ZOMBIELAND (2009)

"I'm in Garland, Texas. It may look like zombies destroyed it, but that's actually just Garland."

This movie was disappointing. I watch a lot of zombie movies and read a lot of zombie novels (go buy "The Rising" by Brian Keene right now) and for some stupid reason I actually thought, based on the trailer and word-of-mouth, that this movie was going to have some badass, high-budget zombie action in it. Instead, ZOMBIELAND is a poorly written story about a dweeb, a semi-hot chick, the semi-hot chick's little sister and Woody Harrelson on a road trip across America after the zombie apocalypse.

My biggest problem with the movie are the lame jokes. I have no problem with a comedy set in the zombie world (THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD is one of my favorite movies of all time), but at least be funny! My second biggest problem is the lack of zombies. For a world taken over by zombies there's not many of them around. At the very beginning there's a little zombie action, but it's silly and played off more as a lame joke. It's like the zombies are just a nuisance instead of an actual threat. Then, for a long period in the middle there's only probably 6 zombies for like 45 minutes. Another problem here is how smug and slick this movie thought it was with the high speed camera action shots and the annoying "Rules" popping up all over the joint non-stop. They thought they were being clever, but after the 5th time it was just annoying.

I give the movie a little credit for at least trying, but it's still a failure. It felt like the filmmakers were trying to cash in on the zombie fad without actually being zombie fans...kinda like Christian music is always a watered-down, soulless rip-off of popular music. If you want my advise, just skip this dead duck and watch INFESTATION instead. I actually like that movie: the geek endearing, the story was interesting, the action was more entertaining and the hot chick was way hotter. Plus, there was a spider-dog!

Part 2 - Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)

LADY VENGEANCE (2005)

As far as the Vengeance Trilogy goes...OLDBOY is the best, followed by SYMPATHY FOR MR VENGEANCE and this one third.  The story was too slow and the vengeance was weak as fuck. Visually though the film was great to look at!

The story jumps around back and forth and all over the joint, so I'll just give you the simple version and say a woman served 13 years in prison for the murder of a child she didn't kill. Now she's out and she wants revenge. She gets it, but it slooooowly. At least in SFMV you had a bunch of stabbing and that great baseball bat the the skull scene, in OLDBOY you had the tooth-pulling and the legendary hammer scene, but in SFLV there's really nothing that stands out. It's a good movie, but I found it overly boring and nowhere near as exciting as I had expected from Chan-wook Park.

Good film and definitely worth watch, but I found it to be a minor drag. Honestly the highlight of the entire movie was seeing the brief cameo by Kang-ho Song and that other dude, the guy who farted on his mother in THIRST. Check out Park's other stuff first.

Part 1 - Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)
Part 2 - Oldboy (2003)

THE PRIVATE EYES (1981)

There's been a murder at the Morley Manor and it appears that the victim, Lord Morley himself asked that detectives Don Knotts and Tim Conway come solve his murder. How can it be that the murder victim is the one who contacted Scotland Yard? Kinda strange huh? Well, not as strange as the cast of characters that make up the servants and family that live in the mansion. I won't go through them all, but my favorite is the butler who murdered his wife's 13 lovers and now anytime he hears the word "murder" he goes into a violent frenzy until you kick him in the balls!

Naturally, both Knotts and Conway are idiots (Knotts thinks he's smart and Conway has a knack for inventing useless items, like the "Time Gun" that goes off every hour), but despite this they still somehow come across some clues. Will they solve the murder? Or figure out who's the hooded figure going around killing all the servants?! Well, you're just going to have to find out for yourself.

I might be biased towards this film since I fell in love with it as a child and watched it a million times, but I genuinely think it's a funny film and well worth checking out especially if you enjoy silly mystery comedies.  Highly recommended.

The audio commentary by Don Knotts is also worth a listen. He tells some pretty interesting stories about filming this movie in such a huge mansion and even says the script was written in two days, but I find that very hard to believe.