Doom Plague Movies

I recently got pretty sick. Sick enough that I was incapable of doing anything at all except laying on my couch in complete delirious misery. I wasn’t even able to sleep, it was so bad. This gave me a lot of hours to fill. A lot of hours. Needless to say, perhaps, I cleared out a good number of things from my instant queue, and even hit a few things that were just randomly picked hoping they’d lull me into oblivion.

In total, I hit 20 movies in about 60 hours.

So I thought I’d do a bit of a brief writeup on each, and use a very easy scoring system. + if I liked it, - if I didn’t, \ if I don’t really go either way or maybe go both ways.

Here we go:

-American Loser: I really feel like they used Sean William Scott and Gretchen Mol as magnets for this movie knowing that people would flock to it, and then didn’t bother, you know, writing anything. This was such a boring movie. The idea that a guy is an alcoholic with learning disabilities and is trying to form a relationship with a chick that is just as fucked up as him has potential. It was not met. Or even glanced at.

+Assassination of a High School President: This was a lot better than I expected it to be. There were really interesting layers and the story was pretty intriguing. Bruce Willis’ character was simply amazing, his aversion to gum was well played out (something that I thought was going to be really stupid). It had a kind of noir-ish feel to it, but doesn’t quite dive into the pool. This isn’t a bad thing, even though it sounds like it should be.

+Let Go: Another movie I really thought was going to be blah, but turned out better than hoped. The description that Netflix gives it doesn’t really do it justice, not that I’m surprised by that happening anymore. Everybody they cast did a brilliant job at their parts, though I have to say my favorite was Kevin Hart. I love that guy. I really felt for him through the whole movie. He just kept trying and failing, and it so wasn’t even his fault.

+Safety Not Guaranteed: Granted, this movie has some kind of strange moments in it, and those moments wouldn’t have worked in any other setting, but they did in this one somehow. They only really left one thing untouched that nags at me, and that’s the like “I have only done this once before”. It’s never questioned, never brought up to the guy. Everything else is taken care of. Why not that? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO ME!? I WAS SICK!

+Heavenly Creatures: I’ve known this story for some time. I have a couple of true crime books that talk about it or give the short version. When I found out that a movie had been made, of course I had to see it. I had never previously encountered the journal entries, and the addition of those just made the whole story more … more. It adds a level that you just don’t get when you’re reading the basic facts.

\The Snowtown Murders: So. So, I really liked the information this movie put forth. The facts of what went on. Depicting all the characters really well. It just wasn’t a very exciting movie. At times it was incredibly graphic (a scene where one brother rapes another goes on a lot longer than you’d think), and there was enough to keep my attention, but I think that I would have much rather read about all of it. As detailed as it was, there were some spots that didn’t really touch on things too deeply, and that was weird. I didn’t hate it, but I won’t watch it again.

-Jerk Theory: Fucking suuuuuucked. There was no redeeming moment in this movie at all. Not one. Nothing. The acting was bad, the story was stupid, it was boring, it had obnoxious songs in it. Bad. All bad. No good.

+He Was A Quiet Man: Not really something that I expected to see Christian Slater in. I mean, obviously he is, but the role, the character he plays, isn’t really Slater norm. I think it really shows his diversity as an actor, his amazingness, really. This movie was really touching. There were a lot of unexpected things, too, which I liked. I kind of wonder why I didn’t hear more about this movie, but I kind of don’t. You don’t really know what to expect going in, and there’s no real way to describe it to anybody else that doesn’t make it sound trite or unlike the movie you just watched.

+The Killing Jar: It could be that I just really really love Danny Trejo, Michael Madsen, and Harold Perrineau, but I had a lot of fun with this one. A lot. The plot synopsis makes it sound really boring, but I was not bored for one second.

\Capote: I like things that Capote has written, I just wasn’t really interested in the movie. I can’t exactly say why, either. Maybe just because I was sick and it’s not really a great sick movie? I don’t know. I also didn’t hate it. And Phillip Seymore Hoffman’s portrayal of Capote was glorious. Beautiful. He was stunning in that role. That’s what kept me watching the whole time, honestly.

