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0 of 11 Skulls
Date
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0 of 11 Skulls
Date
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0 of 11 Skulls
Saturday, 2-23-8
Ok, see if you can follow this because I'm not sure I did...
A stripper (Rose McGowan) quits her job and walks down a secluded road. A truckload of military people almost run her over causing her to cut her leg really badly. She limps into a restaurant where she bumps into her old boyfriend Ray. The military trucks meet a scientist who has more of the "secret chemical" than originally planned so military guys (Bruce Willis) try to kill the scientist. The scientist releases the chemical agent, turning everyone in the area into zombies.
The stripper and her boyfriend come to the hospital because of her badly cut leg and Ray is taken into custody by the sheriff and moved to the jailhouse. At the hospital is a husband/wife doctor team who are having problems and she is planning on leaving him for a woman. The stripper's leg has been amputated and the wife/doctor's other woman shows up in the hospital as a victim of the zombies. The husband attacks his wife after finding out about her plan to leave him and that is when the zombies attack the hospital and the jail. The sheriff still doesn't trust Ray but he agrees to go to the hospital with him to kill the zombies. Ray goes into the hospital and jams a table leg into the stripper's stump and they escape the hospital. The wife doctor escapes in her car and the husband doctor has been infected and escaped as well. Everyone agrees to meet up at the restaurant and fight the zombies.
While the group organizes, the stripper and Ray start to have sex in the back of the restaurant. They are interrupted by a melted film and "missing reel" message. When the film resumes, the zombies have arrived, the sheriff is dying and the restaurant is on fire. They all decide to make a run for Mexico in a truck a convertible and a custom chopper. They looked like the processional from "Escape From New York" and just as I thought that, the music kicks in and it is the "EfNY" music. As they get to the bridge a group of zombies is stopping them and are then blown away by the military guys who have come up behind them. The military guys take the survivors into custody and lock them up with the scientist.
The scientist reveals that the reason the military guys are in a panic looking for the chemical zombie agent is that they ware intentionally infected by their superiors after they accidentally killed Osama Bin Laden. The only known cure is constantly inhaling the gas. Our little cast of survivors are apparently immune to the gas and the real cure must lie within their blood. The survivors fight back and take over the military crew holding them prisoner. Ray has modified a machine gun/grenade launcher to be the stripper's new leg. She blows up the bad guys with her new leg and they all make it to the helicopter except for Ray who dies trying to protect everyone. The dying sheriff and his dying brother (owner of the restaurant) stay behind to blow up the base, killing the zombies and destroying the chemical.
It is a bright sunny day and the stripper is riding a horse leading a group of new survivors to her fortress on the coast of Mexico to join her fellow survivors in starting to rebuild the world. As the film ends we see the stripper's back and she is carrying a newborn baby, apparently the results of whatever happened during the "missing reel". The end.
No really, that's really what happened. I couldn't make this shit up. It was a whole lot worse than I made it sound, I left out all of the little details that just made this thing silly through and through. It was fun but silly. Buckets of blood splashing into the sky and limbs falling off just from a simple gunshot. Dreadful zombies with fantastic makeup effects. Tom Savini was one of the sheriff deputies in here so I'm sure he must have had a little input into the zombie makeup. This is the first time I've seen him in a movie with multiple speaking lines and after watching him I have decided that he is the grown up version of Dante from Kevin Smith's "Clerks".
But he was what made this movie endurable. I kept seeing him and remembering that this was a sick-gore-fest zombie movie. The splatter and gore was fun but the writing and acting was tough to sit through. Much like the other half of "Grindhouse", "Death Proof", I really liked the faux 70's look to the film stock and the "missing reel" was brilliant. The best part of the movie wasn't even part of the movie. It was a fake trailer for a movie starring Danny Trujillo called,"Machete". Those of you who don't know who Danny T is, he's the scarred Mexican that is always throwing knives and taking off his shirt showing a full seniorita tattoo on his chest. If you still don't know him, you don't watch the same movies I do. Anyway, this fake trailer looked better than the actual two features in "Grindhouse". I wish they'd make that thing into a movie.
