geophyrd

Its not that this is just a retread of Casino Royale. Far from it, Casino was a really good movie, and an excellent James Bond movie. Quantum of Solace was pretty awful by any standards. I don't understand how it got a 7.2 rating scale, but then again, that same voting public kept Fantasy Island on TV for 9 years.

Note: In my humble opinion, the action scenes were filmed before there was a script and everything else added later in post. Wow...way to burn the great deal of goodwill engendered from the last movie.

Spoiler Alert! This means YOU! After a fantastic setup, really from the last movie, where a top top top secret organization (which is so secret as to be totally unknown to the British Secret Service) has devised a scheme so intricately ridiculous that no one can possibly imagine it to be true. Literally, the entire purpose to this organization is....(wait for it) to become a water company.

Yep, that's it. They kill, maim, bribe, cajole, torture their way through an entire movie. Listen, Marc Forster....even Long Island Water doesn't want to be water company.

Watched this movie last night and had a great time with it. When's the last time anyone was able to say that about a movie with Robert Englund in it? The flick takes place in a world in which Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers are real and (in some places) admired for their killing sprees. Leslie Vernon is either a wannabee killer or a killer who's looking for some fame. He invites a film crew to come document his life, his friendships (including his now-retired mentor and his wife) and his plans for his next developing murder spree. All is not what it seems and there's some surprises as well as a great deal of the kind of tongue in cheek humor("So would you say you're pro-life, Leslie?", "Mikey, Jay and Fred, those guys redefined it, turned it into an art') that I like.

The acting is good from the two leads, less so from some of the other players. In particular, Zelda "Everyone must cross over" Rubinstein provides a terrible performance that is almost distracting enough to have made me turn the movie off: her one scene, based on how the director keeps cutting away, I think they must have been feeding her lines one by one.

Englund is given a decent role, basically playing Donald Pleasance from Halloween and doing about as well as Pleasance did.

This is a very clever low budget movie, one that turns its shortcomings into assets and, tongue planted firmly in cheek, it entertains. Well worth catching on cable.

Well, I received a screener for Day of the Dead yesterday and watched it last night. I'll write the following and try to avoid spoilers but if it takes spoilers to make you decide not to watch the movie, then I'll give you spoilers.

First off, the cover art (zombie vomiting, eyeball in middle of mess)is deceptive. It never happened in the movie and would only have made it worse if it had.

This is NOT a remake of the Romero classic Day of the Dead. The zombies aren't zombies. They're infected, much like 28 Days/Weeks Later. Whatever they've got, they don't go into it much during the movie, just a trite ridiculous explanation and some graphics showing cells being infected.

Now, before I get into it, the good. The movie looks good. The DP did quite the competent job on it. Its well lit, the scenes are well composed and there are some very nice shots, particularly of sunset/sunrises over Colorado. OK, that's the good. I mean that ALL of the good. What they did with the movie was terrible.

The script is terrible but let's face it, scripts in zombie movies are less important than having a sense of story. I know they're supposed to go hand-in-hand but they don't alway. In this case, there seemed to be a lot of improvisation, a fair amount of after-the-shoot-is-wrapped ADR/story lines implanted. A good example is the 'hot girl' (I think that's how they identify her in the end credits) who decides to walk home through the woods. After about 20 shots of the tattoo around her belly button, she's attacked and pulled off screen. Wow. Rather than show the obligatory splash of blood to show something bad happens to her, a big wad of flesh is thrown into a puddle. Hey! Its the tattoo! And the bellybutton! The actors are fine, just not given much to work with. Mena Suvari (who is actually an excellent actress)is given a thankless task. I'm guessing she saw what Sarah Polley did in the Dawn remake and thought that was a plan. Having said that, its a little ridiculous that anyone expects her to kick arse and take names but that's the role. Hope she didn't thank anyone for it. What made Polley's part so much better was that she didn't kick ass. She was just trying to survive. Polley was good. Not Suvari's best work. Probably her worst.

AnnaLynne McCord, fresh off a stint of the now unwatchable Nip/Tuck. In the show, she is Portia Rossi's daughter who is Anally-Obsessed-Because-She-Wants-To-Be-A-Virgin (henceforth referred to a AOBSWTBAV which really doesn't seem shorter)and who poisons Julia by putting mercury in her fruit cake and serving her slices over the whole season. Heck, I've wanted to poison Julia more than a few times, but doesn't anyone in Hollywood know...NO ONE eats fruitcake. AnnaLynne looks good just standing around. She really is a beautiful girl but its a good thing that she can't act her way out of a bag; No one expects her to in this film. If the film had a more competent director, they'd have convinced her to at least skin off her clothes at some point and give the viewer something to see, something that Nip/Tuck's been trying to hint at all season.