-HottieBoombaLottie: Just. Shut up. This was a movie I hoped would destroy my brain and let me sleep. Unfortunately, I stayed awake for the whole thing. There were tiny funny moments, and that’s all it’s got going for it. So bad. So very, very bad. I might have actually gotten sicker due to this movie.

+Repeaters: What happens when you Groundhog Day a trio of recovering drug addict kids? Chaos! Wonderful, wonderful chaos. It’s not the most intelligent movie on the planet, and there are some plot holes that never get cleared up (really kind of minor plot, thankfully). Still, it was fun.

\Hick: The actors played their parts well, the concept was interesting, but when it was all said and done, I just wasn’t into the story. It wasn’t bad, it was just blah. Not the best. Also, Netflix should learn how to properly describe things, because this movie is nothing like how it’s written up.

+Nightwatch: There are two movies of this name. One of them is Russian and the other has Ewan McGregor and Josh Brolin. It is very important to make sure that you do not watch one thinking you are watching the other. They are very very different movies with very different plots and you will get VERY confused. That said, this Nightwatch was FANTASTIC. Man, I loved it. I was on the edge of my seat. As much as I could be, since I was laying down curled in a ball. WATCH THIS MOVIE. Goddamn.

\Howl: I am not a fan of the poem, Howl. This movie, however, was pretty well done, and the animation was amazing. Jon Hamm and James Franco nailed their parts. And the story of the trial is pretty interesting, too. They cut out the more boring bits, of course, making it seem less tedious than I’m sure it was. It was entertaining enough to keep a sick girl happy.

-Arthur: I hate Russell Brand. I do. There’s only one thing he’s in that I can think of that I enjoy, and that’s Despicable Me. I’m not sure why they picked him to redo something Dudley Moore did so well, but it was a poor, poor choice. He just didn’t pull it off.

\Project X: I watched this largely because I saw a preview for it with a friend of mine and the dog in the jumping castle was really amusing. I’m ambivalent toward the movie in general, as it had some fun parts, but the concept is not really… anything I’m into. If that many people were anywhere near my house, people would be getting shot. By me.

-Nine Dead: I don’t think I’ve been so disappointed in a movie in a really long time. This one should have been great. Nothing about it was, though. It was flat, it didn’t have suspense, it didn’t have interesting characters, the actors failed at getting anything across (except for the mob guy, he was pretty believable), and I will never – not ever in my life – believe Melissa Joan Hart in a role like that.

+Employee of the Month: This movie really starts out shitty. I gave up on it a couple of times just because the flow was off and the story wasn’t catching me. But I hit a certain point and all of it turned around. From then on, it was good times for everybody. Okay, just for me, since I watched it alone. Blood, laughter, things that were completely unexpected. It’s like the recipe for awesome.

+Killer Elite: Yep. Yes. All the time yes. All the yesses in the whole world. I cannot yes enough. I did go into this thinking that it was all action, which it’s not, but I wasn’t upset at the absence. There were actiony parts that were enough to fill my desires. The rest of it… wow. Wow. And the line “Strawberry or fuck you”? I knew I was in love as soon as it was uttered.

Wit’ch Storm

Sigh.

Alright.

I don’t remember the first one being this grammatically bad. There was a reiteration of my hate toward apostrophes being placed into words that didn’t need them, which seemed to me to be more rampant in this book than in the other one. But it could just be that the story in this book wasn’t as engaging or entertaining as it was in the first one. There was nothing there to take my attention away.

Actually, there was a lot to hate about this book that has nothing to do with characters or story. Like the fact that it seems as if this man has never been introduced to a thesaurus. Not once. In his whole life. I’m willing to bet, in fact, that he wouldn’t know what a synonym was if I beat him over the head with it until he was unconscious.

