Saturday, September 24, 2011

URBAN LEGEND (1998)

Predictable, but enjoyable late-90's SCREAM clone.

There's a killer stalking a small group of college students, but instead of just hacking and slashing, the killer uses different urban legends like calling from inside the house, killer hiding in the back seat and headlight flashing to kill his victims. URBAN LEGEND isn't groundbreaking, but watching it again I got a little nostalgic for the simpler 90's, pre-SAW slasher films filled with cheesy alt-butt rock, no cell phones and funny looking internet sites...then again if you'd ask me what I thought of this film back in 1998 I probably would have said "It sucked balls." Oh well, I guess I'm getting old.

Zero gore, zero nudity, nearly all bloodless kills, low body count, 90's fashions, Alicia Witt looking hot as fuck, Jared Leto looking dreamy as fuck, Tara Reid looking only half busted, Danielle Harris dressed up as a Hollywood version of a goth (mmmmmm), Brad Dourif cameo, Freddy Krueger as a professor. For a horror movie, URBAN LEGEND is pretty shitty, but for entertainment it's passable and I got some good laughs out of it. Worth wasting your time with if it comes on cable and you're too drunk/high to change the channel.

Part 2 - Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000)
Part 3 - Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005)

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

LIMITLESS (2011)

Bradley Cooper is a loser. He wants to be a writer but he sucks, his girlfriend dumped him because he sucks, even his landlord hates him because he sucks. Then one day he runs into a dubious ex-friend who turns him onto a pill that will kick start his mind into using its full potential. He takes the pill and it's fucking amazing. Suddenly he can remember everything he's ever read or heard and thinks at a million miles per hour. He's super confident and can soak up knowledge almost instantly. He's like a superhero, he can even solve a Rubik's Cube...just using his dick. No hands. In 4 seconds.  That actually didn't happen.

Then comes the crash and he's a big dummy again. A dummy that remembers what it was like to be a god. He goes to the dealer, but some bad stuff goes down and Bradley barely gets out alive...but with a whole stash of pills! Boo-yah! He starts popping pills left and right and living the life of a super genius, but who are all these mysterious dudes trailing him? Hmmm. There's a few other side stories and that's where LIMITLESS derails. Instead of going one direction and kicking ass, it goes four directions and stalls out in all four.

Personality I would have been happy just seeing Bradley go all out with the pills, but instead I was bored with the stuff about the loan shark angle, the evil corporation angle, the side effects angle and the other users angle. Hint: I don't give a fuck. I just want to see a dude be a super genius, not getting in fights with mob enforcers.

The other thing that bothered me was it's was all very tame. They briefly implied that he was fucking random women, but they never showed anything. And worst of all he never really used his new found brain power for anything cool. Yeah, he made some money on the stock market. Big deal.

Worth a single viewing, but this movie already needs to be remade into a darker, more imaginative version. Oh yeah, and please don't use that over-saturated picture effect. It looks like shit.

Monday, September 19, 2011

ARMAGEDDON (1998)

A massive asteroid, named Dottie, is headed directly for Earth and our only hope is that two super Space Shuttles can take a group of oil drilling badasses up into space, slingshot them around the moon and land on Dottie's ass so they can give her a nuclear enema that'll blow that bitch out of the sky. Yasujiro Ozu it's not.

Nope, it's Michael Bay. So check your brain at the door and get ready for some cheesy, goofy bullshit filled with helicopters flying in front of sunsets, explosions, slow motion overdose, frantic editing, rugged saintly-like tough guys, product placement, camera spin, Aerosmith power ballad overdose and some of the worse dialogue ever written. "Miss Stamper? Colonel Willie Sharp, United States Air Force, ma'am. Requesting permission to shake the hand of the daughter of the bravest man I've ever met." Ooowwwch! That line just gave me instant terminal butt cancer. Better go watch DEADLY PREY.

For a 90's disaster movie, ARMAGEDDON is about as big and dumb as it gets.  It's awesome! The disaster is "a global killer", the characters are bigger than life and the director has no shame. One of the biggest guilty pleasure movies of the 90's.

Little known (untrue) fact: In the unproduced ARMAGEDDON 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO, literally 1 second after everybody finished hugging each other that the end of the first film, everybody on Earth immediately went back to hating the living fuck out of each other for totally unimportant reasons like skin colour, money, genitals and imaginary creators.