The Human Race

In the land of the deaf, the one-legged man is king.

Or something.

A group of people (I think there are about 75) are randomly picked up from some random street corner in some random town and find themselves in a gated area. They each hear their own voice in their heads telling them to start running and follow the arrows. Also, make sure to not step on the grass because you will be killed. Don't try to escape because then you will be killed. Make sure you are not too slow because if someone overlaps you - yes, you guessed it - you will be killed.

We are supposed to care for a few of these people while others are not given any traits at all. We are not even sure how many there were to begin with, anyway, and most of these people we will not miss.

The film starts off with a very mean little twist. Pre-credits we are introduced to Veronica, who sits by her dying sister's bedside and later gets diagnosed with the same for of leukemia she lost the little girl to. But she won't let it bring her down and starts getting really active, running at night and all, and despite the initial bad prognosis she is actually on the way to recovery.

Then, when at the game (for it is a game), the first she (or anybody) does is....step on the grass. Apparently, she is not the main character after all.

Then....restart.

This time we see two soldiers in the desert. One is practically carrying the other, who has lost a leg. Jump to a few years later and one of them (he who is in one piece) is working with disabled kids (he knows sign language, which will come in handy later) while the other (the one-legged one) gets drunk and has a string of one night stands. Together, they end up in the game as well. Should we care for these two? As they are there are no more back stories coming we can take it as a sign that yes, yes we should.

We do briefly meet two runners, both deaf, as well.

So, the crowd starts moving and whenever someone gets killed, you own voice in your head will give you the current total of survivors. This is very exciting for the two deaf people, who hear anything for the first time.

What follows is running, some unity while the group might actually try to stick together to save an elderly man who simply is unable to run and is about to be overtaken. Of course, there will be a few loners that only look out for themselves. One of them (bad guy in yellow shirt) just runs off. Old guy's head explodes.

From then on it's anybody for themselves (more or less).

Towards the end, deaf boy is trying to get into deaf girl's pants, with everybody about to die and all, but she makes it very clear that he is in the friend zone. This causes a bad rift between the two, some unwanted fondling and a push onto the grass.

The last two people standing are the deaf girl and the guy with one leg. There is an initial idea for the two to not hurt each other, but the girl has obviously gone round the bend (and who wouldn't?) and pushes him onto the grass, as well. However, he manages to move back to safer ground by only walking on his crutches and never touching the grass with his one remaining leg. He comes back and kills her.

And then....

They had to go and ruin a perfectly average film by making the game the work of some alien race that is going through different species from different planets and having the survivors of each group then move on to the next contest, this time all winners against each other.

Just....no.

2/10

Saw IV

Now, this may appear even more confusing than the previous part, but really it gives you so many answers and - if you are patient - you will figure it out in the end.

As I so often do, I will now give you one big spoiler off the bat: whatever happens after the beginning credits happens more or less at the same time as the entirety of part III. Before the credits you see what happens after Jigsaw died. This may not make much sense on paper, but it does once you give yourself over to the notion that this is not linear storytelling.

The players this time are the law enforcement officers. A local police officer is still looking for Eric Matthews from all the way back in part II. He has been missing for 6 months now but his former colleague is sent on a scavenger hunt to his location. The FBI meanwhile is hunting the hunter, who they believe to be helping Jigsaw (because he himself is too sick to arrange all the elaborate machinery and Amanda is too small to do all of the heavy lifting the preparation has required).

Unfortunately, the FBI agents have to deal with some of the dumbest and one dimensional dialogue in (probably) horror film history. Also, the two actors are terribly wooden (and, yes, well, one dimensional).

Eric Matthews is the one I felt most sorry for. While everyone is off trying to beat the clock and find whoever it is that is now working for Jigsaw, he is stood on a block of ice while at the same time has a noose around his neck. The idea is that he will hang himself once the ice is melted enough while at the same time lowering a see saw contraption that on the other side will put another police guy into water that will then have an unpleasant union with electricity.

