Undead

Undead is an amusing enough Australian entry into the zombie comedy genre. The plot is nothing to write home about - girl is trying to leave her horrible small town by hitching a ride with some skeevy guy from the city but is thwarted when meteors rain from the sky and turn people into zombies. She gets rescued by the local quiet nut job who has been warning everyone about the imminent invasion ever since he was attacked by zombie fish. They band together with other survivors and spend the rest of the movie trying to escape the town. Throw in some rain-making, giant-wall-building aliens somewhere along the way. Yay.

Effects aren't worth noting, either. The film was funded entirely by the directors' family and friends and all of the money seemingly went to buying as much corn syrup and red food coloring as possible.

But I still liked this movie. The characters make it work. Well, two of them do. The rest can get stuffed. On the one hand is the excitable local constable. He's completely snapped in response to the zombies and much of the comedy early in the film stems from his swear-ridden dialog.

On the other hand is Marion, the poor bastard/gun shop owner whose life was turned around in a fistfight in the middle of a lake with a couple of zombie fish. I don't think he stops to reload his guns (except perhaps the one he made by welding three shotguns to a crossbar) once in the entire film; he simply pulls new ones out of his clothing. I do not particularly care to speculate as to how he accomplishes this feat while naked. Perhaps he was hiding them under his hat.

On Twilight and Domestic Abuse

I hope I don't get a beaker of acid in the face for this.

Comment this week

Lo, I have posted.

A couple hours late, sadly. Comcast decided to be Comcastic again tonight.

Sars Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis

An absurd title for an absurd movie. Think of it as a Thai version of Scary Movie, only the characters aren't denser than lead -most of them aren't, anyway- and the plot isn't a mash up of last years top grossing horror films. That isn't to say that the film doesn't spoof other, more famous movies. It's just not as blatant about it and casts a much wider net. I was by no means expecting to be reminded of Peter Pan when watching this movie, for example.

Highlights include:

• The best Man vs. Giant Mutant Snake fight I've ever seen (and I've seen plenty).
• The goggles! They do something!
• Unconventional methods of recharging batteries (don't try this at home, kids).
  
• Some nice animated segments - one of the early ones reminded me of Terry Gilliam's work, I'm not entirely sure why.

Downsides:

• There were several times throughout the movie where I got the vague sense that a joke had just gone completely over my head. One of the perils of foreign comedy, I suppose.
• Whoever did the subtitles should be sacked. It was far too common for the characters to be talking and for there to be no subtitles. I highly doubt that I'm alone among region 1 viewers in being unable to speak Thai. The subtitles were also in serious need of at least being run through spellchecker.
  

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder

If you thought that the original Starship Troopers placed too much emphasis on the Mobile Infantry and Johnny Rico and not enough on Jesus: this is the movie for you.

If you want to see Casper Van Dien take his shirt off again now that he's 11 years older: this is the movie for you.

If you have a fetish for mobile phones the size and shape of a brick: this is the movie for you.

If you saw the word 'Marauder' in the title and were excited because you read Heinlein' original novel: this is not the movie for you. The powered armor would have looked dated 11 years ago and gets less than 5 minutes of screen time - which it shares with people praying, of course.

If you want social satire with your space marines and giant bugs: this is not the movie for you. You will find no satire in this movie that hasn't been covered a dozen times over in better works.

If you just want to see some giant bugs, is that so much to ask?: I'm sorry. You might enjoy the first 40 minutes if you can get past the scorpion moving exactly like the ants did in 1954's Them!.

Westender

Apparently the road to redemption requires a lot of walking. In the literal sense. The movie, Westender, follows one 'Asbrey of Westender', a famous former knight (I know neither why he is famous or former) as he tries to recover the ring of some dead woman (I know neither her relation to Asbrey, or why she was burned) which he lost gambling (while drunk). Oops. Theres a catch, however, as the ring is in the hands of a group of slavers. Queue epic action packed adventure. Or a lot of walking in silence, that works, too. I mean a lot of walking in silence. The man walks through the forest, over two mountains, and across a desert without uttering a single word beyond repeatedly screaming "take me" during a flashback sequence when the desert drives him mad.

The movie isn't bad, in spite of all the walking. Absolutely gorgeous scenery and some excellent acting are the films saving graces. I was delighted to see a scene where a pivotal question is posed and answered entirely without dialogue near the end. Capture the villain, or protect the innocent and lose the villain permanently? Many films would have two characters spelling the question out for the audience. One screaming about how the villain is getting away, the other pleading for protection. Westender cuts between shots of the last slaver as he flees into the distance with the ring, two cloaked men watching from a nearby hill, and the mute face of one of the slaves Asbrey had just freed. Shots of Asbrey twisting in his saddle to look both ways highlight his inner struggle. Much better than the screaming.

