Screenhead

Just in case you might have been wondering, yes, it is now officially confirmed what I said at the end of my District 9 review: there WILL be a sequel to District 9. And by director Neill Blomkamp’s own words, chances are it’ll be called District 10.

We all know that Neill Blomkamp is desperate to get back to the concept.  He’s on record as saying “I would do anything to go back to the world of District 9 again.  Or District 10.”

The sequel is, meanwhile, perfectly set up, with the “prawn” Christopher insisting that he’ll be “back in three years”, while his people are actively being moved to District 10.  Wikus, meanwhile, is stuck between bodies and may well be, by the time Christopher gets back, completely “prawn”.  The really nifty part here?  What will Christopher bring back with him?  A few dozen of those really awesome weapons?  A few dozen “prawns” to use them?  Or something even more horrifying?

No matter how you slice it, this is going to be amazing.

You may not be aware of this–I wasn’t, until about three hours ago–but District 9 actually started life as a short film called Alive In Joburg.

Needless to say, about the same time I found about that…okay, so first I swallowed my own tongue.  Then there was a really embarrassing five minutes where I pulled it out of my throat, and then I got over to YouTube to watch.  And thus, here I am, reviewing the short film that would become District 9.  Follow this link to catch it–it’s been up for just over three years but hasn’t cleared three hundred thousand views yet.  To call it the best-kept secret on YouTube might be hyperbole, but not by much.

Anyway, the plot on this one is about what District 9’s will be–aliens land, but they’re not out to help us or eat us or slaughter or enslave us–nothing usual aliens do–but these aliens are really just a nuisance.  Why are they here?  What do they want?  The answers will amaze you.

This really is an interesting predecessor to District 9.  Though the short by itself will prove to offer a whole lot more questions than answers, it will also serve to whet appetites very well for the upcoming film.  Watching Alive In Joburg has made me VERY excited for District 9, and I look very much forward as a result.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale safely issues a seven out of ten to a good film, not a great film, that does what it sets out to do, but only because it gave itself really, REALLY, low goals.

I’m not sure, exactly, why the folks behind G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra felt the need to keep this one out of the critics’ hands.  You’ll find out why in just a second.

First, the plot.  Someone apparently took the Patriot Act WAY too far and built a clandestine team of highly-powered and extraordinarily well-equipped soldiers from around the world (I don’t even want to think about how much international law THAT maneuver breaks).  And frankly, it’s a good thing they did, because they find themselves facing a nearly-equally highly-powered and well-equipped force of terrorists / mercenaries / general bad guys.  There’s a lot more than that going on in here, but suffice it all to say that the plot can basically be reduced to “G.I. Joe is going to fight Cobra, much like it did back in your childhood”.  Though don’t expect this to look too much like your childhood–they have, of course, dispensed with canon.  Which kind of sucks–I WISH they’d kept Cobra Commander as a former used-car dealer turned mercenary.

Let’s be clear–this is NOT an Oscar contender.  This is Short Attention Span Theatre at its absolute zenith.  I didn’t think to bring a stopwatch with me but something or someone will get shot / blown up / stabbed / sliced / run over with alarming frequency.  The movie is essentially one long fight scene occasionally broken up by dialogue.  Sometimes the two will even overlap, causing a kind of plot development and backstory.

In the strictest sense, this really isn’t that great a movie.  It has precious little story to it, and doesn’t really challenge the viewer in any way. This may well be why no one wanted critics there–so that they couldn’t go on any diatribes (like this) about how the film community is basically out to turn the world, in a truly Cobra Commander style plot (double bonus irony points! Woo hoo!). into a legion of mindless sheep by feeding them a steady diet of crap.

Basically, they could’ve titled this movie “Violence!” and no one would’ve noticed a difference, nor likely cared.

But that was the point.  This is just a fun movie, something you go see for an adrenaline rush and to watch hot chicks fight and see stuff blow up on a regular basis.  It’s quite possibly the new gold standard of “popcorn movie”.  This movie might well appear in a dictionary entry next to the phrase “aggressive mediocrity”.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale awards it a seven out of ten for doing EXACTLY what it set out to do and nothing more.  In the grander sense, it’s a C-student–make no mistake about that–but it’s definitely the BEST C-student ever.  There’s nothing wrong with this movie–but there’s not as much right as there could have been, either.

Well folks, with just under six weeks until it bows in theatres, the final Pandorum poster has finally been released.  It’s a doozy, I’ll tell you that much, though I have to wonder if it’s really as effective as it could be.

The movie stars, of all people, Dennis Quaid as part of a two-man team of astronauts who suddenly wake up in their spaceship.  But this by itself wouldn’t make much of a movie, so there are complications.

