Shocktober Revisited: Don't Go In the Woods

 M. Night Shyamalan once famously tried to "re-brand" The Happening as a "B Movie" after audiences (and critics) had a chance to see how terribly inept it was. At one point, I had to prove to a friend of a friend that it wasn't the case by showing them the special features on the Blu-Ray, which has Shyamalan lauding his cast and crew on what a terrifying thriller they were making, one that would open people's eyes. Now, I suppose, it's possible that when he saw the finished cut, he revised his strategy, but given his typical stance of believing his turds are golden eggs, I think it was studio pressure to salvage his eco-disasterpiece. But that's just my theory. The Happening does all of the heavy lifting by itself - you decide if this was supposed to be schlocky or just ended up that way as a result of gross incompetence.

 What bearing does this have on Don't Go in the Woods (sometimes with "...Alone!" at the end)? As I learned after watching this 1981 slasher movie, director James Bryan intended the film to be a comedy, and not just a "me too" entry into the subgenre. That would put the film in the same company as Student Bodies, but the problem with this characterization of Don't Go in the Woods is that it's almost impossible to tell while watching the film. Bryan seems (well, seemed - I won't pretend I'm familiar with his filmography) to lack any basic semblance of pacing, editing, or sensible shot composition, and somehow makes a movie that's barely 81 minutes feel twice that long. It doesn't work as a comedy or as a slasher film, and yet, is oddly appealing in fits and (blood) spurts.

 One wouldn't be mistaken in assuming there's no plot to be had during the first twenty minutes of Don't Go in the Woods, as Bryan haphazardly jumps from one hastily cobbled together "kill" to the next, in rapid succession. Other than the fact that someone - or some thing - is hunting anyone who wanders into the forest outside of Park City, Utah, there's no connective tissue whatsoever that can be identified. Bryan's notion of setting up a "kill" is to throw a character on screen, without any sense of context, cut to hand-held "POV" shoots of the murderer, and then go straight for the gore. If you get a kick out of seeing the camera run into branches, lose balance, and then unexpectedly cut to a guy losing his arm, Don't Go in the Woods has you covered. We eventually learn that he was an ornithologist (McCormick Dalton), which is relevant in no real capacity, but that is the only one of Bryan's procession of victims we have any sense of back story for.

 Also wandering around in the woods, presumably just to be murdered, are a girl running around (Alma Ramos), a newlywed couple in their customized shag van (pun intended) (Carolyn Braza and Frank Millen), an artist (Cecilia Fannon), a tourist (Dale Angell), his mother (Ruth Grose), a fisherman (Hank Zinman), and a guy in a wheelchair (Gerry Klein) who is, inexplicably, slowly rolling himself up a dirt road. His struggle, including at least two times when his chair tips over, are agonizingly cross-cut with the final showdown between our heroes, the police, and the killer. For the record, my favorite theory about the killer prior to discovering it was just a Killbilly was that it was a "bear with a knife," which is really what it looks like when the artist dies and her toddler-aged daughter disappears.

 Yes, I did mention "heroes," didn't I? Eventually, in the midst of all of this random killing for killing's sake, we do actually meet the four twenty-somethings that one expects to find in a slasher movie: Craig (James P. Hayden) Ingrid (Mary Gail Artz), Joanne (Angie Brown), and Peter (Jack McClelland). Craig is leading the expedition out to a cabin in the woods - relax, we never see it, and it is never mentioned again once the killer shows up - with the rest in tow. He's the natural leader, Boy Scout type, and Peter is the "tenderfoot" who makes mistakes and resents Craig. Ingrid and Joanne are, um, the girls. One of them has short hair and the other one doesn't. To be honest, without looking at them in the movie, I can't remember which is which, but I think Ingrid is the one who lives at the end (SPOILER). Since I'm SPOILING, this breaks with the at-the-time nascent concept of "Final Girl" theory by also having Peter survive, but Craig and Joanne are long dead. Like the rest of the murders, there's no real rhyme or reason for this decision.

 I should mention that in the midst of hiking to a cabin, they spend the night in the woods twice, despite the fact that the cabin is close enough to walk to "by mid-day tomorrow." The killer isn't even stalking them at that point - he's instead murdering another group of campers (Leon Brown, Jr. and Linda Brown, although I could have sworn there were more people). It might have been a clever "bait-and-switch" if it were possible to tell what the hell was going on in Don't Go in the Woods. By that point, Bryan is stretching the story out in all possible directions, also including the morbidly obese Sheriff (Ken Carter). He's responding to the missing ornithologist report, until he just decides to give up in the middle of flying over the woods. No, really, that's what happens. He requests a plane to fly over, in the hopes of seeing, um, something, and then tells the pilot they'll never find the guy, he probably went home. But don't worry, the police and a local militia will be back for the "big" finale.

 Perhaps Bryan's notion that Don't Go in the Woods being a "comedy" comes from the sensory overload of ridiculous, bloody murders that make up the first half of the film. If so, he failed miserably, because there's nothing particularly comical about having the tourist's dead body lying on a rock just above two frolicking teenagers - a shot he returns to after killing the mother. There's nothing particularly tragic or ironic about it, either, because the composition is so in-artful. The closest thing to outright comical happens during the honeymoon - and honestly, you can't even tell they're married until you see it on the side of the van - when, after the couple is slashed thoroughly, the killer decides to flip the van over, into a ravine. And it explodes. I laughed at the audacity, and again when somehow nobody noticed that this happened, despite what is clearly a crowded forest.

 To be fair, I go into most slasher films with a healthy suspension of disbelief. The ridiculous nature of murder set pieces were part and parcel of the subgenre, even in 1981. I can even put up with sometimes amateurish execution, as long as the payoff is worthwhile. What's difficult to reconcile about Don't Go in the Woods is the stunning lack of tension. We barely have time to register that someone is on camera before they're being stalked and summarily slaughtered, and none of it is done with any degree of flair. There's no suspense in the film because there's no sense of geography for the characters, or any attempt to set up anything. If you'd like to make a case that the killer's M.O. resembles the Texas Chain Saw Massacre (and his cabin is clearly designed to) and therefore is somehow meant to make it "random," I'd listen, but then you'd have to explain the ending as something less coherent than "repeating the cycle." What begins as a slasher film slowly devolves into a mishmash of The Hills Have Eyes, but with random asides not unlike the police subplot in The Last House on the Left. And I somehow doubt that Wes Craven or Tobe Hooper would be happy to have their films compared to Don't Go in the Woods.

 And yet, I did say I kind of enjoyed it, didn't I? Well, that is true. It's an excruciatingly boring movie from the halfway point onward, but the random killings at the beginning are amusing in and of themselves. It's a little bit like that DVD, Boogeymen: The Killer Compilation, which was just clips of famous monster movies without any semblance placement within their respective films, crammed together. It's not the ideal way to watch a slasher, but the sheer willingness to throw narrative away and just randomly murder people with no rhyme or reason is amusing. And I reiterate: whether intentional or not, the fact that the killer pushes a van off of a cliff (sideways) is humorous. Some of Don't Go in the Woods is so stupid that you can't help but chuckle. The "score," by H. Kingsley Thurber (Frozen Scream), is a synth-heavy cacophony of "was that the right choice?" Every now and then he provides the punch line for a joke, which is funny in all the wrong ways, especially for the musical "fart" that accompanies Peter soiling himself.

 So, in fairness, while Don't Go in the Woods is frequently an interminable bore, there are moments of sheer stupidity, of incompetence in the direction and writing (how could I leave out Garth Eliasson, he who wrote the story and the script?), that will make you chuckle. If it had, oh, a sense of pacing, let alone a better sense of one, I would be inclined to recommend it, because some of the kills are decent, and before you know what the killer is, there's a sense of baffling confusion. As it stands, I would only recommend it to slasher die-hards who have exhausted most of the better offerings. Don't Go in the Woods isn't bottom of the barrel - it is watchable, if nothing else - but you might find yourself struggling against seeing how much time you have left.

Blogorium Review: Jurassic World

 Jurassic World is a pretty good movie and a great example of corporate filmmaking at its best. That is to say that it reflects the kind of movie that fulfills all quadrants, offends nobody, and coasts along on enough charm that it does not bore or annoy audiences. Just don't think to hard about it, and you'll be just fine. It's weird, because I feel strange saying that I thought it was enjoyable. I've watched the Screen Junkies debate and I watched Red Letter Media's Half in the Bag review, and to be perfectly honest, I can't mount a defense of any of the problems raised about Jurassic World. The characters are barely one note, the contrivances and narrative conveniences are at time embarrassing, and yeah, there are plot holes you could drive a truck through. I'm not even going to try to defend the movie from the type of criticisms I'd normally hold it accountable for. I can't. By the same token, I've tried to talk myself out of the fact that I did enjoy it, and it's not sticking.

 Let's get the elephant out of the room right away: I don't view Jurassic Park with rose colored glasses. I feel like that's important to point out, because I didn't watch Jurassic World through the lens of nostalgia. I think Jurassic Park has some fun moments, mostly the suspenseful ones, but have always felt like most of the characters are broadly drawn cartoons who dress in such a way that you can easily tell their toys apart. I'm the weird person who still kinda likes the mostly terrible The Lost World, even though I just watched it again, and yeah, it's still pretty bad. The "Spielberg does Godzilla" part still makes me laugh, because it's such a stupid, audacious way to close out that movie. But I didn't really care about seeing Jurassic World. I wasn't interested at all, and when I did see it, my thought process was "what the hell, I just watched The Lost World yesterday, and it can't be worse than Jurassic Park III." And it's not. Unlike just about every review, I'm not going to say that Jurassic World is better than the sequels but not as good as Jurassic Park, because I don't hold the first one in the same standard as most people. Bear that in mind as we move forward, because your mileage may vary.