They say that this half of the "Grindhouse" flick was done by Robert Rodriguez but I get a lot of "Pulp Fiction"/Tarrantino vibe from this one. Almost all of the characters run across one another or have previous relationships. I suspect that Quentin probably had something to do with this half of the movie as well.
Overall it was a better flick than "Death Proof". I liked them both for the bad 70's look but this one didn't make me want to leave halfway through. I can't score it any higher than "DP" but if I did half skulls I'd give it half a skull higher than "DP". But I don't so...
2 of 11 Skulls
Monday, 2-18-7
How can you pass up a title like this one? I had seen the title years ago but passed it off as just another pro-Nazi propaganda film. I have already seen too many of those. When someone mentioned it recently as being used as filler in another movie I decided to see if it was available on Netflix. There were four of these movies(Three Ilsas and one Greta) and I figured I'd try the one I heard about first and then follow up with the others.
Nazi rape/torture porn. That's about it. I watched it and there were moments where I had had enough and was just about to turn it off when I realized how ridiculous the movie was. The torture was like an early 70's special effects trial run. It was sick yet harmless. I don't know if that makes any sense...
There is a camp where POWs are taken as workers and women are handed over to the doctor, Ilsa. She is based on a cross between Josef Mengele and Ilse Koch. The actress has one of the greatest set of "pre-implant era" breasts I've seen in a movie in a long time... Cruel and unusual experiments are preformed in the efforts to show that women can take much more punishment than men. These are the barbaric scenes that are difficult to sit through until you see the cheesy effects. Still, it's hard to watch even fake depictions of things you know really happened.
All of her guards are also busty women and the male POWs are used for their lustful wants. Each night Ilsa selects a male prisoner to take to bed with her but when he is finished before her, she is left unsatisfied. She then castrates him and sends him back to the prison camp. Until the arrival of the American prisoner Wolfe. He is able to withhold himself during sex with Ilsa and she is impressed. She repeats her nightly ritual with him enticing him with more and more lurid exploits. When she can not break him she realizes he has broken her. She wants to run away with him after the war and have children.
The men in the camp have found a way to meet up with the women and have devised a plan to make their escape. Assisting in their escape is the visit of an important General who has arrived to make an inspection of the camp. As he tours the camp he is impressed until he comes across Ilsa's private experiments. He chastises her for carrying out cruel experiments to further her own research. He is angry but he is also turned on. At dinner that evening the General gets drunk on wine and on the decadent torture of a woman during their meal. He sees that Ilsa is a sick woman and after dinner makes some of his own sick suggestions to her.
When Ilsa is done with the General she sends for Wolfe. He has taken control of their sexual encounters and she is eager to comply when he suggests tying her up. When she is tied he gags her and steals her gun. He runs out into the camp and the liberation begins. All of the prisoners are expert shots and the SS soldiers are straight out of Star Wars in that they couldn't hit a target the size of a house from thirty feet away. The camp is almost free and we hear the oncoming tanks, the General has sent his troops in to destroy the camp and erase all evidence of Ilsa's experiments. Before she can be killed by the General's men, the one woman prisoner that Ilsa couldn't break limps into the room (almost unrecognizable from the various torture) and dies slumped over her bare chest.
The camp has been erased, Wolfe and a beautiful prisoner escape, Ilsa and her doctors/guards are all dead. The end.
Well, I still think it was a difficult choice to admit to you that I even rented the damn thing much less sat through the entire thing. Hey, I had to check it out and to be completely honest, I have seen much worse in my more indiscretionary youth. This one was a work of fiction and not really glorifying anything, just taking advantage of the controversy in order to make a quick and cheap movie. I have a thing for old 70's movies and this one felt right at home with all the other exploitation films I like. This isn't really a movie I'd ever watch a second time and I took the other three out of my Netflix queue as soon as I saw this one. I'm sure the other three are more of the same and I have seen enough. It was a crappy movie but it never promised to be anything BUT a crappy movie. It was sick, but you knew that going in to it. I got exactly what I expected and to be honest it was a little bit better than I expected.
