Holiday Special: Four Movies

Watch Carefully

Another Name for Airhead: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Watch Carefully.

Are We There Yet: Transporter 3

Transporter 3

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Size Sometimes Matters: Cloverfield

Cloverfield

Watch Carefully

A Double Dose to Hold You

Eagle Eye

Never Back Down

Watch Carefully

This isn't a movie review. If you haven't seen "Dr. Horrible" yet, do so now.

Then watch.

Can't Wait for the Sun: Zombie Night

This may be the worse one yet.



Zombie Night


Also, check out The Guild with the lovely Felicia Day.

Watch carefully.

One Missed Call

Santa's Slay

Machine Girl

Zombie Nation

Watch Carefully

Teddy's Angry: Grizzly Rage

Grizzly Rage

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Critical Mass


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Coming Soon!

The review of "Critical Mass" will be up tonight. Stay tuned.


-AK

The Top Ten

This Post is Better Than This Movie: The Signal

The Signal

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Reach for the Stars: The A-Movie Review

Hancock

Wanted

WALL-E

Dark Knight

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Once More, With Feeling

I apologize if this is horrible, but every good blog needs a theme song and I had to do my part. Enjoy

Ahh, Eyelash: Eye of the Beast

Eye of the Beast



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Don't Look: The Happening

!SPOILER ALERT!

The Happening

Doesn't Make the Cut: Semi Pro

Semi Pro

Is It Cold in Here: Ice Spiders

Ice Spiders

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Video Game Double Play

Hitman
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

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Some Kind of Tease

I'm sorry. I know it has been a while since I said it had already been a while.

You should know that I haven't left you. I'm still watching terrible movies.

I just have taken my sweet time in getting the reports out.

Well, I'm in Texas right now, about to begin a national tour with my band, The Rif.

I'll get at least one review out of the way, the long awaited "Hitman". It may not have much style to it, but I'll make it in depth for you gamers out there.

If you guys want to check out my band and follow the tour, go to our MySpace page.

I'll see you all very soon.

Watch carefully.

Coming Soon!

Being a hard working college student/ soldier in the MANG (Mass National Guard), I often have to prioritize work. As such, the blog often takes a beating. 

I wanted to let you know of some of my upcoming videos so you can get appropriately excited. 

Hitman:  A movie about a videogame? Experience says it's a sure thing!

Day of the Dead (remake):  Well, Dawn of the Dead was so great, let's see what happens this time. 

Ice Spiders:  What? My two least favorite things in the world under one roof? Fantastic!

Hope to see you soon.

Watch Carefully. 

Samuel L is Gonna be Pissed: Snakes on a Train

A New Intro

Holy crap! Video Blog!

The Wave of the Future

Start getting excited.

As of now, I have a new power. A super power.

The power of the video blog.

Starting this week, I will review movies in person, bringing in music and clever movie tricks.

Hell, I might even try acting out a scene or two for you.

See you soon.

Watch carefully.

Worse than Terrible: Serum

It's not often that my father brings me a movie.

This is mainly due to the fact that my father has much better taste in movies than me.

This is also because my father, in having an actual job, doesn't have time to waste on B-movie trash.

That was why I was so surprised to find a suggestion in my mail, one for a movie I'd never heard of before.

Let me begin by saying it was terrible.

I'm not just throwing that word out, either. I really mean this was an awful piece of trash that had no purpose soiling good television screens.

I'm talking, of course, about Serum.

Let's begin by analyzing a critical flaw in the movie's production. While only a minor detail to some, this really affected the overall enjoyment of the movie.

It was filmed in Texas (something I generally recommend, as Texas is awesome) during the summer (now we're getting into dangerous territory) and, apparently, they couldn't afford air conditioners for the shoots. Everyone, and I mean everyone, looks as though they just ran a marathon.

I mean dripping with sweat.

This makes sense for some scenes, such as when something tense is happening, but when you have two guys in a house watching their neighbor sunbathe, I really don't feel comfortable with the sweating.

Let's also address the acting. It was terrible. I'll come back to this later.

The story centers around Eddie (Derek Phillips of nothing ever again) a budding young adult with a strong future in medicine. His father, a well known doctor, has just remarried to a whore.

