I’ve said it before, but perhaps I wasn’t listening hard enough.
Never go into a video store without some sort of vague plan of what you want!
Anyway dumb-ass me goes to the video shop. I already know exactly what I have seen lately and know that they have nothing worth watching but I go anyway in the vain hope of finding something that slipped through without me knowing.
I love movies, I spend an hour a week minimum reading about what is out, what is coming soon and what might be worth me tracking down. It is nigh impossible for a movie to come out that I haven’t heard of, and unfortunately after devouring a steady diet of film for the better part of 20 years I have seen a hell of a lot of older films, classics and decent foreign language flicks.
There seriously isn’t that much worth watching that I haven’t seen. This leads me back to the net to scour sites for under the radar stuff, cult classics and underappreciated gems. Doing that for the past 12 months has caused me to watch way more shitty films than I have ever done before in my life, but you wade through those to get to the Oldboy’s, Session 9’s and The Descent’s (several months before most knew about it by the way), hell even the Splinter’s and Black Dynamite’s.
So what happens when you fail to plan? You plan to fail that’s what! (Thankyou inspirational quote calendar!)
In a rabid frenzy of hopelessness and futility I spent 15 minutes going up and down the new releases aisle with no luck. Disenchanted I then wandered the weeklies gazing half-heartedly at the spines of thousands of well used DVDs hoping for an epiphany or a fluke.
No dice. Back to the New Releases. By this stage all I knew was I had an entire afternoon with no decent sport on TV, nothing of interest worth doing outside of home and the entire house to myself with the wife and boy out for the night.
I was watching a movie dammit and I was watching one I haven’t seen before!
Here is what ended up making its way back to my DVD player in a 3 new release deal: (The following are abbreviated reviews for my sanity… and yours.)
“We’re talented actors!”
Into the Blue 2
Into the Blue was an ordinary film about Jessica Alba’s extraordinary arse, from memory at least. (But then so was Fantastic 4, Good Luck Chuck and whatever else she has been in, it’s not like the girl can act.) If you watched the preview you saw the best bits (literally).
So to be brutally honest the part that sold me on Into the Blue 2 was the little white section on the front cover which read: “MA 15. Nudity and sex scenes.”
Busted, I wanted to look at some eye candy.
What I didn’t think was that this would be nothing more than a Baywatch episode with a couple more murders, a little profanity and slightly more nipples, and only slightly.
And Baywatch is on subscription TV every day and I haven’t watched an episode since my teens, so now I’m paying to see a cut rate version?
The Plot: Bad guys do bad things in Hawaii. Beautiful young people get accidentally involved when they agree to look for a sunken Spanish ship. Only they aren’t really looking for a sunken Spanish ship, they are looking for containers, they just don’t know it yet.
So now they are dealing with the bad guys who want them to keep looking, but now they know the score they don’t want to help…
But if you are a 14 – 40 year old guy, this is really what you want to know. There are more montages than actual scenes with dialogue. In order:
– A bikinis at the beach montage.
– A having fun in the water with bikinis montage.
– A “gee isn’t Hawaii a great place to live when you’re wearing bikinis” montage.
– A beach volleyball game while wearing bikinis montage.
– A nightclub dancing montage with a bonus wet T shirt bit.
Bikinis…
All in the first 30 minutes. If you’ve lasted that long without feeling “sleepy” kids the rest is a by the numbers good guys trying to get away from the naughty bad guys with guns affair.
The so-called “action” is about as realistic as a high school play, I swear some of the punches miss the targets by 4 or 5 inches and I didn’t care if it was the bad guys or the good guys died as long as the film ended.
And really I don’t know why I bitch about this. After all I rented it knowing full well what it would be, and it was exactly that.
For full disclosure:
1/ The cover hottie never gets ‘em out, the only real nudity (and it is pretty fleeting) comes from peripheral characters.
2/ There is not one full body bathing suit in the whole film, just bikinis. Not whinging, just sayin”.
Final Rating – 5.5 / 10. Hard to complain when the movie is exactly as advertised. A sub-par movie with no drawcard except good looking people wearing very little, and it provided that.
So we’ve already established that when you have no idea about what you want you go mostly by the cover, here is another fine example, only for very different reasons from Bikini Adventures 2.
