Screenhead

It’s extraordinarily difficult to write a review of a movie like The Fourth Kind because it’s not really a movie so much as it is an agenda.

Clearly, someone desperately wants us to believe that what we’re seeing is actually really really REALLY REAL, and won’t be satisfied until, my guess is, we start pestering our Congress critters for answers.  I’m not sure.  Because I’ve never left a movie so utterly confused, and I’ve seen David Croenenburg movies.

This one follows Dr. Abigail Emily Tyler, who is played by Milla Jovovich, who actually TELLS us that’s what she’ll be doing in the beginning of the movie.  And we’ll be following her around as she conducts a sleep disorder study on the people of Nome, Alaska.  Now, Nome is downright infamous for being hard to reach, but apparently it’s also got a serious missing persons problem, and it’s somehow become the FBI travel destination of choice, garnering over two thousand official visits when neighbor Anchorage, who has something like seventy times the population, rates only about three hundred visits in that same time frame.

Now, it’s hard to tell at first glance just how much of this is real and how much of it so utterly fake as to be a complete pantload, because the movie is trying so very desperately hard to convince us that EVERYTHING WE SEE IS HAPPENING FOR REALS, YO, by virtue of running split screen so often I thought I was watching 24.  They’ll do two splits and three splits and four splits and four splits with rotating frames.  It got to the point where I wondered, is this a movie or a Final Cut Pro demo?  And they’ll run, almost ad nauseum, “real footage” alongside footage of the actors, to try and cement that belief.

I’ll freely admit that this is some creepy stuff–when that guy started levitating I got a little freaked out, and Abigail Tyler “herself” under hypnosis was a cold chill up my spine but do I believe this actually went down?  No.

See, one great line from the movie that manages to describe the movie in its entirety is where one of the “patients” is muttering that he’s okay, and “Dr. Tyler” swings in with “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”  And that’s exactly what I thought of this movie.  Yes, okay, you’re going to RELENTLESSLY show me this “real footage” and insist, as loudly and vociferously as possible that it’s real, and frankly, I kind of doubt it.

Folks, this has allegedly been going on since the year 2000.  But somehow it took almost TEN YEARS for someone to exploit it?  Come ON.  We’re talking about a Hollywood scene so desperate that TWO GARFIELD MOVIES looked like a good idea but we’ve got allegedly actual footage of a woman shrieking that she’s god in SUMERIAN and NO ONE’S ran with that ball yet?

The Screenhead Ten Scale joins me in a dismissive back of hand “bah” to this creepy but horrendously disjointed fright fest and acknowledges that the idea is pretty scary but forces my suspension of disbelief engines to glow white hot and give off an ominous whining noise.  Thus, it hands this incredulous horror romp a five out of ten for being creepy yet not even vaguely credible.

Johnny Depp may join Angelina Jolie in The Tourist, a film that is experiencing many, many casting and directing changes – yet is set for production this February.   

If Depp joined Jolie, he would play an American tourist drawn into a web of intrigue and danger by a female Interpol agent (Jolie) as she attempts to locate a criminal who was once her lover.

You may be asking yourself, wait…I thought Sam Worthington was playing this part or Tom Cruise.  You’re thoughts are correct but changes happen in the film biz fast and furious.  Even Charlize Theron was attached to play Jolie’s part.

I am not sure about all the directors, but Alfonso Curaron is at the head of the line to take on this juicy and plum gig.

I like the idea of Depp and Jolie working together on a spy thriller. Don’t you?

(Source)

Remember how, when I wrote about The Haunting of Winchester House, how GREAT I thought it was that The Asylum was finally getting out of the mockbuster trend and no longer Asylumizing movies?

Sadly, that’s all gone as The Asylum releases 2012 Supernova, which is pretty much taking on 2012.  The only problem is that, of course, The Asylum doesn’t have anywhere NEAR the cash required to make those kind of special effects.

The plot, though, is actually pretty interesting–two hundred years ago, a star exploded and launched an enormous wave of radiation.  Sadly, two hundred years ago was apparently during the War of 1812, because it’s about to hit in much-popularized 2012.  So now a group of scientists is out to launch a whole load of nukes into the upper atmosphere so they can augment the Earth’s natural anti-radiation shielding.

I’ll admit, though, that The Asylum clearly does the best it can with what it has to work with.  What baffles me, though, is that they try to take on this monster projects with the most minimalist budgets you can imagine.  It’s like trying to eat a Ho-Ho the size of a Buick, and doing it with a knife and fork.

The result, however, of trying to load a bunch of AA batteries in a space designed for a Diehard is that the whole thing has this vaguely repetitive feel in which a simulated disaster happens, then we react to that disaster, then another one happens, and so on and so forth without much in the way of an overarching plotline to hold it all together.

There will be plenty of thrills here–watching people try to escape from things blowing up and whatnot–but are these thrills going to be enough to hold the overall picture together?  Well, that’s your call, in the end.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile,  isn’t so impressed and thus hands the newest Asylum knockoff a fair enough five out of ten.  it clearly tried, but it just couldn’t tackle what it set out to try.

Young man as a wolf is something to behold. Don’t you think? 

The more I see Taylor Lautner with his pack of wolves the more I am interested in the Twilightmovies — owooooo!

Ridley Scott is one BUSY individual.  But let’s face facts–the man’s got like thirty hojillion projects in the works right now, so his announcement that he’s considering an Alien prequel needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  A grain of salt about, say, the size of a Buick.

