Category: horror

Two interchangeable, incredibly dull, incredibly white teenage boys with hidden cameras try to Youtube star their way out of an incredibly dull, incredibly white small town, and then an Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) ripoff starts, but with rather stupid children instead of competent adults.

Slightly creepy stalker vibe, which could've been a good variation on the theme, then the pod people start being obvious. As usual, the cops are useless until it's too late. The girl who joins the party in the second act is more liability than help. Her little brother Joey needs rescuing, but mostly takes care of himself, like Newt in Aliens. A film about him would've been far more interesting.

The pod people are strong, fast, hard to kill, organize wordlessly, imitate people tolerably well up close, and yet so stupid they fall for obvious tricks and can't tell their kind apart from Humans who walk slow and show no emotions. There's no way they should be able to replace more than a couple people before being noticed and shot by angry townsfolk. They do the open-mouth scream from 1978 with an extra CGI mouth expansion. They don't get you when you're sleeping, they just have your naked clone chase you down and hold your head; probably the filmmakers were scared to promote amphetamines. The mass body burnings are grim but a little obvious, unlike the dump trucks collecting bodies in 1978.

There's very little originality to this, it's as blunt and linear a ripoff as it's possible to get, with a little Youtuber narcissism as the only spice. It's as toothless and non-scary of a "horror" movie as I've ever seen. But I'm not bored by it. Certainly it's better than the military base remake (how are pod people soldiers different from regular soldiers?!), or the incredibly awful Nicole Kidman/Daniel Craig remake with the happy ending. Fuck Hollywood.

This movie's "not rated", but at most, it has moments of nude clones with their nipples and genitalia taped over/CGI airbrushed out/blocked by convenient furniture. The most the lead couple manage is a hug and kiss. There's no real blood, some ketchup stains for bug bites; hitting someone with a rock or pipe, or strangling them, is presented as cartoony, no physical injury shown. The few fights have no choreography, but they're just mobs grabbing or pushing. Even the one gunfight just has victims fall down, or a little ketchup on the head. It's basically G-rated. The 1978 film was PG (it's barely not R, and PG-13 wasn't added until 1984), and still had more nudity, sex, drugs, and violence.

The ending scene is silly, who is broadcasting that? How are they getting satellite feeds from around the world? Also most Internet services won't stay up long without Human maintenance. Organizing survivors in Youtube comments is not sustainable.

★★½☆☆

British show on Amazon Prime, and it often shows in their hilariously inept, incompetent, outright stupid misunderstandings of US distances, environments, politics, and military forces, and many of the actors can't manage an American accent. Best not to take this seriously.

Vampire plague spreads across the eastern US, Humans flee West, and somehow, explained in ham-fisted exposition, there's a no-man's-land established across the Midwest, borders with Canada & Mexico walled off, and mighty England and China embargo communications and shipping.

So, the vampires are the least fantastical element here. The orange cheeto criminal's border wall with Mexico is a fiasco, and somehow during an emergency plague they accomplish this and thousands of miles of Canada are also walled off? No. Anyone on Earth is capable of stopping US warships from leaving? No; and that it's China is incredibly funny, since they have one of the world's worst navies. If it was Russians at least it'd be competent if underpaid, underequipped sailors & ships. Anyone's capable of stopping US-owned satellites from sending and receiving? No, the ESA and Russia together might conceivably be able to take out US satellites, but it'd be WW3. And why block comms for 10 years? It makes no sense. Vampires can do business as well as corporate executives can (who can tell the difference?), and they can't suck your blood on a phone call.

At one point a vamp Predator drone shoots missiles at a Human base; except it's launched from New York, and the base is in New Mexico, 1800 miles away. Predators have an operational range of 777 miles (according to Wikipedia, I didn't go all Jane's Guide on this). The writers are uneducated children.

Why didn't they set this somewhere plausible, like Australia, or England? You could cut off AU with some effort and no border walls, their states are isolated enough making the outback no-man's-land is doable, and they have almost no ability to project their military outside their continent except to murder boat refugees.

Using England treads on 28 Days Later, and the vamps could just swim or walk underwater across the Channel or to Ireland, but mine a couple military harbors and it could be patrolled. England has minimal air & rocket capability, and their navy's fine for murdering Argentine farmers but not able to fight the US or Russia.

So back to this increasingly preposterous show. An arrangement has the Humans somehow get fed even though the best farmland is in the no-man's-land, and donate blood to the vampires every Sunday to keep peace.

