LITERAL REMAINS

Tom Havyn is a man in a crisis.  After his grandfather dies,Tom inherits his Idaho ranch and decides to move there, where he spent so many wonderful times as a child.  So he leaves behind his research job as a biological psychologist and moves to Idaho with the ultimate goal of killing himself.  See, his grandfather had a mental breakdown and suffered from hallucinations and behavioral problems, including paranoia.  Tom has been suffering from hallucinations himself, and these hallucinations may have led to his young son’s near fatal drowning.  His son survived, but suffered brain damage as a result.  This put a strain on Tom’s marriage which ended in divorce.  Full of guilt, and fearing a complete breakdown with reality just like his grandfather, Tom’s thinks blowing his head off is the answer to the pain he already suffers, and the pain yet to come.

But the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray, and Tom’s suicide attempt is thwarted by a giant of a man named Connie. Connie is on the run because there was a freak accident which killed one of his coworkers, and it really looks like Connie did it.  How do you explain a swarm of…something…flying out of nowhere and boring holes into somebody?  Connie is a recreational drug user, and even he is having a hard time getting a handle on the situation.

And then there are the earthquakes.  And Tom suddenly has the talent of predicting the future, especially when a news camera is pointed at him.  Don’t forget the secret underground labs, highly advanced nanotechnology used by militia groups  that could cure Tom’s son, and something in the water turning average citizens into psychotic, merciless, killers.

This is a full slate of a story.  The title, Armageddon Yellowstone: Hell Unleashed, is a mouthful, and there’s a lot of plot to go along with that lengthy name.  It is a feat in and of itself that the author, Terry Rich Hartley, pulls all the strands together; major kudos to him given that this is a rather short novel.  Which is the problem:  there’s just too much.  It almost feels like, at times, that Hartley combined the plots of two or three books and put them into just this one.

That’s not to say that Armageddon isn’t worth a read.  It’s a fast moving story, and it keeps you hooked; I had no idea where this book was going, and by the middle of it I was just wanting to see how everything met and fit together. With some better editing, this could have been a killer high tech thriller.  It falters and stumbles here and there, and though it may not ultimately succeed, if you’re looking for something different it may be worth a look.

2.5 out of 5
John Jason 

Yes, yes,yes, it’s Poe’s birthday. And mine. So, I guess it’s my tradition now to post a reading of “The Raven”, which is my favorite of Poe’s poems. Enjoy.

John Jason

Before I go any further, I want to point out three movies that should really be seen.  They are three very different independent films, and they represent the best of what the horror genre has to offer.  D4, Emerging Past, and Mask Maker.  They represent science run amok, psychological horror, and the slasher categories respectively.  They are quality films made on tight budgets that give the big league Hollywood machine a run for their money.  Talk about filmmakers using ingenuity, these three movies should not be missed.

Clicking on the title will take you to my original review.

Best Books
Dead of Winter by Brian Moreland
Flesh Eaters by Joe McKinney
A Season of Darkness by Douglas Jones and Phyllis Gobbel
Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford
The Ice Princess by  Camilla Läckberg
Alan Wake by Rick Burroughs

Honorable Mention:  The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi, Dimiter by William Peter Blatty and Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Worst Books
A Dark Matter by Peter Straub
Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge
The Dead Path by Stephen M. Irwin

Best Movies
 Super 8
Husk
Insidious
Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Honorable Mention:   Captain America: The First Avenger, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Valhalla Rising, Dread,Stag Night, Monsters, Attack the Block, Green Lantern, Outpost, Source Code, Let Me In,  and Black Death

Worst Movies
Hellraiser: Revelations
Chain Letter
Chillerama
Fright Night
Skyline
My Soul To Take
Red Riding Hood
Final Destination 5 