The really rough part, however, that no matter if he survives long enough to be presumably saved by his former colleague, as soon as said colleague opens the door to the room, the contraption is rigged to smash his head with two more blocks of ice. (And it does.)

In the end the surviving FBI agent encounters - and shoots - Jeff, who is still stumbling through the building, now looking for his daughter. Also, we now know who Jigsaw's successor is.

At this point I am very much looking forward to the next part(s) and hoping for better dialogue.

6/10

Saw III

Yesterday was Friday the 13th. There was also a full moon. If this does not scream for a horror film night, I don't know what does.

In my continuous quest to see the entire Saw series a friend and I moved on to part III (and, as you will see, part IV right after).

Our favorite psychopath, Jigsaw aka John, is on his deathbed. To finalize the initiation of his very eager pupil Amanda, he has one more elaborate game that she orchestrated on his behalf. A female doctor was kidnapped and is forced to keep John alive for as long as it takes another player, Jeff, to complete a very special series of tests. She is also outfitted with a nifty collar that will explode upon John's death.

Jeff is a sad sack, that has lost his son in a car accident and has been neglecting his wife and daughter ever since. What made things even worse for him is that the driver got off with a mere 6 months sentence. What he is being tested for is whether or not he is able to forgive the people involved in his son's death - the only witness, the judge and the driver himself.

At the same time, Amanda is being tested by John. Apparently, she has not been doing as well as he expected, as she has been mingling with the players (killing, maiming) even after they won their particular games. 

In the end, the doctor wins but Amanda fails and kills her (which was basically her failure). Jeff makes it through the tests without any of the three board pieces surviving. But then we learn that the doctor is his wife and she falls into his arms after she was shot. While she is fighting for her life, Jeff kills both Amanda and John, signing his wife's death sentence. The last he learns from John is that the couple's daughter has been kidnapped and, well, too bad, now John cannot help Jeff find her. Tough luck.

Whereas the story is not as straight forward as parts I and II, what makes this interesting is the flashbacks and parallels that first confuse you but really only gives you the strings tying it all together.

7/10

Phantasm

Wow, the brothers Mike and Jody are idiots. They are pretty moronic on their own, but when they do stuff together, the idiocy multiplies.

They live in a town so boring that apparently the only interesting thing to do is make out on the cemetery. Well, people Jody's age do. Mike is only 13, so all he ever does is run after Jody. He must be a pretty fast runner, too, as he frequently turns a corner on foot after Jody just arrived by car. The kid should join the track team.

One night when Jody makes out with a random chick on top of a grave (like you do) and Mike is hiding in the bushes watching (like you do), a midget in a monk's outfit starts hunting Mike, who runs off in total panic. That night he has nightmares about the caretaker of the funeral home attached to the cemetery ("the tall man" ooooohhhh). What does he do? Yes, he goes right back to the funeral home to further investigate. By himself. At night.

Not very surprisingly, he runs into the tall man, but narrowly escapes and slams a door onto the pursuing man's hand. Then he cuts off the fingers (boy, that knife must be sharp, slicing right through the bones and all in one swift move). The fingers bleed yellow ooze. Why? Why cares?

He brings home a finger as evidence to show to his idiot brother. The finger turns into a huge fly (I think), that looks very much like it's made from plastic and ends up in the garbage disposal (twice, because it survives the first round through the deadly blades. Jody arms his little bro with a shotgun, tells him to stay put, arms himself and heads off to the cemetery. By himself. At night.

In the funeral home he gets attacked by a midget in a monk's outfit and shoots it from the weirdest angles. When he runs off (middle of the road, of course) he is followed and almost run over (standing there in the middle of the road) by a car. Then Mike comes along in the brothers' car (didn't listen, did he?) to rescue Jody. They drive off and get followed by the mystery car again, but Jody shoots it up and it drives right into a tree. They immediately run to the car even though they have not seen anyone drive and because, well, they are idiots trying desperately to run into open knives whenever possible. There the see another midget (come to think of it, we have never seen more than one midget in any scene up to this point so it could still just be the one...there will be more together later, though) and Jody pulls the hood off to discover that it has the head of his late friend (who was killed while making out in the cemetery, btw).

