Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Leveraging Your Synergies

You guys remember how much I love British horror, right?  I think the fact that some of the best horror ever made comes from a people thought of as prissy and boring is the ultimate in irony and there's nothing I like more than irony and dead-pan humor... and cupcakes...

So, yeah.  Anyway.  My job, lately, as much as I love it, is eating my life in gory chunks and it's with THAT in mind, that I bring to you an undersung rock star of a flick, Severance.


In this world of conferences and team-building exercises, it's not surprising to see horror take a bunch of over-stressed middle-management types and slap them in the middle of the woods.

We all know what the woods want, right?

They worry.  They should.
Our intrepid band of... business-people... from the multi-national weapons corporation, Palisade Defense, are going to a team-building exercise in the mountains of Eastern Europe.  Seriously?  Have we learned NOTHING in horror movies?  Eastern Europe is the LAST place anybody wants to go.  But that's beside the point.  They're all "Oooooh, let's play paintball" because I guess that's what weapons people do.  Of course, we all know that it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.  Or a leg. 

Bear traps are no one's friend.
Suffice it to say that this does not end well.

This is a slick one, kids.  It's got plenty of comedy, which I love, a decent amount of gore and, shock of all shocks, it doesn't leave itself open for a sequel!  FINALLY!  Someone who understands that you CAN end a story in the last reel.

Ah, yes.  The office dickhole.
I highly recommend Severance.  It flew under a lot of people's radar and sometimes, that's a great thing.  Plus, Andy Nyman needs a cuddle.

If you haven't noticed, I'm trying, lately, not to tell the entire story.  This is on purpose.  I noticed that I was giving entirely too much away.  As fun as it is, because my potty-mouth needs a workout on occasion, it wasn't fair.  So I'll just stick to vague snarkery.  I promise I'll make it worth your while.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

The ONLY Time CGI is Acceptable.

As a gamer as well as a horror nerd, I find myself distinctly lacking in video game movie entries, here.  And there have been quite a few that bear mentioning but I'm just going to stick with one for now.  Mostly because my blog is very limited in scope and I need to leave myself material for reviews.  You don't want me to have to resort to reviewing the Monster High DVDs, do you?  I'm not sure my pancreas could take it.

So, yeah.  Today, I'm gonna share a tiny slice of awesome.  Resident Evil: Damnation


For those of you not familiar with the Resident Evil series of video games, they started as the pinnacle of Playstation zombie survival horror in 1996.  It was originally released in Japan by the name of "Biohazard" and I'm fairly certain that they didn't get to KEEP that name in the US due to trademark infringement lawsuits.  It is currently one of the most successful multi-media game franchises in the world.

And I suck at it.  Bad.  When I picked up the first one it took me three days to get past the first fucking screen because I couldn't aim the fucking gun.

He's better at it than I am.
ANYWAY.  After a successful series of live-action films starring Milla Jovovich (none of which actually follow any of the video game plots, each one worse than the last in that hilarious way that I adore, all of which I'll cover later, probably as part of a theme week, and Paul W. S. Anderson really needs to stop casting his wife.  Nepotism is alive and well, people.), Capcom decided to make a few of their own movies all CGI-like.  Because you can get pixels to do some awesome shit that just isn't humanly possible in the real world and now that we've gotten past the "Final Fantasy: Spirits Within" levels of Uncanny Valley creepiness in terms of creating believable human characters (that still look like they're in a cartoon) that's totally OK with me.  The Japanese, barring their strange inability to write believable English dialogue and unlike Mr. Anderson, have expanded on the game world and bring us a world-spanning epidemic that, while it's horrific, isn't as bleak as your standard zombie apocalypse.

Damnation is the second of the CGI RE films and, frankly, it's the superior of the two.  It takes place in a near-future analogue of an Eastern Slavic nation in the throes of a burgeoning revolution.  Leon, the primary hero of the franchise, no matter what Milla Jovovich would have you believe, is an American operative there to root out the revolutionaries whom he believes is using biological Bio-Organic Weapons (BOW's) in their bid for power. 

Gene Simmons, eat your heart out.
Yeah, those things don't look like zombies but there's a long and colorful history to Resident Evil and the Lickers are a part of it.  Trust me when I say that zombies do play a very large part in the franchise.  The Lickers are kind of... super-zombies. 

And they now have handlers. People infected with a "Plaga", which gives them control over the undead.  Oddly, no one really states who made the Plaga to begin with and no mention of the Umbrella Corporation is mentioned.  This does not deter from my enjoyment of the film, though.

This guy?  Deters a little.  I wanted him to die horribly.
Thwarting our hero are the revolutionaries, the President of the nation and Ada Wong, a super-spy who pretends to be investigating the BOWs for her own purposes. 

Suffice it to say that regardless of the awesomeness of the action and the nifty creatures and the weapon-y doo-dads, ALL of these movies, CGI and live-action alike, veer directly into "action" territory and, eventually, leave the horror angle behind which makes me a little sad.  Yeah, we want to see the good guys win but did we really need a fuckin' Chun-Li battle in the Slavic equivalent of the Oval Office?

