Originally created as a recap blog for my friends too busy to watch t.v., I've branched out to movies, books, food, life in general. No politics tho', don't worry.
I'm not going to lie to you: 2017 has been a rough year. I mean, I have had it exceedingly easy compared to most people. But I have been anxious/unhappy/frustrated/sad/angry under our country's current administration. I have needed to escape in pop culture that has no connection with current events, the more fantastical the better. That's how I found myself watching Kong: Skull Island the other day.
I liked Peter Jackson's King Kong film, finding myself appreciating and connecting with Andy Serkis's Kong. This iteration does not have that personal connection: Kong disappears from the screen for long periods of time and when he is onscreen, he is all rampaging warrior. His posture is strange: upright, like a human; but there is no personality peering out of those big brown eyes this time. Still, K:SI is hugely entertaining. And as has been said, sometimes you don't know you needed to see a gas-mask-wearing Tom Hiddleston slicing mutant pterodactyls with a samurai sword until you see a gas-mask-wearing Tom Hiddleston slicing mutant pterodactyls with a samurai sword. Escape accomplished.
One of the problems with The Walking Dead is that there is no spatial sense or sense of time. How far are Alexandria, the Hilltop, the Kingdom, the Sanctuary and Oceanside from one another? In some episodes, it seems like just a few miles; in this episode, people seem to be driving for hours and hours and hours. And how long has this all been taking, this carrying out of Rick's plan against Negan and its subsequent breakdown? Days? Hours? Also, how long does it take to die of a zombie bite - one that doesn't rip your throat out but a flesh wound that merely introduces the virus into your bloodstream? Asking for a friend.
Rick stares down into the Sanctuary, stunned by the epic falling apart of his plan. At the first return of gunfire by the Saviors, Jadis and her garbage people cut and run and we never see them again for the rest of the episode. So they were super-helpful. Carol drives up, Jerry riding shotgun, and Rick dives into the car. The three of them talk over each other, expositing that (a) the Saviors got out and (b) the Saviors are going to hit back with a vengeance so they need to warn the other communities ASAP.
This is interspersed with a flashback to Carl telling Rick that they need to stop fighting and start working on how everyone is going to live in the future, after this shit with Negan is over.
Back at Alexandria, WTF Daryl, you don't even stick around to see if your plan worked? No, he didn't and he will be surprised to find out that no, it didn't, not really, since the Saviors got out. In a house, a weirdly shaky Carl is writing what looks like goodbye notes - of course, if Negan has his way, there won't be anyone around to read them. He has crap handwriting, btw. That night, Michonne catches him dropping food down into the sewer; he's got Sadiq stashed there. Then, they hear a pounding at the gate. Michonne: "They got out!" It's Negan, giving them three minutes before he huffs and puffs and blows their house down.
At the Kingdom, Ezekiel finally snaps out of his funk when the Saviors arrive and start throwing their weight around. He hides, sneaking around, and setting off a big explosion. The Saviors give chase, knowing that Negan wants his head on a pike. In the confusion, some of the Kingdom people start to fight back, which is particularly notable since none of those left are fighters. Carol directs the people on where to meet up outside and then she sees Ezekiel. He has Shiva's old chain in his hands and he smiles at Carol as he closes and locks the gates, himself inside with the Saviors. Carol's all, NO! And he tells her to save his people like she saved him. Then the Saviors come up and knock him unconscious. Luckily, Morgan is lurking there, outside the Kingdom's wall.
Out on the road, Maggie, Jesus and some Hilltop redshirts get ambushed. Maggie: "They got out!" One of the Hilltop redshirts gets shot and the Saviors throw their weight around, menacing and threatening. The Hilltoppers are finally allowed to return home and toe the line. When she gets back, Maggie calls one of the imprisoned Saviors out of the holding pen and, in front of a shocked Jesus, shoots him in the head. She orders him tossed out of the Hilltop with a message: WE HAVE 38 MORE. STAND DOWN. "We aren't even but it's a start." Then she starts planning for Hilltop to make the last stand against Negan.
In Alexandria, Carl has decided he is in charge and his plan is for everyone to run and hide in the sewers. His goal is to save lives for what comes later. Michonne protests that they can't just give their home up to Negan. Carl's all, no - all we have to do is survive the night. As Negan continues his countdown, Carl climbs up to the top of the wall and offers himself up: Kill me, if you have to punish someone, and leave everyone else alone. Negan's all, that's tempting but it's much less fun when you volunteer. So then Negan starts firing off grenades or RPGs or some such, exploding some of the houses. Carl drops back down and as the Alexandrians start to scatter, they toss around smoke bombs so that soon the town's streets are full of smoke. As Negan and his goons stroll through the town, Carl skulks around, unseen, heading for the sewers.
And on the back side of town, Daryl and some cohorts bust through the walls, with Dwight and some Saviors giving chase. The Alexandrians get out far enough and then set up their own ambush: Daryl, Michonne, Tara and Rosita with big ol' guns. There's a shootout, during which one of the Saviors realizes that Dwight betrayed them, then Daryl and his posse prevail, killing everyone but Dwight, who has gotten wounded. It looks touch and go for a moment, whether Daryl et als. will let him live but in the end, they scoop him up and take him with them, sneaking back into Alexandria and into the sewers, as Carl planned (except for Michonne - she won't go down there). Daryl does ask Dwight what happened, if what Daryl did allowed the Saviors to get out, but Dwight says that Eugene figured out how to get out. Which begs the question: with all the recent focus on Eugene, why didn't we get to see this brilliant idea?
Back at the Sanctuary, Eugene's conscience gets the better of him. He takes care of the guards (dosing them with laxative - heh) and gives Gabriel keys to a car just outside so the priest and the Hilltop doctor can get away. Amazed, Gabriel asks him to come with them but weird ol' Eugene just leaves them to it.
When Rick finally makes it back to Alexandria - seriously, where the fuck has he been? how long does it take to drive from the Sanctuary? - he goes to his house and starts yelling for Carl and Judith like a fucking lunatic. Negan is there, waiting for him, and the two of them have fisticuffs, Rick managing to dodge Lucille more often than not. Eventually, Rick gets himself tossed out a window and just makes a run for it.
Michonne finds him, out there on the smoky streets, and leads him down into the sewers. Everyone is there, sad and quiet, but safe for now. Rick glares at Dwight and Sadiq, is relieved to see Judith. He and Michonne go to Carl who for once is not wearing that STUPID FUCKING HAT. And then Carl pulls up his shirt and shows them the walker bite on his stomach. It's been there a while - hence the goodbye letters, hence the attempt to offer himself up to Negan since he's going to die anyway. Michonne falls to her knees (and now I'm thinking that's why everyone else is so sad and quiet too) and Rick just stares at his son, stricken.
Oh yes, the latest recap of The Walking Dead is super-late. I don't really have any excuses other than I just haven't been able to make myself do it yet. WHY OH WHY IS IT AN EXTRA-LONG EPISODE? There is absolutely no reason for it - they easily could have cut it down to a regular length episode (and still not much would have happened). What could they have cut out? All the "artsy" close-ups of people's faces. Shots of characters grimly driving cars. And Aaron/Enid's entire storyline.
Here it is: Aaron and Enid are going to Oceanside because Aaron thinks he can convince Oceanside to join the fight against Negan even though not so long ago, the Alexandrians raided their community and took ALL their guns and ammunition. To sweeten the deal, Enid stops at a distillery - that somehow has not been entirely looted since the zombie apocalypse happened (which is bullshit, because no one is going to leave a distillery unplundered) - so they can load up a truck full of hooch. They park outside Oceanside and that night, when Aaron confronts an Oceansider lurking nearby, Enid shoots her. It turns out to be the community's matriarch so I'm pretty sure that's not going to help Aaron and Enid's bargaining position. So what was the point?
First of all, WTF kind of strategist is Rick if his plan hinges on the cooperation of Jadis's junkyard people? He thinks he's just going to walk into the junkyard with no back-up and convince them - using his silver tongue or effervescent charm - to join with him against the Saviors? How's that working out for you, Mr. Stuck-in-a-Box? What happens to the rest of your people when the junkers kill you? Did you plan for being stuck in a box? Also, I am not a Eugene fan so this episode was excruciating. Prologue - Rick is let out of the box for a few moments so Jadis can photograph him and some other junker dude can make a quick sketch. Jadis tells him this is so she can sculpt him: "After."
Eugene - At the Sanctuary, Eugene is being all Eugene-ish. He has a face-to-face with Dwight and instead of picking a side - joining Dwight to help take down the Saviors or ratting Dwight's betrayal out to Negan - he simply decides to keep his mouth shut as long as Dwight keeps his activities quiet and doesn't let any innocent workers get hurt. He spends some time with a dying Father Gabriel (apparently gooping oneself up with zombie guts can led to some fucking nasty infections (which of course Negan has not caught)) and rebuffs Gabriel's pleas for aid in getting the doctor back to the Hilltop. He misses a deadline negotiated with one of Negan's "wives" for fixing her boombox but manages to cadge the bottle of wine she promised in payment because he needs help sleeping. He has a one-on-one with Negan, who blows all sort of smoke up his ass, making Eugene feel important.