John Jason

I have been a Sherlock Holmes fan since I was about six years old or so.  For me, Jeremy Brett will always personify the world’s greatest detective.  But Robert Downey, Jr., he ain’t so bad.  He is a pretty good Sherlock for the modern audience.  In A Game of Shadows, Holmes is pitted against his archenemy, the diabolical and equally genius, Professor Moriarty.  Moriarty has an intricately woven plan to, well, get rich.  Of course, according to the plan, a lot of people have to die for him to get his obscene amounts of money.  Fortunately, Holmes has some intricately woven plans himself to stop the mad professor.  I liked this movie a little bit more than the first one, I think this one has a little bit of mystery to it.  Not much, but a little.  I think it’s funnier than the first one.  Towards the end, though, it gets a little too stylized, and a little too Matrix-like.  Noomi Rapace had nothing to do in this movie, which is sad; she was vastly underutilized.  And one thing I don’t understand, for Dr. Watson to be limping due to an old injury, he sure can haul ass pretty fast.  4.5 out of 5

I loved the original Quarantine, based on the Spanish film REC (I have those two movies still to watch).  Quarantine 2 finds a group of airplane passengers exposed to the super-rabies-virus-whatever-you-call-it, and quarantined to a terminal.  If you have seen the first film, or the original Spanish films, you know that means the infected get really mean and violent.  And like to bite, tear, and gnash.  Q2 is a pretty good low budget effort, though it lacks the ferocity of the first film.  There are no real shocks or Oh My God! moments, and you know just about everything that is going to happen.  Yet, I liked it maybe more than I should have, and they may be because it is better made than you would expect.  3.5 out 5

How best to describe The Orphan Killer?  Long.  Tedious.  With a few fleeting moments of interest (mainly the nudity).  I’d like to see what the makers of this film could do with a bigger budget and, let’s face it, a tighter script that doesn’t take itself so serious.  A kid, an orphan to be exact, grows up hating the Catholic church and people in general, I think.  I don’t know.  I have to confess, I kind of zoned out watching this movie for a while.  It has a sort of bargain basement kinetic, grungy, style that’s likable, but it needs some editing.  Watch it as a midnight movie with friends.  It tries too hard to be hardcore, and comes up cliched and limp.  Click here for ordering info.  2 out of 5

Can anything stop the remake steamroller?  We can only pray.  Now, some of the remakes I like.  I am in that minority that liked the remakes of The Fog and Halloween.  And The Wolfman.  I do not like this remake of Fright Night.  I like the original, but was never a die hard fan of it.  This remake is just boring.  I thought The Orphan Killer went on for too long; that masked slasher needs to cut this steaming pile to shreds.  Right off the bat we know the neighbor (played by a boring Colin Farrell) is a vampire.  Everybody in the movie knows it pretty much too.  And then it just goes on and on and on.  At one point I checked the time because I thought it was near the end, but, no, there was still like forty or so minutes left.  Put a stake in this damn thing’s heart already.  1 out of 5

John Jason

I’m still trying to catch up on some reviews, especially since I injured my knee recently and I have a little time on my hands.  So, this will be the first of a few reviews deemed Knee Injury ’11.

Attack the Block is the kind of movie you have to watch more than once.  There are two reasons for that.  Reason number one:  If you’re not up on your English slang, especially when the accent is rather heavy like it is here, you’ll have have to watch a second time (and possibly a third and fourth) to catch what all is said and what is meant by it.  Reason number two:  It’s just a good movie.  It has that late night feel to it, even if it does feel too cool for the room at times.  Short and sweet, it’s about a group of inner city London teens fending off some big, furry, mouth-glowing, aliens who invade their turf.  It’s fierce, fast, and funny, though the ending overdoes it in the message department.  4 out of 5

Moon was the debut feature film of director Duncan Jones, and remains a favorite of mine.  Source Code is his second film, and a mainstream Hollywood sci-fi foray.  It’s not on the same level as Moon, but displays a lot of the same heart and soul that can be found in that masterpiece.  Military pilot Colter Stephens (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds himself inhabiting the body of a man on a train that explodes.  It’s Stephen’s mission to locate the bomb and the bomber, and he only has eight minutes to do it.  Through the miracles of some radical science, he is able to share the dead man’s brain.  He has to piece the puzzle together each time the program starts over.  Stephens is also trying to unravel the mystery of how he got recruited into this science program because the last thing he remembers is flying a helicopter in Afghanistan.  It’s the kind of movie that isn’t easily explained, you just have to watch it.  4 out of 5

