I tried to watch The Spirit and Dylan Dog: Dead of Night…and failed

September 7, 2011 7 Comments

Do you guys have any idea how long my Netflix queue is? I’m not trying to brag or anything, but pretty much any movie  have ever heard of, whether it’s supposed to be bad or supposed to be good, ends up on my queue. I’ve hit maximum multiple times and have to go back and erase some titles. That’s why things like The Spirit and Dylan Dog: Dead of Night end up arriving in my mailbox. When The Spirit was released theatrically, I had no interest. I heard nothing but awful things about it. However, being a comic book movie, it somehow made its way into the queue. I saw trailers in theaters for Dylan Dog, because it was supposed to get a theatrical release, but instead went straight-to-video. Still added it to the queue, thinking there would be a plethora of people interested in it. Sadly, both movies were hard to get through, and even though I don’t often do this, I had to shut them both off before they were over to get them the fuck out of my house.

 

If Samuel L. Jackson being referred to as “Octopus” or Scarlett Johansson having big boobs doesn’t save your movie, nothing will.

 

What I knew about The Spirit as a comic book was that one of my professor’s never shut up about it or about the author, Will Eisner, for any reason. I know that Will Eisner is really important to comic books, I’m not denying that, and I also know that Frank Miller had a huge boner for him. I also know that Frank Miller writes comic books, draws comic books, and does not direct movies. I have a feeling that what happened after the success of Sin City and 300 was that movie executives approached Frank Miller and said “Hey, I know you have no experience directing, but wanna direct something, anything, as long as it’s related to comics?”, and Miller’s eyes were replaced with dollar signs and agreed. I’m not knocking him or anything, because if someone offered me a shit ton of money to direct anything I wanted, and I could make a movie based on one of my favorite comics so that someone else wouldn’t have the opportunity to direct it, I’d do the same. Unfortunately, I think that if you take a comic book that was written in the 40′s with a certain tone, and have someone who has never directed anything attempt to do that over 60 years later, some things might not work. The characters and narrative were exaggerated and somewhat tongue-in-cheek, which I feel alienates you audiences who don’t quite “get it”. The film itself is exactly what it would look like if Zack Snyder took the Sin City movie out on a date, slipped roofies into its drink, then raped the living shit out of it. Every shot is either super-saturated blacks and whites, or are filmed in color, but with the saturation brought down. Don’t get me wrong, I love Frank Miller’s comic book work, but I think he should stick with that instead of attempting more movies.

 

I didn’t get this far in the movie so I have no fucking clue what’s going on here. Actually, even if I did get this far, I still wouldn’t have any idea what was going on.

 

Even though he was only in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World for a few scenes, the ones with Brandon Routh were some of the more entertaining moments of the film. Remember that whole part about the cleaning lady, dusting things, and the Vegan Police? HI-LARIOUS. Coming off of that, I was looking forward to seeing him as Dylan Dog, despite also never having read the comics. I did see Dellamorte Dellamore (a.k.a Cemetary Man) but know that it’s not a direct interpretation of the comics, so that doesn’t quite count. Even though this movie was about vampires, werewolves, and zombies, I could barely keep track of what the fuck was going on. I don’t think it’s all that uncommon for comic book movies too end up being too serialized, filled with short little adventures that are all connected to a major storyline, but I couldn’t keep track of that one thread that kept the plot moving forward. I feel the same way about Hellboy II: The Golden Army, in the sense that I can’t tell you exactly what the fuck happened in that movie, but at least when I left that movie, I enjoyed myself. Unfortunately, if you get an hour and fifteen minutes into a two-hour movie and still have no clue what the fuck is going on or why, you have to make an executive decision to put that movie into that little red envelope that will take it straight back to Netflix Hell.

 

No, this scene isn’t taken directly from The Spirit, but I was getting sick and goddamned tired of Googling “The Spirit Eva Mendes” and seeing page after page of pictures of this girl’s butt. INFURIATING.

 

I hope you guys don’t judge me for bailing on these movies without finishing them, especially after seeing how much garbage I am willing to sift through. I think I need to keep a new policy in mind when adding things to the queue, which should start to exclude the need to add EVERY comic book related movie out there. I’ve also seen a couple of those direct-to-video animated comic book movies, and although I might be entertained, ultimately decide against reviewing them. In hopes of you preventing this shit from happening in the future, I’m going to go ahead right now and delete a bunch of shit from my queue that I know I will hate. Come back soon for actual reviews of whole movies!