Daryl and Tara, et als. - Daryl, Tara, Michonne and Rosita go over the plan: crash the garbage truck into the Sanctuary, busting a hole in the building so the walkers swarm in and take out as many Saviors as possible, with the hope that the workers won't get caught in the crossfire. Morgan, who has been in a nearby building on sniper-duty, joins them. Rosita and Michonne are all, why can't we stick to Rick's plan? Daryl's like, well, we don't have the numbers to take out the Saviors now that the Kingdom has been wiped out. Rosita and Michonne bow out, which begs the question why they even bothered leaving Alexandria in the first place. Also, Daryl seems to have a bit of a death wish going on, saying that it doesn't matter if he survives this operation - he just wants it to work.
Eugene - While fixing the wife's boombox, Eugene gets an idea. He fetches Sasha's iPod from the coffin (which is conveniently stashed in some storeroom nearby) and affixes it to a radio-controlled model airplane: the plan is to draw the swarm of walkers away from the Sanctuary by playing music, just like those Saviors were going to do with the speaker-truck last episode before Rosita and Michonne took them out. Dwight finds him and warns him not to do it. Eugene actually grows some balls turns the speaker on and launches the airplane. Dwight considers shooting Eugene in the head and then settles for shooting the speaker-plane out of the sky before it can distract the walkers.
Daryl and Tara - Daryl and Tara, with Morgan providing coverage, put their plan into action: getting the garbage truck in close, then Daryl putting a cinder block on the accelerator and jumping out. The truck crashes into the building and the walkers swarm in through the gap. Inside, it's carnage. Unprotected workers are easily taken down by the walkers; the Saviors wield their semiautomatic weapons but there are a lot of zombies and they have to retreat.
Eugene - Eugene FREAKS THE FUCK OUT, watching the walkers invade the formerly safe Sanctuary. He runs to Gabriel's bedside and shouts at him that he won't help as all he can do is protect himself. But he uses a LOT of words and it is super-annoying. Then he goes to Negan, promising that he can make enough bullets to replace the ammo spent on the walkers so that Negan can go on the offensive against Rick's crew as soon as this shit is cleaned up. He also alludes to another revelation, something big - but they are interrupted by Dwight and Negan's other lieutenants. With Dwight in attendance, Eugene is not brave enough to rat him out to Negan, so he just says that he can get the intercoms working again and scurries away. If someone can explain to me why it was necessary to devote a whole episode to this twit, that would be great.
Epilogue - Jadis lets Rick out of the box, putting him in the center of the junkyard arena in his boxers, hands tied. One junker stands behind him, keeping him there, while another comes out with a walker. These junkyard walker designs are pretty awesome, actually: this one has a half-helmet, protecting its skull but leaving its mouth free, and a long pole is attached to the back of the helmet, allowing the junker to control it and stay out of reach. Rick manages to get free, downing the two junkers by gaining control of the walker. He uses the pole to fight the men, eventually twisting the walker's head right off, which is fantastic. Then Rick tackles Jadis, knocking her gun away and wrestling her to the ground, her panicked face just inches away from the walker's still-gnashing teeth. Rick's all, I'm getting my clothes and my gun back now and leaving, and if you don't join up with me, my people will come back and murder you all. For some reason, the junkers don't just shoot him where he stands. Instead, Jadis gives up and agrees to join him. There's some negotiation - each community will get a fourth of the Sanctuary's supplies - and Rick explains his grand plan: they will go to the Sanctuary, he will offer the Saviors amnesty and then, after they give up, he will kill Negan and everyone has a happy ending.
Except, of course, when Rick, Jadis and the junkers get to the Sanctuary, it is no longer surrounded by a herd of walkers because they are all inside the building, chewing on the living. I assume Rick recognizes Daryl's garbage truck but he really looks more stunned than anything else. I dunno: I think I'm with Daryl and Tara in that Rick's plan seemed pretty far from likely to succeed.
It's supposed to be winter - I am supposed to be skiing right now - but the weather gods are not cooperating, keeping our skies clear and dry and mostly too warm for the resorts to make much man-made snow. Our ski area is open, with just two trails available, so that's enough to get Mr. Mouse out of the house, at least for the mornings (if he doesn't ski, he gets fidgety). I prefer a greater snow-to-rocks ratio in my skiing so I've opted out and opted for holding down the couch to watch some movies. Here are some recent successes:
Josie and the Pussycats - Yes, I watched it. And it is ridiculous in all the right ways (early 2000s fashion! A very young Rosario Dawson! Excellent soundtrack with "Josie's" vocals done by Kay Hanley of Letters to Cleo!), plus it is completely subversive/satirical with respect to all those manufactured pop acts from that time period with their sponsorships and product-placement.
Split - In which former golden boy M. Night Shayamalan puts together an excellent B movie about three girls who get kidnapped by a dude with multiple personalities (twenty-three total, we're told). It is suspenseful and tense, with interesting cinematography, and James McAvoy is just outstanding as Kevin, the dissociative identity disorder guy. We only get to see about eight of the alters onscreen but McAvoy plays each one as a separate character and it's fantastic.
Krampus - 'Tis the season! I think I was hoping for more scares from this admittedly PG-13 flick but the movie has a strong cast (Adam Scott, Toni Collette, Allison Tolman, David Koechner, Conchata Ferrell) and visually it looks great, with some wonderfully twisted takes on holiday classics. Krampus is an actual folkloric baddie, the yin to St. Nicholas's yang, doling out punishment to naughty children.
The episode title references Negan's instructions to his Saviors to capture "the King, the widow and Rick" alive ... but to be honest, this damn episode should actually have been titled "The King, the Widow, Rick, Carol, Carl, Michonne and Rosita, with some Daryl and Tara for good measure." If the intent had been to focus on Ezekiel, Maggie and Rick, the writers lost their focus a bit. And in case you were wondering, this is another talk-heavy/place-setting episode.
The good guys have set up a nifty little message system, hiding notes for one another in various roadside trash heaps. As we check in with Carol/the Kingdom, Rick/on the road and Maggie/at the Hilltop, the ponderous voiceovers talks about how the plan is working even though we're losing people. Only there are a LOT more words - but it's all kind of pointless because it's just rehashing everything we've just seen over the last couple of episodes.
Rick: On foot and on his own, Rick walks to the Garbage People's compound to try once again to enlist their help. Jadis and her weirdos hear him out and then turn him down, throwing him into a hot storage container. Jadis: "[He] talks too much." Word, sister.
Maggie: The denizens of the Hilltop are conflicted about the Savior prisoners Jesus has brought back. At first, they are tied up along the outside of the wall, guarded by Jesus and other gun-bearing Hilltoppers. This is dangerous for Maggie's people, however, with the exposure to walkers and non-imprisoned Saviors. Gregory thinks they should build a gallows. Maggie instead builds a barbed wire enclosures within the Hilltop's walls. The prisoners are ushered inside; Gregory, who has been driving Maggie up a fucking wall, also gets roughed up a little and thrown in with the Saviors. Maggie tells Jesus that she's only holding onto the prisoners on the off-chance that they can be exchanged for any of their people that Negan takes captives. Otherwise, after this is all over, they're going to have to be killed. Afterwards, Aaron (who delivered the baby Rick found to Maggie) heads back out, with Enid tagging along.
Carol: Even though "The King" is in the title, Ezekiel is too busy being sad so most of the focus is on Carol. They're supposed to meet up with Rick and since she is unable to roust the King, Carol goes alone. She is followed by some little kid (Henry?) and has to rescue him from a couple of walkers he is trying to fight. She snaps at him, then hands him a gun and leads him back to the Kingdom. Over Jerry's protests, she forces her way into the theater where she finds Ezekiel sitting on the floor beside his throne, clutching a length of Shiva's chain in his hands. He is very sad. Carol gives him a rousing speech about how his people need him to lead them as he has done up until now and if he's struggling, to just fake it 'til he makes it. They have a nice little bonding moment (and both these actors are so good together) over how he helped her when she isolated herself in that house but ultimately Ezekiel says he just can't be the King now.
Carl: For reasons, Carl goes out into the forest, looking for that dude he and Rick came across a few episodes ago, the one Carl tried to befriend and Rick chased off by shooting rounds into the air. Carl finds the dude who is engaged in setting up walker traps - his parents thought that killing zombies released their souls and he is trying to honor his parents by offing the undead. Intrigued, Carl asks the three questions (remember those). Sadiq says he's killed about 237 walkers (nice!) and only one person, putting him out of his misery after a walker attack. Carl's all, let's be friends and then they both almost get killed when a small group of walkers comes out of nowhere. They finally put down the walkers and Carl's like, come with me, I can't take you to my community because my dad's kind of touchy but maybe I can put you somewhere else.
Michonne and Rosita: After basically being absent for the first five episodes - they have been "healing" back at Alexandria, Michonne and Rosita go against orders and leave Alexandria because of reasons: they want to "see the Sanctuary." Whatever. Like they would do that. This is just an excuse for the writers to get them on the road where they hear some music coming from a warehouse. Worried that the noise will draw the herd of walkers away from the Sanctuary, they go to check it out. The warehouse is storing a TON of weapons, like military grade, and there are two Saviors inside, getting a truck laden with speakers blasting opera to go to the Sanctuary, specifically to draw the herd of walkers away. Michonne and Rosita get into a gunfight with the two Saviors. Rosita AWESOMELY blows one dude up with a fucking RPG but the woman gets away, driving off in the speaker truck. Fear not - read next paragraph.