Kafka is Steven Soderbergh’s best film.  That’s my opinion.  I just thought I’d throw that out there.  Contagion is a zombie movie without zombies, or, at least, that’s how I saw it.  To be exact, I saw it as a zombie movie for the sweater-wearing, high-rise apartment dwelling, Ira Levin reading percentage of the population.  Not that there’s anything really wrong with that.  A killer new virus is spreading around the world and it’s, well, killing off a butt load of people.  The virus spreads, the sick people die, the not sick go criminal and loot, and the husband of the woman that brought the illness back to the U.S. discovers his wife was cheating on him.  Things don’t happen so much in that order, but it’s the highlights.  This is an interesting movie, the disease side of it anyways.  The rest of it, the “human” side, let’s call it, is less interesting.  It begins on Day 2, and at the end we see how the entire thing started on Day 1, but by then I really didn’t care. 3 out of 5

John Jason

Sometimes you find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Sometimes things happen around you that you have no control over.  That just may be what you call Life, I don’t know.  But if you are Tucker or Dale, you may want to become a recluse, because the things that happen around you, through misunderstanding and through demented and cruel twists of fate, are just plain bad and offer up a world of pain.  And death.  And dismemberment.

Tucker and Dale are two good ol’ boys heading to the woods.  Tucker (Alan Tudyk) has just purchased a cabin, what he declares his vacation home.  He brings along his best friend, Dale (Tyler Labine), to help do some repairs and cleaning on the rundown little place.  Also going camping that weekend near toTucker and Dale are a group of college kids.  The kids sit around the campfire and tell the story of the Memorial Day Massacre; it amounts to a hillbilly going crazy on some campers.  The college kids then go for a late night swim.  Tucker and Dale, who could be called hillbillies, are doing some night fishing.  Allison, one of the girls from the college campers, sees the two fishing and thinks they are spying on them.  She slips into the water and hits her head.  Tucker and Dale fish her out of the water and into the their boat, saving her life.  The other young campers see them and think they are kidnapping her and run screaming.

Okay.  What follows is Tucker and Dale just trying to relax and do some work.  Allison, upon waking, learns what happened and becomes friends with them, and helps them around their vacation home.  Allison’s friends, though, think she was abducted, has Stockholm Syndrome, and try to rescue her.  All their attempts at rescue go horribly awry.  How horrible?  They keep getting themselves accidentally killed.  Tucker and Dale have no idea why these kids keep killing themselves on Tucker’s property; they can only figure it some kind of crazy mass suicide pact, and it is majorly freaking them out.

Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil has some truly great moments, but it is never really as funny as it should be.  It is chuckle inducing, but doesn’t have the belly laughs.  The college kids get themselves killed in some truly outlandish, and ingenious, ways, and Tudyk and Labine are good comedy team.  I’d like to see them together again, either in a Tucker and Dale sequel, or something else.  Their charm, chemistry, and timing are what really make this film as successful as it is.  I felt the movie went on for too long, mainly because there are so many damn college kids to kill off.  The entire Memorial Day Massacre subplot wasn’t really needed.  In fact, I think they should have cut the Massacre thread and saved it for part two.

All in all, it’s above average.  Definitely a lot better than Chillerama.  Gore for gore’s sake isn’t funny; someone tripping and going head first into a wood chipper ain’t exactly comedy.  That’s were it relies on Tudyk and Labine, they make it digestible.  Plus, Tucker and Dale has a big heart, believe it or not, that helps to overlook their faults.

3.5 out of 5
John Jason

I wasn’t born until 1977, so I missed out on the heyday of the drive-in.  I just caught, and barely remember, its swan song.  I have an aunt who worked part-time at our town’s drive-in (she also worked at our local cinema, the Capri, and would get us in for free– she was the coolest) and I can remember going with my grandfather to pick her up as her shift ended.  I can remember standing in the bed of his pick-up truck, on the toolbox, and seeing snippets of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho II, and Six Pack (which I’m kind of glad I can scarcely recall that one without the aid of any pharmaceutical substance).  Of course, drive-ins have made a somewhat comeback in the last few years, and we (my friends and family and I) go to one nearby and it’s all good fun and I highly recommend it.  If we had seen Chillerama at our drive-in of preference, a movie that wishes to fondly recreate and give the viewer the experience of lovely B-movie trash from long ago, we probably would have skipped it.

