Could we call it a flawed masterpiece?

I want to re-visit Event Horizon. As I said before, I REALLY want to like this movie. And I keep trying. The story is good, the actors are all good (well, Laurence Fishburne basically plays himself, and Richard Jones is an okay as the Magical Black Man, Cooper ( though he seems to be trying to hard to play a young Eddie Murphy)), the idea behind it is great, and by 1997's standards, the cgi is pretty damned good. I mean, everything was in place. This should have been an A-1 Super Dooper horror movie in space. (Look at me laying down those sick rhymes!)

It's not, but it should have been. I don't know. Everything just doesn't come together. It feels forced. There's just so little chemistry in the movie. And, I still blame Paul W.S. Anderson for that.

I keep watching his movies, hoping that he'll get it together and make something good. He did a good enough job with the first Resident Evil (though even there a lot of the casting, acting and story choices were a little suspect), but nothing else has really felt as cohesive.

So, it made me think last night, as I was watching Event Horizon again...what if someone else had directed Event Horizon?

I think it's fairly obvious that had Danny Boyle directed it, you'd basically have gotten Sunshine. Go figure.

What if Speilberg had been at the helm? He's done a few movies with aliens, but not really anything in space. He can certainly make a scary movie. Though you run the risk of making Saving the Event Horizon which has some great scares at the beginning and end, but a lot of boring BS in the middle.

Can you imagine Paul Verhoeven, instead of working on Starship Troopers, making a different kind of space movie. There'd be corruption everywhere, and a bit of nudity. The Event Horizon would be a warship, and the gravity drive a weapon. Everyone would falling in love and betraying each other as the Event Horizon destroys planets everywhere it goes.

What about George Romero? Event Horizon of the Dead. The Lewis and Clark arrives to find out that the crew have become flesh eating zombies. Weir gets bit, but hides it from everyone (someone ALWAYS gets bit and then hides it), and upon returning to Earth, he begins to infect everyone else.

Ridley Scott...? Well, most likely, he'd just make Alien. Which he did. 20 years prior. So, I guess, really, if you had Anderson remake Alien, you'd get Event Horizon.

31 movies I would recommend for someone's month long Halloween movie marathon...now THAT'S an idea...

The other day, in my comments, I received a comment that I wasn't sure what to do with. No, not a comment, an invitation. It was from one Ed Hardy, Jr of Shoot the Projectionist and it read:

Hey there! I just wanted to drop you a line to invite you to participate in the 31 GREATEST HORROR FILMS survey we have going on over at Shoot the Projectionist. Here's a link to the original announcement:

http://shoottheprojectionist.blogspot.com/2007/09/31-greatest-horror-films-survey.html

Thanks.

Naturally my first reaction was one of shock. I don't know this guy, yet here he is, asking me to join in. It's kind of a neat feeling.

So, I read a little more...

I hereby announce the 31 Greatest Horror Films , a survey to be compiled throughout Shocktober! and published on Halloween. I am inviting, inducing—hell, just plain cajoling—you to submit a list of the 31 Greatest Horror Films according to you. Whether that means your 31 favorite scary movies or the 31 films you feel are the most influential or original, well… that’s sort of up to you. I suppose when I do my list I’ll include the 31 horror films that I feel are the most worthy for discussion, because that’s usually the defining factor of whether I care about a film or not. And, of course, the entire reason I’m picking the number 31 instead of some other arbitrary number like 25, 50 or 100 is that there are 31 days in Shocktober!, so if you would like to think of your list as the perfect month-long horror movie marathon, I encourage you to do so. Think of it however you must, as long as you submit a list!

So THAT'S the catch. I have to make a list. A list of 31 movies. Horror movies at that! What do I know about horror movies? Oh yeah, a little bit. For me to make a list of the movies that I've found to be scary though...well, we're talking a short fucking list. The Descent for sure. In the Mouth of Madness. The Thing. I'm sure there's a couple others, but, well, not another 28! However, what I did like was

so if you would like to think of your list as the perfect month-long horror movie marathon, I encourage you to do so

Yeah. Now we're talking. I could do that. What would be the 31 movies I would choose to watch for a fictional, month long Halloween marathon...for someone else. See that. If I were going to do a marathon like that, I wouldn't want to do 31 days of movies I've seen. But trying to do a list of 31 movies I would suggest for someone else's marathon, well, that's a fun kind of idea.

31 movies I would recommend for someone's month long Halloween movie marathon. Ed, I'll get the list to you next week, and I'll post it here before Oct 1st.

NOTE:Ed has corrected me, the official title is 31 FLICKS THAT GIVE YOU THE WILLIES

We interupt our regular scheduled programming

I'm just happy to see someone finally gets it.

The lady doctor had a terrible whiny voice too

Alright, I know that there's been a lot of downtime lately, so lets see if we can get back on track. I mean, how hard is it to sit down and watch a movie? Seriously.

