The End of Dr Blood's Video Vault

Yes, it's really the end of the blog this time.

This news will come as no surprise to my readers who have noticed that I've slowed down a lot over the last couple of years and not watched many movies at all. For one thing, I don't have the time or patience for reviewing horror movies anymore, and for another, I've lost interest in movies completely. I could blame it on various health issues that have come and gone, but really it's just part of getting older and growing out of stuff.

I'll leave the blog up as some of what I wrote is funny to go back and look at. In particular, the horrible punctuation mistakes of the early posts are somewhat amusing, and all of the vitriol I poured out on crappy low-budget horror is still relevant. Pointless movies made by delusional people which I really only wrote about because I had nothing better to do. Meh, we live and learn.

So what's next? Nothing really.

Up until fairly recently, I'd still been buying the occasional DVD from CeX, and although I wanted to write a series of posts called "The Joy of CeX", it's just not the same as those fantastic pawn shop scavenger hunts I used to go on. There's no satisfaction from the hunt when you can easily look up whatever you want and buy it from a website. The bargains are there, of course, because DVD and Blu-ray are almost dead as a format. Hell, the entire movie industry is pretty much dead now too, or if not dead, it's certainly extremely poorly and ready to kick the bucket at any time. There's nothing relevant for anyone my age. In fact, there's very little which is relevant for anyone over 18 now. It's mostly a lot of misguided, preachy, virtue-signalling, political crap which is so poorly disguised with feeble "storytelling" that only the very foolish still buy into it.

Having said that, I don't even watch the older movies I collected, they just sit on my bookshelves as a reminder of this great time-wasting folly. Same with the books I will never read and games which I never play.

So yeah, that's it. Nothing more to see here unless I change my mind again one day. I can't really see it happening though. There's no money to be made from any of this. In case you missed it, the magazines are slowly disappearing, and the big name blogs (which have never been acknowledged by normal people for having any credibility) are apparently e-begging. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and all those Patreon pan-handlers can fuck right off. If you really want to pay "idiot tax" to a bunch of people who don't care about anyone except themselves, go ahead, but I'm not falling for it.

The whole "scene" is now an even bigger pile of cliquey shit with nothing but the really shitty people left in it. When they aren't cross-promoting each other, or falsely playing the victim while bullying and inciting witch-hunts against anyone who challenges their brainwashed opinions, they are regurgitating the same old nostalgia crap as clickbait. It's pathetic and boring. The rest of us, the good people who've seen the light, have kicked the dust of this crap off our feet and moved on.

Later, gators.


Update
Photobucket is holding everyone to ransom over third-party image hosting. It looks like they finally did what all the trolls, haters, psychopaths, bullies, and pathological liars couldn't do. They killed my blog.

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)

"Alice returns to where the nightmare began: The Hive in Raccoon City, where the Umbrella Corporation is gathering its forces for a final strike against the only remaining survivors of the apocalypse."

There's no point writing any kind of in-depth review of "Resident Evil: The Final Chapter". It's just as disappointing and "samey" as all of the "Resident Evil" movies, and it's even more boring than playing one of the linear computer games that it's based on.

With lots of overly dramatic music, big bangs and explosions, crowds of zombies, close-up hand-to-hand combat, surprise T-virus mutated-zombie jump scares, and too much reliance on timers to create tension (which nearly always falls flat), you will rightly wonder who exactly this movie is intended for other than diehard fans. It certainly wasn't intended for me or anyone looking for characters with any depth or a story that can't be summarised in more than three sentences.

The only character to stand out even a little bit is Isaacs (played by Iain Glen, otherwise known as Ser Friendzoned from "Game of Thrones") who goes through various incarnations of being either a clone or the real Isaacs until you don't care which is which. Various other characters from the previous movies return as little more than cameos. Wesker, the Red Queen, and Claire whatever-her-name-is (played by Ali Larter) all get dressed up to play pretend for hardly any reason.

The rest is just a mess of running around and fighting in the dark with CGI everywhere and computery things popping up to remind you that this is all based on the Capcom console game which nobody has played since the late 1990s. It's not difficult to follow what little story there is, but it's not worth paying too much attention to it either.

