reviews

Retrospective: The Howling (1981)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time again folks, to dive into another movie series to see how it has changed. And if you can read the text above you, you’ll know that our latest subject of examination is The Howling series! However, before I commence with the retrospective I just want to mention a couple things briefly. The first has to do with my Project X review. Yes, I am still hung up on that bloody movie. Anyway, at the end I threw in a little post-script defending my position on the movie regarding any questions of my objectivity in regards to giving the movie a 0.5/10. However, after giving it a little thought, I don’t think that that post-script was really warranted. A film review is simply one person’s analysis of a movie, and I found Project X morally indefensible. While I do try to temper my personal feelings somewhat (for example, Triumph of the Will is an expertly crafted movie, even if it is Nazi propaganda), if I have to excise my feelings entirely then it’s hardly my review of a movie then, is it? I expect my readers to engage with reviews from a critical perspective, so if you don’t agree with me then that’s fine – you’re entitled to your own opinion.

The second thing I need to mention is the passing of Roger Ebert. I’m sure that most of you have heard about this by now. While I myself did not follow him very closely, and found myself clashing with his reviews on occasion (most notably on his assessment of Kick-Ass), but for any film buff the news of his death is quite tragic. He was a very visible face of the profession, and his absence will most assuredly be missed.

This seriously made me tear up…

And now my final little thing before we get into The Howling. As soon as I published my last blog post (or perhaps the one before it), Metal Gear Solid V was announced. Suffice to say, as a fan of the series, I’m psyched. Sure, there has been a fair bit of fan backlash from David Hayter apparently not being involved (we’ll see…), but let’s be honest – that’s hardly going to break the game. In any case, the uncertainty about the game and the backlash about Hayter has me thinking towards the future: specifically, where will the series go from here? It’s looking like Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V will feed directly into the original Metal Gear, and so, aside from interquels, there’s no where really to go but into the future. I mean, sure, there’s the Rising series which is doing that, but they don’t have the same core gameplay which defines the Solid series. In any case, what direction do you go into the future? Do you have to bring back Solid Snake to avoid losing fans? And will doing so stretch narrative credibility (already convoluted narrative aside)? Well I think I have a great solution for these problems (if anyone who is reading this can pass this off to Konami or Kojima, PLEASE DO SO).

Make the next game star Meryl Silverburgh. Snake’s story was finished in Guns of the Patriots, and I sincerely hope that he will not come back and have that conclusion ruined. Rather, I think it’s time for Meryl to step up and earn the “Snake” codename. Part of the problem which Metal Gear Solid 2 had was that Raiden just came out of nowhere. He was a new character with no prior history for us to be introduced to him, and now suddenly he had to fill in Solid Snake’s shoes. However, Meryl gets around this problem – we’ve gotten to know her quite well over the course of 2 games, seeing her grow her skills and mature. Look at the above picture – she has even adopted Snake’s trademark headband. Kojima loves circularity in the Metal Gear story, and Snake/Meryl have a bit of a The Boss/Big Boss dynamic going on. Maybe FOXHOUND reforms and she gets to lead it or something along those lines. Furthermore, as Snake’s “apprentice”, she would fit in perfectly with Solid‘s stealth gameplay style. Another very key element is that she’d be a great female lead. Video gamers (and by extension, developers and producers) are often knocked for being sexist, and for not taking risks with female lead characters – I’ve read about production companies killing games on the basis that “no one wants to buy a game with a female character”. Making a Metal Gear game starring Meryl gets around some of these problems, putting a female face on a very high-profile game franchise (the only other one I can think of being Lara Croft). The fact that she is not an objectified and sexualized character also really helps give this a lot of credence (in contrast to, say, Mass Effect‘s Miranda, for whom the camera constantly focuses in on her ass). Sure, they may lose some douchebag fans in the process who can’t accept any form of change, but I think that this is where the Metal Gear series needs to go in the future in order to remain relevant.

Ok… wow I wrote way more than I intended to there. Well, let’s get into the meat of this post then: welcome to the first post in The Howling retrospective! In this entry we will be focusing on the first movie in the series, The Howling (1981)! For those who don’t know, I love werewolves as a monster. The idea for them is just so rock-solid: they represent our inner-beast, the Id, the overpowering impulse for violence, primal fear and so on. Also, a giant wolf that runs around and kills people is just plain cool. Unfortunately, werewolves have had a rough time translating to film in comparison to the other two classic movie monsters – zombies and vampires. Among the more notable examples of the genre are The Howling movies. Many werewolf aficionados will point to the original Howling movie as being one of (if not THE) best werewolf movies ever made. As for the sequels… well, we’ll get to those in the coming weeks. Anyway, is their assessment of The Howling spot-on? Is it really a must-see classic, if not in general, then for werewolf junkies? Well read on and find out…

Another great, iconic poster!

The Howling is based on a novel by Gary Bradner, and was directed by Joe Dante, a Roger Corman alumni (hey don’t knock that credit, Corman is practically responsible for modern cinema). At the time, Dante was fresh off of the well-received original Piranha and was approached to adapt The Howling to film. Aside from these two films, his other two major credits include the two Gremlins movies; clearly Dante was an accomplished creature-feature director, in addition to having an awesome name. The other major player in this movie was special makeup effects creator, Rob Bottin. Originally Rick Baker was hired, but he left to work on another werewolf movie, An American Werewolf in London instead. The Howling was really Bottin’s first major makeup effects job, but it was a key one – his very next movie was The Thing, and I think we all know how much his expertise propelled that movie into the territory of “classic”. I’m not particularly familiar with the cast unfortunately, but the one big name I see in it is Dee Wallace, a vertan of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, and who would later go on to appear in such movies as ET and Cujo. So all-in-all, the movie had assembled a decent director and cast and an amazing effects creator: certainly within the boundaries to create a horror classic.

The Howling was released in 1981 – a particularly notable year, as there were 3 other major werewolf-themed movies released which sparked a renewed interest in the creature (the other two movies were An American Werewolf in London and Wulfen, the latter of which is not technically a werewolf movie but rather a movie featuring extremely intelligent wolves… but it’s close enough to still count). In terms of its story, The Howling is quite unique. The film revolves around a news reporter, Karen White (Dee Wallace), who is traumatized by her encounter with a serial killer who she was luring for the police. She ends up being referred to a rehabilitation resort called “The Colony”. However, it soon becomes clear that The Colony is a secret place for werewolves to segregate themselves from humanity and that Karen and her companions are in danger as a result. Running through this narrative are themes of the tolls of psychological trauma (particularly in the scenes where Karen can’t have sex with her husband, Bill, and drives a rift into their relationship as a result). All-in-all, the movie takes itself and its subject matter quite seriously, an assessment which is somewhat at odds with some other peoples’ – the movie’s Wikipedia entry in particular claims that the movie is supposed to be self-aware and a satire, although I did not get this impression at all. The only way that it may be considered a satire is that The Colony seems to be based on Hippy Free Love communes… although, again, it doesn’t really seem to be commenting on them all that much. Of course, Wikipedia also says that the wolf allusions in the movie are “subtle” but they’re really not. Almost every single scene has someone watching a movie about wolves, reading a book about wolves or even eating freaking Wolf-brand chili. They’re so in your face that there’s no way you’d be surprised that it was a werewolf movie. In any case, The Howling feels like it was trying to be like Alien: B-movie subject matter trying to be taken as serious, A-level material.

That said, while the movie has A-level pretensions, it doesn’t live up to them. Instead, it really does feel like the B-movie it’s trying to emulate. There’s one sleazy character who basically only exists to be an “Elvira-esque” character, showing off her cleavage all the time and, in one scene, her… uh, pubes (it was the 80s). Another problem with the movie’s A-level aspirations is that the performances are very dull. Dee Wallace puts in a particularly flat performance, which is pretty crippling since she’s supposed to be carrying the narrative. Of all the characters, the only one I really sympathized with was Belinda Balaski’s Terry Fisher, and this is mostly due to her performance rather than any material she was given to work with. The story, while an interesting premise, actually is paced too slowly and really becomes rather boring at times. There’s also silly script conveniences, such as the guy I’d dub “Chekov’s Occult Book Seller”, who just so happens to know everything about werewolves, especially how to kill them, despite not even believing in them. Oh, and then there’s the fact that he says that the stuff about werewolves the characters know is “Hollywood bull crap”, but then proceeds to immediately spout out Hollywood bull crap about them himself (silver bullets do not appear in werewolf folklore, they were popularized by Hollywood horror films). Another complaint is that the music in the movie occasionally feels really out of place. I get the feeling that they just grabbed some stock horror music and just threw it into the movie and said “good enough”.

I’ve really been ragging on The Howling thus far and that’s because, quite frankly, I think that it’s massively overrated among werewolf fans. However, it does have a few very notable sequences which certainly make it worth a viewing. There’s a 10 minute section where we finally get some good werewolf action when Terry gets trapped inside of an office with one of the werewolves, and it’s awesome. We get some great looks at the makeup effects, and they’re quite good. My one complaint with the werewolf design would be that the ears are way too damn big, making them look more like were-jack rabbits, but other than that I quite like them. The other notable scene is the famous transformation. Check it out:

Pretty impressive… but you may have noticed a pretty major flaw with the whole sequence. For one thing, it’s WAY too drawn out (almost 3 minutes!), when normally the werewolves seem to take less than 5 seconds to transform. Also, more importantly, why the hell doesn’t Dee Wallace run away while he’s transforming? It’s just another plot convenience really, and literally as soon as he finishes transforming, she splashes his face with acid. So much for that. The only other really cool scene is the one where Karen and Chris escape The Colony while under attack from werewolves on all sides.

And then there’s the ending. Oh God, the ending. Even people who love this movie hate the ending. Karen gets bit by a werewolf and now she too becomes one. She decides that she has to reveal this to the world, and so goes on TV and transforms on the news. We are treated to this abomination:

That the f–k is that!?! Why did she transform into a cross between a wookie and a shih-tzu!!? And to make things even stranger, Chris then shoots her, on live TV. Oh, and to put a final nail in the ending, it is then revealed that the skank I mentioned earlier somehow avoided getting burnt to a cinder in the barn and is now on the loose. Then credits, superimposed over footage of a tasty-looking burger (cue Samuel L. Jackson). It’s just such an odd-ball ending, made worse by the terrible werewolf design that they decided to give to Dee Wallace.

All-in-all, I didn’t really care that much for The Howling. It has some cool sequences, but it hardly deserves its reputation as a classic werewolf movie. When doing a bit of research for this retrospective, I came across this post on IMDb and I think it sums up some of the big problems with the movie quite well:

“I feel like it’s more enjoyable if you lived through the 60s and 70s and dealt with the 80s, with all of the excess and fear those decades imparted. It deals with the umbridling of passions(freelove blah blah) and the backlash of that freedom from selfcontrol (AIDS yaddayadda). I think the Howling has lost a lot of its impact as the years have progressed. Most of us who grew up after the fact aren’t as affected by the shock value of these issues. We grew up in, or are growing in an environment where the 60s look ridiculous, the 70s look like a car crash, and the 80s were just a thin layer of make up trying to make American society look like it hadn’t just been beaten by an abusive partner.”

If you’re interested in werewolf movies, then I’d recommend seeing The Howling, but there are much better movies in the sub-genre. I would definitely recommend An American Werewolf in London, Dog Soldiers and Ginger Snaps – they’re all classics.

5.5/10

Be sure to come back soon for Part 2 of this retrospective: The Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf (AKA Stirba – Werewolf Bitch)!

Movie Review; Project X (2012)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to preface this review with a bit of a personal event which happened to me recently. On Saturday, March 16th around 9pm, I was riding the bus on way home. Shortly into the trip, the bus stopped to pick up a dozen teenagers just dicking around together. When they got on, they were loud, they were brash and they were disrespectful. And that’s before they started throwing ice at the bus driver. The bus driver tried to get them to stop being morons and let him get on with his job, but they started taunting him. Meanwhile, a couple of them which had already gotten aboard started holding the back door open so their friends could get on for free (as if the driver would let them on board after that…). Soon enough, they driver kicked all of the teens off the bus and started driving away as they started to punch and threw ice at the bus. The thing is, I knew when I saw that big crowd of kids that nothing good could come of it. Sure, while that might be prejudice on my part against teens, and while they are subjected to that sort of prejudice on a frequent basis, it’s not exactly unearned. In general, teens (especially groups of teens) are f–king self-absorbed morons.

What does that have to do with Project X? Basically everything, as you’ll soon see.

