What Did I Fucking Tell You About Children?

"Oh, hey!  How ya doin'?  Podcasting is going well.  Work is fine.  How's the wife and kids?

Oh, your stepson is the Antichrist.  That's fun to know.  I'll, aaaahhhh... I'll be over here.  Not pointedly laughing at the horrible birthday clown who IS NOW ON FIRE, WHAT THE SHIT, MAN?!?"

And THAT'S the conversation I would be having with Adam Scott in the new Netflix piece, Little Evil, which wins absolutely no awards for having such a douchey name but it's still kinda fun, should I have gone into acting like I always wanted but my lack of any drive whatsoever kept me from pursuing, except I'm ALL ABOUT the casting couch because I am a sex-positive person and if a blowjob is gonna get me some choice parts, I swallow, thanks.

So, Adam Scott is playing Gary.  New stepdad to Lucas, the titular Little Evil, and new husband to Samantha (Evangeline Lilly) who is adorable and lonely and clueless.  She's really not a helicopter mom but she watches out for her boy.  Her boy who was conceived during a cult ritual and she fucking knew it, so her son being the actual Antichrist really shouldn't have come as such a shock to her but, y'know... here we are.

Awww, lookaher... All smiles and adorableness... and stupidity...

Gary, of course, being the stepdad, just wants to be a good guy.  Soapbox derby cars, ice cream, the works.  The kid, on the other hand, has some fuckin' issues.  The most pressing, of course, being that he is literally the spawn of Satan, begat via creepy reverend (Clancy Brown) who moves into town to harvest the goddamn crop.  Gary, meanwhile, is showing this dude property, none the wiser.  He's ALSO getting calls from the wedding videographer who, while taping the ACTUAL FUCKING TORNADO THAT DESTROYED THE WEDDING GROUNDS, noticed that Lucas was untouched by winds that have been known to pick up and toss around cows and trains.

Yo, Damien.  It's past your bedtime, buddy.

So, what does Lucas do to Gary the first day he drives him to school?  Manages to get himself detention and get Gary blamed for it.  Gary, who has to attend mandatory therapy and now has a Child Protective Services agent visiting (played delightfully by Sally Field).  His co-worker, a male-identifying individual by the name of Al (Bridget Everett), is also part of the the group, and they form a bro-bond over the whole thing.  A bond that is as tight as Octomom's pelvic floor.  At least at first.

She has a fantastic eye for sweater-vests.

Suffice it to say that Lucas is so upset at having a new daddy that he buries him alive.  Literally.  Called Samantha from a box under the swingset.  She DUG HIM OUT.  Which upsets Gary which upsets Samantha who puts Lucas in a time-out (seriously?) and proceeds to not believe Gary which almost gets divorce papers signed but flowers and a trip to the water park for Gary and Lucas are all it takes for happy families, I guess.

If this SOUNDS like a set-up, that's because it is.  What do we do with the Antichrist when we find him, kids?  That's RIGHT!  We try to kill him.  And that's when the fun REALLY starts.

No, for real, kids, other than that whitewashed sack of weeaboo fangasm, Death Note (which I'm currently in the middle of and thoroughly hating), Netflix is putting out some good material and, while this is not really Oscar-worthy (and come on, how much do I watch that is), it's actually pretty good.  It funny, it makes good use of its people, it's heartwarming in that "You can be whatever you want to be and I don't want to kill you, anymore" kinda way.  It's actually a decent "family" horror-comedy. 

Give it a shot.  It's cute. 

Doomsday Prep 101

Hidey-Ho!

Today, on Candy-Coated Razor Blades, we discover that I'm not nearly as good with words when I'm speaking them without a script.

 

I'll get better at this, I swear.  

Circle, Circle, Dot, Dot...

Class?

CLASS!?

CLAAAAASSSSS!!!

Now that I have your attention, let's aim our peepers at today's assignment:

 Ah, Cooties.  How have we survived so long without you?  A zombie movie where the only zombies are kids?  Surely you jest!  You don't jest?  This is fo' real-real, not fo' play-play?

SQUEE!

Only just a little squee, though, because this movie?

Not great.

Yes, even though it has pigtail girl in it.

So, our story goes a little like this.  Tainted chicken nuggets infect school kids with a zombie virus.  Because they're school kids, they're complete asses about it.  Enter the new summer school substitute teacher, Elijah Wood, an"author" who's never actually been published and who has decided to use his classroom like a set of pint-sized editors.  For a horror novel.  And wonders why he hasn't been published, yet.

Of course we then meet the rest of the staff.  Former high-school jock turned gym teacher aching for the glory days, hyper-vigilant Tea-Party enthusiast, sweet and lovable old flame, kooky science teacher with "previous brain injury" realness, and obviously gay .  Basically a group of unlikable jerks (barring sweet and lovable, up there and kooky kind of grows on you but never quite gets there).

Obligatory OHNOES shot.

