Mediocre Movie Thread

Already have one for movies that don’t suck and one for movies that do suck so there has to be a place for movies that are in-between. Movies that are so okay that they’re totally forgettable. If you do remember them you can talk about them here.

Dancer in the Dark-  
It stars Bjork,and that’s the only reason I picked it up.  
It’s an okay flick,but the ending,jeezus,if you want a movie that really kicks your ass,here it is.Bjork is a single mother,with an inherited condition causing her to lose her sight. A bunch of stuff happens with a neighbor,and she ends up in court.the only way out is to use the money she’s been saving for her son’s medical bills to cure the condition he’s no doubt inherited. She doesn’t use the money,and ends up getting the death penalty.  
And this is a musical.

 
A spin-off of The Big Lebowski, focusing on the life of The Jesus. It’s basically just,him and a buddy going around Fucking girls and each other,and stealing cars. There’s some funny stuff,some disturbing stuff,and then it ends without much of a conclusion. Not that it had much more plot than just following The Jesus’ odd little life for awhile.

 
The Guyver  
The American live action adaptation of the anime/manga series.  
The creature effects and suit acting are impressive,but other than that it’s a pretty dull cliche flick. A bunch of bad guys are trying to get an alien Bio-Armor. The armor links to some dude,and he fights off a bunch of monsters,including ones played by Michael Berryman and Jimmy “Jay Jay” Walker. Walker’s monster raps. The main Villain is the typical “I wanna take over the world” type. Jeffrey Combs plays “Dr.East”, get it? Because he was Dr.West in Re-Animator? Laugh,dammit. While the effects look amazing,there’s not much investment in the plot.  
The villain is defeated,and the dude who has the Guyver armor has a happy ending with his girlfriend. Then there’s a painful setup for a sequel with a cia guy from earlier being revealed to be a bad guy as well,and Jimmy Jay Jay Walker’s monster says “Dyno-mite”.  
Oh,yeah,Mark Hamill is in it. His name is always the biggest on any release of this.  
Thankfully,there was a sequel that improved greatly on this first effort.

I just watched a mediocre movie today, so here it goes.
 
Blade Runner 2049. Why not a nice, even 2050? Don’t know. In fact, there’s a whole lot of don’t knows throughout this movie, because they expect you to watch the first movie right before it and memorize a lot of little details, so if you’ve seen the original years ago (or not at all) they don’t explain anything and you’re up shit creek.
 
The movie begins with a very long string of dots that I think were supposed to be words but damn they’re small. Each “letter” (I assume) is a rectangle of 6 pixels on my TV. The text, if it was text, was too small to read even an inch from the screen. I hope it wasn’t important. It’s also a very dull orange color. The same is true of the ending credits. They were so small they were just dots.
 
After that we find a fancy European car with louvers at a house with a bunch of greenhouses and a sky filled with fog. Every scene either has fog, rain, or total darkness. This was the third darkest movie I’ve ever seen, after AVP: Requiem and The Descent. There was one scene where it was so dark the screen was totally black and there was no sound and I didn’t know if it had ended or not.
 
That also happens a lot. This movie has like six fucking endings and then it keeps going for two and a half hours during which about 30 minutes of plot happens. Several times I was totally expecting the credits to start rolling and then the movie just kept going until my bladder reached it’s limit and I had to pee anyway knowing I wouldn’t miss anything important.
 
Oh, and the car can fly. That’s an important point later in the movie.
 
Ryan Gosling and his one expression meet a bald guy who’s growing maggots or something in an indoor swamp. They look like peanuts at first until they start to move, so I guess they’re bugs or something, we’re never told.
 

 
The bald guy is a “replicant” and if you know nothing about the lore of this franchise you have no clue what that means. Ryan Gosling is a replicant too, which means they can both beat the shit out of each other and not die. Are they robots? Don’t know. Maybe the text at the beginning would have explained it better if it wasn’t microscopic. Apparently the bald guy’s name is Sapper according to the Wikipedia page but they don’t really do enough to hammer the names home in this movie. Ryan Gosling has to kill Sapper because he’s an older model and that’s bad, I guess. They never explain it. Newer models have to kill older models for some reason, just accept it. After a fight Ryan Gosling kills Sapper and cuts his eye out as proof so he can get a bounty and buy his hologram wife a new projector. They have hologram wives in the future and they are all named Joi and played by Ana de Armas, who’s Cuban but really looks Chinese in this movie. They do some crazy stuff with makeup in this movie, trust me.
 
Replicants are slaves in 2049 (I’m just writing 2050, it’s easier). Why? Don’t know, just accept it. People are also extremely racist against replicants, even coworkers. Why? Don’t know. The only way to tell them apart from normal humans is by scanning their eyeballs so how the fuck would anyone know? Don’t know, just accept it.
 
Ryan Gosling’s boss is an older woman named Madam, unless that’s her title, they never say. She’s the head of the LAPD. Los Angeles in 2050 is still a shithole only now there’s Chinese (or Japanese, or Korean in one scene) writing everywhere, neon signs, and flying cars that have miraculously eliminated all traffic. It also rains 24/7 and no one has lights in the future. Every room is extremely dark, lit either with neon signs or very dull orange lights that shimmer like water, which look really cool but you’d get eye strain pretty quick if you tried to read anything. They have books in the future, Pale Fire and Treasure Island, among others.
 
