Beyond Skyline
When I grabbed this at the dollar tree, I was certain that it would be a mockbuster. Some sort of parody or Asylum knock off that co-opted similar words and names, like Transmorphers… that sort of thing that they do. Imagine my shock to discover that Beyond Skyline is actually a real bona fide sequel to the 2010 film Skyline. I remember commercials for the movie, and thought it was interesting, but never made it out to see it. I don’t think too many other many other people did either, Skyline was a flop… Which would explain why it took seven years for them to cobble together any sort of a sequel. I had my doubts about going into this so cold, and wondered if there would be any problems watching the second movie before the first. Beyond Skyline begins with a cop (Frank Grillo) picking up his delinquent son at the police station, before boarding a subway home. That’s when the aliens arrive. This cryptic message is coming over the CB “don’t look at the light! Don’t look at the light!”. That’s pretty good advice, because the light turns people into zombies obsessed with reaching it. Aliens are happy to oblige, sucking dozens of people off into space.
OK, we have our premise. Looks like I didn’t need to watch that first movie after all.
Frank does his best to shepherd people through the subway tunnels in an attempt to escape the movie I assume that is going on above ground. It doesn’t work, though and ultimately he ends up on a spaceship with a few friends. 
While he’s there, he runs into a pregnant woman, just about to give birth. This is more than a little unusual considering that she’s about six months along, but the light apparently accelerates the pregnancy. In addition to sucking out the brains of their victims and placing them in biomechanical shells, the aliens also experiment and tinker with unborn children. It just so happens though, that the father of this child, Trent, managed to maintain some of his consciousness even after his brain had been plucked out of his dead body and tossed into an alien robot that looks like it’s straight out of Independence Day. He defended the baby, but now needs Frank to spirit it away. Grillo promises to take care of it and he and his friends get off the ship. Turns out, the ships moving this entire time and now they’re in Laos, finding themselves in the midst of a group of freedom fighters. The baby is growing like a weed, almost up to six or seven years old and she turns out to be the day of Deus Ex Machina – her blood is the key to stopping the aliens. If they can shoot some of that blood into their main engine or drive Or something, it will stop all the aliens cold. At least I think that’s the plot… It was getting a little hard to follow at this point. In any event, it all goes terribly wrong, and the MacGuffin drops out of the ship into the middle of the monastery ruins. It gives us a chance for a big fight between two giant alien biomechanical robots while the little girl rushes over to the unit, and places for hand in… Solving everything.
10 years later, she and her alien robot father would prepare to lead a group of freedom fighters to the aliens home world… Taking the fight to them.
I don’t hate it. The movie has some interesting moments, and the design is beautiful. The alien robots are frequently a combination of CG and practical suits, very smart way of doing things. There’s not an over reliance on CG until the very end, and unfortunately when the computer generated nasties are on screen for too long, fighting their way through computer generated environments, it does start to look bad. It doesn’t look like they had the budget to really perfect these FX. The deus ex machina solution here also feels a little bit too much like V to me… Our young child, Rose, is basically the star child. This like so many other of the elements of this film feels hopelessly derivative. The film is smart, even though it’s building itself off of bits and pieces that it’s stealing from other better films, it does have the sense to steal the best elements and then throw it on twist. Instead of fighter jets and guns, the combat with the aliens is much more personal and brutal. Frequent Hand to Hand fights involving knives and alien blades seem to be the call of the day. Frank Grillos good at action and they’re playing to his strengths. It’s definitely an attempt to turn him into a leading man after playing second banana in the Captain American films, but 
I’m not sure if I’m sold or not.
At an hour and 46 minutes, the film is too long… They were at least three moments when I was watching the story and thinking… OK, so were at the end now? And would look at the clock and be a palled at how much time this thing still had to go. But all in all, it works as a B-movie. That may be the problem, I don’t think this thing was intended to be a B-movie, but it’s worth watching if it pops up on the Syfy channel.
