Bad News From Outer Space

Get Out The Vote

2012-01-27T11:23:00.000-08:00

Well, the Presidential Debates for 2012 are in full swing, but it really doesn't matter. Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Liberal - as this behind the scenes photo clearly shows, they're ALL aliens.

Screencaps from Trekcore.com. Star Trek is a Registered Trademark and Copyright 2012 by CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody.

Soap, Shampoo and Motor Oil

2012-01-19T10:24:00.001-08:00

Droid showers.

They're not something for human eyes to witness. Ever.

Star Trek is Copyright 2012 and a Registered Trademark of CBS Studios Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com

Avengers Assemble...My Desk!

2012-01-06T23:02:00.001-08:00

This bit from MTV Geek is fun, and totally for those of us who remember what it's like to be a 10 year old kid.

It's an Avengers-inspired desk from Tom Spina Design! And by the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth, it rocks, with nods to Captain America, Iron Man, Hawkeye, Thor and even S.H.I.E.L.D. head honcho Nick Fury encased within.

Play spot 'em all if you can!

Ride On Past Rango

2012-01-06T22:45:00.000-08:00

The Game of Villainy Is Afoot

2012-01-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

Trekmovie.com is reporting that they have finally cast the lead villain in the upcoming and much-anticipated Star Trek sequel.

Director J.J. Abrams has selected the talented and impressively named Benedict Cumberbatch for the role of the man who antagonizes Capt. Kirk and the Enterprise in the summer 2013 release.

Cumberbatch is a real up and comer. I watched the recent three-episode BBC series Sherlock, where he plays Holmes in contemporary London, and he was mesmerizing.

Here's hoping J.J. and company knocks this one out of the galactic park.

Drawn to Blade Runner

2011-12-31T15:08:00.000-08:00

Recently, friend of the blog Dave C. brought to our attention that a looong out of print book of the incredible, eyeball-melting artwork by "visual futurist" Syd Mead for the seminal sci-fi movie Blade Runner is now available online.

This post from collider.com looks at that one of a kind tome.

Syd Mead is a national treasure. Seriously, someone award this man a medal. I bet he could design a really cool one.

Imperfect Holiday Gifts

2011-12-28T19:14:00.000-08:00

Well, another Christmas season has ended. Soon now-brittle trees will be carted out to the sidewalk for disposal and wreaths and ornaments will be stored away until next year.

And gifts that were exchanged are now…brought back to retailers for full refunds. Yes, despite the well-meaning intentions, some gifts just aren’t the right fit, or just rub people the wrong way, or are just way dangerous and pervy.

We’ve polled retailers nationwide and, hands down, the number 1 returned item this season has been the "Nomad Home Probe" from Roykirk Industries (model #MK-15c).

Here are just a few of the comments culled from return forms:

“This thing tried to mount my Roomba vacuum! What kind of pervert are you people selling?”

“My husband was singing in the living room on the new karaoke set the kids got him for Christmas, when Nomad comes in and zaps him. Now he can’t remember who he is!”

“My Nomad seems to be conspiring with the appliances in my kitchen. I see him hovering around the microwave all the time, calling it “Tan Ru.” I seen I, Robot and I don’t want that to happen to me!

"Nomad keeps “accidentally” floating in on my wife while she’s in the shower. I wouldn’t mind so much, but his antennae are always fully extended, which creeps her out."

“Every time I try to watch Jersey Shore, Nomad yells something about how he must “sterilize imperfections,” then fires an energy bolt at the tv. But then for a half hour afterwards, he hovers around mumbling something about wanting to tap Snookie’s exhaust port.”

Star Trek is Copyright 2011 and a Trademark of CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com.

Ridley Scott's Return To Science Fiction

2011-12-25T22:45:00.000-08:00

Ridley Scott directed two landmark science fiction films, Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982). The former set the standard for sci-fi/horror, while the latter is the best film noir via sci-fi story there is.

Both movies are also rightly known for their trendsetting production design, with their gritty, lived in look and details. To this day, any new science fiction movie cribs from the look of one or both of these films.

Now, three decades later, Scott returns to the genre with Prometheus, a quasi-prequel to Alien. Here's the first real trailer for the film at BleedingCool.com, which opens June 2012. And here's a very cool trailer screencap breakdown BleedingCool did a few days later.

I love that they used the original Alien trailer's sound effects over this new ad. It just serves to further tie Alien and Prometheus together, and if you didn't know where that sound came from, it is still creepy/scary and totally appropriate for the trailer.

Happy Happy, Joy Joy!

2011-12-25T14:43:00.000-08:00

GREAT Apes, Indeed

2011-12-22T22:53:00.000-08:00

This short bit of video footage, found at io9.com, is more thrilling, amazing and moving than the entire recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes movie (sorry, Andy Serkis).

Just watch it and see.

Seriously. (The action starts at about the 1:05 mark).

The Restoration of Manos

2011-12-19T12:21:00.000-08:00

SOMEONE IS RESTORING "MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE!"

Sorry about shouting that, but, seriously, according to this NPR post, a film school grad - dude named Ben Solovey - wants to restore "Manos," one of the the WORST films ever made.

You were likely introduced to "Manos," as I was, through the glory days of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Is this a good thing, Torgo, or should such wretched celluloid cheese be left alone in all its scratchy, grainy glory?

Odds n Ends

2011-12-15T10:46:00.000-08:00

Movie critic Christy Lemire lists her Five Favorite Performances by Robert Downey Jr. I agree with her assessments of Downey's work in Iron Man, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and the hilarious Tropic Thunder. I also agree with her that RDJ's Sherlock Holmes is a waste of celluloid. Rent the BBC's recent 3-episode series Sherlock if you want some adventurous fun with the brilliant detective.

We are all into the late lamented sci-fi western series Firefly here at the BNFOS Orbiting Space Station, and io9.com has a fun piece about how artist Dan Dos Santos did the cover art for a recent Dark Horse Comics Serenity issue.

These toy designs that would have been tie-ins to a Tim Burton directed Superman movie are some premium nightmare fuel. Superman is THE FIRST superhero ever. Why the fuck do they want to mess with that simple iconic design? "Underwear on the outside?" That's just the way it is, leave it alone. If a man flew out of the sky, landed in front of you and lifted a car over his head (on a movie screen, natch), if the first thing you say is, "Your underwear is on the outside" you are a complete idiot.

An Off-Road Segway

2011-12-03T17:20:00.001-08:00

Holy shit, but this is so cool.

You know what a Segway is right? That weird two-wheeled thingy that was supposed to revolutionize transportation, or something. Know anybody who owns one? Didn't think so. (I've only seen it on tv used by mail men or cops.)

Inventor Ben Gulak did the Segway one better: he put tank treads and a 200 cc engine into a Segway-like off-road devil called a DTV Shredder. It's all in this Rolling Stone piece.

I wonder if Ben got his inspiration from the Mandroid in that goofy scifi masterpiece The Eliminators (see my running commentary of that funfest here)?

John Byrne Art

2011-11-28T01:06:00.000-08:00

Artist John Byrne has some fun pin ups at his website Byrne Robotics.

If you're an X-Men fan, he revisits a piece he did for the Comics Reader back in the day, where he put the "all new, all different" X-Men into the original team's school uniforms.

Then he flips that idea on its head and puts the Fantastic Four in original X-Men style uniforms. I wonder if there is a "What If?" story hiding in here somewhere.

And lastly, he gives us this great looking "future girl soldier" piece, where the partial coloring gives it a distinctly European or Heavy Metal magazine vibe. I'd love to seem a scifi story done with this woman.

The Walking Dead - Fall Finale

2011-11-27T22:27:00.000-08:00

AMC's The Walking Dead just aired its fall finale. What a long, strange trip it's been.

Our intrepid band of zombie apocalypse survivors has slowly been coming apart (a little too slowly this season), mostly over the handling of The Search For Sophia, Carol's daughter and Carl's friend, who went missing after the group encountered and evaded that awesome Zombie Herd (TM) on the highway in this second season's opener.

Shane (Jon Bernthal), he with the chest which makes Arnold Schwarzenegger openly weep, is going into uber-survivalist mode: he will do anything - kill anything and anyone - that stands in the way of his safety, and of those under his protection. Of course, this philosophy directly conflicts with the views of his best friend Rick (Andrew Lincoln), the show's star and the erstwhile leader of this ragtag group, who still believes in notions like civilization and respect for other people's viewpoints and property. Rick and Shane will ultimately come to a reckoning - a "Come to Jesus/George A. Romero" moment - and I believe that's gonna be a brutal, ugly thing (which is great for a post apocalyptic survival horror-drama).

I blame the firing of Frank Darabont for the meandering this show has taken in its second season. The first season only had six episodes and then-showrunner Darabont kept the plotting nice and tight. Season two has twice the episodes (13 eps, actually) but they appear to have stumbled a bit with the transition from Darabont to current showrunner Glen Mazzara. The search for Sophia and the stay at Herschel's farm has taken up the most of the entire first half of the current season, with a lot of that "spinning our wheels, going nowhere" feel during much of it.

How many times did they have the scene of the gang gathered around a map on the hood of a car mapping out search grids as they attempted to locate Sophia? It could be its own Internet meme. Plus, Lori's whole "I might be pregnant but I'm not going to tell my husband storyline" was drawn out so much I thought they might finally resolve it after she gave birth to the kid and he or she went off of Post Zombie College.

The last ten minutes of the fall finale, "Pretty Much Dead Already" almost, and I mean almost, makes up for the slow plotting and pacing that came before it, with Shane going bugnuts (he made a lot of sense in that scene - and Bernthal was great) at the barn and those utterly heartbreaking final moments (my jaw was on the floor).

The Walking Dead is perhaps my favorite show on right now, but I sincerely hope that the plotting gets tightened up for the last six episodes of the season. If this episode is any indication, they are on the right track.

Martians And Kung Fu, But No Martian Kung Fu

2011-11-27T11:20:00.000-08:00

Here are some new pics from the upcoming and eagerly anticipated JOHN CARTER, directed by Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo and Wall-E). from io9.com

I never read the pulp novels, but I recall fondly reading the Marvel Comics adaptation "John Carter: Warlord of Mars," with the curvaceous Dejah Thoris, the four-armed Tharks, and assorted Martian strangeness.

Also found on io9 is this wackass Chinese fantasy kung fu movie called Demon of the Lute. They feature a clip where the hero is first attacked by some ninja-types with hidden trampolines (trampoline fu, as Joe Bob Briggs might say), then a bald dude with an orange goatee. Mr. Orange travels by way of a cannibalized Radio Flyer wagon-as-chariot pulled by a pair of German Shepard dogs.

Mr. Orange - who could film a Rogaine commercial when he magically grows a full head of orange hair that would put Carrot Top to shame - could cut down on the between-meal snacks as they have to speed up of the footage of the dogs pulling the wagon or those scenes would take up the movie's whole runtime.

Run, Run Away!

2011-11-20T23:58:00.001-08:00

Movie car chases usually get all the glory, but now EmpireOnline.com has this great piece up featuring "35 of Film's Best Foot Chases."

There's some amazing and even fun stuff here, everything from Ferris Bueller's crazy run home to beat his sister Jeannie, to the cool efficiency of the Bourne films. Also included are foot chases from recent films like Inception, Kontroll and Kung Fu Hustle, and also classic films including French Connection II, Bullitt and Blade Runner.

Lace up your sneakers and join in, won't you?

A Lizard and a Toaster Watch Movies

2011-11-14T00:08:00.000-08:00

Move over Roger Ebert, Nomad & The Gorn are gettin' into the movie review biz.

Star Trek characters copyright 2011 by CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of their rights is intended with this PARODY. Screencaps from Trekcore.com

Show? Out of Danger?

2011-11-12T20:33:00.001-08:00

David Letterman isn't known for his movie parodies, so this recent gag is a bit of an oddity.

Dave starts the normal Top Ten List countdown and something gums up the works - perhaps a particle of pre-animate matter caught in a matrix.

He sends a stagehand downstairs to investigate. Now either Letterman is a closet Trekkie, or someone on the writer's staff got a favor called in. And check out the use of James Horner's music in the piece!

(I found this courtesy of a post at the John Byrne Forum.)

Title, Movie Title

2011-11-03T11:24:00.001-07:00

"James Bond Will Return."

That message has always been appended to the end credits of every James Bond film since the first one in the series, Dr. No, appeared on screen in 1962.

The latest Bond, Daniel Craig, will return to the 007 role in the just announced Skyfall, slated to appear on screens in November 2012. (From the L.A. Times' blog Hero Complex.)

Is it me, or does the title not sound very exotic, very Bond-like? Skyfall? Skyfall? Put it up there next to You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me or even the last film, Quantum of Solace, or even the single word titles like Thunderball or Moonraker (we can leave out Octopussy).

Oh, well, at least it's not Attack of the Clones.

Daniel Craig is back in the fitted tuxedo, Judi Dench returns as M, Javier Bardem is a new bad guy, and they are being directed by Sam Mendes, so Skyfall sounds very promising indeed.

Claws Versus Katanas

2011-11-02T11:04:00.000-07:00

The Wolverine, the sequel to the disappointing X-Men Origins: Wolverine, is scheduled to start filming next year.

James Mangold has been enlisted as director. I'm very excited about this. He directed two films I enjoyed very much, Walk The Line and 3:10 to Yuma.

Mangold's strength is characters, and Wolverine is more than just a set of claws and a killer squint. The new movie is set in Japan and will be heavily influenced, apparently, by the seminal comic book mini-series from writer Chris Claremont and artist Frank Miller. It will explore the samurai code, Yakuza, ninjas and lots more according to this post from SuperheroHype.com.

With the recent success of X-Men: First Class, which had a huge James Bond vibe in its 1960s setting, and now The Wolverine being set in Japan - "like a foreign language film" per Mangold - maybe they will take more chances with comic book movies and move away from the cookie cutter approach they've long been taking.

Maybe.

Happy Halloween Weekend, You Things From Another World, You

2011-10-29T21:28:00.000-07:00

The above pics are from my previous review of the trick or treat episode "Catspaw" from Star Trek TOS.

Go Tell It On The Mountain

2011-10-23T22:47:00.000-07:00

Recently, I sat down to watch a movie I knew nothing about, other than it starred Clint Eastwood and featured mountain climbing. The movie was The Eiger Sanction, and it was a pleasant surprise.

Eastwood, who also directed, played a college art history professor with the awesome name of Jonathan Hemlock. Unbeknownst to the college and the cute coeds who make googley eyes at the prof, Hemlock is also a government assassin who worked for the shadowy agency C2.

Hemlock is sent to “sanction” or terminate the people who killed one of the agency’s own. He realizes this is pointless, but accepts the work for the money which he uses to buy black market art pieces (hey, everybody got to have a hobby).