Every goddamned paragraph was so tragically repetitive. Once he found a word he liked to describe what was going on, he never strayed from it. This is how elementary school kids write. This is not how grown men with a book series write.

Where I was interested in what happened to everyone in Wit’ch Fire and was anxious to get the next novel to keep on with the story, in Wit’ch Storm the story was flat. The characters somehow lost all of their life. The new characters that were brought in did nothing to enrich the tale, the new information heralded no excitement. The battles felt more like hissy fits.

I am lost as to how this took such a nose dive. It’s as if the first book is sitting on a nice plateau and this one just fell right over the edge of the cliff. Maybe the first book nudged it.

I have no idea if I can bring myself to read any of the following books in this series. I haven’t a single nagging urge to find out where things go next. I don’t even care that I’m potentially quitting in the middle of all of it, not even my OCD can be bullied into giving a shit. It’s just as willing as I am to give up now and call it good. It’s a sad day when not even my OCD can prod me into finishing something.

Faces in the Crowd – again

That was… not really worth sitting through a second time, despite the fact that I didn’t really see it the first time.

The idea of the movie was pretty interesting, but that’s about where the good ends. They don’t pull off the idea very well, and there are parts of the story that feel like they just left something out. I don’t know if it was bad editing, or what, but I really think that pieces were missing.

The directing was really bad, too. With actors the likes of what were there, things should have been a lot more engaging. But they weren’t. I really didn’t give a crap about any of the characters.

For a thriller, it wasn’t very thrilling. Not even mildly suspenseful. I had no moments of wondering what was going to happen, or if the killer was going to catch up to her. I didn’t even care when he did.

And the killer, for that matter, felt like a cop-out. This might harken back to the loss of information, the bad editing or whatever it was. But it just didn’t feel set up enough for it to end up who it was. There were very minor clues, but they had to be pointed out to me, and they didn’t come until the very end of the goddamned movie.

Another cop-out was that she could recognize what’s his ass because of his facial hair. It seems to me that if she picked up on that clue, anybody with that facial hair would have then looked like what’s his face. After all, she does at one point think some guy is her boyfriend because he’s wearing the same tie. The theory should translate. And yet…

No. No this was not worth being conscious for.

Gnomeo And Juliet

I am crazy in love with Romeo and Juliet. The first time I read it, I was in fourth grade, and it started me on a path to Shakespeare and I never looked back. Okay, I’ve looked back a few times, if you mean it in the sense that I’ve reread everything he’s written about a half a million times.

The idea of making a version of the story for kids, involving garden gnomes, seemed pretty fun to me. I thought it was a cute idea, and that I would really enjoy watching.

Now that I’ve seen it? I don’t think there should be a children’s version of Romeo and Juliet. I also don’t think it should be done with garden gnomes. And I’m pretty fucking pissed off that Mercutio was completely missing from the entire thing. How do you fucking leave out Mercutio? He’s such a pivotal character to the entire story that dropping him hurts everything. Everything.

I’m not happy with the way Tybalt was portrayed, either. I know, I know. For kids. Garden gnomes. I get it. But he comes off as a brute and a bully, with none of the slyness or wit or intelligence that he actually has. Tybalt and Mercutio are two of my very favorite characters in this piece, and I am very irritated at the absence of one and abuse of the other.

Really, so many characters (and important scenes) were missing from this movie that I almost couldn’t sit through it. Luckily for this movie, I was feeling monumentally lazy and couldn’t force myself to move the tiny little bit it would have taken to just shut it off.

I believe that if one is going to make a movie out of a great piece of literature and try to structure it for a younger crowd, one should not completely butcher said work and destroy all the meaning behind it. I would like to point out that I did manage to read this in the fourth grade and grasp everything that was going on pretty goddamned well. I think that treating children like they’re idiots is just breeding a generation of the borderline retarded. What happened to challenging young minds? Building them? Making them grow? What happened to giving kids something to read and then helping them to understand it instead of dumbing everything down so that we don’t have to explain it? This really pisses me off. I’m sure you couldn’t tell (sarcasm, it’s fun).

