Newb82 Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 A good portion of CRYSTAL LAKE MEMORIES is people who helped make the movies shitting on them.I do agree that the commentary track in question is terrible.I also don't like the Sean S. Cunningham "roller coaster" theory of horror. It's probably why, as one of the investors in the original Ft13th noted in the book, he never made a notable movie after that.Well, alrighty then... (adds to Amazon wishlist)To be fair, there is still a little bit of ramanticism from certain people, especially towards the first one.It's basically done in the style of the SNL & ESPN books, with snippets of interviews done with just about everyone important to the series woven together to create a narrative of how it all went down without much from Bracke himself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tromatagon Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 The thing is, I really can't laugh at most shitty horror movies, because I want to MAKE horror movies. I take the genre very damn seriously, and have zero patience or sympathy for all the fucking hacks out there who seem to have a "who cares if it's good, it's just a scary movie, it ain't Shakespeare" attitude of intellectual laziness towards the whole thing. Fuck ALL of that. Horror films can be just as artistically beautiful, just as deeply intelligent, just as emotionally devastating, just as all-around-great as movies from any other genre. But the talentless assholes who make 90% of horror films (and many of the undemanding Fangoria-type fanboys who are happy to pay for anything as long as it's got blood and tits) are a millstone around the genre's neck, forever helping to keep it in Hollywood's dirty ignored ghetto. So a bad horror film, or even a mediocre one, doesn't entertain me. (Unless we're talking about something like Birdemic, but stuff like the lousier Friday the 13th movies aren't nearly bad enough to be that good.) It just makes me angry and depressed, like I'm a modern wrestling trainee who looks at "his business" and sees nothing but a sea of non-working backyard wannabes, performing their shitty cosplay spots in front of ever-dwindling houses. As someone who writes horror movies, and actively trying to sell scripts (which I'm saying to be a dick and get you to make something instead of talking about wanting to) these feelings are just going to make you want to kill everyone in a fit of rage. It's way worse than you could even imagine. If you saw the development side of this shit, it's bleak as fuck.You gotta have a sense of humor about it because ragehatekill isn't going to get you hired/sold. You can go the indie route, sure, but you'll still have to get distributed by those people.Also, stop saying you want to make horror moves and make them wtf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jingus Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 With all the F13 talk, personally I'd rank 'em like this, from best to worst: Freddy vs Jason Part 6 Remake Part 4 Jason X Part 8 Original Part 2 Part 7 Part 3 Part 5 Jason (Can) Goes (Right The Fuck) To Hell (For All I Care) Yeah, I'm fully aware that I'm probably the only person on the planet who would rank them anything like that. I always enjoyed the comedic entries in the series more than the ones that were trying to be serious. They're all the cinematic equivalent of McDonalds french fries anyway, so let's at least try to have some fun with our salty boxes of crap and have them be tongue-in-cheek aware of what they are. Also, stop saying you want to make horror moves and make them wtf Dude, seriously, that ain't an option now. I'm currently in the middle of summer break from my freshman-level classes at my shitty film school. I have no camera of any kind, know no actors who even live in the same state, have no car, have no money, have no computer of my own for editing, currently live in a vast suburban wasteland in the middle of nowhere FAR away from all my friends and acquaintances. The only people I see on a regular basis are my family, and they are NOT the kind of cool family who will star in your movie or provide any sort of funding or encourage your dreams or even let you shoot in the house. And I'm a fairly lame screenwriter, I'd pretty much need a cowriter to help me bounce ideas around and stay on track for the length of the film and clean up my miserably terrible dialogue, and I know nobody who could possibly be said cowriter. Under those circumstances, how would you make a movie? And thanks for the other advice; but believe me, I'm way less KILL THE PHONIES in real life; forums like this are where I vent. Many writing workshops have thoroughly exposed me to just how awful many "artists" (and many people's dead-wrong opinions about shitty art) can be, and I've gotten pretty good at finding something nice to say beyond "well, at least you spelled your name right... mostly". (And the few ideas I have are goddamn strange and off-putting enough that going the starving-indie route is almost certainly what I'll be doing.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tromatagon Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 Okay I know Texas is fucking huge and all, but how close are you to Austin? Or are you going to school in another state? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jingus Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 Okay I know Texas is fucking huge and all, but how close are you to Austin? Not even remotely. Five, maybe six hours away. I'm in the endless suburban prairie north of Dallas. I'm hoping to transfer to UTAustin at some point because they're a REAL film school and my current alma mater's film program is a pathetic corrupt nepotistic arrogant wannabe which acts like it's goddamn USC and it's doing you a favor by letting you pay them thousands of dollars and wait around for two years to get into the program in the first place, despite them never having produced a single alumnus worth mentioning, but said transfer can't happen for at least another semester. I'm actually gonna be double-majoring in English at the moment, because at least the English department here has some real published authors for teachers and can at least claim the likes of Larry McMurty and Anne Rice as graduates. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Burgundy LaRue Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 You hate ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE? Get bent, jerk.** Where's my chainsaw when I need it? **Said in jest, but honestly, MANDY LANE isn't nearly that bad. And if there's anything I dislike more than a formulaic slasher, it's a formulaic slasher that tries to hit me with "clever" plot twists that I saw coming about sixteen, maybe seventeen miles away. Yeah, the acting and production values in Mandy Lane were way better than in your average early-80s generic Dead Teenager flick, but that's just the icing, not the cake. And I thought All The Boys... was some pretty goddamn rancid cake. Especially when it trotted out a lot of the same old slasher cliches that we've seen far too many times, right in the middle of pretending it was doing something different. (Which is also one of many reasons that I should never start ranting about the Scream franchise or else I'll never stop.) With all due respect, I think you missed the overall arc--which is to take one of the major elements of this genre, turn it on its head, and then see how it plays out against the other genre staples that have remained the same. I think you're overlooking the feminist aspect of it, too First off, let's agree that the movie is GORGEOUS. It may be the most artistic approach given to a teen slasher film. It has a lush look, something you don't expect from a movie of this genre. The acting is also well above the grade. Amber Heard makes Mandy super approachable. She could have been a Teen Queen Prom Time Barbie type--a cold, distant beauty. But there's an earthiness to her that makes her charming. Anson Mount gives dimension to his ranch hand character in what could have been a throwaway role. The other characters don't get fleshed out much, but the actors are very good. I thought the big twist was intriguing, if underdeveloped. It plays on what we think is truly innocent within these type of movie, and by extension within the confines of high school. I liked it, but acknowledge that you can see it coming due to it not being intergrated fully within the story. It starts to stick out in an awkward way. I think the movie's biggest mistake is taking itself too seriously. Had it kept the same motif but presented it as tongue-in-cheek, it would have acquitted itself better. As is, though, it's a solid movie with an interesting concept that didn't fully live up to its potential. But it's still worth a viewing for anyone that enjoys teen slasher films. So don't listen to ol' Jingus. BLR would not lead you wrong--this time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jingus Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 I wrote that review like five years ago and haven't rewatched Mandy Lane since then, so the review literally remembers more about the movie than I do. I do recall seeing all the big twists coming ahead of time and finding the characters unpleasant and not liking the kills and not buying the attempted feminism (except for that weird scene in the bathroom, which seemed like it was from a different better movie), but maybe I should give it another shot sometime. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RIPPA Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 Jingus made me watch Postal for the movie club Grrr Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stevie Ray Von Erich Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 Jingus, just wanted to point out that my comment a few pages back was a rib and I've read pretty much all of the stuff you've posted here. Also, I know a ton of performers in Texas if you ever get the resources, specially in the Dallas/Richardson area. But I just want you to watch good movie and be happy now. As much as I love it, No Holds Barred is a terrible damn movie. If you watch it knowing Vince and Hulk rewrote it in 3 days locked in a hotel room together, it totally makes sense. You can basically FEEL the coke binge coming out of the movie. The production values are good, and I honestly don't think the acting is bad either. But the pacing is insane and the tone jumps around so damn much. It's not so much that it's a bad film, but a failure of a film. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Newb82 Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 I will always love that NO HOLDS BARRED is essentially about a Hogan-esque character flipping out because a promoters asked him to *gasp* DO A JOB! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
driver Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 The Toy. I saw it in the theater when I was 12. It made me want to hate Pryor(who I really liked since I had seen him in Stir Crazy in the theater when I was 10) and Jackie Gleason. It didn't get much worse than that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jingus Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 Jingus made me watch Postal for the movie clubGrrr I maintain that it was far better than every movie I've reviewed in this thread! C'mon, the ludicrous trailer-park shootout alone was worth suffering through all the "...what the hell?" typical Boll moments. Jingus, just wanted to point out that my comment a few pages back was a rib and I've read pretty much all of the stuff you've posted here. Also, I know a ton of performers in Texas if you ever get the resources, specially in the Dallas/Richardson area. But I just want you to watch good movie and be happy now. Yeah, I know you were just kidding. (My self-loathing is very damn real, but I'm long used to it and sometimes enjoy using it to freak people out in a "dude, that goes past self-deprecation and into... shit, I don't even KNOW, man" sort of way.) I do watch plenty of good movies, these reviews are all compiled from like the past seven or eight years and I'm only posting the particularly viciously negative ones. (More to come later.) And thanks for the offer, but there are plenty of actors around my college; but the problem with going back to school in your thirties means that you spend damn near all of your time frantically doing schoolwork and wondering when the hell your ability to memorize all this stuff just packed its bags and walked out the door, leaving little room for extracurricular shenanigans. I helped make one short film, in an exhausting 24 Hour Film Challenge... that's about it. Also, if anyone ever doubts my total freakin' insanity, just ask Newb about the PM I sent 'im containing some of my... less-mainstream ideas. (I didn't really mean to zap you with eight hideously bizarre concepts in a row, but I realized that I hadn't really written down a list of my recent brainstorms anywhere and then got on a roll and couldn't stop.) They are the sort of thing that would make Alejandro Jodorowsky raise an eyebrow and say "...you got issues, gringo". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Newb82 Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 Nothing worse than the plot synopsis I read for A SERBIAN FILM. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jingus Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 He said, "You're really an ugly girl But I like the way you... play." And I died But I thanked him. Can you believe that? Sick, sick! ...I don't even know what the theme is with the song lyrics I'm picking now. Let's just hope I don't start quoting Otep. Anyway, here's more reviews, SPOILERED because my lack of social life means I have waaaaay too much word-vomiting time on my hands: Funny Games (2008): 2/10 If there's one thing I cannot stand, it's a movie that thinks I'm a dumb mark and assumes that it can easily work me. Fuck you, Michael Haneke, writer-director of Funny Games (a shot-for-shot remake of a movie he made in Austria in 1997). Basically, this whining pussy decided that American movies were too violent and that American audiences should feel ashamed for liking such a thing, and specifically crafted a movie which explicitly tells its audience that they are bad persons for watching this movie. What the fuck kind of crappy cinematic entrapment is this? Basically the movie's stance is "you wanna see torture and violence and gore, right? You know you do, stupid Americans, you always do!". It's all a histrionic Moral Message from Haneke insisting that anyone who willingly watches a movie like this needs to be punished until they see the error of their ways. It's like a parent who catches their child smoking, and then forces them to chainsmoke the rest of the pack to make them sick. I can't imagine the deranged thought processes behind a movie which deliberately sets out to not be entertaining. The story is about a family (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, some kid whose name I'm not bothering to look up) who go on vacation, and then are waylaid by psycho killers. (I guess Haneke decided that the best way to mock stupid American movies would be to copy the very stupidest cliches from American movies.) Very annoying non-intimidating psycho killers all dressed in pretentious white who talk like they're auditioning for the role of Anakin Skywalker. They're really pathetic villains, I could take these two twerps out by my god-damned self with nothing but my bare hands. However, we've got some of the most incompetent "heroes" I've ever seen, the type who practically hand the maniacs a knife, fall down and break both legs, and then tie themselves up. This is one of those films where our worthless weakling protagonists spend most of the film tied up and tormented by the brilliant godlike killers, and I can't think of a genre of film which is more unappealling. But the movie is supposed to be unappealling. Haneke has said in interviews that you're supposed to hate this movie, and that walking out is the proper reaction. No. Fuck you. The proper reaction would be to lambast the arrogant piece of shit who made this abortion. The movie is agonizingly slow, about forty minutes of action crammed into two hours of time. None of the actors are any good except for Naomi Watts, who through a frankly heroic and vulnerable performance somehow made me actually care about the fucking idiot she was playing, she alone gets the movie above a 0. The rest is all garbage. Especially those retarded moments where they break the fourth wall. Especially the bit with the remote control, which is one of the most retarded things I have seen in any movie ever. What the fuck, Chuck. Jenifer: 3/10 I've gotten into more heated arguments about horror movies by the simple revelation that I do not like Dario Argento. Sorry, but I've seen four of his movies now, and they ranged from mediocre to incompetent. (2013 DVDVR EDIT: I ended up enjoying Deep Red once I finally saw it, but not THAT much.) When I tell a horror fan this, they react like I just stomped on their toes and laughed about it. I mean, they take that shit personally when I say that the best thing Argento ever did was provide the sperm for his daughter Asia. And when I ask about the bad acting and wretched dialogue and incoherent stories and massive plot holes and overreliance on gore and nasty attitude towards women and general "what the fuck did I just watch?" qualities of his films, his defenders usually don't have any comeback beyond "...b-but it's cool, and you're stupid, shut up, LA-LA-LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU". I will not apologize for finding even the much-hyped visuals and atmosphere of Argento's nonsensical films to be underwhelming. So what the fuck am I doing watching an episode of goddamned Masters Of Horror directed by him? Hell if I know. Sometimes I'm just masochistic like that. In this one, we've got a cop (Steven Weber, who also wrote the script) who is on boring stakeout duty one day when he happens to see a man trying to kill a woman. He rescues her, and it turns out that the chick, apparently named "Jenifer", is deeply retarded and hideously deformed. She's is played by one Carrie Fleming, who is the only thing I liked in the movie, as she somehow makes the overly-handicapped Jenifer seem nearly human with nothing more than inarticulate moans and body language. Anyway, the cop ends up taking her home, and it turns out she ain't housebroken, and it's all downhill from there. Weber embarasses himself at times with