Daryl and Tara: When Daryl gets back to Alexandria, Tara goes looking for him. She says he was right to not kill Dwight because they couldn't have gotten this far in the plan without him, but after this is all over, she's gonna kill him. Because he killed Denise, yes? Daryl, still holding a grudge for his Sanctuary treatment at Dwight's hands, says maybe the two of them could kill him together. Later, whilst driving their big ol' garbage truck, they broadside the speaker truck and hook up with Michonne and Rosita. Daryl's like, we got a lot more work to do - all of us. They drive to where Michonne and Rosita can see the herd of walkers swarming the Sanctuary. Daryl's like, we're gonna end this thing, right now. I think he's still not on board with Rick's plan and wants to blow some shit up. And frankly, with Rick stuck in a Garbage People's storage container, sweating his ass off, Daryl may have a point. Previously on The Walking Dead / next time on The Walking Dead
I dunno: The AV Club liked this episode but man, it was ALL TALKING except for the Rick-n-Daryl show, which wasn't full of talking but also seemed jarring and a little out of place given the tone of the rest of the episode. I suppose it's good to spend more time with the bad guys - delve a little deeper into what makes them tick but IT WAS ALL TALKING. Sorry this is so late - The Punisher and then Thanksgiving got in the way, and then I just was putting it off - but now we begin: Bit of a flashback to Father Gabriel in his more cowardly days, praying and asking to be given purpose in the remaining life he has.
Then, a bit more recent flashback when Gregory was staying (being kept?) at the Sanctuary: Simon brings him breakfast and then takes him to a meeting with Negan and Negan's upper level councillors (Simon, Dwight, Eugene, Regina, some other asshole). Gregory talks and talks, clearly terrified out of his mind but bluffing as best he can. Negan, who is a little less obnoxious, lays out his overarching strategy: if you kill the right people, you can manage to save hundreds more (hence being called "the Saviors"). Gregory makes promises, saying that he can deliver the Hilltop to Negan and exile anyone who thinks to ally themselves with Maggie/Rick/etc. Negan's all, I think you are playing both sides, Gregory. Gregory: [weasels like he's never weaseled before.] Simon interjects that if Gregory can't deliver, they can always go in and kill everyone. Negan abruptly stands up and slams Lucille into the table, scaring everyone: "People are a resource! Money on the table! People are the foundation of what we are doing here!" He glares at Simon, snarling, "Are you confused about who's in charge? Are we backsliding?" Simon: "Um, no." Negan sets out the new plan: "We kill the right people (Maggie, Rick, Ezekiel) in the wrongest way possible and we make 'em all watch!" That'll bring the communities back in line. Then, the meeting gets broken up as the coordinated attacks begin. Then those events happen and eventually Negan and Gabriel get trapped in that trailer and we're back up to now.
Negan and Gabriel sit quietly as the walkers claw at the trailer walls. Negan: "Your friend Rick is an asshole." Gabriel: "You're an asshole." Negan, chuckling: "Yes, I am. But Rick's gonna get people killed. [paraphrasing] I may kill people but I don't get them killed." Gregory thinks that may be semantics, despite what Negan says. And then there's a lot of talking. Gregory says that he's looking for a purpose and maybe being stuck in this trailer with Negan is it: "I think maybe I'm here to take your confession."
Here's the just of it. Gabriel confesses that he is a coward and locked his parishioners out of the church when the apocalypse happened. Negan only confesses to cheating on his first wife when she was alive; he feels no compunction about what happened after the shit hit the fan. As the zombies get a little more excitable outside, Negan points out that the longer he is stuck in here, the more the Saviors are going to come apart at the seams without him to keep them in line.
Meanwhile, Simon, Dwight, Eugene, Regina and that other asshole have assumed that Negan is dead and what the hell are they going to do next. They argue amongst themselves but do come up with some salient points: they need to protect the worker population because the workers outnumber the Savior fighters by a lot and if the workers revolt, they could win through sheer numbers. Regina wants to mount an attack. Dwight wants to protect what they have left and stay alive. Simon wants to find out who on the inside leaked the information that allowed Rick to get this attack coordinated. Everyone looks at Eugene here; Eugene looks at Dwight.
In the comic relief interlude, Rick and Daryl work to retrieve the munitions from the truck they overturned. Daryl packs up a bunch of explosives: he thinks they should blow a hole in the far side of the Sanctuary and allow the walkers to flood in, wiping everyone out. Rick thinks that is a bad idea - that would kill workers as well as Savior soldiers - and they need to stick to the original plan (of which there are apparently a few more stages left to enact). Daryl's all, nope, Ezekiel's crew is gone (the dying Savior truck driver told them this before he croaked) and we're gonna blow shit up. Rick's all, nope, we're not. Daryl grabs the explosives and storms off towards his motorcycle. Rick tackles him and there are fisticuffs. For the record, Daryl punches first. They're pretty well-matched, slugging and snarling and wrestling each other to the ground. At one point, Rick grabs the pack of explosives and tosses it back towards the wrecked truck - which is leaking gas and possibly on fire at this point) just as Daryl catches him in a choke hold. Daryl brings Rick down and just before he loses consciousness, Rick sees the flames catch at the truck. He and Daryl stop fighting to scramble away, getting just out of range as the truck explodes. They sit there, hilarious expressions on their faces, and then they get up to continue with the plan: since the explosives exploded, Daryl's got no reason to go against it now. As they get ready to continue on, Rick on foot because his jeep is shot up and Daryl on his motorcycle - Rick mutters, "Chokehold's illegal, asshole." Daryl: "Mm-hmm. Yes, it is." Heh. Rick says that he'll meet Daryl after the last play. Daryl asks if that's really necessary and Rick says yeah, it is. They head off.
Negan and Gabriel make a run for it, dressing themselves with zombie guts for disguise and armed only with Lucille and Gabriel's partially-loaded pistol. They make it about halfway before the walkers notice them. They're going to make it, of course, because Negan won't be taken down by some random walker horde.
Inside the Sanctuary, the remaining ruling committee is getting frazzled. To make matters worse, the workers are advancing on the Saviors, getting restless and worried and rebellious. Things start to escalate and Regina loses her cool and shoots a couple of workers. Just as everything is about to fall completely apart, Negan and Gabriel, covered in gore, stagger into the hall. Everyone - worker and Savior alike - drops to their knees. Gabriel kneels too. Negan does his schtick and promises that after he's gotten cleaned up, he and the committee will be figuring out how this all could have happened. And then they'll get back to doing what they've always done: saving people. As he saunters off, tossing a directive to his men to put Gabriel in a cell but treat him gently, a woman calls out, "Thank you, Negan. Thank god for you!" Negan grins at a flabbergasted Gabriel: "And that is why I am here."
Later, Eugene brings Gabriel a pillow and some food. Gabriel is sick (why is he sick?), sweating and shaking. Eugene says he'll get the Sanctuary's doctor and Gabriel looks up, saying that the Sanctuary's doctor is Maggie's doctor, kidnapped from the Hilltop. Looks like Gabriel has found his purpose: he's going to bring the doctor back to Maggie.
And in the one WTF moment of the episode: as Rick tromps down the road, heading for wherever he is heading, he hears something. He stops and looks up, just as a helicopter flies low overhead. That's the first aircraft we've since the apocalypse started. Wonder who's flying it? Previously on The Walking Dead / next time on The Walking Dead
With my apologies, this week's The Walking Dead recap will be late because I spent my Sunday and Monday nights bingeing my way through the back half of Netflix's Marvel's The Punisher and I just haven't watched Sunday's TWD episode yet. I have to say that I really enjoyed The Punisher, more than I expected to. I've never read the comics and so my only exposure to the character was through Daredevil S2. Frankly (haha see what I did there?), I thought Frank Castle was the best part of Daredevil's second season. I never liked Jon Bernthal in The Walking Dead but now I realize that it was his character - Shane, ugh - whom I hated because Bernthal is FANTASTIC as Frank Castle. He can be charming as hell and then turns on a dime to be brutal/sad/scary; he has fantastic chemistry with pretty much anyone he is paired with, especially with Deborah Ann Woll/Karen. The Punisher is truly brutal but it is also very thoughtful and if I wished it had been even more introspective/exploratory in some of its themes, it is still not the Rambo-esque bulletfest I feared it would be.
Netflix/Marvel series, in order of preference: Jessica Jones; The Punisher; Daredevil S1; The Defenders/Luke Cage* (tie); The Defenders; Daredevil S2 (as a whole because too many damn ninjas); stupid/insipid Iron Fist.
* I'm torn on where to put The Defenders: parts of it I LOVED (anything with Jessica and/or Luke; and anything with someone giving Danny Rand shit) but then you had to have Danny Rand and Matt in his mope-y iteration which was less enjoyable. On it's own, I liked Luke Cage quite a lot but they killed Cottonmouth too soon OOPS SPOILER and I may have dozed off during some of the later episodes. In any event, Claire Temple should be in all the shows more.
Ezekiel finally gets to have an episode focused on him. We start with a bit of a flashback: getting ready before launching the big fight against Negan, dressing, arming himself, walking out into the Kingdom and giving another speech. The man does love to give speeches, even as Carol watches, bemused, but the thing of it is, his people thrive on his words. He encourages them, lifts their spirits, rallies them.
