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.

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 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.

2013 Recap: The Bottom of the Barrel

 Folks, we've come around full circle again; 2013 has left us and 2014 began just a day ago. I'm not really sure where the year went, and there were a lot of things I meant to do that didn't happen, so hopefully the Cap'n can pick up where I left off. In the meantime, there's a year's worth of movies to recap, and as I do every year, we'll start at the bottom and work our way up.

 I lost count of how many new movies I saw in 2013 (it's somewhere north of 40, but the list I put together is eluding me, so we'll stick with that estimate), and thankfully most of them were very good to really good. Some even great, but we're not here to talk about those today. Nope. Today is about the small, but vocal minority of true garbage that assaulted my ears and eyes in 2013. Some I've already forgotten most everything about, some I regret even considering sitting down to watch. At the race to the bottom, First Place is an unenviable position, and I really struggled deciding which of the following nine films sucked the hardest. Every time I think "yeah, that's the one I hated the most," I see another one on the list and change my mind. So this year, there will be no numbering - they're all the worst.

 And I watched them So You Won't Have To.

 Movie 43 - There's an old adage that the more recognizable names you see on a movie you've never heard of, the worse the movie is. Most of the time this pertains to direct to video releases on already clogged shelves, and usually to indie dramas, but every now and again comedies. For something like Movie 43 to make it to theatres, even in the "dumping ground" time of the year, is a testament to the inexplicable star power willing to blemish their resumes with this shit.

 When either of the "haven't been funny in a decade and a half" Farrelly brothers are involved (Peter, in this case), that should set off alarm bells, but with so many talented people directing segments of this Kentucky Fried Movie wannabe, I remember that we rationalized it would at least have something worth seeing. We were clearly not paying attention to the warning signs, and nothing about the lazily titled Movie 43 was worth seeing. Not Hugh Jackman with testicles on his throat; not Chris Pratt shitting all over a taxi to impress Anna Faris; not Jason Sudekis and Justin Long as Batman and Robin at Superhero Speed Dating (spoiler - one of the women was a dude! Hilarity!). Let's not forget about the wacky game of Truth or Dare that turns Stephen Merchant into an Asian caricature with a penis tattooed on his cheek! Or Halle Berry making guacamole with her boob!

 I had to look some of these up because, to be perfectly honest with you, we'd already forgotten about most of Movie 43 by the next day. Looking at IMDB, I thought "oh yeah, that was in the movie, wasn't it?" and then I remembered that it wasn't funny and that's why I forgot about it. And before long, I'll forget about it again, and hopefully you will too. Don't let the list of names on the cover lure you into a blind rental or Netflix streaming - it's not worth it unless you desperately need to lose and hour and a half of your life. You'll remember as much of Movie 43 by not watching it as you will by enduring it, so why bother?

 Kick-Ass 2 - I'll keep this brief. I hated Kick-Ass when I saw it in 2010, and that position hasn't softened at all. I was vaguely curious about Jim Carrey as Colonel Stars and Stripes based on the trailer and it seemed like expanding the world of "real life" heroes and villains might maybe be worth looking into. And it wasn't. Kick-Ass 2 is more of the same stupid swill that I didn't like at all three years ago, and apparently not even fans of the first movie could choke this one down. I already didn't care about Hit Girl, but her adventures as "Mindy the normal girl in high school" that ended up as a stupid retread of Mean Girls really made me miss Nicolas Cage's Big Daddy. Nothing about Kick-Ass 2 is worth mentioning, so I'm just going to move on...

 R.I.P.D. - Speaking of movies with nothing worth mentioning, here's a transparent remake of Men in Black that substitutes ghosts for aliens and stars Ryan Reynolds from Blade Trinity and Rooster Cogburn from the Coen brothers' True Grit. Oh sure, it's Jeff Bridges, but he's playing Rooster Cogburn without the eye-patch. Also Mary Louise Parker and Kevin Bacon is the bad guy (SPOILER for the first three minutes of the movie) blah blah blah lousy special effects blah blah blah lazy jokes blah blah blah lots of shooting and yelling end of the world etc. R.I.P.D. is neither bad enough to hate nor good enough to give much more attention to. It simply limps along, reminding you of better movies that you could be watching instead of this. In fact, I watched a MUCH better movie before this (more on that when we get to the Best of 2013) and was so excited by it that I decided to use R.I.P.D. as a kind of "palette cleanser," which may be exactly what it's good for. If mediocre is your thing, this is the movie for you.

 Bullet to the Head - I don't really have anything to add to this beyond what I said in the original review. I only bothered to review three of the nine movies on this list, and in both instances I'll just include the links. There's a much better Stallone movie that came out in 2013 (Escape Plan) that you should see instead, because Walter Hill's un-buddy cop / revenge film is somebody's cup of tea, but not mine.

 Evil Dead - I get that people like that the remake of The Evil Dead is really violent. Like non-stop, unpleasant, close-up on the gore violent for most of the movie. Got it. I 100% don't believe the continued insistence that the effects are practical and that there's "almost no digital effects" in the movie. Sorry, I've seen it twice and you can see the digital effects, even during parts of the commentary where the director claims there aren't. But that is another argument for another day. The problem with Evil Dead isn't that it exists - there can and are good remakes of horror films out there, so I'm willing to put aside my affection for the original and let this exist in its own right.

 The problem with Evil Dead is that it's extremely violent, and nothing else. If you're looking for a movie where people are slowly, painfully mutilated, with long shots of the aftermath where they're half-crying and half in shock while removing needles or nails from their skin, good news - you'll find it in spades in Evil Dead. There's no humor, no characters, not much in the way of plot (that isn't abandoned, anyway), but lots of moments designed to remind you that this is a remake of The Evil Dead. Just one that's grittier and gorier and more hardcore. Because that's all horror fans care about, right? Oh, also just throwing Bruce Campbell onscreen after the credits to say "Groovy" in silhouette., because you gotta have Bruce, right?  It's no secret why the best and worst reviews of this film said the same thing: "It's REALLY violent." That's all there is to Evil Dead, and it's not enough.

 A Good Day to Die Hard - I like the theory that Red Letter Media has that each Die Hard sequel is designed to make the previous film look better by comparison. At the same time, it terrifies me to think how bad Die Hard 6 is going to have to be to make this piece of shit look good.

