Tag: movie

What I'm Watching: The Old Guard

A 'flix adaptation of a Greg Rucka comic; I haven't read this one, but his series Lazarus and Queen & Country are also headed to adaptations. I'm more interested in Lazarus, post-apocalypse feudal lords with engineered female super-soldiers. Greg's got a similar "type" to mine, and buff women is it.

I'm not going to spoil this much, but I need to talk about the first scene.

The Old Guard starts dumb.

These guys are immortal soldiers, like four little Deadpool experiments but not funny, must have dealt with thousands of clients, and they can't figure out that transparently treacherous CIA guy is playing them? Even after walking into an obvious trap, the goons who kill them in the first minutes don't keep an eye on the corpses, search them? Even with non-immortal victims, combat praxis is to remove weapons, flip them over to make sure they're really dead. "No, it's fine guys let's huddle over here with our backs to the corpses." SIGH.

Show doesn't understand that suppressors are not fantasy "silencers", you can't shoot someone "thwip thwip" and it's not heard, suppressors just make guns less incredibly loud. The actual melees are pretty standard but well-choreographed vampire/superhero fights. There's nothing here you haven't seen in Blade 1-3, Deadpool 1-2, every damned Marvel flick, the Punisher series, the Nolan Batman movies, Red, Polar, etc etc, but it's competent enough. I wasn't paying a lot of attention to bullet counts, but they do run out of ammo, and regularly stop and scavenge guns from enemies, which I see too rarely in these things.

Any time a scene is a little bit dark, it goes full cyan/orange filter, forget about being able to see colors. Then the camera moves anywhere lit, and it has mostly unfiltered color. It's super jarring, but I guess I should be happy it wasn't cyan/orange all the time.

There's a wafer-thin backstory exposition for the ancient Scythian "Andy" (Charlize Theron; she's still very cute); Crusader Nicky (Luca Marinelli) and Arabian Joe (Marwan Kenzari) who are in love, there's a good scene with them and some stupid snickering soldiers, but I don't believe love lasts years let alone centuries; Napoleonic soldier Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts); joined by newbie US Marine Nile (Kiki Layne, barely capable of hitting marks and saying lines, her fighting is poor).

No explanation for their ability is given, "that way lies madness" says one of them, and the magic/psychic dreams are unexplained even though Andy mocks religion and magic. I must say I'm always glad when atheists get heroic representation in movies. It's just a scene, but thanks, Greg.

The little bad guy, ex-CIA spook Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is pathetic, and has implausible moments of morality; nobody with morals becomes a spook. It's just kind of insulting. His Zodiac-conspiracy/Andy-stalker whiteboards are full of stuff, but he behaves like an accountant, not a motivated crazy person or soulless spook. Terrible writing, acting, or both?

The big bad guy, Merrick (Harry Melling, aka Dudley Dursley; but he's twice as ugly skinny as he was fat), is a jackass: Scene-chewing, Shakespeare-quoting, openly admitting he just wants money for saving lives, openly sadistic. There's a partial violation of Chekov's Law, he poses with Andy's axe, but then doesn't use it; holding it keeps it from being forgotten before the next scene, but it's still a tease not delivered on.

The plot is linear, most of the twists are obvious. When they're not, it's always revealed in low-stakes environments, and then you just wait out the development of the twist. There are zero surprises if you're paying even minimal attention.

Actual plot ends with 15 minutes of denouement and team-building, like a superhero "Pose as a Team Cuz Shit Just Got Real" scene. Words cannot express how tedious and commercial the ending is. I feel a couple thousand years old like I've seen every possible story when I see a scene this badly written.

Then it has a "post-credits" scene, but of course Netflix makes it hard to watch credits, so they moved it up before even the star credits, let alone the technical credits and classical music. Sit thru your goddamned credits, people. That's when I write these posts, I've just got some notes until then.

★★★☆☆

You know what I liked in this genre? The Losers (2010). Andy Diggle & Jock's comic was well-adapted, the fights were higher-stakes and weirder, the characters had massively more personality & development, and were much more aware of being double- and triple-crossed. Zoe Saldana is a fucking magical special effect all by herself. It didn't do great in the box office, I dunno why.

What I'm Watching: Barbarian Queen

From the SHOUTFactory Sword and Sorcery Collection. Remember DVDs? You stick it in a slot and your movie just starts playing!

First, trailers!