Ving Rhames, also a fine actor, is mostly wasted. Just when I thought he was going to get kind of interesting, he vanished in the movie. Won't spoil what happens to him; Its already rotten.

The 'zombies' become infected and their eyes turn white. Their skin instantly becomes porous and shredded and they get hungry. They'll apparently eat anything. One of them grabs his own eye out and downs it. Its the Zombie Ourobourus. They also get superpowers. They jump, leap, crawl on ceilings. They jump out of buildings from four stories up and keep going. The film editors use a BS technique to make them scary where they accelerate their movements by 50% and then jumpcut their motion so, fast as they seem, they look like they're on top of you instantaneously. Its editing room nonsense, but that's the movie.

Summary: Walk, don't run, away from this movie. Do not pass it and decide to grab it in the pile of rentals. Do not buy it. Avoid it. There are some things that you can't unsee and there are some moments in life you'll never get back. Here's a gift. 1 1/2 hours to do anything you want...don't waste it on this dreck

I went to see 1408 this last weekend and was shocked by how good it was. I remember the short story from Stephen King's Everything's Eventual. I've even reread it since seeing the movie. The filmmaker really nailed the details of the story, even the clothes described (hawaiin shirt). Not only that, part of the dialog to the movie (the main character's dialog) was cribbed whole from King's own introduction to the story in the anthology. Not only that, but King himself is heartily endorsing the movie. There's been A lot of bad Stephen King movies (and more than a few bad books), but I read King's articles in Entertainment Weekly and he and I share A lot of the same likes and dislikes. If he dug it, I knew it would be good.

When I took my wife to it, it was with the stipulation that the movie wasn't horror, that it was a slick ghost story with horror elements, but much more along the lines of a thriller. She wasn't thrilled to go and I could foresee what happened at 29 Weeks Later happening again (her curling into a fetal ball and going to a happier place...the crap she has to put up with being married to me).

The movie unfolded. Suffice it to say, it was one of the best, scariest rides I've taken in the movies in recent memory. Forgetting the couple of jump-scares (there's a few), the feeling of utter terror permeates the movie. Every time you think you know where its going, it turns 90 degrees in a completely unsuspected direction. By the time its over, it was amazing.

Now, I understand people are referencing The Shining in their reviews. That's understandable. King wrote both (although I do prefer the Kubrick movie to the piece of crap that was on TV a few years ago) and it does have to do with a haunted hotel. But that's where the similarities end. What I compare this to is much more of Jacob's Ladder, the 1990 Adrian Lyne mindscrew starring Tim Robbins. Both are about the internal effects of trauma, about how the haunted can also be the haunter.

This was a great movie, one which surprised me about 20 times. Still not 100% sure of everything in the movie. There are loose ends, a few little plot gaps, but the acting is top notch (Cusack for Oscar?) and the directing was superb. My hats off to Mikael Håfström. He's a directing talent to watch. He just got added to my 'don't care what the flicks about, he's directing' list. Romero is on that list too (although after Bruiser...)

Woof...just saw The Lost Room on Sci Fi. I wasn't expected much but boy was I surprised! Great miniseries and I'm hoping its one of those stealth pilots that might lead to a miniseries.

If you've read the 2 sentence blurb about the show (everyday objects, fantastics powers!) don't think you've got it. There are complexities underneath the surface of this show and it was very well done. The lead, Peter Krauss, used to be the lead on Six Feet Under. I expected higher profile roles for him after SFU died, and when I saw he signed on for Lost Room, I was disappointed. It sounded boring.

It isn't. Its a wild ride and I promise three things. You'll believe that Kevin Pollack can play menacing exceedingly well and Dennis Christopher isn't as cool as you remember him being back in Breaking Away about 100 years ago.

The last thing I can promise is that you will dig the show. Its supposedly coming on again in Jan 2007. If you haven't seen it, see it and tell your friends. This is one we want to get behind.

Scifi is starting to show up more and more often on my ReplayTV list. Being a huge science fiction fanboy geek, that's probably the way it always ought to have been but for years the channel was showing reruns of The Hulk and and old bad scifi TV. Lately, with BSG, Stargates (all flavors), hopefully soon for Painkiller Jane and Dresden Files, its finally coming into its own. I expect that in 2007, I may be watching it as much as I do HBO and Showtime and I pay for those! Now, if I could just get Scifi to stop showing stuff like Mansquito and the like, I'll be one happy damned camper.

