HERE'S A MEDIOCRE STORY THAT COULD HAVE HAD SOME ORIGINALITY BUT THEY GOT REAL LAZY ABOUT IT...

Antisocial (2013) Canada

Oh boy. Another movie about the possible mental effects of social media. <YAWN>

This Canadian walk-through is about an unscrupulous company that runs a mass media program called Social Redroom (looking at you Zuck). Don't expect non-stop excitement, I mean they used the last picture at the end of the movie as their poster - what does that tell ya?

This Facebook-like program has been experimenting with updates to increase the number of posts and people who join. Apparently they DON'T kick off people just because their name sounds funny (looking at you again Zuck). 

But oh my, their updates have been getting more and more intrusive on the personal lives of their users (still looking at you Zuck... ah hell, you're ugly - I can think of much better looking men to stare at). Finally it comes to a point where they make a big whoopsy, and those who use their program become bleeding, nasty, violent killers (still looking at... uh... Eric Balfour - sorry Eric).

This is in the vein of several movies in several different countries giving us warning signals that hey, maybe we shouldn't depend so much on social media, put down our phones and just TALK to each other. Too much?

Let's just get this weirdo non-action film over with. Ya got your teens (pushing 30 no doubt) in college and they're all on Redroom - whether it's the smartphones they cart around or both the phones AND the laptops (still looking at... the ground 'cause Eric shouldn't have to appear so much in movie reviews he didn't even star in). Our main girl, who's pregnant (Canada seems as lax with birth control as the US) just got dumped, by text, by her boyfriend.

But hey, it's New Year's Eve and they're having a party and convince her to come. We end up with the requisite five or six people, now let the action begin! I SAID let the action begin! I SAID... never mind. If you want a movie with almost no action but is a lot smarter, may I suggest you watch Pontypool (2008)?

Sam (Michelle Mylett), the aforementioned pregnant reject goes to the party and is there when things go awry. I would say go apeshit but any action is 'reported' on their TV which is always on (At a party?) or by others online so... yeah.

Those who use Redroom (I keep wanting to say Redrum - maybe I've got 'the electronic virus' - oh no, that's right, no more Facebook for me 'cause my name sounds funny, thanks Z - what was your name again?) first get nosebleeds and also blood comes out of their ears. It is explained that the 'update' stimulates a part of the frontal lobe, actually forming a growth that eventually will cause their heads to explode. No, we don't get any Scanner-type action, just a hole goes poof from their heads and this bloody tendril comes out.

Somehow after death those who got the 'bug' and died of it still continue to 'post' pictures of what their dead eyes see. Duh. And the Social Redroom dude did all this on purpose. Duh again - and watch it Zuck.


So after waiting an interminable amount of time, Sam is pretty much on her own and gets to perform self-surgery with a drill. Fun! Afterward she wakes up to a day where the affected have all died from the extra brain tissue exploding their heads. But now they're undead and they're telepathically linked. Uh-oh.

There's a sequel to, I guess, see what these linked zombies do, but I don't have much interest to find out. And that's all I have to say about that.






                      

OH, IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY - APPARENTLY MISS MURDER REALLY PISSED SOMEONE OFF HIGH UP IN GOVERNMENT BECAUSE THE UNITED STATES IS TRYING TO KILL HER

Oh Sure, Reverse Everything You Told Me Yesterday

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I'm experiencing a life-threatening condition that needs immediate treatment <pauses for raucous laughter> but that's okay now 'cause we just got insurance (NOT Obamacare) now, right?

No problem - says the new insurance company - you just call the people you need to see, flourish your brand new laminated card at them and poof! You're cured!

WRONG.

Now this particular condition I'm dealing with is not the kind of thing you discuss with... well, anybody. That's why I typed the whole thing out - I didn't want to leave anything out and this way the doc could just read everything, ask his questions, wave his wand and then poof! I'm cured!

WRONG.

Maybe if I'd included my selfie... HEY! STOP LAUGHING!

My hubby, knowing how horrific this is for me and how in this country women aren't taken nearly as serious as men when it comes to health (he can make an appointment for me in a week as opposed to me trying and maybe getting one a month away), made the call to the right doctor and, despite having the work load of two people right now, he went through the bullshit that makes this country's care system, uh, such bullshit.

He tries to make an appointment. OH, IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY. They can't just see some stranger who's afraid of imminent death without previous records from her regular doctor. But the insurance people said... he can practically hear the rattling of the chick's marbles as she turns him down flat. 

