ALIEN VS. PREDATOR (2004) - Making aliens boring.

I remember the first time that I was genuinely scared out of my wits by a movie. As a 12 year old, I'd already seen all sorts of scary movies, but there's only so many times you can see a masked guy slashing teenagers before it loses its shock value. Then I saw Alien one night on cable TV and even with my dad sitting alongside, Ridley Scott's masterful horror flick scared me shitless. I also remember the first time I saw Predator, and as a 4th grader, seeing Arnold and the Predator beating the crap out of each other blew me away. Both of these were classic movies with great creatures, and it's no wonder that they've spawned several sequels. It's too bad that aside from Aliens, none of the sequels even came close to matching the greatness of the original movies.

Nothing is sacred anymore.

The imaginatively named Alien vs. Predator opens with  millionaire industrialist Charles Weyland (Lance Henriksen) putting together a team of scientists to investigate a subterranean pyramid structure detected under the ice on an Arctic island by one of his satellites. Weyland hires Woods (Sanaa Lathan) to serve as guide for the team, who reluctantly accepts the offer. They arrive at the location and find a bunch of abandoned buildings, and to their amazement, a huge shaft drilled into the ice at a perfect 30 degree angle. Unknown to them, the hole was blasted into the ice by a Predator space ship orbiting around the Earth, as the creatures get suited up to join the party.

Where's Ripley or Dutch when you need them?

The humans soon realize that the pyramid is in fact an ancient temple used for a Predator hunting ritual. Every so often, the Predators would visit Earth and hunt aliens and whoever else was stupid enough to go inside the temple. They must try and make their way out of the pyramid and ensure that none of the aliens reach the surface, while at the same time avoiding the Predators. If the story sounds supremely retarded, well... that's because it is. Directed and written by Paul W.S. Anderson, the guy who butchered the Resident Evil franchise and made maybe one good movie, means that AvP was doomed from the beginning. It's plagued with bad dialogue and worst of all, weak action. There are a few good parts, but unfortunately most of them are lines or ideas lifted right out of the original flicks.

At least the Predators are still badass...

If you're going to make a movie with forgettable characters that nobody cares about, then it better have some great action to make up for it. In AvP, every action scene was apparently filmed on days when the guys who set up the lighting were off drinking at the pub. They're dark, muddled, and it's just about impossible to see the action clearly. All those neat, well-detailed creature designs and the expensive sets are wasted thanks to the shitty camera work, with shots that are either too dark, too close up, or cut too quickly. That being said, the aliens and the Predators are very well done, with smooth CGI and the always cool Predator heat vision being used to good effect. There's obvious production value in these areas. As cool as the creatures are, there really are no scares in the entire movie except for some cheap jump scares. The attempts at creating tension are laughable, most of the acting (aside from the great Lance Henriksen) is piss poor, and the ending left me wondering if I should laugh or cry at its cheesiness.

...never mind.

Alien vs. Predator has accomplished something very difficult in the world of movies. It's not that it managed to kill not one, but two great franchises with its ridiculously stupid premise and crap execution. Oh no. Even worse. It made two of science fiction's most exciting series seem boring and dull. The film's only saving grace is that it runs a merciful 100 or so minutes and that we get to see Predators killing off nearly the entire cast of dimwitted characters. From now on, I'll pretend these stupid versus movies were never made, and just watch the originals instead. Spare yourself the time and forget this movie.

TL;DR -Boring, inane mash-up that will ruin your childhood memories - 3/10

SLITHER (2006) - Comedy + horror = always a great mix

Take equal parts The Fly, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, zombie movies, and countless other horror movie inspirations and what do you get? You get Slither.  James Gunn's movie is a hilarious throwback to some of the best of the cheesy B-movie horror flicks of the past, adding comedy into the fray and a good cast to boot. There's plenty of familiar faces and familiar plot points you'll probably see coming a mile away, but it won't change the fact that Slither is a very entertaining flick.

Starla has a problem: her husband eats wild animals and is apparently, an alien.

Slither begins with a meteor making its way into Earth's atmosphere, leaving a fiery trail across the sky as it lands on the outskirts of a small hick town in the middle of nowhere, unnoticed by two sleepy cops pulling an all night shift. The meteor splits open, and we see that it's no ordinary meteor... *GASP*, it's an alien meteor! Cut to Starla (Elizabeth Banks), a pretty blonde school teacher married to a rich jerk named Grant (Michael Rooker) who drives a fancy Cadillac and owns the biggest house in town.