3 of 11 Skulls
Tuesday, 2-12-8
I was trying to stay up late on night in the hotel room because I had to work a midnight to 6am window the next day. So I was flipping the channels and trying to find something interesting on at 1am. That's a bigger challenge than it sounds. I happen on a movie that was just getting started and it was about these kids acting all "gangster tough" and every once in a while, when these kids ran into other people the screen would pause and display the people's names and "Witness #5" or whatever number. I watched the rest of the movie because I had to find out what the hell that was all about.
You have young white thugs acting tough and pretending they are gang members. They don't know they are pretending, they think they really are tough but just one look at them and you'll see what I mean, they're not very scary. One of them is Justin Timberlake for fuck sake. So the main lil' gangster is upset because some guy owes him money. He decides to kidnap the guy's little brother until he pays him.
They get the brother who is completely docile. He isn't upset about being kidnapped because he was running away anyway. Main gangster (something about his blonde hair makes him look ridiculous) makes Justin take care of the little brother while he goes out looking for the older brother. Justin and the little brother become friends and Justin offers to let him go but the little brother chooses to stay and hang out.
So the mini gang (plus one) does their thing. They hang out, get high and have sex. The little brother is having the time of his life. At one point the little brother shows his skill as a blackbelt (this will become important later) and everyone is having fun. The number of people that saw these guys with the kid is now up to something like 25 or 30.
The gang leader returns after consulting his lawyer and says they need to abort the whole thing because they will all do serious time if they are found out. He orders Justin to kill the little brother. Justin doesn't want to do it and is forced to act by another member of the gang. They take the kid out into the desert (where even THERE they are spotted by a couple of hikers!) When the kid realizes what is going on he breaks down and goes into hysterics. Why did they show us that this kid could disarm and beat up multiple people if he never used it? Should have just left it out or had the kid break out and beat them up. But he doesn't and they kill him.
One of the 30 or so witnesses realizes something is up after the kid disappears. The movie ends with the usual photos of the gang members and how much time they are serving. I haven't mentioned the mother of the kid yet. She was played by Sharon Stone and was for the most part forgettable until the very end. And it wasn't memorable in the good way. She played the mother of the kidnapped/killed boy and she had packed on 100 pounds and gone crazy. They interview her in the asylum and she's "Hollywood" crazy, not "real" crazy. Too much. Bruce Willis was in this too but I don't see why. Only for a couple of scenes and badly played at that.
The reason for the numbering of the witnesses was because this was a true story. All of this really happened (allowing for poetic license) the kid was really killed and the gang all went away to prison.
It was a really crappy movie about a bunch of morons. I have no idea why this held my attention for the duration. I guess I kept waiting for something to happen, waiting for a hook. But it never came. This movie was almost like watching a documentary but without any of the interesting facts. I hated it yet I sat through the entire thing voluntarily. If I every do anything worth making a movie out of, please don't let these guys make it. My life is already pretty bland, I don't need these guys making me look any more ridiculous than I already am.
2 of 11 Skulls
Saturday, 2-9-8
It was next on my Netflix queue. Teresa just mailed in her movies today so on Monday the queue will move up and they would have sent me this movie. I say would have because after watching it on VH1 last night I couldn't remove it from my queue fast enough. I got out of bed at 3am to make sure they didn't send me this piece of crap.
One of the podcasts I
listen to was talking about the movies they had seen during 2007 and what they
were looking forward to in 2008. One of the guys said that this was one of the
funniest things he had seen all year. I had never heard of it so I put it in
the queue to check it out. Last night Teresa and I were watching the 4+ hour
"Hamlet" and when that was finally over at 1am I sat and flipped channels and
saw that "Air Guitar Nation" was on. I decided to watch it and after just two
minutes I changed the wording from watching it to suffering through it. It
wasn't enough to turn it off and forget I ever thought about watching it, I had
to get through the entire thing so that I could tell all of you just how bad it
really was so that you don't suffer the same fate.
Air guitar. We've all done it. You, me, him and her, nobody likes to get
caught doing it because we look like fools. It's fun in the privacy of your
bedroom or even in your car but when someone looks at you funny while you're
walking down the mall and you realize you're holding an imaginary guitar, you
feel really stupid.
