect to rope.

By that, I mean I have no clue how to approach reviewing this film.  Everytime I tried to talk about it, I could feel that rope starting to draw taut.  They knew who I was, what I was.  I am the boogeyman male, potentially about to say something mean and insensitive about women's lives.  But if I praise it, then am I just parroting what the filmmakers were clearly going for, no longer thinking for myself but just trying to get feminist brownie?  No escape, I think, staring at the carrot.  No escape.

 I don't want to make this sound like a bad thing, as I strongly believe that one should expose their jaded critical bodies to constructs that don't comport to the critic's framework of a good thing.  It's the reason I occasionally play twine games even though my brain immediately starts screaming for a super shotgun the first time I click on lesbian vampire.  But it still makes me wonder if this movie was even remotely meant for someone like myself, aside from transforming me into a screencap that a radical feminist posts on their twitter feed.  In my defense, almost every critic seemed to have run into the same conundrum.  Reviews of Felt fall into two categories: "it's brilliant art that cannot be fully appreciated until you have subsumed the psychosexual intricacies of rape culture," or "THIS MOVIE BORING WANT SLEEP."

Felt revolves around the disjointed brain world of Amy (Amy Everson, whose performance, while dangerously twee at time, is probably the only aspect of the movie I can unreservedly recommend), working a dead-end job while hanging out with friends who are fairly problematic in their own right.  Something Bad happened to her prior to the film, and while it's never stated, the fact that a large section of the film's first half is devoted to her wandering around landscapes in costumes that are part whimsical and part inspired by every rapist in a 1980s crime film, complete with giant penis.  Indeed, in the traditional sense nothing at all happens in the first 40 minutes, instead going for that indie standby of people improv mumbling about topics the writers thought would be germane to impoverished hipsters (such as some girls fantasizing about the best ways to kill dudes, i mean that is a fantasy right *ulp*).

nope can't reckon what's gonna happen at the end of this here film

That isn't to say that some of the scenes aren't fun to watch, such as Amy's horrifying OKCupid date with a failed Owen Wilson vat clone that states that "roofies are the bar equivalent of Santa Claus," and her showing up to ruin a bearded hipster's nude photo shoot via grossly exaggerated felt sex organs.  And naturally that's horrible to say that scenes like that are fun to watch when they're essentially exploring the aspect of rape culture but they are funny in their darkness and it's better than watching her walk around the woods as the Penismonster and jesus christ this movie is just closing its jaws around my skull.

Eventually the film hatches a plot when Amy meets the film's One Decent Man, who talks to her like a person and gives comfort hugs without ulterior motives and does elaborate birthday celebrations and if you've ever seen anything like Felt you'll immediately know that the One Decent Man is also not really a good person.  AND if you saw the film's poster on Netflix you'll also immediately know where the plot is going to end up.  Therein sort of lies the film's biggest issue: once the film grants your wishes and moves on from straight mumblecore to something resembling a story, you discover that the story is so depressingly obvious about what the end result is going to be that you yearn for the good old days that were thirty minutes ago, when nothing happened and thus you never had to be hurt.

Films like Felt are why I'm glad I don't have any sort of rating system.  This is a movie that, by conventional standards is an absolute fucking mess, with an 80 minute running length that creates one of those time dilation fields that make it feel ten times as long.  Almost everyone in the film in the film is awful and there's rarely anything pleasing to look at, the film framed so even nudity is unsettling and makes me regret ever getting a boner.  But that's the point of this film, something that some reviewers seem to miss.  Alot of "feminist" horror films, from I Spit on Your Grave to Jennifer's Body to Teeth, are still squarely shot in the male gaze, so that although guys are getting hell of mutilated, you still get to see lady butts square up.  Felt is pretty dedicated to making you suffer for searching "BIG PLUMP ASSES LET ME SEE THEM" on google when you were sixteen.  I'm not entirely sure I agree, but at least it made me think?  Yeah, let's go with that.

