Welp... That's All Wrapped Up...

In the interest of saving my reputation as someone who watches bad movies for pleasure, I have suffered through another couple of hours of celluloid trash for you.  I do this because I love you.  It's for your own good, really.

Today's shitheap?

The Mummy (2017).

Because, really, we needed to take all of the humor and fun out of the Brendan Frasier 1999 version, move it to the present day, add a few new characters and references to other classic movie monsters so that audiences have "easter eggs", and gender-swap the whole thing so that it LOOKS like a whole new movie but, in all truth, it's really fucking not.

That face says it all, really...

SO, the deal is that Tom Cruise plays Nick Morton, an utter dickhead who spends his life an an antiquities thief in the military who, for real, just should have ended up incarcerated for the shenanigans he pulls with his buddy, Chris Vail (Jake Johnson), at the very beginning of the film because he deserted his unit hunting for a town that's basically named "Curse".  That's even before they found the tomb that was a giant health and safety hazard because of a whole shit-ton of free-flowing mercury (which was used because it supposedly holds evil spirits at bay).  We get introduced to Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) as part of the aftermath of the drone strike that opens up the tomb.  She hates Nick, too.

As we all should.

See that hole?  Just fill it right the fuck back in.

Moving forward, Nick does something monumentally stupid and raises Ahmanet, our titular Mummy (Sofia Boutella)... yes, she's female, no that's not meant to be punny... unless you want it to be, I guess I can't stop you.  Rude.  ANYWAY, as part of this whole schtick, Nick gets saddled with the curse.  The curse of Ahmanet choosing him to be her vessel for Set, who, according to people that really didn't do their fucking homework, is basically the Dark Universe's (Yes, that's what Universal is calling their remakes of their classic monster films... I don't know why their team couldn't have gone cooler but the logo is nice, I guess) Egyptian Satan.  And possibly her baby-daddy because she gets ALL up in his grill a number of times throughout the film.

Yeah.  Because moldering linen, missing flesh, and the ability to summon sand and vermin are so fucking hot, right now.  She also kills Chris and keeps him around to haunt Nick into doing more stupid shit, a la Jack Goodman from An American Werewolf in London.  YAY, hallucinations and what very little humor they left in the film! 

And double irises.  Thus confounding cosplayers FOREVER!

We also get introduced to Prodigium.  A secret society, led by Dr. Jekyll (Yes, that Dr. Jekyll and portrayed by the always UNFH-worthy Russell Crowe... seriously, that man can wreck every inch of it, for real.  Call me, Russell.  Call me.) that exists to hunt supernatural threats.  Because of COURSE it does.  It's absolutely amazing that these things can cause such massive amounts of property damage and loss of life that no one knows they even exist.  These folks must have some Men in Black level memory-erasing bullshit to deal with every fucking window in London being broken down into sand and flung willy-nilly, blinding and choking the entire fucking city.

So, yeah.  This movie got pretty much nothing but negative reviews from everybody most fucking deservedly because it's in that grey area between Action and Horror that nobody likes or wants.  As an action film, it was middle of the road.  As a horror film, it was not enough.  Just because you throw in a soul-sucking dead thing who can create more dead things to follow her command and her goal is to stab Tom Cruise (which... seriously?  I'm down) making him the living embodiment of fucking DEATH, does not mean you have a horror movie and, listen right the fuck up, Universal, these ARE horror movies.  Stop fucking pandering to the lowest common denominator and fucking scare us.  I know you can.  You've done it before.

Oh, look.  Evil fan service.  Her lack of nipples is disturbing.

For me, I didn't hate it.  It's not a great use of your time.  You COULD be volunteering somewhere or walking with children in nature but if you feel the need to spend a few bucks and get out of the Summer heat, you could do much worse.

But, I didn't fucking like it, either.  I am not a fan of making the utterly devoid of human compassion jerkface the main protagonist (and this is brought up a few times without any tangible glimpses of redemption on the part of Nick).  I don't like that they took what could be a very strong female character and made her simper at the man who saved her life for the remainder of the film.  I don't like that they took the villain and made HER simper at the man she wants to turn into a god.  She HAD the power.  She didn't HAVE to do anything but wreck shit and rule Egypt for fucking ever  (and, y'know, pay Set back for his part of the bargain).  But, no.  Let's take a being that can literally sand blast the pyramids to dust and make her vulnerable to a fucking poison dart so we can entomb her alive for 5000 years to come back to wave her decrepit genitals at Tom Cruise, The Tiniest Scientologist.