After Starla rejects Grant's advances in bed one night, Grant goes off for a brisk walk to cure his case of the blue balls. He meets up with another woman in the forest, and before they get frisky, they come across the meteor lying in the boonies. Grant gets too close while investigating, and gets a worm shot at him by some weird slug looking thing. It buries into his chest and after losing and regaining consciousness, he heads back home.

Nathan Fillion is hilarious. The guy is such a bro.

Grant is obviously not the same dude however. He starts getting enormous cravings for meat, starts acting weird around others, and soon enough we learn the bug inside him is a parasite, slowly turning him into a hideously deformed freak from the inside out. Starla is shocked to discover her husband has been killing animals around town, so she tells Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion), the local town Sheriff. Bill and the rest of the town folk are forced to deal with Grant's mutation before the town is overwhelmed by the alien slugs turning everyone into mindless alien freaks. Oh yeah baby... gotta love that B-movie flavor.

Kill it with fire! Or nuke it. Or BOTH.

I'm disappointed in myself that I had never thought to give Slither a chance before. The mix of comedy, horror, and nastiness is just about perfect. There's plenty of genuinely funny lines and scenes, and the horror isn't half bad considering it's not an out and out scare flick. Nathan Fillion is one of my favorite actors, and he's great as usual, nailing the funny and serious aspects of his role, and his Sheriff is a standout character. Rooker is also good, especially in the beginning as the unlikeable Grant, and the rest of the cast does decent jobs (the asshole mayor is just hilarious). The make up and gore effects are also convincingly disgusting, especially a barn scene with a hideously mutated fat lady, or the famous bath tub scene referenced in the poster.

Favorite part of the movie? Why yes, yes it is.

Slither knows what it wants to do with the audience and does it pretty damn well. It's got the right amount of laughs and thrills to make it enjoyable, switches from gross out horror to comedy seamlessly. It's too bad that Slither did terrible at the box office. Maybe people were expecting a full-blown horror film and were surprised by the funky comedy factor. In any case, if you're in the mood for some tongue in cheek horror, look no further. Very recommended (just don't eat anything while you watch it).

TL;DR - B-movie gross out fun with plenty of one-liners and people getting split open - 8/10

28 DAYS LATER (2002) - Fast zombies?!? Game over, man.

I apologize for the lack of posts recently, seeing as how I've been fairly busy with job interviews and the addictive drug that are Black Ops and CoH: Online. However, I have been watching a few good movies so I have a bit of a back log to make up for. Recently, I've been watching The Walking Dead on AMC and if you haven't seen it, give it a shot. It's a damn good show that's been picking up pace since the pilot episode and there's only a few episodes left before the season ends. Anyways, seeing all that zombie mayhem got me in the mood for some zombie post-apocalyptic horror, and I decided I'd give one of my personal favorites of the genre another watch.

28 Days Later is directed by Danny Boyle, of Sunshine and Slumdog Millionaire fame, and suffice to say, it's a bit different from most zombie movies. The flick kicks off with some animal liberation nutjobs breaking into a British medical laboratory and releasing monkeys infected with the highly contagious "Rage virus." Despite the frantic pleas of the scientist they capture, who warns them that a single drop of blood can infect anyone, the activists release the animals, and the chimps go batshit crazy and attack everyone. It turns out that Rage is a virus that turns anyone infected into, well... a raging maniac with a taste for murder and human flesh. And as opposed to the generic slow, clumsy zombies we're used to seeing in movies, the infected in Boyle's film are fast as Kenyan sprinters and absolutely tireless - jumping, climbing and avoiding obstacles.

London is empty. Cillian is all alone. Except not. There's zombies. Fast ones.

After the lab scene, the screen fades to black and we're presented with the words "28 days later," and see as Jim (Cillian Murphy), a former bicycle courier, lies completely naked on a hospital bed. He awakens and makes his way through the deserted hospital. As he stumbles outside, he realizes that London is completely devoid of people, leading to some very impressive shots of Jim in his hospital robe walking down an empty Westminster Bridge in amazement and horror. Jim quickly learns that he is in fact not alone. He is chased out of a church by a mob of deranged zombies intent on eating his face, when he is saved by two survivors, Mark and Selena (Naomie Harris).

The group takes shelter in an abandoned shop and Jim is told about the spreading of the virus, the chaos that followed and the evacuation and breakdown of the British government. Jim insists on visiting his parents to see if they are alive, and the other two survivors reluctantly agree. They arrive at the house the next day to see Jim's parents lying dead in their bed. Their forced to spend the night there, and in the middle of the night they're attacked by the infected. Mark is bitten and Selena kills him at once with a huge machete, knowing that he'd turn into one of the zombies near instantly. Selena and Jim eventually meet Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah, who are holed up in their apartment, and as a group decide to follow instructions Frank has heard on the radio announcing a survivor's center near Manchester.