  • Streets (1990): "The most brutal, sadistic killer on the streets… is a cop!" Yeah, no shit! That was true even in the '80s. Christina Applegate (age 19) is cute as a teenage hooker (age 16). Eb Lottimer made a half-assed career of dirty cops and evil soldiers. This looks better than average for exploitation flicks by Roger Corman.

  • Angel in Red aka Uncaged (1991): Whores and a psycho pimp and brother. Looks dire. Apparently a remake of Streetwalkin' (1984) by the same writers, and the director Lisa Hunt took her name off it. Nope.

Huh. I guess they know their audience. And now our feature presentation. Note: R-rated and then some.

  • Barbarian Queen (1985): Instantly starts with a blonde girl (Dawn Dunlap) gathering flowers captured, tits exposed, and raped by two heavy metal dudes (long hair, black clothes, medieval, work with me here). Sets the tone for the film; if you can't handle this, don't go on.

Wedding day for the girl's sister, Amathea (Lana Clarkson)—previously seen in Deathstalker—is rudely interrupted by a whole bunch of these heavy metal dudes who didn't RSVP. Mass fight choreography is… not an exact science. Mostly you see dudes taking turns holding up a sword or staff, enemy attacks, then they switch roles, very D&D initiative sequence, not much like real swordsmanship.

All the village men are defeated, but the women can bare-handed (sometimes bare-breasted) kick the ass of any man. Mostly because the heavy metal dudes stop mid-fight to try to rape, which turns out to be a tactical mistake.

The barbarians have fabulous '80s hair & makeup, and wear preposterous linen bikinis and reed bundle pushup bras/legwarmers, uh, and unlabelled Keds tennis shoes. The people live in reed & grass huts, but then bundle up in furs. This was filmed in Argentina, like so many of Roger Corman's wilderness flicks. The wilderness cinematography is quite good; they try to avoid showing skylines and obvious clues as to the location.

The "city" (barely a village) isn't bad but anachronistic; low stone/adobe walls, topped by wood pallisades. The "arena" is a solid wood pen, because of course they have a gladiator arena. A few hundred extras, wearing a weird mish-mash of clothing, muu-muus, hoodie robes, tunics & pants, half middle-eastern. It's like any bad D&D campaign, the Referee just threw random stuff together until it was full. The rebels of course hide in the dungeon tunnels under the city. There's always a dungeon.

The props deserve a call-out, and not in a good way. Weapons range from clubs, sharp sticks, and stone axes, to a few pole-axes, to many crappy mass-produced shiny swords with bad brass/gold pommels, and stage swords made of pig iron. Shields are a layer of hammered tin(?) over wood, very awkward. Armor is mostly black linen with big chunky chains sewn on top, it looks ridiculous and offers no protection. One or two people have brigandine which doesn't look awful. None of this fits any consistent period.

Katt Shea, Susana Traverso, and a little tomboy girl soon join Lana as an adventuring party, hunting heavy metal dudes. They never lose HP to these dudes. Dawn goes looney tunes, because that's what happens when you're tied to a tree. Middle girl is constantly eating, thru the entire film, it's kind of remarkable, giant lump of bread, unidentified "meat", craft table in the harem, she's horny for food.

"I'll be no man's slave and no man's whore, and if I can't kill them all, by the gods they'll know I've tried." —Amathea will kick your ass.

Armando Capo as Lord Arrakur is very businesslike. I can't tell if he's supposed to be stoic, doesn't know his lines all that well, or thinks he's doing taxes instead of torturing, raping, and killing. He's much too fat, useless, and square to lead the heavy metal dudes, I don't know how he got cast here. When I think of all the roles Jack Palance chewed scenery in, and compare him to this dork, ugh.

"20 years that THIS KINGDOM has ruled THE LAND. And we gather for your entertainment, the greatest warriors of ALL TIME, willing to sacrifice their lives for the glory of THIS KINGDOM." —Arrakur has no idea when or where he is, either.

The torture room, and glasses-wearing Jewish nerd torturer are amazing. Hanging metal claw hands, swinging stabby gadgets, acid bath, and an automated rack. Lana's tits spend a lot of time exposed and upthrust. Her '80s-style G-string bikini bottom is a little out of time. Her way of getting off the rack is amazing, only ever matched by Kathleen Turner in The War of the Roses.

