Tag: Bad Movie

Soulless Witches Versus Toxic Warlocks: The Craft Legacy

Konich-Witches in movies haven’t been doing that well lately. Recently Anne Hathaway had to apologise for her role as the Grand High Witch in the new adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book. Apparently the community was at an outrage because the author wrote that these witches had three fingers just.. and Anne Hathaway had the audacity.. to portray a character with three fingers. It was an insult to everyone with Limb Difference.. said the community.. you are portraying us as evil…So Anne had to apologise….  The Craft Legacy.. does the exact opposite.. It tries to be as inclusive as possible and not offend anyone…. unfortunately just including “everyone” doesn’t make a good film. Mostly  because while everything is here.. no one has any personality whatsoever.

Un-EARTH-ing the Origins

Written and Directed by Zoey Lister-Jones this movie is a sequel to the 1996 movie “The Craft”  Directed by Andrew Fleming and Written by Filardi. The sequel currently holds a 4,3 out of 10 on IMDB and has a Metacritic score of 3.4 from the audience.  The Craft from 1996 is one of my favourite witch movies.. and I love it for how amazingly 90’s that movie is.  From the title crawl to the end of the movie.. it almost is so culty that it feels like a family guy 90’s movie spoof.  The Craft Legacy is connected to the original in the most loose way possible and only comes into play at the end of the movie.. otherwise it is unconnected. What the two do have in common though is how anchored they are in this time. This movie is SO ridiculously 2020 that I think in 5 years it will be hilarious and a lot better than it is now.

This movie IS SO insanely politically correct it is almost hilarious. Do not get me wrong.. I am all about inclusion.. but this group of four is so ultra inclusive between the four of them.. that it kind of feels like one of those “A Rabbi and Priest and a Imam walk into a bar “ jokes. There is our main actress, who plays the white girl Lillith..she is the one why this movie is called Legacy.. then we have  Frankie who seems to have slight hispanic roots, Tabby is our melanated  character and Lourdes is the trans-witch. Again.. I do think this idea is awesome.. I love that they went in this direction.. this should be possible… however.. when you realise we do not even learn Lourdes and Tabby’s name in the entire movie.. you realise we are in trouble. Of the four main characters.. two aren’t really named on screen..ever..I might have missed it.. but if I did so did my friend. 

When your main characters are not even named , they do not deserve a power Walk!

Please FIRE the director

.

I am not a fan of cancel culture.. I do think we should work hard to make Hollywood a place for everyone.. but that Anne Hathaway stunt I mentioned earlier.. I find very dumb.. For one Witches are written to not be humans.. so a different physiology  should not be taken in offence whatsoever.. by that standard Baby Yoda would and Yoda would depict people with less fingers as having very weird eating habits. No witches in this variant are not humans.. even if there are other definitions of witches. Do not question EVERYTHING or involve everything to yourself.. is my rule. Now I think the movie makes all the right inclusions.. but are they really inclusions?! I am not so sure… when you want to include people .. make sure they are actually included.. as characters. If you want to make a trans person a witch do write her to be at least a bit interesting. I don’t Lourdes being a trans woman should affect the plot or anything but at least let her say her name.. instead of saying she doesn’t get periods.. She doesn’t have an identity…. and the only thing she mentions is a few spells and a few comments on being Trans that’s not a real person. Same goes for any of the other old hollywood-shunned acting people.

Fairly early in the movie the girls enchant the stereotypical bully jock into being nicer. It turns out he actually has more depth.. or so they would like to believe… because he then spouts politically correct exposition explaining what a cis-gender , explaining women rights .  He also is bi-sexual .. which seems to be a plot point but doesn’t go anywhere. He cries over it and he feels relieved having confessed but much like Lourdes.. it kind of feels as if the character tries to make itself stand out… for being different and being “2020”.  There is a lot of good things going on.. there is a closetted gay  person in this movie who struggles with his sexuality.. it seems to be a plot thread.. but once again.. after it is revealed .. nothing happens with it. I REALLY like the inclusion.. but I think you really cheapen things by letting all the characters tell you what makes them inclusive.. just to see them replaced by some generic stock character.  Kind of like the Mighty Morphin Power Ranger Roll Call.. “Lesbian, Bi-Sexual, Melanated, Adopted, Transgender Girl”  Then they all morph and we cut to the Japanese stock footage with completely different characters.. I really hated it.. as if it plays inclusion as a gimmick to be cool. That doesn’t show you are a skilled writer or a good director.. that shows you pick popular buzzwords and put them into your movie… No I do not think they should fire the director.. though she clearly did a bad job.. I am sure she has her merrits.. I just needed every chapter title to resemble the elements.

These look like Twilight Characters to me

Full of Hot AIR

I am happy the trans girl is played by an actual trans person and we do see an example on how movies can be.. in THEORY.. this does feel in a way like the world we want to see.. but at the same time it does paint a bit too much of an Utopia..  This kind of brings issues within the settings of this movie.  Really hurting any sense of credibility. The story is as follows. Lilly and her mother move in with her mothers new boyfriend. As Lillith adapts to her new school three girls discover she wears a mysterious pendant tying her into the world of magic..  Every which has an element and a wind direction, Tabby is Fire, Lourdes is earth and Frankie is air.. however without Water they can not do powerful spells.. what do you know it seems Lily is a very powerful witch…attuned to Water. This poses a bit of an issue.. how astronomical are the chances of four THIS diverse girls all having a different element all being born in a line of magic?! I like the idea of making a movie that includes people who never could shine in Hollywood.. but making them feel common by making them special and chosen one.. feels contradictive.. luckily this movie has more where that came from. Spoiler for people who do not know what the word Legacy means.. because that is the only way you will not get this plot twist….. 

Lillith is the daughter of one of the witches of the first movie.. a villian drained her of her magic…which already happened in the first movie… so it ignores the ending of the first movie to an extent.. and she was given up  because that woman went crazy but also did not want Lily to grow up with her magic .. she must never use it. Sure, that is a nice trope.. hide the kid away from their true nature. This seems to be a huge rule though.. Yet the ONE memento her real mothers seems to have given Lilly.. is a necklace.. that connects her to the magic of the four wind directions.. that necklace is the very thing that makes her discover she is magic. …… The heck?! That’s like saying.. Girls from Charmed.. I do not want you to discover you have magic powers.. I’ll send you to spain.. Please have my magic book!?! Eeeh… What.. It get’s worse though.. Lily’s new father played by David Duchoveny is called Adam… (like the first man)   he is a famous motivational speaker who talks about holy Masculinity.. he believes women to be inferior beings… ..jeesz I wonder who the bad guy of this movie is going to be…Spoiler.. again..  but …

He turns out to be a Warlock who wants to steal magic from Witches because women should not hold power. I think he is Lily’s real father but it is never made clear..but since a Witch has to voluntarily surrender her powers.. he seduces her adoptive mother.. tries to torment her into manifesting her powers.. then driving her and her friends apart making her resent the powers so she can give them up.. Except.. he  doesn’t do anything of that..  Everything that happens .. happens kind of at random. The girls find Lily because of her pendant.. which has nothing to do with Adam.. Lily falls in love with someone.. because they used a spell on him.. which has nothing to do with Adam.. For some reason he knows everything in the end.. even what Lily’s friends do at different locations, he knows how the girls magic works at one moment.. at the very next moment he completely forgets and walks into a death trap.. kind of showing more toxic masculinity in the end.

This movie really likes to put people in neat rows

WATERered Down Original

It’s such a shame that this movie is so weakly written. The original gave all the girls mini arcs to go through here.. we don’t even learn their names.. there is no character development for any of them. There is no consequence to any of their actions.. at one point they seal their magic away.. literally a MINUTE later.. they are back with their magic more powerful then ever. The original had consequences.. they reacted to each other, had arcs started to mistrust each other.  Here the group break up comes out of nowhere at the most inappropriate time ever, with no real precedent why the thing that was made an issue is an issue.There even was a perfectly good reason to let that break of trust happen.. but for some reason they did not get mad at Lily deeply shaming a girl’s trust and choosing forsaking how friends should behave amongst another.. for some reason they get mad for a thing they aren’t even sure caused an issue.. This movie could have been such a good thing for Hollywood.. but instead of making a real movie they just shoved a bunch of feathers up their own touchie.. look at how cool we are!

This movie is nice for a twelve year old girl who thinks witches are cool..but the things these girls do feel way to overpowered and not grounded in real magic.. a girl lays in a bathtub  and it glows.. and they make a whole thing out of it..the first ever spell the girls learn is to freeze time..It’s so poorly written because that ability kills all the tension. The CGI is really bad and the cringiest sentence in the movie is “I want to learn how to shapeshift.. so I can become Kirsten Stewart because I am a huge Twilight Stan” This movie is made for 12 year old girls and if you are NOT a twelve year old girl.. this movie is something you should stay away from. It’s Tik-Tok Hollywood and that ain’t for me!  I love the way this movie set worked.. too bad it did not produce a movie but a viral video instead.

Bloodless Bollsheviks and Soulless Suckers! Boll’s Best BloodRayne! Third Reich Review!

Hello Island Guests! I have done it! I have made my way through all the BloodRayne movies! The third movie was a surprising experience! Not only are the rules of vampirism redefined in the same franchise once again …and even in the movie.. but this movie actually dare I say it offers a somewhat okay story. Could it be there is hope for Mister Boll?!

I am not even sure that’ the main actress on the cover let alone that she wore an outfit she actually wears

Third Time’s the Charm

Mister Boll, while on average a horrible movie maker and possibly a worse person, actually managed to craft something that is eligible for the title movie this time. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that the writing this time mostly comes from Michael..who is mostly known for doing stuff for Uwe Boll movies! The BloodRayne movies that came before were just a few action scenes linked together, with some softcore porn, convenient exposition and  horrible camera transitions. I am glad to inform you that this time we have an actual story that moves from A to B and the scenes in between only have two of the three usual filler bits. The movie actually uses Rayne’s unique nature to give us a new type of antagonist that feels like we actually scale things up for a sequel and the plans of the bad guys as a result more or less make sense! Whoop Whoop! That is how you do it Mister Boll.

I can believe some blood fell in his mouth! Way to go Mister Boll!

Rayne works with the Bolsheviks in this movie, not that you would know as they aren’t even named that except for an insult once. Never is the location disclosed either. It’s “somewhere in europe” but given that there seem to be concentration camps in the neighbourhood so I guess it is set in Poland?! Rayne rescues some jews from the train but in doing so she accidentally infects an SS officer with her blood. She feeds on him as well. This results in him becoming a Vampire and not a Dhampir  that can walk in the sunlight. His Lieutenant and a crazy scientist investigate and decide. They discover Rayne’s blood is a source of power and want to obtain more of it so they can turn Hitler immortal! However the vampirified commandant spirals more and more out of control himself.  Wow that’s like TWO things happening at once! Good Job Mister Boll!

Vampire Hitler sounds about as entertaining as Sharknado!

The commandant has no name by the way.. if you read the box art he is named Ekart Brand but he is never named in the movie itself, nor does he have a name on the credits. Same goes for the evil doctor and the lieutenant. This movie .. got adapted into Uwe Boll’s Horror Comedy.. Blubberella.. which is basically the exact same story but Dhampir is now half vampire,  and the main character is fat. Every other person except for some actual prostitutes Boll hired for BloodRayne  are cast in the same roll! Only in Blubberalla Hitler has been recast. Uwe Boll wanted to play him himself.  So.. oddly enough if you want to see a more offensive version of this movie with characters named Slutlana.. you have an option here!  Also it’s weird that Uwe Boll Plagiarized himself… BloodRayne 3 is the better version of the two though… so hey.. when you watched the best version of this story if you watch this one as well! That is smart mister Boll.. Also that’s kind of disgusting that you rehash your own plot for a fat joke!

At least the characters in THIS movie were shot nicely!

When it’s  Rayne it’s poor!

While the movie is competently written , I did find this the most poorly acted one out of the lot.  Rayne and the Doctor who have the most screen time are HORRIBLE actors in this movie. Nathassia Malte does such a poor job in this movie, her lines are very wooden and her acting is very apathetic. There is no emotion at all. Maybe a bit  in her sex scenes but when she is supposed to be concerned… well .. let’s just say I was happy there was an actual story to follow! The acting Rayne does isn’t bad in the Tommy Wisseau way. Where Johnny feels like an Alien’s interpretation of a human Rayne here feels like an actor that isn’t really trying. The “this is for a paycheck” acting. Which extends to most of the main cast. The best acting comes from characters like “prostitute”  or Magda. The first may or may not be an actual prostitute as Uwe Boll has more than once done this, and the second is this blond decoder lady. Who allegedly decrypted the decoder. The latter has to mostly play acting upon acting and she can get away with some cheesiness. The first gets turned into a vampire (as does Magda later on)  and both go very  hammy in all their acting.. but it seems fun! Good job on casting them mister Boll! Boo for Nathassia though. I have to say .. she sucks!

Whoops! Looks like I made two enemies in the Boll Universe now!

Where Natassia Malte is the queen of coasting, Doctor played by Clint Howard is the king of “that’s not how you say that”.  His delivery seems off! Not in the funny way either. Part of it is because of how the doctor is written. He is one of those “cartoon” mad scientists. However those are on screen way less than one in a movie. That level of energy is not something you can keep up for 75 minutes (as that’s the length of this movie give or take minus credits). There is a difference between a cartoon and a real character. Clint Howard doesn’t commit to one and he switches between cartoony energy and more grounded character and that makes him stick out like a sore thumb. It’s not like he is god-awful.. or well maybe he is but I’ve seen worse. I feel more like he is a capable man but the director should have said.. “let’s try that with one more take, it’s very close but maybe a  bit less/more cartoony here”. As a result this movie at times gave me Ed Wood vibes. Where Ed did not have money for reshoots I guess Uwe did not have the talent for reshoots!  However I do really love Ed Wood movies so making me feel that way is not that bad! At least I had a pleasant experience. Much better than BloodRayne 2! Much better than BloodRayne 1 and much better than Postal. If we establish Uwe Boll movies as a genre .. it might actually be good within those confines.

You can just hear the fake German accent from the screenshot…..you’ll probably imagine it better than in actuality though.

Deja Vu

This movie unfortunately has some trouble escaping some of the mistakes the earlier BloodRayne movies made. The biggest one is the fact that Vampire lore is very weirdly established. Rayne is a Dhampir born of human and vampire, however her blood seems to turn people into vampires. However her blood allows vampires to walk in the sun. So while Rayne is a half vampire.. her blood makes full vampires, people she creates by feeding them her blood turns them into day walkers.. but if those day walkers create a vampire.. not all of them are daywalkers. Some inherit Commandant’s strengths but to varying degrees. Some go insanely evil others retain their dominant personality. Some get taken down by gunfire others need to be staked. It once again feels like vampirism is a bit of an afterthought.. which is weird because it is a big part of the story. Silver from the last movie doesn’t work anymore and thank Arceus that bullets that were next to cloves of garlic don’t work any longer.

