Thirteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #7 #Alive

 Nothing like a zombie movie, amirite?  I do love a good one but these days, zombies are oversaturated.  There's been so many movies, plus The Walking Dead (remember when I used to recap that show? good times) and its spin-offs, that it's just difficult to come up with something new and exciting.  #Alive (2020, Korean, with English subtitles, on Netflix) is decent but not particularly groundbreaking.

The apocalypse (mini-apocalypse, really, very limited) happens quickly: people get infected, then they eat other people, then they get gnarlier and gnarlier as the disease progresses.  These are the fast zombie variety and technically they're not zombies since they're still alive (hahaha #alive lol); they are of the 28 Days/Weeks ilk: infected and deadly.

Our protagonist is a gamer dude who lives at home.  When he wakes up late one morning, finding a note from his mom that there's not much food in the house so he should go to the store, all hell breaks loose in Seoul.  Suffice it to say that he doesn't get a chance to grocery shop.  He hunkers down in the apartment, posts on social media to let people know he's still alive, and watches horrible things happening on the street below him.  Days pass, zombies break in sporadically although he's mostly barricaded in, the water gets shut off - and here's a quibble, how the fuck does he survive for fifteen days with scarcely any water? - and eventually he gets desperate.  But soft! What light from yonder window breaks?  It's another survivor in the apartment building across the way and thank goodness, she's a LOT more competent than our guy.

#Alive is entertaining enough, slightly different from the usual zombie fare due to the main characters' extreme isolation.  The zombie makeup is really good, which makes up for the fact that this isn't a particularly scary movie.  Or maybe after the last six years, zombies just don't scare me anymore.

Thirteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #6 Day Shift

 Day Shift is a new (2022) straight-to-Netflix horror-comedy starring Jamie Foxx as Bud, a hard-working but non-union vampire hunter in the San Fernando valley.  When his ex-wife threatens to take their kid and move to Florida, he needs to come up with enough cash - quickly - to pay for the kid's tuition and braces to entice her to stay.  He wheedles his way back into the Vampire Hunters Union, on the good word of legendary slayer Snoop Dogg, but gets saddles with Seth, a bean-counting chaperone (Dave Franco).  JF starts racking up the kills (the hunters collects vamp teeth as proof) and soon kills the wrong old lady vampire, pissing off the head vamp, Audrey.  Audrey kidnaps Bud's family, there's lots of car chases ... and this just didn't hold my attention very well.

The action is solid, with good fight choreography, and it's plenty gory.  But this is not even close to scary, or all that funny, or all that original.  I give it a meh.

Thirteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #5 Oats Studio

 From the mind of Neill Blomkamp comes Oats Studios, a series of post-apocalyptic / science fiction / horror short films (some of them very short), both animated and live action.  There's plenty of violence and gore but horror purists will likely take issue with my including this here.  I don't care.  This is my blog, this is my October series, I liked most of these little films and several of them made me squirm.  Scroll on by if you must.

Rakka - This was the longest of them, I think, an alien invasion/human resistance piece.  It very much looks like District 9 (love that movie).  Violent, bloody, with body mods and holy hell Sigourney Weaver!

Firebase - Set in Vietnam, U.S. forces finding tens of thousands dead, mutilated corpses like no one has ever seen, a survivor in the tunnel, the River God.  Unsettling.

Cooking with Bill - The scary movies are interspersed with funny ones to lighten the mood.  Cooking with Bill definitely has a lighter tone but HOLY FUCK I literally gagged at the sushi.  Not for those with weak stomachs.

God: Serengeti/ Chicago - Imagine God as a bored, petty deity inflicting pointless misery on the humans laid out before him in dioramas.  This is half live action and half animation and the tiny human animation is very, very good.

Zygote - Only two miners have survived out of 98 at the installation.  Something horrific killed the rest and the survivors are trying to get to the next building where there's a possibility of safety.  The male actor was nearly impossible for me to understand, speech-wise.  The monster is AMAZING and looks really good even though I think it's mostly animation and not practical.  This one counts as space horror.