And then we cut to now: the field where Ezekiel and Carol's band of mainly Kingdomites lay in bloody, bloody pieces, torn to bits by the Saviors' two .50 cal machine guns.
When the shit went down, Carol was out scouting. Ezekiel was protected by a group of his people, shielding him with their bodies. He drags himself out from under the pile. His leg is injured and he crawls from corpse to corpse, turning them over, looking at their faces and their massive, ruptured wounds. He allows himself a scream to the sky ... but it is cut short when the first of the dead stirs, coming back to life. Soon enough, the King is crawling away from a herd of walkers. His gun is empty, the next gun he picks up is empty, he's only got his sword/cane. The walkers converge. Ezekiel is saved - momentarily - when a still-living soldier of his rushes up, putting down the closest walkers and helping his king to stand.
That rescue is short-lived when a nerdy, glasses-wearing Savior kills the Kingdom soldier and forces Ezekiel to his feet. This dude spends the next while badgering Ezekiel, telling him he's a con man with gullible subjects, waving a gun in the king's face and generally being a huge asshole. All the while, the herd of walkers marches inexorably towards them.
Meanwhile, Carol makes her way through the warehouse where the Saviors are packing up those giant guns. She is a calm, competent badass and when she hides in the ceiling and then takes out five of them, it's awesome (even though it's ridiculous because she shot through the drop ceiling and certainly couldn't have seen her targets). More Saviors show up and she has to skedaddle, out to the door yard where she watches them load those big guns onto a jeep.
King Ezekiel and his captor are cornered at a chainlink fence. Ezekiel is in a lot of pain and is beginning to lose his bravado. The Savior decides that maybe he doesn't need to bring the King back alive - maybe his head will do. But before things can get much worse, Jerry is there, swinging his big ax and splitting that Savior right about in two. Jerry picks off the nearest walkers to buy some time and then tries to break the chain holding the gate together. When Ezekiel tells him to stop calling him "your majesty," Jerry's all, "Dude, yes I do." The walkers come closer and closer and Jerry can't get the chain off the gate. He and Ezekiel are trapped and soon fighting hand to hand against the walkers. Jerry: "Thank you, your majesty." Ezekiel, with no trace of his Shakespearean accent: "For what?" Jerry: "For bein' such a cool dude."
In the door yard, not far from the fence where Ezekiel and Jerry are trapped, Carol and the Saviors start shooting a lot of bullets at each other. It's basically a standoff and a ridiculous number of bullets are wasted. Then Carol sees Ezekiel and Jerry, pinned down against the fence. She fakes out the Saviors and manages to open another gate behind her foes. The walkers come in and attack the Saviors, giving Carol enough time to run to the fence by Ezekiel and Jerry. She drops the walkers there with her machine gun and gets the chain off, letting the two men in to safety.
The remaining two Saviors drive off with the .50 caliber guns, however. This distresses Ezekiel, since their mission had been to collect those guns, but then they catch the sound of Daryl's motorcycle in the distance. Carol: "They're not getting away with the guns."
Another flashback, this one a little intrusive, given that the episode had been pretty involving up until this point, with Ezekiel and Carol talking and admitting that each of them made a choice to become who they are today.
As Daryl and Rick, in a jeep, run the Saviors off the road and capture those guns, Carol, Ezekiel and Jerry are on foot, trying to stay ahead of the herd of walkers. Ezekiel's hurt leg is slowing them down and they end up trying to make their way through the woods. They come upon a creekbed filled with barrels of toxic waste: the walkers milling around in there are pale and bloated - like that walker Ezekiel commented upon a couple of episodes ago (and we KNEW these toxic walkers would make another appearance) - and when Jerry hits them with his ax, they basically explode into disgusting white pus. Carol, Ezekiel and Jerry try to get across the creek but there are a lot of walkers. They struggle to get the king up the far side and he insists that he leave him there - he can buy them time. In fact, he wastes some time by making another speech - time that would have been better spent climbing up that banking and getting away - crying out that he isn't a king, he isn't a leader, he's nothing, he's just some guy.
Just then, Shiva the magnificent CGI tiger leaps into the creek. As she lays waste to several walkers, Carol and Jerry haul Ezekiel out of the creek. He turns and calls to the tiger but she keeps fighting the walkers as they surround her. Eventually, there are too many even for her and they collapse on her and begin to feed as Ezekiel screams her name. (Apparently this is the way she dies in the comics, under a pile of walkers, sacrificing herself so Ezekiel can get away.) The scummy water in the creek turns red with tiger blood. I'm a little sad - yes, for the death of a CGI tiger based on a comic book tiger.
Carol, Ezekiel and Jerry finally return to the Kingdom. They are the only ones to come back out of everyone who left. The people of the Kingdom gather around their king, shock and sadness on their faces. He can barely meet their gazes. There are no speeches now.
Best episode of the season so far. Even if the tiger had to die.
Ooooooooooooooo John Wick: Chapter 2!!! Everything that was great about the first movie (and that's pretty much everything) is even moreso in JW:C2. It is bigger than the first one, without the singularity of focus, but it is friggin' awesome. I have decided that should I need a lost weekend, I will be marathoning The Road Warrior, Mad Max: Fury Road and the John Wicks, plus Terminator 2. That's some of the best action going, in my opinion.
But I digress. Watch John Wick: Chapter 2. So good.
How is it possible that an ultraviolent show full of flesh-eating zombies and people on the ragged edge of humanity is so fucking BORING? And why are we three episodes in with only minimal Michonne? Don't get me wrong - I'm grateful that we haven't much been subjected to her "chemistry" with Rick (*gag*). But Michonne is a kickass fighter and I miss that. Perhaps her Black Panther schedule meant she couldn't be around so much? I suppose that's it. Sigh. Guess I can't put this off any longer. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ...
Sweet christ on a pony - King Ezekiel is STILL talking about their victories, one leading to another, and how they haven't lost a warrior yet. He is obviously not up on his television tropes since this definitely means disaster for his war band by episode's end. In the meantime, he and Carol and his fighters stick to their plan, remember their training and manage to decimate rather a lot of Saviors in several different places.
Morales makes Rick put his guns down and they talk and talk and fucking talk. Nothing new is said. Morales is all, you're a monster now, I'm a monster now, blah blah blah. It seriously goes on for WAY too long and in addition to that being annoying, Morales calls Rick by his name practically every other sentence which makes no sense since there's only the two of them there. Morales talks and talks and talks and no one cares, because who even remembers this guy? And then, with no ceremony and HILARIOUSLY, Daryl comes up behind Morales and shoots an arrow into his head, just as Rick is all, "Wait - no!" Daryl shrugs and retrieves his arrow; Rick looks stunned but that's sort of how he looks all the time now unless he's shouting at someone.
Meanwhile, outside, the Saviors have been called back into the building (where they will shortly be hunting Rick and Daryl). Aaron takes advantage of the lull to get Eric to a quiet tree around the corner. They pack Eric's gunshot wound as best they can and then Eric tells Aaron he needs to go back to the fight. Aaron cries and snuffles and they both smooch and say "I love you." Then Aaron gives Eric a rifle to defend himself and goes back to the fight, with many tearful backward glances. You know this means Eric is going to die now, off-camera, right? It would be touching if Eric had ever been given some depth character-wise.
Meanwhile, Tara, Morgan and Jesus are marching their captive Saviors back to the Hilltop. Tara is very cranky about the prisoners but Jesus is insistent that they not be executed. Morgan is even crankier about it - and seems to be holding onto his sanity by just a thread - and you know, I'm kind of with him and Tara on this. The Hilltop is ill-equipped to contain a bunch of violent Saviors and I think this is a terrible idea on Jesus's part. Luckily, they get interrupted when a small herd of walkers comes tumbling down a hillside into the group. This is one of the best parts of the episode: seeing the zombies roll down the hill. Tara, Morgan, Jesus et als fight the walkers; several of the tied-up captives get munched on. But a string of captives take advantage of the distraction to make a run for it.
Morgan takes off after them, catches them and drops one or two. Then Jesus catches up and he and Morgan fight about it. Like, literally beat each other up over whether the captives should be killed or not. Despite Morgan having his bo staff, Jesus gets the better of him with just his bare hands. Morgan is pretty crazed here - seems like he's all all-or-nothing guy with respect to killing. Personally, I miss Zen Morgan a bit: I think his philosophy was a tough sell in this post-apocalypse but Serial Killer Morgan is less interesting. Finally, they stop fighting (Jesus wins, more or less) but Morgan. Has. Had. Enough. He's all, "I'm not right but that doesn't make me wrong." As he runs off, unable to handle things right now, Tara calls after him, "Morgan! You are right!"
Meanwhile, the remaining Saviors who were shooting at Aaron's group are now inside, shooting at Daryl and Rick. This goes on a LONG time (many, many bullets). Neither Rick nor Daryl gets shot and Aaron's group finally comes in and picks off the Saviors. Trouble is, there are no guns in this building like Dwight said there were. Aaron runs out to check on Eric: there's a lot of blood under that tree, and Eric's abandoned rifle, and a walker in the distance who looks like it could be Eric. Aaron has lots of sad feelings about this until another Alexandrian grabs him and leads him back to the rest of the group. Rick comes out with that baby Gracie and a tearful Aaron says that he will take the baby to Maggie at Hilltop.