I'm not going to say that you should skip this one.  There ARE elements of this movie that I enjoyed greatly.  There are a metric ass-ton of Easter eggs that it's fun to watch for (like the Book of the Dead from the Frasier flicks popping up and all sorts of delicious nasties in glass jars).  The special effects are decent and I actually really liked Sofia Boutella's performance.  I liked that they basically gender-swapped the entire story.  I liked Russell Crowe in a well-tailored suit, and WHO DOESN'T?!?  None of these things make up for a lackluster story with too many extraneous elements and a complete lack of judgement when it comes to time and distance.

It's not good, it's not bad.  It's just meh.  Bland.  Not necessarily boring.  But bland.  Salt required.

And I SWEAR TO GREAT BLOGATHOTEP, IF YOU WRECKED MY CHANCES AT A REMAKE OF CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, TOM CRUISE, I WILL ENSURE THAT YOU SPEND YOUR ENTIRE LIFE REGRETTING THAT YOU SIGNED ONTO THIS PICTURE!!  Seriously, bitch.  Run.

Make Like a Banana...

M. Night Shyamalan is back with Split.  And I watched it.

Oh, for fuck's sake...

I really should have known better.  I really should have.  But, noooooo.  The promise of James McAvoy and Betty Buckley lured me into Shamalamadingdong's creeper van with the promise of great acting and a decent storyline.

Great acting I got.  The storyline?  Not so much.

SURPRISE!!

So, our story is about three young women who get kidnapped by a man who has developed 23 distinct personalities due to childhood abuse, collectively known as "The Horde" because there's, apparently, nothing more frightening than a World of Warcraft reference.  We get McAvoy cycling through a few key personalities in an effort to bring forth "The Beast", which is the new 24th personality.  This one is a cannibal.

De-fucking-lightful.

Childhood Abuse Powers!  ACTIVATE!

Luckily for us, one of the girls is ALSO an abuse survivor and gets her mad on to try and help the others.  His shrink is also on the job, not quite knowing if he's behind the highly publicized kidnapping or not but pretty damn sure since one or more of the personalities are fighting back and bringing him to see her daily to try and mitigate the damage.  And I literally mean damage because the shrink has a hypothesis about the personalities having their own physiologies alongside their personalities, such as only ONE of the Horde having diabetes.

Verrrry innnderesding.  But schtupid!

None of this is really helpful.  It's too new so I won't give it away.


I tried, kids.  I tried.  This looked so good and it almost was.  The tension needed to be amped up and the ending... just blah.  Like a stale waffle with no syrup.  The acting was fantastic.  Everyone did an amazing job with their roles.  Everything else was just too understated.  The action needed to be more action-y, the scares needed to be more scary, the drama needed to be more drama-like.  It was just a flat line of beige all the way through.

I mean, give this a watch if you want but I just did not care for it.  Frankly, Shablamgela's career should have been over after Avatar.

Return of the Bride of the Son of...

HOLY FUCKBALLS, I'M BACK!!

My children, I have return-eth-ed to you.  To snark your eyeballs into oblivion and annoy your parents.  To make children skip in the streets and to make directors cry and hang themselves.  To ignore my own aching brain to provide YOU.  Yes, you.  With comedic splendors.

And obscenities.

'Cause that's how I roll.

So, yeah.  Let's talk about Insidious, shall we?

Can we talk about how this is quite possibly the worst "haunting" movie I have ever seen?  Can we talk about how Patrick Wilson will never, ever win any kind of award other then a Golden Raspberry?  Can we talk about how Universal Studios theme parks have lost a modicum of allure from me because they embraced this shitpile?  Can we talk about how James Wan and Leigh Whannell need to be eaten slowly by kittens? 

SURE we can.

Plot:  House is haunted.  Turns out house is not haunted.  Kid is haunted.  Turns out kid is not haunted.  Dad is haunted.  Creepy old lady ghost that looks entirely too much like the awesome ghost from Dead Silence only wearing enough black tulle to gag a drag queen wants to be all "breathing" again.