Of course all vampire women become super slutty! Because It’s an Uwe Boll Movie

The weird cuts in scenes also appear again. Nothing as bad as  the second movie but a few scenes are really cut short, I could count two or three where it really feels like they cut a scene directly after a sentence which felt a bit jarring. There are also a few fade to black cuts when Uwe Boll was really clueless on where to go. Again making it feel more like a hobby flick than made by a professional. The camera quality is a lot better. Having the ability to make a lot of daytime shots really helped with the image quality.  We get no shaky camera shots and it feels fairly obvious this movie had a larger budget than the previous one. I don’t feel like a porn cue is about to chime in as soon as a female character wanders onto the screen… which is funny because this movie dials depicting women as whores up quite a bit.

I wonder how many brothels have velvet bathrobes for female guests!


Every woman in this movie is a prostitute or acts like one! This leads to the most hillarious and inappropriate sexscene ever.  Rayne earlier in the movie had sex with a female prostitute indicating she might be into women.. but she gets captured and drained of almost all her blood. When she wakes up she is on a prisoner transport .. towards the Fuhrer.. her love interest got beaten mercilessly and woke up just a little before that… as soon as they see each other.. while being captives.. they just start going at it like rabbits. It’s so Uwe Boll to do this and it’s horrible but at the same time.. it would not be Uwe Boll without it! Thank you mister Boll for staying true to yourself. 

And I thought not taking of your socks was a dealbreaker!

For a movie made by a man with no talent we get an entertaining trainwreck. The blood effects that make no sense from the first movie are back!  Most of the times people just yell ugh.. and fall down! No bullet wounds, no mar on their shirt, just a soft ugh.. as if they were a video game  character.  It’s weird but oddly it feels mostly like the video games. The cheesy deaths, the setting actually matching the game. BloodRayne the game has a level of campiness that I think this movie does manage to capture. It doesn’t work in a movie.. at all  but it feels like a good video game cutscene… well good is a big word..it’s not on the level of command and conquer not this is those in game video game cutscenes we saw in the early to mid 2000’s . Yes this movie is from the 10’s so it’s many years to late ..but it reminded me of the games. Even the soundtrack feels like a video game one. I am not sure it works for a movie.. but I am not sure we should hold Uwe Boll to that standard. He can’t make movies but with 75 minutes in length, this barely qualifies as such.Maybe I have such low standards by watching these but I actually found entertainment here.. but I never really viewed it as a component product. I wasn’t expecting it.. I did not get it .. like every other Uwe Boll product.. but unlike other Uwe Boll products.. I had fun.. great job mister Boll!

Mister Boll also shows us how German Bratwurst is made!

Uwe Boll Sucks!

This movie is better than the movie with the same characters and same characters Blobberella. That is exactly the same movie with the difference of .. what if the main character is fat and we add some stupid jokes like Slutlana into to mix.So already this movie is automatically not the worst! While I had fun with this movie is it worth a watch?! That is difficult. As a vampire movie I’d say it is a definite no! Vampirism is so inconsistent yet again. Some vampires still die by bullets, Rayne’s Damphir nature barely comes into play other than her blood creating a vampire that can daywalk. As a BloodRayne video game Adaptation I’d say it is not worth your time either.It has the time period right.. but all the other elements that were in the last movies like the hunter organisation, the story about her father which was actually concluded in this time period in the games.. it has been told before. Brimstone has no presence here..and besides Rayne using her swords like twice.. this is just a vampire movie set in World War 2 rather than a BloodRayne movie. She still complains about her mother being raped though .. it is mentioned 5 times in the movie even though it has to do nothing with the plot and happened over 100 years ago.

This movie still raised the bar for Mister Boll still!

No this movie has no viewing merit based on any of it’s tags. It’s not good at horror, even though the torture scene is kinda cool, it’s action is choppy and humorously inconsistent and to complete the series.. this does nothing.  Yet for people like me who actively watch bad movies this one has some merit! This is Uwe Boll producing a movie that is watchable. If I had to create an analogy Uwe Boll is like the LJN (a video game company notorious for only releasing bad titles) of movies… he  releases a lot of utter shit..but sometimes something is remotely playable. No we are not talking LJN’s Maximum Carnage here.. that game is too good! No this is NES Wolverine, a pretty shitty title that still is a huge step up from Spiderman or The Uncanny X-Men. So if you are the type or person that would play Uncanny X-Men on NES because it’s not the worst the studio has to offer and you want to see them sorta get it right.. this is your movie. It’s as if your kid normally gets F’s in art class and now gets a D+ so you frame it as an achievement for your kid… If you just want a decent movie stay away.. if you want to see a piece of unlikely movie history… it’s watchable. I still stand by that Uwe Boll can’t make a movie.. but now I know he can at least make something that looks like one!

With that we conclude the BloodRayne Triology! Did you see the trilogy?! What is your “favourite” Uwe Boll movie? Let me know in the comments! Now it is time to leave september behind and move into Oktober and I got something special for you guys planned…hey whats that translucent figure floating in front of me?! Oh no! It’s the spirit of Uwe Boll’s Vengeance!
You can help me rent an exorcist by supporting my Kofi! It would be much appreciated!

The Damphir and the Dumbkopf: Bloodrayne Review

Yay Island Guests it’s time for everyone’s favourite director again! Uwe Boll! Where Postal made me hate him as it was one of the worst movies I’ve EVER seen, I had high hopes that this one would at least be better.  Then I found out that 2005’s Bloodrayne fairly commonly is seen as Uwe Boll’s WORST movie. Where Postal just proved Uwe Boll is a horrible person.. this one taught me that Uwe Boll is a horrible writer as well. The greatest mystery to me is not the Loch Ness monster, it is how Uwe Boll can get well known names in his movie… and there are quite a few of them .. in Bloodrayne..
As Michelle Rodrigeuez with her super fake british accent would say in this movie… it was bloody awful. This post will spoil the entire movie as we will need it to unearth it’s flaws.. but trust me.. it is not relevant to your enjoyment of this film.

Writing Rule Number 1: Every Story Needs A Setting

Lord of the Rings is set in Middle Earth in the third era or something.  Star Wars is set a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. Rampage is set in modern day Chicago.. and Bloodrayne isn’t set anywhere. We start in an undefined kingdom in an undefined timepiece and we do not know if this is our world or some magical world. Only the THIRD movie in this series would reveal  that it is set on earth at least with the subtitle Bloodrayne Thirdreich. The THIRD movie has a setting.. this one not so much!  Now you may argue that it does , it’s probably the dark-ages as black powder from China is new and unknown and everyone talks with a British accent except for Michael Madsen and Matthew Davis, who both play vampire hunters.. with american accents.. .. before america was even born. But heck that is the least of the consistency errors in this movie! This movie doesn’t do world-building at all. 

The movie opens with Michael Madsen and his crew riding in a town, they are looking for someone or something, the local barkeep might have some answers when Davis character Sebastian spots a tavern goer not having a reflection and stabs him, everyone takes this very calmly..so it seems we have a world where vampires are very common and hunters as well. That could be cool…the next scene we are introduced to Rayne, she is a captive at a circus where she is used as a freak show, where they make bank on showing the monstrosity known as vampires to the world…..uhm.. but did the last scene not show the world accepts them as common? Also why are vampires allergic to plain  water… I would not mind but later they go trough lengths to get holy water..uh oh.. its going to be THAT type of movie?

A scene later Rayne is raped..cause Uwe Boll thinks women are equal to condoms just something to hang Woody Woodpecker in, but she escapes, in a weird mix between a flash forward that through cinematography reads as a dream or flashback. They add in some nausea inducing screen smears and we are in the next scene, the vamp hunters now are in the camp, Rayne went on a rampage and killed those who wronged her and bit her friend on accident..so without explaining to the circus troupe the hunters  start beheading their dead and murdering those who have been bitten. Of course there is no reaction from the carnies whatsoever because to them vampires are common now! Jeesz Uwe cant even be consistent with this on the same group of characters! And I am only 10 minutes in. Then we see Rayne killing a vampire by just stabbing and slashing her?! So why stab that other guy in the heart with a stake?!…Oh.. this rule isn’t gonna be consistent right?! ..That’s right!

Writing Rule Number 2:  Every story should happen for a reason

We get the backstory of Rayne told soon after, she is a Damphir a half human half Vampire that can wear crosses and feed on vampires. She seduces a female vampire, who from being into guys completely abandons her male prey to get killed by Rayne allowing herself to be bitten and drained in seconds. First of all.. if you had a sure thing.. why trade it in? Second for Rayne to seduce the woman and assume she is into women as well is quite a stretch whenever this movie is set and third, the woman is a vampire! Surely she’d be aiming at Rayne’s neck not expose hers for some cheap thrills? She was hunting why turn her into just a skank looking for some hot woman on woman action?! Because Uwe Boll doesn’t understand the difference between a woman and a sextoy thats why! Anyway.. the vampire is dead now from a two second bite..stupid but more movies do that. A Roma fortune teller shows up and sees this and tells Rayne to follow her and trough tarot her backstory is told. Rayne’s father Kagan played by Ben Kingsley raped her mother and later to kill his daughter from said rape. Since he is an evil vampire he wants to be immortal… or more immortal?  For this he needs 3 items called the talisman and with it he can rule the world… also he nearly destroyed everyone who can resist him already and actually manages to dispose of every organisation oposing him during the movie BEFORE he gets any relics…so had he not done the whole plot thing.. he would have won anyway..so Why is he looking for these?

Rayne must find these things to stop him, why he hunts for these relics now and not when she was little? Who knows?!It would have made sense if he searched for the relics while his enemies were at full strength but now there is only a single cell left! Okay he didn’t know where they were. No one does, so the fortune teller obviously just tells Rayne the exact location of one With these artefacts Kagan may be able to rule the world and become immortal..which he already is..one of them just allows him to take a bath..another would allow him to wear a cross around his neck….. so these artifacts sounds REALLY underpowered., so if Rayne wants to save the world.. she has to find these artifacts before he does. Regardless Rayne tells the Roma lady “No I do not care about the world .. I just want revenge”. Then she goes out to find these artefacts.

The first one is guarded by a bunch of monks. Who immediately believe a woman of healthy colour, no damaged clothes and carrying two huge swords indeed lost her family on her road and is so sick and weak that she needs shelter. In a world where vampires are established to be super common(sometimes). Mind you these monks protect a relic from vampires! So without a doubt they invite this Vampire into their monastery and allow her to kill their molten faced guard.. who for no reason at all has a face like that.. He can wield a big giant fake hammer.. and again for no reason he swaps that out for a spiked club… Both are bludgeoning weapons and both are used in the exact same way.. the only reason the creature swaps is so Rayne could feasibly lift it to bash it’s face in. I am willing to believe these monks don’t turn away a plea for help..but come one Uwe! These monks protect the relic against vampires..and when a warrior woman without a scratch on her body shows up at night they just allow her to roam into their reliquary? Jeesz.. also why is there one monster monk?! It makes NO sense!

His necklace unlocks a secret passage because..of course it does.. and Rayne finds a room that is trapped by the Looney Tunes.. like seriously its that exaggerated. THink hexagonal tiles and across all lines sawblades are fired faster than your eye can track. I mean that literally I could not keep up with the trap visually.. so of course she leaps trough it seeing a pattern..to discover the relic is an eye. When she takes this eye.. which allegedly makes her more immortal.. she activates the final trap. Now before we move on from here let me explain how these relics work. There are A Rib, an Eye and A heart.  One makes you immune to sunlight, one makes you immune to the holy stuff and one makes you immune to water. So I would assume the eye would make you immune to sunlight, cause blinding light etc.. the heart against holy stuff cause you know heart/love goodness god etc.  And why a rib makes you immune to water would be a bit weird.. but a rib kinda looks like a boat?!


But no.. the eye makes her immune to water. The heart makes you immune to sun and the rib lets you resist holy stuff talk about random! Now let’s play a game! How well can Uwe Boll Write! I am gonna write a scenario Uwe Boll has set up.. and then you have to think like him.. for an awfull solution to the problem. Here we go : So a Damphir/Vampire just stole that item that can make them immune to the harmful water… Oh no! The vampire can take a bath now.. and travel across a lake apparently..cause they would normally not be able to do that either. What trap do you design to stop them after gaining Water Immunity?! Mind you.. you already fired 20 cartoon sawblades at them and it missed. … How would Uwe Boll write the NEXT trap. To stop an even stronger vampire! …………….. If you thought that stopping someone with water immunity through a water trap would be the way to further this story… you are correct! The room fills up with water..about ankle deep. But that is not all.. there is a trial after that.. a monk politely tells her off! Also fun little detail NONE of these monks wear the same cross around their neck… which just feels stupid. They are an ORDER..

So for some reason, Ben Kingsley Vampire who never knew his daughter was alive.. now knows she is alive and exactly where she is .. and has a guy from his castle follow her..which means riding out with a battalion of dark knights.. obviously they arrive at the EXACT time that Rayne finished the trial.. despite not having searched for her.. they just go to the right location.. fight some monks and if they do not want to tell where the eye is .. they kill them..including the last guy who could possibly know. This of course lets the bad guy realise it is Rayne who has the talisman so he captures her. Because..otherwise they are stuck and the plot won’t further. Obviously the Bad Guy actor knows Rayne has the eye! He has the script! They bring her to Meatloaf Vampire who can offer them shelter for the night but he wants to add her to his harem.. because 14 boobs are not enough. The henchmen guy doesn’t agree which sends Meatloaf in a very over acting rage. Then the vampire hunters.. two of them.. come in after having fought off dozens of vampires and the henchman guy..decides to flee…..later he would demonstrate he could take both of them at full strength fighting them simultaneously.

Meatloaf being a vampire of course chose the room with windows that have the sun shining in from 4 different directions and while Rayne perfectly rolls in a blanket four beams poof Meatloaf vampire away.  Man.. the price of that house with every side facing the south (or west)  must have been hella expensive. Also… dear Mister Boll… that is not how Sunlight works. It’s a beam.. You can never have four perfect beams of lights from all directions.. heck with one direction it is even flat out impossible whatsoever. Why am I even surprised by this though! Stuff doesn’t happen in this world because it makes sense in the context of a world. Things happen because Uwe Boll thinks it’s cool..or because he feels he needs to proof women are all floozies and addicted to male genitalia..or female ones.

Writing Rule Number 3: Give your characters relevant development.