Meanwhile at Hilltop, that weasel Gregory has found his way home. He shouts and begs and pleads (and is pretty funny in his weasel-osity). Maggie makes him squirm for a while and then finally lets him in. And then the sentry shouts for her: Tara and Jesus and their captives are at the gate. Gregory vigorously protests letting them in and Maggie sends him off. But she is reluctant, reminding Jesus that there are families - children - here. Jesus pleads his case: we can't let them go and we can't kill them. Maggie looks as though she's not entirely sure (but I'm guessing she'll let them live - and then regret it in the near future).
Rick and Daryl are the last to leave wherever it is they are. A last Savior takes a shot at them and Rick makes a deal: if he tells them about the guns that were supposed to be there, they will give him a car and let him go - Rick gives him his word. The Savior comes out with his hands up, tells them that the guns were moved a couple days ago (intel that Dwight apparently (?) didn't have). Then Daryl shoots the guy in the head, dropping him. Rick is all, but I gave my word! And Daryl's all, dude, I so DNGAF.
Finally, King Ezekiel is crowing about his band's latest success. Carol heads off to sweep the compound they just took. Everyone else stands in the field and stabs the heads of Savior corpses to keep them from turning. And then, Ezekiel catches sight of movement in a warehouse window. He shouts for his people to take cover but it is too late: a massive volley of machine gun fire (the guns Rick and Daryl were hoping to find?) rakes the field, shredding a bunch of the King's men. That's okay just do not shoot the tiger. Previously on The Walking Dead / next time on The Walking Dead
After watching the first Purge movie back in October, I was fairly convinced that this series didn't qualify for horror movie status. But I wanted to be thorough in my research and watched the second one, The Purge: Anarchy and yes, I can reiterate that I do not consider the Purge series to be horror flicks but tense action/thrillers instead. No sense letting a quickie movie review go to waste, however!
Once again, it is the near future in the U.S.A. and time for the annual Purge wherein poor and brown Americans are disproportionately killed off, thus keeping the power in the hands of the rich white folks. From out of this horrible night emerges a hero - played with a steel jaw by Frank Grillo - who ignores the unwritten rule that you are not supposed to save lives, only take them. The twelve hours of the Purge become a cat and mouse game of trying to stay alive.
This movie is violent and has a horrible concept but it ain't horror. It is compelling enough that I'll probably see the next installment as well, as from what I've ready the series gets better as it goes. Plus, more Frank Grillo!
I try to get my recaps of The Walking Dead up on Tuesdays: the show airs Sundays (but late enough that I don't stay up to watch it); I watch the show straight through on Mondays; and I rewatch the show whilst recapping on Tuesdays. This past Tuesday was Halloween and Mr. Mouse and I had gone out for dinner - we never get enough trick-or-treaters to make it worth staying home and handing out candy - and got back too late for me to want to drag out my laptop. No big deal - it's not like anything happened. I never thought that an episode of nothing but gun battles could be as boring as an episode of nothing but hanging around Herschel's farm, talking. But yeah, it kinda was.
Extreme close-ups of: Rick, Daryl, Aaron, Tara, Jesus and Morgan, all looking nervous and determined; Carol and Ezekiel, looking dazed and dusty.
Here's the thing, we now will spend the entire episode following several groups of our heroes as they execute various attacks on Savior installations.
Aaron, boyfriend Eric and a crew roll up behind their homemade armored cars and get into a shoot-out with a bunch of Saviors, some fighters and some workers. There is much shooting of semiautomatic weapons. Seriously, does no one reload? Does no one worry about the finite amount of ammunition left in this world? They shoot and shoot and shoot and no one tries to gain any ground. The Saviors advance a little and start picking a few good guys off. Then, apparently this has been going on for HOURS because the dead Saviors become zombified and turn on the living Saviors, who just stand there and get bit. Because they can only fight against living people? And how long does it take for a corpse to get back up again? Because that seemed pretty quick. Also, boyfriend Eric gets gutshot and Aaron is sad. Eric's only characterizations are (1) ginger and (2) Aaron's boyfriend, so I'm not that torn up about it.
Morgan, Tara and Jesus are attacking a Savior outpost with big satellite dishes on top. I don't know or can't remember why this outpost is important (food? weapons?) other than it is held by the Saviors. They work their way through the building, picking off Saviors. Morgan has clearly moved on from his not-killing-people stance (which is too bad because it made him interesting). Jesus and Tara find a dude locked in a closet: Tara wants to kill him, Jesus wants to spare him and it turns out that Tara was right because the dude grabs Jesus and almost kills him. Our heroes finally get the upper hand and Jesus insists on tying him up. I'm sure that won't turn out to be a bad idea. Meanwhile, in another part of the building, Morgan and two redshirts open a door. The Saviors inside open fire, dropping them all before scampering away. Some time later, it turns out that Morgan is, in fact, not dead; the two redshirts either are or are about to be. Morgan stands up, shakes himself and then moves through the building to rejoin his team, implacably shooting a hell of a lot of people. When he meets back up with Jesus, Tara et als., they have - against Tara's better judgment - convinced the remaining Saviors to put down their weapons and surrender. Morgan looks like he's about to gun down the lot of them but Jesus talks him down.
Carol and Ezekiel's team is dazed by an explosion that went off at the end of last episode. A bunch of zombies pour out of a building and they have to deal with them first, before setting off after one Savior (who set the explosion) because if he gets back to base, he'll tell Negan that they're coming. Carol: "If he tells them we're here, it's over before it's started." But I'm pretty sure that the Saviors are already aware they're under attack, so I'm not sure what the big urgency is. Still, they start tracking the guy, Ezekiel doing his rah-rah-king spiel which makes his men happy and makes Carol roll her eyes. As they track their quarry through the woods, they encounter a particularly gross walker - droopy and gloppy and swollen, with shredded flesh - and Ezekiel asks, "What befell this creature?" I'm guessing that this will come back again at a later time but Carol brushes it off. They keep going through the woods, tracking the runaway Savior. He almost makes back to his outpost when another group of Kingdom soldiers appear - with Shiva. That giant gorgeous CGI tiger pounces on the runaway Savior and kills him. Ezekiel gives another rah-rah speech whilst scratching Shiva behind the ears. I wonder if I'm the only one worried that Shiva will get a taste for human blood and turn on the good guys - I'm not sure a tiger can be trained to only kill Saviors.
Rick and Daryl work their way through another building, looking for a cache of guns that Dwight told them about. It takes them a long time, picking off people as they go, working their way up floor by floor. Rick and Daryl split up to cover more ground. It still takes a long time. Daryl finds a cell that looks like the one Negan held him in and he gets feelings about it. Rick gets into a brutal skirmish with a Savior and ends up impaling the guy on a metal shelving bracket. Then he finds a baby in a crib ("Gracie" on the wall) and gets feelings about the baby. Then a dude comes up behind him with a gun, saying he's already radioed the Sanctuary and the Saviors are coming back. Rick recognizes this guy from Atlanta (i.e., S1) and it's supposed to be important, I guess? The guy's name is Morales and maybe the comic book fans are excited about this but honestly, I don't remember him at all and am having a tough time caring.
Extreme close-ups of: Rick, Daryl, Aaron looking sweaty and worried; Morgan, Jesus and Tara with blank looks on their faces; Ezekiel and Carol with confident little smiles.
So yeah, lots of bullets, not so much actually happening.
Here we are, gentle readers, the final movie of this years Scarelicious October Movie Series! I had hoped to get to twenty but nineteen scary movies watched in a month still beats the previous record of seventeen, so I'm not going to pout about it. I could probably squeeze one more in but there's the TWD recap to go up on Halloween proper. At any rate, the final movie of the month is the very Halloween-y but not very scary Trick R Treat.
I'm feeling particularly lazy so here's IMBD's plot synopsis. Five interwoven stories that occur on Halloween: an everyday high school
principal has a secret life as a serial killer; a college virgin might
have just met the guy for her; a group of teenagers pull a mean prank; a
woman who loathes the night has to contend with her holiday-obsessed
husband; and a mean old man meets his match with a demonic, supernatural
trick-or-treater.
This isn't an anthology; rather the stories brush up against each other on one Halloween night in a small town that goes all-out to
celebrate Halloween and making the punishment of those who violate the
rules of the holiday the focus of several of its vignettes. All over the internet, horror movie aficionados praise this flick as one of the best of the season and I will agree that it is absolutely one of the most Halloween-centric movies ever, Personally, I'm more of a horror fan than a Halloween fan, and Trick R Treat is just not scary, so while I appreciate the sentiment, I was a bit meh about the execution. Still, for those who looooooove Halloween, I can see Trick R Treat becoming a yearly re-watch.
As a rule, I am not a big fan of the slasher genre of horror movies. Other than the classics that started the whole thing (the original Halloween, Friday the Thirteenth, Nightmare on Elm Street and Black Christmas), I don't find them to be that good: group of kids, largely unlikable, get together for shenanigans; killer, whose past drove him to kill, starts picking them off one by one; I don't care because I don't care about any of these characters. Cold Prey, a 2006 Norwegian slasher (a/k/a Fritt vilt), takes all the well-worn slasher tropes and does right by them.