 G.I. Joe: Retaliation - I originally watched this as a planned week long segment called "The Rock Report," wherein I'd see every Dwayne Johnson movie released in 2013 and cover them for you. After G.I. Joe: Retaliation and another movie on this list, I decided it wasn't worth the effort to track down Snitch and Empire State. Going back to Movie 43, it's probably worth pointing out that I should have known better than to be interested in a movie with Dwayne Johnson, Ray Stevenson, Jonathan Pryce, Walton Goggins, RZA, and Channing Tatum (SPOILER briefly). Somehow (see above), it's only the second worst Bruce Willis movie I saw this year.

 True, I'd never seen the first movie and I don't plan on ever seeing it. True, it had gone extensive reshoots that delayed the film for half a year. True, it was the sequel to a G.I. Joe movie. But dammit, it had Dwayne Johnson and he made the Fast and Furious series better for two movies in a row (more on that in a later post). I now understand why Joseph Gordon Levitt and Christopher Eccleston didn't bother to come back for this (and it had nothing to do with Don Jon or Thor: The Dark World). It's a thoroughly average and mostly boring "action" movie that makes me glad I didn't watch the first one and pleased to know I don't need to see any more of them.

 Machete Kills - I'd love to believe that some day, Robert Rodriguez will start making real movies again. But with Sin City: A Dame to Kill for around the corner and the promise / threat of Machete Kills Again in Space looming, somehow that doesn't seem likely. That's too bad, but at least I know that this downward trajectory is something I can avoid from here on out, rather than risk being disappointed again.

 Pain & Gain - If there has to be a "worst of the worst," the absolute skidmark on the underpants of cinema for 2013 (that I was willing to watch), this is probably it. Machete Kills really sucks. A Good Day to Die Hard isn't even a Die Hard movie by the shaky standards of the fourth film Movie 43 barely deserves to be called a movie. But Pain & Gain not only reminded me why I stopped watching Michael Bay movies after The Island, it made me angry.

 I've been following a lot of the "controversy" surrounding Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street from people who are boycotting the movie in principle because it "glorifies" Jordan Belfort. Having not seen The Wolf of Wall Street but having seen Goodfellas and Casino, both of which are also based on real people who did horrible things and benefited in some way from the films based on their story, I have a hard time with the "outrage." This is what Scorsese does. With the exception of Hugo and Kundun, almost all of his protagonists are morally compromised to varying degrees, and some are downright unlikeable. As a storyteller, he gets you invested in them, even if you don't like them, and yes, to some degree that helps people like Henry Hill and "Whitey" Bulger (who Jack Nicholson's character in The Departed is loosely based on).

 Why people weren't comparably outraged by the glorification of the pieces of human garbage in Michael Bay's Pain & Gain boggles my mind, because when you see pictures of the real criminals who kidnapped and killed people, it's abundantly clear that turning them into Anthony Mackie, Dwayne Johnson, and Mark Wahlberg is only making them look like a million bucks for the movie version. Bay also makes the film a comedy, specifically styled after the Coen brothers, even though it's abundantly clear that Michael Bay does not understand what makes a Coen brothers movie funny. He got the "dumb criminals" part and stopped there, content to include his usual bag of tricks: hot chicks, fancy cars, oiled muscles, and rampant homophobia.

 The worst part is that, in spite of all of this, Pain & Gain is still sometimes sporadically funny, in spite of itself. Most of that comes from the very talented cast, trying hard to sell what is inherently unfunny but so unbelievable it becomes ridiculous (when Bay has to include a title card to remind you that "This is STILL a True Story" when Johnson is burning severed hands on a grill, you should get some idea how crazy it gets). But then, at the very end, when they finally do get caught, the closing credits cuts to photos of the actual perpetrators who did the things we're seeing played for laughs, and it's hard to see Pain & Gain as anything other than a glamor shots version of their lives. Michael Bay wants us to enjoy these assholes for the things they did, and laugh because of how silly it sounds. So I think I'm good going back to not watching his movies again. We seem to get along better that way, and the rest of you can wonder why I haven't and won't see a Transformers movie.

 The good news is that from here on out, things only go uphill. The next section(s) will deal with the middle ground - movies I liked but didn't love, but would recommend nonetheless. Thanks for wallowing through the worst of it with the Cap'n.

Blogorium Review: Machete Kills

 I really wish Machete Kills was a better movie than it is. It's just a bummer, because Machete is dumb fun: a trashy, grindhouse-esque slice of Mexploitation, with a stacked cast and a sense of reckless abandon that manages to be coherent in spite of itself. And Machete Kills? Well, let's just say being able to shoot anything at any time digitally has really ruined Robert Rodriguez...

 Machete (Danny Trejo) is dealing with loss when he's summoned by the President to stop a crazy drug lord Marcos Mendez (Demian Bichir) from launching a nuclear missile at Washington, D.C. When he easily infiltrates the compound, he discovers that Mendez has connected the firing mechanism to his heart, so if he dies, the missile launches. Machete must bring him back across the border from Mexico, keep him alive, disarm the bomb, and contend not only with the cartels, but a gang on vengeful prostitutes and an assassin who can take on any face. And that's not even taking into account the person who gave Mendez the missile...

 If you're looking for a movie that delivers on the title and nothing else, then Machete Kills lives up to its promise. Machete does kill, and he kills in any variety of creative fashions. Does he flip a boat over so that it runs into a dock motor first, chopping a bunch of stooges to pieces? Yup. Does he attach a guy to a grappling hook and send him into a helicopter? Also yup. Does he attach himself to a helicopter rotor and spin around decapitating guys with his weapon of choice? He sure does. He even uses a gun that "turns guys inside out" to end a chase sequence. So, as President Rathcock (Charlie Shee-, pardon me, Carlos Estevez) says, "Machete kills! That's what he does!"

 The problem is that it all looks like bargain basement, Syfy Channel / Asylum Pictures digital skullduggery. The "inside out" gun, no exaggeration, looks like a slightly bloodier version of what happens when a Dalek shoots someone on Doctor Who. There's so much CGI blood in this movie that, when added to the copious green-screening, makes Machete Kills look like something that a film student would make over the course of a weekend. I understand that Rodriguez can make a movie like Machete Kills on the cheap, but it doesn't have to look this cheap.

 And before you say "but Cap'n, it's an exploitation movie! It's SUPPOSED to look like shit!" allow me to remind you that this is the same Robert Rodriguez that made Planet Terror, which has a comparable level of carnage and still looks like a movie, not something that's supposed to sit next to Birdemic in the $7.99 bin at Best Buy in two weeks. Machete Kills looks less realistic than Spy Kids 3-D, and I'm positive there are at least a few 100% practical sets in Machete Kills. Most of them don't look like it (and at least two of them are just a bar and restaurant somewhere in Austin), and it feels like every driving scene was done in front of the green screen in Rodriguez's studio.

