Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #7: Bloodsucking Bastards

Shaun of the Dead plus Office Space plus BtVS = Bloodsucking Bastards.  You could do much, much worse - and I have.

Evan Sanders (Fran Kranz, Dollhouse, Cabin in the Woods) is having a rough time of it.  He is the acting sales manager at a telesales company, with an apathetic sales team comprised of bros and weirdos.  His girlfriend just dumped him and she works in the same office so he sees her all the time.  Just when he thinks he's going to be promoted to sales manager, his boss hires someone from outside: Max (Pedro Pascal, the Viper from Game of Thrones), Evan's douchey nemesis from college.  And just to rub salt in the wounds: Max is a vampire and he's on a recruitment tear.

Bloodsucking Bastards is a lightweight horror comedy.  It's pretty funny and has buckets of blood but is never actually scary.  It's clearly lower budget than Shaun of the Dead or Slither, and yet has its own charms.  The characters are actually well-developed and the way they act makes sense for who they are and the universe they inhabit.  I'm not sure it's ever found much of an audience but I'm glad I found it: its cheerfully bloody tone has encouraged me to press on with scary (or, "scary") movies for the second half of October.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #6: Bad Milo!

I am really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.  I have got to find something that is both scary and good, or at least not awful.  Bad Milo had some promise:  a Duplass Brothers production, this horror comedy has a great cast, including Ken Marino (who looks really good here), Gillian Jacobs, Patrick Warburton, Mary Kay Place, Stephen Root and Peter Stormare.

Duncan (Marino) is a very nice guy who is under a lot of stress.  His boss (Warburton) is making him do the round of layoffs and also has just stolen everybody's money.  His wife Sara (Jacobs) wants to have a baby.  His mom (Place) has a sexed-up boytoy second husband who wants Duncan to call him "dad."  A fertility doctor, hired by his mom, is convinced Duncan has ED.  And his dad (Root) abandoned him and his mom when Duncan was just little and is living off the grid somewhere, smoking a lot of dope.  All of this stress and anxiety has manifested itself as ... a giant, sentient, detachable butt polyp with shark teeth and a penchant for popping out of Duncan's butt to eviscerate his enemies.

Now, normally I love monster movies, especially ones with practical effect monsters.  But I just cannot get behind [pun intended] a rectal polyp monster.  This is a middling sort of movie, not committing to being really funny or really gory or really making fun of anything.  The cast is strong and game, given the potty humor they're given, but Bad Milo! is just unnecessary.  It's not terrible enough to be offensive but it's pretty pointless.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #5: Pod

My notes, before the movie starts:  Well, at the worst it's only 1 hour and 18 minutes.

In Pod, there are three siblings: Martin, Ed and Lila.  Martin is a vet, struggling with PTSD and living "in the middle of nowhere" which is actually the coast of Maine.  Ed is a doctor and Lila is a millennial with a bit of a drinking problem.  This is all the characterization you will get for these three.  After receiving a disturbing voicemail from Martin, Ed and Lila drive up to make sure their brother is okay.  He isn't: he has covered the interior of the tidy little coastal cottage with foil, is paranoid, ranting and raving, has pulled out some of his own teeth and shaved his head, and claims to have been experimented on when he was in the army.  Oh, and he says he's got a "pod" locked in the basement, which creature killed his dog and scratched him up something fierce, infecting him.  Obviously his brother and sister think he's nuts.  But later, after [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS], Ed investigates the cellar - which is a pretty typical Maine cellar, all ledge-y and full of water seepage - and, gosh, he shouldn't have done that.

My notes, during the movie:  How many shots in a rifle like that?

As mentioned above, the characters are thin and underdeveloped. I did squirm a little when the tension rose a little: I was expecting jump scares that didn't come, so that made me nervous.  There's not much blood/gore and it really isn't scary.  The plot is nothing if not unoriginal, but at least what happened made sense in the movie's universe and was interesting.

My notes, at the end:  Well, it's not GOOD but it's better than Final Girl.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #4: Final GIrl

Ugh.  To follow the marvelous Babadook with this piece of crap?  I'm talking about Final Girl, not to be confused with the recently watched and moderately entertaining The Final Girls or Stacie Ponder's excellent and much lamented blog Final Girl.  This 2015 steamer starring Abigail Breslin (still trying desperately to break away from her breakout Little Miss Sunshine role) and Wes Bentley is not worth anyone's time.  I almost didn't bother including it here - since there's nothing horror-y about it, despite its Netflix tags - but figured if I suffered through it, I might as well make you suffer through it too.