The zombie apocalypse? I still needs my Cocoa Pebbles dawg.

28 Days Later has a relentless pace that never lets up, and Danny Boyle has a great talent for creating excruciating tension with his scenes. Walking into an abandoned gas station or going around a corner, you're constantly expecting something brutal to happen. Strangely enough, there's not a lot of gore compared to some other flicks of the genre, but the effect is the same and doesn't subtract from the horror aspect. The infected are genuinely badass - they're vicious, very fast, agile and have a habit of exploding out of the screen when you least expect them. The performances are generally good as well, with Cillian Murphy having a great starring role in his first major well known gig. He's believable and does a good job of portraying the fear and terror he goes through in the scenes.

It took me a while to finally watch this movie again, but I'm glad I finally did. Boyle's movie is an instant classic in the zombie genre, no doubt. It's a fresh take and one that is worthy of watching with some friends to maximize the scares and thrills. Very recommended.

TL;DR - Scarecrow from Batman Begins hides from zombies in England. Profit? - 8/10

THE MIST (2007) - Damn nature, you scary!

Frank Darabont's The Mist is based on an original story by the one and only Stephen King, who has made it his life's goal to scare as many people shitless as possible. He has been pretty successful. Darabont, on the other hand, has been pretty successful himself in adapting King's writing into good movies. His track record is damn good too: The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. It's no surprise then, that The Mist is a great horror/thriller and one of the best adaptations of King's stuff to make it to the screen.

It could be worse... you could be trapped at Hot Topic.

The Mist is set in a small town in Maine, where self-employed artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane, from The Punisher fame) lives with his wife and son Billy. After a loud thunderstorm and an enormous tree smashes into their house, David is forced to go into town to buy some supplies and groceries. He takes his kid and his asshole lawyer neighbor with him and upon arrival to the grocery store they notice a heavy mist has fallen all over the town. While shopping and minding their own business, some raggedy old guy walks in, bleeding and screaming for everyone to get inside the store and shut the door.

Old Screaming Guy is yelling about something grabbing people off the street. Scared and confused, the customers pack inside the store and close the doors, hoping to wait it out. Problems soon appear when David and few other guys try to venture outside, and a bag boy (played by none other than the SHERMANATOR from American Pie!) gets dragged out and killed by some gnarly tentacles. Besieged by whatever the hell is waiting out there for them, the customers and staff hunker down and start arguing within themselves over their options. Even worse, a batshit crazy religious lady starts to tell everyone it is the end of days and that it's God's will that everyone die because of America's sins... uuh okay. The tension starts to build up quickly as the people inside the store start to realize that their fellow humans might just be as dangerous and cruel as the monsters waiting outside to chew their faces off. All the while, our protagonist David is just trying to make it out alive with his kid and get back home to his wife.

Horror Movie Survival 101: Stay away from giant tentacles.

The Mist suffers from some lack of believability in the actions of the characters. I know it sounds a bit dumb to criticize this in a movie about giant monster tentacles eating up people in a grocery store, but hear me out. In the beginning of the film, the asshole lawyer is confronted by Drayton and some others who saw the bag boy get dragged out by the tentacles. He refuses to believe their story, and even refuses to go into the loading dock to see the tentacle piece they had cut off with an ax. Seriously? How hard is it to walk a few yards to see the damn thing? No, instead he gets pissy and starts some rant about how the country hicks think they're better than the "out of towners." Idiot. I was really hoping he'd get killed in every scene.

The creatures themselves are original and well thought out. There's a variety of weird ass designs and they eventually start killing off humans in some grotesque form or another. The constant fog over the town makes their appearance very fast, unexpected and downright scary.

COME AT ME BRO!

This is a movie that could easily have copped out and taken an easy way out in the final few minutes. If you haven't seen it, I won't spoil what I think is one of the GREATEST endings in recent years. It is seriously shocking  - I saw The Mist for the very first time to write this review and I had no idea about the ending. You really owe it to yourself to see the stuff Frank Darabont was ballsy enough to pull off screen and get away with in an era of Michael Bay OMGWTF 3D extravaganza blockbusters and constant remakes.

TL;DR - trapped inside a store by mysterious monsters outside and religious nuts inside - 8.5/10

TREMORS (1990) - Rednecks fight giant worms.... success!!!