So after that the hunters take in Rayne and train her as one of their own… Sebastian doesn’t trust her too much and she is very mean to them.. because she has suffered so much!  She explains her backstory…which by the way she also told the monks so this is the third time we see that story in flashbacks and it is also depicted in art in the opening credits I think.. so this story .. He raped my mother and killed her.. is now VERY well known.  She tells no one else could possibly feel what she feels. Sebastian tells her his parents both turned vampire and he saw hunters kill them right before his eyes.. as they saved him as his parents were about to kill him.  I lost both my parents, he says!…This of course triggers the romance scene and Rayne and Sebastian begin to fuck like animals against a cage… because both of them had dead parents… here I thought the Martha from Batman versus Superman  thing was kinda lame! Boll did it first and worse though.

After that they are in love , which is shown by the fact that they smile at each other cutely once or twice.. other than a few spars together with the worst looking swords you have ever seen in a movie.. and I am not kidding.. There are high school plays that have better looking swords and no I am not overreacting. I shown these pictures to some weapon buffs and some who barely saw a movie and both set this was the fakest stuff they had ever seen. Sebastian is tagged out by Katarin, who is the character played by Michelle Rodriguez and has a very weird british accent. She seems friendly to Rayne at first but then shows her narrow mind. Also her father is a vampire..that is her backstory. He wants to get back in touch with her as they care for each other…so clearly she totally isn’t going to betray the group and have a fight with Rayne right?! Nah.. 

Actually no.. set up for a destined fight! Hah! No time for that plots gotta happen! Katarin betray sthe group almost immediately after this scene and that sword fight they kinda hinted at happening never does . Katarin betrays the order and it gets slaughtered. Her reason.. she doesn’t believe in Vladimir anymore and doesn’t want him to make everyone rush into their death. So obviously she kills everyone! This happens Rayne Sebastian and Vladimir are fetching weapons because.. one of Raynes blades broke.. and they have to go to a few hoops to get two crates of weapons. Why is this a task that needs to be done by the leader of the order?! Also there are SOOOO many weapons in the order already. They just did this for two black powder grenades and Raynes akwards swords! Why did they go?! Well so that Katarin can betray them of course. It turns out she has the third talisman as well. it was always in the fort hidden underwater. How lucky Rayne got the water immunity earlier. Why she never told anyone this when she still trusted her leader.. who knows! It’s never explained. Oh also Ben Kingsley found the second talisman of screen somewhere. Each time he is shown on screen we are shown the exterior of his castle first with a lightning sound effect.. it’s basically the same as lord Zed is introduced in power rangers.. so Sorry I forgot.. I did not take it seriously enough. Katarin and Rayne wrestle in the water.. because… it’s an Uwe Boll Movie and women have to mud wrestle. Michelle Rodriguez’s character is finished off without any honour and in a very lame splashy way. As we move towards the finale of this movie.

Writing Rule Number 4: An Ending should feel earned and in line with the story!

Rayne of course now knows where her father lives.. while she was looking for him earlier.. because everyone instantly gains knowledge they did not have before as soon as the plot requires it. And no.. she did not learn this from Vladimir or Sebastian.. she seperated from them! Knowledge directly being gained from the script is the most consistent thing in this movie.. Now to stop Kagan she lets herself be captured and hands him an artefact..which in fact is an empty box like all movies. One that not one but 4 seperate people fail to check before it is time for some sort of ritual. Oh yeah this ritual since Rayne absorbed one relic…but secretly two.. it will allow Kagan to remove these parts of her. Even though no one ever obtained these before and originally they were part of a very hard to kill vampire. There is no way this ritual should exist let alone that Kagan should know about it .. but the plot would strand without it so now he knows!

Rayne is disarmed and put in a prison! But no worries Sebastian and Vladimir come rushing in and ..get themselves captured. Which leads to Rayne being strapped to an altar as the ritual starts. This must have been part of her original plan..even if she did not know Vladirmir and Sebastian would come.. in fact.. she should not know or assume this.. but had they not been here.. this plan would have surely killed Rayne.. without a fighting chance. So why did she settle for it? By now you should know.. her actress read the plot. In the fakest Guard My Cellmate has vanished act, which no real person would belief.. heck which 90% of fictional characters would not believe, except for Looney Tunes Villains and Uwe Boll characters, the two guys are freed and manage to get to the altar to free Rayne . A fight breaks out and  Vladimir and Sebastian now effortlessly kill the soldiers that stopped them before also effortlessly I might add .. but it’s different not because now the soldiers are aided by some more elite troops….uhm you might have gotten that reversed Uwe. Ben Kingsly gets the lamest kill in the movie.. as he impales Vladimir who is held by two vampires .. ..by simply walking into him. Of course no one reacts to his death.. not even Vladimir himself. Sebastian gets mortally wounded.. with again.. no one  reacting to hit.. but by holding the plastic stick close to Hencheman’s neck.. his neck  explodes and henchman is killed instantly as Sebastian slowly fades away. There is an extreme amount of blood in this fight. Everyone is equipd with red water balloons and squirty devices.

Rayne and her father face off and it is revealed Rayne absorbed the heart. Shocker!. Ben Kingsley calls Rayne an ungratefull bitch..which makes perfect sense, such elegant dialogue.. he given her so much to be grateful for.. nearly sacrifiing her.. killing her only friends, murdering and raping her mother and leading her to lead a cursed existance as a Damphir.  What not to be thankful for. Well she is a women.. in a Uwe Boll movie so she must be grateful for sprouting of the seeds of a man I guess.  She isn’t though and manages to kill him.. after a super lame fight scene that had more dialogue that  most of the movie even. Riveting combat! Kegan dies.. in a very weird effect..again that only the vampire in the beginning mimicked.. no other vampire died like that. I was shocked to see he had Pigtails all along!

Rayne goes to her fuckbuddy and is so upset that he is also passing away and that he doesn’t want to be a vampire that she sits in Kagan’s  throne and thinks about blood..seemingly turning evil.. and with that.. we end this  atrocity..

I had my way of fun with this flick! I was amused in analysing it..but do not misunderstand This movie was bad! It made no sense anywhere.. , the effects were super lame, the writing was non existent and how the heck did all these actors agree to this?! What the heck is wrong with people?! I think Uwe boll might be some sort of Incubus! THis movie made it very clear to me.. while he can remember like 20 video game titles.. and can befriend movie actors.. he can’t do anything else! Stay away from this one! Please! If you like me can enjoy a bad movie it might be fun.. but Uwe Boll doesn’t do the “so bad that it’s good” thing. It feels to lazy for that. It doesn’t take itself seriously enough.. yet also takes itself seriously enough for it to never be clever or witty about it’s bad or shitty choices. While this movie made me less angry than Postal did.. this one clearly shows less competence as a fill maker. So once again even though I really hoped ot only give this grade once.. this movie is …….

PS all of this had very little to do with the actual video game!

Now I am sure that next week there will be a more competent film waiting for me… I might not be strong enough to pick up the sequel just yet…then again it can hardly be any worse! Now that I have a security guard I am not even that afraid for Mister Boll. If he challenges me to a fight Indigo said he would fight in my stead! I would still love to see mister Boll make a Fortnite movie… as long as I do not have to see it! That would be so bad it would probably kill me.. then again… maybe two negatives cancel each other out!


The Movie that made me hate Uwe Boll : Postal

My dear island guests… I will warn you. This review will contain extreme negativity as well as very controversial movie subject. Today I will talk about not the worst movie I have ever seen, but the movie I hated most . When Uwe Boll makes a horror movie it becomes so bad it “devolves”  into a comedy. It is so bad some bits are funny .When Uwe Boll makes a comedy it makes me wanna go postal on all the people involved with this film.

The movie Postal is a comedy movie based on the equally titled film series and this movie has 2,2 critic  rating on MetaCritic and a 6,3 user review rating. So I thought.. hey this film might not be so bad. This movie also has a 9% tomatometer and a 34% audience score.
I find every single of these reviews to be too good!  The movie’s box art proudly tells it is super offensive and I’ll be honest.. I don’t always dislike offensive movies. There are a few times where offensive humor can give me a chuckle… the key word.. humor being part of the equation. That is not the case here!  Uwe Boll can not make comedy! This movie proves that. He  is worse at comedy than he is at horror movies.  but before I began tearing this thing apart let me tell tell you this movies plot.

We follow a main character that never gets a name and is just referred to as that Postal Dude.  His story starts  up when he starts applying for a promotion in a corporate job where A douchebag manager lets him do all sorts of weird things while he stares at the severed heads of some other corporate drones who failed at their job. They make jokes about them being a fake and blood drips off them as soon as they say it. He goes home to find his obese wife who lives in a trailer cheating on him… or well he finds out she is cheating on him. But I am already getting ahead of myself. This movie opens up with the Hijacking of the 9-11 planes. Al Qaeda terrorists have taken control over the ship because they want to surprise  the others by actually taking them on a trip to Cabo or the Bahamas or something nice and tropical. The people who fought for their lives on those planes break in and try to  subdue Al Qaeda actually cause them to crash into the twin towers. On this briljant opening… we move to the Dude.. and the stuff I told you happened. Why do I mention that intro now? Well because it ties in with the rest of the story. Osama who is actually living in the states and is best friends with George W Bush is planning to steal a shipment of Krotchy dolls. Krotchy is a crotch plushie that is the mascotte of some sort of weird  thing. But they are not the only one who wants to steal this doll that is a penis with a set of balls.

There is also Dude’s uncle who started a bogus christian sub cult to get laid. However his organisation is not paying their taxes and now has a few million dollars debt. His attendant warns him about this and points out these Krotchy dolls sell for like 3000 dollars each or so.
It turns out that these dolls have vials with Avian Flu hidden in them which Al Qaeda wants to use to destroy the western civilised world, while the attendant who actually beliefs the new bible of the uncle character to destroy the world. Dude and his uncle just want to earn some easy money! The only way that Dude can keep the world safe is by killing everyone else.. so he has to go postal!  For this he has to kidnap Verne Troyer and let him get raped by a 1000 monkeys team up with some random gothic chick from a coffee shop and use a cat as a silencer for a gun among other things.


Now the cat silencer was in the games so I see why it was in there.. but Postal has never been this much about being offensive.. it was always more about just going on a random meaningless killing spree… that is NOT what this movie is. In Postal you can pee on the elderly before whacking their head of with a shovel but it always gave you a choice. You did not need to be offensive, you just vented a shitty day… in a very trash way..but there is a difference in choosing this or seeing it.   The humor in this movie is akin to that of your average Scary Movie film..with the offence meter dialed up to 100 and the comedic timing turned back to 0. Each joke is so cheap.. and meaningless that it isn’t a joke anymore it is just offensive. Let me take you through the movie in more detail.  We begin with that dreadful 911 joke… While I am iffy on those already I think in a movie like these you CAN actually make jokes like that. It’s for a very limited crowd but you could still do it. Take for example the Family Guy joke where the terrorist fly through that seattle arc. Sure I’ll chuckle at that. Turning heroes into villains for the sake of comedy however isn’t fun.. it’s a role reversal that thereafter gets completely negated by having Al Qaeda be their classic evil.  Had they made it so they were actually the good guys but kept being blamed.. maybe ..you had a funny joke.. but no.. it served no point! They even add in a window washer to make it more slapstick!

The song about the evil corporation and  them actually cutting of heads is not funny either, the joke has been done a million times before  and it leans heavy into such standard timing and is sooo in your face obvious that it isn’t fun at all.. also the company doesn’t come back at all so again it is completely pointless. It just shows this guys life sucks. When he moves back and finds out his wife is sleeping around while he steps in dog poop.. we get the message. His wife is just made so gross that it is almost as if Uwe Boll says.. every woman has to look super fit.. and slightly slutty.. because literally all the other women are super models or goth chicks.  That are super skinny with flawless skin and etc. Everything else is trash. Why?!  You could have made the man miserable with a normal looking woman she did not have to be Jabba the Hutt.  Religion is than mostly seen as a sham and we see cops kill minorities for not understanding the language.. that joke certainly aged well.A dark skinned cop shoots an old Chinese lady who is old and flustered and doesn’t know what to do under a traffic light anymore! I get that people too old to drive can be annoying but again these cops are mostly a side story.. they actually follow a line skewed to the plot… It’s almost as in those Ice Age Movies… where we see scenes of Scrat trying to get his nut.. these cop show up and mess with the Chinese people or with a crippled man just to be offensive.. but never is there a joke.. as if Uwe Boll things that offensiveness IS the joke. 

Again I am not that squeamish.. there is a way to make offensive jokes. They are not for everyone.. but they can when used correctly make us aware of our flaws. South Park used to be able to do this quite well. Yes it was offensive but it also held us a mirror this is us. It has been made more cartoony. South Park and Family Guy can make this (subjectively)  work for two reasons. There is more behind just an offensive punchline.. there is either a clever idea or a lesson to be learned OR  they get away with it because it’s a cartoon. Inhuman behaviour is acceptable because we do not see a human we see a cartoon character.  Postal’s character are more one dimensional than the “offensive” cartoon shows.  Take Verne Troyer playing himself for example… he has to go to speech at the Krotchy doll festival because he looks like the thing and people want to use him as the spokesperson for these dolls. He travels with a suitcase bigger than himself..because HAHA he is a tiny person, but when he gets locked inside the suitcase we find out there is nothing but Dildo’s  and crossdressing stuff inside. Where is the joke?!

It took me 3 days to finish this movie as 30 minutes a day was about as much as I could stomach! I never had to turn off a movie before for not being able to work my way through. Even Coco Avant Chanel.. which I found an atrociously boring slog I managed to sit out.  This actually hurt me to watch. Nearly all of my gripes are all directly Uwe Boll’s fault. The actors aren’t the worst out there, I just wonder what made them this desperate. I know a few of these actors , mostly from tv and these are like B/C list actors that are quite passable. Postal Dude looks really awkward in front of a camera though maybe that is his character I am not fully able to tell.. he is a kind of awkward guy. His Filmography isn’t all that great either.. but come on! JK Simmons is in there just to do his JK Simmons thing.. only to be blown up by a suicide bomber in a sort of running gag.. where nobody wants to do it so Al Qaeda keeps tricking their members into doing this task. There is talent in this movie but it just doesn’t come out.  The writing in this movie is so bad nobody gets to shine. 

