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Thanksgiving (The movie)

So I just saw this horror movie and surprisingly it managed to be better than I expected. Which is doubly surprising since its based on the “fake trailer” that Eli Roth did way back in 2007 for the movie Grindhouse.

Combined with the amount of time relevancy that had passed and the excessively over the top hilarious cheese factor from the fake trailer, there was a good chance that this movie was going to suck a lot or be very mediocre compared to the fake trailer which had the benefit of not being very long so Eli could just shove in all the good bits (His exact words when first asked to do the trailer in 2007)

So it’s a slasher movie at its core and they do the whole “Who is the slasher” thing as opposed to the unstoppable supernatural slasher ala Jason/Freddy. Honestly, it’s pretty easy to guess who the slasher is from the start (Or close to the start) even if they try to throw in red herrings every now and then. But you’re not really watching this for the mystery factor anyway.

One thing that they don’t do which was very welcome was they didn’t do the whole Scream meta/breaking the 4th wall bullshit that has gone on far too long in fucking horror movies. 

Like yeah a few times it was alright (Though I never was a fan of it) but seriously just have a regular slasher movie, we don’t need some faggot going on about a goddamn play by play of “the horror movie rules”

Of course that’s the trouble with slashers, they’re fairly predictable so they need to really stand out to be half way memorable. Having gruesome unique kills typically works, along with a theme.

Thanksgiving does manage to achieve this for the most part. 

The other big one is how entertaining the slasher is himself (Or herself sometimes). “John Carver” is alright I suppose. He’s no Art the Clown, but the whole killer pilgrim thing works for him. He’s ultimately just a normal guy not an undead terminator, but he does pull off a few “impossible slasher tasks” in at least one major instance since he changes up his style which you don’t normally see since slashers tend to be a bit one dimensional with how they kill. 

Oddly, the victims aren’t even excessively annoying. I mean you don’t really care if they get killed still, but there’s really only a couple where you’re like “Yeah I’m glad they’re dead.”

Now if you’re at all into horror movie and have been for a long time because you’re OLD like me, you’ll probably wonder if the movie had any of the stuff that was in the Grindhouse Fake Trailer and the answer to that is, they do have a few scenes. 

Some of the bits aren’t in there at all, and two of the more infamous scenes from that fake trailer have been toned down, which wasn’t too surprising since this was going a bit more for a mainstream audience and you can’t have butcher knives going into a cheerleader’s pussy or the killer fucking a corpse cooked like a turkey. 

They also were playing this movie a bit more serious than the fake trailer, so the intentional over the top dialog is mildly toned down a bit, though they do have the killer at one point saying “There will be no left overs.” Though it really missed the opportunity to say “White meat, dark meat, all will be carved.” when he’s got the black guy and the white folks hostage. 

It still does have the dark humor moments, most notably near the beginning which sets everything in motion anyway. There’s a mild massacre at the Right Mart (This world’s Walmart I guess) store during a Black Friday which is sort of funny.

Anyway, if you’re into horror movies with enough bloody kills to appease your inner Khorne, its worth watching.

And here's the fake trailer from Grindhouse if you haven't seen that before (I know some of you are still practically babies on this site)

Thanksgiving Grindhouse Fake Trailer

This about sums it up.

Silent Night (The movie)

So after realizing that Napoleon was just going to be a cuckfest, I wisely skipped that movie and waited until Silent Night came out instead.

Well I saw it and while it was about what I expected based on the trailers, there were a few bits that made it stand out a bit.

The main thing is it has absolutely no dialog, other than screams, grunts, groans, muffled voices and maybe some unintelligible lyrics from a song playing in the background at one point.

While I knew the protagonist wasn’t going to be able to speak, I didn’t know they were going to do that for everyone in the movie. But again, it’s a revenge action flick, you really don’t need much talking anyway.

Speaking of the revenge plot, if you’ve seen the trailers, the protag’s son gets killed in a gang war shoot out. The movie actually starts off a little after that scene happens since the protag is chasing down the gangster’s cars (Which are still shooting it out) and ultimately the gang leader lives and shoots the protag in the neck and leaves him for dead. And well, we go from there.

After that bit, its sort of a slow burn until the last half hour. You see a lot of grief, followed by consuming rage and preparing himself for REVENGE. Naturally this doesn’t have a great effect on his marriage, so by the end of it all, he’s pretty much got nothing left but revenge.

And seeing as this is a revenge flick, you sort of already know how its going to end. This one though probably tries to go a little more on the emotional side though since it really tries to emphasize that he’s pretty much destroyed by the death of his son and he’s not coming back from this, even if he “wins”.

The dude isn’t Keanu Reeves (Or Charles Bronson, if you’re BOOMER enough to remember the original Death Wish series). There’s more than a few times where in his beginning stages of revenge he’s not the one man killing machine even if he’s trained himself to be one. He fucks up a few times (More than a few times).

Of course by the last half hour of the movie, it’s a bloodbath shootingfest.

Besides the obvious comparisons to John Wick or ye olde Death Wish movies, one movie series that obviously had some influence was the original Mad Max. Despite this taking place in present day America, there is actually a lot more car combat than I was expecting. That was cool of course, but more than just that, there’s a music box that the protagonist keeps winding up occasionally, which reminded me of what Mad Max did in the Road Warrior.

There’s sort of a “B-plot” too, involving a detective that works the gangland unit investigations. I sort of thought he might be in it a little more than he actually was, but his role is pretty minimal. Isn’t really until the end where he becomes helpful.

The detective is also a black dude, so it probably makes the movie look a little less “racist” if he’s helping an angry blonde white guy killing a bunch of brown people. Though to be fair, the protagonist’s wife (and dead son for that matter) are Mexican and the ones he's killing ARE violent criminals, so it’s not really racist. That’s just a hilarious coincidence. (Fully expect to see some faggot critics saying that it's RACIST for the very thing I just mentioned though)

Anyway if you’re into revenge action movies, it’s worth a watch.

Godzilla Minus Zero (The movie)

Well after everyone in the discord raved about this movie (And by everyone, I mean Malk and Cricket) not wishing to look like an outsider, I decided to follow the norms of the community for today by going to see Godzilla.

And it yeah, it actually was pretty cool. Honestly, I haven’t really been invested in Godzilla movies for a long time. I used to watch the old ones on TV when they came on Creature Feature or some similar horror based Saturday afternoon/night show back in the day.

A lot of the later ones just haven’t caught my attention too much. Last one I saw and really only in passing was King of the Monsters and it was meh.

If you know anything about Godzilla movies, then you know the plot is pretty simple. It’s a giant radioactive lizard destroying shit. Sometimes he’s fighting other monsters. (He’s not fighting other monsters in this one)

I think this one worked for me on a few levels. For one, Godzilla sort of wasn’t even the main focus. I mean he was, but the story itself revolved more around the tortured protagonist.

And granted I’m not excessively into the whole ongoing angsty protagonist bit for most movies, but the fact that this guy was a kamikaze pilot who failed to do the whole kamikaze thing and was upset about his cowardice (As well as failing to shoot Godzilla the first time he met him), made it a little bit more interesting. Not to mention this is a guy who was serving under the AXIS POWERS at one point, which technically made him a villain protagonist. (Okay, probably not, but more on the nationalism tones later)

All the other characters were fine too in the roles that they played. Didn’t find any of them to really be useless or annoying. The fact that it was set nearly right after WW2 made it a little different too.

Basically the American government are too focused on the Soviets to help in a military way and the Japanese government doesn’t want to help directly so they’re trying to keep the whole thing quiet. (Lol good luck keeping Godzilla quiet) so it’s up to the common Japanese folks to handle Godzilla with a few bits of military equipment that they’re allowed to use.

While its not like the movie was celebrating the Rape of Nanking or Unit 731, the movie definitely has a nationalistic bent to it. They try to temper this a bit by the characters fighting Godzilla occasionally criticizing the Japanese government rather than the military/people, but yeah, it’s still there and honestly that makes it even better. There's been talk of Japan lately wanting to re-militarize in a major way, so I'm wondering if the movie was a statement about that.

Hell, I mean if they don't have a military, how are they going to protect themselves from giant reptiles?

Speaking of Godzilla, probably what made this movie more appealing is the fact that it’s Godzilla being a “bad guy” again. I know they flip back and forth with him a lot. Usually he’s a good guy if other monsters are involved, but really I like seeing the back to basics, giant lizard just fucking up Japan because fuck you that’s why. It's sort of funny how he powers up like some sort of Pokemon for his breath weapon though. It's not just a radioactive fire beam either now, it's basically a small nuke.

The ending of the movie was even wholesome.

Anyway, yeah I liked it a lot.

The Iron Claw (The movie)

Alright, so this is essentially about a family that was into professional wrestling and also how each one of them died one by one (Save for one).

So its a feel good movie for the holidays!

Anyway, if you’re into wrestling like I know a few of you are, you might already know about the Von Erich family and the “curse” they had. Whether you actually believe in such things or not, one can certainly say “Yeah, their family sure had a lot of tragedy.”

I’m not spoiling anything since their story has probably been better documented on something like Darkside of the Ring, but the movie is still worth a watch, especially if you want to compare it to the real life situation.

Which brings to the point that the movie probably in the interest in not being a complete depression quest fest, toned down some of the aspects.

For one, they focus on 4 brothers Kevin, Kerry, David and Mike, when there actually was a 5th brother named Chris. (And I’m not even counting the 6th one who was technically the oldest, Jack Jr. that died by getting electrocuted when he was about 6 years old) Having one less brother that popped his cork certainly tones down a little of the tragedy.

What they sort of did was combine Chris into Mike’s character since both of them weren’t really quite as gung ho about being wrestlers and were shoved into. Granted all the of the brothers were, but those two just didn’t have the talent/desire at all and in both cases it lead to suicide due to frustration/injury/depression/etc.

Then there’s some of the stuff surrounding the deaths. In David’s case, he’s officially said to have died of a rupture of the intestines which is what they go with in the movie. However, there’s another story that he died of an accidental drug overdose while in Tokyo for a match with Ric Flair and one of the other wrestlers (Bruiser Brody) flushed the drugs down the toilet trying to cover for him. And David also had a daughter who died, which isn’t in the movie, but again its another example of there was no way they could include all the damn tragedy.

Also from most things that have been said and written about him, their dad, Fritz Von Erich was a 1st class ASSHOLE to his sons. Now it does show him to be definitely one of those competitive sports dads that pushes his kids hard and uncompromising, but the movie probably didn’t show how bad he really was. Hell, the brother who wasn’t in the movie, Chris was way shorter, had asthma and brittle bones, but he got shoved into wrestling by his dad due to Mike dying (And Mike got shoved in due to David dying!) he had no business in the ring.

Yep, Fritz was a major dickhead. Funny enough back in his wrestling days, he’d taken on the persona of a Nazi heel hence the name Von Erich. Guess it came natural.

Now while the movie takes more of Kevin’s point of view which is understandable since he’s the only one that lived and it does show how popular he was, I honestly don’t remember him at all (Really don’t remember any of the brothers except one I’ll get to in a moment). Probably because it was still during the wrestling territory days and he just wasn’t on the channels that I watched since the Von Erichs were more famous in Texas and the southern states. I didn’t really get into watching wrestling until around the rise of WWF which was more prominent in the northern states.

Which is why I always figured Kerry (Or the Texas Tornado as he was known) was the most successful of the bunch considering he made it to the WWF during its height, but as always the business is fickle and he had a shitload of drug problems mostly due to the pain that he was wrestling with no foot.

He’d lost it in a motorcycle accident even before he made it big, so its sort of impressive he actually made it and was genuinely popular for a few years in WWF. I know back then none of us had any idea he only had one fucking foot. Of course that’s all thanks to no internet back then and the magic of TV and putting on a good show.

However like I said, the good years didn’t last and he was addicted to drugs, marriage failing, possibly going to jail for parole violation so he shot himself since he figured he was going to die soon anyway and figured he’d join his brothers. They didn’t include his conversation with Brett Hart who thought at the time that he’d talked him out of killing himself (Brett said his daughters would need him more than his brothers would.) But I noticed they kept WWF references to a minimum anyway.

In the end of course they focus more on Kevin “breaking the curse” by focusing on his own family.  Ends with a mention of him having 4 kids and 13 grandkids. Technically only 2 of the kids were his, the other two kids were from his brother Kerry, but you get the idea. They managed to replenish enough Von Erichs to make up for all the dead ones.

There was also the mention that the Von Erich family had been inducted into the WWE Hall of fame back whenever that happened.

Doesn’t mention that Fritz and his wife got a divorce just before Kerry committed suicide. After several dead sons, I guess she was finally done with his bullshit.

Well anyway it's a movie, so I didn’t expect it to be completely accurate to begin with.

It probably would have beaten Thanksgiving in body count. Lol.

Or rather part 2 of the new Dune adaptation.

Not much to say about it, other than I actually liked this second part better than the first part. Always cool to see Christopher Walken in a new movie as well.

Again about the only major complaint is the portrayal of Baron Harkonnan who just really comes off as bland compared to the 1984 movie or the mini-series. Oddly I think his nephew Rabban got slightly more focus than him or Feyd during this adaptation. And Feyd just sort of showed up to get killed.

Anyway, it's essentially a story about a civilized white guy saving a bunch of sand dwelling brown people from degenerate gay pedophile rulers in his quest for vengeance. Oh and there's some giant worms. What's not to like?

Time to necro this thread since there were actually some movies worth going to see this month. I guess I’ll go in order of when I saw them.

Last Night With the Devil

This one I went in expecting to be pretty good and it actually delivered. Always nice when that happens.

This one is set in the 70s and is done in a found footage format, though it isn’t like that bullshit Blair Witch Project shit. It’s supposed to be the unaired episode of this famous talk show “Night Owls with Jack Delroy”

Basically Jack is a down on his luck talk show host who is currently trying to beat Johnny Carson in the ratings game and he’s failing miserably. Things get worse when his wife dies of cancer and his drive starts going out the window because of it and he also start focusing on less serious talk show interviews and going for shock value shit like fake psychics and such.

Of course it all comes to a head on this very last show that never aired.

You sort of already know this is all going to end in tragedy due to it being a found footage film anyway, but as they say it’s the journey that counts.

This movie does a really good job of capturing the 70s talk show scene and what was considered the “wacky fringe” element at the time. In real life there definitely were a lot of fake psychics and such popping up on these shows claiming they could bend spoons and all that shit. There was also a well known skeptic called James Randi who used to go around debunking all of them.

They got a character very similar to Randi and another guy who is more of a conglomeration of all those fake psychics, though he looks the most similar to a man named James Hydrick, even dressed like him and had the same pedo mustache (Appropriate since Hydrick actually was a big fucking pedo)

Around this time the whole interest in the occult and SATANISM started becoming big too, so that was another added element and it really wouldn’t be complete without a little girl being possessed by some demon/devil.

Also kept the footage looking like something out of the 70s too so overall it’s really good at maintaining period piece setting, which is probably what made me like it the most since I do remember some of that time period (And because nothing completely changes when a new decade starts, a lot of that late 70s stuff was still carried over into the early 80s).

As far as gore/blood content, it mostly saves that for the end and even then it’s not too much.

Worth a watch.

The First Omen

Now with this one I actually wasn’t expecting much. I figured it would be mediocre at best and complete shit at worst. Turned out to be way better than expected which is also nice when that happens.

This one also takes place in the early 70s, but it had to anyway since if you’re familiar at all with the original “The Omen” series that one started in the 70s and this is supposed to be a prequel to it.

As a general rule a prequel can easily fuck up continuity if you’re not paying attention to shit. This one does do some minor retconning, but to be fair even the immediate sequel to the original Omen did a bit of retconning, so meh. Plus you can sort of get away with it a bit more in horror movies.

This one would also be another one where you know how it’s going to end because Damien is going to get born no matter what happens to set off the events in The Omen, but again it’s journey that’s important.

So there is a twist in it, but really it’s pretty easy to spot early on. I imagine this was done to try to make the movie less predictable due to the outcome being certain. It doesn’t make the movie bad or anything, it’s just you already see it coming especially if you’ve watched enough horror movies with devil/demon shit in them.

One thing I did like which isn’t really a spoiler is they apparently decided to ditch the whole cabal of devil worshippers setting up the birth of the Anti-Christ plan from the original movies to a group of fanatical Catholic Church priests, nuns and cardinals doing it.

So why the hell would they do this?

Well the Catholic Church used to be a major power for thousands of years and in more recent times it’s become a lot weaker. These folks want the power that the church used to have in the olden days. They decide the only way to combat secularism is to prove that shit in the Bible is real and they figure they can get people to believe and come back to the church is by giving the people something to fear.

And the best way to do that is to bring about the birth of the fucking Anti-Christ! They also figured they’d be able to control him so things don’t get too out of hand. Basically bringing just enough evil into the world so people will go back to church.

This as you might expect is an incredibly BAD plan.

Anyway, this one has a few more bloody bits than the other demon movie I just mentioned, but spaces it out a bit more throughout the movie. Might as well spoil this bit since it was sort of surprising that they showed it, but at one point you get a HUGE CLOSE UP of a vagina with a demon hand coming out of it.

It isn’t often they put something like that in mainstream horror movies so it definitely got an extra point for me because of it.

Overall, it’s worth a watch, especially if you’ve already watched the other older movies in the series. And if you haven’t, those are mostly worth a watch as well. The first two are cool. The third one is sort of meh and don’t even bother with the fourth one since it sucks a lot. The Omen remake is okay, though they make Damien a little too obviously evil in that one, worked better when he just seemed like a clueless little kid.

Civil War

And finally I just saw this one and it could have gone either way, but thankfully it ended being cool.

First off I sort of came in thinking the movie was going to be semi-left wing propaganda, but the movie does a pretty good job of staying politically neutral. I imagine that’s why they had California and Texas allied with each other to keep you wondering how the fuck the President fucked up so badly to make those two ally with each other. You sort of only get a few hints of what he did such as disbanding the FBI, bombing American citizens, staying in power for a third term and a few other things.

Basic premise is its a road trip movie with a bunch of war journalists. Two of them are trying to get to DC to do an interview with the president, the old fat journalist is trying to get to Charlottesville to get a story from the front lines. And finally there’s a young girl who is an aspiring war journalist who manages to tag along too.