William (Wes Bentley) recruits recently-orphaned five year old Veronica into the Program, wherein the long goal is to avenge his murdered wife and child.  Twelve years later, Veronica (Abigail Breslin) has been "trained" to be an assassin and is pointed at four privileged teen-aged douchebags who enjoy hunting and killing girls.  Her "training" has included standing with bare feet on cold rocks and punching awkwardly; Veronica is no Sarah Connor.  (And these teenaged douchebags are clearly not William's ultimate targets, since they would have been five years old when his family was killed, so this "movie" is presumably the first installment in a series as Veronica hones her skills, I guess.)  Veronica goes out into the woods with the douchebags and with very little difficulty, no tension and no blood to speak of, kills them all.  Then she and William have diner pancakes where she sucks her whipped cream-covered finger suggestively.

This is not a horror movie.  It is not the least bit scary and there is no suspense or jump scares or gore.  It is scarcely violent.  The whole thing is stagy and stylized, with bright spotlights out in the middle of a rainy forest for no reason.  My notes include: "OMG SO BAD" and "We're at the climactic fistfight and I would be beside myself with annoyance except I just don't fucking care."  I don't know why Breslin and Bentley did this movie and I don't know who, if anyone, watched it.  Trust me, you can do better.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #3: The Babadook

There now, that's more like it.

Widowed mom Amelia (the incomparable Essie Davis) is not coping well.  Still depressed by her husband's death as he drove her to the hospital for the birth of their son, she is stressed and exhausted, sleep-deprived, struggling to connect with her child.  Samuel (Noah Wiseman, also very good) is a weird little kid and from the moment you meet him, you feel for his mother.  He is disobedient, shrieky and off-putting.  Already under strain, their relationship deteriorates after the appearance of a horrible children's pop-up book, Mister Babadook; Sam becomes violent and menacing, building homemade weapons and repeatedly telling his mother that "[he] doesn't want her to die."  Unable to sleep and with no support from her family, Amelia becomes more and more unhinged until suddenly the audience realizes they have shifted their sympathies to Sam: his mom has become terrifying.  All the while the Babadook lurks and looms.

The titular monster isn't all that original or scary in and of itself - we've all seen skittering, looming and lurking before.  And I lost my focus for a time towards the end of the movie when the threats became more overt.  But for most of this wonderful little Australian movie, the tension ratchets up, bit by bit, until I was continuously squirming nervously in my chair.  Whether you believe that Mister Babadook is a real malevolent entity or instead a product of Amelia's instability and Sam's overactive imagination (and I believe a case can be made for that), The Babadook is a taut, scary look at loss, resentment and parenthood.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #2: All Cheerleaders Die

Here's a brief plot synopsis of All Cheerleaders Die (2013): When the head cheerleader dies in a freak cheering accident, her spot on the squad is filled by her unlikely film student/outsider friend Maddie, who is intent on infiltrating the football team/cheerleader world to avenge her fallen friend.  After some high school lesbian hijinks and hurt feelings, it turns into the girls vs. the boys, which escalates into Maddie and her friends getting driven off an embankment and drowning the river.  Luckily, Maddie's ex-GF is a Goth witch and she resurrects the dead girls who, after a short adjustment period, get their revenge on.

Look, this movie is a mess.  Within the first five minutes, I was completely annoyed at the loud music montages - the sound is very uneven throughout.  There is way too much very shrill screaming, the magic/blood special effects are abysmal and distracting, there is barely any character development to differentiate one of the high school stereotypes from the other.  There are a couple of funny bits, and some laugh-out-loud/bizarre music cues, but just not enough to make this a clever horror-comedy.  The director is the same guy who made the strong little May and I could get what he was going for, some sort of a Jennifer's Body meets Heathers meets Bring It On meets The Craft.  But ACD is nowhere near the quality of any of those movies.

Plus the only really scary part came in the closing title card when it read: All Cheerleaders Die Part One. I mean, dafuck, there's more?  That's TERRIFYING.

Seventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series #1: The Final Girls

Seven years I've been doing this October scary movie series?  It's a good thing too, because if I didn't, the number of annual posts here at Friend Mouse Speaks would drop off even further: in 2008, I posted 217 times; last year, I only put up 61 - and twelve of them were in October.  Wow.  So here we go, limping along with 2015's The Final Girls.

Max Cartwright (Taissa Farmiga) is a sad girl, having lost her beloved mom (Malin Akerman) in a car crash three years ago.  Her mom, Amanda, wasn't the most successful person - her one claim to fame was starring in the in-universe sleepaway camp cult slasher, Camp Bloodbath, in the 1980s - but Max misses her.  When Max and some of her friends attend a local art house showing of Camp Bloodbath, they are mysteriously drawn into the movie and Max finds herself face-to-face with her mom, except that she's "Nancy," the character in the slasher film.  All the CB characters are only aware of themselves as the characters and it soon becomes clear to the modern teenage interlopers that they will only get out of the slasher flick alive if they make it to the end credits.  When the slasher flick starts to deviate from the script and the designated Final Girl meets an untimely end, Nancy and Max's bond becomes strong as they step up to fight against CB's masked and machete-ed villain.