 

As a bit of background, I had heard about Project X being like the found-footage version of American Pie, but it didn’t really interest me. But then, much like with Noobz, I read an article about how the movie was really, really terrible on multiple levels. Maybe I’m a bit of a cinematic masochist, but I find this sort of indictment irresistible. Nevertheless, even I wasn’t prepared for exactly what it was that I was signing up for.

I’m not even going to mince words or build up any sort of uncertainty about what I thought about this movie, but rather I’m just going to state it upfront and outright: I absolutely loathed it. I was taking notes as I was watching it, and these notes read like a descent into madness – my first note was literally “less than 1 minute in, when the guy does a crotch grab and then starts yelling ‘HEY, I WANT SOME PUSSSSSSAY!!’ I know I am going to hate this”. By the end, my notes have lost coherence, becoming little more than garbled swear words decrying the movie, its characters and the filmmakers. The only consolation is that I get to write this review to try to capture why I hated it so much… I hope you enjoy this, because I know that I am going to.

 

First of all, it should be noted that Project X is a part of the found-footage genre. Now despite what you might think, I actually am not a found-footage snob like some reviewers. In fact I have quite enjoyed the majority of the films I have seen in the genre, such as The Blair Witch Project(which was quite frightening), Cloverfield, REC and Chronicle (which, in my humble opinion, really represented an evolution of both the superhero and found-footage genres). In fact, the only found-footage movie I didn’t really like was Diary of the Dead, but not due to the filming style, but rather because of the weak story and characters. All of these films took a central gimmick (the hand-held camera) and kept it consistent, using it in interesting ways (especially Chronicle). However, I felt that Project X used its central gimmick incredibly ineffectually. For one thing, it feels like it is really nothing more than a gimmick, used because it’s popular right now (a la, Paranormal Activity) and costs less to make. While this is a more minor issue, the use of the camera doesn’t really have consistency – the perspective is largely based around a single camera, but without warning it jumps to someone else’s camera a few times during the movie. In Chronicle this made more sense because the singular camera wasn’t what was important, but rather surveillance in general, but it feels like little more than convenience in this film. Finally, and most importantly, the camera is used in an extremely unnatural way. I’m not talking the Cloverfield-style “put down the camera and run!” sort of unnatural – I can live with that. What I mean is that the cameraman will document stuff which makes absolutely no sense for him to capture as a guy who is filming for a party.The movie forces in “quiet moments” where two characters talk privately to one another (you can tell they’re emotional because no one is talking about banging bitchez) or parts where the camera is watching from far away and yet still perfectly captures the dialogue going on. Even little things like changing angles during a conversation are forced in and just break the illusion of consistency. Then there’s other issues – why do they have a cameraman documenting a party which hasn’t even been planned at the start? Why did they get a cameraman who they don’t even know? Why are they documenting using an expensive camera when they’re just a bunch of teenagers? Honestly, it doesn’t make any sense and really breaks the illusion.

Moving on to the characters, who happen to be some of the most obnoxious douchebags I’ve ever seen in a movie. The most grievous offender is Costa, a loathsome little shit whose only priority and care in life is getting laid. I think he was meant to be endearing in his selfishness, like Stifler in American Pie, but he just comes across as a massive asshole. Maybe that’s because Sean William Scott is a much better character actor than Oliver Cooper, or because Stifler always got his comeuppance, or maybe even because he had redeeming traits. Whatever the case, this does not apply to Costa. He is gleefully irresponsible, self-centred, sexist and homophobic, even playing pranks to get babies to cry for a laugh. Holy shit, no I did not watch the North Korean propaganda version of Project X by mistake, the guy I just described is one of the freaking heroes of the movie.

The other characters aren’t even worth going into detail on because they can be summed up in a sentence or two. The supposed protagonist, Thomas Kub, is basically just a geeky teenager caught up in a party that he can’t control. His friend, J.B. is a fat loser, and that’s literally all you need to know about him. Kirby is the generic love interest who Thomas (and his friends for that matter) somehow doesn’t notice is not only really hot, but also has a crush on him for whatever reason. Finally there’s Alexis, the popular girl at school who, again, wants to bang Thomas for some inexplicable reason. Alexis Knapp (the actors in the film share their characters’ names for the most part) claims that she wanted her character to be more than the typical “hot chick” archetype, but that didn’t come out in the movie at all.

Okay, so by my tally that leaves us with a cast of flat characters and then one massive asshole to round it out. Well that’s fine and dandy, but terrible characters alone don’t sink a movie – after all, I quite liked Final Destination 5, and the majority of the cast there were pricks. So what did I think of the movie itself then? Well let me put it simply: less than 15 minutes in, I wanted to turn it off. The characters were so obnoxious that it was painful to watch. Not only that but there’s also a lot of empty space filled with pointless stuff, such as the couple minutes in the film where the main characters corner Costa in a bathroom stall and dump garbage on him… never before has mean-spirited pranking been more boring. Or how about the part where Costa makes pelvic thrusting motions at a lawn gnome for 10 seconds before deciding to steal it in little more than an obvious plot contrivance (since it turns out that the gnome was filled with ecstasy). Then there’s the pointless stuff which was just plain gross – I thought it was screwed up enough that they decided to film a girl taking a piss on the driveway (which she didn’t seem to have a single problem with), but then they also show another guy getting gang pissed on. BLOODY HELL. Ha ha, teenage antics and all that, right?

Anyway, the party gets ridiculously out of hand, and the neighbours come to try to break it up because it’s 11:30pm and the guy can’t get his freaking baby to go to sleep because of all the damn teenagers being morons. Sounds like a pretty reasonable request to me, but then again I’m not an abhorrent dick like Costa. He basically tells the guy to screw off and then his security team freaking tasers the guy out of nowhere. WHAT THE HELL. This guy is then treated like he’s a massive dick, when he’s acting totally reasonably.

 

You might notice that I haven’t really focused that much on the actual party that the movie revolves around. Well, what can I say? It’s a video of a party. There’s lots of time spent watching people drinking, doing drugs, running around naked and just acting generally irresponsible. It’s like watching a video of fireworks – sure, it might have been cool to watch for real, but do you really care about it when it’s just a video? For that matter though, how the hell did no one die at this party? J.B. does a freaking roof jump and breaks his pinky finger like it’s no big deal (he’s literally laughing about it), and a guy with a freaking FLAMETHROWER shows up and starts torching everything. But beyond the ridiculous things which happened in the movie, there were a ton of ways in which one of these idiots could have killed themselves, from overdoses to the parts where people are blowing up f–king beer bottles on the stove all over each other.

As for other issues with this movie, there are many. I could mention that the only reason that the movie features a midget (or, uh, I think little person might be the proper term now?) is so they can throw him in the oven for a cheap laugh. I could focus on homophobia, but I think that it’s really a minor issue in regards to this particular movie. No, the real focus should be on the ridiculous amount of sexism. With the exception of Thomas’ mother and a store clerk, literally every woman in this movie boils down to two things:

  1. Tits, and
  2. Ass

Remember when I was talking about Kirby being the love interest earlier? Normally in a teen comedy of this ilk, such as American Pie, the love interest will generally be fleshed out as something more than the T&A which most of the girls are shown as in the movie, if only by a little bit (in the case of American Pie, think Heather in comparison to Natalia). Kirby barely falls into this category – she’s completely undeveloped and really only serves as T&A half of the time anyway (quite, uh, literally at one particular moment where she steps out of the pool). Of course, she walks in on Thomas with Alexis, but she gets over it at the end because apparently if a guy’s sorry and you throw an epic party then you can get away with anything. Kirby’s hardly the exception though, since every other girl in the movie is ridiculously good looking and overtly sexualized. As far as we’re concerned, they all came to the party to have sex, full-stop. Even the freaking news anchor at the end of the movie is nothing more than a pair of boobs.

 

By the end of the movie, the characters have caused hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions of dollars worth of damage, but there’s hardly any acknowledgement of the consequences of their actions. Thomas’ dad barely even seems to care that his son burned down his house and destroyed his car (in fact he’s almost impressed). The epilogue claims that Thomas is the only one who actually suffered any sort of retribution for his actions (although it’s softened in that he gets Kirby), whereas Costa and J.B. get off completely scott-free. If you actually threw a party like that, you can be sure you’ll be getting a criminal record and probably arrested as well, which doesn’t exactly look great on a resume (not to mention the lack of a degree due to all the fines you had to pay). Possibly worst of all, Thomas is turned into something of a martyr – he was just trying to have a bit of fun with 1500 other people! Why should he get in trouble for that? Putting aside the obvious, this is an extremely irresponsible line of thought, and has already had its consequences – in the wake of the movie’s release, lots of total dumbasses decided to throw their own Project X Parties. The consequences of this should be pretty freaking obvious: millions of dollars of damage has already been caused and at least one person has died. I will reiterate what I said at the start of this review: teenagers are morons. Especially when they get together.

To put a point on things, Project Xwas horrendous. To people who defend this movie by saying that it’s just fun, that it’s not going for any Oscars or anything, I must say this: Terminator 2 is also fun. The difference is though, that Terminator 2 is an awesome movie, whereas Project X is a massive pile of shit. Why watch Project X when you could watch Terminator 2? If you think that’s an unfair comparison, then try this: Shoot ‘Em Up is a stupid movie, but it’s incredibly fun to watch. Project Xwas abysmal. Rather than try to explain just how bad it was, here’s a link to Thesaurus’ entry for “horrible”. There’s only one other movie I’ve seen that I hated more than Project X (and I’m going to withhold it for now because I want to write a retrospective on it sometime in the future).

 
And worst of all?
 
They’re making a sequel.
 
No words can express how I feel quite so adequately…
 
0/10
 
(If you think my score is pretty harsh, then I’ll consider this – even if I didn’t ding the movie an irredeemable piece of shit because of its ethics and treatment of minorities, I’d still harp on it for its awful characters, poor filmmaking and generic story. I think the very best I could muster if I was feeling generous would be a 2/10. So, either way you slice it, it’s still a cake made of shit.)

Retrospective: Final Destination 5 (2011)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Welcome back for the 5th and final entry in the Final Destination retrospective! In this post we’re covering the latest entry in the franchise, Final Destination 5. As I have mentioned previously in this retrospective, in pre-production it was being bantered around as 5nal Destination, although this was thankfully changed very quickly. That was one good decision, but after the disastrous The Final Destination, did anyone expect this to be any better than that? Was Final Destination doomed to the same law of diminishing returns which has plagued every other slasher series? Well, read on and find out…

Once again, before I go any further, I just have to mention that Final Destination 5 had some great promotional posters. I guess I’m a bit of a sucker for a great poster, but the art team really outdid themselves with this one. Some of them are just painful to look at (in a good way), but really capture the morbid spirit of the series quite well… in fact, the one with the rebars was so effective that it ended up getting banned by the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK… unwarranted in my opinion, but if they thought that was bad, then I would just hope they haven’t seen the DVD cover for Severance…

Anyway, after the shit-show that was The Final Destination (one which I enjoyed somewhat, but guiltily), it looked like the series was going to die… until the studio execs saw the box office numbers coming in. The damn movie made $186 million worldwide. Despite the big “THE” in its title, the producers decided that it was more of a suggestion than commitment and so set about working on a 5th entry in the franchise. However, thankfully, they knew they’d screwed up with The Final Destination and wanted to set things right. They claimed that they wanted to make the movie more suspenseful and dark. That’s all well and good, but talk is talk: remember what they said about wanting to use 3D properly and not just fling things at the audience in the previous movie? Marketing buzz is cheap, results are all that is really worthwhile in Hollywood.

Perhaps the most intriguing production news surrounding the film was that neither series directors James Wong or David R. Ellis were returning (Ellis was probably not asked back after the poor reception of The Final Destination and/or because he was working on Shark Night 3D and Wong… probably because everyone hated Dragonball Evolution and/or because he was working on the much ridiculed TV show, The Event). Instead, the producers announced the acquisition of a new director, Steven Quale. This was Quale’s first major film, having only directed a TV movie and the documentary Aliens of the Abyss. However, the man did have some impressive credits to his name, being second unit director on both Titanic and Avatar. As you can probably guess from his short CV here, the man is friends with James Cameron. In fact, apparently it was James Cameron who personally recommended him to direct this movie, which is pretty damn impressive. So, a man who has connections to the legendary James Cameron was going to be directing Final Destination 5? Colour me intrigued…

Well enough about the production and now onto the meat of the film itself. The characters are what you’d expect from this series – not the worst, but not the best either. I can’t say any of the leads did a standout job, but they were all serviceable. The tradition of throwaway characters continues though, with 4 obvious ones this time around (and 1 red herring): Isaac Palmer (who went to the Frankie Cheeks school of douche-baggery), Dennis Lapman (“the boss”, although he’s so throw-away in this movie that it’s actually quite hilarious), Olivia Castle (the obnoxious but pretty girl in the cast) and Roy Carson (the angry factory worker, who actually wasn’t even a part of the actual disaster). The red herring, Nathan (an intentionally subverted token black guy), is actually pretty cool, although he’s not given enough time to develop. While this is a bit of a problem in most Final Destination movies, it’s less of an issue here, since there are some actual character development moments built into the script, so I actually found myself sympathizing with the non-expendables (as few in number as they were).