So, one of the cool things about this flick is that we're watching the outbreak from step one which, unlike ANY of the Cabin Fever films, is actually well done and makes some fucking sense.  You know... barring a disease that takes a few hours to hit the first girl who bites into that nasty chicken nugget and doesn't even bother to notice that it's fucking black and oozing green stuff but then hits both of her first victims within minutes which should be patently impossible but we pay movies to make the impossible possible so why am I even questioning this?

ANYWAY!  Yes, kids, there are a lot of parental fears wrapped up in this one and they aren't being analyzed, really.  They're being lampooned.  Which I love.  Because fuck parental paranoia.

"Pink slime"?  We, as Americans, didn't LIKE the shape of actual chicken so we made nuggets.  How else do you think those little nuggets of chicken meat get shaped to look like a fat California?  It's still meat, it's just ground like hamburger.  Cows don't come in a patty shape either.

This is what happens when you get a dork to play a gym teacher.

"Anti-vaccination"?  Yep.  If you don't get your kids vaccinated, they will turn into snarling Hell-beasts and eat you.  Or, y'know, just die from a completely preventable disease before passing that shit on to people who either can't get immunizations for one reason or another or people with auto-immune disorders and FUCK YOU if you think that vaccinations cause autism because, seriously, if it really comes down to it would you rather have a live kid with Asperger's or a dead one.  For real, fuckwads.  You choose.

"The horrors of puberty"?  Yeah, not so much.  That's the kicker, here. 

Who let the hobbit drive?

So, what do I think of Cooties?  I think it's a decent way to spend a couple of hours and that the producers spent a little too much on star power and a little too little on script writing and special effects.  There was just a hair too much CGI blood (and, seriously, Hollywood, fucking quit it) for me to lose myself in it and while it was funny, it wasn't the side-splitter I thought it was going to be.  If you're going to produce a movie that features ONLY zombie children as your unstoppable monster force, you'd better make my stomach feel as if I'd done a million fucking sit-ups. 

I mean, it's enjoyable but it needed work.  My husband hated it but he's generally bored by horror movies anyway so he doesn't count.

OK!  Now that that's out of the way, who wants nuggets?

That Which Man Was Not Meant To Know

You know how I keep saying found-footage movies suck donkey balls? 

I'm about to be a little bit of a hypocrite only not really because The Atticus Institute is a mockumentary.

The premise behind this movie is a parapsychological testing lab created in the 60s.  Like most of these institutions, they had they battery of tests.  The cards, the dice, the coins, the electric football tables... wait, seriously?  Electric football tables?  I know they were a thing but, for fuck's sake, there has to be a better way to test telekinesis.

ANYWAY!

Everything is going all "Ho-hum, I'm so bored with trying to find people that actually have magical powers.  When will someone with real power come and make ten years of this bullshit worth it?"  And along comes Judith Winstead.

And she is PISSED!

Now, we can tell right away that good ole Judy has some... issues.  Frankly, the folks at the institute had to be blind and deaf to not know this.  They kept going, though, because she was blowing the other psychics away with her utter mastery of "mind over body".

This doesn't end well for a damn one of them.

A sad, sad, lonely man who may or may not be a total perv.  The movie doesn't mention his sex life.

And WHY, do you ask, does it not end well?  Because Judith is fucking possessed.  She's not just crazy, we're talking inches away from crab-walking down stairs and a full-on Exorcist twist.  (And there's your Buffy reference for the day.)

This... should have tipped them off.

Now, I don't normally go in for possession movies but I have to say that this one was a pleasant surprise.  It wasn't preachy, it was just people in an extreme circumstance.  There was almost no reference to religion until the end when they had to bring in a priest.  (Mind you, not an old priest and a young priest.  Just one priest.  He does not do his job right.)  It was... refreshing, if not original.  There have been plenty of films that reference studying psychic phenomena as a focal point for evil.  This one just used the old tropes extremely well.

Except for this.  What the fuck is this?

The effects?  Old hat, unfortunately.  Yeah, there was some CGI splatter.  That didn't make me happy.  What, did you blow your budget on 70s pimp-wear and couldn't afford some fucking Karo syrup and food coloring?  Seriously?  What the fuck?

Overall, I really did like this one.  maybe not enough to watch it again, but it was certainly a couple of hours well-spent.  If you don't mind a slow-burn, check it out, kids.

Racism is Bad, Mmm-kay?

Warning:  Sexual abuse triggers ahoy, kids.

So, I was going to do a review of Attack of the 50-foot Cheerleader today but I felt this might be a little more important, at least from a "good horror movie" perspective.

Savaged, kids, deserves a watch.

It's hokey but it does the job.

See, our main character is a deaf-mute girl in a peasant dress that looks like it was lifted straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and that's OK because as Final Girls go, she works out just fine, even though there are... complications.

She's on a trip to meet up with her fiancee when she runs afoul of racist, redneck dickheads that feel it's their mission to wipe the brown folk off the planet.  Because racism.  Did we mention that her fiancee is black?  Because that playes a huge part in this movie.