Dead Seven
First and foremost, I want to start this review off by saying I actually enjoy Dead Seven. However, don’t go into this expecting any kind of a serious horror movie. Don’t go into it expecting a serious Western, or serious action or sci-fi or anything of the sort. What is his is an opportunity for a bunch of former boy band members to get together, hang out, dress up, and play. The tagline is “Larger than life” for a reason! The fact that there’s no music is probably merciful, but you’re almost wonder if it’s a missed opportunity.
Dead Seven is a sort of apocalyptic sci-fi zombie epic with a sort of western theme and homage to the magnificent seven overlaid. Somewhere in the badlands, Deborah Wilson is raising a zombie army, and our cowboy heroes are slowly 
assembled to face off with her before she destroys thier small town.
I’m actually a fan of Deborah Wilson, I know her from her work on MAD tv, and think she’s insanely talented. However I’ve never seen her in a role like this. Comedy, drama, sure. The sort of cross between savage and zombie voodoo queen that she’s pulling off here however, is absolutely terrifying. There’s no trace of that charming comedian in this film, only a brutal, terrifying villain. That’s OK, because we’re juxtaposing her with our band of cowboys…*Takes deep breath*
I wasn’t listening to boy bands in the late 90s or early 2000’s, so while I kind of know Jon Secada and remember names like Nick Carter and A.J. McLean, I genuinely only recognize 
Joey Fatone. Of all the boy band refugees out There, he genuinely seems to be to have done the most with his life. Joining the other Cowboys as a drunkard gunman, he provides some of the comic relief as a blast their way through the sci-fi undead.
There’s not enough story here for me to really get into a description, and besides, that’s not really what this kind of movies about. It’s more about a fun romp with a bunch of familiar faces, suitable for airing on any weekend marathon on the Syfy channel. Believe it or not, it’s worth it just for the sheer ridiculousness of it and being another dollar store purchase it’s one I absolutely don’t regret. The DVD’s got some genuinely good extra features to give you a little more insight on how they pulled this whole thing together and it’s definitely worth a look.
Better call Saul
It’s odd, I seem to be watching more television than I ever have before. At least more than I’ve watched a very long time, and this is in great part due to the fact that my wife is watching a lot of this with me. Ladies you know that saying that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach? Totally wrong. A way to a man’s heart is by watching his television shows with him. Seriously sit down and watch an episode of Doctor Who with them or catch the football game with him on Sunday and then talk with him about it – I’m telling you it’s almost better than sex. It’s one of the things that my wife does with me that I love the absolute most.
So I watched the premiere of Better Call Saul this weekend, and it has some bad will 
immediately because of the way AMC tried to shoehorn it in between Walking Dead and Talking Dead (especially considering how emotional WD was this week!) I understand trying to follow a strong popular series with a new series that you’re trying to promote, but to move the Talking Dead (which is basically the documentary on how each episode is made)further back, it’s too late in the night that for that nonsense and you lose momentum. Better Call Saul needed a very strong series premiere to build over come the bad will there.
This was not that strong Episode.
One of the things that made the Saul character work in Breaking Bad is that he was the comic relief.What I was really hoping for in Better Call Saul was a single camra comedy with dashes of drama kind of taking itself seriously but still being funny. This is not what we got, and the character lacks the gravitas to really pull the levels of dram they are shooting for. Saul was always designed as a one-dimensional character in this attempt to go back and retcon him into some sort of layered deep character just doesn’t work. I will not be back for the rest of the series and quite frankly I think the entire conception was a Misstep. I realize we’re following Breaking Bad, but Better Call Saul wasn’t the way to do it. Better Call Saul would be better served as something lighthearted and funny.
Among other things you’re watching this weekis Gotham. There was a real misdirect here, I was looking foreward to the Scarecrow episode and to discove it was his father was a little disappoing. I think the scarecrow could be someone older than Bruce Wayne, in fact I’d love to have seen him actually be one of Wayn’s teachers, however, being homeschooled now kinda puts the kibosh onthat. The biggest misdirect however was the way that Edward Nigma was suspended. I thought for sure this is the beginnings of the Riddler and it would make perfect sense for him to be disgruntled after being fired from the police force, but no, by the end of the episode the status quo was restored and he was back on the force. I’m not sure if that was a missed opportunity or not .
