At some point the question I have to ask myself is, why do I watch this stuff? What am I hoping to get out of it? How could this possibly be anything but throwing away two precious hours of my life? Do I consider myself a 'genre' fan? Well, certainly I used to be. And with the current bumper crop of horror films I guess I have been interested in seeing what's going on, what's new, who's shaking things up.
I saw Saw, or I've seen Saw, which came on like a clarion call to fans of lurid, sadistic, nasty-ass film fans everyone that their favorite genre had just been taken off life-support and given a new lease. Ok, it had an interesting premise involving a killer who does not kill his victims per se, but forces them to kill in order to survive. And by not killing or refusing to kill, they inadvertently set in to motion their own demise. Blah, blah, blah, there is a lot of yelling, screaming, crying, and grotesque set-pieces all leading to one of the most absurd examples of the currently-in-vogue-and-all-too-obligatory-required-expected-device: the twist ending . (you can almost hear the buzzing among horror fans: "Is there a twist?" "What's the twist?" "No twist?" "I'm not going.")
Anyway, House of Wax bears no relationship with the 1953 Vincent Price classic except one of the baddies is named Vincent. Quel homage! The other bad guy is Bo and there's some "back-story" about them having been born Siamese twins and separated by their father, the doctor, employing some "radical procedure" while mom stayed at home and got involved with building wax figures. Yawn! Soooo typical. As for the rest of the plot-points let's go to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre blueprint which requires that six 20-something idiots travel together, get lost on some back roads that only exist in shlock and begin to snoop around when all signs seem to indicate that they should get back in their cars and leave.
In all fairness the titular house of wax, which coincidentally is literally a wax house, is fairly impressive. But why it never apparently suffered from waxus-meltus-ona-hottus-dayus is anyone's guess.
House of Wax, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, rolls along o.k. without really providing anything new to the genre. For me, as soon as the six doofus idiots were introduced I began to moan audibly. I felt forced into playing the "that guy's obviously not going to make it, that guy's toast, Paris Hilton? No way she'll make it" game.
I give this piece of earwax a nearly empty box of Q-Tip swabs.
BTW, there's no twist. And the people you thought would buy it, do.
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Thursday, January 05, 2006
What I Went to the Movie Theater to See in 2005
Well, looking back, these are the films I actually went to the movieplex to see:
Wallace & Grommit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit: far and away one of the best animated features of all time and one of the greatest laugh-riot films ever. The only person laughing harder than me was another dad three rows up. When the lights went on, turned out he was none other than Adam Wilcox, City News writer and fellow Happy Farmer bandmate. I knew I liked that guy.
Godzilla Final Wars: the Godzilla flick that actually dares to end civilization as we've never known it. The big guy looks great, Gigan with chainsaws is awesome, and the spikey-haired villain in the Matrix-leather duster does the best freak-out since Jack Nicholson in the Witches of Eastwick.
Pooh's Heffalump Movie: Sweet. Roy liked it. Actually I had no complaints about it. I miss the original voices but they did a good job nonetheless.
Shrek 2: I can't say I'm a big fan of the Shrek movies. This was Roy's first venture into a darkened movie theater and that alone made the experience memorable.
The Bourne Supremacy: very edgy sequel to The Bourne Identity with Matt Damon's character becoming more menacing with each frame. I could have done without the rapid edit-till-you-puke style and the sound in the theater was horrendous: so loud the speakers were clipping. Very annoying. A good watch on DVD however. Oops, we saw that in '04. God, we're such lousy movie-goers...
That's it, folks. Hopefully next year we'll settle on a good babysitter and get out more. Truthfully, there really wasn't anything out that I felt compelled not to wait for the DVD release.
King Kong will have to wait for next year's selection. I will see that in the theater.
Wallace & Grommit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit: far and away one of the best animated features of all time and one of the greatest laugh-riot films ever. The only person laughing harder than me was another dad three rows up. When the lights went on, turned out he was none other than Adam Wilcox, City News writer and fellow Happy Farmer bandmate. I knew I liked that guy.
Godzilla Final Wars: the Godzilla flick that actually dares to end civilization as we've never known it. The big guy looks great, Gigan with chainsaws is awesome, and the spikey-haired villain in the Matrix-leather duster does the best freak-out since Jack Nicholson in the Witches of Eastwick.
Pooh's Heffalump Movie: Sweet. Roy liked it. Actually I had no complaints about it. I miss the original voices but they did a good job nonetheless.
Shrek 2: I can't say I'm a big fan of the Shrek movies. This was Roy's first venture into a darkened movie theater and that alone made the experience memorable.
The Bourne Supremacy: very edgy sequel to The Bourne Identity with Matt Damon's character becoming more menacing with each frame. I could have done without the rapid edit-till-you-puke style and the sound in the theater was horrendous: so loud the speakers were clipping. Very annoying. A good watch on DVD however. Oops, we saw that in '04. God, we're such lousy movie-goers...
That's it, folks. Hopefully next year we'll settle on a good babysitter and get out more. Truthfully, there really wasn't anything out that I felt compelled not to wait for the DVD release.
King Kong will have to wait for next year's selection. I will see that in the theater.
Monday, January 02, 2006
THE ISLAND (2005)
A random sampling of dialogue from "The Island":
Run! Run!
Go! Go! Go!
Get them! Don't let them get away!
How do you know what you're doing?
I don't know!
Hold on!
Look out!
Go! Go! Go!
Look out!
Directed by Michael Bay, I give The Island (2005) an oscar for best screenplay. Without giving anything away, let us pray this tripe never gets cloned.
Run! Run!
Go! Go! Go!
Get them! Don't let them get away!
How do you know what you're doing?
I don't know!
Hold on!
Look out!
Go! Go! Go!
Look out!
Directed by Michael Bay, I give The Island (2005) an oscar for best screenplay. Without giving anything away, let us pray this tripe never gets cloned.
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