Horns is the greatest movie of all time

Horns (2013) staring the Harry Potter man himself, one Daniel Radcliffe, follows a twentysomething who develops demonic powers and grows horns after being wrongly accused of the rape and murder of his girlfriend. Despite getting mostly shitty reviews, I consider this a solid addition to comedy-horror genre.

This is totally my type of movie. Joe Hill, son of Stephen King and writer of the kickass book NOS4A2, wrote the novel. It’s a little long (they probably could have cut a few of the 50 flashbacks) but it has a nice pace to it, they throw you right in, and they don’t feel the need to explain why this happens (I fucking hate movies that try to explain the unexplainable). Not as fun as say Detention (2011), which is amazing, but it has charm. I will definitely rewatch this movie.

Pros: Radcliffe is amazing. Works well with both horror and film noir tropes. Fun and compelling story. Heather Graham (Grr). Explode police head.

Cons: Too many flashbacks. A little too long. The GF is a terrible fucking actress.

Disclaimer: My notes pretty much always contain spoilers.  

Notes: The beginning starts with a dream that sets up the relationship between Harry Potter and his girlfriend (the movie ends with the same scene taking the movie full circle, which is irritating) as one that looks solid. Then he wakes up to people outside his home, picketing, as everyone in the town believes he is getting away with a high profile type crime.

Now the town pariah, he meets up with a girl who is in love with him. They go home together from the bar she works at. He is wasted and does her. When he comes to, out of the blue, he is grows the horns. Here is where things go bananas. The girl from the bar murders these donuts saying the donuts are making her sick but she keeps eating them like a maniac. HP is all, “what the fuck is wrong with you? This is insane.”

So he goes to the doctor because horns. While there, everyone starts confessing and doing crazy shit while in his presence (a lady admits to doing her golf instructor, the most annoying kid ever talks about wanting to kick her mom in the face, the doctor and nurse do each other after snorting oxy instead of dealing with his horn situation). This happens constantly for the rest of the movie.

Start getting these flashbacks around here. At first they make you sort of nostalgic for adolescence (which is universally terrible) but eventually I start getting annoyed with these. But they set up the story and show that the main characters have been hanging together forever. They also present the early romance of HP and his GF and introduce Lee, HP’s lawyer who has always had a thing for the GF. Spoiler: Lee fucking killed her.

Goes to his mom and dad’s house. Not wise with his powers as walking truth serum. Mom was in the Twilight Zone and Breakdown. Dad was Dexter’s dad. They both fucking suck. Think he did it. Tell him they think he sucks.

Typical hostile take on the media and celebrity worship. The media are always evil. They are shouting the horrible shit they do and what not and HP tells them to beat the shit out of each other, winner gets and exclusive. Bedlam breaks out. Reporters beat each other with mikes, camera men joust with camcorders, male talking head chokes the shit out of a female talking head. It is insane. Sort of interesting considering Radcliffe’s runs with paparazzi but as a former unjustly hated journalist, I will say it's bullshit how they make us all out to be TMZ. Then there is Heather Graham—who looks great, just an older version of Annie Blackburn (her character from Twin Peaks), waitress uniform and all—who lies to the police in some really fucked up ways in hopes of getting on TV and being discovered. She wants to be a star. Has it all planned out. Wants to release a sex-tape and everything.

Full demon HP

In a more recent flashback, we go to HP asking his GF to marry him at the diner that HG works at. She thinks they should breakup instead. He freaks and storms out, leaving her there. Around here we learn HP's brother is a fucking asshole. He and Lee were both sort of hanging around to celebrate the engagement but when it went south they both thought, hey, rebound. Basically, HP's circle is constantly trying to sexually assault this lady.

So HP eventually embraces his new powers which include controlling snakes. It gets to the point where he goes full demon.Skipping to the end, Lee is just slaughtering everyone and acting like a maniac. They have this friend they call meat bag or something gross who is closeted homosexual cop. He shows up to arrest Lee, pulling a shotgun on him. Him and Lee fight over it or something and Lee ends up sort of accidentally blowing this dude's head completely off. It explodes like a Tarantino movie. Anyway, now with his powers in check and completely demoned out, HP goes after lee and horns in the heart. Still sort of alive, the snakes come and lock him down. Finally the sort of snake leader comes and busts through the wound, coming out the other end, then finally like skull fucking dude and going down into his entrails. It was sort of a cheesy end to an otherwise great movie.   