a Nic Cage type performance; the bit where he screams "Wha di you do?!" over and over is a bad laugh. The filmmakers tried to have their cake and eat it too in terms of the makeup; Jenifer's face is so repugnant that it's hard to look at, but more than half the time it's hidden behind her hair like she's a kid in a Japanese ghost movie. But the main thing that killed the whole movie for me is that I simply did not buy the cop's obsession. He basically throws his entire life away for what's essentially a dangerous animal, and the movie never once convinces me that this seemingly smart and sane individual would be this stupid and crazy for no apparent reason. (There is some hint that she infects him somehow, but it's quickly forgotten about and never dealt with.) Add all that to a shitty predictable ending, and it's one big bowl of suck. Boy Eats Girl: 3/10 This zombie flick is about a bunch of teenagers trying to fight off a zombie outbreak in their suburban town. In Ireland. Just having a zombie movie take place in Ireland is unfortuantely the only innovative thing in the picture. Boy Eats Girl has the best of intentions, just wanting to be a funny yet icky horror flick with plenty of 80s Teen Romantic Dramedy stuffed into it as well. Unfortunately, it makes SO many errors in the execution of its premise that I have to do the rest of this review dissection stylez. -So we've got our hero, some improbably handsome and charming high school kid who's inexplicably unpopular and has absolutely zero other defining characteristics. We've also got the chaste nice girl he's in love with, the nice girl's asshole father who inexplicably hates the hero, his two comedic sidekick buddies, the hulking school bully, and the bully's slut girlfriend who's inexplicably in love with the hero. Yes, the stereotypes are exactly as stifling as I'm making them sound here. There's not a single interesting person in the entire movie. -Of course, our hero and his love interest are not allowed to be happy together before the end! Therefore they're kept apart by some incredibly fucking ridiculous contrivances. Let's just say that the hero ends up convinced that the chick was blowing some other dude in his car, instead of coming to the private candlelit meeting where the hero planned to express his undying love for her. Yes, it's that bad. Like, "the military dad thinks his son is blowing Kevin Spacey in American Beauty" bad. -In fact, this is one of those movies which really offends me with its strident views of sexuality. In this movie, not only does everyone who has sex end up eaten by zombies, but everyone who has sex is actually portrayed as being evil as well. The film goes out of its way to point out that all its villains having healthy functioning libidos, and that all our sympathetic protagonists are virgins. What the fuck is wrong with the people who write these scripts? -This is one of those films where most of the high school students don't look a day under 25. And the high school has one of those Hollywood Proms which has live music and lavish decorations and catered refreshments and complex lighting rigs and all the students are openly getting drunk on the dance floor. Has any real prom in the history of this planet ever really looked like this? -The film also rips off Return of the Living Dead Part 3 by having an undead yet sentient main character (the eponymous "Boy") and also hordes of more regular mindless zombies. Specifically, fast running zombies. Sweet Baby Assfucked Jebus, I am getting so desperately tired of all these modern zombie films which use the fast running version and do not use them well. -The action scenes and kills are very poorly choreographed. Every time zombies attack, it happens like this: they sprint towards there victims. Then they suddenly stop a few feet away, and proceed to snarl all menacingly for a moment. THEN they attack. Length of time spent snarling is directly proportionate to how important a character their intended victim is. Also, most of the "zombie makeup" is just blood dripping down their mouths and dark circles under their eyes. And they never ever specify the rules about how these zombies work; it's totally random as to whether any given wound will make them drop dead, or just snarl more. -This movie barely runs seventy minutes long. Yet the zombie stuff doesn't kick in until it's already halfway over. And some characters are still oblivious to the incipient zombiegeddon as close as fifteen minutes before the end credits roll. And several more I can't discuss without SPOILING: SPOILERZ: -The mom somehow didn't notice there was a page missing until the morning after she'd already performed the entire ritual? What? -How the fuck can you die INSTANTLY from hanging? This wasn't "he drops through the trapdoor and his neck breaks" hanging, this is "the chair knocked over and he dropped half and inch and somehow was immediately strangled to death while his mom was standing right there". The worst part is there was no reason to HAVE the mom standing right there, when the entire glaring plot hole would've vanished if they'd just had her walk in a couple minutes later. -I know that many movies enjoy portraying police officers as buffoons, but this is just ridiculous. Our hero bursts into the police station, says he's killed a girl, and offers to show the cops to her body. The cop inexplicably tells the kid to buzz off. Seriously, that's the entire scene. They didn't even try to invent a reason why the officer might not believe him. Fucking pathetic. -How the hell was the Blowjob Kill supposed to work? The girl turned into a zombie in mid-fellatio? What? -Even in a movie about voodoo magic bringing zombies back from the dead, there are some things I simply cannot accept. One of those things is them trying to make me believe that a rotting zombie can be instantly turned back into a live human just by getting bitten by a certain snake. WHAT. -And we promptly forget about the snake! Nobody even tries to cure the rest of the zombiefied population, they only give a shit about fixing the main hero schmuck. -Why did the town whore chick suddenly turn out to be level-headed and competent later on? Especially when she's killed in such a tossed-off manner, abandoned by the "heroes" who run away and don't even try to help her. Are we supposed to think the bitch deserved it, despite growing more sympathetic in some ways than our useless helpless nerdy heroes? -The scene with the backhoe was at least energetic, which the movie badly needed by that point. Too bad it was such a blatant ripoff of the lawnmower scene in Dead-Alive. Also, how many backhoes come equipped with a customized woodchipper on an extendable articulated arm? -What happened to the hero's mom? I guess it's implied she's dead, but it seemed like she just vanished. The boy completely forgets about his mama's probably hideous death via zombie in a damn hurry. -And finally, the "happy" ending. I suppose all these fucking idiots we're stuck with as our main characters just kinda forgot that the entire fucking town had been taken over by the undead, and that despite having killed a dozen or two, there must be hundreds or thousands more still out there. END SPOILERZ. I will admit one positive: the acting is decent, especially the comedic sidekicks and the girl who plays the town whore. They seem to at least be attempting to play well-rounded people, no matter how insistent the script is on not letting them do so. And a couple of the jokes were funny. Sadly, that's all the compliments that I can give. The Spirit: 0/10 Well this pretty much the worst comic book adaptation I've ever seen. Writer/director Frank Miller commits total franchise assassination with this unbelievably awful movie, a chunk of howling batshit insanity which just defies all description. It's hard for a movie to be so bad that it actually makes me angry, but congratulations, this one did it. Yeah, it's worse than Batman & Robin, worse than Superman IV, worse than Ghost Rider, worse than X3: The Last Stand, worse than Elektra, worse than any other comic-spawned theatrical abomination that you could possibly name. Will Eisner's original Spirit comics aren't well known among casual fans. I doubt if there's enough people on this site who've read them for me to count on two hands, and truthfully I wouldn't be shocked if I was the only guy here who's ever seen them. But the damnable part is I KNOW Frank Miller has read them. He goes so far as to insert individual out-of-context quotes of random dialogue from various issues. Yet Miller, a guy who knows better, murdered those original concepts and props them up like Bernie on the weekend and puts on a puppet show. At their best, Eisner's comics were practically a satire of how ridiculous the crime-fighting pulp heroes of the 40s were; the finest stories often barely had the Spirit himself in them at all, focusing more on the human bystanders surrounding the tale. So naturally, adapting that kind of thing into a garish CGI action flick which combines the worst parts of Adam West Batman with Joel Shumacher Batman while totally ripping off the stylized look of Sin City should be the very first thing that would come to any sane person's mind, right? I mean, what the fuck is wrong with Frank Miller. I'm a fan of the guy; yes, I even liked Dark Knight