Queen Of Cheese

I watched this the entire way through giggling my copious butt off. It wasn’t until after I read the Amazon synopsis that I realized all the anachronisms I saw were intentional. This version of Beowulf is supposed to be set after the apocalypse. Sure, why not? I mean, we all know that after the world ends mankind will rise back up and have a few electronic devices, such as infrared telescopes, and loudspeaker systems, but will have no indoor plumbing, no lighting, and will naturally go back to a feudal system (where the women stride around in Victoria’s Secret lingerie). Oh, and heroes of legend such as Beowulf will wander the land as an immortal who must constantly fight evil so he does not become evil himself.

So I got laughs for all the wrong reasons with what I thought were anachronisms. That’s okay. There was plenty else to entertain me for all the right reasons.

Not the least of these were the star, Christopher Lambert. This was made shortly after Mortal Kombat, and it shows in the soundtrack, and the manipulation into the script of the line “That was a mistake.” If you have seen any of his later work, you’ll understand why he is yet another entry into the “You Poor Bastard” category. He’s not a great actor, but he is charismatic, and always entertaining. I don’t think I have ever seen him take himself too seriously, which is why I love him nearly as much as David Hasselhoff. Here he plays Beowulf with his usual flair, and thanks to a talented stunt double, is still a great action star.

We are also introduced to Rhona Mitra who plays Kyra, Hrothgar’s willful (naturally) daughter. She has a solid career going for her now, including Doomsday (which I still need to see), Skinwalkers (another one I intend to watch) and taking over the lead role in the upcoming Underworld 3: Rise Of The Lycans. Watching her performance here you can understand why. Sure, she’s walking around showing off her svelte figure in lingerie ensembles no self-respecting warrior woman would wear, but she plays against the testosterone-laden co-stars with believable fire and intelligence. Thank god she had a good agent, because she definitely deserves roles in better movies than what I enjoy!

The rest of the cast does admirably well with this B-grade flick and take on the hackneyed lines with just enough tongue-in-cheek attitude that the movie is entertaining and fun. Grendel’s mother is played by a former Playboy centerfold, but she delivers her lines with a lot more skill than I would have expected. Even when they stick her in Species alien makeup, she takes it all in stride.

The mixture of a techno soundtrack and western movie themes just adds to the ludicrous nature of this telling of Beowulf. I haven’t read the epic poem, yet I’m sure they took a few liberties here and there, and still stayed true to the spirit of the legend. But really, that’s not the point of movies like this.

Basically, don’t watch Beowulf for the story. Don’t watch it for the acting. Don’t watch it for the action. Don’t watch it for the laughable ’special effects’ on Grendel. Don’t even watch it for the giant paper cutter the enemies beyond the castle walls use to dispatch refugees. Watch it for the same reason I watch these kinds of movies: because you’re bored, you need a laugh, and you can appreciate a bad movie for all the things that make a truly bad movie so great.

And Christopher Lambert, go ahead and do the remake of Mortal Kombat that I see is in casting mode. I, for one, will watch it just for you, dear man.

Tags: anachronism, apocalypse, Christopher Lambert, giggle factor, You Poor Bastard

This is yet another After Dark Horror Fest movie, this time from 2006. Wicked Little Things was a lot better than the other entries I forced myself to sit through, but not great. There are a few things that hold it back.

The acting talent surprisingly was not one of those things. Chloe Moretz plays a sweet little girl who befriends a zombie child, but it doesn’t come off as saccharin. She’s just a kid who wants to make friends in her new neighborhood, and a zombie just happens to be the first person her age she meets. Hey, it happens all the time, right? Okay, not all the time, but I could totally believe this would happen if the circumstances converged just right.

The rest of the cast are decent in their roles, but none more so than poor Ben Cross, another entry into a fast-growing category known as “You Poor Bastard”. Anyone else playing a deep woods kind of guy who blood-lets himself daily so he can paint his door, and now his new neighbor’s, with it to keep vengeful zombie children at bay, might have gone a bit overboard with camp. Not Ben Cross. He plays every role I see him in, no matter how god-awful beneath his talent, with a very, very serious demeanor. He adds a depth to this movie that otherwise would have sunk it down to the depths of D-grade films that bore you when they mean to be oh-so-scary.