No, you're right, it's not that hard. It's just that I have all of these....EXCUSES... and I want to use them SO badly. But I won't! Onward ho, to the movie!

King Kong Escapes was the sequel to King Kong vs Godzilla. You remember that one, right? Where Kong fights Godzilla in an all out street brawl to the death? No? Well, it was good. It was fun. KKE however was...well, less fun.

Basically, Dr Who is helping an agent of an undisclosed nation mine for Element X. Apparently, it's some sort of nuclear material. To mine it, he has built a giant monkey robot. Sort of like Mechagodzilla, only an ape. But the Mechani-Kong breaks down. Some sort of a problem with magnets. And then he kidnaps the real Kong to finish the job. And then robo-Kong and real-Kong square off in Tokyo.

Ok, I admit it, I stopped paying attention to what was going on in there somewhere. Damn thing just couldn't hold my interest for more than a couple minutes at a time. I did have a few questions about the whole thing though. A few...points to ponder, if you will...

How is it that someone can question the existence of a giant monster like Kong in a sequel? I mean, there he was. Fighting a giant lizard. How can you say 'but I thought he was only a legend' after that? It kind of ruins your credibility.

I don't care if it is a grown man in a costume stomping on toys. I like it. CGI is great, and in the right hands, can really look very believable. However, I hope that there is always a place in the world for miniatures and men in rubber monster suits.

The King Kong costume looked terrible. That's not a question. Wow! That thing looked rough.

I'll give the whole thing 5 'that's fair, right? I didn't really pay attention, so I can't give it a super low score for being bad, but it couldn't hold my interest, so I can't call it really good either's out of 10.

Milla, what happened? You used to make such good movies...

I really wanted to do something special for my 300th post. Why? I don't know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Boy was I wrong.

I decided I wanted to see a brand new movie. Something at the old cinema. Something I could overpay for and watch among strangers. And, since I was in Atlanta, and away from my dvd player at home, it seemed like a reasonable plan to go up to Atlantic Station to see Resident Evil: Extinction.

What a piece of shit.*

No, I'm serious. Total garbage.

Look, I really liked the first movie. I thought that it had some really good moments and worked well as a zombie movie. And then came the sequel. Which, I enjoyed. It was a good action movie, I wished they'd done more with the zombies, but Nemesis was cool. The third one though, I just can't explain.

It's at this point that I would normally give a rundown of what happened. The problem here is that...well, NOTHING happened. For 95 minutes, no one did anything, and nothing was accomplished. This was supposed to be Milla's last turn as Alice, the genetically mutated zombie killer, and they left the whoel thing wide open for a fourth movie starring Milla.

"What's going on here? I have no idea..."

I'm going to give you a bit of a spoiler here. Alice's blood is the key to curing the T virus outbreak, and at one point she is in a facility with everything she needs to make the cure, so what does she do? Does she make a cure? Who the fuck knows! They never tell us. She raises an army of Alice clones to go after the CEO of Umbrella. End of movie. That's it.

The movie exists almost entirely to kill everyone off. Carlos and LJ return and are a part of Claire's convoy, cruising around the desert aimlessly. They're looking for supplies, but have no base, and no destination. Until Alice comes along with a journal from a dead guy who claims that their might be safety in Alaska. They go to Vegas looking for gas, at which point everyone dies. Well, most everyone. Well, most everyone except for the people who had just been killed by the zombie crows.

Oh, and Alice has mind powers.

Things just happen for no reason. Nothing is explained. And in what should be the closing act of your saga, nothing is wrapped up. The movie itself is an exercise in futility. There is nothing to become emotionally invested in. It's a group of entirely one dimensional characters. There is no real conflict in the movie. And there is nothing for them to do. I'd say it was the epitome of banality if I knew what banal** meant.

Rather than showing any real action, director Russell Mulcahy uses quick edits to give the appearance of action. This is a lazy technique used by incompetent directors everywhere. It's a way for implying action when you are incapable of actually showing anything. It's a cheap trick.

And good old Paul WS Anderson goes on, once again, to show what a fucking hack he is. The only thing he's worse at than writing seems to be directing. So, I guess it could have been worse. Can someone please tell me why Hollywood keeps letting this guy work?

The upside of the entire experience was seeing the trailers for Iron Man and 30 Days of Night. Both of which look pretty fucking sweet.

Resident Evil: Extinction gets 3 zombies swarming around the compound until the fence is blown wide open and the mysteriously decide to stay out of the compound of their own volition out of 10. And, I'd like to add a simple plea...please stop. Let this be the last movie. I don't think I can take much more.

*In all fairness, I reacted the same way after seeing Episode 3 for the first time. I now love it.
**I know what it means.

Well good! Fuck you!

Over at Cinematical, they're saying that 7dp favorite Quentin Tarantino was approached, but declined to offer to direct an episode of the NBC series Heroes.

"They were trying to get me to do one. I haven't even seen the fucking show. What the fuck is Heroes?"

