IHAO on ... See No Evil 2

I really really liked See No Evil.  Like, super duper liked it.  I would dare say it is a GREAT movie ... except I know better.  Yeah, it is not the best written thing when it comes to dialogue, and it is VERY trope-oriented for a slasher film.  But what makes See No Evil great is that it uses all those tropes and either subverts them or embellishes them.  Jacob Goodnight is just a human, a big ole monster of one that isn't quite right in the head.  But you watch him run, you watch him think.  He is an incredibly interesting slasher villain.  And the camera never shies away from him, either.  We get to watch him think, and act.  He isn't one-liners, he isn't one-note, he is a complicated villain, that makes the stakes even higher for our young adults (they aren't teenagers at all) trying to survive.  See No Evil is easily my favorite slasher film.  Grade: B+++

I actually reviewed it earlier on this site, if you wanna go digging through archives to find when I did video reviews, cursed more, and lived in a different state.  I'm actually pretty proud of the See No Evil review.  But that is neither here nor there.  See No Evil 2 is awful.  It is no bueno.

"No bueno" is the actual words that I said after viewing it.  It was the only thing I could say.  See No Evil 2 = No bueno.

It makes me very mad and sad, because it ... it is just terrible.  It has so many flashbacks from the first film, and is already super short, but feels super long.  All the good stuff that they did with Jacob Goodnight before, now he is spouting out weird monologues and awful stuff.  The characters are all terrible.  The set is atrocious.  The deaths are unmemorable at best.  The plot is terrible, because there isn't one.

Here you wanna know the plot?  Jacob Goodnight, who the first movie absolutely 100% kills without any doubt in an over the top ridiculous way, didn't die, and is killing people in the morgue.  That's it.  That's the end.  There's no character arc, no story progression, he just kills everyone.  The only surprising, trope redefining thing that See No Evil 2 does is there is no survivors.  Spoiler.  Except not, because I don't want anyone to watch See No Evil 2.

I love supporting WWE films.  I watch all of them when I get the chance.  I buy them even more likely.  But this movie was trash.  The only good thing about it was Katharine Isabelle, better known as Ginger Snaps from the horror franchise of the same name.  She was always over the top and entertaining.  No other character, not a single one of the other characters were.  Well, that's not quite fair.  The film didn't really start going downhill until Michael Eklund died.  He was also good.  That's all the nice things I can say about this movie.  The deaths were lame, the props were lame, the costume was lame, the writing was lame, the direction was boring, the film was probably 1/10 flashbacks in an already ridiculously short 90 minute film, and it felt like it was probably another hour on top of that.  Avoid, and do not watch.  Go watch the original one.  That one is great!

Grade: F-

IHAO on ... Saw: the Final Chapter

Good googly moogly is this film atrocious.

Yeah, I'm not even going to be close to pretending it is good.  This, THIS is the torture porn I've had quite a few conversations about since I started watching the Saw films.  I mentioned it in an earlier review, but let me go ahead and lay out my mindset here: films with torture do not equal torture porn.  That is like saying a erotic thriller film is a porn.  The term "torture porn" was created to describe Hostel, which came out the year after Saw and could not have corresponded to Saw II.  And torture films existed way before the Saw films.  The Saw films are not the "father" of torture porn.  Cannibal Holocaust, I Spit on Your Grave, lots of torture films existed for decades before Saw came out.  The Saw films, while having torture in them, are not actually about the torture.  It is about the mindset of a man who would torture, and the twisted morals he is trying to teach.  The films are made with an A-plot about Jigsaw, his past, his accomplishes, and so forth, and a B-plot that is the "test" or series of torture devices.  The fact that the torture isn't even the focus of these films narratively should absolutely help out.  The Saw films ARE NOT TORTURE PORN.

Except for this one, because this one is garbage torture porn.  And not even good torture porn that makes you cringe or feel something as you watch.  Just really really terrible crappy ... everything really.

Plot real quick: 2ish months after the events of the last movie, a survivor of a Saw trap, who has become a Tony Robbins style motivation speaker for three years now, is tested by Jigsaw's apprentice, maybe.  He's tested by someone, don't know who.  Jigsaw's apprentice, meanwhile in B-plot land, is once again dealing with cops and trying to get some personal revenge.  Yeah, that's right, the torture part is the A-plot this time, which is a first.

Ok, so I'm just going to list off all the problems I have with this movie.  List style.  Because I cannot get my mind focused any other way currently.  Here we go:

1. The opening trap is absolutely 100% pointless with no narrative purpose, no setting purpose, and no way to even understand how it fits into the storyline.
2. The timeline of the film, which is a huge aspect of the Saw series as a whole, is all janked up.
3. The second trap is absolutely 100% pointless with no narrative purpose, no setting purpose, and very very little point in fitting it in with a featured extra's story that ultimately is also pointless.
4. The casting is abysmal, straight across the bored, without a single good actor in the whole film.
5. The blood is pink.
6. The BLOOD IN THIS MOVIE ALL LOOKS PINK!
7. A TRAP INVOLVES JIGSAW HAVING ETCHED NUMBERS INTO A MAN'S MOLARS, WITHOUT HIM EVER FEELING IT HAVING HAPPENED TO HIM!!!
8. THERE IS AN AUTOMATED MACHINE GUN THAT IS NOT A TRAP, JUST A MACHINE GUN THAT IS THERE TO KILL PEOPLE!!!!
9. THE TRAPS IN THE FILM ARE ALL COMPLETELY ILLOGICAL, RIDICULOUS, AND UTTLERLY FAKE LOOKING!!
10. THERE IS NOT A SINGLE POSSIBLE WAY THAT ANY OF THE THINGS IN THIS MOVIE COULD HAVE HAPPENED IN THE AMOUNT OF TIME THAT IT SAYS THEY DO!!!!

I just ... cannot express to you how terrible this whole movie is.  The more I think about it, the angrier I become.  It is not only a very bad movie, it is an utter failure as a Saw film.  Which is ridiculous, because it is the same people that made the last film, which is my second favorite narratively.  I can make some leaps to plug in the holes in logic, consistency, and what not, but they are completely unfounded.  The two hooded guys, no answer.  When, where, how, and why the first trap of the film happens, no answer.  Who put together the enormous plot test, when it looks like everyone was focused on something else, no answer.  Ugh.

This movie is not worth watching.  There is no reason to watch anything beyond a youtube clip of the final reveal, the final puzzle piece.  I have nothing positive to say about this movie beyond some things were "fine."

Grade: F-, as a Saw film, F---

((0-0))            ((0-0))            ((0-0))

And that's it!  I made it through, and I am very happy I did.  It was ultimately completely worth my time and effort, and I'll absolutely watch a good amount of these films again in the future!  I was asked to make a list of my favorite traps at some point recently, as well as put my final ranking of the films, so let's do that now, shall we!