There is ONE joke in the movie and it goes a little something like this.Krotchy is going to be revealed in a place called little Germany so Postal Dude and his uncle’s cult .. mostly some bikini models who walk in bikinis for the entire movie.. have to dress up as Nazi’s not to stand out. So they all get a hitler Moustache and a Swastika added to their outfit and everyone thinks they belong.. but that is not the joke ..because who else is in Little Germany but Uwe Boll.. who is being interviewed as a celebrity why all his movies suck! He makes a joke about stealing money and mysterious funds.. which was a serious case against him and Krotchy suddenly rips off it’s head.. revealing.. the lead developer of the Postal Game.. blaming Uwe Boll for ruining his game with this movie.  He begins shooting at Uwe and Boll kills the man.. but not before they killed about 20 children who were all there to get their own Krotchy doll.. as no one can see the mascotte is a crotch.. or balls and a penis. Uwe Boll gets shot in the crotch and dies as well.. also he wears a Bavarian outfit..because it’s funny cause he is German. A journalist piles up all the dead children to make it look worse and the Postal Dude is blamed for this.. causing everyone in the world to want to kill him now. 

The way the action is shot is terrible. In a movie about shooting and killing everyone, you’d think there be a few good shootouts but  this is just a series of guns being shot and random people falling down.. even if they weren’t really in the shot. It again looks like a cartoon.. but that is not being sold because it is still live action.  If special effects are used they are very underwhelming OR super exaggerated.. they never get it right and I mean never. The Cat silencer was semi.. funny but in the world established so far it made not sense physics wise.. nothing else functions fantastically.  The cat doesn’t explode right away in Postal games but after a few uses it still does.. having the cat be unharmed felt like a whimper.  A bit of a funny whimper but a whimper still.  The Uncle gets betrayed by his attendant and in an order to convince him not to kill him the guy says he has become gay and a chubby chaser.. and he agrees to have Verne Raped by the 1000 monkeys mentioned earlier but is shot anyway.  A weird twist further and we end up with everybody firing on Postal Dude in the trailer Park.. he is hiding behind a car and killing them by the bushes. Not a single person thinks about walking around again demonstrating no one is sentient here.. it’s just unfunny movie characters.

Osama asks George Bush for help and Postal Dude and his girlfriend get away. While he tricks the Attendant guy to blow himself.. plus the fat wife and the two cops.. who also did her for no specific reason up. However Bush pissed of some people and now America is being Nuked.  While Postal Dude ride off into the sunset with his new flame.. ..his fifth one in this movie Bush and Osama hold hands and skip through a field while all across them Nukes impact. Destroying America and any hope left we had off at least a single funny scene.  It is all filmed with very cheap angles, never is a a set properly used and all the locations are boring and bland as hell.  I was so glad I could turn of this movie and it made me reconsider my watching all Video game movies idea. Before I thought Uwe Boll was just a bad director..now I think he is a horrible person, who has zero understanding of film and less understanding of comedy.How bad he is was always a joke.. but seeing him attempt comedy.. made it more than a joke.. at least a joke would have been funny..

There are a few things that are okay with the movie. The filming angels are very boring but never bad. The fights are extremely boring and do not convey the game at all but I’ve seen worse, the cast is passable except for the barely understandable Boll and the very poorly acting Lead Director of  the game. It’s just that it is so painful and unfunny. Characters have been written just to offend, and woman are only good if they are bikini bimbo’s once again.  Eye candy and nothing else.  There are  no jokes because Uwe Boll thinks being offensive is funny on it’s own and this is the result.. a movie that has less flaws than many that will be on this list.. but is so empty that it easily is the one I hate the most.  And I don’t mean of my movie viewings.. this is the movie I hated seeing most…EVER.

If I were to compare it with something it’s a screaming Monkey. We all know monkey’s can be funny when they do monkey things.. but Uwe Boll things.. just having a monkey on the screen is enough..well he also makes it scream so we KNOW there is a monkey on the screen.. but never does it hop around or toss a nut or do anything it just screams and rages and smells like monkey! One of those monkey’s you are scared off or annoyed by rather than entertained.. but Uwe Boll says we are wrong because it’s a monkey.. that is what funny is.  This movie is like putting bread on your cat and seeing it distress.. but you think it’s funny because of the memes.  As such I am giving this movie one grade lower than my lowest grade!  This movie is unwatchable. And I used this pun in his last movie! Now Uwe Boll has made me so angry … he gets a grade below my lowest named after him!

Next week’s movie will undoubtedly be better and I do not know yet what that movies is going to be. This thing was awful but if you think being offensive is funny this might be a movie for you! If you are a Movie Maschoist like me.. the movie is on YouTube and no one bothered to take it down for well over 6 years! So I will share that link with you!.. Because I am nice like that!

It wasn’t GLORIOUS: Mortal Kombat Annihilation Review

Hello Island Guests it is time for more video game movies! Today’s movie is one of the more infamous movies among the list and for good reason. Where the original is an okay movie.. like legitimately there was enough to like in that flawed product..that is the first Mortal Kombat movie.. but this second outing is just….

The second movie picks up exactly where the first movie left off. Our heroes Johnny Lui Sonya Kitana  and of course Raiden come back to Lui’s temple for a well earned celebration for saving the world. Except.. something looks different. Something is not right. Raiden, Johnny Cage and Sonya have all been recast which already is a pretty big flag. The big name actors did not want to participate anymore! While I did not like Christopher Lambert’s portrayal of Raiden in the last movie.. I do think he made the right call here. While James Remar, who is probably best known for playing Harry Morgan in Dexter, in my opinion does play the superior Raiden that is much closer to the personality of what a Thunder God should be, I really did not like how much the persona had flipped over the last few seconds since we saw Raiden in the last movie. Somehow somewhere Raiden suddenly became a much more religious duty filled god. I would cheer for that in a remake, or even a sequel that took place years after the original..but you can not have an actor play a role as “their thing” if it is set seconds after the last one!  

The whole Shao Kahn reveal thing happens differently as well, in the first part they just saw Shao Kahn’s face in the sky before stuff went down.. that doesn’t happen at all now! Instead his face is only show last… in some sort of dramatic pose reveal! That’s not how this happened?!  Guys if you are going to break continuity at least set this as few moments later to facilitate what you are trying to do! Obviously that is not what is going to happen here! Shao Kahn reveals the new fighters that need to be defeated and says the the earth will be destroyed in 6 days just like it was created and on the 7th day mankind shall rest IN PEACE!
Now that kind of sounds cool in a speech! You know a christian parallel.. but you are literally telling this to people who revere a thunder god named Raiden at a Shaolin temple!  So that whole bible quote is made for us as an Audience.. because there’s literally like two people there that even have the slightest chance to be christians!  With the deadline set people have ot find new fighters as they climb into giant steel balls that go through the core of the earth to anywhere. Sonya goes to America to find Jax… you know the guy she left behind three days ago to apprehend Kano in Hong Kong.. apparently when his partner vanished the thought… let me return home to America take a few days off and let me get my arms mechanically enhanced.. you know like any good special forces partner on the job of apprehending a criminal ganglord would do.

This movie is super painful , where the original does tell an okay job of giving a version of the original Mortal Kombat, Annihilation just throws darts at a player select screen  to pick which character to introduce next.  Obviously they could not continue to play the game or read some in game lore text because there were arrows through the screen… See movie what I did.. I set up one event… and let it have a logical effect on the subsequent events.. that’s a thing! This movie’s story telling is a mess. While Raiden and Sonya chase after Jax…oh right Not Johnny Cage died in the first minutes by the way… Kitana and Liu have to find a man named Night Wolf so he can teach Liu Kang the power to defeat Shao Kahn. When suddenly the Scorpion that exploded showed up..working for Shao Kahn and then kidnaps Kitana. New Sub-Zero shows up (and this IS a thing)  and fights New .. (I hope) Scorpion in one of the most awkwardly stage fights ever. Scorpion captures Kitana in the end and flees.. and he stops existing from the movie.. meanwhile New Sub-Zero tells Lui … well though luck for losing the princess better find that Night Wolf guy .. bye bye .. and he stops existing as well.  Now it’s nice to see Scorpion and Sub-Zero duke it out as this is cannon but the current Sub-Zero had a beef with Scorpion because he killed his brother Bihan. Yet in this movie Lui killed Bihan…or Bihan mostly killed himself  yet for some reason the blue ninja  still has a beeft with the yellow ninja.  He also is an earth fighter now while his brother represented Outworld.. I guess with the fusing worlds it can happen…but it feels so weird to suddenly see an Outworld fighter side with Earth Realm.. because…?! Cameo! This movie is very poorly written.

This movie is insane, which gives it some entertainment value but also makes it really hard to sit trough.Don’t get me wrong I like crazy but there has to be some sort of payoff and that isn’t always the case in this movie. For example those steel balls which you steer by leaning into.. being moved by the thermics of the  magma flow of the earth… how do they not burn alive in those! They have to hold the metal that uses the earth’s heat and termics  to go fast… you are holding a steel object right above lava… But sure I am willing to believe that one.. what I am not willing to believe is Night Wolf. At one point our main Hero finds Night Wolf who instead of a wise indian Shaman.. is Raiden from the last movie.. unhelpful. To beat Shao Kahn look has to do a few trials.. like he did in the last movie.. He also must have a vision on how to unlock his animality. To get this vision Night Wolf…..throws an axe to his head and knocks him out.  While Lui doesn’t really take any trials as he is interrupted by the cleary treacherous but .. I trust her anyway, Jade…in the end it turns out that axe to the back to his head was enough to unlock his animality…even though the world is at stake Night Wolf also just ceases to exist…All this wise man did was mention the word animality and then throw an Axe at Lui’s had… and arguably that was enough to save the world!

Meanwhile Raiden visits “the temple of the Elder Gods” With gods named like Fuijin, Raiden and heck even Shinnok  you would expect  some for of eastern themed, perhaps shinto like temple but no! Clearly they dwell in Central American Ruins. Probably because that was cheaper…and instead of talking to someone in person they just are a water wind and fire effect. ..When Sindel the evil Banshee queen wants to destroy her enemies whom she can look straight at she firstly collapses the temple a mile away..because….. frick if I know. Not only does this movie pay no attention to telling a flowing story, it doesn’t even care if characters act completely invisible. Sonya can’t tell the difference between Kitana and Mileena who have a vastly different fighting style, one wears Pink and got sent to the different side of the world and she doesn’t even look like Kitana, not the same actress.. it’s just a reference to the in game sprites…if you wanted to look so alike have them acted by the same actor with a different haircut or something.. No one makes sense in this movie not one single person has a logical goal. Jade for example turns out to be a betrayer… why did she not just kill Lui in his sleep, why actually take him to outworld and in the right direction?  What did she gain from that betrayal? Why did Nightwolf run away if he has an animality himself he can help stop Shao Kahn, Why does Sonya act like she was Johnny Cage’s lover? That never happened!

Then of course there is the final fight against Shao Kahn.. where the animality thing.. which was the big gimmick of the movie doesn’t even matter in the end.. the fight is not finished in animal form it goes on a bit after that. While Lui is the only one that can stop Shao Kahn Raiden tries anyway and dies because obviously he would as he knows he is not the one to stop Shao Kahn.. I get why he fights since they are brothers and all.. but .. basically he ignores the entire quest they are send on just to get hit by a slow projectile.. He has also been hit by these things before and it did not do that much damage.. sure Raiden was weakening but it felt like a super odd kill.  Then Liu Kang changes into the wrong dragon..and Shao Kahn changes into….something.. and  Shinnok gets the same punishment general Zod did. For an all powerful god he certainly got super surprised. It is all super weird and feels much more like a kid trying to string each other a few cool scenes than to make a semi decent film product.

When I called the  fights in part one poorly choreographed I did not remember how much poorer these fights were.  There is so much sloppy CGI in these ones that there is almost no actual fighting going on. Fireballs speed up kicks, flying bodypresses, all the stuff from the games is here now..bit since the movie doesn’t have the budget or the skill to pull it off now nothing feels like it actually connects. This is solved by making the camera blink in and out of a scene within mere seconds, motions aren’t rounded off and the moment a cgi attack impacts a character we usually see an angle switch or two, maybe some slow motion too to make the landing of a hit feel real?! It doesn’t help that now half of the cast is either a cg character, or horribly a super gimmicky character either. Like half the evil generals are killed by accident or by Shao Kahn himself.. who throws Rain in a bit of fire..because he defeated Striker and Kabal and he captured instead of killed them?!  Why.. they are captured you can kill them still.. the heroes are still days off and you know it. Sheeva gets crushed by a chandelier… not kidding.. she gets Looney Tuned to death and Baraka falls in that same fire pit again. Jade gets fed to some ugly cgi for no reason at all. Had the Emperor of Outworld not had offed  half of his own allies he would have even won most likely. Yet this saved in having to come up with fights for characters not designed to fight.

Sheeva and Rain for example never did anything, never threw a single punch. Sheeva being one of those four armed Shokan with a smaller body than Goro I can see be very difficult to realise so instead of not having there.. they opt for having her be there and be crushed by a chandelier. Ermac who fights magic and telekinetic powers was not visual enough so instead they give him Noob Saibot’s abilities. Honestly the only enemy that sort of mattered were Motaro and Sindel and while Sindel is plot relevant you can completely leave Motaro out of the plot and nothing would change. Raiden’s fights are the worst though.his fight against three reptiles is so weird. There is one moment where both he and a reptile stand there doing three  spin kicks.. but they are so far out of each others range clearly they would miss. While Raiden is running away for a more tactical ground instead of just backing up he decides to cartwheel around burning energy.. and as soon as they land punches.. we see each hit from three angels.. once is the stunt actor doing the fight, the second is a limp prop hitting the target and the third is a shot on the actors phase to say..yeah that’s clearly Raiden. I had to take a short break to give my eyes a bit of a rest that’s how flickery it was. The absolute worst parts in his fighters are when they add Raidens game cry to  to his attack.. like the Aybabayay flying thunder god attack. There isn’t too much stuff good going for this movie. 

This movie is quite terrible, like I can almost honestly say there is nothing good about it, the soundtrack is not bad but it’s as good as the first one! It’s just a repeat of the same thing. What saves this movie is the terrible acting. It is so poorly done… that is is just soooo funny to watch. Sindel, Shao Kahn and Motaro in particular are so insanely over the top I just  laugh out loud.. I honestly think if Shao Kahn gave this speech about conquering our world for real..but if he did it the exact same way I’d be rolling on the floor laughing. If my own mother would go evil and go missing and I’d say Mommy.. you are alive and she’d be “Too bad YOU!… will… DIE!”  I’d soil my pants. This movie is definitely in the category so bad that it’s good. However where movies like Troll 2 , Rubber , Birdemic and The Room kind of reward you with some lovely weirdness here I feel the movie is just a bit to derailed.  In Troll 2 we get scenes where we know not to take this movie to serious… like the sex scene that is so hot that popcorn starts popping.. but he also eats vegetables so he can turn into a vegetable.. it flags the movie as a mess! Rubber which is about a car tire with psycho kinetic head exploding powers is like that as well. The Room almost has this alien-like quality to it as well. As if the writer really doesn’t understand humans.  

