Over the years I have seen more than my share of movies, both good and bad. This has lead me to a lot of observations about both the movies themselves and the contents found within. Here is another year’s break down.
Dialog-driven dramas are amazing films to watch. They don’t wow you with special effects, they bowl you over with smart conversations and intelligent writing. Horror movies pander to a much lower intellectual need, the need for blood, gore, boobs, and atrocious human depravity. Some horror movies keep you engaged with tension and set up scenes that keep you on the edge of your seat guessing where it will go next. Some succeed, but sadly, most fail to impress the masses. This is where I come in. I love horror movies in general. Good movies are great but bad movies are just a shade behind. While there have been movies that I cannot even stand to finish, most of the time I know enough ahead of time to know what I am stepping in. However, these are some of the worst movies I have ever sat through. It was a hard year.
Fish and horror movies
So what is it about horror directors and killer fish/things in the water? I guess it could be the fear of the unknown. I have had a long-standing fear of deep water where I cannot see the bottom. It freaks me the hell out. Maybe the directors of movies like Two-Headed Shark and Piranha have the same fear. As for Super Shark, well… when you put a guy barely known to a current generation of moviegoers as a starring role and he’s in the movie maybe five total minutes, you have a LOT of problems.
Oddly enough, this year I chose to watch two movies about killer fish that both starred an O’Connell brother. While Jerry O’Connell played a very convincing coked-out douche bag skin flick director, his brother Charlie could not be less convincing as a professor of marine biology(?). This is fine for Charlie because he is in good company flanked by Carmen Electra as a doctor of medicine, and Brook Hogan as a jack-of-all-trades student. While Jerry had to suffer the indignity of having his dick bitten off by a piranha, Charlie was basically taken out of commission in the movie with a skinned knee.
Vampires really suck the life out of some films
Vampires are arguably one of the oldest movie monsters, and as such, it’s hard to really step outside of the coffin, if you will, and do something different. There have been great examples of this like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Lost Boys, and even Blade. These movies have set themselves apart from the pack by either production value, story direction, or creativity. Then there are movies like Vampegeddon, the Twilight Saga, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Curse, which by the way, Bram Stoker had NOTHING TO DO WITH.
I appreciate that young movie directors/writers want to get out there and make a name for themselves, but watching a movie like Vampegeddon makes me think they have no one to criticize their actions. Vampegeddon stars girls in their thirties portraying high school/college kids. Not only that but one has the biggest fake breasts in all the movies I watched. Also, the entirety of the movie’s atrocious dialog is recorded as additional dialog recording (ADR for short). It makes the movie sound really cheap, cheaper than the cast makes it look.
Having now seen more of the Twilight Saga than my wife, I can comfortably say that it is barely even fit for tween females to see. The love story is so overly saturated with melodrama and cliches that it is almost to the point of disgusting. Written by a woman that is older than me about girls in high school falling in love with vampires and werewolves. Stephenie Meyer leads a sad, albeit rich life.
Women … Can’t live with em, but directors love killing ’em
I have seen a lot of movies over the years, and probably none of them I have wanted to turn off more than Girls Gone Dead and Jennifer’s Body. Two others, that I will cover later, Sorority House Massacre and Cheerleader Massacre are a close third and fourth, but the first two are above and beyond.
Girls Gone Dead, an obvious play on the still somehow ongoing video series “Girls Gone Wild” is almost completely devoid of any value whatsoever. I have called out (and been called out by) directors for their movies before, but this one I almost took offense to. A movie about a girl from a Christian home that goes on spring break looking for fun and ends up getting hunted by a killer. It sounds like there would be something in there, but nothing about this movie is worth seeing. Unbelievably written by a woman, I even went to my wife and asked her if she knew ANY girls that talked or acted the way these girls do, she definitively said “no”. The movie is a piss poor excuse to have girls drink a lot (if a lot is a 6 pack) and swear like they just figured out what words meant. I am not one to care about nudity in movies, especially horror movies, but this is just dumb. The producers of Girls Gone Dead should truly be ashamed of themselves.
Jennifer’s Body is another shining example of terrible writing totally killing a movie. Diablo Cody, who won an Oscar from Best Original Screenplay with Juno, managed to squander all that credibility away writing this dreck. From the jump, the characters speak using so much slang and shitty one-liners that I almost shut it off. I’m not oblivious to the fact that high school kids use slang –I was once in school and used it myself –but this is ridiculous. I don’t know if Cody thought she was being clever by making up terms and then writing them into the movie or what. I was able to tolerate it in Juno because the story itself was interesting. Jennifer’s Body is far from interesting. A succubus inhabits the body of Megan Fox and proceeds to eat people to sustain her life. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. The one thing I loved is the fact that it is called Jennifer’s “Body” but you never actually get to see her body. I can only imagine the number of eleventeen-year-old boys that thought they would get a glimpse of Fox’s tits or ass only to be shut downtime and time again.
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Is that it? No. I have much more to say about the movies found in this year’s marathon. Stay tuned for part two, coming soon. (Just like any good/bad movie, this post has a sequel.)
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