The Wire just finished its latest season and this show has become a remarkable thing. I had to write. In a time of great television (BSG, Unit, Studio 60, Dexter) the Wire, which was on the bubble last season, came back as the best of them all.

This season was superlative, an extraordinary achievement. Not only was it riveting and heartbreaking, it is easily the best show HBO has produced (including Deadwood and I'm a very big fan of Deadwood) and ranks as one of the best television shows ever. The acting was amazing, particularly this season by the 'kids.' The show is about the lives of the cops and drug dealers in Baltimore, how they intertwine and interconnect. To say more would do it an injustice. This is great TV.

If you don't know the show, you oughta. Go get the DVDs, look on HBO On Demand, beg, borrow or steal episodes. Use your ipod video. I promise you this, the show will captivate you. Amazing!

I saw a remarkable movie this weekend. It was really good but half of the people that see it won't get it, and they'll hate it and talk about how it sucked and was confusing and how they wish they could get back that two hours. I heard all about it at the urinal in the movie theater before I left.

Me? I'll be over in the other crowd talking about how some movies don't connect all dots, that sometimes the canvas is meant to contain your own perceptions of what you saw and how it worked. I could also be talking about a mirror as canvas and how it contains different images for everyone. That is one of the incredible things about the movie...that when its over, your take on it is different than anyone elses (although mine's pretty close to Harry Knowles' take over on Ain't It Cool News). I loved it and wished it hadn't ever ended and how it is both gloriously beautiful and very familiar.

In The Fountain, there are three stories revealing themselves gradually. There is a Spanish Conquistador, asked by his queen to seek a mystery. There is a modern man who is looking to save his wife, dying of cancer. And last, there is the same man, far flung in the future, performing t'ai chi sequences in a bubble beside a tree in far away space. Oh yes, and there is the glorious Rachel Weisz. Trust me...Rick O'Connell's love for Evelyn in The Mummy movies is NOTHING compared to Hugh Jackman's adoration for his wife here.

How are they connected? What do they have in common? Is it worth the 2 hours you're going to spend going somewhere with these characters? Oh yes, clearly. Although half of you will think it sucks and half of you will see brilliance.

I'm still dazzled....great movie.

Whoa...I read the reviews on Ain't It Cool News and I have to say, despite their hyper-active vocabularies, they nail it.

More appropriately, Scorcese nails it, as does Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Leo DiCaprio, Anthony Anderson, Alec Baldwin and pretty much everyone else in the movie.

This movie rocks and rolls and it kicks ass so completely I was shocked. I mean, I went to see a Scorses gangster flick. I didn't expect a gangster flick the sits up there with The Godfather.

In a lot of way, Boston is getting a lot of attention from gangster cinema. I mean, I just got done watching Brotherhood (really good TV) and this is like that but a much bigger picture. Departed is the ultimate cop/rat movie and I hope Scorcese has a dozen more in him just like it.

I won't go into details but Baldwin, Sheen and Wahlberg are amazing. Nicholson gives an unbelievably believable performance and scared heck out of me. And for once, I'd actually like to be friends with Leo DiCaprio. That last is a minor miracle...I never saw what anyone else ever saw in the guy. Not till last night.

Enjoy it...I know I did and I'll watch it a dozen times in the future, enjoying every moment.

I've only seen the premier but wow, that was really good. I know a lot of people dig on Adrian Pasdar but me? I haven't dug anything he's done since Near Dark. Desperate Housewives, Judging Amy, Mysterious Ways....who is advising this young man on his selection of scripts and projects? But Heroes is good. The script pops and the story isn't ridiculous. I love comic books, but really, in the movies how ridiculous is it when someone gets superstrong and suddenly an overly-colored cackling bad guy shows up immediately to get his arse kicked? That's my problem with most superhero movies. They create a situation and immediately have to counter balance it with another (more ridiculous) opposition.

In Heroes, you have a girl who is suicidally curious (she tries suicide, but she immediately heals ala Wolverine). It was fascinating in that she deliberately stuck her hand in a running garbage disposal just to watch it heal, while chatting with her mother from whom she was hiding her wound. The thing that sealed the deal for me with her was how she swatted the dog away who was licking up the blood.

