Mongolian Death Worm (2010)
Who
could resist a title like that? This actually wasn't
awful, but it's another CGI monster movie in which giant
worms menace a village and a shale plant in Mongolia.
Sometimes the effects are competently done, sometimes not
so. There's a villainous businessman who is smuggling
artifacts found in the tomb of Genghis Khan, a doctor played
quite well by Victoria Pratt who gets caught up in the mess,
a treasure hunter of dubious moral persuasion, an honest
copy, and a cast of extras. Some of the acting is quite
good, some of it pretty bad. The story is predictable
and there are a few odd spots where people don't act the way
one would expect them to, but on the whole it's watchable,
though quite forgettable. 2/14/12
Doctor Who Series 6 soundtrack, composed by Murray
Gold, Silva Screen, 2012, around $20
I
was rather disappointed by this season of the
venerable Doctor Who series, but it wasn't because of the
music, which was up to its usual standards. With the usual
caveats that some tracks fix a particular scene and don't
stand well on their own, this two disc set is actually very
listenable. The selections are grouped by episode although
there is some repetition of themes, obviously. There's
considerable variation in tone, though not in
instrumentation. Not a lot of standouts in this one,
although I liked "Apollo 11", "Deadly Siren", "The Curse of
the Black Spot", and "Tell Me the Truth" on the first disc.
The second disc seemed a bit repetitious to me but that was
probably because of the recurring themes. I liked most of
the "Night Terrors" sequence and a few of the selections
from "Let's Kill Hitler" the best of these. 2/12/12
Metal
Shifters (2011)
This
made for cable television movie is a variation of the usual
CGI monster, in this case a bacterium from outer space that
can animate metal and takes over a tall sculpture made from
scrap metal as it wanders around town draining the iron from
the blood of various characters. The science is awful - a
biology teachers glances at the growth and analyzes its cell
structure - but the acting is at least competent, though why
they cast a 21 year old to play a 15 year old girl is beyond
me. The plot suffers from the usual bad logic. Machines
don't work in the creature's vicinity, except when it is
more convenient to the plot if they do. No one bothers to
call anyone outside the small town where it all takes place,
or to get in their car and drive away rather than hide in a
building. Then there are goofs, like the sheriff knowing
where a dead body is even though no one has told him, the
coroner who doesn't alert anyone even when he thinks there
is a plague in town, and a budget so low that the town is
essentially deserted all the time. And a one ton statue,
even animated, is not heavy enough to make buildings shake
noticeably when it slowly walks nearby. Watchable, but
silly. 2/11/12
Beowulf
(2007)
Although
this retelling of the classic myth using a screenplay
co-authored by Neil Gaiman has a good story, I was put off
as soon as I realized it was animated, i.e. computerized
images superimposed on the actual actors. Why? Anyway,
Beowulf comes across as a conceited braggart and morally
weak, but ultimately honorable. Grendel is an asymmetric
troll, completely animated. His mother – who wears high
heels for some absurd reason – looks reasonably human. The
closing sequence involving the dragon is the highlight of
the movie, which takes considerable liberties with the
traditional story. 2/10/12
Bikini
Girls on Ice (2005)
This
got sent to me by accident when I bought another movie on
Ebay and the seller told me to keep it. I should have
insisted he take it back. It looked like a standard slasher
movie but it’s below average even for that genre. A bunch of
bikini clad girls en route to a car wash are temporarily
stranded at a garage we know to be frequented by a long
haired, spaced out killer. The plot, such as it is, actually
goes downhill from the premise, with the car wash relocated.
