Sarcastic Movie Reviews

It has a cast of nobodies and a pale faced wide eyed kid in it so you KNOW that it’s a horror flick. Can we kill the kid at LEAST once in these things? What’s the point in having them in there if you’re not going to kill them? The guy in the wheelchair never survives and no one feels bad about that. When I write my horror movie the kid is getting snuffed in the first five minutes AND he’s going to have polio. Screw you … he’ll be holding a kitten when he dies too. If you want a happy ending go watch the Telletubbies.

The premise of the film is that a cabin full of teens rent a cottage in the woods. They borrow a video and it’s a little weird. Imagine if the Canadian government gave a grant to a bunch of pot smoking goths to make a tourism video for Nova Scotia.

You get the idea.

The bad part is that after you watch the movie the phone rings and a whispery voice says “7 days” which is how long you have left to live before you die and don’t think that by not answering the phone you’ll be ok. It leaves a message just to be polite.

Fast forward a week.

We’re in a big empty house as two high school girls in plaid skirts are having a topless tickle fight (well… they SHOULD have been). When one girl goes upstairs to get something the other chick gets spooked by a tv that keeps coming on by itself. Sure enough she goes up to look for her friend and…. well…. it ain’t pretty.

The autopsy said she had a stroke.

I was having a stroke when I saw the two teenage girls in plaid skirts but you don’t really want to hear about that now do you?

The dead girl’s cousin starts to investigate and she finds outs that everyone who watched the video died at the same time on the same night exactly 7 days after they watched the video.

See? The videotape is SMART. It waits long enough for you to return it before it kills you. If it killed you on the same night then who would pay the late fee?

Like all really clever people in horror films the first thing that the victim (um… I mean cousin) does is to piss off the supernatural killing force.

Let’s play the video and see what happens? Oh look… the phone is ringing. Oh… um… shit…. now I’m screwed too eh?

Dammit.

Well, now that she’s got 7 days to live she keeps playing the tape again and again looking for clues as to why the video is so evil. Along the way she infects her ex boyfriend and I’m going to ignore the easy joke (so piss right off).

Now we have TWO people whose numbers are up.

Imagine if this thing got into the hands of CBC?

All 23 people watching would die.

As they start to investigate things get spookier and spookier. Nose bleeds, suicides, evil children, insane women…. it’s like a Boxing Day Sale at Bayshore.

It’s actually not a bad film. Just when you think that it’s going along the lines of that crappy “Stir of Echoes” movie that Kevin Bacon did it changes its mind and gets all creepy again.

Horror movies generally suck large and this only sucks a bit. It’s not The Sixth Sense but it has its moments.

I say… go out and watch it you big pussies.

How do we know it’s from Japan?

Well, God bless our Asian cousins for their technological innovations but their grip on the Queen’s English is somewhat lacking.

For example, this movie takes place beneath the bustling metropolis of …………uh…..

“Raccoon City.”

I can just see the brainstorming session that came up with the story line.

“Yuki… we need super number one fantastic name for city.”

“Uh….. ” (frantically searching through his Japanese-English Dictionary)

“Ok Joe, we say “Raccoon” very American hot car yes?”

Let’s not dwell on the name though.

I love it long time.

The movie opens with the explanation that the world’s number one corporation is ….um….”The Umbrella” corporation. Look, it’s actually a good movie ok?!! I can’t help it if they just started picking nouns out of the back of the dictionary. At any rate “The Umbrella Corp.” is suuuuuper fantastic number one money maker (sorry) but they’ve really been creating biological weapons for the government. Well, they also made Tamaguchi’s and Pokemon but technically it’s the same thing.

One fine morning a guy sneaks into the lab and steals some blue and green test tubes. He packs them into a stainless steel suitcase and heads for the elevator but not before he tosses a blue one over his shoulder. It smashes on the floor and the blue liquid becomes a colorless/odorless gas that escapes into the ventilation system. This is probably not a good thing because all of the Doberman guard dogs start freaking out when they smell it. Well….. there’s also the fact that the security system starts sealing doors and drowning the staff all over the building.

It sort of reminded me of the Hi-Tech layoffs that I’ve been through.

Here’s a tip for anyone who gets a job in the Umbrella Corp in Raccoon city.

DON’T take the elevator. Trust me on this one.

So after everyone has been killed we find ourselves in spooky mansion above the subterranean laboratories on the outskirts of the city. Slowly the camera pans over the unconscious body of Alice (MILLA JOVOVICH) as she lies on the floor of the shower. Conveniently the shower curtain has adhered itself to all of the naughty bits much to the chagrin of the men in the audience who could be seen tilting their heads like a dog at a whistle factory trying to get a better view.