 For starters, I guess I do like the premise: Ingen finally got its shit together and John Hammond found somebody to reopen the park. His name is Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), and he's immediately not like the usual sleazy businessmen you've seen in the other Jurassic movies. He's one of those carefree billionaires who is managing the money and taking care of Hammond's vision, but mostly just wants to show off that he's almost finished his helicopter lessons. He leaves the actual running of the redubbed "Jurassic World" to Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is a numbers, spreadsheet type that thinks of the dinosaurs as "assets" and is concerned about the bottom line and appeasing investors. In other words, the character we're probably not going to like but since she's a main character, she'll eventually see the error of her ways, right? Eh... maybe not so much. Back to that later. Claire is supposed to be hanging out with her sister (Judy Greer)'s kids, but she doesn't have time and foists precocious Gray (Ty Simpkins) and moody teen Zach (Nick Robinson) on her assistant Zara (Katie McGrath). They have VIP passes, so they can go anywhere which is a good way for us to see the park. It beats seeing the control room, which is where comic relief audience nostalgia surrogate Lowery (Jake Johnson) works. (He bought a Jurassic Park t-shirt on Ebay and has dinosaur toys on his work station).

 Anyway, nobody cares about the characters, because there's a new dinosaur. Like, a new, genetically modified dinosaur that never existed, and as dumb as Indominus Rex ends up being a lot of the time, but reason for her existence is actually a pretty sound one. In the universe of Jurassic World, the park reopened two years after Jurassic Park (well, actually they completely rebuilt it, as we find out) and it's been a tourist attraction with a cruise ship that takes people to Isla Nublar every day since then. Claire is explaining to investors from Verizon (no, really) that after twenty years, the allure of dinosaurs has started fading, and they want something new. Audiences want something they've never seen, something scary, so Dr. Wu (JP alum BD Wong) cooked up the I-Rex, a mystery hybrid that has super powers. We'll also come back to the convenient super powers later. The reasoning behind creating the new dinosaur plays like a commentary on moviegoers today. I mean, the novelty of seeing dinosaurs in a movie has pretty much worn off, so lets make them bigger stronger faster scarier. More CGI. More mayhem. Jurassic World the movie is the proof that Claire the character isn't wrong: people went in droves to see it.

 Indominus has been raised in her paddock, alone ever since she ate her sibling, and Masrani wants Claire to have ex-military consultant Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to check it for security before the consider opening it to the public. Claire doesn't like that because of course they went on a date when he started working there and of course it didn't work out because she's into designing itineraries and he's into the Matt Foley school of living life. But he's Chris Pratt so we mostly like him and he's capable and manly and cracks jokes, etc. He cares about the dinosaurs and has raised a pack of Velociraptors from birth and is their alpha. Just in case we don't get that, their names are Echo, Delta, Charlie, and, uh, Blue. I guess maybe they thought audiences might not understand why a raptor was named "Bravo" or maybe the network said they couldn't use it, so it has blue markings instead.

 The raptor subplot is actually a lot less stupid than the trailer made it look, because Owen just barely keeps them in check for most of the movie. It's established early on that they accept him as the alpha, but only to a degree. They listen to him, but he still has to roll under the closing gate to get out of their pen when he saves some idiot who falls in. They know he's not like them, but he's their alpha, so it's a tenuous balance. You've seen the part in the trailer with the motorcycle, but that happens because he's following them as they follow the scent of the I-Rex, and that happens as a matter of last resort. Mostly thanks to subplot we didn't need in this movie character Hoskins (Adventures in Babysitting's Vincent D'Onofrio). His "lets militarize dinosaurs" contractor guy feels like a leftover plot thread from the abandoned John Sayles draft of Jurassic Park 4 with the human / dinosaur hybrid Dirty Dozen*.

 But anyway all of these characters have to converge so of course the kids are out in a gyrosphere rolling around when the I-Rex gets loose and Claire has to evacuate most of the park while the Asset Containment Unit gets slaughtered. See, the I-Rex can mask her thermal signature if she wants to, so she tricks them into thinking she's not in her cage and Owen can see how dangerous she is when she eats a fat slob red shirt (seriously, this dude has a tie that's not on straight, a barely tucked in shirt, and a safety hat that's tiled at an angle: he's clearly getting eaten from the moment we see him). I-Rex goes on a murder spree, killing everything, in a once again reasonably explained way. Owen correctly points out that having been raised in captivity with no contact at all, Indominus Rex has never encountered other dinosaurs (or anything) before, and doesn't know its place in the food chain. And they really don't want her to find out.

 Anyway, dumb kids somehow go "off road" and Claire and Owen have to find them. Hoskins takes over the control room, and everything goes straight to hell. This leads to the disaster part of the movie, where people die horrible, horrible deaths. Like, I was surprised how horrible in some instances. There's one character whose death is wildly disproportionate to their behavior in the movie, unless being inattentive means you should be pecked apart by Pterodactyls and then swallowed alive by the Mosasaurus, the Sea World-like attraction. I mean, the dude who grabs his margaritas while running doesn't even get it that bad. He might not die at all, and there's no way he ordered both of those drinks for himself, if he ordered them in the first place. There are people who totally deserve to have their arms bitten off or to be dino-stomped or Pterodactyl impaled**, but there's dome disproportionate brutality going on. Maybe director Colin Trevorrow had a bad vendetta with somebody or just hates Mary Poppins or something.

 Well, now's as good a time as any to transition into the "why people think this movie sucks and I can't even argue with them" part of the review. I'm going to start with two pieces of dialogue from the dumb kids who are only in Jurassic World because the movies are ostensibly aimed at kids (and not their 30-something parents who saw Jurassic Park twenty years ago). I'm going to slightly modify what they say to point out what incredible plot conveniences they introduce, but if you're SPOILER averse, you might as well skip ahead to the last paragraph.

 "Hey, do you still have those matches neither of us ever mentioned at any point before now even though we just got away from the I-Rex by jumping into water?"

 "Do you remember that time we fixed up Grampa's car which would totally mean we can repair this Jeep we found in the old Visitor's Center from Jurassic Park and then drive back?"

 Putting aside the fact that any theme park that offered a "gyrosphere" attraction without a guide should have a way to bring said gyrosphere back when the park is unexpectedly closed, those two lines are indicative us just how lazy the writing in Jurassic World is. They both happen within five minutes of each other, and I think they were hoping we'd be too caught up in fact that "hey, it's the old Visitors Center! I remember Jurassic Park! Omg!" to really think carefully about how contrived those plot points are. Almost as contrived as Indominus Rex, who is white (except when she's not), can mask her thermal signature (once), pulls out her own tracking device, and is part Raptor. How do we find out she's part Raptor? Someone in the movie has to say it. In fact, here's what Owen says:

 "No wonder they didn't tell us what's she's made of: she's part Raptor..."

 This happens at the end of the motorcycle scene, when the Raptors find I-Rex and, even though she's never seen a Velociraptor before, she begins communicating with them. Guess there's a new Alpha. Oh wait, that's also something Owen says. The Raptors of course turn on Owen and Hoskins men and kill them, and then go all the way back to their paddock to chase Claire and the stupid kids who are sitting in a truck that the boys for no apparent reason won't close the back doors of. It's one of the many, "wait, what?" moments that Jurassic World hopes you won't ask questions about, like "where did the other helicopter pilot go if Masrani and the helicopter are still on the island?" or "wait, wasn't the Mosasaurus attraction further away from the main park area?" or "would you really stop to comfort a dying dinosaur when there's nothing you can do to help at all and you're searching for two children that may or may not be in mortal danger?" Yes, the last question is the closest scene Claire has to a humanizing moment, and it may be the only dinosaur in the entire movie that isn't CGI, but if you give it a moment's scrutiny, why does it need to happen?

 And yet, I didn't really mind while watching it. Yes, in retrospect, the film compounds so many lazy, convenient, or "we hope you're not paying attention to this" moments that you probably won't even remember the loose plot thread they leave for the next Jurassic sequel (hint: BD Wong). Does it really matter what happened to Lowery? Eh, I didn't even think about him in the last scene. In truth, most people are only going to remember the final battle, and to Jurassic World's credit, it takes the humans out of the equation and goes for full on dino fight. And it's a pretty good fight with a great (if implausible) conclusion. You'll be excited, you won't care about product placement - I mean, have you been to a theme park? Is the Jimmy Fallon scene really that out of place? - and if you loved Jurassic Park, you might even cheer when T-Rex makes her grand return by crashing through a Spinosaur skeleton. Take that, Jurassic Park III. You never forget that everybody hates you. I'm sure there's tons of press material where producers and the director and four writers talk about making the fans happy, and that lip service is expected, but this movie was created by committee. And to be honest, for what it is, it's better than it has any right to be. I cannot pretend that it's a well constructed, well thought out film, but Jurassic World gives you what you came for. If you're the nostalgic type, there's a chance you might like it even more than I did. It's not really the best or the worst, which I know the internet hates, but that's how it is sometimes. Every now and then you get a mostly happy middle, and for reasons I can't quite fathom, Jurassic World was entertaining, in spite of itself.



 * I am not making that up.
 ** Although, if we're picking nits, one was done in The Lost World and the other was the original ending of the film before Spielberg took T-Rex to San Diego.

Retro Review: Jurassic Park III

 Jurassic Park III is the one that Steven Spielberg didn't direct, the one that has a dream sequence with a talking Velociraptor that says Alan Grant (Sam Neill)'s name on an airplane. I mean, that really ought to cover it, right? It's the one that's universally recognized as terrible and that director Joe Johnston (Captain America: The First Rocketeer) somehow managed to bounce back from. William H. Macy and Tea Leoni are in it, somehow they talked Laura Dern into shooting a cameo but Jeff Goldblum said, "nah, there's a line and I'm not crossing it again." I guess that Cats and Dogs money was too good to pass up. But enough about Jeff Goldbum - people will debate until the end of time about whether The Lost World really sucks or just kind of sucks - Alan Grant is back you guys! I choose to believe that this is the work of Sutter Cane, but obviously I have no evidence to support that because Cane hasn't given me any.

 Anyway, so I saw Jurassic Park III in the theatre because that was back when I'd go see anything and maybe we didn't know it was going to suck. Or we hoped it wouldn't. Or maybe we did know and we went to see it anyway because, hell, we'd already seen Jeepers Creepers. It was a long time ago. We watched the terrible movie where the Raptors have quills because dinosaur research had continued to advance and now they're closer to birds than lizards to yeah, multi-colored quills. Some dumb kid with rich parents got lost on Isla The Other One from The Lost World (I would like to point out that in The Lost World you can also see this island chain includes Isla Muerte. I'd love to see the dinosaurs on that one) and Alan Grant has to find him. Even though he's never been to that Island. I guess Vince Vaughn isn't considered trustworthy enough to find a kid. Probably a good call.