When I was a kid, my family moved to Europe for a few years, and growing up as a twelve year old in the U.S. you get take awesome stuff for granted, like being able to plug in your Sega Genesis without it blowing up in your face or being able to speak English with everyone around. Living in a tiny apartment in Europe mostly sucked, since there was no room to run around playing cool games like cops and robbers and even worse, European TV sucks major ass. As in, it's godddamn awful. To make things even worse, one day while out jumpan, exploran and having adventures, I jumped off a 10-foot wall and sprained the hell out of my ankle. So I was stuck at home, with nothing to do but enjoy the misery that is European television.

Thankfully, this was the golden 90s, when you could count on Uncle Sam exporting the best of our low-budget cult films out to the needy Old Continent, and I was able to experience the greatness of Tremors for the first time. Sitting there with my swollen foot wrapped in a cast, I kicked back and started watching this curious movie about some hick town in the middle of nowhere that is attacked by giant, mutated earthworm aliens. As a 12 year old, there is nothing better than seeing rednecks being eaten by monsters and seeing an Oscar-worthy (I'm lying) performance by Kevin Bacon wearing a cowboy hat.

The first ingredient for any summer blockbuster: Kevin Bacon.

Tremors introduces us to two down on their luck handymen, Valentine (Kevin Bacon) and Earl, played by the always badass Fred Ward, as they get ready to leave the craphole country town they call home in search of better jobs. On the way to work, they run into a college seismologist that Val gets the hots for. She tells them that there's been some weird seismic activity, and they head back into town, where we meet the rest of the small cast: a Mexican dude, an Asian dude, some lady with two annoying kids, and a crazy gun-addicted survivalist couple, Burt and Heather, and played by Michael Gross and Reba McEntire.

You can never have too many guns in a B-movie.

Soon enough, the town is attacked by graboids, some giant earthworm things that can magically move underground as fast as a running human. The graboids don't have any eyes (duh) - instead they can home in on sound and chase footsteps. They're about as big as car and have some snake-ish tongue things that come out of their mouth and grab tasty redneck prey. It's ultimately up to the bumbling Val and Earl to save the townfolk from getting eaten. Thankfully though, the two gun crazy wackos have enough machine guns to overthrow a small Latin American democracy. They also know how to make explosives out of household items apparently, but seeing as how they're batshit crazy to begin with, it's not surprising. Most of the rest of the cast is just around so they can be eaten in various hilarious ways, and the killer worms are actually pretty damn smart and keep changing things up.

Giant earthworms. Giant earthworms everywhere.

Tremors is a shitty B-movie of the best kind. It's fun as hell to watch - the acting is not that bad and the action scenes are pretty believable. About as believable as being attacked by giant alien worms can be, but anyways. Val and Earl have most of the best lines and their banter back and forth is bound to get a few chuckles. If you're looking for a serious, thoughtful movie, this ain't it - it's no Memento. Otherwise, it's 96 minutes of hilarious B-movie goodness.

TL;DR - killer worms eat people in a small town and Kevin Bacon wears a cool hat - 8/10

RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE (2010) - Only slightly better than a toothache

Every once in a while, you see something during the course of your average day that makes you feel terribly sorry for what you just witnessed. I got this feeling during the first five minutes of the latest crapfest unleashed to this undeserving world by Paul W.S. Anderson. What did we humans as a species do to deserve movies of such assfactor? What genocide did we skip over that we are now paying for? Which cute, cuddly, endangered species did we mercilessly throw into the wood chipper of extinction?

Let's see how much cash we can get out of having Milla scowl a lot.

It's no secret that Milla Jovovich is a gorgeous woman. There's no denying it and if you are a man, and you think otherwise, you obviously have a problem acknowledging the fact that you are a flaming homo. She is also a decent actress to boot, so it makes it all the more sadder to see that she is stuck with terrible, shitty movies like the Resident Evil franchise. As a series, it has been consistently awful, with things going downhill after the first movie, which was only passable. If there was ever a great candidate for film euthanasia, this is it. The Resident Evil games back in the glory days of Playstation were damn scary, thrilling, and fun as hell to play. It's a damn shame that such a cool series of games got shafted so badly but that's the truth and there's no hiding from it. 