Strikes Back and All-Star Goddamn Batman. But here he goes so far off the rails that he should never, ever be allowed to handle any existing properties ever again. The Spirit (Gabriel Macht, no I've never heard of him either) is kind of a Batman-meets-the-Shadow crimefighter in Central City, an obvious stand-in for NYC. He does a lot of really shitty hard-boiled narration, fights with his arch-nemesis The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson, and ho boy we'll come back to him), and is inexplicably followed by cats everywhere he goes. He also finds time to romance a shitload of women (Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Jaime King, Paz Vega, Sarah Paulson, Stana Katic, and many more) in a manner which even James Bond would find unrealistic. Every single one of these actors seem to think they're all in different movies, and all of them go for totally different tones. Some try for straight-faced camp, others play for sincere emotion, some are dryly observing the wacky shit around them, and some seem to have no idea what the hell they're doing there. It all mixes together into an unappealling mess which makes you feel like none of these people have ever acted in a movie before, and none of them ever need to do so again. And then there's Sam Jackson. This is the single most over-the-top performance he's ever given. Yes, really. Without question or competition. He hams it up like Nicolas Cage could only dream of doing. Which is even worse if you know that in the original books, the Octopus was a shadowy mastermind who was so far removed from the action that we never even saw his face; basically, he was Doctor Claw. In the movie, we get Jackson stomping around in a Nazi uniform and obsessively talking about eggs all the time. DO NOT WANT. I mentioned that the visual style is blatantly stolen from Sin City; I don't know if that's fair or not considering that Miller wrote that comic, but this movie is still trying way too hard to copy the look of that one, at times practically shot-for-shot. It fails in the attempt, too, often looking more like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. In terms of simple storytelling, the movie is an appalling disaster. It's incoherent, confusing, the comedy is not funny, the action is not thrilling, and the drama is so terribly bad that it actually pissed me off when the movie seemed to expect me to care about these cardboard characters. Fuck Frank Miller for this worthless film which takes a contemptuous steaming piss on Will Eisner's grave. Chaos: 0/10 The only reason I watched this miserable little exercise in depravity and despair is because of that god-damned Roger Ebert. In his book Your Movie Sucks, he gave Chaos a review so viciously negative that not only did he tear the film a new asshole, but he shoved an angry porcupine into the hole and then sewed it back up. I was truly curious to see exactly what kind of movie could inspire that level of legitimate outrage in a fellow as usually even-tempered as himself. Sadly, I have now seen it. Chaos is indeed a horrible moviegoing experience on every level imaginable, just a wretched piece of filth that the filmmakers should be ashamed of having made. The movie is a blatant rip-off of Last House on the Left, copying that movie's plot so thoroughly that Wes Craven could've sued these clownshoes and won if he'd given a shit. I mean, copied right down to the "angry father pulls out a chainsaw" scene. The story, such as it is: two teenage girls go out to a party in the woods. They're waylaid by psychopaths. Gruesome shit ensues. Humorously, the movie isn't as offensive as it thinks it is, largely just due to lack of talent and artistic clumsiness. The acting and dialogue is so mediocre that at all times I was aware that these were actors speaking scripted lines; my disbelief was never suspended. (Well, except for one part, but we'll come back to that.) There's also a heaping helping of racism from most of the characters, and general sexism by portraying all the girls as useless idiots who can't do anything. The main killer guy is named, yes, "Chaos", and it's a bad laugh every single time one of the other killers calls him by that name. It's also one of those movies where you know the bad guys are really bad because they all say "FUCK" about a thousand times. The whole movie feels cheap and phony, and the structure of the editing is really fucking poor. Throughout the parts where the girls are being tortured in the woods, we keep cutting back to their boring parents trying to figure out what's going on, and the useless cops they ask for help. All of this is timed so badly that it's unintentionally funny. And the shaky handheld cinematography is so terrible that there are times when the camera isn't even in focus. This film is just piss-poorly made in every technical aspect. But there is one scene, one fucking scene, which was so nauseating that I literally couldn't believe what I was seeing. The killers have one girl trapped in the woods. They strip her naked, and then Chaos proceeds to cut off one of her nipples with a butcher knife. This is all shown in graphic closeup, with the camera never cutting away, and unnervingly realistic gore effects. Then, Chaos eats half of the nipple, and forces her to eat the other half. She vomits all over herself, her skin already soaked with blood and covered with dirt and mud and leaves and grass and shit from laying down naked in the woods. Then Chaos turns her over, stabs her repeatedly, and assfucks her while she bleeds to death. She dies at about the same time he cums. I think. It's hard to tell. Him fucking her makes her limbs flop around a lot, after all. You know how I complain about misogyny in horror movies? I shouldn't even have to explain my feelings here, other than to note that I really had to stop the movie and go take a break for a while. This was the single most gratuitous and repugnant piece of violence I have ever seen in any film in my entire life. The whole of I Spit On Your Grave and Cannibal Holocaust COMBINED weren't as nasty as this one scene. Worst of all, the filmmakers actually claimed that they made this film as some sort of social awareness project! There's some opening credits narration, which talks about how shit like this happens in real life all the time. Well, no, I doubt that ludicrously contrived ending has ever happened in exactly that manner at any point in the history of the planet. But nevertheless, they have the balls to claim that they're doing this to try to warn people "and hopefully, save lives". What's the fucking warning here? Never trust anyone ever? Barricade yourself up in the basement for the rest of your life? Don't have children, because something bad might happen to them? The BALLS of these people. This is one of the worst fucking movies I've ever seen. Cube: 2/10 This is one of the most misanthropic films I've ever seen in my life. Cube is an ugly movie about ugly people, and seems to have a general message about humans being nothing but self-destructive bastards who are utterly incapable of cooperating with each other even if it means their own death. It's also a movie which has picked up a cult following over the years, and truly I have no idea why. Plot: six strangers wake up in a bizarre maze of identical cubic rooms, with no idea of how they got there or why they're there at all. The maze is filled with deadly traps, which seem to be designed less for efficiency or practicality and more for providing as wide a variety of gruesome gore as possible. The rooms all look alike except for the color of the lighting, in a poor attempt to hide the fact that this entire low-budget movie was shot on one small set. The people are all stock characters: the angry cop, the caring woman doctor, the hollow corporate suit, and, god help us all, the autistic idiot who also just happens to be a mathematical genius. These are all played as being whiny, useless morons in a really annoying fashion. The acting sucks, sucks hard, with them intoning the awful dialogue in a really wooden fashion. Plus there's some bonus racism, with the only black guy being a tempermental brute who's sexually obsessed with young white women: thanks, movie! The film tries to offer some weak backstory about the Cube, but I didn't buy any of it. The explanations are often contradictory, and even out of context none of it makes any freaking sense. It kind of acts like it explains why someone would spend billions of dollars building a giant deathtrap and then fill it with innocent civilians doomed to torture and death, but it all sounds like so much bullshit that it actually pissed me off by believing that I'd accept such flawed reasoning. There's one or two decent scenes of tension as the people are trying to avoid the traps, but such brief moments of light are few and far between in this oppressively grim experience. Also, it's one of those infuriating movies which gets cutesy and symbolic with stuff like the characters' names (they're all named after famous prisons), and multiple instances of people speaking Hopeful Life-Affirming Dialogue as their last words right before their hideous demise. Just an incredibly unpleasant movie which doesn't work either as realism or allegory, filled with facepalm moments on a grand scale. Dear Wendy: 3/10 Can we make