Bad President - Another "funny" segment (not very funny) about how awful the U.S. president is after the alien invasion.  My least favorite of the lot.

Adam: Episode 2 - All robots, prisoners and guards.  They're trying to remember who they were, where they came from.  All animation.

Adam: Episode 3 - A mystic requires all supplicants to renounce technology in exchange for refuge, healing and miracles.  The miracles are real but there's a twist.  Uncanny valley animation.

Gdansk - More uncanny animation (not my favorite style, to be honest) set in what looks like medieval times.  Plus there's a giant.  And the Neverending Story theme song which made me laugh.

Kapture/Locust - The final bit is more uncanny valley animation with new weapons testing on unsuspecting human prisoners.  Lots of animated blood splashing about.

I definitely preferred the live action stuff (Rakka and Zygote particularly) to the animated pieces.  Some more successful than others but generally solid stuff if you're in the mood for weird sci-fi/horror adjacent stuff.

Thirteen Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #4 Creepshow 2 (1987)

 As previously noted, I am a sucker for anthologies, even though they are so often a mixed bag.  Such is the case with 80s classic Creepshow 2.  Trying to capitalize on the success of the first Creepshow, this second installment just isn't quite as good.  It has only three chapters, down from five in the first movie, due to budget constraints.  Based on stories by Stephen King, it was written by George Romero, and one would think that you couldn't get any more horror pedigreed than that.  But the third chapter is very thin, character- and story-wise, and the first chapter is plagued by bad wigs and off-screen gore.  The interconnecting story is on the light side too, and I didn't much care for the animation, although I get that it's got that comics connection. 

Chapter 1: Old Chief Wood'n Head.  This one at least has George Kennedy!  He's a general store owner in a dying small town.  His wife would like him to cut his losses and close the store but he knows that it's the only place around for the local indigenous population and he doesn't want to leave them stranded, even though they're all overextended on credit.  As he is meticulously repainting the wooden Indian on the front porch, one of the local tribe's elders comes to him.  They treat each other with mutual respect and the elder gives Kennedy a pouch of priceless turquoise and silver jewelry.  When Kennedy protests, the elder says that it is just until they repay their debts.  After the elder leaves, some young punks rob the store, killing the shopkeeper and his wife and taking the tribe's treasure.  The wooden Indian, who has seen all that has transpired at the shop, avenges the killings and retakes the tribe's treasure.

Chapter 2: The Raft.  This is the only one for which I vaguely remember a Stephen King short story.  Four kids go out to a lake long after summer season is over.  It's chilly, but no one is around so they strip down and swim out to the raft in the middle of the lake.  Unfortunately, the lake is home to a menacing slick of black oil/goo that has a taste for meat.  People meat, in case that wasn't clear.  The acting is impressively bad but the evil goo effects are terrifically gross.  And despite my very short plot summary (it's all you need, really), this was a really fun, sick little piece and by far the best of the three.

Chapter 3: The Hitchhiker.  A rich woman, having an affair, is late to get home and runs down a hitchhiker.  She bolts and tries to rationalize that she'll turn herself in later, after she's gotten home.  (Meanwhile, several other good Samaritans, including a truck driver played by Stephen King himself, do stop to try to help but the stricken hitchhiker dies.)  This chapter was especially dumb, I thought.  There's no plot to it at all, just this unsympathetic lady driving her Mercedes through the woods, trying to escape the murdered hitchhiker who is now haunting her.  That's it.  That's the story.  On the plus side, the practical effects of said hitchhiker get increasingly gnarly as the movie goes on, so that's good.

Thirteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #3 Urban Legend (1998)

 Ah, that's better: a classic late 90s slasher, one of the post-Scream attempts to revitalize the genre. Urban Legend came out in 1998 - also known as the year I met Mr. Mouse - and it has all the 90s hits: gas at $1.14/gallon!  Girls with dark lipstick! Pagers! Internet via phone line modems! Slide projectors! Boot-cut jeans!  And it has an outstanding cast: Jared Leto, Alicia Witt, Joshua Jackson (with a hilarious Dawson's Creek joke), Tara Reid (before all the surgery), Michael Rosenbaum and Rebecca Gayheart (I coveted her hair), plus Robert Englund (Freddy himself) and a pre-Deadwood Brad Dourif.  Just outstanding!

It was a dark and stormy night in Maine.  (And hallelujah that no one really attempted a Maine accent.)  A Pendleton college girl gets axe-murdered to start things off.  And later, her murder comes up when a college professor (Englund) is teaching his class on urban legends.  As someone starts picking off college kids, our Final Girl Alicia Witt (no one care what her character name is, right?) realizes that the killings are patterned after various urban legends.  For some reason.  

At this point in my notes I decided to guess who the killer is: I picked Jared Leto because he was kind of weird and bossy and has a crush on Alicia, so he's killing all the people around her.  I also noted that: no one uses glass mugs at frat parties.  They use red Solo cups.

This is a slasher, so here's how everyone dies SPOILERS FOR A TWENTY-FOUR YEAR OLD MOVIE: beheaded with an axe from the backseat; hung in the woods; strangled while roommate is in the next bed; run over in parking garage and impaled on tire spikes; pop rocks and Drano (plus dog in the microwave); stabbed; axe-murdered on air; stabbed and stuffed in a trunk.

Is this a horror movie?  Technically, but it's more silly than scary and not at all gory, axe-murders notwithstanding.  Still, I enjoyed it lots more than that Resident Evil nonsense.  Viva la 90s slashers!

Thirteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #2 Resident Evil: Retribution

 Oh my hell.  Will someone please tell me to never bother watching another Resident Evil movie again?  I've seen two for this movie series so far - Extinction (2007) and now Retribution (2012) - and I know I've seen the first one (2004).  But there's also Apocalypse (2004), Afterlife (2010) and The Final Chapter (2016) and it's really important that I don't watch them.  I do like Mila Jovovich and she is by far the best part of these ridiculous movies but it's just so dumb.

Basically - and yes, I know that this series is based on a horror video game and I know that the series has grossed $1,200,000,000 - but Retribution is a plot-free video game where the "characters" move from scene to scene, shooting things and trying to move to the next level.  The "story" is that Alice has been stripped of her previous super-powers and captured by the Umbrella Corporation, held in HQ where they develop bio weapons and run self-contained simulations in places like "Moscow" and "New York" and, for some reason "Suburbia."  A team goes in to rescue Alice; she ends up rescuing them right back, in addition to a little "girl" who is a clone/fodder for the bio weapon simulations.

Some old friends pop back (Oded Fehr and Michelle Rodriguez) and some old enemies too, I guess.  The zombies are pretty good - fast and vicious and prone to ripping throats out, but not even enough to make this a "horror" movie - but there's just so much shooting (SO MUCH) and bad CGI.  It's distracting and just all so dumb.

OH AND IT'S IN 3D, DEAR GOD

Thirteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #1 Creep

 Welcome back, ghouls and goblins, to the THIRTEENTH annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series! I can't believe it's October already - it seems like we haven't done so much this year and yet, still, the year has just flown by - but let's get into it.  I asked on social media for scary movie recommendations because after over a decade of doing this, and over 187 horror (or horror-adjacent) movies watched (see the Movie Review A-Z link over there, will it do ya?), I'm needing some help finding good ones.  There's plenty on the streamers but so many of them seem to be Netflix-originals (or whomever) and that stuff is just jump scares and weak sauce.  If you've got any suggestions, please leave them in the comments!  I'm especially partial to monster movies (werewolves, aliens, creepy-crawlies, giant alligators, slugs, and I'll include vampires and zombies too) and big bonus points for practical effects.  Some of my all-time favorites are The Thing (I may need to rewatch that this year ...), American Werewolf in London, Ginger Snaps, Dog Soldiers and Dead Alive.  