The movie is a documentary. Not a mockumentary wherein they pretend to take the subject matter serious. But a real documentary. They really wanted to show this "art" that is "sweeping the nation". Yeah, they are a few decades too late catching on but really, they think this is a new and exciting thing. Everyone did it in the 80's and I remember watching a movie of Joe Cocker doing it live at Woodstock. It was probably around since not long after the invention of the guitar. Going back farther I wouldn't doubt to hear of someone playing air-violin or air-harpsichord.
So Finland holds the World Championship of Air Guitar every year and America is just finding this out. Two clubs hold competitions and have the face-off between the east and west coast winners and send the American champion to the world Championship. There is friendly competition and eventually the American is crowned World Champ. Two hours of guys and girls faking guitar movements and even then, not well. Every contestant takes on a stage persona and the more outrageous, the better. The main focus was on American champ David Jung (C-Diddy) and Dan Crane (Bjorn Turoque) was the continual loser who refused to give up and ended up looking like a sore loser. They dress in the gaudiest outfits and flail their right hand about waist high wile holding their left hand still. (I guess air guitar isn't captive to such pesky ideas as frets or fingering...)
Maybe this is just the inevitable outcome of having thousands of people playing hours and hours of the video game "Guitar Z(H)ero". If I can remove myself from the situation, maybe it wasn't an absolute turd of a movie. Maybe I'm just embarrassed to see these guys acting like this and knowing I was a lot like them not too long ago (hours maybe...) It's a lot like watching the news interview someone from some organization you are in and instead of the rather intelligent, well-dressed guy, they always interview the bag-lady in the filthy sweatpants who spouts nothing but rhetoric and ends up making the entire organization look stupid. I know I look stupid when I air guitar, I don't need these guys making me look worse.
1 of 11 Skulls
Thursday, 1-31-8
This one was recommended by some of my eFriends. They were surprised that I liked "28 Days/Weeks Later" but that I didn't really care for the "Dawn Of The Dead" remake. They just don't know me well enough yet I guess. Being a remake, "DotD" had to live up to certain standards and although I think it was a decent movie, it wasn't good enough to merit the effort.
But I digest... (inside joke)
"Fido" is a zombie movie comedy. Imagine "Leave it to Beaver" meets "Dawn of the Dead". I'll give you a second to come to that special place in your brain that says, "No!!!, no! no!".
It is the early 1950's and "space dust" has come down to earth and now all the dead walk in search of human flesh. Lucky for us, ZomCon built fences and created special collars that neutralize the zombie's thirst for blood. Now the Zombie Wars are over and everyone has zombie servants, mowing the grass, serving dinner and Mr. Theopolis has a zombie named Tammi that... Well, we'll just let you use your imagination...
Enter the Robinson family. Father is a golfing workaholic and the mother is the perfect June Cleaver. Little Timmy is kind of a spaz and gets bullied at school. The new family just moved in across the street and they have six zombie servants! Their dad is chief of ZomCon security Mr. Bottoms. Mom is tired of being the only one on the block without a zombie. She brings home a zombie and dad hates it. He's afraid of zombies because he had to kill his own father when he turned into a zombie. He is obsessed with death and funerals where they bury the head separately.
Dad relents and lets mom and Timmy keep the zombie as long as he's chained up in the back yard when he's not doing chores. Timmy is trying everything he can do to get attention from his father but dad would rather golf than hang out with Timmy. So he goes off to the park and he is attacked by the bullies. Along comes Timmy's new zombie and saves him from a beating. Timmy starts to look up to the zombie as a father figure because they wash the car together and play catch; all the stuff Timmy's dad is too busy for. Timmy's dad is also too busy for Timmy's mom and she's starting to flirt with the zombie as well. Timmy dubs the zombie "Fido".