What irks me with this film is the the story mires itself down in melodrama when it just needed a sprinkling for seasoning. It starts off with a tragic mining accident which results in the deaths of several children. It is the result of greed by the town’s big, bad landowner, so the children come back hungry for revenge. That’s pretty damn awful right there.

That really should have been enough. But then they bring in a mother and her two daughters. The husband recently passed away, leaving them nearly bankrupt, but they discover the deed to this house in an old mining town, and head on out to claim it. We have to sit through about a third of the film listening to them all whine and cry about how unfair it all is, and why, oh why did they have to move way out here to this disgusting house, and everything is just so tragic and awful, but they still love each other, and as a family they’ll get through it. Okay. I get it. It’s horrible to lose a loved one. We know this. But for a horror movie, you don’t need to beat me over the head with this kind of thing. C’mon! You’ve got zombie children with pickaxes waiting outside! This is supposed to be their story!

There are also some inconsistencies which I won’t go into, mostly because they’re minor. There is a bit of blood and gore, including one scene where three surviving cast members get soaked with the blood of a not-so-fortunate character. I kept thinking of shampoo and conditioner commercials gone wrong, but that’s just me.

There aren’t a lot of special effects used, which gives Wicked Little Things the perfect vibe. The filmmakers also added this weird sound effect whenever the zombie children are around. It sounds almost like insects, but not quite, and it’s a nice, creepy addition.

Aside from the excruciatingly-long setup before the action really starts, this is a solid story with refreshingly good writing. Subtle makeup, and excellent casting of the quiet, killer zombie children, all add up to make this a rare thing for me: an honest-to-goodness horror movie I found I enjoyed.

Tags: blood should not be used as conditioner in your hair, You Poor Bastard, zombie children

yawn…

Oh, sorry, I nodded off just thinking about this movie. I had high hopes for Unearthed, mostly because it stars Emmanuelle Vaugier, who I think is a very good actress, and needs to get better roles. The movie even starts off with a hint of humor. There’s a truck driver heading back on the road from a favorite truck stop, and he is wearing a t-shirt with a picture of his dogs. When he gets in the cab of his truck, he looks at another picture of his dogs, one which happens to have said canines wearing their own shirts, featuring a picture of their human. I think a movie that starts off with a character like this will definitely give me some chuckles along with the creature special effects.

Nope. Wrong. So very, very wrong.

The driver is killed off nearly immediately. You barely get a glimpse of the creature responsible through the whole movie, and when you finally do, it’s not worth the wait. I have no real idea why this creature is ‘unearthed’, or what it wants. The characters talk about it, but it makes no sense to me for the genre of film this is. First they talk about being in harmony with the earth through pottery, but then switch to how some things in the earth are just so dark that there’s no purifying them. Then in later discussions, the writers apparently decided it’s supposed to be an alien. Alright. Fine. Whatever. The ant-looking creature is an alien.

But I still can’t figure out exactly who did the ‘unearthing’, or why they did it, or why I should care. Yes, it’s sad that the creature feels the need to kill off struggling actors and actresses who already have enough problems just by appearing in this film. But really, I’m selfish, and just want it all to be over.

Emmanuelle Vaugier is the only shining point in this film, and it’s only because she’s a good enough actress to rise above a weak storyline. I like B-movies, and even B-horror movies. But Unearthed just went for some gore, some cheap scares, and nothing else. This was part of the After Dark Horror Fest of 2007, so I’m hoping there were riots in the streets after people sat through it. I really hope no one made the creators of a movie this lazy and weak feel like this is what people want.

I want creature special effects. They don’t have to be spectacular, but you have to at least give me the common courtesy of letting me see the beast for more than ten percent of the film. I know no one is going for an Oscar or Academy Award, but I do ask that there be a little bit of thought put into the story, and perhaps some attention paid to this little thing I like to call ‘plot continuity’, and god forbid, even the slightest bit of ‘character development’ above and beyond a cliched flashback to a traumatic event that has no bearing at all on the events of the film.