It's called "foundation".  Invest.

Magic "cougar" that knows how all this went down shows up to help.  Shit goes to... well, not Hell.  Hell would be scary.  Grandma is worried.

OH!  And we're totally gonna talk about Insidious Chapter 2, too.  Because that shit is packed with more cheese than a Wisconsin colon.

OH NOES!  LET'S THREATEN A BABY!  And then go nowhere with that.

Fuck me, this was painful.  I suppose the only reason I made it through was because it was 4 in the morning and there was nothing but infomercials on and I needed SOMETHING to do.  GUESS WHAT, KIDS!  Same fuckin' plot except the magic cougar gets all dead and shit.  Woo.  And, then we have the OTHER ghost that possesses Patrick Wilson and makes him all murder-y in the blandest way possible (as in he never actually kills anyone) by a dude whose mom (previously mentioned tulle-enrobed psycho-biddy) raised him to be a little girl.  Someone's fuckin' bitter.

Yeah.  Not a hugger, I'm guessin'.

Also?  Who the fuck names their kid "Dalton"?  That's a wedgie-name, right there.  It's like they WANT him to grow up to be a male stripper.  'Cause, seriously, banana-bouncers are the only people I know that have that name. Then again, I don't know that many Daltons.  I'm not sure I want to.  The name wants me to bully them and I'd feel bad.

Grandma is still worried.  

PABLUM!  THESE MOVIES ARE FUCKING PABLUM!

Pablum: Bland, mushy, unappetizing and infantile.  Much like a Disney Channel sitcom.  Except Disney Channel sitcoms are oddly charming.

I like Mighty Med.  Sue me.

What the fuck, Hollywood.  Are you SO driven to pander to the lowest common denominator that you can't actually recognize that a horror movie isn't scary?  Or intelligent?  Or watchable?  Damn, son, My Little Pony is scarier than this shit.

Seriously.  Find and read the MLP fanfic "Cupcakes".  Pinky-Pie is fuckin' psycho.

I'd ask why I bother with modern horror movies but they inspire me.  They inspire me to find new and interesting ways to describe the multitude of ways that the moronic tard-monkeys that make these movies should DIE IN A FIRE.  Fuckin' Hell, Hollywood.  You will SANITIZE MY CREVASSE AND LIKE IT!!

So, yeah.  If anyone can make all extant copies of either of these movies disappear, there may be sexual favors involved.  Just sayin'.

Side Effects May Include...

I'm not normally one for medical drama.  Hell, I'm, like, three seasons behind on Grey's Anatomy because I don't work at home anymore and Lifetime doesn't show the all-day marathons like they used to.  I have no life.

ANYWAY, that being said, I got a wild hair up my ass and picked up The Facility on On-Demand.

 You all have heard of those clinical trials that hobos and teenagers sign up for, right?  The one where they pay you a couple of hundred bucks to lock you in a hospital ward for a few days so they can monitor new drugs and see what kind of horrible things they can do to your body?  Well that's where this movie takes us.  Right into one of these trials.  I won't say the middle of it because you start at the beginning, with the subjects being taken in and having the ins and outs explained to them.

We get our standard characters.  The asshole jock, the nice girl, the outsider kid, the nerd, the creepy old dude, the goth-ish girl, and the too shy to survive in the real world, let alone a horror movie guy.  They're brought in to test a drug called PRO9.

You're gonna put what where?

As can be expected, they get one dose of the stuff before things start to go horribly wrong.  Because otherwise this movie would be really fucking boring.  (And, for realsies, it kind of is, anyway, but we'll get into that, later.)  In the meantime, we're talking about vomiting, sweats, some serious rosacea, swelling, fever, hallucinations, bleeding from the pores, loss of speech control, cutting your own damn face partially off, stalking hallways naked, homicidal and suicidal tendencies, attempted rape and anal leakage.

OK, I made that last one up.

No, I didn't.

The problem here is that's pretty much the story.  There's not much suspense other than "can they get in here" and "who's next" and "why the fuck did I do this again?"  We're not given a whole lot of information about the drug other than that it's supposedly an anti-depressant and that some of them got placebos (which, really, is standard operating procedure in scientific testing).  We don't even know that much about thecharacters as people.  There's no sympathy for them because we don't know whether or not they SHOULD survive.  Frankly, I was OK with an all-out bloodbath and I didn't even get that.

