Still nothing good to review

Every so often I think about reviewing something again, but unfortunately, there's been nothing worth watching this year. The quality (and quantity) of new horror movies is even worse than last year, and the year before, and the year before that. There are lots of reasons for this, but the blame mostly lies with lack of talent and new ideas. It doesn't help that the various nepotistic cliques of niche reviewers keep praising utter shit (when they aren't writing lazy nostalgia pieces) because it's all they have left to talk about.

The only "Summer movie" I watched.

Yes, we've had "The Conjuring 2" which deserves some kind of mention for trying to match its sets to how things looked in the Enfield poltergeist haunting videos on YouTube. I noticed the pop posters and had a bit of fun trying to identify the ones which were obviously different or in the wrong places. The Bay City Rollers, David Soul, and Joanna Lumley posters were close, but I don't remember The Kinks pullout poster from Jackie magazine actually being one of the girls' decorations. I also have some concerns over the family owning 1960s-style telephones (especially the wall-mounted kitchen phone) rather than trimphones from the late 1970s, but I can let that pass as "good enough". British telecommunications were not this movie's focus or forte. As for jump-scares, yeah, the nun-demon got me, and old Reg had a good moment.

Some people remarked how "The Conjuring 2" felt like more of a Christmas movie than anything else (duh, because it's set at Christmas), and I have nothing else to add to that uber "insightful" (oh God, that awful low-brow word overused by sheep across the internet!) observation. It's not Christmassy like "Gremlins", but the seasonal trappings are there in the background if you bother to look for them.

Maybe I should congratulate James Wan on trying his hardest to make heroes out of a pair of known charlatans. I'd never even heard of the Warrens before "The Conjuring", mainly because I don't really "do" paranormal investigation bullshit, and of course, I'm not American. According to ghosthunter Harry Price, the Warrens only turned up once, very briefly, and weren't big players in the Enfield poltergeist investigation at all. Patrick Wilson singing an Elvis song as Ed Warren is also a bit weird, out of place, but probably kind of nice for the ladies. So kudos for having very little historical accuracy then. But hey, the whole thing was a hoax anyway, so who even cares?

Not the worst thing I've ever seen but damned close.

I've also watched some horrid Kevin Bacon movie called "The Darkness". It's filled with clichés and the usual predictable possession guff, albeit with a couple of seemingly original "native American" touches which fall flat. Typical Blumhouse shit and as worthless and instantly forgettable as everything else they churn out. I think they tried to make it controversial by having an autistic kid in it and making him even more evil than autistic kids usually are in movies, but it didn't work out too well. Most "reviewers" simply saw Kevin Bacon attached, exclaimed "Doesn't he look old now?", and that was the highlight for them. "The Darkness" was rendered virtually unwatchable, however, by being filmed with a handycam with its very noticeable quivers and judders. Could nobody afford a tripod? Perhaps they spent all the budget on advertising their website. I don't know and don't care.

From other genres, "Green Room" bored me rigid. American Nazis (for lack of a better term) imprison a punk band in their backwoods concert hall and much merriment fails to ensue. I couldn't understand what that Yeltsin guy (who died by running himself over this year) said in any of his mumbled lines, and the namby-pamby feebleness of the instantly unlikable characters frustrated me. A couple of gunshot effects were undoubtedly cool near the end, but "Romper Stomper" is still the go-to movie if you like this kind of thing.

Fuck me, I liked something!

The biggest theatrical release for me was "Gods of Egypt". I actually enjoyed "Gods of Egypt" to the extent that I got threatened with physical assault on Facebook (and one person blocked me) because I dared to like something. The fucked-up-ness of that whole situation is quite hilarious. I've seen people getting all bent out of shape because I didn't like something but never the opposite. Even my infamous and blatant love for the "Twilight" movies never went that far. To this day, people still bitch about how I liked an incredibly successful franchise which they consider to be "non-horror" even though it had vampires and werewolves in it, while at the same time, they rave about their shitty horror-comedies which are even less worthy of being part of the genre. Some people, as we know, are just nuts.

