Shocktober Review: Deathgasm

 Deathgasm is far and away the best discovery of Shocktober movie coverage. It's a scrappy, low budget film from New Zealand that wears the influence of early Peter Jackson on its blood-soaked sleeves. It's the second film I've seen this year about a metal band that uses cursed music to bring demons to Earth - the first was MegaMuerte - but of the two I think I'm giving Deathgasm the edge. MegaMuerte gets a lot of points for creativity, and for bringing back puppet monsters, but Deathgasm has such an infectious sense of fun, of not caring about who might be offended, that I can't wait to share it with friends.

 Brodie (Milo Cawthorne) is a young metalhead who finds himself dumped in Greypoint, New Zealand with his fundamentalist Uncle Albert (Colin Moy) and Aunt Mary (Jodie Rimmer) after his mother has an unfortunate incident involving methamphetamines and a mall Santa. Transplanted to a small town that sees him as a total outsider, Brodie is tormented by his cousin David (Nick Hoskins-Smith) at school, but strikes up an unlikely friendship with Dion (Sam Berkley) and Giles (Daniel Cresswell), two Dungeons and Dragons fans who share a similar "outcast" status. Things brighten up for him when he meets Zakk (James Blake) while browsing the metal section at the local music store / fortune teller. Zakk and Brodie share a love of raising hell, listening to brutal metal, and when they break into the legendary Rikki Daggers (Stephen Ure)'s place to try to steal one of the 666 existing copies of HaxanSword's first album, the boys end up with crudely handwritten sheet music instead. Since they're forming a band that Zakk has determined will be called Deathgasm*, it only makes sense to play the music, right?

Well, maybe they should have boned up on their Latin first, because with a title like "Vocavitique Rex Daemonia Virtutem Fortuna Hymnus Nigrum"**, they probably should have considered translating it first. Brodie eventually does, and it says "Summoning the King of Demons, A Black Hymn for Gaining Power and Fortune" (or, The Black Hymn for short), but they decide to play it anyway. That's after the first attempt, when Uncle Albert begins vomiting blood and the boys nearly pass out. The second time, everyone in Greypoint begins vomiting blood, and the boys do pass out. When they wake up, half of the town have become minions of the King of Demons, also known as The Blind One or Aelos (I think - you don't hear the name clearly). Summoning The Blind One is exactly what a nearby cult was looking for, which is why its leader, Aeon (Andrew Laing) sent Vadin (Tim Foley) to kill Rikki Daggers and steal the music. He failed, so he loses his head and bleeds all over Aeon's custom rug, much to his displeasure. His second-in-command, Shanna (Delaney Tabron), doesn't seem to notice, for reasons that are better for you to find out yourself.

 Brodie has problems beyond raising The Blind One, as David's less conventionally metal-oriented girlfriend, Medina (Kimberly Crossman) takes a shining to him. That doesn't sit well with David, but it gets even more complicated when Zakk inserts himself into their relationship, promising to act as an intermediary when Brodie ends up on the wrong side of a beating. Dion later refers to Zakk as "chaotic neutral", which is probably appropriate, since he intentionally misleads Brodie about Medina and then meets up with her, explaining that Brodie's not interested. It's not the last time that Zakk conveniently removes critical information, but he also comes back to help at a crucial point. The son of a mechanic, Zakk really doesn't seem to care about anybody but himself, so he alternates between good and evil throughout the film. It may be a nerdy descriptor, but Dion's mostly right.

 Deathgasm is, not surprisingly, a very violent movie, one where swords, daggers, chainsaws, axes, Incredible Hulk gloves, twenty sided dice, and musical instruments are used to provide maximum gore as our unlikely heroes try to stop the mess they started. Its sense of humor is, to put it mildly, juvenile, but frankly I don't find that to be very surprising. Writer / Director Jason Lei Howden had been working on visual effects for The Hobbit films, and Deathgasm is very much in the spirit of early Peter Jackson. May I remind you that "I kick ass for the Lord" is still one of the most quoted lines from Dead Alive. With that in mind, it should hardly come as a surprise that Brodie and Zakk battle the possessed Albert and Mary in what amounts to a dildo fight. They are, after all, teenage metalheads, and on the off chance you've never met one, this is fairly representative of their sense of humor and level of maturity. Your mileage may vary as to whether you want to watch an entire movie loaded with dick jokes, rampant profanity, and crude humor, but I find it in keeping with the scrappy, low-brow comedy of Bad Taste or Meet the Feebles. In that respect, it's also similar to MegaMuerte, which has roughly the same plot up to a point, but that film pushes into more twisted directions, including necrophilia. Deathgasm has what is perhaps the only time I've heard someone say the name of the band Anal Cunt out loud in a movie. So, pick your poison?

 I'm not quite convinced that the subplot with the cult is necessary - it actually tends to distract from the main story. Aeon is in what amounts to two scenes before (SPOILER) he's murdered by Shanna, who hopes to become the vessel of The Blind One, and she (BIGGER SPOILER) is subsequently murdered by Zakk who, in true "chaotic neutral" fashion (EVEN BIGGER SPOILER) becomes the embodiment of Aelos. I mean, who didn't see that coming, though? The point is that you could excise the cult subplot, just have Brodie / Deathgasm play The Black Hymn, and have roughly the same story without cutting away from them for characters who barely figure into the film. I guess it does give you an extra beheading plus gratuitous nudity, which in retrospect there's less of than you think there would be in a movie called Deathgasm.

 Other than that, I had a great time watching Deathgasm, perhaps even more so than MegaMuerte. Its tongue-in-cheek, don't-give-a-shit attitude and inventive use of gore (seriously, why did it take this long to use car buffer to tear someone's face off?) make for an infectious sense of fun. As long as you don't mind low-brow humor, and to be honest, I don't when used as earnestly as it is in Deathgasm. Sure, it can be dumb, and clearly I've seen a movie with almost the exact same premise earlier this year, but Deathgasm is highly entertaining. It's one of several New Zealand horror comedies I've seen lately (Housebound, What We Do in the Shadows) that find just the right tonal balance. Also, it's quite gory, and a lot of it looked to be practical, which is sadly lacking in horror these days. If Peter Jackson isn't going to be New Zealand's goremeister anymore, I'm glad that a new generation are picking up the mantle and running wild with it.