some international sanctions to keep Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier from making any more movies about how much America sucks? He didn't direct Dear Wendy, but he wrote the script. Once again, we have a movie set in America, among selfish and self-destructive lower-class people, made by a guy who has never been to America. Not even once. Ever. Supposedly he's got a crippling fear of flying on airplanes. Which doesn't explain why he couldn't just take a boat. Point is, he's a cock-knocker. Von Triers is still such an accomplished cinematic artist that he can sometimes get away with it; his talent can triumph over an odious story, like in Dancer in the Dark, or at least make it worthwhile like in Dogville. He's often unusually good at writing English-language dialogue, which is perplexing considering that he can barely speak it himself. Unfortunately, this movie is more like Manderlay, an infuriatingly shallow and xenophobic polemic about how gosh-darned awful those Yankees are. Dear Wendy is about a group of teenagers, living in some unidentified American city in an undetermined time. (That's one thing that really bugged me: the sets are from the 1930s, the props are from the 1960s, and the clothes are from the 1990s.) These teens all have shitty lives, and so they all decide to carry guns in order to boost their self-esteem. It's dressed up in a lot of more flowery language and annoying philosophy, but it's basically "we'll carry concealed weapons at all times, but we'll NEVER use them because we're pacifists, and also we give our guns names and become experts in ballistics, aren't we sooo cooool". They have meetings in one of those Movie Secret Society Hideouts, a gargantuan abandoned mineshaft with millions of dollars' worth of old equipment just lying around, and oh yeah of course it's inexplicably lit by several thousand candles. Eventually, you might be shocked to find out that they discover that having guns might not be the best idea, and bad things can come of it like all the main characters getting mowed down in a Butch & Sundance ripoff massacre. In terms of craft, it's a mixed bag. The dialogue is okay, as long as you assume that it's supposed to make you want to smack these douchebag kids across the mouth every time they start whining about their principles. And the young actors all acquit themselves admirably, even guys like Chris "Sherminator" Owen whom I've never seen do much worthwhile before. These people speaking these words are strong enough to drag this wrongheaded film above the 1/10 it was headed for. Unfortunately, it is missing one thing big-time: the pictures. In the movies he directs, Lars Von Trier always has a great eye for really striking imagery and rock-solid spatial relationships. This time, pinch-hitter Thomas Vinterberg can do nothing of the sort, and it's a jumbled mess. Even worse are a bunch of unnecessary flashy techniques, trying for that Three Kings or Fight Club sort of "watch us fuck with reality and draw diagrams in mid-air!" sort of thing, that just get in the way and don't improve anything. The movie has pretensions towards an intellectual nature, but it's all surface foo-fah; there's no depth here. I'm not kidding when I say Bowling for Columbine had many more worthwhile, substantive things to say about American gun culture than this off-putting and artificial flick. It also makes detours into some very tacky tangents: like, nasty racism. There are two black characters in this otherwise all-white film, an old woman who works as a maid and cleans up after white people (she's apparently employed full-time by a miner?), and her grandson, a street thug who's a convicted murderer and lusts after white girls. UGH. Furthermore, how does a movie actually make me cringe at the sight of pretty naked female breasts? There's a moment of nudity in this film which is SO gratuitous and uncomfortable that it seriously made me all like "please, barely legal girl whom I find attractive in a naturalistic and non-Hollywood sort of manner, put your shirt back on". I haven't gotten laid in so long that I'm embarassed to define the specific time period, and even I couldn't find this the least bit sexy. How do you DO that in a movie?! Last of the Living: 3/10 Is the Silver Age of zombie movies we've been enjoying here in the 21st century finally coming to an end? It's been a few years since the last great zombie flick (28 Weeks Later) and recently I've been seeing more and more of these cheap copycats with little in the way of inspiration or innovation. Every country has been weighing in on the zomgeist, and now it's New Zealand's turn. Unfortunately, their contribution Last of the Living is a derivative and lamebrained affair, always going for a laugh when it should be trying for a scare and vice-versa. If for some reason you happen to feel an unstoppable urge to watch a Kiwi comedy/horror flick, go with Black Sheep instead. I will give the filmmakers credit for one thing: unlike 90% of zombie films, this is not an origin story. Last of the Living takes place after the zompocalypse has already taken place, with our main characters being a trio of slackers who actually seem to be enjoying the end of the world. Okay, there are interesting things you can do with that, as the original Dawn of the Dead so memorably proved. Sadly, such commentary on humanity and society is far beyond this movie's abilities. These guys basically sit around all day getting drunk and playing video games, apparently not the least bit concerned about the facts that everyone they've ever known are all dead and that there are hordes of undead roaming the land. One day while out shopping for a new mansion, they happen to run into a hot chick, who also happens to be a scientist who can help find a cure for the plague if she can get a Macguffin to an island of researchers, and... y'know, I'll just stop here, because the plot becomes more stupid and full of holes the closer you look at it. The acting is uniformly amateurish, the budget is low, and the script keeps forgetting everything that happened more than five minutes previously. The movie would've been mediocre no matter what, but what really kills it are the fucking terrible characters we've got as our protagonists. Imagine that Tom Green, Adam Sandler, and Dane Cook were the leads in a postapocalyptic horror movie. Seriously. The very worst is our main guy Morgan, a seemingly retarded motherfucker who combines rampant stupidity, egomaniacal selfishness, macho misogyny, obsessive homophobia, and endless toilet humor into one rednecky package. This is our hero, a moronic pig who cares more about getting laid than about keeping his friends alive. Oh sure eventually he has an Enlightened Epiphany where he decides to make a Heroic Sacrifice and shit, but it's an arbitrary outta-nowhere swerve from a character who's not shown a single selfless bone in his body until that point. I DO NOT WANT TO SPEND NINETY MINUTES WITH AN ASSHOLE LIKE THIS. There is exactly one genuinely funny moment (it involves a parachute) which seems to come naturally from the characters we're dealing with, but the rest of the time we're dealing with fucking idiots who surprise me by not finding a way to accidentally strangle themselves while tying their shoes. Even on its basic brain-eating fundamentals, the movie fails. Are these slow-staggering zombies or fast-running zombies? Don't ask Last of the Living, since it alternates back and forth between both. Although it does provide multiple examples of flatulent zombies which fart as they stumble along. Wonderful. The physics of the action scenes are laughable bullshit: like, they've got a customized car with spikes on the front. They run over several zombies with this car. None of them ever stick to the spikes, or even leave the tiniest bit of blood on their shiny chrome surface. Also, I never knew you could cave in something as dense as the human skull with something as flimsy as a golf club, until this movie taught me the error of believing in elementary physics. There's even hardly any gore, and what little there is all looks phony. It just sucks all around. And just when you think it couldn't get any worse, the ending is a ridiculous piece of messy cinematic suicide which harshly clashes against the goofy tone of the rest of the film. Like, imagine if James Bond suddenly got shot dead at the end of the movie. That's the best comparison that the careless finale to this stupid piece of crap could possibly inspire. Prom Night (2008): 1/10 Ho boy, this movie. This fucking movie. This was the worst excuse for a slasher flick that I've seen in a long long time. And this isn't even a case of "fuckin' remake killing my nostalgia", since I've never seen the original Prom Night. Doesn't matter if a movie like this was remade from Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, it blows by itself and needs no help from the relative quality of its source material for contrast. This is a movie about a lunatic killing teenagers during a prom held at a hotel, and the results left me wondering if the filmmakers have ever been in a fight, been to a prom, been to a hotel, or ever known any real lunatics and/or teenagers. -"Why?", you may ask. "Jingus, really, why did you even watch this?" Well hey dammit, sometimes I just like watching a shitty