Category Archives: movies

Alone in the Dark

The Netflix Fairy brought us Alone in the Dark. I read the sleeve and couldn’t figure out what could possibly have compelled me to put this in our queue. Christian Slater, Tara Reid and Stephen Dorff do make an appealing trifecta of uber-badness, but that couldn’t have been the reason.

OK, there’s pop culture archaeology, too. That’s impressive, but not enough. If I get well enough to return to teaching pop culture and archaeology, I can’t imagine assigning anything with quite this much running and screaming.

It’s not the running and screaming that’s the problem. It’s how unconvincing it is. To be fair, my voice-over work only ever involved screaming. Maybe I’d be terrible at running and screaming, too. If someone would like to pay me a lot of money, I’d be happy to test this out.

Anyway.

Husband finally remembered why we wanted to see it: it’s directed by Uwe Boll. And it’s widely regarded to be his worst movie of all time.

Uwe Boll’s worst movie of all time.

Uwe Boll. The man who brought us BloodRayne. Holy crap, is BloodRayne a bad movie. That’s the the movie that one critic regarded as “not as bad as getting your eyelid caught on a nail.” The movie that did this to me.

I can’t wait.

Elvis Died For Your Sins

It’s the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis. You aren’t at work, are you? Of course you aren’t. You’re at home, wearing a sequined jumpsuit and reflecting on where you were 30 years ago today.

I know where I was.

I remember not because I loved Elvis, but because our neighbor Selma* loved, loved, loved Elvis. When Selma learned that Elvis went to the Great Hereafter she stood in the road and sobbed. She didn’t just cry, she wailed. Like a banshee.

Then there were the candles. Eventually there was a neighborhood caravan up to Graceland, which I was not part of. At least in my memory there was a caravan. I don’t really remember if they actually went, my overwrought Elvis-loving neighbors, or if there was just a lot of talk and beer consumption by the light of Selma’s shrine. It was a lovely shrine, under the palm trees in her front yard.

I was very young, so it’s kind of a blur.

There was live coverage blaring from the crappy AM radio Selma usually took to the beach. The grownups drank lots of beer and talked about Our Great National Tragedy.

They didn’t know about the toilet yet, not that it would have mattered. He was, after all, the King.

Yankees get drunk and plot roadtrips to Florida. Floridians get drunk and plot roadtrips to Graceland. It’s the Cycle of Life.

At any rate, if you’re reading this you’re probably not at Graceland today. That means (I hope) that you’re at home, watching the TCM Elvis movie marathon and making dinner from recipes in Are You Hungry Tonight?

The hagiography at the Graceland site not enough Elvis info-tainment for you? Too lazy to search google? Here’s some suggestions for you:

You can visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Elvis Induction Page.

You can read the remarkable list of hundreds of songs about Elvis and/or Nixon. (sadly, with no links or mp3s, but the novelty wears off prettty fast, anyway).

You can groove to the sounds of Jesus Presley.

You can visit the First Church of Jesus Christ, Elvis (who I would swear used to have a better website, but maybe that was a different Elvis Church).

You can go to Vegas and get married at the Elvis Chapel.

You can catch up on the Girls Guide to Elvis.

You can read about the saga of the Elvis statue in Memphis and the efforts to have it restored to it’s former glory:

The statue was popular with tourists. It was so popular tourists climbed onto the base of the statue and managed to pry loose the metal fringe on the jump suit. They also treated it like the front wall at Graceland until the statue was tattooed with well wishes and not-so-well wishes. “I touched Elvis’ butt,” seemed particularly egregious.

That probably would have continued had locals not begun complaining about the condition of the statue around 1994. The question of who was responsible for the upkeep and, more important, who would pay for the needed cleaning and renovation of the statue hit a web of City Hall red tape.

Enter Robert “Prince Mongo” Hodges, local eccentric and self-professed visitor from another planet. Mongo claimed the statue as his own since no one from the city would take specific responsibility.

He announced he would remove the statue, take it in for repairs, pay for the repairs, gold plate it and then install it as part of his former Front Street nightspot Prince Mongo’s Planet. When he showed up at the plaza one morning and a large crane followed, Memphis police were ready. The move was put off when police told Mongo the crane couldn’t park there. Mongo pledged to come back the next day. But his interest waned. Shortly thereafter, the statue was repaired by others.

[read the whole article]

Last, but not least, don’t forget the Elvis Lives fanclub.

—–
*not her real name.

Prince of Darkness

TNT apparently ran a [tag]John Carpenter[/tag] marathon over the weekend and “Prince of Darkness” caught my eye because it seemed vaguely familiar (in a non-Robert Novak sort of way).

Donald Pleasance, Jameson Parker (1987) “A priest summons a professor to an old church to see a cannister of liquid satan.”

