[this review is from The Jaded Viewer 2 DVD Giveaway Winner Kim K. She suffered through these awful flicks like a real soldier and for that I'm giving her a honorary jaded viewer gold star of awesomeness]
I was warned - these movies won’t be making any "best of" lists. Watching them was a test of will. I have a short attention span. I'm rating them not by spinkicks, but by how many failed attempts it took me to actually sit down with the movie long enough to watch until the end.
"Ferocious Planet"
Alien movies, even when done well, are not typically the subgenre I reach for first. Plus, I tend toward thinking that any film with the word ‘Ferocious’ in the title is bound to be lame. But you can't judge a film by it's cover right?
Okay... maybe you can.
This movie begins with two scientists giving a demonstration to a group of politicians, military and fellow scientists on their groundbreaking technology whose purpose quickly becomes unimportant as once activated, the entire lab rips out of our dimension and into one inhabited only by dinosaur-like aliens. The scientists spend the remainder of the movie trying to fix their machine so that the group can make it back home. The politicians & military men prance around the jungle exploring, in hopes of securing fame and fortune. You can probably guess which group was (marginally) more successful.
There were funny moments, though most of them were likely unintentional. This movie had a feel of Jurassic Park-meets-Predator tweaked for a scifi original. The CGI was cartoonish, but in the context of this movie, it works well enough. The concept was ridiculous from the get-go, so I say run with that. The movie doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously either, which I respect, so if you’re going to watch, make it a drinking game:
Drink every time someone gets killed
-Twice if it’s not the person you expect -Three times if killed in almost identical manner to the previous character
Drink for every cut-to-commercial edit
Drink whenever someone says “that’s impossible,” “we’ve hit a snag,” or “we have a problem”
Drink for every time gunshots don’t work.
-Twice when characters use them anyway.
Drink anytime someone mentions self preservation
Drink for breathless running through the forest.
There is one kind of funny, ironic twist in the final five minutes that I appreciated, but not enough to make watching the entire movie worthwhile.
I give this film: 4 failed attempts.
No nudity in either flick and minimal gore, I’m afraid.
And there you go. Now may I request you send me a copy of “Martyrs” or “The Woman” as consolation for playing? ;)
It's that time of year where I look at every body's Top 10 lists and watch the one's I think may make mine. So I saw that Triangle was on one of these lists and I gave it a shot.
It's no square.
Triangle delivers everything you want from a horror movie. Heightened Hitchcockian suspense, twizzler twists and turns and there is blood by the pint. For a movie created out of the UK/Australia that boasts a group of Aussies doing their best American accents, it delivers on everything you want in a horror thriller.
Your mind will trip out from the amount of WTF is in this film. So much head turning plot twists you may need to drink some Four Loko to get it all straight. It all comes full triangle and by the end you checking IMDB message boards and trivia to find out what's the what.
Well I did. Boring Plot-O-Matic
When Jess sets sail on a yacht with a group of friends, she cannot shake the feeling that there is something wrong. Her suspicions are realized when the yacht hits a storm and the group is forced to board a passing ocean liner to get to safety, a ship Jess is convinced she's been on before. The ship appears deserted, the clock on board has stopped, but they are not alone... Someone is intent on hunting them down, one by one. And Jess unknowingly holds the key to end the terror.
Awesome Review-O-Matic
This review won't be that long because if I explained what's going on it would give away tons of good stuff. Like all movies like Inception, Sixth Sense, The Others you have to pay close attention to get the clues sprinkled throughout. But the film gets into the creamy filling quite quickly. Jess (Melissa George) and her friends go yachting, big storm, encounter strange ship. Spooky strange things happen on the ship.
SLIGHT SPOILERS below...
So we get into weird time travel mode and things get kooky doubly as they investigate the ship. Our crew gets bloodied and shot at and everything seems to revolve around Jess. The best comparison to Triangle is the low budget brilliant Timecrimes which I never reviewed because my head hurt after watching that awesomeness. I would say Triangle is a horror version of Timecrimes. END SLIGHT SPOILERS
The performance of Melissa George is solid. She plays her part well evolving her character into different iterations. The rest of the cast are just stand ins to the reveals we see. Smith who directed the uber awesome Severance cleverly employs the stand by suspense techniques with Kubrick's The Shining and Hitchcock flicks. There's talk of mythology scattered throughout as the film creates its own. Sure there may be BIG plotholes and logic questions. Even I started questioning if our main hottie Jess did this or that, her dilemma would get resolved but I decided to go with it. When your watching a fantastico time triangle, you just have to shut down the old cerebral CPU.