With so many horror films popping up every week it is hard to pick the good ones from the rest, especially if you are dopey enough to believe every critic’s positive blurb. After all, you only need one critic to make nice and that’s what ends up on the front, even if the other 89 uniformly say the film sucks.
I’ve been caught out before when the quote is glowing and only after I’ve watched and hated the thing did I look to see exactly who said it. The E channel saying something is scary really doesn’t mean much, neither does the Hackensack Sentinel critic proclaiming the latest J-Lo flop as a “must see”.
The solution? Trust no-one. Watch everything. Decide for yourself. Painful but true.
Growth
Scientists engineer “helpful parasites that cleanse the body of impurities or some shit. Only of course they go rogue at the worst possible time and end up killing half the inhabitants on the island where the breakthrough took place.
So guess where 4 teens are heading?
The vacuous reason given to put them in harm’s way is that they are cleaning up a house so that it might be sold, and one of the kids is the niece of the scientist.
Kooky!
It only takes a short while before one of the kids gets got. He wakes up with minor superpowers of sorts as his body has been “enhanced” by his new buddies. There are hooded people roaming through the woods, the local townsfolk all seem to know much more than they let on and when they finally get around to doing something the special effects are absolutely lousy.
And I haven’t even mentioned yet that the ending is absolutely abysmal and indefensibly bad, regardless of budget.
And the creatures? In short the parasites are direct rips from the worms in Slither, as is this entire film. Only without the jokes, creativity and scares.
Awesome huh?
Final Rating – 5 / 10. I still think the poster is cool. But it has NOTHING to do with the actual film, which is totally yawnworthy. Bad original horror is one thing. Bad rip-offs another altogether.
Finally…
Sorority Row
No illusions here, I knew this was going to be horrible, it was a matter of exactly how horrible.
Fucking horrible.
At the usual film college party with numerous hot chicks in their undies and well muscled meatheads walking around shirtless 6 chicks from the same sorority play a prank on one of the chick’s brother (by pretending to get slipped a drug so he can nail them in a coma!), the hoax backfires when he tries to get rid of the (alive) corpse, only he tries to cut it into pieces first.
The surviving girls (and guy) swear to keep a secret, dump the body and move on.
8 months later…
The girls are about to graduate and throw a party to celebrate, of course someone turns up to pick them off one by one.
Yawn. Next.
It wouldn’t be so bad if there was some concern or if one of the girls deserved to live, but these conniving, bitchy sluts all need to be killed.
I don’t know what has changed in cinema, it used to be you picked who you wanted to live, now it isn’t even about who will die or when, just how gory the killing is.
Sorority Row has about as much tension and uncertainty as a Harlem Globetrotter’s game, and a plot as empty as the heads of the vacuous bints on the cover.
Now, what I really want to talk about.
Rumer Willis, daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, is one of the 6 girls. In short, the fugly one. Every year a new actor/actress arrives in a film and is announced as the “son of…” or the “daughter of…”, and that happened with young Rumer, only she went out of her way to say she is an actress and not a novelty.
Woah girl, you are a novelty. Actually more a freak. It wouldn’t be so bad if you were hot, Bruce seems to have pretty good genes and even though I’m not a fan you couldn’t call Demi ordinary, but Rumer appears to have been smacked by the ugly stick.
Her face looks like a paper plate with sallow empty eyes and a nose drawn on, there is no other features, no cheekbones, no jaw definition aside from the massive Buzz Lightyear chin, and a mouth that looks like it would be more comfortable drooling lazily. Thankfully the filmmakers seemed to realise this and there is not one scene in the film where her hair isn’t pushed over her face to hide her elephantitis.
I can hear the makeup and hair guy going “no darling all the girls are wearing it this way this season, the camera will love you! Now just look in the opposite direction to where all the other girls are looking…”
And as for the other girls, they are all attractive in the studio selected way, which means they all look like they came from the same assembly line. The too must have been thinking a similar thing; “I had 14 surgeries and 2 acting lessons and she gets a role simply because of whose thighs she fell out of!”
Sorry Rumer you mumbling sow, I don’t mean to be mean but you are the one that said you act because of your ability and not your background. Even Paris is not that dumb.
Well she is, but you know what I mean.
Final Rating – 3.5 / 10. This film made me feel like less of a person for having seen it.
The moral to the story? Do your homework and don’t settle for DVDs based upon the covers.
(A public service announcement by OGR.)