* In one of many instances of characters breaking the fourth wall, Zakk literally grabs the camera to keep it from panning back and forth between him and Brodie and insists that his band name is what they're going with.
** Forgive any misspellings, I'm transcribing as closely as I can to the handwritten words on the sheet.

Shocktober Revisited: Mortuary

I've long wanted to check out Mortuary because of its fantastic trailer. It doesn't tell you much of anything, features no footage from the film, but is short, memorable, and promises a properly spooky film:



 Going into the film, I wasn't sure what to expect based on the trailer, but I guess it wasn't roller skating or people quacking like ducks. The trailer may be misleading (okay, it's blatantly misleading about the actual film), but Mortuary actually has plenty going for it in its own right.

 After Christy (Mary McDonough)'s father , Dr. Parson (Danny Rogers) dies in a pool related "accident," she's prone to nightmares and spells of sleepwalking. Her boyfriend Greg (David Wallace) and his pal Josh (Denis Mandel) are dropping by the warehouse of a mortuary Josh used to work for, when they discover the mortician, Harry Andrews (Christopher George) holding a seance with a woman that appears to be Christy's mother (Linda Day George). The guys are separated, and just as Josh finds what appears to be the body of Mrs. Andrews, he's killed by a mysterious figure in a cape. Greg arrives in time to see someone speeding off in his van, and he and Christy set off to discover what happened to her father, Josh, and what the behind all of these clandestine activities. Is Christy losing her mind? Are Mrs. Parson and Mr. Andrews scheming behind her back? And who is the stranger terrorizing them in the night?

 Mortuary is a pretty straight forward mystery with some clever twists and turns. After a slasher-like set up, the film shifts between Greg's attempts to find Josh and Christy's delicate grip on reality. Is she really being followed at night, or are they part of her walking nightmares? Did Josh really leave to join the Navy (okay, no; we see him die), or is Mr. Andrews colluding with the Sheriff (Bill Conklin) to railroad Greg? And what about Paul Andrews (Bill Paxton), Harry's well-meaning, if slightly loopy son? He has a crush on Christy, but his innocent flirtation and awkward social stylings don't seem to be doing him any favors.

 Even if you've already figured out who the killer is (and it won't be hard about an hour in when they pretty much tell you), Mortuary finds other ways to misdirect you and keep you invested in the mystery for 87 minutes. Just when you think you have it figured out, a revelation shifts your perspective on motives and leads you in a different direction, which I always appreciate. It offsets the slow chase scenes and overlong game of cat-and-mouse towards the end. At the risk of spoiling too much, I'll say the ending is an interesting variation on Psycho, but with a final shot that you might not see coming, even though they set it up briefly.

 I'd like to highlight a young Bill Paxton, who nearly steals the show as the awkward Paul Andrews, a guy who doesn't know much about other people but is an ace around the dead. He's endearing, a little off-putting, and just "off" enough to keep you watching, even when the pace gets a bit sluggish.

 Was I a little disappointed that Mortuary isn't at all like its trailer? Well, yeah. It wasn't the movie I was hoping to see; the one I was promised. On the other hand, Mortuary is still a fun movie from the early 1980s with a more sophisticated plot than many of its contemporaries. The gore is sparing, the body count not high, and the gratudity is pretty limited for 1983, but what is there makes sense in the story. While not exactly what I wanted, I'm happy to say that Mortuary still delivers in its own way.

Shocktober Revisited: Death Spa and Killer Workout

 editor's note: this review originally appeared as part of the Summer Fest 5 coverage.


For whatever failings Prisoners of the Lost Universe has (and there are many), Death Spa and Killer Workout were the palette cleanser we needed to get back on track for Saturday. While it is rare that I'll program one movie, let alone two, sight unseen*, I had enough faith in the slasher movies of the 1980s not to let me down and went in blind. And I'm glad I did.

 Death Spa is not in the traditional sense what one would call a "slasher" movie, although it shares a similar structure. It also doesn't actually take place in a spa, necessarily, which disappointed one attendee who looked forward to "killer facial peels" and other "spa"' related kills. Nevertheless, while it commits two cardinal sins of "false advertising," the movie is bizarre enough and and of itself to compensate.

 If I were to compare Death Spa to anything, I guess you could call it a spiritual successor to Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. It isn't quite as formless as Death Bed, but amidst the three or four competing plots in Death Spa, there's definitely a "this gym / health center / indoor swimming pool is haunted and is killing people." A ghost is using the totally automated system against people who go there, seemingly at random. To say much more about who the ghost is or what it wants would spoil parts of the movie that generate the most "what the hell?" moments.

 Fortunately, there's a bunch of other crap in Death Spa I can talk about that's just as weird. Like the group shower scene where the spa shoots tiles at naked ladies, or the killer fish (yes, a killer fish in a gym). There's the package loading ramp at the bottom of the stairs in the basement that serves no purpose, or the "Parologist" (I'm assuming he studies haunted rocks) hired by the owner to investigate the haunting. There's the conspiracy to shut down the gym before the big Mardi Gras party (no amount of killings will close this Death Spa!) and the question of whether the place is haunted or if somebody is killing people in order to make it look like it is.

 SPOILER ALERT: It's both. Yes, on top of the ghost, there are people also killing random gym members to make the owner look bad. And the owner's brother-in-law has an, um, "unhealthy" relationship with his dead sister. The dead sister who set herself on fire after a miscarriage left her wheelchair bound (the flashbacks to this are unto themselves strange enough to recommend Death Spa).

 There's so much going on in Death Spa that I can't possibly cover all of it, and yet it manages to hang together well enough that you want to know how the hell it's going to resolve them. And it does. Well, kind of. But even that's fun to watch too. Also, Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead, From Beyond) has an extended cameo where he only has to appear at the beginning and the end of the movie and gets to live (SPOILER).

---

 Killer Workout (Aerobicide) is, by contrast, a more straightforward slasher movie, but one with its own particular set of charms. It follows an extremely basic structure: a long montage of an aerobics routine featuring some, *ahem*, chesty ladies (sometimes also a morbidly obese guy in overalls riding the exercise bike), then a conversation with owner Rhonda Johnson (Maniac Cop's Marcia Karr), and then somebody being murdered, usually with gym equipment. Although not always: sometimes the killer uses and over-sized safety-pin (shades of Student Bodies).