As expected, the film follows the same basic set-up as the other movies, but with a bit of a twist… which we’ll get to in a minute. First of all, we have to talk about the absolutely spectacular opening disaster. In fact, it was declared one of the single best sequences of any film all year, in a year which included such movies as Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the final Harry Potter film, Sucker Punch and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It’s not even empty praise either – it really earned it. Don’t believe me? Well I’ll let it speak for itself:

It’s pretty clear that Quale has learned a great deal about spectacle from Mr. Cameron, because this scene is very Cameron-esque in its crowd-pleasing scope. I haven’t seen it in 3D, but from what I hear, it’s fantastic and I can believe it. The depth provided by it must make the viewing experience absolutely dizzying, and further plays (and preys) on peoples’ fear of heights. If I had to complain about this sequence, I’d say that I’m a little off-put by the sudden emphasis on gore, but it doesn’t really take away from the scene all that much. As far as I’m concerned, Final Destination 5 has the best opening sequence in the whole series.

So, does the movie blow its entire load in the opening 10 minutes then? Well, not exactly. Like I said, there’s a bit of a twist on the normal formula. However, rather than the twist being “he gets more than one premonition!” or “the photos have clues!”, the writers have come up with something quite interesting – Bludworth (Tony freaking Todd is back!) reveals that the only way to successfully cheat Death is to kill someone else in order to steal their remaining years away from them*. This idea adds a lot of suspense and tension to latter-half of the film which, in previous movies in the franchise, tended to be rather weak. They honestly should have introduced this new element in Final Destination 3, because it really is a great conceptual evolution for the series.

Beyond even the twist on the formula, Final Destination 5 would still be considered one of the best entries in the series if only for some of the masterful death sequences. The first of these, the gymnastics sequence, is so tense that I consider it a textbook definition of great suspense. Quale just does a great job setting up a number of potential causes of death, giving us many red herrings and just plain stringing the audience along until the shockingly simple payoff. Check it out:

Holy crap. That’s by far the best death scene in the whole movie (in part because it doesn’t rely on excessive gore to satisfy the audience), but the others don’t exactly disappoint either. The other one of particular note is Olivia’s death, which is sure to get more than a few people shifting in their seats just from the set-up alone. I won’t go into much more than that, but this image alone should suffice…

Also, I’d be remiss if I failed to mention the ending. If you plan on seeing it, then skip ahead a paragraph because this is a pretty massive SPOILER… So it turns out at the end that the two leads have survived the ordeal and are going to live happily ever after as a chef’s apprentice in France… wait a second. That’s right, the movie was secretly a prequel all along, and they just stepped onto the plane which blew up at the start of the first movie. I’m pretty sure no one saw that coming (in fact, on more than one list I’ve seen, it’s considered one of the best and most unexpected twists in cinema… not at the same level as Planet of the Apes mind you, but it’s quite impressive for a movie of this calibre). Again, it’s a bit of a piss-off to see the characters get killed at this point, but the cleverness of the ending softens the blow enough that it’s totally forgivable.

So, I’d say that it’s pretty clear that I quite liked this movie. Hell, I even loved the opening credits. While it’s still pretty unambitious conceptually, the level of craftsmanship on display is shocking. On my first time seeing the series, I would have put Final Destination 5 second to the original, but now that I’ve seen them both a few times, I’d have to give the crown to this entry. It’s just so well-done compared to the somewhat-flawed original.

7.5/10

With the success of this film (it made $158 million worldwide) it seems like there will be more entries in the series soon… and while I haven’t heard any announcements, I’d be satisfied if it ended here. The chances of pulling out another movie of this calibre are pretty slight, considering the producers’ resistance to any ambition beyond “teen slasher movie”. However, if it does happen, I hope that they really run with the premise and create something which breaks formula. I’ve got a few ideas of my own floating around, so if anyone from New Line is reading this, you should hit me up *wink wink*. I’d welcome any comments on what people think would improve the series as well if it continues.

Aaaand that does it for my first retrospective! If you have any comments on this series, I welcome them. Also, if you have any suggestions – be it for future retrospective series, or how I can improve my current style – then I’d welcome those as well. Finally, if you liked this, then I’d appreciate if you’d “Follow” the blog – I get ~25-50 views a day, but it’s always good knowing that you’re amassing an audience. Thanks for reading!

*This, of course, opens up some speculation as to Bludworth’s origins. The easy train of thought is to assume that he is Death incarnate, but the producers have denied this multiple times. However, I actually read a theory on TV Tropes which really stems from the twist in this movie: the theory goes that Bludworth had a premonition and killed someone in order to keep himself alive… in fact, he may have killed several people over the years to basically achieve immortality. It’s a chillingly intriguing idea which could provide plenty of material for a potential movie…

Retrospective: The Final Destination (2009)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Welcome back for Part 4 of the Final Destination retrospective! In this post we’re going to cover the poorly-titled The Final Destination. This was a bit of an intriguing entry for a couple reasons, although the fact that it was in 3D might be the most important. In fact, it was early to the party for the 3D craze, arriving a whole 4 months earlier than Avatar (and even then, Avatar didn’t reach a fever pitch until about 3 weeks after release when people actually started seeing it en masse). Did the 3rd dimension make this the best entry in the series yet? Well… read on and find out…

As a side-note before we get into the retrospective, I was a bit worried I wouldn’t get this entry out today as I have spent most of the weekend writing an essay for school. However, as of the time I’m writing this, I’ve got about an hour til midnight so I’ll either get it out by late on the 10th or early in the morning of the 11th. This is only really important because I want to have a schedule for my retrospectives of 3 or 4 days between posts (work permitting). To me, there’s nothing worse than a blogger who can’t maintain a consistent schedule and so I’m going to attempt to commit to one… for retrospectives anyway as a start. For regular blog posts I’m committing to at least 1 post every 7 days.

Anyway, enough of that, let’s talk about people getting killed… IN GLORIOUS 3D!

So after Final Destination 3, the series producers were looking to expand the franchise. They ended up deciding that 3D was a good way to do this (possibly anticipating Avatar, which had been in production for quite some time, or My Bloody Valentine 3D, although apparently they had planned Final Destination 3 to be in 3D oddly enough). James Wong was unavailable to direct (he was working on… Dragonball Evolution… good God), so the duties were passed on once again to David R. Ellis. Well… hopefully he learned from his experiences with Final Destination 2 and managed to create something better, right? Nothing wrong with a little optimism, right?

In this case, yes. The Final Destination is easily the worst movie in the entire series for a number of reasons.

First of all, the characters are largely unsympathetic. I liked the main character, Nick O’Bannon, his girlfriend Lori Milligan and the token black guy, George Lanter, but that’s literally the extent of it. Furthermore, it’s not due to the script or even the direction… if anything, it’s from the actors themselves, although I’d be hard-pressed to say anyone put in a great performance… and the main reason I liked Lori was because she was good looking to be brutally honest…

Anyway, everyone else is a massive douchebag. Nick’s best friend, Hunt, is completely unlikeable… almost as much as Frankie Cheeks. Ouch. There’s even a character who is literally just called the “Racist Man”, because that’s the extent of what his “character” is. So, once again, David R. Ellis presents us with cannon fodder for Death to have his way with, making it rather difficult to become engaged with the film.

“Well okay,” you may say, “I come to Final Destination for the deaths, not the characters anyway.” Well on that front the death set-ups are… strange. At one particularly silly stretch of the movie, a character gets her head stuck in her sunroof while inside a car wash, while at the same time, another character gets his ass stuck to the bottom of a pool… umm, what? Even worse though, most of the time the film doesn’t properly build enough tension before a death – Death seems to be striking at random half the time and sometimes the deaths themselves are just really abrupt, particularly in the opening scene. And speaking of the opening scene, I’m not sure what they were thinking. The other films’ opening disasters preyed on common phobia – fear of flying, fear of getting in a huge pileup, fear of rollercoasters. All sensible. But this movie has the fear of… race cars? Rednecks? And, near the end, fear of movie theaters? Uh, okay… I don’t know about you, but I can’t say I’ve ever been worried about getting killed at a sporting event. And for that matter, how does half the arena get destroyed by a race car crash? The stupidity in this movie is pretty boggling (although the death of the Racist is pretty awesome).

Another point of contention would be that the deaths look really fake half the time. In previous Final Destination movies, they used lots of dummies, make-up effects and minimal use of computer effects for the deaths, and they worked quite convincingly most of the time. However, in The Final Destination, the majority of the deaths are done using CGI. I can’t be sure of the reasons for this, but I imagine it’s in part due to the 3D focus. Apparently the producer, Craig Perry, said that he wanted the 3D to add drama and not be there to throw things at the audience, but that did not translate to the final product at all. I’ll admit I haven’t seen this in 3D, but from what I’ve seen of it in 2D, it seems like all they did with it was throw shit at the audience (and, in one particular instance, I mean that quite literally).

As for the story… eh, what about it? It’s the exact same plot we’ve seen in the past 3 films, and they really didn’t go to a lot of effort to differentiate it. And they didn’t even put Tony Todd in it! I mean, at least he got an un-distracting voice-over cameo Final Destination 3, but he’s completely absent here. At least the ending didn’t piss me off this time, because I didn’t really give a damn about the characters getting run over by a transport… and, admittedly, they were a bit clever about it all – the ending reveals that everything which the characters has done to subvert Death has actually been a part of his plan all along (*cue transport truck*). It’s clever and expands the series somewhat, but for this movie it’s too-little, too-late…

Honestly, the best part of the movie is the opening credits – the montages are very cool and the music is good as well (apparently the soundtrack was highly praised, oddly enough). Otherwise, The Final Destination is objectively a piece of crap. Between this, Final Destination 2 and Shark Night 3D, my opinion of David R. Ellis is pretty low (although he was a hell of a second unit director).

Yet, despite all of what I have just said, tearing the movie apart… I kind of enjoy it. I think I’ve seen it more than any other Final Destination movie, which even I’ll admit is pretty sad. I enjoy it in the same capacity that I enjoy the (even worse) Aliens vs Predator: Requiem – an exercise in stupid fun that doesn’t require anything beyond that. It’s a bad movie on pretty much every level, but it’s also enjoyable and kind of fun in spite of it all. It takes a special kind of movie connoisseur to enjoy a movie like this, but if you can extra fun from crappy movies then you might dig this… either way, I’d recommend any other movie in this series over this any day of the week though.

3/10

Be sure to come back soon for the final entry in this retrospective: Final Destination 5!

Retrospective: Final Destination 3 (2006)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Welcome back, good readers, to Part 3 of the Final Destination retrospective! In this post we’re going to cover the next entry in the series, Final Destination 3. If you haven’t read the previous 2 entries in this series, then I would recommend that you do so to get up to speed and see how this franchise has changed over the years. Did this entry improve on the formula after the disappointing Final Destination 2? Well, read on to find the answer to that…

Final Destination 2 was pretty terrible, and really wasted the promise that the original contained, trading that out for laughs and gore. Perhaps the producers and folks at New Line Cinema realized this and ended up getting James Wong back on board for the third entry in the series. Promisingly, Wong was both writing and directing, so with any luck the crew who crafted the first film would be able to put it back on track (so to speak), right?

Umm, well no, not exactly.

First off, this is the point where the series really embraced its formula and became a straight-up slasher film. Aside from the leads, death is almost never subverted, so the middle section of the film is basically just scenes of people getting killed in sequence. This could have totally destroyed any sense of suspense that the film could try to establish, but there’s a bit of a twist: suspense no longer comes from wondering if Death is going to kill his victims, but rather how. This is done in an odd manner (Death hid hints in some… photographs? Dammit Death, you bloody photobomber!), but it does invoke a sense of morbid curiosity.

