LITERAL REMAINS

Inconsistent.  Disjointed.  Intriguing.  Overlong.  That’s the best way I can describe the Alex Proyas directed/Nicolas Cage headliner Knowing.  It has it’s flaws, that it almost completely overcomes, and is full of mysterious charm.

In 1959, an elementary school buries a time capsule to be opened fifty years in the future.  The children draw pictures of what they think the world of 2009 will look like to go into the capsule.  The children draw pictures of spaceships, robots, and everything else their sci-fi minded minds can dream up.  It’s all very 1950′s.

All the children draw kitsch except for troubled little Lucinda Embry.  Lucinda hears voices whispering feverishly into her ears.  The voices whisper bad things.  Little Lucinda doesn’t draw any pictures, she fills her paper to overflowing with numbers.

Fifty years later, the elementary school unearths the time capsule and gives each current student an envelope from it.  Caleb Koestler, who is a little different than most of his classmates, receives the envelope containing Luncinda’s page of numbers.  He thinks it’s interesting and keeps it.  He also doesn’t know that the whispered voices Lucinda heard are the same ones he himself hears.

Caleb’s father, John Koestler, is a professor at MIT, and is still struggling over the death of his wife.  During a drunken binge, John discovers Lucinda’s numbers aren’t random gibberish, they are actually a series of dates and coordinates that document tragedies of the last half century.  Some of the dates are prophesies yet to be fulfilled.

John is then thrust into the task of trying to make sense of it all.  He tries to convince others of what is happening, and he tries to stop the tragedies yet to come.  In the process he discovers mysterious strangers are stalking him and his son, and he learns that the late Lucinda’s daughter and grandaughter are suffering through much the same things as he and Caleb.

Knowing has an atmosphere of mystery that saves it from collapse.  The movie is stylistically disjointed.  And Nicolas Cage gives an uneven performance that took me out of the movie a couple of times, but he does what he can when he is saddled with some of Knowing‘s weaker moments.  Parts of it feel cobbled together from other movies.

It falls somewhere between the War of the Worlds remake and Signs.  It’s good, but if you can get past the lip service and polish it’s easy to see it could have been classic.

3.5 out of 5
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Miles Jackson is your typical carefree, widely feared, international terrorist walking the streets of New Orleans with the FBI tracking his movements in an undercover, clandestine, sting that he knows all about.  There’s a double cross at the beginning of 12 Rounds perpetrated by Miles against another criminal in league with the feds that sends the feds scrambling blind while Miles is casually escaping, stopping to smell the roses along the way.

Enter John Cena as New Orleans Police Officer Danny Fisher.  He and his partner stop Miles and his fiance for questioning (because Danny recognized her from the video footage provided by the feds).  Miles gets gun happy, shoots Danny’s partner in the ass.  Miles and his woman race off, and Danny, because he is John Cena, chases them on foot cutting across lawns and taking shortcuts through houses.  Believe it or not, Danny catches up to them and stops them with a runaway boat (I know, I know, a boat).  Miles and his girl try to get away, resulting in his honey getting run down right in the street by a speeding motorist (in a truck, not a boat).  Miles promises Danny that he’ll not forget this injustice that has been committed against him.

Jump to a year later, Danny and his partner are detectives and Miles breaks out of prison and kidnaps Danny’s woman.  In order to save her, Danny runs all over New Orleans with the help of the fire department, the police department, and the FBI, narrowly surviving one trap after another.  Miles is pissed and really wants revenge.

12 Rounds is sluggish, unexciting, dull, and ultimately stupid.  Stupid I can handle, stupid I can accept.  But it’s just not fun.  It’s eleven rounds and about eighty-something minutes too long.  Director Renny Harlin is unable to recapture his glory days of Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger (hell, I even liked Mindhunters and The Exorcist:  The Beginning).  This is a sad knock-off of the Die Hard franchise.  It’s also a sad imitation of an action film; it does everything bad.  All the standard notes are hit.  Again and again and again.  I mean 12 Rounds really beats a dead horse.  The crazy, sloppy, camera work beats it doubly.

And no one is believable in the slightest.  No one playing a cop, no one playing a fed, no one.  John Cena has the potential to be a great action star, if he can find his Terminator or his Commando.  In this movie he draws attention for all the wrong reasons.  His charisma is sadly absent.

1.5 out of 5
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Check out the video below. In it you will clearly see the dark silhouette of someone moving from one room to the other. Fake? Real? Camera trick? Reflection?

A Boeing 777 lands at JFK International Airport and shuts down.  It goes deathly quiet and dark.  The shades are drawn on all the windows and the crew does not respond to air traffic control.  Police arrive and they eventually board the plane to discover the passengers dead.  A special branch of the CDC, the Canary Project, lead by Dr. Eph Goodweather, is called to investigate.  Goodweather and his team discover four survivors, hanging onto life by a prayer.  They also find a large black box, a coffin, in cargo, and ultraviolet light shows something sprayed all over the interior of the plane.