The gladiators don't get much better at fighting, and they end every fight in a KO or kill, which is not how you keep a gladiator population; they were highly-valued entertainers, like pro wrestlers. Here, apparently the reward for the surviving gladiators is the harem, which rather misses the point of harems; but there is a fat eunuch harem guard in pseudo-Turkish outfit completely out of place with everyone else.

Maybe this whole thing's post-apocalypse. No artifacts or mention of the olden days, but there's also no churches, the entire operation's such a mess of periods it's just nonsense as history, but perfectly reasonable as post-apocalypse Argentina. I've had the same hypothesis about Deathstalker, but it has Orcs and magic, more likely a secondary world.

Some great shots. Guards go running past, Lana slips out sword ready and runs like a panther. She looks great and kills like an experience-crazed D&D murderhobo PC. The final fight is still badly fight choreographed, but well-paced.

Title is a lie, she's not the queen of her barbarian tribe, nor of the city (I presume the rebels take over, but the ending just freeze-frames).

The deleted scenes on this DVD are a mix of longer kills, even more T&A, and some backstory for the traitor and rebels.

A classic of swords-and-no-sorcery, heavy on the exploitation, half-assed (if that) at production as usual for Corman, but mostly saved by the story, and focus on Lana Clarkson and the girls.

★★½☆☆

(A reminder about my star ratings. Full ★ is for quality filmmaking. The extra ½ is earned by being fun, regardless of quality. I'd rather watch a ★★½☆☆ than a ★★★★☆!)

What I'm Watching: Bordertown, Freaks

  • Bordertown: The best of the grim Scandinavian crime dramas. Kari Sorjonen (the Finnish title is just his name), is a borderline autistic, Sherlock Holmes with a memory palace technique, and partner Lena, a Russian ex-FSB cop/thug/defector. There's a wife and a kid, and Lena has a daughter, sometimes, and there are a few too many household drama stories early on, but it mostly lowers that to a background level later.

But most of the series is Kari pursuing really crafty serial killers, including a repeat nemesis, supergenius high school chemistry teacher, not named Walter or Moriarty but oughta be.

Emotionally the show could not be more Finnish. Everyone is stoic and awkward, frosty to their friends, completely closed off to anyone else, until they have a giant emotional meltdown and kill each other. Secrets and actual intentions are rarely revealed and when they are, everyone's glum but takes it. The distance between Kari's emotional flatness and everyone else's emotional bunkers isn't far.

Finland has a harsh and beautiful wilderness, and the cities are the grimmest of industrial shitholes, and then the interiors are mostly sterile black and white unadorned furniture, like Jony Ive set designed it; when you see a warm set it's just jarring. The cinematography and music are great; I'm unamused at the pretense the daughter sings the title song, tho, and in this last season she got way too much screen time doing so. Apparently the actress is a wannabe Miley Cyrus.

I read subtitles fast, and can usually rely on being able to pick up some spoken words, but Finnish is annoying; English lets me pick up enough Dutch, Norwegian, or Swedish to recognize many words, my bad French lets me get a lot of Flemish and Belgian, and so on… but Finnish sounds like gibberish, and these people talk fast; I usually complain about slow-talkers, but here it's a little stressful. So good thing this is on Netflix where rewinding for a complex scene is easy. It'd be unwatchable on 'zon's terrible video player.

S3 switches from overlapping almost-season-long stories to more episodic 2-parters, but there is a continuing story.

Picking on some of the non-plot elements aside, this is just a perfect crime drama, watch it.

★★★★½

  • Freaks (2018): It's Firestarter; this Charlie ^W Chloe is a different kind of little girl freak, but the "psychic powers make your eyes bleed" thing, the father, the low-rent treachery, the government murderers are straight out of Stephen King. The Shop ^W ADF is funded like post-9/11 counterterrorism, not a CIA hobby project.

I'm both amused and horrified by a trick used to get the ADF to kill innocent people, the writer's not original but able to embellish well.

Once you realize the scope of Chloe's, and her family's, and the missing mommy's powers, the question of "is this overreaction" changes to "what would you do for species survival"; altho Dallas probably had it coming. Little Chloe also learns to kill like a teenage boy playing Call of Duty, way faster than a supposed 7-year-old (actress was 9) should. No way she should see this movie or the evil shit her character does.

★★★★☆ — despite the near-plagiarism, this is well done.

