Movie Review: The World's End (2013)

Ay yi yi. Are the holidays over yet? I need my regular boring life back.

Edgar Wright. Simon Pegg. Nick Frost. No joke, three of the greatest things to happen to movies in the last decade. Shaun of the Dead is beyond words brilliant as a rom-zom-com with blood, guts, belly laughs, and a lot of heart. Hot Fuzz was an immensely successful follow-up that ventured into the buddy-cop action movie genre, but still had the blood, guts, belly laughs, and possibly even more heart. And now the fan-coined "Cornetto Trilogy" concludes with the appropriately titled The World's End. The blood and guts are blue this time, but they're there, and so are the belly laughs and never-ending heart.

Five childhood friends return to their hometown to attempt to complete an epic pub crawl they began over 20 years ago - 12 pubs in one night, concluding at The World's End. As the boys rehash old times and deal with their issues, they realize that the town is not the same as they remember, and for good reason, too - most of the townspeople have been replaced by robots.

The boys surely haven't lost their touch in creating something that audiences will love, both newcomers and those already familiar with their work. Once again I was impressed by the writing and the delivery of the writing by all the actors. The jokes come at rapid-fire pace (and people make fun of me for always using subtitles) and the humor is smart, sometimes dirty, but always cleverly laid out in relation to what the movie is about and situations that come later. Watching the movie again lets you catch on to some references you missed before, the double meaning behind some of the lines ("We're here to get annihilated!" "It must be the network"). They did similar things in their previous two films, but it still works and it's still brilliant how they're able to pull it all together.

Pegg and Frost are of course great in their roles, especially since here they are sort of playing a reversal of their previous roles in both Shaun and Hot Fuzz. Pegg is the wild and goofy Gary King, spouting out more one-liners than I could keep up with, while Frost is the more professional, subdued Andy Knightley. Nobody plays best buddies better than dudes who are actually best buddies in real life. Truth be told, though, I kind of loved the actors playing the other three friends in the group - Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, and Eddie Marsan - a bit more, as they were all completely adorable and hilarious. It was good to see all of them have their chance to shine, instead of the movie being all about Pegg and Frost (not that they would intentionally do that, but they are the stars of the show to the fans).

Looking at the movie for what it is on the surface, it works as a weird hybrid action-scifi-comedy-bromance thing but there is a message and a reasoning for what they did. I liked the whole thing at the end about how human beings have every right to be fuck-ups because I get it. Conformity makes you normal and safe, but making mistakes lets you learn, become wiser, and help others. There's also something there about conforming and making uniform all the charming small town pubs and stores and whatnot (as two of the pubs in the movie look exactly the same) which is also somewhat bothersome. How long until real mom-and-pop places just cease to exist? However you choose to look at it, The World's End is a very charming movie about the simple things in life - friendship, a good night out at the pub - and how important they are to people.

It almost feels wrong to heap so much praise on pretty much everything these guys do, but I really can't help it. I fucking love Shaun of the Dead, I really super-duper like Hot Fuzz, and now I'm all kinds of giddy over The World's End. Wright and Pegg probably aren't completely done making movies but I do wonder about what they are going to do next. Something totally different? More of the same but different actors or something? I don't know, but I do know that I will be right there to experience whatever they come up with.

Project Terrible: Alien Origin (2012)

Oh snap, horror fiends! You better believe I came back for some more terribly awesome movies in this latest round of Project Terrible. Along for the ride are my good buddies Alec from Mondo Bizarro, Robert from Gaming Creatively, and Maynard from Maynard Morrissey's Horror Movie Diary. This round I've got an interesting combination of movies that has aliens, zombies, and robots - and all those words in the titles, too! First up is Alien Origin, assigned to me by Alec.

Alien Origin is a found footage movie about a documentary crew (and by "crew" I mean one videographer and a chick that carries around a Flip camera) following a small group of the Belize Special Forces on one of their missions. We know that they are all going to die because the beginning of the movie tells us this, as they so often due with these FF movies. Anyway, when they go off to look for two missing archaeologists, they have to deal with a bunch of aliens that we never see.

This is one of those movies that kind of makes your brain hurt a little bit after watching it. The brain-hurting is not so much from the movie's suckiness, though, as it is from its complete and utter DULLNESS. Sure, there are some terrible things about Alien Origin but mostly the damn thing is just boring. Found footage can indeed be a very effective technique at upping suspense and fear - it just works a lot better if you have an interesting story to back it up.