We were also delighted to return with Wizard Wars. This series really engaged me, and I think it’s got to do with the way it’s a competition and also with the stage and parlor aspects of it. I tried watch the show following it on SYFY a sort street magic kind of series 
which is interesting in itself, but I’m not that into street magic I’ve always been drawn far more to parlor and stage magic, indeed that’s the kind of magic that I do.
Sci-fi did manage to raise my ire however. The series premiered the week previous and I missed it and there’s no way of me watching it on sci-fi without loggin in with some arcane credentials from my cable provider. I used to catch up with Hollywood treasure by watching online and it kind of pisses me off that site is making it so much more difficult to keep up onthier shows. Just another reason to hate the network I suppose.
I enjoyed the flash this week as well. The Flash has really been quite a discovery for me, I don’t think I wanted to like this as much as I do (I suppose a misguided loyalty to the 1990 series) but I caught up on the entire series over he Christmas break and found it to be really well done at whole lot of fun. The return of the series has been no exception. We’re back to monster of the week and in fact this a villian we’ve never seen in the comics, but 
there is also another bit with the Pied Piper. The scene with his implants was horrifying and we can see he can be quite a violent character, and I think actually more interesting than anything we’ve seen in the comics.
Really I think this is where the Flash’s strength lies.
They embraced that this is a comic book, something that superhero shows in the past of really shied away from. Arrow even took a long time to get there.
You can see where they are trying to shoehorn Firestorm in to the series. We’re in full back-door pilot mode, though I can’t really see Firestorm carrying his own series. A miniseries or perhaps even setting up appearances in Justice league? This would be the smartest thing at DC could possibly do. Far smarter then steadfastly trying to separate their television and cinematic universe, but that’s a whole other tangent, we don’t really wanna get into that right now.
That’s it for this week, Gotham is on tonight and I will be seeing in front of the television with my wife seeing where we go with the scarecrow ! Can’t wait. (but since we have to, go check out todays Violent Blue!)
The Prometheus trap
The Prometheus Trap can be summed up in a very simple way. It wants to be Triangle (Imdb referance here) in space. We have a very standard time loop kind of story where the crew is unaware that things are changing .Over all, this film lacks the power of script that Triangle had. Triangle attempts to elevate the above subject matter, and really gives us a sense of dread, playing with the atmosphere and the timeline itself . You’re not really aware that you in some sort of weird time loop period until well into the film. Prometheus on the other hand, wears it like a badge of honor on its sleeve.
The Prometheus Trap has a great poster,now I know you cant judge a book by its cover, in the same is true of any movie, however I checked out the screen grabs insight in arresting costumes nice-looking said and some good-looking ships. That elevated it above a lot of sci-fi dreck that we run into from time to time. The production values are good, and the look is standard that stylized. The real problem here is the script in areas it almost feels like it wants to be terribly philosophical, however it doesn’t have anything to say 
(Though, I’ll admit I liked the bit about being programed to know your creator – there some Christian philosophy in there somewhere…) and the plot is just threadbare.
This is a problem because it doesn’t justify the 89 minute running time. One almost gets the impression that the screenwriter figured that because it going to be repeating events over and over and over again we don’t really need that much plot and character development. This is where the film largely fails and possibly is the starkest contrast to Triangle which is all about character development. I suspect this would have worked better as a short subject rather than a feature film There’s some clever bits here, like the androids being able t
o perceive the time loop because thier memories are cloud based, stored outside the bubble, but it’s just not enough.
In the end I’d say don’t waste your time on this one. It’s rare that I say completely pass on something but this one just isn’t worth the time to watch. If you’re flipping channels and find on SyFy hang out for half an hour or so you’ll get the basic idea and then move along.