 So we left the stupid movie and went to a friend of a friend's house, which is never my idea of a good time, especially when the friend who brought you there (and is driving) goes in one of the back rooms to get high and you're watching South Park with some dude who is half conscious and mostly paying attention to his turtle aquarium behind the couch. Good times. If that doesn't already sound sketchy enough to you guys, the people who lived in this apartment would later steal a bunch of stuff from some girl, get confronted about it, and decide to just leave it all on the runway of the airport for them to find. True story. But eventually my friend comes back out and he's going to drive me home which is what I wanted to do, and he grabs two beers "for the road." This is my only option of getting home and we're well before the days of cell phones here.

 Well, as luck would have it, while driving back there's a police checkpoint and he's already opened one of the beers to drink while on the road (in his defense, he's a very functional alcoholic) and can't turn around. So, uh, we're going to have to deal with this prickly situation. In his infinite (read: under 21) wisdom, he opens the other beer and proceeds to pour both of them onto the floorboard of the driver's side, hoping that they won't notice. Take a guess how that well that worked. We are both ordered to get out of the car and to submit to a breathalyzer, which is fine with me because I haven't been drinking and I'm not going to jail. On the other hand, they continue to ask him "Sir, have you been drinking?" and he answers "No."

 Taking the breathalyzer out: "Sir, are you sure you haven't been drinking?"

 Him: "I have not"

 Handing him the breathalyzer: "Are you certain that you were not drinking tonight?"

 Him: "No"

 He's blowing into the breathalyzer: "One last time, have you been drinking tonight?"

 BEEP!

 Him: "Well, maybe one beer."

 And they put him in handcuffs and take him off to jail. Me? I'm sober and without a ride home, so I get to walk with the officer back to his truck so she can take a look around and see if there's anything else they should know about. The entire cabin reeks of cheap beer and I'm getting a headache just standing there. She finds his back pack filled with issues of High Times and says "this is promising" and to this day I don't know how she didn't find his bowl or why she didn't check the ash tray, which is exactly where what he normally smoked was tucked away. I mean, you are a cop, right? Well, I'm not going to be too rude, because she very apologetically explained that I would have to take his truck home because they couldn't spare an officer to drive me to my parents house (that'll be important in a minute). She have me her badge number and name in case someone pulled me over and noticed the pungent odor of beer everywhere, and off I went.

 I was living with my parents, who were asleep, so I had to sneak into their room to get the cordless phone out. That way they wouldn't wake up when he called me from the drunk tank to come pick him up, as he did at about 2 in the morning. I took my car (much better idea) and navigated through downtown - which I didn't know very well - and found him outside of the jail, giving a homeless guy the last five dollars he had. Then he smoked a cigarette and I took him back to his truck, which he drove home without incident. He lost his license for a year and there was probation or something else and now he has a PhD and four masters and is an expert on bats. So I guess it worked out. One time we shared a motel room during a wedding and there was a bat outside. He brought it in, but because he was drunk, he dropped it and the bat went under the bed. He laughed and said "that's what you get when you party with me!" and then went to sleep.

 Where was I...?

Cranpire Movie(s): Sorority House Massacre and Sorority House Massacre II

 Welcome back to Cranpire Movies! It's been a little while since I visited this feature of the Blogorium, so maybe a quick refresher is in order. There are bad movies I like to watch, but many more of them that I just can't (or won't) find time to sit through. When that happens, I'll hand then off to my friend Cranpire, who will watch just about anything I won't. He's fond of Syfy Channel Original movies, and not just the new ones - thanks to Bruce Campbell's presence in Terminal Invasion, Alien Apocalypse, and The Man with the Screaming Brain, Cranpire was on board early with their quickly manufactured schlock. Every now and then, the Cap'n ends up watching something (usually accidentally) that would normally fall into Cranpire's wheelhouse, and when that happens, they are reviewed accordingly.

 Today we're going to take a lot at the Sorority House Massacre series, specifically the first two. The third film - Hard to Die - is technically a sequel in that it has much of the same cast and uses the exact same back story, but it's also a Die Hard knock-off instead of a slasher flick, so I'll mention it in passing or when relevant. It's also worth noting that other than possibly using the same exterior, there's no continuity whatsoever between Sorority House Massacre and Sorority House Massacre II, although the second films does tie itself to a completely different slasher series. But more on that when we get to the sequel in name only.

 For a Roger Corman produced, late-era slasher cheapie, Sorority House Massacre is kind of... classy? It's a relative term, I realize, but considering where it came from and what the marketing sells the film as, there's a comparably nuanced story buried inside of slashing and T&A. Yes, it's borrowing (heavily) from A Nightmare on Elm Street during the dream sequences, but the imagery is also suggestive of Dario Argento in a way you wouldn't expect. If you somehow end up seeing the films in the wrong order, you'd be shocked at how much better Sorority House Massacre is than its "sequel". While Carol Frank didn't quite make a "Feminist Slasher" on the same scale as Amy Jones and Rita Mae Brown's Slumber Party Massacre, it's definitely a less voyeuristic approach to the subgenre than I had expected.

 Actually, it's debatable that Sorority House Massacre is even a slasher film at all, because the dream / psychic connection between the Final Girl and the Killer (shades of Halloween II) means we almost immediately meet our antagonist. Most of the film is about putting together how they're connected, what he's after, and what it has to do with the sorority house their paths collide in. By necessity, I'm going to SPOIL this, but it's hardly that since the audience is miles ahead of the characters for most of Sorority House Massacre. Beth (Angela O'Neill) is a withdrawn college student staying over at a friend's sorority house during Spring Break. Most of the girls are gone, including their sorority "mother," but when Beth arrives, she begins having nightmares about the house, of tables covered with blood and butchered mannequins. Her dreams begin to affect her waking life, and simultaneously Bobby (John C. Russell), an inmate in a mental institution, becomes more active, eventually escaping. He's looking for Laura, the only member of his family he didn't kill during a bloody massacre, and wouldn't you know it that Beth just happens to be her middle name...

Sorority House Massacre is not an especially violent or even gratuitous movie. Sure, there's nudity, but not in copious amounts (mostly taking place while Beth's friends (Wendy Martel, Pamela Ross, and Nicole Rio) try on the "rich" girl's clothes after she leaves, and during a Teepee make-out later in the movie), and most of the film's 77 minute running time is devoted to cutting between Beth's hallucinations / memories and Bobby coming "home". He kills just about everyone he runs into quickly, particularly the unfortunate boyfriends (Joe Nassi, Marcus Vaughter, and Vinnie Bilancio) of the main characters. What keeps Bobby interesting is that when he sees the women, it switches to his POV, where he imagines them as his sisters. He calls them not by their names, but by who he sees them as, almost as though he was killing them all over again. The disconnect between imagination and reality in the film actually makes the deaths that much more brutal.

 Of the two films, the first Sorority House Massacre is probably less deserving of being a "Cranpire Movie": it's a lower-to-mid-tier slasher film, but is surprisingly atmospheric for a low budget horror film. While it borrows from better movies, Frank at least manages to make the "lifts" seem interesting, and the characters are at least developed enough that you care when they die. Horror hounds looking for a quick and bloody fix should probably go elsewhere, as this is (surprisingly) reserved considering where it came from, but I might have a film that's right up your alley in the next paragraph...

 If Sorority House Massacre has some degree of class in the way it's presented, Sorority House Massacre II has all of the exploitation elements, and almost nothing else. Directed by Chopping Mall's Jim Wynorski, it offers gratuitous nudity, spurts of blood, leering perverts, dumb jokes, pointless subplot(s), and 60-ish minutes of nubile young ladies running around in their nighties, sometimes soaking wet. That said, as schlock goes, it's pretty entertaining, provided you're watching it in the right frame of mind. The opening should be a dead giveaway that it's not to be taken seriously, with an aggressive synthesizer soundtrack and pseudonyms in the credits like "Produced by Shelley Stoker" or introducing an actor as being the same person as his character.

 The jokey tone is heightened after we're introduced to the new sorority sisters moving into a house that may or may not be the same one from the first film (if it's not, the exterior is pretty close, but the interior looks nothing like it - just a generic "house" set). In short order, we meet Linda (Robyn Harris), Jessica (Samurai Cop's Melissa Moore), Kimberly (Stacy Zhivago), Suzanne (Michelle Verran), and Janey (Dana Bentley), who are staying at their new house overnight until the power and phone utility men come over the next morning. They got the house cheap because it was the site of a series of murders five years ago, which kind of creeps out the girls, but they have tequila, so it's okay. They also meet their creepy neighbor from across the street, Orville Ketcham (himself) who, in addition to keeping the key to their basement in his underwear, was present during the original massacre. Just not the Sorority House Massacre.

 For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the fact that there's already a Sorority House Massacre and it's kinda the same house and roughly five years later, Wynorski opts to use the back story from a completely different movie in both Sorority House Massacre II and Hard to Die. Even though the house looks nothing alike, all of the flashbacks to "Old Man Hocksteder" who went crazy and killed his family is footage from Slumber Party Massacre, another Corman produced slasher movie that has its own sequels. And it's a lengthy flashback to many of the "kill" scenes from Slumber Party Massacre, which uses a totally different murder weapon than the hook in Sorority House Massacre II. Why? Your guess is as good as mine, but it adds another layer of intertextuality, albeit a very silly one.

 The girls, having taken cold showers and slipped into something more comfortable, go down into the basement and find a Ouija board, so they have a little séance - as you do - which ends in a spooky way. And by "spooky" I mean "basically what happens in Night of the Demons but much cheaper". Maybe it's the framing, but it's easy to spot the boom mike in many scenes, most notably in the living room near the beginning. It's also a shockingly well lit house for only having candles and a few portable lamps. Maybe it's the lightning that helps, although that looks an awful lot like the same stock animation I saw in Hillbillys in a Haunted House...