Chillerama gets the look right, but misses out on everything else.  It’s never funny, and it tries to be funny, Lord how it tries.  And watching it try to strangle the laughs out of the material made me feel sorry for it.  It’s like watching a comedian die a miserable death on stage.

There are four segments that comprise this anthology: “Wadzilla”, “I Was a Teenage Werebear”, “The Diary of Anne Frankenstein”, and the wrap-around story “Zom-B-Movie”.  The characters of “Zom-B-Movie” are attending the last night of business for their local drive-in before it closes.  The movies they watch are the ones listed above, but a zombie plague is breaking out among the patrons thanks to a drive-in employee who tried to get his groove on with his wife’s corpse.  The corpse came alive, bit him on his daddy parts, and now he is spreading the zombie disease through some neon colored goo-goo juice.  The result is that the zombies are really horny, and that this segment quickly descends into stupidity.

Speaking of stupidity, there is still “Wadzilla” and “I Was a Teenage Werebear” to cover.  In “Wadzilla”, a man takes a pill to strength his sperm count, but all it does is strengthen the one bullet he has in his chamber.  It’s not funny.  ”I Was a Teenage Werebear” is about a teenager who tries to suppress his homosexual feelings.  During a wrestling match in gym class, he gets bit on the butt.  That bite turns him into a leather clad, S&M loving, werebear.  This one is a musical.  This one is also the worst of the lot.

“The Diary of Anne Frankenstein” is the best of the bunch.  It is mildly amusing.  Anne is the niece of Dr. Frankenstein, and in possession of his diary.  Hitler steals the diary and learns how to create his own monster.  That the monster is Jewish and has his own feelings about killing, and who he kills, ultimately goes against Hitler’s plan.  The simple minded Hitler is kind of cliche’, but well played, as is the monster, named Meshugannah, and the lusty Eva Braun.

Chillerama should have been so bad it’s good, but too much effort was used to make it bad.  Black Dynamite it is not.  If you do decide to watch it, watch it with a group of friends MST3K style.

1 out of 5
John Jason 

This movie makes me sad.  I can’t watch those agonizing Sarah McLachlan save the animals commercials on television; I have to flip the channel on the double– they will ruin your entire day.  Same goes for the feed the kids or the adopt a Jewish family in the Middle East ads (they’re out there, watch for them).  Credit can go to Andy Serkis (Gollum, King Kong) for that; through motion capture, as Caesar, he gives the best performance in the movie, and one of the best performances I’ve seen all year.  It’s emotional and, oddly, genuine.  Caesar feels more real, on an emotional level, than the human characters.  Really, all the apes are.  The only problem with the apes (all computer generated) is that they move a little too smoothly (especially Caesar) through the environments; there’s no sense of weight to most of them at times.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes concerns research scientist Will Rodman’s (Franco) attempts to find a cure for Alzheimer’s.  It’s his life’s work; his father, Charles (the great John Lithgow) suffers from the disease.  After testing the experimental drug on chimps, Will is pressing the board of directors at the pharmaceutical company Gen-Sys, where he works, to move to human testing.  The drug works, and the shining example is Bright Eyes, a chimp that has shown increased intelligence on the drug, which works at repairing damaged and diseased brain cells.  The drug has shown no side effects other than flecks of green in the eyes.

Then Bright Eyes goes ape-dookie crazy, tears the place up, and is shot dead.  The idea of human testing is shot dead as well.  Will’s boss orders the destruction of the other test subjects, and orders Will to start from scratch on the drug.  While cleaning the chimps’ confinement areas, Will discovers that Bright Eyes didn’t go crazy from the drug, she had given birth and was just defending the baby, thinking the scientists meant to harm her newborn– she wasn’t crazy, she was just being a mom and protecting her offspring.