So, here's the deal, horror directors, there's a time and a place for subtle.  Having your characters turn into insane monsters?  Not the fucking time or place.  If you're gonna give me insano-drugs, give me over-the-top shenanigans.

I like shenanigans.

So do we.

So, there you have it.  Cold boogers on a paper plate.  I should totally ask for a refund but I don't think the cable company is gonna give me my 6 bucks back.  I should have expected it, really.  The director is the same guy that directed Monsters and I turned that shit off halfway through.

Fuckers.

I'll Be There For Yooooouuuuuuu...

We all know Danielle Harris, right?  Cute kid.  Wore a kind of iconic clown costume in a few of the Halloween sequels?  Graduated to jailbait victim in the remake and its sequel?  The bane of Victor Crowley in the Hatchet movies?  Pregnant vampire hunter in Stake Land?  We love her, right?  Tiny, little horror pixie that she is?  We like to encourage her in her endeavors.  She's awesome and deserves to succeed.

Only, now we get to deal with some growing pains in her career because she finally got the chance to direct.

Kill me.

Good lord this was bland.

Among Friends, like many a horror tale before it, brings a bunch of asshole friends together for a party.  This party is special because it's all 80s Prom murder mystery themed.  This just means that coke is going to figure heavily into the evening.

I'm totally not kidding about that.

So, anyway, the kids get taken to their friend Bernadette's house in a limo.  Driven by a foul-mouthed Kane Hodder who seriously just needs to keep his fuckin' mouth shut.  I like Mr. Hodder, I really do but he's so much better when he's silent and menacing and, more often than not, carrying a damn machete covered in the blood of asshole teenagers.

Until you get naked on camera, Mr. Hodder, shut your face-hole.

So, yeah.  Decked out in their totally tubular finery, the kids make themselves comfortable until their hostess arrives and you KNOW that something is wrong when she shows up behind them like a goddamn ninja.

POOF, BITCHES!

Bernadette (don't call her Bernie) lays out the rules and has the friends search the house for clues, placing them in strategic teams.  Why they're strategic, I really don't know.  All I know is that two of them end up high on mushrooms and one of them is doing coke in the bathroom.

Then they break for dinner and they get presents!  YAY, PRESENTS!  They're all clues to the mystery they're supposed to be solving.

Hint:  This is the sexually generous two-faced cunt.

Somehow or other, they all end up paralyzed and taped up to the dining room chairs.  Pretty sure it was in the booze.  They're all "I can't feel my legs!  Oh, NOES!  Who could have done this?  Who was the only damn person in the house capable of movement all this time?"

Braintrusts, the lot of them.

So, yeah.  Bernadette is a psycho.  She also happens to be a psychologist.  Nobody seems to know the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist so I'm gonna lay this out right now.  A psychiatrist is the one that can dispense medication.  That just begs the question "Where the fuck did she get the paralytics?" 

And this is where the game gets nasty.  Her friends can ask her questions but she gets something in return.  In the case of one friend, she collects a piece of her scalp.  Another rule?  Every time someone says "please stop" someone loses a finger.

It occurs to me that many psych majors take that course load to figure out their own damn problems.

Wanna get hammered?  It's a total head trip.  No, seriously, her faboo 80's hair is fucked.

Oh, and, by the way, Bernadette has been secretly filming all of her friends whenever they're partying at her house.  Because, and I cannot stress this enough, she's CRAZY.  Only not really crazy in an entertaining kind of way.  Just in a "we need a villain, see if you can't gnaw your way through that wall" sort of way.

Those tapes are the reason behind this little shindig.

Stoned is quite possibly the only way this movie could be even halfway entertaining.

Now, I'm not saying that I don't like this movie.  I'm saying that I absolutely hated it.  I'm sorry, Miss Harris but this half-assed throwback to Happy Birthday to Me (BTW, Happy 300th Post to me!) needs a LOT of work.  I know it's your first shot and I know that you have to build your craft but I think you have to do a little homework in terms of subtlety and tension.  The bones are there but the flesh and blood is missing.