The funny thing about Triangle is when you think it's over, it keeps hitting you with more crazy WTF.
Suffice it to say Triangle is the one flick I've seen this year that had me Wikipedia-ing, Googling and IMDB-ing after I saw it. I enjoyed the film but wanted to understand it completely. There is always one film a year that makes my Top 10 list that has me hitting the message boards to get some answers. That makes you think minutes, hours, days and months after you've seen it. I like seeing those films (though in small quantities).
Triangle tries to out clever you and it succeeds. You want a horror thriller to challenge you, make you really try hard to find out what's going on. As the ending approached I had my theories and I kinda knew what was going to happen. You can see the cliche coming but it's all good. You want to see THAT ENDING. The one you feel is coming.
Triangle does just that. It's definitely going to make my Top 10 List for 2010.
It's that time of year where I look at every body's Top 10 lists and watch the one's I think may make mine. So I saw that Triangle was on one of these lists and I gave it a shot.
It's no square.
Oh oh. Fuck me.
Gore-ipedia
Shotgun trauma Head trauma Slice and dice
Nude-ipedia
Melissa George for an hour and change is in a tight white tank top and Daisy Dukes. Yum. WTF moment
A pile of dead bodies....say what?
The Jaded Viewer's Final Prognosis
One of the year's best horror films you never heard of. Its out on DVD and probably on Netflix as well. One of the year's best....ARGHHHHH I better stop writing now.
After bringing you all a list of 5 supernatural TV shows you may have forgotten, I've come up with more TV shows that I used to watch back in the day. Some are from years back, others are from the 90s. Mind you, back in the 90s, cable wasn't the way it is now and only a few channels were standard back in the day.
Much of the exotic TV came in the form of syndicated shows and basically Fox putting anything on broadcast TV.
In any case, these are some shows I decided to follow because either they had a hot actress, involved some sci fi element and had kung fu. Ahhhh thank you You Tube for letting me time travel back to these awesome days of the toob. 5.) The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
Network: Fox/Syndicated (1994)
the jaded viewer says: The thing about Bruce Campbell is that after seeing Evil Dead, you became a fan of anything he was in. Bruce is in a TV show? I'm so gonna watch it. It's a western with sci-fi elements and its oddly bonkers. I know Brisco fans became Jack of all Trade fans. C'mon admit it.
the jaded viewer says: My main man Russel Wong's second show that 's on this list (I watched any show that had Asians in it because American TV doesn't have Asians in it). I think they axed this show mid 2nd episode. Show was about some wrongly imprisoned Chinese martial artist who opens up a school in San Francisco. His students included Ray J, Missy Peregrym, Sarah Carter and Mako. Stereotypes galore in this one (because we all know every Chinese man, woman and child knows kung fu)
the jaded viewer says: OK ok, as part of Universal TV's Action Pack series, I didn't watch Cleopatra 2525 for the acting, story or special effects. I watched it for the very revealing outfits, especially the ones worn by our ditzy blonde lead Cleo (played by the hot Jennifer Sky). It's so silly sci-fi about armed flying machines versus kick ass girls you'd really don't mind the cheesiness when Gina Torres and Victoria Pratt are blasting bad guys and machines in tight leather.
the jaded viewer says: I'll admit, I'm a time travel junkie. If it be Quantum Leap or a BTTF cartoon, I'm watching it. So a little show about a cop from the future traveling to the past to catch bad guys is MUST SEE TV for me. He had an AI disguised as a credit card!
the jaded viewer says: Another TV show that was part of Universal TV's Action Pack series and starring Russell Wong. Seriously, it had an Asian male as the lead and getting "action" from all sorts of yummy ladies. Basically Vanishing Son started off as 4 made to TV movies about 2 brothers who come from war ravaged China to start anew (thank goodness they didn't end up in Arizona). But racist bad guys are everywhere so Jian-Wa has to kick ass to protect the innocent. Yes, this is the TV movies that had Rebecca Gayheart in them playing Jian-Wa's girlfriend. This show made it possible for Asian guys to date white women.
I never saw the original or its sequel and though I like time travel stories, I just couldn't see myself watching Ashton Kutcher in something he would ultimately fuck up.
But Revelations is Kutcher free so I figured its now safe to enter the water.
So seeing this 3rd installment is a complete shocker as its actually a tolerable, mediocre piece of filmmaking. It's isn't completely horrible and it's not critic proof brilliant. It's just average. And being average for an After Dark movie is like climbing Mount Everest.
You made it to the top!
Boring Plot-O-Matic Sam Reed can travel back in time, and makes his living helping to identify killers to the police. The problem is that if changes anything, deliberately or accidentally, the "butterfly effect" causes history to change. When he returns to the present, things are often completely different and he has no clear memory of what happened in his new history.