The vampires of course call themselves names like Viktor and Viggo, and dress like dead Eastern European aristocrats, and play shitty baroque chamber music while torturing and draining Human victims because of course that's what vamps do. I love these shit-sucking vampires. Most of them are burned by sunlight, and their hunters use the Blade trick of full biker leathers and helmets to go out in the Sun. They even have a classical Renfield named Jared or Neal or something, at least for a while. Their leaders call themselves Elders, and claim to be immortal and ancient, but I think they're just LARPing, same shitty infected Humans as the wild ones. There's no way actual immortals would be this exposed, but someone who just got their shit together after being turned might be this dumb.

The vamps would benefit the most from being set in England. Aristocrats turned vampire eating the peasantry is no different from what they've done for 953 years since the Norman invasion (and the Danes, Saxons, and Romans did to the native Britons/Welsh before that). Walling off Scotland is possible, Emperor Hadrian did it with Roman technology. Having a delusional inbred English monarch (but I repeat myself) try to run the Crown in exile in Scotland or Wales, while the vamps rule London & the South, would make this story make sense and have some historical parallels. Some depth.

Instead we get the worst fake President I've ever seen in a movie. She's obviously cast to be a Hillary imitation, but the total opposite: meek, quiet, stupid, and wants to tend to her garden, passively takes all sorts of shit from the military goons (who are completely implausible as active service Generals), and leaks vital intelligence to the vamps, like a female Chauncey Gardiner.

The fight scenes are adequate but cartoony. The vamps are strong and fast, and vamp-on-vamp fights are over quick; the fight choreography is OK. They don't have any gore, though, this is strictly PG. Guns do nothing much, so it's bizarre that the Humans carry rifles; now, realistically I think they should tear the vamps to shreds and we'd maybe see them regenerate? Or they could have white phosphorus tracer rounds, or flamethrowers; or wooden bullets, if that's what works. But this is just like firing blanks. The soldiers also have no military discipline, they don't form fire teams, they don't find cover, they just stand around firing at random until a vamp leaps in and gives them a hickey, which is apparently enough to kill someone. Couldn't the filmmakers get even British Army consultants to help them?

I've put up with 2 eps so far, so I'll probably finish this just to watch the vamps chew scenery, but it's really really dumb.
★★½☆☆

More great vampire flicks of the past:

Lost Boys (1987): "One thing I never could stand about Santa Carla, all the damned vampires." Best soundtrack in any vampire movie, but a lot of it is just goths on bikes in California, not "vampires" as such. The Frog Brothers are big damn heroes. Some of the best vampire fights in any movie.
★★★★½

Blade (1998), and Blade Trinity (2004). Not brilliant, but always fun, Snipes does a fantastic run as Blade, and the vamps are powerful, crazy, and smart. And I love ♥ Parker Posey ♥, and for different reasons Kris Kristofferson, so hell yeah. Little baby Ryan Reynolds playing Hannibal King from the comics was fun, he was still in his pre-Deadpool b-movie days. Blade II is unbearably stupid, though Ron Perlman does redeem it a little bit.
★★★½☆

Ultraviolet (1998) was right on the edge of being silly. They're one of the main drivers of "not saying the word vampire", with Code Five and such. Idris Elba's a dignified dude, but pretty much everyone else was whiny or comedic. The vamps had no personality or real motive, just coming out like cockroaches and trying to take over. But the hunters are smart, use plausible science and technology, and pay attention to what the vampires can and can't do.
★★★★☆

A morning driving around in sunlight and dealing with the morning people made me wish for eternal darkness. Skipped over some bullshit soap operas and Buffy ripoffs with teenage vampires, found one adult vampire flick on Netflix.

Family Blood: Starts with the last moments of a vampire wrecking a family, so you know what kind of people this'll be about…

Then jumps to junkie mom Ellie in AA (which doesn't work) and new guy "Christopher" (from the last scene) who talks about "torn thru so many people". Then very long slow never-throw-out-b-roll shots of nothing interesting happening with her teenage kids.

Whatever city this is has "sketchy" neighborhoods of parks and great big houses with multiple floors and spartan concrete murder basements, ideal for serial killers/vampires; the black neighbor is right to be worried about gentrification, they'll just drain the lifeblood from your community.

Then Christopher turns Ellie by dripping some blood in her and snapping her neck; clearly the writer learned about vampires from Vampire the Masquerade, which this is the slowest fanfic of ever. Hours, days of footage later, Ellie starts to turn.

"I turned you into whatever it is that I am", says a guy who doesn't know he's a shit-sucking vampire? Everyone has known what a vampire is since Dracula in 1897 (earlier vampires just didn't get the reach of Stoker's novel). The boy who draws horror art all the time does recognize the symptoms, but doesn't say the V-word (Vampire, not vagina, tho he doesn't say the latter either). I hate this MacBeth-level actor bullshit of not naming the thing because it's "bad luck".