 Anyway, so the girls try to get some sleep, but they have arguments about sleeping with a guy someone else is "going with," and somehow Jessica's 40-something boyfriend Eddie (Mike Elliott) never comes up again. Sorority House Massacre (mostly) waits until the boys come over to start a-murderin', but Sorority House Massacre II is ladies night through and through. Other than persistent cutaways to Ketcham looking menacing / loathsome, the bulk of the film is just gals in lingerie bouncing around the house, running into oddly placed bear traps (in the attic!) or getting murdered by a hook (despite the presence of a chainsaw in the basement). Interestingly, the drill that "Hocksteder" used to kill all of his victims in the "flashback" is nowhere to be found in the film.

 To keep the "appropriating Slumber Party Massacre as a prequel to this film," Sorority House Massacre II has a subplot involving to cops (played by Jürgen Baum and Karen Chorak) who are slowly investigating a phone call that came from the "old Hocksteder place" - which, for the record, is the house with no phone service. They don't want to drive through a roadblock (or something) because of the rain, so instead they head to a strip club. If you're asking "why?" the answer is more breasts on camera while the action slows down back at the house, but the plot excuse is that one of the survivors of the original massacre is now stripping to work through her trauma. Candy (Bridget Carney) has her own routine, followed by a sit down with the cops while another stripper does her show (all on camera, of course), and suggests that maybe Ketcham shouldn't have been ruled out as a suspect. While this should surprise nobody, Bridget Carney wasn't in Slumber Party Massacre, nor was there a character named "Candy." But hey, more boobs, am I right fellas?

 As it's really not clear where this movie should be going, Wynorski throws in a "possession" angle to justify the Ouija board, and while I won't tell you who ends up with Hocksteder's ghost at the wheel, I will give the director enough credit to make sure they're always where the killer would be or at least separated from the group. There's a lot of "let's split up" that you'd expect from really bad slasher movies, but in this instance it does serve as pretty good misdirection, at least until there aren't enough ladies left to rule out anybody else. Despite continually trying to imply that Ketcham is dangerous, it's pretty clear he's just a weirdo red herring, and despite being stabbed, choked with a chain, drowned in a toilet, and being shot by the police, he's still somehow alive at the end of the movie, not to mention the one who kills the, uh, Final Girl. It must have been all the raw meat he was eating earlier...

 While I can easily say that Sorority House Massacre is pretty good "for what it is," it's difficult to say the same for Sorority House Massacre II. It is exactly the lurid, dumb, gratuitous slasher movie you think you're getting based on the cover. So it has that going for it. If you want cheap thrills, you'll mostly get them without groaning too much. Gone is any hint of artfulness, replaced with a workman-like approach of showing the goods and getting out. The comedy isn't that funny (trust me, I'm not sure if we're really supposed to laugh at the "Arab" stereotypes at the strip club, or just marvel at how dated they are), the gore is mostly limited to blood splattering on the wall (and one bathtub scene lifted from Slumber Party Massacre 2 - oh, did I not mention that there are more than one Slumber Party Massacre films?).

 I guess the only thing that Wynorski really delivers on is the nudity, which I suspect Cranpire will agree is at least a selling point. They are attractive young women, and have no problem disrobing and taking cold showers for no reason, or standing directly underneath a porch dripping water in white nighties. Good for them? While Hard to Die is more of an "action comedy," it does have most of the same cast, including Orville Ketcham, playing the same kind of unkillable exposition machine he does in this one. Oh, and yes, the same flashbacks to a different movie. Well, the same different movie, because Hocksteder was a busy driller killer. As Cranpire Movies go, these are arguably better than his normal fare, but what is that really saying? I can easily recommend Sorority House Massacre and Sorority House Massacre II over the likes of Sharknado 2: The Second One and, uh, Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No, but they aren't going enhance your life or anything. Or maybe they will. Who knows, it might win you trivia one night, just by knowing what other series this one flashes back to. And if I'm being honest, the Sorority House Massacre movies are better than Slumber Party Massacre 2 and 3, so there's that. If you're the sort of person who hears the phrase "Cranpire Movie" and is excited, you're probably Cranpire, but if not, prepare for a fun double feature.

Blogorium Review: Don't Go in the Woods

  M. Night Shyamalan once famously tried to "re-brand" The Happening as a "B Movie" after audiences (and critics) had a chance to see how terribly inept it was. At one point, I had to prove to a friend of a friend that it wasn't the case by showing them the special features on the Blu-Ray, which has Shyamalan lauding his cast and crew on what a terrifying thriller they were making, one that would open people's eyes. Now, I suppose, it's possible that when he saw the finished cut, he revised his strategy, but given his typical stance of believing his turds are golden eggs, I think it was studio pressure to salvage his eco-disasterpiece. But that's just my theory. The Happening does all of the heavy lifting by itself - you decide if this was supposed to be schlocky or just ended up that way as a result of gross incompetence.

 What bearing does this have on Don't Go in the Woods (sometimes with "...Alone!" at the end)? As I learned after watching this 1981 slasher movie, director James Bryan intended the film to be a comedy, and not just a "me too" entry into the subgenre. That would put the film in the same company as Student Bodies, but the problem with this characterization of Don't Go in the Woods is that it's almost impossible to tell while watching the film. Bryan seems (well, seemed - I won't pretend I'm familiar with his filmography) to lack any basic semblance of pacing, editing, or sensible shot composition, and somehow makes a movie that's barely 81 minutes feel twice that long. It doesn't work as a comedy or as a slasher film, and yet, is oddly appealing in fits and (blood) spurts.

 One wouldn't be mistaken in assuming there's no plot to be had during the first twenty minutes of Don't Go in the Woods, as Bryan haphazardly jumps from one hastily cobbled together "kill" to the next, in rapid succession. Other than the fact that someone - or some thing - is hunting anyone who wanders into the forest outside of Park City, Utah, there's no connective tissue whatsoever that can be identified. Bryan's notion of setting up a "kill" is to throw a character on screen, without any sense of context, cut to hand-held "POV" shoots of the murderer, and then go straight for the gore. If you get a kick out of seeing the camera run into branches, lose balance, and then unexpectedly cut to a guy losing his arm, Don't Go in the Woods has you covered. We eventually learn that he was an ornithologist (McCormick Dalton), which is relevant in no real capacity, but that is the only one of Bryan's procession of victims we have any sense of back story for.

 Also wandering around in the woods, presumably just to be murdered, are a girl running around (Alma Ramos), a newlywed couple in their customized shag van (pun intended) (Carolyn Braza and Frank Millen), an artist (Cecilia Fannon), a tourist (Dale Angell), his mother (Ruth Grose), a fisherman (Hank Zinman), and a guy in a wheelchair (Gerry Klein) who is, inexplicably, slowly rolling himself up a dirt road. His struggle, including at least two times when his chair tips over, are agonizingly cross-cut with the final showdown between our heroes, the police, and the killer. For the record, my favorite theory about the killer prior to discovering it was just a Killbilly was that it was a "bear with a knife," which is really what it looks like when the artist dies and her toddler-aged daughter disappears.

 Yes, I did mention "heroes," didn't I? Eventually, in the midst of all of this random killing for killing's sake, we do actually meet the four twenty-somethings that one expects to find in a slasher movie: Craig (James P. Hayden) Ingrid (Mary Gail Artz), Joanne (Angie Brown), and Peter (Jack McClelland). Craig is leading the expedition out to a cabin in the woods - relax, we never see it, and it is never mentioned again once the killer shows up - with the rest in tow. He's the natural leader, Boy Scout type, and Peter is the "tenderfoot" who makes mistakes and resents Craig. Ingrid and Joanne are, um, the girls. One of them has short hair and the other one doesn't. To be honest, without looking at them in the movie, I can't remember which is which, but I think Ingrid is the one who lives at the end (SPOILER). Since I'm SPOILING, this breaks with the at-the-time nascent concept of "Final Girl" theory by also having Peter survive, but Craig and Joanne are long dead. Like the rest of the murders, there's no real rhyme or reason for this decision.

 I should mention that in the midst of hiking to a cabin, they spend the night in the woods twice, despite the fact that the cabin is close enough to walk to "by mid-day tomorrow." The killer isn't even stalking them at that point - he's instead murdering another group of campers (Leon Brown, Jr. and Linda Brown, although I could have sworn there were more people). It might have been a clever "bait-and-switch" if it were possible to tell what the hell was going on in Don't Go in the Woods. By that point, Bryan is stretching the story out in all possible directions, also including the morbidly obese Sheriff (Ken Carter). He's responding to the missing ornithologist report, until he just decides to give up in the middle of flying over the woods. No, really, that's what happens. He requests a plane to fly over, in the hopes of seeing, um, something, and then tells the pilot they'll never find the guy, he probably went home. But don't worry, the police and a local militia will be back for the "big" finale.

 Perhaps Bryan's notion that Don't Go in the Woods being a "comedy" comes from the sensory overload of ridiculous, bloody murders that make up the first half of the film. If so, he failed miserably, because there's nothing particularly comical about having the tourist's dead body lying on a rock just above two frolicking teenagers - a shot he returns to after killing the mother. There's nothing particularly tragic or ironic about it, either, because the composition is so in-artful. The closest thing to outright comical happens during the honeymoon - and honestly, you can't even tell they're married until you see it on the side of the van - when, after the couple is slashed thoroughly, the killer decides to flip the van over, into a ravine. And it explodes. I laughed at the audacity, and again when somehow nobody noticed that this happened, despite what is clearly a crowded forest.

 To be fair, I go into most slasher films with a healthy suspension of disbelief. The ridiculous nature of murder set pieces were part and parcel of the subgenre, even in 1981. I can even put up with sometimes amateurish execution, as long as the payoff is worthwhile. What's difficult to reconcile about Don't Go in the Woods is the stunning lack of tension. We barely have time to register that someone is on camera before they're being stalked and summarily slaughtered, and none of it is done with any degree of flair. There's no suspense in the film because there's no sense of geography for the characters, or any attempt to set up anything. If you'd like to make a case that the killer's M.O. resembles the Texas Chain Saw Massacre (and his cabin is clearly designed to) and therefore is somehow meant to make it "random," I'd listen, but then you'd have to explain the ending as something less coherent than "repeating the cycle." What begins as a slasher film slowly devolves into a mishmash of The Hills Have Eyes, but with random asides not unlike the police subplot in The Last House on the Left. And I somehow doubt that Wes Craven or Tobe Hooper would be happy to have their films compared to Don't Go in the Woods.