When Alice wakes up she can’t remember anything. She finds a sexy red dress and a drawer full of high powered semi automatic weapons so at least we know that Raccoon City is in America.

Probably Texas.

Alice ventures outside but the wind blows a bunch of leaves at her so she freaks out and runs back into the house only to be confronted by a bunch of black clad military commandos. The task force has 3 hours to investigate why the main computer has killed the staff before the whole complex is sealed off so they hop on board a train and drive it into the bowels of the hive to see what the problem is.

I’ll tell you what the problem is buddy. The computer wants to kill everyone in the damn complex. Oh… and that virus has turned all of the corpses into blood sucking killer zombies.

Let the games begin……

Oh sure there are some flaws in logic like how can they make a wet J-Cloth stick to Alice’s naked body no matter how many back flips she does but they can’t create a locked 300 pound stainless steel door that’s impervious to being cracked with a wet bobby pin?!!

Eh… who cares?

Jackie Chan, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jen’s HUGE bazongas.

The movie starts out with Jackie portraying a luckless cab driver. What did you expect him to be doing in New York? The guy can’t even say “New York.”

Wouldn’t you think that after the first hundred million bucks or so that he could afford to hire a dialect coach? If we can make Arnold Swartzenegger enunciate “tumor” then why can’t Jackie say “Fried Chicken?”

Well, Jackie is in love with a woman who works in an art gallery but he can never muster up the courage to talk to her. Instead he spends his lunch hours gazing at her through the window.

This is how I get all of my dates. I find rubbing my crotch and spanking my ass as I lick the window a big help too.

Well, enough of that sub-plot. It’s kind of pointless anyway but I just bought a book on screenwriting and they say that you have to have one so there you go. They must’ve bought the same edition as me. Damn, I have to re-write that whole Jesus in New York deli scene. It’s so derivative now.

Jackie gets a customer one afternoon and she says she’ll double his fare if he’ll speed down alleyways and fishtail out into rush hour traffic to get her somewhere before she applies her makeup.

Yeah… that’s worth another 10 bucks. It’d cost you more to pry the homeless guy out from under the grillwork on your cab.

Jackie makes it on time and she decides that he’d make a perfect limo driver for a top secret agent named Clark Devlin.

How do they audition people for head chef? I picture sharwarma sauce being flung all over hapless pedestrians as some poor Lebanese guy runs down the street clutching sliced onions and pita bread.

Imagine how he’s going to pick an obstetrician when his wife gets pregnant. Yikes….

Around this point we are introduced to our villain. He’s a bad ass who has discovered a way to change water into a deadly mixture that drains all of the moisture from your body until you turn into a nice grey powder. You never see the liquid go anywhere and this puzzles me. We’re made up of mostly water so if you’re going to turn me into dust then shouldn’t I be pissing like a frat boy at a kegger?

Ok, they didn’t want to get bogged down in pesky details and all those guys who worked on “The Mummy” had a few dried up corpse kits lying around in the back.

Jennifer shows up as the perky scientist/ninja who on her first day manages to get the assignment to help save the world because she’s so stacked, uh… I mean smart.

When a remote controlled skateboard blows up the limo he’s driving it knocks Clark out of commission and Jackie (naturally) tries on the super secret tuxedo that his boss keeps behind Plexiglas in the den.

That’s what I always do when someone I know is in the hospital. I try on their clothes. Usually it’s their underwear and I put it back at the end of the day after I’ve gone running for a few miles. What a trooper that Jackie is. Maybe he should go shopping for a new limo but nahhhhh he wants to look snappy when his boss gets out of intensive care.

Wait a minute…. this thing is a super suit and now Jackie can fight like….. uh…. Jackie Chan. He can defy gravity. He can shoot like a sniper. He can dance like James Brown (too bad he couldn’t DRIVE like James Brown. The Godfather of soul drove across 4 state lines with his tires shot out back in the 80’s. Now THAT’S a limo driver you want working for you).

Of course he’s totally conspicuous wandering around all day and night in a tux. They couldn’t have made a nice pair of cargo pants and a black T-shirt with the same thing eh?

Then there’s Jennifer Love.

She spends her time bending over a lot and…. um… what was I saying?

Oh yeah… they have many adventures like when Jennifer falls into a pool wearing a slinky dress and… um…..

Sorry…

Or was it last week?

Maybe it was tomorrow……

Oh well, I’m here to give you the straight dope on the movie at any rate.

This is the latest film based on the classic piece of literature penned by H.G. Wells. I’d let you know how close it is to the original, it but like most people of my generation I don’t read books. Even Coles Notes was too much effort for me in high school, so thank God for film adaptations. What I can tell you is that the lead character Alexander is played by Guy Pearce, or as I like to call him …”mutant monkey boy”.