The survivors don’t remember anything, once their health improve, and the matter is more puzzling when the other hundred and some odd bodies go missing from the morgue.  Aged Harlem pawnbroker Abraham Setrakian knows the culprit behind it all.  It’s a creature he has hunted since his days as a prisoner of a Nazi execution camp.  When he confronts Eph, spouting facts about the bodies he shouldn’t know, he is quickly arrested.  After Eph is made suspect and has to work outside the law and the system, he teams with Setrakian to stop the plague of vampirism that is spreading throughout Manhattan.

Written Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, The Strain isn’t the innovative, end-all-be-all, vampire novel the world has been awaiting.  It’s a good book, but is hampered with by-the-numbers plotting and cliches, e.g. Eph’s frame up and dismissal from the CDC.  It’s those predictabilities that make The Strain frustrating.  From this first book of a trilogy, I wasn’t terribly impressed, and it doesn’t make waiting for the second book in 2010 unbearable.

The Strain‘s vampires are interesting, but not as interesting as the vampires of Del Toro’s films Cronos and Blade II.  The vampirism as virus is good, but Ray Garton did it better with werewolves with his novel Ravenous.  The opening with the airplane is good, and there are some other creepy little scenes scattered throughout.  And there is some interesting bits of info about rats to found.  A lot of this book is similar to Stoker’s Dracula, an obvious comparison, but it’s a credit to the authors that it doesn’t feel like cribbing, but more like respect and honor.  The terrors in the suburbs and side streets give it a small town horror feel in the middle of the big city.

It would probably be better to review the trilogy as a whole.  The Strain is basically just a set up for the next chapter in the series.  A good effort, but not that impressive.

3.5 out of 5
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Of all the Russell Mulcahy-directed films I’ve seen, I think his best are The Shadow and Resident Evil:  Extinction.  Argue amongst yourselves.

Sadly, I don’t think good old Russell will be back for Resident Evil:  Afterlife.  Yes, I know, it upsets me too since Extinction was the best of the trilogy.  And I’m not being sarcastic; I didn’t care for the first two.  Honest. I was really disappointed by the first one. It just wasn’t Resident Evil to me.

Afterlife has a projected release for September 2010.

P.S.– I’m not a Highlander fan either.  If there can be only one, I hope it’s The Shadow.

And the job goes to…Nimrod Antal.  He directed the Kate Beckinsale/Luke Wilson winner Vacancy.  Yeah, this, uh, oh man God help us all. 

You know, Vacancy was okay up until the ending which completely sucked, but surely that doesn’t qualify Nimrod for the job of the new Predator.  You know, Freddy Got Fingered had a couple of good jokes in it, so how about Tom Green directing the new Alien movie.  Or Uwe Boll?  Yes, let’s get Uwe Boll on this mutha-scratcher.

What has the world come to?

Scarce begins right off with a man running through the winter woods naked and covered in blood.  Who among us hasn’t run through the winter woods naked and covered in blood?  But that’s a story for another time.  Suffice it to say, naked man is really the lucky one- he dies early and doesn’t have to watch this piece of crap.

Three friends on a snowboarding trip in Colorado are traveling back home to New Jersey and get sidetracked by a winter snowstorm in Pennsylvania.  They stop at roadside greasy spoon diner to eat food that sucks and then ask for directions back to the interstate.  They, naturally, receive bad directions and crash their car on a snowy, deserted, back road.

The guy with the broken leg stays in the car while the other two go for help.  They meet a creepy man in a cabin in the woods who agrees to help them.  They discover their friend is gone; creepy hick suggests a nice local stopped to help him.  The two travelers, in a moment of clear brilliance, decide to stay the night with creepy hick who agrees to take them to the good Samaritan’s house to find their friend.  Once the blizzard blows over, of course.

We all know where this is going.  The backwoods rednecks are cannibals, and the only way this movie would be good is if the opening credits came alive and ate the rest of the movie that followed them.

From start to finish, this movie is bad.  It’s not funny during the attempts at humor.  It is funny at times when watching these people trying to act, but that delight quickly dies and it becomes nothing more than sad and sadder.  This is a gore film for gore hounds, with no redeeming qualities this side of eternity.  I give it half a point for the bad acting.

Gore and torture may be the new porn when it comes to horror, but you have to really be hard up for Scarce to get you off.

0.5 out of 5
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Television reporter Angela Vidal and her cameraman Scott Percival are assigned to cover a night in the life of the L.A. Fire Department.  They are set to shadow two firemen, Jake and Fletcher.  They tour the firehouse, they see how the men and women live, they see the showers, the racquetball court, the sleeping quarters.  They slide down the pole, they play basketball, the make wagers on who can get into the gear fast enough, Fletcher or Angela.  It’s another routine night, even when they get a routine 911 call to an old apartment building.

