Screenhead

Admittedly, when I went into New Moon this morning, I wasn’t expecting anything good.  My experience with Twilight was only a few months old, and it still hurt to think about that slow sludgy mess of sparkly emo boi vampires dragging the genre down with it.

But when I grit my teeth and walked in,  what I got was something somewhat different from what I was expecting.

Just to catch you up on the plot, we’re still with screechy loser Bella Swan and her sparkly emo boi vampire boyfriend Edward.  Only now, we discover that werewolves are also thrown in the mix (it was probably supposed to be a surprise but they tipped their own hand on this point MONTHS ago) and for some reason, both vampire Edward and relative newcomer werewolf Jacob Black are all very much into this pasty cipher of a girl who seems to exist for no other reason than to give the teenage girl fans in the audience an easy point for self-insertion.

Yes, there’s still plenty wrong with this whole thing.  One, none of these people can act worth a fart in a stiff wind–Kristen Stewart still seems dazed by the whole thing and is acting like she’s been suffering a concussion since about ten minutes into the first movie.  Robert Pattinson is a willowy mess–when he takes his shirt off and reveals his new “six pack” it looks like nothing so much as a man in desperate need of a SANDWICH.  Taylor Lautner is the girliest macho man I’ve ever SEEN.  He’s trying DESPERATELY hard to be some kind of bad-ass but then everything he tries is toned down so hard for the consumption of the tweenagers in the audience.  It’s like someone told him, “Be a bad boy, but don’t actually be THREATENING.”  He’s doing his best, I think, but he’s doing it under terribly strained conditions.

Also, why isn’t White Wolf suing holy hell out of Summit, Stephenie Meyer, et al for copyright violation?  I remember the nature-boy werewolves and cosmopolitan corporate vampires back when I was one of the handful of people playing the Rage card game back in 1995!  Now all of a sudden it’s a major motion picture and I don’t think White Wolf’s getting any taste on this.  They DO still have the license at last report even if it’s been sold more times than real estate.

But, like I said originally, this was better than I expected.  If for no other reason than the only way it could be much worse is if Stephenie Meyer personally came to theaters at random and gouged out the eyes of one of the viewers.  There was more action in this, and a developing storyline that still seems rather limited (White Wolf, for Pete’s sake, it’s werewolves versus vampires.  You did ALL this long before them!), but is actually somewhat bearable.

There’s still plenty of slow parts in this, though, and lots of reason to be unhappy, though not nearly as many as the FIRST Twilight installment gave us.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, naturally, agrees with me and hands over a five out of ten to a vampire franchise that may well be starting to look up.  If it continues improving at this rate, Breaking Dawn’s going to be a non-stop bloodbath and even I’ll be impressed.

So today I’ve come in contact with one of the first ever examples of Screamkings online videomaking–the question is, is their short title For Indoor Use Only any good?  Let’s watch!

A young man, working with some Christmas lights, curses the holiday in a moment of frustration.  And when that happens, Christmas decides to take its revenge.

Admittedly, Christmas horror is in fairly short supply.  But this particular example is kind of sparse.  Sparse like the needles on Charlie Brown’s tree.  Oh, sure, what’s here is done fairly well, but it’s not very satisfying.  It’s almost like the Christmas mashed potatoes, or shaped sugar cookies without frosting.  Far from the best, but not necessarily offensive.

The Screenhead Ten Scale shrugs in the general direction of this lackluster title and awards it a five out of ten.  While there isn’t anything really wrong with it, it lacks the necessary force to be called good.  The best you can say about it is that it’s merely mediocre.

Oh man, this movie is creepy.  I would not want to be human in this social system.  I’d gladly be a vampire. 

Daybreakersstars Ethan Hawke who plays Edward Dalton, a researcher in the year 2019, in which an unknown plague has transformed the world’s population into vampires. As the human population nears extinction, vampires must capture and farm every remaining human, or find a blood substitute before time runs out. 