Don’t forget, there’s new Violent Blue today!
Not a review of Guardians of the Galaxy
I was aware of the movie of course, because of all the buzz, but it wasn’t one I was just waiting on pins and needles for.
In many ways I think I’m the target audience for it. People who might have heard something about this, but arn’t really familiar with it. I tried an issue or two of the comic when Bendis rebooted it a couple years ago, but nothing really grabbed me. I like the idea of the talking raccoon (a smart mouth funny animal character is one of my elements for a perfect sitcom formula) and I like Sci-Fi, but had nothing invested here.
There’s a million reviews for Guardians. There’s nothing I can add to those really. I took my kids, Lydia’s favorite character was Groot – mostly because he spends the entire movie saying nothing but “I am Groot”. And Maddie loved Rocket. Yeah, nothing new here.
What I want to explore is why this movie is important.
I like this because it’s sci-Fi without being SyFy. It’s not Star Trek or Star Wars. It’s not the gritty or nilistic attitude that we’ve seen in Sci-Fi for the last ten years or so (thanks for nothing Battlestar Galactica). It’s not Gravity or Edge of Tomorrow. It’s fun. It doesn’t take itself to seriously while still going all in to the genre – and this is where you can see Gunn’s Troma roots. Say what you will about Troma, (and I hate ’em) but it’s one of the last places you can go in as nothing and truly advance by merit. You can start off as a PA or a grip and end up a script supervisor or editor. That’s not an exaggeration, Joe Lynch did JUST that on Terror Firmer. It’s like New York, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Much like Roger Cormans studio, Troma is actually forging a generation of professionals despite (or perhaps because of ) working on drek. Gunn knows where to be serious and where to go completely zany, and if he can make you tear up at the image of a raccoon staring down at the charred branches of a tree – that’s something worth noting. This is original. Like nothing else in film today, because they remembered this is supposed to be a good time. They remembered that they cans still make you feel, when you’re having fun, it doesn’t need to be bleak and heavy to get that reaction.
It’s also a game changer.
There has been much written in reviews of how the Marvel brand is a proven one. Sure it is. But only with Superheroes.
Thor was a Sci-Fi movie, but with Superheros. So was Iron Man. And even though they were second stringers at the time (remember in the 90 and early 2000’s if it wasn’t an X-book or Spider book it was back bench), they were recognizable enough. Guardians is pure Sci-Fi. A shrew eye can catch the comic book dynamic – charismatic leader, sexy girl, smart mouth, a warrior, and a tank. Even so, it’s very Sci-Fi, with more in common with Firefly than the Avengers. It’s proof Marvel can do other things. What could happen next? Marvel Horror? Marvel Mystery? We’re getting a very Crime based set of shows hitting Netflix and it’s obvious Marvel want’s it’s brand to encompass more than just superheros. Guardians is the proof it can do so, and may be the key to surviving when the market gets oversaturated with superhero movies and the bubble inevitably breaks.
It’ll be interesting to see where we go from here.
Over at Violent Blue by the way, Steve took Jen to see the movie. We’ll be exploring their relationship against the backdrop of the film all week. Check it out here!
RPG films
I miss my gamer days. I actually do, but the problem is I was never a true gamer, but more of a casual player. I just wanted to run a game once a month or so, and it’s hard to find a group like that (even the guys I would play Heroclix with were always way more into it hat me, playing a couple times a week as opposed to me playing a couple times a month). I never did D&D (I know it’s fantasy, but I don’t dig having to deal with other deities. I have one God and he’s sufficient.) but would regularly play Earthdawn, Night Life ( Like Vampire the 
Masquerade, but less pretentious) and Star Trek (Which turned into the most popular one amongst my group). We even did a game night for one of my three bachelor parties.
I’m sure I mentioned the Gamers 2 on this blog a year or two ago, but I can’t seem to find the post to link to it. In any event, it’s a fun movie that captures the spirit of gaming, moving back and forth between the players sitting at the table playing, and shifting into the scenario itself, showing up the adventure they are having. It’s funny, and has a lot of heart – and despite being a sequal, is actually a superior film to the less than memorable The Gamers.