While playing catch the ball goes into the bushes and Fido goes to get it. His collar malfunctions and he ends up eating the nosey old lady next door. Timmy realizes they'll take Fido away so he buries the old lady in the park, but not before she also zombified another person. One loose zombie leads to two loose zombie which leads to four, eight and so on... The bullies know the truth and try to kill Timmy with his own zombie by tying him to a tree and dismantling Fido's collar. Their plan backfires and the bullies are zombified by Fido. But Fido never tries to kill Timmy, even with the collar out of commission. We get the great scene of Timmy sending Fido for help and when Fido gets to the mother she asks, "What is it boy, is Timmy in trouble?" It was transparent but still funny. Something about replacing the picture perfect collie with a six foot flesh-rotting zombie was just funny enough to make me laugh.
Mom and Fido show up in time to save Timmy but back at home they have discovered that Timmy was the cause of the new zombie outbreak. ZomCon decides to let Timmy off with a warning but they take Fido away to be "put to sleep".
Timmy finds out that Fido was actually taken to work in a ZomCon factory. He sneaks in and tries to rescue him but Mr. Bottoms stops him and puts Timmy outside the fence into the "Wild Zone". Mom, Fido and Dad show up and are in time to save Timmy but the dad gets shot and Mr. Bottoms gets turned into a zombie.
The movie closes with Mr. Robinson's funeral (Head casket please) and then a backyard barbecue where we see the little girl leading her new zombie dad on a leash. Fido is now the father of the family and they all live happily ever after.
Was it a great movie, was it art? No, but it was funny. Billy Connolly played Fido and everyone seems to be talking about that as if it were important. He has NO speaking lines, how funny could he be? He walked like a zombie, the makeup and hair department made him look like a zombie, he acted like a zombie. But the face behind the makeup was barely recognizable and he never said anything funny. Carrie-Anne Moss as the mother was played well and she's attractive as always.
All the really funny parts are all one-liners. They aren't very funny out of the context of the movie but they made me laugh a few times. Such as watching an ad for ZomCon's new heart monitor;
"Sure the elderly are friendly but can they really be trusted?" Cut to a grandfather playing with his granddaughter and having a heart-attack, "Help, Grandpa's fallen and he's getting up!"
It was worth checking out. Not terribly great cinema but better than a lot of the crap out there.
6 of 11 Skulls
Sunday, 1-20-8
Ok ok ok. I can hear you all screaming in disbelief that I actually saw this. You all know my penchant for picking apart movies and making even the most cosmetic flaw or historical inaccuracy into a huge reason that the entire movie sucked... Ok, I know I'm an idiot but hey, what are you gonna do? I watched this one simply as a movie and a comic book adaptation. I've read the Frank Miller comic and I know what to expect. With that in mind, I tried so hard to put the historical facts out of my mind and enjoy what promised to be a good blood fest. And it was.
In fact, I don't own the comic but I may have to read it again just to compare notes, there was imagery and scenes on the screen that were directly from the book. The lines seemed to be word for word and the scenes were comic pages come to life. To be fair, I'll only review the movie, not the comic, even if the movie lifted it directly from the pages.
We start on "Lion King" rock with the birth of a baby boy. The narrator describes the brutal life of a young Spartan boy. The life long training as a soldier. The boy grows up to become King Leonidas. We see a nice long shot of his naked ass and he makes love to his queen (who looks like Alanis Morissette) in slow motion and in cut scenes. The Persians are coming. We never really know why in the film but if you read your history you'd know about Darius the Great and that the Persians thought the Spartans deserved an ass kicking... So the king realizes that once Sparta falls, all of Greece will fall. But, because of bribes and corrupt politics the King is forced to climb a mountain, deal with leper elders and watch a stoned naked chick swim under water. After all of this the elders tell him that he is not allowed to go to war because they have a big party planned and they don't want a war ruining it. The King climbs back down the mountain and gathers up 300 of his best men. All of them with spectacular pectoral muscles. I felt like I was watching gay porn not a historical interpretation... As they march out to Thermopylae the council reminds the king that the oracle told him not to go to war and he responds that these men are his personal bodyguards and they are just going out for a stroll.
Along the way we have a half human monster stalking along with them. When one of the men points this out, the king actually says, "He has followed us since Sparta" and I expected Gollum/Smeagol to come out from the shadows. But instead we get the hunchback who wants to be a soldier. He is brave but can not hold his shield in phalanx formation so the king dismisses him because he'd be a weakness in the phalanx. (Even though we barely EVER see them fight in phalanx formation throughout the entire movie!!!) The hunchback warns the king of a secret path around the mountain that would give the Persians a way to surround them if they discovered it. The king nods and sends him off to make sandwiches or something.
