This movie is glorious.

This is a prequel to the 1982 movie (also glorious) by John Carpenter. It has the same name, which is a bit confusing since it’s not a remake. It deals with the events at the Norwegian camp that discovers a crashed spaceship and an ever-hungry, shape-shifting, face-eating, slime-spewing, claws-and-tentacles waving alien survivor.

How can you not love that?!

If you saw and liked the 1982 movie, then you there is no question you will love this one. This movie is better. That’s right; I said it. This movie is better. It has the same style, tension and suspense. Perhaps not as MUCH suspense, but you’ll barely notice the difference. It’s like they took out a cup of tension and poured in a half gallon of claws and tentacles. Then they set it all on fire. Literally. The special effects are done the same way as the original; those CGI-haters out there who thought Hollywood would ruin this movie with fancy technology (I don’t understand you people), can breathe easy. There is SOME CGI, but the good stuff… the money shots… are all real, just like the original, but with 50% more “You Gotta Be Fucking KIDDING!!”

In fact, the biggest difference between this movie and the 1982 version is the amount of time the creature spends on screen. This Thing (heh) is all over the place. There’s an old saying in horror about not showing too much and letting the reader’s (or watcher’s) imagination fill in the rest. That’s supposed to be superior, because what they come up with is darker and better than anything you could show/describe.

This movie says “FUCK THAT” and proceeds to throw horror after horror in front of you as if daring you to come up with something to top it. The 1982 movie did that as well, but this movie does it more. And better, longer, harder, deeper, and faster. While on fire. There was one scene toward the middle of the movie where the main character is getting attacked, but manages to run out of the room just in the nick of time. You EXPECT the scene to end there. No. The Thing runs after her, chasing her into a brightly lit hallway… down the hall… into another room… into ANOTHER room… gets set on fire… runs under the fucking SPRINKLERS to put the fire out…

Hell. Yeah.

The original version couldn’t touch that shit.

Anyway, another thing (heh) I liked about both movies is the characters. True, none of them are long for this world and you don’t really get to know many of them, they are all REAL people. What I mean by that is this: When confronted with horror, they react the way real people would… by perforating it with large caliber projectiles, burning it, then burning it again. Without hesitation. There are no silly teenagers. No “Let’s communicate with it” nonsense from the scientists. None of the cliche BS that you find in Every. Other. Horror. Movie. Once the crazy shit starts happening, it’s all Claws and Tentacles vs. Guns and Fire until the credits roll.

Well, mostly.

I must say that the ending was a bit of a step down. Here, we actually go inside the alien spaceship for a final confrontation with the OMGWTF!!. Honestly, I wish they’d gone a different direction, but hey, it wasn’t my movie. The special effects took a hit on the climactic scene, as the final creature (particularly the face) could have used some more love from the FX budget. Then they tried to go for an ambiguous ending like the 1982 version, Okay, well… whatever. I suppose I wasn’t supposed to notice that this movie doesn’t exactly match up with the 1982 plot, since in that Thing, the alien ship is blown to shit, and the end of THIS movie has the ship intact. I guess ‘someone’ could have gone back and blown it up later. Whatever. The ending has problems, but its still better than anything else I’ve seen this year.

BTW, be sure to stay through the first half of the credits. After the credits roll for a few seconds, there is a series of scenes that ties the end of this movie with the beginning of the 1982 movie, and I think they may have used some of the same footage. It doesn’t add a lot, but it does answer some questions. (i.e. just who WERE the people in the helicopter).

Bottom line: go see it. If you’ve got the money, go see it in the theater. It’s worth it. But this does assume you liked the older version of the movie. If you hated the 1982 Thing, then don’t waste your time with the prequel. If you never saw the original, do your self a favor and see it first before you see the new one. Consider it a pre-test before the final exam.

Based on all the negative fuss there is around this movie, I feel pretty confident in guessing that I must be the only person on the planet that liked this film.

Apollo 18 is about a secret moon mission that encounters some unexpected (or is it?) alien nastiness on the moon. No one makes it back alive. Or dead, for that matter. The story is presented in the form of ancient video clips that are somehow recovered years later. How these videos are recovered given that nobody made it back to earth is a mystery, but they do present a pretty interesting tale.

It’s a good movie. Is it a great movie? No. But it kept my interest (mostly) and delivered what it promised in the trailers. This is a lot more than I can say for most of the other so-called films I’ve seen lately. This movie is much better than most of the low-budget independent crap that people recommend to me these days, and it outpaces anything that the SyFy channel shows on Saturday nights. It ain’t worth seeing in the theaters, but it’s absolutely worth renting, streaming, or downloading.

Seriously: If you watched the trailer for this movie and liked it, then you’ll probably like the movie itself. If the trailer seemed dumb or uninteresting, then why are you watching the movie in the first damn place?