Don't get me wrong, "Gods of Egypt" isn't a great movie, but it's easily as good as "Clash of the Titans" or any of those other adventures meant for little kids. It looks fantastic, the story is okay-ish, and it certainly didn't wreck Egyptian mythology as much as "Immortals" shat all over the ancient Greek legends a few years ago. I saw some SJW bullshit about "whitewashing" with the casting, but since those comments came from people who have no education or faintest idea about the diverse ethnicity in Ancient Egypt, I can laugh that off. There's no point arguing online with liberals, SJWs, or any other brainwashed "causers" because their combined IQs are less than a tin of pilchards. They clearly didn't watch the movie anyway, because if they had, they would have realised that there are more black characters than any other race portrayed. It may be one actor (Chadwick Boseman playing Thoth) repeated hundreds of times, but it still counts!

Starring lots of beautiful actresses whose names I can't remember.

Lastly, as far as new movies go, I watched "The Huntsman: Winter's War" and almost loved it. Again, nothing all that new, and no Kristen Stewart in it, but it has some nice bawdy British humour and a little bit of visual subtext which reduces the current "gender wars" (which really only exist in fake realities such as American college campuses or online, you know) into the minuscule kerfuffle that they truly are. If you don't pick up on it, you aren't good at reading images and certainly shouldn't review movies.

Among many things I've boycotted, I obviously haven't watched the remake/re-imagining/reboot/sequel of "Ghostbusters" because I don't like horror-comedies and didn't ever like the original or its sequel. The original failed at everything I call entertaining, apart from the one scene with the old woman/librarian ghost, and is just too sickeningly "American" for my taste. In other words, its comedy is fucking lame. Big deal that they changed all the genders, I couldn't care less if they replaced the characters with talking bags of shit. I doubt that anyone would notice the difference, but it's possible that I'd be more inclined to watch it if they had. Replace the cast with cats though, and I'd definitely watch the next one.

Please don't make any more of these!

Thanks to Amazon Prime (and a mixture of curiosity and boredom), I suffered through the three "Divergent" movies. I had no idea what to expect, and now wish I hadn't wasted my time. They are full of "pretty" talent, owe a lot to "Starship Troopers", and have some decent eyecandy here and there, but sci-fi blows anyway, and this is particularly shit sci-fi at that. When the kids all celebrated one of their minor victories by self-harming with tattoos, that was enough for me. I'm not the target audience for this crap, and even if I was, such trendy teen sci-fi has really gone downhill since "The Hunger Games" ripped off "Battle Royale".

In other news, I may start a new blog eventually about computer games. Aside from making cat videos and intentionally awful 5-hour podcasts, I've been playing computer games more than watching movies this year because, as I said at the start, this has already been a truly shit year for movies, and it isn't going to get any better.

Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013)

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The Conjuring (2013)

"Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren work to help a family terrorized by a dark presence in their farmhouse. Forced to confront a powerful entity, the Warrens find themselves caught in the most terrifying case of their lives."

I've finally done it! I may be two weeks behind everyone else in the world, but I've now seen "The Conjuring"! I even managed to avoid all the spoilers on Twitter and Facebook beforehand, which wasn't easy considering how overhyped this movie has been.

Supposedly based on a previously unpublished case file from paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, who I've never actually heard of before, "The Conjuring" starts off like an episode of "Friday the 13th: The Series", turns into a clone of "The Amityville Horror" for an hour, and ends up as a twenty minute version of "The Exorcist". As you can imagine, I was not impressed.

In fact, I was so disappointed with "The Conjuring" that I was tempted to only write the following for my review:

BORING CRAP!

If someone perusing the aisles next to me in a DVD store were to ask me what I thought of "The Conjuring", those two words would be the most honest initial reaction I could come up with other than adding whichever choice expletive I might deem appropriate to the situation. I'm not saying that this has happened, although it certainly has done with other James Wan movies in the past, and the response of the person asking has also been equally negative. I'm sure that similar conversations have transpired between other people in various locations.

Maybe I live in my own sheltered little bubble where everyone shares the same good taste, but I've never known of a director other than James Wan whose movies are so consistently underwhelming apart from Christopher Nolan. Even Zack Snyder has double the amount of good movies on his résumé. I'm not going to acknowledge Dario Argento, Uwe Boll, Lloyd Kaufman, or Ulli Lommel because, let's face it, all their movies are guaranteed to be crap from the get-go.

A metaphor just waiting to happen.