This weekend I watched Zero Charisma, a crowdfunded take on gamer life which originally screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. The main character is 
the archtype of the loser gamer – the one who lives with his parents (or in this case grandmother) feels entitled, the rule lawyer and obnoxious type. It’s not a bad film. The direction is good and there really is a story here. The main problem is having someone totally unlikable as the protagonist (and in certain ways antagonist). We don’t see much of an arc with him…he might have grown just a teensy bit at the close of the movie but I’m not sure. I feel I can cut him some slack when I see his mother (who abandoned him at an early age) and the truth is, as obnoxious as he is, he’s right about a few things. That doesn’t save his life from falling apart though, and in the end, you really can’t say he doesn’t deserve it. We spend an hour and a half laughing with him and cringing at him. It manages to be beautifully sad in the end.
I also hit up Knights of Badassdom. This one takes place at a LARP and ask the question what would happen if a bunch of gamers used a real spell book by accident and summoned a real demon? It’s directed by Joe Lynch, who I’ve been enjoying on Holliston and was recommend by Ted over on the Horror 
Ect podcast. It’s great. A fun time in gamer culture, with some outside characters to ground us. Peter Dinklidge is amazing here by the way. This is before Game of thrones, but he is an absolutely brilliant warrior in this. It manages to be tense, funny, bloody and fun all on a budget about equal to what you might pay for a happy meal at McDonalds. This, by the way is exactly my beef with the SyFy channel. They constantly put out soulless boring, stupid films on shoestring budgets with lousy CG on budgets about the same as what we see here. If this were the kind of movie SyFy was running on Saturdays, I’d be glued to the TV. Find some filmmakers with passion and a hook like this and give me some good films and you could win me back I and second. In any event, Knights is a high recommend along with the Gamers 2. Zero Charisma isn’t bad per se, but go in knowing its going to be a little depressing…there’s no rewatchability on that one.
I really have to run and get some Violent Blue done. I’m trying to do a topical series this week, but I can feel the window closing on me before I have to dip into the buffer and post a different strip. Still, before I go I’m going to throw a fun little music video in here. Also well done, though I’m not sure if gamer culture is being celebrated here or satirized…
The Resident Evil series
I finally decided to sit down and watch the Resident Evil series this weekend. I’m not a gamer so while I am aware of the source material, I don’t have any real experience it or any connection to it. I totally get it when my buddy Jason says “forget the movies, just play the game….” but that’s not quite as viable of an option for me! Besides, I liked the first one. It was fine for what it was…..
Hmmm. There’s a question in that statement – what exactly IS this move anyhow?
This is the first thing you have to understand. Resident Evil and all of it’s sequels are not horror movies. I hear “Zombies” and I think “monster movie”. But much like in the Walking Dead, the zombies aren’t really the main antagonists. They’re background. They’re waking props. Resident Evil is far more about the people, and the evil Umbrella corporation. Once you’re past the first film, the Zombies -they’re always there but they really fade in to the background for the most part.
Resident Evil is a sci-fi action series. If you go in expecting a scary movie you will be disappointed. If you go in to see punches and kicks and gunfire, you’re in the right place. Once I realized this it changed my expectations and how I was going to view this series (it also made Milla Jovovich’s casting in the Expendables 3 make a lot more sense). You don’t go into Rambo 
looking for great cinema. The quality of these movies across the board is still better than anything I see on the SYFY channel (in fact, if SYFY would just rise a few inches to this level, I’d probably be a fan again)
The thing that surprises me about this series is how uneven it is. What makes that odd is the fact that every one of these films have been written by the same guy. Resident Evil on screen is Paul W.S. Anderson’s baby, without a doubt. You can see it in the continuity and it benefits from having that guiding hand.