1. The ship is completely powered down.

2. Neither one of the astronauts can remember who they are or what their mission is.

3. There’s something alive on board the ship…and it’s not supposed to be there.

Given the rather nonspecific nature of the plot synopses, the poster actually makes a note of sense.  But there’s a difference, at least to me, between playing your cards close to the vest and just being truculent.  This qualifies as sheer truculence to me–they’re not going to tell you a THING before you actually watch it, and while that does make for the most possible suspense, it also makes a buying decision difficult.  Will this be worthwhile?

That’s a question I’ll be happy to answer for you, folks.  Keep it right here for Screenhead coverage.

Uh-oh, folks…we’ve got some serious problems here.  Seems that virtually all the early buzz around the trailers and such for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra has been almost universally negative.  And worse yet, Paramount will be running critics’ screenings for the sci-fi actioner, but they’ll only be running them about a week before the movie opens, leaving in some cases precious little time to release reviews ahead of deadline.

For those of you out there who don’t follow the industry, or aren’t film critics like myself, if a studio won’t put up a movie for critics’ screenings, that generally means they’re not counting on it to do very well.  They want to get one big weekend out of it to try and get its shooting budget back, but then word of mouth–not to mention the delayed critics’ reaction–will kick in and pretty much sink repeat business.

The excuses are already flying hot and fast around this one’s nigh-inevitable financial castigation, including my personal favorite: “We wuz trying to beat the writer’s strike!”

Way to pass the buck, fellas…anyway, we won’t have too much longer to wait to see just how this one turns out–you know I’ll be hitting this one opening day for you.

Well, folks, it’s time for another round of fun courtesy of the folks at Magnolia Pictures, and these guys have a downright malicious streak when it comes to their horror movies.  They’ve been known to put out some really impressive fare–almost like Lions Gate used to back in the day before they took pretty much anything in sight, including some really godawful pieces, but that’s neither here nor there for our purposes.

Today we’re taking a run at Splinter, a movie that shows that one of the hardest places on earth to film a movie may well be at a gas station.  Anyway, Splinter is a monster movie, plain and simple–an escaped convict and his (essentially) apprentice kidnaps a young couple.  But the plans quickly go awry as the foursome finds themselves attacked by a “splinter parasite” with some kind of goofy mind-control capability.  Essentially, it assimilates its host and controls its actions via infection.  When the group must take shelter from the attacking monstrosity, all they can find is an abandoned gas station.  They must find a way to repel the monster and get out alive, neither of which will be easy to do.

You’ll get a chance, real early on, to see what kind of damage a splinter infectee can do, and frankly, it’s a sight to behold.  I love it when movies put you on a fairly even keel with the rest of the storyline right away–too much exposition can really bog things down, but Splinter doesn’t have this problem. It’ll provide what information it does in little bits along the way, and they’re carefully interwoven into the plot itself so as not to break the suspense.

If anything, Splinter suffers from something of a lack of exposition.  I’m not sure just where these “splinter” monsters came from nor how they operate.  Granted, it’s not necessary to know their life story in order to go along with the movie–it’s enough to know that these monsters exist and that they’re really unpleasant.  But still, it might have been nice to at least know if I’m watching a horror flick or some science fiction.

Admittedly, that doesn’t matter so much, as regardless of what genre this actually falls under, it’s still pretty scary and plenty entertaining.  What’s really impressive about this one is how frighteningly immersive it is.  The movie was more than half over by the time I thought to check the clock. Some truly fantastic sequences will be born out of this, and by the time they figure out how to beat the splinters, you’ll get some especially nice surprises besides.  It’s downright ingenious what they come up with.

Despite some really rather minor flaws in terms of exposition, and the fact that fluctuating gas prices must make it a bear to shoot at a gas station, Splinter is a wild, scary romp that will almost certainly leave you breathless.  The sheer immersive capability, coupled with the overall force of the plot, makes Splinter a winner no matter if you’re here for monsters, aliens, or just mold run amok.  Splinter takes home an eight on the Screenhead Ten-Scale, and the most fervent endorsement we can give.

Admittedly, Vin Diesel is definitely one of the first actor’s names that comes to mind when you’re thinking “Sci-fi action” role.  But just because Vin Diesel’s got the background to handle sci-fi action roles, does that necessarily mean that the movie around him is any good?  That’s what we’ll be checking into today with Babylon A.D.

This time, Vin’s going to be playing a guy with the unlikely name of Toorop, a mercenary sent by a crime figure in Russia to retrieve a young lady from a convent and escort her to America.  But of course it’s never so easy, and Toorop’s going to have to deal with a series of doublecrosses and various factions scrapping amongst each other to get their hands on his rather mysterious package.  Can he get the girl where she needs to be?  Or will he even bother once he finds out the incredible secret she’s carrying with her?