We get to know a few of the 300 men. The captain of the guard, his son and another soldier, we'll call them Bill and Ted because that's all I could see was this Keanu Reeves look-a-like and his friend frolicking in the background. I thought I saw something on the History Channel about how ancient elite warriors were sometimes paired up as younger/older homosexual couples. The bond of lovers kept the desertion rate at virtually zero and also encouraged the men to fight even harder. "I'd fight for my brother but I'd die for my lover" type of thing. This may or may not be true but I thought I saw it once in a documentary and I definitely saw it with Bill and Ted here. I guess they didn't want to really display it because how many of us would have paid to watch 150 half-naked gay couples fight and die?
So Xerxes finally shows up and he looks like an eight foot tall cross between Patrick Swayze and RuPaul. He does the typical, "Submit and I'll let you keep your lands and title" speech and of course the King of Sparta says, "Fuck you". We get a few battles that are spectacular if you like CGI and green-screen (remember, this is a comic strip, not a movie) Every time the Spartans defeat the army thrown at them they have to beat the level boss and then they get a harder army with a harder level boss. The same recipe video games have followed since 1982. They beat the swordsmen? Throw the War-Rhino at them. They beat the masked ninjas? Throw the 30' tall elephants and the guy with the blades as arms at them. No shit. A guy with blades attached at the elbows instead of arms. And you can't blame that one on the comic. It swear I don't remember any of this zany shit in there. I guess the comic book world isn't weird enough for Hollywood.
Another thing I don't remember from the comic was the failed and useless subplot of what happens back home. The queen is trying to get the council to vote to go to war and support the 300 men already fighting. She can't because there is a guy that all but runs the council and he wants to be king. The queen agrees to sleep with him in exchange for his support at council and he agrees but he insists on grudge-fucking her and humiliating her. She endures it to gain the support of the army. At council the next day she makes her plea and then he stands up and says that she's full of shit and even forced herself on him last night. She kills him, Persian coins fall out of his purse (how convenient) and the council begins to see how they were being directed by a traitor. No one gives a shit about what is happening back home. If we cared enough about that we'd watch the Discovery Channel documentary about it. We want inhuman amounts of blood!
Back to the fighting, we beat the 7' tall beastman that reminded me of the mutant guy from "Weird Science". Now we come to Xerxes himself. The hunchback is in his army now, having turned sides and exposed the Spartan's back door to Xerxes in exchange for riches, power and an orgy that is pretty much his only chance to ever get laid. Xerxes offers his deal again. Again the reply is "fuck you". We get the final battle in which all 299 Spartans die. (King Leonidas previously dispatched a wounded soldier back to the council to tell their tale.) The soldier makes it back to the council and turns out to be the narrator telling the story. Somehow we skip to a whole year later (read more history and you'll know why the Persians haven't conquered Greece in over a year, shipwrecks, Battle of Salamis, civil unrest back home...) and the entire Spartan and Greek army is ready to fight the Persians. The end.
Some of the cheesy lines couldn't be helped because they are recorded in history as actual lines said by these people. They have just been over used again and again until they have become cheesy. They used these lines in "The 300 Spartans" in 1962 and they used them in the comic and they used them here. But there were a few lines that seemed to be snuck in directly from the "post-9/11 justification for the war in Iraq" playbook. The most notable being "Freedom isn't free". The speeches in the movie were staged and fake, like they were trying too hard for the Academy Award nomination. One of the speeches was a direct lift from Shakespeare's "Henry V" and the rest seemed to shout "Braveheart". The worst was the "I never got to tell my son I loved him" speech. I wanted to puke.
The music was confusing. They shook it up so much that you couldn't help but notice the music. You get a nice rousing orchestral score and it seems to fit the "Hey guys, lets go kick some ass" and as soon as they start off to battle you get guitars and an industrial metal sound. Either way might have worked but mixing the two didn't work for me.