can you begin to imagine who got the soundtrack to this fucking movie

also fuck whoever called this a slasher

Fist of the North Star (1995)

It's no secret that snarky reviewers love to rip open adaptations.  Certain awful people have built their entire internet empires on making wacky faces in between random scenes from Super Mario Brothers.  There's even fairly obvious tiers to these films based on how many reviews of them there are where someone goes WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA, MY PRESHIOUS NOSTALGIA (mug, mug).  At the top you have stuff like the aforementioned Mario and Street Fighter, films that virtually every internet review king has to talk about at some point.  Then you have the second tier, films like Double Dragon and the entire oeuvre of Uwe Boll, which get their fair share of in-depth outrage.  Finally you get relatively unknown films such as Wing Commander or King of Fighters, films that have avoided the brunt of scorn either because the source material isn't as readily familiar to 13-year-olds, or because the movies are just really kind of dumb and forgettable.

All this being said, it's kind of shocking and depressing that Fist of the North Star seems to be at the bottom of attention, since in addition to the film being far more insane and terribad than the vast majority of film adaptations,  it also implies that not enough people have watched/read the source material.  And that really sucks.  Because YOU WA SHOCK is about a million times better than whatever the hell you watch.

So in the mid-90s, Tony Randel, a guy who got his start directing Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (a cash-in sequel that was surprisingly good in that it at least recognized that all we wanted was more skinned people and more Cenobites) and Ticks (I make no apologies for loving this movie) decided it was time to broaden his horizons and go film...a direct to video adaptation of an anime that only hardcore nerds were really aware of at this point (unless you had like 500 dollars to burn on VHS tapes with 3 episodes apiece, ah the good old days).  Or maybe "decided" is the wrong word, because if you look at Randel's output in other films versus what we have here, it's obvious that regardless of the understanding Randel had towards the source material, he clearly didn't give a flying fuck about it.

There's almost always two scenes in video game film adaptations.  One is where it's made really really clear that the director doesn't care about the actual video game plot.  It's when you have Yoshi appear as a tiny ass dinosaur that looks sad all the time, or when Wing Commander first utters the words "Pilgrim."  The other scene is where it is made really really clear that video game plots are too complicated for people that haven't actually played the game.  It's when the film just expects people to understand that a giant fat black lady in red is supposed to be something else, or why anyone would ever be named Abobo.

Fist of the North Star is notable because not only does it consolidate its hatred of fanboys and confused neophytes into a single scene, it is literally the second scene in the movie.  So let's break this down.

After the standard "THE WORLD IS RUIN, HELLO 20XX," opening narration, we see Admiral Tolwyn Malcolm McDowell playing Ryuken sitting in some ruined dojo.  Shin (played by Costas Mandylor, who you might know better as EVIL DETECTIVE HOFFMAN GOD I HATE SAW) walks in, there's some awkward talk about DO YOU KNOW YOUR MISSION AS WELL AS I DO YES I DO YOU MUST DIE.  Then McDowell plays his trump card of "well I'm Fist of the North Star and you're Southern Cross WE CAN NEVER FIGHT," which is the point when one half of the audience is like um why.  But then Shin states:

"This is not a fight.  It's an execution."

So let's review.  Not only does the movie immediately start throwing weird minutiae about competing fighting systems, it also features Ryuken dying to a fucking revolver.  Wielded by Shin.  Maybe this is being a little too fanboyish, but holy shit way to completely subvert everything about Fist of the North Star immediately. It's like the title crawl of a Final Fantasy VII remake talking about how Sephiroth was once a respected US Senator until someone spilled radioactive coffee on his crotch, and now he's an angry robot that wants to pull down Space Station Mir.  