What I'm Watching: 12 Monkeys (1995)

Haven't seen this since the theatre when it came out.

So, 1995. Bruce Willis was familiar from Moonlighting, and Die Hard, and his mediocre blues album The Return of Bruno, but hadn't become quite the caricature and one-note joke he is now. Brad Pitt had just come off True Romance and Se7en, whining and crying "What's in the box? What's in the box?!" Madeleine Stowe was the A-list femme fatale from China Moon, Revenge, and The Two Jakes. Plenty of smaller familiar actors, like Chris Meloni (most punchable face in the world) as the asshole cop, years before Law & Order: Formulaic Rape Is Bad Unit.

This film's a massively extended (too much so) Hollywoodization of the French experimental… it's not quite a movie, except in the way Ken Burns' documentaries are… sequence of moving pictures, La Jetée. Which in some ways is very effective, but it's dry as hell, lacks any characterization, it's an idea without implementation. Hollywooding it up was inevitable.

The style of the future, the police station, the mental institution, the shitty New York corner they keep going back to, just every set except the outdoors and the mansion, are basically Terry Gilliam going crazy with his brutalism and industrial post-war England anti-aesthetic. Visually impressive sometimes, but good grief, Terry, not everyplace looks like the concrete cell you were apparently raised and beaten in. The man needs a psychiatrist, not a director of photography.

The closed time loop of James Cole's life is pretty obvious from the first flashback, if you have any science fiction background; I'd well forgotten the details, and immediately realized it. The people of the future can't find anyone honest and sane who's tough enough to survive time travel, so they send a stir-crazy prisoner; but everyone seems to be a prisoner or a guard, there's no indication of normal life in the future. Cole's inability to calm down, act normal, like he remembers people being from childhood, is what causes all of his own problems.

The Army of the 12 Monkeys are well-cast, I've known a few people in extreme environmental causes and they're… not well-adjusted. When you're "the only people who know the truth!!!", you can either work sanely to raise awareness; or wait for it to be a giant mess so finally people act at the last minute, which is what normally happens, see global warming; or scream like a maniac and discredit everything you stand for, which is how these groups usually work. Pitt's a convincing lunatic, he's always had that twitchy look and when he gets screaming & whining & making weird hand gestures, nobody can stop him. Is there a film where Pitt doesn't flip out?

There's a nice tight 60-90 minute story trapped in a flabby, repetitive 2 hours 10 minutes of film. There's no reason for the second or third trips back, or the side-jaunt to the more distant past. A tighter version: Cole goes back, gets nabbed, stays in the asylum a few years, escapes, goes on a road trip with the shrink, the finale happens. Nobody else from the future ever needs to show up, the shrink picks up the last clue in the airport.

I so want this to be better than it is. The premise is great. It's better to watch than La Jetée. Madeleine Stowe is very nice. But I had to take a few breaks and got out my phone during the long repeat acts. The slo-mo death scene with swelling music at the end should've been cut, it shits on the tone of the rest of it.

★★★½☆

What I'm Watching: Doom Patrol

So back in 1989, Grant Morrison took over Doom Patrol, which had been around in various forms since 1963, the original genius in a wheelchair, deranged freak "students", fighting weird enemies and society, months before the X-Men. Except instead of having white kids (and later token Storm & Jubilee) stand in for racism with a trite ending every time; Doom Patrol had broken people stand up for themselves, insane, crippled, or just weird as they are. Grant took a weird thing and made it weirder, with increasingly postmodern, deranged plots and villains that just make no sense, cut-up stories and art. Great comic, everyone should read it. Don't bother with anything Grant didn't write.

The show on HoboMax does a decent job of making a core Doom Patrol team: Larry/Negative Being (but not gender-changed Rebis yet?), Cliff/Robotman (voice-acted by Brendan Fraser), Jane/Crazy Jane, Rita/Elasti-Girl, Niles/Chief, and Vic/Cyborg. Larry's easy, a body-wrap of gauze and a shitty ball lightning effect; he whines about his wife and boyfriend a lot, nobody cares. Cliff has a fairly good whole-body suit, and we see a few flashbacks to frumpy Fraser when he had a body. Jane gets a bunch of additional voice actresses for the alternates, her powers are mostly shitty jump-cut teleports and such, the only impressive power is speaking words into steel floating in the air, which become knives. Rita's a pretty good special effect, instead of growing and stretching, she just turns into The Blob but made of fat tissue, oozes into or over everything, and her character trying to fight what a horrible thing she is, is well-portrayed.

