NoWo600Wo: Good. Bad. Ugly. Etcetera.

Last weekend I learned that there is something scarier than the concept of unkillable Nazi zombies.

Good

Outpost

Outpost features the scariest historical zombies since the conquistadors in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie. A man working for the C.I.A (I think) hires a group of mercenaries to take him to a currently war-torn area in Eastern Europe because he is on the hunt for something the Nazis left behind. The mercenaries believe he is just hunting for gold, but he is actually searching for a machine that controls time and energy, a project similar to what Einstein was working on before he abandoned it because of the nuclear bomb. A group of Nazi ghost/golems/zombies are protecting the place and start picking off people one by one in really gross ways. Outpost is somehat similar to a John Carpenter film, except that I think if anything, we get to know the characters in Outpost even less. Which is possibly the film’s only flaw.

Bad

Airborne

This is a movie that got played a lot on TBS when I was a teenager. One of it’s taglines is “the first rock n’ roll rollerblading movie”, although if you check out the poster, it has at least three taglines. It is a super cheesy movie that has never been released on DVD , but somehow Netflix Autoplay has it (you think it would be since a young Jack Black and Seth Green are in it and companies like to cash in on that sort of celebrity, but my boyf reckons there are some song rights issues). Given the fact that just about everything in this movie seems super-dated to the early 1990s doesn’t help the cheesy factor. It’s your standard teenage movie about overcoming the odds, or bullies, or being a California extreme sports kid who spouts surfer dude and Buddhist philosophies in strange non-sequiturs that is forced to move to Cincinatti. This is one of the few teenage films where the hero is rightfully mocked by his new classmates. Our hero’s name is Mitchell Goosen, which isn’t a very surfer dude name. He is dull and can only speak of waves. His cousin, played by a very awkward and not-cute-yet Seth Green is a kid still trying to figure out his identity, as noted by the fashion montage to “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred at one point in the movie. I felt extremely embarrassed for Seth Green throughout this entire movie. Jack Black is one of the bullies, and you get to see that he’s been doing his hyper persona for a good 16 years now, although he is actually kind of funny in Airborne. Anyway, Mitchell teams up with his bullies at the end to help defeat the bullies from the prep school in some downhill rollerblading race. Seriously, all this film was missing was serious class issue overtones and that speech from Wet Hot American Summer about defeating the evil “other” team from the other camp. Directed by Rob Bowman from The X-Files. Seriously.

(I would have posted videos of both the Seth Green fashion montage and the speech from WHAS, but Youtube has removed the fashion montage due to song rights, and I can’t find anything other than 10 minute clips of WHAS).

Ugly

The Room

Meet your new worst movie ever that is scarier than unkillable Nazi zombies. I don’t even know where to begin with this. The Room is a drama that tries hard to be a Tennessee Williams-type play but fails on a massive level. Although this movie was apparently made in 2003, the clothes and the look of the entire movie screams “early-mid 1990s Cinemax/Skinemax movie!” Presumably due to budget constraints (I’m not sure I’d consider $6 million budget constraints though), Tommy Wiseau writes, directs, produces, and stars in this movie as Johnny, a well-to-do banker and relatively nice guy with an accent of undeterminable origin who is being cheated on by his girlfriend/fiancee of 7 years, Lisa. Due to budget constraints, I’m sure the entire cast was found from a Craigslist post. There are a few gratuitous, overlong sex scenes. The first one happens within the first 5 minutes of the film and caused my uterus to shrivel up and die. The soundtrack for the film sounds like Color Me Badd, and Johnny pulls out a cassette recorder at some point, so this kind of proves that Mr. Wiseau’s points of reference ceased to exist around 1993. Despite all this and the rampant misogynistic overtones of the entire film, it is highly entertaining and good for a laugh. Just a warning again though: consider whether or not you want to become celibate before watching though. The sex scenes are that gross.