But hey, I thought.  So they completely threw away any credibility within six minutes.  What are we really here for?  PEOPLE EXPLODING!  And at first, the movie seems to comply.  After some opening bullshit about the plucky little civilian town with fresh water (this being 1995, this water is highly coveted because all the rain has become ACID RAIN that burns the skin away), we see Kenshiro (played by Gary Daniels) seeking refuge at a nice couple's home that is naturally attacked by raiders.  As a result:

Pretty great, right?  Well, good news:  this never happens again!  Instead, the rest of the fights are standard mid-90s american kick punch affairs, on a technical level slightly higher than when pink ranger did splits to beat up putties.  I don't know if Daniels demanded more realistic fights to show off his kickboxing skills or the sfx budget ran out or what.  While it's disappointing, that's not even the dumbest part of this film.

Remember how in the early episodes of Fist of the North Star Kenshiro constantly ran away from trouble and let civilians get tortured/raped because he didn't want to fight?  I don't either, but apparently some joker spliced together neon genesis evangeleon scenes into the tapes the screenwriter used to write the film, because I have no other explanation as to why, aside from that early fight, Kenshiro does jack shit for two-thirds of the film.  My best guess is that the writer felt that they needed some DRAMATIC CHARACTER GROWTH, but why?  Is there anyone in the conceivable target audience that would not have preferred just a linear series of Kenshiro punching people?  Or maybe it was a way to justify having Malcolm McDowell on the cast, since he randomly appears as visions, possesses little girls, and even reanimates as a zombie (I'm not even joking here), all to constantly tell Kenshiro to "STOP BEING A PUSSY BRO."

All that exhorting doesn't really come to much, as when the good guy village is raided by Shin's bad guy corps (who pilot those little mini asian taxis, which are only slightly more intimidating than the floor cleaners in space mutiny), Kenshiro just sort of peeks out from behind rocks with wacky asian teenager sidekick.  Finally, after like 90% of the village has been raped to death, Kenshiro decides to attack the bad guy camp because he really feels bad and realizes that Julia is alive after all or something.  

So it's action time, right?  The early sequence was just a taste of what to come?  No.  Instead, all the other fights are quidessential 90's low budget kung fu sequences, where nobody ever seems to get hurt, just flipped over and over.  Or slapped.  Ken slapping people.

One of the few things worth noting about this film is the hidden contest between the two main actors trying to top each other in how little they care about the film.  Both actors just have the same dead faced glare, to the point that in the final confrontation, Shin is wearing some sort of rubber butcher's smock for the sole reason of giving us a chance of telling them apart.  Also for some reason the final fight room is accented by refrigerators with Gatorade bottles and Ajax boxes, which I'd like to believe is a commentary on materialism but considering the design decisions in the rest of the movie I refuse to postulate.

No, what I want to finish this review talking about is really the only memorable aspect: 

Yes, that's Chris "chubbiest of the Penns" Penn.  In the movie, his name is "Jackel," but make no mistake, that's Jagi.  He's no longer Kenshiro's brother, but has the same delightful sociopathic attitude and the same protection from a previous Ken Punch.  

Say what you will about what led Chris to accept the role of being an evil guy wearing belts around his head, he is the only remotely fun thing about this movie.  While everyone else in the film shuffles through their lines and looks embarrassed, Chris Penn...also looks embarrassed, but he's still charismatic as fuck about playing an evil rapedude.  The only highlight of the movie is Penn's speech to the rest of the raiders, which ends with "LET'S KILL SOME PEOPLE, AND LET'S ENJOY IT."  Of course, for being the only source of joy in the film, how does he get offed?  No doubt by another AWESOME SFX ATTATATATATA HEAD EXPLOSION right?

no he tries to rape julia in a giant clock or something and she rips off his belts and his head explodes

fist of the north star

The Chernobyl Diaries

There's a fantasy I like to have about The Chernobyl Diaries. 

Once it was just a nice little script.  Some aspiring, slightly dopey screenwriter that had watched Stalker while drunk and realized, in perhaps the most influential moment of his life, "hey, nobody has done a slasher movie INSIDE Chernobyl!"  He sets to work, watching a Discovery Channel documentary about the disaster, googling "Geiger Counter Ghostbusters Sigourney Weaver nude," and trying to come up with an interesting hook for the killer before throwing his hands up in the air and jotting down "ATOMIC MUTANT."  Eventually, the script it finished.  It's not really good, but there's some decent scare scenes, a boobie or two, and enough gore for those indie horror fans.  The script is shipped around, but there's not alot of interest, and eventually the screenwriter is exhausted of the whole process, vowing not to bother another bored talent scout with his dumb script ever again.