Chief, I haven't seen a lot of yet, he's a pompous, secret-filled, treacherous jackass who'll do anything to "put things right" but also to work on his Human experiments; it's Timothy Dalton, so he may be able to pull it off. Mr Nobody, the main villain, is Alan Tudyk, and he gets some CGI erasure to be half-there, which is fine, he mostly just chews scenery and taunts people, nothing actually happens.

The problem here is Vic, fucking Cyborg. In the old Teen Titans comics, Cyborg was the joyless stick-up-his-ass bureaucrat part of the team, but he was opposed by the far more competent Robin/Nightwing, and Beast Boy and every other crazy vigilante to shout him down. Put in with the Doom Patrol, they're no more respectful of Vic the Dick, but he's the least crazy and so kind of runs roughshod over them. Someone please dump him in a recycling bin. Every scene Vic is in is just a drag.

I'm kind of impressed they mostly stuck with '80s-style practical effects and lowest of low-budget surface CGI/painting on the film effects. There's nothing here they couldn't have done back in the '80s.

Speaking of, there's a… setting trick. So, Doom Patrol is deeply tied up in WWII mad scientists, and it's written, set in the '80s. But this show is set in the present. They just skip 30 years, assert that everyone stayed in the mansion and didn't age. I don't know if this will ever be addressed for how dumb it is, but whatever, it lets them have the original crew & villains somehow in 2020. Don't think about it too hard, I guess.

The plots are gibberish. There's a hole in the ground that eats a lame town, and then they travel into a donkey, in order to spit the town back out. They travel to Paraguay and watch a puppet show, put on by living puppets. They're certainly trying to be as weird as Doom Patrol, it's fairly pointless so far, but I'm amused for the most part. It could use some editing to get the pacing up (easy: Just delete every scene Vic is in), these 44-minute episodes feel 2 hours long.

★★★½☆

What I'm Watching: Adventure Time: Distant Lands: BMO

Available on the HoboMax.

BMO, especially delusional BMO being a hero, is generally my favorite character of AT, even tho I skip all those awful Grables eps. So I was looking forward to this. Not happy about the result.

No way to talk about this without spoilers:












BMO and their potatoes are going to Mars. But then they're redirected to an ancient space station made of little environment pods, like blown-up Xandar (in the comics, not the boring planet in the Guardians movies), or Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, and BMO sets off to save everyone!

Unfortunately everyone in the station sucks. The bunny kid sidekick is useless, spineless, and nigh-treacherous (but too spineless to be an effective traitor), the repair drone is just a follower, the adults are all villains or parasites who should be broken down for scrap. The character designs, other than a few sight gag characters in street scenes, are very plain, either blobs, the laziest-drawn humanoid bunnies ever, or a few alien/elf hybrids. Literally the only sympathetic characters in the entire show, besides BMO, are two thieving bugs, and a scrap robot (voiced by Simone Giertz! So there's like one good thing about this!)

There's an amazing environment, a setup perfect for a long series, which is wasted on a very stupid plot and a trite non-Adventure Time ending. Brute force or reason shouldn't get you out of trouble in AT, only insanity, lateral thinking, or coincidence should. Pen Ward hasn't written or directed since S8, everyone still involved is like 3rd-hand hires from when it was good, so tone drifting towards Hollywood garbage writing is inevitable, but tragic.

Well. That was, I guess not surprising after S10, but disappointing. Will any further eps be better?

★★☆☆☆

What I'm Watching: Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster

  • Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964): Both UFO cultists and cops agree, heat wave in winter and meteor showers are weird. A cop is assigned to bodyguard a princess from a small island under civil war. Said princess is contacted by an alien voice and told to jump from the plane, and she never even got her drink! Scientists hike into the mountains to investigate a meteor landing.

I must say, Japan's wilderness looks fantastic. The cinematography on this one, in color!, is head and shoulders above previous films. Even when they go into matte paintings and sets, it looks good. They do interesting cuts, like using a subway car as a wipe. It's almost hard to believe this is Honda Ishiro still, not doing locked-down cameras and super simple cuts or wipes; earlier he was more a director of people and cool events, not using the camera well. Even the rear projections are now fairly close to seamless.

