The two I speak of are “Shadow Puppets” and “Voodoo Moon.”

… Haven’t heard of them? Well, neither had I. The only reason I even got them was because I was looking into movies that starred actors I like (in this case James Marsters and Eric Mabius, respectfully) …

Alright, so obviously these guys just needed paychecks… I really don’t know what I was expecting, being that both of these horror films simply SCREAM “B-Movie” … the sad part is the actors. I mean, they do their best with the crappy plot and the cheesy special effects, but they end up coming off as even MORE silly than if they acted badly.

Long story short:
“Shadow Puppets” is about a bunch of people who wake up in a mental hospital / prison with no recollection of who they are and there is a creature made of darkness and shadows that is stalking them. And killing them. Oh and one of the characters is actually the one responsible for their memory loss and the creature.
The movie explains HOW the creature came to be, but they don’t give it a good WHY. Or even a good reason as to why is is going about killing everyone. And the film purposefully attempts to mislead the viewers as to who can be trusted and who cannot. Which is ridiculous because the one who actually IS responsible is NEVER hinted at. EVER. That the crap is that? Whatever, I’m over it.

and “Voodoo Moon” … *sigh* Eric Mabius starts as a dude who uses powers of ALL the different faiths to fight off a “Devil” type character over and over again. He has to go home and reunite with is “seer” sister (played by the beautiful Charisma Carpenter, i might add). Mabius’ character has few friends he’s made over the years come and help him out and they start getting offed one by one… yeah.
A lot of the film looks like it was filmed with a hand held camera, a little shaky and what-have-you.
Again, cheesy, but I wasn’t expecting much.
God vs. Devil. Good vs. Evil. Not that original, not terribly creative. *shrugs*

Hopefully next week I will watch a more interesting film I can write more on.

Chris Evans stars as the son of a telekenetic (who is killed in the intro credits) who hiding from Division, but must join forces with Dakota Fanning, who plays a precog (the film calls them “Watchers”) to save a runaway girl who escaped Division HQ and has something that can bring the company down.  Oh and our hero sucks at his power and is only good at it when he’s pissed.  Yay for us.

Okay, on paper this sounds like it could be a fun “popcorn movie.”  You don’t have to put much thought into it, you get your popcorn and soda, pull up a chair, turn off your brain, and get ready for silly fun.

But the problem is, turning one’s brain off for popcorn movies is really supposed to only allow you to watch cheesy unbelievable things and go “Wow this is fun!  That could NEVER happen, but this is great!” … Turning your brain off does not… block… STUPID and SHITTY.

The plot was more or less weak overall, and the actors were doing the best with what they had before them (i mean, come on: both little Ms. Fanning and Mr. Badass Hounsou are FANTASTIC actors).  It felt way too contrived (even for a movie about people with super powers).  The villains were laughable: a bunch of Asian mobster dudes with sunglasses who could scream really loud and break things and cause people’s ears to bleed.  Oh, but the catch is they can only do this power if they take off their sunglasses and make a bunch of silly faces while they scream.  OH and the head-hancho Asian dude with the scream power is SO powerful at this, he destroys the supports of a building’s construction site, which falls on top of him and kills himself.  Ooo scary!

Essentially, Djimon Hounsou is supposed to be the “main” villain: he is supposedly Division’s most badass agent (and highest ranking) who all the other people with powers knows and fears.  He is the one who the Chris Evans character sees kill his father when he was very young (like eleven or twelve or something).  The intro credits have this whole thing where the dad is telling the young chris evans all this cryptic shit and weird advice and yaddda yadda, and they hole themselves up in some hotel room somewhere (cuz ze bad guys are coming!)  The young chris evans character escapes via his dads cool telekinetic power, and goes to hide and watch as Mr Badass Hounsou makes his entrance and goes into the hotel room with a squad of SWAT guys, only to have there be “explosions” of some kind, and lights flashing, bodies flying all over the place, so-on-and-so-forth, but us as the audience don’t really get to see the fight.  Djimon’s character comes out of the room saying that killing the dad was such a waste, and that the remaining soldier guys need to bring his body back to the lab..

So I’m thinking: “DAMN, Djimon Hounsou’s character must have some crazy uber power if he can survive a fight with a hypothetically badass telekinetic!” ….  WRONG!  What do we find out Djimon’s character can do about halfway through the film?  He can “push” (see the name of the film? eh, eh, eh?), meaning that he can get inside peoples heads and either plant false memories, or get them to do his bidding.

Translation: Jedi Mink Trick, ya?