However, the second film is just SO BORING. I ‘d swear there wasn’t a scriptwriter here, just story by committee (It was what prompted me to check who the writer was. I was surprised to find it was still Anderson). In fact story is pushing the description a little bit. RE2 just drifts from set piece to set piece, encounter to encounter. Lot’s of action, some nice makeups but no development or plot. The series really isn’t expanded by this movie other than to point out that Umbrella really is evil….a point that one might be able to kind of argue in the first movie. A lot of people will blame this on the director – a newbie on his first film. I’d be quick to jump on him myself, but honestly, the direction is perfectly serviceable. There’s just nothing here for him to direct. RE2 really makes me wonder how RE3 ever got made.
I suspect the answer is two words: Ridley. Scott.
I’m not saying a RE movie is BENEATH Ridley…..well, yeah. Actually that’s exactly what I’m saying. It actually makes NO sense to me why he took this job, but he does a fine job with it. We go post-apocalyptic in this edition and it makes sense. He may have taken in it a little far though – suggesting the entire earth is one big Mad Max-like desert wasteland. That seems to be contradicted a bit in later films (but seriously, who in their right mind was expecting to milk this series for six movies?). Ridley was adamant about setting this one entirely in daylight. It’s an interesting turn, but perhaps not as noticeable as you might expect. These are, after all, action movies. Not horror.
The addition of elements like zombie crows and a chance to really showcase the main character’s powers is a good addition. The series has been around long enough to feature recurring characters and we kind of know the world now. It’s enough to justify another sequel.
Form here on out, Anderson will direct all of these himself and number four manages to once again impress me, picking up on a thread left over in 3 – the search for a part of the world that is safe and not infected. There’s a little retcon, but nothing to dire and the axe wielding bad guy is another nice addition. RE5 will pick up from about thirty seconds after RE4 leaves off, so closely linked you might have thought they were filmed back to back. However we’re back to meandering territory here. Little story, Lot’s of action and one of Milla’s best outfits. It almost seems like sometimes the producers feel the need to go back to making the movie look like a video game, just to get back in touch with it’s roots.
It’s a shame, other than the first and third, these films can’t really stand on their own, but it’s a series custom made for marathoning or running in the background of a party. I don’t ever expect much from Milla Jovovich. She’s nice to look at and I suppose it’s cool to have a female action star, but she’s never had any real acting chops that I’ve observed. Her best role is still in the Fifth Element because she doesn’t have to speak for most of the film. I can absolutely see myself popping this stuff on while I draw Violent Blue and I might even catch the sixth one next year when it comes out, but I can’t imagine going out of my way to really watch any of these again.
Grave Encounters 2
I’ve heard such mixed reviews on Grave Encounters. It seems that people either love it or absolutely despise it. I’m one of those people who actually thought The Blair Witch was scary, so I don’t automatically trash on Found Footage films, but I do get that the market is over saturated with them. Grave Encounters was one of the better ones of recent years though, and the way it spoofed the ubiquitous ghost hunter genre that has grown up around the SyFy channel the last few years was nothing short of brilliant.
That said, there really wasn’t anywhere else to go with the story….or was there?
Blair Witch utterly failed in it’s sequel by going meta and self aware. Grave Encounters goes down the same path here, but with better results. First and foremost, they keep it as a found footge movie. That makes a big difference…you know what to expect. Secondly, they actually expand the mythology of the abandoned asylum. We find out more about what went on there and perhaps why it’s haunted. We learn more about the ghosts themselves without getting to personal.
The problem is that we don’t get any of this until almost the third act.
The first forty minuets to an hour of this film are almost painful to watch. I’m so glad I didn’t give up on it because it was real close there for a while. None of the characters are likable and you can’t feel sympathy for anyone. All of this works against the film.
The set up is a film student reviews the film, then starts to suspect that it wasn’t just a movie after all, but a real documentary repackaged as fiction. The actors are all missing, but he tracks down the lead’s mother who is suffering from dimensia, and also the producer who gets belligerent but basically confirms what they suspected. He tracks down the asylum they filmed at and that’s when stuff really starts to happen.
