Movie Mon. - I Hope Giant Killer Rabbits Like Cheese

Watched quite a few movies this week, but very little to really recommend other than Saw II, which I've already talked about. But while I might not be able to recommend most of the following that doesn't mean I have nothing to say about them. Read on to see what the best bad movie I saw this week was!

House of Wax: I'm disappointed; Paris Hilton was nowhere near as hilariously bad as I had hoped. And I felt bad for Jared Padalecki having to say such clunky lines as "It is wax. Like, literally!" And almost an hour went by before we got any of the old ultra-violence. But man, was the face-peeling scene ever freaky! And the final sequence with the destruction of the house was pretty cool. Probably would have been an okay film on the big screen in a dark theater; I think most horror flicks are enhanced when viewed that way. But only half-watching it while reading through my old journal entries kind of cut down on my ability to totally get into it.

Night of the Lepus: Oh, if only I had seen this before I did my Giant Animal post; think this would have ranked pretty highly just for unintentional comedy alone. I mean, a movie about giant killer rabbits? Priceless. I loved how to the local police the phrase "horribly mutilated" equals "lying around with a couple of tears in the jeans and some red paint splattered around." And the fact that the first rabbit victim's screams were higher-pitched than the little girl in the film had me rolling. I thought that the giant bunny FX were going to be the funniest thing in the film, until I saw the scenes featuring stunt-men in bunny suits; high comedy, my blog monkeys, high comedy. Best bad movie of the week.

Dracula 1972: The first 20 minutes or so of the film which were focused on the wild and crazy bohemian hippie types was highly entertaining; everything after they resurrected Dracula, much less so.

Nothing: Not even close to what I expected. I mean, I'm not sure what I expected a movie about a couple of misfits who suddenly wish the world away and find themselves in a vast expanse of nothingness, but whatever it was, this wasn't it. And now, I'm still not sure how I would rate the film. On the one hand, some of the slapstick stuff turned me off; on the other, there were some really interesting uses of the guys' ability to "hate away stuff": my favorite was when the agorophobe made his fear of failure disappear, so he was suddenly able to do all sorts of stuff he couldn't before because of fear, like beating his overbearing roomie at video games. Not sure why that sequence appealed to me so much . . .

Demon Seed: This was one creepifying flick, I tell you what, even if the robot arm in a wheelchair is one of the hokiest looking things ever put on film. And what's up with the "I can't touch you like a man can touch you, but I can show you an overlong computer animation show reminiscent of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey" sequence? I may have missed the explanation for this while doing something else, but I'm also still questioning the logic of why the professor had this enormous mechanized Rubik's Snake in his basement. With Proteus' obsession with doing what was necessary to create its child, I kept thinking of Mia in the last few Dark Tower books; kept expecting it to start referring to the child as "my chap."

Lifeboat: Well done Hitchcock film, but I'm afraid I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for it while I was watching it; too antsy to give it my full attention.

The Fog: Cap'n Disaster and I went to see this Friday night. To my great surprise, Maggie Grace (a.k.a. Shannon on Lost) did not provide my biggest annoyance during the film; no, that distinction belongs to the two girls sitting behind us who felt the need to make some form of noise throughout most of the film, everything from endless high volume giggling, to catcalls whenever Tom Welling would take off his shirt, to chanting "dun-dun-DUN" whenever something mysterious happened, to shouting out goodbye to everyone who left the theater, to (my personal favorite) resounding back to an on-screen crack about a certain game show with an indignant "I like Jeopardy!"

Now, as for the movie itself: yet another remake that proves that it's usually best to leave well enough alone. The film had a little bit of promise, here and there, but most of it was drowned out by its horrible, horrible script. I felt sorry for Tom Welling, who was forced to move from playing a young Superman on Smallville to having to play Captain Overly-Obvious Exposition in this crapfest. He gets on a boat; turns the ignition key; the engine starts; he turns to romantic interest and says "The engine works." Gee, thanks, never would have guessed that. And that ending; that horrible, horrible, pointless ending. It's been ages since I've seen the original, but I'm pretty sure its ending was nowhere as mind-numbingly idiotic as this one.