Okaaayyyyy…. So what was the crazy fight off-camera about in the beginning of the film?  Was he mind controlling the guys that were already on his side to do something they were already ordered to do ANYWAYS?!  What the SHIT is that?  Did the screenwriters fucking FORGET what wrote at the beginning of the screenplay and about 50 pages into it they were like “What powers were we going to give him again?” “I don’t know” “Oh well, let’s give him the same thing as the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend and see if that works” “it doesn’t really” “oh well, we wrote it already, i guess we have to keep it…”

DUDE, there are people out there called Script Doctors.  It is their fucking PROFESSION to hep REWRITE LAME ASS SCRIPTS THAT SUCK!!!!!
I wouldn’t be surprised if the guys who wrote this lame ass flick were the same assholes who wrote seasons 2 & 3 of Heroes…

Anyways, the movie has a bunch of half-baked ideas that either contradict themselves or don’t make sense.  Take this one for example:  There is a villainous Watcher character who is able to know and draw exactly what the heroes are going to do the instant they are going to do it.  She can predict what’s going to happen, draws it, then tells her father the plan (he father is the head of the stupid screaming-power guys – see above).  This girl is so good with her power that the bad guys are pretty much always able to get one step ahead for most the movie…  So to “thwart her,” chris evans character writes down instructions for everyone on what they are supposed to do, and then has his memory erased by a guy whose power is erasing memories (who would have thought eh?) …  Okay, so the theory behind his plan is since none of the heroes know what they are going to be doing until they open up there envelope and read the instructions, the chick with precognative powers won’t be able to figure out what they are doing….  rrrriiight.  Is anyone else here seeing the problem?

IF SHE CAN SEE THE FUTURE SHE WON’T NEED TO KNOW WHAT THE HELL THE INSTRUCTIONS SAY IN THE ENVELOPE!!!  SHE SHOULD KNOW WHAT THE HEROES ARE GOING TO DO EVEN BEFORE THEY DO IT!!!  What the hell kind of a plan is that?  So instead of me knowing what i’m going to be doing and the villain knowing what i’m going to be doing too, let’s change is so I have NO IDEA what I am supposed to be doing and the villain who can SEE THE FUTURE will STILL KNOW what I’m going to do because they’ve SEEN IT!!

What… the… heck?!  Lame.  Lame.  Lame.

I am the first one to admit that I like the cheesy “popcorn” movies, but this was just ridiculous.  On an epic scale.

And at the end, nothing is resolved!  When the agents from Division finally catch the girl they were chasing the ENTIRE movie, they are kinda like “MEH, well we didn’t really want HER it was the case she was carrying” (which to TOTALLY contradictory to the rest of the film)…. AND when the syringe-o’-black-goo that is in the case Division is after gets essentially “destroyed” (or more accurately: “used”), the agents go “MEH, oh well I guess we lost” and just… fucking…. LEAVE.  That’s it, that’s all.  Nothing else.  We as the viewers see that it was all a ruse and the heroes actually stashed the REAL black-goo in a dumpster outside, who when the heroes reunite, they can get it and use it against the organization, my thought was like: “If Djimon Hounsou’s character is such a badass, and has a full team of Watcher/Seer/precog guys a phonecall away, why on earth didn’t they call him up and say: ‘Mr. Badass Agent guy, we can see the future and it looks like the hero didn’t die and the syringe we are looking for is in the dumpster outside.  Once you leave they are gonna go grab it.  Just FYI?’ “   and THEN i starting thinking “The bad guys should have just circled the block!  They would have gotten that phone call, came back around and see the heroes leaving the building and going for the dumpster!  OPEN FIRE!  Yay, heroes pwned, villains win,  MOST HORRIBLE MOVIE EVER!”

…. But they didn’t have it that way.  instead we are left with a lame ending with the hint that there could be a sequel, whihc will NEVER happen because it is so lame.  If Super Mario Brothers didn’t get a sequel, than this REALLY won’t get one.

So much potential gone to waste…

On a complete aside, it was interesting to see Chris Evans and Cliff Curtis in another film together other than Sunshine (which IS a good movie, in my personal opinion)

Alright, so the first trailer for Solomon Kane hit Friday, September 11, 2009.

Let me link it here from one of my favorite website (sorry guys)
http://www.superherohype.com/news.php?id=8679

Personally, I think it look okay.  Yes, just okay.  What has really been bugging me though is that all the people who have commented on this trailer all say the same thing:  That it looks like a knock-off of Van Hellsing……

Van Hellsing… that STUPID, IDIOTIC, MORONIC, PATHETIC movie that DARE use the name “Van Hellsing”, “Draula”, “Frankenstein” and “Wolfman”… that in NO WAY upheld ANY of the lore about ANY of the original stories it was based upon…  What the crap?!