A dig team visited the site where Sapper was killed and found a chest containing a skeleton of a woman who died in childbirth. Apparently she too was a replicant. But replicants can’t get pregnant, so this discovery must be swept under the rug or the world will end for some unspecified reason. The boss is very adamant about this. She wants Ryan Gosling to find the child and kill it.
 
Ryan Gosling, meanwhile, has his own plans. He visits an archive run by the only replicant in the world who has a name. She’s Luv and she works for Jared Leto who invented replicants or something and he used them to conquer nine planets, a fact that pisses him off because he should have conquered thousands. Jared Leto wants to find the child too but there are no records as to who it could be since an unspecified cataclysm called “The Blackout” eliminated all digital media prior to 2030 I think.
 
Jared Leto has a problem. Even though anti-gravity and interstellar travel and memory uploading exists they haven’t found a way to manufacture replicants fast enough to meet the demand. You see all great civilizations are built on the backs of slaves, except they aren’t. Slavery has been the reason great civilizations have stagnated and died, since unlimited free labor artificially holds back technological progress. But whatever, space racism built nine planets of civilization out of space cotton and the factories can’t crank out space negros fast enough to colonize the galaxy so Jared Leto has to find the one replicant who was born and not made in a factory to make self-replicating replicants who are superior to humans in every other way and won’t resent being slaves and totally won’t rise up and exterminate the humans.
 
Except that’s exactly what the replicants are planning to do. They already know who the child is and are waiting for the right moment to stage a rebellion and overthrow the humans. Jared Leto’s plan is poorly thought out bullshit that is guaranteed to fail, but whatever, accept it for the movie to continue.
 
Blade Runner 2049 requires you to have a PhD in Blade Runner-ology to know what the fuck is going on but simultaneously requires you to shut your brain off and not notice that nothing makes any sense and exists just as plot contrivances to drive the story forward. And fucking hell do they cram a whole lot of plot and a whole lot of twists and a whole lot of unnecessary complexity into two and a half fucking hours.
 
Where was I? Ryan Gosling goes back to the farm and sees a date carved into a tree trunk. That date was exactly 10 days ago (10 June 2021). So where are my holographic wives, flying cars, and artificial humans? This is the future, and I want all that stuff. Ryan Gosling then burns the house down. Why? Don’t know. Ryan Gosling has to keep his boss off his tracks because he doesn’t trust her. He’s also being tailed by some replicant hookers. The hottest one has orange hair and tries to seduce him. Remember earlier when I said they did some weird shit with makeup in this movie? You look at this chick and she’s so hot you don’t believe it. You’ve only met one person in the really real world who looks this good (maybe better) and she has a pretty crappy personality and more baggage than… than… than something that holds a whole shitton of baggage (I can’t come up with genius all the time) , so you dodged a silver bullet there. But enough about my dating history, back in the movie, this hooker is so hot you don’t believe it. And then you look her up on IMDB and find out that she’s the soydrogynous mandroid from the latest Terminator movie and you wonder how the fuck something like that can happen. That’s some great makeup or CGI or something. (By the way, a mandroid is a man android, as opposed to like a chickdroid.)
 
This is now 3 single-spaced sheets of paper and the movie isn’t even half over yet.
 
Anyway, the movie makes it painfully obvious that Ryan Gosling is the super-replicant messiah child who was born and not made, because he has memories of his childhood with a wooden horse that really exists in the really real world. He also visits a doctor with no immune system who can read memories with a microscope because that’s a thing 30, sorry 28 years from now. Fuck off 2049. She tells him that his memories are real and not implanted. But it’s a stupid plot twist because she’s the child and she deliberately implanted her real memories into Ryan Gosling as a red herring because this is a movie and not real life and everything that happens is a plot contrivance. And we find out that the dead woman replicant was Rachel from the first movie and she had a kid with Harrison Ford who maybe is a replicant or a human, no one knows. We don’t find any of this out until two hours in.
 
Ryan Gosling has to leave LA and goes into an even worse shithole in some unspecified place in North America where everyone speaks Russian for some reason. Why? Don’t know. Where as LA was a filthy, dark ghetto with thousand story skyscrapers for Atari and 400 foot tall holographic naked women, wherever Ryan Gosling goes next is a literal wasteland of garbage full of Russians. Luv, watching from a satellite or something, blows up the Russians with missiles because Ryan Gosling has to find an orphanage run by the black guy from the first episode of Walking Dead. His orphanage is full of bald white kids who strip old computer parts of their gold like Chinese kids do in the really real world today. Ryan Gosling threatens to kill him unless he reveals who the messiah replicant child is, but that page is missing from his record book. Who took it? Don’t know.
 
Luv also kills the Madam boss of the LAPD because she wants to kill the messiah child and Jared Leto wants the child brought to him alive.
 