Filed under 1 Star, 1 Star, 1 Star, Comics, Horror Film, Inane Bullshit, Non-Horror Film

Eagle Eye (2008) [REVIEW]

July 25, 2011 8 Comments

 

Shia LaBeouf is a stupid douchebag. Well, I think he is, at least. I’m sure you assume that this line of thinking is unwarranted, but after I heard his (possible) response to being offered a role in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I’ve hated him. I’ve heard conflicting reports on what his response was, but the one I heard first was that he was no longer interested in being a sidekick kind of role and was only leading man material, due to the success of Transformers. This is so dumb, because if you’re offered a role in Indiana Jones, you take it, no matter what. However, after explaining this story, I’ve heard other people say that they’ve read interviews where it was the exact opposite. It even says on Wikipedia that he signed on without reading a script, but I don’t trust that bullshit! Considering I’m not a fan of his, you might be wondering why I watched this movie. I did too, until I remembered that it was directed by D.J. Caruso, who is the most recent attachment to the idea of a movie or TV series based on the comic book “Preacher”. not having seen any of his other movies, i figured I’d give this one a shot.

 

“Hello? Lady on the phone? You sound an awful lot like an embarrassed Julianne Moore.”

 

Shia LaBeouf plays two roles in this movie. TWO I SAY. He plays one stupid loser dude, and he plays the stupid loser dude’s dead brother. While alive, that brother was involved in the military or something. When his brother dies, the stupid loser dude checks his bank account and finds a shit ton of money. When he goes to his apartment, he finds tons of weapons and bomb making supplies. Something wacky is going on! When he hears a cell phone ringing, he answers, and a female voice says the FBI is about to break in. The voice was right, and now stupid Shia ia apprehended under suspicion of terrorism. Meanwhile, there’s another lady who gets a mysterious phone call from the same voice that is explaining that her son will be in trouble if she doesn’t cooperate with phone voice. After a series of wacky events take place that allows Shia to escape FBI custody, he meets with this other lady, played by Michelle Monaghan, and they are both all “WTF IS GOING ON?!” and oblivious. After multiple contacts with phone voice lady and a series of strange technological coincidences, such as traffic lights allowing their escape or automated construction equipment or messages for these two appearing through video screens in town, they learn that all this shit is being done by a sentient computer! Fuck! Those are the worst kinds of computers! Not only is it a sentient computer, it’s one that was built by the government in response to monitoring cell phones and emails for terrorism that has become so much of a nationalist that it has instructed multiple individuals to take part in the assassination of the president through the use of crystals that will be exploded by the sounds of a trumpet. That sentence is one of the most ridiculous plot points I’ve ever typed. Eventually some federal agents learn about this computer and attempt to kill it, while it also attempts to kill them, in a scene that’s a mix between Wall-E and 2001: A Space Odyssey, while Shia tries to prevent the assassination attempt by shooting the ceiling, causing himself to get shot. Sadly, he lives, and the computer has been destroyed.

 

This is the villain of the movie. I repeat, THIS is the villain.

 

FUCK THAT. It sounds even more ridiculous in retrospect that when i was watching it, and even while I was watching it I knew how ridiculous it was. Okay guys, I get it, what if our fear or terrorism drives us to the point that we could even consider the president a terrorist because of how loose of a definition we have for “terrorism”. But, fucking seriously? I assume I missed a couple plot points as to why it was planted for Shia to be set-up as a terrorist, but it doesn’t really matter because, well, “computers”. Just blaming everything on computers just makes the whole plot more acceptable as far as the filmmakers were concerned. The voice of the robot killer thing was Julianne Moore, who I’m hoping took her name off of the movie because she realized how stupid and convoluted it was. The only redeeming thing, and it was only mildly redeeming, was the fact that the beginning of the movie took place in Chicago, and it seemed as though they were using actual street names and train stations. For example, at one point, Billy Bob Thornton asks for a roadblock at Granville and Sheridan. Those are real streets! Also, the computer tells Shia to get off at the Wilson stop while he’s on a train, and when he gets off, it actually looked like the Wilson stop for the Red Line train. Other than that, this movie was garbage, and I kind of hope that Mr. D.J. Caruso is no longer allowed any Preacher involvement.

 

Wolfman Moon Scale


Official Site
IMDb
Netflix
Amazon Blu Ray

Filed under 1 Star, Non-Horror Film Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) [REVIEW]

June 14, 2011 7 Comments

 

Is this what my fucking life has come to? Admitting to watching this movie on purpose might as well be the cry for help the people who commit suicide normally do. This might even be more embarrassing though because when someone cuts their wrists, everyone feels bad for them and buys them presents, but if you watch Transformers 2? Everyone makes fun of you, and everything gets worse. To let you know how badly I didn’t want to see this, when I was applying for a movie theater job, they asked if I could hang out for a while so I could meet a manager, and offered to let me see this movie for free. My response? I WENT HOME. Got the job anyway, but still. I originally planned on watching this movie and doing a live tweeting commentary, but this movie is TWO AND A HALF FUCKING HOURS LONG. No way would I have any followers if I had to do that. I hated the first one, and figured that if this one was entertaining enough, I’d consider going to see the new one, where Chicago gets the shit kicked out of it. After sitting at my house for a month, Rampaige forced me to watch it so we could get more movies that wouldn’t sit around. Please forgive me, Cthulhu.