The absolutely wooden acting doesn’t help and the college
students look like they should be on the faculty. There’s
very little gore – the killer freezes his victims to death
in the cooler – and we never figure out who he is or why he
does it that way. There’s a creepy old guy who warns them
off, a couple of mild comic relief characters, and a jealous
boyfriend. The very brief nudity and lesbian kissing seem
almost pro forma. When people start disappearing, no one is
particularly alarmed, and even after nightfall the female
characters refrain from getting dressed. And naturally
their cell phones don’t work and when one of them reaches a
phone knowing that there’s a killer, he doesn’t call 911 but
his girlfriend, who doesn’t believe him. And why would a
long abandoned gas station still have power? A waste of
pixels. 2/9/12
V for
Vendetta (2005)
I
finally got around to watching this, which didn't seem like
something I would enjoy but turned out to be pretty good.
England has succumbed to an authoritarian religious
dictatorship, the US has collapsed, and the rest of the
world isn't mentioned at all. A survivor of a secret
government project to develop chemical weapons has been
horribly scarred so he wears a Guy Fawkes mask as he
initiates a campaign of terrorism and propaganda to
undermine the existing government. Along the way a young
woman reveals to V that he is acting out of arrogance and
the desire for revenge rather than for noble motives, even
if the ends are desirable. There are some good action
sequences sprinkled throughout. I did somewhat question the
invariable competence of V, his ability to command
widespread and very expensive resources, and his
intelligence gathering operation even though he has no
allies. And one would think that after seeing his image on
television as a terrorist, the people who manufactured
700,000 copies of his costume might have alerted the
authorities. Still good though. 2/8/12
Frontiers
(2007)
Four
thuggish young adults pull of a robbery and escape across
France, taking shelter in an inn whose owner has a secret.
It seems that there are many tunnels beneath the inn, and
those tunnels are home to a mob of cannibals. Oh, and the
innkeeper is a Nazi planning to breed a new master race. The
rest of the plot summary is probably superfluous here, but I
should also point out that the film is in French and is
subtitled. The opening sequences, in which Paris is troubled
by riots, may have been intended to set the tone, but it
really does nothing to advance the story. There's more
violence than even most low budget horror films involve, but
there's very little opportunity to feel any empathy for any
of the characters. The acting, when there's a chance for any
of the cast to do so, appears to be reasonably good. The
photography on the other hand is jerky, erratic, and the
light and filter levels are distracting. This one has most
of the attributes, and failings, of any number of similar
direct to video failures. 1/21/12
Prowl
(2010)
This
low budget horror movie tries too hard in the early going,
with jumps back and forth in time, slow motion sequences,
night shots of a woman running through a dark forest, and
some late teen angst. The result is that within five minutes
I disliked all the characters, was annoyed by the
pretentious bits, and confused by too many parallel story
lines. Amber, the protagonist, wants to move to the big city
and convinces her friends to drive her there. Car trouble
ensues and they get a ride in the back of a commercial
trailer truck, only to discover that they are sharing the
cargo space with containers of fresh blood. The transition
is not very credible; there's no reason why all of them
would have taken the ride in the back of the truck since
they broke down within walking distance of where they
started. Things improve a bit for a while. They are backed
up and released into a locked warehouse with dim lighting.
And they're not alone. The good part ends quickly with
attacks by cannibals which feature real quick shots that
usually can't be followed and don't make sense when they're
intelligible. All the males are dead within a minute or two
and the three surviving females are barricaded in the truck
and one of them is dead a minute later. Turns out the
creatures are vampires - all males except for the leader for
some reason. No big surprise there. Our heroine turns out to
have superpowers of her own - odd that she's never noticed
before. There's some story but the photography was so awful
it was hard to tell. Not worth the time. 1/20/12
A Game
of Shadows (2011)
The
second Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey in the title
role moves at a hectic pace from beginning to end. Professor
Moriarty is planning to precipitate a world war and he and
Holmes are engaged in an open duel of wits which will lead
to their final confrontation at Reichenbach Falls. As with
the first movie, the casting and performances are excellent
throughout. Some of the action sequences make use of stop
action effects, which I find distracting and even annoying,
but they aren't bad enough to spoil this one. Despite
reviews suggesting this is better than the original, I
didn't think it was as good, but it's still one of the best
movies I've seen recently. The death of one of the
characters took me completely by surprise, and I thought the
sequence in the armaments factory was particularly good.