Jessel's favorite Saw films

Saw III - Grade: A++

Saw VI - Grade: B++-

Saw IV - Grade: B++

Saw V - Grade: B+

Saw II - Grade: B+

Saw - Grade: B

Jessel's top 5 favorite Saw traps

Survivor Roulette - Saw VI

Blood Sacrifice Trap - Saw V

Take My Breath Away Trap - Saw VI

Acid McGee - Saw VI

Arteries Husband-Wife Trap - Saw IV

There we go.  That is enough talk about Saw and torture and porn.  Next week, we get into some neato action stuff, and another really bad horror movie that I just didn't have time to get to, as well as a comedy based Arbitrary Numbers!  See you next week!

IHAO on ... Saw VI

Let's get this out of the way: Saw, Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV, Saw V

I've been waiting for the shoe to drop since the third movie.  I've been waiting for that really terrible movie that ruins the series, turns it into torture porn and a gorefest, that strips away all the character drama and storytelling.  And, you know what?  It still hasn't happened.  In fact, The quality has become pretty consistent, and even better, in someways, it continues to improve.  Saw VI continues the trend of telling good stories, with interesting traps, and surprisingly deep characters.  I saw surprising because ... ok, let me do the plot set up first.

Spoilers (very minor) ...

Jigsaw is dead.  His apprentice has taken over completely by this point.  But John Kramer has one more trap he needs done, one last will and testament.  And it is all around the insurance guy who would not allow Kramer to do an experimental drug course on their insurance.  Even more interesting, the insurance guy, played by the really excellent Peter Outerbridge, ISN'T wrong!  The experimental treatment has a less than 50% chance, and that is just too high for an insurance company, especially for someone as old as John Kramer.  It isn't fair, it sucks, but he's right.  So he is tested.  At the same time, the Apprentice is trying to get his name cleared, but some unexpected turns happen as he finds himself in a seemingly losing battle to cover his tracks.

Saw VI has some HUGE PROBLEMS to begin with.  Some of the bad actors return, though the good actors that return all more than hold their weight.  It has a LOT of "color-coded" scenes, which drives me nuts.  You know what I'm talking about?  When a movie color tints EVERYTHING, generally with the REALLY stupid blue-orange color dynamic.  It gets really really irritating, and it took me out of the film.  A lot.  We are also introduced to a whole bunch of characters very quickly, so they are all basically just swathes of two-dimensional characters, including Outerbridge's character.  But that is just to begin with.

After about ... 15 minutes, things change.  And Saw VI becomes ... almost my favorite of the series!  The traps, all of them, are incredibly well done.  Sometimes the traps in these movies go a little crazy and overboard.  Saw V was really overboard with its traps, the ones that weren't stupid.  But there is a great combination of inventive, unique, and simple traps.  They are all visceral without being incredibly gorier, other than the very first trap of the film, which is a wonderfully difficult to watch section based on Shakespeare's "a pound of flesh."  The acting is so good, the writing is incredible, the cop plot is fantastic, the test of Outerbridge is wonderful, and ... I cannot say enough good things about MOST of the movie.

The opening makes me SO ANGRY because of how good everything else it.  But what is really great about it all is that the only really cringe worthy moment, for me, was an extended replay of the last movie.  And this film not only makes an excellent trilogy-ender for Saw's IV, V, and IV, but it is a fantastic stand alone.  I really really loved the parts I loved in this film.  But the parts I hated ... oooooo did I hate it.  Hopefully it will not get any worse than that stuff.

Grade: B++-

IHAO on ... Saw V

This is a GREAT poster, by the way.

We reach a point in these Saw films, after watching so many of them, that if the writing isn't really good then it all starts to blend together.  I'm not saying that the writing for this Saw is bad, but ... ok, lemme do the plot rundown.  I'm doing my best to keep the spoilers out of these, but as we get deeper and deeper in the story, it becomes harder and harder to avoid spoiling some of the overall plot.

The two stories here are one dealing with Detective Strahm chasing down Jigsaw, because now it is personal, and then five people, connected by their traps and their lives, have to try to live together or not.  Their traps are all tied to working together, which becomes the crux of their story.  We also get the backstory of the Jigsaw apprentice and how he got involved with Jigsaw, which started with a copycat trap.  I love the very loaded critique "inferior blade" Jigsaw gives him, and it is paid off in the acting, which is great.

Saw V has some bits I really like and some bits I really didn't.  All the flashbacks and the detailing of the apprentice and his interactions with Jigsaw are really great.  I very much understand some folks not liking the apprentice's acting, and I certainly didn't care for Strahm, but I like Clayface (our household nickname for the apprentice).  I also like the overarching schtick of the test plot, though its actual formulaic-ness ends up forcing characters to alter drastically between scenes in at least one case ... actually, I guess I could put that on the actress and not the writing.  The final scene in the test is phenomenal, truly horrific and the best scene of the film.  It isn't the final scene of the film, which is also pretty good.  You know, the more I talk about this film, the more I like it.

It is also the most cringe-making Saw I've seen yet as there is a sequence that, while it has some build up, the actual damage hit me like a sack of bricks.  It was very effective.  But once again, I do not feel it was unjustified or glorified.  Actually all the traps, except one, are great.  That one is awful.  Truly stupid.  Oh, wait, the first one is also, while a classic and pretty good, isn't as good as many of the others from pure filming perspective.  Really, the cinematography in generally is just a little under par.

This film is hard to for me to quantify.  It is definitely not as good, but it is still good.  Essentially, it just doesn't excel, but it is good.

Gameover.

Grade: B+

IHAO on ... Saw IV

Coming off the heels of Saw 3, Bousman once again creates a new film, but now with a new writer.  How well does this one go?  Well, let's give a quick plot.

The cops find the body of one of their own, a detective trying to figure out who Jigsaw is.  A SWAT member, Rigg, has now seen two of his close friends die in their pursuit of Jigsaw, and it makes him entirely unhinged and angry, so he is sent home.  There, he is thrust into his own series of tests as Jigsaw tries to get him to truly understand Jigsaw's purpose.  In the other story, two new detectives, Perez and Strahm, come in trying to figure out who Jigsaw is, but who his second apprentice is, as the evidence shows that there is another person helping Jigsaw.  We also get to learn the backstory to Jigsaw himself as a man, John Kramer, and how he became Jigsaw.

The film opens with an amazing sequence of an autopsy.  Bousman shows his skill as a director in this scene, once more showing the "gore" and "torture" aspects of the film series in another subversion, as this is the absolute goriest part of the film.  Empathic-ly it is not the most disturbing, but it absolutely is the goriest, and the film tricks used to show it on an actor who was actually there on set is incredible.  It also is the "opening kill" which is a nice subversion of the entire series.