 There's some procedural work done by Detective Lieutenant Morgan (David James Campbell), and an undercover agent posing as a new employee (Uh, I forgot his character's name and IMDB isn't helping), but mostly it's a slasher movie from the 1980s, which means some creative kills, a twist-y backstory for the killer, and lots of nudity. Actually, not as much nudity as you'd expect, and a lot less than Death Spa, but there's MUCH more time devoted to the aerobics routines Jaimy (Teresa Vander Woude) puts together, many of which appear to offer no exercise value whatsoever. So while you don't get as much nudity, there's a lot more jiggling.

 But don't worry, ladies, there's also a lot of guys in impossibly short shorts too. This unintentional recurring motif of Summer Fest was perhaps never more in evidence than during Killer Workout.

 What really helped Killer Workout as a companion piece to Death Spa was the weird touches, like David James Campbell's unfortunately high-pitched voice, one that in no way matches his imposing physical presence. It made it nearly impossible to take him seriously, all the way up to his final scene that must have, in some abstract way, inspired the series Dexter. There was also the guy we nicknamed "Johnny Pervo" with his pervo mustache that we later realized was two different characters that just looked alike and both happened to be sleazeballs.

 And then there's the "twist" of the film, which the Cap'n will immodestly admit I called twenty minutes in, about who the killer is. What I didn't realize until the "reveal" was it tied into a prologue most of us had forgotten about involving a tanning bed accident. Unlike Death Spa, Killer Workout doesn't have a supernatural angle, but it does have what one viewer described as "pudding tits."

 The two films do share some interesting connections, though: both Death Spa and Killer Workout close on freeze-frames of the villain, implying that both of them secretly won (well, in Killer Workout, it's flat out saying they did). And in Killer Workout, the reputation for murder makes the gym a target for vandals, one of whom spray paints "DEATH SPA" on the window... interesting...

 Up next is a blast from Horror Fest past with the return of Kingdom of the Spiders!



* Not since the Matango / See No Evil debacle at Horror Fest IV.

Shocktober Revisited: The Mutilator

 editor's note: this review originally appeared as part of Horror Fest 7 coverage, but as the film is scheduled for release later this year, it seemed appropriate to include it.

 So... The Mutilator. What the hell was that?

 I don't know if you remember Sleepaway Camp, or have even seen Sleepaway Camp (which you clearly should, if you haven't), but it has a prologue and some really bizarre flashbacks during the movie that slowly hint that Angela is in fact a dude (SPOILER), something revealed at the very end of the film.

 Nothing that outlandish happens in The Mutilator, but it does have an opening every bit as inexplicably odd and an ending that's up there with Pieces in the "Wait! That can't happen! What the hell?" category. Also, I guess it might help to have seen Pieces so that the last sentence was in any way relevant to what I was talking about. Oh well, if you'd been at Horror Fest V, you would have seen Pieces, and if you wanted to watch Sleepaway Camp I can only assume you would have already. If not, I guess you could watch them and then read the rest of this review, even though I'm not really going to mention either film again.

 So The Mutilator (written and directed by Buddy Cooper) begins with young Ed Jr. (Trace Cooper) and his mother (Pamela Weddle Cooper) getting ready of Jack Sr. (Jack Chatham - and I know that should say Ed Sr, but I'm sticking with what IMDB says)'s birthday. Ed Jr. decides he's going to clean all of his father's guns while his mother makes a cake, and like the genius he is he also pulls the trigger, accidentally killing his mother. Oh sure, technically it's his father's fault for keeping a loaded rifle in an unlocked cabinet where his kid could accidentally kill his mother, but Ed Jr. is clearly an idiot.

 Anyway, so Jack Sr. comes home, tries to kill Ed Jr., then drags his dead wife into the study where his guns are, pours himself a drink, and then pours a drink for his dead wife. He also tapes the "For Your Birthday, All Cleaned By Me" sign that Ed Jr. put on his gun case to her body. Just because, I guess. And then we hear police sirens while the kid stares on (did he call the cops?).

 From this promising beginning, we leap forward ten years or so, when college-aged Ed Jr (Matt Mitler) is sitting in the local hangout arcade / pizza joint with his friends, deciding what to do for Fall Break. When his father inexplicably calls him AT THE arcade / pizza joint, to tell him that he has to come to Jack Sr.'s beach condo to "close it up for the winter," Ralph (Bill Hitchcock), Sue (Connie Rogers), Mike (Morey Lampley), and Linda (Frances "related to Claude" Raines) talk him into letting them come along to party for Fall Break. They also bring along Ralph's girlfriend  Pam (Ruth Martinez), so everybody can pair up and have sex. Well, almost everybody, anyway.

 When they arrive at the beach condo (in Atlantic City, NC, which means the college is probably ECU since they complain about not being close to the beach and they have southern accents that come and go) it's already unlocked. Little do they know that Jack Sr., aka "The Mutilator" is planning on killing all of them, and pretty much anybody else.

 This begs the question: was he just planning on killing his son and it's just a bonus that Ed Jr. brought five friends, or was Jack Sr. just insanely over-prepared for his murder rampage. Considering that he never says a word to his son, or really anyone else ever (including at the beginning of the film), it's hard to know what his motives are.

 The condo is filled with his trophies of previous kills and Ed Jr. mentions he's hunted everything except for humans (foreshadowing) so we can kind of guess what Jack Sr. is planning, especially since it's not long before we see him hiding in the garage downstairs, cradling his battle axe and dreaming about murdering his son (as a child). He is, however, not much of a mutilator, although there's a reason for that I'll get to in a moment. See, Jack Sr. does drown somebody, and he uses a motor boat to rip someone's guts out, and he also decapitates a police officer ("special appearance by" Ben Moore), but it isn't until much later in the film that he does anything that would qualify as "mutilating." That said, when he does it's a real doozy. I mean, I've seen some creative kills with a hook before, but this one takes the cake by a long shot.

 So I mentioned the whole "mutilator" thing, in part because the title of the movie wasn't The Mutilator until it came out on VHS. Prior to that, it was called Fall Break, which explains the lengthy title song that plays over the credits while the gang is driving from unnamed college (ECU) to unnamed beach (Atlantic City, NC) which is also the least slasher movie theme song you're ever going to hear.