 Machete Kills doesn't feel like a movie; it feels like a lark that Rodriguez (or, more likely, 20th Century Fox) expects people to pay for. Rodriguez was probably more than happy to make it, even if it feels less complete than the last Resident Evil movie (which, if you remember, I likened to an extended trailer for the inevitable next Resident Evil movie). At least Resident Evil had the decency not to open the film with a trailer for the next film.

 That's right, Machete Kills opens with a trailer for Machete Kills Again: In Space, which arguably manages to look even worse than the movie you're about to watch, but only because it's all in front of green screens. It promises the exact same cast and already sounds like the director doesn't care ("And Lady Gaga as... whoever Lady Gaga wants to be!"), and lets you know this is where we're going. Just bear with Machete Kills as it spins its wheels for 100 minutes, because at the end of the tunnel we're going to space! With lightsaber machetes and a guy in a silver mask played by Leonardo DiCaprio (* Casting Subject to Change) plus Machete fights clone Machete!

 And then we have to watch Machete Kills, which would have been not so good even without the promise that there isn't going to be an ending. Right out of the gate the second problem with Rodriguez's "shoot anywhere, any time with your friends" approach is apparent. It's true that his casts are stacked (no pun intended about Sofia Vergara there), but if you're expecting to see many of them on screen together, don't hold your breath. He's taken the Sin City approach of "shoot when you're available" to the extreme, and for the first time it's readily apparent in Machete Kills.

 When I saw Sin City, I didn't know that Mickey Rourke and Rutger Hauer weren't in the same physical location for the scene between the two characters. It's just the two of them sitting on opposite beds across from each other. Using green screen trickery, Rodriguez convinces you that two actors who filmed on different days are talking to each other and are inhabiting the same space. Only later did I find out they weren't acting against each other, and it was an impressive trick.

 On the other hand, I could tell almost immediately that the one day Jessica Alba was available to shoot was not a day Mel Gibson was there to kill her character (SPOILER) and that the reason that Gibson's character, Luther Voz was wearing a luchadore mask (the only time he wears it) was to disguise the fact that they weren't on screen together. If that were the only case of scheduling tomfoolery in the film, I'd forgive it, because Rodriguez manages to use the mask as a visual bridge later in the film, but it's just the tip of the iceberg.

 It's clear that most of the people in the film came in for one or two days, filmed all of their scenes, and probably never interacted with Danny Trejo. The character of El Chameleon is a perfect example: this is a super assassin who changes faces after every kill, which is a great way to include Walton Goggins, Cuba Gooding Jr., Lady Gaga, and Antonio Banderas in the movie, except that the first two are in scenes with people who have nothing to do with the story, Lady Gaga makes a grand entrance in a gas station that looks fake and then is driving in front of a green screen, and Banderas and Trejo are barely in the same scene together. And this is a character who decides to collect a bounty to kill Machete.

 Well, it should be that, but instead it feels like "hey, Lady Gaga, come shoot whenever you're available and I'll make you a badass assassin with a cool poster and put you in the trailer." Goggins is in one scene. Gooding is in three, and Banderas is in two. They're all really fun to see, but they don't have any time to make an impression. Machete Kills is too busy cramming in plot to have anything good to do with the great cast Rodriguez assembled. Most of the movie is Danny Trejo and Demian Bichir (Che, Weeds) on the road, saddled with a dumb subplot about how Mendez has a split personality that conveniently shifts whener the story needs it to.

 It would be easier to dismiss Machete Kills outright if it there weren't some actual highlights to the film, chief among them the commercially toxic Mel Gibson. I understand that mentioning Mel Gibson goes over about as well as invoking the name of Roman Polanski, but the truth is that as super villain / inventor Luther Voz, Gibson is great fun to watch. It seems like Rodriguez and screenwrite Kyle Ward poured all of their good ideas into the character, from his obsession with Star Wars to his admiration for Machete, and I have to say that it's fun to see Mel Gibson playing slightly comedic again. They manage to sneak in Mad Max and Man Without a Face references without being too obvious, and he's definitely a highlight in the film.

 The other high point is Marko Zaror, who plays Zaror, a genetically engineered army of clones created by Voz to battle Machete and to protect him when he leaves the nuclear ravaged Earth for the safety of his space station (aha, see where that's going?). Zaror is a Chilean martial artist and has a cult following among actions fans, so it's nice to see Rodriguez give him several opportunites to go mano-a-mano with Danny Trejo (I don't need to tell you that he's spot on in the title role, do I?). Also good are Amber Heard, Michelle Rodriguez, and I guess Tom Savini, although the three of them are in so little of the film that they don't register for long stretches. And yes, Tom Savini plays the same character who killed Machete's brother in the first film, but he's had a change of heart and, well, it's just an excuse to bring him back. Until I looked at IMDB, Like Lady Gaga, Sheen / Estevez doesn't make much of an impression. And William Sadler? I forgot he was even in the movie...

 It's a little maddening that there's so much of this cheap, boring, over-complicated movie to have to sit through in order to have a handful of bright spots, and even though Machete Kills barely made a dent with audiences, I somehow suspect Rodriguez made the film cheaply enough to have already shot most of Machete Kills Again: In Space. But I have to be honest and say I don't want to watch it. I didn't like, but respected Sin City. I loved Planet Terror. I liked Machete. I disliked almost all of Machete Kills, and looking at how digital filmmaking has slowly turned Rodriguez from a director who made movies with what he had to a guy who can literally use anything and shoot on anybody's schedule, all to his detriment, I'm not so keen on his movies anymore. It's like he's become a parody of his own Grindhouse segment, and we seem more and more distant from something like Desperado or The Faculty, which looked and felt like actual movies. Machete Kills feels like an experiment, and not the good kind.

Retro Review: The Faculty

 So, interesting tidbit about The Faculty - I completely misjudged when this came out. If you asked the Cap'n when I thought I saw this movie, I would have leaned summer of 97 (15 year anniversary!) or maybe early spring of the following year, but December of 1998? Really? That's just odd, and not because The Faculty is more of a late summer / fall kind of movie (it's like the reverse of Batman Returns, a winter-themed film released in the summer of 1992). Most people are out of school by December, and The Faculty is very much a "high school" kind of movie.