Also Ryan Gosling is going to be “retired” (killed) in 48 hours since he’s completed his mission. Or, he lied about completing his mission and Madam believes him. Was he scheduled to be killed at this date or is he being killed because he knows too much and is now a threat? And if it’s the latter why not just wipe his memories? If false memories can be implanted then surely real memories can be erased. Whatever, you’re not supposed to think about it.
 
Back at home Joi hires the orange-haired hooker to have sex with Ryan Gosling while she projects herself holographically onto the hooker’s body because poor Joi can’t touch Ryan Gosling because she’s just a hologram. It’s sad because she’s so nice. You could say she’s only nice because that’s how she’s programmed, but I’d take that over the people we have in the really real world any day. It’s a really erotic scene even though you don’t see anything (there are naked people, men and women, throughout this movie and the one time no one is naked is the sex scene, which happens entirely off screen) because they sure used some high tech wizardry to make that chick super hot.
 
Oh, also somewhere Jared Leto has a naked replicant woman dropped from the ceiling in his office which is very dark and has very dull orange lighting. He gropes her, complains about how he’s not the god emperor of mankind, and then murders her. He also has a whole collection of Bluetooth earpieces that Luv brings him in a wooden box because wood is the most precious commodity on the planet.
 
Ryan Gosling visits some black guy in the ghetto who talks some unknown African language. Everyone in this movie is functionally multilingual. They all speak their own native language and yet understand what everyone else is saying without the need to translate. According to wikipedia it’s called non-convergent discourse. The African guy analyzes the wooden horse that Ryan Gosling has and it reveals that it is highly radioactive, so much so that there’s only one place on Earth that it could have come from. Where? Don’t know. They never tell you where any of these locations are.
 
Ryan Gosling takes Joi with him to an even worse shithole where everything is bright orange and the sky is totally opaque orange fog and there are statues of naked women everywhere because why not. And I mean EVERYTHING. The interiors of all buildings are orange too. His scanners reveal that the only life in the area is a bee hive and that somehow leads him to a very surprisingly large building that’s 100 stories tall and has gaming tables, several bars, and an auditorium that can accommodate thousands. Also, the sign on the front of the building is written in both Japanese and Korean. Apparently Harrison Ford from the first movie has been living there with his dog for the past 28 years. How did he survive the super-intense bright orange radiation? Don’t know. He has a fight with Ryan Gosling who doesn’t want to fight him, thinking that Ford is his dad, even though Ford is the dad of the scientist girl, so he lets a very haggard, old Harrison Ford punch him in the face several times while holographic Elvis Presley sings in the background (that actually happens in the movie) until the almost 80-year-old Ford gets exhausted and has to stop so he invites Ryan Gosling to have a drink.
 
Harrison Ford gets his dog drunk and acts angsty with Ryan Gosling who finally gets Ford to talk. He says he abandoned his child so no one would hunt the child down. But if they haven’t hunted Ford down and this messiah child has been on the loose for 28 years and hasn’t been in any danger yet what makes anyone think… whatever, you’re not supposed to think, just watch the plot advance.
 
Luv and some masked nobodies break into Ford’s penthouse, kidnap Ford, beat the crap out of Ryan Gosling, and kill Joi. They leave the dog to die alone stranded in the penthouse. The scene literally ends with the sad dog looking out the broken hundred story window. They did that.
 
The hot chick rescues Ryan Gosling and introduces him to some old woman and a bunch of nobodies who are the replicant resistance. They know that science lady is the child and have known all along and are waiting for the right moment to rise up and enslave the humans. When is the right moment? Don’t know. They’ve waited 28 years already and it doesn’t look like they’re in any hurry. Old woman then emotionally rapes Ryan Gosling, cruelly mocking him “What, you thought YOU were the messiah child? Don’t make me laugh. You’re nothing special. You’re a nobody, a worthless piece of shit living a meaningless life and that’s all you’ll ever be. Fuck you.” That’s not an actual quote but some people online take that to be the moral of the story. Science lady implanted her real memories into Ryan Gosling because fuck knows, it’s just there as a red herring so the movie can hit you with a last minute plot twist.
 
Jared Leto has Harrison Ford in his now even darker office and don’t lights exist in the future? He gropes Ford, asks him where the child is, and then presents Ford with a fake Rachel, who Ford rejects. Luv then shoots her in the face and, at Jared Leto’s command, takes Ford to LAX to be taken “off world” to be tortured until he talks.
 
Ryan Gosling in his space Mercedes-Benz shoots down Luv’s space jalopy and the two of them fight in a waist deep puddle somewhere, at night, or daytime, who knows, it’s pitch black 24/7. Luv stabs Ryan Gosling in the stomach, I think, it’s too dark to tell, and flexes that she’s the best replicant who has ever lived. She then goes to get Ford who is near drowning because the waist deep water is somehow flooding the space jalopy and Ford is handcuffed to a sofa. Then, wouldn’t you know it, Ryan Gosling leaps out of the waist deep water (how was he hiding in waist deep water?) and with his superior strength shoves Luv’s head underwater until she drowns like six whole minutes later. Her death takes a really long time. Ryan Gosling then breaks Harrison Ford loose and tells him “You died in that crash. Now nobody will come look for you.” Wait, if no one looked for him in the previous 28 years and now they know he’s alive and his body wasn’t discovered at the crash site wouldn’t they redouble their efforts to find him now? Whatever, you’re not supposed to think about it.
 