Naoko the journalist and the Princess are both cute as hell. Naoko's cop brother is kind of a doofus, and utterly extraneous to the plot. The bodyguard cop has no personality except brooding and shooting (not very well, he never kills anyone with at least 30 shots), and there's no love between him and the Princess in the first half; all he has is a picture, and she's not herself. Has Honda learned cinematography, but forgotten about romance as the main driver of Human-scale plots?! What a terrible bargain.

The Mothra twins appear on TV, and summon a vision of the Mothra larva. This is a Japan that just lives with the regular existence of giant monsters and magic on TV, I don't see how anyone can mock UFO cultists or prophets from Venus in that world.

"Stay out of Mount Aso, Rodan will emerge!" "Shut up prophet! … OH NO IT'S RODAN AAAIEEE!" Incredibly predictable scene, but perfect "fools die of their folly" scene. Rodan's costume & flying puppet are much improved over the first movie, but it's a little odd being more of a Pteranodon/Roc hybrid now.

"Don't get on the ship!" And at least the important characters pay attention, but the poor sailors are going to meet… well, who else would be in the ocean? Big G's moving eyes look really weird. The suit's otherwise fine, but definitely reaching the end of this first design.

Fools stand far too close to Ghidorah's… egg? Meteor? Spaceship? But someone must witness the birth of a death god. The Princess tells the protagonists the Earth is doomed, and sells it for once. We start to get a real kaiju cosmology here, with planets preyed on or defended by monsters.

Finally we have all the world's monsters assembled, rampaging begins.

The assassins chasing the Princess thru the entire film have been unstoppable, but not very competent, and kind of a waste of time. The plot as it is would happen without them.

Possibly too much of the monster scenes are them arguing with Mothra, rather than fighting, there's only a few minutes of King Ghidorah vs the three defending kaiju. There is a bit of destruction in Tokyo, but mostly it's a beloved peasant village or wilderness at the foot of Mt Fuji. Mothra's very slow and annoying power, Godzilla throwing rocks, Rodan standing around waving its wings, are enough to drive off the dragon. FOR NOW.

★★★½☆ - Needs about 15 minutes less Human time, replaced with monster fighting time.

This is a major influence on my favorite kaiju movie, GMK: Godzilla Mothra King Ghidorah Giant Monster All-Out Attack, but there Godzilla and Ghidorah switch places, and the subplots are wiped away so it's just reporter, crazy old man as "prophet", and monsters. And on the latest Hollywood Godzilla King of the Monsters, but there everything is 100x larger than life.

What I'm Watching: Us

  • Us: Another Jordan Peele Twilight Zone flick. Text crawl claims that there's thousands of miles of tunnels of mysterious purpose under America. With the implication that it's full of monsters. So Dungeons & Dragons is real?! Good to know, Jordan. Then there's 20+ minutes of utter boredom back in 1986, when normally I would rate the '80s as the least boring part, very briefly a scene with some tension and the little girl Addy.

20 years later (and it feels like it), the plot starts. Addy's very gentrified, possession-oriented black family settles into their Santa Cruz beach vacation house, get a boat, meet their honkie friend "Josh" and his blonde family at the beach. Nice and idyllic. And then out of nowhere, we get told more of the little girl's scene, and the monsters show up.

Addy gets tied up and terrorized a lot, Dad is utterly useless, but the kids are fairly impressive little survivors.

As a slasher flick, there really aren't enough victims, and it doesn't sustain the tension, it keeps releasing to long "oh that's over" scenes. The killers are more pathetic than terrifying.

SPOILER TIMES

There's a lot of weird visuals, which are poorly to never explained. The remake of Hands Across America (a USA For Africa charity event, you may know the song "We Are the World") makes no sense, how did non-verbal shadows work this out? Police or soldiers will just destroy them once it's sunlight. Do politicians have their own shadows, and how would scissor-wielding maniacs get past the Secret Service? The final scenes show helicopters flying over woods, presumably where the Shadows Across America line goes? Why aren't they firing or dropping bombs on these known mass murderers?

Addy has a final descent into the mythic underworld by escalator (her knowing the way down telegraphed her origin, but it has problems, too), where she finds bunnies running loose (but no explanation how the killers raised them down there, or where all the supplies come from), and a long nonsense explanation about cloning and souls.