 And yet, I did say I kind of enjoyed it, didn't I? Well, that is true. It's an excruciatingly boring movie from the halfway point onward, but the random killings at the beginning are amusing in and of themselves. It's a little bit like that DVD, Boogeymen: The Killer Compilation, which was just clips of famous monster movies without any semblance placement within their respective films, crammed together. It's not the ideal way to watch a slasher, but the sheer willingness to throw narrative away and just randomly murder people with no rhyme or reason is amusing. And I reiterate: whether intentional or not, the fact that the killer pushes a van off of a cliff (sideways) is humorous. Some of Don't Go in the Woods is so stupid that you can't help but chuckle. The "score," by H. Kingsley Thurber (Frozen Scream), is a synth-heavy cacophony of "was that the right choice?" Every now and then he provides the punch line for a joke, which is funny in all the wrong ways, especially for the musical "fart" that accompanies Peter soiling himself.

 So, in fairness, while Don't Go in the Woods is frequently an interminable bore, there are moments of sheer stupidity, of incompetence in the direction and writing (how could I leave out Garth Eliasson, he who wrote the story and the script?), that will make you chuckle. If it had, oh, a sense of pacing, let alone a better sense of one, I would be inclined to recommend it, because some of the kills are decent, and before you know what the killer is, there's a sense of baffling confusion. As it stands, I would only recommend it to slasher die-hards who have exhausted most of the better offerings. Don't Go in the Woods isn't bottom of the barrel - it is watchable, if nothing else - but you might find yourself struggling against seeing how much time you have left.

The Worst Movies I Saw in 2014

 So the year is very nearly over (which year? check the title, I guess...), and as with every Year End Recap, I like to start at the bottom and work my way up. The Cap'n tried very hard to avoid movies that looked like they'd be a waste of time this year, but that doesn't mean I missed all of the rotten apples. I just didn't feel like talking about all of them, and only one had the dubious distinction of being a "So You Won't Have To". That said, unless I somehow muster up the interest to finish watching Tusk before the 31st (outcome: very unlikely), it's safe to say I've watched the worst of 2014 that I'm going to see.

 One thing you'll notice is the lack of obvious punching bags around the internet: as a general rule, if I'm not at least a little bit interested, I'm not going to see it. So that means no Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, no Transformers 4, no Adam Sandler or Seth McFarlane movie. I didn't even watch Jingle All the Way 2, although I did trick people into thinking they'd be seeing it*. That said, anything that makes this list is something I truly loathe, or felt like time was wasted watching. Or, maybe in the case of one movie, one that made me feel stupider, kind of like Lockout did. But we'll get to that one. Aside from the very worst movie of 2014 - which closes out this recap - there's no particular order to this, just a general cathartic primal scream of "Bad Movie! No Doughnut!"

 Shall we begin? (SPOILER: yes)

 V/H/S Viral - Remember how V/H/S was too long and only had a few good segments, but the frame story was fairly interesting even though why would you tape a Skype conversation and put it on a tape? And then V/H/S 2 was a marked improvement in every way, because it was shorter and the vignettes were more concise and creepier, even if the frame story was kind of a mess? I guess when the time came to make V/H/S Viral - which might as well be "3" based on the end of the movie - everyone involved from the producers to the writers and directors forgot that.

 The wrap around story makes almost no sense until the very end, and aside from an amusing cookout gone wrong, there's nothing but gore for gore's sake until the mysterious van that causes people go turn violent is shoehorned into the V/H/S mythos (such as it is). If clips from the first two films weren't crammed in as cutaways, you wouldn't even know it was supposed to be part of the same series. The "tapes" are abandoned completely, leaving us with a combination documentary / found footage story of a magician whose cape gives him real powers, a trip into another dimension that, initially, looks like ours but really, REALLY isn't, and twenty minutes with the most obnoxious skaters you're likely to meet, who are eventually killed by zombies or eaten by a demon the zombies are summoning.

 Of the segments, the second one - "Parallel Monsters" - by Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes) is the only one worth watching. That said, it's so over the top that you're liable to start laughing at the "reveal" of how the alternate universe is structured. The Day of the Dead / Skater video only gets remotely interesting near the end, when it's clear they can't kill the cult members in Tijuana. Everything else is an absolute waste of time, and I worry that trying to turn the series from a Videodrome-like vibe to a "viral video" ending (think The Signal or Pontypool, but much worse) isn't going to serve V/H/S well.

 Left Behind - Look, I know that the only reason anyone reading this was even considering watching the 2014 remake of Left Behind is for ironic purposes. You heard that Nicolas Cage was in it and then saw the awful trailer and thought "see you later, Sharknado 2!" Well, I have some bad news for you - this is every bit as boring and sanctimonious as the Kirk Cameron Left Behind, and Cage doesn't go anywhere close to MEGA until and hour into the movie. Even then, it's not for very long, because he's just trying to avoid hitting another plane. The worst sin Left Behind commits - worse even than oxymoron-ic internal logic, wafer thin characters, and groan-worthy dialogue - is being boring. Like, really, "geez this thing is still on?," boring. I can't prevent you from watching it ironically with your hipster friends, or convincing yourselves that you enjoyed it somehow, but I'll never watch it again, nor will I subject an audience to it during Bad Movie Night.

 And I made them watch Things.

 Horrible Bosses 2 - Cranpire and I disagree on this, but I found this to be a perfect example of a lazy sequel coasting on the goodwill engendered by fans of Horrible Bosses. The jokes are lazy, the shock value is lazy, most of the three times I laughed came from surprised outbursts of profanity, and even Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day seem to be phoning it in halfway through. They dutifully go through the motions, but it's abundantly clear that the new titular characters (a father / son duo played by Christoph Waltz and Chris Pine) are ahead of them every step of the way, and neither Waltz (barely in the movie) or Pine (in way too much of it) can muster the same sense of pure evil that Kevin Spacey does, literally phoning it in from behind a plexiglass wall in prison. You've seen every good joke in the trailer, and when Jamie Foxx's Motherfucker Jones only made me laugh once - it involves driving through a chain link fence - you know you're in trouble.

 What If - I do not understand this movie. Like, do not get it. Who is What If for? Because it feels to me like this is a movie that would appeal to Men's Rights assholes, who believe that "friend zone" is a real thing they are being subjected to. The moral seems to be that if they persevere, she totally wants you and it will work out, but it's cool to have unrealistic expectations and lash out at each other for interpreting deliberately mixed signals. I genuinely am confused about this film, because it makes a concerted effort to be a romantic comedy that portrays both sides (Zoe Kazan and Daniel Radcliffe) trying to "just be friends," but feel ambivalent about it, make overtures to be more than friends (on purpose, because there are scenes set before and after that reinforce we did not see one of them misinterpreting the other) and then get angry at the other one. Rinse, repeat.

 What is the purpose of this film? I'm being serious, because I've seen some outlandish concepts for romantic comedies, but What If goes out of it's way to represent the concept of "friend zone" as just another obstacle to true love. It would be one thing if it was just Radcliffe's Wallace being a creep, or Kazan's Chantry being totally misunderstood, but the narrative makes a concerted effort to show both of them acting behind the scenes in a way that you know they'll end up together (she refuses to introduce him to her friends, he tries to sabotage her engagement) and then spending lots of time with them not speaking to each other for doing just that! It has all the elements of a romantic comedy: the meet-cute, the dramatic plane flight to profess your feelings, the friends who set them up in secret (in this case, Wallace's roommate and Chantry's cousin, Allan, played by Adam Driver who playing Adam Driver's character from Girls). There's even the whimsical indie rock soundtrack, and because Chantry works for an animation company, her drawings come to life and float around to convey her feelings. But it all feels so unseemly because the message is that you should not respect another person's feelings about your friendship because they are into you and you just have to wear them down. I guess as long as you're Daniel Radcliffe and she's Zoe Kazan, the Men's Rights assholes are correct: just ignore the "friend zone" and keep pushing, because she'll totally realize what a great guy you are.

 In all honestly, I'd love to hear the female perspective on this movie. It feels like a movie made by guys to reinforce a particularly deplorable view of relationships that turns out exactly the day it never would. It's the meanest romantic comedy I've seen in a while, and no amount of saccharine at the end can take away the bitter aftertaste.

 The Expendables 3 - Take everything I said in my original review, and then compound it. This movie does not get better with repeated viewings. In fact, I'm kinda on the Conrad Stonebanks side of things now, because Barney Ross was a chump in the movie.

 Life After Beth - I've seen this in nearly every review of Life After Beth, but sometimes the oft repeated phrase is true: this would have been a pretty clever short film. I could see it playing at festivals, maybe winning some awards, and you'd have the added bonus of keeping the cast in place. But as a ninety minute feature? No, Life After Beth stops being funny a long time before the titular character-turned-zombie (Aubrey Plaza) goes full on undead. The premise is fun, and Dane Dehaan does an admirable job playing the straight man in what I think is the first time he isn't playing a totally sullen jerk (depending on how you feel about him in The Place Beyond the Pines).

 Most of the rest of the cast are there to play one-joke roles, like John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon as Beth's parents. It's not clear why Paul Reiser and Cheryl Hines are in the film at all until their dead parents show up (it's not just Beth who comes back, although the movie takes a while to get to that). While it's always nice to see Anna Kendrick, her part is so insignificant and underdeveloped that you wonder if the film even needed a love triangle. Plaza seems to be having fun as the increasingly unhinged Beth, who doesn't know she's dead and can only be calmed with smooth jazz, but largely speaking, Life After Beth has a lot of good small ideas that do not sustain its running time.

 The Sacrament - It's maybe not fair to put this in a "worst of" list, but I don't feel like Ti West's retelling of the Jonestown Massacre holds up under its own "found footage" gimmick. If you can't sustain your own internal logic, I don't care how interesting the cast can be or what suspense you manage to generate.