He calls my regular doctor (who, if I trusted anything he said... well, let's continue) to request that the records be transferred to this new doctor. OH, IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY. I have to make an appointment to see MY doctor to tell HIM what's going on (which I would have done in the first place if I wanted him to know) and THEN have them transfer everything to the new doctor. Then I get to see them, right?

OH, IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY. Apparently, their appointments (which makes me envision all these people sitting around waiting for their turn or their deaths, whichever comes first) are at least a month out.

IF WHAT WAS HAPPENING TO ME WAS NOT IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO SEE A DOCTOR RIGHT AWAY, WOULDN'T YOU THINK I'D JUST WAIT ANYWAY?

This? Means nothing - just cheers me up...

OH, IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY. If you have an emergency before your appointment, rush to the nearest ER and pay out the BIG bucks, especially if after tests you have to stay in the hospital to fix what you've been trying to take care of from the beginning.

That means instead of the insurance (which the hubby pays big bucks for) covering my, uh, problem, he has to pay cash out of pocket to take care of me so I don't, you know, die.

AND THAT'S THE WAY IT WORKS.

Canada's looking pretty good right now, eh?

BLOODY HELL IT'S A MOVIE ABOUT AN ASYLUM - IT'S NOT ABANDONED, IT'S NOT HAUNTED, IT DOESN'T EVEN HAVE A CRAZY DO... UMM, WAIT A MINUTE...








Stonehearst Asylum aka Eliza Graves (2014)

Warning: Today's review is a little bit of whining, a little bit of Edgar Allen Poe, and the rest is a movie that takes place in the southern provinces of France. You have been warned.

Well, yesterday really sucked. If you have a blog you know what I'm talking about. All the videos that weren't directly from YouTube disappeared and frantic people were trying to get help to find out what happened. Guess what? NOBODY got help. It just decided to start working again. I had tried to replace a couple with videos I uploaded to YouTube but the video police slammed them down and spanked me for using third party content. One they just outright deleted. Nice.

So I'm trying to figure out what to do and... things freeze. Then they stop. Then I get sad faces on every page I try to access. Yes, the freaking internet went down again. ALL DAY. With us that includes our cell phones and apparently there were MANY very unhappy people because trying to call both tech numbers resulted in a busy signal before the number even finished dialing. Crap.


I really wanted to do this movie quick mostly because of Jim Sturgess, who I first saw in the movie Across The Universe and I have an ick-crush on. Just kidding. Right now, I actually have an ick-crush on Eric Balfour. What? What's an ick-crush? It's a crush that if the person you have it on ever found out they'd look at you, grimace and say "Ick!"


So the hubby has been telling me I need to be as funny as I used to be. And that would be what on a scale from one to ten??? What is 'as funny'? Okay, maybe the movies haven't been stupid enough, so I watched one this morning, Dark Ride (2006) which, as far as teenage slasher flicks go, is as stupid as one can get. I mean REALLY dumb.

I had it figured out in the first ten minutes (and I was right). The teenagers even got slaughtered in the order I guessed. And it was dumb, dumb, dumb. Huh, somehow I still don't feel very amusing. To hell with it, on to the movie...

I usually really don't like period pieces. They're long, they're dark, and they're boring. This one? Meh, it wobbled between good and duh through most of it, with a twist ending that I thought wasn't terribly original, but since Edgar Allan Poe wrote the original story, I guess back then it was.


Then I did something smart (I know, I'm scared too!). I took a break from writing this review and thought about how could Poe write a romantic type story as this movie portrays it? I thought about it some more (okay I confess, I actually was stuffing my face with Red Vines) and I started seeing the creepy. 

Trouble is, the way the direction and the production was handled (and I was VERY scared to see Mel Gibson as one of the producers), it took what was actually a very creepy situation and tried to run it through the washing machine a couple of times with bleach to see if they could make it look any better. They didn't.

The movie, directed by Brad Anderson (who did Session 9 - if you ever want to see an abandoned asylum movie done right, watch that one), is based on Poe's short story, "The System Of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether."

I laughed so hard I... nah, I just went huh, that's kind of clever. The main reason I watched it though was the strong cast - Jim Sturgess, Kate Beckinsale, Michael Caine, Sir Ben Kingsley and a brief appearance by his son Edmund, David Thewlis and others that seemed to guarantee a sure winner.

Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope.

Oh the movie was GOOD in those boring ways people like to talk about movies. It had beautiful cinematography, a great director, and solid performances, I'll give them that. But if this is a tale right out of ole' Mr. Poe, they must have screwed around with it some. I DO read and I like Poe so I read over this short story and yeah, very little of the original story remains. 