The duel/dance is passable, but Addy never cooperates with Red's dance, which would've made this fight more interesting. I think especially of Jet Li's The One, where he fights himself, but each has mastered a distinct martial arts style, so the fight's visually amazing. This is… it reminds me of Marvel movies, where there's amazing fight choreography but the actors aren't all up to performing it, so you get a martial artist fighting a drunken bozo.

The final revelation about Addy doesn't make a lot of sense. Addy's awful vulnerable and emotional for a soulless murder machine like the others. Red's croaky voice is from being strangled, fine, but why didn't she ever come up to the surface before? How did she organize a worldwide cult of the shadows to come up at the same time, when they don't talk, or really seem aware?

Obviously I'm pretty tolerant of implausible premises in movies, given my love of kaiju and fantasy, but this one falls apart internally worse than most.

★★★½☆ Good try, Jordan, better than your awful Twilight Zones, but not another "Get Out". Jordan Peele is the new M. Night Shyamalan.

The concept's been around a while: Mirror people, dopplegangers, or faerie changelings, ultimately going back to pre-historic myths. My favorite's in the Nightbane RPG by Palladium Books, where the Nightland (always dark, mirror image Earth) is populated by dopplegangers of Earth people, just waiting for a chance to use a mirror as a portal and kill and replace you (Nightbane also borrows heavily from Clive Barker's Cabal, Great and Secret Show, and Hellbound Heart). I really should dig the books up and run Nightbane again.

What I'm Watching: Unfriended: Dark Web

  • Unfriended: Dark Web: Written and first-time-directed by Stephen Susco, the writer of the American Grudge remakes (which utterly missed the point: The Japanese films were cursed hauntings of familiar, safe places; the American ones set in Japan are hauntings of a person who's already alienated and scared, not to mention that Sarah Michelle Gellar's range doesn't extend this much beyond stabby cheerleader). And it's a Blumhouse film, which is to quality cinema what pickled pigs feet are to cuisine. BUT I DIGRESS.

Do you want to watch 90 minutes of a doofus with terrible hair using Facebook® and Skype® on a stolen MacBook? Because that's what this is. It never takes the camera out of the screen, which is an interesting choice; everyone has a giant selfie-cam in Skype, right? I will say, this may be the only movie I've ever seen use Terminal on a Mac. Also the "Papaya" app for translating speech to text to personally-recorded American Sign Language videos (because the doofus's girlfriend is deaf, and he's too much of an asshole programmer to practice ASL without writing code for it) is unique. Awful, but unique.

But then it goes into discovering the previous owner made torture porn/snuff films for an obscene amount of bitcoin on a darkweb site named "The River", populated by "Charon 68" ("they never made it to 69"), a figure who projects static into all cameras appears, and things get more and more desperate.

A film of just finding the snuff films and chasing down the perpetrator online would be interesting. But the squeamish characters stop the doofus from playing any of the videos for more than a few seconds, eliminating the only actual horror in this "horror" movie.

Then it goes from a slightly fantastical computer horror show, to a secret society of utterly impossible killers and l33t h4xx0rz, and cops that show up in 2 minutes. The last half ruins a perfectly good premise.

I watched the "Extended Edition", which has a bad ending for everyone, but given the super-powered secret society, it's the only consistent ending. There's also an incredibly stupid "Charons vote and think he's enough of a bastard to live" happy ending on the regular edition.

End credits are live-edited into what looks like SSL source code; ironically if anyone had been using SSL, drive encryption, and secured their computers with more than 1-letter passwords this entire script would be impossible. I assure you I keep my snuff flicks (no.) and darkweb bitcoin lockers (also no.) in an encrypted volume with a long password written nowhere else.

This is a sequel/remake of Unfriended, which I have not seen but is apparently an actual ghost haunting Facebook®, which might be more plausible than what I just watched.

★★☆☆☆ — not bad enough to be good, but stupid enough to be funny at times.

What I'm Watching: Mothra vs Godzilla, end of Watchmen, cartoons

  • Mothra vs Godzilla (1964): Environmental destruction, in this case draining wetlands to make an industrial zone, exposes radioactive material. An egg floats near land, and is brought ashore. The twin fairies and Mothra herself show up asking "please give our egg back", but a greedy land developer, backed by even greedier billionaire, puts the egg at the center of a theme park. None of this can end well.

    I'm fairly displeased by the green screen/rear projection tricks in this one. It was early days for color, but it wasn't a technology ready for this time.