Under normal circumstances, I love dystopian fare.  I love the post-apocalyptic, the study of the differences between the normal everyday that we all know so well  and the survival of the fittest lifestyle that we see in the dystopia.  But Babylon A.D. isn’t really all that post-apocalyptic.  In fact, for an apocalypse the world is surprisingly unscathed.  Aside from the fact that Russia looks like a crater-pocked wonderland of irradiation, Canada and the United States both look like brilliantly lit megalopoli with lots of shiny new, well, everything.  Some apocalypse, says I.

Anyway, this movie shows the converse of the low-budget movie beautifully: the effects and such are just fantastic, but the movie itself suffers under a muddled script and really, REALLY confusing plot elements.  Watching the last half hour or so made me wonder if my disc skipped or something, because it feels like a MASSIVE chunk of the narrative just vanished or something.  Seriously–we go from one point to another seemingly years later without any kind of connecting thread in the narrative.

Sure, on a visual level, Babylon A.D. looks just amazing.  There’s this fantastic sequence in which a car flies through the air, dangling from a helicopter with a magnet for support.  It looks amazing.  It looks so amazing that it’s featured in the box art.  The cityscapes are amazing and laden with neon.  Everything in here is just BEAUTIFUL.  Even the Russian slum districts are exemplars of their gritty condition.

The problem, of course, is that this movie is well on its way to full-bore incomprehensibility and has about as much regard for a decent narrative storyline as a fish has for a newspaper.  Which is to say, of course, none at all.

This is one of those movies that it’s hard to trash because, frankly, it was fun to watch.  There were plenty of explosions and lots of gunplay and some absolutely beautiful scenery.  On a visual level this thing is AMAZING.  It’s only too bad that they couldn’t be bothered to actually make this wreck make sense.

Babylon A.D. proves unquestionably that beauty will only get you so far–in fact, all it’ll get you around here is a four out of ten.

Summit Entertainment, since its release of Twilight, has pretty much been on top of the world lately, pumping out a series of movies with the geetus, some of which turned out better than others.  One such movie was Push, a movie that didn’t stick around long in theatres.  The question of the day, of course (not to mention the one we’ll be tackling right now) is, does it make sense that it didn’t stick around long?

First, though, some background–Push is the story of a world in which government agents and such have mental powers.  There are Watchers (precognitives who can see the future), Movers (psychokinetics who can move things with their minds) and Pushers (people who can exercise telepathic control over others).  When a Watcher and a Mover steal a briefcase containing a secret worth billions to the right person, the government’s out to get their hands on it too.  So to evade the government, the Watcher and the Mover go in search of a Pusher to keep themselves trail-free.  But will the Pusher help them…or ruin them?

It’s a strange sort of action / science fiction hybrid, with plenty of exciting moments but a pretty glossed-over backstory.  But then, this really isn’t about the backstory, is it?  No, this is about watching people toss each other around like rag dolls and try to shatter their skulls with ultrasonic screams.

Really, all Push is is a slightly darker X-Men with a limited number of mutant powers set in Hong Kong.  This isn’t to say it’s a bad movie, but it’s a very straightforward and sort of predictable movie.  You don’t really have to be a Watcher to see much of this coming, but you’ll likely have a good time while you’re watching.

In all honesty, I’m not sure why this is a movie in the first place.  It would’ve made a vastly better comic book series than a movie.  They’re trying to do too much with entirely too little–to be fair, this could’ve easily been several different movies.  If it were part one of a series, it might make a little more sense.  But as it stands, Push feels oddly unfinished, somehow incomplete, lacking some basic fundamental sense of SOMETHING that leaves it less than satisfying.

But again, I want to emphasize…this is NOT a bad movie.  No, not by any stretch of the imagination.  What is here is at least passably well done and at least mildly entertaining to watch.  It probably was for the best that Push got out of theatres quickly to make room for other movies, because this one is actually a better rental than a theatre stop.  There aren’t any special effects here that require a giant screen–no big ships, no massive explosions, nothing really image-intensive (though I confess I love watching guns float around and being operated remotely).

Instead, there are good fight scenes, a few interesting surprises, quite a bit of the kind of thing you’ve already seen, and a lingering sense of dissatisfaction.

Push is definitely a better rental than anything else,  and manages to rank a six out of ten–slightly better than the average, but not without significant flaw.

Back when I was first getting started in movie review, the first company I managed to partner with–that is, convince that I was a sufficiently big deal to send movies to in order to review–was The Asylum.  And back in those long ago days, you could count on The Asylum to take chances and show an unusual amount of spine for an industry that so often imitates itself.

But that hasn’t been the case lately…The Asylum went the way of the so-called “mockbuster”, or as I was calling them for the longest time, Asylumized movies.  They’d take whatever was big in the theatres–or would likely be big–retool it a bit and release it.  For instance, ahead of the first Transformers movie, The Asylum released Transmorphers.  When A Stranger Calls became When A Killer Calls, and so on right down the line.  Some of them have been better than others, and some have just plain old been complete wastes of DVD plastic.