Dragon Wars

Dragon Wars struck me as something SciFi Channel Original Pictures would make if they had the money. The story is bad - a girl is born with some Heavenly MacGuffin in her, the chosen one must protect her until she comes of age at which point she is to sacrificed, only the two fall in love and their reincarnations get to try again 500 years later - and about half of the dialog is prefaced by some variation on "You're going to think I'm crazy, but." And neither the LAPD nor the FBI is capable of tracking a 200m long serpent as it rampages through downtown LA. No one believes the night watchman and thinks his story about the serpent eating all the elephants in the zoo makes him insane, prompting me to wonder how he's the only one who noticed that the elephants weren't there anymore.

So where did the budget go, if the story and script are abysmal? Quite simply, Dragon Wars is special effects porn. A scene devoted to showing off an immense battle for downtown between the evil serpent with it's army of dragons, dinosaurs, giant toadlike creatures, and faceless minions and the US military lasts around 10 minutes. It does absolutely nothing to advance the plot, but is a lot more fun to watch, so I've got no complaints about it taking up more than 10% of the total runtime.

Brotherhood of the Wolf

It has been a long and painful journey, but I have finally managed to locate a French film which, instead of making me regret my choice of major, I actually enjoyed. That film is Le Pacte des Loups, or Brotherhood of the Wolf.

I've long counted cryptozoology among my interests and have been a fan of both the martial arts and monster movie genres for as long as I can remember. Brotherhood of the Wolf is a wonderful mix of all three, and yet manages to avoid being cheesy. Not even the scene where an immense, armored, and CGI-rendered beast is chased through the French countryside by an Iroquois with extensive knowledge of kung-fu is cheesy.

The film doesn't put forth a serious explanation for what the beast of Gévaudan really was, instead option for a variation on the conspiracy theories surrounding Jean Chastel, who historically killed the second, and last, beast believed to have been responsible for the killings. I can hardly fault the filmmakers here; having the beast be a particularly large and agressive wolf would be anticlimactic and make for an absolutely horrible vehicle for any message.

Knightriders

I had no intention of viewing Romero films two weeks in a row, but Knightriders happened to catch my eye as I was browsing through the Science Fiction section of my local Hollywood Video. A movie about a traveling Renfaire on motorcycles written and directed by the father of the modern zombie? Yes please, I am a fan of the absurd, and Knightriders looked absurd enough to go beyond bad and back into good.

I will admit, I was utterly wrong in this assumption. Knightriders is not 'so bad its good.' Its just good.

Knightriders is the first movie I've seen in years to actually make me care about what happens. Its also the first movie I've seen in a similar amount of time where I didn't spend the movie operating under the assumption that good will triumph over evil, the lead male will get the girl, and everything will be happily ever after. Partly because I wasn't entirely sure who was good and who was evil. With the exception of the big city publicist. Publicists are always evil.

The movie elicits a good mix of emotionsl. I laughed, I didn't cry (but I definitely heard some heartstrings go 'twang'), I cheered, and I really hoped those stunt men were okay.

Land of the Dead

Land of the Dead is one of the more disappointing zombie apocalypse films I've come across. Thinking, communicating zombies should be scarier than their mindless counterparts, but Romero's, sad to say, just don't cut it. They're capable of learned behaviors and organizing themselves, but they do next to nothing with it and accomplish nothing with their newly found intelligence that normal zombies could have accomplished. Where the common zombie would simply bash its way through car windows to access the prey cowering inside, these thinking zombies will wander off in search off in search of something with which to torch the vehicle, denying themselves the food withing. Score one for the mindless. The greatest flaw of these intelligent zombies is that they simply do not use their intelligence. They act exactly like the mindless version, only now they have weapons. There is no "clever girl" moment. The zombie horde just keeps shuffling forward to victory.

The zombies use their intelligence in a different, and far more absurd way: they are apparently psychic. Zombie telepathy is the only way I have been able to even come close to rationalizing the end of the movie. The zombie horde initially sets out from its peaceful little town when the town is raided for supplies and a few zombies die violent re-deaths at the guns of 'Dead Reckoning', a heavily armed and armored vehicle used by the humans. The zombies are out for vengeance, not food, and they get it. But not against Dead Reckoning. Or the guy who designed built Dead Reckoning. Or anyone who was operating Dead Reckoning. Instead they kill/eat everyone they can catch in the city, which is a surprisingly large number given that people are capable of running, the zombies aren't, and the horde is moving in a straight line. Among the slain is the evil human overlord of the city, which triggers the zombie horde to retreat, satisfied. On their way out of the city they come across Dead Reckoning and a number of survivors. One would expect that seeing the object of their hate in front of them might incense them just a little bit, but no. The lead zombie stares into the eyes of the Dead Reckoning's creator, who is standing in Dead Reckoning's door, over the smoldering dismembered corpses of dozens of zombies which have just been annihilated by the rockets mounted to the roof of Dead Reckoning, then simply walks away. At which point the creator utters, "They're just looking for a place to go. Same as us," the movie ends, and I gently cry myself to sleep.