I can't fault the movie too much for the actual FF filmmaking technique because they do it quite well for the most part. The framing is good and all that jazz, and it looks like every other FF movie out there. Granted, most of what we have watch is not that interesting to begin with. There are far too many big chunks of the movie that involve nothing more than following the group as they walk through the jungle. No dialogue, no suspense that anything is going to happen - just walking. The last 30 minutes is even worse as they try to add some action in there of the guys shooting at something that keeps launching grenades and shit at them, but to us it looks like they are shooting at nothing. So I was bored. Again.

Not only is the plot incredibly boring and uninteresting, the characters also bring absolutely nothing to the story. For one thing, there is no main character to follow. You think it's going to be the documentary host, Julia, but she ends up not only totally disappearing about 20 minutes until the end, but she also gets just as much screen time as anybody else. That's good for the actors, I guess, but not for the audience, as we have to follow a bunch of no-names that we don't care about. And we don't care about these guys because the actors do not give any of them any sort of personality or character traits. The guy who is supposed to be in charge of the group is hilarious because he has the most un-commanding and unimposing voice and mannerisms. Nobody would take orders from this dude. He stutters, and he uses these ridiculous quasi-military hand gestures that I'm pretty sure he made up as he went along.

Another thing that became a major problem for me is something a little strange, I guess - the title cards. They have the typical ones that show what day of the mission we are on and the time of day, but there are also these ones give little plot synopses and such. Now, I didn't think it was possible to screw up a title card, but seriously, these guys weren't even trying. They were all just white text on a black screen with horrible grammar. They were all left-justified on the screen instead of centered so that some entries
looked like somebody
was having
fun
with the
spacing
and some were completely missing punctuation and capitalization. That would have been, like, a two-second fix. I think y'all had time for that.

(Did you like what I did earlier there??)

Lastly, as for the alien action, there was fucking NONE. There's a dead alien skull and a little bit of an alien spaceship but I never saw the dang thing. Those guys could have been shooting at giant ferrets for all I know. Every time the alien supposedly showed up in the camera's sights, the video conveniently goes all wonky with interference so only a small glimpse is given. I seriously feel cheated. Was it just not in the budget or did they think it would make the movie more mysterious or something? Hate to break it to you, but... not so much. Oh, then they add this whole stupid thing at the end about one of the archaeologists explaining about how the alien (or giant ferret) actually shared 70% of our DNA, making them ancestors of the human race (and hence the title). Aliens are our ancestors. Sure. Why not.

Hopefully I didn't say anything that would make you even remotely curious about Alien Origin because it is so not worth the effort. Even if you enjoy found footage like I do, you won't find anything to enjoy with this borefest - especially if you actually want to see some damn aliens.

Movie Review: The Falling (1987)

Ugh, what a letdown. Never before have I seen such a boring alien invasion movie. For all the excitement that happens in The Falling, you may as well just watch an episode of Three's Company. Plus, way too many other good movies came out in 1987 - The Lost Boys, Near Dark, Dirty Dancing... hell, even Mannequin is a more sophisticated and interesting movie than The Falling. Alright, let's see if I can write a review without boring myself to tears.

Years ago, the Skylab from the Apollo 14 moon mission crashed and brought some aliens with it (or something like that). Scientists from a NASA lab in the tiny town of Duarte, Spain don't really do anything to stop the aliens from infecting people and I guess it's a big problem even though it never really seems to be. Meanwhile, three friends traveling to Madrid end up in Duarte and get caught up in the alien mess... and then nothing happens.

My goodness, I am already exhausted trying to come up with something to say about a movie that doesn't deserve to have anything written about it. It's really quite a turd. The plot could have been a lot better but I don't think they were really trying all that hard to make it any good. And it shows. The transitions between scenes and new characters are very abrupt and it made it hard to follow what was going on. Plus weird people just show up wherever the main characters happen to be to screw around with them, and all these scenes are shot on the same two streets in the town. A little variety is not that much to ask.

The characters are actually okay and though they do a bit of the overacting, they were the most enjoyable thing about the movie. Damon and Michael have been friends for a long time and they both have a crush on the girl, Samantha, and continuously act like dorks trying to impress her. Lynn Holly Johnson, who plays Samantha (and is a former Bond girl), is a very beautiful woman whose looks are wasted here. I can't say much about her acting talent except that she's very good at flipping out at the boys for no reason, which she does several times.

A big problem I had with The Falling is that even though it's about an alien organism that enters people's bodies, they never made it seem like that much of a threat. The scientist that the kids meet tells them that the whole world could be taken over in a matter of weeks by this alien, but I don't believe it. From what the audience sees, there are only about five people in the whole town of Duarte (I don't know, maybe everyone else was already dead) so it's hard to see how the infection could really spread that fast. Our main characters only run into a few infected people and they never seem to be in any danger of infection themselves, mostly because it is never explained just how the freaking aliens infect people.

