If you’re looking for some holiday movies to go along with that bottle of bourbon Santa left under the tree, here’s a trio that will guarantee your whole family needs therapy for years to come.
Rare Exports (2010) is a 3 year old Finnish horror/comedy for the whole (Addams) family. It’s a really good movie.
The other two movies on this list? Not so much.
Santa Claus (1959) is the heartwarming tale of the year Santa fought the Devil. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) features a young Pia Zadora. Enough said. Neither of those films should be viewed in their original form. Trust me, you’ll break your brain. Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (MST3K) versions of both are readily available on Netflix, Amazon, Youtube, etc.
I haven’t had time to read any reviews for the new Friday night TV show, Dracula, so I kept forgetting to look forward to its debut. I haven’t noticed much publicity for the show and Husband doesn’t think he’d have been aware of it at all if I hadn’t Tivo’d it.
In this respect, and so many more, this show has lived down to our every expectation.
There aren’t any spoilers here, because nothing happened in the pilot episode.
Nothing.
This show makes Dr. Who seem like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
(Husband just pointed out to me that Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride is actually known as the Wind in the Willows to people who were not raised by wolves and/or Disney. And also that I must be thinking of the ride, because the movie Wind in the Willows is rather slow moving).
Not the point.
There is no point – not to my story, not to this show.
As soon as you accept that, you will enjoy Dracula. It’ll be on for at least 5 more weeks while they burn off the investment, so go ahead, don’t be afraid to commit to at least a fling.
With its elaborate sets and drawn-out scenes of minimalistic yet overwrought dialogue, punctuated by lengthy, action-less sequences where the actors may actually just be reading a dictionary to one another, Dracula is like a 1960s House of Hammer summer-stock performance of Dark Shadows.
Sample scene:
“Insatiable. I-N-S-A-T-I-A-B-L-E.”
“Unquenchable. U-N-Q-U-E-N-C-H-A-B-L-E.”
Okay. They weren’t really spelling the words after they said them, but it would have livened things up just a scosche if they had.
The original Dark Shadows was a terrible high-camp show that ran from 1966-1971. Each revival since has been met with teeth-gnashing and displays of nostalgia and expressions of a woefully misguided belief that the show was even remotely “good.”
Who knows, perhaps Dracula will be able to leverage its flagrant disdain for quality into an equally long run!
The characters all look alike, which is a problem because we can’t figure out who anyone is or which side they’re on. Maybe there aren’t any sides.
I have no idea.
I’m pretty sure that Dracula, now calling himself Grayson, has been resurrected in 1896 and is pretending to be a rich American inventor.
And he’s out for revenge. Or he’s passionate about patent law. Or his pants are too tight.
I really have no idea.
Husband says Dracula/Grayson is definitely out for revenge. He hopes Dracula/Grayson will attend Revenge Academy, like Emily Thorne apparently did before taking revenge on characters named Grayson on the show Revenge.
Maybe there’ll be a cross-over story arc! Revenge has gotten incredibly tedious, so that would be pretty great.
Dracula and a major character who looks just like many of the other characters who may or may not be main characters are having a dramatic conversation. We can’t remember who this guy is or what his name is, so Husband is referring to him as “Beardy” because he has a beard. We missed most of the scene because we were debating whether he was the character who’d had his throat ripped out in an earlier scene or if he just looked like him.
In closing, this is a bland show. It’s like low-sodium saltines. But with the application of just a tiny bit of emoting and Acting, it could be like low-sodium saltines with Nutella on top.
Maybe. I don’t know. Much like the pilot of Dracula, this post has run out of steam and is just staring longingly into the camera, sighing at irregular intervals.
Intending to watch the hilarious Happy, Texas but instead watching the not-hilarious Paris, Texas is a mistake I doubt one makes twice.
I certainly haven’t.
Ditto: thinking you’re in for an evening filled with the adorableness of Sandra Bullock (and adorable alcoholics, judging from the description) in 28 Days and accidentally finding yourself immersed in the horrors of zombies in 28 Days Later.