It’s a series of pit stops where they encounter various people and have to deal with what happens to be going on at the time at these locations. They’re mostly “safe” due to their Press IDs, but much like in real life that isn’t a certainty when bullets are flying or dealing with people who don’t give a shit. The action shoot out scenes are done pretty well and the final showdown in DC is even better.

While you do get to learn a little bit about the main characters, you still don’t learn much. While it’s not really a case where you don’t care if they live or die (Hell there was one character I was surprised they survived), but they don’t seem important in the scheme of things, and maybe that was the point. Even the President (THE VILLAIN) isn’t all that impressive the few times you do see him. Ultimately the movie is probably carried more by the premise rather than excessively strong characters.

And maybe because of that, the movie almost felt like a video game. Especially since the young female character looked like Ellie from The Last of Us (Hell, she even looked a little like Ellen Page who that character was clearly modeled off of) and the way she’s going about snapping pics towards the end of the movie just seemed very video game like. (AKA Dead Rising) The pit stops they make felt a little like that game Road 96 which is based around a series of pit stops on your way to escaping a country in the midst of a civil war/rebellion.

Arguably the most memorable character is the one from the trailer and if you’ve seen the trailer, you already know it’s the soldier with the red tinted glasses asking “What kind of Americans” they all are and he’s just some unnamed soldier.

In any case, it’s worth a watch.

Saw Anatomy of a Fall. Super cool movie with basically only perfect performances all around. Makes it even weirder that that fucking lightweight Emma Stone cinched the Oscar. Gonna watch Killers of the Flower Moon next probably 

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (The movie)

There isn't too much to say about this one other than if you've liked the other 3 movies in this new series, then you'll most likely enjoy this one as well.

This one jumps ahead a few centuries from the last one so nature has pretty much reclaimed everything at this point and the apes have just about forgotten all the shit they learned from humans (So they aren't carrying rifles around anymore and they haven't got any industry to make bullets anyway)

The main plot follows a young chimp called Noa from a relatively peaceful tribe that trains eagles until a king ape's soldiers arrive. Yep, basically they're following in the footsteps of humans. Speaking of which, some of those hairless apes pop up too and intrigue ensues.

Anyway, won't give away too much more. It's definitely a very nice looking movie as far as the landscape and scenery goes too.

Definitely liked it a lot and looking forward to another movie in the series. There were 5 in the original series, so the next one might wrap it up.

Hopefully they have gibbons in the next one, there was a brief mention of them.

They keep making bonobos the major villain leader apes in this series which is odd since in real life they're generally considered the most peaceful of the apes, but maybe there's some sort of irony at play there. I'm guessing making them all sexual degenerates like how they really are would interfere with the PG-13 ratings the movies go for though.

I always wanted to see some evolved mandrills in the series, but unfortunately they're not part of the great apes and are merely just really large (and dangerous) monkeys so they don't get to evolve to be some badass beserker warrior class. (They already got perma-warpaint)

I was worried Disney was gonna shit out another crappy reboot in a critically acclaimed franchise as they have done so often lately but somehow they didn't ruin it.

Furiosa (The Movie)

I’ve often said the post apocalyptic genre is probably one of my favorites to the point where I’m pretty forgiving even if it ends up not so great be it movies, tv shows, video games, etc.

So I was fully ready to see the Furiosa movie and forgive all its many faults, though as it happily turned out it really didn’t have many. If anything this might be better than Road Warrior which was the best of all the Mad Max movies. (I’m still not certain that Furiosa actually did beat Road Warrior yet though. Still going back and forth on that one)

What helped is this one had more story going on in it as opposed to just recreating the tanker chase scene for two hours because it was cool in Road Warrior. Yeah I really like the vehicle combat shit too, but I enjoy those scenes a lot more when there’s other stuff also going on in the movie. The storyline doesn’t need to be complex (and it certainly isn’t in this case) it just needs more than one long action scene.

Other thing that was different from the usual Mad Max movies is there really isn’t a main “good guy” faction at all in this one. All the major factions are wasteland assholes fighting each other. Sure Furiosa and there’s another guy who is essentially “I can’t believe it’s not Mad Max” who are “good” but they’re pretty much by themselves and just working for one of the larger wasteland gangs.

There was probably only one major thing that happened near the beginning of the movie which Furiosa did that was so fucking retarded that it made me think “Well, this movie is going to be average at best.” but it managed to redeem itself greatly as it went on. Which a lot of movie don’t even manage to do after fucking up. (And of course if she hadn’t acted so fucking retarded in that one instance, we wouldn’t have had a movie at all)

The movie also made a few surprising references to the old Mad Max game that came out years ago. Dunno if the video game is considered canon since there's debate about that, but I guess a few of the characters are now in at least an altered form.

Overall it was a cool movie and I liked it a lot.

In a Violent Nature (The Movie)

Hey, did you ever want to see an artfag version of Friday the 13th? Well that’s this movie.

Now I should clarify that calling this movie an artfag film isn’t really the insult it sounds like, but more of a warning of if you are into horror movies, you should sort of go in with a certain mindset. Also Im going to be “spoiling” this a bit, but not really since at it’s core its still a fucking slasher movie so you should already know what to expect.

Most of the movie is basically shot in such a way that it’s following the slasher (But more on that later). So basically imagine a Friday movie that follows Jason the entire time. Now the camera isn’t strictly always focused on him, since it does have moments where it’s focused on the victims, however in these cases, the slasher is still in the area watching them, so he’s always around in some capacity, whether directly or indirectly.

As for the slasher himself, he’s basically Jason. Has similar deformed face, slow methodical walk, same build, etc. (His name is even Johnny) He’s modeled more on the current undead Jason rather than the living one since he starts off rising out of ground because someone fucked up his resting place by taking a gold watch that his dad gave him as a kid.

Later he gets his favorite mask and killing implements (Hatchet and two large hooks connected by a chain) as one does.

And the movie plays out like a normal slasher would except with all the artsy style camera shots of him stomping about in the forest. So it makes the movie feel a lot slower paced, though it’s not a continuous camera following him around since that really would get boring, they’ll often cut the shots to speed up time for him to get to his destination.

But the main reason why you’re going to a slasher movie is to see the dumb ass victims get killed, (And they definitely do some dumb ass things) so the real value as always is how good are the kills. 

Well, they’re suitably gruesome or at least most of them are. 

A couple of them could be classified as dull or mundane, but there is definitely a super gory one that I hadn’t seen done before that stands out. Now I won’t spoil this one, but using a recent horror example of explicit gore, think of something Art the Clown would do in Terrifier and this kill ranks up there. I’m going to guess that particular kill was the one that caused someone to literally vomit in terror.

So for me the movie was fine, I wasn’t disappointed to watch it and I don’t mind seeing something different being done with the slasher genre, however it does sort of fuck up in the end. Not enough to ruin it, but I’ll get into that.

Alright going to spoil the ending, but like I said not really because you already know there’s going to be a Final Girl in a slasher movie.

So where the movie for me sort of fucked up is it stopped following the slasher and then switched to following the Final Girl at the end.

Though you don’t really know that’s the case since you assume that he’s probably still chasing her, however he really isn’t. She just thinks he’s still after her, even when she gets rescued by a random pick up truck you sort of think it’s all a build up that he’s just hiding in the pick up truck’s bed, but no he’s effectively out of the picture.

Now not too long before the last major kill, one guy who knows about Johnny explains to the final girl that you can’t just give the gold watch back to him, you have to put him down and then lay the gold watch on the place where you buried him to keep him in place.

After seeing the last of her friends getting brutally killed, the Final Girl drops any plan they had to try to kill Johnny and just runs off. She also leaves the gold watch next to the can of gas she had to set him on fire.

As it turned out just giving this undead murderous retard his dad’s watch was EXACTLY what you were supposed to fucking do! The final shot is the gas can and the watch no longer there implying that after Johnny was done chopping the chicken soup out of the last victim, he turned around saw his dad’s watch, took it and then went back to rest in his original grave.

The End!

Now the last 10 minutes (Or however long it was) where it’s focusing on the Final Girl’s escape antics can be seen in a couple ways. If you’re going with the arthouse approach, it was probably trying to subvert expectations and build up tension, etc.

However for me, it was just pointlessly dull since I don’t give a shit about the final girl and up until that point the “gimmick” was following the slasher around, not her. A better ending would have showed her running off like usual, but instead Johnny hears her, turns around, sees the watch and takes it, has the camera follow him like it has been, but this time going back to his resting place effectively creating a “bookend” since that’s how the movie started.

And if they wanted to add more artfag stuff, they could have even had another little flashback for him with his dad talking to him like they did earlier in the movie.

Anyway like I said, I didn’t mind the movie. Wouldn’t be one I’d go out of my way to watch again though.

The Bikeriders (The Movie)

So I already read one review that mentioned this movie is basically Biker Goodfellas as if it was told solely from Henry Hill’s wife’s perspective and that isn’t really inaccurate. I actually did get a Goodfellas vibe with how it was going about things, but there’s still a ton of differences.

Most importantly it isn’t nearly as good as Goodfellas, though it’s not bad, just that it would have to do a lot more. A WHOLE lot more.

The movie is based on the rise of the real life Motorcycle gang, “The Outlaws” though they call them the Vandals in the movie. It mainly has the girlfriend of one of the prominent bikers telling the story to a journalist, though the journalist himself is semi in the gang to at one point, but that was during the old days when you could leave a gang a lot easier. And he ended up leaving right before things started to change with the biker culture.

Like with most things, the club started just as more of a fun thing with the leader basically getting the idea after he watched the movie “The Wild One” with Marlon Brando when he played a biker.

Back in the early days the bikers were basically a bunch of dudes that liked to ride motorcycles, hang out, drink and basically do a lot of male bonding. A lot of them had a streak of rebelliousness in them for whatever reason, though keep in mind most of these folks still had real jobs (Mechanics being obvious) and families. So the early bikers probably had more of a “code” on just how far they were willing to go as far as being a criminal is concerned.

Of course like with anything as soon as more noobs see this shit and want to join up to be cool, things change and eventually you get psychos joining up who just want some back up when they go and commit murder, rape and the like.

The main focus is on the biker leader, his desired heir apparent and the heir’s girl who is telling the story. The heir basically the “ideal” biker in that he doesn’t seem to give a shit about anything except the club, he’s definitely ride or die since he doesn’t take off his vest/colors even when it would be a good idea to not wear them.

However, he’s also too ideal of a biker since he’s truly one of those “free spirit” types that doesn’t want the responsibility of being in charge or anything like that despite the aging biker leader wanting to take over eventually.

Of course the flip side is his girlfriend who once was a regular housewife and turned into a motorcycle mama when she saw the Heir one day. I’m saying housewife, though I’m not exactly sure what she does, I feel like she must have a real job of some sort since she lives in a house by herself. She does have a man when she first meets the biker dude, though he takes off soon after and it’s not really clear if they’re actually married or not. She still has the house all throughout the movie even when she’s by herself.

Anyway she ends up wanting him to leave the club on many occasions and go to Florida where he can work as a mechanic with his cousin, but again he’s a free spirit so he’s not listening to her either.

Besides that triangle, the movie just follows the various monkey shines the Vandals get up to.

As I said though as the years go on, the club starts to get a bit more violent due to all the noobs joining who are all trying to prove how tough they all are, plus a lot are vets coming home from the Vietnam War and all that entails. While the biker leader is about the only one of the old guard that’s tough enough to sort of keep up with the changes, he ends up alienating his heir apparent who takes off entirely abandoning the leader and his girlfriend.

Ultimately the biker leader/founder gets killed by some snot nosed kid that he disrespected years earlier who wanted to join but got turned down. The kid went and joined the Vandals in another chapter and then challenged the Chicago leader for leadership. In traditional fashion they are supposed to settle it with fists or knives. The kid goes with knives and I sort of thought the old leader seeing that he wasn’t really able to lead like he used to and how this new kid is hungry for power, that he was going to just let the kid kill him. Die a warrior’s death in true club fashion so to speak.

But nope, he was definitely going to fight him, however before that happens, the kid shows up and just pops a cap in his ass. Which is basically the symbolic end of the “Golden Age” of biker culture. From that point, bikers are all just criminal thugs. The old guard either falls in line, die or drop out of the club. (The kid takes over and turns it into a proper gang.)

As for the heir apparent he ends up hearing about the death of his old friend and shows up again on his girlfriend’s doorstep and he cries for the first time she’s ever seen him cry. (Breaking down those toxic masculinity barriers) And he ends up leaving the gang permanently (He was a still a Vandal when he took off before, he just left the chapter rather than the gang) and moves to Florida with her and becomes a mechanic in his cousin’s garage.

And she’s happy living in boring ass suburbia and he gets to live the rest of his life like a schnook.

The End

Yeah basically it ends where presumably you would have seen more criminal action with the biker gang, but if you want that, go watch Sons of Anarchy or Mayans M.C. I guess.

The movie’s alright though.

Alien Romulus (The Movie)

I actually saw this a month ago, and just never got around to writing a review since I busy running the Fallen Land game at the time.

It's actually been awhile, but I probably should say something about it out of a sake of completeness.

I actually liked it better than I thought I would. Interquels are the easiest to fuck up when it comes to the "quels" department. If you actually give a shit, you have to make sure it doesn't fuck up the preceding events AND the events that come after. It's not an easy task most of the time, hell I know first hand having done it multiple times with stories.

But this one actually did do a fairly good job of avoiding all that, while still being a cool enough Alien movie in its own right. I think they managed to have at least one reference to every other movie in the Alien franchise. The major one being the Ash android. (And he says the line at one point)

The character were fine and served their purpose. I wasn't really annoyed by any of them too much. There was enough violence to keep the bloodthirst sated too.

In any case, I guess I'll just end with saying I liked the movie. I probably would have bothered more with a longer review if I'd done this right after the movie, but there you go.

Terrifier 3 (The Movie)

Well out of all the horror movies I’ve seen this year, I’m pretty sure this one just beat them all. And I can’t imagine any others coming out for the remainder of the year are going to do any better.

So for those that might be in the dark about this movie or franchise in general, Terrifier is basically a slasher movie series involving a killer clown imaginatively called “Art the Clown”

The series has become fairly infamous for being one of the bloodiest horror movie series in recent years. Possibly of all time. It’s not just the kill count either, it’s also the quality of the kills as well. Shit gets REALLY graphic and doesn’t pull away from that fact. It also falls a bit on what they call the nihilistic side.

There definitely is something about the films that give a faint aura of merciless cruelty Mexican cartel murder video style. About the only thing that offsets it a bit, is the fact that Art acts just goofy enough that it takes a bit of the sting out of what you’re watching. Then again the gore is usually so over the top it starts becoming bloody hilarious.

Granted I’m also usually laughing at some of the shit Art does so my sense of humor is warped anyway.

Also I’ve come to the conclusion that after this movie, Art the Clown is definitely a slasher villain that has finally reached the same slasher icon status as Jason, Freddy, Michael and Leatherface. There really hasn’t been one since those four.

(And no I’m not fucking counting all the faggots that played Ghostface from Scream even if he somehow wormed his way into mainstream recognizability with the rest. As for Chucky, yeah he’s okay, but he’s ultimately a fucking doll and not even a very creepy looking one in the scheme of things, which is why they started going the semi-meta horror comedy route with him)

The movie also wasn’t given a proper rating so it avoided getting the gay NC-17 rating and just was “Unrated”. Back in 80s there were quite few horror movies that did this to avoid getting an “X” for too much gore. So it’s a nice throwback to that time as well.

Alright on with the actual movie.

So this one pushes firmly into the supernatural element more. Granted when you got unnaturally strong slashers that can’t be killed, you’re dipping a bit into the supernatural anyway, but this more like heading into demon territory rather than “mysterious unknown force” (Like say Jason)

Art is definitely a demon of some sort (Or at least one is controlling the body its inhabiting) and he’s got a helper in this one, though it’s still him mostly doing the killing, but his assistant is along for the ride and does a bit more of the talking when its required since Art’s as mute as ever.

While you probably wouldn’t have to watch the first two movies to understand what’s going on, it probably would help clear any minor questions you’d have about the storyline since this one does expand on the general plot that they went with starting with the second movie. It at least follows the 2 survivors of that one, though the “survivor” of the first movie is in it too, but well I already mentioned Art had a fellow demon helping him now.

Chances are you’re probably only going to see this, if you saw the first two anyway. They ended this third one on a bit more of a cliff hanger, though they did that with the other movies too, but that was more along the lines of “Art’s not really dead, look!” which is common in horror in general. This one ended with the final girl definitely needing to go on a “quest” of sorts to tie up unfinished business.

It’s a fine simple plot for this sort of movie though anyway.

As for the gore, well I already mentioned the series is pretty infamous for it. They put their bigger budget to good use. Kills are definitely just as if not more gruesome than some from the last two movies in the series.

There’s usually at least one absolute bloody mess style murder in these movies and this one probably has more than one, though one in particular stands out. Art and especially his demon companion are a little grosser in this one, which seems fitting given that the demonic entity stuff is better established. Demons should definitely be wallowing in being disgusting on top of reveling in being cruel (And they both definitely do that)

Also in another throwback to old 80s style horror, he kills a few kids in this one. 70s and 80s horror movies, especially the lower budget ones usually gave zero fucks to adding kids to the body count. Terrifier 3 does likewise.

Now you don’t actually see said kills, but you definitely do see the bloody aftermath of it. And in one case, the off screen squishy sounds of an axe chopping (And that’s something that happens like in the first 10 minutes of the film)

So to sum up, obviously I liked it a lot and if you’re into all this edgelord torture porn shit with no redeeming social message other than to remember that clowns are evil, well then you should go see it too.

Not sure if you've seen it, but I recently got forced into watching midsommar, and since you seem to like horror movies itd be cool to see your review of it. 

Yeah I saw Midsommar. I liked it better when it was called The Wickerman (The 1973 one, not the horrible Nicky Cage one)

Nah, actually I still liked Midsommar, though again it felt like it was an updated version of The Wickerman. I sort of liked the director's first movie, Hereditary more.

Oh yeah, I've seen hereditary as well, that was really good. With hereditary I found it scary because I couldn't see a way in which they could survive (except praying to jesus, literally) lol. With midsommar it felt like they weren't necessarily messing up, but if Rambo was in midsommar or someone the least bit physically a competent fighter, they'd have more than a good shot lol. I couldn't see that with hereditary. 