 So I guess by 1985 maybe Buddy Cooper and company decided that Fall Break wasn't a sufficient holiday to make the title of a slasher flick, so the film was renamed The Mutilator. I can't say for certain whether one is better than the other, but it's a weird movie indeed. In addition to all of the strange dialogue ("you're more likely to get struck by lightning on the beach" while the moon is visible in the background) or the fact that these wild college kids spend most of their time playing Monopoly and a version of Blind Man's Bluff that looks suspiciously like Hide and Seek mashed together with Sardines, interspersed with some gratudity and a killer that unlocks the door to the kitchen so he can sneak back into the condo he has the keys to later that night... look, a lot of The Mutilator doesn't make any sense. And that's part of the charm, even if it isn't very good. I found it strangely entertaining in the same way that Splatter University is. Now that doesn't make it good, but it makes it watchable, and I'll take watchable over Moontrap any day.

 Also, the killer is cut in half at the end but still manages to stay alive long enough to chop off a cop's leg before dying, just for kicks. Spoiler.

Blogorium Review: Ex Machina

 There's really only one way that Ex Machina can end, and it does. It would hardly be fair to hold that against a film that poses so many intriguing questions about mankind and our relationship towards (if not, eventually, with) machines. For ninety or so minutes, we watch a Turing Test play out, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, with parameters that aren't well defined, and based on agendas we can't necessarily predict. And yet, despite the "all is not what it seems" atmosphere which is as pervasive throughout the film as it is in the trailer, writer / director Alex Garland (The Beach, 28 Days Later) manages to address concerns as the narrative unfolds without betraying the audience. After all, there's only one way it can end, but how it gets there is best part.

 Ex Machina is ostensibly the story of Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson, Frank), a code writer for Blue Book, the largest search engine in the world. He wins a company raffle - of sorts - and is sent to spend a week at the estate of Blue Book's creator, Nathan (Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis), for purposes undefined. There are clues in the opening scene that something else is going on, some subtle, some less so - although we don't know why until later. Nathan, who lives in the midst of a fortified compound in the midst of mountainside land (as the helicopter pilot explains when Caleb asks when they'll be at Nathan's property, "we've been flying over it for the last two hours!"), is very strict about who he allows to visit. Custom made ID badges are required, and they don't always grant access to rooms. Nathan himself, a coding prodigy who built Blue Book as a teenager, lives in isolation, exercising and drinking in equal measure. To say the least, Caleb is intimidated. This man is his boss, trying to talk to him like a friend, but under specific parameters. Parameters he's not always willing to divulge.

 But Caleb isn't really there to hang out with his boss for a week. No, Nathan's invited him for a very specific purpose, one that explains the need for no windows and a self-sustaining generator. And no cell phone service (can't leave that one out). Nathan's been working on an advanced artificial intelligence, and he's chosen Caleb to be the man to administer a Turing test. Can Caleb determine whether Ava (Alicia Vikander) passes for human or not? Nathan's already decided to bypass some of the original rules Alan Turing designed for the test: he's confident that if Caleb couldn't see Ava, he'd be convinced, so instead Caleb has to interact, to see. Ava has a human face, human hands, and fee, but is otherwise clearly a machine. So the question becomes, can Caleb, knowing he's talking to a machine, discern the presence of intelligence and be convinced that Ava is more than artifice?

 In writing the last paragraph, I caught myself trying to write the word "she" when referring to Ava, which is a nagging pet peeve I have, even for myself. The concept of trying to anthropomorphize, to gender identify, something which is explicitly identified as non-human is still difficult to shake. Pay attention to how many people refer to Apple's SIRI as a "her": because a woman recorded the audible responses that SIRI provides, we give it a gender. But SIRI is not a human being, and neither is Ava, which became the first philosophical point of contention I thought I would have with Ex Machina. Why sexualize Ava if all Nathan wants to do is prove its intelligence is genuine? Ava has a woman's face and hands, contoured plastic breasts and buttocks, so even if the arms and torso are transparent, even if the top of the head is, too, Caleb's eyes are going to be drawn to some degree to the fact that Nathan made a specific decision to gender-ize Ava.

 As it turns out, just as I was beginning to really think about the conscious decision to give Ava a gender, Garland chose to address it by having Caleb come right out and ask Nathan about it. The film is broken up into "sessions" between Caleb and Ava, punctuated by conversations with Nathan or sequences where Caleb learns more about the house. It's not far into the movie - maybe the second or third session - before the conversation comes up, and like many things which appear to be adhering to "audience expectation" tropes, there's a method to the madness. In fact, as Garland slowly reveals, there are several: Nathan has a specific reason for making Ava look like a young woman, one tied to the nature of the testing. But there are other reasons as well, although I'm not going to SPOIL much about Ex Machina. Suffice to say that many of the plot points I thought were or would be problematic turned out to be better thought out than your average screenplay.

 Ava is, indeed, quite impressive, and Caleb finds himself conflicted. On the one hand, he understands his role as the skeptic - he has to evaluate Ava from all possible angles, including whether Nathan's programming is responsible for its "flirtatious" behavior. By the same token, maybe Nathan is right that Caleb is "the first man Ava has seen" other than him. Nathan's a little looser when it comes to talking about Ava, and sometimes says "her," but I'm trying to refrain from that. They don't just talk about Ava, and it's very clear that Nathan has a secret agenda. He's also condescending and dismissive, except when he's not. There's something Caleb just can't trust about the parameters of this "test," which is confirmed when the power cuts out during a session with Ava. Ava warns Caleb that he shouldn't trust anything that Nathan says or does, which sets off the second half of Ex Machina. But which one of them is more trustworthy: the creation or the creator?

 Unfortunately, Caleb's only other point of communication is with Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) - Nathan's housekeeper / cook / assistant, who can't speak, read, or understand English. Nathan prefers it that way, as it allows him to "talk about trade secrets" without fear of any leaks. Astute readers are already working out her role in the story, but since Kyoko appears so early in the film and there are so few characters, it would be unfair to leave her out. While attempting to negotiate his living space, or the fact that the television in his room only shows CCTV footage of Ava, Caleb continues his sessions, becoming more smitten with Ava's apparently genuine expressions of intelligence. Ava draws, turns lines of questions around on Caleb, and begins to blur the line between machine and human. In the last instance, literally: Ava puts on a dress, stockings, and a wig (left in a closet, one might assume, purposefully), which obscures much of the artificiality. The results on Caleb are somewhat predictable, although by that point he's far more concerned with Ava's status as "captive" in Nathan's home.

