A carnival of technology

These children are home alone, too. But their parents won’t be coming back.

Rated R for horror violence and language.

Starring a combine and that filter from Predator.

Viewed 2005-07-07 by David, Susi, David, Mike, and Dane

Corn: America’s true amber waves. It’s in nearly everything we eat, as starch, sweetener, or oil, and it sees some popularity as a fuel source, both in the form of ethanol and biodiesel. Also, it can host a deadly mold that causes children to form a corn-worshiping cult and kill their parents. Yay, corn!

Children of the Corn II was oddly hard to find. When taken as a whole, one expects the Children of the Corn series to be horrible: it’s a seven-movie long horror series with Stephen King involved. However, even given these low expectations for movies 3-7, every movie except the second is still in print. For number two, I’m not sure if it was even ever put on DVD; we had to settle for a poorly-made pirate version that I suspect was manufactured in Hong Kong. The compression was a bit bad, but at least it was in English.

Notable in Children of the Corn II is that after watching the movie, we’re not sure who the protagonist was. I remember some of the characters—there was the single-dad tabloid reporter looking for a story on the corn children, bravely facing ridicule from more legitimate reporters and disinterest from his son; there was the rebellious son who became entangled with the evil children; there was the teenaged son’s big-breasted love interest; there was an Indian guy; there was some lady who wore shoulder pads with her t-shirt; and there was the old lady who tried to move her house. All of these people were threatened by the children in some form, but, in true horror movie fashion, none of them received much character development beyond the summaries I just provided. I suppose that one could say that the plot actually centers around the cult of corn, following the religious fervor of the kid with the creepy eyes (Isaac? Jedediah?) as he bravely stood up against the tyranny of adulthood, but the thing that kills people is never the protagonist in horror movies, and this movie isn’t nearly artsy enough to try something like that.

Of course, what would character development be without bad acting, forced dialog, and a painful, tedious plot? They talked about corn a lot. Adults are bad. Corn, corn, corn. The corn tells us to kill our parents. Let’s go back out to the corn; there aren’t any adults there. That’s about it. The lack of stupid crossfade wipes and stupid camera angles were an improvement over Battlefield Earth, but nothing blows up in Children of the Corn II. This is an unfortunate missed opportunity. Corn is such a versatile plant that they should have easily been able to find some excuse to make it explode.

Prepare to become obsolete

Rated R for nonstop strong violence, and for language and nudity.
Rated O by the USCCB (link)
Given a final score of 23 with an influence density of 2.21 by CAPAlert (link)

Starring Michael Jai White standing around a lot in a tight shirt, Bill Goldberg adding his delicate touch to the collective oeuvre of wreslters-cum-actors, and some Belgian guy.

Viewed 2005-06-16 by Susi, Mike, Dane, David, and David.

Although the idea of a third sequel to a Van Damme movie sounds like the perfect film for Golan-Globus/Cannon, it’s not a Golan-Globus movie. Van Damme came on to the scene too late for more than a couple of series starters, like Bloodsport and Cyborg, but it’s good to see that the Golan-Globus ideal of crappy action movie sequels carries on. Universal Soldier: The Return is one of those sequels.

I don’t think that any of us had seen all—or perhaps any—of the previous Universal Soldier movies, or at least we couldn’t remember them, so there were a couple of elements of this movie that, even with the unsubtle recapitulations, were left unexplained due to our ignorance. The key issue was whether or not Van Damme’s character was an undead abomination. I mean, he died in the first one, right? They talked about how he used to be a Universal Soldier, and part of that process involves being dead, so I’m not really sure how the reversal would have worked. I tried to derive the plots of the other three movies from the single sentence plot summaries on IMdb, but all I could gather from that is that Universal Soldier III appears to be the same movie as its successor.