 

It’s hard to tell the difference between official movie stills and erotic robot photoshop projects

 

You might be wondering what happens in the opening scene in this movie, and so am I. Something happens involving robots in disguise, I’d be willing to bet, and some of them are bad, others less bad. Whatever, it’s so fucking stupid. We learn that Shia LaDouche is going off to college without his love, that dumb cunt Megan Fox, nor with his car, Bumblebee. As the family is getting ready to leave, we see two dogs humping. More specifically, a smaller dog humping a bigger dog. Get it? Fuck. Twenty minutes it and this is what it’s come to. At college, something happens with LaDouche that involves awkward roommates and girls. There really isn’t any filter in my brain as far as what was important to this story and what wasn’t, or maybe Michael Bay had no filter either. This whole time, the bad robots are trying to bring the super mega-bad robot back from underwater death, supposedly because of some other bad robot, who is even more super meg-bad than the underwater one. I use words like “super” and “mega” because I’m pretty sure those words were in the script. There ends up being a “hot chick” bad guy robot that seduces LaDouche, and there are awkward, theoretically ”funny” moments of confusion between LaDouche and Megan Fox where she thinks he’s cheating on him…BUT NO NO NO, IT WAS A ROBOT! HAHAHA IT’S SO FUNNY AND AWKWARD! Also, LaDouche’s parents are constantly making sexual references, which is just gut-busting. As in, it quakes your bowels. Eventually, we get to see Optimus Prime fight some bad guy robots in the woods, which was kind of fun, but dies. Boo hoo.

 

These are the dogs that hump each other

 

Lucky for Mr. LaDouche, he remembers having visions of strange symbols, which through the help of John Turturro realizes he can go to the pyramids in Egypt to find a dagger to stab Optimus in the heart and bring him back to life. pretty convenient that there is also a super-mega-gnarly-bad guy weapon hiding in a different pyramid. Glad to see that John Turturro survived getting peed on by a dog AND a robot in the first one to reprise his dignified role in the sequel. Did I mention Megan “The Whore” Fox getting humped by a small robot? I don’t remember when that happened, but it did. Maybe the dogs humping was just foreshadowing of this moment, as opposed to arbitrary yuk-yuks. Yeah, that’s what it was. They find the dagger, Shia LaDouche gets killed and sees the robot Gods, because apparently when humans die, they finally get to meet their deities…which are robots…but they bring him back to life. Then he brings Optimus Prime back to life, but not until after John Turturro sees a robot from behind and underneath, noticing its “scrotum”, according to Turturro, which are played by two giant wrecking balls. Apparently the robots do indeed have their own sexes and genders, and have external reproductive organs, which can mean nothing less than the fact that baby robots come from adult robots fucking each other. SO MUCH SCIENCE! From there, Optimus kills the bad guys, and I think that’s the end, but there might have been some fart or balls or dog humping jokes in there, I can’t really remember.

 

Megan Fox is a stupid cunt. I’m just including this picture so that hopefully anyone looking for pictures of her comes across this page, and sees those dog pictures. I seriously think that this stupid cunt is just a computer generated image, with the proper boob-waist-hip proportions. There’s no way this thing is a real human.

 

For as shitty as this movie was, because, trust me, it was shitty, really fucking shitty, so very, very shitty, it was, wait, what was I saying? Oh yeah, it was fucking awful. As if the first one wasn’t shitty enough, and let me remind you it was fucking awful, so very fucking awful…I’m losing track of what I wanted to say. I hope that one day Zack Snyder gets to make a movie with Michael Bay, can you imagine that? The title of the movie, of course, would be “Robot Boobs Explode Mountain Dew Truck of Fire…in Slow Motion”. I might be all over the place with this review, but I feel like watching this movie gave me a concussion. Even Rampaige chimed in and said “Why does everything in this movie…look like that?” I had to explain that every single one of Michael Bay’s movies are orange, over saturated, with high contrast. I think we then starting talking about Armageddon, and I started crying, then said “Armageddon outta here!” Okay okay, back to this movie, which was fucking terrible. The one thing…and I mean ONE thing that I will credit it with over the first movie is that the action scenes with robot fights took place out int he open, instead of in between buildings. You could make out more easily the difference between background and robot, whereas the first one made it difficult to differentiate. Other than that, it was just as shitty as the first, but I still might go see the third movie so I can see Chicago get the shit kicked out of it.