Ryan Gosling then takes Harrison Ford to see his daughter science lady. It’s snowing now even though it was raining just a few hours ago. It’s also daytime, I think, because the sky is opaque grey instead of opaque black. Ryan Gosling then sits down on the stairs and looks up at the sky. Did… did he die? The plot just leaves him there without telling us what happens.
 
Harrison Ford puts his hand up on the glass protecting science lady and she puts her hand up to his. The end.
 
You may ask yourself “That seems like an extremely cynical, pessimistic take on the movie, so why do you say it’s mediocre and not crappy?”
 
Because, for all it’s worth, it really did seem okay until the last 20 minutes or so. It was going pretty good until the twist at the end that revealed Ryan Gosling was a nobody and that science lady was the messiah child. The movie presents an incredibly bleak, filthy, disgusting future 30 years from now that’s totally believable, where 99.99% of people are poor slaves living in festering slums while a handful of trillionaires control multi-planetary empires and kill whoever they want to satiate their own sick god complexes. It’s totally realistic.
 
Blade Runner 2049 got a lot right: great premise, a cool mystery, the right mixture of cool technology and believable social elements, a good soundtrack, and that super hot chick. It has lots of fantastic elements that just don’t fit together. In better hands it could have been a masterpiece, but instead it’s a jumbled mess that drags on for too long, has extremely poor lighting, and just doesn’t go anywhere. It’s not as bad as Ghost in the Shell, which was another generic Hollywood movie that bought the rights to another franchise to use its title but didn’t really have anything to do with that original story (I’m looking at you, Starship Troopers), but it’s not great. It feels like it’s setting up a sequel that will never happen because it tanked at the box office, and the protagonist is just a plot device who exists to get two characters who have 15 minutes of cumulative screen time together at the end before maybe dying alone in a snowy wilderness like his life has been totally meaningless.
 
Blade Runner 2049 is a solid C+, maybe even a B- if I’m feeling generous. It’s not crap, but it’s not good either, it just kind of exists.

I’m a big fan of the first two TCM movies, so I figured I’d give the third a watch.  
It’s a pretty typical backwoods cannibal slasher flick.  
Leatherface, despite being the title character, is pretty inconsequential to the plot.  
The plot is basic. Some people get stranded out in the middle of nowhere, and are hunted by the cannibal family of the movie.  
My favorite scene in the movie is where Leatherface is playing on a speak and spell game. A picture of a clown pops up and he repeatedly types in “food”.

Alien was boring. Long and boring. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t a masterpiece. “It’s building tension.” For 2 fucking hours. Alien must be the only 90 minute movie that’s 3 hours long. It starts with 45 minutes of introducing us to half a dozen assholes. By the end I’m rooting for the alien to kill them all because I hate everyone except the cat. And the kills take only 15 minutes. We spend more time listening to the self destruct countdown than we do watching the alien kill people.
 
I think the Alien 3 assembly cut was the movie the original Alien wanted to be.
 
As a side note people are retarded for complaining about the scene at the end where Ripley is getting undressed, something everyone does when they get ready for bed. “She’s in her underwear for 30 seconds before putting on a space suit! Sexist!” We see more of John Hurt in his underwear than we see Sigourney Weaver and no one complained about that.

@UrbanMysticDee  
Why do they try so hard to save the cat? Like, they could leave, but they dick around to get the cat. The cat that doesn’t even like them. Why did they take a cat to space in the first place?

@Dex Stewart  
The cat is there to eat the rats. If they have a big huge giant open space with hundred foot ceilings and chains and indoor rain then they have to have loads of rats.
 
(seriously, people say the movie is claustrophobic but there’s a giant stadium sized room with indoor rain on a space ship, it’s the biggest space ship I’ve ever seen, bigger than any building I’ve been in probably)

@UrbanMysticDee  
Huh. Alright. That makes sense.

 
I’ve just watched Rosemary’s Baby for the first time. It’s pretty good, but long, and it feels unevenly rushed towards the end.  
The whole film keeps a tense slow pace, until the end when it all starts rushing. The ending is intended to be ambiguous, but I just found it to be abrupt. Like they had a runtime to meet, and once it was reached, everything halts.  
The character interactions are charming and carry the movie. There are tiny drops of clues throughout to build up a mystery.  
Overall, it’s decent if you’re a fan of old suspense or psychological horror movies.

 
I watched this a few days ago.  
It’s… Fine.  
It’s certainly not a standalone film, you really need to have watched the original Rosemary’s Baby to understand the context of anything going on here.  
The biggest problem is that there’s not alot of tension. The first film kept a good balance between the horror elements and everyday normality, creating a sense of mystery.  
The sequel throws all that out and there’s zero ambiguity.  
The cast is good, though no one really makes an impression.  
It felt like a necessary sequel, since the first film ends so abruptly. This one unfortunately also ends abruptly, and with even more questions!  
There’s a pacing problem with this one, sometimes taking its time to allow characters and story to flow naturally, and other times rushing along to get to the next scene. It feels like this was intended to be longer, or possibly be a series.  
If you enjoyed the first film, at the very least this follow up is a worth a look.