 Although I said there was only one way that Ex Machina could end, I'm not going to address it in this review. In fact, what has been covered leaves out a number of plot points, because there's a great benefit to not knowing much more than what you see in the trailer. That might even give away a bit too much, although the "what" of what happens is more interesting when the pieces of "why" it happens come together. It goes without saying that Caleb is also being tested, Nathan is being far less than straightforward, and that Ava is taking advantage of that. Or are all three of them manipulating the others, and themselves? There are a number of interesting Biblical allusions in the film, as well as nods to Frankenstein, The Allegory of the Cave, Star Trek, Blade Runner, and Oppenheimer's famous "now I am become Death" quote. There are also some smaller references to Wittgenstein, Close Encounters or the Third Kind, and Hoffmann's The Sandman.

 With such a small cast, it's hard to really say any one of the three leads stands out, although much of the credit goes to Alicia Vikander, who has to appear to be human without being human. Considering that most of her on-screen performance is a visual effect, Vikander manages to sell her role in /as the effect. The reasoning behind how Ava is capable of reproducing human expressions has its own interesting plot device, but Vikander's slow evolution on camera as Ava is most impressive. It's hard to tell who is the cat and who the mouse, as Gleeson slowly moves from star-struck rube to man in crisis to his own sense of (possibly misguided) agency. Isaac appears to have the more one-note role, playing Nathan mostly through intimidation - physically, mentally, and emotionally - but there are a few moments in the last act that shed light on him. Some for the better, some for the worse, but I feel like his last conversation with Caleb is a better glimpse into who Nathan really is than the diabolical puppeteer we've been taking him for. It all depends on whose side you take during Ex Machina - and don't worry, the title is quite appropriate - to how you react to the inevitability of its conclusion. Like I said, there's only one way it can end once the pieces are in place. Discovering how it gets to that point, however, is what makes the film worth your while.

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.

Bad Movie Night Recap

 The time has once again come for Bad Movie Night: my shameless celebration of the movies that just aren't quite good enough, but also aren't so terrible they become unwatchable. It's a fine line, and sometimes it's just the right goofy element that pushes it over. Sometimes it's just who you watch it with, and the Cap'n has a fairly loyal crew of masochists willing to descend on Blogorium Headquarters every year. Even though I subjected them to Things last year, they came back. What that says about their cinematic fortitude is up to you, but I'm proud to call them my friends. This year, I opted to give them a less agonizing experience, but not without some serious brain bending. Let's take a look at what you (hopefully) missed out on:

 We started with Devil Girl from Mars, based on the hit London stage play (or, that's what I'd like to believe), and it shows. Despite the fact that a Martian spaceship lands outside of a remote Scottish Inn, most of the motley crew of patrons are concerned with their own stupid problems, leaving time for Naya, the titular character, to enter and exit through the same door, repeatedly. At least it's nice to know that Martians also call their planet Mars. They - well, she - arrived on Earth with her new prototype spaceship, which has organic metal and runs on an engine that creates nuclear reactions that explode inward, creating perpetual motion. Their science is vastly superior to ours, but in the great war of the sexes, all men were wiped out and they need some breeding stock, if you catch my drift. Perhaps if she'd landed in America, rather than Scotland, this would have been an easier task, because the citizens of the United Kingdom are more interested in cockamamie plans to shoot or electrocute her, to no avail.

 Brave newspaper columnist Mike Conner (or Carter, depending on who's saying his name) has the scoop of a lifetime, but would rather his on a fashion model hiding out in the inn. Thankfully his indeterminate accent doesn't bother her, and she even falls in love with him in the two hours between when they meet and when he agrees to join the Devil Girl on her ship. That, of course, is a ruse for him to try to steal the remote control for Johnny, a robot who "looks very similar to you Earth people," in that he looks nothing like humans but instead a guy in a robot costume. Naya has a ray gun that's effective on everything but glasses, constructs an invisible wall that the only scientist in the group somehow runs into headlong, and loves to open the same doors over and over and make sweeping pronouncements about how stupid we humans are. There are other characters, because we clearly care about an escaped adulterer who murdered his wife or some dumb kid, but the innkeeper's husband's name is Jamie Jameson, which is amusing. Also, they sit down to eat dinner at 10 o'clock at night. If only Mike and the Professor had taken the turn to "Loch Something" (actual line), they might have missed this unfortunately duller than it sounds movie.

 Speaking of dull, I hadn't seen Disney's knock-off of Star Wars, The Black Hole, in close to 25 years, so I didn't remember what a bore it was. Fortunately, I also didn't remember a lot of other things about it, like the fact that a 90 minute film had an overture and that all of the music - by James Bond composer John Barry - sounded just like any other Bond music. I did remember the robot with the Texas accent, and that Event Horizon lifted quite a bit from this terrible, terrible movie. When it's not ripping off Star Wars, it's borrowing liberally from the released-the-same year Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Forbidden Planet, and Battlestar Galactica, and pretty much any other vaguely popular science fiction film they could think of. To be perfectly honest with you, we lost interest about fifteen minutes in, started talking about the new music on Star Wars and about The Hobbit, and eventually made some jokes about Ernest Borgnine's libido and the movie Alligator, while pausing to note just how badly one could steal from George Lucas. I might have even said something kind about The Phantom Menace, which might be a first for the Cap'n.

 High School Confidential! eased us out of the "boring" zone of bad movies - hey, I try, but sometimes things just don't land with the crowd - by being entirely too interested in being "hip" and "with it". That works wonders in its favor, because the ridiculous overuse of slang, coupled with what seems to be not even veiled suggestions about incest between Tony (Russ Tamblyn) and his aunt Gwen (Mamie Van Doren). In Tony's defense, it's mostly one way, and given there's a twist, I guess it's possible that they maybe aren't related, but why would he refer to her as his aunt behind closed doors? There are a number of questionable "bait and switch"-es in High School Confidential!, a movie about Tony moving in to town and taking over the high school drug trade in the course of two or three days. He's tough talking and backs it up, and pops his collar, even when it's on a sweater. Why? Because he's hip, daddy-o.