However, a covert group of vampires makes a remarkable discovery, one which has the power to save the human race

You know, I always knew Miley Cyrus was a few fries short of a Happy Meal, but this latest move marks her as either abysmally stupid or the single ballsiest player in Hollywood.

Seriously.  Stones like CANNONBALLS.  And I’m thoroughly aware she’s a chick–it’s a metaphor.

Anyway, check out what she had to say about it:

“I’ve never seen [Twilight], and nor will I ever. I don’t believe in it—I don’t believe in it. I don’t like vampires, I don’t like any of the stuff, like the wolf that pops out of the screen when I’m watching my TV at night. I feel like it’s seriously, like, people really like get into it maybe because it’s like people always fall in love with the characters I don’t like it, I don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t like the shirts, any of it.”

Hmm…now, why would a tween pop icon deliberately, suicidally, denounce the hottest book / movie property for the tween market?  There are several possibilities.

1. Miley is genuinely outraged as a good Christian and is denouncing those Satanic vampire movies. Yeah, I didn’t really buy that one either–because where was she before now?  But it’s a possibility, and anyone giving her the benefit of the doubt has to include that.

2. Miley is genuinely outraged that Twilight is cutting into her profits.  Much more possible.

3. Miley is feigning outrage to stir the pot and get attention because her standard practice of alerting the media to where she’ll be jogging in a bikini top and getting upset when they show up isn’t working any more. Again, even more likely.

4. Miley is too stupid to live.  She doesn’t even realize that she and Twilight share so many fans it’s ludicrous, and to try and get between them and their other love is just, as said above, abysmally stupid.

Which of these is it?  I can’t say.  But it’s pretty likely to be one of them!

I’ve sampled horror flicks from all around the world, and I’ve found that most of them have a pretty regional flavor to them.  The Japanese and Koreans, for example, love ghost flicks.  The Europeans favor the theme of man’s inhumanity to man.  And most horror I’ve come across from other lands is at least fairly good.  Joining the ranks of the best, however, is a little title from Poland, The 206.

It’s about a guy who wakes up in a stairwell, semi-conscious, unable to figure out what’s going on.  As he sets out to reconstruct his life, he finds out there more going on here than he realizes.

The best part about this one?  There’s NO DIALOGUE.  The story is being told entirely through the actor and through the background music, both of which are quite thoroughly awesome.  The ending, however, is somewhat unclear and can be interpreted several ways, something I never like.

However, the rest of the film is enough to wrangle a rare eight out of ten from the Screenhead Ten Scale, who was sufficiently on edge through most of it to appreciate its sheer Hitchcockian tendencies.

As it turns out, there are a LOT of Saw parodies. I really didn’t see this coming, but a basic search for “Saw Parody” on YouTube turns up a whole lot of pieces.  Some of them I knew about, like Mad TV’s version.

But then there are those like Jigsaw’s Crib, today’s short film target, that just came out of nowhere.

Jigsaw’s Crib is a bizarre combination parody of Saw and MTV’s Cribs.  And as entertaining as that idea would be if it were played straight, the problem is in this case it’s played with absolutely NO CONNECTION to the Saw series.  I figured maybe they’d take us around that warehouse we saw in Saw III, or at least some facsimile thereof, but no.  No, we wandered around some kid’s house while he walked around doing three important things.

1. Talking like a rapper.

2. Being drowned out by the “background” music

3. Doing that ridiculous “air jerk” thing.

No, this was a good idea, and probably would have been hilarious if it were done right, as opposed to being mostly a badly cast episode of Cribs, complete with ludicrously oversized “joint”.  Because as we all know, Little Billy was a serious pothead.

No, he wasn’t. He was a PUPPET. And if these putzes had actually watched one of the Saw films, they might have realized that.

Wildly out of line, with only a minimal contact with the Saw films by virtue of Little Billy and a brief mention of Dr. Gordon, Jigsaw’s Crib is just like its MTV parent–a sad, sorry, sloppy mess.