Conclave (The Movie)

Alright so I do occasionally watch something other than horror (It's true!) so I figured I'd break up the horrorfest with this one.

The Conclave is basically a drama with some mystery going on in it. It's apparently based on a book, but yeah of course I didn't read it. Hell, I didn't even know about the book until just now.

Its got a couple of old school actors in it like Ralph Fiennes and John Lithgow. They used to play in a shitload of movies back in the past so it felt like a movie from the old days (When things were better of course)

Since I knew nothing of the movie going in other than it involved Vatican politicking shenanigans. I sort of thought there was going to be a murder involved since that's usually how these Catholic Church centered dramas go, but other than the old pope dead in the beginning, it's just a normal secret dealing conspiracy sort of thing. No murderous monks or anything bloody like that.

Anyway it's basically a bunch of cardinals vying for the big pope seat. You got the liberal faggot one, the scheming centrist, the basic conservative, and of course the based fanatic who wants the church to go back to the old days (Again, when everything was better of course)

Finally in the middle all this is Ralph who's overseeing the conclave to choose the next pope and he's surprisingly getting votes too even though he doesn't really want the job.

So there's quite a few things going on, from an unknown cardinal popping up from Kabul that nobody knew about, accusations that one of the cardinals got relieved of all his duties just before the pope died, and a couple other skeletons. Ralph of course ends up being that "truth above all" type and just continues digging deeper to uncover stuff until the final twist outcome of who wins the pope seat.

And after that twist, there's one last twist.

Yeah, I can't really go into too much detail on the movie since it is a mystery so saying more would just give stuff away. Overall I liked the movie but I will say I didn't really like the twist of who finally won the pope seat mainly because it didn't seem like they would have that many supporters. (The final twist after that was fine though)

Also would have liked to have seen the fanatical cardinal go on more racist crusader rants because extremists always tend to be more amusing.

If you're into mystery dramas and got 2 hours to spare, it's worth a watch.

Yeah all the stuff I did mention is brought up within the first few moments of the movie so none of those are really spoilers.

Heretic (The Movie)

Heading back to the horror genre but still keeping the religious theme, Heretic is a movie about 2 young Mormon girls who knock on the house of some old guy who seems friendly at first, but of course quickly starts tormenting them.

He also does this in a trolly type fashion while chuckling a bit at his own dark jokes the entire time.

And while I've been making THIS joke in the discord, this really did seem like an extreme version of my interaction with poor Suranna here. He even uses damn boardgames in this process at one point.

So yes of course already I liked the movie and I hadn't even gotten through half of it yet.

Hell, towards the beginning of the movie there was a bit (So this isn't a spoiler) where some other girls make fun of the more "wholesome" Mormon and pull her pants down making remarks about her wearing magic underwear. I laughed so hard when that happened, took awhile for me to stop actually since it shows her afterward still sniffling about it. Lol.

In any case, the old guy is basically challenging the girls on their faith and religion in general, setting up a whole twisted game about it.

There is a small mystery of why he's exactly doing this which I won't mention I guess, unless Suranna who apparently is seeing the movie as well wants to chime in and we can have a nice wholesome discussion about it. Perhaps over a game of Monopoly.

Anyway definitely liked the movie a lot. Was actually way better than I thought it might be.

Heretic (The Movie): A Mormon's Thoughts

As End has said, I also went and saw Heretic not long after he himself saw the movie, and I came out of it satiated. I wouldn't label the movie as perfect, but it came close and is one of the better movies of 2024. I'd probably even consider it to be one of my personal favorites. Also, my movie review isn't as spoiler free as End's, so I recommend checking out the movie first if you desire.

SLIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD

Overall the movie is about religion and faith, and has used members of the LDS church to prove its point. It was surprisingly not so much about bashing on Mormons in general as I expected it to be, and was more about religion as a whole. I think the movie would have been the same had it been Jehovah's Witnesses or some other missionaries of a different faith as the main characters. But the movie was basically just one big long discussion about theology, philosophy, the role religion has in the world and what it means to individuals(I guess that's still theology), existentialism, and funnily enough even the idea of simulation theory was brought up once. Of course it was this with all the added psychological elements, plus the cat-and-mouse game that Grant and the two missionaries go through.

I thought the representation of Mormons in the movie was very fair, and often scarily accurate. Some of the things that the more 'wholesome' Mormon girl said came straight out of your typical mormon girl upbringing (My upbringing). In the beginning of the movie when the two girls are climbing a flight of stairs to get to Grant's house, one mentions that her future husband will get hotter with every step she has to climb. One of the few mormon girl inside jokes are that every time you have to do something that is somewhat challenging, your husband is now guaranteed to be hotter because you went through with it. Lol. Even the way the two girls were talking about pornography in the beginning was very innocent, and they were both always making sure to be very polite to Hugh Grant, even though the both of them were going through all of his psychological mindgames. Think Lucy from the Fallout show - being very optimistic and bright while going through the horrors of the wasteland. By the end of it they had shed their politeness, so I guess Grant was successful in at least part of what he intended.

The movie went a lot farther into some horror aspects than I expected, but I was pleasantly surprised by them. There wasn't so much of an actually boardgame that the two girls would be forced to play as I original thought, than just a discussion of Monopoly and an analogy of how it relates to religion. That would have been interesting to see. You landed on my property, I will now pull out your fingernail! Lolol. 

The execution and narration was great. There were no plot holes, things that were brought up once were brought back in an interesting way, and even the ambiguous ending left nothing to be desired. There was, however, no explanation as to why Hugh Grant would go through the trouble of tormenting these girls, other than him being a delusional religion-obsessed fanatic, and during the entirety of the movie I was expecting an explanation (Hugh Grant did spend a lot of money making his house into some weird torture labyrinth, and I assume it wasn't for parties). I did find some fan theorys online where Grant used to be a Mormon, and his wife died to some sort of faith-related activity, and now he captures and tortures Mormon girls to prove a point about how God isn't real. But of course it was just a theory, so I guess we'll never know unless they decide to make a sequel.

But overall I would have to give this movie a solid 8.5/10. It has its imperfections, but was an enjoyable experience, and like End said was way better than expected. I recommend it to any horror fans, or people who would rather watch something interesting for their Theological Studies thesis paper lmao.

The mystery bit of why he was doing it I was referring mostly to was the idea of if they were going stay grounded in the real world (He's just nuts for reasons they never completely explain) or if the movie was going to go the supernatural route of some sort. Specifically he was worshipping something older than any earth religion (Basically Cthulhu shit)

Even when she called him out on changing the bodies, there was still the possibility he was some cultist performing some sort of elaborate ritual.

Though of course it ended up sticking to a non-supernatural setting.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (The Glorified Fanfic)

Alright going to start off by saying I’m spoiling this movie mainly because nobody really needs to go see this.

Also going to say, I’m not really a Tolkien nerd that knows every damn detail of Middle Earth history. Hell even The Hobbit movies didn’t piss me off like they drove some into a RAGE around here.

That being said there’s still a limit. Like based on what I know that shitty Rings of Power Amazon show, it definitely sounds like something I wouldn’t want to associate with the work. Orcs having baby orcs and orc families so you’re supposed to feel sympathy for them just isn’t something I need, let alone arguments over “nobody is born evil”.

Orcs can argue with the point of a fucking sword.

So where does WOTR fall on this ever growing scale of LOTR fanfic? Well, for me, it wasn’t the TV level since I at least was intrigued enough to watch it, but that’s a really low bar.

One could say for the LOTR purists this wouldn’t be as bad as The Hobbit movies since it doesn’t alter a whole lot of established canon, but the movie has issues even without that.

So this is basically about King Helm Hammerhand’s unnamed daughter who is apparently called Hera. As you can expect she’s one of those girls that doesn’t want to do any of that princess stuff and is doing other things like feeding giant eagles, playing with swords and generally being a tomboy.

The shitstorm gets started when one of the lesser lords comes with the offer of marrying his son to Helm’s daughter and Helm ain’t having it mainly because he doesn’t like this particular lord in the first place and he wants her to marry someone from Gondor anyway.

Helm realizes he needs to slap this fucker down so he knows his place and he literally one punches the guy and kills him. Naturally this upsets the son Wulf who is already pissed because Hera doesn’t really want to marry him despite the fact he’s been simping for her since they were kids. Of course it’s not just him, she doesn’t want to marry any man because she’s really a big lesbian. (Oh okay, that bit’s not established, but come on we all know what’s going on) He gets exiled along with the remainder of his clan and he vows revenge one day.

Now then, this all might sound like “woke” narrative what with strong independent women and incel dudes wanting revenge because they can’t get laid by the hawt princess, however I would propose that THIS aspect is counter balanced by the fact that Helm, his family and his people in general are all mostly a bunch of Aryan master race folks (Hell his two sons are blonde and Hera’s a red head) with the pure blood of GODS AND KINGS and they’re basically killing a bunch of treacherous mudblood untermensch (Wulf himself has half hill people blood) and darkies (Southern mercs show up later)

So no being “woke” isn’t the issue with the movie and despite the based racism going on, the movie still manages to fuck things up

Anyway years pass and some shit happens, but nothing important until Wulf shows up with an army of wild hill people and a bunch of African mercenaries with hostile elephants. He’s actually making his staging ground at Isengard which confused the hell out of me since I thought that was Suraman’s home, but apparently he wasn’t living there yet.

He even captures Hera and she even offers to marry him in order to stop him from attacking, but he’s done simping and nothing short of mountains of skulls and rivers of blood are going to do at this point.

She escapes and warns her dad with one of her warrior cousins, but he’s an idiot and gets pissed at her cousin for “not protecting her properly” and sends him away. Should be noted that her cousin has also got mixed wild hill people blood so her dad was probably just being racist.

Hera wants to go fight since she’s all into the legends of the shield maidens, but he tells her she’s supposed to stay home and make sandwiches while the men have all the fun killing each other.

Turns out of course, there was a traitor that Wulf had in Helm’s court so the battle doesn’t go as planned and they have to retreat despite initially doing well.

So Eodoras gets razed to the ground (though it managed to get evacuated first) one of Helm’s sons gets an arrow to the neck and Helm himself gets riddled with them, but manages to survive. Everyone’s retreating to a place called Hornberg since it’s a lot easier to hold up and defend from there. Helm’s other son gets captured along the way.

So Helm and Hera are at Hornsberg and Wulf is standing outside with his general and Helm’s younger son in tow. Helm offers to surrender everything in exchange for his son’s life and even Wulf’s general is telling him to take the deal because it’s going to be slog if they have to assault Hornsberg, especially with winter coming soon and all.

However now its Wulf’s turn to make bad strategic decisions and he just executes Helm’s son and tells his general to have everyone start building a big ass siege tower throughout fucking winter.

Now I think it was at this point, the movie just started to lose me since I wasn’t really minding it up to then. It started slowing down and I think the stupid military decisions just started to annoy me too much. Bigger problem is Wulf just isn’t an impressive villain. And granted yeah this is looking at a normal human conflict so he’s not going to be Smaug or Sauron, but I dunno he’s like Kylo Ren level as far as impressive villains are concerned. (Which is more of shot at how unimpressive Klyo was considering he was a Sithlord while Wulf is just some usurper of a minor kingdom.)

So Hera’s dad is in coma of sorts, but despite his wounds he’s still healing up. People in Hornsberg are worrying about supplies running out and Hera’s trying to keep morale up while hoping her dad gets better. Wulf takes the crown even though Helm isn’t dead, but he’s confident that it won’t be long.

Months are passing and winter gets worse and now trouble comes to the besiegers. Someone starts killing shitloads of them which fucks up the whole siege tower construction. Things get even worse when the bodies are later found eaten.

Wulf’s people think it’s Helm come back as some sort of monster. Hera and her folks don’t know what to make of it since they don’t even know how the hell her dad disappeared. Hera ends up stumbling on some one way secret passage and it leads outside so she investigates.

And then she ends up stumbling on something that really wasn’t necessary other than it’s a Lord of the Rings movie so hey, you gotta have orcs in it right?

Yeah she stumbles on a couple of orcs that are picking over the dead bodies. What its established that they’re doing is looking for rings. They got a little bag full of them, and they also got a horned troll with them and that’s the thing been eating the bodies. (Well probably the orcs are eating some of them too)

Anyway the orcs and their troll are about to kill Hera, but then more impossible things happen with Helm coming from out of nowhere and starts fist fighting a damn troll. And wins.

Turns out Helm has been out in the cold for months on end killing Wulf’s men with his bare hands. Also no armor or hell not even protective clothing from the cold at all. And keep in mind this guy is an old man that was severely wounded. Yeah I guess that’s what being an Aryan Ubermensch will do for you

I think my problem with this isn’t so much doing 6 impossible things before breakfast, but more with the fact of if old man Helm can kill half of Wulf’s army (AND a fucking troll) in the freezing cold with his bare fucking hands over the course of several months while recovering from heavy wounds, then why in Balrog’s balls wasn’t he able to just kill Wulf’s entire fucking army while he was in perfect health, armored, and had a goddamn weapon in hand?

I mean this guy is clearly a Chadly demigod, there was no reason to ever retreat, fucking war with Wulf would have been over within the first half of the movie.

Anyway Helm and Hera run back to Hornsberg and she manages to get back inside, but he holds off the army by himself and Wulf’s mongrels aren’t even the ones that kill him. The next day Hera finds her dad standing outside the gates still fucking standing guard frozen to death. Shit, if they’d thought to shove a bear skin through the door opening to give the guy to wear he could have survived.

So now Helm’s dead which means there really is no real reason to besiege Hornsberg anymore, since Wulf is officially the king with no contest now seeing as Helm’s sons are also dead. Wulf’s general advises him that the best course of action would be to pack it all up, head home and start properly ruling. But Wulf as usual has to be a retard.

However, Wulf even acknowledges his retardedness by stating that all he’s got left is revenge and if he doesn’t get it completely then all of it is for nothing. So like a true incel he’s gotta kill the hot Stacy that turned him down, instead of just y’know going back and enjoying being king and fucking a more willing Stacy.

Anyway so the final showdown is Hornsberg getting overrun, but Hera challenges Wulf’s MANHOOD with a one on one battle, winner takes all. Once again, Wulf’s poor general advises him that this is obviously a trick and for him to NOT take the fucking bait.

So of course Wulf takes the fucking bait and gets his ass kicked by a girl. (Facepalms ensue anytime Wulf doesn't listen to his general)

However Wulf being the bastard he is, has no intention of honoring his word that he’ll leave and orders and all out attack. His general though has had enough of this shit and refuses to follow orders calling him a dishonorable coward. Wulf being a dishonorable coward ends up suddenly killing his general and ordering the attack himself.

Chaos ensues, but Hera’s cousin comes in with his army to save the day. Hera meanwhile has one more round with Wulf and she actually doesn’t want to kill him, but he resorts to sneak attacks again and she doesn’t have much choice.

Alright so it all wraps up with Hornsberg getting renamed Helm’s Deep, Hera’s cousin takes the throne since Hera doesn’t want to rule, Saruman shows up to become Isengard’s new caretaker, and finally Hera’s off to see Gandalf since he wants to know more about the orcs that have been looking for rings.

Then the narration states that Hera remained a unmarried lesbian for the rest of her days.

The End

Yeah so that was certainly a movie set in Middle Earth

This seems neither as bad as I feared, nor as good as a Tolkien fan could hope. Into the dump of forgetfulness it goes.

I'm disappointed hoped it would be better 

I went to see it yesterday. Not so much because it's LOTR (unless it's based on the words of Tolkien, it's not real LOTR) but more because my nephews wanted to see it and because I do love a good 2D animated movie and from the ads it looked kind of on the Castlevania/Vox Machina kind of level, both of which I loved so I figured even if the story was shit, it would be worth watching for the animation alone... I was very wrong. I wouldn't say the story was shit. It was okay. Nothing special but worth watching at least. The animation on the other hand was terrible. The 2D animation was pretty lacking and I really wasn't impressed, but the real issue was that they combined 2D animated characters with a mostly 3D animated background and it looked absolutely God awful! They didn't even try to make the 3D animated backgrounds look 2D .

You know what it reminded me of? Back in, I think it was the 80s, there was an Australian animation studio that made a few films including Dot and the Kangaroo and The Camel Boy where the characters were 2D animated but they didn't have the budget to animate the backgrounds so they just used photographs and videos of the regular Australian forest and countryside as the background and plopped the 2D characters on top of it... That was how terrible it looked.

Yeah I hadn't even gotten into the animation aspect. Whatever they were trying to do, they were doing it totally wrong.

Nosferatu (The movie)

Seen more than a few horror movies this year and glad to say this one ended it on a high note. (Also for movies seen this year in general after that awful LOTR cartoon)

Okay so I’m really not spoiling anything here since this tale is pretty old and if you’re even just barely familiar with the tale of Dracula or the original Nosferatu movie (Or ANY of the remakes of either) the basic plotline is still the same.

Young guy with a young wife goes and visits a creepy aristocrat in a creepy castle for business reasons. Turns out to be a vampire, he fucks with the young guy who barely escapes, and the vamp goes after his wife who’s back at home having dreams about him. There’s also a crazy human minion who helps the vampire. Young guy eventually gets the help of a couple of doctors and experts and they hunt the vampire down. This final showdown always results in Dracula/Orlok getting killed by someone in the group, sometimes its even the young dude’s wife that kills the vampire. Some in the group die in the fighting.

This movie more or less follows that same story, but it does do a few different things which were fine and kept it fresh while being familiar.

Anyway with all that out of the way, the movie looks excellent. Got the whole gothic 1800s look down.

This was also probably the best looking version of Orlok, and by best looking I mean absolutely foul looking like a based vampire should look. Orlok has always been a representation of the “predator” aspect of a vampire. No gay sparkling pretty boy shit. He looks like a monster, however despite this his appearance was always a bit “comical” sometimes with the oversized beaver fangs and pointy ears. Even other versions that copy/pasta this “Bat Demon” look (Like Salem Lot or Vampire the Masquerade) just always look a bit funny. (Of course it wouldn’t be so funny to see one in real life).

This version of Orlok though looks like a fucking rotting corpse. Seriously there’s a bit where you see just how fucked up looking his naked body is at one point with maggots and shit crawling out of him. Part of his skull is even showing on the back of his rotting head. It’s totally metal I assure you.