 There are so many ways to address how hard the writers are trying to sound "cool" and failing miserably: the hip version of Columbus that J. I. Coleridge (John Drew Barrymore) "lays" on his class, or the awful (even for Beat Poetry) performance at a "Jazz Club" the kids all go to. Or the notion that marijuana is a gateway drug to heroin, and nothing else. Tony, a "7th year" high school student, immediately starts hitting on his teacher and also moves in on Coleridge's girl, who turns out to be a junkie. The drug kingpins in town are played by Charles Chaplin, Jr. and Jackie Coogan. Yes, Uncle Fester forces Tony to shoot up to prove he's not a narc. But wait, he is! (SPOILER) Tony is really Mike, who works with the cops, and there's a big shootout at the jazz club when a deal goes bad. Fortunately, the leader of The Rangers - played by Michael Landon - is there to help out, even though they're the rival gang to Tony's Wheelers and Dealers. Also, Jerry Lee Lewis begins and ends the film playing the title song, in what appears to be the same shot.

 High School Confidential! picked up the pace a bit, and after a musical interlude, it was time to dive right into Raw Force. It's an almost perfect storm of kung-fu zombie cannibalism interspersed with gratuitous nudity and hokey special effects. And yet, some people were grumbling, perhaps because I oversold the "cannibal monks who raise kung-fu zombies" part of the movie. Yes, most of Raw Force's 86 minutes is devoted to a Kung-Fu cruise to "Warrior Island," where disgraced martial artists are buried. It's also where Hitler sells prostitutes in exchange for jade. Is his name Hitler in the movie? I honestly don't remember, but if he looks like Hitler and talks like Hitler, we're going to go with "that guy is Hitler". The cannibal monks eat the girls because it gives them power to raise the dead, which they use (eventually) for the final showdown.

 In the meantime, there's a lot of showing off of kung-fu skills, coupled with late 70s / early 80s clothes, music, and nudity aboard the cruise ship. Almost everyone on the boat - from the cook to the bartender - seem to know how to fight, and are therefore well equipped to handle Hitler's lackeys. You see, despite the fact that Warrior Island is the home of an illicit human trafficking ring, it's also the subject of its own tourism guide. Because, why wouldn't it? When the cruise ship catches on fire (or, rather, has fire overlaid over the image), some of the passengers escape, and the rest are presumably killed. We never hear from them again, so let's just assume they died. What's important is that the life raft lands on Warrior Island and the monks raise the dead. There's lots of chop sockey, some decapitations, some dynamite, and piranhas. How are there piranhas in salt water, in the ocean? My guess is they couldn't find any stock footage of sharks. So Hitler gets munched on by piranhas (SPOILER).

 Rather than launching into the "Luc Besson Presents an Affront to Science" double feature as promised, I gave them the option of getting the Trappening out of the way, which they decided was best. What they didn't know was that this year's mystery feature wasn't just a Bad Movie - it was a Great Bad Movie. By no stretch of the imagination could one call Commando a "good" movie, but I'll be damned if it isn't one of the most fun films to throw conventional cinema out the window. Continuity errors? Check. Bad one liners? Yessir. Gratuitous nudity? Well, it has absolutely nothing to do with the fight scene, so yep. The mall from Chopping Mall? Sure is! Arnold Schwarzenegger killing an entire army, single-handedly? You know it.

 To get Alyssa Milano back, Arnold will plow his way through David Patrick Kelly (John Wick), Bill Duke (Predator), Dan Hedaya (Alien Resurrection), and finally The Road Warrior's Vernon Wells (Weird Science) for the mother of all bad puns. Oh, and his name is John Matrix, because Rambo is a pansy. I firmly believe that Commando is what everybody thinks all action movies from the 80s are like (that, and First Blood Part II), and why they hold the admittedly average Expendables series to an impossible standard. Matrix is introduced hauling a log down to a cabin (on his shoulder), and then eats ice cream and feeds a deer with his daughter. Because he's tough, but sensitive. Until you steal his daughter, and then he just kills you. Rae Dawn Chong's Cindy isn't even developed enough to have Stockholm Syndrome when she assumes the role of "new mom" at the end, having been kidnapped by Matrix less than twelve hours before. Commando is all killer and no filler, but I asked attendees to give it the same scrutiny as any of our other howlers, which is exactly the point at which you realize the many logic gaps and inherent flaws that make it technically "Bad." Now that everybody was in a great frame of mind, it was time to throw common sense out the door and let Luc Besson insult our basic intelligence...

 I've been hosting official fests for nearly a decade now, and in all that time I have never heard the phrase "wait... what?" as many times as I did during Luc Besson's Lucy. Perhaps the mini-review in the "Worst Of" recap didn't quite convey just how painfully cavalier Lucy is with the concept of "science," but the reactions were hilarious. During the film, at least one large bottle of Kraken was consumed, and descriptions of what they'd seen ranged from "an atrocity" to "amazing." A friend of mine whose dissertation is on Philip K. Dick insists that it's not science fiction at all, but rather a brilliant example of "slipstream," a newer iteration of magical realism. The entire room erupted with laughter when Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) explained that she could "feel her brain" in what's supposed to be heartfelt scene over the phone with her mother. The comical, video-game-esque use of brain percentage "unlocked" was also a source of enjoyment, but nothing stood out quite as much as figuring out how long it took for Johansson to "say this horseshit with a straight face." One viewer worried that she could no longer take Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole seriously after seeing him in Lucy. I freely admit that Lucy is a bad movie, but it's a very entertaining one, and it was somewhat validating to see the baffled reactions as they tried to take Besson's affront to science seriously.

 That said, I made a critical mistake in putting Lockout after Lucy, because by comparison, the former is just a "run of the mill bad science fiction film". It's true that after you've heard Scarlett Johansson explain what it's like to feel your bones growing, or to become the monolith from 2001, a high speed unicycle chase just doesn't have the same impact. Even my favorite line of awful science, "the gravity should keep you floating" just can't compete with Besson's double-down on Insane Clown Posse-like disdain for science. Lockout is still a bad movie, and it's insistence on identifying everyone and every location on screen (repeatedly, in the case of the latter) is amusing, but it just wasn't the same head-scratcher that it was in 2012. On the other hand, the outcries of mental anguish reconciling what Lucy was saying vs. what they knew to be true was more than worth it.