The reasons why "The Conjuring" is such boring crap are very easy to list. For a start, the story is unoriginal and clichéd, and it's a messy fusion of far better films that came out over 30 to 40 years ago. We've seen it all before ad nauseum. "The Conjuring" brings nothing new to the table and doesn't even present what it has got in an entertaining manner for adults.

Thus, the second huge problem with "The Conjuring" is that it might as well be a PG-13. How and why it got an R-rating is beyond my comprehension. There's no nudity, no swearing, no sex scenes, no gore, and it's not scary in any way. So how the Hell did it get rated as an R? "R for Rubbish" is my assessment although I'm betting on failed bait and switch shenanigans behind the scenes with the MPAA just to get asses on seats in the movie theatres.

The big giveaway that the target audience was initially meant to be braindead teenagers is the amount of grammatical errors in the script. Both Lorraine and Ed get away with saying "hung" instead of "hanged" without anyone correcting them, and if that's not bad enough, there's Ed's immortal triple-negative, "We ain't never seen nothing like this!" which you can see in the trailer along with all the other "good bits". The terrible dialogue is almost as bad as the "I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do" line in the shitty "Evil Dead" remake. No wonder the mumble-mouthed younger generation are the way they are!

Thirdly, there's no characterisation whatsoever. I couldn't tell you the names of any of the characters even though they were given, what they might be interested in other than ghost hunting or being the victims of a demonic haunting, or any details that would make them more than two-dimensional. The best I can come up with is that "The Conjuring" stars Patrick Wilson with sideburns, Vera Farmiga looking far more beautiful than I've ever seen her look before, the Peter guy from "Office Space", the plain-looking girl who played Nell in "The Haunting" remake whose name I always forget, and a bunch of other people who I've never heard of poncing about in a badly maintained American house. If you think I'm joking, try telling me the names of the family members without looking them up on the IMDb. While you are at it, what are the names of the cop or the Warren's assistant? No idea? Case proven.

Without characterisation, what's the point of a horror movie? If you can't identify with the protagonists, empathising with their situation and feeling the catharsis when it's resolved is completely lost, isn't it? Or is this something that kids today just don't care about? As much as anyone born after 1989 is likely to be a complete moron in my estimation anyway, there are exceptions who must have left the cinema as disappointed as us older guys. Even the ones who only went to see some scary effects must have felt cheated of their $10.

Vera Farmiga is so hot in her granny clothes!

I wish I could find something good to say about "The Conjuring", but it's a typical James Wan movie. There are a couple of overloud jump scares which don't work, the usual creepy dolls which aren't creepy at all, some guy in a latex witch mask which is supposed to be scary, horrible shaky camerawork (but with lots of zooming this time just to be very '70s!), irritating child actors, poor CGI effects, plotholes everywhere, no atmosphere, no tension, total chaos at the end with a lame resolution, and nothing original whatsoever. The tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of Blumhouse Productions' formulaic style of composition when the family mentions birds hitting their house (as in "Dark Skies") is realised when the birds repeat their kamikaze attack near the end, but you can't make in-jokes like that when you do the same damned thing yourself!!!

I suppose the period setting in 1970s America is well done, but that's not exactly a difficult thing to achieve. Apart from the cars, America looks much the same as it has done since the 1920s when it comes to the crappy wooden sheds which people jokingly refer to as houses. Every house in my town looks like the one in "The Conjuring" only in an even worse state of disrepair! Forget nostalgia, these firetraps need to be knocked down and replaced with some proper bricks and mortar! I'm sure that I've mentioned that several time before on this blog though.

I'm not happy about James Wan using a cover version of "Sleepwalk" with lyrics either. The original Santo & Johnny instrumental from 1959 which is such a signature feature of Stephen King's "Sleepwalkers" (1992) just doesn't belong anywhere else! The guitars in "Sleepwalk" even sound like cats meowing for God's sake! But, in spite of having a witch in the story, there are no cats in "The Conjuring"! There's a collie dog called Sadie who meets her maker off camera, but no cats! Oh, that makes me so angry!

The word on the street is that James Wan is giving up horror movies now to make the next homoerotic installment in "The Fast and the Furious" franchise. I wish him the best of luck, but after "The Conjuring", I can't say that he will be missed.