A group of five sporty, young, attractive Norwegians - Jannicke and Eirik, Ingunn and Mikal, and fifth-wheel Morten - head off into the back country for some crowd-free snowboarding. It is all going swimmingly until Morten takes a hard fall and breaks his leg badly. Jannicke proves quite capable and resets his leg; the group then takes shelter in an abandoned ski resort. The place looks to have closed in the mid 1970s and a closer look at the hotel guest book shows that someone's child was lost, leading to the closure. After Jannicke disinfects Morten's wound and seals it shut with crazy-glue, the kids build a fire, manage to get the generator running again and make the best of it. As night falls, Ingunn and Mikal find an empty hotel room (Room 237, in a shout-out to The Shining) and that's when things start to go bad. The killer starts picking them off, one by one. It is bloody but not horrifically so. The killer is brutal but not inhumanly so. And the kids act like normal human beings would when placed in this terrifying position.
I thought Cold Prey was fantastic. The "slutty girl" was not, in fact, slutty. The "annoying sidekick guy" was neither annoying nor treated like a sidekick. Although there wasn't deep characterization for anyone, I actually liked these kids and so cared when the killer was after them - Jannicke, the kickass Final Girl, is smart, kind, thoughtful and believable. There is a sequel, Cold Prey 2, which apparently picks right up where this one leaves off and, by expert accounts, is even better than this first one. I'm going to have to re-think my stance on slashers if this keeps up.
When I first started John Carpenter's 1995 remake (of 1960's) Village of the Damned, I was super-excited: John Carpenter! Christopher Reeve! Mark Hamill! Kristie Alley! And then there was some mid-90s/rudimentary CGI fog and sinister whispering sweeping across a northern California coastal town - it was going to be awesome!
Plot in a nutshell: the tiny town of Midwich, California (population: 2,000; elevation: 33 feet above sea level (although those cliffs are certainly higher than 33 feet)) is a happy place until a weird wave of sinister whispering flows over the town, during its school fair no less. Everyone in town - people, dogs, cows, parakeets - pass out where they are; one dude has the misfortune to faint onto his gas grill, rendering him as crispy as his hot dogs. Concerned law enforcement and scientific types hover outside the town line until six hours later when everyone wakes up. Most are none the worst for wear, other than the grill guy and the few who died in car crashes when they passed out whilst driving. However, ten women mysteriously catch pregnant (including one high school "virgin" and one lady whose husband has been out of town for the last year). The babies are all born on the same day (the virgin's baby is stillborn and Kirstie Alley's epidemiologist spirits the tiny corpse away before anyone can see it). Also, the babies' DNA indicate that they are genetic siblings and as the years pass, these nine platinum blond kids get eviller and eviller. They use mind control to force people to do things - harm themselves, commit suicide - until the townsfolk are cowed. One of them, David (a baby Thomas Dekker who has the longest eyelashes ever) is not as mean as the rest, exhibiting some empathy for the scared and sad adults around him. The government at first studies the evil children to see if they can perhaps be weaponized, but these tiny terrors cannot be controlled.
I give this version of Village of the Damned a solid meh. It just doesn't feel like a John Carpenter movie: the Halloweens, The Fog, The Thing (omg I love The Thing), Escape from New York, They Live, Christine ... all far and away better than this flick. Reviews I read unequivocally prefer the original version. The acting is decent, Christopher Reeve is very heroic and the idea is great. It just doesn't seem to be Carpenter's strongest work.
When Adam, an arborist/forester/biologist/science-y type, is assigned to identify part of an ancient Irish forest can be cut down, he and his young family (wife Clare, baby Finn and good-dog Iggy) are met immediately with a cold reception. The local townspeople believe that the forest belongs to The Hallow - faeries, banshees, etc. - and that anyone trespassing in the forest will have to answer to those fey folk. And cutting down the trees is the worst kind of trespassing, obviously. As Clare busies herself with settling into their amazing old stone farmhouse, including removing all the pesky iron bars that crisscross the windows, Adam, accompanied by baby in backpack and dog, identifies trees to come down. He finds some weird, oozing black fungus covering a dead deer, organic spikes protruding from the carcass's throat. Because he's a scientist, he takes a sample home and finds that it is aggressively parasitic, like that zombie ant fungus (Ophiocordyceps). Well, that doesn't bode well.
Indeed, it doesn't take long before the Hallow come calling, breaking windows, disabling the family car, oozing through ceilings and floors and poking Adam's eye out. Note to viewers squeamish about eye trauma: this may not be your favorite movie. Adam becomes infected/connected to the Hallow (iron burns him, light makes him flinch, he grows spikes, etc.), baby Finn is endangered and there is much yelling and screaming whilst running through the woods once the monsters make themselves known.
I feel more positively about The Hallow than negatively but I didn't love it. I loved the setting, the practical creature effects (skittering, oozing, very yucky), the body-horror make-up was strong, the cinematography effective. But at only 1:36, the movie still felt long, especially since I didn't much care about Adam, Clare or the baby (I did care about Iggy the dog), and once the flaming scythe came into play, I was over it. Seriously: there is no way that scythe stayed burning for that long. I think part of my disconnect was also that the film couldn't decide what the monsters were. Were the monsters really faeries? If so, what was the point of the sentient fungus? Was it the fungus (a la Splinter) that turned humans into the Hallow monsters? If so, how did the changeling baby happen? Either one - faeries or fungus - would have worked but both just seemed a little undecided to me.
Holy shit - season 8? How is it possible that I have been watching this ridiculous show for that long? I can't believe I've stuck with it - I'm really only in it for Daryl, Carol, Morgan and Shiva the CGI tiger. Sometimes Maggie, now that she's become a badass. Unfortunately, there's not quite enough of any of them in this S8 opener. Anyway, the three communities - Alexandria, Hilltop and the Kingdom - have banded together and are going to war with Negan.
First scene: Rick outside somewhere, sweaty, beaten-looking, dazed. Next: a well-put together house with Weird Al's "Another One Rides the Bus" playing faintly in the background for some reason, and Old Man Rick, with grey hair and a truly HORRIFIC beard, opening his eyes in bed, fresh flowers on the bedside table. It appears we will be having flash-forwards this season. Sigh.
In the now, there are lots of preparations going on for this here upcoming war. Blacksmithing and welding; Carol and Tara up on a building or overpass, timing a herd of walkers; Daryl and Dwight exchanging sneaky messages via arrow ("TOMORROW"); Rick (and later King Ezekiel and Maggie) making awful speeches. Seriously: the writers cannot do an uplifting speech to save their lives. Blah blah blah "We start tomorrow right now ..." UGH. Just start shooting some shit already, would you?
Really, that's what most of this episode is: everyone gearing up. There's a scene with Carl out searching for gasoline and getting spooked by an unseen person who sounds slightly unhinged but harmless, until Rick pops up, shooting into the air and chasing that person off. Carl gives his dad an exasperated look and Rick's all, what? I shot over his head - I hope he'll be okay. Carl: Hope isn't enough anymore, dad.
Part of the preparations are picking off Negan's various lookouts and I now remember that Morgan is killing again (after that Kingdom kid from the end of last season), as he stabs a Savior in the back with the sharpened end of his staff. Father Gabriel and Rick have a brief heart-to-heart. Rick says goodbye to Judith - who has grown from a baby to a toddler seemingly overnight - and then kisses Michonne (and honest to God that was one of the most chemistry-free smooches I've ever seen). Michonne and Carl are staying behind in Alexandria, to defend the town should it come to that. Maggie, on the other hand, is on the front line with Rick and Ezekiel, leading her Hilltoppers. She thanks Rick for showing her how to lead and he smiles, saying that's good because after this, he's following her.
Finally, it's time. Carol, Tara, Daryl and Morgan start to lead a massive herd of walkers down the highway towards the Saviors' Sanctuary. They blow shit up from time to time, the explosions drawing the herd, keeping them moving in the right direction. Then they rig an explosive boobytrap on a route they know (from Dwight's intel) the Saviors will take to investigate the explosions. A stray walker almost sets it off but Morgan scampers down and drops it, just before the Saviors drive through. The trap goes off, obliterating those Savior cars.
Another couple of flash-forwards: sweaty/sad Rick; and happy Old Man Rick, living in peace and happiness with Michonne and Carl.
Meanwhile, the main rebel contingent has driven their armor-plated cars right up to the Sanctuary, then getting out and into place, guns a-ready. They fire enough shots to draw out Negan and his upper cadre (Dwight, Simon, Gavin, Regina, Eugene) And there's a shitload of talking. Ugh. Negan talks and talks and OMIGOD WHY DOESN'T SOMEONE WITH A RIFLE JUST PICK HIM OFF? He's right there in the open, just fucking shoot him and end this shit. The Saviors would fall apart without him. But no, it's Rick's turn to start talking and he offers sanctuary to anyone - other than Negan - who surrenders.
More talking. More talking. Negan isn't even scary anymore. He's just annoying as shit, then he does something atrocious, then he's annoying. Repeat ad nauseam. Also, he drags out that asshole Gregory who proclaims that any Hilltopper who fights against Negan will be tossed out. To which Jesus snarkily shouts, "The Hilltop stands with Maggie." And Simon gets annoyed with Gregory and pushes him down a flight of stairs. Heh.
Finally, the time for talking is over and the rebels open fire. And WTF is this? They shoot out all the windows in the warehouse. Like using thousands of rounds of semiautomatic ammunition. How is this part of the plan? Does no one remember that no one is making bullets anymore? So wasteful.