1/17/12
Husk
(2011)
A
swarm of crows smashes into a windshield and leaves a group
of young people stranded in the middle of a cornfield miles
from anywhere. One of them disappears and the others split
into two parties, one going for a tow truck, the others
staying with the car. Eventually they take refuge in
an apparently abandoned house, but we all know what that
means. The acting isn't bad but it's kind of flat, and
there's no musical accompaniment to establish mood. Nor is
it clear why the twosome looking for a tow enter the
cornfield rather than follow the road. It started to lose me
when the girl finds a scarecrow with a human body inside it,
but doesn't tell anyone. Then she runs off, apparently at
random, looking for her boyfriend. She gets dragged off by
some unknown party and the three male survivors try to
figure out what's going on. So does the audience. Things get
explained, but only partly and not very convincingly.
There's little suspense, no standout scenes, and not a whole
lot to hold your interest. And the characters so
consistently act stupidly that I began cheering on the
monsters. 1/16/12
The
Android Invasion (1975)
A
Tom Baker Doctor Who, with Sarah Jane Smith. Our heroes
return to Earth to find it infested by spacesuited creatures
with guns in their fingers. Everyone in the nearby
village is acting very strangely and there are what look
liked large seedpods sprinkled across the countryside. Some
of the cast chews the scenery in this one, I'm afraid.
There's a malevolent alien behind the plot, which is to
menace a nearby defense installation. Sarah gets captured
and replaced by an android duplicate. (They're actually
robots, not androids.) And then it turns out they aren't on
Earth after all but just a test site for an invasion yet toc
come. A slightly above average Baker adventure, and one of
the shorter ones. 1/14/12
Invasion of the
Dinosaurs (1974)
One
of the early Jon Pertwee Doctor Who adventures, and the last
to be in black and white; it switches to color with part 2
and there's a colorized version of part 1 on the disc.
The Doctor and Sarah Jane return to a strangely deserted
present day London. UNIT is dealing with a plague of
dinosaurs which have sprung up inexplicably in the London
area. The Doctor gets arrested as a looter, complicating
matters. The dinosaurs - which are impervious to bullets
naturally - are pretty badly done, essentially rough
puppets. Eventually they discover that people from the past
are also being transplanted through time. One of the
regulars, a member of UNIT, is actually in cahoots with the
renegade scientists involved, through some misguided plan to
wake up humanity about damaging the environment. Sarah Jane
is actually ahead of the Doctor on this one, which results
in her being captured by the bad guys. This is
actually one of the better adventures, if you can ignore the
really bad special effects. The science is also pretty
hokey. There is no habitable planet close enough to Earth
that one can still see the continents on Earth while
orbiting the other. It's a hoax, but even so the thousand or
so intelligent people duped by the process would have known
better. 1/13/12
Dark Town
(2004)
One
of the nuttier and most pointless vampire movies I’ve ever
seen. One plot involves a family planning a birthday party
for the head of the family, who happens to be a slumlord.