Six months later, there's a call.  Three hours later, our hero is in a comfortable office, talking to some so and so executive from Warner Brothers.  He loves the script, and thinks there's a good chance that it could become a feature move.  The executive leans forward and smiles, his teeth filed to pointed ends.  "There's just a few changes we'd like to make," he says as his hand goes around his chair, grabbing an ax with the words "PG-13" carved into the handle.

---

Of course, this is almost certainly not even close to the truth.  I don't want to admit it, but there's probably a ready corps of shitty screenwriters that have no problems with pumping out PG-13 horror for the film off-season.  The screenwriter didn't see Stalker, but instead thought that abandoned amusement park scene from Call of Duty 4 was so cool.  And Chernobyl Diaries isn't the worst film in that gang, but it really exemplifies everything that makes me hate current commercial horror films.

The first thing to know about The Chernobyl Diaries is that you absolutely should not watch it for a "so bad it's good" feeling.  This is because, for a movie that can't even muster a 90-minute running time, it takes just about an hour until something actually happens.  Until then, you're forced to watch a bunch of cis-white scum college fucks bumbling around Ukraine at large, then Chernobyl under the pretense of an EXTREME TOUR.  Despite the insinuation in the title that this might be some awful found footage thing, the film can't even muster that aside from some WACKY HIJINKS in the opening credits and one spooky scene found on a blooooody handheld caaaaaaaaaaameraaaaa which, even by the basement standards of the found footage trashboat, is so disorganized and clunky it's a good thing we just got standard cinematography for this shitheap.

None of the characters are remotely likeable, of course.  There's the sensible brother and the wild brother, the boring blonde engaged to the sensible brother, the brunette that the wild brother wants to bang.  Eventually this CORE GROUP is met by the boring Russian tour guide who naturally dies first, and some European mishmash couple or something who fucking cares.

Even when they get to Chernobyl for their big tour, nothing happens for awhile.  They walk through some abandoned house and see the spooky amusement park, then someone sees something but it's nothing and JESUS HAS IT BEEN 55 MINUTES ALREADY THIS MOVIE JUST ZOOMING BY.  The baddies eventually attack, but since this is a PG-13 movie and nobody knows how to make scenes creepy anymore, it's just jump cuts and blood stains on the floor.  There's a scene where one of the ladies is abducted by the marauding mutant men, and not found until about 15 minutes later, where she's clearly in emotional shock but still wearing all her clothes.  It takes a very special kind of movie which manages to both be extremely gross and yet deny the viewer his prurient pound of flesh.  Good job, Chernobyl Diaries!

There's just one more thing I want to say about Chernobyl Diaries before I can never think about this shitty film again, a thing that really encapsulates everything that needs to be said about it.

When the Bore Crew rolls into Chernobyl, they stop at some river or lake for a breather.  There's a failed jump scare, then someone throws a piece of jerky into the water for some reason.  They leave, but the camera stays on the beef jerky, before being PULLED UNDER THE WATER.  Sad to say, this is probably the closest thing this movie comes to actually being...anything really.  So what's the payoff for this set up, you ask?

Later on after the monster dudes have revealed themselves, the survivors are running away from about three small dogs (don't fucking ask), and have to cross a 20 foot river via a rotting footbridge.  The first few people make it across, but then a rung in the bridge breaks!  Some one falls off into knee-deep water! But no, the terror isn't over, because some underpaid intern is in the water making splashing noises while the actor screams in terror over something we can't see!  Then he wades across in five seconds, only to reveal that his leg was slightly scratched.

The Chernobyl Diaries.

