Thursday 20 August 2015

Bit-size impressions: Santa Claws


"Santa Claws" by Asylum is adorable. Santa Claus is allergic to cats (among other things), so when he's given three kittens to take care of, he's incapacitated and the kittens have to take over the job. *squee* 
It's low budget, and it feels like they didn't manage to film all of the scenes, so the plot is inconsistent, but there was no way a pitch like that wouldn't be adorable. 

I especially like the girl who wants to keep the kittens for herself, in her own little corner of hell. 
That kid reveled in that role!

Monday 17 August 2015

Sharknado has been seen!


So, we finally sat down and watched the “cult B-movie that attracted a whole fan base of not really b-movie fans” and it was.. much better than I expected (in a bad B-movie way). 
I think it manages to straddle the line between wink-wink and just low budget necessity really well, and while there’s some scenes that try too hard, I felt enough of the movie was trying genuinely to make its idiotic script work for it to be entertaining in the “bad B-movie” way. 

Ian Ziering does a surprisingly good job, playing his role totally straight - loving family guy estranged from his wife, and Cassie Scerbo does a passable job as Nova, the action hero of the group. Minus points for killing off the best character in the movie early (George - John Heard!). 

Don’t get me wrong, the movie is bad; stock footage with only passing similarity to where the movie is shot, obvious stationary studio shots when in the car/helicopter (where we spend most of the movie), inconsistent editing, bad dialogue (nobody knows each other’s background/history even though they’re friends/work together), horrible CGI, reused shots (so much repeating!), sharks acting like mindless killing-machines (and shark species from all over the world all fall down in California)… But it’s fun. 

My 2 favourite scenes are: 1. the guy who has his arm bit off by a fly-by shark, falls to the ground and has his leg chomped by another shark, and then, after he’s dead, he’s hit in the face by a Hammerhead shark that fell out of the air. That’s jumping the shark so highly that it works again. 

2. The ending. Not spoiling, but it was exactly what we wanted and where the movie should have gone. It was campy, it was ludicrous and excused everything else. I’d recommend the movie just for that scene. 
Though it should have ended on the “I fucking hate sharks” line. 


We watched “Into the Storm” before this, a high-budget tornado disaster movie, and Sharknado was a lot more enjoyable and memorable. Into the Storm couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a “ramp-up” disaster movie or a character driven lower-budget disaster movie, and ended up being neither. Its storms just don’t have any impact or show any signs of actually being “the biggest tornado ever” (ex: it only uproots specific trees to then throw towards our cast), and there’s no character development to speak of. A camera man who wanted to quit his job does a 180 and decides to sacrifice himself for a dangerous shot and his camera, and the conflict between the father and the youngest son never reaches a climax or solution. 
There’s just nothing there. 

For all of Sharknado’s faults it at least has charm. It feels like it had something to build off of, it’s just that the end result is a mangled mess with “funny because they’re bad” scenes. I’ll take that over big-budget “meh” any day.

Saturday 15 August 2015

Arctic Outbreak/The Thaw review


Arctic Outbreak, or "the Thaw" (real name according to movie and Imdb, no idea why it's been renamed) is... Err.. Hmm. 
The first 40 minutes are bad. Really bad. A boring, preachy drek that insists on not showing you anything that's going on, and skips 2 days forwards over what could have been the most interesting part of the story. 
The second half is too filled with shiny cgi to actually be scary, and the "shock twist" is blatantly obvious if you bothered to stay through the first half. 

And yet.. I kinda like it. The second half is almost a psychological thriller, and even though it falls into some of the common disaster movie tropes (no one ever knows even basic first-aid), it also subverts several of them. 
You so seldom see people willing to take the difficult choices, willing to maim themselves to get rid of infection or sacrifice themselves to save others, and here most of the main characters do, they even react rationally and efficient in crisis situations. The action hero of the story is the most unlikely one, and she makes a choice in the end I've never seen a woman make on film before. 



Most of the actors give decent performances too, notable exception being Val Kilmer, who just couldn't be bothered. 

I just.. There's so much wrong, the editing is bad, the score is manipulative bleh, the movie has no idea if it wants to be a disaster movie, a gross-out horror, a psychological thriller or an environmentalism warning, and yet.. 

I think I like what this movie could have been. If the first half had focused on the 2 days we skipped over; showing the beginning of the infection and them slowly figuring things out, if they'd not had a cgi-budget and had to do everything with props, puppets and prosthetics, if the bug threat had been turned into an invisible horror instead of a overwhelming, always visible thing, and the whole "epidemic as scare that'll finally convince people of the reality of global warming" plot-line had been dropped.. 
There's some really good ideas in there, and good acting performances too, I just wish the final result was something I on good conscience could recommend to others (it's not). 
:S

Tuesday 11 August 2015

Talking about Homeward Bound

Rewatched Homeward bound last night. That movie still holds up today. The editing and cinematography is great, there's no special effects, the pets don't move their mouth when they talk, and they don't understand the humans, making them a lot more animal-like than other family pet movies. Also the dog that plays Chance is such an adorable doofus. He keeps crashing into things and tripping over his own legs. 

There's this great subtle side-story where the new father (who married into the family) stands alone to the right in the shot while the family grieves the lost pets, but at the end he's playing with the children and standing with the family when the pets come back. In the time we've followed the pets' journey to get back to their family (and becoming their own little pet family, with Chance being the "New one") the human family has become a family too. 
Totally love the subtle, visual pictures that give depth to the movie's story and moral.

Thursday 6 August 2015

On Adam Sandler and his type of comedy

I’m one of those who hate Adam Sandler with a passion because (yes, I will elaborate), because he perpetuates a type of comedy that bases itself on being stupid and demeaning. The main character is an arrogant, selfish, stuck in his own head stupid asshole who inadvertently and on purpose is mean to people and animals around him, but go through some sort of redemption arch so that we’ll sympathize with him in the end, forgetting all the lives he ruined to get there (see Nostalgia Critic’s review of Eight Crazy Nights for a good example). 
During the first part of this video they mention a list of things one expects to see in an Adam Sandler movie, which also perfectly lists why I hate them, as well as talk about how these movies are really just a big scam to advertise and earn their actors money. 

There’s a reason the Mr. Bean movies didn’t work, there’s a reason the Pink Panther remake didn’t work, you cannot do a movie based solely around the concept that your character is an inadvertent asshole that hurts other people, and yet, this is the only thing Adam Sandler does, and he gets away with it! 

To be fair, I’ve seen very few Sandler movies, I didn’t like the two I’ve seen (Hotel Transylvania doesn’t count!), so most of my impressions of his work comes from the horrible trailers, like Click, where they showed me Sandler slowing down a woman to look at her boobs, which, to be fair, was a great way to tell me never to see it, not a good way to make me watch his stuff, but even just from the trailers I feel I’m justified in giving these movies flack for keeping alive the dickish, childish humor, where we laugh at others getting in trouble, and creates an audience for things like this: https://youtu.be/ScMOyURq9os where straight up murdering a cow is played for laughs in the trailer. 

(And yes, I do not like the original National Lampoon movies for the same reason I don’t like this new remake trailer. I can’t stand when animal cruelty is played for laughs. It’s one of the best ways to get me to stop being entertained and instead feel just sad and frustrated. Killing sentient beings shouldn’t be amusing!)