 In fact, it's a distant cousin of the post-Scream "teenagers in peril" self conscious horror subgenre that was all the rage until remakes of Japanese horror films became all the rage. Just like I was wrong about when it came out, so too am I surprised by two things: 1) that it came out AFTER Disturbing Behavior and 2) that Disturbing Behavior was released in July of 1998, because I saw it with two people I only thought I spent time with in high school. Weird. But this is not exactly about Disturbing Behavior.

 So why, do you ask, did I even bring up Disturbing Behavior, a movie that many of you are struggling to remember if you saw or not? Because when I put on The Faculty, the first thing that l realized after a long time away from the film is that its soundtrack leaned heavily on the "alterna-pop" of the day (Disturbing Behavior will always be linked with Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" in my mind, but imagine my surprise that The Faculty opens with The Offspring's "The Kids Aren't Alright," a song I'd totally forgotten about). Not exactly a promising start, huh?

 Well, there's a pretty good reason that I'd forgotten about the musical accompaniment for The Faculty, Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Williamson's "high school John Carpenter's The Thing." When we went to see it at The Studio - the long gone shoebox dual theatre in Raleigh where the young Cap'n saw Trainspotting and Trees Lounge - the transition from trailers to actual movie was so abrupt that we didn't actually realize the film had begun and it wasn't just some trailer about Robert Patrick as an irate football coach. In fact, jokes were made and we were genuinely caught off-guard when Patrick started yelling at Shawn Hatosy and Usher Raymond, making his (much hyped) cinematic debut. Oh, this IS The Faculty. Wild!

 So The Faculty is a pretty good (not great) version of the "movie trope literate teens who find themselves in ____ genre situation," in this case an alien invasion from creatures who need lots and lots of water and who can infect humans and control their bodies. Eventually it becomes a cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing, including a scene where they use a drug to prove who is and isn't human. Then there's a showdown between one of the heroes (I won't give it away just in case you haven't seen it) and the alien and everything goes back to normal. Oh, SPOILER. Then there's a kinda Breakfast Club "we learned to overcome out high school social castes and work together to fight aliens" but nobody gets a nose ring ripped out like in Disturbing Behavior*.

 On the Robert Rodriguez-o-meter, The Faculty rates well below El Mariachi, Desperado, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Sin City, Machete, or Planet Terror, but probably slightly above Spy Kids 3D. Maybe on par with Spy Kids and Spy Kids 2, but not in the same league as From Dusk Till Dawn, it's rough contemporary in the "making a movie like the ones he used to watch" Rodriguez filmography. Comparatively speaking, it's probably really high up on the Kevin Williamson-o-meter, right below Scream but waaaaaaay above Scream 2, Scream 3, Scream 4, and Teaching Mrs. Tingle.

 Also of note is the high ratio of people you kind-of knew in 1998 but definitely know now. There's Elijah Wood (The Lord of the Rings, Wilfred), Jordana Brewster (Fast Five), Clea DuVall (Canivale, Zodiac), Laura Harris (Dead Like Me), Josh Hartnett (30 Days of Night), Shawn Hatosy (Southland, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans), Famke Janssen (X2, Taken), Jon Stewart (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Death to Smoochy), plus distinguished guest stars Piper Laurie (Carrie), Bebe Neuwirth (Cheers), Salma Hayek (From Dusk Till Dawn), Robert Patrick (Terminator 2), Christopher McDonald (Happy Gilmore), Daniel von Bargen (O Brother, Where Art Thou), and uh, Harry Knowles (Ain't It Cool News). Also in cameos, Danny Masterson (That 70s Show) and Wiley Wiggins (Dazed and Confused). It's like a who's who of "huh, they were in this movie?"

 Well, so The Faculty isn't exactly a classic, but it's enjoyable enough considering other movies like it that populate theatres from 1997-2001 (when Valentine functionally killed the subgenre**) and we had fun when we saw it. While I can't remember correctly when I saw The Faculty, I certainly recall who I saw it with, because when leaving The Studio one friend announced to another that his car was being towed, which was a bad joke. For some reason, it's the first (and almost only) thing one says to the other when they see each other, even though it's really not funny nearly 14 years later.

 So in closing, happy fifteenth anniversary to Face/Off. You were a ridiculous movie.


 * The only other thing I remember about Disturbing Behavior. Seriously, that movie sucked.
** And NOT Urban Legend: Final Cut. That movie rules.

So You Shouldn't Have To: Blu-Ray Edition

From time to time, I like to mention to readers that new releases on DVD or Blu-Ray are coming out that may be of interest to you. I often include the caveat that no one is paying me to say this, because it's true - no one is paying anything for this blog*. I rarely tell people not to buy something; there are instances of movies where the Cap'n says "So You Won't Have To" but that's more of a "you're curious, I'm curious, but it's better that we all don't spend time and money on this."

That said, I am strongly advocating that people avoid any and all Miramax titles coming to Blu-Ray in the new few months. Most of it isn't going to be high on your list of priorities anyway, but since a few of the titles that people might want (including From Dusk Till Dawn) are already appearing at Best Buy for $10, I can already see people I know picking up a few of them. Don't.

There's something that many people are not aware of that directly impacts what you're seeing and will be seeing over the summer. Part of the Miramax settlement after the company crashed was selling off its catalog - it's why you haven't seen Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love, The English Patient, Jackie Brown, Good Will Hunting, Amelie**, or From Dusk Till Dawn on Blu-Ray to this point (instead, there were a handful of released after they collapsed like Clerks and No Country for Old Men, as well as earlier discs for Kill Bill and Bad Santa). Some of the films went to Lionsgate: the Scream series, and many of the "marquee" titles listed above you've been waiting for.

However, many of the Miramax / Dimension films went elsewhere: specifically, Echo Bridge Home Entertainment. Ever heard of them? Probably not, unless you're a big fan of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, 2012: Doomsday, War of the Worlds 2, or Mega Piranha. They specialize in releasing dirt cheap DVDs (and recently, Blu-Rays) of movies that straddle the line between Syfy Channel Original and knock-offs designed to capitalize on better known films.

And it turns out they got most of the horror, science fiction, thriller, and action films, including From Dusk Till Dawn, a movie I'd very much like to have on Blu-Ray. Miramax's DVD had a bunch of great extra features, including deleted scenes, a commentary, and even a full-length documentary about the film called Full Tilt Boogie. The problem is that the movie itself isn't enhanced for widescreen TVs, which wasn't an issue when it came out eleven years ago.