You know what? Thank god. Tarantino is a hack who only knows how to replicate the things that have been done before he came along. All he does is remake bits and pieces of his favorite movies. He contributes nothing original to the cinematic landscape and does not deserve the admiration that his fans give him. Fuck Quentin Tarantino.

This is madness! No, this is 298!

Wow, time flies when you're having fun, doesn't it? What the fuck have I been doing the past few weeks? Obviously not posting anything! And why not, you ask? Because I haven't! That's why!

Look I could make up lame excuses, but the truth is, I just haven't had the time to write, let alone anything to write about. And that hasn't changed today. And it may not change for a while.

I leave for Atlanta tomorrow, and while traveling has never STOPPED me from writing, I don't know that it will allow for it on this trip.

On top of it, I've been kind of nerding out with my Star Trek DVDs. I know. I know. But, First Contact! And I picked up the Borg fan set. Dude, I never realized Voyager was so good. I have the first season Netflixed! And I've been catching up on the first season of Heroes! Save the cheerleader, save the world! Hiro is the SHIT dude! I need to watch Dexter too. That's what I might watch on my flight. And I picked up Wonderfalls, so I'm excited about catching that.

I have been following some of the Toronto Film Festival coverage at Bloody-Disgusting and Cinematical. And I have to say, À l'intérieur has me intrigued. But, then, it's a French horror movie, so that will naturally catch my attention (After Haute Tension and Ils I'll give them the benefit of the doubt). Hopefully I'll get a chance to see it in the nearish future.

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but this is #298! That means the next post is #299 and the one after that is #300. Pretty cool, huh? Well, I'll try to do something special, or at least interesting, or at least mildly entertaining for that. In the meantime, go one and get back to work!

More? You want MORE?

What the hell is wrong with me? Am I REALLY this retarded?

Don't answer that...

What makes me ask such a question? Let me tell you.

See, I'm cruising my favorite corners of the interweb, and I stumble upon an article over at Bloody Disgusting...

I've known that they were going to be doing these direct to video sequels for a while. So, that's not really news to me. What IS news is the casting of Apollo, aka Jamie Bamber. Not to mention, a little taste of the plot.

In the films, Bamber plays Stephen, a recently divorced account exec for a large sales firm. He busted up his own marriage because he slept with someone else. He is the man that "let it all get away." In the post phantom world, he hides out up in his mountain lodge, behind an armored wall of sentries. He finds his child, thankfully still alive, and must protect her from the phantom of ex-wife Michelle (as well as from the jealous and possessive fling subject, Marta).

Look. I know what to expect here. I saw the first one. But I saw the original, too. And I think that's why I'm still hopeful about the whole thing. It's just such an interesting idea to me. The original was such a great exploration of the way that emergent technology is isolating us from everyone else. And, while flawed, even the remake does one thing fairly well in that it tries to play on our fears of our technology revolting against us like Maximum Overdrive sans Emilio Estevez. Maybe that's what Pulse needed! Emilio Estevez! He makes any movie at least 10 times better!

Here boy! Come here!

And after a long holiday weekend, I'm back, here, talking about movies. Though, I have to admit that I'm not really sure what to say. I got to see Fido over the weekend. You may recall that I posted the trailer a while back. This is a movie that I've been wanting to see for something like 2 years.

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe it had been on the cusp of my consciousness for too long. I have that problem sometimes. This wasn't some sort of 'not living up to the hype' scenario. Oh no. I enjoyed Fido. It was a fun movie. I just don't have much to say about it.

Fido is essentially sort of a cross between Leave it to Beaver and, well, any zombie movie you've ever seen. Imagine a war between man and zombie. A war that man, inexplicably, wins. Now, having defeated zombie-kind, it's time to enslave them. That's what Zom Com does. They have a collar that makes zombies as docile as a household pet.

Timmy is a bit of a dweeb. No? Dork? Loser? Nerd? Geek? Whatever generic title you want to give to him works. Think back to being 11, what would you have called him? He has no friends and he can't shoot worth a damn. That's ok though, because now, he has a pet zombie. For his mom, appearances are everything, and they were the only ones around without a zombie, so she HAD to go get one. His dad, however, is afraid of zombies and isn't too keen on the whole thing. What his dad IS keen on is funerals. Not everyone can afford a funeral, so most people come back as zombies. The ones that can afford a funeral though have their heads removed and buried separately.

Timmy and Fido become friends, but Fido's collar malfunctions sometimes causing a mild zombie outbreak. As a result, Fido gets taken away and sent to the glue factory. Timmy, and his mom, have become quite close to Fido, and have to get him back.

Like I said, it was a fun little movie. Carrie-Anne Moss was great as Timmy's mom. Billy Connelly, however, felt a bit wasted as Fido. It really felt like anyone could have played the character just as well. The movie itself, well, like I said, it just doesn't leave me with much to say. It's certainly worth checking out if you get the chance though! 7 and a half bloody baseballs buried next to the corpse of the old lady down the street out of 10.