The traps in Saw 4 lack the skill of those written by Whannell.  Not completely, but partially.  Such as, the first trap we see does not have the signature Jigsaw story element of the explanation of the poetic justice of the trap.  There's a reason, but it is a very lame one.  Also, the characters we deal with this film are mostly uninteresting.  I personally like Rigg and I have no problem with the actors, but they certainly are not as compelling as Jeff or Lynn.

The themes and plot of the film are great, but under realized.  This movie is doing a LOT, and most of it works, but it doesn't go as deep as I wanted.  There is this subtheme of who the new apprentice to Jigsaw could be, and with Rigg being prepped to possibly become the new apprentice, but it doesn't quite come to fruition.

I need to say, by the way, something I haven't mentioned yet in these Saw reviews (Saw, Saw II, and Saw III): Charlie Clouser is incredible with the music.  He does so many small things that are wonderful with the music, and the actual Saw theme itself is one of the best parts about these films.  It is Tubular Bells or the Halloween Theme; it has a character of its own.

The writing of this film, like I mentioned above, is just a little off.  Not bad, just not as great as a cohesive whole.  But this is also Bousman's best work as a director.  The film flows beautifully, and is truly one of the best directed films I've seen.  The writing leaves a little bit to be wanted on the plotting, and the acting isn't great, especially the actress brought in to play John Kramer's ex-wife.

Despite its few missteps, this is easily another of my favorites in the series.  Just like 1, 2, and 3 made an excellent trilogy, an even stronger trilogy, in my opinion, is 2, 3, and 4.  Watching those films all with each other has made me really come to love this franchise.  Especially in 3 and 4, I'm so incredibly happy to have found this series and given it another chance.  I can understand if other folks do no want to give this one a chance, and it isn't as good as the previous one, but I really think it finishes the story in an amazing way.  Of course, it isn't the end of the story.  We still have three more films!  I cannot wait!

Cherish your life.

Grade: B++

IHAO on ... Resolution

Tension is a very powerful tool in film.  You create tension through music, cinematography, editing, and strong acting.  And it is not an easy to accomplish.  Even great films do not build and build tension throughout the film.  It isn't a requirement for greatness, but some films thrive on their tension.  The Hurt Locker, for example, is the most tense film I've ever seen.  It just builds and builds and builds as we see the life of Jeremy Renner's character.  The Conjuring and Oculus are horror movies that built tension amazingly well to boot.

I say all that because Resolution is EXCELLENT at tension building.  Extremely good.  It had me very very worried and eventually looking half at the movie as I watched, as it got too tense.  It just got thicker and thicker as the characters waded into the climax.  The finish of the film was underwhelming, but the tension ...

Ok, plot time.  Michael is a good friend to a terrible dude, Chris.  Chris is a meth addict who has ruined his life with his addiction.  Michael comes to give Chris one last chance ... by force.  He handcuffs Chris to the wall of the house he is squatting in and stays with him as he detoxes for a week.  But strange pieces of media start showing up, showing imminent death.  And meth heads, missing scientists, and Native American thugs round out the story.

The tension is the best part of the film.  Vinny Curran's Chris is the second best thing.  He has to play a meth addict slowly sobering, and stay likable the entire time, and he does an excellent job.  The rest of the film is ... fine.  It sort of strives for something great and just kind of flounders.  It is shot as a found footage film, but it is not treated as one.  There is no camera man per-say.  I don't wish to spoil things, so I will say that this film's largest problem is that it fails in having any real horror or scares.  It is very clever, with some clever bits, but its script is just too simple, and its filming even simpler, to make the actual idea work.  I wish a higher quality, larger budget version could be made, much like Oculus.  It is a perfectly fine film, but it doesn't reach for the points it strives for.

Grade: C

IHAO on ... Saw III

Combine the creative script and concepts of the first Saw and the excellent direction of the second Saw, and you have Saw III.  How is it as a film?  Spoiler ...

It is flipping amazing!  Easily the best I've seen so far, and a hard bar to for the rest of the series to reach.  It does a fantastic job of creative a surprising narrative and work in the traps themselves as a narrative feature as well.  The violence is more brutal, yet still not torture porn levels of ... casualness.

Actually, let me take a moment here to actually talk about "torture porn."  The terminology, as best as I can tell, was thrown around casually right about when Saw II came out.  You see, there were many Saw imitators that started to crop up, films that focused on the violent aspects of these films.  The Saw films (so far) have not been about the violence, not truly.  The violence has always been present, as the crucible of choosing to live over letting yourself die is a very large theme of the series (so far).  But the imitators did not have such a deft hand.  They thought that the torture was the point, and preyed on viewers giving them just that, and nothing much else.  The Hostel films, a Serbian Film, High Tension, the I Spit on Your Grave remake, and so many others are films that torture its protagonists and other characters as its goal.

Well what is the difference between what those films do and what Saw does?  It is about weight.  Torture porn treats torture and violence and gore as casual, much as actual pornography treats sex as casual.  There is no weight, meaning, thematic impact, character, or story.  There is just the violence and torture.  Sure, you might get a torture porn film that has a flimsy "pizza guy shows up and his penis his hidden inside the pizza" plot that many porns have, but that is really it.  The violence, gore, and torture are treated as casual aspects of the film.  They are just what happens.  And that is what separates the Saw films (so far) from the entire conceit of torture porn.

As an example, as I said there is a lot of violence, and it is shown more graphically.  Yet it is shown with character, and just a little detachment so the audience can feel comfortable knowing that the person getting hurt is a character, and not real life.  Yes, I cringed at the broken foot parts, and the many times the poor dude got his broken foot smashed.  But it was getting smashed not just because someone was smashing it.  It was plot, character, and story driven.  The traps are complicated and difficult, and there is one near the climax that will probably be very hard to watch, though it isn't unwatchable or even grossly overdone and gory.  There is a level of artifice there that actually allows you to be able to be more calm even though your empathy as you watch has you feeling their pain.  And with the interlocked story that you see the traps through, it gives you another deeper character driven level to these sequences.

Saw III even has a specific moment that subverts the "torture porn" conceit by being the goriest and most frightening scene in the film, and it truly is torturous ... and it is a surgery procedure.  Think about that.  It is a thing we've seen in countless films and television shows, and none of them have this label "torture porn" thrown on the.  It is a very clever use of subversion.

Forgive the long diatribe.  Talking about film intellectually is just kind of a thing I love doing.  If you couldn't tell.