Considering that this is a Final Destination movie, it should also be noted that the opening disaster was a strange choice. On one hand, it makes sense – a lot of people are afraid of roller coasters, so you can prey on that phobia – but on the other, it comes across as rather silly. In fact, the film is pretty silly overall: bimbos get killed in a tanning bed, a guy’s head gets torn up by an errant flying motor, a football player’s head gets crushed by his weight machine, etc. Compounding this problem is the decision to set the story in a high school setting. Yeah, the other 2 films in the series had followed high schoolers (or possibly early college in the second movie), but they didn’t center their actual story around that setting, it was merely in the background. Unfortunately, Final Destination 3 revels in high school horror and all that that entails – there’s the usual social cliques for each of the characters (jocks, preps, goths, etc) and the romance subplot you can expect in basically every high school movie. Most of the characters are now totally throw-away and exist only to get killed to sate our bloodthirsty appetite… especially Frankie Cheeks. Good God, he is by far the most grating character in the entire series.

That said, Final Destination 3 has its positives. For one thing, it’s fairly well-made overall. Sure, it’s very silly and gratingly cliche at times, but it still manages to be far more interesting than your average horror-slasher. Final Destination 3 manages to be quite entertaining overall (thanks to Wong’s direction), even if the script is pretty crappy (thanks to Wong’s, uh… writing). I’m also quite glad that, while the movie shifted the series straight into slasher-horror, it isn’t overly gory. Now I’m not adverse to gore by any means, but I think it often distracts from any sort of actual horror a movie could try to build up, is just a crutch for some bad filmmakers and is just totally fetishized (see any Saw sequel, especially those after the 3rd). Anyway, considering that the Saw series and Hostel were kicking off the gore-porn trend at this time, that’s pretty surprising to me.

Anyway, you might be able to tell that I’ve been skirting around something throughout this whole post, and if you could then you’re totally right. That “something” is the movie’s greatest strength: Mary Elizabeth Winstead and, to a slightly lesser degree, Ryan Merriman. The chemistry between the two leads totally carries this movie – without them, Final Destination 3 would probably be utter crap. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, fresh off her first major role in Sky High, really elevates the material she’s given here and makes her character, Wendy Christensen, very interesting and sympathetic. Considering the crappy script she’s given, Winstead’s performance makes this movie far more watchable than it has any right to be. In fact, I’ll go ahead and say she’s my favourite character in the whole series. Ryan Merriman’s Kevin Fischer also aids in this regard, as the chemistry between Wendy and Kevin is excellent (perhaps they became friends beforehand on the set of The Ring Two?). Wendy and Kevin really form the emotional core of the film, which is especially important in a movie with so many expendable characters. In fact, it makes the ending quite infuriating because it is certainly implied that (SPOILER ALERT) they get offed like every other bloody hero in this series. I guess they never actually show it for real, so you can hold out some hope that they escaped, got pregnant and gave birth in order to end the cycle, but that’s mostly just optimistic wishing on my part… all I’ll say is stop killing your freaking leads for no good reason!!!

The only other character of (positive) note is Kris Lemche’s Ian McKinley, a philosophical goth character. While he has even less material to work with than Winstead or Merriman, Lemche manages to make Ian a very interesting character in his limited screen time. Ian’s philosophizing about Death’s plans actually manages to create some tension and moral questioning for the leads. He becomes unhinged towards the end and makes for a rather weak secondary villain, but up until that point he’s quite intriguing.

As you can probably glean, Final Destination 3 is largely buoyed by Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ryan Merriman’s performances, competent filmmaking and a bit of good ol’ fashioned fun. However, the script is extremely weak and the series had become noticeably formulaic at this point. It’s a pretty middling entry overall. I enjoy it for the fun that it manages to deliver, but I really appreciate it for the performances from the main characters – without that, this would really be a hollow entry and I probably wouldn’t have even gotten into the series at all.

6/10

Be sure to come back soon for Part 4 of this retrospective: The Final Destination!

Retrospective: Final Destination 2 (2003)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Welcome back to Part 2 of the Final Destination Retrospective! In this post we are (obviously) covering the second entry in the franchise: Final Destination 2! This entry in the series is interesting for a few reasons: not least of which because it is the only direct sequel in the series. I would definitely recommend reading the first entry in this retrospective if you haven’t yet in order to see how Final Destination 2 tries to differentiate itself and improve on its predecessor. Does it succeed? Well… we’ll get to that in a minute.

Before we get into the movie itself, I just want to say that this movie has an awesome poster. Seriously, look at it. The use of colour and blending is really striking and visually appealing. Certainly far better than the Brazilian DVD cover… how did they ever consider that better than the official movie poster?

Anyway, moving on. Final Destination was an unexpected success, and so New Line Cinema was eager to make a sequel. Unfortunately, the original crew was unavailable at the time so an almost entirely new production team was brought in. This meant that the film was given completely different writers and a new director, David R. Ellis. This was a bit of an… odd decision to say the least. David R. Ellis has a long history in Hollywood as a stuntman and coordinator, as well as a second unit director. His one full directorial credit at the time was Homeward Bound 2: Lost in San Francisco… or, as I remembered it from my childhood spent watching Homeward Bound all the time, The Exact Same Movie as Before. Since Final Destination 2 his major credits have been Snakes on a Plane, The Final Destination and Shark Night 3D… his CV is full of largely trashy and gratuitous horror films. With the benefit of hindsight, you can probably figure out for yourself that he wasn’t exactly a great choice (although, to be fair, original director James Wong has put out some seriously shitty movies in his time, including The One and Dragonball: Evolution). Also, on a related note, it turns out that David R. Ellis passed away in January, which I did not realize until now. He wasn’t exactly a director I liked, but I appreciate the work Ellis put into film during his lifetime (look at his credits on IMDb, he worked on some big films like Scarface).

Anyway, the only returning cast from the first movie are Ali Larter’s Clear Rivers and Tony Todd’s Bludworth – both good characters in the previous film, although the decision not to bring back Devon Sawa’s Alex Browning really hurts Clear’s character. The chemistry between Clear and Alex was part of what made these two characters interesting in the previous film, and by cutting Alex out Clear becomes considerably less engaging – in this movie she is less of an independent figure and more of a poor attempt to make a badass chick. Aside from Clear, the two main characters are AJ Cook’s Kimberly Corman and Michael Landes’ officer Thomas Burke. Unfortunately, neither character is anywhere near as engaging as the main characters from the previous film. I mean, was somewhat sympathetically inclined towards Kim and Michael, but neither character was particularly well-acted or had much depth at all. In fact, the only other new character I even had an inkling of sympathy for was Rory (Johnathan Peters), a hopeless drug addict who’s pretty much resigned to death. However, Rory’s really the exception here: pretty much every character in Final Destination 2 is underdeveloped (if developed at all) and are basically just there to act as cannon fodder.

At least Kim is easy on the eyes. 😉

Okay, well they dropped the ball on the characters… how’s the story then? Well I’ve got some good things to say here at least. For one thing, it’s obvious that there was at least an effort put in to break the 3-step Final Destination formula of “1) Premonition of disaster 2) Try to escape death 3) Everyone dies” which basically every movie in the franchise follows. For one thing, Final Destination 2 shakes up the formula slightly – Death is working in reverse, trying to clean up all the loose ends caused by the characters in the last movie. This element is revealed about midway into the film and is actually quite an interesting connecting twist, although it could have done with some better integration. The other major new element is the idea that the characters can successfully cheat Death through certain means, in this case creating a life which would not have existed otherwise (and therefore making Death’s former plan out of date). This is actually an element that I really liked, and one which I wish they would reintegrate in future installments. I hate how they always kill off the characters at the end of these sorts of films, it’s basically a big middle finger to the audience saying “oh, did you care about those characters? We didn’t, they’re just there to die.” That aside, if the characters in this film were better done then this particular change might have been even better to Final Destination 2 overall, but as it is it’s a cool expansion of the concept.

However, while there are some changes to the formula, Final Destination 2 is largely just a rehash of the first movie, only with more of an emphasis on the death scenes. That said, the first 45 minutes work fairly well, but feel like they only exist to get us to the aforementioned death scenes. Compare this to the first movie where everything, up until the final 20 minutes, felt very natural and gelled together well – the character development was considered just as important as the death scenes. Luckily, while Final Destination 2 emphasizes the deaths more, they really pull out all the stops on them. First off, the opening disaster is FREAKING AWESOME. Watch this:

Holy shiiiiit… say what you will about David R. Ellis, but I’m sure that this sequence was totally his work. As a second unit director he was responsible for such classic action scenes as the car ambush scene from Clear and Present Danger or the highway chase in The Matrix Reloaded (both of which were the only real highlights from their respective films), and you can really tell that that’s the case here. Of course, the scene is totally ridiculous (cars turning into nuclear bombs when their roof hits a trailer), but undeniably spectacular as well. Of all the opening disasters in the series, this one is really the visceral highlight for quite some time.

Aside from the opening disaster, Final Destination 2 is also the point where the individual death scenes themselves started getting very creative and really become the crux of the films themselves. Consequently, this also marks the point where the series really started to move towards horror/slasher rather than thriller, although it hasn’t abandoned its roots completely yet. In any case, this entry features some really wicked deaths – while they aren’t set-up as well as they were in the previous film, the deaths themselves are wildly creative and very darkly funny (highlights at 0:55, 2:20 and 2:43):

So what is my assessment of Final Destination 2? Honestly, while I think the deaths in this one are pretty cool at times, it’s the last 45 minutes that I don’t particularly like. The film was being pretty clever up until that time, at which point it basically becomes a montage of deaths strung together weakly. In all, while it has its moments and is certainly not the worst movie in the series, Final Destination 2 is probably the one that I enjoy the least – it really had some promise, but it doesn’t come to fruition in part because it has the weakest cast in the whole series. I’d recommend it if you’re a fan of the series, but if not then the 2 videos I posted here should provide all the highlights you need.

4/10

Be sure to come back soon for Part 3 of this retrospective: Final Destination 3!

Retrospective: Final Destination (2000)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Hello readers, I’m about to embark on something that I’ve been wanting to do since I started this blog in December. As I’m sure most of you are aware, I’ve done movie reviews quite frequently on this blog. In fact, 4 of my Top 5 most-viewed posts have all been movie reviews (for those curious, my top 5 posts are: Hulk, Judge Dredd, 5 Reasons to Prepare for the Ape Apocalypse, Transformers 3 and Dredd). However, since starting this blog I have really wanted to start writing franchise retrospectives – and I’m not talking about mega-franchises like Harry Potter or Terminator. Rather, I want these sorts of articles focus on franchises which, for whatever reason, don’t get nearly as much written about them and yet have a very interesting history (well… maybe I’ll do a Star Wars every once in a while, but it’ll be the exception rather than the rule). If you were ever looking for a place to read about The Howling series or Resident Evil movies, then I’d suggest you start following me! If not… well then follow me anyway, make me feel like I’m accomplishing something here.

Anyway, the first franchise which is getting the retrospective treatment from me is the Final Destination series. As a little background, I was only really dimly aware of these movies until about a year ago – I had always thought they were bog standard slasher films. My only real interactions with the series had been in the form of a Final Destination 3 poster which I swear was outside the local movie store for years, and the laughter which accompanied the (thankfully redacted) announcement that the 5th entry in the series would be called 5nal Destination (who didn’t read that as “Anal Destination”? Seriously?). However, this changed when a friend and I happened to be hanging out when Final Destination 3 came on the TV. Despite having little interest at the time, we watched the first 30 minutes or so before we had to leave. However, what I had seen had been very intriguing, so I decided to track down the movie and see how it ended. I’ll save my thoughts on that particular movie for later, but suffice to say I tracked down the other films and watched them all out of order (I watched them in the following order: 3, 5, 1, 4, 2).

First off, I’m going to mention the characters. Unlike some other movies in the series, Final Destination actually goes to some effort to flesh out its characters and make you give a damn about them. Devon Sawa’s Alex Browning is an interesting lead, a bit of an outsider who you can’t ever be entirely sure isn’t totally crazy. I also quite liked Ali Larter’s Clear Rivers, a character which actually manages to subvert the stereotypical “female love interest” role and become a figure of her own. In fact, of the main cast there’s only really 2 throw-away characters there to provide some quick and easy death fodder… which is actually not too bad by the standards of this series. The lead actors put in acting which ranges from “pretty good” to “serviceable”. Of the leads, I felt that the only one which was really weak (both in acting and characterization) was Kerr Smith’s Carter Horton, the typical bully character. However, he does develop a bit by the end which redeems him somewhat. Oh, and no discussion of Final Destination characters is complete without a mention of Tony Todd’s Bludworth – he only gets about 5 minutes of screen-time, but he just steals every scene he’s in. The man has a creepy voice and just knows how to chill you to the bone with little more than a look and a smile.