I think giving him a Vlad the Impaler style mustache helped make him look more menacing too. Usually you don’t see these style vamps with any facial hair at all. (Or hair in general)

Everyone’s acting was fine too. I guess they originally wanted Anya Taylor Joy to play the woman of Orlok’s focus. I actually would have rather seen her in the role, but Johnny Depp’s daughter was alright.

William Defoe was probably a nod to his role as Count Orlok in the 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire. I guess he was even considered to play the role again, but I think having Bill Skarsgard was a better choice. Defoe was cool as the Van Helsing knock off anyway.

This movie also had more necrophilia in it than I expected. Granted it wasn’t like a zombie harem or something, but it still was there. And I don’t mean the “totally not necrophilia because the vamp is hawt looking” thing either. The rotting Orlok physically fucks at least one person in the movie (Potentially more if we go with mindfucking or just blood sucking to be the stand in for "penetration") 

Also someone else just outright fucks a corpse at one point. Not undead, just plain dead. (It’s tasteful though.)

So yeah it’s a good movie, go see it now if you haven’t already.

Sinners (The Movie)

Okay like most horror movies, there’s not much to spoil. You usually know the premise and how its going to go. Especially since the movie starts with the ending and flashes back to what happened the day before.

That being said, I suppose I’ll keep a few things out, because if you’re into vampire movies, this definitely is one of the better ones you’ll want to go see. No gay sparkling shit for one thing. In fact no gay shit at all surprisingly for a vamp movie. Well actually maybe that will alienate some vamp enjoyers since gay shit is sometimes the whole purpose of them.

It is however very black, so Cel still might want to miss this one unless he’s feeling unusually progressive that day. (We know it happens from time to time, it’s okay)

Anyway it takes place in 1932 rural Mississippi and focuses on twin brothers opening up a juke joint for their fellow black people to party and such at. They’re a bit shady and acquired the money to do this by criminal means, but in any case, they recruit some folks to play there the night including their little cousin who is sort of the main protagonist besides the twins.

The cousin is a young guy who has a preacher father who wants him to follow in his footsteps, but he’s determined to play that devil blues music.

A good first part of the movie sort of just establishes the location, characters and day to day life which I actually kind of enjoyed. Hell, I probably could have enjoyed the movie even without the vampire angle since there was a lot of mini-stories going on with the characters that could have made for an interesting movie too.

It actually reminded me a bit like the old From Dusk Till Dawn movie where the first half is basically a crime movie and then it doesn’t get to the horror bit until second half with the vampires.

And upon some quick Google searching, apparently yeah I wasn’t the only one that got a From Dusk Till Dawn vibe from Sinners. Even the director says it was a huge inspiration.

The vampire (And soon vampires) show up a little later after the juke joint is up and running. They stuck to some traditional lore with them. Especially needing to be invited inside part and wooden stakes. The bit where they all can sort of read each others thoughts like a hive mind was a newer twist.

And as you can expect mayhem and vampire killing ensues.

There’s certainly enough bloody bits to keep you entertained if you’re a bit of a psychopath like me that enjoys that sort of thing. Plenty of killing definitely.

Also too, when the credits first start rolling, don’t just immediately leave like a bunch of other retards did in my theater. Because there’s actually more than just some Marvelesque “stinger” at the end. There’s actually a longer than average bit that happens during the credits (Not entirely after the credits either. Just few names show up and there’s more movie that plays) It’s a good enough bit that you’ll want to see it.

Now all that being said, here’s some brief deeper movie analysis because it’s fun to act like a pretentious pontificating dickhead sometimes.

So usually with black horror movies there’s some sort of racial message going on. This one really isn’t an exception, however what probably makes it way better than most is it doesn’t really beat you over the head with it.

First of all, the vampires (Or at least the main one and the two he “recruits” first) are white. Ignoring the obvious white devil comparison, they’re also wanting to be let into what is obviously a black space. When they manage to finally sneak someone they bite in, well that’s the beginning of the end of the juke joint and the rest of the folks inside.

This could obviously be seen as cultural appropriation or how white folks are always eventually taking over black owned businesses, etc. and the fallout of such things never goes well for the black folks.

Also the head vampire is Irish. There’s a long history of Irish folks being called “white niggers” due to the whole exploitation thing by the Brits, being indentured servants and all that other good stuff. So there’s a connection the two races of have.

He actually at one point preaches how they’ll all finally be “equal” if they all become vampires. Pointing out that the rich klansman the twins bought the land from isn’t going to just let a juke joint survive anyway. They’ll never be truly equal in this world and should join the family so to speak.

While this might sound appealing to join this supernatural commie rainbow coalition, well a white guy is technically still in charge isn’t he? Not to mention it’s explained by one of the more folklore knowledgeable characters that vampires still carry around a lot of pain and hate with them due to their souls being trapped and unable to move on, so it’s not all fun and games.

So basically even when white folks are trying to do nice things for black folks, they’re still fucking them over in some way. Lol

There's also a bit where one of the twins shoots it out with the KKK, which probably just served to appeal to black audiences watching a black dude kill a whole bunch of white motherfuckers. Nothing that hasn't been seen before in any 70s blaxpoitation film though.

Anyway the moral of the story is don’t trust white people.

In conclusion it really is a good movie and I liked it a lot.

Well I gotta watch it now

Clown in a Cornfield (The movie as opposed to the book it was apparently based on)

So with a title like that, you pretty much already know what’s going to happen, though it’s actually a misleading title since there’s more than one clown so it should have been plural.

Also of course all the kills aren’t necessarily in a cornfield, but it’s not really important where the blood flows, just as long as the blood flows right?

Spoiling the movie since if you’re going to see this, you’re going for the kills and you’re not seeing this for the complex plot anyway, though I’d say it’s one of the better slasher movies as far as that goes. Really what it reminded me a little bit of is one of the Scream movies but thankfully not going overboard with the “Oh this is a horror movie, look at the tropes!” meta faggotry.

Actually I’ll make this more amusing by substituting the character names for names on here instead, mainly because other than a couple of them, I already forgot the character names.

So a teenage girl and her dad (We’ll call them Stargirl and End) are moving to their new home in some bumfuck small town. Not quite small town hell Kansas, but probably worse since it’s Missouri. Stargirl’s mom died of a drug overdose and End couldn’t deal with continuing to work in a big city ER anymore and a small town family doc seems like a good change.

Naturally Stargirl is finding all this very boring and is tired of End singing 80s rap songs in the car. Anyway they get there and End promises he’ll try to get the wifi up and running at the house and she’s off to school, but she bumps into some tall weird dude that kind of talks in short sentences. (We’ll call him Tim.)

So Tim offers to walk her to school since he’s going to the same one and lives nearby, and they awkwardly have a conversation where she’s asking what’s there to do in this town and he’s rattling off a bunch of redneck things like hunting and then apologizes for sounding like a stereotypical redneck. As Tim parts ways at school he tells her to be careful since there’s a few weird people in the school.

Stargirl gets to class where the teacher (We’ll call him Gower) is being an asshole to everyone though the class is being just as much of an asshole to him. In any case a couple of them pull one too many pranks and some of them get detention including Stargirl even though she didn’t do anything.

And this is where she makes all new friends. The black guy (Petros) The big gymbro (Peng) The mean blonde girl (TCat) and the black girl (Uh Suranna. Yes I know she’s far from black but I’m working with what I got and this is funnier. Hell, the gymbro isn’t Chinese and I’m still using Peng to rep)

Oh and of course the guy she instantly falls for. (We’ll call him Chris)

So already Stargirl is hanging out with the “bad crowd” and Chris is a descendent of the founder of the town so his dad is the mayor (We’ll call him Madglee). So the group makes youtube horror movies about the town’s clown mascot “Frendo”. So Petros and Peng in particular take turns dressing up like Frendo for their little channel and get massive clicks for it.

Later Stargirl meets her dad in a diner where they’re served by a surly waitress (We’ll call her Mizal) giving her the stink eye the entire time. End is scolding Stargirl for getting detention on her first day and as she tries to explain herself, the big fat abrasive sheriff comes in and starts talking to End. (We’ll call him Ogre) So Ogre and End are talking and then Stargirl sees Chris and the rest outside the diner and she is trying to figure out how to get out of there.

Ogre sees them and they go running off, which then causes Ogre to mention how there’s been trouble with some teenagers that burned down the factory that put a bunch of the locals out of a job. He then warns Stargirl that she should stay away from that crowd. In any case Stargirl gets out of the diner and catches up with her new buddies and then they proceed to semi-rob a store via distracting the store clerk. (Guess this can be Anthrax) Though they actually leave money on the counter to cover the cost of the alcohol.

So they’re all hanging out by the cornfield drinking and being delinquent. Petros and Peng at one point pull a Friendo kill prank on Stargirl as part of the movie stuff. Stargirl questions them about the factory thing, but they mention it really wasn’t their fault. They just happened to be filming at the factory at the time and the fire started. The official cause was faulty wiring. Eventually Chris drives Stargirl home.

Stargirl being a fast girl, makes the first move with kissing, but it gets interrupted by End who immediately puts a stop to anything further. Chris drives off, while Stargirl and End argue and she goes and cries in her room. Then she gets some message with her bit in the Frendo prank kill. Though when she’s watching it, she notices there’s a second clown in the background. Stargirl sends a close up of the pic to Petros who’s busy messing about on his drum set.

Well as you might expect, Petros is the first of the group to get killed first. He sees some clown on the camera doorbell and figures its Peng pulling a prank, but of course it’s not and he get gruesomely killed.

So the next day is Founder’s Day which is a big deal in this small town. There’s a parade and everything. Madglee at first tells Chris he’s not going because he fucked around and got detention, but his mom tells him he can go. The group is all together, but they don’t know where Petros is. Meanwhile Peng pulls a prank in the parade wearing a Frendo mask and juggling these “bombs” while riding a unicycle. Ogre sees this and tries to catch him, but Peng gets away, but he drops one of the lit bombs which then sets fire to some of the corn displays and causes a big fiery mess. This results in the rest of the group except Peng getting thrown in jail.

Eventually they get released and it’s End that posted the bail. Now he’s even more pissed at Stargirl who is still defending her new delinquent friends and she finds out she really fucked up since he’d actually went and bought her a car and it was going to be a surprise, but she’s not getting to drive it now. The car in question is also a stick shift, which she doesn’t know how to drive, but End was going to teach so it was more of a bonding experience.

Meanwhile Peng’s back home lifting weights presumably to look all extra buff for his girlfriend Suranna (Since they’re an item in this movie), but while he’s lifting one of the Frendo clowns shows up and puts a saw blade on the barbell and well decapitation ensues.

Cut back to night and Chris texts Stargirl who is grounded FOREVER in her room. She says she can’t go to the party, but Chris is already outside ready to pick her up. Stargirl sneaks downstairs and sees End’s asleep in his chair so she sneaks out entirely.

On the way there, they nearly run over Tim who has been out hunting and carrying a deer carcass, he mentions ever since the factory burned down he’s gotta hunt more for now unemployed dad and himself. You learn here that Chris and Tim used to be closer friends, but something happened and now they don’t hang out anymore.

Anyway they go on to the party which is at this big abandoned barn near the cornfield and TCat and Suranna are there, but they still don’t know where Petros is and now they don’t know where Peng is either, but they figure they’re probably setting up some sort of prank.

After a bit of partying (And Tim shows up at the party after all), Stargirl immediately takes Chris away from the barn and into a smaller shed. As usual Stargirl is making all the first moves here, but Chris is wanting her to slow down a bit and he isn’t sure if he wants to take this step yet. She feels like an idiot, though Chris tries to calm her down, but she’s just really embarrassed by the situation.

So she’s then greeted by TCat and Suranna who start mocking her, since they know Chris turns everyone down. It starts getting more hostile and Stargirl and TCat are physically fighting until one of the party goers steps out of the cornfield and falls down dead with an arrow in her back.

Stargirl’s first reaction is to scream but TCat tells her not to get fooled again since this is obviously a prank. Peng’s head then gets tossed from the cornfield, but Tcat figures it’s a plastic mold, and she tosses it playfully at Suranna who bitches about getting “fake blood” all over her.

Stargirl however, start examining the party goer’s body and she’s not getting a pulse. Causing them all to realize this isn’t a prank and they’ve been throwing Peng’s real head around.

So a killer Frendo comes out of the cornfield with a crossbow and instantly pops another teenager. Now chaos breaks loose and most of the teenagers close themselves inside the barn, though except for Stargirl, TCat and Suranna who are now trying to get away from crossbow clown.

Fortunately Tim shows up with his shotgun and kills him. Unfortunately multiple clowns with various weapons come out of the cornfield. Tim gets another one of them or at least blowing his hand off. Chris then shows up to bash one in the head with a shovel and all 5 of them take shelter in the large shed.

They start arguing about what to do next and after a few bits of dialog are exchanged, Tim says something about Chris being afraid to admit who he really is causing Chris to say he isn’t sure and to leave him alone. This revelation leads to the three ladies all now understanding why Chris turns down everyone.

So the shed turns out to have sewer grate and they escape that way, though Tim stays behind to set off a distraction which results in a big explosion using the propane tanks in there. The remaining 4 run off in the cornfield to try to get to the closest house which is known to have a landline phone. (Yes, cell phones are pretty useless in this mostly dead zone of a town or at least the really rural areas)

Meanwhile End’s awake again and goes into Stargirl’s room to try to talk with her and then realizes she’s not there and then goes off driving to find where she’s snuck off to. While he’s doing that, he notices his doctor’s office has been broken into. He goes to investigate and hears someone moaning. Then a clown gets End by surprise threatening to kill him and his daughter if he doesn’t save his buddy which turns out to be the clown who got his hand blown off earlier. It cut back a few times to them as the clowns are talking to each other on a walkie talkie saying they got more wounded that they might need to bring in. End eventually manages to steal the wounded clown’s radio while he’s plotting to get away.

Back to the teenagers, they exit the cornfield where a road is and foolishly flag down car. Turns out to be Sheriff Ogre, who’s already had enough of their shit and seeing as Chris is carrying a shotgun, he uses it as an excuse to arrest him. He ignores the tales of killer clowns and leaves the three girls stranded. So now they’re back to the plan of finding that house with a landline.

Well before they even manage to reach that house, one of the clowns kills Suranna with a chainsaw. When they finally get to the house the phone turns out to be a rotary one and they hilariously don’t know how to use it. Fucking retarded zoomers. Lol

Stargirl realizes this house is a trap anyway and they need to get out, but now TCat gets kills with a pitchfork, or rather she’s alive, but impaled to the floor. Removing it will just kill her quicker which TCat doesn’t want, but Stargirl needs a weapon to fend off the clown, so apologizes and rips out the pitchfork and stabs the clown with it.

With her dying breath TCat says she hates Stargirl, and the clown also dying beside her says he hates Stargirl too.

Stargirl grabs truck keys and gets to the truck parked outside the house, but unfortunately it’s a stick shift which she doesn’t know how to drive and curses the fact that she should’ve let End teach her after all instead of being mad at him. Three clowns close in on her and knock her out.

Meanwhile End manages to fool the clown threatening him with the knife as he does surgery on his buddy. End gets the drop on him by shoving his own knife in his neck and tells him specifically not to pull it out and that he’ll be back to fix him up later (Still holding semi-true to the doctor code of “do no harm”), the clown of course doesn’t listen which causes him to bleed out. End tells him he told him so and takes off using the info he’s heard from the walkie talkie to find out where the clown base is.

At the clown base, Stargirl wakes up and tied to a wood beam. Here you finally see the remaining clowns unmasked, Gower, Mizal, Anthrax and Ogre (Well you saw him unmasked anyway) With them is also Madglee who is dressed slightly different, going for a more Joker looking appearance circa 1989 Burton’s Batman. Chris is also there tied up with a noose around his neck precariously standing on something which is about to be pulled away at anytime.

It’s here where the villain monologue comes in of why they’re doing this.

With some of them (probably most of the clowns that already died) they had family or they themselves that worked at the burned down factory so they’re pissed about the teenagers burning it down or at least believe they did. Gower’s brother for example committed suicide since he lost his job at the factory.

Madglee mentions that every so many generations a sacrifice of sort has to be made. Back in the 30s for example his great grand dad created the popular corn syrup that kept the town afloat. But in the 40s the town got overrun by hobos, so they had to get rid of them. Then in the 60s they had to get rid of some hippies, then in the 90s they had to get rid of all the depressed Nirvana listening to faggots, but he thinks that this generation might be the worst of the lot what with their social media and all.

So yeah turns out all the clowns are a bunch of evil BOOMERS that don’t like change. Chris even points this out to his dad and saying he won’t get away with this, but Madglee is unmoved and merely laughs saying he’s already disowned his son claiming he’ll be starting over soon. Also mentions he’ll have all this look like a murder suicide over a girl that turned him down at the party and he’ll have the video message posted on the social media his generation likes so much. Ogre on the other hand is getting tired of all the talking and wants to get on with it.

Stargirl is about to get her brain blown out, when End smashes into the clown base in his vehicle managing to take out Anthrax who gets his head smashed like a melon and Mizal who gets impaled by a pipe. End catches part of a a shotgun blast by Ogre causing him to fall telling Stargirl to run, who has managed to get loose and grab the electric prod Ogre was zapping her with earlier.

Chris is barely alive managing to stand on the car that’s now under him, Madglee tells Ogre to go get Stargirl and he’ll take care of Chris. It’s at this point Chris figures out that it was Madglee that burned down the factory since he was losing money with it and got the insurance money for its destruction. This revelation gets a minor applause from Madglee who gets in the car to try to drive out from under Chris so he can finally hang. He’s having issues though since the car is stuck due to debris jammed under the tires.

Ogre is hunting down Stargirl with the shotgun, but after a bit of hide and seek, she gets the drop on him and zaps him inside the mouth with the electric prod frying his entire head.

Madglee eventually manages to remove the debris and drive the car so Chris is now hanging, but End manages to prop him up to keep him from dying. Then Tim shows up and kills Madglee and help get Chris down. This rescue results in Chris and Tim reigniting their GAY relationship with a GAY kiss.

Stargirl returns and the 4 get into the clown car that’s outside. Stargirl is about drive it, but it’s a stick. End talks her through on how to drive it and then Gower shows up with the chainsaw. End tells Stargirl to punch it and she does so messily killing Gower.

Cut to one year later and End is running as the new mayor of the town and Stargirl is off to college.