The Screenhead Ten Scale shakes its head in disgust and hands Jigsaw’s Crib a two out of ten for barely having a clue what it was talking about.  This was a good idea that went horribly, horribly wrong.

Well, despite a whole lot of stops and starts, and the arrest of the original series’ writer, it seems that Silent Hill 2 may not be completely dead.  In fact, it’s so alive that they’re projecting a release date…in 2010.

Dig the word from the series’ designer:

“I was working on storyboards for that around the same time last year…It’s going to be pretty crazy. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there. Roger (Avary) has some awesome ideas and hopefully we’re going to bring that to fruition sometime next year.”

Yeah…too bad Roger (Avary)’s in lockdown, buddy.  But hey, if Roman Polanski can engineer his movie from prison then maybe Roger Avary can drop some notes down or something.  Stranger things have happened, and many of them have happened to us.

I have to admit, I’d kind of like to see where they go with it.  After the miserable ending the last one had, I have no idea what they’re planning to do.  There’s not even much of anything they CAN do.  I mean, two of the three mains are ghosts of some kind and the third is sort of, well, still around.

So what can they do?  I don’t know. And that intrigues me.

It’s probably about time we got a few more amateur Saw parodies.  The franchise is indeed rife with possibilities, and today, we tackle Saw XIV, or, The One Where Saw Constantly Screws Up.

The title basically gives away the premise and the plot–Jigsaw’s death traps (now Hoffman’s death traps) have always been mechanically complex wonders of amateur engineering.  But what would happen if those darn death traps just wouldn’t work right?

They’ve got a really good point, actually.  All this stuff is incredibly complex–I mean, just one slipped gear or misfired sparkplug and the next thing you know, blammo! No death trap.

And the best part is, this is actually really funny.  Though as it turns out, it’s not alone.  Just because I hadn’t heard of them before, apparently there are a LOT of Saw parodies out there.

The downside here is that the movie was made clearly by people who either didn’t see the Saw series or didn’t watch much of it, as they’re continually referring to Jigsaw as “Saw”, not to mention dressing him up like Little Billy, when we really should be seeing either Jigsaw himself or the “replacement” Jigsaw that is Detective Hoffman.

Anyway, the Screenhead Ten Scale just wiped away a tear of hilarious laughter and hands Saw XIV a seven out of ten. Admittedly, it’s low budget, and they clearly only have a loose idea of what they’re parodying, but the comedy more than makes up for the lack of effects work.

Excuse me while I recover from the paroxysm of hilarious laughter I just had.  My stomach hurts SO bad right now.

But anyway, apparently, Michael Bay’s huge embarrassing failure that was the Friday the 13th remake is toes up.  So much so that word is already out saying that Friday the 13th two is going to be Jason’s last dance. For good.  In perpetuity throughout the universe.

Now you see why I was just laughing my ass off.  Seriously, what are you going to do to Jason Voorhees that hasn’t already been done DOZENS of times?  Stage it in Florida, get him to walk under a space shuttle booster?  Hurl him into the sun?

…okay, that might work.  Marcus Nispel, call me–I’ll write Jason an ending like no one’s ever seen before!

But seriously–considering that Jason’s already had two “final” movies, I kind of doubt that this one will be his REALLY final movie.  Especially with fans actively clamoring for a second Freddy Vs. Jason installment.

The one thing I really love about short films is their openness.  Anybody can come along and shoot one of these on a shoestring in their backyard.  And today, we’re going to prove that exactly right with Dearest Mrs. Apple.

This is the story of a man, his unusual friendship, and the circumstances that led to its end.  I know, sounds kind of like some cheesy chick flick or something, but I assure you, someone will get eaten by the end of this.

Yeah. EATEN.

Dearest Mrs. Apple is actually pretty funny because of its ludicrous nature and its outlandish concept.  This is almost too stupid to be believed, but it will carry on anyway, despite the fact that it really has no business existing.

The Screenhead Ten Scale loves a quick cheap laugh, and thus hands Dearest Mrs. Apple a six out of ten for bringing the funny in short film.