So what does the Echo Bridge Blu-Ray, selling at Best Buy for $9.99, have on it? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. They treated it like any of their other "get 'em out cheap" titles, took the extras away, reframed the image from 1.85:1 to 1.78:1, didn't bother remastering the film for Blu-Ray, and dumped it out there. The early reviews on Amazon are from people who bought it, and aside from the person Echo Bridge is targeting these released to (people who don't really care about extra features, subtitles, or decent picture / sound quality and don't want to pay much), the consensus is a big SKIP IT.

Halloween fans might want to also check out the write-ups on H20 (unless you also plan on buying Halloween 6), because the Echo Bridge Blu-Ray reformats the from the much wider picture 2.35:1 to 1.78:1, and drops the DVD's 5.1 surround sound for a cheaper 2.0 stereo mix. Plus none of the extras or anything listed above. Hellraiser and Children of the Corn completists should also take heed to the warnings about Echo Bridge's cut rate tactics.

Nothing here is new - all Echo Bridge releases are like this, including Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. The company doesn't really care about putting quality titles out, just cheap releases that require the bare minimum of effort before dumping them in a "bargain bin" at your local Big Box Retail Store. Most people won't even care, and I can already hear people saying "Awesome! From Dusk Till Dawn for ten bucks! Who cares that it looks like crap, it's TEN BUCKS! What did you expect?"

What do I expect? Better than that, to be damn sure. If a company doesn't really care about the product they're putting out, they just dump it out there and take your money, then I don't want anything to do with that company. For five dollars more, I can get the same DVD you mastered your Blu-Ray from, and with another disc and actual extras, and it's only going to look marginally worse.

Here's the kicker, and I want cinephiles that are saying "What are you getting so worked up for?" to think about this: after Echo Bridge dumps these out, and their license runs out, someone else will pick up the rights to these movies. Someone who will probably care more than Echo Bridge does. Lionsgate at least put some effort into the Scream Blu-Rays, and you'd better believe there's going to be a world of difference between their BD's and Echo Bridge's.

For once I don't feel like it's a pipe dream to see From Dusk Till Dawn have a Spine Number on it. Why not? If Echo Bridge could afford it, why couldn't Criterion? That's a Blu-Ray I'm willing to wait for.





* Unless you count the cost of internet, power, etc.; in which case, I am paying for it.
** You can, by the way, order Amelie from Canada's Alliance on Blu-Ray, with everything you'd find on the DVD, for a very reasonable price.

The Blogorium: Home of Second Chances

Here at the Blogorium, the Cap'n has an inexplicable tendency to give movies another chance, especially ones I didn't like the first (or sometimes second) time around. Why I'm willing to give these movies (say, House of 1000 Corpses) another shot when I'm not willing to give others (say, Twilight) a shot at all remains one of the great mysteries of our time.

Friends have pointed out that this is attributable to some masochistic streak in the Cap'n: not only can't I just let a bad movie "go," I won't let it go, returning for more and more doses of disappointment, disgust or, worst of all, boredom. And it is true that in some cases I simply can't understand why it is something clicks with so many people yet is a dud to me, and I'll try to approach the offending feature from various perspectives. The aforementioned House of 1000 Corpses is such and example: to this day I can't figure out why anyone would give something so shoddy a pass, yet almost everyone I know does. Many of them really like it, which boggles my mind further, as I can't find anything to like in that train wreck disguising itself as "homage" horror.

Last summer I found myself yet again sitting through Shit Coffin (many of you might know it by the moniker Friday the 13th the Remake) with Professor Murder because the people who don't want to outright ignore it find the moniker "Shit Coffin" to be a sign of strong emotions, ergo something they should see (The reality is that "Shit Coffin" is a perfectly reasonable name for the film, an adequate descriptor of the content therein, even if explaining why is folly. It's just easier for you to see for yourself that the film is, in fact, a "Shit Coffin").

Anyway, so as not to risk pushing the Not Safe For Work boundaries any further, there I was once again watching Platinum Dunes vomit all over a horror franchise that I counted myself a fan of, still unclear on exactly what was appealing to the people who saw this: Friday the 13th fans had nothing to go for, people vaguely aware of the films might find some cheap thrills but if they thought even half a second about the massive plot holes they'd tune out, and stoners who would overlook all of the above don't go see movies. They can't smoke in the auditorium and the drive is too much for them. I will admit that Friday the 13th the Remake has its own stupid charms, stemming from the lazy way the film is constructed, and I hate it less than Platinum Dunes' A Nightmare on Elm Street the Remake (which if you're wondering, is in fact Shit Coffin 2).

In some instances, I find that second chances work out. While it didn't with Sin City for example, I was more forgiving of The Fifth Element, a film I hated in high school (for reasons I don't quite understand) but am now glad I came back to. If I had stuck with my "I hate Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," I wouldn't have given Chamber of Secrets a shot and would accordingly have missed out on films that improved as time went on. The same can be said of The Devil's Rejects, functionally a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses (a film I hate) that I found myself pleasantly surprised to enjoy as much as I did. Interestingly, the exact same dynamic is the case with Rob Zombie's Halloween remakes - I hate the first one, but really like the second, and have tried (with no success) to "understand" why people like the earlier remake.

All of this is my way of letting you know that I'm toying with watching Cabin Fever again for tomorrow's Retro Review: Eli Roth's debut is a movie that I kind-of liked when I first saw it, talked myself out of it shortly afterward, watched again on home video, didn't really enjoy for a few particular scenes I'll highlight tomorrow, but can't shake. It's usually the first DVD / Blu-Ray to go if I need to sell something, yet I've been known to pick it up with other used DVDs if the deal is good. I realize that makes no sense, so hopefully we can work through it together tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Special From the Vaults: To the Wayback Machine

Okay, wayback might be pushing a little bit, but this is (arguably) the oldest piece I could find that the Cap'n wrote about film. There may be some high school related ephemera, but as I've lost all of the "year end recaps" prior to 2003 to the vast wasteland of outdated email accounts, what I have left is a recap from nearly eight years ago.

To set things up: as it states in the first sentence, the Cap'n emailed my end of year roundups to friends, family, et al. For years, I didn't do much blogging, and what I did was limited to silly things like livejournal that are almost entirely gibberish*, so this is about as "readable" as they come.

That said, punctuation is still a mess, sentence fragments abound, and I had a very hard time capitalizing letters for some reason, often arbitrarily. I opted not to change anything, so what's below can be embarrassing, at least to me. Still, it's a valuable learning tool, or if nothing else an example of how far I have (or haven't) come. Enjoy.