Of course, in addition to all of these characters is the main attraction of the whole movie – Death itself. Despite never actually appearing on-screen (aside from some very mysterious liquid and in a reflection), Death is a very real presence and character in the film. The film really establishes Death as a morbidly creative force which interacts with the world to kill his victims, dropping them clues about their impending demise for little more reason than we likes the thrill of the hunt. The methods which Death uses to slay his victims are very imaginative, although they don’t devolve into full-on gore porn like some of the later films in the series. The fact that Death never actually appears just makes him all the more frightening – he’s an omnipresent, inescapable, inexhaustible force which is going to inevitably hunt down and kill the characters that we are becoming invested in and he could strike at any time. Furthermore, compared to other slasher villains like Freddy Kruger, Jason Voorhees or Leatherface, he doesn’t devolve into self-parody – Death is established pretty early on as having a very dark sense of humour and irony and this is one of the aspects of the series which has remained true throughout (although each movie will play with the details somewhat). Director James Wong should be commended for pulling off this sense of malice for a villain who isn’t physically present, because I can just imagine how easily it could have backfired on him. The fact that it was his first film makes the achievement even more impressive.

What is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the first Final Destination is that it is quite different from its successors. Whereas subsequent movies in the franchise would skew closer to slasher-horror and eschew character development in favour of a body count, the original Final Destination is obstinately a supernatural thriller film with some very light slasher elements. The emphasis is really clearly on mystery and suspense rather than on killing off people in the bloodiest ways the writers can imagine. It’s unfortunate that the other movies in the series don’t do this more often, but in Final Destination characters actually survive Death’s attempts to kill them more often than not. As a result of this, and of the fact that we actually give a damn about the characters, the potential death scenes have a lot of suspense – you can’t really be sure whether or not a character really is going to die, or even the manner in which Death will attempt to off them. Of course, Death has a really morbidly creative streak and his plans tend to have redundancies in order to ensure that he collects his kills…

Any discussion of a Final Destination film is incomplete without mentioning the central disaster. In this movie it’s a plane crash, which really does prey on many peoples’ fears. The filmmakers could never have predicted that this would become even more powerful only a year later after 9/11 – seriously, I thought that they were just banking on post-9/11 paranoia when I first saw this movie, until I found out that it was released a full year prior to it… quite prescient indeed! In any case, the disaster itself is very frighteningly well-done, weakened only in that it doesn’t look entirely convincing now. However, it was done with nearly entirely practical effects, so it’s quite impressive what they managed achieve.

Of course, following the opening disaster, the surviving characters are one-by-one picked off by Death, and it is here that the film slowly starts to come apart. Being the first in the series, Final Destination isn’t plagued by franchise fatigue yet, and so it manages to keep this section interesting with some creativity and philosophy rather than defaulting to slasher tropes. The characters struggle with a variety of conflicting emotions – why (and how) were they spared from the wreckage of Flight 180? And when Death starts coming after them, they all are forced to wrestle and come to grips with the idea of their own mortality. It’s some really interesting stuff, and far beyond what I would expect of a teenage thriller/horror film of this sort. Unfortunately, the last 20 minutes of the film largely drop this philosophizing and it is at this point that things start to get really weak. I felt that these last 20 minutes really didn’t engage with me nearly as well as the rest of the movie have and end up putting a bit of a damper on the whole experience… and that’s just unfortunate, because I really do like this movie. It has some great ideas – they might not all be executed perfectly, but it’s generally a well-done film with an intriguing premise that puts it head-and-shoulders above a run of the mill thriller/horror movie. When I first saw it I would have given it an 8/10, although I think that was a bit generous now. That said, I definitely enjoyed it, and certainly recommend seeing it even if you are turned off by the ideas of the sequels.

7/10

Be sure to come back soon for Part 2 of this retrospective: Final Destination 2!

Video Game Review: Dead Space 3

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

I was struck with a bit of good fortune this week: a couple months ago it occurred to me that my school’s reading week coincided with the release date of Dead Space 3. I loved Dead Space, its sequel (which is easily one of my favourite games of this console generation), Extraction and most of the extended universe as well (the Ben Templesmith comic was amazing, the other comics and Martyr were decent, but the animated films kind of sucked) and so clearly I was eagerly anticipating the latest entry in the series. However, as I followed the pre-release info I was getting understandably nervous.

  • “They’re adding co-op? Didn’t that screw over Resident Evil 5? Isn’t it hard to make a horror game with co-op?”
  • “That trailer really didn’t scare me at all. It looked like a big shoot-’em-up like Lost Planet.”
  • “WTF, there are going to be human enemies this time!?”

Despite my concerns, there was still no way I was going to pass up another excursion to the Dead Space universe. So, were my fears unfounded, or was Dead Space 3 a massive disappointment? Well I suggest you read on to find out… (Note that for my first [and so far only] play through, I played on Hard Mode and did not do any co-op or get any DLC aside from what’s bundled with the Limited Edition. Also, there are some spoilers in this review, so be careful.)

Dead Space 3 opens very… dishearteningly. Basically all my worst fears seemed to be confirmed within the first 30 minutes. The prologue is pretty interesting, but it definitely emphasizes action and scripted set-piece moments over the slow-building tension and horror that the series is known for. Things get even worse when it shifts back to poor ol’ Isaac Clarke. While I’m a bit dissatisfied with the story at this point (which I’ll get to later), what really disappointed me here was the shootouts with Unitologist gunmen. This feature was incredibly ill-advised for a number of reasons. For one thing, the cover system is terrible. Isaac can crouch behind cover, but it doesn’t really provide him with much protection at all. There’s also very little hit feedback, so you can be taking damage and not know it unless you quickly glance at your RIG’s health bar. The enemy AI isn’t that smart either – they just sort of make their way to you while firing until you choose to blow their heads off or shotgun them. They don’t provide any challenge at all until late in the game when they’re attacking you from 2 directions at once or at one particular instance where 2 guys on a balcony are firing rockets at you while you’re simultaneously being attacked by Twitchers, which took me almost a dozen tries to overcome. It should also be noted that I was playing the game on Hard Mode on my first play through, so the general lack of challenge is pretty unfortunate and surprising. Finally, the gunplay is simply just not that fun. Dead Space isn’t built to accommodate a third-person cover-based shooter, and so throwing one in anyway wasn’t a very good idea.

This opening doesn’t have the same sort of “oomph” that Dead Space 2 did: in that game, the opening cinematic laid the groundwork for that game very well, and then when the game started in earnest I literally shouted “HOLY SHIT!!!!” All that without having to resort to over-the-top theatrics to try to get your blood pumping. In short, Dead Space 3 has lost most of the sense of subtlety and tension that the previous games fostered, something that the opening hour demonstrates very well to all the people who feared such a thing.

Anyway, once you get beyond the first couple chapters, Dead Space 3 starts to pick up a bit. The chapters spent in space feel largely like classic Dead Space gameplay… with some refinements and new issues of course. One notable difference is the new crafting mechanic, which allows you to customize your weapon, its attachments and upgrades, then add further upgrades in the form of circuits. The crafting benches also allow you to make health and ammo packs, as well as other items. Put simply, the crafting mechanic is very handy and it’s fun to put together a super-weapon: I took the DLC Evangelizer Carbine + Shotgun attachment and it lasted me the whole game as my mainstay weapon, just tweaking it with new modifiers as the game went on. The only downsides to this system are that enemy encounters can be a bit of a joke as you blow them away with your super-gun, and that I miss having 4 weapons to switch between for different situations instead of 2… yeah you’re technically still running 4 different guns now, but that also means you’re down the alternate-fire from the previous guns as well. It also sucks when you’re in the middle of an encounter and then suddenly find yourself needing to reload, losing the use of one of those guns. The other issue with crafting is that you’re never going to be short on health or ammo packs… not that the game doesn’t provide you with tons of them anyway. Health and ammo are ridiculously plentiful in Dead Space 3, even in Hard Mode. I literally never ran out of ammo in this game. In contrast, the last 1/3 of Dead Space 2 was an intense exercise in ammo conservation. I had to get really good at dismemberment, stasis and kinesis if I wanted to survive… in Normal mode, no less. In comparison, Dead Space 3 is a breeze.

Another new feature in Dead Space 3 which I really liked was the addition of optional side-quests. While they’re all just a half-dozen Necromorph encounters to get a key to unlock a door, then a couple more encounters to find some epic loot, the developers did a good job ensuring that they stayed interesting… even if they begin to grow stale towards the latter point of the game. Some of these are co-op only, but that didn’t bug me too much in all honesty. I hope they were a little more diverse than the single-player ones in any case.

Those disappointed that Dead Space 3 would be on a planet shouldn’t be too put-off, since they’re actually going to spend quite a few hours in space. However, the action soon switches to Tau Volanis, which is where the game actually manages to wring out a few scares and intensity. In the first 30 minutes or so that you’re on the planet, you have to keep your body temperature regulated or you’re freeze to death. This makes it pretty dangerous to be outdoors for very long – especially in a fight where you’re given another way to die on top of being eviscerated by Necromorphs. The Feeders also will scare the piss out of you the first few times you run into them. They can be dealt with without confrontation, something this game desperately needed. Trying to sneak past and distract them is intense, they’re creepy little bastards and if you alert them then it can be hell trying to deal with them coming from all directions. Enemies also occasionally burst out of the snow which can be startling (although not nearly as much as I would have expected it to be).

The stretch on Tau Volanis largely continues the same problems of the rest of the game, however. Enemy encounters are unfortunately still very straight-forward: Stalkers, my favourite enemies from Dead Space 2 for their clever AI, are reduced to simple and predictable foes since they’re far more aggressive now. Encounters can also get infuriating as enemies have a tendency to drop in behind you unannounced while you’re fighting waves of foes. It’s not scary, it’s just annoying. The planet setting has some great potential to be just as terrifying (if not more) than space, but the game does not live up to this promise. Just imagine how scary it would be to be in a blizzard with limited visibility, but hear Necromorphs creeping up on you just outside your field of vision. Or how about backtracking through a non-combat area only to discover a fresh set of footprints followed you through that area – OH SHIT, WHAT/WHERE IS IT?!?!

For the purposes of this review, I feel the need to mention the latter chapters since some new issues arise there as well. On the positive side, super-charged kinesis is EPIC. Tearing the limbs off of living Necromorphs never gets old, and throwing whole Markers into the eyes of a giant monster is probably the coolest thing in the entire game. However, the last chapter was a massive piss-off. Ignoring the physics of running and fighting on a giant rock which is flying through the air towards a living moon, the game doesn’t tell you that there’s a blizzard behind you which is tearing said rock to bits if you don’t move fast enough. I literally died here about a dozen times with absolutely no explanation and was understandably frustrated until I just ran through the level. The lack of explanation here just ticked me off, and could have been easily fixed with some dialogue along the lines of “oh shit Isaac, the ground behind us is disappearing! Run!” The final boss fight is also exceptionally easy (although this seems to be a Dead Space hallmark at this point), although it was also very cool at the same time.

Moving on to other notable aspects, the story is a bit of a convoluted let-down in Dead Space 3. The scene is set for Isaac’s personal journey, but the game fails to set up the events transpiring in the universe at large. Apparently an army of Unitologists have overthrown EarthGov and are causing Necromorph outbreaks across the galaxy through terrorist actions! Holy shit, that sounds insane! Unfortunately, the game doesn’t set-up, elaborate on or provide closure to these events at all, which is a damn shame. Hopefully we get some extended universe pieces which cover these developments, because whoever wrote the script for Dead Space 3 didn’t seem to care. The secondary characters are also really throw-away, I couldn’t really remember who they were or even really care when they died. Simply, the plot is nowhere near as engaging or coherent as the previous games were, but I’m glad they did not default to the “Necromorph outbreak occurs and character X has to survive it” template which nearly every other Dead Space media falls into.

Other things worth noting are that this game is far less violent than the previous 2 games were. This is surprising and odd, and really just seems like another side-effect of a shift to a mass-market focus. Honestly, there’s only 1 really violent on-screen death and the camera jumps away from it after a split-second. On a more positive note though, the co-op mode is very unintrusive and should set the bar for co-op modes in the future in my opinion.