You also have a boy convinced he can fly, a girl who's mirror reflection is harboring dangerous, deadly secrets, a Japanese fanboy who has realized that he can alter time and teleport. And then there's the artist who, using heroin, paints extraordinary paintings of the near future.

Wow...just amazing. When Hiro (the Japanese boy whose friend, in Japanese, calls him "Super Hiro") finds out he's in NY after imagining going there from Tokyo....the joy on his face was one of the most exuberant things I've seen on TV in a long time. Excellent show! Now the previews for the show look amazing. It showed Hiro seeing himself drawn in a comic book, his expressions just the same, his actions recorded in four-color glory. What would you say? Excelsior? Can't wait to see where Heroes is going, but I'm pretty sure just on basis of premiere that I'm going to dig the ride.

Before I review the film, understand that 9/11 wasn't something I experienced at a distance. I was in the WTC ten minutes before the first plane hit. When it hit, I was in my office right across the street. When the buildings came down, they ripped the windows off my entire building. My building was close enough that our ground floor level served as the morgue for the site. It was One Liberty. You can take a look and you'll be surprised how close. Wierdly, if you are into movies, when you watch The Siege with Bruce Willis, its our building that got the car bomb.

When the first plane hit, the building security told everyone to get to the other side of the building until further notice. When the second plane hit, I told our staff to get out. Go down the stairs, not the elevators, young ones help the old ones. I helped our last two older employees down 18 flights of stairs after locking the office. Not that locking mattered. Everything not nailed down that was worth anything was stolen within a few days anyway.

Down on the street, I stood in a crowd of thousands and watched several dozen people jump to their deaths. Everyone was crying. It never occurred to me that the buildings were going to come down. My impression was that it was a heck of a mess and I couldn't see how they were going to put out the fires. My instinct was to run to help. But I had a six month old and I stayed with our employees until I could convince them all to leave. Then I left. I'm not proud of that fact, but I also know that if I had gone to help, I'd be dead now. Two people who were debating doing the same thing with me died less than forty five minutes later.

In subsequent days, I was at Ground Zero many times, all related to work. No one went there for curiosity, not after the first time.

It smelled. The air was toxic. You could smell poison in the wind and the air was claustrophobic. They say that soldiers on the battlefield know the least about what's happening and that day, I can confirm it. There were rumors everywhere, that NY Downtown Hospital had been hit, that the White House had been bombed. I heard someone tell me that there had been assassinations. Everyone was confused because no one had the whole story. Not yet.

I'm not sure we still have it all. But that someone's plan involved the successful highjacking of four planes simultaneously...that sounds a little too ambitious to actually work.

I titled my review, "Oliver Stone got it right for a change." He really did. I've had a troubled relationship with Stone's movies in the past. He's a terrific filmmaker and its usually his lesser movies that get my attention. Platoon was good, but I'm not sure I've seen the definitive Vietnam movie yet. I think Platoon was more about war mythos than about the war itself. Maybe the best movie about the war was Born on the Fourth of July, but that was a Stone picture too. JFK was fun, but he admitted making up parts out of NOTHING. The Doors was an interesting character study, but I don't think for a moment that Val Kilmer was channelling Jim Morrisson. Alexander was horrible.

Having said that, Natural Born Killers, Salvador, Wall Street and U-Turn were excellent. Pure stories with the right balance of surrealism/realism, politics and drama. They told great stories in interesting ways.

Stone turns off the tricks here. The only trick on display is someone telling a human story amidst events so large that they dwarf everything else.

That day, it was what it was like. No one's story was big enough to notice on 9/11. The stories that made up the pastiche of the people's occurrences that day, they all melded into one big pot. That the pot is the collection of the stories, that is why I think America, as melting pot, is such a target for the terrorists. I believe they hate that we can pull off disparate views with such grace and elegance and Stone's movie makes a human story of an inhuman event.

I have trouble judging WTC as a movie. I think every actor did a fine job, particularly Nicholas Cage. The script was good, the effects perfect. Stone doesn't show the explosions but, after all, what would seeing them add to the human story.

But Stone's made me sit up and take notice. As much as I dislike some of his movies, I will always go see the new Oliver Stone film. Even when they don't work, they do it in the most interesting ways.

World Trade Center is the kind of movie if you wonder what it was like to be down there, at Ground Zero when the attacks came. Then it goes inside and we see the valiant efforts of men working to save lives.

