"low budget space movie with robot that turns astronauts into space zombies"
Alas, the Cap'n found nothing. No trace of this movie anywhere. If I had not seen it with my own eyes and did not have documentation (photos by Major Tom, to give belated credit where it's due) one could reasonably convince me that no such film ever existed. But it does. I know it does, and it's alternately comforting and baffling that it's so hard to identify a movie in the age of information.
But seriously, how could you not want to find out the movie responsible for these images?
Please help. I'd love to share the video, but it's so hard to follow the movie without our inane commentary, but if it comes to that, I will put that up if it helps you identify the film.
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My brain and throat are unpleasant, so it's just about time for the best "From the Vault" you could ever hope for...
See, last year I promised not to mention M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening on the Blogorium for a year, and that year is up. For those of you who are intimately familiar with my coverage of The Happening, I hope you enjoyed the sabbatical.
For those of you who aren't aware of my unique relationship to Night's first "R" rated film, I happily re-present the first of two reviews for The Happening. Tomorrow I'll post the second review. One of them is the absolute truth, and the other is a total lie. I'll leave it up to you to figure it out.
Blogorium Review: The Happening
There's a common expression on the interweb for a person who posts a positive review of a movie almost everyone else is panning: PLANT!
Typically, this is to imply that the person who gives the thumbs up to something universally reviled is actually an employee of the studio releasing the movie; hence, their review is "planted" on sites like CHUD or Aint It Cool in order to swing the negative trend.
It's particularly fitting that I'm likely to be hit with "plant!" for what I'm about to write, considering that the menace of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening may or may not also be leafy and green. Moreover, I do not work for or know anyone at 20th Century Fox, and while it's going to be an uphill battle convincing you, I really feel like The Happening is the victim of "piling on".
As you probably noticed in the last few days, I was in no way interested in seeing The Happening: as a person who was not a fan of Signs and didn't bother seeing Lady in the Water or The Village, I had pretty much given up on M. Night and was buying into the sea of negative press his new movie was getting. Could an R rating actually make the difference for a guy who had apparently lost all sense of storytelling?
Well, I don't know about the R rating, but The Happening is waaaaaaayyyyy better than you've been hearing. I might go so far as to say it was amazing, but then you'd think I was drinking the Kool Aid or something. The catch is that this movie is being advertised as this sort of Hitchcockian thriller, ala The Birds or something like that, and The Happening isn't that at all.
Going in to this The Happening, you should probably have movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers on the brain, because that's what Night is doing here. The Happening is a hyper-stylized film, and it seems like most of the reviews are missing that. Yes, everyone stands around like a deer in the headlights and delivers lines like they weren't just in the scene preceding this one, but it's uniformly corny. It's not like one person is acting like people normally do in this movie; everyone is acting like they're out of a 1950s "Red Scare" science fiction film. You might also want to consider Soylent Green.
I can honestly say I sat riveted through the whole film, as did Daniel and Leckie. Even though there's no M. Night "twist", he finds ways to keep the menace creepy and (largely) unseen. The plant angle is pretty much where the film goes, but they keep other possibilities floating around so that you have options to follow. I also dug little moments and, no pun intended, signs like the one that reads "You Deserve This" on a real estate billboard.
The mass suicides are effective mostly because Night drops you right in on them. The world is pretty much exactly like the one we recognize, and right off the bat crazy shit starts happening. It would be like if Steven Spielberg cut the awkward opening off of War of the Worlds and just got to business wiping out people. The R rating may be less for the stuff you've seen in the trailer and more about the two brutal shotgun killings (of kids, no less) and the "lion" scene.
Well, I know you aren't going to believe me, because everyone else is hating on the film. That's fair: if they want to beat up on Shyamalan because that's the path of least resistance, so be it. I'll stand up proudly and recommend all of you see it and judge for yourselves. It's the only way you'll know for sure. Feel free to ask for more information. I promise you I did see it and I could not turn away.
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