Annihilation lacks that self awareness. It’s not made to be this bad it’s not made to make you laugh at the wooden acting. It has to many drama moments for that and a story that is written as if it should be really taken serious and it becomes a lesser movie for it. Where I can watch The Room and be “hahaha oh my Arceus, that is so dumb” while with Mortal Kombat I more oftenly found myself going Mewwwz that is dumb!  *Annoyed sigh*  Where Troll 2 told us a bonkers story with bad acting it at least told it consistently in how it tells it. Heck even Rubber with it’s fourth wall breaking plot. With Mortal Kombat, so many characters just stop existing that it feels a bit like a unfinished childrens drawing.  You can look at it and laugh at the silly figures but you can’t laugh to hard because it’s not finished.. is the mistake intentional or would they come back to add to it still.. what is in the background it seems to have been erased, so all in all you can take in some elements and laugh at that.. but as a whole.. it’s just there….it’s good for a drunken night but if you really want a so bad that it’s good movie.. keep following this blog and maybe in a week or two or three … I’ll offer you something better… I have seen this movie three times now.. and that is more than enough! Just no!

You can watch this movie perfectly fine on a bad movie night and there is a chance you might enjoy yourself.However there is nothing positive about this movie other than ..it’s bad enough to just laugh.That doesn’t mean it deserves a better grade though. Normally I end with an analogy so here it is.. this movie is like an SM session, if pain is your thing this is enjoyable but the damage is still real. Unfortunately the branding Iron we get in the beginning is quickly swapped out for a rubber band with only a few cattle prod moments.. so mostly it is annoying.

That being said it’s no where near as bad as the next video game movie I will be watching Uwe Boll’s: Postal! You will not be getting that the next week though as we start my anniversary special! The week after that my OWLS post goes live..so only on the 27th will I talk to you about the movie..that scored lower than Mang-No! Subscribe to make sure you do not miss it!

This is Bollshit: House of the Dead (2003) Review

Hey my lovely island guests! For a while now I have been doing movie reviews on monday, and for the last two weeks I have been discussing video game movies! I thought it was a fun idea for me to go to EVERY video game movie made up till this day! You know since we are all geeks and that! Yet there is one man who makes this challenge turn from hard, into a herculean feat! One man whose movies are so bad that his IMDB entire oeuvre  average grade (for game movies at least)  is almost an entire grade lower  of the total score Tommy Wiseau’s The Room has! That man is Uwe Boll.. and my friends made me start with potentially his worst movie! Today I review House of The Dead.

Very few movies are so bad that the director is accused of money laundering. While this movie ‘only’ costs about 12 million dollars, people saw this movie looked so bad, it possibly can not have cost that much. Since 12 million is almost nothing for a film nowadays… that is saying something. Now having seen this movie.. I am pretty sure there was some money embezzled here and there because the zombies in this movie..do not look better than your overzealous halloweenist or what you might encounter in a haunted maze. In this movie we follow Rudy and his friends who go to a rave..of 12 people or so.. on an island known for it’s gun smuggling business and the rumors of a deadly curse that dates back to the golden age of Spanish trade. While Rudy is already on the island his friends miss the boat and they pay a smuggler 1000 dollars to take them to the island.  Before they get there to shit goes down as all 12 rave visitor get killed by zombies.. lead by the immortal Castillo Sermano.. whose big motivations are.. that he created immortality…because he wanted to live forever.

This is the best looking zombie in the movie is by far the main Villian

Yes that is actual dialogue from the movie “You created it all so you could become Immortal, Why?” To which the villain answers “To live forever” Now that’s some pretty hokey dialogue. Mind you.. this man is Spanish..he kills everyone on this island immediately and no one dares to set foot on it.. but he speaks English. Then again he might be the mastermind of the Sega sponsored rave so he could get some new body parts to look fresher.. but I am not sure. Anyway.. people get naked.. and people die..typical Uwe Boll stuff, there isn’t that much more to the movie. Of course since it is based on a light gun game.. there is also a lot of shooting as well. A near infinite supply of hand grenades spawns from a single crate as well. At least Uwe had the video game logic down. In fact.. a lot of times it even looks like a video game, and I don’t JUST mean fake!

Actual Screen-grab from Movie

House of the Dead is one of the classic arcade shooters and if you have ever been at a convention or at an arcade you’ll most likely have at least seen it maybe even played it. If you haven’t don’t worry Uwe has got your back.  I honestly think that game’s pixelated graphics has better looking zombies than this movie. Then again.. if you have your face painted in Mcdonald’s, 9 out of 10 times it will look better than this movie. People just get some white lenses and some blood is smeared on their somewhat whitened face .. and tadaa.. you are a zombie. Well that or you are rotten to absolute heck.. and kinda look like a Jawa without the cloak. I’d imagine. Bullets can leave holes in your torso the size of a soup bowl or not have any effect at all at totally random. Sometimes people lose arms at random or aim for something they clearly are not hitting. So somehow Uwe simulated how actual aged light guns work.. and translated that to a movie! At least that’s faithful. 

Kore we Zombie Desu Ka?! No seriously I am asking here!

To give you more immersion scenes are strung together with actual game footage  flashing throughout the entire movie at random intervals, since people are very bad at acting we do not get death scenes we instead get “game over screens” where the camera spins around a character in a more heroic moment before the screen turns red and fades away. I honestly have never seen a movie whose cinematography is so painfully bad as this one. People look so awkward with their guns yet somehow every one .. from cop, to model to random girl can wield these weapons with pinpoint accuracy..even while being eaten, underwater  and of course while insanely drunk. Sets are so obviously fake that it seems like something Vampirella would present on.. or whatever those horror hosts did. Even Ed Wood might say.. you might wanna adjust those lights.

This is at night by the way

Now sometimes a movie is so bad that it’s good. Not with this movie though! While what I might have said sounds like it is a hilariously bad movie like Birdemic and The Room, this does not have that charm.  Where in those movies.. and Who Killed Captain Alex too for that matter there is passion..this is a movie of paychecks and “let’s get it over with” acting.  People read their lines and that’s it. It feels like a ‘you get your diploma but barely’  graduation project from acting school. It isn’t always the actors fault though Jonathan Cherry who plays Rudy.. really can not carry any dramatic scene. Jürgen Prochnow who is better know for Das Boot and Dune  is passable at times but the character is poorly written. All the characters are poorly written. We have the dumb model, the crazy superstitious sailor, the straight shooting cop and the over sexed bimbo.  However.. our main cast is Random doctor student , random ex girlfriend.. and other random girl who is also a friend. They have no traits whatsoever except for being mean to the model guy. It’s hard to act if your character doesn’t have a personality so I get that. 

Captain Kirk and Captain America working together!

Well the doctor guy.. Rudy Curien  likes girls. That’s his trade.. but with girls named Liberty, Karma and Alicia.. you got a pretty good idea what Uwe Boll things a woman is. A stripper.
Alicia fights the final fight in some sort of leather skimpy corset. Liberty wears one of those 60’s american flag jump suits with some serious push up and there is a lot of boob in this movie. They are meant to look sexy and basadds, so most of the times girls wield Melee weapons.. just so the camera man can get away with some close up shots that follow the line of “hey my eyes are up here’. The cop named Carter (she is never given a first name in this movie)  and captain Kirk..(yes thats what he is called)  are the only two characters I remotely enjoyed. Unfortunately Kirk gets bitten and uses dynamite to blow himself up.. because dynamite is a weapon.. like shotguns and all .. it’s really not but they have tons of it in a weapons crate in this movie.  

Carter gets her legs chopped off by a axe wielding zombie..who throws the axe away and loses it prior to chopping her legs of with it. (Also he gets killed before) So I am pretty sure Uwe Boll pays tribute to the respawning video game enemies.  Carter of course dies from this and in a very well acted Rudy moment *cough*  he says goodbye to her and we see her die.
Afterwards the house her corpse is in gets blown up. Zombies still roam the area and later a special force team clears the area of anything remotely suspicious.  So obviously she’s the star of the sequel… (That’s no joke..despite getting her legs chopped off, laying there for almost an entire night bleeding, getting blown up by a huge gunpowder explosion.. she is the star of the sequel.. that takes place AFTER these events). Oh right and I almost forgot you to tell about the acid spit zombie.. of which there is exactly one! The model whose face is slowly dissolving acts out his pain with so much zeal… who am I kidding.. his acting is on the level of an early 90’s video game voice acting person.  So again! Point for Uwe for faithfulness.

Clearly this woman can survive and entire night of bleeding out and being blown up! Look at how healthy she looks!

Never really get annoyed by a movies soundtrack but in case of this movie.. it literally does everything wrong! We get very odd music choices that do not match their situation at all. A despair fight they are losing gets high octane metal music as if we are playing doom, while someone dying on the table gets a slightly whimsical melody.. a creepy crypt is more generic rock/metal and the rave itself doesn’t really have rave music at all. Then again no one going to this rave is your usual raver either. I found some music choices so painful.. and out of place I just wonder where they got the track.. are they in the video game? If so that game has a really bad soundtrack.. but still I bet it utilizes it more wisely.. this feels like the sound editor just wanted to be cool! And just picked some edgelord music pieces and strung them together. The best comparison I can make is that this movie sounds like one of those strip clubs that serves free chicken wings.. just to get some guests in their place.. you know the place where strippers look more like actual zombies than the zombies in this movie. 

I like that red guy in the back right in front of those zombies without make up near the flame!

To be honest I’d rather go to the stripclub though.. I mean .. free Chicken Wings. Nothing against strippers by the way, I have sex worker friends and as long as you have fun what your doing it’s all good.. I just mean.. some can look a bit .. washed up. Scarier than the zombies in this movie. Anyway I was talking about the sound. Of course this movie constantly has weird camera moments where like a video game the camera spins around a character to show a critical hit or something.. this is accompanied by weird swooshing noises, epic close ups that have bullets whistling and super stock sounding explosions and gun effects.. as if the files have been ripped straight out of a video game. …

The unlockable secret outfits come already unlocked as well 10/10

As far as video game movies go.. it’s about the equivalent of someone taping their let’s play of House of the Dead and selling it as a movie.. except it has more annoying characters, more poorly timed music, worst hit detection and zero gameplay. Less satisfying gore a worse story, worse camera angles and less interesting set pieces. It’s not enjoyable to watch yet has this magnetism to it.. you can’t help but to keep watching.  While I haven’t been positive nor is there much to be positive at all, I do gotta say.. weirdly..I do feel this is a video game movie.. more so than say Assassins Creed. It is as if Uwe Boll does really care about this game and has put so many elements of the game in.. to make it feel like he was playing the game again while shooting this movie. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t treat women right, it doesn’t care about being a good movie.. but there somewhere is some understanding of the source material. I think.. or he somehow managed to make a movie that is so awful that it feels like the game .. in the wrong places by sheer coincidence. 

I saw something.. like a little spark of a connection.. like our inner gamers clicked just for a tiny moment. It’s buried too  much under trying to turn this movie into his persona edgy strip club! Where the chicken wings are free but so oily and greasy..that they look more like zombies.. than the zombies in this actual movie.

While some movies are so bad they are good, this one is just plane bad! A point can be made for it having heart.. but a point can also be made that this movie was made for the reason to embezzle some of the 12 million this movie costs and to turn a movie into your private stripclub! Sorry this definitely deserves my lowest score:

Review System Update coming soon!

PS:

Dear Mister Boll, if you ever read this review…somehow.. or one of my other dips into your Video Game movies, which at least according to IMDB aren’t much better, please do not invite me to a boxing match to beat me up, like you did to other critics. I might die from that! So IF you have to take your revenge on me..please make a movie about my absolute favorite games in the world, making a movie so bad it kills the games?! I would be so sad and you would have the intellectual victory! My favorite games are Fortnite and Call of Duty..possibly Fifa too! I accept that you might want revenge..so these are my tributes to you!….But please do not make these movies within the next year! I have to review all video game movies.. if you manage to make one within 40 weeks.. i’d have to review that too and a Fortnite movie by Uwe Boll sounds like absolute dogshit! Thank you for understanding!

MONKEY!! The Super Mario Bros Movie Review

A long long time ago the earth was ruled by dinosaurs. They were big so not a lot of people went around hassling them. Actually no people went around hassling them because there weren’t any people yet just the first tiny mammals. Basically life was good. Then something happened. A giant meteorite struck the earth. Goodbye Dinosaurs! But what if the Dinosaurs weren’t all destroyed? What if the impact of that meteorite created a parallel dimension where the dinosaurs continued and evolved into intelligent vicious aggressive beings….just like us? And hey what if they found a way back?!

If you haven’t checked my blog title you might wonder. If you haven’t seen this movie or been oblivious to it you might still surprise you that these are the first words uttered in the movie that is called Super Mario Bros. This movie is something I owned on VHS back when I was just a tiny Pinkie.  For those who do not know what VHS is.. back in the pre-internet age movies did not stream on network but were pressed onto disk or even earlier trapped into a cassette with small versions of movie reels contained inside them! It was magical!  Even back then I was surprised. I personally would have never imagined to set a Mario movie in a sci-fi  cyberpunk dystopian alternate dimension ruled by Fungi and Dinosaurs. Director Rocky Morton, his former wife Annabel Jankel and their writing staff  clearly had a bigger imagination than me.. and you know me I am a weirdo!

This is how Mario Starts!

Now I called Dragonball Evolution  one of the most unfaithful movies ever but this one takes the crown. Yet where I really suffered through DBE this one has long since became a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. I would have placed it in my Pinkie’s Guilty Movie pleasures list, but I decided to review video game movies for the next few Mondays to come and let’s while plenty of them go under that category , I doubt I can say I had pleasure when I get to the Uwe Boll movies. In fact I should spread those around a bit because otherwise I will suffer too much in a row. Anyway after that note to myself, i’ll have to admit I kind of had fun watching the Super Mario Bros movie again. Somewhere in the same vein as I would find it fun to see aliens land on earth or look at Honey Boo Boo or some weird Dutch Bed and Breakfast owner talking about wines. I don’t want to watch it all the times but sometimes it can be fun!

1/10 Moustache Curves the wrong way

So for those who do not know the plot of the super Mario film, here you go. A dinosaur queen traveling dimensions places a capsules in front of a monastery. In this capsule are an egg and a meteorite shard. From this egg hatches Daisy, who twenty years later has become an archaeologist. A mean construction mogul named Scapelli tries to sabotage her dig-site and unknowingly opens the breach between the dinosaur dimensions and ours again. King Koopa has usurped the other dimension by turning their former king into Fungus and their world has falling into disarray, lacking enough resources to continue on. If he can insert the Meteorite piece into his worlds side of the meteor.. both the worlds can merge together and dinosaur can feast and rule over mankind. Daisy being of the true royal line is the only one who can actually insert the meteor without being killed so he needs her as well. So he sends cousin Iggy and Spike ..to capture her as she holds the meteor as well. Daisy and Luigi started to date in the real world.. and when the plumbers use their skill to save daisies dig-site.. she gets captured and Mario and Luigi have to venture into the world of the dinosaurs to save Luigi’s date.