I hated this movie. HATED IT. There is a burning loathing happening in my heart right now, and all of it is radiating outward in the direction of the writer of this movie. I’m a little disappointed in James McAvoy, too, for willingly going along for the ride. I think I’d rather just imagine that somebody was holding a loaded .45 to his head the entire time, or keeping his cat hostage until he completed recording.

This movie offends me right down to the depths of my soul.

Breaking Bad

I had heard from a good number of people that this was a really good show. So, since Netflix decided to have the first three seasons on streaming, I decided to give it a go.

What I discovered disappointed me some. Okay, more than some. I really wanted to like this, and I even watched all three seasons to give it a really fair shot at hooking me. It just failed to.

The elements are there. Good actors. An interesting plot idea. But from there, it falls off. The writing itself isn’t bad, either, not totally. It’s just drab. I feel as if the writers sat around their table and came up with really great episode ideas and then just fell asleep. They let it fall to the wayside, and did nothing to try to recover it. Then followed this model for each episode.

It’s really not a good thing when you fall asleep in the middle of an episode, in the midst of what is supposed to be really heavy or important moments, wake up at the end and not only are able to figure out what’s gone on, but also don’t give a shit about starting where you dropped off. When you can move on to the next thing and not care what the characters did or said in particular, it’s a very bad sign.

I hate to say it, but I have to. I found myself bored. Through all three seasons. There is not one episode that I can think of that made me sit up and take notice. There is not one moment where I felt whatever emotion was supposed to be elicited from me. Not one character that I connected to.

I’m kind of really surprised, now that I’ve seen it, that so many people that I know have enjoyed it. Not saying anything against them. But what am I missing out on? What key thing passed by me without my notice? What part of my brain did not light up in response to what I was seeing?

I know that everybody has their own tastes, and we can’t expect to all like the same thing. That would be stupid. But when so many people have given something praise and I feel like I missed the boat, I have to ask myself these questions. Is it me? or is it them?

Cowboys & Aliens (graphic novel)

Wow.

I … I really don’t know how to say this, guys. I’m really… I’m really sorry.

I know we all really liked the movie version of Cowboys & Aliens, Daniel Craig did a really fantastic job running around in chaps and hurting people a lot. Really, everyone did a rousing performance in that movie. We enjoyed the way they made the aliens look. We like that the shitty kid got hurt a lot. In general, we just really liked the film.

And in really liking something, we tend to want more of it. So we go around looking for things that can prolong our experiences. Things to make us happy. Things that will bring back that joy we felt while watching shit blow up on the big screen.

Which might lead some of us to the graphic novel. And those of us who find it might become very excited. We might order it on Amazon and wait anxiously for it to be delivered. Once we get it, we might sit for a while, just looking at the cover (a new cover, by the way, not the old one, this one is mighty pretty). We might, then, crack it open to the front page, ready to nestle into our favorite reading spot and relive our glee.

Then we might find ourselves very, very disappointed.

It’s kind of like when you see somebody do something really stupid, but they don’t end up hurting themselves. Or watching a car blow through a red light right in front of a cop, but the cop doesn’t do anything about it. It’s that kind of let down. Enormous. Soul crushing (Okay, that might be going a little too far, maybe).

Pretty much the entire thing is different from the flick, and I can really see why they’d choose to change everything right down to the character’s names, because really, other than the concept, the whole thing sucks. From the start, right to that very last page, you’re going to find yourself wondering what the fuck you just read. Then you’re going to wonder why the fuck you just read it. Believe me, you won’t find a good answer for that. All the reasons previously stated, all that wonderment brought about by the movie, and that need for more of it, it’s going to be gone. Right down the tubes.