The written story contained a really cool sentence where the doctor (who is not identified at first) sees a beautiful woman but wonders if she is sane because she had "a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes which half led me to imagine she was not (sane)."


Some of the treatments sounded pretty good to me too: "We put much faith in amusements of a simple kind, such as music, dancing, gymnastic exercises generally, cards, certain classes of books, and so forth. We affected to treat each individual as if for some ordinary physical disorder, and the word ‘lunacy’ was never employed." 

"A great point was to set each lunatic to guard the actions of all the others. To repose confidence in the understanding or discretion of a madman, is to gain him body and soul. In this way we were enabled to dispense with an expensive body of keepers.” “And you had no punishments of any kind?” “None.” “And you never confined your patients?” “Very rarely."

But this is not really Poe's story per se, so lets get on with the movie. We first see an Oxford demonstration of a woman who cannot stand to be touched - the Professor giving the lecture is rough when touching her, which causes her to seize but not before she tells the audience she is 'not mad'. The Professor explains that guilty people claim to be innocent, and mad people claim to be sane. His methods are rigid, rough and inhumane (in my opinion).

We then see that one of the doctors from there is sent to an out-of-the-way asylum in France (although it was filmed in Bulgaria) to train in asylum medicine. Duh.


It's nearing the turn of the century. The doctor, who identifies himself as Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess) meets Dr. Silas Lamb (Sir Ben Kingsley). Dr. Lamb had no idea anyone was coming, but the mail in 1899 isn't ideal and they need the help so he takes him on. To Edward's surprise, the "system of soothing" (Poe's words) seems to be in effect and there doesn't seem to be any order to the place at all. In fact it seems to be the total opposite of what Oxford was teaching.

Dr. Newgate also discovers that the woman shown in the demonstration at Oxford is now at the same asylum - duh. He's obviously enchanted with her but can't even be a gentleman and kiss her hand without her having a fit. 

His first clue that something is amiss with this situation (besides the unorthodox treatments) is that a big feast is prepared for the staff and patients alike - the main dish being squirrel meat. He is sitting across from Eliza (duh) who kicks his leg, causing him to spill his drink. When she guides him to a place to clean up, she says he has to leave - NOW. 

This movie would have been mercifully short if he'd just done that, but noises from the boiler pipes leads him into the basement, where in cages he finds sick, starving people begging for release. They tell him that THEY are the staff of the hospital, were overcome by Lamb and his cronies, and now the crazies run the place. Hmm... that sounds pretty familiar too but - meh.

The one claiming to be the real superintendent of the place, Dr. Benjamin Salt (Michael Caine) begs Dr. Newgate to help them as the cold and damp have sickened many of them and they are barely given anything to eat - not to mention they're not supposed to be locked up. To prove he's not lying, he tells Dr. Newgate where he hid Lamb's file to show he's a patient, not a doctor.


He finds it. The guy is one class A nutjob. Today they would say 'Oh no, that's not politically correct, he was obviously suffering from PTSD and Bipolar disorder.' But here, I get to say he's nuttier than a fruitcake, crazier than a shithouse rat, more insane than Randy Quaid, and nastier than two starving dogs fighting over one bone. Good enough?

So Dr. Newgate's got a major problem. He's being watched 24 hours a day, yet trying to sneak food, water and medicine to the staff trapped in the basement. He's puzzled to hear that Dr. Salt believes in the rough type of treatment he learned about at Oxford - all those horrible things you see in other movies - the scalding baths, being confined to a chair and have cold water poured over your head and other goodies.

When Dr. Lamb finds that he's been discovered, he keeps his cool and to get revenge on Dr. Salt reveals his 'invention' - basically the first (I doubt it but it keeps the story going) electro-shock therapy machine. It is the only time he strays from his 'gentling' treatment and he uses it on Dr. Salt until the man no longer remembers who he is or anyone else for that matter.

Dr. Newgate's close to being found out so he's got to get out of there but he won't leave without Eliza. His obsession... well, let's address that later. He decides to try the same thing Lamb did to the real staff - spike the champagne with chloral hydrate (since this has so many names, let's just call it a knock-out drug). But he's discovered, the crazies don't drink the drug and things go, to excuse the expression, crazier.


But in one of those last-minute saves, just before Dr. Newgate is subject to the shock treatments, he shows Dr. Lamb a picture that was the primary reason he went nuts in the first place. How did he get it? There is a freaking lot of duhs in the movie 'cause when the plot gets stuck, something just pops up and they say 'Oh, THAT'S lucky!' Pffft...