Good movie and I will see it again

Before I review this movie, I have a couple of caveats worth caveatting First caveat: I'm into history. I've been in the SCA for more than 20 years, have fought in armor and love studying medieval period history. I am one of those guys who gets annoyed when the heraldry's wrong, let alone the history. I like it accurate. Some films get it right (Flesh and Blood, Braveheart) and others pretend (Alexander, Troy) and others don't even bother trying (Robin Hood, Price of Thieves, Army of Darkness). I have uses for all of them, but the first one holds a special place in my heart.

Second caveat: KoH came out at the same time (approx) as Troy and Alexander, both highly inferior flicks. I think its why the flick got buried. It shouldn't have been. If it came out a year earlier or a year later, this would have been a blockbuster.

The review: KoH was excellent. The story line was intriguing and rang very true. The characters are (I think) mostly fictional but there were no doubt men and women just like the characters. The battles were spellbinding and for once, they used CGI the way it should have been used: to enhance the reality not the surreality.

The story is simple. A blacksmith whose wife just dies meets his father, a noble who raped his mother years before. The man apologizes, offers to take the blacksmith with him to Jerusalem to join the crusades. Along the way, stuff happens. When he gets there, more stuff happens and when it is all over, stuff stops happening. What lies between the beginning and the end is a fascinating, enjoyable story.

The actors (Orlando Bloom, Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson briefly and everyone else) do an excellent job. I don't know who played the king but even in his leper clothes, he was excellent.

I highly recommend this movie. I watched it a little grudgingly but got into it quickly.

Oh, and the heraldry was (I'm pretty sure) right for a change. King Richard's standard on his chest was the one he adopted during the crusades, the 2 Lions Rampant and Countered, not the Lion Rampant and Roaring that always gets used but was only used by him when at home. Yeah, a bit anally retentive, aren't I?

This should NOT be confused with Black Hole, the excellent graphic novel that I reviewed by Charles Burns or the David Brin novel Earth which are both must reads.

This flick (Black Hole starring Kirsty Swanson and Judd Nelson]) is a must skip. In fact, this film should not be confused with anything even mildly connected to the word excellent.

It was an embarrassing mess.

It starts promisingly. In fact, it starts very similarly to David Brin's great novel Earth. A black hole is artificially created and stabilized (in the book by Brin, they were looking for a power source and deliberately created the hole. In this addled movie, they were doing quantum research and wound up with a surprise, actually two)

So, with the black hole comes a creature. No one understands the creature (including myself having watched this piece of crap) or its motivations other than it likes electricity and hates loud noises. Somehow it's affiliated with the black hole, which looks like a miniature hurricane and moves just as ponderously, wiping things out in its path.

First about the acting...it's terrible but I know Nelson is capable of better. The script is to blame and some of the lines are real howlers. Nelson seemed embarrassed the entire time and had NOTHING to do until the end, when he saved everyone. There's half a plot line that he's divorced and his ex-wife and daughter finally see his value as he's saving the world. Of course, there's another jarring plot line where he's either in love with Kristy Swanson or had an affair with her or something. Boy, it's ridiculous.

Swanson looks good. She's never been a brilliant actress. In fact, the only movie I can recall where she impressed me was Higher Learning and that was only because I dug her plot line as a bi-curious chick seducing Jennifer Connelly.

Last, the physics. A black hole would not sit on the surface of the planet if it were released there. In fact, what is most likely is that it would sink immediately into the earth and orbit the core, eating the planet from within, a place we can't get to. That was the plot of Brin's novel (among many other plots) and it was much better than either this addled flick or (for that matter) most other hard sci-fi novels. Next, whatever the creature was, I don't know why they felt the need to make it humanoid. If there are creatures that live in black holes (black rabbits maybe?) then I doubt they need musculature, faces or would need to tap electrical power lines. What was it eating before it popped out of its hole?

Skip it. It's worth neither the time to watch nor the effort to write this review. Spend the time either reading Brin's book (Earth) or getting the graphic novel (which is science fiction but nothing like you'd expect). Click below for links to those.

I caught Boo on SciFi the other night. I wasn't expecting a lot, as anything that airs on Sci Fi is generally low budget even if its got something greater on its mind. That isn't often. SciFi, aside from Battlestar Galactica and the occasional Stargate derivative, isn't generally all that good. The channel's a great idea, but the execution isn't all that.

Having said that, I actually found myself enjoying Boo. I said its appropriately titled in that time after time, this pop up, much like a little brother startling you, yelling boo.