I am Not a Serial Killer is the greatest movie of all time

This flick about an adolescent with psychopathic tendencies on the trail of a serial killer with supernatural powers in small-town Minnesota totally rocks. The kid, who is Culkin esque, and Christopher Lloyd work well together in this fresh look on horror. It’s not often that I see something completely new in the genre. It’s dope. Even the female companion liked it.

Pros: Christopher Lloyd and the kid. Clever. Beats along really well. Story is sort of touching for all the mass murder.

Cons: At times CL’s grumbling is unintelligible. Hard to follow at times. Shitty CGI at the end.

Disclaimer: My notes pretty much always contain spoilers.  

Notes: Opens with the kid hanging around a crime scene. Cop asks him “what’s the prognosis,” which is a weird thing to ask a kid loitering around an active investigation. He’s dead so prognosis negative. Also, the kid isn’t old enough to drive, we see him walking around and riding his bike everywhere, and he has an antisocial personality but his mom, who owns a mortuary, allows him to work in the morgue and sort of play with the bodies that come in which is a little off.

For the first bit of the movie we see the kid going around doing rambunctious serial killer things like tooling on some asshole, playing with dead bodies, and writing reports about BTK to his very patient high school principal’s annoyance. It’s during this time that the kid figures out that the killer is stealing organs as trophies.

He keeps seeing this guy sketching about and suspects him of the murders. CL takes the guy ice fishing and you think this guy is going to kill CL. Classic red herring. CL kills the dude as he is trying to attack CL from behind. Apparently there are bunch of lunatics in this town of 10k. But here we get the first glimpse of some supernatural shits going on as CL has some weird praying mantis arm thing going on. Witnessing this from afar causes the main kid to either cum or piss his pants.

Now the kid does a lot of hanging around CL, witnessing various murders, sort of trying to stop him. The kid also does a lot of helping CL and his wife, who are elderly, with stuff around the house. During this time he keeps leaving CL clues that he is on to him and CL chases him around (though the kid is masked). Even though this goes on for a third of the movie, CL has no idea, maybe, until the end that the person he is chasing is the kid that has been shoveling his steps and putting him in the bath which seems impossible. Then again, at the end he makes it seem he has known all along. It is weird.

Anyway, it comes out that CL is organ harvesting from his victims to prolong his life, a life he stole from some guy many years before (things get a little muddled here). The kid finds a way to slow down the carnage, it has to do with CL’s love for his wife, until it gets to where CL is knocking on deaths door he is in such desperate need for a heart. Eventually, it comes time to see the thing inside CL. Up to here I kept wanting to see the transformation. But then it happened and looked like shit. With the budget you can’t fault the quality of the CGI but they probably could have done the same thing without it.  

The Loved Ones (2009) is the most overrated movie of all time: Also, it is the worst movie of all time

How the fuck does this have a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes? Basically an hour and half of “torture porn” akin to Hostel. Do not watch if squeamish.

This is a fucking nightmare of a meeting the family situation. There is no build up like “Get Out,” for those that have seen it. Dude gets thrown right into the shit and stays there for most of the whole movie.

Pros: Beautifully shot. Sidekick’s subplot, that goes nowhere, is sort of funny at times. Ending is somewhat satisfying.

Cons: Fucking brutal. Even though it’s under that hour and a half sweet spot and moves along pretty well, it still felt like a bunch of stuck could have still been taken out… I like em short.

Disclaimer: My notes pretty much always contain spoilers.  

Notes: Good opening scene. Main kid is being taught to drive by his dad when out of the blue some naked bloody guy shows up causing him to swerve and crash into a tree killing his dad. I like when movies just put you right out in there. Always a good sign that things are going to move along (which they sort of don’t).

Cut to like a year later on the day of some big dance. See main dude and his GF. They have this boring conversation and she leaves. Out of nowhere this girl shows up and asks him to the dance. He says no. Later we find out she means to her own private dance which is just torture.

Main dude’s GF has the biggest neck mole ever. It’s fucking insane. It looks like a trach. Before we get in the shit, she is driving him home. It comes out later that he either hates driving or hates being in the car. This information goes nowhere though and at the end he is driving around no big and runs down his torturer who gradually becomes the terminator.

Sexy!

Anyway, GF drops him off and tells him she loves him. He is basically like, “what?!?”