horror movie, okay?! Although I had no idea it would be THIS shitty. "Jingus, man, it's a PG-13 teenybopper remake of a slasher film, set at a goddamn prom. What were you expecting?" No, no, you don't understand! I mean that despite the fact that it's a PG13 teenybopper "horror" flick, it's shitty even by those standards. -I utterly do not see the point. Horror films tend to be separated into two categories: suspense/mystery (where the terror is from not knowing what's going to happen) and slasher/snuff (where we know exactly what's going to happen, but holy shit look at all that naked flesh and bloody gore). This movie is neither. From the very beginning, we know who the killer is, and we can tell that at the end of the movie he'll be dead and our "hero" will still be alive. Yet thanks to PG-13, the kills are the weakest sauce imaginable, a bunch of mundane stabbings where half the time we don't even see the death onscreen. I'm not kidding, I've seen more gore on episodes of Heroes than in this movie, Hayden Cheerleader got mutilated several times on a more horrifying scale than anything that happens in this alleged scary movie. -You might've noticed I typed it as, our "hero". This movie has one of the weakest excuses for a protagonist that I've ever seen. Her name is Donna, the killer murdered her whole family three years ago, and... that's absolutely every single thing we know about her. The longest conversation she has in the entire movie is debating with her boyfriend over whether they should go to the same college or not. Who is this girl? What is she like? What's her favorite color? Is she popular in school? What does she want to study in college? Does she have a job? Does she have a car? Does she have a pet? Did she decide to take karate classes after her entire family was brutally massacred? Is she even a goddamn virgin? That last bit is usually considered excessively important in lousy slasher flicks, but this one never even asks. She doesn't even get to kill the freaking killer, nor get the tiniest measure of revenge on him. -An even worse detail: Donna is played by Brittany Snow, a vapid blank-eyed barbie doll. Brittany has exactly one distinguishing feature: a big scar right on the middle of her forehead. We're talking a big, deep, absolutely impossible-to-overlook scar. Much more prominent than the one Harry Potter wears in his movie. Now: remember, this is a slasher film, one which starts with the violent stabbing of this girl's immediate family, right in front of her. Is it too fucking much to ask that she receive a flesh wound in this incident, thus explaining the giant goddamn scar and also throwing in a wee bit of metaphor about how the murderer has forever left his mark upon her? Yes, both of those are too fucking much to ask of this pathetic little queef of a film. -The prom itself. Oh, the PROM. They host this thing at a giant five-star hotel. They've got intricate lighting rigs, a professional DJ, a Titantron, ludicrous amounts of decoration, and a frigging red carpet at the entrance complete with a horde of paparazzi behind the guardrail and many spotlights swivelling their mighty beams across the sky. WHAT. What fucking prom in the history of the fucking planet has ever been like this. You can't even use the excuse that it's supposed to be a bunch of rich kids here in Standard Fictional West-Coast "Small" Town. I actually went to high school in a rich neighborhood, and we had the same ol' collection of ribbons and ballons strung across the gymnasium for our prom like every other school always has. It's mentioned that this prom "went $100,000 over budget". Nevermind the overrun, what the fuck was the original budget? -The aforementioned extra 100K: it was paid by the father of the local Evil Rich Blonde Bitch. Yes, even clocking in at barely 80 minutes, this movie had the gall to throw in this particularly ancient Marxist plot device. As usual, the Evil Rich Blonde Bitch is haughty, vapid, stupid, and utterly self-absorbed. "But hey", you might say, "this is a horror flick, so at least we get to see her killed". NOPE. She lives! She's never even threatened. Not a scratch on her. Her big comeuppance is finding out that she didn't win Prom Queen. Which rings rather hollow when we know that the girl who did win has already been knifed to death. -Time for some good ol' fashioned Stalk The Women, Shock The Men! You know the drill, this is when the men tend to be suddenly blitzed and killed outta nowhere (when not killed totally offscreen with their body only being found later, which happens several times). Meanwhile, the women? Oh, no, that's not slow enough. The women first have to look around and realize someone is near them. They have to say "Hello, is anyone there?". They have to get surprised by the killer, and try to run away. They scream a lot. They struggle, but it's useless, since the killer is a big strong man and they're a lil' weakling woman and there's nothing they can do. Finally he gives her the mercy killing by penetrating their body with his HUGE knife. Don't claim I'm reading something into this that isn't here, these described formuli are the exact pattern for nearly every kill in this movie. -The villain: he's pure bullshit. The first time we see this guy, he's allegedly a teacher; however, he looks like Snape and Sirius had a lovechild, with long scraggly hair and a villainous black goattee. Since when do any public schoolteachers in the entire fucking world look like that? (Actually, is Makebelieve High even supposed to be a public school? Dunno, never says.) What subject did he even teach? Who knows, who cares, this movie sure doesn't. He's apparently in love with Donna, but somehow doesn't realize that stabbing all her friends and relatives is something which will not endear him to her. Also, he's quite clearly alone in a room with her on several occasions, but chooses to just wander around and make spooky noises rather than actually pursue the target of his obsession. -Furthermore, this dude has THE stupidest level of Bullshit Movie Killer Superpowers that I've seen in recent memory. He can run rings around Jason when it comes to teleporting from spot to spot in the blink of an eye. He's also the king of hiding inside bare rooms where there's absolutely nowhere to hide. He's also like Flash-level quick, able to kill a guy in a car, break into a house, go upstairs, kill a guy inside, and not only do this all silently but literally do it in about thirty seconds. He also has powers of telekinesis, as witnessed by his ability to levitate a dead body up into an air vent which is in a ceiling at least ten feet high with zero means reach it. Most alarmingly, he's apparently an Adrian Monk-level neat freak, as shown by his curious power of stabbing people over and over again while somehow not getting a drop of blood on neither his own clothing nor the floor where the victim was standing. -This killer also has a marked tendency of stabbing people in the stomach, wherein we never see any gore besides a little bit of blood on their clothes. There are a few exceptions whom he stabs in the neck, but we never see him actually do it, just their bodies afterwards. This makes no sense until you remember oh yeah, PG-13, it's all a shamelessly calculated ploy to con 15-year-olds out of their lunch money. -This movie has some of the more incompetent cops I've ever seen. They keep it a secret when a vicious psycho killer has escaped. They never call for backup until it's already too late. They're able to somehow lose sight of a killer when they know exactly which room he's in. They're easy prey for the killer even when they're specifically sitting there waiting for him to show up. I mean, fucking pathetic, even by slasher movie standards. "Darn, the psycho mass murderer got away. Oh well! Good thing we've got a whole two police officers sitting outside the intended victim's house, otherwise she might be in trouble, LOL!" -This movie also continues that rotten Scream tradition of having knives make metal-sharpening sounds every time the camera points at them, and mysterious shadows making loud whooshes by just stepping past the lens. -The criminals here are writer J.S. Cardone and director Nelson McCormick. Neither one of them have ever made a movie before this one. It shows. McCormick directed a bunch of television episodes of mediocre shows, and Cardone wrote for really low-budget direct-to-video movies which might've been even lamer than this one. These two filthy fucks are currently working on a remake of The Stepfather, one of the few legitimately great slasher flicks of the 80s. May God have mercy on their souls. Cabin Fever: 2/10 It's a shame I've so recently seen the depressingly incompetent Prom Night, or else I could truthfully say that Cabin Fever is the worst fucking horror movie I've seen in a really long time. This movie is incredibly unpleasant and repellent in nearly every way imaginable, a deeply unentertaining film which makes me wonder just what the fuck is wrong with the people who made it. It's the wrong kind of sadistic, feeling like we're supposed to laugh or get off on the miserably icky things that happen to every single person in the film. It's misanthropic, misogynistic, racist, nihilistic, grows from being merely awful to batshit insane, and seems to have been produced