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Showing posts from November, 2014

Hellgate

Today's movie is  Hellgate  - and holy shit is it boring. Running just about 1.5 hours, the pacing makes it feel like you're slogging through mud for more like 5 or 10 hours. There are more things to be frightened of in a Disney movie than there are in this movie. The Gist: Jeff ( Cary Elwes ) loses his family in a car accident which may or may not be his fault . Post accident (a la The Dead Zone ) he can "see dead people" and hear them (alternately) asking for help and threatening to destroy him - if one can call zombie grunts any type of actual threat. During his recovery, he falls for his sexy Asian nurse. Throw in some spiritualism and we learn that his soul is trapped in the spirit world - yada yada yada. Complicated rituals and spooky pronouncements follow. When Jeff crosses over to the spirit world to collect his missing soul, his dead, mangled wife tells him that he should go back and have a life with the sexy nurse who would do anything for him. I don...

Mr. Jones

If The Blair Witch Project had a baby with The Mothman Prophecies , it would be Mr. Jones . The short version of the story goes something like this: a filmmaker and a photographer move to the woods to shoot a nature documentary and end up discovering the home of a famed, underground artist. This "artist" creates "sculptures" that look like collaborative efforts between The Blair Witch and whoever decorated the house in Texas Chainsaw Massacre . When you've got a guy like that living next door, you can be sure that "spooky shit" is going to start happening, relationships are going to suffer, and SURPRISE! someone's going to die or be trapped, forever, in a waking nightmare in which they are menaced by an evil paparazzi doppelgänger. The sad fact is that while all these ideas sound like they could be terrifying, the movie just can't deliver the level of terror needed to take it from a forgettable independent film to a beloved classic. Film...

The Taking of Deborah Logan

If I thought I was tired of found footage movies or possession movies - I'm doubly, triply, infinitely tired of movies that are BOTH. The Taking of Deborah Logan is just that: another found footage, possession movie. In case you're wondering, I'm about to divulge all kinds of spoilers here. If you don't want the movie to be ruined , you should stop reading now. The plot unfolds like this: Poor, small town woman ( Sarah ) needs money to save her house and pay for the medical care of her mother, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. A PhD candidate ( Mia ) will pay Sarah the money she so desperately needs if Sarah will allow her to film her mother over a course of some months. As the days progress, strange things begin to happen that are clearly supernatural and all hell, literally breaks loose. The 20 minutes leading up to the ending are COMPLETELY absurd and even jump the shark for a possession movie. If I'm to believe that this movie is REAL, don...

Cheerleader Ninjas (2002)

This movie made my brain hurt, but in a sort of  really good way. While it was completely stupid (like Poolboy , which I may never forgive my household for making me watch), it was also somehow charming and funny. I kept wanting to shut it off until I found myself laughing too hard to actually do it. One of those great, mysterious facts of life is that you just  can't  explain comedy.  If I start telling you about the plot and it doesn't make any sense, don't be surprised. The phrase "madcap antics" was created for movies like this one.  A bunch of nuns want to eliminate smut from the internet. Because, you know, that's what nuns do.  For absolutely no logical reason - AT ALL - they decide that a bunch of local cheerleaders are Evil - capital E - and somehow contributing to the smut problem by being young and sexy. I mean, this sounds totally legit. So the nuns then get some Catholic school girls together to kill the cheerleaders. This plan hinges...