I'm not being mean here. This woman seriously is a whore. And a drunk. All that and she seems to want to sleep with her step-son.

Anyway, Eddie recently lost his girlfriend, Sarah, who is the least attractive girl in the film.

Now, don't get all mad at me for being shallow. I'm not saying that a girl needs to be perfect in order to be attractive. I don't believe that at all. But when you center a film around a guy's love for a girl, and he could honestly do MUCH better, it loses some of the effect.

A lot of the problem stems from the fact that the minor characters, including some without any lines, do a better job of acting like human beings than the leads. This makes scenes with just the main actors almost unwatchable.

The drama begins when Eddie, drunk and despondent after Sarah informs him he can't have her, is hit by a car. He ends up a vegetable in a hospital. That very night, his mad scientist uncle steals him and takes him to a secret lab. The father consents to a radical "serum" which brings dead cells to life.

Does this sound derivative? It should.

Anyway, one of the noticeable side-effects is a severe swelling of the face and a sudden urge to beat people to death and consume their still-warm flesh.

Basically, it's a lot like Claritin D.

As you can imagine, Eddie soon becomes a monster and kills most of the cast, except, of course, for his sweet Sarah.

Now, you might think this movie is likened to "Frankenstein", or some other man-makes-monster story.

You would be wrong.

This movie is more along the lines of Dzigo Vertov's "Man with a Movie Camera," in that the director just turned his camera-phone on, told people to do stuff, and then went to get a sandwich.

A lot my time watching the film was spent crying, so my tears may have actually added some drama to scenes that lacked it.

The make-up is terrible, to the point of being laughable. In a scene of particular crapulence, Eddie (post-monstered) goes to see Sarah. Before he can go into the diner she works at, he suffers and episode of "the swells." The make-up is clearly coming off his face. I mean falling off. I mean not attached well.

We live in a world with spirit gum, rubber cement and Elmer's-freakin'-glue. There is no excuse for this kind of crap.

I consider this to be the worst movie I've seen all year. Yes, that is something I tend to say a lot, but this time I mean it.

Don't see this movie. Ever. Don't rent it. Don't allow it to be rented by friends.

This is the most mindless drivel to come out of Texas since the Branch Dividians.

I give it a negative forty-three out of ten.

Watch carefully.

Ask Questions...Never: Shoot 'Em Up

Now here's a movie that gets it right.

No pretense for quality dialogue, no characterization to get in the way of mindless violence, and no story to bog down the action.

Fantastic.

"Shoot 'em Up" serves a heaping helping of lead with a side order of snappy dialogue and more one-liners than a Larry the-cable-guy stand-up special. 

Clive Owen ("King Arthur", "Sin City") stars as Mr. Smith, a nameless British action hero with no past or present. He likes carrots and justice, and can improvise in a pinch to get the baddies.

He can also defy gravity. 

Enter Paul Giamatti ("Sideways") who plays Hertz, a well versed and family-oriented hitman with one thing on his mind: kill a newly born baby.

Finally, just for good measure, add Monica Bellucci ("Matrix") as a prostitute who specializes in infant-fantasies. 

And what's it all about? Lord, I wish I could explain. The "plot" is so odd and bad-political-thriller-esque that I can't even begin.

The baby in question relates to some governor who is running for president, and then there's the gun control people making super weapons for the faceless goons to use in vain against the hero. 

It all winds down to a series of rooms  that beg to be splattered with blood. 

And the film does not disappoint. 

John Woo, the high emperor of gun play, made a name for himself with his unique ballet of gunfights. 

Director Michael Davis makes a name for himself with guns that never empty, gravity that is optional, and carrots as weapons. 

In one scene, which sticks with me, Clive speeds down a highway, leans out of his, grabs a gun off the ground, drives straight at an enemy van full of baddies, shoots out his window, shoots out THEIR window, CRASHES into the van, FLIES through the window and lands SOFTLY in the back, and shoots all five goons before they can draw.

Wow.

I'm out of breath. 

This is not a movie for substance. This is not a movie for girls who like ponies.

This is a movie for beer, meat and candy bars. 

This is a movie for people who don't care for plots, but want hot women and gore. 

I give this movie an eight, based solely on its action.