entirely by people who hate humanity and intended for an audience of the same. Plot: some beautiful young people go into the woods and get fucked up. When I say "fucked up", I mean both "they get inebriated" and "they get massacred", consecutively more than concurrently. We're stuck with some of the more loathesome characters I've ever seen, even by Horror Movie "Teenagers" standards: we have Sensitive Protagonist Guy, Chaste Leading Lady, Uptight Preppy Prick, Slutty Supporting Lady, and Redneck Macho Idiot. Those descriptions contain every ounce of characterization which is given to them in this film, and the actors all engage in unforgivably hammy mugging and screaming at some point or another. They're all unforgivably stupid, the type who walk right towards someone pointing a gun at them and are apparently oblivious to the possible consequences. Then some unnamed fictional flesh-eating virus gets involved and they all rot to death, although a couple of 'em get shot first. I have now seen everything that writer/director Eli Roth has ever done. I now feel comfortable in dismissing him as an utter hack, all hype and no talent, a man whose only recognizable ability is in self-promotion and occasionally thinking up a really sick gore effect. He's a mediocre director and a thoroughly terrible writer; so many times during Cabin Fever, there were inexplicable scenes which made me wonder just why the fuck this extraneous bit was even in the movie to begin with. He is totally unable to write anything even resembling a real human being; the sigh-inducing Crazy Backwoods Hicks which made up the entire population of this town were the obvious worst parts, but there were so many other close contenders. Fuck all this garbage, and I'm glad that Roth has yet to make another movie since Hostel 2 bombed. Saw V: 3/10 The opening scene totally gives the game away: Jigsaw is supposed to be a hero now. We see a man strapped down under a razor-sharp pendulum. Jigsaw's dummy pops up on a television screen and tells us that this man is a murderer who was released early on a technicality (something which seems to happen in movies way more often than in real life, and they never specify what the technicality was either). To stop the pendulum, the man must insert his hands into a machine which will crush them flat. He does, and we get loving closeups and crunchy splatty sound effects as his fingers are squashed as if they were blood-filled condoms. But alas, treachery! The pendulum continues to descend, and it cuts the guy in half very slowly while flinging his guts all over the walls. That's all plenty bad enough, and makes shameful liars out of any who claim to enjoy this series for any reason but the gory torture (and this is by far the goriest entry so far, a sure sign of desperation on the part of the filmmakers). But it's not the worst part. The dying man turns and sees someone who is clearly not Jigsaw watching him, and wheezes: "I did what I was supposed to do!" Obviously, the watcher is one of Jigsaw's apprentices, who has been breaking the Code set down by the original killer. Herein likes the problem. According to this movie, the ONLY thing that is morally WRONG about this scene is that the trap kept going and the guy had no way out. It's perfectly okay to strap a guy down to a table under a deadly blade that will cut him in half, as long as the hand-pulverizing machine really does allow him to escape after he's mutilated! When Jigsaw says his catchphrase "I've never killed anyone", we're supposed to agree with him. FUCK THAT. I will allow NO hero-worshipping of Jigsaw in any way whatsoever. He was a fucking monster, a serial killer and a God-playing madman. Any other interpretation is not just fundamentally wrong, but is in fact evil. So, plot: aw hell, I'm not even going to try. It's a fucking Saw movie, you know the drill: we watch far too many arbitrary plot twists in between grisly scenes of human bodies being disassembled in the most spectacular manners possible. This one is kind of a combo remake of parts II (bunch of assholes have to work together to escape a trap house; they are less than successful) and IV (explaining the backstory behind the twist at the end of the previous movie). By now, we've killed off all the supporting characters, so we're reduced to a colorless spear-carrier like Agent Strahm as our hero. Um. Who the fuck is Agent Strahm? I'm assured that he was in the previous films, but I have no memory of him whatsoever. I've never seen a series as utterly obsessed with the minutiae of its own continuity like Saw is. Unless you've completely memorized all the earlier films, you'll be lost, as I was on several occasions here. Even stranger: you know how all the Saw flicks have an ending that combines incredible Evil Triumphant pessimism with a plot twist that seems to lead off in a new direction for the next movie? Well, this one has the pessimism, but not the twist. When the credits abruptly rolled, I literally blurted out loud "That's it?!" in disbelief. Add all that together with the aforementioned loathesome underlying message, the nastiest torture pr0n scenes in the series, and a heavy case of Xanatos Roulette and it all combines into one shitty movie. Oh, what's Xanatos Roulette, you ask? That's from our fine friends at TV Tropes. It defines a ludicrously complex mastermind plan which depends on perfectly predicting a bunch of variables which are completely impossible to predict. I HATE that kind of omniscient villain bullshit, and the Saw movies not only swallow it whole but go back for seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths, and sixths. Jade: 1/10 What. The FUCK. Was that?! I come to expect bad movies every now and again. Goes with the territory. But movies like this just blow my fucking mind. How?! How was this made? Who could have possibly thought it was a good idea? How do you fuck everything up like that? Okay, the very fact that they have David Caruso as the leading man is strike one, sure. But it's not like he could've wreaked all this carnage by himself. The supporting cast is decent enough: Chazz Palmenteri, Linda Fiorntino, Michael Biehn, Richard Crenna. And the behind-the-scenes people are even better. Director William Friedkin has made some bad movies in his day, but he's made many more good ones. Cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak has filmed many a great movie in his day. They even got James Horner to do the music. And the script is from the then-highest paid writer in the business, Joe Ezterhas. So I have no idea why... wait a sec. JOE EZTERHAS. Showgirls. Sliver. An Alan Smithee Film Burn Hollywood Burn. Aha, I believe we have found the culprit. However, even the presence of the single worst writer to ever command a seven-figure salary can't possibly explain all the bullshittery on display here. You know that dissection thing I do with real bad movies, where I list all the big problems? There are too many to do that here. I know for a fact, because I was taking notes! And after the first thirty minutes, I had already filled a full page's worth of snarky shorthand. I threw it away. I would've gone mad if I kept doing that. So I kept a tiny shred of sanity by simply MST3King the movie out loud, yelling back at the screen, while my cats stared at me with deep suspicion. I'm not proud, but I had to have some entertainment here, even if I had to provide it myself. Too much fucking effort, more effort than the filmmakers actually put into the movie. So the plot is about... y'know, nevermind. Let's not even try. It's a murder mystery conspiracy involving a bunch of people being killed in ridiculous ways, inside giant mansions. One of those. You know the drill. Except worse. By the end, even though it explicitly tells you who did the killing and why, you're still not sure what the fuck just happened. Also, what was with the whole bizarre subplot of the multiple-personality chick who craved anal sex? It not only didn't make sense, but also felt like the movie just never bothered telling you half the story. And if you want to see some of the worst fucking acting ever, I mean more terrible than you could imagine, just check out Caruso's wild mugging in the reaction shots during the laughable car chase. JESUS, I've never seen crappier emoting more perfectly distilled than those half-second shots of him grimacing while driving the car, truly epic shit. I might've let this movie off with a 2, because while it's fundamentally incompetent, at least it's not trying to force some bullshit message on us. But no, they had to go and piss me off personally. There is a musician named Loreena McKennitt. She mostly does Celtic type stuff, glistening harps and elegant strings and mournful horns. She has the most beautiful, angelic, otherworldly voice you've ever heard. It's enough to reduce a grown man to tears. And Jade has the fucking BALLS to use one of her songs. The beginning of one called "The Mystic's Dream", off her album The Mask and the Mirror. They start playing the song, and then quickly cut it off. Over and over again! Imagine putting this disc in your CD player, listening to the first ten seconds, and then turning it off. Then do it about twenty times, over the course of an hour and a half. Welcome to this movie. Welcome to Jade. Welcome to hell. The Hitcher (2007): 2/10 ARGH. ME HEAD HURTS. What a STUPID fucking movie this was. It's been a long time since I saw the original 80s version of The Hitcher, so my memories on it are a bit hazy. I kinda liked it, as I recall, finding it grim and nightmarish in a good way. NONE of those adjectives can be applied to this shitty, shitty remake. All the warning you really need is contained in three words: "Co-starring Neal McDonough". FUCK. He's not a bad actor, but his presence is practically a guaran-damn-tee of a movie that is horrible beyond human reckoning. The role-call from the past decade: I Know Who Killed Me! Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li! Walking Tall! 88 Minutes! Timeline! I mean, JESUS, someone find this poor fucker's agent and fucking crucify him already. (We'll just blithely ignore the fact that he was also in Minority Report and Flags of our Fathers.) So, we've got a couple of young college students going on a cross-country road trip. They run into a psycho killer, as you do. The two students are played by talentless teenyboppers who are so terrible that I'm not even gonna bother looking up their names. The Hitcher is essayed by one Sean Bean, usually a perfectly tolerable thespian, but here a blank slab of unflavored tofu as the ludicrously supercompetent heel. (It especially doesn't help if you've seen the original, with C. Thomas Howell and Jennifer Jason Lee as the heroes and Rutger Hauer as a terrifying monster of a villain, all of them far better than the actors in the remake.) So the killer kills people, he chases the teens around, sometimes he tries to kill them and sometimes he tries to keep them alive, and all the while he manages to frame them for a ridiculous number of murders. That was the dumbest fucking part of a dumb fucking movie, how the cops keep believing that these two wimpy little kids are somehow responsible for leaving piles of bodies littering the roadside. At one part the cops grab and arrest them, despite zero evidence of any actual wrongdoing; and in the process, they literally yank the boys' hands off the spurting artery of a wounded victim he was trying to save and put those hands directly into cuffs. After the hitcher comes in and SILENTLY pulls a Terminator on an ENTIRE police station, later cops on the scene know that the kids couldn't have done it; still doesn't stop them from chasing them down the road and blasting away at them with automatic weapons. And then, outta frickin' nowhere, the hitcher shows back up and Rambos three cop cars and a helicopter and does it all with A PISTOL. Meanwhile, Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" is blaring as background music! I couldn't fucking believe it. Most asinine thing I've seen in recent memory. Piss on this shit. I'm done... ...for now. Ha. Mwa ha ha. AHHH HA HA HA HAH HAAAAAAAA! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Burgundy LaRue Posted July 28, 2013 Share Posted July 28, 2013 Nothing worse than the plot synopsis I read for A SERBIAN FILM. As much as I consider myself a horror film buff, I cannot bring myself to watch that movie. I read the Wiki description and that was enough for me. Those of us who watch horror know we're doing to come across some weird stuff done in the name of art, but ASF seems to go too far. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Newb82 Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 I like CUBE & CABIN FEVER seemed OK when I watched it ages ago. SAW V sucks, but we disagree on the reasons why. PROM NIGHT 2008 has nothing to do with the original series accept the title and the movie being set on that particular night. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Niners Fan in CT Posted July 29, 2013 Author Share Posted July 29, 2013 Wait what was the deal with Friday the 13th part VII? I don't remember the ending. What was the ending and what was it supposed to be? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Newb82 Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 The ending was supposed to be the telekenetic girl's long-dead father emerging from the lake (we saw how he drowned in the beginning) and dragging Jason back down into the lake with him. That's essentially what we got, but the dead dad was supposed to look a lot more like a rotted corpse and less like the actor just got a little dirt on his face. The director claims a certain bitchy producer, pissed that he went over her head once to get the mask off Jason toward the end. shut down any idea of him getting what he wanted for the ending. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scruffynerfhrdr Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 winner winner chicken dinner Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Burgundy LaRue Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 I'm gonna need a description of that ASAP. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Craig H Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 Originally, it was Summer of Sam. My god, fuck that movie with a hot poker. That was later trumped by Eyes Wide Shut, which is one of the most pretentious movies I've ever seen, but also one of the worst. However, neither of those hold a candle to the Village and The Happening. I wrote an epic review of the Happening which is on the web somewhere. That movie is just beyond dumb. The Village though, takes the fucking cake. Signs is one of my favorite movies, as is Unbreakable, but The Village was the movie that made me realize that M. Night was a complete fucking hack and someone else actually made Signs, Unbreakable, and The Sixth Sense. Every character is beyond retarded, Bryce Dallas Howard plays THE WORST BLIND PERSON EVER, the twist is telegraphed way early in the movie, and, ugh, it's fucking terrible. It is the WCW Thunder for PSOne of movies. I had 7...SEVEN...long island iced teas before I went to see The Village and it somehow killed my buzz and sobered me the fuck up. It was so painfully bad and M. Night has been an abomination ever since. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
piranesi Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 That was later trumped by Eyes Wide Shut, which is one of the most pretentious movies I've ever seen, but also one of the worst. Oh, fuck, thank you, C.H.. If only I hadn't already been forced to consigned you to the third circle of Hell for your unholy SHAWSHANK love, I would give you an internet kiss...but sadly I can't mingle with the previously consigned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Natural Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 The Crow: City of Angels and Batman & Robin. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LooseCannon Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 The thing is, I really can't laugh at most shitty horror movies, because I want to MAKE horror movies. I take the genre very damn seriously, and have zero patience or sympathy for all the fucking hacks out there who seem to have a "who cares if it's good, it's just a scary movie, it ain't Shakespeare" attitude of intellectual laziness towards the whole thing. Fuck ALL of that. Horror films can be just as artistically beautiful, just as deeply intelligent, just as emotionally devastating, just as all-around-great as movies from any other genre. But the talentless assholes who make 90% of horror films (and many of the undemanding Fangoria-type fanboys who are happy to pay for anything as long as it's got blood and tits) are a millstone around the genre's neck, forever helping to keep it in Hollywood's dirty ignored ghetto. So a bad horror film, or even a mediocre one, doesn't entertain me. (Unless we're talking about something like Birdemic, but stuff like the lousier Friday the 13th movies aren't nearly bad enough to be that good.) It just makes me angry and depressed, like I'm a modern wrestling trainee who looks at "his business" and sees nothing but a sea of non-working backyard wannabes, performing their shitty cosplay spots in front of ever-dwindling houses. As someone who writes horror movies, and actively trying to sell scripts (which I'm saying to be a dick and get you to make something instead of talking about wanting to) these feelings are just going to make you want to kill everyone in a fit of rage. It's way worse than you could even imagine. If you saw the development side of this shit, it's bleak as fuck.You gotta have a sense of humor about it because ragehatekill isn't going to get you hired/sold. You can go the indie route, sure, but you'll still have to get distributed by those people.Also, stop saying you want to make horror moves and make them wtf I'm picturing a film in which a horror movie buff figures out his way into a menial job on the set of a horror movie remake by a famous director, only to find out how horrible the film will be, how the director is doing a half-assed job and is more interested in sleeping with cast members while crapping all over the legacy of a classic film, that he goes nuts and start trying to kill everyone he thinks is a hack...the director, the writers, the actors. Jingus Unchained? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fat Spanish Waiter Posted July 29, 2013 Share Posted July 29, 2013 Fuck I see no way that wouldn't be awesome Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now