First, the good. The sets are remarkable. I understand they actually used an abandoned sanatorium and (if the cross advertising can be believed) the cast and crew of the film actually had some ghostly encounters themselves. The sets (the sanatorium) are (is) amazing and creepy and should probably qualify for a starring credit above pretty much anyone else. I saw someone say it was the creepiest location since the movie Session 9 and I would agree. Like Session 9, the location (which they probably got for free) was the best special effect going.

Also good was that the bad guy was genuinely nasty. Freaky guy, all he had to do was show up to getcha.

Last for the good: there were some actually creepy moments. Never mind the gore, of which there was quite a bit, the elevator that only goes to the third floor, the stairs which only lead to the third floor (you can descend only to find yourself back where you started), the hole in the wall and the ghostly reveals all work pretty well. Ironic that the creepiest parts of the flick probably cost nothing.

Now, the bad. The direction in this movie was terrible. I don't know if there was a script but all the dialogue seemed improvised. While several of the actors were actually kind of likable, they seemed like they were having a hard time with their dialogue, like it didn't fit in their mouths.

Next, the actual story was kind of weak. I don't know how or why the villain could do what he could do. Apparently, he could possess bodies but the bodies wear out pretty quickly (aka Collie Etragian in Desperation). They (the bodies) also explode if shot and immediately splatter anything near. If a person is splattered, they get possessed. Or something, 'm not sure what .

Last, the inclusion of certain characters (Dee Wallace Stone for example) seems to be simply for marquee factor. I'm not sure when Dee Stone (from Cujo) became a draw, but then again I'm a little confused about the whole movie.

Its a little perplexing. Here is a movie that is actually better than some of the old Italian horror flicks (Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, almost anything by Mario Bava, Fulci or Dario Argento) that they seem to owe a debt of descendence. The movie is obviously a TV movie. No one would pay to see this in a theater and yet, here it is, on television with many many edits for obscenity (curse words dangit), an obvious missing sex scene or two, etc. Someone miscalculated. Dunno, maybe the foreign market will like it.

Anyhow, its worth watching very late at night, for free, particularly if on a cable station where it will maybe be unedited for language or content. Don't bother renting, watching on SciFi or taping. Not worth the time.

Just amazing. Go see the flick. You won't be sorry.

Every once in a while (well, to be honest, usually all the time) I read, see or hear something to which I want a sequel. Some projects just demand them. Other projects just need closure. Still more projects exist purely between my ears and they have an inner life.

Examples might include any of the Romero Dead movies (let's face it...not one is a sequel to another and that probably explains the series' unevenness), another Indiana Jones movie, another Frank Miller Batman series. Sometimes, since no one else seems interested, I come up with them. Anyone want to hear my sequel to Luka by Suzanne Vega? Or Rent II? How about Dawn of the Dead II (original, not remixed)? But most of them simply aren't very good. Usually I'm disappointed (any movie made by George Lucas in the past 15 years, most Steven Spielberg movies made for the last, oh, 15 years, and about 99% of every sequel.

Serenity isn't one of those. For all my hopes for the flick, it surpassed every one. It is an instant classic, better than the TV series which makes it better than most forms of entertainment.

For all the press about the movie, go rent the TV dvds. Watch two and you'll watch them all, one right after the other. They're too good to stop. But then go see the movie and it will rock your world.

Just amazing. Go see the flick. You won't be sorry.

Caught Hellraiser: Hellseeker last night on cable. I'm a fan of the first two movies, particularly the second. The mythologies that are involved are pretty amazing.

Pinhead's evolution as the lead Cenobite seems to have come from his having the only spoke lines from the Cenobite faction in the first movie. In the subsequent eight (nine?) movies, he has become human, an astronaut, a statue, even humorous at times. But he's remained downright scary. Whatever else they're willing to screw with in the franchise and into who ever's hands they're throwing the director's megaphone, they're keeping Pinhead scary. That's the right thing to do, big time.

Hellseeker features Dean Winters, of Oz fame and the original Kirsty Cotton, Ashley Laurence who has seemed to have a decent career making mostly bad movies. She seems to be to go-to-it girl for bad cheap horror. But if you don't remember from the first two movies, Kirsty's Uncle Frank started the whole thing. He was a depraved pleasure seeker who opened the LeMerchant box and set the Cenobite's free. They ripped him to shreds and set the first movie into action.

Kirsty's stepmom, evil as they come, was the focus of both first and second movie. Both come back to life looking for revenge. In both movies, the Cenobites come looking for their escaped victims. In the second movie, the mythology moves to Hell where Leviathan rules. Lev looks like a giant spike that, when it squats, turned into the puzzle box. That's the clearest explanation for the puzzle boxes ever.