 They Came Together - For the first time that I can remember, I found myself thinking (and eventually saying out loud) "I think I hate this David Wain movie." Say what you will about how over-exaggerated parts of Wet Hot American Summer or The Ten are, at least there's some bite to the way they approach their subject matter. Wain, who co-wrote They Came Together with Michael Showalter, brings a sledgehammer to romantic comedies, and approaches the tropes with all the subtlety that Gallagher brings to a watermelon. It could be funny, like Wet Hot American Summer, except there's a lingering sense of "see how funny we are to skewer these movies?" And by that, I mean literally, the characters look at the camera after saying something stupid or cliché to undermine the entire façade.

 It reminds me of how a friend described the difference between Joel and Mike on Mystery Science Theater 3000: Joel was a guy who made the best out of a bad situation by poking fun at movies, but you got the sense that Mike really wanted to stick it to these turkeys. That's They Came Together in a nutshell: a movie that aggressively tears apart every overused rom-com gimmick and then stands there and says "look at what I did; I really gave them what for, am I right you guys?" What's weird is that Showalter already did this in the much better The Baxter, a movie about the guy who the girl always leaves for the lead character. It's a smarter movie, the jokes are better developed, and the execution isn't as grating or obvious, which makes They Came Together all the more baffling. The film even lacks most of Wain's signature non-sequitur moments, the ones that really make movies like Wet Hot American Summer memorable. Instead of "I'm going to fondle my sweaters," Christopher Meloni's character shits himself at a costume party and tries to pretend he came dressed in a robe. That's the joke. I guess the fact that her parents are white supremacists or that his grandmother wants to have sex with him are supposed to be funny in a shocking way, but Wain is far to invested in sticking it to romantic comedies to go anywhere with either setup.

 Were it not for Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler trying really, really hard to keep me invested, I think I might have turned They Came Together off after twenty minutes. The rest of the cast, who includes Bill Hader, Ellie Kemper, Michael Ian Black, Cobie Smulders, Ed Helms, Melanie Lynskey, Jack McBrayer, Kenan Thompson, Ken Marino, Adam Scott, Michael Shannon, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Randall Park, John Stamos, and Michael Murphy, land mostly on the side of "annoying," showing up for a scene or two to mug shamelessly and then exit the film. If you had told me this was the Farrelly brothers follow-up to Movie 43, I'm not sure I would have doubted you, but it shocks me that I hated a David Wain movie this much.

 See No Evil 2 - I'm not going to waste much time talking about this movie. I guess that maybe I thought going from a porn director in See No Evil to Jen and Sylvia Soska (American Mary) could have only have been an improvement, but apparently the only memo they got was "use fluorescent lighting in a hospital and make every hallway look the same." I thought the first movie was underdeveloped on every level, but at least it was grimy. This one is sterile, dull, and the gore is perfunctory. Maybe you could say that it's cool to see Katharine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps) and Danielle Harris (Rob Zombie's Halloween 2) in the same movie, but SPOILER they both die. In fact, forget it, SPOILER everybody dies except Jacob Goodnight (Glen "Kane" Jacobs), who the Soska's can't find anything to do with other than kind of give him a "monster" costume, consisting of a mortician's apron and one of those masks NBA players wear when they break their nose. Forgive me if I sit out the inevitable See No Evil 3, because WWE Films loves to make franchises out of movies that don't need them (*coughTheMarinecough12Roundscough*)

 Lucy - If you hadn't guessed, Lucy is this year's Lockout. It may be the stupidest "high concept" sci-fi / action movie I've seen since, well, Lockout. I guess Luc Besson genuinely didn't understand the "10% of our brains" metaphor, because he literally uses brain percentage as the hook for how Scarlett Johannson goes from normal party girl to transcendent god-like being in ninety minutes. It's a mind-bogglingly stupid movie, in just about every way it can be, and in good conscience I couldn't put it anywhere other than on this list.

 That said, if you have some friends coming over with a case of beer, Lucy is a rollicking good time as bad movies go. Make no mistake, you're going to feel less intelligent by the time it's over, and if you happen to know a scientist (in any field, but I suppose a neuroscientist would be the best), there will be a lot of "wait... no, that can't happen" said aloud. In fact, I can almost guarantee you this will be playing at Bad Movie Night in a few months, possibly with Lockout. I'll see if I can't lower the IQ of the room by a few points. Besson goes all in with audacious stupidity with Lucy, and if you can put aside the improbability of, well, everything, it's a breezy ride of dumb fun. Just don't pretend it's anything else.

 Sin City: A Dame to Kill For - I was just going to link this to my "So You Won't Have To" review from earlier this fall and be done with this terrible movie, but when it came out on Blu-Ray, I read a couple of write-ups from reviewers I normally respect giving Robert Rodriguez a pass for this piece of shit. That I cannot abide. Being forgiving of Sin City: A Dame to Kill for because it has more of a narrative through line than Machete Kills is, to me, unacceptable. It's like saying that Resident Evil 5 is okay because it's not as terrible as Resident Evil 4. No, it's not okay - at the end of either one you feel cheated and that you wasted time that could have been put to better use. Interesting tidbit about Resident Evil 5 and Machete Kills: both are glorified trailers for as-yet-unreleased sequels disguised as a feature film.

 Is it true that Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is better than Machete Kills? Eh, maybe. Does it matter? Nope. Unless you're some kind of die hard Sin City fan that can also somehow divorce yourself from how much cheaper, poorly thought out, and lazily constructed the second film is from the first (let alone the ways it mangles the source material despite that fact that the creator co-directed the adaptation), there's nothing worth watching this for. Nothing. If you really need to see Eva Green naked and don't have the internet, pick almost any other film she's been in. Hell, watch the Frank Miller-based 300: Rise of An Empire, which while also not great, is better than A Dame to Kill For in nearly every aspect. Want to see Joseph Gordon Levitt in a crime movie in over his head? Watch Looper or The Lookout. If you watch Looper you'll even see Bruce Willis giving a shit about his role. For everything else, just watch Sin City. As many problems as I have with the first movie, it still does everything better than A Dame to Kill For.

 I'm genuinely convinced that Robert Rodriguez forgot how to make movies, or maybe just does not care anymore. Maybe he was too interested turning From Dusk Till Dawn into a ten hour miniseries I couldn't finish. The only directorial flourishes in A Dame to Kill For are ones that echo the worst parts of his digital era to the present. This is easily the worst movie I saw this year, and I watched Things twice. This year! At least Things rewards you with this at the end of the movie:

 A Dame to Kill For is one of my favorite Sin City stories, which makes it all the more egregious that Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller butchered it so badly. There's nothing to give this movie a pass for, and I totally feel like it deserves the rotten reputation it has. I don't think critics were overly harsh panning this crap - the negativity is right on the money. Avoid it at all costs, and just read A Dame to Kill For again.

---

 Next time we'll go up the ladder a bit, discussing some movie the Cap'n liked, or kind of liked. I might save the movies I had high hopes about for its own column, since it'll cover many of the major releases that didn't get coverage at the Blogorium this year. Stay tuned: the top of the list is a random assemblage this year...

 * Instead, we watched Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever, which has the distinction of being either the second best or second worst "talking cat" movie I saw this year, depending on how you feel about A Talking Cat?!?!?

So You Won't Have To: Sin City - A Dame to Kill For

 So far this year, the Cap'n hasn't had to write a "So You Won't Have To" review, which is honestly preferable on my end. Don't get me wrong: I don't mind biting the bullet for you folks every now and then, but any year I can go nine months into without seeing a movie bad enough to merit a SYWHT is a good year. Also, I've been trying to avoid those unless it's bundled into a Bad Movie Night or a Summer Fest. It's better for everybody, it seems.

 But once and awhile my curiosity gets the better of me, or opportunity permits me to watch something I had decided probably wasn't a good idea to see, and as a result I'm going to satisfy your morbid curiosity about former filmmaker Robert Rodriguez. At this point I can't even call him a director, because if what he's doing in Machete Kills and Sin City: A Dame to Kill for qualifies as "directing," then I need to rethink my stance on the quality of Asylum productions. I really don't know what happened to this guy, because the Cap'n was a fan of Rodriguez deep into his career. I'll still defend El Mariachi, Desperado, The Faculty, From Dusk Till Dawn, and the first two Spy Kids movies. I think Spy Kids 3-D and Once Upon a Time in Mexico have problems, but I still enjoy them. Planet Terror and Machete are a heaping help of down and dirty fun.

 Somewhere along the line he got too comfortable with the freedom of shooting digitally, and the ease with which he can put together a movie is working against him. Rodriguez's films are starting to look cheaper, sloppier, and his "freedoms" have become his weaknesses. Sin City had a lot of these problems, but because Rodriguez was working so hard to replicate the iconic imagery of Frank Miller's comics (with Miller along to co-direct) that you could maybe forgive a shoddy looking CGI shot. Well, for an hour at least - Sin City was too long, the stories to condensed, and the movie too faithful to the source material to really be interesting. I haven't been that disinterested in an adaptation since Watchmen, and the individual, uncut stories only work a little better.

 For 9 years, Rodriguez and Miller hinted that they were planning on adapting A Dame to Kill For - one of my favorite Sin City stories - as a sequel, but they kept putting it off to make garbage like The Spirit or Spy Kids 4*. All the while, my enjoyment of Rodriguez films continued to drop off, so while there was some hope when he and Miller decided to actually make A Dame to Kill For, Machete Kills seriously hobbled my expectations. Even with my hopes in check, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For managed to disappoint.

 Let's start with something you might have noticed from the trailers (if you watched them) and were wondering: no, there's no reason that Joseph Gordon-Levitt's new character has anything to do with A Dame to Kill For, or Powers Boothe as Senator Roark, or Bruce Willis' extended cameo as ghost Hartigan (yes, ghost Hartigan). While they could have easily just made A Dame to Kill For the entire film, Rodriguez and Miller again decided to cram in other stories as "filler," to pad out the 94 minute running time. Two of them add nothing to the Sin City universe at all, and the last one seems to contradict the first movie (if not, by extension, the comics) altogether.