 By the end of Lockout, just about everybody was ready to go, but a few stragglers felt like they had one more Bad Movie in them. Despite the fact that it meant Cap'n's Choice - I hadn't planned on anything past Lockout - they were willing to suffer through another one. Being that it was late, or comparatively late (we can't do movies until sunrise anymore), I opted to go short and show Cranpire a "Cranpire Movie": Sorority House Massacre II. As I'll be writing about that and the first Sorority House Massacre soon (and possibly Hard to Die), I won't go too into detail about it, but he enjoyed it. There's barely a plot, and most of the first half of the movie is devoted to showing as much gratuitous nudity as possible, followed by another 30 minutes or so of women running around a house in their nighties and going out in the rain for no good reason. Jim Wynorski (Chopping Mall) even takes a pointless side-trip to a strip club to shoehorn in more nudity under the specious logic that one of the characters from a flashback is now dancing topless. Classy stuff.

 For the immediate future, I think I've hit my quota of schlock (although that doesn't rule out watching Furious 7). There's enough time to reload the queue in time for Summer Fest, where I think 80s cheesefests Without Warning and Deadly Eyes are going to be a hit. Thanks to everybody who made it, and to the folks at home who didn't, you now have a roadmap for your own Bad Movie Night. Just have alcohol and a good support system of friends nearby. And whatever you do, don't watch Things.

Reflections on "Bad Movie Night" by Cap'n Howdy

 Bad Movie Night is coming up this weekend. For some of you that means you'll be at the Blogorium, inexplicably sharing in on the agony and the ecstasy of the best of the worst I can throw at you. For some, it will be a recap you take a look at later on, and think to yourself "wow, I'm glad I didn't have to sit through that." For the Cap'n, it's a fun, if admittedly unorthodox way to spend time with friends. It's also a good opportunity to clarify a few things, as I do from time to time. There's an inherent contradiction coming up, but I am vast and contain multitudes. Or I'm a walking contradiction. I can't remember. Anyway, let's discuss how Bad Movie Night fits into the evolving notion of the Blogorium and the Cap'n Howdy mission statement overall.

 Without fail, at some point during Bad Movie Night, someone is going to ask me if I'm going to see X or Y terrible movie, and I'm probably going to say "no". A friend recently asked if there was a review on the Blogorium for Tusk, and was confused / disappointed when I explained that I stopped watching the movie around the time that Johnny Depp showed up. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, the point at which I realized that nothing Kevin Smith had in store for Tusk was worth investing any more time on. If you really want to know how I feel about post-SMODcast Kevin Smith as a director, there's a review for Red State out there that pretty much covers it. I'll add that it isn't particularly enthralling to hear his M.O. for making movies that aren't sequels is to get really high, record a podcast, and then turn whatever he comes up with into a movie. You know, like "Jaws with a moose." Nevertheless, I fully expect a question about how excited I am for Mallrats 2 (not at all).

 That said, it's totally fair to ask me that, especially at something called Bad Movie Night. Historically speaking, the get together-s hosted by the Cap'n have centered around horror movies or schlock, and primarily schlock. They're fun films to rally around, and are conducive to a party atmosphere. It's an informal crowd that comes to Blogorium events, and while you aren't expected to participate in any MST3k-like riffing on movies, I don't discourage making comments when something just doesn't make sense. The specious plot that bridges gratuitous nudity in Andy Sidaris films practically begs for some level of commentary. But I wouldn't do the same if I was at Nevermore (well, sometimes, but much more quietly). We do, on occasion, watch screwball comedies or more serious fare, and there's talk of branching into different "fest" directions, but let's stick with Bad Movie Night for now.

 Bad Movie Night was borrowed from a tradition my brother and his friends started more than a decade ago: during birthday celebrations, they'd each buy the birthday boy or girl the worst movie they could find, and everyone would have to sit through it. They would drink heavily and apparently it got quite loud. I'd never actually been to one, but the first Bad Movie Night was built loosely on that premise. Having had some experience with Horror Fest and Summer Fest, I thought I could program one that had some really entertaining stinkers, and we'd kick it off with a field trip to see Crank 2: High Voltage. Trust me, while highly entertaining, it falls squarely within the rubric of "bad movie". That was followed by The Giant Claw, Batman and Robin, Mac & Me, Troll 2, and Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. A good time was had by all, and whenever possible, I've tried to keep it going.

 The Blogorium has existed in various forms over the years, but since I moved to this service, I've kept the "about" information over to the right basically the same. Sometimes, the phrase "Trash Savant" has come back to haunt me, because it implies that my movie watching palate is limited to sifting through lots of garbage to find the Least Worst Of. And I get it, because around the turn of the century / millennium / whatever, there was a point where the Cap'n and friends would go see anything. Like, literally, we'd just go see a movie to see a movie. How else do you explain watching The In Crowd, or Loser? Or the double feature of The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps and The Replacements when I had an entire multiplex to choose from? Yes, I saw 8mm and Idle Hands and the first two Resident Evil movies. On the big screen. I don't know why. Well, I do: they were playing and we had already seen Payback or whatever else we really wanted to see. Sure, I also spent the summer of 99 watching Eyes Wide Shut and The Sixth Sense, even The Blair Witch Project and South Park (and, yes, The Phantom Menace), but for some reason only the bad movies stuck.

 It continued over the years, and yeah, I would organize group outings for Alien vs. Predator or The Matrix Reloaded, or Professor Murder and I would just go see, well, anything. Again, allow me to stress that yes, we only saw Paycheck because we were too late for Win a Date with Tad Hamilton. I don't remember why we went to see Godsend or The Butterfly Effect, or even Saw. A lot of that was a throwback to high school, I think, when we would regularly go to the discount theater to see things like The Big Hit or Suicide Kings, or The Big Lebowski. And also Godzilla, Lost in Space, Scream 2, and whatever else was playing. It was fun, and cheap, and bad movies are tremendously entertaining. The summer of 2008 had to be a record for "what's playing this week," because I saw The Dark Knight, The Happening, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and The X-Files: I Want to Believe. One of them was good.