But I digress.  This first one was recommended to me by a grade school (!!) friend.  He watches quite a lot of horror movies - I think he's got a higher tolerance for jump scares than I do - so I tend to listen to what he says. And he said: Creep, the 2014 found-footage film starring Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice.

Aaron, a videographer (Patrick Brice) answers an ad for a one-day gig, up in the mountains of California, filming a day-in-the-life of a dying man, Joseph (Mark Duplass), as a video diary for Joseph's unborn baby.  Easy enough gig, just have to put up with this slightly off-kilter dude for eight hours.  And to be sure, Joseph is off-kilter: invading personal space, naked in the bathtub within fifteen minutes of meeting Aaron, jumping out and scaring Aaron multiple times.  But Aaron is conflicted, because although this guy is weird, he's not too weird, maybe just lacking in social graces and off-putting in the face of his imminent demise.  So Aaron puts up with it, with the wolf mask and the fast-paced hike into the wilderness (lol I know it was in service of the plot, but I do a lot of hiking and there's no way anyone could have gotten lost on that well-travelled a trail, despite Aaron's city-slicker misgivings), strange confessions, etc.  

Aaron finishes the gig but picks up a disturbing phone call on Joseph's phone after the other guy passes out from too much whiskey.  In the morning (too drunk to drive, plus keys mysteriously missing), Aaron gets the hell out of there when Joseph seems threatening.  It doesn't end there, however, and Aaron realizes that taking this job was a big mistake.  I'm not going to spoil it further: at under an hour and a half, you'll get where this movie is going fast enough.

Is Creep a ground-breaking little indie, a la The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity?  No, not at all.  Is it uncomfortable and creepy, edging into unsettling for moments?  Yes, absolutely.  Mark Duplass is quite good at going against his mumblecore type.   There's a number of jump scares too (gawd I hate jump scares such a chicken) and to sum up, this is an uncomfortable without being scary, solid little non-gory creeper.

Watchlist, late summer edition

 We're gearing up for the Thirteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series so I guess I should do an update on the general watchiness around here.

• Umbrella Academy 3 - Gosh, I just love this show.  Super entertaining, dark-ish but not too dark, how can you not love bickering pseudohero siblings?
• Stranger Things 4 - What can you say about this juggernaut?  I didn't love how everyone was separated for the most part, and the ending seemed rushed, but again, super entertaining.  And Kate Bush getting the global love she always should have had.
• The Mandalorian - Love the theme music, love Pedro Pascal, love baby Yoda.  Not over the moon with this series but a very strong entry into the Star Wars universe.
• Sex Education - Binged however many seasons are currently on Netflix (three, I think).  Really liked this one, thought the cast was charming and well-put together.
• Ms. Marvel - Talk about a charming and well-put together cast!  I binged through this one quickly and thought it was great fun.  Love how colorful and young it was; enjoyed and learned a lot from the peeks into Pakistani culture.  Great show.
• So You Think You Can Dance - This competition show is back after a couple years away, "updated" for a younger audience which means that one of the judges is now Jojo Siwa (whoever the hell she is).  I really like watching the dances but the show was shortened and so it seemed like there was much less actual performance than in seasons past.  The judges were annoying (other than tWitch) and almost never gave any actual criticism / placing too much importance on "feeling the character."  Yeah, but you also got to point your damn toes.
• Sandman - I love the comics (and need to reread them) and thought this live action version was damn good.  Looked expensive, though, and I'm hearing rumors that Netflix won't sign on for a second season.  That would be a shame because there's still so many stories to be told there.

Mr. Mouse and I are also up to speed on all the Better Call Saul on Netflix; we're ready to dive into S2 of Only Murders in the Building, S2 of Reservation Dogs and S5 of Cobra Kai.

Also, I got a new laptop with a different touchpad and am on a learning curve with it - so no links to shows right now.  Y'all know how to google things, don't you?

Next up: the first scary movie of spooky season.  (I hate myself for using "spooky season.")