That evening, while inspecting one of his properties, he is
bitten by a vampire and becomes one himself – although the
vampires in this one are kind of zombies as well. It’s
really not very clear. He acts very strangely even before
the blood starts flowing, but then again, so does everyone
else. The second plot involves a bunch of punks, one of whom
is named Mos Eisley, who are involved with drugs and a
shooting and decide that the slumlord is to blame, so they
decide to visit his home just as the biting and screaming is
beginning. Meanwhile it appears that the whole town is under
attack. Despite some over the top gore and some almost funny
nudity, this one is pretty bland and uninteresting. 1/11/12
Final Destination V (2011)
I’ve
always had a bit of a problem with the premise for this
series. One potential victim has a vision of a disaster and
warns the others. But Death will not be cheated and
elaborate accidents occur afterward in the same order as the
deaths would have occurred. Okay, except that if the person
had the vision and warned people, that was fate, not the
other way around, so Death shouldn’t give it a second
thought. But sometimes the elaborate deaths are clever and
the production values are usually good. That’s the case with
this one, which opens with a bridge collapse as the
disaster. But the writing starts to go downhill quickly,
with the stereotyped insensitive boss and the police who
suspect the protagonist because of his foreknowledge, even
though it clearly was not sabotage. It’s as though the
writer just couldn’t think of an alternative subplot, or
more likely didn’t even try. The police also suspect his
breakup with his girlfriend as the motive, but that didn’t
happen until minutes before the collapse. Similarly the
writer has no idea how a business is run. The union rep has
no business questioning an off site assignment for a
manager, his physical confrontation with his boss would
almost certainly have resulted in disciplinary action, and I
can’t imagine a company sanctioning drinking in the office
during work hours. The sequence in the acupuncture parlor is
laughable and I very much doubt you can walk in off the
street and immediately sit down for laser eye surgery. Nor
do I believe that a patient under a laser would be left
unattended, or that the equipment could overheat without
setting off an alarm, if it could overheat in the first
place. And the rules don't seem consistent either. Fair.
1/10/12
Bruiser
(2000)
After
hearing a man commit suicide on the radio, our hero wakes up
one morning with his face white as a sheet and decides to
take revenge on the people who have screwed up his life –
boss, unfaithful wife, insolent maid, crooked investment
counsellor, etc. This was written and directed by George
Romero, but if you were expecting zombies and gore, you will
be disappointed. The casting is excellent – Jason Flemyng
as the nerd who turns and Peter Stormare as the really awful
boss. Nerd kills maid and wife in short order. Continuity
goof. Sometime after one acquaintance says he heard of the
wife’s death, we hear a broadcast that says her identity is
being withheld. More carnage follows, but with restraint.
This is actually a very good movie. 1/9/12
Backwoods Butchers
Fished
through the 99 cent bin and found some compilations. At 25
cents each, some of these might be worth the price.
Bread
Crumbs (2011)
A bunch of young adults plan to make a
porn film in a remote cabin. Why? Anyway, they encounter a
couple of creepy children on the way – except the actors
playing the kids are as old or older than the others. The
kids are a kind of metaphor of Hansel and Gretel, except
they’re homicidal. Since none of the characters are remotely
likeable, we naturally don’t care what happens to them. The
acting is visibly forced. The plot even moreso. Immediately
following the first attack, the seven adults know the two
“kids” are responsible, but cower in the cabin rather than
subdue the kids who are in plain view and unarmed. The ways
in which the various characters are fooled into believing
the most unlikely stories makes raises implausibility to new
levels. Even when the girl kills one of them in plain view,
one of the survivors insists she didn’t do it. Bad. Very
bad. And it goes on and on and on. Value 25 cents.
Mother’s Day Massacre (2007)
A Bothered Conscience (2006)
The first of these was so unbelievably
bad that I couldn’t watch more than a few minutes. Value
zero. Ditto for the second title, which barely held me
through the opening credits.
Butchered
(2010)
A bunch of college bound teens have a
last three day party on a remote island that happens to be
the refuge of an escaped serial killer called the Butcher.
Outside cellphone range. Yup, it’s one of those. And as
expected, none of the teens look like teens. There’s some
tension among the prospective victims, adequate but
unoriginal, some below average scenery and slightly above
average musical accompaniment. The actors are occasionally
convincing, but not often. Ditto for the story line. It’s
also set in one of those alternate universes where a man
walking normally can easily overtake another man running
full tilt. Boring killings and nothing to recommend it.
Value 15 cents. So I didn’t get my money’s worth. 1/8/12
The Green
Hornet (2011)
A
very silly rendition of the Green Hornet that sometimes
works but sometimes doesn’t. Spoiled industrialist Britt
Reid moonlights as a vigilante battling the Los Angeles mob.