Will takes the chimp home, names him Caesar, and raises the highly intelligent chimp.  Caesar inherited his mother’s drug enhanced intelligence.  Will, believing the drug to be safe, uses his father as a guinea pig.  But the cure is only temporary for Charles.  During a severe episode of dementia, Charles is attacked by the neighbor, and Caesar comes to Charles’s defense, injuring the neighbor.  Will is then forced to place the grown Caesar with a chimp sanctuary. It’s at the sanctuary, with other apes and chimps, that Caesar begins to question his place in the world.  Imprisonment in the sanctuary is the culminating factor for Caesar.  He knows what his life has been leading up to:  revolution.

It may sound like Rise turns stupid, what with Caesar questioning his reason for being, and his identity crisis and all, but it’s far from it.  Rise is smart, thoughtful, and the action is perfectly balanced.  Give it a watch and you’ll see.  Not only that, you’ll cheer for Caesar.

5 out of 5
John Jason 

Okay, I’m continuing to catch up here with some reviews that slipped by me.  To their credit, the movies reviewed weren’t the most memorable.

Final Destination 5?  They should have stopped with number 2.  Final Destination 2, best of the series.  I can only hope this fifth excursion into Death’s revenge is the last of the franchise.  Let it die quietly, please, please, please.  If you have seen any of the films in this series, then you should know what it’s about, but for those of you who may be unfamiliar with the plot, it goes like this:  a group of people cheat death in a major disaster because somebody in the group has a vision of the forthcoming disaster, leaving the group of people saved and Death seeking revenge.  ”Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.”  Thank you Emily Dickinson.  Now, if only the movie producers will stop the insanity.  FD 5 brings nothing new to the franchise, and manages to be boring.  There are slow, languidly agonizing  build-ups to the murder pieces and no happy endings for the viewers.  Final Destination‘s schtick has gotten old.  1.5 out of 5

John Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece, The Thing (a remake of 1951′s The Thing From Another World) gets a remake.  The Thing has always been my favorite Carpenter film (I like it better than the original Halloween), and it’s one of my favorite horror films of all time.  Based upon the John W. Campbell story “Who Goes There?” , Carpenter’s film was full of paranoia, tension, and all out, balls to the wall horror.  It was a genuinely creepy and terrifying movie about research scientists in Antarctica who encounter an alien that can replicate other lifeforms.  It was the real deal.  True horror.  This new Thing is supposed to be a ”prequel”, but it feels more like a remake.  In fact, it feels like an imitation, just like the titular alien.  The 2011 version isn’t bad, but it lacks all the tension, terror, and paranoia of the original– all things that helped to make Carpenter’s film pitch perfect.  The Thing ’11 doesn’t even have a sense of isolation.  It’s watchable, but there’s just no need for it.  3 out of 5

John Jason

In Florence, Italy, sixteen murders were committed between 1968 and 1985 with the same gun.  The victims were couples and they weren’t just shot in cold blood, but often times mutilated as well.  In the years since the first killings, suspects have come and gone, and innocent people have been implicated as the killer or as accomplices.  One such individual that was threatened for investigating the murders was American author Douglas Preston.  For co-authoring a book with his friend, the noted Italian journalist, and Monster expert, Mario Spezi, Preston was kicked out of Italy.

Mario Spezi was a reporter for La Nazione, and just happened to be working the crime desk by chance on the morning of June 7th, 1981.  He got a tip from police about a double homicide; it broke up his boring morning because “nothing ever happens in Florence on a Sunday morning.”  The victims were Carmela De Nuccio and Giovanni Foggi.  They were not the first.  But Spezi would discover that later, doing better police work than the actual investigators themselves.  Although the investigation would be hampered, and brought to dead ends, by people in power far above the detectives.

In August of 2000, Douglas Preston (co-author of The Relic, and many others, with Lincoln Child) moved to Florence.  It was dream come true for him; he fell in love with Italy at the age of thirteen while on a family vacation.  Thirty years later he moved his own family there.  While researching a novel, he met Spezi who told him the story of the Monster of Florence.  In fact, one of the killings took place just next to where Preston lived at the time.