Etcetera

His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th

Eh, I liked the documentary on the Jason X DVD better. But I guess this is good if you want to see more interviews with the cast members of the series rather than horror critics and historians

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

Hey, I finally found a Friday the 13th movie other than Jason X to like! This one had likeable characters, and jokes that actually worked. The only things I did not get however was that Jason went after two female characters who were basically good people and good camp counselors, he tended to terrorize children in this one, and he walked at a really brisk pace (but he’s Jason, so he’s constantly a monster-man with purpose). I’m slowly working my way through the series, and none of the video stores had Part V, so we jumped ahead to Part VI.

I should probably recognize that trying to piece together a reasonable mythology for the Friday the 13th movies is not a good idea. This isn’t Lost, Supernatural, or Harry Potter.

What I’ve been up to…

Winter time is when I generally just start watching TV shows on DVD. In summary:

Mystery Science Theatre 3000 – Because what else am I going to watch when I’m up to my ears in pre-finals coursework and final exams, then after that, knitting projects for Christmas?

Rifftrax – Subpoint to MST3K. The first 11 minutes of the Iron Man Rifftrax are hilarious.

Cinematic Titanic – Subpoint #2 to MST3K. The redux of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is still pretty funny even if it doesn’t feature “Let’s Have a Patrick Swayze Christmas.”

Supernatural – Or as I like to call it “The Hot Guy Show.” I got drawn into this show due to the Homicide and now Deadwood-clause in my brain, meaning, I will give any show that features an actor from either show a shot. Supernatural has Jim Beaver as Bobby (he was Whitney Ellsworth on Deadwood), Sam and Dean’s sole father-figure and fellow demon-hunter. He only pops up occasionally, but the story right now is good enough that I’ve continued to watch it. I’m going through the first season of the show on DVD right now, and I’m getting the feeling that there is no greater narrative until probably the third season. The first season just seems to be the old “freak of the week” thing that Buffy and The X-Files used to do while pushing the greater narrative at a snail’s pace as we slowly get to know Sam and Dean Winchester better. Bonus: Probably one of the few CW TV shows that features adult-age main characters, and adult from the start, not an exhausted show that started when the characters were teenagers, and is now following them into their twenties (Smallville, One Tree Hill).

The Dead Set – Reality show-based horror is nothing new really, at least if you’ve seen Series 7 or the even more obscure Kolobos. The Dead Set begins with the premise of “What if there was a zombie outbreak near the location of the Big Brother house?” Mind you, The Dead Set is British, and the cultural barrier seems to be that Big Brother is way more of a big deal in the UK than it is in the US – people actually hang out outside the set as a sort of party to see the person who was most recently kicked out. It is easy to get past though, because the story is good and pretty scary. The zombies in this show run, for one thing, and this leaves few survivors in the initial outbreak. Mostly it is the housemates of the TV show, one production assistant, the executive producer (a Ricky Gervais character x Captain Rhodes in Day of the Dead x 100 = this guy), with the production assistant’s boyfriend fighting his way through the countryside trying to get to the set to find her. It’s an engrossing television show, and the boyfriend and I sat through the whole series in one night. Personally, I think I would totally be cool with zombies annihilating the cast of The Bachelor/The Bachelorette or Momma’s Boys. (You can watch episodes of the show from its website, but uh, the website kind of features spoilers if you scroll down enough).

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane – Did not blow my mind as much as I expected it to, but it is a pretty good modern take on the slasher genre.

Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! – Directed by Monte Hellman, and featuring two actors from Twin Peaks, Laura Elena Harring, and Bill Moseley (as Ricky Caldwell), this sequel still managed to be bad, and still managed to eke in clips from the first film, although Ricky was a freaking baby when the murder of his parents happened. No flashbacks to the second film, so we’re never told how Ricky went from being a guy with a gym membership to skinny ol’ Bill Moseley with a brainpan on his head, who is basically mute for almost the entire movie, so we do not get to hear his version of “GARBAGE DAY!” The film is given a more supernatural story of psychic blind girl who has inherited Eric Freeman’s acting talent who gets to see the comatose Ricky’s memories due to taking part in a scientific study. Ricky awakens from his coma and due to his psychic bond with the blind girl, is able to follow and arrive early to her grandmother’s house for Christmas and wreak havoc. It’s never really told why he wants to kill the blind girl. Maybe if he did, there would have been some Ghostbusters technology coming out of her brain into his and he would have gotten his memories back? I dunno.