I wasn’t expecting the movie to have the “American James Bond” vibe that it did. Most of this was courtesy of Hemlock’s creepy agency boss who goes by the name, Mr. Dragon, played by Thayer David. Dragon is an albino with white eyes and a need for his office to be bathed in red light, a spectrum which he can tolerate. Hemlock and Dragon’s exchanges bring to mind those of Bond and his boss M, but with a bit more venom, as Dragon is a real asshole (both characters know this). Dragon even has a nurse named Miss Cerberus, a combination of Nurse Ratchet and Young Frankenstein’s Frau Blucher, who changes his blood!

The movie, based on a popular novel by “Trevanian” (a European sounding pseudonym for American writer Rodney William Whitaker) is slower paced than contemporary action movies, or even James Bond movies of the time. However, the mountain climbing scenes were well done – no CGI or crappy process shots - with Eastwood and company actually climbing the mountain in Europe, as well as mountains at US locations seen earlier in the film in sequences showing Hemlock training for the Euro-climb.

George Kennedy was a treat as Hemlock's old pal and climbing trainer, Ben Bowman. Here he brings a bit of the fun and energy he had in his Academy Award-winning role in Cool Hand Luke.

The movie is a little on the longish side, it could easily have had 10 minutes trimmed off, but Eastwood was in top form, as were many of the lovely unclothed ladies featured in this R-rated film. And the film is topped off by a nice romantic John Williams score.

Does The Future-NRA Know About This?

2011-10-21T23:08:00.001-07:00

The new Fox series Terra Nova is the most expensive show on tv, with an estimated budget of $4 million per episode. But there appears to be an area where they are skimping on the dineros: props.

Now, every sci fi series has had to take "found" objects, modify them, and turn them into futuristic props of some kind. The old Star Trek was famous for taking fancy silver salt shakers and, with some snazzy sound effects, turning them into Dr. McCoy's 23rd century surgical tools.

The prop people on the original Star Wars took a German broom-handled Mauser pistol, added machined parts, a scope, a new muzzle, and created Han Solo's iconic blaster.

But Terra Nova, according to this piece at io9.com, apparently took some orange and blue plastic NERF toy guns and...just spray-painted them black to use as guns. They didn't use the NERF guns as the basis of a new cool future weapon, adding cool new parts to it, as the Han Solo weapon above was created; they just took something that was one color and painted it another.

For $4 mil per episode, I would have expected some original designs, manufactured just for the show (after all, in the storyline, the tech comes from 100 years in our future). But, seriously, spray-painted plastic NERF guns? That's something a movie with a $4,000 budget would pull.

Patroling The Highways And Byways In Style

2011-10-19T10:44:00.000-07:00

Remember The Highwayman, the jaw-droppingly stupid 80s adventure series starring Sam J. (Flash Gordon) Jones and, in his inexplicable 15 minutes of fame, Australian weirdo Jacko as dudes who patrol the roads of the near-future in a big rig that just happens to covert into a helicopter? (Yeah, it was a Glen (Knight Rider) Larson production.)

Here's the $3 million luxury RV version, but instead of converting to a copter, they added a mini-bar. (from Yahoo News)

Marvel Short Kicks Butt

2011-10-17T11:39:00.001-07:00

In this Marvel Films short at ComingSoon.net, we get to see just why Phil Coulson is an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Funny and cool at the same time. It will be included with the Captain America movie DVD out next week.

Avengers Assemble a Trailer

2011-10-11T10:20:00.001-07:00

Here's the newest trailer for The Avengers movie, due out in May 2012 (via io9.com).

This. Is. Looking. Good.

Steve Jobs - Tribute

2011-10-08T18:32:00.000-07:00

Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs passed away earlier this week at the age of 56. Mr. Jobs gave the world its first personal computers (the Apple II), popularized smartphones (the iPhone) and believed in a little computer animation company (Pixar) when others didn't.

The amazing logo above is the work of Hong Kong art student Jonathan Mak Long, which I found in this Yahoo News piece. I love it for its stark simplicity.

Catch 1970s Fever All Over Again!

2011-10-05T23:41:00.000-07:00

When I was a junior space cadet, I lived on the movies and tv series of the 1970s.

I feasted on everything from re-runs of Star Trek, Space: 1999 and UFO, first run episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers, to Ark II, Space Academy, Return to the Planet of the Apes (animated monkeys!), and, of course, Land of the Lost on Saturday mornings.

Trips to the movies included fare such as Message from Space ("Hey, walnuts!"), Alien and some movie called Star Wars.

Now, there's a blog that helps us re-live those special, polyester-clad days - it's called Space: 1970.

Do stop by, and tell 'em Bad News From Outer Space sent ya.

Terra Nova Limps Across Our TV Screens

2011-10-02T19:03:00.000-07:00

Alright, Terra Nova, you and me are gonna have a little chat. I just watched your two hour Fox Network pilot again, and you definitely do not have me hooked. SPOILERS AHEAD.

First of all, WHY do you want me to watch you, for what reason? It’s not the dinosaurs, which, I’m sorry, while they look like decent “Walking With Dinosaurs” caliber viz effects, they are definitely NOT “Jurassic Park”-level effects, which we as an audience are expecting. Seriously, it’s been 18 years since “Jurassic” premiered in theaters and Steven Spielberg is one of your producers. Couldn’t you just use the ILM software from back then?

Also, Spielberg apparently doesn’t want to use the same dinos from the Jurassic movies, so instead of everyone’s fave Tyrannosaurus Rex, we get their limp Cretaeous stand-ins Carnotaurs. In place of Velociraptors we get the goofy “Slashers” with their blade-tipped tails which are an entirely MADE UP species of dinosaur. I’m sorry, but you’re not simply taking liberties with animal traits/abilities (like the spitting dinos in JP), you’re just making shit up. Not cool.

Another Spielberg influence is apparently that we humans cannot be shown killing a dinosaur, even one that is trying its darnedest to slash/chew/eat/devour us. You can fire an A-Team episode's worth of ammo at the suckers but they will never fall -- "their hide is too tough" or some nonsense -- or even be scared off by the sound and muzzle flashes. This is a bunch of baloney.

The physical look of Terra Nova is great. Using amazing Australian locations, with lush jungles, craggy rocks and water falls; you’ve built a wonderful “frontier town” (although it’s just a bit TOO comfy, with its modern buildings, amenities, technology and defensive weaponry).

No, Terra Nova, the real reason I don’t like you is the Shannon family. In the future of 2149 where the story began, with its dwindling resources and severely pollution-damaged earth, there is a two child per family limit. According to the pilot, Jim and Liz Shannon simply decided to have a third child, risking their entire family’s safety in the process. Well, they are indeed found out, and Papa Shannon is sent to prison for a spell. The Shannons knowingly broke the law in having a third kid and they hid her for three years before the Terra Nova project came along to save them all. If Terra Nova didn’t exist what kind of life could their youngest kid have in 2149 (talk about an “illegitimate child” - was she going to live her whole life in the house's airduct?).

It would have been better from a story standpoint if Liz Shannon got pregnant despite taking government-supplied contraceptives, so instead of Jim Shannon telling Commander Taylor they had a third child “because it seemed like the thing to do” which is a witless moron’s answer, he could have said something a bit more profound and sympathetic, e.g., “We did everything we were supposed to; we didn’t plan to have Zoe, but her spirit would not be denied.”

Mrs. Shannon apparently comes from some means, and the overall vibe is this family gets whatever it wants. They have a third child against the rules, hubbie breaks out of a maximum security prison (apparently due to a lot of money being put in people’s hands), Zoe their little girl is taken from wherever the hell she was being held for two years while Pops Shannon was in the joint, the family is reunited and gets to start all over again in the past. They come across as over-privileged people, and that’s not someone I’d like to root for each week.

Couple of Hoods

2011-09-28T23:22:00.001-07:00

We Have Foreign Movie Sign!

2011-09-23T11:01:00.000-07:00

Blastr.com has a fun post looking at foreign movie posters for some very well known American sci-fi movies.

Now most of these movies are iconic films in the genre, but you'd never guess it from these weird ass graphics. It's one thing to use Campbell's Soup cans in the Army of Darkness poster. We get it, foreign ad agency guy: the dude who plays Ash has the same last name as the "Andy Warhol soup." Fun-nee.

The Ghostbusters poster is six kinds of fucked up. What the HELL is that thing supposed to be, a jester?

The Gremlins poster looks like a cheap supermarket greeting card.

King Kong has a shark in one hand, a snake wrapped around the other, and one foot on the Titantic, but at least he's all ferocious and shit.

In the Empire Strikes Back poster, Yoda looks like he's had the contents of six vacuum cleaners dumped on his head, which is the correct look for Yoda in the PREQUELS but certainly not in Empire.

Willow...really, WTMcF?

Next Stop Blue Screen Mountain

2011-09-14T12:13:00.000-07:00

Vulture at NYmag.com has this great clip from the new Sarah Michelle Geller series Ringer.

Now if you recall, old Hitchcock movies like North by Northwest had obvious process work, where you could plainly tell that an actor was in the studio and not on location. Same for many of the early James Bond movies where Connery was in a nice cozy English studio for the close ups of him driving his Aston Martins and such.

We see a speedboat in the clip's opening and closing moments, then they cut to Sarah, playing identical twin characters on-board. The problem is that it is OBVIOUS this was shot in a studio. Did they even TRY to match the on location lighting?

If this clip is any indication, the special effects budget is about the same as a Starbucks' vente.

Working For A Living

2011-09-11T23:46:00.000-07:00

(With apologies to Chuck Jones.)

Star Trek is a Registered Trademark and Copyright 2011 by CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com.

It HAD To Happen Sooner Or Later

2011-09-11T21:16:00.000-07:00

Mainstream movies of the last several years seem to be having more explicit sex scenes; films like Ken Park, 9 Songs, Shortbus, The Brown Bunny, Lust, Caution, Antichrist, and Blue Valentine dip a toe, or other body part, into territory usually reserved for adult films (especially those that feature actual sex and not just the simulated variety).

Now comes the news that a porno company is making a sci fi film, called Horizon, with heavy emphasis on the sci fi. (This is via blastr.com.)

Great! Just what we all look for in our porn: more plot!

These porn actors and actresses have enough trouble trying to act in complex scenes involving pizza delivery and cable repair, imagine having to deliver lines about post-apocalyptic conditions on Mercury and alien invasion tactics. The mind boggles.

Up, Up, and AWAAAY!

2011-09-07T12:31:00.000-07:00

File this under, "If I had a million bucks just lying around doing nothin'."

Sideshow Toys is offering an amazing Superman figure, based on the likeness of THE Man of Steel, the late Christopher Reeve.

The costume is spot on -- when costume designer Yvonne Blake adapted the blue and red togs from the comics to the real world, she nailed it (compare this version to the costume interpretation in the new Zack Snyder film - guess which one will be remembered the longest). The figure's body is incredible, with just the right amount of musculature to emulate/duplicate the physique that Reeve worked so hard to create (no padded-muscle-suit wearer he).

The range of motion is terrific, based on the gallery pics. The figure looks very life-like in the poses featured.

The one slight flaw is in the figure's expression. The sculptors did an astonishing job, but something about the eyes is not right. Compare this to Hot Toys work on a similar Michael Keaton-Batman figure, wear they got it 110% right.

The (Animated) Adventures of Jonny Quest

2011-09-04T09:53:00.000-07:00

Jonny Quest, which ran for only one season in 1964, is one of the greatest animated adventure series ever made.

George Lucas must have seen this series as a geeky kid starting film school, as Jonny's adventures crossing the globe, traveling to exotic lands and encountering "scum and villainy*" (often with a supernatural bent) feel like mini-Indiana Jones tales.

I bring up this beloved series because an enterprising guy named Roger Evans has recreated the opening titles of Jonny Quest with stop-motion animated figures. It's a hoot and a half, and a real work of love. Evans does nearly shot for shot recreations, with some tweaking here and there (e.g., the Quest jet design). Here's the original article at io9.com.

And the JQ theme by Hoyt Curtain is still one of the greatest pieces of music ever composed for TV!

*yes, I know that's from Star Wars not Indy!

Monkeying around with Planet of the Apes

2011-08-28T01:00:00.000-07:00

The latest Planet of the Apes movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is still chugging along nicely at the box office, proving to be a surprise hit.

You may remember its original title was Rise of the Apes, but cooler and perhaps hairier heads prevailed at Fox Studios and they put the franchise moniker "Planet of" back in there as it should be.

What you may not know is that in the reboot/rethink process the film went through several possible titles, which are presented here for the first time:

How the Planet of the Apes Got Its Groove Back

Manos: The Hairy Paws of the Planet of the Apes

To Wong Foo, Thanks For the Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes vs. Frankenstein and Jesse James

Stop! Or My Ape Will Shoot

Honey, I Shrunk the Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes 2: Electric Monkey Boogaloo

Destroy All Monkeys (Planet of the Apes in Japan)

Planet of the Apes: The Banana Hangover

Cowboys & Apes & Aliens

WTF?, Planet of the Apes

Justin Bieber: Never Say Planet of the Apes

Final Destination: The Planet of the 6pes

Tyler Perry’s Madea Straightens Out the Planet of the Apes

Your Time is Up

2011-08-27T09:59:00.000-07:00

Writer/director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca and The Truman Show) has a new scifi film coming up called, In Time.

In the near future, units of time are bought and sold. If you want to buy something, you give them minutes of your life, if you want to live longer you have to work very, very hard for those precious extra minutes.

Here's the international trailer for In Time by way of io9.com.

Droid Safety

2011-08-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

Here at the space station, a cute girl with an R2-D2 bike helmet gets our full attention. Now this is an item Uncle George's marketing peeps should have thought of a long time ago....

(This item was originally found at the blog Pop Candy, run by the lovely, talented and geektastic Whitney Matheson.)

Replaced have I been, Yes!

2011-08-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

Well, the Star Wars Saga Blu-Ray release is coming up on us.

Uncle George decided to replace the puppet Yoda in Episode I: It All Goes Into the Shitter From Here with a CGI version to match the digital Yoda in Episodes II and III. io9.com's article on this has a nice pic comparing the muppet with the digi-version.

Now I love, love, love the Stuart Freeborn-created puppet used in The Empire Strikes Back, but boy oh boy, the puppet in Episode I is...just something, ain't it? LOOK AT THAT FUCKING THING! It looks like Yoda's dumb, drunk-n-hopped-up-on-painkillers, "look-alike" cousin.

Adios, fucker.

Timeline of the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

Being into all things monkey, I heartily recommend this article at Rope of Silicon, where blogger Brad Brevet posts a timeline for the original five Planet of the Apes movies.