I watched Luck, it was kinda cute I guess, but overall just generic and cookie cutter.

The Ice Pirates (1984). It was intended to be a serious science fiction story but when the budget was cut down to a third of what it was supposed to be they decided to make it into a comedy that rips off Star Wars pretty hard. These two space pirates are contracted by a princess (because princesses love space pirates. I’m thinking of changing my profession.) to find the mythical “Seventh Planet”, a planet that is almost entirely made of water that her father discovered only now he’s dead or kept in some prison or something, it’s not clear. Water is the most precious resource in the “galaxy” (whatever that is we don’t know) because all the planets are apparently deserts. The princess is in fact supposed to pay the pirates with a giant block of ice in the cargo hold only she hijacks the ship and takes them to see this guy who gets killed by these Mad Max looking freaks who also die in short order. They then make it to a time warp that ages them first a day every 30 minutes then keeps speeding up until they’re aging a day every second. It’s the only way to get to the Seventh Planet. The villain boards the ship with like a hundred robots and they fight in fast motion and one of the robots pees and it was so funny I have to give this movie a C at the very least because of that scene. The pirates are now old and ready to die when the son white pirate (the other one is black so they can make a lot of jokes about how white people are different from black people) and the princess who had sex just before they entered the time warp is now grown up and he saves them before the villain dies of old age. They then exit the time warp and they’re all back to normal (so the son hasn’t been born yet) and they arrive at the Seventh Planet which is Earth.
 
It’s just a big, dumb, 80s movie with 80s fashion, bikini girl guards, talking heads without bodies, space herpes, and weirdness that doesn’t make any sense but is there just for fun. It’s a good movie if you want to turn your brain off for 90 minutes and be entertained.
 
The Ice Pirates gets 75/100.

Watched a movie called 7 Mummies starring Danny Trejo. If you’re looking forward to either you’ll be disappointed, as both appear in a single scene.

The movie begins with two old guys with really bad teeth dragging a coffin across the desert. It hits a rock and gold coins pour out that don’t really sound like gold coins (or really anything for that matter). They laugh at how they’ve struck it rich when some guy on horseback comes along and kills them both with a sword.

Fast forward (I think) to the present day when a police van falls over. A bloody officer calls in backup when six prisoners – Discount Kurt Cobain (named “Rock”), Mexican Bald Guy, Black Bald Guy, Ponytail, Guy with Long Dark Hair, and Cannon Fodder – come out and kill the cop. I had to look up how many there were because Cannon Fodder does nothing but die apparently and I had forgotten about him. They take a lady cop hostage. She’s played by the chick with the rack and that’s pretty much the sum and substance of her entire character.

They walk through the desert looking for the Mexican border but soon realize that walking through the desert in the hot Sun is a death sentence so they go off looking for water only to find an empty ditch. Only it isn’t empty, there’s a skeleton half buried in the dirt and he has a gold medallion with what either Discount Kurt Cobain or Long Dark Hair identifies as “a Jesuit cross and old scriptures” to which one of the other prisoners reply “What are scriptures?”

Ponytail realizes that Discount Kurt Cobain is leading them to their deaths so he heads off alone. We won’t see him for a good 20 minutes or so and when we do he shoots a good 8 – 9 bullets out of a 6-shot revolver straight at the Sun in a delirium of heat, then shoots the 10th bullet into his foot.

The others find an old cabin and a well and get water. They also find Danny Trejo pretending to be Apache sitting on his porch looking out at nothing in particular. He tells them “You have to trade for water,” but they never trade anything after he sees the medallion. Instead he tells them about a town off in the desert that houses “More gold than 10 greedy men could spend in 10 lifetimes” but the town only appears twice a year “When day and night are of equal length.” He sings in what’s supposed to be Apache and one of the guys, Long Dark Hair I think, understands him. There’s an info dump. Apparently the Indians mined gold until the Spaniards came and enslaved them. Seven medallions were guarded by seven Jesuit priests. Then the perennial villain of history “the white man” (even though the Spanish are white we’re told these are different white men) come and set up a mining village there and get cursed or something. Danny Trejo offers the people snake jerky which one prisoner assures us isn’t that bad, then they go off into the desert looking for the town while Danny Trejo squats by the well and laughs.

And that’s it. We never see him again except two flashbacks of him laughing. And he gets top billing.

Long Dark Hair doesn’t want anything to do with the other prisoners and is worried about the chick with the rack. As a result Discount Kurt Cobain says he won’t get a share of the gold.

They find the town because coincidentally it’s one of two days in the whole year the town appears. Everyone is wearing old west costumes and no one finds it odd. They enter a saloon and a guy with a stutter gives them booze and hookers.

A sheriff and his two goons enter and talk a load of nonsense, threaten the prisoners while Discount Kurt Cobain puts a gun to the chick with the rack for whatever reason, then the sheriff and his goons leave.