Considering how much bitching you just read through, it probably sounds like I absolutely hated Dead Space 3. However, honestly I did enjoy it: the basic mechanics of the series are very enjoyable and the game adds some fun new elements to the mix. That said, the game does not live up to the expectations that the rest of the series established. Put simply, EA and Visceral sold out with Dead Space 3, toning down the series’ horror elements in favour of the lowest common denominator shooter/action market. I can live with that if that’s the future of the franchise, but if so then they should build the next game to be action from the ground up, rather than tack it onto a horror framework.

Bottom-line: Dead Space 3 is a lot of fun, but it’ll be a disappointment if you’re a fan of the series.

7/10

Movie Review: Noobz

~ Barloq ~ 2 Comments

So recently I stumbled across this review of a video-game movie called Noobz. Normally this wouldn’t excite me all that much, except this particular review ravaged the film. As a bit of a purveyor of bad cinema and crappy-movie lover, I instantly knew that I had to track down this film and review it for myself. Was it really as bad as Dan Ryckert said? Well, read on and find out…

So what exactly is Noobz? Well it’s supposed to be a comedic road-trip movie about a clan of gamers trying to get to the biggest gaming tournament in the country, celebrating gaming culture along the way. Honestly, that’s a bit of a rote scenario for an independent film (see Fanboys for Star Wars, One Week for supposedly “Canadian” culture, etc), and Noobz really doesn’t distinguish itself from the other similar movies in the genre… well, not in a positive way anyway. Why not? Well for one thing, it does a really, really poor job capturing gamer culture. While I didn’t like Fanboys, its one redeeming feature was that it captured the Star Wars geek culture pretty well. Noobz is closer to One Week in that it shows a really stereotypical view of its subject matter… except, in the case of Noobz, this is a really BAD representation. The director and star, Blake Freeman, was actually a professional gamer… a decade ago. Based on the content of the movie, it seems like this is where all of Freeman’s “research” came from, because it’s a woefully outdated and portrays gaming as the domain of anti-social nerds. This MIGHT have flown back then, but this is 2013: basically everyone games now, and nerds are actually coming in vogue as well. You’d swear this movie was made by CNN or something based on the way it portrays gamers, not someone who is apparently one himself. Furthermore, he just completely fails to capture gaming culture in general. One of the most glaring examples of this is that there’s a Frogger tournament at the same tournament that the main characters are at. However, only 2 people enter it because coin-op gaming isn’t “cool” anymore. Now it doesn’t take a lot of research to know that retro gaming is a huge subculture right now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if such a tournament actually had more competition than a modern shooter. Another issue is covered here:

“There’s a passing mention of Frogger, but the only gameplay footage from the fictional Cyberbowl video gaming championship is based exclusively on Gears of War 3. While it’s clearly a form of product placement, it’s a bizarre choice at that: Gears of War 3 isn’t a championship level game by any means (especially with the atrocious host-advantage issues in multiplayer).”

Watching the movie, I actually speculated that this was the case, but it’s nice to see it confirmed. That said, I’m not really all that knowledgeable about tournament-level gaming (I’d imagine that PC gaming, particularly Counter-Strike, would be probably the #1 choice for competitive play…?), but it’s notable that this stuck out as clearly as it did.

In addition, Freeman shows only the worst aspects of gamer culture. You know that douche bag 12-year-old screaming racist and homophobic slurs on your headset every time you boot up a first-person shooter? Basically every character in this movie is that kid, except that they’re like that 24/7 and not when they’ve got the anonymity that a headset provides. Sure, some of them probably are douche bags like that in real life, but Noobz disproportionately presents every gamer as someone with some sort of major personality flaw. The “heroes” are stereotypical dicks living the Jersey Shore lifestyle (with the “dudes” and “bros” thrown around CONSTANTLY throughout to cement this), and every single female character is either a grotesque hag or a sex object. And, of course, everyone is shocked to discover that the girl gamers are actually good at video games… this, unfortunately, is probably a stereotype which actually persists in this culture, but Freeman isn’t exactly putting this part in here to make any sort of statement. I think the worst part about all this though is that Blake Freeman really seems to think that he’s portraying gamers in a positive manner, because you get this sense all the time when the character Andy spouts off his ramblings about how major league gaming should be considered a real sport. While I’m not entirely sure I’d call them “athletes”, pro gaming clearly takes a lot of skill and deserves some respect, but Noobz isn’t doing this culture any favours.

I think it’s also worthwhile to go deeper into each of the characters… because boy do they ever deserve to be torn apart. Each and every one of them is a one-dimensional stereotype: there’s Cody, the slacker with major anger management issues. Next is Andy the optimistic dude-bro who’s in love (read: wants to screw) with Rickie, a girl gamer on the other team (who isn’t really given much characterization beyond “is hot”). After that is Oliver, the massive screw-up who is also an extremely flamboyantly closeted gay (the movie tries to make his sexuality ambiguous, but the scenes where he runs around in lipstick, screams like a girl, constantly tries to suck his friends’ dicks, etc pretty much destroy any possible sense of ambiguity that they could have tried to foster, instead turning him into a hugely offensive stereotype). Finally, there’s Hollywood, a disabled kid who I believe has a severe form of asthma… of course, everything about him revolves around his juvenile sexual fantasies and his breathing apparatus (apparently it’s supposed to be funny when his air supply gets cut off and the kid is freaking dying in front of us). Seriously, even in the end credits he apparently writes a hit hip-hop single called “Let Me Breathe”, because everything in his life apparently revolves around his disability.

As you can probably glean from the descriptions of the main characters, Noobz is offensive as a bus full of dead babies, but you don’t know the half of it. The portrayals of Oliver and Hollywood are really the worst of the bunch (apparently gays aren’t considered “men” in this), but there’s also plenty of casual racism and sexism. Did you see the picture above of the black kid with the comb in his hair? I’m pretty sure you can guess exactly how they portrayed him in this. There’s also a scene where an Indian gas station attendant acts like a ridiculously racist caricature, and tells the cops he’s white so they won’t discriminate against him. It seems like Freeman thinks that he’s being clever and satirical, but it really doesn’t come across that way: I mean, is are we really supposed to believe that he is making fun of racists by being racist and then simultaneously calling out racial profiling at the same time in some sort of inverse-satire cluster-f–k? Short answer: no. Instead, I really get the feeling that Blake Freeman is just a hardcore opponent of political correctness, suggested by the scene where the douchey little black kid gets a free ride on “DeezNuts Airlines” (“thank you for riding DeezNuts!” …I did not make that up) because he claims that he’s being racially profiled by a white attendant. While I hate political correctness as much as the next guy, Freeman isn’t using offensive material to make a statement or to be satirical… he seems to just find offensive things funny for no other reason than it’s offensive. Even in this department, they fail because they recycle the same old offensive jokes over and over and over again.

In fact, for a supposed “comedy”, Noobz is deathly short on laughs. I can honestly say that I did not laugh at any of the jokes in this film, which is pretty pathetic. The only times I did laugh were in sheer disbelief as I literally yelled out “WTF, did they seriously put something that stupid in the movie?!?” This is pretty brutal in the scenes with Greg Lipstein (a play on Billy Mitchell) which might have been funny for the crew but translate really awkwardly to the rest of the audience who are sitting here thinking “what the hell is wrong with this guy?” Furthermore, the comedic set-pieces are really tenuously constructed. Take, for example, the scene I mentioned earlier with the Indian gas station attendant. Cody goes into the gas station to pay for their gas and get some snacks, but comes across this little shit of a girl. Of course, the two begin going at it, insulting each other with dialogue that doesn’t reflect human speech in the slightest (that might be an odd criticism, but the dialogue in this scene is just totally out of tone with the rest of the film). Then the girl’s mother believes that, because Cody is hugging her daughter, that he must be a pedophile and proceeds to taser him without explanation. Then the Indian gas station attendant launches into his ridiculous shtick. This is honestly some of the most contrived comedy I’ve seen in a movie, and it’s just not handled very well (uhh, no pedo).

Anyway, in the end the “heroes” lose to the girl gamers (who were far more deserving of the prize money anyway), but get signed to Mountain Dew… except they don’t, because 2 seconds later in the credits they reveal that the guy was arrested for impersonating a Mountain Dew executive (WTF!? Is that even a crime?!!), but I’m not really sure that I care, because the main characters were such huge douche bags and they didn’t learn or earn anything from the events of the movie… so it makes things completely pointless. Congratulations, you just wasted an hour and forty minutes of your life!

Bottom-line: the only positive thing I can say is that Freeman is a competent enough director, but he severely needs some better material if he ever wants to amount to anything. Noobz is not that material. It has a bland story, non-existent comedy, garishly offensive and doesn’t even portray its own subject matter with any sort of reverence. Unless you’re looking for a really bad movie like I was, stay away!

0.5/10

Movie Review: The Postman (1997)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

My good friend over at The M recently called me up and said that we had to see a movie he had just bought called The Postman. He just told me that it was a post-apocalyptic film, it starred Kevin Costner and that it would probably suck. With little else to go on, I decided to take him up on the offer and see how it went… little did I know I was heading into a multiple-Razzie winner. Read on for my thoughts…

Something that becomes very apparent about The Postman quite quickly is that its editing is a bit of a jumble. Early on there’s a scene of the Postman in a ransacked store, and then suddenly he’s in a town performing Shakespeare for kids. I thought “oh, this must be a pre-apocalypse flashback” since he’d had a couple quick flashbacks already… but no, a couple minutes later the party gets interrupted by a bunch of raiders and it becomes clear that this is in the present. Well then, that raises more questions… like where did his gun go? How did he find the town? Honestly, moments like this happen throughout the entire movie.

Even worse, the entire opening 50 minutes of the film are completely unnecessary. The film seems to be setting up something important, but it literally all gets thrown away all of a sudden… even all the secondary characters and one of the villains get killed too. To make matters worse, this ruins any sort of mystery that they could have derived from the premise. How much more interesting would it be if we were wondering if The Postman was telling the truth or not? If they played with our own sense of optimism for the reestablished US Government then it would be far more interesting than a completely unnecessary opening act that spells out everything for us.

My main issue with the opening however, is that it adds 50 minutes to an already overlong film. People bitch that The Hobbit is overlong. While they are right about that it doesn’t feel unnecessarily so (well, most of the time anyway). However, The Postman has no excuse to be a 3 hour “epic” whatsoever, and could do with some serious trimming of the fat. As it is, the film is excessive, bloated and boring half the time – cutting out the opening would have made it a hell of a lot more bearable.

In terms of acting, none of the leads are particularly awful. Most of the characters are serviceable, it’s only the younger actors which dip into sub-par level. The only one I found that really stood out was Will Patton’s Bethlehem, the charmingly psychotic villain. It’s always fun when he’s around and he really chews up the screen, sort of like an evil Chuck Norris.

The plot is… strenuous. Here’s the premise of the film: society has collapsed because of some sort of apocalyptic event and most of the towns in Oregon have become subdued under the heel of the Khan-esque General Bethlehem. In the middle of this, a deserter from the clan cons people into giving him food and shelter by claiming to be a member of the reconstituted US postal service, acting on behalf of the new President. As a result, he (and the new postal service) inspires people to rise up against the clan and TAKE. BACK. THEIR. FREEDOMMMMMMM!!! If that sounds a little far-fetched, then you don’t know the half of it. The film has, quite simply, a pretty ridiculous plot which is way too strung out. It also has an air of pretension that it frankly does not earn. Say what you will about The Tree of Life, but it is deservingly pretentious. This movie is more like Rubber, in that it’s trying to look smart, but is probably stupider than most of the people in the room.

On a related note, I expected the film to basically be a distillation of this song from Team America, but luckily it avoided that… except when it didn’t. Confused? Well what I mean is that the film largely avoids being American propaganda, but occasionally it will suddenly pull out an “America: F–K YEAH!” moment out of nowhere. This generally happens when the Postman arrives in a town and causes the citizens to feel hope that the clan won’t be ruling much longer. This inevitably causes them to stand up to the clan soldiers and basically flip them off… FOR AMERICA. I’m pretty sure that this is supposed to make us feel proud to be American, but it just made me think “You people are idiots“. Seriously, if these people understood the notion of subtlety, then an entire town wouldn’t have been killed. America, you can be proud of your country, but be smart about it. Maybe consider assassinating the leaders of the clan when they come into town next time, rather than tell them they’re not gonna boss you around anymore when you have literally nothing to back up that statement. Honestly, the “patriotism” in this movie results in a lot of civilians getting killed due to sheer idiocy (doubly-so on the part of Ford Lincoln Mercury, who’s basically a budding terrorist cell leader). Don’t be kind of like one of these dumbasses.