Haven’t made that mistake again, either.
Mistaking Under Satan’s Sun (aka Under the Sun of Satan) for Under the Tuscan Sun would probably be the most disturbing of all, but I haven’t seen either one so I’m just speculating.
Unless Under the Tuscan Sun also stars Gérard Depardieu as a self-flagellating priest. I hadn’t considered that possibility.
After about 30 seconds of research I’ve realized it’s a bit less ominous than I thought, in that it turns out Lost Horizon bears no resemblance to the movie that I originally thought he was referring to, Lost Highway.
I am not to be trusted with the Netflix queue when I have a high fever.
Today we embarked on our Two Days of Crap Filmfest (aka Crapfest). Between our Netflix queue and our Tivo, Overlord II, we have an abundance of possibilities because I’ve been hording the worst of the worst for months. I made a spreadsheet to track the themes, key elements, and featured stars.
Eliza Dusku! Barry Williams! Charisma Carpenter! Danny Bonaduce! Misha Collins!
We’ve also got Liam Neeson’s Battleship and, as incentive to keep pushing forward, we’ve got that all-time Bad classic, the Manitou, as the headliner.
Bad (watch immediately, repeatedly).
bad. Boring Bad (see also: Badish, Badesque).
Not So Good.
Mediocre (neither bad nor good enough to bother with).
Pretty good (might even see it again).
Terminator 2.
We started with Open Graves – a 2009 epic I tivo’d off SyFy on a Saturday morning in February at 9:30 a.m. It opened with a montage of my least favorite things: screaming, bloody torture, fingernail ripping, and snakes. This was on at 9:30 on a Saturday morning? Even I find that inappropriate.
It’s 6:30 on Friday evening and I still find it inappropriate.
There could be spoilers here, but you shouldn’t care because you shouldn’t watch this movie.
Seriously: this movie sucks.
I am telling you this movie is not worth your time.
Think about that.
Since we watched it, I might as well tell you what you’re (not) missing:
After the random spasm of violence that comprised the opening credits, we cut to a bunch of annoying graduate students partying in Spain. After a few minutes of “character development” we’ve already started rooting for a return to torture. Fortunately, Eliza Dushku showed up to give us someone to cheer for.
One of the annoying grad students, played by Mike Vogel, who might possibly be the intended star of this movie, bought an antique boardgame from the Spanish inquisition so hopefully most of these people are about to start dying, violently.
The Spanish Inquisition was famous for it’s board games. Little-known fact.
In related news, this movie has too damned many snakes in it.
To summarize: the idiot grad students play the Spanish Inquisition Boardgame and then start dying violently, each in the manner predicted by the game. The game is the vehicle of revenge for the witch, Mamba, whose skin was used to make the game.
Got that? It was more convoluted than that but actually made sense when Eliza Dushku read it to another character after she looked it up on the internet, presumably on Witchipedia or the Spanish Inquisition Boardgames Wiki. It’s not worth recounting in this post because I don’t wish to make the movie sound clever or interesting.
Then some stuff happened. Then it ended.
At one point, Eliza Dushku’s character said, “Everyone could win, everyone could lose.”
This is also a good summary of what could happen to audiences of this movie.
House of Bones, which was the Saturday morning double-feature with Open Graves, had a distinct advantage, in that Open Graves set the bar pretty low for the evening. House of Bones turned out to be a Ken Badish production, which was amusing at first. Later, as the movie teetered on the verge of “boring badness (aka badishness) we wondered if it hadn’t actually been an omen we’d failed to heed.
Corin Nemec (Mansquito, SS Doomtrooper) co-stars alongside Carpenter as TV ghost hunters that enter a reportedly haunted house that may prove to be the death of them.
Oh, dude! The star and the producer of SS Doomtrooper and Mansquito? Why didn’t you say so earlier? (Nemec was also one of the short-lived Campbell cousins on Supernatural).