She says goodbye to her dad and her two gay friends. She drives off and throws one of the Frendo jack in box toys that are present throughout the movie out the car window. It pops up laughing. Roll credits.

And that’s it.

Anyway, I liked it well enough.

End couldn't stay away from a movie about killer clowns and cornfields. The name inserts made this a lot more interesting :)

Nice review, chicken jockey!

Final Destination Bloodlines (The Movie)

Alright going to keep this one short.

If you know anything about this series it’s all about someone typically getting a premonition of dying in a large accident of some sort and so they don’t get on the plane or avoid getting on a freeway, etc. in order to avoid said accident which inevitably happens.

Of course Death doesn’t like it when someone cheat him so he’ll methodically go back and kill everyone who avoided dying in the order of which they were supposed to die. And because Death has a twisted sense of humor, he’ll typically go the Rube Goldberg machine route of setting minor shit up that eventually lead up to someone dying gruesomely.

Well this is more of the same, but here’s the extra plot anyway.

This one deals with a college girl who’s been getting dreams of her grandmother dying in one of these mass accidents except of course that didn’t happen since her grandmother obviously survived along with saving everyone in the sky tower restaurant that collapsed.

This was back in the 60s, so death has been playing catch up for decades killing off all these people, but it also had to kill off all their children some of these folks went on to have since they weren’t supposed to ever be born in the first place.

Death has finally gotten around to the grandmother’s family since in the situation she was the second to last to die. The mayhem ensues from there.

So who was the very last one to die in this accident that never happened? Well she saved a little boy and this is who Tony Todd’s character is revealed to be. There was always some mystery about him since he was in just about every movie and seems to know about Death’s pattern and how to avoid/cheat a little longer.

The movie itself is fine for a Final Destination movie, but this was Tony’s last movie and the short screen time he has sort of elevated the movie to be the best of the series if only for his last lines which were improvised and basically him not only talking to the characters in the movie but also to his fans.

Anyway, liked it.

28 Years Later (The Movie)

Alright so the 28 franchise has never been my favorite. While everyone raved over the first one when it came out, I saw it and almost had a facial expression. Last half of the movie was basically just some dull “army bad and full of RAPISTS” bit and I thought it was stupid.

The sequel which for whatever reason was less well received I actually liked better, but it wasn’t anything special as far as “zombie” movies go.  And we won’t even get into that whole argument about what’s a zombie and what isn’t. (Mainly because they’re not dead, so they ain’t zombies. There’s no argument to be had)

So I went in not expecting anything too much better than the second movie which was once again a good idea on my part since it exceeded my expectations. In fact it was completely different than what I was expecting even based on the trailer.

Spoiling the hell out of this so I suggest you prepare yourselves.

So starts out somewhere in Scotland with a bunch of blonde children (like maybe 6 or 7 of them) watching the Teletubbies. Only one of them seems to be a boy and that’s Jimmy. There’s some yelling by the adults elsewhere in the house and Jimmy and the rest get told to stay in the room. Well eventually Jimmy goes to the door to listen to the sudden silence only for the door to burst open slamming him into the wall and the infected rage dude murder the shit out of ALL his sisters (I assume they were his sisters, they all had blonde hair) while Jimmy stands there in shock.

I’ll admit THIS was a great way to gain my attention right from the start. Already better than the first two movies. Granted they weren’t showing the kids getting killed, but it was enough to make me laugh out loud in the theater. More movies should begin like this.

So Jimmy manages to escape and he runs to the local priest who is praying and half insane himself saying that the infected are saved and fully intends on joining them soon. He gives Jimmy his cross telling him to keep it. he then lets himself get chomped on while Jimmy hides again watching the entire thing and seeing the priest become infected with his new rage buddies.

Cut to 28 Years Later. I assume the previous stuff happened after the second movie because you then get a quick recap that the rage virus was beaten back from the rest of continental Euroland (The last movie showed the infected invading France from the tunnel) and contained to just Britland which was then quarantined and everyone was left to fend for themselves on that dreary little island.

So now you got a kid named Spike with his mom and dad living in their safe heavily fortified post apocalyptic village that is on an even smaller island off the coast of Britland. (Lindisfarne) It’s sort of a perfect defense point since there’s a causeway that routinely gets submerged by a high tide. So there’s only a few hours of low tide to go across it. Spike’s mom is sick and nobody knows exactly what it is, but she goes into states of being delusional and confused for awhile so she’s in bed a lot.

As for the dad, well he’s getting Spike ready to go on his first infected hunt. Gotta become a man and all. Spike’s a little on the younger side since he’s 12, and usually they wait until at least 14/15 before sending the kids to do this, but he’s determined. The village itself is about medieval stage level with maybe a few bit more advanced here and there thanks to existing tech. It’s also a bit of a “last stand of Britannia” since they’re still waving the tattered remnants of the English flag (Though not the Union Jack) and have an old Queen Elizabeth pic hanging in their great hall. I’m sure there’s some sort of message there of Britland becoming a third world shithole and hanging on to fading glory, but back to the dimestore zombies.

Spike and his dad leave the village and head to the main island to go hunt some infected. This part of the movie is basically a typical father/son bonding over killing shit sort of thing. Keep in mind that this is Britland so nobody’s using guns, they’re all using bows. So it’s a little harder to hit a fast running target but this would be a good point to get into the “video game” element of the movie.

What I mean by this is the franchise seems to have decided to make different kinds of infected now and it doesn’t make too much sense though damn fool me for trying to apply logic to a dimestore zombie movie right? Still, the 28 series generally tried to stick with in movie medical reasons for the rage virus to keep it a bit different than the usual zombie stuff.

For example, the infected because they’re actually alive, they do have to eat to continue living. It’s mentioned in other 2 movies that they will eventually starve to death if they go without food like a normal human. Of course they’re still able to move a bit quicker in a starved state probably due all that rage virus stuff in them, but if you found a place to hold up and waited long enough, eventually they’ll run out of targets and food to keep them going. So realistically there probably shouldn’t even be a lot of them around anymore after 28 years if Britland has been quarantined effectively.

Of course that would make a for a pretty dull movie, so naturally they just sort of hand waved some of this and it seem that they’ve evolved like pokemon.

So now you got grossly FAT infected that hilariously crawl around on the ground eating worms. Seriously? You’re telling me these fat fuckers got that way just crawling and snuffling about like pigs eating worms? Granted they’ll eat humans too (or anything they can grab) but would you even have fat infected after 28 years with a semi-steady diet of worms with maybe the occasional human?

Anyway Spike kills one of those first and his dad helps with some others.

When the normal fast infected show up, Spike has a harder time of it and his dad has to do most of the heavy lifting. Shit really hits the fan, when an Alpha shows up. And here’s where we get into the next type of infected.

Alphas are leaders of infected packs as you’d expect, but they’re also a lot bigger and freakishly strong. At one point later in the movie, they actually do try to explain this one saying something about the virus creating a steroid effect in some. I’m guessing maybe something similar is going on with the fatties just in a different way, because I don’t remember hearing them explain those. I’ll also mention that at this point the infected are all mostly naked with their clothing having rotted off long ago. So lots of ugly, dirty naked folks running and walking around in a jerky motion like retarded crackheads. (Well except for the fat ones who are just like normal grossly fat people)

So at one point Spike and his dad have to hide out from an alpha and a pack for a night and then they get back home during a low tide, but an alpha starts chasing them. Apparently alphas also have some sort of mutant ability to control ravens too (Or this one leveled up), because he had a flock of them temporarily harass Spike and his dad on their way home. (They just make one pass though) After a thrilling sequence of the high tide coming in and the alpha closing in, Spike and his dad manage to get back inside the village gates after the village guards pepper the alpha with arrows and even a small ballista bolt.

Cut to a celebration at the town hall where everyone is getting drunk and partying while Spike’s dad brags about how well his son did. Spike though is feeling imposter syndrome since he didn’t do that well, but his concerns about that are discarded when he finds his dad later eating out some woman that isn’t his mom. He heads home to see to his mom and briefly talks to an old guy who was looking after her while they were gone. After some back and forth about what he did and saw out on the mainland, Spike does bring up one more unusual thing which is he saw a fire to the southwest direction, but his dad at the time didn’t want to speak too much on it. The old man mentions that’s probably Dr. Kelson, which perks up Spike since he was under the impression that all the doctors were gone based on what his dad said. The old guy won’t elaborate too much further since if his dad didn’t want to speak anymore on it, then he shouldn’t either.

The old man leaves and Spike checks on his mom and sleeps in her room. Next morning, his dad finally comes home and Spike confronts him about cheating on his mom along with potentially taking mom to that doctor. Dad doesn’t have too much response to cheating on mom, but going to the doc’s is out of the question since he says the dude’s crazy. He mentioned he did travel to the fire once a long time ago and saw the doctor with a literal graveyard full of bodies laid out as he was tossing them into a fire. Doc waved them down in a friendly manner, but he and his group took off instead.

Anyway after a bit of a physical confrontation with his dad (Of which he stands no chance, but his dad does understand why he’s upset so he doesn’t kick his ass into dirt) Spike is once again determined to take his mom to the doctor. He manages to convince his half delusional mother to follow him first, then he also sets a fire and calls to the gate guards that all help is needed to stop it.

Then he manages to get across the low tide causeway and back to the mainland only for then his mom to snap out of her delusional state as she tends to do and she’s demanding to go back to the village. He assures her though that they need to go to this doctor which she agrees to so they’re off on an adventure.

Along the way during one of their rests, Spike falls asleep while on watch and a fatty manages to sneak up on him (Thinking his shoelace is a worm at first) The mom however prevents anything from happening as she puts a bag over fattie’s head and smashes it repeatedly into the concrete. She’s doesn’t remember doing it though, the pair of them wake up to just discover a fatty corpse with a bag on its head.

There’s also a separate scene with a team of dudes with military gear, however a horde of infected lead by another alpha kill all of them except one. This particular alpha will pop up throughout the movie. Literally pop up since you get close ups of his GIANT DICK angrily flopping about while he’s ripping people’s heads off. The military team soon becomes important since the one survivor soon rescues Spike and his mom from getting killed by a different pack of infected.

Erik is the surviving military dude. He’s NATO and he’s from Sweden. He mentions his patrol ship got destroyed crashing into rocks (So much for any proper viking genes on that ship) and how he’s the only survivor of his group that made it to shore. He’s not exactly the most friendly and only helped believing that they could help him somehow with directions, but since they got their own mission to the doctor and he doesn’t have much else to do, so he decides to go along with them to the doctor. He’s got some funny banter and he gives a little insight on how things are in the rest of the world, which seems to be chugging along just fine. He’s got a cellphone with his plastic surgery addicted girlfriend on it and bitches about not becoming a simple delivery driver like his friend.

Basically the world literally just said fuck the Brits and surrounded it with NATO warships. Lol

So then Spike’s mom gets distracted by the sounds of moaning and wanders quickly towards it. A sane person wouldn’t do this, but as we all know Spike’s mom isn’t well. She stumbles upon an infected woman who is ready to pop with a great big belly. You actually see this preggo infected earlier in the big dick alpha’s pack while they were drinking (and even washing a bit) in a shallow stream. She wandered off to give birth, so it can be assumed at this point that the infected occasionally fuck each other which is probably a way to explain why there’s still some around after 28 years, but it still stretches logic a bit. (And I’ll explain why in a moment)

In any case, Spike’s mom somehow manages to become an infected whisperer and the infected woman actually stops trying to attack long enough to simply just hold her hands while she pushes out a kid. Spike is sort of unsure about any of this, until his mom tells him to cut the umbilical cord with his knife. Erik on the other hand is ready to shoot the infected mom and the baby since this is a bad idea letting them breed like this. Supposed to be lowering their numbers, not allowing them to increase.

The infected mom immediately goes feral again after giving birth, prompting Erik to kill her. He’s going to shoot the baby and Spike’s mom for being insane enough to hang on to it. She  claims though that the baby doesn’t show the signs of infection. Which sort destroys the idea of the infected sustaining their numbers through occasionally breeding since she’d probably eat the baby after having it. Though they don’t go into excessive detail on potential infected motherhood and there’s a bit later that suggests that this isn’t a normal occurrence anyway.

Erik doesn’t get to do shit though since big dick alpha shows up and rips Erik’s head off and continues to carry the head (and partial spine) while chasing Spike and his mom. He temporarily stops to look at the dead infected woman and just gets even angrier, so it’s clear that even on some primal level this woman was his chosen mate.

So Spike manages to shoot a few arrows into the alpha, but it ain’t slowing him down. What finally stops him though is a blowdart with a morphine mixture which puts him to sleep. The blowdart was from Dr. Kelson. The doctor is played by Ralph Finnes so he’s suitably good at playing a weird guy.

And the doc is certainly weird, though he’s not strictly crazy in the traditional sense, he’s definitely gone into the strange philosophical hermit area. He’s basically been taking all the bodies, burning them, and making a huge temple/memorial to the dead out of their bones. He’s been doing this for years so there’s a small “bone forest” at this point. Just pillars of bone and in the center of his sanctuary is an even bigger stack of skulls. He even takes Erik’s decapitated head from the sleeping alpha and later burns off the flesh to a skull and tells Spike to place him somewhere on the skull temple.

Besides the doctor’s death obsession, he asks about the baby and always wondered if a baby by an infected would be immune to the virus thanks to the placenta. Spike then mentions why he’s really there which is about his mom. The doc examines his mom the best he can without proper medical equipment and determines that she’s got cancer and it’s progressed either from her head to her body or vice versa, but either way there’s nothing he can do and she’ll be dead soon of it. Spike of course says about going to a hospital to gather medicine, but Kelson is like there’s no medicine that’s going to help at this point. The mother mentions she had a feeling it was cancer, but wasn’t sure. She says she should have just said something sooner.

So after saying some goodbyes, Kelson hits the mom with a morphine dart overdose and walks her away from Spike. He then later returns with her freshly cleaned SKULL and hands it to Spike telling him to find a good place for her.

Which is sort of fucked up when you really think about how the doc just chopped off his mom’s head and scorched it down to the skull and handed it to him lol.

However at this point Spike’s sort of on board with the doc’s death philosophy that eventually everyone dies, so he climbs to the top of the skull pillar and puts his mom’s skull on top looking out at the sunrise and he even kisses it goodbye because Spike’s just that fucking hardcore at this point.

So there’s one more encounter with big dick alpha (Or Samson as Kelson has named him) and after they put him to sleep again (Not sure why they just didn’t kill the fucker the first time around when he was asleep) Kelson says that he believes Spike should head back to his village with the baby.

Which is what he does uneventfully. However, Spike himself doesn’t go back. What he does instead is leave the baby outside the village gate with a note saying that he’s going to explore the mainland more and tells his dad he’s fine and not to go after him. Also mentions the doctor isn’t crazy (relatively speaking), the situation with the baby and what happened to his mom.

His dad is pretty upset about this of course, but there’s actually a law in the village anyway that there’s no rescue party attempts due to losing too many people in past. (Hence why they never went after Spike and his mom in the first place)

So cuts to Spike traveling a bit and then encountering some infected. He gets a few of them, but there’s too many and he gets blocked by a rockslide. However an older blonde guy appears from the rocks above saying that his bow skills are impressive, but he probably could use some help. Spike quickly agrees and then blonde dude calls his buddies which all also have blonde hair similar to him and they’re all dressed like chavs and doing all sorts of acrobatic fighting moves with melee weapons taking out the infected.

The blonde guy helps Spike up and says his name is Jimmy and he thinks they’ll be friends. And if it wasn’t apparent by this point, this is the kid who we saw in the beginning now grown up and he’s even wearing the cross the priest gave him, except its upside down.

Roll credits and wait next year for the next sequel which they apparently filmed back to back with this one.

So final verdict is I liked this one way better than the other two. Even the kid wasn’t annoying in it which was good since he’s the main protagonist and sort was going to fail or succeed based on him.

Looking forward to the next one which apparently going to be called “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” so I assume this will involve more conflict with Jimmy since he’s obviously set up to be a cult leader. I also figure Spike’s dad will be ignoring the village rules and going out to look for his him. I guess they’re even having the protagonist of the first movie returning in that one too.

One thing I liked that many seem to overlook is that Jimmy is clearly based on and maybe even self-consciously cosplaying as MEGA PEDO Jimmy Saville -- he's got long blond hair and a track suit on.

Anyway, I super dug this one. Reminded me of that one arc of Crossed where it's set a century into the future and the Crossed have set up a weird rudimentary society

Holy shit I can't believe I missed that Saville connection. Lol

Green (Though she's only briefly active once every so many years)

Will (Though he lives in Police State Hell AKA China)

Cat

Goodnight

Crimson

And Flutter whenever he's decided to stop jerking it to cartoon ponys and poorly attempting to troll Malk with an alt

It's nice to get some heat for once. Tends to lift peoples dreary moods here. I haven't seen the movie and don't plan to but based on how End described it, at the very least it functions as a great allegoric, hyperbolic, social commentary. If you head down to any city centre you'll definitely see some shared semblance. 

I mean, the Alpha zombie uses improvised weapons, has his flock set up rudimentary ambushes, posts deer heads on his territory, and shows a strange kind of zombie concern when he finds a dead pregnant zombie. Presumably this mutated form is capable of like, ripping fur off animals as blankets, or leading them to milder areas during winter. 

I figure the rage virus might make them "run hot" so it might make them more tolerant of cold weather. Enhances their speed so they can actually move fast enough to chase down stuff like deer. Probably prevents them from catching other potential diseases like rabies (though they already sort of got that) if they're just catching and consuming raw wildlife and drinking unfiltered water.

(They're basically Petros.)

Still doesn't really explain the worm eating fatties and the exact nature of their breeding habits (if they're doing that on any major scale) but maybe they'll go into it more in the next sequel.

Gotta get that zombie money

Superman and Weapons (The Movies)

Alright a bit late on writing something up for these two, but I'll keep it short.

While both of these movies obviously couldn't be more different from each other, they're both pretty good. Superman in particular surprised me since I generally don't go for superhero stuff, but everyone here that saw it kept going on about how good it was so I figured I'd take a chance on it.

And yeah like I said, it was probably one of the best superman portrayals in a movie. I think what helped is they didn't bother going over his fucking origin story for the umpteenth time like they do with every new reboot.