Positive notes:  this horror/comedy mess has a strong cast, with the aforementioned Farmiga and Akerman, plus Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development) and Nina Dobrev (The Vampire Diaries) among others.  The scenes between Max and Nancy/Amanda are really strong.  And it's fun to see the teenagers navigate a universe they know so well due to repeated viewings of Camp Bloodbath and general knowledge of slasher film tropes.

On the minus side:  The Final Girls is incredibly uneven in tone.  The rules of the universe are changeable so it's difficult for the audience to get a grip.  Rated PG-13, it's practically bloodless and pretty much tension-free so as to scarcely qualify as horror, and while parts are funny, it's certainly not funny enough to be a comedy.  It isn't a full-on spoof nor is it much of an homage, as the camera work is not very classic slasher-like.  Scream, now a classic in its own right, did a much better job of acknowledging, pointing fun at and ultimately abiding by the rules of horror films.  The Final Girls is entertaining but would have been stronger with some actual scary moments to balance out the humor and the move-within-the-movie self-awareness.

Trying to keep up

This blog seems abandoned but in actuality I am circling the wagons for the upcoming Seventh Annual Friend Mouse Speaks Scarelicious October Movie Series.  BUT ALSO, there's just so much I want to be watching on Netflix right now (as opposed to crap horror movies).  Like more Farscape and needing to start Galavant and Luke Cage is about to drop and I know nothing about Easy other than it looks like it's got a fantastic cast and OMIGOD the last season of Penny Dreadful is available now ...

It's too much.  There's too much.  I clearly need to quit my job, never go outside again and just consume as much visual media as I possibly can.

Farscape, where have you been all my life?

I recently got chastised by several scifi/fantasy loving friends for not having tackled Farscape yet.  In my (admittedly thin) defense, I have been busy watching BtVS, Angel, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, The X-Files, Fringe, Dollhouse, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly and a whole bunch of other genre shows.  I am currently working on this deficit, having just finished S1E16, and I just like it more and more as it goes on.

For those who don't know, Farscape is a science fiction television show that ran for four seasons (1999-2003 (or 1998-2002, depending on what source you use)) before being abruptly cancelled.  Nutshell summary:  an American scientist/astronaut gets shot through a wormhole during an experimental flight and ends up on board a starship with a bunch of on-the-run aliens.  Yes, it is a show about a bunch of people on a spaceship flying around the universe and having adventures ... which pretty much describes every other science fiction television show ever made (Star Trek in all its iterations, Firefly, BSG, etc.)  What makes it different is that when we start, none of the characters like or even know each other, plus half of them are puppets a la The Jim Henson Company.  The CGI is pretty weak but there isn't much of it and the practical puppets and make-up effects are phenomenal.  Each of the characters is developed and they all change and grow - even though they are the "heroes," they all do unlikable but perfectly understandable and in-character things.  It's quite amazing, actually, for a show like this.

I'm getting through episodes as fast as I can, and hopefully won't get derailed too badly by returning network shows (or Galavant, which was just raved about by one of the aforementioned friends).  What I really need is a rainy sick day so I can just immerse myself in the Farscape 'verse.  And you should too, if you haven't already (it's streaming on Netflix so go for it).

Season's greetings

Since I am still resolutely avoiding finishing out the True Blood recaps, all I've got for you a premieres list of new and returning television shows in which I will be indulging.  Clearly I have too much time available to watch television.  (Also, judging from the length of this list, I better buckle down if I want to get through at least one Farscape season before regular t.v. starts up again.)

American Horror Story - 9/14 and I have no idea what this season's theme is (ridiculous show)

Gotham - 9/19 and yes, I am going to give it another shot although it may have to go

The Good Place - 9/19 with Kristen Bell, a resurgent Ted Danson and pretty good initial reviews

New Girl - 9/20 although I may take this off the list and just catch up on-demand

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - 9/20 although I will be mourning Agent Carter for the duration

Last Man on Earth - 9/25 which Mr. Mouse watches with me (yay!)

Luke Cage - 9/30 (on Netflix) can't wait can't wait can't wait

The Flash - 10/4 and I hope they crossover a LOT with Supergirl

Arrow - 10/5 and I've forgotten where we left off story-wise but don't imagine it much matters

Supergirl - 10/10 and I will be paying close attention to the stunts because Jessie Graff kicks ass!

Legends of Tomorrow - 10/13 but this is another bubble show for me and is totally on probation

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - 10/21 and my new favorite, now that I binged S1 this summer

The Walking Dead - 10/23 and yes, we will be picking up the grim recapping right away

There are a couple other shows (on SyFy? Falling Water?) that I don't know much about other than marginally intriguing trailers, so we'll see how the season shapes up.  Mr. Mouse will be complaining that Better Call Saul and Fargo aren't back yet ... we'll add those in when they get here.  What will you be watching?