I just watched the Spider Man reboot again, and I don't care what y'all say, I dig it. Flawed and entirely too soon, but I dig it.
I wish Sony would sell it back to Marvel and we could see what Marvel/Disney would do with their own Spidey story.
Other than the design of The Lizard and his speech, I thought it was great. No shame in saying so.
Started off 2013 right.
First feature-length film I watched was Hugo for the first time since seeing it in 3D. It doesn't hold up as well as it did seeing it theatrically, but it doesn't take away from how great it was. For film purists and historians, it's a treat. It still choked me up in quite a few scenes, and the cast was so damn solid. Might've been my favorite film of 2011.
And then, I watched Chernobyl Diaries.
I know I'm probably the only one on here that will probably watch it, but I had so much hope for this one when I saw trailers earlier this year. Then I saw how poorly it was received on RT, and decided to stay away and buy it once it came to Blu-ray.
So I did that, and man, it has so much potential. You got a gorgeous setting and premise, but the script and plot is pretty bad. After they get to Chernobyl, it all just starts to fall apart. It wasn't filmed in Chernobyl obviously, but it was filmed in Europe and the one redeeming quality is that the scenery is great. It has the feel of a film that was filmed in radioactive nuclear crisis. Also the fact that there's something out there? Kinda cool. But the execution is very poor. For the first fifty minutes or so (it's only 85 minutes), the only threat we see are some wildlife, some wild dogs, and a bear. And some piranhas?
Once you realize that there's something else out there, that there's a greater threat out there, it became a little more intriguing. But as I stated, the execution is just so poor. The group gets split up at one point, as one of their friends is injured and leaves him in a van with his girlfriend. The survivors go to look for car parts because obviously the car won't start. Fine, I'll buy it. But once they come back, the car is torn to SHREDS; completely flipped over, and looked like it was just a metal shell, no interior or anything left. Well, we must be dealing with something serious!
After some of these things start chasing what survivors are left, we see that they are rather cumbersome, almost zombie like. But you never really see what their face looks like, so it leaves you wondering what exactly they are. A few more survivors fall off-screen, and one gets caught up on a ladder and ends up being gobbled up by what are clearly mutated humans. There are a few frightful scenes, like creepy little girls somehow showing up behind the group of survivors, but they never show the pay-off.
Several more chase scenes later, they are cornered by about 5 of them. These same cats that flipped over their friends van, and a woman is easily able to take care of two by herself, and save her male companion? I'm not trying to sit here saying that women aren't strong, but if a woman can beat up two of these mutants, while their friends get their van torn to shreds? Ehh..
So, the kids eventually get chased into Chernobyl reactor #4 (where the accident happened), and they go through some creepy scenery, and they suddenly start to feel the effects of the radiation that's still there, and as they finally get out of there, they are stopped by local hazmat soldiers that conveniently come through right as they are on the edge of life.
Cut to a hospital where there's only one survivor (the woman), and doctors speak in Russian that she's seen too much (the mutants), and that they can't let her leave. So what do they do? Throw her into a jail cell with a bunch of the mutants. That makes sense.
Cue credits.
The alternate ending consists of the girl waking up in a hospital bed, at night, tossing and turning in her restraints, showing that she is slowly being kept alive, but turning into one of the mutants herself, which was kind of cool.
There just wasn't enough substance. The mutated guys (which we don't ever get a good look at), look like that guy from Robocop who gets soaked with acid, that looked cool, but you only see them for maybe 10 seconds total screen time. It's a shame, because it looked like practical effects, and looked pretty good. The setting as I said was awesome, and there were bits and pieces of a decent horror flick in here. That said, 4/10.
2012 was such a putrid year for horror.
You had Prometheus and Chronicle, which were both semi-horror, and Cabin in the Woods, which was probably the best horror film in maybe a decade. Sinister wasn't terrible, it was genuinely creepy in parts, but still had scenes that needed to be cut badly. Still, finding those old tapes and watching them on a super 8 camera, it had balls, it just wasn't perfect.
Then you had trash like The Devil Inside (where you only get 2/3 of a film), The Apparition (a Costco ad where the only frightful part is given away on the poster), Paranormal 4 which apparently sucked, House at the End of the Street which looked supremely stupid, The Possession which was uninspired and lacked scares, Chernobyl which just didn't pan out, and your normal crap sequels like Resident Evil, Underworld, and also a disappointing sequel to Silent Hill, where the first was very okayish.
2013 has some hopefuls, but a lot of duds as well.
- I'm intrigued by The Last Exorcism 2, because even though the first had it's flaws, for a PG13 horror film, it was pretty damn good. The synopsis seems kind of weak, but if they touch on some of the elements that I liked about the first, I should dig it.
- World War Z I'll see no matter what opening day. I have the worst feeling that it's going to suck. I can already kind of feel like it's going to be one of those films that a lot of people will enjoy just because of the action, the same kind of people that enjoy Wrath of the Titans and Immortals and films like that. Not saying there's anything wrong with films like that, but they just always seem to lack substance, at least for me. WWZ has been plagued with development issues, and that's usually a dire sign.
- The World's End is the last (apparently) of the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy (the first two being Shaun of the Dead & Hot Fuzz) where a group of friends try to fraternize and pub-crawl their old college favorites, namely The World's End, where they happen to run into the end of the world as they know it. It sounds fun, and Wright/Pegg/Frost have yet to let me down.
- A Carrie reboot with Chloe Moretz? Day-one, showing-one, please. Carrie was a classic, and Chloe is the perfect actress I want to see in a Carrie reboot. There's no other actress I'd feel comfortable with other than her doing this role. I don't have confidence it will be great, but I have confidence she will be.
- Evil Dead is the biggest question mark for me. I don't have the same fear that it will suck like I fear WWZ will, but at the same time, it could suck just as bad. From the trailer, at times I feel like it's just another Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm St. crap remake, but then I see some of the twisted gore and think it might work. By far the film I'm looking forward to most in horror.
- Insidious: Chapter 2 is either going to be a home-run, or it's going to be a strike-out. I don't feel like there's much wiggle room to be had with Insidious, because the first 45 minutes of the first film was so perfect, yet the way they ended it just didn't feel like it left much room for anything to build on ever again from what they established before. You can't undo what you've done, and I don't know if they can get back that vibe they created in the first. If they do though, it should be a blast.
- Lastly there's quite a few indie-horror films that I definitely want to see. I've been on the Rob Zombie band-wagon for quite a while, and he's coming out with Lords of Salem in April, but it just hasn't' gotten great reviews. I'll see it regardless, but my expectations are dampened. Maniac is a pseudo-remake of a 80s slasher film where you follow the killer and delve into his psyche. Elijah Wood stars as the serial killer, and apparently it's widely gotten great reviews, so I'm in. Last is Antiviral, which comes from Brandon Cronenberg, son of David Cronenberg. It's a crazy film where a kid makes a living by selling live viruses from diseased celebrities to fans. It's also gotten great reviews in it's festival run, so I really want to catch it.
As a genre fan, if it weren't for some very excellent re-releases of horror classics on Blu-ray and The Cabin in the Woods, I might've offed myself. 2013, please don't hurt me like you did last year.