Afterlife takes place sometime after the events of the previous film Extinction, which altogether means nothing since the story makes little sense anyways. The movie opens with one of the few decent scenes in the entire flick, with Alice (Milla Jovovich, as if you didn't know) and a bunch of her clones attack an Umbrella Corporation underground base. They break in after killing a metrick f*ckton of guards and chase after a douchebag wearing sunglasses even though he is a good twenty floors underground and it is nighttime. Because... he's baaaad, get it? Anyways, Alice has some superpowers, kills a lot of Japanese guys, then the baddie runs away in a snazzy tilt-rotor plane. Alice sneaks aboard, fights said bad guy, and gets her superpowers taken away from her. Immediately after this, the plane crashes into a mountain and Alice goes on to survive a MOTHERF*CKING PLANE CRASH without a single scratch. So much for no powers, right? Alice then has a jolly good time exploring the mostly dead planet Earth in search of survivors and of course, running into tons of vicious zombies.

The dude with the giant ax was pretty rad, I'll admit.

I had a hard time accepting just how bad this movie is. I tried to like it, I really did, and here's my reasoning. Zombie movies are a staple of the guy movie diet, right below destroying third world countries and white guys learning Asian martial arts, so it's painful to see zombie movies done badly. Afterlife just plain sucks, and it's blatantly obvious that this latest installment was just trying to milk as much cash as they could out of the gullible dumbasses who paid the $20 or so to watch this in 3D. The plot makes no sense whatsoever, and neither do most of the characters. There's about twenty different English accents used, for no apparent reason. Most of the action scenes are pointless and filled with gimmicky 3D objects flying towards you. Every ten seconds or so, the action turns into slow-motion - it's tired, cliched and just boring. I'm sorry, but even a guy movie has to be watchable.

I wear shades 24/7. Can you tell I am a bad man? CAN YOU?!?

TL;DR - You might as well spray yourself in the eyes with vinegar and then put on 3D glasses - 1.5/10

THE THING (1982) - Because not all remakes have to suck

Director John Carpenter knows a thing or two (damn, I'm clever as hell) about making classic cult movies, and his 1982 remake of 1951's The Thing from Another World is one of the coolest, most enthralling horror movies ever put to celluloid. The story is set in an Antarctic research base, where a team of American scientists are getting ready for the coming winter, when they get an unexpected visit from a few crazed Norwegians hell bent on killing a poor dog. Little did they know, the dog is in fact a shape-shifting killing machine which has already wiped out most of the Norwegian camp and is getting warmed up for some more nefarious murderin'.

Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.

R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell) takes charge of things as events take a turn for the worse and one by one the alien starts to do some nasty, violent things to most of those unlucky enough to be stuck on the base for the winter. In all, a dozen or so of the scientists have to come to terms with the fact that "the thing" is in fact a murdering space freak than can imitate anything it kills in perfect fashion. This creates some fantastic tension within the group since any number of the scientists could in fact be infected by the alien and the man standing next to him would have no clue about it. The group begins to crack under the pressure and there's a delicious sense of mistrust and fear that creeps in, and we realize that the humans might in fact be even more dangerous than the disgusting alien. The tension is constantly growing and never lets up; characters that  you are sure are humans might not be, and there is a constant sense of dread whenever you hear that great ominous score beginning to pound away.

He might be infected. Let's light him on fire with a flamethrower to be sure.

Speaking of the alien, goddamn is that thing nasty. Back in the 80s, when computer graphics were in their infancy most movies relied on great practical effects to make the outlandish seem possible. The Thing has some of the best effects of the time, and the alien itself is just badass. The thing morphs into any number of weird, grotesque forms, and dispatches the scientists one by one in some pretty grisly ways. I can safely say that if you're seeing The Thing for the first time, you might gag at first sight of the alien. Tentacles, pus, blood squirting everywhere, deformed heads, eyeballs popping out, veins exploding, skin turned inside out, you name it. Shit gets straight up nasty, son.

Dinner and a movie might not be a good idea with The Thing. I'm just sayin'...

That's part of the great tension behind the film. The alien has no stupid powers beyond replicating whatever it is that it kills. It doesn't shoot lasers out of its nipples, or spray nerve gas out of its wrists like the dumbshit aliens in Signs. Nope, it just comes up real close and rips your head off or bites your arms off at the elbow with gigantic teeth. The humans have to use flamethrowers, shotguns and dynamite to try and kill off the various bodies the thing takes over. If you have an aversion to seeing people lit on fire, don't watch The Thing. It happens a lot.

The Thing is a classic horror flick and I've lost count of how many times I've seen it. It gets better with repeat viewings and if you've never seen it, you ought to remedy that right quick.

tl;dr - Kurt Russell and friends attacked by shape-shifting disgusting alien with bloody results - 9/10