So dude goes cliff dangling with his dog and gets kidnapped by some weirdo. The kidnapper kills his dog. It’s fucking sad. I hate that shit. I’m basically anti this movie now.

We are now at the kidnapper’s house and the girl who asks main dude out at the beginning is there. Her room is decorated like a psychopath that is really into the color pink. The kidnapper, the girl’s dad who looks like Delmar from Oh Brother Where Art Thou, brings her this hot-pink dress. She changes into it in front of him and he basically drools while staring at her. It’s weird.

Main dude wakes up in a tux at the dinner table with Delmar, pretty in pink, and some older woman with a hole drilled in her forehead. She is just sort of there. The father/daughter duo melt main dude’s vocal cords by injecting them with Drano. The girl then force feeds him chicken and keeps asking him if it is “finger licking good.” Then she makes him lick chicken grease off her fingers after which she asks if he has to take a piss. He is like, “yeah, that’d be nice,” and she grabs her milk off the table and pounds it like a psycho and then makes him pee in the glass else her dad is going to nail his wang to the chair. So he pees and then she threatens to bite his dick off.  This dinner is insane.

Oh, and while all that is happening, at the real dance, the sidekick gets a handy in the middle of the dance floor. They are then kicked out and he and his date do it in the parking lot.

This is too much for him and he like breaks free for a few minutes. They catch him again and nail his feet to the floor with a steak knife. My female companion had to stop watching at this point. She likes crazy shit too but this was just too much.

He is basically just repeatedly tortured for the rest of the movie excluding brief reprieves where he is witness to a slightly more fucked up than typical father-daughter dance until the end when shit goes down. It’s fucked. I’m sorry I watched this movie.

Blair Witch (2016) is the worst movie of all time

Been watching a lot of threequels lately. At movie three filmmakers either go over-the-top and flirt with comedy-horror (the Ghoulies going to college, Toxie going to work for Apocalypse Inc., Freddy saying “bitch” all the time) or reboot (see Jaws 3-D, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Jason wearing the hockey mask). This is in the reboot category and is totally unnecessary.

In this case, I remember liking The Blair Witch Project for nostalgia. Book of Shadows was shit. Then there was this one which basically remade the first one with better cameras and a stupid looking Jurassic Park dinosaur tree monster thing. There were like three ineffective jump scares and a horrible ending. I like pretty much everything; I did not like this movie.

Pros: 1 hour 29 min run time

Cons: Boring. I don’t give a fuck about the half dozen characters in this movie.

Disclaimer: My notes pretty much always contain spoilers.  

Notes: The main character is the brother of the girl from the first one (she does not appear in the movie). He finds this YouTube video that makes him think his sister is still alive roaming the woods. She went missing when he was four, apparently, but now the dude looks like he is 35.

Main dude and three others go to the guy’s house who found the footage that became the first movie. He is like 12 so must have been an infant in 1999. Also, racist. He talks everyone into allowing him and his GF to go along. This guy gets more and more ratlike as the movie goes along. By the end he has a disgusting full beard even though the movie is over the course of three days. And he is a complete maniac.

Once they go out in the Blair Woods, or whatever they are called, which are time bending, supernatural, drone killing woods, one girl cuts her foot and something like enters the wound. Now this thing is like living inside her and likes comes out of the many gashes she picks up in the woods. Kept thinking that she would end up getting possessed by this magic bacteria and she would become a witch. But that didn’t happen and she eventually gets killed by the tree monster witch thing.

The rest of the movie was just, “hey, remember this from the first one?” Fucking sucked. Unfortunate as I like the first two and like the other work from director Adam Wingard whose work includes You're Next and The Guest which are both excellent. 

I'm Back, Bitches

I lost interest in this when I was working as a journalist. Writing for pay sort of took the fun out of blogging. Now that I am in IT, however, I want to get back into it. This will mostly be movie reviews and musings. Also, I don't read shit anymore. My eyes aren't what they were six years ago. That and I am steadily employed.

David Foster Wallace Postsecret

Chicken In A Bucket

Mother Fuck it.

Lost WTF?

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

This video more or less sums up the questions I have as a fan of Lost. This is especially true of anything Christian Shepard, DHARMA Initiative, and Walt related. However, it doesn't go nearly far enough. If I ever meet anyone from the show I am going to be the most annoying fan boy ever. What was the sickness on the freighter? How did Kelvin Inman get on the Island? Etcetera etcetera etceter-fucking-a. I loved the show. I'm just saying.