Is there anything good I can say about The Postman? Well to be honest, yes I can. The best thing I can say is that there’s some great production values – there’s basically no CGI that I could see, and the sheer number of extras that appear in some shots are unbelievable. Some of the sets are absolutely massive as well, I have a tough time believing that these were just miniatures – I think they were the real deal. Also, despite all the harping I’ve done on the story, I eventually found myself genuinely interested to see where things were going to go. I honestly believe there is a good movie hidden inside of The Postman somewhere, but it’s buried beneath shoddy editing, a weak story and excessive self-indulgence which basically make it a slog to sit through.

All-in-all, The Postman is an extremely flawed film. It’s bad, but not in a “so bad it’s good” manner. It’s just not the sort of movie I could recommend that someone sit down and watch for any good reason.

4.5/10

Movie Review: Hulk (2003)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Apologies, I have been busy lately and so haven’t had much time to update the blog. It’s not a matter of lack of content/inspiration… on the contrary, I have a notepad file with more than a half dozen ideas I could use in a pinch. In any case, I’m not shirking my commitment to make a post at least once per week – unlike my past blogs, I want this one to last long enough to get some sort of readership!

So this week I’m tackling a bit of a personal review. I recently saw Ang Lee’s Life of Pi in theatres, and quite enjoyed it, it was an almost perfect adaptation of the book (although I wish that M. Night Shyamalan had gotten the director’s duties, but I’m not about to complain about the movie we did get). However, there was only one other Ang Lee movie I had seen up to this point, and that was his 2003 blockbuster Hulk… which for at least half a decade I had proclaimed “the worst movie I’d ever seen”. Now, the last time I saw it I was 14 or 15. Both the superhero genre and myself have changed mentally and physically. I decided that it was time to give Hulk a second chance. Was I just harsh on it as a stupid teenager, or did it really deserve my righteous indignation? Well hang on, we’re gonna take a trip back to the past…

Let’s travel back to the year 2003. Superheroes were just starting to get really cool again. Spider-man had blown our minds, and its sequel would soon top it. Batman Begins would revolutionize the whole genre in a couple years, but at the time comic book properties were treated as… well, comical properties. I had watched some of the Hulk cartoons on TV as a kid, so when I heard they were making a movie adaptation I thought that it had the potential to become the new Spider-man. Of course, when I saw the movie itself, I was extremely disappointed with the direction Ang Lee went in. It was more of an art-house film than a superhero blockbuster, and so I was very bored with it. However, I also noticed some rather… questionable elements of the film that further added to my distaste for it. I hadn’t been more disappointed in a movie before, and so I proclaimed Hulk the worst movie I had ever seen (it wasn’t until my mother made me watch The Santa Clause 2 years later that it was finally knocked off its “lofty” position).

Honestly, the action element of Hulk hasn’t really changed at all. It really is a quiet, thoughtful production. If it wasn’t about a man who turns into a big, green, pissed, muscle-bound monster when he gets angry, then this might be more forgivable. However, the whole point of the Hulk is that he smashes things. It’s his thing. Ang Lee might have been brave tackling this property in such an intellectual way, but he also displays that he just doesn’t understand why people like the Hulk in the process. He compensates by trying to deconstruct the character, specifically asking “why is the Hulk so angry?” and then exploring the potential origins of that. The answer Lee comes up with? Daddy issues, and lots of them to go around. Lee also treats the film as more of a monster movie than superhero origin, in the vein of Frankenstein or (especially) The Wolf Man. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s just another source of disappointment for fans, it was marketed incorrectly and towards the wrong audience.

The Contemplative Hulk (this image seriously summarizes about half of his screentime).

If Ang Lee had pulled off his super-hero deconstruction project successfully, then I could have totally forgiven the lack of action… however, Hulk is caught in the uncomfortable crossroads between being very smart and very, very stupid. I mean, the film is attempting to work psychology into the superhero mythos and figure out what makes Hulk angry. That’s pretty interesting. However, that effort is sharing screen time with jaw-droppingly idiotic moments like this:

Nice acting dude…

…or this:

Ugh, those dogs would look out of place in a Star Wars prequel…

When the Hulk finally goes on his rampage, the smashing is frequently broken up by the big guy staring at things thoughtfully. This is where I can legitimately call out Lee for being overindulgent – the Hulk is impulsive, not contemplative. Bruce Banner can be thoughtful all he wants to, but Hulk should be the embodiment of aggression and impulse. Quite simply, Hulk can’t stick to a consistent tone. Whenever it tries to get you to take it seriously, a really intrusive and cheesy transition will pull you out of the drama, a CGI monstrosity will invade the screen or someone will do something maddeningly illogical that shatters all its efforts. Central to this issue is the plot itself. Lee wants to make a psychological drama, and while he gets the psychological aspect down well enough, the plot that it is hung on is, put simply, an atrocious mess. Here’s just a few of the biggest issues I noticed while watching it again:

  • How/why did Bruce become the Hulk?
  • How did David know that Bruce would become the Hulk?
  • Why does General Ross hate Bruce so much? He didn’t do jack shit to anybody.
  • Why does David NOT become the Hulk when he goes through the same process? It seems to be some sort of trauma-based process… but how does that make sense?
  • Why does David suddenly decide to join with Betty after trying to kill her earlier?
  • WTF is up with the ending…???
And who thought covering Hulk in fecal matter would be a good idea?

Ultimately, the writers would have been better off not changing the Hulk’s origin at all, because the version they came up with just plain didn’t work, nor did it make any sense, undermining the movie’s braver efforts in regards to its psychological focus.

This might be a controversial statement, but I wasn’t particularly impressed on the acting-front either. I have looked up some contemporary reviews such as this one in preparation for this review, and they seemed to like Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly and Nick Nolte’s performances. For my own part, I thought that Eric Bana and Jennifer Connelly were unconvincing to say the least. As for Nick Nolte, he made David Banner batshit insane, although I’m not so sure that this was acting on his part or just him being himself. In all, I don’t think any of the leads were particularly awful (Josh Lucas doesn’t count as a lead), but they didn’t deserve the praise that some people heap on them either.

Finally, the special effects are one glaring noteworthy mention. At the time they weren’t exactly top-notch, and they look downright cartoonish now. You already saw the video with the dogs earlier, and they just look like cartoon characters. Check out the picture of Hulk covered in shit above, and focus on the pants. They don’t even look real, they look like someone photoshopped them on. And check out Hulk’s proportions here:

His proportions are all wrong. He doesn’t even look like a real being. And I can blame this one on Ang Lee himself, because he is directly responsible. The “overlay” effects were awful as well (as you can see most egregiously in the video of Talbot’s death).

Geez, I’ve really been ravaging this one. You might ask if there’s anything I enjoyed about Hulk, and to that I say that there were a few things. Honestly, when Hulk actually does start smashing things it’s pretty enjoyable. I also thought that the split-screen shots were pretty cool as well, and the film is shot with the eye of a true artist – I can give Ang Lee that (although he puts that eye to much better use in Life of Pi). I also quite enjoyed the Stan Lee and Lou Ferrigno cameo, it made me chuckle and wasn’t too blatant. Finally, I appreciate Hulk for what it is – a risky experiment with the superhero genre which was honestly trying to elevate it. However, unlike some reviewers I do not consider this grounds for absolution, for if I could then Birdemic would fall under the same criteria. I think my younger self was a tad harsh on the film when it came out due to not appreciating its efforts, but I wasn’t totally wrong in my assessment. Hulk is a colossal failure, as both a disappointment for the people who went in expecting a smash ’em up, and just for people who love good movies in general.

3/10

Movie Review: Dredd

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

When I reviewed Judge Dredd, I promised that a comparison-review would be coming in regards to its successor, 2012’s Dredd. Naturally, with the DVD/Blu-Ray now out, I am delivering on that promise. First off, a bit of background information. I personally had very little interest in the 2000AD universe before seeing the film, and based on the trailer I figured it was going to be a generic action movie. However, about a week before its release, I noticed that Dredd had a staggeringly high rating of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. This score would dwindle down to about ~75% around the release date, but by then I was sold – I had to see Dredd to get my fill of adrenaline-pumping action.

First off, we’ll focus on just the most important element of an action film, and that is the action itself. In this sense, Dredd delivers from the opening scenes with a blistering car chase which sets the bar for the action and extreme level of violence that is to come. The meat of the film basically revolves around a single set-piece, Die Hard style, as the characters fight their way to the top level of the Peach Tree block. Lamentably, while Dredd came up with this idea first, The Raid: Redemption was released earlier and stole a great deal of thunder for the concept. That said, it certainly is a fantastic set-up for an action film, and works to great effect here.

Dredd punctuates its action sequences with some impressive uses of super slo-mo footage. Normally I dislike slo-mo in action movies because it is either a) gratuitous, b) cliche or c) all of the above (eg, 300 or House of the Dead). Some movies manage to overcome this hurdle because they work the slo-motion sequences into the story (such as Sherlock Holmes), and Dredd is definitely an example of this. In the film, some of the characters take a drug which causes the brain see the world at about 5% its normal speed, and the results are quite striking… especially when the bloodletting begins. Bullets fly and explosions go off in super slo-mo, causing quite the visceral spectacle for the viewer. These sequences also made the 3D used by far the best in any movie I have seen to date.

The integration of spectacle and story are some of the most impressive elements of Dredd actually. The film doesn’t waste time using exposition to set up “Chekhov’s Gun“. Rather, it integrates elements in naturally. For example, foundational world-building is done very quickly at the beginning of the film, but is expanded throughout the run-time: an unobtrusive shot of the sheer, overwhelming scale of the crimes occurring across Megacity 1, Dredd informing his superiors that the bodies in a shootout need pickup to be “recycled”, little snippets about mutation, etc. The script does a great job of pulling us into an incredibly grimdark universe without doing so bluntly (unlike, say, Inception). Anderson’s psychic abilities are another example of this, which we discover ourselves rather than have listed out to us so we know what exactly it is she is capable of. Perhaps my favourite example in the entire film is how we discover that the guns used by the Judges have “special” features… I will say no more, because to ruin the surprise(s) would be an injustice to the script and destroy some truly badass moments.

In terms of characters, Dredd is much stronger than its predecessor. Judge Dredd himself, played by the always-badass Karl Urban, is very true to his character – constantly scowling, morally inflexible and devoted to the law (and no, he doesn’t take his bloody helmet off). Dredd is a force to be reckoned with, an unstoppable embodiment of the law. He is difficult to relate to, but this is part of his character – he is intentionally impenetrable, basically a sci-fi Harry Calahan. While you may not relate to him, you’ll certainly find yourself grinning with glee at the acts of mayhem he produces. I also appreciated that the costume department did not do a literal translation of the comics like they did in the previous film, because the result was pure camp. Instead, they opted for a more practical (and far cooler) costume design which suits his character and the darkness of the universe.

The counter-point to Judge Dredd is the rookie, Judge Anderson. I’ll admit it here and now: I fell in love with Olivia Thirbly’s portrayal of Anderson. Dredd’s the unstoppable badass, but Anderson is the human connection, and Thirbly did a great job of this. Unlike some sidekicks that we could name, Anderson isn’t a burden either – she can keep up with Dredd most of the time, and actually exceeds his abilities in others. Most impressively, this all happens without falling into the usual Hollywood cliches – Anderson is not a love interest (see any boy + girl pairing in an action movie), she is not a man written as a woman (eg, Sarah Connor in Terminator 2) and she is not an aggressive attempt at shoehorning in feminism (eg, The Enforcer). Instead, she is a very natural addition and feels like a real, identifiable character.

Finally, rounding out the important characters is Lena Headey’s sadistic villain, Ma-Ma. The way in which Headey chooses to play her is as a very subdued, but sinister manner. She rarely outwardly displays any signs of aggression, but there is a palpable sense that she would willingly carve up any of the thugs she surrounds herself with should it please her. It might have been interesting to see how a hammier villain would have been in this film, Ma-Ma is certainly a distinct threat to the heroes throughout their ascent to the 200th floor of Peach Trees. One of Ma-Ma’s underlings, Kay, is also given a bit more of a background than you would expect for a common thug, but Dredd, Anderson and Ma-Ma round out the important characters in the story.