Before the Saw series became a yearly Halloween "treat" for the last few years, the period of 1970 to 1973 saw the release of a new Apes movie each year. And while the budgets for each successive movie were slashed considerably, they were able to tell some imaginative, thought-provoking, exciting and fun adventure tales that still hold up today. Original Planet of the Apes screenwriter Rod Serling would have been proud.

Stick them to the Game Grid

2011-08-23T10:41:00.000-07:00

Here's the lightcycle chase from Tron, as interpreted by rolls of Duck Tape-brand duct tape, from io9.com.

Way awesome.

Of (Giant) Mice and Men

2011-08-22T23:41:00.001-07:00

Ever have that dream where you wake up in the "Land of the Giants" and that creepy giant hand they always used is s-l-o-w-l-y moving in to scoop you up.

Maybe it's just me....

Anywoo, "Land of the Giants" was fortunate enough to feature not one but TWO great main title themes from the Maestro of Movie Music himself, John Williams. Here's Season One, and, my fave, Season Two.

LOOK OUT! IT' S MONDAY!

2011-08-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

Yup, it's Monday. The start of another work week, or work weak if you prefer.

If you're like me, that's means a grief-filled day. In that spirit, here's an io9.com post about the Five Stages of Grief thru the lens of the Schwarzenegger Conan movies.

If you need a sugar rush to get through today's festivities, here's a fun piece from cracked.com looking at Marvel super-heroes and Hostess Snack Cakes. I particularly like the second item with the Hulk versus the Roller Disco Devils, which are a bunch of dudes in their mid-forties on roller skates, listening to tunes with lyrics like, "Yeah! Yeah! Baby" and "Wo! Wo!"

Review the Block!

2011-08-14T23:39:00.000-07:00

I’ve been re-reading "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In" by the one and only Joe Bob Briggs. It’s in that spirit that I present the following review. The drive-in will never die!

I took the landspeeder down off blocks, and since it hovered there in the air, I drove it down to the Arclight in Mos Hollywood to catch this little alien invasion flick that was made “across the pond,” as they say, in non-Communist Britain.

It’s called Attack the Block. It’s about these teenagers with funny accents who don’t own Xboxes and don't have much parenting going on, so they go around mugging women for their jewelry.

Then an alien lands smack dab into a car parked on the same street where the Little Thieving Rascals are doing their mugging.

Then the alien critter attacks the lead teenager named Moses.

Then Moses goes all Sammy Sosa on steroids on ET and kills it with a baseball bat.

Then the kids meet up with Nick Frost the neighborhood pot-head, and later the local drug dealer who wants Moses to be his new Number One Guy.

Then MORE aliens fall from the sky, except these are A LOT nastier than the one Moses clubbed.

Then the kids and the woman they mugged have to defend their ghetto block from crazy aliens while staying out of the path of the drug dealer’s bullets.

No breasts (except if you count the female alien, and I don’t). Several excellent beasts with day-glo teeth. Drive-in Academy Award nomination for John Boyega as Moses the Denzel Washington look-alike teen leader. Heads roll. Three quarts human blood. One quart alien blood. One motor vehicle chase with crash. Motorcycle, scooter and bicycle chases with minimal crashes. No kung fu. Samurai sword fu. Baseball bat fu. Kitchen knife fu. Oven fu. Not a lot of plot to slow things down. Excellent tunes from bands I never heard of. Three stars, BNFOS says check it out.

Of Capes and Cowls

2011-08-05T11:54:00.000-07:00

The amazing folks at io9.com have some cool first photos from two very anticipated movies.

First up is the dreamy Anne Hathaway in her Catwoman garb from The Dark Knight Rises. From the pic, it looks like the thieving kitty stole the Bat's wheels.

And here is the first look at star Henry Cavill all suited up as Superman in Man of Steel. I like the tone of the image, what with all the sparks, rubble and busted metal, and I like that they're not using the Brandon Routh version of the costume, but, seriously, what is with the textured look to the costume?

Ever since the first Spider-Man movie, does every superhero costume has to have shit, i.e. a printed pattern, all over it? (Or was it Billy Zane's The Phantom that started the trend? But in that movie the Phantom's costume was more or less "tattooed" with tribal art and skulls, things associated with the character, and not just some silly grid pattern.) Are solid colors simply verboten? That aesthetic even carried over into the 2009 Star Trek film reboot, with the little delta symbol plastered all over their uniforms instead of having it simply be a solid color. The new Spider-Man reboot costume looks like it was made primarily from recycled basketballs due to the silly patterns in it.

Christopher Reeve and his classic costume showed you don't need little textured crap all over everything. It showed you need a very talented actor to bring the character to life. The actor makes the costume work, not vice versa.

Pot, Kettle

2011-07-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

Transformers 3 Fried My Circuits

2011-07-03T14:50:00.000-07:00

We're Mad about Cracked!

2011-06-04T16:02:00.000-07:00

For perhaps the first time in history, we get TWO comic book movies released in the same month: X-Men: First Class came out yesterday and on June 17 Green Lantern will hit the big screen.

To celebrate this momentous moment in human/mutant/alien history, I've been reading some very funny shit on Cracked.com, like "5 Comic Book Movies Way Worse Than Batman and Robin," which includes such gems as the Captain America and Nick Fury tv movies. If you didn't know, tv Cap's shield is just a giant plastic see-thru Frisbee. Why? Perhaps so he can peep at the totally creepy David Hasselhoff and the puppies pic posted in the article.

There's also "The 7 Least-Faithful Comic Book Movies," which pokes the fun at Stallone's Judge Dredd flick (say it with me now, "I EM the law!") and the aforementioned, and much Bat-nipple-adorned, Batman and Robin. Perhaps my favorite comic book movie-related Cracked post is this one: 5 Upcoming Comic Book Movies That Must Be Stopped, which looks at some long in development pictures, including Shazam!, Sub-Mariner, Luke Cage, and two heroes who actually made it to the screen this year, Thor and Green Lantern. Yes, this Cracked article is a few years old, but we hear at Bad News From Outer Space bow to all things funny, and besides that whole space/time continuum is a twisty, bendy river that flows back into itself, or some shit like that.

Some choice observations from that last article: "The Green Lantern is more of a class or profession than it is a man. Similar to "the sheriff" or "the mayor," or "an asshole,"" "according to the movies the vast majority of gangland activity before 1991 was comprised of double-dutch competitions, choreographed roller skating and breakdancing to save the community center from an evil strip-mall developer,"and "(Sub-Mariner's) powers are roughly equivalent to that of a jacked-up Aquaman, a character most famous for being ridiculously useless."

Great Bird

2011-05-20T12:12:00.000-07:00

Forsooth, Verily It Be Hammer Time!

2011-05-08T19:45:00.000-07:00

THOR (2011)

Marvel Studios first gave us a lusty, snarky billionaire who wears a flying suit of armor. Then they presented a nerdy scientist you never, just never, want to get angry, because he turns into a Monster of Mass Destruction. Now the comic book folks go into the next dimension, literally, and give us a superhero god in Thor.

Following the template laid down in 1962 when Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Larry Lieber introduced the character, Thor follows the exploits of the extra-planetary being who, with his compatriots, inspired our ancient ancestors’ belief in the pantheon of god-warriors who reside in Asgard at the end of the rainbow bridge which connects our worlds.

Thor (Star Trek’s Chris Hemsworth) is the headstrong son of Odin, the leader of the gods (Anthony Hopkins) who thinks with his mighty hammer Mjollnir, instead of his head. The Asgardians and their eternal enemy the Frost Giants have had a truce for much of our Earth’s civilized existence, but the Giants make an attempt to steal a powerful object back from Odin’s people. For that brazen maneuver, Thor wants to wipe them out, and going against Odin’s express orders, the cocky warrior leads a team including his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) to Jotunheim, the world of the Frost Giants.

They quickly get in over their heads and Odin beams into save their armored hides. For his temerity, Odin banishes Thor to Earth to learn some lessons – after all, he can’t let a hot-head succeed him to the throne. It’s on Earth that the movie seriously slows down. Thor not only has to learn his lesson and get back in time to save Asgard, but he has a limp love story with Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), a cute physicist who is studying the effects of the bridge that gets Thor and others to earth (she calls it an Einstein-Rosen bridge, Thor sez it's “Bifrost, the rainbow bridge”). He also runs afoul of S.H.I.E.L.D., the shadowy government agency with the tongue twister of a full name.

The movie even takes the time to introduce Clint Barton/Hawkeye the super archer who will appear in The Avengers movie in what is perhaps the stupidest cameo ever committed to film. The appearance is so forced you have to be an Avengers comic book fan to even get it. To the casual viewer, you’re left wondering why some dude with a bow and arrow WHICH HE NEVER USES BTW shows up for 30 seconds. If he used his arrows to pin Thor to the wall, that would have been a decent move, instead he just sits in a crane bucket in the rain, not firing a single arrow. Compare that to Scarlett Johansson's memorable kick butt scenes as super agent the Black Widow in Iron Man 2 (she's also to appear in the Avengers).

Thor is not a terrible comic book movie by any means, Elektra and Catwoman get to safely keep that trophy between them, but it is so jam-packed with story, credited to five writers, that it needs more than its just-under-2-hour runtime to properly cover it all. All the pieces are put in place: the cast is uniformly good under the direction of Kenneth Branagh (which is probably why the Asgard scenes are the most fun with their kings, young princes and palace intrigue), the special effects are top notch (Thor swinging his hammer just as Jack Kirby drew it over 40 years ago brought a smile to my face). But Thor isn’t given a true journey of redemption as he should have been. He’s simply on earth for a few days and comes to the conclusion he’s been a bit of a dick, without actually having to DO anything to get to that life changing point. Loki’s character was also short changed – we don’t know WHY he would turn on Thor and Odin, especially if they’ve shown him nothing but love his whole life (does he just have an inferiority complex?). Being evil is never enough, unless you’re Sauron in Lord of the Rings, and Hiddleston shows some real spark as Loki.

This particular story with the god/fish out of water could have also used much more humor. When you run over a 6'5" ripped dude in the New Mexico desert with your truck and he claims to be the Norse god of thunder, he's either bug nuts insane...or he's not. Kat Dennings was the official comic relief in the earthbound scenes, but this story would have seriously benefited from more laughs, a la Iron Man 1.

The movie proclaims that Thor will return in The Avengers. I’m up for that, but let’s hope that writer and director Joss Whedon is better at juggling his Ocean’s Eleven-type superhero story and character demands.

Favorite Quote of the Day

2011-05-02T20:25:00.000-07:00

From the article "The 7 Least-Faithful Comic Book Movies" at Cracked.com.

"Gene Hackman (Lex Luther) reportedly refused to be in (Superman III) due to a dispute with the producers. Meanwhile, Richard Pryor was coming off a string of hits and the producers figured he'd make a nice replacement. It was kind of like finding out you have no milk for your cereal, and using bourbon instead."

Pucker Up

2011-04-29T12:26:00.001-07:00

One Beamed Over the Cuckoo's Nest

2011-04-22T16:39:00.001-07:00

One upon a time, boys and girls, the USS Enterprise stopped by the looney bin in a TOS episode called, "Whom Gods Destroy." It was run by Master Po before he shaved his head, lost his vision and started hanging around with David Carradine.

The inmates were revolting, er, I mean they revolted under the leadership, magnetic smile and smelly fur coat (seriously, did he ever dry clean that rag, it must smell like Chewbacca's crotch on a warm day) of Garth of Izar, not to be confused with Garth of IZOD, the clothing magnate of Krypton (company motto, "KNEEEL Before My Crocodile!").

Anyhoo, Garth is running the show on Elba II and he's itching to take it on the road, so he needs a ride, and what better wheels than your own friggin' starship (it's even been washed and detailed). But James T. ain't no dope; he and Scotty concocted a safe word based on a popular board game, like Chutes and Ladders or Hungry Hungry Hippos or something.

Garth spends the rest of the story trying to trick Kirk into giving up the secret word (say it really, really loud with me Pee Wee Herman fans: "Queen to King's level one!"). He offers Kirk power, glory, you know the usual stuff. Hell, Garth even throws Batgirl at him. At that point, I'd have squealed the secret recipe to KFC chicken AND Coca Cola, but not Kirk. Move over Superman, cause Jim Kirk is the real Man of Steel!

All's well, that ends well. Kirk and Spock (using Starfleet Academy's little known "Hit Me Over the Head So I Fall Down and Let You Two Fight It Out Until I Can Figure Out Whose Ass I Should Phaser" technique) defeat Garth and his Insane Clown Posse, free the asylum's overseer Dr. Donald "Duck" Cory, zap out all the bad and evilness from Garth and also got to check out the
asylum's cafeteria, which actually has a 2 star Michelin Guide rating.

Star Trek is Copyright 2011 and a Registered Trademark of CBS Studios, Inc. Wall-E is Copyright and a Trademark of Pixar/Disney. No infringement of these rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com.

She Can Kill You With Her Little Finger

2011-04-18T19:03:00.001-07:00

Hanna (2011)

What do you get when you make Jason Bourne 16 years old, and a girl? You get Hanna, but you lose a lot in that conversion process.

Hanna, well played by Saorise Ronan, is raised in isolation near the Arctic Circle by her father (Eric Bana). They live in a ramshackle fairy tale cabin. It seems that papa is a former CIA black ops agent, and he's passing all those survival and fighting skills to his daughter: Hanna is a pint-sized assassin.

But what's an assassin without a target? Enter dad's former boss Marissa Viegler (Cate Blanchett, with an extra large Texas drawl). However, the movie, written by Seth Lochhead and David Farr, is fairly muddy as to exactly why Marissa is doing what she's doing, which leaves an unsatisfying impression with viewers (none of use who watched the movie together could put a finger on what was Marissa's motivation).

Director Joe Wright handles the action scenes well enough, as we knew he could do the quieter moments in this story after directing Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. The major problem is the pacing.

The story resembles The Bourne Identity in that both follow super-assassin main characters who are unsure of their origins. Both stories take our heroes across several countries: Hanna starts in upper Finland, moves to Morocco and then to Germany. It's when she meets this traveling hippie family in Morocco that the movie nearly grinds to a halt. Hanna was raised in isolation in one location by her father and now she's introduced to other people, cultures and places. She also makes her first friend, winningly played as a hyper teen by Jessica Barden.

A lot of the culture clash material was interesting (Hanna discovers electricity, but also the constant noise of our modern society, even at night), but it went on far too long. It was almost as if they took two films, one an action flick and the other a coming of age drama, and edited them together. The story went from heavy action in the beginning to the culture clash to rather dull before remembering its action origins.

Hanna is certainly not a bad movie, but one that may play better on DVD when you can fast forward a bit through the dull parts.