Luckily, the movie is so completely different from this bound colorful wad of paper that you won’t even be able to bridge your disappointment of the one to the other. It’s like you’ve seen a Muppet movie and decided to read a how-to guide about frogs to further your fun. There really are only very vague similarities, and those you can ignore or wipe from your mind completely. Don’t fret too much over it. It can be forgotten. I’ve nearly already done so, and it’s only been a couple of days.

I suppose I’ll keep the thing around, because the cover is really very pretty, and I spent money on the thing, so I feel bad doing anything else aside from letting it have some shelf space. But I feel like I really need to spare you from the same fate.

Do not buy it. Do not even read it. If a friend has it and offers to loan it to you, they’re likely trying to pawn it off on you, don’t fall for it. Say ‘Thank you, my good friend, for your thoughts of me on this subject matter, but I must respectfully decline on the basis that you are a liar’. And then maybe quickly leave before your friend tries to sneak it into your car or backpack.

It does make me sad that I have to write words like this about something that should have been good. But I cannot bring myself to lie when things are bad. It’s unfair to the rest of the world. I suffer so that you do not have to. Don’t let my suffering be in vain.

The Vanguard

I know this was a requested movie. Somebody said that they wanted me to review it, but I can’t think of who it was now.

Whoever you are? I’m sorry. But I couldn’t get any further than about 10 minutes in. It was so very bad. The acting was horrible. The story stopped appealing to me entirely right away, and even the way it looked turned me off.

I’m not a big budget snob, I’ve had plenty of low budget films I’ve enjoyed that look low budget, but there was something about this one I couldn’t tolerate. Maybe because of the other factors. I don’t know.

I tried. I’m so sorry. But I did try.

But obviously I can’t give this a full review.

The guy on the bike also pissed me off for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint.

The Fourth Kind

I really thought that I was going to enjoy this movie. I really did. This was one that I really wanted to see in the theater, and I was disappointed when it didn’t happen. I was excited for it to move to first place on my Netflix list, and excited when it came in the mail. I excitedly opened it up and excitedly put it into my DVD player.

And now? Now that I’ve seen it how do I feel?
Well, I’m glad that I didn’t waste my money seeing it in the theater. I’m kind of sad that I invested any time into it, and wondering how it happened that I was so excited and I am left so… not. So quickly.

It’s not that the story wasn’t intriguing, because it was. I love a good alien true story. Fire In The Sky. I also love fake aliens. Such as those found on X-Files. It’s not even like the acting was bad, because it wasn’t. It was really good, honestly. In fact, this really had all the elements of being a very good movie. But it just wasn’t.

How does that happen? you might ask. How can all the elements, all the ingredients, be right, and yet it’s all so bad once put together?

They used real footage and real audio of things that happened in Nome, Alaska. I believe that what they were going for was to validate the dramatized scenes, making everything creepier because you’re seeing what actually happened. I can see the thought process behind it, and I could even see myself having the same idea if I’d been behind the making of this movie. It didn’t quite work out the way that they’d hoped. At least not for me. Instead, it worked against the film, hugely. Monumentally.

Firstly, putting in the footage and the other stuff felt like an interruption. It broke me away from the story and took me out of the moment. This resulted in me not caring about the characters or what was happening to them. I was so roughly jolted out of the movie that I didn’t have a chance to connect to any of it. I also found myself having to rewind and watch scenes again, not because they were incredible or interesting, but because I felt like I’d missed something. This is a bad thing to have happen in a movie, you don’t want your viewers to think that they blinked during an important part, or might have dozed off. And it happened more than once.

The second thing is; instead of validating the movie with reality, I found myself doubting the reality. Those scenes in which they cut away from Milla Jovovich and her costars and go to the real footage feel fake. They feel like they were made for the movie, and they feel forced. The woman, the doctor, comes off as a drugged up loser. I find no passion behind her words and no conviction. She tells her story but it doesn’t convince me. I felt as if all of it couldn’t be trusted. That the “actual footage” was just more actors. Putting these scenes in, using the real audio, made it so it was those scenes, not the dramatized ones, became fake in my mind.