You're Next (2013)

You're Next is the first movie I've seen that feels like a modern incarnation of the modern slasher.  I know that sounds either retarded or aintitcoolnews level over-laudatory, but hear me out.  Every slasher film I've seen in the past decade can be placed into two neat little categories:

1) The always gory, occasionally emotionally punishing painfest where the focus lays less on a body county or cheap rubber masks and more on how many shots of a crying girl being stalked can be inserted into a 100-minute running time.
2) The dogmatically slavish to form "old school" slasher film, which usually plods around like Halloween was released a year ago except that's plenty of time to make winking "ha ha slashers" jokes at the audience while usually completely failing to be even remotely good.

What I liked about You're Next is that it feel like a natural evolution of the slasher, without rubbing the audience's nose in WHOA MODERNITY 9/11 NO ONE IS SAFE ANYMORE that enormous retards like Eli Roth think represent interesting horror theories.  That isn't to say there isn't a relevant theme (that being an outsider being confronted with the easy opulence of the rich), but it's subtle and you can enjoy the movie without even having to pay attention to the director's BIG IMPORTANT POINT.  

The plot is simple enough: qt girl goes with schulmphy dude to meet his rich parents, who are having big family gathering, home invasion occurs, twists, etc.  The bloodless character development goes for about thirty minutes, which does a good job in setting up stereotypes and preconceptions that are (usually) shaped and changed throughout the movies.  The family members are rich and wallowing in various degrees of self-interest, but thankfully it's not another lazy "blah blah rich bad one percent kill all bankers" garbo tour.   The director, Adam Wingard, had a background in mumblecore films, and while I FUCKING HATE THOSE MOVIES JESUS CHRIST it actually is a benefit to You're Next, since the interminable dialogue that is set before us at the start is prefixed on the notion that we will not have to suffer through it for the entirety of the film.  Stuff WILL happen.

And happen it does.  Once the eventual throwdown occurs, the large amount of people gathered at the house means that the plot is a nonstop killbath (gore, for better or worse, is fairly muted).  The twists, once the initial one is realized, are fairly standard and predictable for a veteran horror nerd, but I've at least ascended past watching horror for gasps, I just want a stable follow through.

(I guess I should say SPOILERS here, so if you want to remain pure just assume that I really liked the film)

The big surprise of the film for me was the resilience and likability of the prerequisite "final girl."  I had read the reviews that spoiled that she was tougher than most, and had read that to mean that she was in the vein of final girls that magically GETS TUFF in the final act, which is to say she throws an axe at the bad man or something useless like that.

In actuality, her behavior is "cathartic horror movie veteran soothing."  For the first time I can remember in a long while, when the bad man is knocked down, the heroine actually goes to town on him, viciously stabbing him to death.  It feels weird to cheer for stuff like this, but after 20+ years of seeing the knocked out clown murdermonster just being left to chill in an unsupervised room, it's nice to see good old american LOGIC being applied in this situation.  The explanation for her sudden shift into survival mode strains credulity a tad, but honestly I've been so fucking sick of "the invincible rapist invader king" trope that seeing some sadistic murderers getting dropped in effectiveness from "merchants of fear and suffering" to "slightly more dangerous than the robbers from Home Alone"  warmed my hateful little heart.

Ti West is also immediately murdered, which is pretty good catharsis from sitting through his segment from V/H/S.

So yes, You're Next is a genuinely good horror movie and it's a bizarre shame that good'uns like this and Trick 'R Treat spend years in distribution hell while fucking World War Z get a million screen showing before immediately getting incinerated in the DVD bins.


PS: this film also gets the "Was Never A Fan" award for Best Use of Student Loan Debt in Black Humor.  Congrats!

Pacific Rim (2013)

Here's a leading question.  Do you remember Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?