Watch carefully.

Montezuma's Other Revenge: A Mexican Werewolf in Texas

There are few things in this world that truly scare me.

Spiders

The dependency of American youth on MTV to influence their political choices

Spiders

Australia (mainly for its spider population)

Being the only trained combatant in a world under siege by zombies

Did I already say spiders?

Now I can add "independent horror films" to my list.

To say that this movie is terrible completely deflates the root word "terror". I actually had trouble coming up with a way to express my distaste in this film.

Allow me to enumerate the failures of this epic waste.

Let's start with the characters. As with all horror films of the last half century, this movie decided that using original characters would be a bad move, so they went with stereotypes. Only they chose stereotypes that don't actually exist, so the logical motives are gone during character interactions.

For example:

Two girls, Slutty and Narrator, are in a car as the monster attacks the windshield. Narrator yells out, "distract it!" Slutty complies by FLASHING the monster.

And I mean that literally. She pulls up her top in the film's only nudity, and because the actress looks and sounds like a freaking twelve-year-old, you have to turn away to avoid becoming an extra on "Profile of a Predator."

Another example, Grumpy Father finds out his daughter is sexually active with her boyfriend, Ethnic BF. He decides, because the Mexicans in the town are troublesome, to KILL the boy.

But he can't just kill him. He has to dress as El Chupacabra (the "werewolf" of the title).

The logic is...missing from this film, but I can't really stick to that mantra any longer. I'd have to explain the whole film. I'll give one more example as a segue to the next rant.

Slutty and her boyfriend, Biker, go out to the desert to have some sex. El Chupacabra arrives and eats Biker. THE NEXT SCENE shows Slutty, Narrator, and Booky, their college-bound (and thus death-bound) friend at a diner. Slutty MAKES JOKES about the death of her boyfriend.

Jokes. To cops. Who don't seem to want to investigate. Because the slut is coming on the them.

WTF doesn't cover this one.

In this scene, we also see a directorial choice that boggles the mind. As I said before, this scene follows, immediately, the death of Biker. But when Slutty recounts the event, clips from the scene IMMEDIATELY PRIOR play over the dialogue.

This is a redundancy of Biblical proportions. The audience, unless incapacitated by the terrible film (which is a distinct possibility) already knows what happened ten seconds before, so the dialogue is pointless. Showing clips of the scene is just awful, mainly because it makes us watch the horrible scene twice.

At this point I should explain the beasty, as many of you out there don't know what is El Chupacabra.

A long time ago, during a time of strife in the Mexican political arena, a man came up with a great way to avoid scandal. He created a sense of panic around the mythological creature El Chupacabra (Spanish for goat sucker, I kid thee not).

Now, I believe in many things that are not seen, such as Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, and original screenplays coming out of Hollywood, but I had some trouble swallowing the idea of the goatsucker. Let's move on before I piss off some cryptozoologist out there.

The monster make-up is...actually, let me start over. The sweaty hair ball make-up is awful. The creature looks exactly like roadkill, which is most likely because the no-budget costume "department" had to scrape their props off the side of the highway. Just look at the picture up there.

The script is bad. I'd love to use a better word, but nothing really gets the point across. I mean, the choice was made, possibly early on, to use VO (voice over narration) over the ENTIRE movie, including some of the monster attack scenes. For those of you not on the inside track of filmdom, VO is the screenwriting equivalent of necrophelia.

But you can't knock the narration too much because, without it, you wouldn't have a clue as to what was going on.

The music is early 80s synthesizers, but played by someone who had never before seen a piano or keyboard. It was so bad I went deaf as part of my body's defensive system.

Finally, and this can't be emphasized enough, the filmmaker's made the worst choice of all: They hinted at a sequel.

I could go on forever, but I really must be getting back to the real world. There are more movies to review, and most will be better than this. In fact, I'd say I have a new winner for worst movie of the year.

Let's just end on this note. The love interest of Narrator, Ethnic BF, has the worst Hispanic accent of any actor, to include the early Hollywood films where us gringos would play Mexicans in "Zorro" and "The Lone Ranger."

This film took minutes from my life, so I give it a negative seven out of ten.

Please don't see this movie, but if you must, do so with the remote handy.

Watch carefully.