Hack/Slash Omnibus 1 – I got this as a Christmas present from my boyfriend. It can work as a companion to Supernatural, since both have similar qualities. Supernatural, oddly enough may just be gorier though. Hack/Slash is a comic series about a slasher hunter named Cassie Hack and her sidekick Vlad. They go around the country killing slashers and occasionally helping people. Cassie kind of has a Tank Girl attitude and fashion style about her, although I guess slightly more Gothed up. It’s a pretty entertaining series, although it would almost be formulaic if Tim Seeley didn’t come up with some original slashers, some of whom are downright spooky (Ashley). What’s kind of cool about the series is that every once in awhile different artists illustrate the comics. Some artists work better with certain storylines better than others (again, Ashley).

The “Don’t Go in the Woods”-ish Double Feature: The Burning and Severance

Part II: Severance

Severance is a newer British horror film – I can’t say how much of an opening it had here in the States because the city I live in doesn’t get too many independent films that do not have a large distributor backing it. It’s about a group of people who work for an international defense contractor on a weekend retreat for “team-building exercises”. The screenwriter described it as “The Office meets Deliverance”, which I guess is about right, although you don’t get actors breaking the fourth wall and making faces at the camera, nor any “MC Hammer shit meets Flashdance”-type dancing. I guess the most prominent similarity between this film and The Office is the idiot boss – he’s the one who gets his co-workers into a dangerous situation by arguing with the bus driver after the way to the lodge is blocked by a tree. The driver kicks them off, and they take the other way from the fork in the road and find a lodge that some assume is where they’re supposed to be, although others notice that it’s not a “luxury” one as promised in the brochure. They go about finding food and wood, and one of the workers, Harris, finds a filing cabinet full of short dossiers on the Russian employees of the corporation they work for. Over dinner, the workers swap stories and theories about what the lodge used to be and how their corporation was associated with it, only to be angrily pish-poshed by their boss. Either way, most of the group wants to leave the next day. Later that night, Jill, one of the two females of the group, finds someone in a mask looking through her window. Billy and Harris go out and find that there are rafters built around the trees, but they’re not close enough to the window. The next morning, everyone still wants to leave, much to the chagrin of the boss. Harris and Jill are sent out to go back to the road and get the bus driver to come pick everyone else up, while everyone else plays a team-building game of paintball. Harris and Jill arrive at the bus only to find the door busted open, the keys still in the ignition, and the driver gone. A minute later, they find the driver disemboweled and face down in a large puddle next to the road. They drive the bus back to the lodge, where after the game of paintball, Gordon, the happy-go-lucky member of the group, has gotten his leg stuck in a bear trap.

It’s all downhill from there for our protagonists, I’m afraid. Let’s just say that one of the “ghost stories” about the lodge isn’t actually a ghost story.

Severance wasn’t as funny as some of the reviews I read said it was. It had its moments though. I get the feeling that if I ever watch it again, I’ll find it funnier. Like The Burning, the majority of the characters were smart and tried to get out almost at the first sign of something being wrong (although I guess they couldn’t help that their boss was an idiot). There is an upsetting period of time during the film where three of the most intelligent characters are killed off in a row. Although all but one or two of the characters is British, the defense contractor is an American company. So there is somewhat of a subtext of the anti-American climate in the Eastern part of the world, even in these post-Cold War times, but the subtext is a bit more graceful than that of the Hostel series, which some scenes feature elements of. Likewise, the anti-corporate subtext is more subtle than that of the Resident Evil series. And also like The Burning, there was one actor who was very distracting: the actor who played Gordon looked like a short, chubby version of a friend of my boyfriend’s. It was very weird. There was also an actor who looked an awful lot like Rory Cochrane, and of course he played the stoner guy, Steve, although I guess he was more like the living embodiment of a Streets album. Overall though, I liked Severance. It’s probably good to see if you work in an office and/or have an idiot boss and don’t feel like watching Office Space for the umpteenth time. No matter how bad things are with my job right now, at least I’m not being hunted through the woods by psychos.

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