Guidos and Guidettes in Space

2011-04-15T19:58:00.000-07:00

What? It's the latest episode of the hit series TREKKIE SHORE.

Follow the latest exploits of buff, tanned bodies like K-Rok, Spock aka "The Fascination," Dr. McWoWW and everyone's favorite hobbit-sized hunka tipsy love, Yo'Neck, otherwise known as Snookie Don't Confuse Me With the Wookiee.

Set your phasers to tan, orbit da club, and beam 'em down. What?

Star Trek is Copyright 2011 and a Registered Trademark of CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com.

Buckaroo Banzai: TheNext Generation

2011-04-15T18:42:00.000-07:00

You all know Buckaroo Banzai, don't you? Among other things, he was a physicist, neurosurgeon and a rock singer fronting the band the Hong Kong Cavaliers.

Doug Drexler may be the closest thing the world of Star Trek has to Buckaroo Banzai. He started out as a special effects makeup artist (winning an Oscar for his work on the underrated Dick Tracy), moved into graphic design illustration, and then into CGI visual effects.

He has one of the coolest blogs around, Drex Files, wherein he shares the wealth of material on the projects he's worked on, with special emphasis on Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.

And now he's got another installment of Drex TV, his video blog look at the stuff we fans love. Check it out: http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/drextv-04-temporal-sonar/

The Master of the Movie Poster Image

2011-04-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

Recently, I made a trip to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences building in Hollywood to scope out their exhibition of Bob Peak movie poster artwork. Not familiar with the name "Bob Peak?" Do you recall the posters for such films as Superman: The Movie, Camelot, Apocalypse Now, West Side Story, Every Which Way But Loose, In Like Flint, Rollerball, The Spy Who Loved Me, and the first five Star Trek motion pictures? Then you've seen Peak's amazing work.

Peak has been called the "father of the modern movie poster" for his brilliant designs and use of collage to depict scenes from the films. His use of color and especially light was second to none -- look at the energy in this image Peak created for Prince of the City: http://tinyurl.com/3ot7jam.

My only disappointment, if you could call it that, was I was expecting to see brush strokes or little smudges on the original artwork. Instead they were absolutely perfect pieces, almost like photographs (there were a few pencil roughs for some of the posters, and those were on slightly crinkled paper). I did find it amusing they had to touch up the Silverado poster. The large main figures are all on horseback, with the horses splashing in water, and there is brush spatter (imagine using a toothbrush to fleck specks of paint) that hit some of the smaller portraits higher up in the actual artwork. Those were touched up for the final poster printing.

If you can't make it out to Hollywood, please check out the Bob Peak website http://bobpeak.net/. You will be delighted and thrilled.

Adjusted for Boredom

2011-03-18T11:46:00.000-07:00

The Adjustment Bureau (2010)

Philip K. Dick gets his umpteenth novel/short story adapted to the big screen, this time with extremely limp results.

Matt Damon plays a state representative running for US Senator. He's young, full of ideas and *gasp* folks are saying he has a shot at the presidency. But his career - nay, his whole life - will be derailed if he stays with the beautiful dancer he meets in the unlikeliest of places. As that dancer is played by the luminous Emily Blunt, you can see why a man would want her in his life.

However there are some shadowy figures, who dress like H&R Block agents from the early 1960s, who want to throw a monkey wrench into Damon's plans. Who are these suits and what is their deal? Well, actually we find out about them 20 minutes into the movie, which is a huge misstep on the filmmakers parts. Dick's stories are famous for their paranoia, and what better way to show that paranoia than have a political candidate constantly followed by mysterious men in black (and various shades of grey) who only he can see and who can literally disappear when they step through a doorway just a few paces ahead of you.

The Adjustment Bureau drops the paranoia altogether and merely gives Damon a problem to solve. It was pointed out to me that this story would have been better served if done in a light comedy style, a la Men in Black, and I have to agree. The early scenes with Damon and Blunt are played like a romantic comedy (and they work fine that way), so veering into MIB territory would not have been such a hard thing. Played totally straight though, the story falls apart - this might have made for a decent Twilight Zone episode - but after the explanation of who/what the Adjustment Bureau is, we're left with a big shrug.

This movie should have been adjusted off our big screens and simply never made.

Torch snuffed

2011-02-19T11:16:00.000-08:00

The Human Torch, mainstay of the Fantastic Four, was extinguished earlier this month in Marvel Comics.

Put a stopwatch on your computer and see how long this comics' death lasts (my bet, not long at all).

IIRC, Marvel's last big death was Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, which received mainstream press coverage (verrry slow news day, yes). But they had his former sidekick immediately take up the superhero mantle of Cap, and then they brought Rogers back to life shortly after that as well.

I'm glad I gave up reading comics a long time ago with blatant money grabs like this going on.

Jason X, Audience 0

2011-02-17T17:44:00.000-08:00

Jason X (2002)

Turn the lights back on at the Satellite of Love, 'cuz this is Mystery Science Theater 3000 fodder, bots and girls.

Yes, when you'e done nine previous movies and your slasher series has become bloated and tired after soaking in Crystal Lake these many years, what else can you do but shoot your unstoppable masked killer into outer space?

They spent about $13 million on this turd pile. How many hungry and orphaned kids could have been fed and sheltered with that money? A lot, that's how many. Instead we get something that looks exactly like one of those bad Syfy channel movies, with shaky production values and a goofy cast filled with somewhat familiar TV actors.

And the story, good grief, the story - it was just a lame rip-of of Aliens and Alien. You see there were space marines on board a ship full of space college students (WTF, right). The space college students are from Earth 2, and are visiting our ratty, now-uninhabited Earth 1 with their terribly acted space college professor, where they stumble upon Jason Vorhees doing his Good Humor Man impression in cyrogenic freeze. Of course they bring aboard their ship a giant, hockey-masked freak wielding a machete. Jason quickly thaws out and gets down to bi'ness. First the grunts go after hockey head, get hacked and stabbed, and then he goes after the space kids. The majority of the cast was in their 20s it seemed, even the hardened space marines, so the movie should have been titled, Jason versus the Space Kids.

Now some of the sets come across as pretty decent, they look like they were designed and built by pros with a keen eye and love of the genre; others are of the "lets shoot in a dark warehouse with concert scaffolding and stacked boxes" variety (in other words, severely cheap ass). The CGI is TV quality and mostly laughable; the designs of the space ships are crude and look like pre-animation school student work.

But the worst part is that the kills are uninspired. After nine movies where old hockey face has slashed, stabbed and skewered everything that moves, and some of that gore was during the hey day of the 1980s horror craze under latex-master Tom Savini, you expect these kills to be something special. Use some frakking imagination for Freddy's sake! Jason simply stabs more than a few people, which we've seen 17,486 times already (not counting the Friday the 13th rip off slasher flix). Since Jason doesn't talk, the kills need to be "fun" and creative (especially creative). I laughed just once when he was using a coed in a sleeping bag to bash a second coed in a sleeping bag, which the director said was an homage to a previous Friday film (and I ain't talking about the Friday film with Chris Tucker as Smokey neither). Come on, people, you put Jason IN SPACE. IN A SCIENCE FICTION FILM. Have some fun with that!

The only other laff was when Jason comes back and he's all "robocized" with nanites and metal scraps. He was so ridiculously muscular and over-defined he looked like one of those dolls for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

Nevertheless (and believe me, this movie is all "less") this is a stupid, stupid movie, and should be watched with many beers, pretzels, chips, assorted nuts, and most of all, lovers of crap cinema.

Take this Persian rug out back and beat the crap from it

2011-02-17T17:19:00.001-08:00

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)

Yet another disappointing summer blockbuster, a bloated, bland and boring adventure film with an American actor playing an Asian character but with a British accent.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays dusty Dastan, the titular prince. After raiding a holy city he is accused of killing his adopted father, the king. So he goes on the lame with a beautiful princess (the beautiful Gemma Arterton) to clear his name and yada, yada, yada. Dastan bounces around his and other cities using obvious Parkour/free running styles, but as this is a modern fantasy film, the quick-cut editing employed takes all the fun out of that amazing technique, so we're not sure if we're seeing CGI, doubles or whatever (look at Casino Royale and, of course, District 13 to see how to properly shoot Parkour for a movie). This ridiculous editing style is used in the many action/fight scenes so those are just a messy blur. When will we see an end to this wretched hyper-editing?

This is one of those movies where they spent far too much time and money building sets, props, costumes and on visual effects that very little was actually spent on story and character. Not one character appealed to me, or said a funny or interesting bit of dialogue (Alfred Molina came close). When you watch the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies you cannot imagine any other actor playing those lead roles. Persia's characters are so flat that ANYONE ELSE could play the roles; save for Molina, they didn't cast any actors with any real spark.

The movie was shot in a sepia tone making everything look the same, which is bad for a desert-based film. People, here's another word for sepia: BROWN. The story supposedly took place over more than a week, but everywhere they went looked exactly like where they just came from, simply more sepia-tinged sand and rocks.

There was no sense of adventure to be had in this mess. Watch the original Jonny Quest to see how to do exotic adventure on a shockingly limited budget (as least compared to a $200 million movie).

Sitting through a lousy movie in this genre only makes me want to watch a good one, like the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad movies, which had everything Prince of Persia does not: memorable characters, exotic settings, and a true sense of fun and adventure.

ps: As a capper to show you how they completely f-ed up everything, check out the movie's title font. Instead of a design that evokes a sense of the exotic or otherworldliness or adventure - see Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies - we get a dull white font that looks like it's perfect for a contemporary drama!

This Spirit Has No Soul

2011-02-11T11:16:00.001-08:00

So I popped in the DVD of The Spirit the other day. I lasted all of about six minutes. Something about the movie just makes me hate it.

Comic book artist/writer Frank Miller adapted the Wil Eisner comic book series for the big screen, but along the way Miller somehow turned it into Sin City 2, which was a huge mistake. (I hate to think he's a one trick pony, but that horse is the one in the barn.) I've never read a complete Spirit book, seeing as how it had its hay day in the 1940s. I've seen panels and pages reproduced in book on comics and it seemed to be a series that loved its two dimensional world, with Eisner playing with panel sizes, compositions, layout, color, sound effects, etc. In the film we just get black and white nonsense. These "green screen" movies work every once in a while, as it did with Sin City and 300, but here I was just annoyed. Perhaps because I didn't care for the characters or was interested in any of the actors the CGI work got all the attention.

The cast was full of big names, but nobody made a real impression with their character. Samuel L. Jackson's big bad The Octopus came across like a third-string Adam West Batman tv series villain. Gabriel Macht was a complete snooze as the Spirit. And the femme fatales, who are such a large part of the comic book series, all fell flat. Didn't care for any of them, including Scarlett Johansson, who is in one of my favorite movies of all time, Lost in Translation.

Oh, and Frank, I'd like my six minutes back, please.

Hulk is the Most Animatronic There Is!

2011-01-15T12:18:00.001-08:00

SlashFilm has a post about an unused HULK ANIMATRONIC ROBOT that Ang Lee decided not to use in his film version of the Jade Giant.

The Robo-Hulk was created by effects guru Steve Johnson, who has worked his magic on everything from The Howling IV to Spider-Man 2.

I liked the CGI Hulk in Lee's movie just fine, but it looks like this cable-controlled creation would have been a lot of fun. However, Ang still would have told his Hulk story as over-wrought "Greek tragedy" so it would have sucked either way. (sigh)

Happy 2011 Everybody!

2011-01-02T18:24:00.000-08:00

War of the Worst

2010-12-12T17:32:00.000-08:00

Skyline (2010)

Many, if not most, artists get their start by copying the work of professionals. Cartoonists trace comic books and comic strips before trying their hand at creating their own characters and settings. Young filmmakers using Super 8 film or the family camcorder re-create scenes from their favorites movies in their backyards, i.e. the Raiders of the Lost Ark truck chase, but with Indy on a bike riding up to Dad’s old Toyota pick up.

Skyline, directed by visual effects supervisors “The Brothers Strauss,” is stuck squarely, and amateurishly, in the “recreate scenes from favorite movies” mode.

The story, if you want to call it that, concerns a group of Pretty (mostly) Young Things who are stuck in a fancy Marina Del Rey, California high-rise condo when aliens attack the earth over a three day period. Two of the young things - Jarrod (Eric Balfour) and his girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson)- are from out of town. They party one night with Jarrod’s bud, Turk from Scrubs (Donald Faison, playing Terry), and his shrill gf played by Brittany Daniel, and wake up the next morning to the alien invasion. And you thought YOUR hangovers were bad.

There are two huge problems with this movie. One, none of the characters is very likable, especially Balfour, who just comes across as distant the whole film, even when he should be intimate with his pregnant girlfriend. Seriously, there is no one in the cast we care about or root for. Two - and it’s a big one - there is no story here. None. Aliens attack and our cast spends most of the time in the condo opening and closing the blinds, wondering what to do. I kid you not, they do this so much that the blinds manufacturer should have received a co-producer credit.

In the Spielberg/Cruise War of the Worlds remake, Cruise’s character Ray is trying to reconcile with his kids when the aliens attack. They go on the run with Ray doing whatever it takes to protect his family. In Skyline, Jarrod and Terry have the bright idea to leave their girlfriends and the relative safety of the condo to explore the roof’s helipad. Why? There’s no rescue or escape via that route. They do this stupid move simply so that the movie can show the giant alien ships in the distance and, later, a giant alien monster thing clambering up to the top for a silly action beat. Characters do things so they can get to the next effects shot; nothing is ever done to advance any sort of story or plot point.

It’s like the whole movie was put together from a visual effects “sizzle reel” where there were a bunch of “cool” shots, but when they tried to shoehorn in those shots to make a logical story, the thing falls apart.

The movies that Skyline rips off are blatantly obvious, from Independence Day, to War of the Worlds, to The Matrix, without adding one single spin or fresh idea to any of them. The whole point of this movie was simply to set things up for a sequel at the end.

Skyline is so bad, so inept I predict it will sweep the annual Razzie Awards for Worst Movie next year.

Put this dull beast out of our misery

2010-12-05T22:27:00.001-08:00

Predators (2010)

Predators is the worst kind of sequel, one which simply regurgitates the first entry in the series and wants a generous pat on the back for doing so.

The original Predator (1987) concerned a group of Special Forces types led by Arnold Schwarzenegger with all his late 80s charisma in full effect, as they navigate a treacherous jungle on a mission. The tables are quickly turned as these mercenary predators find themselves the prey of a hunter - one from outer space. It was a Rumble in the Jungle like none other with larger than life figures like Arnold, Carl Weathers and Jesse Ventura, all machismo ("Ain't got time to bleed!"), rippling muscles, and cigars as big as loaves of French bread. Predator was directed by action maestro John McTiernan who went on to helm Die Hard (1 and 3) and The Hunt for Red October.