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I send this out every year as an email, but there's no reason you shouldn't see it too, so here you go. comment freely.


i'd be remiss not to note that this year is by and large the YEAR OF SEQUELS. it was a good year for franchises (or a bad one, depending on your opinion) but at any rate we saw a lot of remakes, second and third chapters, and reruns of movies we thought had already come and gone.
as oscar season begins the grand ascension to top of all things media, i'll go out on a limb and offer what i think will end up doing the golden globe/oscar strut. Let's see... The Last Samurai, Mystic River, 21 Grams, Big Fish, Cold Mountain, The House of Sand and Fog, Mona Lisa Smile, and Return of the King. How many of these did i see? just one. (i don't anticipate seeing any of the other ones, except Big Fish. i am as curious as anyone else.)

now that we have oscar hogs out of the way ( i can not and will not vouch for the quality of any one i haven't seen, but expect to see some variation on them this spring, depending on advertising dollars) i'll quickly dispense of other movies i wanted to see but didn't get to: Lost in Translation, Max, Intolerable Cruelty, Dirty Pretty Things, Matchstick Men, and ... well, i'm sure there are more. it's always difficult to remember when you're in the midst of a list.

there are, of course, the movies i didn't want to see, but any raves/pans/etc would be appreciated: Underworld, Gothika, Charlie's Angels Full Throttle, Freaky Friday, 2 Fast 3 Furious, ahahaha yeah you got me, i don't really care if these movies were 5 Star brilliant! i don't plan on seeing them. ever. (try me, davis. try me)

normally i rank these fuckers, but to be honest, i just don't know how to put these above/below each other this year. i enjoyed/hated all of the following for various reasons, so i'm just going to list them and tell you what i thought. (to hell with organization!)

in no particular order:


The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - with a few minor quibbles, i thought it was great. i anticipate the extended version will fix all of the little quirks i had, but nevertheless you have to hand it to Peter Jackson for setting out to make this epic and succeeding in a way George Lucas and The Wachowski Brothers could only dream of. Gollum/Smeagol looked even better this time around, and the arc of the movie kept my eyes on screen the whole time (this is rare) i can dig it. as an entire series, i expect the lord of the rings will be remembered down the line with all other "classics" and for that, hurrah. the cast was uniformly strong, but special kudos to Miranda Otto, Sean Astin, Andy Serkis, Ian McKellan, and Elijah Wood. and Shelob looked better than i thought she would.

Spider - This is the type of movie Cronenberg hasn't tried since Dead Ringers or The Dead Zone; a character study without the obvious horror manifesting. the slow unraveling of Spider Clegg's mind, the use of images and colour, editing choices designed to disorientate... Spider demands to be viewed repeatedly, there are no other options. Ralph Fiennes gets away from dreck like Maid To Order 2: JLo, and makes this fragile, twisted wreck of a man someone we want unravel the mess inside of his brain. kudos to Miranda Richardson for taking a triple role and not letting anything slide into parody. i don't want to spoil Spider for anyone, so go rent it.

The Rundown - Yes, THAT the Rundown. The one with the Rock. And Stiffler. And Christopher Walken (and Spud from Trainspotting, Ewan Bremmer) It sets itself up early to let the audience know this is nothing beyond a popcorn film, and by that criteria it succeeds admirably. Basically, it's just Midnight Run in the jungle, so if you liked Midnight Run, you'll love it. Dwayne Johnson has a steady career ahead of himself if he chooses the action-comedy genre. (he has an amiable, goofy charm, and a physique that lend him well. oh, and a passing of the torch from arnold. watch the beginning carefully) Stiffler is, well, Stiffler. If you like Seann William Scott in general, you'll have no complaints. Christopher Walken is just CHEWING scenery here, and it's worth watching just to see him imitate the "christopher walken" parody (and during a tooth fairy metaphor, no less) dumb fun.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - would be less polarizing if it had ANY other name. for one thing, it's just not fair to compare it to the original, because OF COURSE it doesn't stand up. as a gritty, high level hollywood thriller, it works pretty well. the camp value of the sequels is nowhere to be found, and leatherface is scary again, not just some guy in a dress. there's an attempt to tie this in to Ed Gein a little more, and to provide a back story to Leatherface, but honestly, who came to see that? TCM is a decent horror movie, and it will only disappoint those expecting the original or better. speaking of the original...

House of 1,000 Corpses - tries too hard to attain the same "shock value" of 70's horror movies (last house on the left, friday the 13th, tcm, etc) but somewhere along the line Rob Zombie forgot that a horror movie needs a story or at the very least someone you care about. House of 1,000 has neither (nor does it have the 1,000 corpses boasted). Instead, we have some hokum about "Dr. Satan", a family that, aside from being crazy, has nothing to do with him, and a gas station/museum/carnival ride owner who curses with intermittent dialogue. this movie is rife with bad choices, and i can't honestly believe that it has a cult audience. i could go on and on about the amateur acting, the miserable "plot twists", or the longest pull back for a death scene ever, but instead i'll just chuckle thinking about Agatha Crispies cereal.

Kill Bill Volume One - Quentin Tarantino's ode to grindhouse flicks of the seventies is a labour of love, and it shows. From his choices in casting to the music or costumes and editing, Quentin lays his inner film geek on the line here. Uma Thurman is a sight to behold in this movie. Cheers to her for coming back strong and shaking off Mia Wallace once and for all. If you haven't seen Kill Bill, know this: This is a VIOLENT movie. I won't say film. This isn't art, this is a loving tribute to a genre with a built in audience, and Tarantino knew it. He doesn't disappoint, and i expect Volume Two to be even better. As a film maker, he's stepping up his game, and Kill Bill is technically superior without being too gimmicky.

Cabin Fever - Eli Roth learned a thing or two from Evil Dead. That's crucial to understanding the marketing behind this low budget gem. Cabin Fever is atypical of horror movies, and that bugs a lot of horror fans, but this isn't quite a scare fest. It's a genre bender, pitting the cast of a Teen Sex Comedy in a Cabin in the Woods Horror Movie. While it has problems (the movie doesn't know where to end and stumbles a bit in the final act), it's nevertheless a nice first film to build a career of off, and they marketed the shit out of this movie (when i went to see it, great steps were made to replicate set pieces, "authentic" paraphenilia, etc.) plus it doesn't look as cheap as it was to make, and there are some wonderful nods to past cheapie thrillers.