One interesting bit they did do different is the idea that superman's biological parents sent him there with the message telling him to rule over the planet. (He didn't know this until later though since the message was garbled)

I immediately thought of the movie Brightburn since that was essentially a superhero horror movie where the alien kid got sent there to conquer the planet. So when I found out James Gunn had a hand in the Brightburn movie too, I figured that was him taking a small concept from that movie.

Of course Clark/Kal El grew up being raised to be the boy scout so he's still not doing anything evil. It's the whole nature vs nurture thing. The movie does a pretty good job in general of making Superman a REALLY good guy which is what Superman should be, just works for him a lot better than the grim and gritty treatment.

Of course there's always faggots that have to bitch about shit on the internet and I see a lot of "WHY ARE SUPERMAN'S BIO PARENTS EVIL, THAT DEFEATS THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF AN IMMIGRANT STORY, IT SAYS ALIENS ARE EVIL AFTER ALL UHUHUH IT'S RACIST GUHUHUHU!"

No it isn't, shut the fuck up you reddit faggot. Superman still ended up being one of the good ones despite his OG culture. It's like how some third worlders come here and actually work as opposed to rape, steal, murder, rape, rape and rape.

As far as the movie itself, well other than the bit about his parents, it's a superhero movie so you know what to expect. He fights Lex and his minions and ultimately saves the day.

Moving on to Weapons

Well this one I can't really go into too much detail without spoiling it and while I generally never give a shit about doing that, it's good enough that I won't.

The whole movie is set around this mystery of an entire class of children walking out in the middle of the night and disappearing. Just like the trailer says. It tells the story from multiple points of view and a bit out of order with some overlap as the mystery is revealed. (Though it's not a major mystery since it gets revealed about half way in)

This movie is done by the same director who did the movie Barbarian and he sort of did something a little similar in that, but this one has less inbred rape product milk monster in it.

As much as I liked Weapons and everything it had going on it, personally I'd still say I liked Barbarian better and not just because it had inbred rape product milk monster in it. I just didn't like the characters in Weapons in general other than the guy looking for his son and the one behind this whole mystery. The teacher that was a fuck up probably worked well in her role though since she's fairly insufferable looking anyway.

Anyway it's worth watching too.

Caught Stealing (The Movie)

So do you like crime genre movies within that mid 90s to mid 2000s period where every character had cool snappy dialog and wacky violent hi-jinx ensued? Well you’ll probably like this one since that’s exactly what this film was going for. It’s even set during 1998. (Obviously spoiling some of this)

Basic premise is you got a normal character who is a bit of a ne’er do well, though his life isn’t really bad considering he’s got his own place, a job and a hawt girlfriend with an obviously better job than he does (He’s a bartender at a dive bar and she’s a paramedic)

It’s shown in a flashback later, but he basically fucked up his dreams of playing professional baseball by getting into a car accident that destroyed his leg enough that he wasn’t going to running as fast anymore. Plus he killed his best friend in this accident since he was drinking and driving and generally not paying attention to the road like he should have.

Still all things considered he doesn’t have it all that bad, until his next door punk rock neighbor runs off to England to go see his dying dad suddenly. Tells him to watch his cat while he’s gone. He’s not gone one day and already there’s a pair of Russian thugs asking him where the neighbor is and then proceed to beat the shit out of him so damn badly, he wakes up in the hospital with one less kidney since it was ruptured in the beating.

And it just gets worse for him from there.

As is tradition in these movies, there’s a couple different factions of gangsters and they’re all fucking with the main character. Also nobody is ever just a plain old gangster in these either, they always gotta have odd quirks. One faction are these two hasidic jews that have a really violent reputation. The other faction involves the russian guys, though one of them talks in sing song English at times and just gets violent over the most minor of shit. There’s a Puerto Rican guy with them as well though he’s probably the most “traditional” of the gangsters.

Wouldn’t also be one of these without a corrupt cop involved, then of course there’s the punk rock English neighbor who got him into all this in the first place. The cat plays an important role all throughout the movie too.

Though as often with these things, the whole thing started over bad timing, wrong place at the wrong time and a major misunderstanding.

Basically the gangsters thought the punk was ripping them all off for the large amount of money he was holding for all of them, but the truth is, he really WAS just briefly visiting his dying dad and they all just jumped to the conclusion he took off with all the money which he still had safely hidden for all of them. The protagonist just got caught in the middle of the shit since he was looking after the cat and the Russians kicked his ass when they saw him trying to go into the apartment.

There’s at least one thing that happens in the movie that is a bit surprising is the protagonist’s girlfriend gets killed about a little under halfway through. I sort of figured she’d be helping him or or he might have to save her at some point, but nope, she flat out gets a bullet to the head off screen and he’s just in time to find her corpse. At that point he’s already lost a kidney fairly early in the movie so it does sort of show how deep of shit he’s actually in.

It does play out very much like one of those crime movies from that era I mentioned, I’d really say the only “modern update” might be is the protagonist isn’t too cool to get upset about his situation. If it was a genuine movie from that era, the protagonist would probably be shrugging everything off emotionally and smoke a bunch of cigarettes or something similar.

But he actually breaks down to cry a couple times which really is understandable given his situation. He’s also not really a killer and never goes around suddenly killing his enemies except towards the very end when he finds out it’s the two Jews that killed his girlfriend. Which was a fuck up on their part since by that point in the movie, they’re actually cool with him and even willing to give him a large amount of the retrieved money, but one pulls out a lighter that was his girlfriend’s so he instantly knows who killed her now. He ends up emulating the way he killed his best friend accidentally by driving into a concrete pillar and the Jews weren’t wearing seatbelts. (They were letting him drive since it was the Shabbat)

Anyway he gets all the money, sends half of it to his mom and goes to a foreign country to lay low. It’s a victory, but he still lost his girlfriend (and kidney) so it wasn't without cost.

As I said, it’s a cool movie if you like that genre and style.

Oh and here’s a racial outlook on the movie for shits and giggles.

It’s a true white man’s movie, since he’s a blonde Nordic type originally from a small wholesome town and manages to overcome:

Slavic degenerates (Russians)
Violent darkies (Puerto Rican)
DEIs part of the ZOG machine (Black female corrupt cop)
And of course let us not forget the Hasidic Jews who are probably considered the most evil and violent in the movie.

Hell when he realizes they killed his girlfriend, they sort of lord it over him a bit saying he really brought that on himself for running earlier. They sort of figure that the fact they’re willing to let him live AND give him some of the money that he’s not going to do shit and he’ll just accept things like a good little goy.

Of course all this racial fun flies out the window due to the fact that his girlfriend was some light skinned black chick unless we want to go with the idea that he was just exercising his right as a white imperialist conqueror of pussy no matter what the color.

Anyway, I liked it a lot.

The trailers looked very interesting.

The protagonist also looks cute.

The Long Walk and HIM (The Movies)

Alright another two movies I’m not going to spend too much time on. One of them had a pretty simple premise already shown in the trailers and the other was a mess of “meh”

Long Walk first

So you know that saying of “maybe the real x was the friends we made along the way?” Yeah that’s basically this movie except all the friends are getting their brains blown out.

It’s set in some dystopic version of the US where there’s a lottery for 1 male volunteer from each state to go on this long walk to win fabulous prizes. It doesn’t go into too much detail why things are this shit, but apparently there was some great war that drained the economy and this walk is supposed to instill the good old fashion American value of discipline and work ethic.

I sort of question if this is the greatest way of accomplishing that. Seems like a better idea to just draft the young men into some sort of work detail to rebuild the country rather than some endurance test to kill all but one of them, but whatever.

I guess things can’t be too bad though if this is all still voluntary. I mean it’s not Hunger Games or even Running Man level. Not to mention there’s apparently still 50 states.

Why there’s no female volunteers, well because they’re presumably more useful to stay home to make more babies and sandwiches rather than getting their brains blown out. Though there is a female soldier you see among the military so there’s still some not confined to tradwife status.

Anyway, the two main protagonists are this country white boy and this nomadic black dude. There’s also a couple other guys part of the friend group, like another black dude and an AZN guy, but you expect it’s going to be either the country white boy or the nomadic black dude.

Other characters are this one guy who’s a fucking asshole to everyone, one dude who is really in shape and it’s really obvious he’s the Major’s son even near the beginning of this endurance test. There’s an american Indian guy, a really young guy, some dumb ass who wants to write a book about this, etc.

Finally there’s the Major played by Luke Skywalker and of course he’s yelling the usual military slogans about honor, balls, and such.

The title drop doesn’t even happen until about 10 or 15 minutes in when the youngest guy gets a cramp and gets his head blown off first.

As the long walk goes on, various people start dropping due to fucking up their ankles, having the shits, getting suicidal, attempting to run, etc. At one point during the first night the military is just blasting fuckers because they’re getting sleepy and falling below the appointed speed.

I will say the movie delivers on the blood/gore since like I said, you’re seeing brains just getting splattered on more than one occasion graphically. One guy even gets his legs run over by the fucking tank and they’re hilariously still giving the warning for him to start walking before he gets shot.

Beside all this, the dudes are all forming their friendship bonds, talking about their feelings and shit, because y’know life and death situations allow guys to bond rather than say some girly sleep over where they paint each others nails and grope each other.

So yeah the movie is a bit of a male bonding movie, in fact you might even say it’s somewhat of the main focus. I’ll spoil the ending mainly because there isn’t much to spoil, you sort of know it’s going to be one of the two main guys winning.

But I’ll give some of the other subplots going on first. White dude wants to win to get close enough to kill the Major for killing his dad years earlier over reading some banned books. When he secretly tells the black dude this, the black dude sort of starts pleading with him that vengeance isn’t enough and if he does win, he needs to go back home to his mom and enjoy life. Black dude is more or less a zen type since he had a really rough time growing up and he’s changed his criminal ways now.

Arguably they both would’ve lost to the Major’s bastard son, but he had the unfortunate timing of getting sick during the walk. He admits to being his son and he entered to prove to his father that he was worthy to go live in his big house.

Anyway it’s the black dude that wins, since the white guy stops the black dude from sacrificing himself and instead sacrifices himself instead. Then the black dude fulfills the white guy’s wish of killing the Major at the end before walking off.

All well and good, though sort of defeats what the hell the black guy was going on about earlier of embracing life and not giving into hate. Sort of figured he’d get capped immediately after, but he doesn’t and like I said he just walks off and the movie ends. Which sort of gives a potential dream/imagination interpretation of the ending.

What I mean by this, is at the end there’s actually a large crowd cheering them both on at this point and after the Major gets shot and the black dude walks off, everyone is just gone. The crowd and even the other soldiers. Makes it seem like maybe this was something going on in the black dude’s head before he got shot and the white guy never actually saved him and won all along.

Well either way, the movie was good enough for a watch.

Moving on to HIM.

So again sort of figured this whole movie was going to be one those black ones using horror symbolism to show systemic racism and how the whole sports shit is a glorified slave market run by old rich white folks, etc.

And it does touch on that, but it never does that great of a job of it. Basic premise is you got one young black dude that’s an up and coming star and an older black guy that’s been a star for a long time and it’s getting near that time to potentially pass the torch.

So new black gets a bad head injury from some crazed fan and the potential future of his career is in question, but he gets invited personally to old black’s private home in the middle of nowhere to train to see if he’s got what it takes.

What ensues is just intense training at first, but soon gets weirder with more crazed fans, a lot of drug injections, blood transfusions, etc. Ultimately you already know where this is going, new black has to kill old black to replace him. The blood transfusions are blood from one old mentor passed down since the beginning of the game and then its all some weird white people cult shit with pig masks and then a sufficient blood bath at the end where new black refuses to sign the contract and kills them all, but it’s ultimately just a mess of a movie.

Really missed a lot of opportunity to have more psychological horror where they fuck with his family/girlfriend/etc. Could’ve thrown in a weird Diddy Party thing in there as part of the whole “losing your soul” thing.

Anyway, yeah it’s not great which is why I’m not even bothering to go over any more of the movie.

This is what men do.

Its also basically the idea of enjoying the moment of friendship while you can, etc. There's really only 2 guys actively going on about being the winner and hoping the rest die. And one of them offs himself over the guilt of getting one of the guys killed due to mocking him to the point that he fucks up his walking speed by falling over while trying to punch the asshole.

The other one is the Major's son and he's fairly quiet about it other than a few lines here and there.

As for the ending, it could've been exactly how it looked and I'm looking into shit that isn't there. It just seemed odd though that there could be a different interpretation.

Good Boy (The Movie)

First off the basic premise is a horror movie from the point of view of a dog. Yep, that’s the gimmick for this one.

Now what this movie does is several ideas and none of them are exactly new, but it’s probably new in that they shoved all the ideas together.

So let’s get the POV thing out of the way first. Horror movies in recent years have been messing about with this lately. In a Violent Nature (Reviewed earlier in this thread!) had the whole POV from the actual slasher chopping up folks. That one did it pretty well for what they were going for. (Basically an artfag Jason film) Apparently there was another horror movie from the ghost’s perspective, I didn’t see that one though so dunno if sucked or not.

So why not a movie with a dog’s POV right? Well, it has been done before and I’m not just talking about some Benji movie (Does anyone remember Benji?) I mean it’s actually been done in horror before. There’s a horror anthology series called VHS and in one of those horror shorts, the camcorder was literally hooked up to a dog, so you were getting all the “found footage” from the dog’s POV as it ran about.

This movie actually doesn’t do that. Which may or may not be a cheat depending on your strict adherence to POV. Personally I feel the movie still qualifies because the camera still for the most part always follows the dog or is shot from the perspective of what the dog would be looking at. In only one major instance does it deviate from this since it focuses on the dog’s owner for a long while near the end before the dog shows up again. (Even in In a Violent Nature deviated from the gimmick towards the end)

New or not, it’s rare enough in a horror movie that I didn’t mind watching it for the gimmick.

Okay so next thing, is it real or is it just all symbolistic faggotry?

Well there’s a shitload of horror movies that do the whole “This monster is just metaphor for X and there actually was nothing supernatural at all!” This movie does something very similar. And while you could watch it and believe something supernatural is going on, even before midway through you’re sort of getting impression that this is one of those symbolic movies. Two that immediately come to mind are Babadook (Because that’s one of the more popular ones of that type) and Him (Since I saw that recently)

So what’s the symbolism? Well I’ll just spoil the whole thing.

The dog’s owner has cancer, like the type you don’t get better from. Even the beginning of movie starts out with him in a comatose state, bleeding from the nose and his sister finding him before calling for an ambulance.

The owner ends up going to his grandfather’s old home in the woods to rest up, because he doesn’t want to spend more time in the hospital resting up. Of course the dog (Or Indy as he’s called) is with him and being a dog he’s interpreting things in his dog like way.

Now you could believe the dog is seeing ghosts, but what this probably is, is Indy interpreting things based on his sniffing. For example there’s a bit where Indy sees the grandfather’s dog and follows him to a location. What’s really happening though is Indy is just catching the scent of the old dog and where he wandered.

They try to mix things up and have you guessing due to the sister occasionally calling the owner and going on about grandpa’s house being haunted since she’s superstitious (Indy’s owner isn’t though). The grandfather died (also implied to be cancer) in the house with a dog which they never found (Turns out the dog was in a separate part of the cellar long dead). There’s times where Indy is physically grabbed by an entity of some sort. He even winds up locked in the basement and the owner doesn’t know how he got there when he’s looking for him.

Well it could be a ghost, however the explanation is simpler. It’s all Indy’s owner doing this shit due to his brain cancer fucking him up. All throughout the movie he’s getting worse to the point where he’s doing shit like banging his head on a door repeatedly and isn’t even aware he’s doing it until Indy nips at him to stop. Indy is just interpreting his owner as a monster because he’s acting in a hostile way when he’s grabbing him roughly or something similar.

So how’s it all end? Well the dog’s owner dies and this is the only bit where you could say some supernatural stuff for certain is happening, though even then it could be explained away as more symbolism. (And probably is)

Indy’s owner wakes up and he’s calling for him and then while the camera is focused solely on him and his actions for awhile, he sees himself in his bed, bleeding from the nose dead. All of this causes him to freak out, Indy pops up again and the entity shows up to grab the owner and drags him down into the basement and then into a dark cave in there. Indy actually runs after his owner through the separate cellar door outside and drags him back out of the cave only for the entity to pop up again.

The entity disappears and it’s just the owner covered in the same black goo as the entity. The owner tells Indy that he’s a good dog, but he can’t be saved and needs to stay. Owner gets dragged back into the cave.

Later the sister shows up at the house and opens up the cellar door outside and you can tell she’s already upset from her voice. She sees the grandfather's dog’s corpse thinking it’s Indy at first but then she see Indy and calls for him to come out.

Indy looks back at the dark cave a few times, and then leaves the cellar (Go into the light boy!)

Credits roll with Indy in the car with his head hanging out the window.

THE END

(So no the dog didn’t die which I’m sure would be a relief to most except Petros)

That actually wasn’t quite the end of the movie though, after the very short credits, the director of the movie pops up with Indy (Which is his dog in real life) and says as a thank you for seeing the movie in the theater there’s a short bit of how they made the movie to make it look like Indy was more expressive than he actually was and how they got him to do certain things. Things like trick of the camera angles, the lighting, how long it took, etc.

“The key thing to keep in mind, is Indy has no idea he’s actually in a movie.”

It was sort of a neat thing to have as an extra that you’d normally only see on a Bluray/DVD.

So yeah I guess you could say I liked it well enough that I didn’t mind seeing it. I wasn’t even disappointed. Though one might wonder why I tolerated this more than say Him or Babadook, both of which I didn’t like.

Well I suppose you could say I cared more about the dog and I don’t care about whining children, hysterical women or black people. (Not necessarily in that order)

Also because I watched this movie which is from a dog’s point of view, I am now a fearsome Pomeranian because apparently that’s just how it works when you read/watch something from a perspective different from your own. Of course the title was “Good Boy” so I’m still a male dog and not a bitch so it’s okay.

And the dog did not die! We like that. And I've heard good things about this one. I'm glad it seems you enjoyed it too.

Tron: Ares (The Movie)

A little late on this one, meant to write something up about it soon after I saw it, but well it’s just not a movie I really felt like writing anything about.

But I’ll try anyway.

This isn’t to say I didn’t like the movie because I thought it was fine. Probably better than I expected, but I tend to like the Tron movies/concept for whatever reason and I think if you’re already into the series you’ll like it, if you aren’t then you probably won’t.