Plot time.  A doctor is stolen from the hospital so that she can perform emergency surgery to keep Jigsaw alive.  Not cure him, as his brain cancer is killing him.  But to keep him alive just a little while longer.  This is the A-plot, and it deals with much more than just that, but I cannot say much more without really getting into spoilers.  The B-plot is your traditional "man in a test/trap" sequence that every Saw film has.  This one features a father, depressed from the lack of justice in his son's unfortunate death.  His story is heartbreaking.  And amazingly well acted by Angus Macfayden.  Bahar Soomekh is also wonderfully cast, and seeing her character's conversations with Jigsaw are easily some of the best scenes in any of these films.  The test that Macfayden's character Jeff has to go through are just as heartbreaking, and different from what we saw in Saw II and in Saw.

This film really perfectly finishes Whannel's trilogy of stories.  Each film gets better, and this film is damn near perfect.  I loved it.  It does everything a horror film should do, as well as a thriller.  It stuck with me and made me think about the deeper aspects of the film, as well as shocked and terrified me at the more horror-film style points without ever causing me distress.  The script is almost completely flawless, and the Darren Lynn Bousman just continues to get better and better as a director.

Can the fourth be just as good?  Or better?  Man oh man, do I hope so.

Grade: A++

IHAO on ... Maniac Cop

There are a plethora of horror movies out there, of all different kinds, qualities, skill, and notoriety.  So I want to do a nice mix of things on Netflix, things easy to find, things that are rare, and things some may have never heard of.  Plus non-horrory things, too, but that's not important right now.  My wife recently had a birthday, so as I looked for things to get her, as the horror lover of the house, I spotted a slasher film I had put on my list a long time ago for one reason, and one reason only: its sequel has an amazing man-on-fire stunt.  I know, weird, right.  Oh, and it had Bruce Campbell as the protagonist (kinda) and that finished the sell.  So I bought it for her birthday.

Maniac Cop tells the story of New York City cops just a week before St. Patrick's Day.  A man in a cop uniform has been going around and brandishing his own law, killing innocents.  The cops don't really know what to make of it until they find a man who was easily framed, Bruce Campbell.  Now Campbell has to find a way to prove his innocence, but the Maniac Cop (Robert Z'Dar) continues to hound them as Campbell and Love Interest look into the Maniac's past.

The conceits of the film are pretty neat.  Something that should be safe, cops, turned into something horrific.  A time of year that is not normally horrific turned into a killing spree.  It has some pretty interesting ideas.  The Maniac Cop himself makes for a nicely iconic villain.  There is a lot to like about the film.

There's also a whole bunch to not like.  It gets really slow in Act 2, Love Interest, while a good actress, doesn't really have much to do, and even our two protagonists, one a cop the other Bruce Campbell, just kind of trade-off screen time.  It just doesn't quite work.  The whole movie just doesn't quite work ... yet a lot of the stuff is really good, too.  Robert Z'Dar, other than his movie climax makeup, is flawless in the role, playing a silent antagonist and merely using very very effective body language to convey a little character to what could just be a Jason rip-off.  The climax is also very thrilling, with car chase and shoot out and a mast going straight through the Maniac Cop, it was pretty rad.  Except for Bruce Campbell thrown around in the back of the car like an idiot.  Just sit down!

Oh, and there's a really weird shot where the mast, just before being driven straight into, totally looks like a dangling pug on a string.  It was disturbing for a whole different reason.  I stopped and rewound and rewatched over and over with everybody in the house it was so odd.

This whole movie is just this weird up and down.  I want to give it a C, but really ... I'm just not positive the good actually equals the bad.  I going with a D.  D isn't so bad.  Dead Heat has a D, and that movie is great and hilarious.  In fact, it is a little better than this one.  Go read that review, then watch that movie.  There, I feel a lot better  I'm definitely still looking forward to the sequel, though!  And then the other sequel, which will probably be utter garbage.

Grade: D

IHAO on ... Saw II

Saw may have been created by James Wan and Leigh Whannell, but the man who really made Saw what it is is director Darren Lynn Bousman.  He created a visual style that would be repeated in the rest of the Saw films.  Leigh Whannell (I spelled it wrong last review, I apologize) helped do rewrites for a script Bousman had already written, trying to make it more Saw-like.  And it ... almost works.

So what's the plot here?  Well, we are a good amount of time after the events of the first film, and following another cop, played by Donnie Walberg.  He finds himself confronting Jigsaw, who has setup a much larger trap than we saw before: eight people locked into a boarded up and steel gated house, with poison running through the air vents, having to do traps to survive.  One of the eight people is Walberg's son.  And that's our dual storytelling: the house, which is a series of games, and the test, which is Walberg confronting Jigsaw, face to face.

The film is incredibly well made from a technical standpoint.  All those little quibbles I had last time about the make-up, lighting, pacing, direction of actors, all of that is perfectly handled here by Bousman.  Bousman is a very detail and visually oriented director, and he fills his movies with small clues and hints of the future, foreshadowing a lot of things and really making the film a delight to watch and rewatch as you pick up more and more details.  Tobin Bell, the actor who plays Jigsaw, also gets to do some nice acting in this film, more than he did last time when he was barely in it.  Walberg is also no slough, really working hard with some great moments.

I just know there's a but coming ... 

But there is a problem with the script.  With so many characters, a lot was cut or trimmed, making all the characters in the house ... meaningless, basically, besides just a small handful.  They didn't have much to do but whine and yell at each other, they didn't get to even speak much because all they did was listen to tapes and participate in the "games."  The Walberg/Bell scenes had some nice moments but they too felt a little off.  You can really tell that this was a non-Saw script changed to be a Saw sequel.

All that said, this is an enjoyable film.  It has some flaws, just like the last one, but Bousman does such a good job pacing the film and moving it forward that it really helps make the film more likable.  Some of the characters are fantastic, in a silly two-dimensional kind of way.  And the gore, much like the last one, is still relatively minor.  I mean, yeah, there's some gorier stuff and you see more blood, but none of it is in your face, or gross, or just there for gore's sake.  It is tasteful, and a very minor aspect of the film.

So far, this one is my favorite.  But man, if only I could get the great writing of the first film and the superior direction of this one, and then cram them together.  Hmm ... (this is obviously a leading statement, as the next film in fact does that exact thing ... but is it any good? ... or at least as good as I was hoping? ... Hmmm ... (Yup, another leading question.  This time, you have to wait for the answer.  That review is next week!))