I feel like they should have either just made a documentary using the real footage – there was more than enough of it – or, they should have dramatized the whole thing and put the real items in with the bonus features. There, people could see the real accounts of what happened in the movie, and in this removed situation would probably be more liked to be seen for what it is. Evidence. Proof. People would be awed by what they are seeing. I felt no awe, no wonder, no anything seeing these clips in the film.

I just don’t think combining them works. I am not finding myself intrigued by the happenings of this movie, thus dulling any want to investigate it further. In fact, I have a rather empty and disappointed feeling. The movie was lackluster.

Boring, even.

Which kind of makes me sad. This could have, and should have, been brilliant. The facts are enough on their own to be really fucking creepy. Dramatizing all of it would have taken away absolutely nothing from that. I think it would have made everything come together better, actually.

I can’t even recommend watching this. There’s nothing to be gained from it.

The Virgin Suicides

I only recently got to see the movie adaption of this book. I read it a few years ago and discovered that I really liked it. It wasn’t until after I finished that I made the mental connection of the author of this book being the author of Middlesex. To say that I enjoy his writing is an understatement. Since I read Middlesex, I’ve gone actively searching for things Jeffrey Eugenides has written. Which means that at the time that I picked up The Virgin Suicides, I likely knew exactly what I was doing, but by the time I actually got to it (through my large stack of books-to-read) I’d forgotten.

I wish now that I’d seen the movie before I’d read the book. It’s the only way I can come up with that I might possible have enjoyed myself while watching. If I hadn’t known how it was supposed to feel, maybe I could have felt anything at all.

This really makes me sad to say. Considering how much I love the writer and I love the book. It really kind of hurts. But this movie really fell flat.

The insertion of real people into the characters went well. They picked some very good faces to fit into what I had imagined. So I don’t know if it was their acting, or if it was the directing that caused the problem. I hate to say either. But considering I’ve seen these particular people in other things where they aren’t lifeless and empty, I think I might have to lean toward the directing.

I don’t want to insult Sofia Coppola, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.

The book made me actually cry. I was dry eyed through the entire movie. The book moved me, it made me feel things. I kept wondering how much longer the movie was going to take. I felt I knew the characters when I read the book. Watching the movie was like stepping into a crowded room full of strangers wearing masks of my friend’s faces. Everything the book was, the movie lacked. I was not interested in the story as I watched it play out on my television screen. I was not intrigued with what the characters were doing.

So much was left out. Not just scenes, but emotions. Key things. Hints. Clues. Knowledge. A life of it’s own.

The emptiness of this movie was really rather astounding. How can somebody take words that have such presence to them and steamroll them into something so dull?

I don’t know.

I wish I had the answer.

Five Girls – Request

I watched less than ten minutes of this movie before I had to shut it off.

The sad thing is, Ron Perlman is in it.

But it was just that bad

S, Darko

This movie is just as bad as I thought it was going to be when I first found out about it.

At least I got to watch Ed Westwick prance around dressed as a greaser. Sadly, this is the only redeeming part.

To clear up misunderstandings I had previously: Frank is not the same Frank. Yet for some reason, the image of Donnie’s Frank in his Halloween costume, the freaky rabbit, is Sam’s “Dream face”. This brings me right back to the idea that Frank was Donnie’s catalyst and shouldn’t make an appearance in this film at all. I still stand by that.

The guy actually named Frank in this movie is a mechanic and has nothing to do with anything.

Not that any part of this movie made any actual sense. It sort of felt like the writer and/or director of S. Darko didn’t actually understand Donnie Darko, and just took imagery that seemed cool and shoved it into this movie. The entire concept is off.

I hated it. I hated it the whole time. Don’t watch this movie. Run from it. Run screaming. If somebody says you should watch it, punch them in the face and then run. Or set their copy on fire. Either one is fine with me.