Of course, Preston was fascinated by the story, and couldn’t shake it.  He had to know more.  And that is this book:  You have to keep reading it.  It’s shocking in the audacity at the actions the police take (at times committing crimes of their own), and the lengths at which government officials exploit the murders for their own personal gain.  It’s mind blowing.  The innocent are often persecuted while the guilty party (or parties) seemingly roam free.

The Monster of Florence is a riveting book; light on suspense but revealing in how modern law enforcement can botch an investigation and how people can be led astray by opportunists.  The book reveals a long list of suspects and whittles that list down considerably with detailed evidence.  Preston and Spezi aren’t afraid to name names, and neither are they afraid of a confrontation.  And seeing as the Monster has yet to be caught, that’s reason enough to read this book.

4 out of 5
John Jason 

I know that article title sounds like the opening of some really bad joke, but it’s not, just I’m trying to catch up on some reviews.  So, I thought I’d spew a few thoughts about these three movies which are based upon three characters I highly admire.  I was a comic book kid, still am, and I grew up reading the adventures of Green Lantern, Thor, and Conan the Barbarian.  Green Lantern, along with the Silver Surfer, helped to develop my interest in science fiction; Thor was an early introduction to Viking lore and myth; and Conan, well, he was just the all-out badass– women wanted him, and men wanted to be him.

Green Lantern is a fun movie.  But it should have been bigger.  The scope is too small.  The Green Lantern universe is as deep and expansive as the Star Wars and Star Trek universes, and I was hoping for something a little more than what director Martin Campbell delivered (I don’t blame him, though, just the screenwriters and Warner Bros.).  It’s good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s fluff.  This really could have been something, it could have been distinctive, but ends up an action flick that’s just a little above average.  Ryan Reynolds is perfectly cast as Hal Jordan, Earth’s first Green Lantern, though at the start he is too Ryan Reynolds, too much himself and almost every other character he has played (kind of like Will Smith).  But he grows into the role, and Hal Jordan actually has a serviceable character arc.  It would have been nice to explore the universe a little more instead of taking the majority of the action to Earth, and the main plot cribs a lot from Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.  This is a vibrant movie, though, and pure popcorn, just not as big as it should have been.  4 out of 5

Thor, on the other hand, is so mixed up, this poor movie can’t decide what it was meant to be.  This movie feels big, but is rather small minded.  Remember back with me, if you will, to the days of yesteryear when The Masters of the Universe bowed its live-action head at the cinema.  Do you remember why that movie really sucked?  Because He-Man was on Earth.  Actually, that’s just one of the many reasons that movie sucked.  Do you want to know why Thor isn’t that good?  He-Man syndrome:  he’s stuck on freakin’ Earth for the majority of the movie.  Thor works in two different ways, but they don’t work good together.  Let me explain.  When Thor is on Asgard and he’s fighting the Frost Giants, and Loki is doing his evil scheming thing, the movie is big and epic and it really works as a action flick.  When Thor is cast down to Earth as punishment for his hot-headed actions, it becomes a romantic comedy of sorts, and it works.  Put the two together, and the damn thing falls apart.  It’s weird.  They should have stuck with one or the other.  The only thing that really saves the Earth sequences is Chris Hemsworth’s comedic chops.  2.5 out of 5

And last, but not least, Conan the Barbarian.  Ahh, Conan, what took you so long to get back hackin’ and slashin’ on the silver screen?  I’ve missed you.  Conan is, was, and always will be, one of my favorite literary characters.  I’ve read all of Robert E. Howard’s original Conan stories.  I have several collected editions of Conan comics.  I love this big lug.  Luckily,  Arnold Schwarzenegger never really defined the character for me, thanks to having read Howard’s stories and all those comic books.  Jason Momoa is good as a young Conan, brash, brawny, and calculating.  This new Conan movie is goofy, free-wheeling, fun; it embraces its pulp roots and charges out of the gate head first.  It’s crazy, I’m not going to lie to you, but the good kind of crazy as opposed to the insanity that Thor heaps on us.  Sadly, this isn’t the definitive Conan movie, we’ll have to wait for that one much like we had to wait for the definitive Batman movie.  Marcus Nispel is an underrated action director (Pathfinder was good, I don’t care what you say), but I wish he had brought a tinge more maturity to the machismo.  3.5 out of 5