Whose that Archaeologist?

Now you might notice there already are a few differences between this and the source material. First of all it’s Daisy who is front and center in this adventure and not Peach.. who in fact is never mentioned in the movie at all.  Princess Daisy is actually the ruler of Sarasaland not the Mushroom Kingdom.. while the name is not officially coined for the Dinosaur World.. King Koopa (back before he was Bowser)  teasingly refers to it as such. Mario is Luigi’s guardian, while he is clearly of a fatherly age he decided to call Luigi his brother. Luigi is actually the main hero in this one and he actually gets  more than a cake at the end.. though not by much.  Koopa normally isn’t really a dinosaur nor is the rest of the Mushroom Kingdom… but hey!  It’s kind of a fun story, it’s just weird Mario and Luigi are in it.

Is it wrong of me to wonder how Dennis Hopper Bowsette would look like?!

The whole rescue the princess stick is in the movie and that is the main thing a Mario game is about and at least it wasn’t all just a dream, just a stage play nor had little mushroom men been transformed into blocks that Mario then murders to get some coins. It doesn’t make a LOT more sense than the NES Mario games but at least it somewhat follows a classical three act structure. We get two people growing closer, one of those being kidnapped and them two brothers trying to save one guys gal… and discovering the other guys gal is also here. Did you know Mario is into WWF?! Well now you do! It’s like a Mario fever dream. You keep wanting to watch to see what else they turned into what. How this world is so not like Mario and puts mario names on thinks that are clearly NOT that same thing.  Did you know what if you paint your SNES Super Scope Grey it can evolve people! Heh! Monkey! Did you know that Goombas are actually 2,5 meter tall muscled dinosaurs with a super tiny head. I always imagined they were like big heads on just feet! Did you know Toad actually was a Goomba?! Who would have imagined.. they look so differently in 8 bit. 

Goomba.. the Jojo’s Version

It’s kind of like looking at a five year old (or younger) make a drawing for Santa than having you explain what they drew. See this is Mario.. and this is a goomba.. and this is King Koopa and if I give this to santa he knows I’ll want the Mario game. They are about equally recognisable and it totally mesmerised me. It’s like making a Final Fantasy VII movie and recast Red as a Kitsune girl.. and giving Cloud a dagger instead of a sword.. but it can grow to any size he wants. Materia would be food that the evil demon Sephiroth would need to eat to summon an ancient demon to earth trapped in a meteor. It would not be right but it would be fascinating in it’s own right! Still that would be only fun once, at least it should yet this movie I’ve seen a handful of times now and I still find it fun. While they do deviate so massively from the source material, unlike Dragonball Evolution , everything so packed full of character that it kinda works. Yamcha in the western movie for example is just a chad with a drill, while Toad here.. is a once rebellious man that sang songs putting Koopa in a bad daylight, that got devolved into a music loving good guy who just likes to smile and make people happy. Who even plays his harmonica when he is set on fire.

I’m sorry Mario! The faithful costume designer is in another castle!

Koopa has now become a weird sort of germaphobe that loves Pizza and is fascinated yet disgusted by the fact that humans evolved from Monkies. He in fact is so obsessed with evolution that he weaponised it and used it as a key to his rule. He stems from the king of dinosaurs so he feels like he is destined to rule as well.  Nothing of it is like the Koopa/Bowser we know but yet again .. there is still a lot of character there. Even Big Bertha .. who is just a fish that eats a lot , in the games here has been given a character. I’m pretty sure that Miyamoto never imagined her as some Sassy Big Boned Sugar Mamma with a though exterior but big heart.. but thats in this movie.  All characters do at least get loads and loads of flavor. It’s a bunch of cliches mashed up yet at the same time it’s something we do not get nowadays anymore.  Characters Alla 2020 veer away from stereo types, they all get some depth and some realism, yet at the same time that also means they become much more interchangeable. Here every character is so extreme and tacky that said personality on another character in the movie would barely work. It doesn’t become a better movie for it but it certainly becomes more watchable for it and re-watchable even. There are so many visual gags , tiny nods and extreme oddities in the world building that even on my fifth romp I notice new things. Like how Bullet Bill’s are now Pneumatic cartridges for power boots?!

Apparently dinosaurs evolved from fish as well..or fish evolved in dinosaur city I mean.. uhnm… this thing is a mess!

Not just from a writing perspective the movie has its flaws, the acting is also odd. The direction is odd. For example at one point King Koopa goes to the real world with his army of Goombas.. an army of 2,5 meter monsters with guns and flamethrowers.. that actually throw fireballs. Yet he also has devolution guns on his person which he  tries to use on Mario to turn him into a monkey. He then hits the construction Mogul instead. You’d think people would be terrified that a guy with a monster army just killed a man and changed him into a monkey .. but no everyone laughs. Not only the humans whose world is being invaded by their very own eyes but the bad guys as well. They stop their actions to laugh at the monkey and the camera painfully lingers on this.. like it’s some sort of briljant gag. Why ? How?

Holy Macaroni! I wore the wrong colour!

Somewhere in the middle of the movie we suddenly see Dennis Hopper/ Koopa order a Pizza.. out of the blue.. there is a chase scene going on.. big set up.. and we get a 30 second scene where he calls for pizza. It was never established he is hungry or that he thinks so lowly of his opponents that he can coast it.. no at their most dangerous.. he just orders a pizza. The way it is acted is almost as if a stand up comedian is making a joke.. with the punchline being weird pizza toppings people would add in a dinosaur world. It isn’t funny yet there is room in the delivery as if they are waiting for people to clap and laugh at the joke.. it’s so weird.

The comedic duo Iggy and Spike! I loved them together in the games!
Oh! Somehow their expressions matched up quite nice!

Then there is a scene where Luigi played by John Leguizamo , while desperately trying to save the princess, decides to prank Mario, saying he can make some sort of impossible jump but actually he is connected to some sort of hook and crane, which at first seem impossible. Egging Mario on to jump as well.. which leads to Mario jumping to his death.  Only when Mario begins jumping he yells.. no no  it’s a joke but of course by then it’s to late. Why would anyone do that?! I mean of course it’s a joke about the brothers amazing jumping ability but they use power boots for that already. so even from a homage stand this made zero sense. He tricks his brother to jump to his death with a smile on his face and Immediately is snapped out of his trauma of seeing his brother fall to his death when Princess Daisy’s father becomes a membrane trampoline that saves Mario… grabbing him in split seconds.  These characters are so incohesive and the acting also reflects that.. this is a sloppily written and acted out garbled mass of events to enter some comedy or drama at random times.

Is it weird that I really wanted to see Bob Hoskins ride Yoshi?!

Yet in a way that is also the saving grace of this movie. You never know exactly what’s going to happen because it’s all so stupid and random. A bomb-omb suddenly obtains the power to break physics, characters suddenly fade out of existence, rules of the world do not always work the same. Throughout the entire movie.. even four or five views in I still have that “what the f is going on” vibe going..Which would be a good tagline for this movie?! Super Mario Bros. The movie  “What the F is going on?” Like a caleidoscope it feels random but it keeps me fascinated even if there isn’t that much to it. Empty and broken yet at the same time colourful and trippy.

10/10 Best Actor in the Movie!

Dennis Hopper doesn’t portray a great Koopa, but he certainly plays a memorable one! Monkey! Is still one of the things he will be remembered for. Bob Hoskins is an odd Mario ..who lacks that Santa Claus vibe, the original Mario has.. and replaces it with Brooklyn brash. Yet when we hear the name we do remember him as Mario still. John Leguizamo , mostly in his early years like this, main trait in acting is… “well I guess they chose him for this part.. how odd” and i’ll probably forget he was Luigi again..but that means I can watch this movie in the future and be right “that’s right.. that guy was Luigi! Such an odd choice” From costume design to actors, to story to screen structure and even in music.. this flick makes almost zero logical choices considering the material.. For example let me put the music choice that is present through most of the movie! The music theme they choose to represent the Mario Bros and use trough most chase scenes! Which is most of the movie… you expect some iconic movie.. you get :

We get one of the weirdest , most 90’s action comedies based on a great IP that is to this day still a mystery to me. Not a single element is great.. most of them aren’t even good.  Yet when combined they do give me a great time when watching it. It might not be for the right reasons it might not last long but a movie length of giggling face palms and me ooh’s and huh’s are definitely not the worst way I spend my time. In that way I do think this movie is kind of underrated. Yes if you break it down this movie offers next to nothing.. only a good time if you can turn of your brain for a bit .. or just let it race….. and isn’t that the most important thing a movie should offer us?! A fun runtime?! Would I watch it again?! Give me a few months  and I would say Let’sa Go!

Score:

Next week we will probably end up with a more faithful movie adaptation! A simple Zombie Shooting Game, should be easy enough to adapt to the big screen right?! Join me next week as I watch Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead! That seems like an easy job to make cool right?!

Pinkie’s Guilty Pleasures: Birdemic Shock and Terror

Hello Island Guests,  what originally began as a spotlight for movies which do not get not enough love has since turned in me discussing the weirdest shows, campiest movies and discussing some notoriously bad movies! The content-cocktail of today features the latter. Join me on a wonderful trip as we discuss. Birdemic Shock and Terror.

This post has lots of YouTube Clips so it is best viewed on the site instead of WordPress-Reader.

In 1963 Alfred Hitchcock made the movies “The Birds” a claustrophobic horror movie about killer birds. We haven’t seen a lot of that since.. of course there was a sequel but the scenario of evil avians has otherwise gone relatively unexplored. However in 2010 James Nguyen thought, what Alfred can do so can I! That old movie did not feature aggressive enough birds! What about if we give them acid spit! Let them explode on impact and give them airplane sound effects?! What if this is a movie about ecological changes, with heavy themes on how we mess up nature.. and big forests fires,beach scenes and of course this only should happen in the second half of the movie! The first half.. we’ll just do some random dating and social life stuff for our characters.

This movie is absolutely bonkers and I love it! This movie is SO bad.. that it’s on YouTube in its entirety. Several Times! It has been so for years as well. The oldest version I found stems from 2013. So for the very first time ever you can watch the entire movie on Pinkie’s Paradise if you wish.. at the end of this post! While I will also show you some amazing scenes from the movie! So if you want to be surprised and want to spend 90 minutes in shock and terror, although for the wrong reasons! Go below first and then come back to me! Now that the spoiler warning has been given it is time cringe!

This movie was clearly inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s great film and it happily pays tribute to it. Alan Bagh plays Rod (he has no last name) the main character of this movie. A guy that walks so stiff he might be a terminator. Rod  though  is also the name of the male lead actor Rod Taylor who played Mitch Brenner in The Birds.  The best friend character in Hitchcock flick is played by a woman named Suzanne and in this movie the female friend character is named Susan. The music on the title crawl seems like something from Hitchcock’s time rather than a 2010 movie and of course Tippi Hedren is in both movies. She plays the lead in the 1963 movie and in this movie, archive footage of her is used on a tv while female character Nat is getting naked.  That same Nat is being portrayed by  Whitney Moore, who will voice Navi in something called “The Zelda Project: The Final Battle”. She also played Jeanette Voerman.. the sexiest female voice I ever heard say the word duckling! And she is in this .. piece of trash!

The voice who plays Jeanette and Tippi Hedren on the screen! Miss Tippi Hedren people!

Now this movie basically IS The Birds.. but a modern retelling of it, done by a mad man, who may be a genius! It mimics the classic, pays tribute and even uses some names involved in the original, yet it never escapes the level of college student film and that is at it’s best moments. It is as if you read Moby Dick and we now hear it trough the bird. Instead of Call Me Ishmael we get “WARK!”  Ishmael! Yes wark! All parrots are classic Chocobo. The beauty of this movie though is that we get that sensation as well “Hitchcock through the eyes of a madman”. I wouldn’t call James insane.. but this is hitchcock fan fiction turned into a movie.

The movie starts with some Oboe or Clarinet music. We see a car drive on a road while the credits scroll by. Aside from the actors James Nguyen did just about everything else. Which is always a good sign when you are looking for a bad movie. After just about forever we see the first character shot. Rod is walking on the streets like he just duked his dungarees before he enters a diner. A blond girl says Hi to him.. and at this time (4:40 in) we know that this movie is nothing like we have seen before. The audio quality of this opening scene is WORSE than who Killed Captain Alex. The girl has been dubbed over in post without adding room tone or background noice and she spikes the mic as well as it had to be turned up because we hear an enormous amount of static. Rod talks back to her in the original audio roll though so suddenly the background noise drops.  In a barely audible accents she hands him the menu and tells him she will be right with him.. yet everything seems off in this scene.Everything! Do not believe me?! Well here’s the scene!

Rod sees Natalie in the diner and apparently he knows her from being in highschool together with her and he falls in love seeing how pretty she has become. After some extremely weird dialogue where they don’t exchange names and don’t really seem to remember each other anyway.. they tell each other where they are from..which makes little sense since they were in school together? They talk about what they do now..and apparently Nathalie is a model.. and to be fair she is pretty. She has a job though so they exchange business cards as they leave.  Rod does the poo walk again watching some tv where clearly the sound is coming from another location as it talks about dead birds and sea ice melting killing the polar bears. Eight minutes in the first foreshadowing of birds happen and only 36 minutes left to the first action scene.



This first half really meanders on with Rod and Nathalie going about their daily lives. Rod plays basketball where at random intervals there is street noise and sometimes there is not. Nathalie models which in the same scene sometimes is a montage and sometimes it is not.  They go eat in a restaurant with a scene that is so painfully overlit from one angle and so studio lit on the other that it feels as if it’s a green screen and directions make no sense. Even though at times we see it shot at location.. it feels very fake.. which is quite amazing.  Rod has great character traits such as liking football and working out. Nathalie is deep.. liking movies and going to the club with her friends. Oh and both are great at their jobs! Not long after they stroll the street together and we get to see how the birds in this movie will look like.

I think they are parots.. the green things!

These are the BEST looking birds you will encounter in the movie  the others look worse. Also sorry for the bad screenshot this was my best take out of 8 . There is something very uncapturable about it.  After this though there is 25 more minutes of dating left before this movie gets anywhere. They go see an Inconvenient Truth in the theather and  all decide to go eco friendly. Now so much seems wrong with this. First the movie is set in 2008 or 2009 I think .. so the movie would not run in theaters and why would you take your date to that movie! A friend of Nathalie who runs a company whose logo is just Inner Peace.. printed on a sheet of A4 paper and her shirt gets turned on by the movie and wants to uncage another form of bird. All again with the horrible audio of background noise fading in and out of dialogue.  When Rod talks you might here the road in the background. When Nathalie talks there is nothing, sound spiking all the time.. and then when we finally reach the 45 minute mark after some very tame scenes and weird audio it all gets a lot worse.