Tara, Morgan and Carol split off and Daryl leads the walker herd through the streets to the Sanctuary, setting off explosions as he goes. When the walkers are about to reach the gates, Father Gabriel sets the armored RV to moving; it rolls into the fence and explodes, opening the Sanctuary up to invasion. The rebels get in their cars and drive off, except for Rick and Gabriel. Rick has Negan pinned down behind some wreckage and is wasting bullets shooting straight into the metal. Gabriel grabs him and is all, the plan is we leave now. Amazingly, Rick hears him, jumps in his armored car and drives off. Gabriel is about to follow him when he sees Gregory wailing helplessly. Abandoning the plan, Gabriel stops to pick him up. But they get pinned down and then Gregory panics, jumping in Gabriel's car and driving off, leaving the preacher stranded and alone. And here comes that herd of walkers.
At the rendezvous, Rick and Daryl are all, I don't think Gabriel's going to make it. They stick to the plan and everyone moves off, heading to the next stage. Which is taking out Savior outposts; Morgan and Tara lead one team, Rick and Daryl another, Carol and Ezekiel a third. The good guys may start taking some casualties in this phase but we'll have to wait until next week to find out.
Back at the Sanctuary, walkers flood in. Gabriel manages to hide in a storage trailer but unluckily for him, that's where Negan has taken refuge too. I'm guessing something atrocious may happen soon.
Flash-forwards: Alexandria is getting ready for a festival and Judith drags her dad outside. He has a limp, uses a cane and is wearing pajamas and a bathrobe. And then it's sweaty, dazed Rick, sitting under a tree with a framed piece of stained glass above him, muttering about mercy.
We close with now-Rick, speechifying: "If we start tomorrow right now, no matter what comes next, we've won. We've already won!" What the fuck does that even mean? It's borderline incoherent. This show ...
Maggie, a 2015 horror/drama starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Abigail Breslin, is a kinder, gentler zombie movie. In this post-apocalyptic scenario, the Necroambulist (literally, "walking dead") virus affects both crops and people in America's heartland. While farmers are able to burn their crops, dealing with people is not so easy. The virus takes from 2-8 weeks to fully develop in people and the infected are supposed to be turned over to quarantine centers after a certain point. Authorities insist that the infected are taken care of there, treated with compassion until their final moments, but reports circulate of people being indiscriminately tossed into huge warehouses, regardless of their infection level, and just left there to rot, the more advanced cases often eating the less sick folks.
When Maggie (Breslin) runs away from her small town farming community, her father Wade (Schwarzenegger) searches for her for two weeks, finally finding her in a city hospital, having suffered a zombie bite on her arm. A local doctor pulls some strings for him and Wade is allowed to bring Maggie home, with strict instructions to get regular check-ups and to turn her in before it goes too far. Although Maggie's stepmom sends the two younger children off to live with their aunt, life at the family farmhouse goes as well as can be expected. As the infection infiltrates Maggie's body more with each passing day, the stepmom grows a little nervous; but Maggie's high school friends support and comfort her and her father is her staunchest ally, even as he knows the inevitable is coming.
A low key character study, Maggie is a horror film in name only - the biggest horror is watching a beloved family member rot before your eyes. There are a couple of zombie moments and the makeup work, as the infection advances on Maggie, is cool. Schwarzenegger is fantastic here, shaken and sorrowful and fiercely protective; many reviews I've read wish the filmmakers hadn't wimped out on the ending because he clearly could have handled it. A nice little movie for people who like their zombie movies with more brains than braineaters.
The Girl with all the Gifts was another suggestion by my friend Heidi B. and I'm awfully glad she pointed me to it. This is a good entry into the subgenre of British zombie movies and while I think it's perhaps a little too long, I absolutely enjoyed it.
Melanie is about ten years old and has a tough existence. Like a number of her peers, she is kept in a solitary cell, fed live mealworms and only allowed out to go to school, during which she is bound by her wrists, ankles and head to a wheelchair. Melanie (and her peers) are zombie children, you see, and unlike the regular adult "hungries" that have overrun Britain, they are capable of conscious thought and able to control their flesh-eating ways. At least a little. Melanie is especially special, exhibiting politeness, empathy, loyalty and capacity for complex thinking. These zombie children are being held in a military facility with research being done by Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close), who is sure she can develop a cure for the zombie fungus. When the facility gets overrun by zombies - which, of course it does - Melanie, Dr. Caldwell, Melanie's favorite teacher (Miss Justineau, played by Gemma Arterton) and a couple of soldiers are the only ones who make it out alive. As they make their way into London, trying to rejoin the remaining humans, the resourceful Melanie becomes very helpful.
The Girl with all the Giftswears its influences on its sleeve: an empty, zombie-ravaged London a la 28 Days Later; the cross-country trekking a la The Walking Dead; the military a la Romero's Day of the Dead - but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable. The cast is particularly strong with Close (pretty sure I never expected to see Glenn Close in a zombie movie), Arterton and Paddy Considine as the gruff Sergeant Parks, and Sennia Nanua is very, very good as Melanie. If you like zombie movies with a little bit of soul, check this one out.
And here's the third crowd-sourced recommendation: Dark Signal, proffered by Jamie G., whom I have known since kindergarten (or possibly nursery school). Once again, I was psyched before the opening credits stopped rolling: set in Wales (I love Welsh accents!), executive-produced by Neil Marshall (I love The Descent and Dog Soldiers!) and starring Gareth David-Lloyd (the most Welsh name ever!) (who played Ianto Jones on Torchwood!)
In gorgeous Snowdonia, Wales, where the sheep seem to outnumber the people, a serial killer is raging, attacking young women and cutting off their ring fingers, earning himself the "Wedlock Killer" moniker from the press. Also, a cranky DJ and her sound technician are on the air for the final time before their radio station sells out to a corporate owner and goes digital. Also, Kate, a single mom with a wheelchair-bound, non-verbal little boy, is coerced into being a wheelman for her overbearing boyfriend, ostensibly for the cash she'll be paid which might keep the debt collectors off her back for a while. The heist takes place at an isolated farmhouse, where the Wedlock Killer has recently claimed a victim named Sarah. While Kate waits for her boyfriend to finish ripping off the farmhouse, she is visited by the understandably unhappy specter of Sarah; unnerved, Kate heads into the farmhouse armed only with glowsticks and a tire iron. Meanwhile, the sound engineer has invited a local psychic to the final radio show and despite the cranky DJ's skepticism, they start to pick up transmissions from Ghost Sarah. Events start to converge, the identity of the Wedlock Killer is revealed and Kate becomes a very resourceful Final Girl. Dark Signal seems to have gotten terrible reviews, largely stemming from lack of logic and focus (one reviewer didn't like that there are so many accents: Welsh, Scottish, English, Polish and Italian). It may be that it can't really decide what it wants to be - ghost story or serial killer flick - but I liked it quite well.
Here's another crowd-sourced scary movie recommendation, this time from my college friend Meredith T: 10 Cloverfield Lane. (To be honest, I had already had it on my list but after she said that it freaked her out, I moved it to the head of the line.) Only tangentially related to Cloverfield, this flick is tense, well-acted and claustrophobic and really solid until the last fifteen minutes or so when we see how it connects to the first movie.
After a car accident, runaway bride Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) awakens in an underground bunker, chained to the wall. Her rescuer (and jailor) is Howard, a hardcore conspiracy theorist/survivalist played wonderfully - and by "wonderfully" I mean "terrifyingly" - by the awesome John Goodman. There's a third guy in the bunker too, a local kid who used to work for Howard and who lends enough credence to Howard's story that Michelle finally listens to it, after quite a lot of terror and trying to escape first. During her first escape attempt, Michelle sees something outside that makes her believe. You see, Howard's story is that something has gone very very wrong in the world above: something happened and a horrific blast (possibly atomic, possibly chemical warfare, possibly extra-terrestrial) has contaminated and killed most of the humans. The three of them settle into a fairly peaceable domestic routine until an air scrubber breaks down. Michelle, as the smallest person in the bunker, has to crawl through the air ducts and fix the machinery. While in the mechanical room, she sees something else that makes her determined to escape, contaminated world or not.
As I mentioned above, the acting is fantastic here. For most of 10 Cloverfield Lane, things are very tense indeed. My claustrophobia kicked into high gear while Michelle was in the air ducts and later, when things go badly, they go very badly. It's only at the very end, when things shift from tense character study to more predictable fare that I felt let down. For the most part, however, this flick holds up.
OMG you guys - where has The Howling been all my life? How can I not have watched it until now? It has everything that I love: werewolves, practical effects/make-up, the 1980s (just barely) and it's only eighty minutes long! A movie can scarcely get better than that, amirite? Spoilers ahead!
It stars Dee Wallace (who would just a couple years later kick major ass in Cujo), as news anchor Karen, who is being stalked by a sketchy dude the press has nicknamed "Eddie the Mangler." After a terrifying encounter with Eddie in a porn shop, Karen and hunky husband Bill head to a retreat called The Colony, operated by Karen's shrink. There are all sorts of weirdos there at The Colony, plus some werewolves slinking around the place. The trouble first starts with cattle mutilations, then escalates when Bill is bitten by a werewolf. Things really kick into gear when Bill totally wolfs out whilst banging The Colony's resident hootchie-mama - herself a werewolf. Karen freaks out and calls her producer/reporter/BFF Terry to come keep her company. Terry is pretty quick on the uptake and starts putting things together and then everything just totally falls apart for poor Karen and her cohorts.