 I don't want to spend more time on this than necessary, so let's just say that the Marv-centric "Just Another Saturday Night" was unnecessary, too short, and doesn't set the tone in the same way that "Keep the Customer Satisfied" did in the first film. Since I'm guessing that's what it was intended to do, even after nine years, it fails to remind us why we're here to watch a Sin City movie. It isn't as clear here as it is in "Nancy's Last Dance," but Mickey Rourke's Marv makeup looks horrible. I'm not quite sure why, but I'll chalk it up to the lighting, or digital after-the-fact "lighting," because Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger don't usually provide such lousy prosthetics.

 The second (and, I guess, fourth) segment is "The Long, Bad Night," a never published Sin City story by Miller, focused on card shark Johnny (Gordon-Levitt), who runs afoul of Senator Roark (Boothe), perhaps by design. The story has no payoff to speak of, particularly when you factor in the last segment, which undoes everything significant about Johnny's plan, but if you want to see Christopher Lloyd and Lady Gaga in semi-useless cameos, I guess this scratches your itch. It has some of the worst use of a green screen set (where only the door is real) I think I can remember, and we haven't even made it to the ubiquitous use of terrible green screen yet.

 "A Dame to Kill For" at least gave me some hope with the inclusion of Eva Green as Ava Lord and Josh Brolin as the pre-surgery version of Dwight, but those hopes were quickly dashed by the overall execution of the story. Maybe it's just how cheap everything looks, or how playing it "hard boiled" somehow translates to everyone snarling or sneering, which makes a two dimensional comic strip one dimensional on the big screen. It's laughable how bad everyone is, and Green is actually perfectly suited to play Ava Lord, but comes of terribly under the "just go for it" direction of Rodriguez and Miller.

 Brolin might have been all right, but the inexplicable decision to keep him, post surgery, and not bring back Clive Owen was a horrible idea. Rodriguez has no excuse, as Machete Kills was filled with actors who came in as they were available (which, admittedly, led to its "piecemeal" execution), and Sin City famously features a conversation between Mickey Rourke and Rutger Hauer that was filmed weeks apart. Putting Josh Brolin in a "Clive Owen Wig" and giving him a few prosthetics to make him look slightly different (honestly, I couldn't tell until the close-up) doesn't cut it. Unless Clive Owen flat out refused to be involved with the film (and he didn't - he was shooting The Knick), Rodriguez could have figured out something.

 There are plenty of small parts in A Dame to Kill For, giving Rosario Dawson a chance to come back as Gail, Jaime King to play Goldie and Wendy again, and Jamie Chung to step in as the new Miho. Ray Liotta and Juno Temple set the tone of the segment off in the wrong way where he hysterically overacts, but at least that's something. Christopher Meloni, Martin Csokas, and Jeremy Piven have almost nothing interesting to do with one-note characters, and I didn't even realize Piven was supposed to be playing Michael Madsen's Bob. He makes no impression whatsoever, like Stacy Keach playing a penis head with boils in one scene. Dennis Haysbert admirably steps in for the late Michael Clarke Duncan as Manute, although he lacks the stature to really pull it off, especially against Brolin and Rourke. Also troubling was the fact that I could see the seam of his eye prosthetic on the edge of Haysbert's nose half the time. Are we really sure this movie cost Robert Rodriguez $60 Million dollars?

 Seriously, before I get into "Nancy's Last Dance," which is the "Exhibit A" of what's wrong with A Dame to Kill for, can I mention how cheap everything in this movie looks? Where did the 60 million go, because it wasn't in the CGI rendering of every background. That looks somehow even worse than the last Sin City movie, and that was from 2005. There a moments of almost comically bad green screen work, where (I kid you not) the camera moves to mask the fact that the actors are hanging in the air (static) on wires. I laughed out loud when Nancy (Jessica Alba) and Marv "jump" over a fence, and by that I mean they didn't move at all and the camera panned down to the fake ground they were "landing" on. It's embarrassingly shitty looking; the kind of crap you'd expect from DTV, not a 60 million dollar movie.

 Okay, I've already spent way more time on this piece of crap than I wanted to, but let me finally chase off any die-hard Sin City fans who are mentally attempting to wriggle their way out of this review. Let's talk about "Nancy Last Dance," a newly created piece by Frank Miller designed to give Jessica Alba a showcase and close out A Dame to Kill For. And, in doing so, taking a dump all over "The Hard Goodbye" and "That Yellow Bastard." Right now, I'm going to SPOIL "The Long, Bad, Night," because, who cares? You're never going to see this awful movie, even if you, like me, wanted it not to suck as hard as it does. At the end of "The Long, Bad, Night," Johnny comes back to Senator Roark's back-room card game to beat him (again) just so that "everyone knows I beat you twice. They won't talk about it here, but it'll get out there, and everybody will know." Roark kills his illegitimate son, and goes back to playing.

 Immediately after this happens, "Nancy's Last Dance" starts, which undoes the significance of Johnny's act by jumping forward in time past "That Yellow Bastard" and "A Dame to Kill For" to a seriously broken Nancy. She's a drunken mess, angry at Hartigan for dying and angrier at herself for not shooting Roark when he left Kadie's Bar in "The Long, Bad, Night." She cuts her hair off, mutilates her face with a piece of broken glass, and decides it's time to kill him once and for all. While this is happening, Ghost Hartigan is wandering around, giving us the half-mumbled musings that come from Bruce Willis phoning it in as a favor. But here's where it gets stupid. If you'll remember, Senator Roark is alive when Marv is arrested and executed in "The Hard Goodbye," which is why it makes no sense that the very same Marv helps Nancy break into Roark's house and is just outside the room when Nancy kills Senator Roark. And how does she kill him? Well, he has the edge on her all the way through the scene until Ghost Hartigan appears in a mirror and scares him.

 I'm going to let you digest that for a minute. Take your time.

 Now, this could be filed under "fanboy nitpicking," and I wouldn't blame you if you decided to go that way, but "Nancy's Last Dance" feels like Miller trying as hard as he possibly can to find a way to put Nancy and Marv together in a story we haven't seen that gives some unneeded closure to her story. He does so at the expense of the logic of not only his stories, but of the first movie. I read some forum post about how maybe Marv was supposed to also be a ghost (hence why he couldn't follow Nancy into the room) but there's a lot of Marv interacting with people when Nancy isn't on-camera for it to all "be in her mind," I get the mental break part of it, but the pretzel logic in this segment is pathetic. Coupled with the horrible "action" and really bad looking Marv prosthetics, or the Ghost Hartigan in Nancy's living room that might be impressive if everything but the couch wasn't a green screen shot, it's just the final nail in this movie's coffin.

 Rodriguez killed any interest I had in the Sin City, Machete, and Spy Kids series in the span of three years. That's an impressive feat. For bonus points, I couldn't even finish watching the From Dusk Till Dawn TV show. I think I'm finally, officially, done giving this guy chances. Whatever it was he had, it's gone, and like Kevin Smith, Rodriguez persists in pushing on, pursuing his own stupid interests in as lazy a way as humanly possible. No amount of gratuitous nudity and extreme violence is going to hide the fact that Sin City: A Dame to Kill For looks more like a star-studded fan film than an actual movie. It's not worth my time and it's certainly not worth yours, but I guess I'm glad I saw it So You Won't Have To.




 * I was going to say Shorts, but I didn't want to confuse people who wouldn't know Rodriguez made a dumb kids' movie with the Robert Altman film Short Cuts.

Blogorium Review: The Expendables - The Third One

 Here we go again. Again. There are a few factors weighing heavily against the third Expendables movie, a series ostensibly devoted to being throwbacks to action flicks of the 1980s. You know, the kind we don't see anymore because all action today is terrible, etc. It has a PG-13 rating, so that means less blood spraying everywhere (digital blood, for the record). That also means only one "F" bomb (strategically placed, we can hope), which, in the minds of action fans of the 1980s, means the film has been "neutered" and will therefore suck.

 Furthermore, rumors abound that the film underwent some serious changes between shooting and release, altering one character's arc and removing at least one subplot / character. There's also the always problematic issue of including Mel Gibson as the villain, as Gibson has (mostly by his own doing) become a lightning rod for controversy and many people won't see anything he's involved with. That's not an opinion so much as it is a fact - did you see The Beaver, Get the Gringo, or Machete Kills? I did, but I know a lot of people who didn't and won't purely on principle. Also, one of them really sucked.

  Also, there's the little matter of the entire movie leaking online three weeks ago in the form of a screener, allowing people who don't mind pirating a movie the ability to see a movie they weren't sure they wanted to pay for. These things do not bode well for The Expendables 3.

 With that in mind, I should probably go ahead and tell you that if you liked The Expendables and The Expendables 2, then you're going to like most of The Expendables 3, even if the narrative is totally unbalanced. The new additions to the cast are, for the most part, welcome and in many cases improve the overall genial spirit of the films. Regardless of how you feel about Gibson (and believe me, I'm not disagreeing with anyone who hates him - I get it), he makes a great villain as Stonebanks, a founding Expendable, and very quickly demonstrates that he's even more dangerous than Jean-Claude Van Damme was in the last film. I'm not sure how much of the film is director Patrick Hughes (Red Hill)'s and how much is the influence of Sylvester Stallone, but the action is a little easier to follow most of the time. If anything, the only thing missing for most of The Expendables 3 is a sense of camaraderie between returning cast members.

 By this point, I really hope that people who claim to be fans of 80s Action Movies are done complaining that The Expendables movies aren't like Commando, which seems to be their frame of reference for the entire subgenre* (that, or the first four Steven Seagal films), but if it helps, a lot of the third movie is more cartoonish at the outset. It begins with a prison train transporting a high value asset back to a fortified hellhole, until Barney Ross (Stallone), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Toll Road (Randy Couture) and Gunnar Jensen (Dolph Lundgren) fly up in the Expendecopter. They're here to make a high speed rescue, even if it means dodging fire from a ludicrously sized gun hiding inside one of the compartments. As it was in the opening of The Expendables 2, they make it inside with relatively little effort and rescue Doctor Death (Wesley Snipes), another original Expendable who's been doing time. If you're looking for a "tax evasion" joke, you'll get it. But only one, thankfully.