But he’s clearly been thinking it over, and even has some possible strategies.  Dig the word:

“It’s a brand new box of tricks. We know what the road map is, and the screenplay is now being put on paper. The prequel will be a while ago. It’s very difficult to put a year on Alien, but [for example] if Alien was towards the end of this century, then the prequel story will take place thirty years prior.”

There are possibilities here.  After all, I seem to remember that one of the earliest parts of Alien described an alien ship that crash-landed on LV 426.  Checking Wikipedia confirms my scattered memories, so a great point for an Alien prequel would be, what is that ship, and how did it get jam-packed with xenomorphs?

Of course, it’s a fair bet that that’s a Predator ship that was seeding the planet for use as a hunting ground, so they may have already kinda sorta covered that already.  Still though, I find myself plenty interested in where they’re looking to go with this one.

January Jones will be starting with Nicolas Cage in the thriller The Hungry Rabbit Jumps. Jones is known for her on AMC’s Mad Men.

Rabbit is schedule to start shooting around the beginning of December.

The film follows a man (Cage) who, after a crime is perpetrated on his wife, gets more than he bargained for when he enlists a vigilante group to help him settle the score. Jones will play the wife.

Reportedly, Jones’ role is very meaty and active.   

Roger Donaldson is attached to direct from Robert Tanen’s script.

I didn’t know that vampires drank coffee drinks.  You really need to check out the bottom picture with Ethan Hawke standing among fellow vampires.  Some of them are holding coffee cups.

The top one to the left has Willem Defoe with Hawke in his sights. Is that blood on Defoe’s sleeve? Look closely it’s the arm with the hand holding the cross-bow steady.

The Daybreakers is creepy but with a clever twist that makes it more human.

Ethan Hawke 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, vampiresmust 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.

There was an awesome poll over at horror-movies.ca, where they posed a question to their audience.  The question:  Which movie was better–Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland?

You likely won’t be surprised to hear that Zombieland won out.  But where you WILL be surprised is to hear that it only won by THREE PERCENT.  And there’s one more surprise in there.

The breakdown went like this:

Zombieland: 37 percent

Shaun of the Dead: 34 percent

Both were equally good: 29 percent

I have to admit I’m in the “equally good” camp myself, but I have to further admit I enjoyed Zombieland more.  Why?  Because Zombieland spoke to my cultural heritage.  Sure, Shaun of the Dead was a comic riot and watching a mostly disarmed country try to tackle zombies WITHOUT GUNS was an interesting if terrifying treat.

But Zombieland was pure baseball, mom and apple pie start to finish.  Okay, so it was more like amusement parks, family and Twinkies, but close enough for government work, huh?

In an objective sense, they’re equally good.  They show the cultural foibles of a society attacked by the horror of zombies and they do so in a hilariously overblown way that emphasizes the comic.  But most have a preference, one way or the other, which you see mirrored in the poll.

So where do you come in on this one?  Zombieland? Shaun of the Dead?  Or do you see the joy in both these comic gems?

Well, this is it, kids.  Today the last week comes together in a magnificent culmination of lights, sound, screaming, and oh yes…there will be blood.

Today we’re talking Saw VI, most recent in the franchise, and ironically, by a large scale, BEST of the franchise.

With Jigsaw, Amanda, and Agent Strahm all pushing up daisies, the only one left to run Jigsaw’s grand games is none other than Detective Hoffman.  But is Hoffman nearly as alone as we think?  Someone else is waiting in the wings–someone else with a vested interest in executing Jigsaw’s final will.  Will Hoffman be able to run the games?  Or will Hoffman’s test leave him without a piece on the board?

I’ll be honest with you, I had big expectations for this one going in.  REALLY big.  One, Saw V was my personal favorite of the series thus far for the massive supergame it ran instead of branching off into smaller games or leaving one person mostly unscathed.  Two, it was directed by Kevin Greutert, whose short film Old Friends we reviewed here a while back.  Old Friends was an awesome piece of filmmaking that really left me on the edge of my computer chair (only place you could see it was YouTube), so hearing that he’d be running Saw VI left me pretty excited.

And sure enough, I enjoyed this one.  For those concerned that this would be a tired rehash of earlier events, no sir.  Saw has one great tendency to build up and kick off something that’ll need a whole new movie to resolve.  There’s more loose ends in here than a telephone switchboard, and it’s small wonder it looks to make nine before it finally ends.

Saw also has one truly ANNOYING tendency, too, and that’s to add details to its earlier canon as it sees fit, despite the fact that there’s no real indication that they ever should have happened.  For instance, when you find out who was with Cecil the night Jill lost her baby, you’ll probably wonder how the hell that actually could have happened, because nothing like that seemed to go on when we actually SAW it happening before.

But there will be something here for all the old fans–the traps we know and love are as awesome as ever–remember the automatic revolver in two?  They kind of did that here…only with a twelve-gauge.  There will be more blood than ever–this is probably why it’s rated like PORN in Spain.  Plus, they’ve kicked off one very important plot detail in the last three minutes of the movie that has me positively drooling over Saw VII.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, is patently blown away, but bothered by the series’ incredible propensity to cheat at every given opportunity.  It therefore hands over a full on eight out of ten for being probably the best Saw yet, both for what it does now and what it kicks off for the next.  We can only hope the remaining entries can live up to this kind of hype.