Subsequent movies never really got back to Hell the same way. In fact, they got stupider and stupider.

Hellseeker is an exception. The plot is actually pretty good, although badly hampered by its budget. There are some genuinely creepy moments in the movie, some decent gore and the surprise ending that maybe telegraphed itself a little early in the game. If anything, it reminds me of a cheap Jacob's Ladder with Pinhead in the mix.

Pinhead is in the movie for maybe five minutes, but the better of this long lived series only used him sparingly anyway. Similar to Morpheus in Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels, Pinhead seems to be best used as the framing device for the story rather than its focus. One of the weakest of the movies had him as a WWI flyer who became who he is. Kind of violates the demon notion, but only by rules not explained in the movies' mythology.

If I could ask for anything for the franchise's future, get Kirsty back to Hell, fighting Leviathan! Get back to the more fascinating elements of the first two movies. They didn't cost a lot and they were quite good.

Last, for those who don't know, Clive Barker, the original author of the short story that was the basis for the Hellraiser movies, is writing a Pinhead novella for his new anathology, The Scarlet Gospels. Interestingly, Pinhead isn't ever a major character in the original story. In fact, he's just one of several demons. But now Barker is going to pick up the threads of the movies and pit Pinhead against Harry D'amour. If you don't know Harry, well, hell, you just don't know Clive, do you? If you're interested in the Scarlet Gospels, you're not alone. do a search on Google and you find that no one knows exactly when the book is coming out. Some said August 2005. In fact, you can order the book from Amazon UK right now. I did...still waiting to find out if it shows up.

Much to my surprise, Cube Zero popped up on Showtime this week.

I'm a big fan of the original Cube. It was nice to see a low budget flick that demanded the use of brains as well as having life or death stakes. There were genuine surprises in Cube that held up well under second and third viewings and Nicole De Boerr is, well, remarkable.

Cube 2: HyperCube was pretty horrible. Slick ideas but the basic plot sucked. Assuming someone could build a hypercube, I find it a little ludicrous that, being able to screw with spacetime and quantum events, someone would then choose to torture people like that. Then the ending...without spoiling, it endangered my fairly happy view of both movies. The first movie was good enough to equivocate my opinion of the two. Maybe it was because the first one never left the Cube. In it, you were as trapped as the poor souls inside.

Now, Cube Zero comes along. Hypercube must have banked some bucks to have created demand for a continuation. Its nowhere near as good as Cube, but its certainly better than Hypercube. For the first time, you have an explanation, however implausible, for the Cube, a detailing that there were more than one and why they were created. Not sure I bought the explanation, but at least there is one.

Only one of the characters was of any interest and that is only mild. There's now both supersoldiers and bad guys (really bad). The stakes are raised by throwing a child into the mix (and then out again) and then raised yet again.

That last 'raising' of the stakes is the killer. The cool thing about the Cube was the presumption that if you were smart, thought your way through, you might be able to get the hell out of there. Oh yes, it would also help if you didn't have to deal with violent co-survivors. But now in Cube Zero, they're messing with your head, your memory, your intelligence. Instead of being trapped with your basic tool kit (your head) you don't even get that.

Not as much a mess as Cube 2, but if this was the first entry, I wouldn't have bothered with any more.

I really wanted to like this movie. I'm a die-hard fan of everything medieval. I'm a card carrying member of the SCA (But the garb WASN'T period) and I've read many many books on this period.

After this movie was over (I think it lasted about 8 hours) I was so flummoxed, I could barely talk about it.

First the good...some of the scenes shot are among the most beautiful I've ever seen. I don't mean beautiful as in Asian movie scene that never exists in reality beautiful. I mean really beautiful. Remarkably composed, engaging, pulls you to that place kind of beautiful.

The acting is also pretty good. Angelina Jolie (who seemed to spend the whole movie in her bedroom playing with snakes and looking hotter than anyone human has a right to look) gives a very memorable performance. Anthony Hopkins (who in the movie looks about 200 years old) provides a voice-over that seems to last longer than Alexander's life. Farrell himself is unremarkable. He has some chops but isn't up to the action sequences. To his credit, I'm not sure anyone would be though, particularly the fight in India.

Thats where the good ends.

We can talk about the muddled plot line which was wierdly non linear. For some reason, yet to be determined Stone shows Philips assassination about an hour and a half after Anthony Hopkins tells you about it; it was to illustrate the dubious loyalty of a character that had maybe 3 more lines in the whole movie.