Politicians are not supposed to be fuckin' ninjas, man!
All-in-all, though, I liked the movie.  I liked ALL of the Resident Evil movies.  Just not because they're actually any good.  This one is a super action-flick and there are definitely some horrific moments worth watching but it's still brainless.  If you need a decent way to waste some time, check it out.

Because she said so.



Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Of Gods And Really, Really Hot Men...

Oliver Reed.  Man among men.  Comfortable enough in his sexuality to wrestle naked on film with another dude (Women in Love... boring as FUCK but those ten minutes are AWESOME).  All beardy and cute with a huge personality and an even bigger dick.  The reason I like my men burly and fuzzy.  Star of the 1971 Ken Russell pseudo-historical magnum opus The Devils.


The Devils lands firmly in the "horror-adjacent" category because it's not really a horror movie.  It's based partially on the 1952 book The Devils of Loudun and the 1960 play The Devils (also based on the book), both of which were depictions of the rise and fall of Urbain Grandier, a 17th century priest executed for witchcraft following a series of "possessions" in Loudun, France.  Oliver Reed, in all his mustachioed glory, plays Grandier while his accuser, Sister Jeanne, is portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave.  And she is deliciously mad.

Hump?  What hump?
You know what, though?  I'm not even going to BEGIN to try and explain this one because, seriously?  It is just fucked up.  There's a lot of yelling and accents and piety and debauchery and Grandier, although he seems to be the bad guy at the beginning, is totally not.  It's UTTERLY an art film and you really need to be in a certain "I need to watch something completely fucked up" sort of mood to gain any kind of enjoyment out of it.

Or if you just want to see Oliver Reed in various states of undress...
This film originally garnered an X-rating, although, nowadays it's barely a hard 'R'.  It had sex and nudity, obviously, but it also gave us masturbating nuns, bible-burning, lots and lots of men in drag, a seriously creepy dude with a bowl cut, various sadistic methods of torture (mostly off-screen) and priests being human.  I'm, personally, guessing that the 'X' was for people that needed to be all high and mighty about religious subject matter.  Grandier's  speech about why priests should be allowed to marry alone probably got a whole lot of Catholic knickers in a twist.

Add to all of that the image of Grandier as Christ in a twisted masturbation fantasy on the part of Sister Jeanne which, seriously?  Was the cause of all of this possession bullshit to begin with, and we have a movie deliberately designed to inflame the religious into providing inadvertant publicity via public arguments about censorship.

All this and bondage, too.
Speaking of censorship, get what they had to cut out!  They had to dub over the words "cunt" and "fuck me".  They got rid of a lot of the nudity, particularly in the church.  They cut out much of the footage of Grandier's legs being crushed and, finally, they had to cut out a scene of Sister Jeanne masturbating with a charred hunk of Grandier's femur.  You know.  Because the ball-joint of a thigh bone is just MADE for flicking the bean. 

Nuns are weird.

A lot of this footage was considered lost for good but film critic Mark Kermode started the ball rolling toward making the film whole again when he managed to find the "Rape of Christ" sequence, presumably in a box in some has-been extra's garage sale where he bought it for a nickel after haggling the price down.

So, yeah.  If you're in the mood for something dark and trippy and have a need to watch nuns get their vengeful sexual repression on, hit up The Devils.  Bring drugs.  You may need them. 

Monday, November 4, 2013

Cap'n Crunch and a Handy

I'm BAAAAACK!

Now that my life has obtained a little more order, let's jump right back in, OK?

There are times when I really do like this little hobby of mine and those moments are when I find something completely awesome that has flown under everybody's radar.  Let me share this moment if I may.






Many of you know that my childhood was spent almost in it's entirety in front of the boob tube.  This was no small feat because my parents would actually use the outdoors as punishment.  All of that being said, Saturday Morning Mystery is my childhood nightmare come true.

Gee, Mr. Weatherby.  You mean there's gh-gh-gh-gh-ghosts?!?
Yes, kids, we finally have the horror movie that we all know Scooby-Doo tried to be without being so scary as to run off the rugrats that ate that shit up, including myself.  We've got Nancy (Velma), Gwen (Daphne), Chad (Freddy) and Floyd (Shaggy) and their mutt, Hamlet (HA!  Great Dane, indeed.) out being all paranormal investigators out to pay the bills with a van full of Floyd's drugs and some ghostbusting equipment.

Seriously, the only thing we're missing is an ascot.

Solvin' mysteries... pissin' off the cops.
Unlike in the cartoon, these kids have problems, bad habits and worse wardrobes.  And the screenwriter must totally hate Daphne because Gwen totally gets shafted.

This is new to video so I'm not gonna go to far into it but suffice it to say that there's acid and satanism involved which totally make for some 80's throwback horror movie awesomeness.  Y'know... with bad fashion choices.

And axes.
These are grown-up characters and I totally dig on this.  If you can find it, give it a shot.  I hearted it.