Predators is produced by Austinite Robert Rodriguez and directed by Nimrod Antal, the script was written by Michael Finch and Alex Litvak, reportedly from an earlier story idea by Rodriguez. This “original” story concerns dropping (here, literally by parachute) Special Forces types, led by Adrien Brody, into a treacherous jungle where they find themselves the prey of alien hunters. Like Predator, the Predators cast is multi-racial. Like Predator, Predators has a lone female member. I can hear Rodriguez saying “homage” but I call bullshit.

The writers’ big idea was to make the soldiers multi-national, instead of from just one country’s army; they are pulled from hot spots all over our world (Russia, Sierra Leone, Israel, etc.). The problem is, not one member of this group "pops" or is memorable in any way (neither the actors, or the characters). They’re bland ciphers, just waiting to be killed off.

I believe a much better angle would have been to have the characters be from different time periods: a feudal-era samurai warrior, a Clint Eastwood-esque cowboy from the 1870s, a Viking, a Special Forces merc, and, at this stage in the sequel game, throw in at least one EXTRA-TERRERSTRIAL soldier to boot. Predators and Aliens have already clashed, so introducing time travel and other intelligent E.T.s into the mix is the next logical step. That would be a real motley crew, a dirty half-dozen of the best human (and non-human) warriors to go up against the Predators.

The major deviation from the original is that this story is set in the jungle of an alien planet, apparently the game preserve of the Predator species. McTiernan shot in Mexico, while Antal has to make due with Hawaiian locations. After Avatar, which created an alien world from the ground (and blades of grass) up, it seems pretty lazy for filmmakers to go to familiar locations like a tropical jungle and call them “alien.” The exotic swamp world of Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back was built on a soundstage, in the Star Wars prequels they created green screen CGI shots of exotic and bizarre worlds, which is what Avatar did. I’m sorry, but the jungles of Hawaii are not alien enough. To add insult to injury, at one point a character recognizes a particular poisonous plant. My question is, HOW COULD HE HAVE RECOGNIZED A POISONOUS EARTH PLANT ON AN ALIEN PLANET THOUSANDS OF LIGHT-YEARS AWAY? And do NOT say the Predators brought the plants with them. That would be beyond stupid.

This is the type of movie that really raises my ire: stupid, pointless, uninspired, and boring. It’s a sequel/remake similar to what Rodriguez did with his second film Desperado, which was a bigger-budgeted sequel that was essentially a remake of his first micro-budget film El Mariachi. But while Desperado improved on the original by casting Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek (professional actors with real charm and personality who "popped" from the screen) and ramping up the action and mayhem, Predators fails at every turn with a dull cast (seriously, you do NOT go from Schwarzenegger to Adrien Brody unless there is a real character to play - see Robert Patrick in T2 for how to play the strong/lean silent type), lifeless characters, and standard cookie cutter action scenes. Rent the original Predator instead.

A Great Movie and a Movie That Grates

2010-11-29T15:07:00.000-08:00

Toy Story 3 and The Last Airbender (both 2010)

I recently had the opportunity to sit through a double-bill of two blockbuster movies released in theaters this year. Both had large budgets, veteran film-making crews, and audiences familiar with the tales. But where one was a magical journey involving a makeshift family, the other was a loud, ugly mess. The movies I’m speaking of are The Last Airbender and Toy Story 3 (guess which was the ugly mess).

It was very informative to watch these two films back to back. Where Airbender got everything wrong, Toy Story 3 got it right. The Toy Story movies have always benefited from the lead voices of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, as Cowboy Sheriff Woody and spacey spaceman Buzz Lightyear, respectively. Unlike the casting decisions of other animated movies, Hanks and Allen were not cast simply for their marquee value, but because they were perfect for these characters. The voice actors for all the other toy characters are spot on as well. In Toy Story 3, I was surprised it was Ned Beatty breathing life into Lotso, the huggable bear with less than huggable intentions, but he was the right choice.

Airbender, which is based on a popular Nickolodeon cartoon series, is set in mystical countries with a heavy Asian bent, but all the main (child) characters are Caucasian. In the beginning, we see an Eskimo-like village where all the elderly people appear to be Inuit, but the adolescent lead actors – a pair of which come from this very same village – are all white kids who looked like they took a bus from the local galleria. The characters in the original cartoon are all Asian, but you can see the studio execs saying, “We don’t feel Asian actors would carry the movie in most major markets, so all the good kids need to be Caucasian, mmm-kay?” It’s at this point that writer/director/producer M. Night Shyamalan should have quickly removed himself from the movie.

Toy Story 3 tells a simple enough story: the little boy Andy is now grown up and heading off to college. What will happen to all his old toys? Will they be disposed of with the garbage, tossed in an old box in the family attic, or perhaps given away to a kid or kids who will play with them? Airbender tells us there are four nations who control the elements of fire, water, earth and air. We see each nation has helpfully color-coded itself so we can tell them apart from one another (the fire nation wears red, the water nation blue, etc). There is the mystical chosen one who can control all four elements, so everyone wants this dude. The trouble is they found a martial artist for the lead (Noah Ringer), instead of an actor. This kid is terrible (which shows you how good Haley Joel Osment was in The Sixth Sense under the guidance of the same filmmaker, Shyamalan).

I’m just going to say it: The Last Airbender is a stupid movie. If the lead kids were terribly interesting actors that might have helped to elevate the thing, but the fact is they were all flat and unappealing. They all looked like they would comfortably fit on any Disney Channel series. Jackson Rathbone, who played Sokka, the young Han Solo/Madmartigan-wannabe NEVER blinked his eyes. It was unnerving at first, then annoying, then just totally silly (it was suggested a drinking game be centered on his unblinking peepers). I never once believed in any of these characters. I was watching actors act (unlike, say, in the Harry Potter series where all the characters are so vividly brought to life).

The scenes of characters “bending” or manipulating the elements were laughable. Apparently to control the elements you have to do a ton of martial arts flourishes – basically a lot of shadow boxing. With all the different styles of martial arts out there, you’d think that perhaps each element would have its own style: something extremely fluid for water, short quick movements for fire, and something “heavy” (or at least less fluid) for earth. This was not the case as each bender seemed to be doing the same flourishes for their respective element.

Toy Story 3 showed us that by keeping the story and characters first and foremost on everyone’s mind, the third outing for a franchise need not be a dull retread. I liked that it was a simple story – apparently one idea for TS3 was that the toys go to China or Hong Kong to save a malfunctioning Buzz. That sounds like something any studio would do, but Pixar wisely jettisoned that idea and kept things close to home (literally and figuratively). They kept the main group of Andy’s toys, but added a few new key characters in Lotso and Ken (Michael Keaton, doing an outstanding job as the lone male action figure in a line of girl’s toys). They even managed toss in an homage to Cool Hand Luke's infamous "spends a night in the box" speech!

That’s not to say Toy Story is all talk and emotions. There are some great action sequences, including a conveyor belt scene that was top notch in terms of pacing, but it also packed an emotional punch.

The Last Airbender left me annoyed and angry that I’d wasted 2 hours watching another failed big budget studio fantasy effort. Toy Story 3 made me laugh and smile and even brought a tear to my eyes at the end, so this double bill wasn’t all bad.

Giving Thanks to All Our Readers

2010-11-25T11:41:00.000-08:00

Dullest Ninja Movie EVER

2010-11-21T14:35:00.000-08:00

Ninja Vengeance (1988)

A blond-haired "ninja" gets into trouble in Redneck Town, USA and quickly goes on the lam. (Someone explain to me how going on the run and not wanting to fight equals “vengeance?”)

How do we know this guy is a ninja? From the contents of his nap sack, of course, which includes throwing stars, some rope, a thing that looks like a flute, some more throwing stars, oh, and two books on ninjas and ninjutsu. The fact that they are two PAPERBACK books clues us in his training was first rate.

This movie could easily have been titled, “Ninja Pamphlet” as it constantly flashes back to our ninja Chris Mason’s (Craig Boyett, who looks more like John Tesh than Chuck Norris) training on the beach by some white bearded sensei (Stephen K. Hayes) who drones on about important martial arts messages such as the way of the ninja, the concept of yin and yang, and the best dim sum joints in town. He’s like a very mellow Tony Robbins.

The town locals are all KKK-carrying racist goofballs, who are often hilariously over-dubbed in crowd scenes (seriously, I've never heard "Git 'em!" so many times in one movie). Led by a corrupt sheriff and his son, Jesse the deputy (David Paul Lord), the rednecks kill a young black student Mike Washington (Frederick Phillips) who is friends with Sam (Janet Pawlak) the white idealistic town cutie who dreams of better things than being a KKK bride to Jesse. The triple Ks frame ninja Chris who tried to stop Mike's beatdown, so he dons his cross trainers and, with Sam in tow, goes running in the woods. And they run some more. And run a little more. And, yes, even some more. I think the woods put up the majority of funding for this flick.

I have to say this: Janet Pawlak, who is a cutie despite her nearly-up-to-her-armpits 80s jeans, runs with all the grace of a coked up orangutan. Seriously, it’s distracting. When she briefly clambers over a tree branch, it was one of the most graceless movements I have ever witnessed a human being perform. Maybe it's the jeans' fault.

The fight scenes are, without a doubt, some of the most inept I have ever witnessed. Lord and Boyett may have black belts but they have no idea of how to fight for the camera, and director Karl Armstrong doesn’t know the first thing about staging a movie fight. Also decent "chop socky" fight sound effects might have helped sell some of this mess, but those were also absent.

The judo flips in the old Charlie’s Angels series were much more convincing. Speaking of which, Boyett appears to have invented the shoulder roll (don't tell William Shatner or Robert Conrad -- two guys who had mastered that move -- about this) -- at least that's what you would think after watching him do that move eight or nine times in the movie, whether he is fighting or not. In fact, after he checks into his motel early in the movie, he goes out for a little exercise and meditation in the park and the first thing he does is a shoulder roll! For NO apparent reason!

Pretty much everyone in the cast is a non-actor. Boyett, here in his first and only movie credit, makes me long for the early days of Chuck Norris. Norris was never much of an actor either, but he at least had presence (and a cool beard). Boyett is beyond bland, and quite beardless.

"Bland" pretty much sums up this nutty ninja caper.

Now, the end credits had something I've never seen before. They credit the group of people at the KKK rally as "Ku Klux Klan members," which is fine, but a group of black people who show up to confront the Klan are credited under the heading, "Blacks." OMG, right?

He's Coming For You!

2010-10-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

Another Halloween treat on tap for you, the great undead funk band Here Come the Mummies performing "Attack of the Weiner Man" on the always awesome Bob and Tom Show.

Dig those mummified horns, man.

Trick and Treat

2010-10-31T09:42:00.001-07:00

As the great orator Porky Pig once uttered, "Happy Halloween, you thing from another world, you!"

Here's a look at Star Trek's one and only - and thank goodness and Gorns for that - Halloween episode, "Catspaw." So load up on the candy corn, gummi worms and Snickers Bars and check out the Halloween shenanigans of Capt. Kirk and company as they go up against the goofiest pipe cleaner aliens you will ever see.

Dig it.

2010-10-20T15:37:00.000-07:00

Warm up to this solid little thriller

2010-10-20T08:37:00.000-07:00

Frozen (2010)

Alfred Hitchcock did it with Lifeboat and Vincenzo Natali with Cube. What these two directors did is set their stories in one very confined space (a lifeboat in the former and a cube-like prison in the latter). Now, writer/director Adam Green sets his story in the great snowy outdoors, but confines his main characters – a trio of college kids on a weekend getaway – to a ski lift chair 40 feet above the ground.

What could have been merely a “stunt” or "high concept" movie turns out to be a solid little thriller, thanks to the time spent at the beginning getting to know our heroes: Kevin Zegers as Dan, Emma Bell as his new girlfriend Parker, and Shawn (Iceman in the X-Men movies) Ashmore as Dan’s best bud Joe.

They not annoying jerks as is often the case with 20-somethings in horror/thrillers, but regular people, especially Joe, who meets a cute co-ed on the slopes and even gets her number, which he tries not to forget even when things go bad. Our trio wanted to make one last run down the slopes before it shuts down for the night, but through a series of believable mishaps, they get stuck halfway up the mountain. They don’t descend into Lord of the Flies territory, but the guys and girl start sniping at one another in a believable fashion; their attempts to extricate themselves from their harrowing predicament are also quiet plausible.

One thing the movie gets right is to increase the problems for the trio. The filmmakers don't simply confine them to the stuck chair lift; Green throws in frostbite scares, a storm, hungry wolves, steel cables which will shred your hands, and more; the tension increases as we go along, which is something the recent film Monsters desperately needed (that movie was simply "stuck in a chair lift").

For a lower budgeted movie, they made sure they got a decent camera/equipment package, including a crane to swoop around the chairlift (shot on a real mountainside), so if our characters cannot move, at least the camera can. The performances are mostly solid, with Ashmore being the standout of the three, and Bell being the weakest.

I have yet to see Adam Green’s other films, primarily Hatchet and the just-released Hatchet II, but if he brings the same creativity, fun and energy to those films as he did to Frozen, then they herald the arrival of a talented new filmmaker to the tired Hollywood scene.

Keep This Nightmare Off Your Street - and TV Screens

2010-10-17T13:57:00.000-07:00

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Freddy Krueger (referred to as “Fred Krueger” in the movie) returns in a wasteful, useless remake. THANKS MICHAEL BAY!

This is the kind of production that gives remakes/reboots a bad name. As in the original 1984 Nightmare, Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley) is not a wisecracking goofball (that came in the later sequels and TV series), but rather a more sinister figure. The make up looks more like a real burn victim’s than the plastic pizza face worn by original Freddy Robert Englund.

This movie features many of the original film’s more famous beats or set pieces: the bladed-glove in the tub, the girl being flung up the walls of her bedroom, and Freddy’s face peering out from the wallpaper. These nods only made me appreciate the low budget, pre-CGI-era original. For example, the wallpaper was made of latex in 1984, now it’s all just obvious digital effects. Since the characters use cell phones, they didn’t try to recreate the memorable scene where the phone’s mouthpiece becomes Freddy’s lecherous tongue.

The cast is uniformly unmemorable, with actors Rooney Mara (taking over for Heather Langenkamp), Kyle Gallner, Kellan Lutz (one of those high school kids who looks 30 yrs old), and Thomas Dekker turning in forgettable performances. Mara appears in The Social Network and the upcoming remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She has a presence that is not fully utilized here; she’s the best thing in the movie, but that’s damning it with faint praise. I blame writers Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer, director Samuel Bayer (a music vid director making his feature film debut) and producer Bay (who has already crapped on/out the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and Hills Have Eyes reboot movies). Haley was an inspired choice for Krueger but since they do nothing new with the character or this story, what is the point?