And now to compare Solomon Kane, written by Robert E. Howard (the creator and writer of Conan the freaking Barbarian)…  It was those jokers who made Van Hellsing who stole Kane’s look:  The cloak and the swords, and the guns, and the puritan hat…  crap all Van Hellsing needed was a powerful staff and the plagarism would be comeplete.

Yes, I said PLAGARISM.

Van Hellsing can kiss my ass.  While I think the film version of Solomon Kane will do what all films so with good stories (i.e.: miss the original concept and/or feel and screw it up) I think the trailer looks quite promising…

But then again, most trailers do…

So on Monday, September 14th we lost a great man and a great actor:  Patrick Swayze.  Now more many, Swayze might not have been a “serious” actor, or even a really “good” actor, being that most of his films consisted of more FUN and/or SILLY titles.  Yet that isn’t all bad when it comes to the entertainment industry.  Yes it is called “Show Business” for a reason.  While the artists are there to put on a good SHOW for their audiences, they have to still do it within a certain budget, and actually draw in the crowds, and hence the money (for all you slow people out there, that is the BUSNIESS part!)

So what does Patrick Swayze have under his belt?  Yes he had a bit part in the cult classic Donnie Darko, sure sure we can all remember that lovely film…  We also see him in such “heartthrob” roles like Dalton from Roadhouse, and Johnny Castle from Dirty Dancing.  And we also have him as the tradgic hero in Ghost and the cool surfer bad-guy in Point Break (opposite Keanu Reeves in one of his most STUPIDLY delivered lines EVER:  I… am an FBI…. A-gent!”    …..just kill me now ) but still…  I think there was something special about Patrick Swayze.  Sure all the women loved him, especially him as the dancing hunk Castle in Dirty Dancing, but I really think guys dug him too.  Not the same way the girls did (well, unless you did, so in which case… more power to you!) but I think it was that Swayze was always the character the guys WANTED to be.  In Dirty Dancing he’s the athletic dude with MAD dance skills that can make it with any woman he wants, but still has a sense of honor, and a code he follows.  In Roadhouse he’s Dalton, the mystereous “new guy in town” who is all about kicking ass, taking names, beating the bad guys and getting the girl.  In Point Break he’s the leader of a group of bank robbers so just surf and live dangerously…  Even in his latest (and saly, last) piece of work The Beast, the television show that was on A&E, he was a rogue FBI agent who was an all-around bad-ass…

I think the world will be a darker place without Patrick Swayze…

However… let me take this moment to move on to another topic, linked to Swayze because he starred in it… a little film called Red Dawn.  Red Dawn (for all of you who DON’T know) is a movie where Russians have allied with Mexico and the two enact a super-sneak attack on the US and take over some town in the middle of nowhere Colorado and effectively begin World War III, and the only ones who can stop them are a bunch of high school kids to escape and hide out in the Colorado wildness and use guerilla tactics to fight back…  Cheesy?  Yes…  Unrealistic?  Yes….  But what can i say?  Part of me will always like it because I watched it as a child and thought it was a fun movie…

It wasn’t until later in life that I came to realize not only the absurdity of the film, but also the lame way Hollywood was trying to use scare tactics on the public.  This film was done back in the 80s, and everyone was still up in arms against Russia and the whole Red Scare bullshit (you think America would have gotten over it by that time, ya?) and not only that, but we obviously had a thorn in our side because of Mexico so we had to put THEM in a bad light too (jeez, this is starting to sound a lot like today’s society, doesn’t it).  Sure, I’m the first to aknowledge that I know about diddley and squat when it comes to politics and history (something I’m sure my father is sad I never got into) but even I know that this kind of crap is done all of the time in all sorts of forms of media as a way so send subliminal messages of hate into the publics minds.

Yes, I said subliminal messages.

All throughout time, in most modern mainstream form of media this type of behavior is seen.  I am not going to go into the countless number of newspaper and magazine title that downright LIE to their readers about wars, or crimes, or police activity, or legal proceeding or ANY of that crap but instead am going to focus on two other areas… lets say Films and Comic Books!

Yes, I said COMIC BOOKS.