Grade: B+

IHAO on ... Saw

The Saw franchise for a long time, seven years in fact, was synonymous with the Halloween season.  When the films were in the theatres going every year ... well, let's just say I was equally opinionated about films but way less learned and objective.  I was not at that point yet a critic, working hard to bring to you all my specific blend of pure opinion and objective eye for details and skill.  I watched the first two films at that point, then decided "gore is stupid" and had enough.  I stuck with that opinion for a very long time, until I started to earnestly get into film critically.  At that point I found a bunch of critics I liked (and a lot I didn't, to be fair) online.  One, Welshy, talked with great fervor about Saw as a franchise.  He did what I was trying to do, which was share his complete opinion, but back it up objectively.  I tend to have more separation of church and state, if you'll permit the metaphor.

The other impetus for doing these reviews was my roommate, who loves the films.  We talked about the Saw, and his fervor really made me want to watch the films again.  So, lookie lookie, they put out all seven on an easy to collect, great price blu-ray collection.  So I got them.  And I'll be reviewing them all this month, about one every three reviews.

Ok, so the first Saw.  This was director James Wan's debut, and Leigh Wannell's writing debut.  And they created a phenomenon!  They have worked together a whole lot since then, creating amazing horror films like the Conjuring and some really fun run of the mill ones like the Insidious franchise.  But they started out the Saw world.  They didn't define it, not really, and I'll get to that in the next review, but they set up the pieces for others to knockdown.

The schtick is that two guys, a doctor and a photographer, wake up locked in a bathroom together, chained to the pipes, a dead man in the center of the room.  They are given instructions to play a game, and from there we learn the secrets of both men, their inner sins, and how they are connected.  We also learn the history of Jigsaw, the serial killer who puts these death-traps together.  It is as much a thriller as it is horrific, and it was really good.

There are some problems.  James Wan has become a much better director when it comes to pacing and coaxing his actors to do what he needs.  And Leigh Wannell is not an amazing actor by any stretch of the imagination.  There's some strange editing and some slow bits.  But the concepts, and a good handful of individual scenes are amazing.  It is like they got scrapbooked together just slightly poorly.  This is these guys' first "scrapbook" so there isn't quite as much precision.  The make-up looks a little cheap in places and the actors aren't quite reigned in strongly by the director.  But both Cary Elwes (did I forget to mention he was in this?) and Wannell do a good job.

The movie isn't great, but it was the beginning of something that became great, historically.  The film itself used to be my favorite ... but now that I've dived into the franchise some ... well ... I'll get there.

Grade: B

IHAO on ... Detention

"Indy" film is a hard one to put a label on.  "Indy" doesn't actually represent much beyond being independently financed.  It can have a large budget or a shoestring budget like The Human Race I reviewed a few days ago.  It can have a lot of pretty good actors like Best Man Down or be entirely cast within the Wyatt family like in Septien.

The face of pretentious indy drama, right here!

All that said, the thing that makes Detention the hardest to talk about is its startlingly odd in film reality and its very mixed up conceit of genre.  Look down at my little tags, I had to throw in three genre tags, and I HATE doing that.  It makes it so hard to sort all the reviews when I have to do that.  But truly, Detention is just that, a horror film, a comedy film, and a science fiction film.  How did it do that?  Well let me ... try really hard to explain.

The "plot" which is ... man, ok.  So there is a slasher going about a high school killing folks, based on the Saw/Rob Zombie/Friday the 13th/Nightmare on Elm Street films called CinderHella.  Our lead character is a broken footed kinda cute, kinda popular but not in the upper echelon chick, and quickly becomes a target for the slasher.  Not only that, she has to deal with her emotions over Peeta who is with her former best friend that six months ago changed everything about her life.

Then ... aliens, giant bugs, time travel, Dane Cook, and lots of satire of life as a teenager.  In fact, there really isn't much in this film we haven't seen before.  The thing we haven't seen is how all of these elements come smashing together to try to tell a singular story.  I think this film succeeds the most as a time travel slasher.  Its comedy is weak, its teen drama stuff is uninspired,  And the cinematography and directing are ... very purposefully off the wall.  Sometimes distracting, always interesting, the film has a very unique identity.

There are some storylines that are extraneous but thematically enjoyable.  There are some actors who are just not up to snuff, but then some that do a real good job.  The script is tight, if preachy and very out there, and the pacing is breakneck speed, pun slightly intended.  This film balances out a lot for me, with the parts I like and the parts I didn't creating a null for me personally, and for the really well done parts more than making up for the small things that just do not work.  This film just ended up not being for me.

BUT I bet it is for some of you.  If any of the things I said above catch your interest, give it a shot as it is on Netflix.  While it doesn't do it for me, I hope some of you can really end up enjoying this one.

Grade: B

IHAO on ... Stephen King's The Stand Miniseries

How?  How can this be this bad?!  HOW?!

*sigh*

So Stephen King is one of the greatest writers of all time, and certainly our current age.  His technical skill and ability to create plot, suspense, and use voice are all unparalleled.  Sure, there are some very specific tropes that King has in his own writing, but that doesn't diminish his technical skills.  He actually wrote the screenplay for this miniseries, too.

On top of that, let's look at the list of great/notable actors that are in this series: Gary Sinese, Matt Frewer, Molly Ringwald, Miguel Ferrer, Rob Lowe, Laura San Giacomo, Ossie Davis, Shawnee Smith, Bill Fagerbakke (Patrick Starfish).  I mean, that is a lot of really good actors (other than Molly Ringwald).

WHAT. WENT. WRONG!?

THIS. GIF. ISN'T. HELPING. ME. MAKE. MY. POINT.

This miniseries has one really entertaining episode, and slowly becomes boring, crazy, and ....  Ok, hold on.  I can explain this better.  Let's do plot for a moment.  A superflu created by the American government gets out somehow, and because of a man and his family running from it, it spreads across the country, maybe the world, and kills probably 99% of the populace.  Some, though, are inexplicably immune.  These people, the Dreamers, all start having dreams.  Either dreams of a lovely old black woman Mother Abigal in Nebraska beckoning them there or of Randall Flagg, a devil in denim surrounded by fire.  And the people pick sides, and in some cases are picked specifically by Mother Abigall and Randall Flagg.  We have a world, filled with rotting corpses, power going off, and a strange psychic vision making people pick sides for a war.

Ok, got those themes?  Post-apocalypse, war, very non-subtle religious overtones, horror.  Ok.

This miniseries is lacking in war, horror, and post-apocalypse-ness.  It is just non-subtle religious overtones and every now again some non-threatening dead bodies.  Now, the first episode actually works.  People dying, people getting fed up with the disease killing people, rioting, rape, murder, so on, so on, that all works.  It is thrilling and interesting.  And from that point forward the whole thing becomes just utter garbage.

Characters are two-dimensional at best, broad brushstrokes of an adjective at worst.  Dialogue is stilted.  We never see anything happening on screen, just people talking about things that happened previously or elsewhere.  And eventually we have the plot rear its head, and it doesn't make any sense.  Character motivations are completely senseless, and ... ugh.  This was chore on top of it all because each episode is film length.