The problem with films like Unearthed and Crazy Eights is they diminish what makes bad movies so great. Gore for the sake of gore and a convoluted, illogical chain of events does not make a bad movie bad for any of the right reasons. There needs to be flair. There needs to be a sense of fun. Try to scare me. Make me try to guess which character is going to make it out alive. Go for the cheese factor! You know damn well you’re making a bad movie, so make it a great bad movie!

Again, I’m digressing, and railing against forces I have no control over. I think I will wander over to National Novel Writing Month and try to remember all the things I just fumed about as I attempt my own horribly crafted, hopefully fun, story. If it’s bad enough, I may even post some excerpts.

You have been warned (both about this god awful movie, and potential glimpses at my own fictional prose. Mwah ha ha ha!!!). ahem

Tags: after dark horror fest, don't bother, national novel writing month, waste of time, yawn fest

Poor, poor Dina Myer. Once again you are horribly wasted in a mediocre movie. They have you playing a mish mash of cliched ‘tough girls’, including Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, Trinity from The Matrix, and your generic biker chick. They give you guns, intelligence, skin tight outfit, and a character profile even flatter than the delivery of some lines by your co-star, Lochlyn Munro. And on top of that, what the hell did you let them do to your hair?

Bad dye job aside, Dina Myer is the strongest acting talent here. Not to say that the rest of the cast is horrible. I’m just saying they aren’t in Dina’s class.

But let’s get to the nitty gritty here. Riddles Of The Sphinx is a lot of fun, as long as you understand this was made for television, and therefore is trying to cater to a broader audience who might not appreciate the value of going for broke when you’re already making a sub par movie to begin with. So the story tends to be bland, despite some nifty graphics on The Sphinx while in true Sphinx form. The producers cheated and have The Sphinx morph into a fierce looking man for ninety percent of the appearances. Pretty lame, but forgivable.

There isn’t much here as far as substance, which is fine. Any attempt at substance would have made this a painful thing to watch, instead of a popcorn muncher on a rainy afternoon. There are plenty of giggles to be had along the way, because the writers are also stealing quite a bit from the Indiana Jones playbook, and costume department.

The basic premise is the usual ‘estranged father is killed while searching for some mysterious object, and father’s bodyguard travels back with said object to bring his son out of the ’safe and boring life of a high school teacher’ to take his proper place at the helm of a secret, under-the-government’s radar agency, and oh, by the way, this horrible creature that killed your father is after me, and say, let’s all hop in the car and run away from this creature that’s now found us, and head to the secret agency headquarters so the son can immerse himself back into a lifestyle he left so long ago to protect his daughter, and hey, let’s go on a quest to answer all these riddles so we can save the world, and we’d better throw a bit of romance in or we’ll lose part of our audience, and we’d better make the teenage girl a genius so no one can accuse us of being gender-biased, and hey, take it easy on the CGI, we gotta pay for that!’ Alright, that’s not so basic, and it is rambling, but it is a lot of fun to try to keep up with.

If you can overlook the fact that no father is going to bring along his teenage daughter on a dangerous mission, or that said daughter constantly brings up all the pertinent data this ‘black ops’ paranormal agency needs with her hand held game console, or that this same young lady is a genius that solves way too much of the riddles herself, or that everyone is oblivious to who is obviously the bad guy through the entire film and look stupefied when it’s revealed, or… okay, you get the idea. Suspend your disbelief (and hang it high, way up out of reach), revel in the cheese, and you’ll get a lot of entertainment bang for your buck with Riddles Of The Sphinx.

And Dina, sweetie, for god’s sake, get a new agent!