What also makes this scenario a bit unbelievable is that the audience doesn't get to see the alien until the very end. How are we supposed to be threatened by something that we've never seen? The alien makes its appearance in one of the only good gore gags in the movie, when it explodes out of a gas station attendant's head. Otherwise, the makeup and gore are almost nonexistent, which is very sad and disappointing for an alien movie. There's one scene at the beginning that was quite yucky when two dogs are feeding on the innards of a dead cow by the side of the road. The organs and stuff looked so real in this scene that I'm pretty sure the filmmakers just said "Screw it" and really slaughtered a cow and pulled its guts out. There was also a nice makeup job on the dead infected guy that the scientist checks out. He's got a huge bulbous prosthetic on the side of his face and his neck - quite nasty and uncomfortable looking.

What's maybe the most annoying about this movie is that it has way too many alternate titles, so searching the net for stuff (I think I was pretty lucky to get those two pictures up there) is freaking impossible. I'm just calling it The Falling because that's how it's listed in Netflix but it is also known as Alien Predator, Alien Predators, and Mutant 2. But you know, it doesn't even matter what it's really called because the movie sucks. It is a cheese-tastic 80s movie, for sure, but even the bad ones are better than this. The characters are funny at times, but with the lack of any real alien action, The Falling is just not cool enough for me.

Movie Review: Night of the Creeps (1986)

Oh, joy! Another 80s horror classic! Did I love this one as much as most of the others I've watched while to play catch-up? Hell yes, I did! Night of the Creeps has again made me think that I've just been wasting my time with all the other shit that I've been watching lately and that I need to get my hands on more classics like this.

Night of the creepy plot (that's terrible I know): Two college friends, Chris and J.C., inadvertently release slug-like aliens onto their campus when they unthaw an infected man who has been cryogenically frozen since the fifties. Now with the help of a sorority girl that Chris is crushing on and an aging, cynical detective, they have to stop the slugs from infecting their friends before the whole campus turns into murderous zombies.

The thing I loved the most about Night of the Creeps is that it is a B movie, and it loves the fact that it is a B movie. In fact, it is quite clear that this is a B movie that actually strives to be the best B movie it can freaking be. This is evident in the first scene (well, the scene after the weird little wrinkly aliens are running around) which takes place in 1959 when the alien slugs first come to Earth and attack a boy out on a date with his girl. This part is shot in black and white and looks like the most cliche 50s drive-in movies ever. There are sweaters, ponytails, and words like "dreamy" and "neato," plus the main guy in this story is named Johnny, just like every other hunky stud was named in the 50s, apparently.

Flash-forwarding to the present (well, 1986) and we meet the two dorks Chris and his unexplainably handicapped friend J.C. One minute into this scene with these two and I knew I was going to love the rest of the movie. From Chris's line, "Her! The vision, the angel, the goddess!" to J.C.'s seemingly unending tirade of one-liners, this movie isn't just 80s awesomeness, it is actually well-written and entertaining all the way through and the actors are surprisingly good. Some of the dialogue might be intentionally cheesy and ridiculous but the way that the actors delivered them made it all highly enjoyable.

There are several elements of the horror genre alive and at work here in Night of the Creeps. It's a little bit sci-fi, a little bit creature feature, a lot horror-comedy, and even a little slasher at times. The final battle with the slugs also reminded me a little bit of Carrie, as it takes place on the night of the school dance and all the college kids are dressed up in formal wear. The gore was a little disappointing but there definitely a few great moments - zombie cats and dogs are definitely included in that!

And here again we have another movie that decided to show its horror chops by naming several characters after famous horror film directors. Cronenberg, Romero, Cameron, Miner, Raimi, Landis, Dante and DePalma are all in there, plus a double whammy since J.C.'s full name is James Carpenter Hooper. Perhaps in a future homage-y movie and somebody wants to do the same thing, they can include director Fred Dekker's name in there as well. Although he only has a few titles under his belt as the big cheese of the movie, Night of the Creeps and The Monster Squad are enough for me to believe that this guy deserves a bit of recognition.

The characters are awesome. The 'Thrill Me' detective, Chris and J.C. are all hilarious and even the blonde-coiffed dickhead Brad is not as bad as he could have been. Cindy was not your typical girl-in-peril, which I liked very much. She put on that flamethrower and gave it to the alien-infected zombies with all she was worth.

This was quite a strange little movie but I'm always up for a movie that seems to love itself and what it is and Night of the Creeps is that kind of movie. Fun and entertainment are not far off with this gem so run to see it if you haven't yet! Though most of you probably have... I'm always the late bloomer.