A minute later it’s night time and all the people in the saloon turn into zombies or something except one hooker who wants Long Dark Hair to get her out of town. A couple zombie hookers attack Bald Mexican and the rest just stand there while Discount Kurt Cobain kills 20 of them with a pump action shotgun, because those things hold infinite bullets. Stutter justifies this saying “You can’t kill us all,” so I guess they’re just waiting until the prisoners run out of bullets.

For some reason Bald Black throws himself out a window and is magically on the second floor so he can break his leg when he falls.

The good hooker leads the others out of the saloon. They run to an old building and watch as Bald Black hobbles along and gets killed by the sheriff with his sword.

The prisoners make it to a two story house and find Ponytail still alive inside the bedroom. He shows one of his friends a large gold cross and a dead body in the bed, only the dead body comes to life (or undeath or whatever) and eats him. Somewhere along the line Cannon Fodder also gets killed somehow, I don’t remember.

The good hooker takes the prisoners to a shed that has a motorcycle and, surprise surprise, she double-crosses them! She’s working for the sheriff. He said he’d let her live and not become a zombie if she gave him the medallion, but Discount Kurt Cobain has it and he went off with Bald Mexican looking for gold and Long Dark Hair and the chick with the rack don’t have it so the sheriff kills the once good now bad hooker and the others escape only to discover that the town is infinite in all directions.

Discount Kurt Cobain and Bald Mexican find a map in an old room full of cobwebs. The map is mentioned once more and has no impact on the story.

At one point Bald Mexican hurts his leg too and they tie a board to it.

The prisoners get together again and find an old church that has some witchcraft stick figures carved into it. Long Dark Hair says it’s a Jesuit diary of the day they died and underneath is a crypt. Discount Kurt Cobain uses the medallion to open it and they all climb down a long tunnel. They reach the crypt at the end and find coffins full of mummies and one is full of gold. At this point only Bald Mexican cares about the gold. When he takes the gold (which sounds like nothing) the mummified priests turn into ninjas and attack everyone and at this point I really don’t know why they don’t let Long Dark Hair and the chick with the rack leave because they never even wanted to come here in the first place.

The ninja mummies kill Bald Mexican and have a kung-fu fight with Discount Kurt Cobain. They manage to escape to an upper floor and one of the ninjas flies a good 20 feet in the air and through the floor and chases after them. They manage to escape down the tunnel and we never see the ninja mummies again. I didn’t count but I’m pretty sure there were only three, not seven.

When they get out of the crypt and back into the church where the sheriff kills Discount Kurt Cobain and lets the others escape on the motorcycle. A tornado turns the sheriff into a rotting corpse and he follows them on a horse because of course a horse can run as fast as a motorcycle. That’s not unbelievable at all.

Heavy metal music plays while the sheriff chases Long Dark Hair and the chick with the rack for several minutes until the Sun comes up. Since the town exists for only two days a year the sheriff and the town disappear into a puff of smoke and Long Dark Hair and the chick with the rack ride off into the sunset.

Skip ahead, I think, and we see two pairs of legs dragging a coffin through the desert. We never see who they are but their voices sound like the guys from the start of the movie. They put the coffin down and the sheriff appears and kills both of them with his sword.

The end.

In all 7 Mummies was pretty okay. It was entertaining. Events followed one after the other in logical sequence in what could be called a plot, even if it was rather pointless. It wasn’t bad, but it’s no masterpiece. I actually enjoyed it more than Blade Runner 2049.