Don't watch this.  Watch something else.  Avoid this.  That's the end.  Blech.

Nanarsday ... Chopping Mall

Yes indeedily-doo buckaroo, this is time for a new thingy!  I've been wanting to do it since I talked about Nanar awhile ago.  If you don't feel like checking on that link, then lemme explain it to ya real quick.  Sometimes there are movies that you can watch and just know they are terrible, that they have objectively failed in basically every regard from writing to filming to acting.  I'm not talking specifically about being able to see the boom mic or crazy bad jump cuts, though they can exist in these.  But just plain NOT GOOD movie making.  But even though they are indeed some of the worst put together films that exist, they are still somehow good.  Not "quality" good, but enjoyability good or gosh-darn-it-they-are-trying-so-hard good.  That is nanar, that "so bad it is good" feeling that happens with certain films.

I have a love for those films.  I love collecting them, I love screening them, and I love sharing them with others.  Some are better than others on an enjoyment factor, but almost all have some kind of redeeming thing to watching them in a group.  So I want to celebrate with these films!  Nanar films are a perfect example of my rating system, of showing the duality of quality and entertainment.  There are plenty of films that are beautiful, well acted, and well directed and I still hate them.  And there are plenty on the opposite end of the spectrum.  So keep an eye out, because every now and again, it'll be a Nanarsday!  Now, let's stick in our newest film and watch it.

LOOK AT THAT NAME!  LOOK AT THAT POSTER!  LOOK AT IT!!!

Do you see how glorious that is?  A metal hand holding a blood soaked paper bag with handles that is filled with enormous eyes, severed heads, hands, feet, and a monster hand or something?!  And even better ... this has NOTHING to do with this movie.  Not a damned thing.  The only word that is even applicable is "mall."  In the movie named "Chopping Mall" there is not a single ounce of "chopping" happening at all.  What a glorious thing.  This poster screams of "we came up with this awesome title for a horror movie, which is all the rage with those teenager kids, let's make a movie about this!"

Basically, a mall has a new security system of robots that have a bunch of "non-lethal" weapons to protect the mall in case of a break-in or something or other.  Doesn't matter, because the robots get struck by lightning four times and gain sentience, which makes them become ninja assassins and just blindly murder all the meaty two-legs around.  To compound things, the night that happens is also the night of 4 couples getting together in a furniture store for some sex and drinking, wooooo!  And then they slowly are killed by the three robots until only survivor girl and nerd boy survive.

Ahh, hush your mouth, Nathan Fillion.  This is not a real spoiler.  The movie's plot is so incredibly pain by numbers, you know who the two survivors are the moment you see them on screen.  What is the best part is the absolute and utter failure to make this movie work in any way for tension or horror.  Heck, even the gross out effects are barely there, though there is a very nice head explosion.  There are plenty of breasts around in one scene, as to be expected from a horror movie, but there is also a lot of trying to make an elevator work and other weird scenes.

The movie's bad.  Real bad.  We wouldn't be talking about it here if it wasn't.  But there are so many gloriously hilarious things to talk about that happen in the movie.  The janitor's mop bucket of water looks like it is just gravy as he slathers it on the floor before being killed by over the top cartoony lightning effects when one of the Robots tazers him to death.  The acting across the board is ridiculously out of place, over the top, or a little underneath where it needs to be, like they aren't trying hard enough.  A guy shoots a machine gun at the Robot while it shoots lasers at him, and to get cover he just kneels behind the smallest potted fern he could have possibly found!

To the movie's credit, the mall looks good.  Mostly because it is a real mall.  But that's it.  That is the only good thing I can give the movie.  The music is atrocious, the costuming isn't even good costuming with ridiculous fashion just to be silly, and the robots.  Oh man, the robots.  They are the least threatening looking machines at all.  They keep clicking their little robot hands, which are curled up under their chin like they are bashful or something, and the film treats it like it is scary.  And the EVIL catchphrase the Robots use is: "Thank you. Have a nice day."

I cannot suggest this one enough.  Find it, watch it with friends, and laugh and laugh.  There is a dull section right at the act-break between Act 2 and 3, but the movie makes up for it with everything else being so ridiculous.  It fails across the board, just is ultimately a fun watch.

Grade: F+

Oh, and before you leave, I am going to do a second AMA (Ask Me Anything) on August 1st.  So I need questions.  Send me questions in my email, in the comments here, or in my ask on Tumblr, or just somehow.  Mark it on your calender, I'll see you then.

IHAO on EVERYTHING, TOO on August 1st

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

-=- Nanar catalog -=-

Chopping Mall
Dead Heat

Hide and Creep

Lenny the Wonder Dog

Omega Doom

The Stuff

Fantasy Booking ... ALTERNATE ENDING to Alien

Not too long ago, I did an AMA.  I super enjoyed that because it got a lot of folks asking me some really interesting questions about ... well, everything!  And I LOVE that.  I mean, the name of the website is I Have an Opinion.  Of COURSE I have opinions on just about anything.  Going through it again, I realized that I answered a question semi-incorrectly, or at least not as was intended.  I was asked about three alternate endings to major films.  Now, I answered over in the AMA (it's the last question, if you want a refresher) thinking it was meant to be which three I thought already existed were best.  But I got a clarification: create three NEW alternate endings to films.  So I guess it is time for me to get the old creative juices going in another rendition of ...

Fantasy Booking

Ok, so it isn't exactly Fantasy Booking ... but I like the image, and I'm gonna use it.  Plus, it gives me an excuse to use it as a tag.  Time to pick some films.  The first film I'll do is one I recently watched, hated, and is well beloved.  I did a quickie on my Tumblr (go ahead and follow me, it'll be really nice) and I think I have an interesting idea ...

Alien (1979)

Yeah, I found this movie dumb.  Really dumb.  Quick grade is D-.  The climax of the film comes as ...  Oh yeah, just in case:

The dumb film is 35 years old but just in case.

The xenomorph has killed all the rest of the crew.  The original ending then creates its tension by having Ripley running about now that she has gotten the cat and sets the ship by herself into self-destruct mode.  But as she rushes to the getaway ship, she almost runs headfirst into the xenomorph.  She leaves Jones the cat there, and with her escape cut off tries to run back and stop Mother, the ship's main computer interface, from blowing everything up, but reverses the process a few seconds too late, unable to stop the self-destruct.  She heads back, pissed and scared, finds the cat was untouched in its carrier-case, and makes it on the getaway ship and watches as the main ship explodes in a ridiculous technicolor explosion.