Jody concludes from this alone that there must be a grave robber about, recruiting an army of killer midgets or something - the tall man! He also starts fantasizing about killing him in the most brutal way(s) he can think of. Then their friends (or random people they hang out with and demand rides home from) start getting killed by the midgets, who for some reason never go for the idiot brothers, even tough they are begging for it.

Later (the same night?) Jody locks little Mike in his room (for his own good, of course), but the kid breaks out after channeling MacGuyver (one bullet and what looks like a tiny bit of silver attached to a hammer with scotch tape, all lying around in his room) only to encounter the tall man right outside the house. His fingers have grown back, too! Mike is thrown into the hears, but shoots his way out and jumps out of the moving vehicle before it crashes (and immediately explodes, as cars in film often do). Could this be the end of the tall man?

Meanwhile Jody is at the funeral home checking on his deceased friend's body. He opens the coffin lid theatrically and than drops it again without looking, willing himself to believe that "he has to be in there". In the next scene Mike comes upon the coffin with Jody nowhere to be seen. The coffin - to nobody's surprise but Mike's - is empty. Then some metallic ball with claws, that we have briefly seen kill some random person before, comes at Mike, but look! there is Jody blasting the thing with one expert shot. What does this guy do for a living, anyway? How does he support himself and his little brother. They are joined by Jody's friend the ice cream car guy. Don't ask.

Together they open "the door" to "the room" (white, well-lit) with "the barrels" in it. The barrels have small openings to look into and then comment, "Gee. Dwarves." Jody sounds actually amazed at this, even though he has previously presented a grave-robbing, dwarf-breeding theory. And then, Behold! a porthole to another dimension right there in the room. Mike gets sucked into it and ends up in a windy desert with red sky and a conga line of dwarfs ("Slaves!"). Jody pulls him back out by the belt.

At this point the lights go out. Then the dwarfs attack. The Jody runs around the house screaming for his brother (did he check inside the room?). Then the lights come back on inside the room but now it's just the ice cream truck guy who thinks the metal rods that mark the entrance to another world are a tuning fork. When he touches them, a heavy wind starts inside and out. Inside the barrels get sucked into the porthole. Outside Mike (his hair blowing dramatically in the wind) is screaming for Jody. Also, randomly, the girl that Jody made out with much earlier, who was about to stab Jody when the wind started, is lying on the ground. When ice cream truck guy chances upon her and tries to help her, she lackadaisically stabs him instead. But wait! The girl is the tall man! After the poor guy dies, the funeral home disappears into thing air.

I am not making this up.

The idiot brothers drive home, because they "can't help him. He's dead!" In the driveway Jody starts philosophizing about a mine shaft going 1,000 feet down. Apparently he plans to throw the tall man down it. Never mind that he was supposed to have died in the fiery car crash earlier. I'm sure dropping him into a mine shaft will take care of him. Off he goes to camouflage the mine shaft. Mike is again told to stay in the house. Now guess where the tall man shows up next.

Foot chase! Headstones popping up out of the ground! A sink hole! The girl is back! Ominous music! More running (now apparently towards the mine shaft)! Now it's the tall man again! Mike jumps over camouflaged mine shaft (that he saw in the middle of the night, no doubt)! Tall man falls into mine shaft! Jody pushes big ass stones (that he would not be able to move an inch in real life) towards the mine shaft (and not one misses and they do not appear to fall 1,000 feet down, either)!

What the hell? Why is the ice cream truck guy back? Mike was dreaming all along? Seriously???

Where is the big final scare?

Oh. There it is.

1/10

Pandorum

I'm not sure what happened but it was awesome!

