Terminator 2: Low Budgement Day

Cannot stop laughing.

HOW DO I SHOT MOVIE

So, like, did Spiderman 2 suck on purpose or something?

Don't get me wrong, it was fun and cool as hell to watch. But with the possible exception of Meet the Feebles (and the jury is still out on whether that was actually intentional), I can't fathom how any single movie could be so unbelievably, laughably bad by accident.

All those comical NOOOOOOOOOO! moments, usually with unflatteringly hilarious facial contortions. And the CGI! The script! The acting!

Haha, just kidding, there wasn't any acting.

I give it two thumbs up for gratuitous damsel-in-distress upskirt shots and wanton destruction of property.

The Reaping: Blood Libel Is OK If You Have A Black Sidekick

So I was watching The Reaping just now, and it was shaping up to be a mildly entertaining flick. And then came the part, about halfway through the film, where poor Hilary Swank finally tells the whole story of how her husband and daughter died: The Sudanese ritually sacrificed them both as an offering to the rain gods.

WHAT.

The flashbacks rolled on as an eeeevil spooky ignorant painted witch doctor gutted the precious Aryan missionary family, destroying Swank's pure Christian faith with his dark and barbaric savagery (not to mention his machete).

Oh, the pathos!

The moral of the story: no matter how much you try to teach them your modern ways, dirty primitive third-world people such as Christian/animist refugees, Jews and hobos will straight up kill your innocent blonde children at the first sign of a dry summer. They just don't know any better. And of course, the spectre of the spooky witch-doctor follows Whitey McHonkenweiss around with a machete throughout the film lest we, the audience, forget her suffering. Bleah! I keep wanting to yell "You missed one! She's right here!"

There is only one thing that could redeem this heap of blood-libelous bullshit now: ROCKS FALL, EVERYONE DIES. That's it. No other options remain.

And yeah, I know it's just a movie and I shouldn't take it so seriously, but this is the 21st century. Do we white people really still need to be doing this racist bullshit? It's like a StormFront campfire story where everyone sits around and deliberately avoids toasting marshmallows to preserve their pure whiteness. I can hear them now:

SCOUTMASTER:
And then the big scary negro.... interbred with the white women!

CAMPERS:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!


EDIT: Aaaaand the only black character is an ex-gangbanger. Of course he is. And he dies first. Of course he does.

Rose Red Review

I'm a little confused about the plot of "Rose Red." These people get invited to a haunted house famous for killing and vanishing the people who go inside. They go "oh, okay," and when there are actual ghosts inside and plenty of evidence that at least one person is already dead, they don't really freak out that much.

Two people dead and the house is starting to mindfuck us all? Meh, no big deal, let's ignore the psychic rumblings and make pancakes.

Three people dead? Fingers getting cut off willy-nilly? OK, now it's time to be shocked, just shocked by what's going on, and get pissy at the crazy parapsychologist who hired us all to come because for some reason it's her fault we all left our senses of self-preservation at the door and that everything we were told would happen and knew would happen is actually happening. Sure it's been going on nonstop right under our noses since the first two minutes inside the house, but now we're surprised and terrified because the plot needs us to be.

Yeah the characters were pretty goddamned dumb, but that dumb? C'mon. Lazy writing treats the characters like generic game pieces who only exist when they're being observed and directed, and only move as far as the writer pushes them. Boring.

Emery gets points for being a genuinely believable and complex character, rather unpleasant but still sympathetic, but the rest of them are two-dimensional puppets who merely drag the haunted house story along its well-worn track.

Also, I object to every person of nonwhite heritage in the story being some form of subservient cleaning staff. Black spooky voodoo maid in a do-rag, black sad-faced maid in a do-rag, black janitor... but no black main character. No black extras, either. Couldn't the first victim of the haunted house be a minority, like in the other shitty horror movies? Was there really no room for one of King's stock mysterious magical black folks in a film about a group of mysterious psychic people?

Come to think of it, maybe Rose Red is sort of scary after all. ;)

Lobotomies = HAWT

Wow, they sure gelded Sophie in the Da Vinci Code film, didn't they?

I didn't have high hopes considering the source material and its author's penchant for "soft eyes" and look-how-clever-I-am plot twists that sort of aren't.

Still, I find it kind of tragic that Hollywood can't even do a movie about the institutionalized supression of the female sex without dumbing down the leading lady from a determined codebreaking femcop into a pretty, doe-eyed sidekick with a mysterious heritage. Then they transplaned her brains into the leading male (of course) so he could save the day (and the girl).

Sophie: "Eek, my mortal enemy, a three-word anagram! Can you decipher it?"

That Guy From Cast Away: "Sure thing, little darlin'! For I have... a penis!"

I should also add that, in my opinion, the first ten minutes looks like a softcore porn version of the Passion of the Christ. This is not actually a criticism per se considering that the Evil Fake Albino Priest is fairly easy on the eyes even when covered in blood, but whatevs.

Resident Evil: Suextinction

It's very rare to witness the formation of a Mary Sue in nature, but the Resident Evil trilogy managed to capture all three stages of evolution on film and share them with the world!

(Spoilers obviously follow)

Movie 1 Alice: Oh! I'm naked and have amnesia. Wait, I'm a badass security agent who knows kung fu. Whee!

Movie 2 Alice: Oh! I'm naked and have amnesia. Wait, I've become an unbelievable martial artist and I have psi powers and my blood is magical and my also my brain is being controlled by science! WHEE!

Movie 3 Alice: Oh! I'm naked and cloned and finally over the amnesia! Wait, I'm the ultimate fighter of the entire universe and my psi powers are so strong I can make energy shields and manipulate fire and there are cameras in my eyes (which change color) because the government experimented on me and I'm on the run because they want to use me to destroy the world and my blood is so powerfully magical that it is both the cure for the zombie plague AND the source of an even worse strain of zombie plague and I can go around wearing hot pants in the desert without getting sand up my cooter and everyone wants to capture me but all ten thousand of my clones have formed an army and we are all going to use our powers to bring down a global conspiracy. WHEE!

The survival-horror genre has never been so terrifying.

PS - Resident Evil: Extinction uses that nasty-ass photoshopping technique that I hate so much. Throughout the film Mila Jovovich randomly went from sweaty and covered with pores to blurry and barbie-smooth, although the 'crawling' effect didn't seem to be present. A different retoucher, maybe?

I have begun to worry that this terrible, terrible abuse of technology might actually be catching on.

The Core: A Fan Comic

Or click here for non-DA file: BOINK

Watched the movie yesterday, in case you can't tell. Suspension of disbelief was a strand so close to the breaking point with the Core that I witnessed a spider actually refusing to climb it for personal safety reasons. Fun, though.