 But, over time, they became a smaller part of my cinematic consumption. I know that a lot of friends from that era didn't necessarily keep up with that, which is why I'm still chided for not having watched Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. I'll probably still get grief for it, because I have no plans to watch it, and what I'll go out to the theater to see grows more and more limited. Most of the things I've seen on the big screen over the last year ended up on the Best of List. The last two movies I saw were Birdman and It Follows, both based on the great word of mouth I had been hearing from friends. Despite what people might assume, It Follows was the first movie I saw in theaters from 2015. These days, if a movie just looks bad (like, oh, Seventh Son), I'm less inclined to see it just to see it. The last time that happened was probably Movie 43, which was every bit as forgettable and terrible as you've probably heard. Lockout was the last time I really had fun with a terrible movie, which is why it's playing as a double feature with Lucy at Bad Movie Night this year.

 Herein lies the aforementioned contradiction, because I do still watch bad movies. Hell, I watched Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster last week, and Sorority House Massacre II the week before that. They are, by no stretch of the imagination, good movies. In the past you'd have reviews up for those, instead of It Follows and The Babadook. In fact, Sorority House Massacre and Sorority House Massacre II are probably going to end up under the "Cranpire Movies" banner, which is what I tend to use when I want to talk about schlock. It's not that Cranpire will watch anything (even he has limits), but it's become a running joke between us that he'll sit through what I won't. Still, the two (technically three) Sorority House Massacre films are so disparate, even from each other, that I'd like to share their charms with you all. But I'm probably never going to watch Taken 3. And I doubt I'll ever finish Tusk.

 The funny thing about having had this blog for so long is that I'm frequently held responsible for reviews I wrote years ago. That's fair, I suppose, but I have tried to evolve as a writer and as a reviewer, so when I look back at a quarter review of something like Student Bodies and have to defend it when someone from the film takes exception to it, I cringe a little. Not because I didn't write it - I did, in the middle of a Fest - but because it's not really a review. It's a reaction to something that happened that I wrote quickly while people had a smoke break. It's a time capsule of a moment in the history of the Blogorium, but it's not how I would write it today. But you can't tell that to somebody who finds the review through a Google search - it's not an ongoing evolution of film criticism to them. It's a review, one that says the movie they like sucks.

 Or worse, it's The Mechanic review, which was a run of the mill Jason Statham movie, where I didn't feel one way or the other about it. In fact, by and large I gave up reviewing films headlined by Statham because they'd all be like The Mechanic - an overview of the plot, general comments about the action, he was good, the supporting cast was okay, the story was serviceable. Other than the Crank films, it's a pretty succinct reaction to most of his starring roles, and if I can't add anything to the conversation, I'll find something else to review. That doesn't stop people from reading The Mechanic review - which they do - and assuming that's currently how I feel about the movie. Honestly, four years later? I've forgotten almost everything about it. Even the "World Champion" ring, but it doesn't matter. Everything is contemporary on the internet.

 Which brings us back to Bad Movie Night and bad movies in general. As long as the Blogorium exists and posts can be found ala carte on search engines, people can and will safely assume that's all the Cap'n is about. And that's fair - I like the Dr. Re-Animator picture at the top of the page and The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman background scroll bar. Perhaps someday they'll change, but hopefully it gives visitors an indicator that things aren't taken too seriously around here. Please don't think that I don't enjoy bad movies: one of the things that drove me crazy in film courses was an attitude of intellectual snobbery, of a dismissal of "low art" that wasn't to be bothered with. It wasn't rampant, but there is an attitude of "if it isn't a classic or a modern classic, it's not worth bothering my time with". I remember working with someone who sneered at the idea that Peter Jackson would adapt The Lovely Bones because it was "pop fiction" and that he was "above" that*. He should just stick to Tolkein, I guess. Look how well that worked out for The Hobbit.

 Over the years, I've tried harder to provide a balance of "high" and "low" art, and to be honest with you, I don't watch a lot of these neo B-Movies. If you read my Hobo with a Shotgun review, you'll notice that I didn't have a lot of fun with the movie. I hated Machete Kills. There wasn't enough about Wolf Cop to merit a review, to be honest, and I don't watch Syfy Channel Originals. It's not a matter of being dismissive of them, to jump back a paragraph - I don't particularly care one way or the other, and I'm not going to tell anyone not to watch them. I try to mention them as little as possible, so unless someone asks why a Sharknado movie isn't at Bad Movie Night or Summer Fest, you won't hear about it in the Blogorium. It's the same thought process behind the Transformers series: I haven't seen them, I'm not planning on it, so why devote time and energy into insulting them? There are literally thousands of blogs that do that. But if you want to know about The Beach Girls and the Monster, I've got you covered.

 Moving forward, the goal is to try to bring you reviews for films you maybe haven't heard about, old and new. If it's a major release, I might review it if there's something worth bringing up I haven't seen anywhere else. Otherwise, you probably won't see it until the Recap. In the meantime, I'd rather focus on movies like Under the Skin or Spider Baby (to name a couple from last year). They're very different movies for very different audiences, but I really enjoyed both of them, and you might too. I'm always open to suggestions, but it's been a long time since the Cap'n would go watch literally anything. By the same token, I'll pay money to see Samurai Cop with an audience, even though I own two copies of Samurai Cop. It was worth it to see their reaction. That was the same situation with Things at last year's Bad Movie Night - I suffered through it alone so I could see the faces I made on my friends. And by the way, they could have left, but no one did.
 

 This year's Bad Movie Night is a... shall we say, unique assemblage of "so bad, it's good"**: Continuing in our trend of "being afraid of women in the 1950s," there's Devil Girl from Mars, followed by High School Confidential, Disney's The Black Hole, Raw Force, the aforementioned Luc Besson double feature, and a special Trappening. Because you shouldn't always know what you're getting at a Bad Movie Night. A recap should follow some time next week, and then after that, it's back to whatever strikes the Cap'n as worth writing about. Maybe schlock, maybe not. We're on the cusp of blockbuster season, so maybe those will make it into the mix. I'm not sure. Above all else, my goal for the immediate future is to make Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium as unpredictable as possible, so as to keep you from settling in to "this is what to expect." Hell, I might even go back and re-review some of the older posts, just for kicks. Stay tuned, and if you're on your way to Bad Movie Night, prepare yourself...



 * I never saw The Lovely Bones, so I can't weigh in on whether it was any good or not, but it's a similar attitude to refusing to read a book that's been adapted into a film - like Trainspotting - because that "taints" the source material. And yes, that was another instance that came up with a similarly dismissive person.
** That's a big criteria for me - bad movies that are just bad are a waste of everybody's time.

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?!?!?