While I have given nothing but overwhelming praise for Dredd thus far, I must admit it is far from the best film ever (or even of 2012). However, in a year where many of the biggest films had some major flaws (eg, Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit, etc), Dredd stands as one of the few in which its inner-workings are damn-near flawless. While it’s not exactly lofty or revolutionary, its individual components are greased to perfection, making Dredd a great example of why a well-polished work can be better than a intriguing failed experiment. If nothing else, Dredd harkens you back to 80s-style action films with its sheer amount of violence, badass-ery and one-liners, while marrying itself to modern conventions in the process. It’s truly a tragedy that it under-performed at the box office and will likely not see a sequel, but one can always hope.

8/10

Movie Review: Transformers – Dark of the Moon

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

This shouldn’t really a big surprise, but I’m not a big fan of the Transformers film franchise. I was moderately familiar with the series before I saw the Michael Bay movies (mostly thanks to Beast Wars), so it’s not like I went into them with any ill will. I’m not looking back on the series in the post-RotF era – I honestly didn’t care much for the film series from the start. I mean, Transformers was a decent film, but nothing special (even if audiences and critics dubbed it the #1 blockbuster of 2007). Then Revenge of the Fallen came out and cemented the series as a cinematic travesty. Now with this in mind, it shouldn’t be a massive revelation I hadn’t bothered to go see Dark of the Moon until now. I had heard it was an improvement over the previous film, but I decided it was finally time to find out for myself. As usual, spoilers abound.

So, right off the bat, we’re shown the film’s major positives – it features some jaw-dropping special effects and action on a massive scale (clearly that was the intention, to start the film on a high-note). Even though the battle on Cybertron is very short, the effects and action here are incredible. The opening also highlights something that I didn’t think I’d say – the film’s conspiracy-theorizing story is actually a very interesting opening to the film. The film would probably have been better if they had dispensed with the Cybertron opening and instead made the moon expedition more of a mystery to the viewer, but suffice to say that the film opens on a positive note.

The effects and action are not limited to the opening either. You’d think this would be obvious, but I actually found the effects in Transformers and Revenge of the Fallen to be rather weak, mostly due to the fugly robot designs which made it nearly impossible to discern what was happening on-screen. Consequently, the action scenes were a mess – a problem compounded by the long stretches of half-baked plot between these parts. In Dark of the Moon however, I actually didn’t have any trouble with the designs making the clashes murky. While I still hate how the ugly Transformers have been designed, it’s less of an issue this time around.

And… uh… that’s all the good stuff I have to say about the movie. Really? I had more to praise in Judge Dredd than this… sheesh, well onto the first problem: plot. A lot of people (and Transformer fans in particular) will argue that plot doesn’t matter in a movie about robots fighting robots, but you’re just plain dead-wrong. Why settle for a piece of crap action movie when you could be watching something like Terminator 2 – a movie about robots fighting robots which also happens to have a great story (not to mention far superior action)? And, predictably, Dark of the Moon screws the pooch. The opening minutes of the film establish this: the half-destroyed Autobot ship somehow travels an unspecified number of light years to reach the Moon… how did this happen? Did it teleport? Did it have some sort of “hyper-drive” that somehow was set off and then transported it to the Moon? Was the Cybertron war taking place millions of years ago? Of course, no one really thinks its necessary to explain this, just leaving it up to editing to conveniently hand-wave it away: it happened, that’s all that matters. That wouldn’t be so bad if this sort of thing wasn’t a hallmark of the series – for example, the Autobots appear, disappear and get captured based on whether its convenient for the writer to keep them around, even if they weren’t in the area to begin with (eg, Optimus and Sentinel Prime are hanging out in the desert alone, and then suddenly are barreling down the freeway with the other Autobots with no explanation). In a particularly hilarious example of this, Optimus gets sidelined for much of the final battle because (and this is not a joke) he flew into a bunch of cables and had to get disentangled. Seriously. Similarly, the film doesn’t really seem to keep its fiction in mind. The whole evil plan is tenuous to begin with, but taken into account with the action of the previous 2 films, it makes no sense at all. Furthermore, Sentinel Prime states that the film’s MacGuffin, the teleporting pillar things, “Defies your [human] physics”… First off, did he mean our understanding of physics, because I’m pretty sure physics aren’t confined to Earth. Secondly, what does Sentinel know of the human understanding of physics? Did he attend an elementary school science class before heading back to NEST to meet with the CIA director? Admittedly, many of these quibbles are rather nit-picky, but they break the sense of immersion in the film’s story (or attempt at one), and they happen constantly.

The next major issue with the film is the characters. I can’t think of many other series which feature so many genuinely infuriating characters. Foremost amongst these is Shia LaBeouf’s deservingly derided Sam Witwicky. I don’t have a huge problem with Shia as an movie star, but the Transformer movies have done him no favours. To make matters worse, Dark of the Moon is by far the worst performance I have seen of his. During the first half of the movie, Sam freaks out constantly and at damn-near everybody, coming across as nothing more than a whiny, entitled bitch. Thankfully, when the shit hits the fan, he finally nuts up and shuts up, but even then he isn’t exactly an endearing character – he’s just finally bearable. Furthermore, the authority figures are totally justified in saying that Sam is just a messenger (which is what made him all whiny in the first place): he isn’t qualified to risk his life with the Autobots at all, and the fact that he isn’t dead yet comes down to little more than sheer luck.

Next on the firing-line: the much-maligned Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. You can tell how deeply a woman is going to be developed when the very first shot of them in the movie is focused squarely on their ass. She is written in as nothing more than sex appeal to horny teenagers, and doesn’t do anything but conform to this. Considering this, RHW wasn’t nearly as bad in the film as I had heard (she, like basically everyone else, was merely serviceable), but I was not convinced that she would ever fall for Sam Witwicky. (By the way, if you don’t see the mindless pandering of women to horny men as a problem [or even as a positive], then fine by me – but this is my opinions on the matter, so write your own damn review if that’s offends you.)

As for the other characters, they’re mostly just an annoyance more than anything else, or are just plain useless. Brains and Wheelie are literally useless and unfunny “comic relief” characters, Sam’s parents don’t do anything of value (and are as irritating as ever), Simmons is pointless and the new additions are either wasted or nothing of note. For example, John Malkovich’s character is utterly pointless and wasted, disappearing without having caused any sort of important impact on the plot. As for the Transformers themselves, they’re about the same as ever (although the stereotypically “Spanish” one made me cringe every time he spoke… which, thankfully, was less than you’d think), including excessive pop-culture references and terrible attempts at humour.

In all, the movie is just way too overindulgent (in more ways than one) and was in serious need of some finer editing. For starters, the movie was way too damn long, and would have fared much better if somebody had cut out the terrible attempts at humour, useless characters and pointless side-plots. Secondly, the movie itself promotes a sense of materialistic excess, reveling in ridiculously expensive cars, houses, etc. Finally, it sometimes just shifts tones in an ill-advised manner. For example, the piano ballad at the beginning of the invasion was very tonally “off”, and doesn’t really jive with the expressly mindless (and distinctly not serious) tone of the film itself. In addition, for a film marketed towards kids, the violence is pretty shocking: robots get torn apart, decapitated and evicerate (by the “good guys” no less), and that’s in addition to mass numbers of people being vapourized and killed on-screen (and having their skulls go flying out at one point) and the numerous counts of collateral damage (including some caused by the Autobots themselves). As an adult, I’m cool with this in my sorts of movies, but in a kid-oriented movie I don’t think I’d want to expose them to this sort of thing until they were closer to the PG-13 age bracket.

Bottom-line: Unless you’re already a fan, there is literally no reason to recommend Transformers: Dark of the Moon, other than the special effects and the last 40 minutes of non-stop action. Thank God Battleship crashed and burned, so we shouldn’t see as many summer blockbusters like this in the future.

4/10

Post-Script: I swear, I’m not just looking for movies to ravage on this blog, but it has just sort of been the trend. I’ll review Dredd next, then you’ll get to hear me gush.

Movie Review: Judge Dredd (1995)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

One of my favourite movies of 2012 is the criminally under-performing, modern-cult-classic, Dredd (which I will review as well when I get my Blu-Ray/DVD copy). I honestly didn’t have any interest in the 2000AD universe before I saw Dredd, but the film completely sold me on it (I’m currently eyeing some Block War minis and Dredd/Anderson omnibuses). However, after seeing it I knew I now had to see the original, oft-derided Stallone vehicle, Judge Dredd. Obviously I had heard the fan complaints (“he takes off his helmet? OMGWTF!?!”), but as an extremely casual fan of the universe I will review Judge Dredd with a bit less of a bias. Also, note that there are some spoilers in this review.

First off, despite its lack of authenticity in terms of character and tone, the Judge Dredd Megacity One strikes me as more faithful to the source material than the Dark Knight-esque, reality-grounded city that appears in Dredd. In fact, the first 5 minutes alone are dedicated to establishing the world, which was a great idea. That said, as an adaptation, the movie comes across exceptionally cheesy and tacky. I guess that’s a side-effect of the pre-Nolan era of comic book movies, but the sets and costumes all looks really plastic and are hard to take seriously in any way. The costumes are straight out of the comics, but just don’t make sense… the Judges are supposed to be fighting crime, so they choose to do so with a giant eagle on their shoulder and spandex? It may look cool in a comic, but this just doesn’t traslate well into movies at all.

Another good thing I can say is that Stallone certainly looks the part of the gruff and grizzled Dredd… sure, as soon as he opens his mouth he isn’t exactly convincing, but in terms of physicality, he’s a good fit for the role. Of course, Stallone completely overwhelms the role, supplanting Dredd as a character and replacing him with your typical Stallone action-vehicle, but we’ll get into that soon. As for the other cast members, Armand Assante as Rico was very enjoyable as the hammy villain-type and seemed to be having a blast. Diane Lane was also serviceable as Judge Hershey. Rob Shneider’s Fergee is the one that is derided most though, and rightly so. He is one of the most absolutely useless characters I have ever seen in a movie, and it boggles my mind why they ever chose to include him in the film at all. He literally does nothing, and just serves as an irritating tag-along and mouth-piece… I guess he disables a robot near the end, but it’s not like Dredd couldn’t do that himself (and in much more spectacular fashion too). Shneider alone screws his movie A LOT.

The entire plot just becomes a way to service yet another Stallone actioner, and one of the cheesy 90s ones at that. It feels a lot like Demolition Man, and while a lot of people like that movie (I’m not among them), it’s not even as fun as that movie was. The plot’s pretty typical: Dredd, the upstanding lawbringer, is arrested for murder… and then proceeds to fight this charge with a hell of a lot more murder, resisting arrest, etc. Obviously, this is completely against character and unintentionally turns him into a massive hypocrite. If there were some sort of irony to this it would make more sense, but the film doesn’t suggest that at all. In fact, it serves to glorify the justice system, rather than satirize it like the comics do. The ending, where Dredd drives down the street with his motorcycle to the cheers of the assembled crowd was just too ridiculously/senselessly patriotic to fathom… also why does the base start to blow up at the end? Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but it seems to me that it literally just self-destructed for no reason.

In all honesty, I’m making it sound like I hated Judge Dredd, but I didn’t really. I’ve seen way worse movies than this within the same week. In fact, it wasn’t bad for the first half of the film (in part because Rob Schneider was sidelined), but it was the second half where I really started to dislike it, and where the negative points I have mentioned creeped in. There were some good lines too, such as:
Fergee: 5 years? No! No! I had no choice! They were killing each other in there!
Judge Dredd: You could have gone out the window.
Fergee: 40 floors? It would have been suicide!
Judge Dredd: Maybe, but it’s legal.
However, these funny bits are juxtaposed with some absolutely abyssmal lines, which are further brought down by horrible delivery, such as:
Judge Dredd: There is a way in. 10 years ago, 2 refugees figured it out, through the city’s incinerator, there’s a flame burst twice a minute, that means they have only 30 seconds to run through before it flames again.
Seriously, who wrote that? Don’t tell me that was actually in the script? Was Stallone even awake when he said that? In any case, guess which half of the movie those 2 bits of script were from. Shouldn’t be too hard.

I AM DER LARRR!!!

Bottom-line: Judge Dredd was just a bad movie, even for a casual movie-goer. For a full-blown Judge Dredd fan, it must have been torture. As far as cheesy actioners go, you could probably do worse, but if you’re that easy to please then you probably don’t even read reviews anyway.

4.5/10