When they arrive on-site, two policemen are waiting.  An old woman, Mrs. Espinoza, has been heard screaming.  They break down the door to find the kindly old lady agitated, bloodied, and foaming at the mouth.  Despite all the attempts of the rescue workers, nothing calms her.  Then she bites one the police officers.

Before anything else can be done, the CDC arrives, quarantines the whole damn place, and won’t let anybody out.  Snipers are posted on the buildings across the street, and armed guards stand watch outside.  Steel shutters are put in place and the building is sealed up tightly.  It’s safe to say everything that happens next is a downward spiral.

When Quarantine first came out, I had no real interest in seeing it, even though I am a Jennifer Carpenter fan.  It looked kind of stupid.  I want to give a shout out to my cousin, the Big D, for telling me to just watch this film.  Quarantine is one of the best horror movies I’ve seen all year.

This movie slowly escalates.  And by the final scenes, it is truly intense.  One of the problems I had with Romero’s Diary of the Dead, and other POV films, is that the cameraman is happy to sit back and scream and not get involved.  That doesn’t happen here.  Scott is ready, willing, and able, to kick ass.

The movie does feel like a documentary at times, and the tension is palpable.  Quarantine is far from ordinary.  The actors bump into the camera, people fall apart, people feel real.  And the ending is killer.  This is a great movie.

5 out of 5
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Hello, how is everyone?  Great.  It sure is hot out there.  What’s that you ask, how hot is it?  It’s so hot I saw two fire hydrants fighting over a dog.

Moving right along…

I posted a new story, ‘The Ruins In Summer’.  It’s different.  It didn’t turn out quite the way I thought it would.  But that’s how these things are sometimes.  But there it is.  Read it, tell me what you think, if you liked it or didn’t.  It’s kind of one of those things that it is what it is.  Yeah.  So.  *fading away in awkward silence*

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Alphonse is a driving a van through Mexico.  His fellow travellers are cameraman Steve, stoned Jimbo, Jimbo’s sister Debbie, her friend Dallas, and the unconscious Daisy.  Alphonse is the director and co-star of the amateur porn film they are going to make.  Jimbo had the van, which Alphonse needed, and though he doesn’t think it’s cool his sister is doing porn, he got stoned and woke up on the road.  Daisy…well she stays asleep.  And Steve, he’s a good natured guy, and Alphonse thinks that since he is of Mexican heritage he should know his way around Mexico.  Steve tells him, “I’m from Seattle.”

The gang miss their exit and find themselves driving through the middle of nowhere far from the “one freeway”.  They find an old gas station, the kind you know isn’t going to have anything you need other than a creepy local who warns you to stay away from someplace that’s on the shortcut he tells you to take.  Sure enough, the gang find themselves at the ghost town of La Sangre De Dios, which means The Blood of Christ.  As Steve informs the gang, it’s where the Mexican government exiled El Mascarado after he went crazy and began killing people in and out of the wrestling ring.

Alphonse decides the ghost town will be perfect place to film scenes for their porn film.  First rule of filmmaking:  location, location, location.  Second rule of filmmaking:  check your set for any crazed masked wrestlers who like to rip peoples’ faces off.

Two words describe this movie:  asno agradable.  There’s a certain level of fun to be had with Wrestlemaniac, but it doesn’t go full throttle exploitation Tijuana style the way it wants to.  Or the way I wanted it to.  It’s entertaining, it has some funny stuff, and interesting ideas and ambitions.  Overall, it’s a so-so gore skip through the tulips.  The town looks great though, and Rey Misterio as the crazed baddy is pretty good.  I just wished they would have done more with it.  It’s rather softcore when it should be hardcore.

2.5 out of 5
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Get ready for a Rob Zombie double punch.  Halloween II bows in theaters on August 28th, but Zombie’s long in the works animated WTF-trip The Haunted World of El Superbeasto will finally be seeing the light of day.  It is available for pre-order now and you can run out and catch it on September 22nd.

It stars the voice talents of Paul Giamatti, Geoffrey Lewis, Sheri Moon Zombie, Danny Trejo, Sid Haig, Ken Foree, Bill Moseley, and a host of others.  The Haunted World of El Superbeasto follows the adventures of Mexican luchador El Superbeasto in the world of Monsterland fighting the evil Dr. Satan.

Zombie had this to say about the film some time back:

“It’s a beautiful-looking movie.  All these animators from studios like Disney came to work on it, and [they're thrilled because] they get to work on something filthy. It’s probably rated XXX now, but we’ll have to cut it back to an R.”