Tags: Indiana Jones playbook, popcorn munching afternoon, suspend your disbelief

Crazy Eights. This was part of After Dark Horror Fest 2006. Why? There wasn’t a writer’s strike going on to explain why Dina Myers and Gabrielle Anwar or even Traci Lords would stoop to such boring tripe. In fact, this movie is placing Dina Myers as a solid second entry into my “You Poor Bastard” category. She’s so much better than this movie, yet she is getting more and more crap roles that don’t deserve her talent. Dina, please, get a better agent.

With such a huge cast of mostly talented actors and actresses, I’m guessing they had to skimp in the budget for writing. The story is poorly plotted, with lazy writing everywhere. It takes the first third of the film to even understand that these people don’t remember their childhood. This turns out to be a critical plot point, but apparently not important enough to make clear to the audience.

The plot then ‘progresses’ to the cast returning to the town where they grew up, supposedly to fulfill the final wishes of another childhood friend who recently died. Inexplicable reasons later, they all end up at a building they don’t recognize, yet all spent their childhood years together in. Even more inexplicable reasons later, something angry and malevolent begins to stalk them, leaving a trail of bodies behind. If I were the spirit, I’d be pissed at being involved in this film, too, but maybe not to the point of murder. Well, then again, it is god awful…

I swear the writers only used a ton of characters just so killing them off one at a time would stretch things out to a painful eighty minutes. At the end, I would have cheered that the film was finally over, but it was just too much of a waste of my time, and the actors’ talent, to feel anything but an acidic bitterness in the pit of my belly.

Don’t bother watching this movie. Or if you do, make sure you have something soft to throw at your television screen so you do no permanent damage. You have been warned.

Tags: don't bother, horrible waste of time, painful test of endurance, You Poor Bastard

I have tons of good, fair, and rather odious movies to write up reviews for, but with life doing that whole ‘run you over, back up to make sure it got you the first time, and then running you over again for the hell of it’ routine, I obviously haven’t been writing them up. For all five of my readers, I promise to post some reviews this weekend.

But first, for Halloween, I’d like to recommend some good, quality cheese to watch while you wait for trick or treaters. These are movies I have in my personal stash, and will be pulling out for my own viewing pleasure.

First we have Fright Night starring Christopher Sarandon as one of my most favorite vampires ever. There are tons of one liners, lots of tongue in cheek humor, not too much gore, and a solid story. What really won it over for me way back when? Christopher Sarandon’s vampire whistling ‘Strangers In The Night’ as he prepares to lay in wait for his next victim.

Next is Sleepy Hollow starring Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane. Christinna Ricci adds some interest as a young woman carefully practicing witchcraft in her small, superstitious town. Christopher Walken as the Horsemen is a perfect pick, as well. Of course Tim Burton delivers a great script, but it’s the humor, once again, sprinkled throughout that earns my abundant praise.

Last but not least is Stephen Sommers’ Van Helsing starring Hugh Jackman. What can I say? You get Dracula, Frankenstein, and wolf men, all in one package! Again, great storyline, great writing, great acting, and lots of humor. If you’ve never seen it, you’re missing out!

These three aren’t necessarily my all time favorite, but out of my stash, they are the ones I grab quite often, and will definitely watch tonight! I hope everyone else has some great cheese they can entertain themselves with, because Halloween doesn’t have to just be scary, it also needs to be fun!

Happy Halloween, everyone!

This is a very strong cheese.  I splurged and picked up a sample of this Shropshire Blue at my local Fred Meyer’s grocery store, and I will buy it again.

Why do I like it so much?  It’s pungent, but not naseauting, so my olfactory senses are put on alert, but not overwhelmed.  It’s attractive, too, with those dark blue veins running through bright orange.  It has a strong bite, but you could have it on a cheese platter, as long as you serve it with foods that can stand up to it, such as salami, Kalamata olives, and apples.  But because it is nearly overwhelming on its own, it’s best crumbled over a dark green salad, or mixed into things like hamburger and meatloaf mixes.

For the price, this is a versatile cheese that I would definitely recommend.  Plus, the kid in me keeps associating it with an old Daffy Duck cartoon.  Because I figure my other five readers may be just as big of kids as me, I have embedded the YouTube link.  If you have eight minutes to be a kid again, enjoy! (And go out and sample Shropshire Blue Cheese to enjoy, too!)