The Animatrix, Matrix Reloaded, and Revolutions - First, let it be known i am NOT a matrix fan. when i saw the first movie, i hated it. It felt like someone had taken Dark City and put kung fu in place of acting chops. That being said, the Animatrix was a nice step towards not hating Reloaded as much. Providing some interesting context to the more interesting aspects of this series makes it head and shoulders better than the movies. Now, onto Reloaded. I was shocked how bad this movie was. The actors were half assing it (even Laurence Fishburne looked like he forgot how to emote), the dialogue was stilted and unecessarily complicated (i'm sorry, you can't try to talk over the audiences head to trick them into thinking that it's brilliant. it JUST DOESN'T WORK) and all the new characters were perfunctory and grating. Speaking of which, what the hell happened to the Twins in Revolutions? They just vanished! The Architect was SO unecessary, as was his scene with Neo. ugh. i could go on about the rave, blah blah shitty movie. BAD BAD MOVIE. the only bright spot was Hugo Weaving, who seemed to understand you can still have fun in these movies. Revolutions was better than Reloaded. i'll give it that. This doesn't mean i didn't have problems with it, but at least the sense of URGENCY was back in this one. people cared about their fate, and it seemed like something was actually at stake. BUT, this does not explain how someone with a pipe CLEARLY sticking out of their lungs can talk for seven minutes before dying. i enjoyed anything involving Agent Smith or the Siege on Zion in this one, but not much else. and the ending.... ugh!


Once Upon a Time in Mexico - seemed to disappoint a lot of people. I'm not sure why. Well, i suppose because they forgot this was the sequel to El Mariachi and Desperado, or they at the very least didn't bother to double check those movies. really. in the opening credits it clearly says
"A Robert Rodriguez FLICK". this is not high art, folks. this is his attempt to create the spaghetti western in mexico, and it adheres pretty closely. the ads were misleading, yes, playing up the epic nature of it, altering the role of Johnny Depp and leading people to believe Salma Hayek was in the movie more than she was (in reality, she was shooting Frida) but this is nevertheless the over the top wrap up to the El Mariachi Series. While Antonio Banderas, Danny Trejo, Willem Dafoe, Cheech Marin, Ruben Blades, and Mickey Rourke are having a ball, this movie belongs to Johnny Depp. He is utterly brilliant here, twisting a plot device character and giving him the type of quirks you can't help but admire. He steals the show out from everyone (again, but i'll get to that later...) Robert Rodriguez helms it all with a love for his craft and it feels like he's having a grand time with this film, just like..

Spy Kids 3-D - Yes, i freely admit to seeing the Spy Kids films and loving all three of them. Get past the stupid trailers; these are top rate kids films that adults can watch and enjoy too. the use of 3-D in this movie is more organic than i thought, and it boasts a higher rate cast than you'd imagine.. (don't believe me? check this out: Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Ricardo Montalban,
Sylvester Stallone, Mike Judge, Salma Hayek, Steve Buscemi, Alan Cumming, George Clooney, Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo, Tony Shaloub, Bill Paxton, and Elijah Wood) yep, that's someone from every robert rodriguez movie represented. and finally, someone reminds us why people liked Sylvester Stallone! See these movies, i promise they're better than you'd think.

Freddy vs. Jason - If you liked the Friday the 13th series or the Nightmare on Elm Street series, you've already seen this. If you don't like them, don't bother. I mean, you aren't going to like it. If you love your horror tongue in cheek, you appreciate a film that balances both series with affectionate nods in both directions, then Freddy vs. Jason will not disappoint. The kills are better than even Jason X boasted, and despite the fact it's not Kane Hodder under the hockey mask, everything works. Can you pass up seeing Robert Englund as Freddy again?

Willard - Is not like the original. the original Willard was, to be fair, bad. It was cheap and not really scary (however it's not a bad as Ben, the unecessary sequel) This Willard is a very atmospheric black comedy, and you really just can't beat Crispin Glover and R. Lee Ermey on screen (Mulholland Dr fans, do note Laura Herring is in this movie too). Don't expect scares and i predict you'll find Willard is hilarious and evil. plus the dvd has the most informative commentary you will ever hear (for the music video of crispin glover's cover of "ben")

Final Destination 2 - I didn't really watch all of it, to be honest. Adam was drunk and just too entertaining. the death scenes were more gruesome (and inventive) than the first one...

Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Black Pearl - was as much fun as you can have at the movies and SOOOO much better than i could've guessed. Anythin based on a Disney Ride automatically breeds suspicion (and later you'll see my theory validated) Orlando Bloom, Kiera Knightley, Johnathan Pryce and Geoffery Rush all do wonderful jobs playing in the shadow of JOHNNY DEPP. just like Once Upon a Time in Mexico, he owns this film. how people forget him year after year baffles me, but the mere fact he's involved in the sequel guarantees i'll check it out. Gore Verbinski has settled himself into steady groove of successful genre films, and more power to him for it (yes, this is how you follow up The Mexican and The Ring, folks) entertaining all around. yarrrr.

Finding Nemo - It's Pixar, folks. Need I say more? The most consistent animated film company hits another one out of the park. Where does it sit with the others? for me, somewhere between Monsters, Inc. and A Bug's Life. Not quite Toy Story or Toy Story 2, but a damn sight better than any other american kid's animation.

The Haunted Mansion - Why? because it was the Haunted Mansion or Gothika, and Mission Valley was closer and cheaper. Yes, it's as bad as you suspect, save for two things: 1) if you like to mercilessly rip into Terrence Stamp (and oh boy, do we) or 2) you want to see a film that ends with a BRIDGE FROM LOUISIANA TO HAWAII. that's right. Terrence Stamp can't honestly believe he's on par with Richard Burton when he's in a film this bad. Eddie Murphy! Get back together with Steve Martin and Frank Oz! Make good comedies. Sheesh...

Bad Santa - Cannot be advertised. You need to understand that. Ads do not do this film justice. It's true, this is the most mean spirited Christmas movie you'll ever see. Bad Santa earns its R rating in the first two minutes of the film, and it's as funny as anything you'll see next year. i promise. Billy Bob Thornton is laugh out loud funny, and you get Samir from Office Space, the MOST pathetic kid in a christmas movie ever, plus Bernie Mac and Tony Cox. From Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World and Crumb) and The Coen Brothers. ok? get crack-a-lackin (ohhhh you idiot terrence stamp...)

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind - Which i believe came out at the tail end of 2002, but i saw this year and couldn't then, so there. George Clooney and Charlie Kaufman turn Chuck Barris's "unauthorized" autobiography into a whirlwind of a movie, and anchoring everything is Sam Rockwell is Barris. This movie sinks or swims on his shoulders, and he handles it so well i'm amazed he's not a bigger star by now. look for him to break out big time soon. Clooney is no slacker his first time behind the camera, either. avoiding digital effects, he uses in camera trickery to pull off the more surreal elements of the storyline. not perfect, but a fine effort.