What makes Universal Soldier: The Return a bad movie is the same thing that makes most bad action movies bad: it does a good job of shooting things and blowing things up but at the expense of a coherent story. If you don’t try to keep track of what’s going on, it might be ok. For example, in the beginning of the movie, they can’t blow up the Unisol compound after all the Universal Soldiers are taken over by the evil self-aware computer (when will people learn to stop making self-aware computers?) because it would release all kinds of biochemical weapons into the air, but at the end, after all the soldiers are alreay out anyhow, the only answer is to blow the thing up. I found this a bit confusing. I also found it confusing that no one was ever thrown into the big tanks of acid. I’ll bet that this movie wouldn’t even be on the list if only they had done something with all that acid.

In all, things blew up, which was cool, but I would not call the violence “nonstop,” nor was it always “strong.” Regardless, they should have used the MPAA rating as the tagline.

Want to see a really killer website? It’s the last site you’ll ever see.

Rated R for violence including grisly images of torture, nudity and language.
Given a final score of 9 with an influence density of 3.89 by CAPAlert (link)

Starring some people playing incredibly unmemorable characters.

Viewed 2005-06-09 by David, David, Susi, and Mike.

Horror movies are a bit of a peculiar genre. Most movies attempt to evoke some sort of emotional response, whether that response is sadness, laughter, or fear, but fear seems to be the most difficult of these. You only need to tell a joke to get an audience to laugh, or convince them to care about the characters to make them cry, but to make them truly scared you need to pull the audience fully into the world of the movie. The thrill of the events on the screen is lost if the viewer is not convinced on some level that those events are truly happening before his eyes. People enjoy a good scare, though, so movie producers, responding to the public’s call, have left no shortage of horror movies for both the cinema and television. As a result, many fans of this genre find that low expectations are the best route, instead enjoying the movies for the often formulaic structure, for the poor acting, for the nonsensical plot, and, if the viewer is lucky, for an occasional thrill. The Bottom 100 list has its share of horror movies, and FearDotCom is the first.

I never saw the The Ring, but, since I wasn’t living under a rock in 2002, I’m familiar with at least it’s basic outline: there’s a video tape that, if you watch it, ensures that you will die in a week, and some creepy dead girl is involved. FearDotCom was released first, yet, even though I can’t find the dates for when either movie was originally announced, FearDotCom feels like the ripoff. Instead of a video on an outdated medium that kills you in seven days, somehow involving some dead girl, FearDotCom has a website that kills you in two days, somehow involving some dead woman. I assume the website was supposed to be very hip, since it didn’t look like a website that anyone would be able to actually use: all the shots of the horribly named feardotcom.com had a full-screen animation with a low framerate, and the web browser’s interface involved typing complete sentences, oddly reminiscent of an Infocom text adventure. Whether this website was an attempt to one-up the VHS of The Ring is irrelevant, though; the point is that there’s a website, and, if you visit it, you die.

Beyond those core details I can’t say that I really knew what was going on. There was some guy who I guess was a surgeon running a snuff film website that was maybe different from feardotcomdotcom. There was some creepy ghost girl with a ball that I think was the same as the woman on the killer website. There wasn’t a whole lot of light. I think people were supposed to die of their worst fears, which means that the smoker’s worst fear was cigarettes, and the lead detective character had some issues with hookers and homeless people.

I was somewhat hoping for a Hamlet ending, since that would have at least created an interesting event for a bunch of characters I didn’t care at all about. Checking IMdb to see if the aforementioned lead detective has a name I was supposed to remember (he doesn’t), I noticed that the featured trivia is that one of the characters, Polidori, is named after the guy who wrote The Vampyre, the first English vampire story, written at the same rainy Genevan villa that brought you part of Byron’s “Mazeppa” and the more memorable Frankenstein. I have no idea what significance there is in naming a character after a Victorian physician to idle rich. Also, the name alone was not nearly enough to figure out just which character they were talking about. The description of “doctor” didn’t help, since the only doctors I remember were women and the one guy they called “The Doctor,” who IMdb says was not named Polidori. Even knowing what the actor looks like, I had to use google to find out that it was the guy who gets hit by a train in the beginning. There were no vampires in the movie.