Personally, I found the pseudo-low quality of the footage to be a bit distracting. AND I absolutely hated the way the video jumped or cut out whenever something interesting was happening. They did this right up until the end of the movie, where they finally decided to let us see something. And it was good. They might have been better off doing this as a regular movie and not this “found footage” foolishness, but I must admit there were a few pleasant “what the fuck was THAT?” moments that regular, clear footage would have utterly destroyed. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit: there was ONE such moment, but it was a good one.

Anyway, I’m still not understanding why people hated this movie, but everybody has their opinion. I liked it.

Now if somebody can explain to me how they got those damned cameras back from the moon…

I remember creating it years ago, and it looks like I even used it a few times before erasing it from my memory. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it now, but I’ve posted a few things… nothing new to regular readers here, however.

BTW… is anybody on Google+ ? I am. I haven’t the foggiest idea what to do with THAT, either.

When did I turn into an old man?

1) It seems decent, but not great. Given the amount of hype that Syfy has been giving it, I was kinda disappointed. But it’s set to record next week. I assume it will get better.

2) Quote from me to my wife: “All that guy needs is a bald head and a wheelchair.” This thing is SO MUCH of an X-Men ripoff that it’s not funny. No, literally… it’s not funny. Fortunately there are no metal claws, laser beams, or leather uniforms. Yet. (Not that there’s anything wrong with metal claws.)

3) The black guy is an asshole. I really want someone to punch him through a brick wall, but since HE’S the one with the super strength, somehow I don’t think I’ll be getting any satisfaction there.

Anyone else seen this thing?

Somehow, as an electrical engineer, I suspected this all along.

I’m not 100% sure, and I could very easily be mistaken, as my understanding of WordPress isn’t perfect. But some key files have been modified to include some obfuscated javascript that caused the site to stop functioning. The offending scripts have since been commented out, but those are only the ones that I could find. Ten minutes on Google turned up nothing, so until I can find some time to understand what these scripts are and where they came from, I would operate under the conclusion that this blog compromised. Use your own best judgement as to what changes in behavior (if any) that entails.

If I discover any more disturbing signs, I may need to pull the blog down. This will be done without warning.

…but then, I DID just finish watching “New Moon”, so I am just a little bit dazed brain damaged.

What did I think?
This was not a good movie. Bad acting, idiotic characters, and poor CGI turned this into yet another nail in the Wrong Turn coffin. I almost didn’t watch it at all. Sure, those first few kills were entertaining (plus T&A always helps) but the entire opening sequence reeked of low-budget crap. Then we moved on to the prison where they introduce the poorly-acted one-dimensional cast and the ‘plot’ for the movie. That part sucked so bad that I wanted to turn it off right then. But I’m almost glad I didn’t. Almost. The movie got better as it went along, and in the end it turned out better than I expected… better than the opening scenes implied, and certainly better than the second movie.

…It just wasn’t good ENOUGH. It was unoriginal and poorly executed. Nothing surprising happened in this entire movie, except at the VERY end. And the cannibals? Two guys in Halloween masks doing an imitation of the Joker’s laugh from the Batman cartoons? This… is horror?

No.

Pass on this one. If you decide not to, then don’t judge the entire movie on the basis of the first fifteen minutes. You MIGHT like enough of it to keep it from being a complete waste of time. But I don’t think so.

What I thought:

I really liked this one. It’s not often that I see a GOOD horror movie. This was one. I usually like anthologies because even if most of the stories are crap, there’s at least one that’s good enough to make it worthwhile. In this case, they’re all good. There’s lots of quality gore and a fair amount of humor without turning the whole thing into a comedy. The stories are a bit predictable, but that’s okay here because the whole point is to enjoy the ride. Not that there aren’t a few surprises that I didn’t see coming.

The nerdy child-killer story was incredibly funny and incredibly dark. The round-headed, sack-masked trick-or-treater (which you see EVERYWHERE in the movie) was creepy and violent. Plus, this kid uses candy as a weapon. CANDY! You just can’t beat that. The one about the Halloween prank has to be my favorite, if only because of the sound effects at the end. Listen for them. The story of the girls and their choice of Halloween entertainment is my least favorite, although it is the only story featuring any T&A. None of these stories are bad or badly done. All of them are that “one story” that would make a lesser anthology worthwhile.

Another thing I liked about these tales is they’re connection to one another. Often you’ll see the characters from the stories crossing paths as they go about their own misadventures, and sometimes a minor character in one story turns out to be a major one in another. And they do this in a way that doesn’t turn the whole thing into a convoluted mess (like I probably would). It’s all just… fun.

End result: It’s on DVD. Rent it or download it without fear that you’ll be disappointed.