Also, apparently nobody uses their cellphone, because that would complicate a "plot" consisting largely of people slowly wandering around. "Dad" is seen a couple times but has no lines, probably to avoid paying scale. The speaking cast is very minimal.

It's very inconsistent about mythology. They don't have reflections, which is a strong supernatural power; it basically means they're just in your mind. They regenerate from any injury. They're superhumanly strong & fast. But sunlight & crosses do nothing, which usually work on any supernatural vamp.

The boy makes his first stake, and it's the best stake ever, stabbed with many times (but not left in the heart like you should do; I actually yelled at the screen), and then is still sharp as a razor multiple stabbings later. When I make a stake it doesn't last that long because wood's soft.

There's a few good vamp-on-human action scenes, but the only vamp-on-vamp is behind closed doors with just foley and shadows. Laaaamme. Builds up, but does not deliver.

★★☆☆☆ - I like the small personal stories, I could take the glacial pacing, if they'd shot just one good vamp-on-vamp fight scene.

There's a Turkish series "Immortals" which looks vaguely interesting, but Turkish shows tend to be pretty awful—badly written, badly acted, racist, sexist, and closeted gay/homophobic—the recent "Protectors" series as case in point—so I dunno if I'm up for 8 eps of that. If they made a 90-minute movie I might try it.

You know what was my favorite vampire movie? Dance of the Damned (1989). It has two speaking roles really, the sets & effects are minimalist, Roger Corman no-budget film. Just a sad stripper and a lonely vampire, for one last night. But it's perfect, never boring or filling dead screen time, and tense up to the last second. That's a ★★★★½ at least.

Near Dark (1987) is amazing, too, best vampires-as-hobo-junkies ever, but kind of sprawls out with the vampire pack, and the ending is absolute bullshit, shoulda been the girl bites the boy and they unlive unhappily ever after. That's also ★★★★½ but as utterly unlike DotD or FB as you can get.

I hated the Interview with the Vampire (1994) movie; the books are great fun, but cool badass mofo Brad Pitt as whiny useless Louis, and tiny neurotic anal-retentive $cientology cultist Tom Cruise as badass rock-star Lestat, was the dumbest casting fuckup in the history of bad casting. It's utterly unwatchable because of Tom Cruise squeaking out lines from his tightly-clenched sphincter-face that should be Lestat's. I know they beat Anne Rice with sacks of money to stop talking shit about it, but I think this film is why she went crazy and found Jesus. Also the sequel, completely skipping the book "The Vampire Lestat" and making Queen of the Damned (2002) which is sub-direct-to-video soap opera garbage.

I'd really like a new Castlevania season soon.

In 30 years, nobody else can make anything good about bloodsucking fiends?

This might be the dumbest film I've ever seen. I've seen every real MST3K (up through Pearl, not the boring new loser), and even Red Zone Cuba or Beast of Yucca Flats aren't this dumb. Written by Stephen King & Joe Hill (his son), so I had some hope. But hours, years later, no, all hope is lost. Save yourself, don't come in.

Walking into this grass field by a vacant small country church gets you permanently lost. There's a steady flow of idiots walking off the road into this shitty midwestern Narnia/Blair Witch, but it's not corn so there's no He Who Walks Between the Rows. There's no sets, just a grass field with some paths stomped down, and a big rock, and a ruined Bowl-A-Drome (or "OWL-A-DME" as the sign says) makes the usual B movie filmed in the woods look like Ben Hur. I miss the variety of sets in Cube.

90% of the dialogue is just characters calling each others names. Beckay does tell a couple good dirty limericks but the wuss brother is useless, the drummer ex-boyfriend does think of marking a trail… not very well, like everything he does. Tobyn (the spirit guide, nice GB reference) is either part of the field or its first victim. His Ted Bundy-lookin' dad is exactly what he seems. His mom and dog appear when needed as props but have no plotline or role.

Of course there's a time travel thing going on, because all movies are time travel now apparently. Oh no I'm stuck in an endless loop of watching bad movies in my comfy chair.

The horrible ancient evil and time loop are trivially defeated by just helping someone out of the field. Every part of this was unnecessary.

★☆☆☆☆ and I'm glad I had a lot of beer.

About half the AHS seasons are good, the other half are total trash. Hotel was fun. Roanoke annoyed me with yet another haunted house story. Cult had two of the most pathetic protagonists ever—by the second ep I wanted both dead just to end the fucking series—clowns, and a political story I had no interest in. Apocalypse is a great premise: A post-nuclear bunker.