Watchlist, late spring edition

 Since the end of March (that's really not that long and I haven't accomplished all that much, tbh):

• Russian Doll S2 - Not as mind-blowing as the first season, which was so unexpected and original, but still vastly superior to most of what's out there.  Adore Natasha Lyonne.

• Moon Knight - Liked it, wanted to love it but didn't.  Kind of dark and gloomy.  Oscar Isaac's English accent was distracting and I wanted much more of Layla, Egyptian Superhero.

• Eternals - Meh.  Felt like a missed opportunity.  Cast too big to get to know, CGI distracting.

• Happy Endings - Finished it.  Seems like it went out with a whimper, rather than a bang.

• Sweet Tooth - Really quite liked this one, having gone into it with no expectations or knowledge of the source material.  Hope it gets a second season because the ending just seemed abrupt.

Currently: almost done with The Mandalorian and am into S3 of Sex Education.  Looking forward very much to S3 of Umbrella Academy (I just rewatched S2 in anticipation) and She Hulk, Attorney at Law.

Watchlist, spring edition

 And this is what I've done since December 5, 2021:

• Finished S1 of Wheel of Time.  I think it finished stronger than it started - I actually wanted more when I wrapped up the last episode - but I very much take issue with what they're doing with Mat Cauthon's character.  I've been sporadically rereading the book series (midway through Book Four) and Mat is not evil and not a coward.  He's a charming troublemaker, and a reluctant hero, who does the right thing in spite of himself, with a big part to play.  This is not what the series is doing and I'm not happy about it.  I'll be waiting for S2 to see if they course-correct.
• I stalled out on Cowboy Bebop and am halfway through S6 of The Expanse.  I am just not interested in the Philip storyline and it's taking up too much time away from the core characters so I am having difficulty rallying to the finish.
• I watched Hellbound and while I very much enjoyed it while I was watching it, I can barely remember it now.  Pretty gnarly violence (CGI blood and burning).
• If you're a fan of stop-motion animation (I am), The House is fun.  Three tangentially connected stories, the first is very creepy and the next two are more charming and clever than eerie.  
• Loved Only Murders in the Building (Hulu).  Selena Gomez holds her own against legends Steve Martin and Martin Short.  Mr. Mouse actually wants to watch it so I'll watch it again with him.
• Got through WandaVision and Loki; started but fizzled out on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.  WandaVision was fantastic and heart-breaking - kudos to Elizabeth Olsen.  I enjoyed Loki too but wanted much much more time with all the multiverse Lokis.  AlligatorLoki!
• Speaking of watching things with Mr. Mouse: we powered through all eleven (?) seasons of the live action Trailer Park Boys.  The first half of the series is very, very funny (being from Maine, we could recognize a lot of the Nova Scotia stereotypes and tropes); the last few seasons were a little too shouty but we needed to complete it.  Will not be continuing with the movie or the animated series.
• We also completed Money Heist.  The first heist was terrific.  The second heist had diminishing returns but we were vested in the characters at that point.
• I don't know where I stand on The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window.  I adore Kristen Bell and I liked the show ... but the tone was odd, swinging from tongue-in-cheek to playing it straight.  I would have been happy if it was all satire (I mean, the title alone) but also it was an actual thriller.  Just pick a side.
• I did a rewatch of the original 2001 Wet Hot American Summer movie (last day of camp) and also the revival series for the first day of camp.  Absolutely brilliant, so fun to see how young that massive cast was for the movie, before they all got famous.  Paul Rudd.
• Is It Cake?  Yes, I binged it.  Doesn't hold a candle to the Great British Baking Show/Bake-Off but isn't really trying to.  It is a silly, silly show and yet I got sucked in because all the contestants were supportive of each other and the host seemed to be enjoying himself and them.

Next up: finish The Expanse, plus Archive 81 and Wentworth, Moon Knight and The Mandalorian.  I've also been sucked into Happy Endings, which found a rerun home on Netflix.  That is an underrated sitcom that got better as it went along - laugh out loud funny.