Now, we have The Terminators, released just around the same time as Terminator: Salvation.  How will it fare?  Let’s find out.

This time, The Terminators assumes a future in which the race of cyborgs (they really seem more like androids or possibly outright robots–admittedly it’s a fine distinction but a relevant one nonetheless) rises up against their human masters for little or no stated reason (what, did they just get sick of working for the man?) and ran amok in an orgy of bloody excess and violence.  All that’s left to take on the so-called TRs is a handful of humans that form the human resistance against the TR hordes.

On the one hand, this movie doesn’t have a bad storyline–it’s kind of interesting to watch relatively low-tech humans tackle these bulked-up androids with not that much better hardware than humans.  It has a certain sort of compelling action / sci-fi feel to it that keeps it interesting.  Plus, you’re hoping as you go through the movie that you’ll get a little more explanation as to just what the deuce is actually going on around here.

On the other hand, meanwhile, this is clearly a low-budget spectacular, and science fiction is NOT the job to do on a low budget.  The result will be that a lot of things that probably should have happened will not–for instance, a handful of human survivors fires a whole mess of ammo into a TR unit, the TR is clearly hit.  Clinking and pinging sounds, along with flashes of white denoting impact, are both clearly seen and heard.  Yet, somehow, the very next shot shows that the TR is clearly unscathed.  And I mean “unscathed”–when a Terminator took a round, there would be a hole in the synthetic skin, probably a little blood.  The TR, meanwhile, takes not even a scratch or a smudge of ash from the impact.

The worst of it is, it didn’t even NEED to be a Terminator hanger-on.  It does all right by itself.  Yeah, sure, it’s a low-budget sci-fi epic, which is one of the worst kinds, but it’s still a fairly compelling action piece.  If someone had called this “Rage of the Autodroids” or some such potboiler nightmare, it’d be no less valid.    No one needed to tie this in to the Terminator franchise.

The Terminators walks away with a six out of ten:  it does do surprisingly well for a low-budget sci-fi epic, but it definitely didn’t factor in its limitations beforehand.

Folks, if you want the very latest in groundbreaking, chance-taking, movie making joy, you’re not going to go to the theatre.  You’re going to go to the video store or somewhere similar.  And today, I’m going to be filling you in on one of the biggest little movies that hasn’t even managed to come out yet.  That’s right–you’re getting a really, really, REALLY advance sneak peek at Interplanetary, the second feature-length film from the guys out at Crewless Productions.

In case you’re not already familiar with these guys–and you should be, believe me–they were the bunch behind Hide And Creep, perhaps the first and only movie to feature a video store clerk as a romantic male lead.    Interplanetary brings that special blend of comedy, suspense, action and sheer low-budget antics to a new frontier this time, science fiction.

In Interplanetary, the Interplanetary Corporation has set up a base on the surface of Mars, for reasons that can only be described as poorly explained.    But this really isn’t the point, as the crew of the Interplanetary Corporation live and work on Mars, and are convinced that they’re the only ones on the planet…at least, until someone takes a rocket launcher to Mars Base Two.  Now the folks at Interplanetary  are neck-deep in mysteries like:

1. Who’s shooting at us?

2. What’s that alien monstrosity that keeps killing us off?

3. Does any of this have anything to do with the fossil we found?

4. Did you get that memo I sent you about the TPS reports?

Before you start thinking that ’s from the wrong movie, you’re right, but not as right as you think.  See, the more I watched Interplanetary, the more I was convinced that it was a weird cross between Total Recall and Office Space.  The Interplanetary Corporation contains a very large and very rigid bureaucracy, and the corporate hierarchy is so ingrained in its workers–at least its middle managers, who are in charge of the base–that they consult company policy manuals for instructions on how to react to hostage situations.  Even when they’re the ones being taken hostage.

This mix is incredibly hard to maintain even under normal circumstances, but doubly hard considering that Interplanetary will actually take itself seriously the whole time.  Yes, there are plenty of killer jokes in here–a short-range spacecraft is dubbed the Hesperus–and there are also more than a few good doses of suspense and action too.  There’s a little bit of something for just about everybody in Interplanetary,  and that’s going to make this a movie superior to a lot of its kind.

There will even be a slew of surprises to be had here–the ending must be seen to be believed–and they’ll be inserted at random throughout the proceedings just to keep things even more interesting.

For those of you who think that science fiction can only be good with A-list stars and an A-list budget, I’m profoundly honored to offer up Interplanetary, a move that will prove you wrong by every measure possible.  In fact, if you’re any kind of science fiction fan at all, this will just prove to be entirely too good to miss.