But oh no!  Ripley has gotten comfortably almost naked and the xenomorph got onto the ship and is curled up taking a nap.  Ripley gets frightened, puts on a space suit, opens the air lock, and the xenomorph goes flying out the ship, and then blown up with the engine port.  She then went to hibernation sleep, and the movie abruptly ends there.

Did I say I found it dumb?  I did.  The xenomorph was less terrifying in the film than the damned cat, which had two jump scares.  It might be the original cat jump scare!!!!  Ok, it isn't, the first cat scare was in the 1942 film Cat People, though ironically it is subverted by it being a bus making a cat noise that scares the heroine.  Anyway.  Let's change it up.

Time to hit the CRAY BUTTON!

Ok, so the xenomorph has killed everyone but Ripley.  She does the whole self-destruct scene as before, then goes running off and runs into the xenomorph cutting her off again.  She puts the cat down, but instead of sliding down the wall, and instead of the xenomorph being a huge puss and not doing a daggum thing for the rest of the film, she gets her guts up and presents herself, flamethrower in her hand, and she says some power statement as she let's loose with the fire ...

Nothing.  Flamethrower is outta gas.  Probably from being on all the time and having the most enormous flame through the whole movie.  Anyway, the xenomorph pounces, knocking Ripley down to the ground.  She drops the cat box and flamethrower, and the xenomorph gets its dumb second mouth out.  Ripley kicks and punches and wriggles, trying to get free.  Just as the xenomorph is going to do its double mouth kill strike, Ripley gets her hands on the flamethrower and jams it sideways into the thing's mouth.  The xenomorph, stymied, slashes at Ripley, giving her a cut on her thigh or stomach, but it allows Ripley to run.
Ripley tries to get back and stop the self-destruct, but just as before, she is just a few seconds too late.  This time because of the scuffle, not just ... being late because she slide diagonally down a wall.

She rushes back, picking up a random pipe she breaks so she can swing it at the xenomorph, but returns to the spot to only find the ripped-open cat container, but Jones is still inside, scared.  She reaches down to get the cat, but the xenomorph does its own Cat Scare, third one of the film, popping out of the floor beneath the cat, hidden in the grating.  Jones in her hands, falling back, scrambling, the xenomorph now crawling after her, Ripley does the last thing she can, kicking at its face.  Double mouth kill shot through the foot.  Look at the clock that is there for this version to actually create tension and a sense of time slipping away, she's got very little time left.  She gets to her feet, Jones running away out of her hands.  She picks up the pipe and SMACK right across the xenomorph's head as it leaps at her again, American baseball style.  Acid destroys the pipe, and Ripley turns and runs.

Now running, injured, trying to get to the getaway ship.  Yelling and crying, unwilling to be the only living crew member left, she finally spots Jones almost out of reach.  Looking at the clock for the self destruct, it is so close to happening.  The xenomorph, showing some acidy damage along its big ole head, comes running up on her.  Ripley finally grabs Jones, then stumbles into the getaway ship and gets the airlock shut just before the xenomorph reaches her!  You hear it slamming against the door over and over as she stumbles and cries, getting to the command seat and setting the thing to fly with JUST enough time to not get exploded, but the space shockwaves spin and knock around the ship, throwing her end over end.

But it all settles down.  She can finally breath.  She makes her final statement as before, and we zoom in on her pod, then the camera pans to Jones' pod ... where something unearthly is moving in its belly.

BOOM!  I feel REAL good about that one.  Also, that's just over a thousand words.  So it looks like I'm going to cut this short.  But I will 100% be doing more of these in the future!  So stay tuned!

Wait a minute, put a little love in it!

OH!  WAIT!  Before you leave, I am going to do another AMA on August 1st.  So I need questions.  So send me questions in my email, in the comments here or in my ask on Tumblr.  So mark it on your calender, I'll see you then.

IHAO on EVERYTHING, TOO on August 1st

IHAO on ... Frankenstein's Army - READER REQUEST

Requested by Matt Hoeker

Bad movie.  BAD movie.  Sit.  SIT.  Stay.  Staaaaay.  No, no movie!  BAD MOVIE!

Heh, ok.  So this movie.  It is shot with HD cameras.  And the monsters look pretty neato.  Some of them.  I have now said all the good things about this movie.

It is not good.  At all.  It is a bad movie.  And not even a super enjoyable one.  The characters come from the Eli Roth school of "let's all be douchebags so the audience cannot wait for us to die."  Which is fine for side characters, but for all the characters?  I have no one to root for.  Not only that, it is a found footage film.  We have two cameras ... though only one ends up being used after the first five minutes.  And ... ok, let's talk about what the film actually is.

A group of Russian soldiers are heading into Germany at the tail end of WW2 to help a distress call by some comrades, only to find a bunch of half zombie, half mechanical monstrosities and that one of their own betrayed them because of orders from higher up the communist regime.  Like I said before, it is a found footage film, so your "protagonist" is the camera-man, who is a Jew, which is nominally important but ultimately not.

The effects are combination of ridiculous, cool, and terrible.  Oh, I know!  New paragraph!

Very little attention span, huh review-critic-person.

Ok, I got it figured out.  This movie is a haunted house.  A bunch of weird visuals as you move around a creepy location (locations look AWESOME in this, by the way) and creepy things "chase" you as you hear terrible scary sounds just out of view.  You never actually feel like you are in danger, but the atmosphere is terrifying alone.  And I do mean that, alone.  The script is basically no existent, the movie gives up on even having a plot around the 1/3 mark.  This movie is NOT a good movie.  But if you enjoy haunted houses, this might actually be right up your alley.  And it is only SLIGHTLY not interesting.  I betcha there are some of you out there who could LOVE this movie.  I'm not one of those people.  But I also don't care for haunted houses, so there might be a correlation there.

Grade: F

IHAO on ... Hide and Creep

Sometimes I just do not feel like I am able to accurately express how good a film is.  I try very hard to make sure that I am analytical in my reviews, and for the most part, that works very well.  I pride myself in my ability to separate my own personal like of a film and its actual skill.  But sometimes, every now and again, I feel like this is detrimental to explaining just how great a terrible movie is.  If you could not tell, Hide and Creep is one of those fringe cases.

Hide and Creep fails in almost every way.  It is shot terribly, with terrible cameras, with bad lighting, and very bad sound.  Its score is ridiculous, and at times drowns out actors and is mostly out of place.  The script is mostly nonsensical in its plotting, though its jokes are both misplaced and in a lot of cases pretty funny.  The acting is basically community theatre at its most ... middle of the road.  It fails in almost every regard.

Oh man, failure can just be the best sometimes, yeah?