John Jason

After his mother, Elizabeth, dies in an accident at work, Joe Lamb is left with his dad, Jackson, a deputy sheriff, who doesn’t really know or understand his son.  All father and son have in common is their grief, and the fact that they have to learn to live without Elizabeth’s guidance.  Once summer rolls around and school is out, Jackson wants to send Joe away for six weeks to a sports camp, explaining to his 14 year old son that it’s what they both need.  Joe feels he needs to help his friend Charles finish his zombie movie.

With the camp vs. stay home for the summer debate at a standstill, Joe sneaks out to help Charles film a scene at the local train station.  It’s then that Joe learns Charles has convinced Alice Dainard to be in their zombie epic, just to round out the cast as the lead’s love interest.  Alice is not only the prettiest girl in school, she’s kind of a bad girl who doesn’t take any crap from anyone, and Joe has a major crush on her.  The trouble is that Alice is the daughter of Louis Dainard, the man Jackson blames for Elizabeth’s death.  Louis and Elizabeth were employed at the same factory, and when Louis was a no show for work, Elizabeth took his shift. As far as Jackson is concerned, it’s Louis that should be dead.

Alice steals her dad’s car and picks the guys up.  When she learns Joe is one of the members of the small film crew, she is ready to back out because of who his dad is.  Joe convinces her to stay, explaining things aren’t exactly hunky dory between he and his pops.  So at the train station, Joe does his best to hide his nerves while applying make-up to Alice (he’s the make-up and zombie effects guy), and she impresses the boys to speechlessness with a convincing performance as a wife worried about her detective husband’s investigation into the undead.

Then tragedy strikes as a truck drives onto the tracks and races headfirst into a passing train.  On the plus side, the young filmmakers capture the derailment on camera.  The downside is that it was a military train, and something big, bad, angry and quite possibly alien has just escaped into their hometown.

Super 8 is the best movie I’ve seen all year.  This is going high up on my list of film favorites.  It’s the mother load of movie entertainment– funny, thrilling, and touching, combining science fiction, horror, and a coming of age story, it’s a film that needs to be seen.  And should be seen.

A lot has been said that writer/director J.J. Abrams has imitated producer Steven Spielberg’s earlier works, especially in the sentimental department.  So what, who cares, it works.  The sentiment doesn’t bring any damage to Super 8, it’s not too much though it does walk a fine line.  Super 8 does feel like a throwback to movies that I grew up with, such as The Goonies, but it stands on its own big monster legs.

I wish there were more films this good, that made you feel what Super 8 makes you feel.  Exhilarated.  Like you’ve just seen something special.

5 out of 5
John Jason

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It’s easy to beat up on this series, to make jokes about it, to dismiss it.  I’ll tell you something, though, and this is coming from a true horror fan:  at the heart of The Twilight Saga there is an interesting story.  It’s buried in there, just like there’s a good movie somewhere in Spider-Man 3.  It’s an interesting premise, but something gets lost between thought and expression; that’s not Twilight‘s fault, it happens all the time.  These are popcorn movies, plain and simple, and sort of, almost, like Underworld-lite for the teen set.

Breaking Dawn Part 1 opens with Edward and Bella getting married.  While on their honeymoon Bella learns she is pregnant.  No one knew a vampire could father a child, especially with a human, and the baby becomes a danger to the mom.  It takes almost two hours to tell this story.  It feels a lot longer than that.

This entry in the saga is a step back from the last two.  Part 1 isn’t as bad as the first movie that began it all, but it’s not as good as New Moon or Eclipse, those two I at least found entertaining.  This one made me do something I hadn’t done since the first one:  roll my eyes.  It’s full of lame dialogue, badly delivered unfunny jokes, and a lot of easy escapes in the plot. Everything from the pregnancy on felt contrived.