First off, you should know that I own this movie on DVD. When I saw it in the theater I found it relatively entertaining, which just goes to show you how WRONG first impressions can be. I laughed myself silly this time around. I had completely forgotten about the star wipes (btw, doesn’t Lucas have a patent on those things?) It’s unecessarily long, and it’s the kind of length you feel deep down in the pit of your stomach…that queasy, uncomfortable feeling one gets when you watch a movie you know people spent millions of dollars to make and then probably drank themselves to death after it bombed.

At least shit blows up. That gives the movie an automatic 2 points, especially since these are expensive explosions. Unfortunately, the addition of a bloated John Travolta automatically deducts 5 points from ANY movie, so my final verdict is a -3/10.

Mac & Me is a classic example of 80’s pulp: it’s an obvious ripoff of another, better movie, right down to the product placements; it has a differently-abled character to make the cast more diverse, but presented in such a way to make it totally meaningless; and the plot completely stops about two-thirds of the way in for a dance scene. Mac, the Mysterious Alien Creature, attempts to capture the charm of E.T., but fails to do so from the very start with two very unfortunate features: he’s hideous and he’s dumb. The aliens have a more human appearance, possibly to make the costumes cheaper, and the result is a grotesque caricature of E.T. The unchanging goofy expressions permanently plastered on their rubber faces does nothing to make them more appealing. The movie opens with one of these monstrous members of Mac’s family walking through the barren landscape of Mars and sticking a straw into the ground for water. Apparently this comprises most of their days. These primitive E.T. rejects can’t even get to Earth without the help of a NASA rover.

In all, the memorable parts of Mac & Me are all accidental. Wheelchair-kid falling off the cliff was a good scene. The unending use of Coca-Cola was amusing, right up to the scene where Coke saves the aliens. The explosion towards the end was kind of cool, but confusing, since the building they blew up, unlike the gas station next to it, didn’t seem particularly explody. And, of course, the almost threatening “We’ll be back!” at the end was hilarious, since they almost certainly will not.

Oh holy jesus. I knew not to expect much from an obvious ET ripoff, but this was much more painful than I could have imagined. The alien suits were really creepy. Wrinkly skin, belly pooch ala starving Ethiopians, puffed out cheeks, and enternally pursed mouth-hole. This is the stuff of nightmares, I tell you, and we’re supposed to think they’re cute? Seeing them dressed up in human clothing at the end was the most disturbing thing of all.

This is pretty much your standard “kid and friends help wacky alien/animal/fairy thingie find family/home/dream car” fare. Only on some kind of psychoactive drug. Highlights include a sing and dance number in McDonald’s, useless 80’s power ballads, a kid in a wheelchair going for a jog with his mom, and shameless product placement. I give this one a 1/10, purely because no one ever drank anything other than Coke.

How two boys worlds apart became the best of friends

Rated PG.

Starring a bunch of people never heard from again, some freaky alien puppets and suits, and a billion corporate sponsors.

Viewed 2005-05-17 by dshea, dcantrell, mimamura, susi, and dane.

What starts out as a modern-day Grapes of Wrath adaption turns it to a whirlwind of plot holes and disjoint scenes. The family is moving from the dustbowl that is Chicago to California because mom has landed a dream job at Sears. Back up a little more to get the aliens to Earth. NASA sent a probe to a planet to apparently collect things. The probe sucks the aliens through its vacuum hose (we learn here that they have no endoskeleton) and starts to malfunction, so it launches itself off the planet and heads back to Earth. OK, so we have aliens on Earth now.

At NASA they manage to break out and run all over the place. Most of them head to the windfarm in Livermore, CA (probably) and the tiny nameless one heads to the other side of suburbia to look for a family. Hilarity ensues.

The acting is mostly absent, but that’s to be expected with kids. It’s obvious the goal of this movie was to promote ice-cold delicious Coca-Cola and hearty nutritious McDonald’s meals. The kids’ lines are forced and timing is off. Not to mention to absolutely scary scene involving the wheelchair kid rolling off a cliff and in to water about 50-100 feet below. This is a family movie? What were they thinking?