But this film is just one of the best experiences.  It is fun to make fun of and to enjoy its ridiculousness.  It has moments of zombie-ness that are actually pretty good, like the pastor's storyline.  There are sequences that are incredibly quotable, and overall, just super fun.  It isn't good at all.  By almost any stretch of the imagination.  But man is it enjoyable.  It reminds me of the Room and the Stuff.

Here is the plot: There might be aliens?  And there are zombies.  And no one acts like it matters.  And everyone is a redneck.  There you go.  Watch this movie if you can find it.

Grade: F++

IHAO on ... Oculus

A brand new horror film, based on a short film and made by the same dude.  If you missed it, I did a trailer trash with this trailer right here.  But did the film live up to the status I thought it would?

Firstly, I want to talk about the actual theater experience.  I don't normally do this, but this was one is worth talking about.  I do not know why or how it happened, but this rated R horror film was FILLED with teenagers in it.  And not 17 year old teenagers, I mean young uns.  I didn't see a lot of parents, but they must have been there and then others probably snuck in.  Behind my wife and I sat a nice sized group, including at least two teen girls and one teen guy, with an adult somewhere and I think maybe two more.  They were awful in some of the most humorous ways.  Like, the lead girl (the lead one being the one that talked the most and the other girl always asked what lead girl thought, so she seemed the most important of the two) LOVED the Geico commercial that is just fake bloopers with the Geeko.  And the entire row all flipped out over how awesome Godzilla is gonna be but couldn't give any craps about Guardians of the Galaxy.

What did they think of Oculus?  After the movie finished, one of the boys, teen or father I'm unsure, got up and declared "This was the worst movie."  None of them liked it.  They bad mouthed it the rest of the way out the theater, and I decided to sit and continue to listen.  Do I agree with them?

Absolutely not.  This movie is really REALLY good.  Other than a few minor nitpicks (which I'll talk about in a minute) this movie is damn near flawless.  Amazing acting, directing, sound design, effects, pacing, set dressing, cinematography, color, writing, plotting, everything.  For the most part.  Again, I'll talk about that in a minute.

How did the teenies behind me not like this thing?  Well, I have a pretty good guess why.  This is a true HORROR film.  It is unrelenting in its atmosphere and its driving sense of dread.  This isn't jump scares and SCARY THINGS and titillation and gore.  This is not a slasher or one of the new wave of haunting films.  This is just horror, terror as we watch our characters, our point of view, have to deal with this haunted mirror.  I compare it to my favorite horror film of all time, Candyman (maybe an IHAF in the future?).  Instead of being a slasher, it is a long character story about ... ok, plot time.

Two kids witness the torture and murder of their mother, and supposedly the son kills the father.  The son goes to a mental hospital for 11 years or so while the daughter gets bopped around fostercare.  But they saw something different, they saw a haunted mirror cause all the problems.  Now, as adults, they have gotten their hands on the mirror and the daughter is hellbent to prove her father was a good man and innocent, and that the mirror is evil.

The film is a study in "seeing is believing" as a horror trope.  It is very difficult to just share everything they do with it, but it is incredible, and like nothing I've ever seen before.  They also play with every horror trope you can think of, but have good reasons for it all.  Like, no one turns on the lights ... because it is day time and just an old house that has a lot of shadows but isn't ever dark.  Or the skeptic, played by the son, who spends a very long time doing a GREAT job playing the skeptic to his sister's believer.

If you like horror, WATCH THIS MOVIE.

Ok, my quibbles.  Because of the unrelenting pace, there is little time to breath.  There is no joke breaks, no moments of levity at all.  Once the movie starts, it is a 105 minute horror train without a single moment to stop.  If your audience isn't mature enough for that, they will find places to laugh, because they need it.  Also, because of that pacing, it makes certain sequences feel long.  Not bad, not even unpleasant or uninteresting, but in the back of your head it is like "we've seen this VERY good scene for a long time, yeah?"  My only other complaint is that of film geography, or knowing where people are.  There was a small sequence where I got lost on where the characters are.  Talking it out afterwards, I figured it out.  The movie does not hold your hand, but as film savvy as I am, even I got lost a little.  That could hurt the viewing of others, especially considering the unrelenting pace.

All that said, this movie was excellent.  The Shining meets The Conjuring meets Paranormal Activity.  If that sound good to you at all, you NEED to see this in theaters.  Do it this weekend.  Vote with your money, and give this film what it deserves, a really good showing at the box office.  I really look forward to a sequel, maybe a whole franchise.

Grade: A+

Also here's a gif finally.

See, I did it like this because of the unrelenting movie pace, get it!

IHAO on ... The Stuff

I love this movie.  Yeah, yeah, I came right out and said the thing that I normally wait for the next paragraph to set up, but I love this movie!  I love how terrible it is.  Because it is TERRIBLE!  Before we get there, let’s talk about what this movie is.

Ok, so some miners find some bubbly snow on the ground and eat it.  It tastes great.  Fast forward an unspecified number of years, and that bubbly snow stuff is now marketed all around the country and called The Stuff, and it is replacing ice cream and yogurt as a healthier, tastier snack.  It is also a Blob alien and turns people into Stuff-Zombies, or Stuffies.  A little kid won’t eat what his family is forcing him to.  An industrial spy, who talks 100% like Huckleberry Hound, is out to prove there is something wrong with the Stuff, and the woman who designed the marketing campaign are all looking for where the stuff originated from to stop it.

The concept is ridiculous and silly, and at a few points, the special effects are just amazing.  Actually, a lot of times the special effects are amazing.  Huckleberry Hound is hilarious.  The commercials for the Stuff within the film are perfect.  So why does this movie get an F?  Oh, spoilers, it gets a big ole fat F.

"Uh, call me 'Moe.'  You know why, uh, they call me Moe?  Because whenever anyone, uh, gives me anything, uh, I always want mo'e."

 - THIS IS A DIRECT QUOTE FROM THE MOVIE!

This movie fails in every ounce of storytelling and editing and cinematography and framing and directing there is.  Not a single scene is edited well, or cut together well.  Things are confusing and poorly shown and jump cut out of nowhere.  There is a sequence where they are in an airplane, and the next shot is of the engine failing, and all of us watching were in hysterics that the plane was going down!  But no, it was just the plane hand ALREADY LANDED and the engine was cooling off.  Ridiculous!  

The music is always out of place.  The acting, even of Huckleberry Hound, is across the board bad.  The film just starts you in "holy crap we are in the middle of a horror movie" mode without every explaining why.  And while I did praise the special effects, any composite shot looks absolutely dreadful. 

This movie reached a mark with me that I’m very happy it did: Best Worst Movie status.  The Room, Birdemic, Troll 2, and now The Stuff.  Watch this movie right now!  You will have an absolutely GREAT time.

Grade: F++