Got Lost

Lost is over. What am I to do? Turns out my meta-theory was sort of right, at times, maybe, I don't know. I guess the point is that none of it really mattered anyway because they all die in the end, sometime. Don't exactly know when it turned into Six Feet Under.

Ok, a lot of (hardly any) stuff got explained in the end. Don't rightly know what the deal was with the numbers, for instance. Saw none of the tie in stuff appear ever. Hanso who? What's with the little kids in the tail section? And weren't there black people in this show at one point?

Basically, the final episode didn't demand as close a watching of the show as I had hoped it would.

This was my show and I watched every minute of it at least 5 times. I've got about a million

geeky questions that don't matter.

The finale didn't really matter. Was it worth watching, sure. Every episode of that last season was pretty good. But I have to say, the end was a little bit of a let down. But that probably has to do with the fact that Locke didn't run shit at the end. Can't see how it was anyone's but his island.

Batman: The Complete Outdated History

Batman is ridiculously old. Created in 1938 by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, he is almost as old as comic books themselves—what we think of as a serialized comic book today began sometime around 1935 and Detective Comics (DC) #1 was published March 1937—but he is still just as popular as he’s ever been. In his comprehensively researched book, Batman: The Complete History, Les Daniels details every aspect of the most ambivalently sinister superhero to wear his underpants outside his trousers while delving into the question of what accounts for this character’s multigenerational appeal.

While this sophisticated book does cover pretty much the entire history of the publication, the text doesn’t offer much insight or go into very much detail in its reporting more or less the bare facts so as to keep the book at a reasonable length. It begins with a time decades before Batman was ever found on the printed page, going through Kane’s various influences (and possible influence)—Zorro, The Phantom, Sherlock Holmes, Doc Savage—and the lesser-known Finger used to create the Caped Crusader.

We are then taken from the hero’s early all-or-nothing days where he was a grim figure willing to shoot down and kill his enemies, to the diluted 1940-50s version of wholesome family type pulp fiction that literally featured a “Bat-Family”, to the pop-art influenced campy Adam West as Batman television show version, to the Neal Adams years of slick realism where he was a grim detective who relentlessly stalked those who preyed on the innocent that has been widely influential since the early 1970s, and ends with the even more expanded visions of Frank Miller, Denny O’Neil, Alan Moore, as well as Tim Burton’s 1989 film and in 1992 Batman: The Animated Series. Be warned, published in 1999, the Christopher Nolan films are not discussed, though the book is so well done you which it would have been written later.

The most frustrating thing about the book is that it is in no way critical of the film franchise even though things really went to hell with it there in the late 1990s. From this DC copyrighted book (who own the entire franchise, duh) you would think Joel Schumacher was a freaking genius for what he did with Batman and Robin. In other ways too Daniels proves annoyingly uncritical, as Claude Lalumière’s review “A Loving Bat-Tribute” sums up: “[it] flirts (but only flirts) with some controversial issues, such as the attribution of proper credit for the creation of Batman’s classic rogues' gallery and the highly questionable 1988 event ‘A Death in the Family,’ where readers were asked to call a 900 number to cast a vote of life or death for the second Robin, Jason Todd.” But I guess its never rise to bite the hand that feeds you as they say.

Some of the best sections are the ones that detail the effects of the Comic Code that regulated the industry making sure everything was PG-ish and wussified which was put into place following the 1954 publication of Seduction of the Innocent by psychologist Fredric Wertham that claimed “the Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies” after seeing things like the panel at right. This sparked a one-sided debate regarding the morality of comic books and since Batman had such a pivotal role in Wertham’s reasoning, much of the campy ridiculous crap came in an attempt to deflect criticism of angry parents and what have you.

This is all sort of like how people have been all up in arms over violent video games like Grand Theft Auto and such, saying they make kids violent and anti-social which is just insane. Here Daniels does a pretty good job of illustrating how the mindset that brought about the Comic Code was equally as ridiculous and stupid.

Also of note are the three reprinted Batman comics from the various time periods that show the comic’s progression. The stories work very well in context and are all excellent tales.

Perhaps the best thing about the book is its wonderful, aesthetically pleasing design engineered by Chip Kidd. Kidd’s work alone is worth the price of the book. Flipping through the book’s pages reveals its beauty with eye-popping art from cover to cover—its pretty much eye candy.