There's a bit of anti-Christian nuttery to make it appeal to the Lefties, but since the motivation of the bad guys and subtext is blatantly more akin to the the rise of the SJW religion/virus and the rioting zombies who subscribe to that ideology, it comes across as a pathetic and hilarious misfire.

Sadly, the once uber hot Milla Jovovich really looks her age now (and more so, once you get the in-joke that I've just made), so I'm glad this is "The Final Chapter". Any more would be as embarrassing as middle-aged James Bond.

Passengers (2016)

"A spacecraft travelling to a distant colony planet and transporting thousands of people has a malfunction in its sleep chambers. As a result, two passengers are awakened 90 years early."

Yes, I'm sure you've already heard the rumours, "Passengers" is just a "chick flick" set in space. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll hurl... or something like that. Probably more of the latter than the former, regardless of which gender (from the thousands of fictitious ones) you might claim to be.

It looks good, has great effects, and has much better acting than the story deserves. It'll also hold your interest, as it did mine, right to the end. But then you'll think, "Damn, fooled again!" There's nothing here which you haven't seen done a hundred times before but in more terrestrial locations.

For the most part, I enjoyed "Passengers". Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence make a likeable but ill-matched couple, and Michael Sheen is a little bit too perfect as the robot barman. Even the spaceship is quite cool. The trouble is that the plot outline was probably written on the back of a stamp by someone who watched "Wall-E" (and possibly a very small part of "Silent Running") as a child.

With nothing of any substance here, "Passengers" is ultimately an easily consumed and instantly forgettable January movie, and to make matters worse, it's filled with nauseating self-sacrifice propaganda.

Next!

2016 - The Year in Review

Damn, it's that time of year again when all the movie bloggers post top ten lists influenced by their political ideologies. So, while they cross-promote and virtue-signal each other like crazy people, I'll just calmly sidestep the circle-jerk by not making any lists whatsoever.

Once again, there haven't been enough horror movies this year to make a "Top 10 Best Horror Movies of 2016", let alone another "Top 10 Worst Horror Movies of 2016" to accompany it. Even combining all the movies from other genres which I've watched this year, it would be impossible to find 20 in total which I feel like mentioning again. It's really been that bad.

Cue the comedy tumbleweed...

Same time next year, Mr Tumbleweed?

Movies I Enjoyed in 2016

There were a few movies I liked, but apart from "Gods of Egypt", "The Huntsman: Winter's War", and "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children", none of them were from this year.

In October, I went on a minor journey into some Hitchcock classics with "The Birds" and "Rebecca", but I couldn't sustain enough interest in old movies I'd already seen dozens of times before to continue. I also discovered that I don't actually own DVDs of the more famous Hitchcock movies to make a series out of it and found myself slipping away from horror towards what can only be described as "great works of A-level English literature turned into dumbed-down movies for the plebs". I was just about to review "Great Expectations" when I realised that I couldn't stand any more of that horribly dated old bollocks. Even "The Joy of CeX" and their ridiculously low prices wasn't enough to tempt me back once the spell was broken.

Pure shit which makes no sense.

Instead, I watched "The Wailing", hoping that South Korea was going to deliver the goods like they did with "Gwoemul" ten years ago. I got really into it to start with as it ticked all the right boxes of "otherness" and "different", but alas, it was not to last. This already tonally-challenged abomination turned into pure shit two-thirds of the way through, didn't make a lick of sense to me at the end, and I gave up on watching and reviewing movies again. We don't even "do" Hallowe'en in Britain, so there was no point in burning myself out even further.


TV Shows of 2016

Other than compulsory viewing of "EastEnders" and "Wentworth", I mainly used the television to play Xbox games this year. I didn't watch any "Game of Thrones" except the last two episodes, and I have no interest left in "The Walking Dead", "American Horror Story", or "Ash vs. Evil Dead".

