The Return of Even More Movies You've Watched This Week III

Off Topic Art, Music, Entertainment
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I just watched “Touch of Evil” written and directed by Orson Wells.

Has an excellent cast:Orson Wells, Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, even Zsa Zsa Gabor. Music by Henry Mancini.

It was touted as this great film noir classic. Obviously a great cast, director, writers.

It sucked. It was a complete mismash of garbage that should have been great. All the parts were there.

I’d love Quentin Tarantino to come, take a giant black pen to the thing, cut out some of the subplots, and brutally re-write and re-do it.

It’s had a bit of a resurgence lately, because the cinematography and acting is great – and the themes are great – but it was a complete flop at the time, largely destroyed Well’s career, and I see why. He needed a brutal editor and script writer.

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As a lifelong fan of Holmes’ stories, I’m absolutely prepared for physical confrontation over the second part of this statement.

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I like old noir movies and modern redos. Have you seen Asphalt Jungle? It’s a good old noir that turned into Reservoir Dogs.

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This guy’s a fan of Japanese cartoons, I’m assuming particularly this one -

which he parodied in his intro, which explains his ability to ramble on and on about nothing for almost 2 hours, and the nerd fan rage on display when a mindblowing show like Sherlock gets massively popular when it really shouldn’t have given the attention span of today’s TV audience. I’ll bet if no one watched it he would be raving about it.

I mean, Elementary was “pretty good”? Lol. It wasn’t bad but come on…

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Precisely, @dt79, precisely.

Both Jonny Lee Miller and John Noble are imo really good actors, I admit.

The arc of episodes where Irene Adler (played by Natalie Dormer) appeared was easily the highlight of Elementary; the show lost it’s luster in comparison after.

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Ghosts of War (2020)

One look at the fucking script and anyone with the ability to count to 10 would have known this would be a pile of crap unless you hired Guillermo Del Toro who would have turned it a nice looking pile of crap like Crimson Peak and critics will call it “art” and I would at least be mildly entertained watching him trying to be a 3rd rate Peter Jackson.

But, no, you used a noob director and cast a bunch of no names who make Brie Larson look like she can act and put Billy Zane’s name on the fucking credits so idiots like me would think this might at least be good for a laugh but he only appears for 5 seconds. FUCK YOU.

If you’re going to knowingly make a movie this crappy at least have the decency to cast Nicolas Cage in it.

1/10

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The Outpost 2020

This is GOOD SHIT. Crom will not let you into Valhallah if you don’t watch it.

8/10

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Anyone attractive in it?

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Other than Orlando Bloom, there are no females in the cast unfortunately.

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No Valkyries, no Valhalla. QED.

p.s. Does Orlando Bloom grovel in the dirt, grab Eastwood’s leg, and beg Eastwood to turn him every which way but loose?

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They’re all sluts.

Haha no, but Eastwood’s kid’s voice and certain mannerisms resemble his father’s so much it gets a little distracting during the action scenes. I was half expecting to see Lee Van Cleef fire an RPG on the other side.

To his credit, though, he can actually act.

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Buahahahaha!

So true! At least with Nick Cage you known what you’re getting, so it’s on you.

That said, he was great on his Vince Meal altercation.

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3152

If you want a decent WWII horror flick watch overlord.

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3153

The Deep Blue Sea 2

Hot college professor shark expert chick with a stripper name gets engaged as a shark consultant at a secret underwater facility out in the deep blue sea by a billionaire who’s conducting experiments on Bull Sharks as to create a new drug to give humans hyper intelligence because he’s afraid computers will one day gain sentience and pull a Skynet on us.

I suspect the movie was written as a comedy but the director thought he was a making serious action drama. The absence of the latter is why I didn’t really get into Sharknado as it was too self-aware of it’s own silliness.

Which is why I was laughing my ass off the entire movie at almost every line spoken with deadpan seriousness by actors who thought they actually had to act.

The Bull Sharks, from what we are told at the start, make Great Whites look like wusses. The Bull Sharks on drugs behave like Raptors. So we have Raptor Sharks which are capable of being trained to swim in a formation at the click of some kind of device, and are able to dig tunnels under electrified fences, lurk around windows while shady corporate characters are having “hushed cliched exchanges about legality and ethics” and pull of a Planet of the Raptor Sharks on the facility.

Which is also why I watched…

The Deep Blue Sea 3

…immediately after this. In this 3rd one, there is a scene where a dude holds a captive shark at harpoon point. I mean he literally points a harpoon at it’s head and yells at all the other sharks to back off. AND THEY DO.

OMG HAHAHHAHAHHAAHA.

I fell asleep before I could finish watching Deep Blue Sea 3 but I’ll probably do it this weekend.

I can’t rate this shit. What you get out of it will depend on your kind of sense of humor.

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3154

Dracula 2000

This is another “so bad it’s almost good” kind of flick, which means it’s not bad enough to be good, and there’s nothing close to good in it other than the bad parts. If they had remained somewhat faithful to the 80s horror movie vampire lore established by movies like Fright Night and The Lost Boys it probably would have at least become a cult classic.