Bearing in mind the criticism the Eastern world has heaped on this movie and the criticism leftwing America has heaped on this movie I venture forth with the following opinion with no disrespect intended... This movie looked like a US Marines recruitment movie. What about this movie doesn't scream, "Real men/real warriors, chiseled bodies, battle is glory, defend your nation to your death!" I honestly expected to be handed a recruitment pamphlet in the theatre lobby on my way out, and I watched this lying in my own bed! That's how powerful that image was in my head.
The best line was in the closing scenes when they commend that few stood against many, that 300 Spartans rescued the world from mysticism and tyranny. They stood AGAINST mysticism and tyranny? These 300 men led by a KING who openly engaged in killing babies unfit to be soldiers and consulted an ORACLE before going to war? Against MYSTICISM and TYRANNY huh?
I've come around to this genre because they seem to be producing more of the darker comics rather than the bright spandex hero types. But we're getting a few of the grittier stories recently and I like it. "Sin City" and "Spawn" were dark, "Spiderman 3" and "Punisher" made feeble attempts to be dark. There are still some good comic movies coming. "Watchmen" is over a year away and "JLA" has been put on hold but we've still got "Iron Man", "Dark Knight", "The Incredible (Gray) Hulk" and "Solomon Kane" to look forward to. Overall I liked "300" as a comic interpretation.
6 of 11 Skulls
Friday, 1-18-7
Well I really never gave this one a chance when it came out. From the name and from the few seconds I saw in the trailers I was expecting a British "Reno 911" or "Super Troopers". I really had no interest in that. I heard that this was the same crew that did "Shaun of the Dead" and while I did like that movie, it's not one of my favorites.
The movie starts out a little slow, a lot of the dry British humor but it was watchable. A London cop (Shaun from Shaun of the Dead) is the best cop ever. He has seen action in every possible scenario and has been decorated in every possible way. He is a no-nonsense cop who believes in nothing but truth and law. He has been forced out of London by his superiors and his team because his numbers makes the rest of the force look bad. He is transferred to Sandford, a little village in the middle of nowhere whose only notice is that they win the "Perfect Village" award every year.
He shows up and immediately begins enforcing the letter of the law and learns that the village is a lot more laid back when it comes to the law. He befriends a fellow officer who insists that Shaun relaxes a little and doesn't act so uptight. Soon a series of murders takes place and the locals (including the chief of police) insist they are merely accidents. Shaun puts them together as a plot by one of the local business owners to buy land that will soon become valuable due to a planed highway expansion. He confronts the suspect and is completely wrong.
He stumbles upon a meeting of a secret coven of the village keepers whose duty is to win the "Perfect Village" award and they have killed all of these people simply because they would have given the village a bad reputation. They kill Shaun and give the body to his partner to dispose of. Shaun's death was faked (by his partner) and he is set free on the edge of town. On his way back to London he remembers watching bad American cop movies like "Point Break" and "Bad Boys 2" with his partner and decides to take the law into his own hands.
This is where it becomes funny. He comes back to the edge of town and beats the crap out of the old couple standing guard there. I was watching this on the laptop with headphones and laughed out loud (scaring the crap out of Teresa) when Shaun does a flying face kick to the 80 year old woman. He rides into town on a horse armed to the teeth looking like Clint Eastwood (Toshiro Mifune for you purists out there) as the man with no name. The village keepers all pull guns out of hiding places and attack him. His partner joins forces with him and together they kill/arrest all of the bad guys. The old crew from London show up and beg him to return and he refuses saying that he prefers to stay in Sandford. He takes over as Chief of Police in Sandford and starts wiping out petty crime.
It was funny but you'd have to be a big fan of British humor. I'm sure if I lived over there I would have liked it a lot more than I did. As it is I liked it just fine but found it to be a bit dry. The final sequences were good but no where near enough to save the movie. I'd probably rank this one a bit higher than "Shaun of the Dead" except that I really like zombie flicks, even if they are dulled down by being British. I won't watch it again but I'd say it was worth a watch.
5 of 11 Skulls
Last Updated: 02/24/08 08:33 p