His troubles begin when he "breaks the rules" by trying to help the sister of his murdered girlfriend find out who the murderer was, and ends up changing his own history. Every attempt he makes to fix the problems that occur create even worse problems, and each trip scrambles his memory even further and puts him in an even worse situation than before.
Can he solve the mystery before he loses his mind?
Awesome Review-O-Matic
I gotta admit, there's an actual ample amount of splatter and nudity in this flick which totally caught me off guard. So as the movie started off with some dude bashing a woman's head in, I was like WTF.
Sam (Chris Carmack) and Jenna (Rachel Miner, girl from Californication, Bully) are siblings and have a nice, cozy family dynamic. Seems Sam use his time travel skills to help the police solve cases so he can support his deadbeat sister. Oddly enough, the movie takes place in Detroit.
Really Detroit? White people live in Detroit? From the opening montages of some brothas playing basketball and some rundown houses, are we really suppose to believe this suburban white kid and his semi hot blonde sister live in the projects?
Who was the location producer on this? Kidding aside, there was even one scene where Sam is walking down the street and some brothas eyeing him like WTF you doing in this neighborhood? I really think they had no idea they were filming a movie.
Anyway back to the flick, Sam loads up a bathtub full of ice and puts on some electrodes to go all Flux Capacitor.
However as his fat Doc Brown friend reminds him he has to abide by the BIG RULES which are:
1.) Never jump to into aspects of your life (personal and family) and try to change anything 2.) ONLY observe and report
But it wouldn't be much of a movie if good ole Sam abided by the rules right?
Seems Sam went back in time and saved his sister from a burning house but the laws of physics and shit say you can't do that unless you pay the reaper which of course happens as instead of his sister dying his parents die.
Later, a blast from his old cases comes in as a friend of Sam's old GF who was murdered tells Sam to investigate her case. Seems the guy who supposedly did it is on Death Row and possibly innocent.
I know what your thinking. Everytime I say Sam goes back in time your thinking Quantum Leap right? Shit people, I was thinking the same thing to. I was waiting for Sam to say: "Al, ask Ziggy what I'm here to change?" Boom! Blue light. And Sam's in a girl's body.
So the odd part of Sam's time travel is he goes back in time in his body. So when he jumps back to a point in time when he was a kid (say around the 1970s) he's in the body of of a 8 year old him. Soon Sam is jumping in to try to save his ex. But that fucks up the timeline and creates a Pontiac serial killer. Sam leaps back and forward in time investigating whose doing the killing and each time changes the future.
So our killer is going all serial killing people with an arsenal of machinery. Chainsaws, dice and slice, etc. Seems like our time traveler just can't figure it out until it's explained to him.
Suffice it to say, you can figure out whose the Big Bad killer 30 minutes in. The ending is little bit cliched, though a nice evil touch is added at the end.
I don't want to ruin or add any spoilers so you know, I won't.
Even our killer has fun explaining the entire craziness of all the slayings by saying:
"This is so Scooby-Doo, isn't it? I would've gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids."
Butterfly Effect: Revelation is not a perfect movie, but it's a competent one. It doesn't go too far off its own logic and it moves quicky for its 90 minutes. Each of the characters have their own little job to push Sammy along to find the truth. His fat physics professor friend, the inept detectives and the big breasted waitress who he boinks all contribute to his timeline life.
Seems people like the 1st one so maybe, just maybe I'll go see that one. But I mean it has the Kutcher. But it does have the hotness that is Amy Smart. Hmmmm. Do I risk watching Ashton the douche to see a hot blonde? Tough choice.
Maybe if future me went back in time to tell me what I should do, this wouldn't be a tough choice. You hear me future me? What do I do?
Hot blonde waitress boobies (in multiple positions!)
WTF moment
The killer explaining everything (motive, involvement, plot, etc) to our man Sam
The Jaded Viewer's Final Prognosis
I gotta admit, this one surprised me. I didn't know I'd actually find this "EH" instead of "ARGH". If you like time travel or the other Butterfly Effect movies I guess you can watch this one.
If you ever go back in time, tell the After Dark commitee to stop making movies. Please.
Ferocious Planet
There were funny moments, though most of them were likely unintentional. This movie had a feel of Jurassic Park-meets-Predator tweaked for a scifi original. The CGI was cartoonish, but in the context of this movie, it works well enough. The concept was ridiculous from the get-go, so I say run with that. The movie doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously either, which I respect, so if you’re going to watch, make it a drinking game:
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