Last time Tivo “suggested” this movie to us, the Bunny and I couldn’t stop saying “[tag]liquid satan[/tag]” for a long time.

Far longer than the joke stayed funny, probably.

Liquid satan.

No, actually, it’s still funny.

Bloodrayne

Happy New Year!

The stalker squirrel didn’t get me, but the movie Bloodrayne almost did.

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Like most films adapted from video games, Bloodrayne is great. If your definition of “great” is, of course, “poorly directed, ineptly shot, incoherently edited, and really seriously badly cast.”

Through the judicious use of the fast forward button, you can condense the movie down to about 27 minutes of entertainment. That’s not enough to salvage the movie, but it’s an amusing way to spend time drinking a cup of coffee. Even the casting of Ben Kingsley and Geraldine Chaplin couldn’t save this movie.

It occurs to me that if you really disliked someone, you could give them this movie as a present and then insist they watch it. To be sure they have to sit through the whole thing, bring beer, act deadly serious about the entire enterprise and keep control of the remote. Rewind and re-watch the “good” parts just to drag out the “fun.” You’ll suffer, too, but I suspect that your target will never, ever bother you again. (I wonder if this would work on a squirrel?)

Highpoints of “the film” included a graphic slo-motion sex scene in some sort of dungeon. This scene did not, thankfully, involve Ben Kingsley and Geraldine Chaplin. Additionally, there was a lengthy and bizarrely random montage of decapitations with gratuitous arterial blood spurts that were totally out of sync with the rest of the movie in just about every way imagineable, including plot, tone, pacing and lighting.

Also, Michelle Rodriguez in what appeared to be a pirate’s costume. It’s possible that by this point I just wasn’t paying attention at all anymore, so I’m loathe to mention that I’m pretty sure Meat Loaf was running around in drag.

Not even Rayne’s propensity to miss her mouth while gulping blood from a chalice, thereby enabling said blood to splash artfully down her cleavage, could save this stinker.

I think I’m making it sound much better than it is.

At least Michelle Rodriguez can probably cop a “I was drunk and didn’t know what I was doing” plea. Sadly, I just realized the film was written by Guinevere Turner who turned the screenplay of American Psycho into a cutting (no pun intended) feminist social satire. I guess everyone has to pay the bills.

I thought the movie had Bill Nighy in it, but thankfully (for his sake) I was mistaken. (If you don’t know who I mean, he’s the excellent actor who stole the show in Love Actually and Underworld, among other movies, with the sheer force of his presence).

If you’re even slightly tempted to watch Bloodrayne, and you don’t have a sponsor or some other responsible adult who can come over to your house and make you step away from your DVD player, at least go read the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes first. There are so many great ones, I can’t pick a favorite, so I’ll just cite this one: “This is a movie that begs you not to watch it.”

Another review at Rotten Tomatoes said that Bloodrayne was “not as bad as getting your eyelid caught on a nail.” Trust me, you’ll have a much better time reading the reviews than you will watching this movie.

Immediately after watching Bloodrayne, we watched Silent Hill. I suspect that Silent Hill was pretty good, but by comparison it seemed brilliant.

I hesitate to praise Silent Hill too deeply because I also watched Valentine in the aftermath of Bloodrayne and even that didn’t seem awful at the time. Valentine was a serial killer movie starring David Boreanaz, Denise Richards, and Amy Irving’s daughter that Tivo recorded from basic cable at 2 a.m.

Yeah. Enough said.

Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep

Scifipedia is off to a pretty good start.

Their SciFi Original Movies season, not so much. The best thing I can say about Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep was that they called it Kraken instead of Killimari. I was only half-watching it, and I was still bored.

SciFi had a contest to name the film and I thought Killimari was an absolutely awesome name for a giant killer squid movie. “Kraken: tentacles of the deep” is also clever and appropriate for a giant squid B movie of the deep, but Killimari was, just, well, Killimari. Just say it out loud a few times. Perfect, no?

Alas, as it turned out, Kraken was a bad movie and thus undeserving of such a cool name. Kraken was just bad, but not Bad. Not endlessly rewatchably Bad. Certainly not “Gratuitous Linda Blair tapdancing sequence” Bad or “James Earl Jones yakking up a leopard” Bad or “Chuck Norris kickboxing the devil in Israel” Bad or even “Bela Lugosi wrestling a giant rubber octopus stolen from the prop room of a John Wayne movie” Bad. It was simply small-b bad. Drowning in mediocrity bad. Boring bad.

To make it worse, they followed it with Snakehead Terror which stars the unholy tryptich of Bruce Boxleitner, Carol Alt, and animatronic stairclimbing snakehead fish. Snakehead Terror is no Empire of the Ants, but it’s lightyears more entertaining than Kraken. B-movies can, and probably should, be many things: badly directed, badly edited, badly acted, even badly written (maybe, especially, badly written) but they should never be boring.