Why is it that whatever country, nation, or ethnicity the United Fuckheads of America is currently pissed at gets to be the target to a landslide of stereotypes, misconceptions and lies?  (See how this leads back to Red Dawn?).  Breakfast at Tiffany’s, considered to be one of the most romantic movies of all time, had the “bad” japanese neighbor who was always spying on Audrey Hepburn and ends up ratting her out (World War II, anyone?), Red Dawn had the beef with Russia and Mexico, like I said…  Let’s see Star Wars, either with dissing Africans, African Americans, most Asains, and Indians (come on Lucas, really?  Did you not think we would get it?  not all your fans are infants…), then we have a lot of more recent stuff post 9/11 and the “terrorist attacks”….  *cough cough*bullshit*cough cough*…

Hell, even fucking the IRON MAN movie based on a comic book had the villains be guys from the Middle East… it was fucking terrible.  Sure the whole concept of Iron Man originally WAS that Tony Stark was a weapons manufacturer / arms dealer who realized his weapons were getting into the “wrong hands” (like our hands are any better, right?) and he tries to make amends and fight injustuce and dave kittens and all that good stuff.  Originally the villains were … wait for it… COMMUNISTS (OoOoooOooo!) and also the Vietnamese (since it originally came out during the war, ya?) … and also, even more back in the day we had Captain America who fought the germans… the guy’s name is fucking Captain AMERICA for godssake!!!  Sure the germans did  a lot of fucked up shit back World War II, but there were certiain power individuals in America that supported when with money, supplies, and power.  Notice how America didn’t do shit to help Europe fight or stop the Jews from getting murdered by the millions in concentration camps until Japan punched us upside the head and said “Fuck You, American Arrogant Assholes!”  Only then did we go “Whoa! What is THIS?” and decide to jump in.

Real great America.  Real great…
And don’t even get me started on Superman…

This all boils down to me wondering why the hell do we have to target a specific group of people on this planet and say “They are the ones against us!  Let’s make our people hate them so they won’t feel bad when we bomb them and shoot them and install our own form of government in their country, and then get filthy rich from all the profits from the “war” …. Ready, Set, NUKE!”  I mean really… wtf?  You know why the earth hasn’t been visited by any aliens or higher life forms?  Because they see what a great job we do at treating each other.

Shit, instead of trying to alienate up from the other cultures in the world, why not educating them?  or perhaps FEEDING them?  Or giving them healthcare?  That’s free?  Free education, free healthcare, homes and food for everyone…  And let such statements get me branded as one of “those liberals” who have “unrealistic views on how the government and politics really work.”

Right.

The writing consultant  / idea guru (whatever his title is) Bryan Fuller, who was around for the awesomeness that was known as Season One has left again….  NBC brought this guy back at the end of Season Three after Dweedle Dee and Dumbshit Two were fired… The guy was supposed to come in and fix the show…  Instead he made it all kinda wonky…  It was almost like it was too little too late…

And now Fuller has left AGAIN to pursue other enterprises!
Personally, I think the guy can sense a sinking ship and is getting the hell outta Dodge before the whole thing goes under… Being such a creative guy, I”m sure he’ll always be able to grab a job somewhere… but really…

I mean, really people, having a good show isn’t that hard.
Listen to your fans…  Watch the show from your audiences perspective.  Take yourself out of your Hollywood positions and actually LOOK at your work.

Do you guys even pay attention to your own story lines?  Really?  I mean, do the writers just sit around a table and write their own individual story, not even bothering to make sure it goes with their companions’ work?

*SPOILER ALERT*

Like at the end of Season Three / Volume Four… wen Sylar kicks the crap out of the Petrelli Bros…  okay sure, we don’t get to see any form of cool fight scene, because the show is about the PEOPLE and not the typical superhero stuff (which is CRAP by the way) but okay Sylar flies off with Nathan Petrelli, gets into a room and slices the dude’s neck open.  Oh no!  A main character is dead!  Dun dun dun!
Exit villain stage left, other characters show up and mourn the loss of the dead superhero… namely Mrs. Petrelli the dead guys mom, and Noah Bennett (Mr. Horn-rimmed Glasses, the indestructible cheerleaders adoptive father)…  They mourn the loss of Nathan and come up with a scheme to trick everyone that he is still alive, and at the same time defeat/get rid of Sylar the villain….

Does anyone see the BIGGEST issue here?

Noah Bennett the character standing RIGHT THERE, has been brought back from the dead AFTER BEING SHOT IN THE FACE THROUGH HIS EYE WITH A FREAKING HANDGUN!!!!!

Does NOBODY remember this?!?!

All it took for his speedy recovery from death was an IV drip of his indestructible cheerleader daughter’s blood…
Sure a cheap-ass way to have main characters come back from the dead if they find it convenient to the damn storyline, but OH NO we suddenly forget this now that it’s a different character?  If the dude was reduced to a pile of ash or something, it THEN would at least make sense!

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Okay, as far as first blogs go, I think that went very well.  Enough of my ranting for now.

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Until next time… Take care of yourselves out there!