Watched the last 30 minutes or so of a movie called The Cure (2014) and it wasn’t terrible.
⠀
A pharmaceutical company has developed a cure for cancer but since that would destroy their trillion dollar a year chemotherapy industry they hid the cure.
⠀
The top researcher is a 50-something year old man. His son has an inoperable brain tumor and he makes a deal with the head of the company to bury the research if he can use it to save his son, and it works.
⠀
Knowing that it works the company still needs to perform human trials so they abduct a bunch of Mexicans and develop an airborne super cancer that is 100% infectious and kills within hours. It’s the kind of Hollywood doomsday biological weapon no one in the real world would ever create for obvious reasons.
⠀
Two younger researchers, Hot Guy (don’t remember his name) and Beth discover that the cure exists and try to release it to the public, because when Beth was a little girl her father apparently died of cancer or something (it seemed more like a stroke to me, but whatever, it was a stroke caused by cancer), so now she’s on a crusade to eliminate cancer forever.
⠀
The company is pissed when they find out and release the airborne super cancer into the air of the lab and send a team of incompetent commandos to kill Old Man, Hot Guy, and Beth, who are wearing biohazard suits.
⠀
Beth McGuyver’s up improvised explosive devices by putting fizzy tablets in water bottles which explode in a ball of flames, killing one of the commandos. They run back and forth between the fifth and sixth basement floors (which are represented as floors -5 and -6 rather than the usual B5 and B6) because the only way out is through the secret tunnel at basement 6 and they need to get an acetylene torch to open the door. The commandos are on their tail so they put the acetylene canister behind the door because a metal cylinder that one person can carry is sufficiently heavy that three grown men can’t push the door aside, so the commandos place plastic explosive on the door which sets off the canister, in CGI slow motion, which sends a CGI door flying at the head commando and crushes him to death.
⠀
Old Man has been shot, which compromises his suit and now he has super cancer and is dying. Beth goes on ahead and finds the Mexican prisoners dying in bed. Old Man and Hot Guy make a deal to sell the cure to a rival company so they can have money enough to escape the country.
⠀
Beth and Hot Guy go to synthesize the cure to cure Mexican woman, and while they’re there Mexican Husband comes with a scalpel and steals the cure, but he’s ambushed by one of the commandos who unloads his entire gun at computers and bottles and everything but Hot Guy and Beth, who escape. He shoots so much that he has to reload so he can shoot some more, laughing. Mexican Husband, who was shot 50 times in the chest and is dying really really slowly, unplugs a Bunsen burner and lets the gas fill the room. He then smashes a flashlight on the ground which explodes, burning the commando badly and melting his face plate to his face which he has to peel off in a decent effervescent practical effect simulating melting flesh.
⠀
Somehow the other commando dies, I don’t remember.
⠀
Beth finds out that Hot Guy is working with Old Man to sell the cure, and she has a war flashback to her dying father, so she gets a gun from somewhere and threatens to kill both of them until Old Man tells her about his son who had cancer so she changes her mind and gives him the cure. They escape, leaving Old Man alone to bleed to death in the lab while burned commando shows up, picks up the gun Beth left on the floor for some reason, and shoots Old Man.
⠀
He finds Hot Guy and Beth and shoots Beth. She’s now infected with super cancer. Hot Guy fights burned commando to distract him while Beth escapes through the tunnel to the outside world, bringing super cancer with her. Burned commando cuts Hot Guy’s oxygen hose, forcing him to remove his mask and infect himself with super cancer. He wrestles around with burned commando, who’s weak from being burned alive, and he dies after getting hit in the head or something.
⠀
The FBI comes. Did I mention that Beth and Hot Guy called the FBI and told them that what the company was doing? That happened. The FBI comes and with zero evidence but the phone call arrests the CEO.
⠀
Beth is in the woods hallucinating because I guess since she’s smaller the super cancer is killing her quicker. She sees her father in the hospital and hands him the USB stick with the formula for the cure and he says “Good job, son,” and dies. She passes out.
⠀
4 days later Beth wakes up in the hospital after having been given the cure. Hot Guy is now dating her or something. They go to visit some old woman who I guess was introduced in the beginning, and they’re hiding out with her now. The cure was given to two different universities who are conducting human trials.
⠀
The end.
⠀
It’s a very good, very realistic concept that was executed poorly on a budget of $2.2 million. This could have been done a lot better but the filmmakers took the easy way out of putting people in a building and having them fight to escape from incompetent bad guys. For the budget the sets, costumes, and effects were good enough, and the actors tried their best, but there’s only so much you can do with such a sub-par script.
⠀
You have the hot guy who has to play second fiddle to Ahm A Wamen unstoppable girlboss, who is the best scientist in the world and can make any invention out of anything, and she’s not really likable as a character even if she’s kind of cute in a not ugly kind of way. She’s like so average looking that she’s okay.

I just watched a weird old flick called To Kill a Clown.

Alan Alda plays a unhinged maniac who lures a hippie couple to an island cabin and attempts to murder them with his two vicious dobermans.
That brief description makes it sound far more exciting than it really is, most of the movie meanders and doesn’t have a real focus. It’s just unnerving stuff happening until the end when Alda goes full maniac. The performances are good all around, and the music is cool.