At first it’s just a bunch of the same stuff from the first film, but obviously with better effects and a bigger budget. As we get into world building and more explanation of how the building works things really do start to get interesting.
Bottom line, buy the first one, and rent this one. It’s worth watching but I don’t think it’s worth revisiting. (Speaking of revisiting, there’s new Violent Blue up!)
The Monster Channel
I was just thinking yesterday about how I missed “The It’s Alive Show” and how we’d watch the show while posting on the bulletin board about what we were watching. Then, while I was checking my podcasts and Facebook feed, I followed a link over to the Monster channel.
Oh. My. God.
Streaming movies, horror host and live chat in the side window. It’s just the BEST. I watched two gorilla movies and an episode of the old Flash Gordon TV show last night on this site, and it was just fun as could be. It’s just the greatest thing ever.
They stream 24/7, and are ONLY on the internet. Cable companies, take note. For decades, you’ve squeezed your viewers into your sales model. We’ve always had to buy channel packages, and have never been able to just purchase individual channels. If the channel we want isn’t in the package we have, we’ve got to upgrade and get a hundred channels we will never watch to get the one we want. I’d ditch more than half the channels I currently get if I had the chance. I only watch two shows on SyFy and most of the time that’s online. I my wife misses “Dance Moms” on Lifetime, she hits the website to watch it there. We really don’t even need the cable for a lot of our shows. Cable industry (and that includes you dish guys and the network themselves too), you’re digging your own gave by holding on tight to a business model that’s increasingly irrelevant. The internet and startups like Youtube and the Monster Channel are no, HAVE changed the face of the market. If you keep digging your heels in and trying to force that outdated model on us, you are in serious trouble. I guarantee the first cable company to offer a package with say…80% freedom where you mostly choose your own channels and pay for (mostly) just the channels you want….that company will bury the others.
In the meantime, I’m off for a quick peak at today’s Violent Blue, then an episode of Hollywood Treasure on Syfy’s site, then off to the Monster Channel for the rest of the evening!
You can find the monster channel at http://www.100ymm.com/
Beowulf
Christopher Lambert has the coolest laugh dosen’t he? I’ve been doing a staggered marathon of his films over the last week or so starting with Forteress 2 and finally arriving at Beowulf. This is my first time seeing the movie, though I’ve caught snippets of it on Sy-Fy. It’s one of those I wouldn’t stop to watch a part of because I really preferred to see the whole thing.
I really liked this. It’s a little surprising because I’m wary of anything on Sy-Fy. That’s one strike. I’m also a little wary of reimagined classics-paticularly amid the absolute crowd of Beowulf productions in the last ten years or so. Two strikes.
Nevertheless, this hit all the right notes of a fun action movie. It almost had a superhero vibe to it and I wonder if they were trying for a franchise. I kind of wish they had. I’d like to see more of these in this continuity.
One of it’s biggest strength is in it’s minimal use of CG. They enhance makeups and suits, and occasionally we have a full on CG creature, but rarely for long. The one exception is the climax where the monster is entirely CG with the exception of a few close up shots that don’t quite match up well. Still, it’s forgivable. This was a creature that couldn’t have been achieved practically and if it hadn’t been CG it would have been poor stop motion on a rod puppet. That it’s so badly done almost makes it more forgivable. They didn’t try to trick you or make you think it was better than it was, they just asked you to suspend disbelief, after all you’ve already come this far huh?
The CG isn’t it’s only problem. I get that they probably didn’t have enough cash to achieve that effect, but the entire film lacks a cohesive look. I don’t believe in the world because there’s no consistent design language – it’s too thrown together without a guiding hand to make it all fit.
Still, all in all, I enjoyed it and will probably get a copy to keep with my other Lambert films. It’s worth checking out if you see it on TV or at the Library. And after that, go check out the new Violent Blue. We’re not doing Sci-Fi action today…but you never know what you might catch the squirrel doing tomorrow….
Argo City Comics 