An American Haunting

Oh, how I tried to like you, movie. I tried so very hard. You had so many elements that I find enjoying. So very many of them. It started, but didn’t end, with Donald Sutherland. I know, not everything he’s been in is the best thing on the planet, but he’s done better at choosing his roles as he gets older. Knowing more what will have public appeal and what will just fail. So I had hopes for him, I did. You were also a movie about haunting, from everything that was written or said about you – EVER. I do like hauntings, movie. I like them quite a bit. It’s really not difficult to please me in this realm, movie. Even if I don’t think I’ll watch a movie again, I can usually derive something from some part of it and come away feeling as if I’ve not wasted two hours of my life.

But you, movie. You did not pass muster. You did not even attempt to meet up with Muster on the battlefield of cinema. I’m pretty sure, actually, that you couldn’t even see Muster from where you were standing – back there in the woods, over an embankment, hiding behind that tree.

What you turned out to be, movie, was a colossal waste of my time. I came away feeling cheated and sad. Used and put away wet. I feel like you didn’t even try to be a real movie after the first twenty minutes. If we’ve learned anything from Pinocchio, it’s that we must try when we want to be real, we must put effort into life, or it’s meaningless.

You, movie, are meaningless.

I was so disappointed as I watched you and you just kept getting worse. I didn’t think it was possible, but it kept happening. I should have known when my gut said “My, those slaps are awfully silly.” But I didn’t. I tried to reason that away with the excuse they tried to give in the script. I should have listened to my gut, really, I should have.

But that hope, it lingered. It lingered until the very end when I just had to finally give in and recommend that they take you out and shoot you, to put you out of your misery. Because you are a lame horse, movie, and you’ll do nobody any good. You’ll probably just suck on the fence and hurt yourself by trying to run when all of your legs are broken.

I do have a tip for you, movie. Hopefully if you ever get reincarnated, you can hold onto this – if you are putting entire scenes that are use IN THE MOVIE with your “alternate scenes” just to have more padding and content, you are failing. If most of your “alternate scenes” are just the same exact scene from a different camera angle, you are failing. And, should I watch your “alternate scenes” and not actually be able to tell the difference between what I just watched and what is supposed to be new, you have failed completely.

I have to give you an F, movie. In all subjects. Believe me, it makes me sad. But remember, I tried – oh so hard – to like you. I was rooting for you from the start. I was behind you, cheering you on, and you let me down.

I hope I never see you again, movie. Because I feel that if I do, I may have to find some matches.

The Stepfather

Craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap.

Seriously. I don’t know what they were even trying to do here. It could have been such an interesting movie, and it’s not. It’s a flop. It’s worse than a flop, it’s so lifeless that it can’t even flop.

You have this guy who gains entry to families with no father, then when something goes wrong, kills them. Seems pretty basic and straight forward. But you’d think that a guy who has done this as many times as they’re hinting at in the course of the movie would be better at it.

But he’s absolute shit. He can’t keep things straight. He’s got people suspecting him right away. Alright, I can buy that. But if he has all these people who suspect him, yet his bride to be doesn’t, does that mean she’s a complete idiot? I mean, it would be one thing if he weren’t forgetting things like his own supposed daughter’s name, but something that big, even if brought up by a possibly spiteful older son, would certainly be something worth checking into. And the whole thing with him not wanting to give his ID to people. In this day and age, that’s so commonplace that a refusal definitely sticks out.

This movie was an hour and forty minutes long, and it seriously took me over two hours to get through it, cause I had to pause to do something else and wake my brain back up.

There is no redeeming feature of this movie. There was no point where something really neat happened, or I thought that it might get better. It didn’t get worse, thank god, but it was definitely flat lined through the entirety.

The Movie To Lull Your Enemies With

There’s this movie that I have in my VHS collection and I don’t like to admit it’s there, but it is. I only have it on VHS because it was a quarter, and I’m pretty sure that nobody is going to bring it to DVD, ever. Not that I’d buy it.