I did force myself to watch the entire first season of "Westworld", although after a couple of episodes, it turned into yet another one of those shows with more padding than narrative progression. The whole thing could have been condensed into one movie without all the "Groundhog Day" repetition, flashbacks, "flashforwards", and general messing about with timelines. Oh wait, it already was. Yeah, I think I'll stick with the original 1973 movie, thank you, rather than waste my time with another "Lost". Just like how the "Losties" were dead all along, I expect the "Westies" will all turn out to be robots when "Westworld" returns for another season in 2018 (when everyone has forgotten about it) anyway.

In fact, the highlight of this year was watching Donald Trump win the Presidential Election. Considering that I'm not into boring politics, I was still intrigued enough to watch it on the BBC, who dragged the final result out forever in the vain hope that it would change in favour of their fellow Lefties. It was great but cringeworthy late night television. Watching more and more American Democrats and SJW-types get well and truly served when Hillary Clinton lost was hilarious to me, and the fallout which followed on social media was like bittersweet icing on a cake already made delicious with their salty tears of misery.

It would be fantastic if Trump's win signalled the beginning of a long overdue worldwide change back to normality and killed the annoying Millennial religion of SJW-dom, political correctness gone mad, and the crybully victim-culture which the mainstream media has milked for all it's worth, but I doubt that it will happen. The Illuminati bankers and Reptilians from Saturn have had their plans delayed a little bit, but that's all. The fact that we voted to leave the EU six months ago in Britain and still no "Brexit" has occurred speaks volumes. As the old joke goes, "It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government still gets in."


In Remembrance

A veritable shit load of actors, entertainers, and celebrities died again this year, including several "stars" who apparently only departed this plane of existence just to upset millions of people who had never been fans of theirs before. Here are the majority of the ones I heard about through the wailing and gnashing of teeth on social media. I've highlighted the names of those I knew of before they died. R.I.P.

Lennie Bluett Leonard White Yves Vincent Richard Libertini Myra Carter Anna Synodinou Umberto Raho Angus Scrimm Ed Stewart David Bowie David Margulies Brian Bedford Conrad Phillips Franco Citti Alan Rickman Micole Mercurio Bairbre Dowling Sheila Sim Dan Haggerty Lois Ramsey Glenn Frey Colin Vearncombe Abe Vigoda Frank Finlay Terry Wogan Dave Mirra Richard Gladman Maurice White William Haze Louise Plowright George Martin James Douglas Nancy Reagan Richard Davalos Robert Horton Keith Emerson Sylvia Anderson Paul Daniels Larry Drake Ken Howard Earl Hamner, Jr. Garry Shandling Patty Duke

Frank De Felitta Ronnie Corbett Douglas Wilmer Merle Haggard David Swift Martin Fitzmaurice Doris Roberts Victoria Wood Prince Madeleine Lebeau Sylvia Kauders Reg Grundy Nick Lashaway William Schallert Nicholas Fisk Valerie Lush Ian Watkin Rosanna Huffman Burt Kwouk Angela Paton Harambe David Spielberg Muhammed Ali Lidia Biondi Ronnie Claire Edwards Ann Morgan Guilbert Dave Swarbick Anton Yelchin Sharon Douglas Götz George Stuart Nisbet Robin Hardy Caroline Aherne Michael Cimino Noel Neill Corrado Farina Seamon Glass Ken Barrie Vivean Gray Terence Bayler David Huddleston Barry Jenner Cynthia Szigeti

Kenny Baker Patricia English Arthur Hiller Michael Leader Steven Hill Marvin Kaplan Peter Comi Gene Wilder Jon Polito John Hostetter Johnny Rebel Hazel Douglas James Stacy Alexis Arquette Todd Kimsey Herschell Gordon Lewis Peter Collingwood Laura Troschel Pete Burns Gary Dubin Ricky Callan Jean Alexander Richard Cavendish Margaret Ashcroft Lene Tiemroth John Carson Robert Vaughn Lisa Lynn Masters Yevgeni Lazarev Andrew Sachs Colonel Abrams Bernard Gallagher Valerie Gaunt Van Williams Alice Drummond Don Calfa Margaret Whitton Peter Vaughan Greg Lake Walter Swinburn Alan Thicke Bernard Fox Rick Parfitt

...and this evil fuck. Burn in Hell!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!