Most of the rest of the movie involves fish-out-of-water scenes. They take the alien to McDonald’s where there’s a huge birthday party going on. The alien family goes to the grocery store. And so on.

Some confusing things about the movie… why does moving in to a new house involving using power tools? Not just drills, but saws and such? The alien planet is a wasteland, like Utah, but the tiny alien brings nature in to the house which one would guess is his attempt to make it more like home. But his home didn’t have trees or shrubbery.

I give this movie a 1/10 because it was better than Cat in the Hat, but not by much. Nothing happened and it ended with a giant, “what the hell?”

Five thoughts that came to mind while watching this movie:

• What’s going on?
• What year is it supposed to be?
• ACTING!
• The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has more gold than Fort Knox.
• “And then star wipe to…”

This movie blew. The plot sucked. The acting sucked. And that wipe. Every scene transition used that damn dissolve wipe. It was like watching Unsolved Mysteries without Robert Stack’s narration. Oh, and without a freaking plot.

I give this movie 2/10 because it had that crazy guy from Waterworld that wanted resin and because the boots the aliens wore looked like something out of Final Fantasy <pick your favorite number>.

I thought Soul Plane was funny. It reminded me of Airplane! Leslie Neilsen movies, which I also enjoy. The prop jokes were endless and it’s the kind of movie that you could watch again and still find funny (again, a lot like Airplane!). I particularly enjoyed the low class section of the plane. It’s called low class instead of coach. The overhead storage bins are like bus station lockers that you put a quarter in to get the key out. There are Colt 45 ads lining the wall just under the lockers. At the very back of the plane they don’t even have seats, just subway-style overhead hand holds.

A movie like this isn’t complete without dick and fart jokes. There are plenty of those. In fact, the key plot element that gets the movie going involves the protagonist getting his ass stuck in an airplane toilet.

This movie definitely has a target audience. People that enjoy slapstick will find this movie enjoyable. It’s too bad that it made it on the bottom 100 list. There are plenty of worse movies.

I give this movie 7/10 because it could do with a bit less sex humor and drug humor. But that’s just me. It’s still a funny movie.

Prepare for battle

Rated PG-13 for intense sci-fi action.
Rated A-III by the USCCB (link)
Given a final score of 62 with an influence density of 1.16 by CAPAlert (link)

Staring that guy from Grease, that religious dude in Saving Private Ryan, and the black guy in Bloodsport (the guy chasing Van Damme, not the other one).

Viewed 2005-05-05 by dshea, dcantrell, mike, and susi.

Battlefield Earth feels like a high-budget film produced by a high school drama class. It has big characters, big, important ideas, big acting and big screen wipes at the end of every single scene. Seriously, it’s like they put the film together using the video editor in a library. The plot is horrible, and the only reason this forgotten dime-store science fiction novel was ever made into a movie is because the author founded a financially successful religion. I don’t really care about whatever Scientologist undertones may or may not exist in this movie—one of the great things about this country is that everyone is free to believe any damn fool thing they want—but the story is really just dumb.

I’ve never read anything by L. Ron Hubbard, but I suspect that his writing is a lot like that of Kilgore Trout, the writer of pulp science fiction in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. Large aliens with inconsistent, vaguely British accents have taken over Earth on behalf of the big evil alien corporation, enslaved the remnants of humanity, and are in the process of mining Earth for its gold. The symbolism in the movie hits you like a punch to the gut all the way up to the heart-stirring climax where the humans prevail through the use of mathematics, the founding ideals of America, and a bunch of Army equipment that somehow still works after 1000 years and that they were able to learn to use in about a week. I’m not sure if the aliens’ dreadlocks were meant to be symbolic, but it’s a lot more funny if you think that they are. The oddly crooked camera angles may have meant something, too, but I couldn’t figure out what. Ultimately, though, it’s the scene wipes that drive the movie. Fade out sound, still frame, wipe from center into moving scene. Every single time.