Reid remains a conceited idiot out for glory and Kato
actually comes across as the driving force and more
interesting person. The tension between them is interesting
at first but eventually wearing. The closing sequence –
which involves a full scale battle, multiple car wrecks, and
so forth, is pretty well done. Not my favorite superhero
movie, but a nice break from the usual. 1/7/12
Conan the Barbarian (2011)
The
role made popular by Arnold Schwarzennegger passes to a
relative unknown in this high budget but still less
satisfying remake. The opening sequences are actually the
best part of the movie, with Conan still a child learning to
temper his lust for violence with the wisdom of hesitation.
The kid playing the part does quite well. Some of the scenes
are shot with a succession of very short camera cuts which
becomes quite distracting. The chief villain has just
gathered the last of a set of magical bones which will give
him magical powers. Conan wants revenge for the death of his
father and his village, which was destroyed in the process
of acquiring the last. It’s a lot more violent and special
effects are better, but story is basic. Jason Momoa has less
fire in the title role. Most of the cast overacts, including
Rose McGowan as the villain’s twisted daughter. Not as bad
as I’d been led to believe, not as good as it should have
been. 1/6/12
The Task
(2011)
This
could have been a tolerable minor horror flic about a
reality show whose participants have to spend a night in a
deserted, haunted prison. Except that they are kidnapped by
force off city streets even though they’ve never signed a
release – and I doubt that any such release could absolve
the producers of the criminal charges involved. The six
contestants – whose characters are exaggerated beyond belief
- have to perform certain tasks during the course of the
evening, and the staff has arranged some surprises for them.
But obviously the prison is going to turn out to be really
haunted and it’s not just the contestants who are going to
be surprised. Implausibilities abound. There is no reality
show imaginable which would include reading the Lord’s
Prayer in reverse, for example. The producers suppressed the
real story of the prison’s history because the town
threatened to sue for another. The producers also leave one
contestant half immersed in refuse because they think the
network has included their uncertainty as part of the
program. It’s a shame so little attention was paid to
details because the acting is good, the sets are good, some
of the sequences are genuinely creepy, and even the
soundtrack isn’t bad. But it’s the little things that count.
1/5/12
Area 51
(2011)
The
government allows two reporters into Area 51 on a tour
carefully designed to avoid the four imprisoned aliens,
three hostile, and one a shapechanger. So naturally that's
the day they decide to escape. Given the abysmal security
precautions, it's a surprise they weren't free long ago.
Some of the guards have almost no training and almost every
one of them freezes when confronting an alien and fails to
shoot even though heavily armed. A single person monitors
the entire area and none of the guards have radios. The
aliens somehow understand our computer system, can guess
passwords, are superstrong, impervious to bullets, and type
in English. Bruce Boxleitner, the base commander, looks
properly embarrassed. The body count rises and those we know
will die do so on schedule. Not awful, but relentlessly
minor. 1/2/12
Born of
Earth (2008)
I
thought this might be an okay low budget horror film because
it had a few familiar names in the cast. I lost hope pretty
quickly. The premise is that a race of demons lives beneath
a small community and has now begun to come to the surface
to kill adults and kidnap children. Daniel Baldwin is
supposedly the only one ever to have seen them and live, but
we soon run into an incidental character who apparently has
as well, not to mention the college professor/author who has
figured out their existence despite a lack of evidence. The
acting is abysmal and the sound recording flat and sometimes
nearly unintelligible. For reasons never explained, he
discovers that five years to the day after the abduction,
the creatures will return and ravage the town, so he goes
back to warn his niece. Completely implausibly, the local
mayor orders that Baldwin be arrested because he doesn't
want rumors of missing children to foul up a development
deal. The teenaged boyfriend is played by an actor who
appears to be in his forties, and he can't act either. The
demons, who dissolve is shot, predictably attack in large
numbers, but prove to be rather fragile. Except that
sometimes they're immune to gunshots. The height of
absurdity is when they don't flee town in the relatively
impregnable cars but choose instead to crawl through the
sewers, which are of course infested. 1/1/12