I saw this film for the first time when I was young. I remember having flashes of a black eyed man killing a man who looked exactly like him for a really long time. It was one of those movies that your adult mind believes you probably just made it up because it’s so ridiculously absurd that it couldn’t possibly be real, and nobody but you has seen it anyway. Because NOBODY knows what the hell you’re talking about when you try to describe it. (I had this same issue with The Brave Little Toaster)

When I saw the VHS, it all hit me suddenly. I remembered everything about the movie from that long ago day. Except, of course, where I saw it.

I’m not going to tell you to watch it, because you shouldn’t. It’s a bad movie filled with really bad 80′s cheese and a whole lot of 80′s hair. I can’t say that any part of this movie is good. The whole premise is a badly made amalgum of Lord Of The Rings and space.

I watch it myself only when desperate. When my sleeping medications are in full effect, yet I can’t sleep. When the nights have blurred into weeks, and I just need to shut down. This movie has the uncanny ability to bore me to tears and unconsciousness nearly every time. (Note, I do have to have taken the sleeping pills, or have been up for several days for this tactic to work. Otherwise, I’m just watching a really shitty movie) There’s something special in the way it’s set up, I think. The right blend of soft focus and a hero who smiles at times when he shouldn’t. Complete with a heroine in a billowy white dress running around a seashell-like castle interior while a power hungry “beast” mocks and chases her.

There, I’ve given away the whole plot.

Oh wait. I have to add that the two main characters have arranged to be married so they can become king and queen and help to unite two warring countries. And there’s a cyclops.

I’m pretty sure that this movie was a curse on it’s actors, because not many of them came out as a recognizable and working product of the film industry. One happens to be Liam Neeson. And yes, there will come a day when I will meet Mr Neeson and hand over my copy of Krull to be signed. I hope that he’s aware of what he’s put out into the universe.

Even the mystical weapon in this movie is ridiculous. There’s no way it would function in any way other than cutting off your own hand if you looked at … well, anything. The Glave, it’s called. They talk about it through the entire film like it’s going to save everything, and I suppose it does. But all I can think of when I see it is “Maybe the kings of old kept it hidden so nobody else would lose a finger”.

Fear Dot Com

It’s pretty sad when even on muscle relaxers and pain killers a movie isn’t even remotely good. Which was the case for this one.

This really has to be one of the worst movies ever made. Not only that, but it steals a good majority of it’s imagery from The Ring. I don’t know where the rest of it came from, but I find it hard to believe that any of it was an original idea.

The acting in this movie was so bad that even if the script had been good, the whole thing would have still sucked. Lucky for the actors, the scrip was absolute shit. It gives them a small sort of excuse, I suppose, for future projects.

I believe the whole premise of this movie was that this guy is a serial killer and one of his victims wants revenge on him. But I’m not quite sure why she’d be attacking other innocent people. If she’s that upset about her torture and murder, you’d think that she’d feel protective of others, not violent toward them.

This movie was such a colossal failure that I had to watch the ending twice just to try to figure out what it all had to do with anything. I’m betting that Stephen Dorff was really glad his character got killed off, so if anybody gets the ‘brilliant’ idea of making a sequel, he won’t have to have anything to do with it.

Hounddog

This was supposed to be some massively controversial flick because Dakota Fanning plays the victim of a rape during it. While that’s really a horrible thing to go through, you don’t see anything, really. You see her and blackness. You hear sounds. She’s screaming. The rape is thusly implied.

But it’s really not enough to get your panties in a bunch for.

Not exactly sure why I watched this movie. Maybe I was hoping it would bore me to sleep. Unfortunately, it didn’t. And just when the thing had potential to get interesting, it ended.

I was never a huge Dakota Fanning fan, and this film didn’t do anything to raise my opinion of her in any way. Her acting was bad. Whoever directed her did a bad job. The story was really boring. Boring story just amplified bad acting.

Then on top of it all, they butcher the shit out of Elvis over and over and over and over and over, until you can hardly remember what his song sounds like coming out of his mouth.

This certainly was a waste of time.