Another thing that truly stuck out is the movie’s principal dream/nightmare location of a rusting industrial factory is spectacularly unimaginative, especially in the same year that saw the release of Inception, another movie dealing with dreams. The “steam and flame” (thanks, Roger Ebert) factory setting in the ’84 Nightmare could be forgiven as it was a low budget effort. But 26 years later, it’s pathetic to do a remake and set it in the same goofy setting, which every other low budget (and big budget) shoot ‘em up has used as a location (see Terminator 1 and 2, Cobra, Space Mutiny, and every other Golan-Globus cheapie action pic). The scenes of a hellish Los Angeles in the movie Constantine would seem to be more appropriate for a true nightmare. Oh, well, there’s always the obligatory Nightmare sequel…

Non Event

2010-10-09T17:51:00.000-07:00

Any of you been watching The Event, the much hyped (perhaps over hyped) new NBC series? I’ve watched the first three episodes and I am so far extremely not impressed.

After watching the pilot episodes of Lost, Heroes and FlashForward, I was instantly hooked on those shows. Those characters (except for Joseph Fiennes and his goofy Drinky the Crow FBI agent) and those particular stories had me glued to the tube (at least until Heroes seriously went bad in the second season onward, and Lost was spinning its wheels from the middle of season two to mid season three). The Event, which deals with non-terrestrial people (are they alien, or what?) and a conspiracy (or two) involving our government simply hasn’t popped for me.

None of the actors or characters seems to stand out. Lead Jason Ritter is like any other handsome young actor. His presence and his character have elicited a big “so what” shrug so far. His gf, played by Sarah Roehmer, is pretty but not much else (remember how you first felt about Evangeline Lilly in that first season of Lost?). Blair Underwood - who has honestly never impressed me - as the Prez doesn’t seem the least bit presidential (see Dennis Haysbert on 24 for someone with presidential presence).

I’m just waiting for something to happen. Even the big moment (I won’t spoil it here) at the end of the first episode wasn’t as cool as it should have been. Perhaps it is the characters, or perhaps the odd storytelling method of constantly flash-backing that left me cold. Sure I wanted to know what happened and how it happened but I wasn't pulled into the story.

With its flat cast and unengaging storyline, I don’t think The Event will last long enough for them to reveal what the Event is.

Here there be Monsters

2010-10-09T17:26:00.000-07:00

Monsters (2010)

I recently watched through VOD (Video-On-Demand) the long-anticipated movie Monsters, from first time writer/director Gareth Edwards. The film is due in theaters on October 29, 2010.

Edwards set blogs ablaze the last several months with clips of his first feature film and the knowledge that he was doing it all for a budget around $15,000, making him the 21st century’s new Robert Rodriguez (Edwards also served as credited production designer, cinematographer and visual effects supervisor).

With fingers crossed we sat down to watch this film, the story of a man and a woman forced to trek across Central America and Mexico – an area infested with dangerous alien creatures - to make their way back home to the United States. Call it Planes, Trains and Automobiles Meets The Mist (By Way of Cloverfield).

A prologue tells us that we discovered life in our solar system, but when we sent a space probe to collect samples and return to Earth, it broke up over Central America and the alien life forms started to spread, not just outward, covering the area, but upward as well: they appear to be 200 feet tall fully grown.

The story follows a photographer, Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), who is still trying to get that one great shot of the creatures that will win him the cover of a major magazine and propel him to the big leagues. He’s forced by the owner of the magazine he works for to play chaperone for the boss’s daughter, Sam (Whitney Able). His new assignment: get her out of Central America and safely back to the U.S.

For $15,000 this is an outstanding film; it looks good, sounds good and the visual effects – apparently created with off the shelf software (Adobe AfterEffects, etc) on a standard pc – are amazing. But the story is flat and the characters not defined enough.

In Monsters, the adversities the couple faces always seem to be on the same level, perhaps due to the low budget. Instead of building to a boiling point the movie just keeps a slow simmer and never gets any hotter. When their plans for Sam to take a ferry boat home collapse, they are forced to travel by car through the infected zone. But this is where the movie trips up. They build up the zone as so dangerous nobody can make it through. However the movie goes out of its way to paint a “life goes on” picture – even though there are giant monsters lumbering about behind hundred foot tall fences and fighter jets and helicopters constantly streaking across the skies, people will be people, so you have to have a roof over your head, you gotta feed your kids, there are still festivals to put on and attend - you have to mourn the dead, but still celebrate life.

I come back to Planes, Trains and Automobiles: each calamity forced those characters to further bang their heads together and examine their lives. It wasn’t enough that they had to share a single bed in a motel room, but then that room was broken into and they had their cash and credit cards stolen (which figures into a later scene). And then of course, they wake up the next morning in each other’s arms (one of the most famous scenes in modern comedy history).

It’s not much of a spoiler but at the end Kaulder and Sam have feelings for each other, but this story didn’t justify how they got there. Kaulder never really stood up and did anything heroic – he didn’t grab a gun and start shooting the monsters when their mercenary guides were killed. He didn’t have any special knowledge or know how that got them out of a tight jam. They were just a passive couple on a somewhat dangerous journey together.

This is a movie that wannabe (and veteran) filmmakers should watch for the technical aspects. I absolutely applaud Gareth Edwards and his two-man crew on what they were able to accomplish (I imagine 15 grand doesn't even cover lunch for a day on a Michael Bay picture). But the simple fact of the matter is you would need to look elsewhere for a more compelling story.

TGIF!

2010-10-08T18:52:00.000-07:00

Prehistoric Fantasy At Its Worst

2010-09-19T17:55:00.000-07:00

10,000 B.C. (2008)

Let me ask you a question – have you seen The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Patriot, Braveheart, and Hanna Barbera’s Dino Boy (scroll to 26 seconds if you want your eyes to melt)? If so, there’s pretty much no reason to waste your time with director Roland Emmerich’s latest empty-headed blockbuster, 10,000 B.C.

Emmerich is a master of visual effects (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow), but still a padawan learner as far as story and characters. Here he and co-writer Harald Kloser crib from so many obvious sources that a new Drinking Game should be made for this movie: you take a shot whenever you yell out whichever movie he is ripping off. At 35 minutes into this dreck, you’d need to call an ambulance to take you to a hospital to pump your stomach.

To begin, there is a bone-headed narration provided by Omar Shariff, that simply states EVERYTHING that is going on onscreen. Did Emmerich think this overly-lifted plot too complicated for his regular viewers?

The story follows a group of Stone Age mammoth hunters, centering on D’Leh (Steven Strait), whose father, a great hunter and leader, up and left one day and never returned. They should have known something was amiss when he said he was just going for “a pack of cave-smokes.” D’Leh has the hots for a blue-eyed girl, Evolet (Camilla Belle) who is the last survivor of her tribe and comes into the care of his people. The resident old lady shaman declares her to be the wife of whoever becomes the tribe’s new hunter/leader.

Evolet is captured by a tribe of horsemen from what appears to be hundreds of thousands of years of evolution ahead of the fur-wearing mammoth hunters. There must be a wormhole loose in the mountains as the story opens in the Stone Age, but then these goofballs – with obviously modulated voices that make them sound exactly like the dudes in Star Gate – ride in to the movie and they have clothing and metalwork which is from a much later period in history. Of course, to confuse things, the movie throws in a mention of Atlantis and even aliens, and ends in Ancient Egypt, pyramids and everything, so all of Emmerich’s favorite “motifs” are here (not only does he rip off other movies, but his own as well).

There is not one interesting or memorable lead character in this story. D’Leh could have been played by any hunky male actor from any show on The CW network. Camilla Belle is certainly no Raquel Welch. With such a fantasy setting shouldn’t you cast actors who pop off the screen and have personality? The heads of the tribes who band with D’Leh are much more interesting, but they are only minor characters.

Admittedly there is some beautiful scenery on display here, with amazing craggy mountain regions shot in New Zealand, Zambia and South Africa, but after The Lord of the Rings trilogy, all those aerial shots of our questing heroes running across said ranges – and there’s a lot - just brings to mind that better set of films. Many of the CGI creatures – especially the sabertooth tiger and the “terror birds” (raptors crossed with ostriches) – look extremely fake.

All the posters feature D'Leh staring down a sabertooth tiger. Here's an idea: since all this is just a bunch of comic book-flavored hooey, why not have the tiger "bond" with D'Leh (a la Marvel Comics Ka-Zar and his prehistoric tiger Zabu) after he saves its furry butt from a lethal trap and have ol' saber-face join D'Leh in his battle to save the girl and bring down the bad guy. It would have made the final battles much more fun.

There is also too much mumbo jumbo at work too. It’s one thing to have a cliched prophesy to fulfill in a story but to just introduce magical elements because you don’t know what else to do is just lame (I’m talking about the ending in particular). For a much more fun time overall, rent One Million Years B.C., a time when Raquel Welch knew how to fill out a fur bikini (and Ray Harryhausen knew how to put amazing and thrilling dinosaur special effects action on the screen).

Shear Advice

2010-09-17T09:09:00.000-07:00

Last One Out, Turn Off the Lights

2010-09-11T18:48:00.000-07:00

Star Trek - "Turnabout Intruder"

Oh, how the mighty have (or had) fallen. This final episode of the Original Series "stinks on ice," to quote the great Mel Brooks.

Captain Kirk's bod is hijacked by a beyond-jealous ex-female friend named Janice Lester. She couldn't hack it at the Academy - perhaps it had something to do with her being bat-shit insane - and blamed all men, particularly Kirk for her predicament. So with the help of some kooky alien tech she finds on some planet, she swaps out the old katra (or whatever) with Kirk, leaving her in Kirk's BVDs and the captain wearing her Victoria's Secret collection.

Kirk starts acting...VERY strange: he starts filing his nails, issuing confusing orders (the Enterprise is apparently going all over the galaxy, proving "female" captains can't drive) and trying to get on Ellen. Why he didn't just put on a drag show is beyond me.

There's no place else to go with this goofy story than with a trial (I wonder if David E. Kelley of L.A. Law and The Practice/Boston Legal fame ever watched this episode - perhaps he saw it as a dry run for Denny Crane).

It's all unintentionally funny and a sad, sad way to end a series, any series. Shatner hams it up so much I imagine the entire sound stage smelled of bacon. Anyone who has ever done a Shatner impression has likely seen this episode. In fact, Shatner, as Lester, gesticulates so much that you could probably watch it with the sound off and still get what's going on.

A Vampire Movie With Dull Fangs

2010-09-05T19:22:00.000-07:00

Daybreakers (2010)

Just because you have a new idea doesn’t mean you will have an interesting film.

Daybreakers posits that after a viral outbreak nearly everyone in the world has become a vampire. Humans – the vampires’ chief source of un-life sustaining blood – are on the verge of extinction.

Edward (not the sparkly ridiculously coiffed one from Twilight, here played by Ethan Hawke) is a blood specialist working for Bromley (Sam Neill). He has been working on a blood substitute to little success; meanwhile Bromley’s company runs a human “farm” which provides real blood to those who can pay (instead of Big Pharma, call it Big Blood). Edward is also a vampire with a conscience. He subsists on other-than-human blood, which is having a detrimental effect. Vampires who do not get real human blood on a regular basis “devolve” into what the movie calls “subsiders:” creatures with all the ugliest traits of the vampires but none of the charm (kind of like the post-Thanksgiving shoppers on Black Friday mixed with the monsters from The Descent).

Edward falls in with the beautiful Audrey (Claudia Karvan) and her band of human freedom fighters. He also hooks up with a man called Elvis (Willem Dafoe) who drives cool muscle cars and makes an interesting claim, which I won’t divulge.

The movie goes through great pains to integrate vampire sensibilities into our everyday culture: a homeless vampire’s cardboard sign reads “Will work for blood,” cars are designed for daytime driving with opaque windows and cameras and CCTVs, coffee stands sell coffee with “20% real blood,” TV ads tout the subwalk, an underground walkway/subway that enables the fanged to safely get around during the day. All this is basically meaningless as the movie never shows the “benefits” of being a vampire. The Lost Boys’s tagline was “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire.” Daybreakers show vampires as beat cops, baristas, research scientists, corporate CEOs, school kids, and members of the military. They’re all hard working citizens of Vampireville. They’re not cool-looking rock stars. They’re just regular folk. So what is the point? Why would you want to be a vampire and live “forever,” especially if your main source of food is nearly gone (Soylent Red, where are you)?

The movie is a modestly budgeted affair (approximately $20 million) from Australia’s Spierig Brothers, who helmed the ultra low budget Undead in 2003. There are a few “juicy” scenes where bodies and head and things go splat, which was a lot more fun than all the decapitations in The Wolfman. The movie looks slick enough, with photography by Ben Nott and production design by George Liddle, but the majority of the film is shot in a sickly grayish green hue. That look apparently started with The Matrix, and since that film is over ten years old, I call for an official moratorium on movies shot in that palate.

The story opens ten years after most of the world’s population grew fangs and lost their reflections, but as human beings have also steadily declined shouldn’t the world be more anarchic or post apocalyptic and less corporate-y – more Mad Max and less Gordon Gecko? Everything is too neat and tidy; it doesn’t feel real. I never once believed in the story, and if you don’t believe, just like the vamps have no reflection, you have no movie.

Woof. New Wolfman Movie is a Dog

2010-09-04T17:14:00.000-07:00

The Wolfman (2010)

Even a filmmaker who is pure of heart
and calls his agent by night
may release a stinker
when the script is not right

This latest remake/reimagining/re-what-have-you, this time of the 1941 Universal Monsters classic The Wolf Man, is a long, bloated tired affair. It has terrific production design and photography - many scenes almost appear black and white - but I cared not one bit (or is that bite?) for the story and characters.

Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro) is an traveling stage actor estranged from his family, father Sir John (Anthony Hopkins, proving he will never get another Oscar nomination) and brother Ben (Simon Merrells). After Ben goes missing one foggy moonlit night, his fiancé Gwen (the luminous Emily Blunt) contacts Lawrence asking for his help. So Lawrence packs his tights and skull (he was playing Hamlet) and travels back to the old manse, with all its creepy vines, cobwebs and thousands of candles (Sir John must own a wax works factory).

Soon after he starts poking around the local Gypsy camp, Lawrence encounters the monster and is quickly bitten. Now he is—cursed! Hoooowwwwlllllll!