    The reporter and sidekick cameragirl are fine, kind of a Howard Hawks-like situation, and they're not stupid, and not unreasonably competent; there's only so much the press can do against a developer who doesn't care. Eggman, the reporter who loves eggs, would be annoying comic relief except he's not onscreen all that long.

    There's a visit and multiple visions of the natives of Infant Island, who've been nuked and struggle to survive in a barren wasteland. They're implausible primitive, but Japan has a long imperialist history of its own to deal with here. The fairies sing a song every scene they're in, which is somewhere between charming, mystical, and "oh shit I hate musicals".

    The monsters appear after half an hour. Godzilla as the walking force of destruction, Mothra as the ancient mother ready to protect her egg, and sacrifice to help the Japanese who have done her people so much wrong, and later the gross Mothra babies as the cycle of life. Their squeaking really gets on my nerves.

    The military/JSDF is portrayed unusually competent here. In most Godzilla movies, they are baffled, they try to fight, and die, and are utterly pointless. But this time they have competent plans, and are not doing too bad. They can't win but they can fight Godzilla to a standstill while evacuations take place.

    The ending isn't reasonable. 10 children and a teacher vs thousands dying on the mainland is a small price to pay. Godzilla hates squeaky little bugs like the Mothra larva, but they aren't actually harming it, and their secret power takes forever, during which time Big G should nuke them into oblivion. Hmn, in 1968, Star Trek had the Tholian Web episode, which has some similarities.

    ★★★½☆

  • Watchmen: Finished up. Happily this isn't getting a second season. Big time spoilers, but don't worry about it, you're not missing anything by keeping it secret.

    In the comics, Dr Manhattan's first action as a superhuman was to reassemble himself from nothing, after disintegration. When Ozymandias… inconveniences… him, he pulls himself back together in very little time. So it's utterly ludicrous that the whole plot of the series was to disassemble Manhattan again, and then "absorb" his "powers". His power is that his nervous system constantly reassembles matter to stay existing, a magic booster shot of Manhattan won't make someone else into a superhuman; maybe disassembling them in the right conditions would.

    So the hillbilly Senator, and Lady Trieu's entire plan, and the egg scene at the end, are just nonsense.

    Adrian's escape plan is dumb but amusingly portrayed, Jeremy Irons does occasionally wake up and play Ozymandias instead of just sleep-walking across the set in some tired English country drama. That's about the only part of this entire 9 episodes of bullshit that I enjoyed.

    Later, Adrian using frozen baby squid as an orbital Project Thor system is fun, but the actual effects would be rather more catastrophic, even with frozen organics from high atmosphere instead of tungsten rods from orbit, they're probably impacting at 3 km/s, ~1 Rick (Robinson, not Sanchez) each, so equivalent to 0.25 kg of TNT per squid, and there's thousands of squid. Holding a box over your head won't help. The area impacted would look like a giant cheese-grater had run across it to a few meters depth. And this is why we shouldn't let psychopaths have teleporters or spaceships!

    Fake delayed tension is all through this shitshow, but most notably in the minutes of "run!" "what?" "take shelter!" "who is this?" "you're gonna die!" "uh..." vamping when they would clearly already be dead. Again, I hate Damon Lindelof and hope he gets cancer of the fingers and tongue so the world will not again be plagued by his writing.

    Angela Abar (Regina King) is OK, decent action-hero chick, but she plays a detective very poorly; just hits her marks and says lines she clearly doesn't believe. As Laurie/Silk Spectre, I preferred the dumb but very fit Laurie (Malin Akerman) from the Zak Snyder Watchmen to this one (Jean Smart) who couldn't do a pushup let alone plausibly be an aging costumed vigilante G-woman.

    Hillbilly conspiracy theory cop Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson) is amusing, maybe not good, but funny. Very ancient Louis Gossett, Jr as Grampa Will is kind of sad, I didn't even recognize him, but I can't hate on Lou even if the role is badly written. Everyone else is a cypher or a walking meatstick.

    They couldn't even get Robert Redford to do a cameo as himself. Incompetent Lindelof wrote him a letter, and he wouldn't even respond.

    ★½☆☆☆ — I appreciate Irons' Adrian enough to not completely savage this, but don't watch it.

  • Adventure Time, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Rick & Morty, etc.: There's a lot of amusing cartoons for both kids and drunk/stoned adults on here.