The iPhone nuclear missile warning isn't bullshit this time, but somehow LA has an hour warning instead of 15-30 minutes like a real nuclear war would have (time from the DEW Line to continental US for a suborbital missile). A random bunch of idiots are spirited away to a bunker by a secret organization.

And for a while, the internal politics and weird Victorian rules of the bunker drive a good enough plot. Even when one of the secret masters shows up and starts testing the survivors with an obviously malevolent bent, it's on plot. Maybe they'll go all Masque of the Red Death, I think.

But then magic creeps in, because the writers just got bored and started recycling from Coven. Half the cast are discarded so this shitty old plot can be dumped on anyone dumb enough to still be watching. When the goody-goody blonde witches start calling the warlock Satan I check out.

Garbage and a wasted premise.

★★★★☆ for the initial premise, then ★☆☆☆☆ after the witches & warlocks take over.

Stranger Things is the very definition of half-assed. They're trying to do "how cool was it to be a kid in the '80s", and it was VERY cool, but most of the people involved weren't even alive then, and they are unable or unwilling to take enough cocaine to really commit to it. They play D&D, but didn't live thru the Edition Wars, where those of us who played OD&D fucked off when Gary's polearm and rules fetishes ruined AD&D, Frank Mentzer's revisionist BECMI baby-fied the Basic branch, and accusations of Satanism were thrown at us constantly (never mind that I actually gamed with teenage Satanists (which I took no more seriously than the Christfuckers, I was even then a Cthulhu cultist and thought Satanists were amateurs), and we mostly played Champions, Stormbringer, and Rolemaster, because those are serious games). They sing along to top-40 songs, but not the hard-rockin' hard-fuckin' songs, but pop movie themes. The fashion is so far toned down from reality it's really depressing; yeah, Indiana was uncool and years behind, but I was a nerd in Idaho which is just as uncool and I wore pastel faded blue jeans and black leather jackets. Nobody in this has Ray-Bans, which were on like 90% of the eyeballs. Fat Rambo Hopper puts on the most faded-out Hawaiian shirt possible, and everyone in the show is like "WHOAH, look at him!" when in reality he was bland as the mayonnaise he guzzles straight from a jar. The Max/El dress-up routine did manage to hit the Osh-Kosh-B'Gosh look and she stayed in bright colors for a while.

So, S1 was pretty much a Steven King's Firestarter/Escape to Witch Mountain mashup, and ended on a down note but it's OK. S2 at least closed a few plot holes and the Hellmouth, but meanders all over with a visit to mom, a visit to punk rock girl, Hopper failing at being a "dad" to El.

S3 then has nowhere to go except over the top, with a giant slime monster possessing people and climbing a mall like a King Kong made of shit, and somehow having "Russians" show up and build a giant underground base. Which looks nothing like Soviet architecture or engineering, it's all shiny surfaces and big open spaces, when the real Soviets liked claustrophobic bunkers and dull industrial paintjobs. And nobody calls them Soviets, the show is all "Russians" or "Russkies"; we said those, but mostly Soviet, because not all Soviets are Russian! They'd be just as likely to be from throughout the USSR or Warsaw Pact. Dumbass writers. And the notion that Fat Rambo Hopper, drunk loser hillbilly cop, can fight a Spetsnaz soldier like the terminator and win/even have a chance is preposterous. This season's monster plot relies on Eleven solving all problems with superpowers, everyone else is just there as a distraction; at least the B-plot of the Soviets has normal kids doing the Red Dawn/MacGyver kind of thing.

Probably as an overreaction to the sausage festival + El of S1 & S2, almost everyone gets a girlfriend in this season, but other than Max they're useless. When the party of kids goes wandering single-file door-to-door, I think of Earthbound games where you'd be followed by a centipede-like trail of your party members.

★★½☆☆ — just not enough meat in that corn-dog.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, adapted from Shirley Jackson's fantastic novel, is lovely, slow, gothic, oppressive, creepy… Merricat and Constance are well-cast for the "creepy witch girl who acts like an old maid" and "Marilyn Munster but even more insane". Uncle Julian, Cousin Charles, and Helen the fussy "friend" are fine… Charles is a creep, like Brad Pitt fucked Steve Buscemi and gave birth to this thing; I don't really buy Constance's quick affection for him in this portrayal, he's too sharp-edged. Julian's too repetitive and often just hard to take, which is how someone that damaged would be. The villagers are awful people, but only about half of them are the hideous caricatures they seem to be in the book.

I hadn't even heard of the film being made & released, discovered it at $9.99 on iTunes, grabbed it instantly. Not a perfect adaptation, the ending adds a little flourish which is not present in the book, but charming nonetheless.

★★★★★