The pregnancy!  I’m sorry, but I can’t wrap my brain around that one.  I know it’s a movie, and I do my best to suspend all disbelief, but a vampire fathering a child?  I just can’t buy it, even for these movies.

Part 1 exists solely to get us to Part 2, the grand finale.  I think if they had just whittled it down some, they could have fit it all into one movie.  Even with the wedding that opens Part 1, it literally feels like nothing happens for the first two-thirds of the movie.  When something does finally happen, it’s all anticlimactic:  you know Bella is going to live, there’s a whole other movie to go.  There’s just no suspense.

My favorite part of the series is Billy Burke, who plays Bella’s dad Charlie.  Burke’s Charlie is the most interesting character.  I still say it would be cool to have Charlie in his own adventures, solving supernatural crimes in the Northwest, only he doesn’t know they are supernatural. It’s sad that Burke is given so little screen time.  The saddest thing of all, though, is that I know Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart have some acting chops, I’ve seen Water For Elephants and The Runaways respectively.  You wouldn’t be able to tell they had talent from this movie.  Neither would you be able to say director Bill Condon had talent– long, lingering shots do not make a movie more dramatic, it only helps to pad the running time.

Maybe I should have waited to review this movie after seeing Part 2, because this is a bridge piece, and it may play better with its companion (the Matrix sequels anyone?).  On its own, it’s mildly diverting, but mostly flat.

2.5 out of 5
John Jason

Sixteen year old Jacob looks back at his not too distant childhood and can’t believe he thought all his grandfather’s stories were true.  His grandfather had lived in an orphanage at the onset of WWII before running away to join the fight.  His grandfather told him fantastical stories of the other kids who lived at Miss Peregrine’s home, a girl who could float, a boy with bees living inside him, an invisible kid.  Of course his grandpa had some old photographs to back up the stories, but it wasn’t too long before Jacob knew that these were fairy tales invented by his grandfather.

Sixteen, though, turns out to be a crucial year for Jacob Portman.  His grandfather hasn’t been doing so well, and the family believes dementia has set in.  Jacob’s dad doesn’t know what to do for him, and the two have never been close (Grandpa Portman traveled a lot for business).  Jacob is the only one with any real genuine concern for the old man, mainly because he and his grandfather are closer than Jacob and his own dad.  Even with grandpa’s fairly tales, which he insist are true, Jacob becomes more protective and understanding.  When his grandfather is having “a spell”, Jacob rushes to diffuse the situation.  What he finds is his grandfather murdered in the woods.  A quick glimpse of the killer changes Jacob’s thoughts on his grandfather’s stories.

What he witnessed in the woods sets Jacob on a journey to a little Welsh island.  Playing on his father’s love of birds, and thanks to his doctor’s advice that Jacob needs closure about his grandfather, the father and son travel to where Grandpa Portman spent the happiest times of his childhood before the war altered his life.

What Jacob finds on the island is a ramshackle old house barely standing at all.  Miss Peregrine’s home was bombed seventy years ago by the Nazis, and no one has lived there since.  Only forgotten memories and old photographs live in the decayed residence now.  It only seems like a dead end, as you might have guessed.  Jacob gets a taste of what life was like for his grandfather in the 1940s, and encounters a world of magic, mystery, and peculiarities.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is full of pleasant little surprises, and I fear telling any more of the book’s secrets will spoil its charm.  Ransom Riggs has come up with quite a story that incorporates vintage photographs.  He has woven the pictures seamlessly into the novel, and they provide a great support to the tale– the story and the photos play nicely off each other.  In fact, I wish there had been more photographs in the book; they are wonderful to look at on their own.

My only problem with the book is that it has an identity crisis.  It would have been a great book  for all ages, but it’s too adult at times for some younger readers.  Jacob is a welcome relief of a teen character, and is easy to relate to no matter how old you are; he has to make tough decisions and take on responsibility.  He would be a great literary character for kids to share his adventures, but some of the language (and a little of the violence) would have to be toned down.

From the ending of the book, I’m guessing this is the first of a series of novels.  It’s a unique start, and I hope Ransom Riggs can keep it that way.

4 out of 5
John Jason