I wasn’t kidding that this is a very slow, deliberate movie. I wouldn’t have minded if that slowness was to build up toward the shocking moments, but that’s not the case. They pretty much show the werewolf in the first few minutes of the movie (way to build suspense). And then Wolfie keeps popping up in Larry’s dreams, so the director and his editor can splice in a split second image of the wolfman. After the third time this happened I gave up. There’s no real shocks or scares in the movie, so what’s the point of it all? The atmosphere is great, thanks to production designer Rick Heinrichs and some splendidly gothic English location work, and cinematographer Shelly Johnson, but if there is no story, I'd rather be looking at still pictures of all these amazing backdrops. One quibble is the constant ground level spotlights illuminating dark forests and such - where the frak is this light supposedly coming from? It's not from the full moon, and campfires don't cast beams like this. It simply draws attention to itself as an artificial means to create atmosphere; it's just silly.

The characters often stand around looking depressed, save for Hopkins and his occasional mad glint. The most interesting character is Singh (Art Malik), Sir John’s Sikh Indian servant. He comes across as a man who has seen a lot, perhaps too much, and is holding back on telling Lawrence something vitally important. The characters don't connect in this movie; they're all individuals living a solitary existence. Lawrence and Gwen eventually fall for each other, but the movie doesn’t convey their romance very well, which is a shame because the end of the movie kind of rests on that fact.

Joe Johnston, a veteran of George Lucas’ ILM visual effects company and director of such fun fare as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Rocketeer and October Sky is an odd choice to direct a gothic monster movie, especially one with as much blood and decapitations as this one (I watched the unrated DVD). In a monster movie, the kills needs to be inventive, but that’s not the case here. I think any of the Friday the 13th movies had more creative whackings in them. I expect more from Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Se7en, but perhaps co-writer David Self rewrote all the interesting murders leaving behind this dull stuff.

There is also a long chase across the London rooftops and it’s much ado about nothing, which is a pity coming from a director, who I believe, had a hand in storyboarding the legendary truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The Computer Generated visual effects, especially involving the Wolfman, looked like CGI, which is a shame because when you hire a make up artist of Rick Baker’s caliber but you then go a route that has literally been trampled with pixels why hire Baker at all? He merely won an Oscar for one of the most memorable onscreen transformation sequences ever - and it was for An American Werewolf in London! Oh, irony. Who cares about another CGI morphing transformation sequence? When the CGI Wolfman figure starts running and leaping about it looks like an silly animated cartoon, which takes us out of the movie.

Watch the original Wolf Man or any of its sequels for a far better time.

Never Give Up, Never Surrender--Your Galaxy Quest Model Kits

2010-09-03T08:59:00.000-07:00

Friend of the blog DC brought this to our attention: it's a model kit of the NSEA Protector from one of the greatest and funniest sci-fi films of all time, GALAXY QUEST.

Galaxy Quest is pretty much a perfect movie, with a terrific, even touching, story, amazing performances from the entire ensemble cast (Tim Allen! Sigourney Weaver! Alan Rickman! Missi Pyle! Sam Rockwell!), first-rate visual effects from ILM and make up from Stan Winston, and more quotable lines than any half dozen comedies.

It's obviously a gentle poke at Star Trek and its fans, but if you know nothing about Star Trek, the movie still works.

The Protector had to invoke the U.S.S. Enterprise, without simply ripping it off. (IMHO, they did a better homage than what ended up on-screen in the recent Star Trek reboot.) The horseshoe design holds up well.

And in addition to the Protector, they also have a sweet looking model kit of GQ's Nebulizer and Communicator. Perfect for that landing party mission with the miners. Or is it minors?

Not Yet Famous Monsters

2010-09-02T14:09:00.001-07:00

SlashFilm.com has a terrific look at a movie I am absolutely dying to see, called, simply enough, Monsters.

Former UK visual effects artist turned writer/director Gareth Edwards has made the movie on a budget that would make Robert Rodriguez proud: approximately $15,000. The movie is set a few years after giant monsters, mutated from life forms brought back from space, have set up shop across Central America, basically taking over much of Mexico. They're real, they're here, and the only way to deal with them so far is to quarantine the areas in which them lumber about and leave them alone. Two people, a journalist and a tourist, must make their way across this alien-infested forbidden zone to the safety of the United States border.

Edwards shows you what you can do with a "prosumer camera," Adobe AfterEffects on a home computer, and a lot of imagination and creativity (not to mention old-fashioned sweat).

Here's another link, again via SlashFilm.com, to a look at what Edwards was able to do for a one hour UK production on Attila the Hun. His visual effects work is first rate, and it makes you wonder where all the money goes in big budget effects-driven Hollywood movies like Clash of the Titans and Percy Jackson & the Olympians.

Cuba Breaks Out A Zombie Comedy

2010-08-25T18:07:00.000-07:00

First there was Dawn, then came Shaun, now there is Juan of the Dead!

Coming out of Cuba of all places, this movie looks like there is an actual story at work, and not simply a broad parody approach/rip off.

Horrorsquad.com has the rundown and some video.

Cross your severed fingers that Juan of the Dead is a winner.

Stick with The Third Kind

2010-08-24T19:42:00.000-07:00

The Fourth Kind (2009)

“I’m actress Milla Jovovich. I play Dr. Abigail Tyler…”

With those words - heard at the start of the picture - I knew I was going to hate this movie. Instead of a simple card reading, “Based on a true story” or “Inspired by true events,” the filmmakers chose to play this goofy game by having its lead actress come out and say she’s an actress playing a character based on an actual person, but one whose name has been changed to protect her identity (you following this?).

The problem is it’s all a bald-faced lie. There is/was no Abigail Tyler, nor any of the other “real/pseudonymous” people “portrayed by actors” in this movie. It’s like the marketing department took over from the filmmakers. It’s a gimmick, and a badly thought out one at that. Moviegoers have seen enough footage on the news to know that shaky, videotaped scenes feel "real" or documentary-like, especially when compared to the the slick movie footage. But instead of clarifying things, all the onscreen titles and pronouncements merely come across as muddled and confusing, as if the filmmakers weren't sure of what they were telling.

It’s a simple enough tale of mysterious abductions in an Alaska town. Tyler, the town shrink, starts seeing similarities in the stories of disturbed patients, which leads her to believe – naturally for a trained, card carrying, diploma-on-the-wall psychologist – that aliens are abducting folks. I guess those anal probes go down better in cold climates?

The movie has tremendous fun with its audience by employing split screens showing the “actual” videotaped patient sessions with the movie’s “reenactments.” Also whenever a main cast member shows up in the movie, we get helpful titles like, “Will Patton: Actor, Portraying Sheriff Fred Gravy” or whomever. Egads. You just want to yell, "Stop it!" at the screen (which I did many times).

Someone tell me why the “actual videotape footage” of the “actual patients” always goes scrolling up into electronic gobbledygook just when things start to get interesting? I’m talking about patients levitating interesting. The aliens aren’t around. There are no implants we know of to interfere with the camera. The doctors all witnessed these levitations, but we’re denied the actual footage, even in the “fictionalized movie version,” not just the “actual videotape.”

It’s all just a big tease, leading to nothing. And who likes being teased in this manner?

You'd have to be crazy to watch Pandorum

2010-08-21T11:16:00.000-07:00

Pandorum (2010)

In space no one can hear you yawn.

Pandorum is the latest riff on the “haunted house in space” theme, of which the movie Alien is still the finest example. Pandorum borrows that Ridley Scott movie’s dark, dirty, claustrophobic spaceship interiors, but not its sense of intelligence, pacing or creepy chills.

Right from the start, Pandorum throws a bunch of numbers at us (used to help confuse the viewer until the big “twist” at the end) that inform us that Earth’s population has grown over the decades, until it got so bad and over-crowded that humanity had to build a giant spaceship to send settlers to another world called Tanis.

It is on this ship, Elysium, where we find crewman Bower (Ben Foster) just awakening from hypersleep. In a goofy plot contrivance, Bower doesn’t remember details about their situation or mission – darn that extended hypersleep side effect! – and neither does Payton (Dennis Quaid), Bower’s c.o.

So Bower goes exploring, leaving Payton to monitor him from a computer terminal, and he soon runs into fast-moving, howling, shrieking creatures - that call to mind Mel Gibson whenever he's pulled over - and lucky for him, a couple of other human survivors, Nadia (Antje Traue) and Manh (Cung Le) who apparently learned kung fu ninja skills during the ship’s long voyage. They’ve been fighting off the creatures for some time now, which is hard to accept when in one scene the movie shows it takes all three of them to kill just one creature, which resists getting limbs chopped off and machete blows to the head that would have done Jason Vorhees proud.

Soon, Payton finds another crewman, Gallo (Cam Gigandet, from Twilight) and things get goofier from there. We have to figure out who is experiencing the Pandorum of the title, which is supposed to be a condition brought on by extended space travel, where a person goes bonkers, hallucinates, and tries to kill a bunch of space-folks.

I nodded off about half way through this sucker and had to continue watching it the next day. There is nothing new here really, and quite frankly, too many scenes recall Alien. At one point Bower is in a shaft and his position is represented on Payton’s console as a little pulsing light with a trails of dashes behind it, just like in the Dallas air shaft scene in Alien. You may say, “homage” but I say “boring rip off.”

The production design looks very industrial, but also not very interesting; everything looks like a grungy factory instead of the last spaceship "ark" humanity ever built. Once again, Alien did a far superior job with fantastic futuristic sets and grungy interiors. During several scenes in Pandorum I just kept thinking, “Why is this area of the ship SO HUGE; they’re wasting so much oxygen (especially if resources are so thin).”

Ben Foster was great in a supporting role in 3:10 to Yuma, and I liked him in X-Men 3, but he doesn’t impress me here as a leading man. Dennis Quaid seems a little looser than he did in G.I. Joe, which is a good thing. The other actors are fine, but the story is too thin and not scary at all, and like a bad M. Night Shyamalan film (which is his last three or four), the whole thing rests on the twist(s) at the end, which weren’t very interesting/plausible and the more you think about it the whole movie unravels even more.

And when you find out about the creatures running around on the ship, you don't go "Cool idea!" but "Come on, you're kidding, right?"

Star Trek is Copyright 2010 and a Registered Trademark of CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com.

No Bark and No Bite

2010-08-12T21:58:00.000-07:00

Twilight Saga – New Moon (2009)

Against my better judgment – which admittedly would fill the average thimble – I checked out the second installment of the “I Can’t Bear To Live My Life Without You” tween angst phenomenon that is Twilight: New Moon.

WHY DIDN’T ANYONE STOP ME?

I wonder if the filmmakers, or at least the studio honchos, ever said, “This will be OUR Empire Strikes Back” which might account for the bleak and depressing tone of this movie. But while Empire was a darker film in tone from the original Star Wars, it advanced the characters and story in every way possible. New Moon doesn’t do anything of the sort. And I kinda liked the original Twilight, as my review of that movie will attest. (I much preferred Buffy the Vampire Slayer's take on the teenage girl/vampire romance, but at least I wasn't bored watching Twi-1.)

In the sequel, we simply get scene after scene of Bella and Edward (Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson) glowering at each other. They don’t do much else. Their entire relationship is based on their obsession with each other. That’s it. I generally like Stewart, but she really annoyed me here with her non-personality. She appeared stunned through 90% of the movie, and I don't believe she ever really smiled either (come on, even Goth chicks smile once in a while).

In part two, we get Shirtless Boy Werewolf Boy (Jacob, played by Taylor Lautner, who HAD to have used steroids to get so big so fast). He’s the substitute obsession for Edward when our sparkly once-and-future bloodsucker racks up the frequent flier miles and ankles to Italy to hang with the vampire royal family. Or something. Lautner lets his muscles do all the acting, which is fine because he really cannot emote (but he can sure flex).

Edward’s absence leaves Bella to awake SCREAMING from nightmares for MONTHS ON END. You’d think after just a couple days of this, Bella’s pappy would have sent her to a therapist, but that is not the white man's way.

This movie is so dumb it hit the audience over the head with its Romeo y Juliet parallels BY HAVING THEM LEARNING ABOUT R & J IN SCHOOL, and even having Big Rob Pat recite some lines (by unbeating heart, natch).

The Empire Strikes Back upped the visual effects stakes of the first Star Wars. In New Moon, the bigger budget is used to make extremely fake looking CGI wolves the size of the average family sedan. The new CGI Yogi Bear looked more realistic.

This movie was simply way, way too long, with interminable stretches where NOTHING happens, except characters staring at each other (and often doing so in the rain - oooo, dramatic no? No.). I think Woody Allen should dub in a new dialogue track, as he did on What’s Up Tiger Lilly? This might be the only thing to save this movie from the scrapheap of history.

Star Trek is Copyright 2010 and a Registered Trademark of CBS Studios, Inc. No Infringement of those rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com.

Come on in!

2010-08-11T23:07:00.001-07:00

I just saw this new diorama from Sideshow Collectibles depicting Yoda's swanky (or is that swampy) pad on Dagobah.

I looks pretty neat, especially with the Luke and Yoda figures inside it (what, no R2-D2 peeking in).

The detail is amazing, with all the dishes, flatware, and odds and ends. But what really gets me is Yoda's FLOOR MAT at the entrance.

Although instead of "Welcome" it should read, "In you must come! Yes!"

Dis'n bombad deesgusting!

2010-08-07T18:08:00.001-07:00

Jar Jar Binks Mega Mouth Candy.

It was an Episode I: The Phantom Menace tie-in from back in the day.

It was a very detailed Jar Jar Binks head, with his TONGUE thrusting out at you, and you sucked on that candy goodness.

It's all here in this Topless Robot article.

Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta go throw up. Lots.

Hose me down

2010-08-06T07:37:00.000-07:00

It's Friday, so that can only mean one thing: Slave Leia Car Wash!

You're welcome.

(Thanks to friend of the blog BW for pointing this one out.)

The Future's So Dim, Forget About Wearing Shades

2010-07-20T22:34:00.000-07:00

Futureworld (1976)

SPOILERS (IN THE LAST PARAGRAPH)

I think I’ve found the dullest film in the world. It appears that someone simply took a documentary of Peter Fonda walking around various underground power plants (Wow, aren't these futuristic? Well, no.) and spliced that footage together with Blythe Danner to make Futureworld, a sequel of sorts to the far more fun and interesting Westworld (with Michael Crichton nowhere to be found).

Like Westworld, Futureworld takes place in the robot-filled “Disneyland for rich adults who want to bang/kill life-size human sex toys” called Delos, which is pronounced at least 12 different ways, included “De-loss,” “De-lows,” “Day-loss,” and “Woody.” (This reminded me of the Star Trek episode with Frank Gorshin as the half black/half white alien from the planet Charon, pronounced, “Cher-on,” Shu-ron,” and “Lois”.)