Yeah, so, in the process of running afoul, she manages to get herself taken hostage, tied to a bed in a shed with barbed wire and raped a lot.  Fortunately for us, that's not really shown.  As a result, she takes a couple of deep breaths, yanks her hands free (Well done, effects-wise.) and starts to run.  Of course, she doesn't run fast and they catch her and, thereafter stab her a lot.

'Cause that's not phallic or anything.

Needless to say, there's revenge to be had and the local shaman who inadvertantly brings her back to undeath is kind of not happy about it because she manages to attract the attention of the spirit of the Native American gentlemen who was killed by the ancestor of said racist, redneck dickheads.

And there was scalping and stabbing and yanking of intestines and a zombie lady putting her arm back together with a piece of arrow and the world rejoiced for the use of practical effects because that's the only way horror movies should be made.

Seriously?  I thought this movie was anti-racism.

I lied a little there.  There was plenty of CGI blood and that distracted me a little.  You're not ILM, people.  Stop fucking doing that.  Give me squibs and karo syrup or shut the fuck up.

ANYWAY.  I kinda dug this one.  I mean, it was kinda heavy-handed with the racism thing (on both sides because frankly the portrayal of the shaman was hokey as fuck and all it needed was a wigwam and a feather headdress to complete the fucking picture.)  And what the hell was up with all of the soliliquizing.. soliloquying?  Saying 5-minute long speeches throughout the entire fucking movie?  The only one who DIDN'T talk should have been the one saying shit out loud.

But that's OK because she didn't really need to speak to get her point across.

On the flip-side, though, we got a kick-ass handicapped anti-hero, positive racial role models, a kind of awesome downer ending that didn't leave this one open for a sequel and some very good acting. 

I know this is a quick one, kids, but I think y'all should give this a shot.  And smack a redneck afterwards.  You'll feel better for it, I promise.

UGAT2014: Samwise Gains a Level in Badass

LINKIE!!!

And so it comes to my last entry for Ultimate Gore-a-Thon 2014 and I'm going to do something... Expected.

Since I've already covered both of the previous Cabin Fever films, I'm just going to say "In for a penny" and go ahead and give you my utterly unsolicited opinion regarding Cabin Fever 3: Patient Zero.  And you can't stop me.  Nyaah.

I have to tell you I came into this with dread.  Fear and loathing were my constant companions as I re-entered the world of a flesh-eating virus that strikes in minutes rather than days.  Hatred infused my veins as I started the movie, wanting to deck the director if this had so much of a whiff of the stench of the other two.

Fuck me if I wasn't shocked as hell.  I actually... *shudder*... LIKED this one.  Probably because Ti West was nowhere near this fucker.  

The fact that I want to bone Sean Astin is completely beside the point.

This third installment of what, to now, has been an abysmal sack of rotten cocks, has an intelligent plot, decent acting (for the most part), gruesome special effects and humor that doesn't always meander straight over the line to Toilet-land.

This isn't to say that there isn't plenty to poke sticks at, though.

First off, this thing is trope-heavy as HELL!  See this guy?

Selfish McDickface.

This guy is a scientist that isolated the LAST outbreak of this shit and found the ONE guy that's immune to it (Sean Astin, above), and DAMMIT if he's not going to find a cure come Hell or high water because that will make him the most famous scientist in the ever-est of ever and fuck all of you because I'm awesome and y'all are dicks.  Of course, since the one guy is immune to it they can't just, y'know, let him leave.  Naturally, he's pissed about it and he figures out a way to get that shit spread to the entire complex because fuck it.

Enter our stupid young adults.  Not teens this time.  Shocking.

Beer.  You're drinking it wrong.

Of course, these dicks are on a vacation in CENTRAL AMERICA (idjits) because one of them is getting married.  So his brother and his business partner (along with his, unbeknownst to the rest of them, ex-girlfriend who happens to be fucking his brother, now) decide to take his bachelor party to a deserted island (idjits) whereupon they will snorkel and cavort with much booze and weed. Because THAT'S smart.

And, natch, the island they happen to land on houses the scientific compound where all but three of the scientists are really, truly and utterly dead.  (Except one guy but he gets his face mushed.)

And, because this virus has many vectors, the ocean around the island is a fucking graveyard, as discovered by the brother and the fuck-toy.  They discover that it's communicable like this:

Way to earn your red wings.

Fucking seriously, people.  If someone has visible signs of a skin infection, which she did and they were pointed out well in advance, DON'T HAVE SEX WITH THEM!  Get them to a fucking doctor.  Toot-fucking-suite.  Pronto.  NOW, asslick!

Jesus.

So, yeah.  Additional hijinks ensue, including tunnels filled with the dead, sympathetic scientist, bimbo scientist with a faceful of rotten flesh and a goddamn rotted catfight.  Because we all need to see formerly hot girls get their tits literally ripped off.

Yes, yes, we see your fakeys.

All-in-all, though, this was a decent romp and I THANK director Kaare Andrews for taking a shitshow and making it actually fun to watch.

Well, as much fun as a disease they treat with BLEACH can be, anyway.