 It turns out Ross needs the Doc to help him with an assassination of a high value target on Church's list (Bruce Willis isn't in the movie, but they refer to him a few times early on). They arrive to find Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) doing recon, and everything looks good until the target appears. It's not just some arms dealer, as Ross had been told - it's Conrad Stonebanks, the man who betrayed the Expendables and who Barney was certain he killed years ago. Stonebanks doesn't take kindly to their presence and (SPOILERS BEGIN HERE) puts two bullets into Caesar before dropping a bomb on the team from his helicopter.

 This, by the way, is the first major deviation that I've read from shooting to release: originally, one of the actual Expendables died (not the "introduce the kid and then kill him" like in the last movie). The scene sure plays out like Caesar is dying - Stonebanks shoots him in the leg and then puts one through his chest, and the exit wound is a big hole. Then they're blown into the water of a shipping port by the explosion, and Henry cuts to the team desperately trying to stop the blood. There are rumors that Caesar did die in the original conception, but the moment I saw him in the plane, I knew he would be back at the end. When Barney leaves his skull ring at the hospital, I realized that "nope, nobody's 'expendable' once again." Don't get me wrong - I love me some Terry Crews, but it really diminishes the threat of Stonebanks if his "kill" isn't really fatal. Also, it renders the entire speech about why Ross keeps the dogtags of fallen expendables on the plane kind of moot. We haven't seen one expendable character yet, and you're not going to in this movie.

 It does cause Barney to dissolve the existing team and go to his buddy Bonaparte (Kelsey Grammer) to recruit younger, hipper, blood to go after Stonebanks. In a probably too long section of the film, Grammer and Stallone travel around the country to find Mars (Victor Ortiz), Luna (Ronda Rousey), Smiley (Kellan Lutz), and Thorn (Glen Powell). They're young and have attitude and skills that reflect the more "modern" approach to action films (hacking, basejumping, drones, smart rifles, MMA training) so while they do help Barney capture Stonebanks, they're also all immediately captured when inevitably the bad guy escapes. Barney gets away and makes it to the rendezvous point where Trench (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is waiting.

 (For the record, I was happy to see that the guy buying weapons from Stonebanks in the art museum was none other than Robert Davi. I had no idea he was in the movie, so it was a pleasant surprise)

 Since Barney is stubborn and won't ask Lee, Toll, or Gunnar for help, he tells Trench to leave and decides he'll take Stonebanks up on his "you want them, come and get them" offer alone. One of Bonaparte's rejects, Galgo (Antonio Banderas) shows up and begs Ross to let him come - "I NEED action!" Despite the fact that his entire unit abandoned him and the fact that he just won't shut up, Ross agrees to bring him along. And then the other Expendables arrive, because why wouldn't they? Time for the big showdown!

 I'm wondering if the complaints about The Expendables 3 being "boring" are coming from the mid-section, which is the bulk of the movie and deals with introducing four new characters, only two of which we every really learn anything about. Stallone and Grammer actually have great chemistry together, so it's fun watching them bullshit between picking up new Expendables, but only MMA fighter Rousey and Kellan Lutz have the slightest amount of character development. Lutz plays the "guy who doesn't like authority but learns to respect the team" and Rousey's Luna is the "woman everyone thinks is hot but can mix it up with the boys." That's about it, although Rousey has a great chance to shine late in the film with the scene stealing Banderas, who it turns out is really, really good a killing people.

 Part of the problem of The Expendables 3 in execution is that we're constantly being introduced to characters as the cast swells. We might like some of them individually, but the aggregate effect is that the film feels bloated well before the big action sequence that closes things out. IMDB lists a character playing Gunnar's daughter, which is nowhere to be seen in the finished film, so apparently there were even more characters in the film. Meanwhile, Jet Li is in the film for arguably even less screen time than he was in The Expendables 2, and most of Arnold's scenes are near the end. Mickey Rourke still isn't back, Charisma Carpenter sat this one out, and forget any rumors about Milla Jovovich, Jackie Chan, Steven Seagal or Nicolas Cage cameos: they really aren't in the movie. Hell, most of the regulars aren't in the movie very much - it's Stallone most of the way.

 I would like to mention someone who is in the movie for a lot longer than I expected, and it's actually a very welcome addition. When Bruce Willis priced himself out of The Expendables 3, Stallone brought in Harrison Ford, who I assumed would be some minimal cameo where he'd be gruff and grouchy for a few minutes and then peace out. Instead, Ford's Drummer is the CIA representative who "took care of Church" and is the one who helps Ross find Stonebanks. He's in a lot more of the movie than I thought, is more central to the story than I expected, and is clearly having a very good time with the action stars. He's mostly onscreen with Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Li, but Ford seems to genuinely enjoy the over-the-top action at the end of the film instead of just phoning it in. He also gets the distinction of delivering the PG-13 mandated "one F-Bomb," which at this point is almost as weird as when Harrison Ford said "tits" in Patriot Games.

 Wesley Snipes also goes a long way towards reminding us why he deserves a place in the action star pantheon. Doc gets sidelined for a lot of the movie, but when he's onscreen it's a welcome addition to the cast. He gets paired with Statham frequently, which makes for an amusing subplot involving their mutual love of knives (and competition to outdo the other). Statham is good but barely registers, Lundgren finds a better balance between comedy and action than in the last movie, and Couture and Crews are once again not given much to do. At least Couture is with the team during the climax of the film, but other than stealing a tank with Gunnar, I can't remember a single thing he does.

 Tank, you say? Yes, Stonebanks leads them to a mostly abandoned city that looks a lot like the one from The Expendables 2 to rescue the "kids," and then uses his connections with the local dictator to throw an army at the team. Also the building is wired with C4, and Smilee can only block the signal for so long, so there's a ticking clock to escape in Drummer's helicopter. There's a long and loud and intermittently fun action scene that involves dirt bikes, tanks, grenades, lots of shooting, and then Rousey and Banderas steal the entire show in what may be my favorite sequence of any of the scenes in the movie. Statham's "big fight" with the heavy felt a little undercooked because you don't really get a sense of who Stonebanks's "muscle" is, and also because Hughes keeps cutting away to Snipes taking out people nearby.

 Meanwhile, Drummer, Trench, and Yin Yang (I had to look, because I forgot) are flying around in the copter, avoiding fire and shooting at anything that moves until they can safely evacuate more people than could possibly fit. And finally, there's the showdown between Ross and Stonebanks, which is, to be blunt, a total disappointment. The entire movie is built around Barney Ross wanting to take out Conrad Stonebanks, up to and including a great monologue by Gibson after he's been captured about the essence of being "expendable," and Hughes and Stallone can't stick the landing. Mel Gibson gives Van Damme a run for his money for the villain you most want to see Stallone brutally murder, but their respective final "fight"s are so lopsided, there's no competition.

 Not only is the fight shot in such a way that you can't really see both of the faces in the frame 90% of the time, the unnecessarily padded nature of having so many characters trying to do so much in so little time means that Stallone and Gibson's "showdown" maybe lasts for five minutes of screen time. It's over so quickly and in such and underwhelming fashion that I can't imagine anyone being satisfied that The Expendables 3 builds to "that". It's a total let down, a waste of casting Gibson, and a failure to live up to the menace instilled in the bad guy. Not since Stone Cold Steve Austin caught fire and Eric Roberts caught a knife to the heart has a bad guy been given such a limp death scene. So if you decide to see this movie just to see Mel Gibson being murdered, don't get your hopes too high - it happens, but very quickly. Remember, explosions!

 For the record, if you were annoyed by the constant referencing of "greatest hits" by the cast in The Expendables 2, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that it's toned down considerably in the first part of the film. Other than the "tax evasion" joke and a Demolition Man reference, I didn't catch anything that really made me groan. However, late in the movie there's a litany of one-liner reference jokes that will drive you nuts, including "Get to the Choppah," "I Lied," and a variation on "I Am the Law." I didn't catch a specific Harrison Ford joke, but I'm pretty sure there's either an Air Force One or Indiana Jones reference during the helicopter scene. There's also another Predator joke involving Caesar, Gunnar, and a mini-gun early in the film. I've forgotten some of the others, but they tend to pile up on each other towards the end of the movie, and not in a good way.

 Once again, I'm looking at an Expendables movie that I mostly liked, but which loses its luster the more I think about it. There's probably enough good to counter the bad, but not enough to outweigh it, and the only reason it's over two hours long is because the addition of nearly a dozen new characters, many of which have extensive introductions, only to not do much later. Ford, Snipes, Banderas, and Rousey rise above the clutter, and Grammer makes a nice impression as a side character, but these films are getting too crowded. There simply isn't enough for everybody to do, and when the element that gets sacrificed is the hero and the villain's showdown, you're doing something wrong.

 What's funny is that immediately after I finished the movie, I was in a good mood and I liked it. But the more I think about it, the more apparent its problems are and I have a hard time remember what it was I enjoyed about The Expendables 3. I'm almost positive that's not the intended reaction to the movie, but it's kind of the same way I felt about the first one. Less so The Expendables 2, but to date not one of these movies really "holds up" like it ought to, and I'm talking the bare minimum requirements of "holds up."

 In fits and spurts, I expect you'll find The Expendables 3 to be entertaining, and you'll probably have fun, but in retrospect, the seams start showing and threaten to fall apart. I'm not sure this series can sustain itself much longer, but there's always the hope that "next time they'll get it right." I'm not asking for Commando, because there aren't actually many movies from the 1980s like Commando (maybe Rambo: First Blood Part II), but Stallone hasn't quite put together an Expendables film that does justice to the films that made him a household name. Yet. There's always hope that like Rocky Balboa or Rambo, he's got one killer Expendables movie in him, and, uh, we'll end on that hopeful, if naive note. In closing, see Escape Plan, available now on home video.



 * Commando is the perfect storm of "no, that could never happen" with respect to continuity, machismo, one-liners, extreme violence, impossible coincidences, economy of story, and ridiculous fight scenes. Arnold takes out the entire army of Val Verde in the back yard of a mansion BY HIMSELF using a machine gun and garden implements. His nemesis is the henchman from The Road Warrior, he throws a pipe through his chest! I'm sorry, but if you expect every action movie to be like Commando, then only Road House is going to meet your expectations Or maybe Exit Wounds - Seagal blows up a helicopter with a handgun.