If you think I’m pulling this out of my ass, go watch Let Me In, which was a masterfully crafted piece of cinema while being the kind of movie that would never have been a minor hit both critically and financially amongst the mainstream audience of the day but for the callback to the 80s in terms of tone, settings and the aforementioned vampire lore.

Actually, I’m really pulling all this out of my ass. That’s only because this movie’s plot is so dumb and haphazard that the only explanation would be it was pulled out of multiple people’s asses and strung together with the hope that all the shit would add up to a coherent whole.

The movie is about Van Helsing and Dracula set the year 2000. Which is why it’s called Dracula 2000 and why Van Helsing calls him “Drah-cooo-lia”, Van Helsing is an uber rich dude who has Drahcoolia trapped in a coffin in a secret vault because he’s “unkillable”, which means the majority of vampire lore is thrown out the window. He’s kept himself alive all this time by injecting Drahcoolia’s blood into himself because he made a vow long ago to find a way to kill him before he can die.

Then some idiots break into the vault and steal the coffin because they think it must contain some really valuable shit because uber rich people normally keep their valuables in coffins in booby trapped vaults and Drahcoolia is freed. Now Drahcoolia is coming for Van Helsing’s hot daughter whom has developed a sort of “psychic bond” with him because she “has his blood” since Van Helsing was obviously using his blood to stay alive during the time he fucked her mother, which makes marginally less sense than Jimmy Fallon’s career.

SPOILERS

All this was FINE. I could still dig it as long as they stuck with this, kept everything else simple and pulled off some old school over-the-top vampire action. But, no, they had to go full Jimmy Fallon.

Drahcoolia can’t be killed because he’s actually Judas. Yes, THAT Judas. The one who betrayed Jesus. While hanging himself after said betrayal, the rope broke and, to add insult to injury and guilt over screwing over the Son of God, his change fell out of his pocket so he had no money to take the bus home. So he became a vampire. All it takes is one bad day to… FUCK YOU.

Crosses, sunlight, stakes, garlic steaks - none this shit works on him because we’re suddenly going with biblical lore now even though Van Helsing calls vampirism a “virus”, which means he’s only mildly adverse to touching silver because he’s still sore about losing his change and having to walk home. But they work on the ones he turns into vampires because FUCK YOU.

Which would still be tolerable if they hadn’t KILLED OFF VAN HELSING halfway through the movie, leaving a bunch of cardboard characters that no one gives a shit about. They eventually figure out that to kill him, they need to hang him again.

The only thing that could have saved this movie would have been Nicolas Cage playing Nicolas Cage with a cape and fake fangs.

3/10

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savage

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Tesla 2020

This movie tries to use the kind of creative meta tricks like having characters break the fourth wall and telling the audience they’re making up an ongoing scene because the real stuff that happened wasn’t as interesting. This was pulled off well in The Big Short because The Big Short had over-the-top characters played with just enough restraint for us to take them seriously by some really good actors.

It doesn’t work when half of the cast can’t fucking act and Ethan Hawke seems to be following the trend of actors looking really sad when they’re hoping to score an oscar nomination. I blame Russell Crowe this.

So we have Sad Tesla. Then we have the daughter of JP Morgan who alternates between playing Sad Tesla’s love interest and the unreliable narrator who occasionally appears in front of a computer telling us to “google stuff”. Then we have Thomas Edison, the lame antagonist who briefly pulls out a smartphone in a bar for no bloody reason, which we never see him do again. There’s club music playing in a theater with flashing disco lights of unknown origin in another brief scene, which was yet another lame attempt to be clever.

And it’s all boring as fuck, at least to me. You know what’s fucking clever? David Bowie playing Tesla inventing a teleportation/ cloning device taken straight out of The Fly that made film nerds spend the last decade arguing about whether it was the original Woverine or the clone that appeared in the second pod.

4.5/10

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3157

A short sci fi movie made by two guys I know, I can neither confirm nor deny that I appear for the whole of three seconds in it.

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They should have made the Blade Runner sequel lol. Who are these guys?

It’s very impressive. Technically, everything’s great. I really appreciate the throwback to old school filmmmaking with the use of stuff like dutch angles that people are too self-conscious to use these days. I’m not too concerned about the plot since it’s a short film and I’m assuming it will also serve as a demo reel for future projects?

What was the budget like?

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Two guys who work in advertising and are huge Blade Runner fans. They wanted to create an homage to BR during the summer vacations in their garage, but then the idea grew until it spiraled out of control, taking five summers to complete.

All the actors are friends and acquaintances and they have a fairly entertaining production diary on YouTube

It started with zero, but they did a Kickstarter campaign at the end for post-production.

They reverse engineered the plot, having first shot the cooler scenes.

It started as a joke, but at the end they actually flew to LA and pitched their ideas to several A-list studios.

One interesting tidbit that I gleaned from them is that when discussing potential projects not a single studio executive is interested in even general outlines of a plot, but instead focus on the trailer.

I guess that explains the last twenty years of major studio releases.

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