After the sex scene between Rod and Nathalie suddenly we get a completely different movie.  With the sound of fighting planes birds begin to kamikaze attack humans. Some are big enough to explodify an entire neighborhood, others are tiny birds who just set the metal of a fuel pump on fire. No gas explodes.. just a part of the metal while that catches fire. The pair fresh from their lovely night together and sleeping in a motel for no real reason it seems, decide to barricade themselves in because suddenly the birds can no longer explode and they just make a sound that sounds like a seagull swallowed a chew-toy. They have gained the power to aimlessly flutter like a helicopter now.. as they menacingly screech on. Magically Rod and Nathalie get dressed while their bed is still shielding explosive birds ..that won’t explode from entering to their front door. Obviously they would not bother with the other windows etc.

The pair wonders why the birds attacked and why they stopped attacking, a metaphor for this elusive and deep plot! Why does it happen?!  Why does it stop? There are no answers in live so there are no answers in this movie. The pair flees from their confines to randomly knock on only one door.. the one door that holds other people! Rod lost his car keys.. for no reason! Did the birds take it? No they weren’t there when all the sex began.. did he just lose them?! He had an expensive looking car.. maybe it got stolen? No he says he just lost the keys?! Oh well!  They meet Becky and Ramsey a couple that also spend the night there.. they have a minivan the group has to reach but the birds can be back any minute.. so they need to take some weapons along.  Some flimsey coathangers will have to do.. and while they race to the minivan and get attacked we get to see the BEST scene of this movie.

Horrible Cinematography, overly lit, poorly mixed audio, bad dialogue, weird sound effects, atrocious cgi.. it is all here in its full glory! This is Birdemic. This is so poorly done it must have been done intentionally so.  Even I can genuinely do  a better job than this and my filmmaking knowledge is very limited. Yet somehow there’s something so sincere in this seen. It’s not the acting .. but it’s as if the actors are trying to sell this stuff.  There are no.. “oh Arceus why did I sign up for this” faces they do give it their all… sure they are more bland than Jeremy Irons Cereal but they do their job without complaint as a result this scene is just mesmerizing. An eternal enigma.. how could this come to be.

It only gets weirder as apparently once inside the van Ramsey and Becky have a pistol and an assault rifle laying in there. With near infinite ammo to boot! Rod is fine with that and takes a gun without complaining. I know they are being attacked by eagles and all but one would wonder why would leave somebody leave a fully loaded assault rifle under their front seat and are they good people?! Well like anything in this movie it seems unlikely. Of course they find some children surviving .. crying for their mommy for about 12 seconds before playing on a PSP and complaining they are hungry. These children are the WORST child actors I have ever seen so that results into something amazing.

I am not sure these even are childeren.. they might be aliens!

What follows is a slew of hilariously bad moments as now this movie is catching steam. Becky dies while taking a poop, a bird flies into her and within two seconds she is dead. Ramsey saves a bunch of people on a English tourbus before he gets covered in some kind of acid these birds can throw up. The camera shows his dead body in three separate positions while already dead and unmoved. There is even a show where we focus on a woman’s corpse.. which is paused footage by the way because obviously they could not hold their breath with their mouth opens and eyes opened for 3 seconds.. which shows the camera man’s feet in the shot. Epic!

They then decide to Picnic at the beach because the  children are hungry…. before talking to a science guy who frowns upon human ecological behavior. The whole world is empty or supposed to be.. hiding in fear of the birds but we can see people walking their dog of flying a kite in the background. This also happens several times when they are on the road.. we see cars pass by regularly as they fight for their lives and birds allegedly killed everything! Top Tier Immersion!

Stores are open hmmm I could go for a dog with let’s risk our lives for one!

The political messages in this movie are also hilarious. Apparently Ramsey was just a good guy.. he was a veteran in Iraq who just wanted peace more so he quite.. that’s why he has the rifle… They get robbed by a Texan man in a gas guzzling pick up truck, who gets his comeuppance a mere minute after his crime and we see a hippie living safely in a forest until it catches fire for no reason at all. This basically feels like an elementary-schooler’s take on nature and pollution. It is so in your face and vexing that it would be a hilarious drinking game. Each time they can descent you or are all super mega eco-friendly.. take a shot.. you’ll be vomiting acid before this movie is over. Each time you see a continuity error take a sip.. you might be hospitalized because there honestly are more shots which have something wrong with them than not. 

Somehow even the hippie looks fake

The best part is the ending… there is non… well they get their happily ever after until part two but for no reason at all the birds just leave. There is no big trigger there is no resolve. They just go to another beach, which is the exact same beach of course, and they see the birds fly away. The movie ends because it wants to end. There is no end of the journey, no lesson learned and no strong new bonds formed. Nathalie and Rod now just stand on a beach after hearing a lot of eco babble with their freshly adopted kids. Who make Rod’s poo walk seem like a cool trait. The Danger Will Robinson robot or Betty White would have been able to play more believable children than these two soulless abominations.

Even Rod’s neck looks fake..and those kids like maniacs

There is not a single good thing in this movie.. but it is tremendously fun to make your own stories. Ramsey and Becky are actually serial killers. The boy was found in a trunk so he was actually a kidnapping victim. The girl is possessed by a satanic force that’s why she sounds so weird. No matter what you imagine it will make this movie better! And that makes this such a hilarious mess to watch! Now if you haven’t had enough or skipped ahead to avoid spoilers I shall present you with the entire movie! You can thank me in the comments! If this post gets enough likes I might review the sequel as well. As for me I will go take a walk in the woods! But with animals becoming more bold while we hid away I better take a coathanger!

Final Score

Pinkie’s Guilty Movie “Pleasures”: Dragonball Evolution

What do you get when you combine Power Rangers, Avatar the Last Airbender, Karate Kid and a whole lot of “teenage” hormones? Well Dragon Ball of course! Not just any regular Dragon Ball either but.. their EVOLUTION!

Dragonball

Sometimes movies can be so bad they are good. This is not exactly one of THOSE movies.  This movie does something else, this movie is so aggressively unfaithful to its source material, this movie is such a trainwreck that it is just fascinating to watch. It’s like an enigma. How could things have gotten so wrong? It’s so bad they even spell Dragon Ball wrong. That’s two different words! Not one… even though spelling it as one word does make a lot more sense. It still is not correct. So when you are already misspelling the title you know you are in for a treat.

Within the first five minutes, which include still images like opening titles and production studio logos there are six major inconsistencies to mythos. Ozaaru is a demon, Piccolo’s backstory is different, using Ki is called airbending, Goku is seventeen, Goku has trouble with learning Ki… uhm I mean air bending the Mafubaa is now something completely unrelated to everything else.  Luckily this is Dragonball and not Dragon Ball.. so that is okay… right? 

Next we see Goku as your typical teen, that feels more akin to Sam Rami’s  take on Peter Parker than the character we know and love. Now obviously this movie can’t  be cast with a six year old kid or something as it would simply not work out. During the Piccolo arc, which obviously is not the first in the anime, thus timewise this makes no sense either,  Goku was a bit older… but sure I can forgive this choice from a logistical perspective.  Filming this with a child actor would be tedious and would not work nearly as well as it could in animated form. I wonder if Justin Chatwin was the right pick for an 18 year old boy because clearly he is much older…fine.  The whole whitewashing Goku thing is nonsensical because he is an alien, he could be about any ethnicity.. of course in this movie he is just hell spawn.. so I guess a white straight cisgender privileged male makes about as much sense as anything else in this movie.

Dawsons Creek

After our first fight which involves grandpa Gohan swallowing a fly to a cartoon sound effect we move onto Goku’s  highschool live. The girl he likes is with this Chad guy played by an actor named Texas Battle.. now that is a Badass name and sounds like an assistant to All Might. Yet no.. in this movie he is a guy who randomly picks on Goku because…looking like Justin Chatwin makes you a wimp? It is never explained.  Now in class we get an exposition scene about an eclipse happening in two weeks and in the most pedantic the teacher tries to teach the school what an eclipse is as the movie tries to force us backstory down the troat by having a half asleep Goku claims that his grandpa believes  it is the sign that the Nameks will use to destroy the world.

Now I know this movie is not Dragon Ball.. its Dragonball but in the original source material Piccolo Junior (the Piccolo we know in the series) and Kami do not find out they are aliens until Dragon Ball Z, which allows for a whole lot of mysticism. Now this might not seem to bad but this leads to a chain reaction. Since Oozaru , a demon spawned from the earth  serves Piccolo they already do not feel connected in this story.. why would demons and aliens work together. Is it because old Piccolo’s nickname is Demon King Piccolo?! That was a title he chose because he did not know who he was! Why make him King of Demon’s while he is an alien.. those two do not connect well.  It also kiled the concept of Super Saiyan from the get go… even before they knew this movie would not get sequals.. If Nameks are aliens they would know of Saiyans and not call them demons…. also a person from Namek is not called a Namek… it’s a Namekian! I am beginning to get angry! And we are just 12 minutes in!

To woo Chichi Goku uses his Ki…I mean airbending to open a locker, now he suddenly airbend while before it was established he can’t do it. So simply by being horney.. he gains power… and this is not the only time it happens.. it’s actually a driving force behind Goku’s power troughout the entire movie. His competence rises with his Libido. Goku is supposed to be about as Ace as I am.. sure he has kids so technically like me he would be grey sexual but the point is the whole character was once build around not caring for these things! So not only do they get his age wrong, potentially his ethnicity wrong, his demeanour wrong and his aptitude wrong.. also his motivations, knowledge and even his SPECIES are wrong. Instead we of Goku get a super powered Dawson Leery trying to woo a girl.

Uncle Ben is that you?

Chichi is the girl Goku likes obviously and because he blew up everyone’s lockers and cluttered the floor, she decides to invite him to a party..on his birthday, which without even considering his grandpa goes along with that. While his grandpa is cooking a feast for his birthday Goku decides to say nothing to him and he just takes off… just so the bullies want to beat him up for showing at a party.  Goku beats the bullies by dodging them, claiming it is okay because he did not fight…. these bullies meanwhile come at him with metal rods… what kind of bullies are these? This is not even good high school drama.The fight is sort of entertaining because of how stupid it is though. With some pretty bad effects, even for the time and some very odd choices of the bullies they soon bite the dust.. destroying Texas Battle’s characters car in the end. This of course pleases ChiChi very much because I would be thrilled if people started a fight that leaves a totalled car on my front porch as well.

ChiChi tries to come on to Goku but Piccolo shows up and Grandpa Gohan’s house and Darth Vader’s Hands Gohan into dying.. after which he force pulls the entire house down on the man… because I forgot to mention this.. but he is looking for the Dragonballs, which he gave to Goku earlier. Goku suddenly can sense this.. and runs back home.  To find the house less destroyed than it was before and his grandpa covered by two sheets of wood. Gohan tells Goku that he needs to find all the seven dragonballs and stop Piccolo becasue after being sealed by the Mafuba 2000 years ago he returned…. how he did that is never explained it just happend. At least when Rita Repulsa returned in Power Rangers we saw some astronauts open the dumpster that held  her.. Piccolo is just back.. and he has a servant named Mai because she was in the original series and we need an evil woman to fight Bulma.

Grandpa Gohan with his dying breath tells Goku that with great power comes great responsibility, using different words and Goku is upset for letting his grandpa down.  Who gifted him an orange Gi from beyond the grave, coincidentally in one of the rooms of the house that has not been destroyed. We see Goku bury his grandpa when Bulma invades his house. Her father’s Orb as stolen.. of which she knows nothing about.. but she managed to build a device that is attuned to it’s wavelength so she can locate it now that it is stolen. To her knowledge it was just a pretty thing though so why build that radar?

At least the original Bulma knew what they did so it makes sense she built a radar. They decide to join forces to find the Dragon Balls and Goku dubs the device  A Dragonball Energy meter.. to Which Bulma says DBE.. I like it.. NO! NO! That is not a good joke! Dragon Ball Z gets nicknamed DBZ.. so Dragon Ball Evolution of course would be DBE ..but you named it Dragonball not Dragon Ball! Yet now when it’s convenient it becomes two seperate words?! This movie is not even consistent with it’s own title!

Go Go Goku

By now we are only about 30 minutes in. There is an hour left, Goku goes to find Master Roshi as his grandpa commanded.. who now is way younger than Grandpa Gohan.. .like waaaaaay younger but he was his master. Which is fine if you say he is long lived because of his Ki or something but no one even bats an eye that a 50 year looking dude taught a 70 year old life time martial artist?! At least give it a mention!  Thank Arceus Bulma finds a dirty book  though and Roshi grabs her butt and she threatens him for it.. this sequence is the only thing that resembles Dragon Ball.

Yet they have to ruin it by making this movie dumb again. Roshi forgot where he put his Dragon Ball/Dragonball so they have to look.. suddenly the DBE meter doesn’t work.. and Goku can sense the Dragon Ball/Dragonball.. this is the only time this happens.. later they establish that the DBE  can detect these relics with pinpoint precision and when the device is not usable Goku can not sense it.. There are so many plot holes here that even the most avid Dragon Ball fan can’t find the crater with Yamcha anymore!

This movie only gets worse, the group gets trapped in a hole by Yamcha that Roshi can just jump out off yet they spend an entire night in that crater whining about how they are running out of time, which in itself is a plot hole. Piccolo must make his wish during some sort of special solar eclipse named the blood moon for some reason and no on realise.. hey we could just keep a dragon ball/dragonball  from him… no they have go gather them all…so they can wish for his defeat? But halfway down the movie they realise this will not work so they do decide on just keeping the balls away.. somewhere down the road and to use the Mafuba to seal away Piccolo again..bringing the Dragon Balls closer to him.

Let’s not forget that the entire world never notices that  Piccolo has a floating sky fortress… which  stops being a thing all together at one point.. he destroys cities and people in the world don’t seem to notice.  This is really really bad. At one point Piccolo can use his blood to create what can only be called Putty Patrollers. That’s right Power Ranger Putty Patrollers are in this movie.  One Dragon Ball/Dragonball is in a volcano but they can not cross the lava because they can not fly yet.. suddenly they are attacked by the putties and Goku and Roshi fight them off when Goku uses them to build a bridge. 