Tags: cheese, daffy duck, shropshire blue

This was one of the hardest movies to find anything on the internet about! Sci Fi aired it as Ba’al: The Storm God, but it is known on IMDB simply as Ba’al. It was apparently made for television, which explains the lightweight action and substance.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this movie a lot more than I thought it would. It starts off with a very basic premise that we’ve heard a million times before. A mad professor is seeking four amulets with ancient power. This time it also involves the Dead Sea Scrolls, so we get to watch an entertaining, totally unbelievable, robbery of a museum to retrieve said Dead Sea Scrolls. Of course, we don’t know at the time what the robbers are after, but this isn’t really a spoiler. Not much in the movie is going to be.

We get taken all across the globe at breakneck speed, and the story splits down the middle between two sets of characters. We have the archeologists and a linguist (who is naturally gorgeous and way too young to have so many languages mastered) doing their puzzle solving and globe trotting. Then we have a weather expert and the military attempting to figure out what the heck is going on with all these mysterious storms! The weather expert is played by Lexa Doig who had a long stint in Andromeda, and also played in Jason X, one of the few slasher films I truly enjoyed (only because it made fun of itself so well). Sadly Ba’al is the last thing listed on her IMDB page, so she needs to get a better agent, fast. But I digress.

Normally split story lines just mean the writers were afraid they were going to run out of story before their mandatory hour and forty minutes (with twenty minutes for commercials). This time they actually wove the two together so it made sense, and even have them converge at an appropriate time. It’s nice when I don’t get dizzy from rolling my eyes so much at bad writing (other than my own).

Halfway decent story work and character development aside, what really entertained me was the CGI. It’s not going to win any awards, but the dark ominous clouds with glowing red eyes are still pretty cool. The storms that kick up are nifty to watch, too. Cars fly everywhere, buildings are uprooted from their foundations, and general mayhem is all around. It is a bit over the top, and there’s no logical reason why the main characters would manage to survive one of them simply by hiding under a large truck, especially after one just as big got tossed like a Lego, but hey, I was in a forgiving mood. I can even forgive how the entire plot of the movie evades me so quickly after I watched it, because cool CGI of an angry storm god appeases me that much.

It doesn’t look like this will hit DVD anytime soon, so you’ll just have to wait for Sci Fi to air it again, which I’m sure they will. For a natural disaster/ancient god type movie, it’s well worth a fair viewing. It won’t bog you down with a lot of details or facts, it won’t preach some higher moral lesson at you (even though it’s hinted at), it’s sprinkled with one-liners, and it will simply let you wallow in some well-deserved B-grade action.

Tags: cool CGI, disaster movie, mythology, not so original

Warning: Cover may make movie look much cooler than it is.

Part Transformers.
Part Bioshock.
Part Demolition Man.
Part Terminator.
Part Battlestar Galactica (the new ‘take-us-way-too-seriously’ version)
All crap.

How does a movie that features robots, an apocalyptic future, a lesbian wife/wife couple, a rebel leader with a nifty accent, and a rich, if overdone, storyline end up so boring? There was even a cat fight scene amongst five attractive women, but the punches were so overly choreographed, and slow, I nodded off a couple of times. It was a five minute time filler. Even the little scene with the wife and wife was boring. It was an emotional ‘goodbye’ scene, and totally would have been believable to have them engage in a passionate embrace. We get a near kiss, as if they were afraid of the censors. C’mon, people, you’re not making this for television! At least don’t wuss out when you’re the ones who brought the subject up in the first place! Not that I think scenes like that are necessary, but it might have at least made me look up from my knitting.