I loved Mansquito. It’s not as good as Snakehead Terror, but what is?
The plot of House of Bones: Alleged haunted house. Reality TV show crew shooting a show with a psychic in the alleged haunted house. Ta-Da! What could possibly go wrong?
Fortunately, it turned out to be juuuust Bad enough to watch with minimal psychic damage, although it’s no Snakehead Terror or Hellbound. The important thing is that we’ve lived to watch another day.
“Where in the world,” I barked, indigent, “do meerkats and chupacabras co-exist in the same habitat?”
Husband, round clear vowels disguising any impatience he may have felt, intoned, “Noooowheeeeere.”
Even before the words were out of my mouth I knew this was a dumb question and that I should stop watching Tivo’d SyFy Saturday night craptaculars and get some real work done.
There will be spoilers in this post, but only for those not astute enough to figure out that a movie whose ads imply it might as well be titled “Chupacabra on the Love Boat with buckets of fake blood and a guy in a rubber monster suit” is going to involve a chupacabra getting loose on a cruise ship.
Giancarlo Esposito plays a cryptozoologist transporting an animal in the cargo hold of a cruise ship. It’s a chupacabra, but don’t tell anyone! It’s a chupacabra who lives on a caribbean island with meerkats! Silly meerkats, why do you think you should only live in Africa?
And the cruise? It’s a chupacabra-themed cruise!
No. Really.
Chupacabra: Dark Seas
I don’t wish to ruin it for you, but when the chupacabra breaks out of the cargo hold and starts chowing down on all the tasty passengers and crew, he doesn’t look anything like the novelty chupacabra carved vegetable centerpiece shown in that photograph.
John Rhys-Davies, as the ship’s captain, seems to be imploring the viewer to use this movie as an opportunity to forget Dragonstorm.
Alien dragons? Fat chance we’ll forget that.
Esposito plays accent roulette, mumbling through awkward dialogue as his chupacabra gets loose on the ship and mayhem ensues.
“I have trapped it before. I can trap it again!”
He says that line more than once. In the same scene.
The captain’s daughter is also the ship’s Tae Bo instructor. I’d forgotten about Tae Bo. I found this fantastic New York Times article (March 21, 1999) about Tae Bo:
A friend of mine says that Tae-Bo is the macarena of exercise: irresistible moves with a beat that anyone can do and look sort of O.K. Men and women, young and old, all ”get” Tae-Bo, because a punch is an instinctive move.
Nothing about yoga, by contrast, is instinctive. (You remember yoga, don’t you? The ”inner” workout?) Yoga is weird and painful and elitist; it made you feel like you weren’t quite a member of the club. And that awful feeling of being left out meant that you weren’t primed to receive the mystical yummies that yoga was hawking. Besides, unless you were writhing around with all your pierced buddies down at Jivamukit on Lafayette Street in Manhattan, yoga was boring.
Perhaps oneness is out. In any case, the mild aggression of Tae-Bo feels like a welcome palate cleanser.
I just looked up at the screen and someone was on fire. I have no idea who or why. I don’t think it matters, it just looked cool. The Navy Seals (who up to this point I thought were supposed to be some sort of comedy-relief coast guard auxiliary) are ineffective at stopping the chupacabra. Luckily, the captain, his daughter and his old navy buddy who happens to be on the cruise, save the day.
The captain’s daughter defeats the chupacabra with – I am not making this up – Tae Bo.
Husband proclaims, “You can’t use yoga on a chupacabra!” Which would have made a great tagline for this movie.
Then we watched Chupacabra vs the Alamo, which stars Erik Estrada as a DEA agent who does battle with….chupacabra. At the Alamo. On Cinco de Mayo. Sure, why not? The Onion A/V Club hits all the highlights so I don’t have to, although I would like to state for the record that I think the chupacabras in Alamo would be more realistic than the one in Dark Seas, if chupacabras were real.