X2 - aka x-men whatever. the movie i saw didn't have the words x-men united anywhere in it, so i'll just call it X2. an improvement in almost every way on x-men (hey, i said almost, but i'm getting ahead of myself) there are plenty of sly references toward the x-universe and hints of things to come (and judging by box office receipts there will be an x3 and 4, etc) alan cumming is spot on as nightcrawler, and it's always a joy seeing Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan on screen together. that being said, the fact that it's a chapter in a larger story means that characters are getting spotty at best screen time (whereas Storm suffered in the first film, Cyclops is pushed almost to a cameo in this film, whereas Logan is still the focus. Rogue doesn't do much but react to Iceman and Pyro, and aside from hinting at the Phoenix to come, Jean Grey isn't particularly important to this movie. the beginnings of the brotherhood of evil mutants was cool, plus a pre-fur Beast, Collosus, and indications of Omega Red and Gambit in the future) a solid, if not perfect, second entry. it won't be the weak link in the series i suspect.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines - Was so much better than it deserved to be. Ok, i'll admit i had ZERO expectations for this film (James Cameron, Linda Hamilton, Edward Furlong all drop successively out of this project, early word is terrible) it's true, i never saw U-571, so i didn't know if Johnathan Mostow could handle a Terminator film, but when it's not your franchise, how could you? Yes, this movie is alternately derivative and slyly nodding towards the other terminator films (the sunglasses motif was cute, and seeing dr. silberman again was fun) Nick Stahl and Claire Danes do the best they can with the script they've got, and Kristianna Loken one up's Robert Patrick as the T-X, plus the film boasts the bleakest ending of any summer "blockbuster" you're likely to see. it shouldn't have been fun, but it is.

Bad Boys 2 - Is too much of a guy/buddy cop action movie for its own good. two and a half hours of over the top violence, gay bashing, and car crashes is too much. really. if you like seeing endless shots up women's skirts, digging through corpses, bullets flying or repeated jokes about dating someone's sister, by all means, this is your movie. if you want to see joe pantoliano and peter stormare cash a paycheck, this is your movie. if you need to stop thinking and say "wow, that car flipped twice over the boat" or you love flagrant product placement, whooooa is this your film. it is not something i'll be watching again.

Looney Tunes: Back in Action - I didn't like the movie itself, but Joe Dante has a knack for detail and throwaway gags that is unrivaled. Seriously, just read the names of the Spy Movie Posters in Brendan Fraser's house (all starring Timothy Dalton) or the fact that a new Batman being filmed on the Warner lot has Roger Corman directing it. Or perhaps seeing Scooby and Shaggy berating Matthew Lilliard. Or Ron Pearlman. or the Area 52 scene (complete with monsters from Fiend without a Face, This Island Earth, The Day of the Triffids, Dr. Who, Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Them!, The Beast from Haunted Cave and the Man from Planet X) or a scene for scene parody of Psycho's most famous scene. if these things sound interesting to you, see Looney Tunes. otherwise, please don't

Secretary - I can't remember if i reviewed this last year or not. anyway, i'll put it this way for you: it's a more fucked up story about true love than Punch-Drunk Love. Maggie Gyllenhaal needs to stay away from things like Mona Lisa Smile (yes, i just checked imdb, and i came out in 2002, but i don't think i saw it until 2003)

and finally, how can i end this but with the only movie appropriate for such an occasion:


The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - This is a trainwreck of a movie. first, it's crucial to understand if you like the comic AT ALL, you should avoid this movie. or pretend you never read the comic. please, because the logic leaps made in this disaster will send any rational reader into head-scratching territory. let me begin with the premise of the comic, as it's BASICALLY the same as the movie.

Okay, it's the end of the Nineteenth Century. Imagine, if you will, the Mina Harker, Allan Quatermain, Dr. Henry Jekyll, Hawley Griffin (the invisible man), and Captain Nemo are in fact real and living in different parts of the world. MI-6 (yes, the one that James Bond will eventually work for) recruits them to locate a cavorite capable of defying gravity (from H.G. Wells's The First Men In the Moon) that was stolen by a crime lord. Sherlock Holmes is presumed dead but rumours abound he may still be alive. this is the premise of the first volume of the league of extraordinary gentlemen.

LXG (as the movie will be known from here out) differs in the following ways:

-Allan Quatermain is not an opium addict languishing away in Africa, but a retired legend.

-Mina Harker is a Vampire, rather than just a "scandalized" woman.

-Captain Nemo practices Kung Fu.

-Hawley Griffin is not the invisible man, but rather it's a thief who finds his serum.

-Tom Sawyer and Dorian Gray are added.

ok, some of this is curious (particularly Tom Sawyer, who in the 1890s would be in his 40's or 50's, not a twenty something working for the US Government [why? because the adventures of tom sawyer takes place before the civil war, putting it 30-40 years before the events of this story]) but ok, for the sake of a more "interesting" movie, we take these changes in stride. right? why then would you put Mina Harker in BROAD DAYLIGHT not once but twice?? Why is Dorian Gray suddenly unable to look at his portrait? i will forgive the city of venice for having waterways wide enough for the Nautilus to fit through and streets in which to have a CAR chase (not just a car, but a six cylinder 1930's style rolls royce rip off). Why betray the laws you set up? that's just lazy film making.

to be kind to LXG, there are some cute attempts to copy things from the comics (nods towards previous Leagues, etc) but ultimately the film fails because it can't get around the horrible logic holes it presents. (ok, one more, and that's it. but this one is a doozy. the villain of the film is James Moriarty, who supposedly died with Holmes. ok. same in the comic, except in LXG he's no older than mid-thirties! this is a man who by Doyle's accounts was older than Holmes himself. the movie even goes so far to insinuate it's Rasputin! [yeah, that Rasputin] before some Mission Impossible Pull Away tm makeup reveals the true identity) anyway, the cast seems to realize how rotten this is and hams it up accordingly. and if you're ever planning to use Hyde again, just go digital! please. the prosthetics looked terrible, and the transformation is laugh out loud bad.

anyway, don't see this movie. or do, but make sure you tear it a new one. it won't be hard, believe me.


that's it. i couldn't do any more if i wanted to. perhaps dvds in another one, but for now, you've got your hands full. feel free to respond, critique... oh you know the drill.




* What I could find in the way of "movie reviews" from 2001-2005 were laughable, incoherent, quasi-write ups.