Star: Trek Into Darkness (They didn’t include the colon so I had to guess where it’s supposed to go)
⠀
I guess this is supposed to be when the original series people were young. I don’t know, I missed the first hour.
⠀
Kirk (pretty blond boy), Spock, and black chick are on a planet with what are supposed to be Klingons, but they just look stupid. There’s a fight that takes place entirely in the computer so the camera is at impossible angles and everything feels weightless and unreal, because it is. Everything is also blue and amber. The Klingon ships can be shot down with pistols and they twirl around like they’re a cheap computer effect.
⠀
Kirk accepts the surrender of a man with emo hair who is apparently invincible. He’s supposed to be Khan but he looks like Eggs Benedict Cumberbund.
⠀
On board the Enterprise (I guess) black chick kisses Spock on the lips, apparently not knowing that she can kill him.
⠀
EVERYTHING in the future is blue and made of light. Flashing lights. Lights and lens flare that are trying to give me emphysema. I can’t hardly see anything. Also the camera is NEVER horizontal, it’s always at some weird angle.
⠀
Khan tells Kirk to examine the torpedoes he has, but he doesn’t know how so he sends the doctor and the hot chick somewhere blue with tilted angles to examine it. The hot chick takes her clothes off for some reason. The hot chick is also better at everything than all the men.
⠀
It turns out a bunch of corpsesicles are in the torpedoes. Peter Weller wants to use them to start a war with the Klingons so he can get glory. Because Kirk knows Peter Weller tries to kill him and everyone else on the Enterprise. There’s a fight and several people fly screaming into space.
⠀
Peter Weller beams the hot chick off the ship and then Scotty disables it before he can destroy Enterprise.
⠀
Kirk and Khan go to board Peter Weller’s ship by flying through space somehow. They have to fly through the airlock which Scotty opens, letting a big guy (for you) fly into space. Khan kills a bunch of people and they make it to the bridge where Khan kills Peter Weller and disables everyone else.
⠀
Spock lets him transport the torpedoes back to his ship, which are now armed, and Kirk, Scotty, and the hot chick are sent back to the Enterprise. Peter Weller Khan’s ship explodes. He’ll be back in the sequel I bet.
⠀
The Enterprise is falling to Earth. Even though “gravity has been disabled” they’re still experiencing gravity somehow. Lots of red shirts fall to their deaths.
⠀
To save the ship and the crew Kirk needs to fix the engine core, which gives him a lethal dose of radiation. He dies in a mirror image of the scene in Wrath of Khan, and Spock cries because I guess Vulcans are different now.
⠀
The Enterprise stops falling, so according to conservation of momentum all that energy is dumped into the atmosphere as heat.
⠀
What doesn’t stop falling is Khan’s ship. He’s still alive and he does 9/11 on Star Fleet City. Now, I know what you’re thinking. A hunk of metal a kilometer or so across falling from orbit would be enough to vaporize whatever country it lands in and eject enough material into the atmosphere to start a nuclear winter. But we’ve already said conservation of momentum doesn’t exist so Khan’s ship just slides across the ocean and knocks over a few buildings.
⠀
Khan survives and falls to the ground unharmed because he’s invincible. He steals a coat so we can identify him in wide angle shots because everyone wears drab grey or drab greyish blue, or red if they want to die.
⠀
Spock beams down and chases Khan. They fight on a garbage truck or something. He’s going to kill Khan with a hunk of metal because an exploding ship, re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, 9/11, and a 30 story fall can’t kill him, so obviously punching him in the head really really hard has to do the trick. Uhura stops him because they need his blood to brink Kirk back to life because Khan’s blood contains magic bullshit that resets the plot, so Spock punches him only half as hard and they put Khan back in the corpsesicle tube, inject Kirk, and revive Kirk.
⠀
Months later Kirk is christening a new Enterprise and they head off on the original 5-year mission from the original series.
⠀
The end.
⠀
Once you get past the shit cinematography, special effects, the worst lighting since Alien vs. Predator Requiem, and the fact that the plot consists of nothing more than bits and pieces of better Star Trek movies cut up and rearranged into 2 hours of nostalgia bait, this movie isn’t half bad. It’s not half good either, but on balance I’d give it a C-.

The Darjeeling Limited was just OK.

It has the feel of a road trip movie, but it’s presenting as an adventure movie in a way. The main characters were too unlikable for me, which did not work because usually Wes Anderson movies depend on having very likable characters to help navigate the unusual circumstances. There were good portions, but they were lost in forgettable filler. It just wasn’t Wes Anderson enough.

@UrbanMysticDee
One thing I forgot to mention is that the filmmakers caught major flak for casting Eggs Benedict Cumberbund as Khan. He’s supposed to be an Indian man but they can’t show a non-white person being the villain, especially if that non-white person does 9/11, so they had to cast the whitest person you’ve ever seen.

Troll 2 has the reputation of being so bad it’s good, but I just found it to be a slog.
It’s not the worst movie ever, it’s strangeness and incompetence keep it interesting enough to hold my attention.
The plot is nonsensical, a boy’s ghostly grandfather tries to warn him of goblins.
The family visits Nilbog, a town full of odd people that turn out to be goblins intent on eating the family.
The quirky performances and bizarre dialogue make it worth a watch at least.
The thing that irritates me the most is how this is a completely unrelated sequel to the first Troll, which I liked quite a bit.

Watched a movie Steel Dawn about a nomad named Nomad, played by Patrick Swayze, who helps a widow and her son defeat a warlord who is trying to steal her water after world war turned the planet into a desert. It was pretty good. Even though Nomad and the assassin fight dirty they still have great respect for each other and share a warrior code that says no one is allowed to interfere in the duel. The assassin even kills another of his boss’ goons who tries to kill Nomad when the duel gets out of hand and starts wrecking the warlord’s equipment. Nomad and the assassin share a moment at the end after the assassin is mortally wounded. It was good.

Saw a movie Jack’s Back (1988). It was pretty good. James Spader looked great when he was younger and had hair.

A couple issues.

Jack’s Back has this same problem. The killer is killed, the police show up, and James Spader and the girl he rescued kiss standing over the dead body, and it ends like that. Did the police know the dead body was the killer or did they put James Spader behind bars? Who knows, the movie just ends like that and we’re left to assume everything works out for the best.

80s nostalgia and sad saxophone music saved this movie. I give it a solid C+.

Saw a Hallmark movie called Catch Me If You Claus. It was nice. The actors aren’t going to win any awards, the plot got a bit repetitive, and several characters spent the movie wandering around looking for each other and doing nothing, but it was nice. It kept me entertained and it had a sweet ending. I give it a solid 79/100.