I honestly couldn’t tell you what this movie was about. It was so mind numbingly boring, with sub par graphics, I simply left it on just in case they pulled a gem of a one liner out, or had some kind of real action. I think it was something about alien robots taking over the earth, driving surviving humans underground, and then after four hundred years, the humans are still thriving underground, and the robots only consider them a nuisance, but the humans are freezing ‘traitors’ who want to fight the robots to take back a planet that they can’t survive on anyway, but now the robots are passing ‘the green line’ and somehow that’s important, and god just get me to the end. After a half dozen references to the robot enemy as over-sized toaster ovens (400 years after a toaster oven should have been obsolete), I just couldn’t give it more than thirty percent of my focus. I think it may have ended with the humans winning, and someone making a heartbreaking personal sacrifice, but I really didn’t care.

If they had turned this into a mini-series, they may have been able to make it work, even with some of the god-awful acting ‘talent’ they dredged up. The major characters did well, but some of the minor ones just made me want to hit my head against the wall. I’ve managed to avoid most porno films in my time, but I do believe there was a good deal of ‘porno quality’ acting to be found here. Ugh.

But I digress again. Really, this story has potential. It just needed a lot more room to breathe and grow into something that could qualify as a real, honest to goodness, story. The hour and thirty nine minutes I exposed myself to was not a story, or anything that anyone should waste their time on. Everyone involved in Transmorphers obviously didn’t give it enough of theirs.

Tags: avoid at all costs, crap, god awful, total crap

Apparently Reptilian is also known as 2001 Yonggary. (And go ahead and let that cover fool you. This is another Godzilla ripoff.) Either way, it’s definitely worth sitting down with a bowl of popcorn and giggling yourself silly at the horrible acting, and rather cool CGI monster.

We start off with a team of men going into a cavern, led by a Dr. Campbell, played by a third-rate version of Robert Patrick, Richard B. Livingston. (Considering this role is the last one listed in his IMDB page, ‘third rate’ is probably being too generous.). The man does things like pointing, making sure his arm is ram-rod straight, and announcing ‘There!’ in a booming, apocalyptic voice. He does this at least twice in the first five minutes, and I am promptly choking on my coffee in a giggling fit. This movie doesn’t feature Shakespearean actors, let’s leave it at that.

This was a good palate-cleansing sort of movie. I didn’t have to pay much attention because there wasn’t really a plot other than ‘aliens are wanting to destroy the earth.’ I was just happy because there was a lot of cheesy dialogue, cheesy CGI, and cheesy alien puppets I was supposed to be afraid of. I tried to get a picture of them, but my camera couldn’t get a clear shot off the television. Please, watch the movie at your first chance (I’m sure it will air on Sci-Fi again soon), because those aliens are worth it!

I also loved the main monster of the movie. His name is Yonggary (pronounced ‘young gary’, I kid you not), and one of the minor players announces that ‘this guy makes Godzilla look like a pussy!’. I’m not so sure about that, but the CGI is really well done. It definitely is CGI, so it wouldn’t win any awards as far as blending seamlessly into the background, but who cares? It’s a big lizard monster who breathes fire, and probably just wants a cookie, like the Krakken from Clash Of The Titans. If they made a stuffed toy, I’d put it on my Amazon wish list because he’s just that cute, in a city-destroying kind of way.

I do have a couple of complaints, but they’re minor, considering this is a B-movie done with the right, not-taking-itself-seriously tone. There are too many minor characters, introduced at random points in the film. There’s a photojournalist that you meet in the beginning, and then halfway through, he just vanishes. He definitely wasn’t killed off, he just stopped mattering, so they ignored him the rest of the movie. Then we meet way too many military types, government types, and somehow they all know each other. It keeps this movie from being a solid B, instead of a B-minus of a film. I like having just a couple of main characters, and a handful of minor players who may or may not become monster chow.

Minimal complaints aside, if you like dialogue that includes ‘The prophecy has been fulfilled!’, ‘We’re all doomed!’, and ‘The city is being attacked by a giant lizard!…No, I’ve not been drinking!’, then Reptilian needs to be watched as soon as Sci Fi decides to air it again. Set your VCR/DVR, or whatever recording mechanism you use (or go for that really cheap price from an Amazon seller), and settle in with a big bowl of popcorn. You will be entertained (especially by those alien puppets), which is all I ever ask from my B-grade cinema!

Tags: aliens, cheese, monsters