The werewolf transformations are outstanding, nearly on a par with American Werewolf in London's, only a bit grosser. There are a couple of boob and butt shots, some hacking off of limbs and a reasonable amount of gore. Super-awesome flick for those of us who love new classic monster movies with practical effects - I'll take a werewolf flick over a slasher any day!
I did some crowd-sourcing for movie suggestions and my friend Heidi B came up with 2003's Freddy vs Jason. I am a big Nightmare on Elm Street fan and the earliest Friday the Thirteenth movies are not without their charms. I don't know who thought it would be a good idea to bring Freddy Kreuger and Jason Voorhees together to duke it out but the results aren't half bad, especially for those of us who like the older movies.
As far as plot goes, no one remembers Freddy anymore so he doesn't have any power over people's dreams. Somehow he is able to resurrect Jason and bring him back to Springwood (the town's name in the first Nightmare movies. The plan is, when Jason starts killing, people will start talking about and being afraid of Freddy Kreuger again, thus giving him enough power to start killing himself. Um, okay. The trouble really starts when Jason won't stop killing people and Freddy is unable to control him. There's the usual bunch of teenagers who figure all this out and have to battle not only Freddy and Jason but also the adults in town, who are convinced that keeping their heads in the sand will keep them alive. The action returns to Camp Crystal Lake for the third act and while there are a couple of survivors, it's tough to say who really wins in the FvJ cage match.
For a lot of this flick, they hewed to the slasher classics. The Final Girl is a virgin with big boobs. The first kid killed off is an asshole who Jason slices and dices right after the poor kid has sex. There were clips of lots of the classic Nightmare dreams (Johnny Depp in a blender - still my favorite!). The Final Girl lives in Nancy's house from the original Nightmare. The parents are all in on it. There's a sexually-active tomboy in a baseball hat (oh, wait, that's a Halloween and/or Carrie shoutout, isn't it?). All of that is excellent. But once things devolved into a slugfest between Freddy and Jason, I got bored. Slashers are just - to me - less interesting when the bad guys are implacable, indefatigable and nigh indestructible, even when fighting each other.
Still, Freddy vs Jason is OODLES better than Zoombies, so there's that.
I don't know what possessed me to pull Zoombies up on Netflix the other night. My very first note reads: "There is NO WAY this is any good. I predict lots of bad CGI." And holy shit, was I right. This may be theworst"movie" I have ever watched in my life. The introduction feels like a TV movie from the 1990s. The acting is terrible, especially by the one child actor. The story, as it were, is this: for some unknown reason, the animals at an endangered species sanctuary*/zoo become infected with a virus (maybe) that turns them all into zombies on the day before the zoo opens, and all the people working there - including some truly insipid "college students" there on internships - try to get out alive. On the plus side, the virus is not transferable to humans; on the negative side, if it had been, this whole thing would have been over much faster.
Here's a list of the completely awful CGI Zoombies inflicts upon its viewers:
zombie capuchin monkeys
eyeballs getting plucked out of a veterinarian's face by said zombie capuchins
zombie giraffes (I actually kind of loved that)
non-zombie elephants (later possibly zombified but that wasn't clear)
zombie lions
humans riding on CGI non-zombie elephants
zombie gorilla (also sometimes an actual dude in a gorilla suit, so points for practical effects)
zombie lemurs
CGI skull-crushing/blood spurtings
zombie lions chasing the jeep
truly appalling CGI zip-lining by remaining humans
zombie macaws pecking their way through glass
zombie eagle on fire
Other items to be duly noted. Most of the zombie attacks/killings happened off-screen - WTF is the point of that? This apparently took place in Canada because a rescue helicopter had ONTARIO written on its side. When something got infected, a zookeeper said, "I have some ointments" which were obviously just a giant tub of Vaseline. Here's one of the really good lines some guy said: "I don't see any animals. Then again, they could be in hiding." OSCAR-WORTHY SCREENPLAY RIGHT THERE.
I could go on, I guess, but I won't. Here, unequivocally; DO NOT WATCH ZOOMBIES. Unless you're planning a drinking game around it, in which case go nuts. (I do kind of like the poster, though.)
Ooh! Starry Eyes (2014) is fun and totally horror-y! What a bleak, nifty Satanic flick about just how far some people will go to make it in Hollywood.
The plot is pretty straightforward: it follows Sarah, an aspiring actress, as she navigates her currently listless existence, waiting tables at a crappy Hooters knockoff and hanging out with vapid friends, most of whom are also trying to get their break into the movie business. Sarah is relentless, however, and while she at first seems like a milquetoast, when she finally lands an audition, her madness starts to surface. It's fun and also brutal to watch: Sarah is our protagonist but she is also a monster, helped along by this production company whose head tells her, "Dreams require sacrifice - and so do we."
A character study at first, the tension ratchets up as does the gory and body horror - all makeup and practical effects done quite well. Starry Eyes is a grim look at Hollywood and what some people are willing to do to achieve their dreams there - according to this movie, some people are willing to do quite a lot. (Other positive reviews here: at Final Girl and at Roger Ebert, no less!)
HERE BE SPOILERS.The Shrine is a 2010 steamer. This guy's review is spot-on - especially when he lists all the better movies this flick steals from and also A FENCE FOR CHRISSAKES - but he liked it better than I did. Read it if you would like some coherence.
But here, this is what you get. (1) Briefly sketched plot summary: an American student goes missing whilst travelling in Poland; two female journalists and a male photographer go in search of the story; it ends badly for most involved. And (2) to change it up here, I'm just going to give you the notes I jotted down as I watched:
Aaron Ashmore is the only decent actor - dialogue is pretty stilted
OMG WANDERING AROUND IN THE FOG FOREVER (demon statue/shrine)
So far, like a SyFy original
Do not follow the creepy little girl! Listen to Aaron Ashmore!
Do not open the coffins! Do not take the murder masks off the corpses!
These three are IDIOTS (only AA has any sense at all). I very much dislike Carmen and Sara = non-entity
Crossbow!
Is that really Polish they're speaking?
While the women are getting prepped for sacrifice, AA gets to dig his own grave
There goes Sara - oooooo the masks have spikes. Meanwhile, AA still digging
Escape! Carmen is good at running barefoot through the forest
Carmen is hallucinating - must have been something in the fog
Demon wants her ... NOPE she's turning into a demon.
NEW THEORY: the fog infects people who go into it so the priests have to kill all the infected people before the demon is unleashed. Priests = good guys!
A lot of people really hated the first of this anthology series, V/H/S - apparently I didn't but found it tiresome and a little shallow. This second installment (V/H/S 2) was also tiresome and I'm going to shout here but WHO THE FUCK USES VHS TAPES IN 2013? It is entirely possible to do actual stories with short movies so why can't these horror directors? While there are some decent moments in these four shorts, the dialogue is largely terrible and the characters uninteresting. Whee!
Framework story:Tape 49. A couple of private investigators break into an apartment looking for a missing college student. They find a bunch of televisions and hundreds of VHS tapes. One investigator sits down to watch the tapes.
Phase I Clinical Trials. An asshole gets an experimental prosthetic eye after losing his own in an accident. There are side effects: the eye sees ghosts/malevolent spirits. It ends badly. My notes say: "Shit. Fake found footage films always make me queasy."
Framework. The PIs are not alone in the apartment. So they watch another tape.
A Ride in the Park. A kid Go-Pros his ride on the BORINGEST mountainbike trail on the planet. Seriously, until the zombies show up, who would ever want to watch that footage? Oh. Zombies show up, the MTBer gets bitten, he turns and bites other people, including the attendees at a child's birthday party - all of which is captured on the Go-Pro. This one was pretty gory (intestines!) but also kind of fun.
Framework. The PIs are not alone in the apartment and the girl one has a migraine and bloody nose. So they watch another tape.
Safe Haven. A clueless (and somewhat douchebaggy) documentary crew films a death/doomsday cult in Indonesia right at the end of days. This one I actually liked for a while: it was very creepy with all the cult members. Then things just went batshit crazy with lots of heads getting blown off by shotguns and skittering ceiling walkers and zombies and exploding cult leaders and demons bursting out of women's wombs. There was a lot of yelling and squishy blood and the goat-demon is the awesomest low budget puppet ever. So there's that.
Framework. The girl PI is unconscious or dead so the other one watches another tape.
Slumber Party Alien Abduction. The title of this short tells you EXACTLY what happens. There's a dog-cam, all the teenagers are completely unlikable assholes and it's very loud.
Framework. Everybody (or possibly nobody, it's tough to tell) dies.
I read, ski, drink good beer, go to matinees by myself, honestly believe that the DVR is the world's greatest invention, burn dinner for Mr. Mouse on a semi-regular basis and watch more horror films than I think I do. I like puppies and kittens and baby bunnies and bacon and sunshine and the mountains of Utah and chocolate banana malted milkshakes and puppies and chick flicks (no, not chick flicks) and surprises and classic Mustangs and did I say puppies already? I like sarcasm and snark and tend to have a glass-half-empty view of life because when things turn out, I'm pleasantly surprised. I also like puppies.
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