That said, the acting isn't bad.  It's not great by any stretch but it's watchable.  The cinematography isn't bad, either.  I really think that the badness just comes from script and direction.  That's a correctable thing if we can get Danielle to watch some Murnau, Craven, Hitchcock and Scott.

Do your homework, missy!  No TV until it's done.

I Would Rather...

OK, kids!  I had a ton of fun with the other bloggers and we're already planning our next event so keep an eye out for that but, for now, we're back to business as usual.

That said, I'm thinking that the torture porn sub-genre has quite possibly run its course.  It also seems to me that under no circumstances should Brittany Snow be producing her own films.

Iris (Snow) is taking care of a brother with leukemia and is having a rough time of it, financially, because, seriously, if she wasn't, this movie would be fucking pointless.  She gets invited, through her brother's doctor, to a dinner at a local philanthropist's house (Jeffrey Combs, who still excels at gnawing on the scenery) that promises to get her the money she needs to save her brother's life.

And for the next hour and a half, we get to see the idle rich work their painful wiles on the poor and the poor play right along, ditching their morals and sense of right and wrong along the way.  Because humans are weak idiots.

 

You wanna cut my WHAT?!? 

Oh... my 'fro... I can live with that.

Plot-wise, there's not a lot more than that.  A bunch of people are required to torture each other because a depraved and bored rich dude and his doubly-depraved, rapist asshole of a son want the poor to beg for their help and they LITERALLY say this during the course of the game.  Because that is what rich people do.

I assume that's what rich people, do, anyway.  I'm not rich so all I get to do is live with my fantasies of rich people staging hobo fights and feeding puppies to the great white sharks they keep in aquariums and blaming their losses in profits on the fact that we would like a living wage, please, and kinda getting off on making us sing "Food, Glorious Food" as they shoot rubber bands and flaming twenties at our faces. 

Apparently, rich people hire butlers that used to be government interrogators and know where and how to hide bodies, too. 

ANYWAY, I know that a lot of people are giving this movie mad props but, seriously?  This is dry white toast.  It's INTENSELY fucking bland and it hurts going down.  For a first time out producing, Ms. Snow should have known better.  She's done some great things (Pitch Perfect) and she's done some things we'd rather forget (Prom Night).  She should know by now what the public wants to see.  

Tiny octopi in top hats.

As a social commentary it's OK.  I mean, there's really no tactful way to say what director David Guy Levy (who seems to be pretty damn pretentious what with insisting on the use of his middle name) is saying.  The rich are cruel and merciless and in order for us to get them to give up their not-so-hard earned cash we need to be prepared to give up our morality and revolution against the rich doesn't work when you don't have the resources to fight them.  I don't personally believe that but there is truth to it on some level.  Would You Rather certainly gets the message across in an anvilicious sort of way.

Anvilicious:  When some form of social message in film is about as subtle as dropping an anvil on your head.

Look at that!  You learned something!  Awesome.

I love expanding vocabularies.

The acting in Would You Rather is... well... creamed chipped beef on toast.  You don't want to eat it but it's right there in front of you and you're hungry.  It shouldn't go to waste. 

This is the best way to prepare bad actors.  Mmmm... tender.

Considering that most of the film takes place in one room with the actors being your main focus, you would THINK that we would be witness to some Oscar-caliber performances but, no.  They barely kept me interested and, frankly, I was more interested in watching the jerks (conveniently sat on the left-hand of the host (the sinister hand, if you will)) get injured. (Iris gets moved over there at one point... it's all meaningful and shit.)

Even considering the downer ending wherein the rich bad guys definitely win, I'm kinda thinking that Ms. Snow should have spent her money on better projects.  Also?  I'm thinking we need to get back to monsters or slashers for a while because if Vile is a better movie than this with an unknown cast and a micro-budget, then we need to start leaving torture horror alone for a bit. 

Unless, of course, we're going to start remaking the Roger Corman/Edgar Allen Poe flicks like The Pit and the Pendulum.  Because that would be fuckin' amazing.

(UTTERLY UNRELATED SIDE-NOTE!  If any horror bloggers that follow me would like to get in on a blogger community that includes avid and active networking, let me know.  I got the hook-up, yo.  I like letting people know about the cool stuff.  You kinda have to be prepared to reciprocate, though.  Sharing is caring.  ;0-)  )