More than likely, probably not.  There was Jude Law, right?  It was a steampunk thing?  If you're really canny, you might remember the trivia that it was the first fully greenscreened film.  I remember every nerd ten years ago was so hot to watch it based off the trailer that made it look like some sort of awesome Nazi Robot fighting airplanes unnngh film, but when watching it on opening night it was just so many ppl talking and the Nazi Robots had like 10 whole minutes.  Critics loved it, but I can't remember another big-budget science fiction film that dried up so quickly in the public remembrance.  I sure as hell completely forgot about the film until I watched the first ten minutes of Pacific Rim.  Hearing our bland white man narrator say "back in the day there was the RIM, and then MONSTERS" had me suddenly forced back into the uncomfortable theater seat, my mind decaying as I worried about my freshman year of college and wondered when the fuck Halle Berry was going to show up.

Oh, sure.  Just because there's CGI and big budgets you think there's some sort of

well look that doesn't mean

okay, this is a little unfair.  After all, Sky Captain relied alot on star power to bring people to the theaters, while the only people I recognized in Pacific Rim were the also-ran actors that nerds point at and say "hey, it's that guy!"  Hey, it's Ron Perlman as a steampunk!  Hey, it's Charlie Day being Charlie Kelly!  Hey, it's Idris Elba looking more uncomfortable as the tough but fair military commander than he did when that white girl was trying to suck his dick in Obsessed!  Seriously, I know I often remark on actors looking not too happy to be playing a particular role, but holy shit Ser Elba does not look happy in this movie.  They can't all be Prometheus, champ.  Suck it up.

So Pacific Rim is Guillermo Del Toro's big nerd epic, the culmination of a billion internet shits jizzing over every SUPERMAN VS THE TERMINATOR fan film released on Youtube.  It's Godzillas vs the Megazord, it's an American Neon Genesis Evangelion (though not too American because we need that international box office papuh), it's the celebration of special effects uber alles.  And yes, the effects are really nice, spectacular even, but I'm in an age where spectacular shit is goddamned everywhere and I'd be alot happier with a plot that didn't lurch around like a drunk guy in a kaiju suit.

Much like how Sky Captain tried to blanket itself from criticism with the concept that its inherent problems were because it was supposed to be like a OLD TIMEY RADIO SERIAL, alot of defenders of Pacific Rim have fallen back on the concept that "it's like Voltron maaaaaan, did you get mad at Voltron?"  And of course I didn't, because I was like six years old and didn't understand anything, except that I hated those smug assholes in Voltron and wanted Planet Doom to kill everything.  I understand that, when the robot finally draws out its sword after ineffectually punching the monster, it's not a plot hole, it's a wacky home-age.

But here's the thing.  The vast majority of the film's influences were episodic things.  The plotlines of these shows were distracting loops, where the heroes have to defeat some prime bad, and the series finale (if there even is one, thanks G-Force) is just sort of the final culmination.  Pacific Rim doesn't feel like an episode of an awesome cartoon, it feels like one of those awful edited movie versions of an awesome cartoon.  You know, where the pilot episode and series finale are awkwardly spliced together with random scenes from other episodes, maybe some exclusive scenes of characters catching up the audience with shit that was happening off screen?  These movies were terrible because episodic kid shows aren't designed to have plot arcs that can sustain a two hour running length.  And look, here's Pacific Rim. 

I can't really hate on this movie, but that's mostly due to the fact that, aside from the visuals, they made everything so bland that it's hard to react to anything.  The dialogue is usually merely clunky (there should be a law against people saying "power move"), the only noteworthy moment when Idris Elba is forced on stage to deliver a "final showdown" speech that really demonstrates why people should give more credit to Independence Day.  Characters are pretty much separated by accents, including the sole female character, who was clearly designed to be a strong feminist symbol by having zero identifiable personality traits aside from the fact that she suffered a Trauma and now is going to Get Over It.  

I doubt Pacific Rim will be as forgotten as Sky Captain was, if just for the fact that the Internet has evolved fandom into such a self-serving mess that nothing nerd related will ever be forgotten by shrill idiots.  But everything about that movie is already fading into the pop-culture aether in my mind, and I'm totally okay with that.