I think this one was a little better than the last sequel, mainly because I can barely even remember what the hell happened in the second movie. I just remember Flynn’s son ended up having an adventure, and gave up control of his dad’s company because he made his cyber waifu a real life girl and rode off into the sunset with her.

They kind of attempted a “back to basics” thing of making the Dillinger family the main villains again. Or rather his grandson techbro. (Nice portrait of old David Warner hanging up on the office wall looking menacing though) He’s trying to steal the code that can make virtual world shit become permanent in the real world. Naturally he’s got an army of programs that are attempting to do this, but it sort of backfires when they all start going rogue (As toasters do) Ares turning completely against him and helping the good guys, while Athena just starts following orders so literally that she starts being more destructive than he intended to carry out his goals.

I think probably the most laughable thing in the movie is the idea that the one corporation is “good.” Even without the cyberpunk genre and using just real life as an example we should ALL know you can’t trust corpos. Though it is a Disney movie so a bit of black and white morality is going to be the norm here.

I feel like the whole series is now basically “The Matrix…for kids!” Though again probably the only ones that are mildly enjoying the series are old people like me that saw the original and are stuck in the 80s. (Hell, there’s even a retro bit where Ares enters an area that looks more like original movie with the graphics)

It does end with some hints at a sequel which probably means we’ll get another one in 15 years or so.

I’m probably more surprised that Disney went back to the Tron series at all given that the last sequel didn’t do all that well. Actually the original didn’t do all that well either, Tron seems to be that series that Disney keeps trying to resurrect but failing at. I imagine they’re determined to get that nostalgia money and think it’s going to draw in a new audience as well, but this doesn’t really work for this series. Though I guess they can afford to take some risks given the shitloads of marvel/star wars slop they can just churn out for quick cash.

Still, if they got that much money burning a hole in their infinite bags of loot to take risks, I’d rather see them bring back Black Cauldron next time.

I would love to know what executive thought it was a good idea to cast Jared Leto

Apparently he practically funded the movie which I didn't know until I just looked it up. No wonder Disney didn't give a shit, they weren't spending much.

As far as Jared is concerned, I never really a gave a shit about him one way or another though I see a lot of people really hate the dude for whatever reason. Not sure if this was always the case or just after he played the Joker that one time since I could've swore folks liked him before that.

Predator: Badlands (The Movie)

A movie with a Predator protagonist and it’s a family friendly one.

While I know that Disney has been buying up everything I actually didn’t realize they’d bought the Predator franchise and it definitely shows in this movie.

First off it’s a PG-13 Predator movie. Again I didn’t even realize it was until I was already going into it. Not exactly a new thing though since the first Alien vs Predator movie was PG-13 and still had killing in it, just not the spine ripping, skinned bodies stuff.

And this movie certainly does have a shitload of killing, however there isn’t a single human in it. Any “humans” you might’ve seen in the trailers are ALL synths.

And since alien and toaster lives also don’t matter, there’s no reason to have an R rating

However, there’s a bit more than just no red blood that make this a “family friendly” predator movie.

First off is the inclusion of the damaged overly talkative toaster chick that he stumbles on making quirky comments throughout the movie. Though I was sort of prepared for that again based on the trailers. I figured they needed the extra character to do the heavy lifting for the dialog for the audience.

Though personally I would’ve been fine with just the predator by himself killing shit, and making his weird noises without even any sub-titles and fuck you if you couldn’t keep up.

The second thing though was definitely one of those things shoved in for the kids. At some point in the movie, a smaller creature on this death world starts tagging along with him and it’s basically the movie’s version of baby Yoda, complete with the wide cutesy eyes.

So besides the Disneyfication of yet another franchise is it still worth watching. Well I didn’t mind it. Certainly was better than the Predator movie back in 2018. (Which I can’t even remember that well since it just didn’t grab me)

At it’s core its basically about him trying to impress his dad who thinks he’s a big faggot that shouldn’t even be alive. So naturally he goes to some death world to go hunt the biggest fucking monster on the planet. The problem though isn’t just everything on the world trying to kill him, it’s that the infamous Wayland-Yuntani corp is there also trying to capture the thing in their usual attempt to make a bioweapon out of everything with disastrous results.

Probably one surprising thing is that WY actually used toasters for the mission rather than just throwing human lives away as acceptable losses. Must’ve overhauled their HR department or something.

Also I suppose with WY being in the movie, this ties the Alien franchise to the Predator one once again. I know there was an attempt of getting away from that, but looks like it’s a thing again, if it ever truly went away. Pretty sure there's some easter egg references to not just past movies, but others as well. Like I think one of the skulls you see is from an alien from Independence Day, because sure why not throw another crossover into the mix.

Anyway if you’re into the predator movies and you can look past some of the Disney shit, it’s worth at least a watch.

Silent Night Deadly Night (The Movie)

This film is a remake of the old 1984 movie, so comparisons are going to be the main focus.

Horror remakes tend to have better chance at being just as good as the original than most other genre remake attempts. There’s multiple reasons for this of course, but the main one is usually horror movies tend to have simpler plot, especially if it was a slasher to begin with.

Typically what is done is to just redo the original and modernize it a bit. Increasing the blood and guts level is usually done since you can put more of that in a movie than you might have been able to back in the 20th century (With some exceptions of course) Usually this approach more or less works, especially if you throw in a couple of nods to the OG version.

Deviating from that tried and true method can have mixed results. For example Rob Zombie’s Halloween did the whole Michael Myers backstory which sort of provided a bit more background than just MM being some evil force of nature, but most didn’t like that. Though it doesn’t help that the first Halloween is one of those sacred cow horror movies that’s considered untouchable so remaking it considered unthinkable.

We can take the Psycho remake as an example of pretty much coloring by the numbers step by step and people STILL hated it. Why? Well because Vince Vaughn is a terrible actor for one, and two it was another movie where it’s a sacred cow that didn’t need to be remade.

Fortunately for Silent Night Deadly Night it was never held in as high regard when it first came out. In fact it managed to get banned in several theater by meddling pearl clutchers while critics bashed it all to hell. Of course in usual fashion this probably helped it do better than it normally would have. Hell it even did better than Nightmare on Elm Street at the time.

But it had its time and then it went into more of a cult status rather than horror icon. A bunch of straight to video sequels of only the second movie I bothered to even watch (and that movie was half made up of all the kills from the first movie!). Only the first movie is really known to any degree, though the second one probably has the most memed line of “It’s Garbage Day!”

Still, it’s probably a bit surprising that it took this long for someone to remake it, especially when there’s been lesser horror movies already remade. Maybe it was a rights issue or something.

So is the remake better or worse? Does it just retell the same story or does it do something different?

It actually manages to balance the different and the similar pretty well. First off it definitely goes in a different direction as far as the killer Santa goes.

Billy in the original is a boy who got trolled by his crazy grandpa of Santa actively punishing folks who were bad and then later that same night gets traumatized by seeing a criminal dressed as Santa kill his dad and try to rape his mom before killing her too. Then he gets raised in an orphanage run by a sadistically strict Mother Superior nun who beats him.

So it’s little wonder that when he grows up and is working at a toy store, he snaps the night they make him dress up like Santa and he goes on a killing spree.

The OG movie isn’t really played for laughs, but of course if you’re a twisted sort (Like me) you’d probably laugh at a few unintentional bits like the cops accidentally wasting a deaf priest dressed as Santa in front of kids since he couldn’t hear them telling him to get down on the ground.

Alright spoilers for the remake!

The remake does a major thing different immediately. Billy still talks to his grandpa, but grandpa just dies coughing up blood in front of him instead of trolling him. Then on the drive home  Billy’s parents get killed by a killer Santa. It dispenses with his immediate childhood after and jumps ahead to him being a young adult and having a dead body in the bathroom in the motel room he’s sleeping in. He’s also hearing a deep voice that’s speaking with him and telling him who to kill and what not to do, etc.

He drifts into a small town and gets a job at a small shop as a stock boy and starts connecting with the shop owner’s daughter who also works there. She’s a bit weird too as it turns out. Namely has an explosive temper to the point of getting violent. She’s also got an ex-boyfriend cop who she broke up with due to punching her in the face.

So for quite some time, the movie sort of leads you to believe that Billy’s just hearing a voice in his head like a crazy person. It isn’t really until the movie is nearly over that you get the whole story though.

What’s basically going on is a Dexter like situation. And if I had to pick another influence, then a lesser known horror movie called Frailty (A cool movie with Bill Paxton) seems like it might have been drawn from.

Basically Billy isn’t really a psycho slasher at all in this one, or at least not one targeting innocent people. Everyone he targets has some sort of dark past they’re hiding which typically means they’re killers themselves. This isn’t quite apparent at first, though by the time he gets to the Nazi slaughter house, you can tell something more is going on.

Yeah, there’s a whole splatter scene where he’s hunting some woman who is detected as a “naughty” person and when he gets there, it’s a big Nazi Christmas party. So he ends up killing them all, even against the voice telling him to not get reckless and to at least take a gun.

As Billy explains it later to his girlfriend, when his parents got killed, his mom managed to get in a good stiletto heel stab to the killer’s neck before he blew her away with a shotgun. Billy however felt compelled to grab killer Santa’s hand and that’s when something supernatural happens which is Charlie’s spirit (The Killer Santa) jumps into Billy and explains what the score is.

He waits until Billy is 17 before he makes him kill anyone though since he needed to be old enough to be ready. First kill was his abusive foster mom who was routinely beating all the kids she took in and collecting the money.

Oh in case you were wondering, Billy's parents were assholes that had fucked with grandpa's meds to kill him for inheritance shortly before Billy went in to visit him. Which is why Charlie targeted them (He was a janitor at the nursing home)

He only kills around Christmas though. Basically he uses an advent calendar to track everything (Putting a bloody fingerprint in the box in a Dexter like trophy collection). And the general rule is, he HAS to kill someone or else he loses control and will potentially kill an innocent. It is implied a few times that this has happened, but they don’t really show any flashbacks about it. This is why Charlie didn’t really want Billy getting involved with the shop owner’s daughter and at one point Charlie even has to talk him down from potentially killing a little girl while dressed as Santa (Dressing as Santa is more of a flip switch that gets him more in the killing mood)

Meanwhile there’s also this ongoing bit where there’s someone going to various small towns in the area snatching kids. The kid snatcher ends up also killing the store owner all of which leads up to Billy telling his girlfriend the truth about himself since she’s going on about wanting revenge on the one who killed her dad. (Fortunately Billy is able to home in on the snatcher since seeing him on the video camera, Charlie is able to do the supernatural GPS thing.

This leads up to the climax of Billy killing the snatcher, but getting severely wounded in the process. He isn’t dead yet, but the ex-boyfriend makes him that way since he shoots him and he’s been following the two of them.

The girlfriend weeps over his dying body. Charlie tells Billy to grab her hand and then she gets the same spirit transfer except Charlie is gone and now it’s Billy’s voice speaking. Meanwhile the ex-boyfriend is seeing if she’s genuinely okay, but now when she looks at him, she sees that he was involved in covering for the snatcher by taking bribes. so she kills him and then it ends with her taking on the new role of the Christmas Avenger.

And that’s it for the movie.

Overall I liked it. It had a few nods to kills from the old movie (Like using deer head antlers to kill his foster mom and someone saying “It’s garbage day!”)

I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s better than the original though and was probably about the same level of enjoyment for me.

Avatar Fire and Ash (The Movie)

Alright I’m not going to spend much time on this one since I know everyone here is all into the franchise so they’re going to see it anyway.

One I’ll say right away is that this was probably the first Avatar movie I actually liked in its entirety.

The first one I definitely wasn’t impressed with. And while I didn’t hate it I still stand by the by the fact that it was Dances With Wolves IN SPACE so it didn’t do much new and I’ve never been into the whole “White dude goes native to help the savages” shit.

And no it’s not out of some hatred of “white savior” trope (I’m fine with that obviously), it’s more the case I just don’t like traitors. And Jake’s a fucking traitor to humanity for a piece blue tail. (Literally, not just her blue ass) That’s all there is to it.

Also didn’t help you had faggots hyped up about this movie so much one of them actually popped his cork because real life would never be as “beautiful” as the Avatar movie. What a fucktard, he missed out on all the future movies.

So by the time the second movie came out, I was going to ignore it, but to my surprise everyone here is a damn Avatar fanatic (Not the ones that popped their cork over it though obviously). Or at least all the important people are. Something about how it’s better than all the marvel shit that’s churned out, etc.

And well yeah of course it is, but that’s a pretty fucking low bar. As far as I was concerned, Avatar is in the same league as the same dumb ass blockbuster Marvel movie with a lot of flashy shit going on. Didn’t do anything new or impressive, I don’t care how pretty it looks.

Well not wishing to look like an outsider, I decided well fine I’ll give it another shot, maybe there’s something I missed or something. (Plus I didn’t have anything better to do and I can’t really be too much of a movie snob for someone that watches people getting their heads sawed off for fun)

So I saw the second one and it was alright. I liked it at least better than the first that I almost had a facial expression.

I think my problem with that one was there were parts that just felt too unecessarily long. Probably would’ve liked it better if it had been about the length of the original one (That one was 30 minutes shorter than the second) Probably was a good idea to bring Miles back since he was pretty much the only reason I tolerated the first one.

Well at this point I’m invested in the series enough that I had to at least see this one and whether I saw any more or not depended on how good this one was. So I saw this one and as I said before I liked the whole thing. As far as I’m concerned this is the best of the movies so far. Seeing as there’s supposed to be only two more planned, I suppose this means I’ll be seeing those as well, even if the next one ends up sucking worse than the first one.

Hell this one was even a few minutes longer than the second one, but none of it really felt like filler. I actually felt like “Yeah, they needed about this long to tell the story.” (It's clocking in at a little over the 3 hour mark)

I’m sure of this was helped once again by having Miles in it a lot more. The interactions with him and his new crazy fire obsessed girlfriend was pretty amusing. The fire queen in general was a fun character. Even Jake’s wife wasn’t boring this time, she’s actually sort of racist in this for awhile which was cool since she wanted to kill Miles’ son a few times. He’s probably the most annoying character anyway.

Other stuff that made this better is expanding the lore a bit more. Introduces some new tribes you haven’t seen before. Not just the new fire bad guys, but there’s a tribe that just goes trading with the other tribes all over, using these balloon like creatures to fly around. They're supposed to be in it more in the next two movies. Humans got a lot more of a foothold on the planet too.

Anyway if you’re into the series already, I can’t imagine you won’t like this one too.

Primate (The Movie)

Okay so did you see the movie Nope and wonder what it would’ve been like if it had just focused on a chimp murdering the shit out of everyone?

If so then this wouldn’t quite match up.

Granted a chimp murdering the shit out of everyone would still happen, but the reasons would be quite different. The chimp in that one was chimping out mainly due to a mixture of bad training, probably bad treatment, stress, and a sudden snap that put him over the edge.

In this movie, it’s just plain old rabies. So it’s more like Cujo with a chimp instead.

And well, that’s about it. I mean I could go into more detail, but there’s not too much point. You’re watching this mainly to see a chimp kill people. It sort of gets going fairly quickly with the murderous ape action. The chimp gets rabies from a mongoose bite and steadily goes more insane and violent. He starts also looking a lot nastier as well. He rips a dude’s face off, rips another’s jaw off, beats some women to death, etc.

Probably could’ve at least used one groin attack, given that is definitely one of the main areas chimps target when they attack besides the face.

There are a few nods to other horror movies, specifically Halloween as there’s a very John Carpenter style synth music at one point during the chimp out. He even bashes down a flimsy closet door (with those slats) at one point like Michael Myers did in Halloween.

Anyway that’s about it. If you’re interested in seeing a chimp kill people well this is the movie that has that in abundance and it’s cool enough for a watch.

It’s no WARCHIMP though.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (The Movie)

This sequel pretty much takes place soon after the last one ended. It’s also less of a sequel and more like the second part of a much longer movie since it’s clearly following the characters introduced in the last movie. Specifically Dr. Ian Kelson, Jimmy and even Samson (The Alpha infected)

Spike is in the movie but he’s more of a secondary character and not really the protagonist. I’d actually say Ian and his interaction with Samson gets the most attention. Jimmy and his gang would be the other focus of which Spike is haplessly dragged along for that ride.

Probably spoilers ahead, but I won’t go into step by step detail.

So as I said the movie focuses a lot on Ian and his interaction with Samson who is still hostile and running at him with a big swinging dick (When he’s not killing other survivors). Ian keeps drugging him and attempting to “tame” him in increments. First he cleans up some of his wounds and speaks to him and from there Alpha sort of keeps returning to the Bone Temple as if he is struggling to not act like a rabid animal.

Ian has to keep him drugged of course to interact with him for short periods of time and eventually he even gets him to speak a word as opposed to just growling and yelling. Samson at one point returns to a derailed train car and has a bit of a flashback to when he was a kid and all this shit went down. He temporarily even snaps out of his rage virus condition which isn’t great at that time since now all his fellow infected now see him as not like them and he’s gotta fight his way through them. (He’s still got his unnatural rage strength so he wins)

Meanwhile Spike gets pressed ganged into the Jimmy cult after he manages to kill one of them in a fight. While they’re all called “Jimmy” the leader goes by “Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal”

And yes of course it’s entirely based on the look of the infamous pedo Jimmy Savile. Though Lord Crystal is more of a Satanist who claims he’s “Old Nick’s” son and is doing his work by going around torturing and killing folks or giving them “charity” as he calls it.

The rest of the Jimmys are all a bit younger than he is and they all got secondary names added to Jimmy like Jimmy Ink who is basically his second in command. She’s less of a believer in all of Lord Crystal’s bullshit, and more of a pragmatist that is along for the ride since it’s safer to be in a group though she does sort of buy into the idea of the devil especially when she stumbles upon seeing Ian interacting with Samson at the Bone Temple through binoculars.

It all comes to a head when the Jimmy gang and the Doctor finally meet.

You sort of find out too that Lord Crystal isn’t completely batshit crazy that believes his own bullshit. He actually has a whole private conversation with Dr Ian (At first he really does wonder if he’s the devil due to all the bones and the doctor’s skin being covered in the stuff that stops the infection)

They end up going on about the times before the infection and such, but he explains that he needs the Doctor to put on a performance that he really is the devil so he can keep his gang in line and such. (Because at that point Spike is clearly not displaying the appropriate amount of enthusiasm for murder and even Jimmy Ink is talking back to him a lot) Of course the other option is not to help him and he’ll just kill him instead.