Peter Fonda stars as ace apparently drugged-out reporter Chuck. He appears to be on some serious downers as he has pretty much only one expression on his face throughout the whole movie. I think he thought he was going to be working with Yul Brynner the whole time, but that immediately fell through and Fonda became pissed the rest of the production. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

Blythe Danner (yeah, Gwyneth Paltrow’s moms) is pretty and all, but she is a pretty terrible actress too; any number of other 1970s era actresses could have played her air-headed anchor woman character.

The movie is basically them stumbling around Delos for nearly two hours, like a couple of drunk college kids looking for their next kegger. Fonda doesn’t even know what he’s looking for, he just knows some dude who claimed to work for Delos was killed and his last words were, what else, “Delos.”

When our intrepid journos arrive at the resort, it looks like nothing so much as Logan’s Run: Part II, meaning it looks like the mall. There’s even a model city under plastic bubbles, like Logan’s Run. Come to think of it, Logan’s Run also had scenes set in underground power plants. Holy crap, this is almost a sequel-remake of Logan’s Run! Michael York would have been a much better choice to play Chuck the newshound, as he has more than one expression.

This is a very stupid movie, produced by the fine folks at cheapie-makers American International Pictures (MGM had made Westworld). Fonda and Danner do make it to Futureworld at one point; they do so by putting on spacesuits that look like giant quilted Snuggies. But unlike the first film, where much of the action centered on Westworld (with the two leads staying there as cowboys), as well as having Brynner's cowboy as a focus, Futureworld is not important to the story. In fact, they spend more time in Undergroundpowerplantworld than anywhere else. That's what they should have called the movie.

They showed some clips from Westworld, which must have been the most expensive single item of the production. Instead of dealing with the robots of Futureworld, Westworld, or any of the other worlds, the plot involves - SPOILERS AHEAD - making replicants of world leaders – “czars, generals, politicians and such” – that are controlled by the board of Delos to keep us from killing each other, blah, blah, blah.They would have been better served to simply make an original movie about replacing the world leaders with clone/replicant duplicates than to have all the Delos/Westworld baggage about the rampaging murderous robots from the first film. That is where the filmmakers went totally worng.

Model Mash Ups

2010-07-20T21:36:00.000-07:00

We're big fans of Star Trek and Star Wars around the space station.

One thing we've always wondered about was what would the U.S.S. Enterprise from Star Trek look like if it was detailed like one of the models - say, the Millennium Falcon - in Star Wars.

After about a half hour of doodling, here's what we came up with:

USS Enterprise is Copyright 2010 and a Trademark of CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended.

Whom Demi-gods Destroy

2010-07-11T18:44:00.000-07:00

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)

Minor Spoilers

Greek mythology - with its lusty tales of warring gods, goddesses and demi-gods, the visions of oracles and undertaking of fantastic quests - has fired mankind’s imagination for over 2,500 years.

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief would single-handedly extinguish that fire.

Based upon a series of books for ‘tween readers by Rick Riordan and adapted to the big screen by writers Craig Titley and Joe Stillman, the movie plays like a mega-budget episode of Wizards of Waverly Place or, worse, one of those SyFy channel Asylum-produced flicks they run late on Saturday nights.

Logan Lerman is our hero, Percy Jackson, seemingly ordinary high school teen, except that he can hold his breath for, like, 10 minutes while sitting at bottom of the school pool (and he doesn’t find this the least bit odd?). Percy is in reality a demi-god, the son of the god Poseidon (which explains the Aquaman riff) and a human woman. Zeus’s lightning bolt has been stolen and for reasons the movie never really makes clear, he believes Poseidon’s son Perce took it. If it’s not returned, Zeus will get very angry. And you wouldn’t like the king of the Greek gods when he’s angry.

Percy undertakes his beyond boring cross country quest to save his moms from Hades in the Underworld and recover the lightning bolt with the aid of fellow demi-god Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), whose absentee mother is the goddess Athena, and the movie’s Jar Jar Binks wannabe, Grover the Satyr (played by Tropic Thunder’s Brandon T. Jackson - that’s right Alpa Chino sports goat legs). Grover gets to utter such memorable, original and mythological lines as, “That’s what I’m talking about!”

Any movie featuring magic really needs to set some rules down, which Percy Jackson does not do. When Percy is in Camp Half-Blood, the training facility for demi-gods, he gets to play a game of Capture the Flag with real swords, the kind that can cut and slash. Being a normal American teen, Percy has never wielded a sword before except maybe in a Wii game, so when he gets into a clash of the teen titans with Annabeth, she hacks him up good. But, this being more a Canadian lake spa retreat than a more appropriate Greek hills setting, Percy stumbles over to a quaint little stream which not only heals his wounds BUT MAKES HIM INTO A MASTER SWORDSMAN. Come. the fuck. on. I can see water healing Percy, and I can even seem him “bending” (sorry Last Airbender fans) the agua, but the water magically making him LEARN swordsmanship? No fucking way. If just dipping a pinky into the water does all that for him, WHY does he need to go to camp to learn how to do anything? If it could impart that kind of knowledge and wisdom, then why not drink it, bath in it, gargle with it, learn who stole the lightning, and just magically make your mom appear, etc. (The filmmakers apparently didn’t read every page of their own script or they'd have pondered that question. )

Lerman is terrible, with a face that seems to be frozen from too many Botox shots. His mother is (as far as he knows) killed before his eyes while in the clutches of a minotaur (which as far as he know is a giant mythological creature)AND HE BARELY REGISTERS ANY EMOTION. Not surprise, nor anger, not wonder or fear. Nothing at all. Look out Sam Worthington, you’ve got some competition in the Bland Face Acting Department.

Daddario is just as bad, with giant wide blue eyes that rarely blink. She’s pretty, but there is no there there. Jackson is a horny goatboy; the less said about him the better. Uma Thurman resurrects her Poison Ivy routine from Batman and Robin for her turn as Medusa, she who needs some hair straightening product pronto (someone please call Chris Rock).

Sean Bean and Kevin McKidd, two British actors, play Mighty Zeus and Poseidon, respectively (Bean is just a little young to play the almighty god-father). In the original Clash of the Titans, Zeus was assayed by Sir Laurence Olivier, and in the recent remake, Liam Neeson put on the godly backlighting. Which begs the questions: why are Greek gods always played by British actors (Melina Kanakaredes from CSI: NY is Greek and plays Athena, but she even puts on a British accent)?

The books feature a 12 year old Percy Jackson and are aimed at that ‘tween audience, but something was seriously lost in the translation when they made the hero a 16 year old kid. The Harry Potter stories start with Harry as an 11 year old, but as he matures, so do the stories and the stakes. You can’t simply take a story with a 12 year old hero written for 12 year olds and make him 16 years old without updating the story, which they did not do here.

It’s a shame that director Chris Columbus is so ham-handed here. There is no trace of the grace, charm, and fun he brought to the first two Harry Potter films. Perhaps that is also an indication that J.K. Rowling told a much more interesting tale, but also that Potter screenwriter Steve Kloves did a masterful job adapting those stories compared to this movie's screenwriters. Food for thought, along with the lotus leaves and the olive oil.

Come for the review, stay for the snark: Bonus Star Trek Greek-themed fumetti! Pass the ouzo!

Star Trek is Copyright 2010 and a Registered Trademark of CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com.

Someone Needs A Tune Up

2010-07-08T19:45:00.001-07:00

Time Traveling Hot Tub-Thumpers Trip Up

2010-07-04T17:39:00.000-07:00

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

SPOILERS AT THE END

What happens when three pseudo-BFFs get sent back in time to 1986 to – well - do something (it’s really not too clear)? You get the beyond lame Hot Tub Time Machine, which could easily be called Back to Bill & Ted’s Excellent (But Not in This Case) Future Adventure for how transparently it rips off Back to the Future and Bill & Ted.

The movie stars John Cusack, Rob Corddry and Craig Robinson as late 30-somethings totally unhappy with their adult lives, and Clark Duke as Cusack’s aimless basement-dwelling, Second Life-playing 20-something nephew. This Less-than-Fantastic Four gets sent back in time to a Colorado ski lodge for reasons the script by Josh Heald, Jared Paul and Sean Anders doesn’t make clear. They are all losers in the present day, so you think they’re magically transported back to 1986 to relive a pivotal weekend that set the tone for their adult lives, but that’s really not the case. Cusack broke up with a girlfriend in that time (in the future, his wife has just left him), Corddry is a loud-mouthed, foul-mouthed loser who got beat up that weekend (in the future, he’s a loud-mouthed, foul-mouthed loser who put himself in the hospital at the start of the story) and Robinson wussed out on an open mic night with his band (as a grown-ass man, he works at a dog grooming salon).

When they realize when they are they, at first, party it up, but are still mindful of the “butterfly effect” which might change their future if they trample over some seemingly trivial item, but soon they start to deviate from the details of that night, starting with Cusack whose girlfriend changes history and breaks up with him instead of him dumping her, and he quickly meets a magazine journalist (played by the always great and lovely Lizzy Caplan) in town to cover the band Poison that’s playing the ski lodge’s festival. The events they relive just aren’t major enough to justify where their adult lives end up, so the movie drops the ball there. In Back to the Future Marty's entire existence hinged on getting his parents together at the dance (and he had SEVERAL obstacles to overcome to ensure that outcome). The equivalent here for Cusack's Adam is after getting dumped by his pretty but vapid girlfriend he gets to hang out a little with Caplan and his life will automatically change for the better?

Here’s the major problem with this movie (aside from the fact it’s not that funny - there's only sporadic laughs throughout): I didn’t care about these guys. None of them is very likable. They also never act like true friends, until, of course, the end of the movie demands it. Cusack looked tired and confused through the entire movie (he was great in Grosse Point Blank, another movie featuring some serious 80s music, which was co-written by, among others, Steve Pink, who directed this film). Rob Corddry is NOT funny. Let me say that again, casting directors and filmmakers: ROB CORDDRY IS NOT FUNNY. He always comes across as an abrasive asshole, and that’s the limits of his acting ability. If he was a FUNNY abrasive asshole I might be able to tolerate him, but he is not (John Belushi in Animal House was a foul-mouthed, brain-addled alcoholic and Peeping Tom, but he was also charming and very funny). Craig Robinson is terrific…in The Office where he has a great character to play, but not here, where it seems like he’s just ad-libbing most of the time.

The movie really didn’t make use of its 1986 setting, which was mostly brought to life by the bright, multi-colored ski jackets of the resort goers. The story made no comment about those times versus now – not the music, the attitudes, the mores, nothing. It easily could have been set at their college graduation or ten years ago or last week.

The movie ends in a much undeserved way*, by basically forgetting everything that came before it and giving the guys something they simply did not deserve. If I had a hot tub time machine I’d go back in time and prevent them from making this pointless and not very funny movie.

(*SPOILER: Here's the ending - leave now - Corddry stays in the past and uses his knowledge of the future to set himself up as a multi-millionaire, which somehow gives him the solid family life he never had, and also all his friends are now super-successful. What a big fat cheat.)

Star Trek images (C) 2010 and a Registered Trademark of CBS Studios, Inc. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody. Screencaps from Trekcore.com.

After the Bomb, Set Your Calendars to Year Zero

2010-06-27T23:04:00.000-07:00

Panic in Year Zero! (1962)

Move over Mad Max. Make room for Mad Milland! As in Ray Milland (yes, you read that right: Ray Milland). When his family is endangered after a nuclear strike against the United States, Ray Milland will do anything to keep them safe.

On the surface Panic in Year Zero! appears to be just another cheapie sci-fi movie from American International Pictures made to capitalize on the Cold War fears of a nuclear attack against the U.S. But first time director Milland makes use of the small budget to focus on his family and the people they encounter as they search for a safe place to ride out the attack.

The movie starts innocently enough with the Baldwin family – father Harry (Milland), wife Ann (Jean Hagen), son Rick (Frankie Avalon), and daughter Karen (Mary Mitchell) – leaving Los Angeles for a camping trip in the mountains. Several miles into their journey they see a white flash of light from the direction they came. Soon after they see the unthinkable: a mushroom cloud. L.A.’s been nuked! The radio only has sporadic updates and every where they go the Baldwins see civilization start to unravel. At a gas station they encounter a man who had just lost his wife when a window shattered in their home cutting her to pieces. The man ran from his home in his pajamas and has no money to pay for the gas a mechanic just pumped into his car, so the man belts the hapless mechanic, jumps in his car and speeds off.

A short time later, when the Baldwins have stopped at a hardware store to pick up supplies, and, most importantly, firearms and ammo, Harry finds he’s a couple hundred dollars short. Naturally Johnson, the store owner, doesn't want to let Harry walk out with everything without paying in full, but Harry quickly loads a pistol and holds up the store owner, promising to pay him back the money he owes. Johnson surprises Harry and the two get into a fight, which Harry quickly loses, but Johnson’s victory is short-lived as Rick rushes to his father’s aid.

This is a movie short on visual effects but long on character. The writers, Jay Simms and John Moore (from novels by Ward Moore), put the burden of the Baldwin family’s survival squarely on Harry’s shoulders. Growing up, I pretty much knew Ray Milland only from his appearance on the original Battlestar Galactica as an aged colonial fat cat, more interested in stuffing his face and fulfilling his every desire. Milland is a much better actor than that (both in Panic... and in another AIP sci-fi cult classic, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes). Harry not only has to plan everything to be two steps ahead of the increasingly lawless people and crowds they encounter, but he has to quiet wife Ann’s doubts about his conduct and actions. She’s worried that if he crosses the line too many times that she may lose her husband, and likely her family.

Frankie Avalon doesn’t sing (thank goodness) but does turn in a decent supporting performance. In one scene, thugs get the drop on his father, and Rick ends up shooting one of them to save him. Harry discovers that Rick got a bit of a thrill from almost killing the man, and he quickly moves to dispel those feelings from his son. The world may be going to hell, but the Baldwin family will keep some semblance of civilization and decorum. In one scene, Harry decides that he and Rick will shave every morning, just one little civilized thing they can do to stave off their animal impulses.

The Baldwins face more threats as they try and ride out the end of the world. Mad Max would have been proud as Harry belts dudes, blasts rapists, and destroys bridges. Unlike many AIP movies, they managed to keep the current trends of the day mostly at bay, so there weren't any gangs with embarrassing slang to fight off (as in the Billy Jack movies [yes, I know those aren't AIP pics]). The filmmakers did a much better job of it than so many end of the world films made today. Carriers was one of the more recent low budget post-apocalyptic movies and its creators could have done a whole lot worse than to watch a little gem like Panic in Year Zero!, for inspiration, which shows that a solid story and characters will always win out in the end.

Oil Slick

2010-06-26T12:13:00.000-07:00