Sure they are monsters but clearly they are alive. Goku should not really be so murderous that he tosses these in lava to form platform but he does… also  without the bad guy’s intervention they would not have gotten to the Dragon Ball.. well that can happen right?! The bad guys might be trying to reach the same location at the same time and  thus the fight would enable the good guys in the end? No! Mai apparently was on the other side all along not touching the Dragon Ball/dragonballl for some reason until she can hold Goku at gunpoint. Why send in the putties when your enemy is in the wrong place… how did you even get there?!

Kamehamehorney 

Not a single scene makes any sense at all. After the Volcano the group decides they don’t have time to find the other Dragon Balls in time so they must learn the Mafuba.. or more like.. get it.. as it’s a spell you can like take along with you apparently. This leads to Goku reuniting with Chichi who participates in the world Tournament.. Goku doesn’t care about such a match because he does not care about fighting, or the tournament.. he does care about Chichi… I honestly do not know how they do it but that single situational descriptor of a simple situation is 100% wrong… like they could not even be more off had they actually set it out as their goal to make an Anti-Goku.

This leads to the worst scene of the entire movie.. Goku learning the Kamehameha. Which now has the power to gently light candles on fire as Roshi demonstrates… yet Goku can not mimic this straight away..invalidating possibly the most iconic scene of entire original series.. Goku doing this complex technique on his first try. Now this would be enough to insult any fans to the core..but they make it WAAAAY worse. Chichi shows up telling him.. that if Goku can use the Kamehameha to light all the candles ..he can stand next to her and they can “kiss” this prompts Goku to grasp the concept of this technique. The two kiss and we fade to black. And we pick up with a scene of Chichi sneaking out of his room.

Oppa Gangnam Style

However this is not Chichi this is Mai in disguise who earlier drew some blood form Chichi which allows her to transform into Chichi… Goku however was not in his room.. perhaps he was at Chichi’s room.. so she is found out. The technique already feels stupid and forced.. but hey guess what it gets worse. When Chichi fights my in ther tournament Mai had no way of knowing who Chichi actually is to Goku, nor does  it makes sense she knew the group would gave up pursuit of the dragon balls instead, nor that their alternative technique would be taught there.

If we consider “Piccolo must have sense the dragon balls/dragonballs they carry’ that is something the group would know as he found plenty already.  Why would  you leave the Dragonballs alone in your room when you know the enemy can detect them. Either way you look at this it doesn’t make sense and the only viable explanation is.. Goku got careless because he wanted to get it on with Chichi which is about the most un-dragon ball you can get for an explanation.

Oh No Za Ru

Mai kinda kills Goku with some kind of Gassy Energy Shot thing.. because in the doppelganger fight Goku decides and hits the wrong Chichi.. even though he learned how to sense energy and should have mastered it because Kamehameha is the highest form of Airbending.  Now dead.. in the same way Harry Potter died in that last movie, Goku sees his grandfather who tells him it is not his time yet, after which Master Roshi Fires a Kamehameha into Goku..which now has the power to revive and heal people as well.  He gets up, they leave Chichi unconscious on the floor which is the second closet actual dragon ball moment in this movie, and pursue Mai and Piccolo who now head to the Dragon Temple..which is the location where you need to use all the Dragon Balls.

Yamcha now has a hovercraft/ flying car hummer which promptly gets shot down and while they are crashing.. Goku decides to switch into his Gi… yes .. while they are crashing! While his friends lie in pain out of the car we see Goku posing in his new Gi for like half a minute.. not even looking if they are okay he decides to face king Piccolo. Swearing Piccolo he will defeat Oozaru. Piccolo reveals to Goku he is Oozaru  and the blood moon will turn him… yeesz.. a once in a lifetime solar eclipse turning you into a giant monkey? How unpratic… it’s not even gonna be a giant monkey is it?!

So Goku turns into a not so great..I’d even so slightly tinier than average Ape and kills Roshi… by the way that whole Mafuba plot line got discarded by the evil Namek blowing up the urn with ease.  His regret causes him to change back into Goku and the final fight begins. The final fight is about is massively lackluster and looks like a 1 on 1 match of  splatoon with some pretty harmless colourful projectiles flying about. Suddenly Goku is as strong as Piccolo so I guess he must really be horney after having been turned into a tiny gorilla. 

The fight feels very throwaway and not Dragon Ball at all. With one final Kamehameha.. which is also the first one.. the conflict is ended… the iconic technique is not done justice of course. Instead they combine with with a visual more akin to the Super Dragon Fist with Goku flying through Piccolo.. like in the classic.. but instead of the hole.. which would make no sense we just see a blue explosion. So it has neither the pleasing elements of the Dragon Fist nor the Kamehameha.. That takes some skill on it’s own to combine both and get non of the joy!

With the evil defeated, Goku magically learns the enchantment to summon Shenlong… because why would they get that name correct..and instead of wishing for the people  that got killed in this incident to be returned the group just wishes for Roshi back. A touching sentiment but given that they would be given one ABSOLUTE wish..a bit lackluster. Given how the Earth Dragon Balls are supposed to bring back multiple people.. they even got the dragon balls/dragonballs themselves wrong!

Gotta Heed to Call Skip on Dragonball

I haven’t even said anything about the bad acting, the sub par cgi and the lack of an interesting musical score. Not only does this movie not work as a Dragon Ball flick, it is written so bad that even with different flavor this plot would have made no sense , with huge logic leaps bad writing and the worst implementation of a franchise ever. Avatar the Last Airbender the movie is a masterpiece compared to this.. the Room had more structure in its writing and Troll 2 had better effects and payoffs. Yet there is something fascinating about this movie. I would not call it enjoyment.. I would not say I had fun .. but I stared in awe as this movie unfolded.  There wasn’t a single moment where I did not want to turn of this movie but I constantly kept wondering.. they can not mess it up more than this right? Just to see it progressively worsen as we go along. 

As a random movie this is a pile of digimon doodoo but as  Dragon Ball/Dragonball Product this is the single WORST movie I have ever seen.. and I have seen Rubber. Which is a movie about a car tire with mental capabilities to explode peoples head..with a meta subplot of cops killing an audience mixed in. DBE is not so bad it’s good.. it’s so bad it’s fascinating.

Also they forgot Krillin!

Pinkie’s Guilty Movie Pleasures: The Room

Usually I have this column for movies that are great, but are never talked about in favor of those Oscar bait pretentious ones we pretend to love. Our secret favorites.. because they would be to “pulpy” otherwise. However you could look as my guilty pleasures also as bad movies I love. One of these, I have mentioned plenty of times on my blog , I crossplayed as the main guy, we went to special viewings, I haven’t sent mail to the director.. who never sent anything back unfort… and It’s tearing me apart!

Now.. to keep this blog life for five years!

A spoonful of horribleness

The Room is a movie directed by the infamous and mysterious  Tommy Wiseau and saw a theater release..for three days or so.. in 2003. It is described to be the best worst movie ever and rightfully so. In this movie we follow protagonist Johny (who never gets a last name) who sees his wife  Lisa slip into the arms of his best friend Mark after being denied a promotion at the bank. We see a positive and dog loving man, change into a tortured shell of his former self. Trapped in despair…. or at least that is what it seems this movie is about. In actuality I think this is a dramatic retelling of the old TV-Show “Third Rock from the Sun” about aliens visiting earth, because the characters in The Room are far from human. From casually saying they have breast cancer to having sex on your friends couch for no reason at all. All emotions in this movie are crooked and wrong. From moving into a serious talk towards a casual “anyway how is your sexlife” to tossing a football in costume at a very inappropriate event. I think it’s aliens!…Vampire Aliens to be exact.

Clearly..Aliens

During the opening credits we see the name Tommy Wiseau pop up a lot. He written, directed, produced and starred in this movie..among other things. The deuteragonist being played by his (former) best friend Greg Sestero. Juliette Danielle playing the female lead and Philip Haldiman complete the main cast. It’s almost completely set in one or two homes , Greg’s  and Tommy’s with a few scenes like a park and a flower shop. Yet this movie costed a whopping 6 million dollars to make. Which you never see in this movie. This movie was almost entirely self funded by Tommy and where the money comes from is a big mystery. When you see this movie, you will also wonder where that budget went. This does not look like a six million dollar movie. It looks bad, it sounds bad and the green screen doesnt look ever look right. It’s written horrible, it’s acted atrociously bad and now it also looks and sounds horrible?! How can this movie be good than? Well this is not just a movie.. this is a phenomenon.

Overacting 101

A spoonful of mystery

Strictly as a movie, this movie already definitely falls under the “so bad it’s good “ category. Yet to watch The Room like that ..almost feels like a shame. Because there is so much more to it.  The best way to watch this movie is to either watch the movie “the disaster artist” soon after, or read Greg Sestero book that movie was based on. It gives this movie a “mystical” quality. How did this ever see the light of day? Two reasons why you can really see Tommy was in over his head are also important reasons why this movie cost so much. Each scene was shot in two camera formats for example. Because Tommy did not comprehend the difference between camera’s he just got both main types and had them running at the same time. Instead of renting these camera’s as is customary in Hollywood he just bought them.
He also rented a billboard to promote his movie..which he ended up keeping for five years..even though movie was not running anywhere during regular  screenings. How could he make a movie like that?

His actors frequently wondered how he could as well.

The plot thickens when Tommy Wiseau tries to be mysterious about his age and origin. He’s probably polish but he might be from space as well. In this movie we get to take a peek in his mind. How does he see people?!  Philip Haldiman who plays Denny for example never knew his character had a mental disability.. while Tommy Wiseau says he written him as that. Suddenly a few scenes begin to make much more sense.. yet his drug abuse scenes suddenly make less sense. Tommy also wanted to reveal his character is a vampire at the end…”He would do this by adding in an effect that Johny’s car would lift into the sky and fly over the San Francisco skyline .. as a closing shot. This action would reveal Johnny’s true nature as a vampire?!…How does flying car say vampire?! Yet somehow I love it. When you see The Room, knowing this .. you pick up little hints to maybe allude to this yet “not really”.You get into his head-space for a bit.. taking you on somebody else’s LSD trip sort of speak.It’s like looking at a molten jigsaw puzzle.. it  sorta fits together.. but it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

How about we play football instead of making puzzle?! Ahaaha!

A spoonful of hidden wisdom?

What does The Room mean?  Clearly Johnny and Tommy are the same person, just watch any interview, their mindset is nearly one on one. Tommy Wiseau even talks extensively how fun tossing a football.. a thing Johnny and his fellows do A LOT in this movie. Most of the times it doesn’t make sense. For example in one talk Johnny  and his best friend go to the park to talk and toss the football? Like who does that?! That sounds like some 50’s styled utopia..alla fallout minus the nuke. Is there a deeper meaning to the football? Or is it just Tommy bleeding over into Johny?! The alledgeded polack is clearly clever enough to get six million somewhere, so could he really be so alien in this? On set his 400! crew and cast members gossiped about the woman which had scored Tommy to make him write this story…but I do think his Mistress is of another kind. I think his cruel mistress is Hollywood.

She kinda looks like a vampire

Johnny is a man of honest intention, a hard worker who tries his best as is passionate and cheerful. Clearly Tommy sees himself as that person. Lisa tears Johnny apart by feeling he is not good enough for her! She wants someone who can do better.. who has that promotion.. or just something new.  I think , Tommy’s Lisa is Hollywood. In the Disaster Artist movie, we see Tommy get rejected by everyone in Hollywood, he could not find a job. Eventually he decided to do it himself. He got fed up with not being good enough for others so he took his faith in his own hand. Just as Johnny wil never be good enough for Lisa .. so will Tommy always be laughed at by Hollywood. Tommy has old values.. so Mark.. are Tommies peers, the younger generation he met in acting class who now outdo him to those jobs.  Now I just need to figure out how a mentally disabled drug abusing neighbour boy who wants to join you in the bedroom, and a mother in law who is casual about her breast cancer fit in. To me this movie is about taking control of your own destiny creating your own path and setting yourself free from those who old you back…….that is if I really try to think from Tommy’s perspective though.. when you just look at the movie itself… there is no way that wisdom will show.. nor might it ever have been intended.

At least they do the drunk japanese headband thing! 10/10 movie!

A spoonful of charm

As someone who watches bad movies for fun with some friends, this one has something many others don’t. While I clearly laugh at this movie and think it’s ridiculous, there is also something pure and adorable with it.  The scene in the flower shop for example… this is actually a flower shop and the woman behind the counter is an actual florist, which is why her line delivery is so bad. The “Oh Hi Doggie” scene never was scripted.. Tommy walked in the store and saw the dog sitting in the back, unnoticed by the rest of his crew because of how silent it was. Fascinated and endeared by the little creature.. to why it was so silent (it was very old) Tommy wanted to put it in his movie. Such an iconic scene from this movie just because of a man taking a liking to a dog at random. There is a sincerity to it.. which does NOT stem from the acting. There is a love for the craft.. and it’s all Tommy. Well him and the role of Claudette, Lisa’s mother. When she tells Lisa about how good of a husband Johnny is and talks about his qualities I can hear Tommy from behind the typewriter going  “Hey Hollywood can’t you see this! I am a good person! Love me”! I find that thought immensely endearing. 

It is a pretty adorable dog ! Hi Doggie indeed!

Seeing how Johnny needed 38 takes from his “I did not Hit her… I did naawwwwt, O Hi Mark” scene in the Disaster Artist makes the scene that much better. “This is as good as it is going to get” feels like the attitude in this movie.  This doesn’t feel like a bodged Hollywood project such as Nine Lives or Cats , this is a passion project come to life because a sense of grandeur and the idea that being sincere and yourself would be good enough to enter Hollywood. Never felt I closer to a writer/director putting himself on the plate. 

Hehehe! Yar Funny Hehehe!

A spoonful of warmth

This is not just a movie about  infidelity.. this movie is like Tommy’s hilariously bad resume. It’s like reading a resume in Comic Sans  and there it shows “guild leader in Neopets” as leadership experience. Under skills they mention they can recognise tractors by engine sound (while they apply for a grocery store or something). It’s hilariously awful but when you read that resume you know it was made by such a sweet honest person.. that unfortunately is not fit for you. So you laugh and put it at the rejected pile…but that night when your job finishes you go back to home and think about that one resume again.. hoping that person will be off well.. you wish them the best.

The room is the equivalent of watching your own children perform a school musical. The Acting sucks , the sets are cheap, everything is off key, jokes are dumbed down and the writing is stupid and nonsensical. Still when you see your kid.. dressed up as that flower run up on that stage and blurt out their lines all wooden by nerves you still can’t be helped but to feel super charmed by it all. Except for me since I hate kids but meh. The Room is like this. All the stories make Tommy our little baby boy..and there he is on stage… being the best tree he can be with his skills. Somehow he managed to cast himself in every other role as well. It makes the play even worse… but all the more charming. Like the most adorable trainwreck ever.

That’s not adorable!