The doctor agrees and it’s a hilarious performance he puts on as he sets up lanterns all over the temple, blasts Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast and dresses up a bit more outlandishly while singing and dancing around. Ralph Fiennes was doing a lot of dancing and singing in general in this movie since he’s periodically listening to other 80s Brit bands. (Seems like he probably had fun with this role)

It’s all going as planned more or less until Ian recognizes Spike and at that point the doctor changes shit up by claiming Lord Crystal needs to “ascend” by getting crucified and then orders his gang to do it. Well as you might expect this results in a lot of folks getting stabbed and killed. Jimmy Ink or Kelly as you find out her real name is and Spike are about the only survivors.

Lord Crystal gets crucified upside down by Kelly before she leaves with Spike. Ian gets to see Samson one last time before he dies who thanks him. It’s not entirely clear if he’s completely cured, but he’s definitely more aware than he was. Lord Crystal eventually gets eaten by other infected.

It then cuts to some time later where you see Jim from the very first movie living in a home where he’s home schooling his daughter. She’s part black so one can assume this is the offspring he had with the black woman from that first movie, though she’s nowhere to be seen so she might be dead.

In any case lit ends with the daughter seeing Kelly and Spike running from some infected and after a brief moment of wondering if they should help them, Jim decides they will and then they rush off to assist.

The End

This one goes back more with the idea that “Humans are the real monsters” thing since Jimmy and his gang are running around torturing and murdering folks for shits and giggles (Or for Satan specifically) as opposed to the Infected who are just murdering and eating folks because well okay they’re still monsters too.

Still, the Jimmy gang is more interesting than just a bunch of army dudes that suddenly turn RAPIST for no reason after only a month.

Also delved more into the idea of someone actually trying to cure the infected since Ian risks his life more than a few times hanging around Samson even if he is drugged.

Anyway it’s a good second part to 28 Years Later, I liked it.

Housemaid (The Movie)

So the trailers to this one made it seem like it was more of a horror movie with a family that looks normal but there’s fucked up shit going on behind closed doors and some young woman getting roped into the madness.

However, it’s a bit different than that. In fact I didn’t even know this was based on a book which was apparently a “psychological thriller” (Kittywow!)

The movie is definitely more in the thriller genre so that checks out. The psychological part, yeah that’s there too.

Amusingly the movie also seems to be classified as an “EROTIC psychological thriller” as opposed to just a plain old psychological thriller like the book. I suppose maybe some of that is in there. There’s certainly one section that stands out in that regard and it comes off like some visual version of a romance novel.

However, I’d switch out “erotic” for “feminist” really since the overall theme is ultimately more about women managing to get their independence back from a shit situation rather than “This guy is really hawt and making all my dreams come true!”

But I’ll get into it being gurl powar or not later. Right now I’m spoiling this shit as always.

Okay so the movie starts off with a young woman named Millie interviewing for a live-in housemaid position at some richie household. The woman (Nina) says she’ll be in touch and Millie drives off with pessimism that she won’t get hired. Things are actually worse than just her not being able to get a job, since she’s currently living in her car AND you find out later she NEEDS to have a job since she’s out on parole and has to be employed to stay out of prison.

She gets hired and she’s pretty happy about it since she not only has a job, but she’s also got a place to sleep too. Her room is a small one at the top of the house which is also sound proofed with a deadbolt door. (Already it’s suspicious) She ends up meeting the rest of the family which consist of Nina’s biological daughter Cece and her husband Andrew who basically is a Chad looking motherfucker. He works at some techbro company he got due to his dad.

There’s also a Mexican groundskeeper who keeps staring at Millie and sort of warning her, but doing it in such a creepy way that she’s put off by him.

Anyway, things start to go south almost immediately with Nina getting into hysterics and bitching at Millie for shit she hasn’t even done. This takes Millie off guard since Nina was pretty nice to her at first. Meanwhile Andrew’s doing a lot of consoling of his wife while also reassuring Millie that everything will be fine and she doesn’t need to worry about her suddenly losing her job since it gets to the point where Nina’s threatening to fire her. Nina giving conflicting orders is an ongoing thing.

Also she starts hearing Nina’s rich bitch buddies talk shit about her saying how Nina was once locked up in an insane asylum for nearly trying to kill herself AND her daughter and how Andrew staying with her is a saint because loves her so much. They’re all wet and jealous over this guy though Millie also is having dreams about Andrew as well which she definitely knows isn’t good idea especially since Nina warns her to stay away from her husband after seeing them a bit too friendly with one another.

The other bit that’s going on is Nina and Andrew are supposed to be trying for a baby, but it’s not going well in that department.

Which of course is already leading to Andrew looking at Millie a little closer what with her being younger and perfect for such things. He even goes on about how Nina used to be so much better and cements the whole crazy bit by saying her parents both died in a fire when she was little and their were rumors that she might’ve caused the fire herself. A touch here, a touch there, etc. It all comes to a head when the wife is out of town and Andrew and Millie go see a show together and then have dinner and then eventually fuck. (This would be the “erotic” scene I suppose)

After this happens there’s the whole thing of “This can’t happen again.” “I wish I met you before.” etc. Meanwhile Millie is half worried that’s she’s going to get fired again since Nina had been texting her the entire day and night she was having fun with her husband. But Nina comes home early and seems to be in good spirits, but suddenly lets it slip that Millie had been in prison for 10 years.

This leads to Millie to figure that Nina always knew about this and this allowed her to just treat her like shit because she knew she could get away with this. Andrew however doesn’t seem to care and says she doesn’t need to explain herself.

The last straw is Nina setting Millie up to get arrested by letting her borrow her car and giving her some dresses and then claiming she stole them. Nina already knew about them fucking since she had given Millie a phone to use and had been tracking it anyway. Andrew however has a lot of pull and gets her out of trouble AND lays down the law saying he can’t put up with Nina being cruel to Millie any longer and tells her to get the hell out of the house. Nina doesn’t have much choice since there was a whole airtight prenup so she wouldn’t get shit. Hell, she doesn’t even get custody of her own daughter because she’s crazy.

Nina drives off and breaks down crying while Millie starts enjoying her new status as Andrew’s soon to be tradwife. Pretty much starts showing them doing a lot of fucking and her cooking, and Andrew is even telling her that soon she won’t have to worry about doing any cooking or cleaning anymore and how he’ll take care of everything. Congrats, Millie hit the jackpot right?

Well not quite and even before it kicks in I figured something was going to be fucked up with the dude from the start.

So the groundskeeper is still lurking about and one day he’s staring directly at Millie from the door and this startles her enough that she breaks one of Andrew’s mom’s plates. This leads to Andrew firing the groundskeeper and he tells her it’s fine about the plate. He just tells her to get all the pieces and he knows a guy that can put it back together. (He also has fired the Mexican on the spot)

He comes back from work later with dinner and it shows him looking at the plate pieces in a plastic bag and then states that the plate hasn’t been washed. Millie thinks this is just him trying to be funny, but as he hugs her, he says the ominous words of “It’s okay, you’ll learn.”

So they go upstair to her old maid’s bedroom and fuck on the bed. However Millie passes out from the champaign though Andrew probably drugged it, because when she wakes up, just about everything in the room is missing apart from the bed she was on. The door is locked and she yelling to be let out. Andrew is on the other side and says he’ll let her out, just not yet and then he leaves as she’s banging on the door.

Okay so now this is where the movie does an info dump in visual form.

It cuts back to Nina when she was crying in the car, but it shows those cries turning into laughter and celebration. The next scene is her writing to her daughter and explaining her reasons for doing what she did. And here comes the flashback info dump.

So Nina dispels the rumor that she might’ve killed her own parents in a fire and just says it was an unfortunate event and she just got lucky with surviving though she sometimes wishes she hadn’t. She went from one foster home to another but through hard work she managed to get herself into college and was going to law school, but she got preggo by some charming professor.

Well the professor didn’t want anything to do with her or even his kid so she had to drop out of college and go to work to support them both and it was a constant struggle. However she ended up meeting Andrew at the company she worked for and he did the whole white knight routine of treating her well, being understanding, and basically solving all her problems.

They get married and it’s a fairy tale, but then one day she doesn’t dye her hair and her ROOTS are showing. He tells her and she says she’s got an appointment later. Well she forgets and he points it out again, but it doesn’t matter and asks if she can go get a document from his personal office upstairs which is that little housemaid room. She goes in finds it nearly empty and he locks her in.

Andrew tells her that she has to learn to be better and that she’s going to have to rip out 100 pieces of her hair and put them in an envelope he slides under the door. He needs to see those follicles!
So Nina holds out for awhile, but all she’s got is 3 little bottles of water and a bucket to use for the bathroom (Which is in a little crawlspace closet) eventually she worries about what will happen to her daughter so she pulls out her hair and gives it to Andrew in the envelope, but he returns saying ONE of the hairs didn’t have a follicle so she’s gotta start ALL over again. Hair is a privilege!

So now she pulls out another 100 hairs and he lets her out. She immediately runs to her daughter and gets to see her briefly before promptly passing out from the drugged bottle of water Andrew gave her just before. She wakes up later she’s getting taken away in cuffs due to Andrew gas lighting the whole thing of her trying to commit suicide with pills and trying to drown her daughter who had been placed in a tub of running water. He’s got cop connections so this works and Nina is in the insane asylum for quite awhile and once again she goes along with everything just to get her daughter back.

So she goes along with “the life” for awhile, but it’s not just about Andrew being a controlling psycho, it’s also about her not even being able to fit in with the upper society bitches, to say nothing of Andrew’s mother who is implied to be one of the reasons why Andrew became the way he is anyway. The Mexican groundskeeper is literally the only one she could sort of confide in since he noticed something was wrong and he tries to assist in her escape by getting passports.

And that plan doesn’t work. Andrew finds the passports and has her sent back to the asylum again. This is an ongoing process for her. And on top of all this Andrew’s been trying to get her preggo since his whole damn goal of doing this in the first place is to have a family, but Nina’s been doing shit to interfere with that process. Morning after pills and such. She even bribes a doc the last time to say she’s got something wrong with her girl parts. (This is about the time Andrew starts looking at Millie a lot more)

In the meantime the Mexican says he knows a guy that could just kill him, but she’s come up with her own plan to escape since she feels like murder would just make her situation worse. She can’t run though since Andrew’s going to just drag her back somehow. Andrew does have a weakness though, which is his constant need to be liked. So that’s when she came up with the solution to get Andrew to leave her and put in a want ad for a live in housemaid. The Mexican dude really doesn’t like the whole idea of just sacrificing another girl, but he keeps quiet (At least to Andrew)

And when Millie applied, so was perfect. Some young attractive blonde who had little in the way of options, desperate need of a job and more importantly had been to prison. From there she pretty much set up shit so that Andrew would be pushed more and more towards hooking up with her and Millie of course would no doubt would fall for Andrew much like she did since he’s good at the whole knight in shining armor routine.

And then it shows her secretly meeting her daughter who apparently got the message she wrote to her, though it’s a little weird because it implied she probably wouldn’t read this until she was 18 or unless Nina was dead. And it’s already sort of implying that Nina’s just going to take off to parts unknown with her daughter.

Meanwhile it shows Millie trapped in the little maid room.

And if this had been a horror movie, that’s probably how it would’ve ended. Actually that’s probably how I would’ve ended it.

However, the movie continues for good or ill.

So THEN it goes into a Millie inner monologue about how she’s figured it out that Nina set all this up in order to escape and good for her she guesses. Millie’s monologue goes into a flashback of how she went to prison in the first place which is when she was in a richie school on a cheerleader scholarship she found one of the “Andrews in training” RAEPING some girl and she smashed the back of his melon in with a blunt object, killing him. The rape victim didn’t step forward to back her up so she went to prison and managed to get a lesser sentence for manslaughter.

She also had a tough time keeping some of her other jobs upon getting out of prison since she clobbered some fat cook in the back of his head while he was molesting a waitress. (Not enough to kill this time though)

Anyway Andrew comes back with his mom’s plate and does the whole scolding routine saying how she needs to be better and all that. And her punishment is she’s gotta take the plate piece he slides under the door and slice her stomach 21 times for each piece the plate is in. And she’s gotta do it good and deep because if not, she’s just going to have to do it ALL over again.

So the next thing that happens while Millie’s taking a piss in a bucket, is she notices a small knife hidden in the crawlspace which was something Nina had been using at some point. Also while Nina is speaking with her daughter, Cece says that they should go back and get Millie even if Nina says Millie can take care of herself.

Millie carves herself up and Andrew of course has a camera in the room, so he knows when she’s done it and he finds her bleeding on the bed and he’s saying all this shit about how he loves her and how this was for her own good, etc. And then Millie promptly stabs him in between that bit where his neck and shoulder would be. After a bit of a scuffle, Millie manages to scramble out the door and lock it.

Now he’s yelling to be let out and she’s taunting him. Starts breaking all his mom’s special plates and such. She says she’ll let him out if he takes the pliers she slides under the door and pulls a tooth out with them. (Too obvious to pry one of his balls off with them I guess)

He refuses and claims he’s going to kill her, but she’s not impressed since she can easily kill him first and starts pouring gasoline around the door along with stating Nina must not have told him she had been in jail for murder. He relents and pulls his tooth out, sliding both under the door. She says she’ll come back tomorrow.

So at this point Nina retardedly goes back to the house and sees that the little maid room light is on. She figures Andrew already has Millie in time out, so she sneaks in to rescue. Millie is in Andrew’s mancave so now Nina figures that Andrew is in there since she hears the TV on. She sneaks upstair, but makes enough noise to alert Millie.

Millie screams at Nina just as she’s opening the maid door and now Andrew is so happy to see Nina, he pushes her down the stairs and then starts strangling her against the wall screaming that this is all her fault. Millie does her classic smashing a dude in the back of the head routine, but now his attention is just turned to her, but she manages to escape him.

Andrew returns to the house in defeat and finds Nina still there and in some weird attempt to recoup his losses, he tries to claim he knows when he’s wrong and how he’ll be better, etc. Though while he’s practically begging for Nina to come back, he can’t help but point out that she doesn’t have anything and at her age she’s unlikely to get anything better.

Nina gives a whole speech of why he sucks, pointing out he’s only got what he’s got due to his dad, he doesn’t have kids, he’s got a wife who hates him and he’s desperately always trying to gain his mom’s approval who will never give it. She almost feels sorry for him and she’d rather be dead than go back.

After a bit of villainous contemplation of her words, he states he’s happy to oblige, but then ol’ Millie was lurking in the darkness and does her classic sneak attack to the head routine and he goes tumbling over the stairs railing hitting several of the spiral sides until he hits the floor dead. Nina then drops a light bulb and states she’s going to say that’s how he died. Trying to change a lightbulb. Millie doesn’t think that’ll work, but Nina says she guesses she’ll see and tells Millie to run. (She also calls the Mexican guy to help do some clean up)

Well the cops get there and Nina tells the story, and there’s a female cop taking the statement and points out that Andrew sure had some deep cuts just from falling.

The female cop then goes on to say that her sister had a relationship a long time ago and eight years later she showed up on her doorstep and was never the same. So basically the female cop knew Andrew was an asshole so she’ll cover for Nina.

Next scene is Andrew’s funeral and everyone’s all sad about it, except Nina and her daughter of course. Actually Andrew’s mom isn’t particularly emotional either and sort of gives a disdainful look at everyone (The rich bitches crying over him) and says one of Andrew’s teeth was missing and then stating it’s important to take care of your teeth, because TEETH ARE A PRIVILEGE!

Nina sees Millie lurking in the cemetery and tells her she should’ve left, but Millie really can’t do that since she’s on parole and has no job again. Nina leaves her a check for 100,000 before she takes off for California with her daughter.

Last bit is Millie applying for another housemaid position and the rich woman mentions that Nina recommended her and it’s implied she’s got an asshole husband that Millie can take care of in a similar manner.

The End

Now while I called this a feminist movie, I did see some arguing that it totally wasn’t, but most of that seems to be because all these folks don’t like the actress playing Millie and going so far as to call her a Nazi. I had to look up why that even was, but apparently it’s just due to her being conservative and being in a jeans ad and the slogan was “She’s got good jeans” And everyone read into it that because she was some pretty blonde blue eyed chick that was endorsing white supremacy, etc.

Yeah it was retarded.

That seemed to be the only damn argument. They don’t like the actress (or her beliefs) so she couldn’t possibly be in a feminist movie. Great logic.

Hell, there’s a better argument that it wasn’t feminist and that’s because half the premise of the movie is one woman actually throwing another under the bus, but I mean that’s what women do.

However, I am still of the belief that the movie still was feminist in nature mainly because even if Nina did sort of fuck over Millie, she did go back and help her out and it was even her daughter that suggested this. (For it is the youth that will lead to a better way!) Millie herself is basically “female Dexter” what with her going around killing or otherwise disabling dudes preying on women.

Every major guy shown save for the Mexican is an asshole predator. Given that it has women taking back their power and independence and not to trust men, and I’d say this is way more feminist than everyone who was losing their shit about Mad Max Fury Road being “feminist.”

Though I will say, Nina REALLY should’ve just went with the Mexican dude’s plan of getting a guy to kill Andrew. I mean she ultimately had him killed anyway and this would’ve saved herself a shitload of time and probably still could’ve set it up to look like he died changing a light bulb or whatever.

But of course it was sort of implied at that point she was done having a man trying to help her and she was going to do this herself. The flaw with this bit is her way STILL ultimately called for the Mexican dude to help her clean shit up after her convoluted plan resulted in a messy bloodbath. Lol.

Anyway I’m probably mansplaining what’s feminist and what isn’t, but as Mizal would say, this is what men do.

All that being said, I still liked the movie even if wasn't something I'd normally watch.

You never really get to know too much about the mom other than the few disapproving looks and comments she makes. I assume Andrew's dad is dead, but I suppose it could've been the case his mom became that way due to the dad. (It's still a man's fault!)

Apparently there's a whole series of these books though where I guess Millie just goes around offing asshole dudes. Though the main complaint about the books is people saying the woman that writes them is a shitty writer, but she wound up on the bestseller list at some point so she's appealing to some people I suppose.