Wolfman Moon Scale


IMDb
Netflix
Amazon DVD

Filed under 1 Star, Non-Horror Film Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2 (2011)

February 17, 2011 2 Comments

 

Considering I make Rampaige watch so many horror movies, it’s payback time. She is making me watch this film, and will probably try to paint my nails and braid my hair afterward. And to be completely honest, the movie hasn’t even started yet, I just figured I’d start writing this review now in case it makes me want to kill myselllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wolfman Moon Scale



IMDb
Netflix
Amazon DVD

Filed under 1 Star, Non-Horror Film Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Fantastic Four (1994) [REVIEW]

March 16, 2010 1 Comment

 

No, you did not enter a time warp, ladies and gentlemen. I really am reviewing a movie based on the Fantastic Four that was made in 1994, despite there being a more popular and bigger budgeted film having been made in 2005. You might be wondering how one could have made a worse movie than the one made with Jessica Alba, and this version made in 1994 certainly managed to do that in spades. As opposed to 2005 version that was made for around $100 million, this film was made for $2 million. Yes, you read that correctly, this version cost 50 times less than the contemporary version, but don’t let that fool you, this film isn’t 50 times worse. I’d say it’s maybe 20 times worse, which I guess can somehow be converted into a math problem, but I don’t feel like working that out right now.

 

In case anyone forgot how awful the 90′s were…

The story starts with Reed Richards (soon to be Mr. Fantastic) attending Empire State University with Victor Von Doom (soon to be Dr. Doom). They are working together on some sort of project involving space and explosions or something, and spend time bickering over the details. The machine explodes with lightning and Victor dies. We then cut 10 years into the future to Reed with his pal Ben Grimm (the Thing) recruiting Susan Storm (the Invisible Woman) and Johnny Storm (Human Torch) to go into outer space. They go out there and are sabotaged by the surprisingly still alive Dr. Doom. Apparently they fall from space, and we see them wake up unharmed. Everyone is confused, especially me. They get hints at their powers and get picked up by the military. Another villain starts showing up who is never actually named as the Mole Man, but might as well be. Ben’s girlfriend is kidnapped, the Fantastic Four go after them, apparently Dr. Doom loses, everybody’s happy, especially me, because it’s over.

 

Yes, he’s made of stone, but also requires a stone helmet?

This movie plays out like an awful episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Not even a good episode or anything where the robot fight at the end was awesome, one of the terrible early ones where the bad guys were made out of clay. Reed Richards used his elasticity to trip bad guys. That’s right, HE TRIPPED DR. DOOM’S LACKEYS. Not to mention the fact that the “doom bots” were basically guys with their faces painted silver and wore green hooded sweatshirts. There is one scene that plays out like a back to school special where Mr. Fantastic explains that it was their personality traits were what caused their powers, Reed stretching himself too thin and Johnny always having a temper, always being a “hot-head”. I do have to say, that any scene involving the Thing is so laughably awful, it is almost redeeming…but not actually. The best is a scene where he is wandering the streets of New York looking for acceptance and finds none. So in a slow motion shot, he looks at his hands, then looks skyward, seemingly to ask God why he has been turned into a big orange pile of dogshit.

 

Where to look…Reed’s boner, Susan’s boobs, or the hint of the Thing’s thigh, because yes, he’s wearing briefs.

Horrible acting, directing, writing, special effects, and costumes, that goes without saying. The interesting part is the fact that I was able to see this movie, that was never actually intended to see the light of day. The company that produced it had the rights to make this film for so long that, had they not filmed anything, they would have lost the rights. They knew from the beginning that no one would ever see this piece of garbage, but they didn’t mention that to the actors. Even after word was getting out that this film would never be released, apparently they were being told it might serve as a pilot episode of a TV series. Despite horrible production value, I was actually kind of surprised to see ways they were faithful to the comic. In the original series, Dr. Doom blamed Reed Richards for the accident at Empire State University that made him deformed, and in Ultimate Fantastic Four their origin is also connected to miscalculations between Reed and Victor. The Thing’s love interested, Alicia Masters, is a blind sculptor, just like in the comics. Something else I appreciated was that they pointed out the original age difference between Reed and Susan, of 11 years. Other than that, total garbage. If someone asks if you have seen it, say yes, so you can advise them against ever seeing it.

 

Wolfman Moon Scale


IMDb
YouTube – Part 1 For the time being, you can watch all eight parts on YouTube

Filed under 1 Star, 1 Star, Comics, Non-Horror Film Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 653 other followers