We can talk about the hard to hear dialogue. There's a lot of it, and not all of it is hard to hear. But the dialogue that is hard to hear is at least 2 movies' worth.

The lighting and set directions were competent but Stone seems to rely on extreme closeups (NOSTRIL HAIR!) to build character, shaky hand held stuff to relay chaotic battle scenes and annoying lighting to illuminate the story. He did this much better in Natural Born Killers (with a Woody Harrelson's face going in and out of focus while the word DEMON was lit on his chest).

The other thing that I found exhausting was that there was little plot development, which is endemic to biographies but there was no dramatic arc. It was like Stone spent so many years developing Alexander that he couldn't decide what to get rid of. Being the heavyweight in Hollywood that he is (rightfully so in the case of many of his movies) I guess he decided that he didn't have to get rid of anything.

The issue that seems to be the focus of so much media debate is that of Alexander's bisexuality. Its pretty unimportant to the movie that the love of Alexander's life seems to have been a male played by Jared Leto who is really really disturbing looking. They used an awful amount of eye liner on the man, really really badly and I cringed whenever he came on screen. That seems to be a theme for me with Jared. I haven't been able to look at him without cringing since Requiem for a Dream.

The gay themes aren't important. But then again, neither is the movie.

Has anyone gone to see The Forgotten? Jesus...this was a movie that seems to have been made first by an excellent director and then edited by committee.

Make no mistake the first 90% of the movie is excellent, gripping, remarkable. There were a few points that scared hell out of me.

But the ending! (light spoilers) Oh! The ending!

I have a theory. I believe the movie has a different ending somewhere, something in keeping with the entire rest of the movie. It is cool and subtle and probably didn't end very well. It was entirely believable and made you want to continue falling in love with Julianne Moore. That's the ending I'm hoping is on the DVD.

The one I saw...must have been shot after a test audience of morons voted something different. It made sense with the rest of the movie but damned if it didn't completely jump the tracks! Any other opinions?

Watched this tripe last night. I heard supposed good things about it when they were making it. BAD BAD BAD movie! Children of the Dead level of bad.

First off, Talisa Soto is one fine looking specimen, but she's aged to a point where she can't pull off either Lara Croft or Vampirella, both of which were modeling gigs she had when she was younger. She even played Vampirella in the horrible movie version with Roger Daltrey as the heavy.

I don't know what they thought they were doing when they made this movie. The locale, Harts Island, is sufficiently creepy. A million bodies, mostly of the indigent have been buried there and should make for a good creep fest, except it isn't used much.

The bad guys are flies which are never seen clearly, although sometimes their perspective is employed by jerky camera moves that detract very strongly from the story. These jerk action moves are very obviously done on a tripod as all the jerks are across one direction or span. Whats more, the actual cinematography is poor. Sometimes, there would be a sweep across abandoned buildings (which we are told in an interesting story onc e housed the quarantined sick and then, later, the mad. This plot line is never brought up again) that goes right to left and then, inexplicably reversed halfway. Bad filming.

The flies themselves are laughable and there is no gore worth watching.

We should have a separate discussion about any movie starring Malcolm "If-Theres-A-Check-Involved-I-am-So-There" McDowell. He phones in his performance, pretty much like he's done in every movie since Tank Girl (last decent performance from him that I saw).

It has NOTHING to do with the Dead Universe, despite the title. Some people do die but their deaths are ridiculous.

The only person worth watching was the island manager, who actually was kind of interesting. I've never seen him before, have no idea what his name is, but he was pretty cool.

Mos Def is also in the movie, for the inane rap music connection.

First of all, the show is terrific, addictive and has a permanent 1 hour place on my Showstopper.

Second, they buy into a show by Joss Wheadon, who has the touch of gold as near as I can tell. Now Wheadon is really good, but he's a slow burn. Took awhile for Buffy to come on strong, maybe even a little longer with Angel. When the network peeved Joss, he shopped Buffy to another network. Obviously he knows how to do this.

Third, when Joss showed them the pilot, they ordered him to tinker with it, which he did. Instead of taking the shows then, they put them on Friday 'kiss-of-death' night, showed them out of order and without significant promotion. The pilot STILL hasn't been shown, as near as I can tell.

What is going on with Fox? Are they crazy? Are the accountants in charge?

This is a really good show that deserves some space, either at Fox or elsewhere. Let Joss do what he does best, which is entertain me and everyone else I know and get us to buy his sponsors products...

Ok, I'm done...flame me. lol