Corporal Bower (Ben Foster, looking raggedly handsome) wakes up in one of those hyper-sleep pods that we have seen in many science fiction films. Initially he can't remember anything (a side effect of very long hibernation). An hour later his lieutenant Peyton (Dennis Quaid, looking as raggedly handsome as always) is also awake and together they are trying to figure out what their mission could be.

The space ship they are on appears to be running on limited power and the door to the bridge is therefore impregnable. While Peyton stays behind to try and open the door, Bower sets out to find the reactor and reboot it.

For dramatic purposes the reactor is situated as far away from where they started as possible. While stumbling through the half lit ship, Bower encounters long dead bodies, some hanging from the ceiling. He also encounters monstrosities. They may or may not be mutant travelers and they look like zombies with thorns. Also they are very, very tenacious. You can chop of bits and they will still come at you.

One of the bodies hanging from the ceiling is called Shepard (Norman Reedus, you guessed it, looking raggedly handsome) and is still alive. But not for long. Bower cuts him down but he is quickly re-hung by the monsters, killed and gutted. And then they feed on him. Shepard, we hardly knew thee.

Bower encounters a few more people on his way to the reactor. All of them appear to be from different missions and have woken up at different times. Since then they have been merely surviving the steady raids for food of the monsters.

Peyton, meanwhile, is going insane. Or maybe everyone is. I dunno.

In the end, the reactor is restarted, Bower and Peyton are reunited and then there is a big twist.

Very exciting, this.

8/10

Black Mirror: The Waldo Moment

Waldo is a blue cartoon bear that - voiced by comedian Jamie - interviews politicians for his TV show. Wouldn't surprise me if this actually happened soon-ish. He is rude and a very uncomfortable interviewer, especially to one Liam Monroe. The producers of Waldo's show even go as far as gate crashing small local events Monroe is holding.

And then Waldo himself is put up for election. Something Jamie, who wants nothing more to be recognized for himself rather than as a cartoon bear, only reluctantly agrees to. The situation gets really complicated after a one night stand Jamie has with another candidate.

Not all the episodes can be great and this one was just all right. Luckily, Liam Monroe is played by Tobias Menzies, who is very easy on the eyes.

Could this really be the last of the series? I am so hoping that Black Mirror will continue in the near future (ha!).

6/10

Black Mirror: White Bear

My absolute favorite of the series.

Here, we follow Victoria as she stumbles through a neighborhood, while she tries to figure out what the hell is going on. She woke up in a strange place and everyone appears to be after her. Whoever is not trying to kill her is filming her with their cells. None of the bystanders are willing to help or only interact with her.

Then she chances upon a group of vigilantes helping her by saving her from the people hunting her. Or so it seems. Throughout Victoria has flashes of memory of a little child that she thinks may be hers.

The conclusion - or ending, as the story does not actually conclude - is awesome and delivers a devastating blow to the apparent heroine that she is not likely to recover from any time soon.

Less science fiction than the other episodes, although also set in the near future.

So, so good.

9/10

The Fault in Our Stars

The beauty of ticket contests is that sometimes you get to see widely anticipated films before their official release date. Case in point: The Fault in Our Stars - an exclusive premiere, one week before its official local starting date (and even before it premiered in the US!). Even better, not only did I win two tickets to this, but a friend also won, so there were four of us.

I've had my difficulties with the book, as I detailed in my other blog. Primarily, I didn't care much for the book version of Augustus. The character was less annoying in the film, I felt. (My friend S. found his constant grinning annoying, though.) Apart from the story with the previous, deceased girlfriend, which fell between the cracks, the book was thoroughly covered. Sure, it took its liberties here and there, but the essence of the story remained.

The translation to screen worked beautifully and the end product is much more enthralling than the book would have led me to expect. The acting was exceptional on all fronts (Willem Dafoe!) and even though there was a lot of laughing in the theater throughout the first half of the film, there was just as much sniffling and nose blowing through the second half.

We laughed. We cried.

7/10