It seems Dr. Lamb was in the war, and after trying to do research to find out which one, I found a whole freaking page of wars so forget it... anyway, he was a field doctor and he entered a tent full of those injured. They were all suffering, most had lost limbs, but what freaked him out most was a child (they intimated it to be a drummer boy) with both arms cut off. He lost it - he shot every person in the tent and tried to kill himself but gee whiz, he was out of bullets and apparently you're only allowed six bullets per war.

So now both Dr. Lamb and Dr. Salt sit at a table together, both permanently out of their skulls, so to speak. Dr. Newgate leaves the asylum in the care of a matron and takes Eliza out of there.

So we have to have a kicker, right? Can't just have it to be happily every after... two gentlemen show up, one to work at the asylum, the other to pick up his wife. One is the real Dr. Newgate, the other is Eliza's husband. D'oh! Oops, I mean DUH!!!!

We get a flashback of Eliza's time at Cambridge - after she was taken out of the classroom, another patient was being wheeled in. WHO WAS IT? TELL ME! C'MON, PUT DOWN YOUR CHEETOS AND YOUR BEER AND TELL ME!!!


Just kidding - it was of course the man pretending to be Dr. Newgate. His condition was one in which he actually has no identity of his own that he can remember so he kind of latches onto an identity of another person, usually a doctor.

The last scene shows him and Eliza, quite happy in a beautiful asylum in Tuscany, Italy, as Dr. and Mrs. Lamb.

Nice ending no? NO. And this is why I'm glad I had some time to think about this.

Dr. Newgate was NOT a doctor. He was a patient suffering from a serious condition. He saw Eliza and became obsessed with her, to the point of breaking out of the hospital, taking on his doctor's identity (And how come Eliza didn't know that? Dr. Newgate was HER doctor too!), he travelled a great distance to reach the hospital where she was sent. So, a doctor stalked her. You may clap at that sentence if you wish.

He then continues the charade and treats people - when he has no medical training. After he finds out that the crazies are running the asylum, for a man in need of a hospital who cannot be on his own, how is it that all of a sudden he's smart enough to outwit a whole prisoner gang and take care of the imprisoned staff?

And THEN when things come to a head, he and Eliza take off together - still with no identity of his own. That is why he takes the identity of Dr. Lamb when he again becomes a doctor at another asylum.

So two insane people are now running an asylum instead of having at least one who was a REAL doctor. How frightening is that?

END OF THE YEAR HORROR MOVIE REVIEW CLEARANCE... PART ONE: MAKING SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING AT ALL



Seinfeld

Seinfeld was a pretty funny TV series but I never watched it... wait a minute. No, no, no, that's not what I was going to review, dammit...

Don't Blink aka Last Stop (2014)

Okay, now we're... pretty screwed 'cause this movie was just awful. And I wanted to like it really, really badly because Zack Ward and Joanne Kelly were in it. Screw Brian Austin Greene - what was he famous for? Oh yeah, marrying Megan Fox. Hmm? He was in what series? Never saw it, sorry.

Soooo... (Starts to sing to the tune of The Brady Bunch - aren't you glad you can't hear it?) Here's the story... of ten rich douchebags... who are going to a mountain top resort... all of them have big issues... with each other... oh wait here's Zack Ward...

I'll spare you the rest of that song. How many readers did I lose with just that one paragraph? Hello? Wow.


Brief synopsis and a good reason NOT to watch this movie: Ten people arrive at a secluded mountain resort to find it completely deserted. With no gas for the return trip, the visitors are forced to stay and investigate the mystery surrounding the abandoned lodge. That's it. There ain't no more and if you're looking for logic or even an illogical damned answer you ain't gonna find one here.

I passed this movie over a dozen times until the name Zack Ward got my attention (one of my fave character actors) and then I saw Joanne Kelly. Mena Suvari gets top billing but I had no idea who she was, sorry. About the only thing I think I've seen her in was her brief role as Elizabeth Short (The Black Dahlia) in the first season of American Horror Story: Murder House. Meh.

And what happened to the benefits of satellite TV? They used to be so cool. When we first got DirecTV it was Chiller, SyFy, and Fuse - which actually played MUSIC VIDEOS. REALLY. MUSIC CAME OUT OF THAT CHANNEL, I SAW IT.

Now? Meh. Chiller is the home of serials played over and over (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Ripley's Believe It Or Not, etc. ad nauseam) and a movie everyone's seen at least a dozen times on Friday nights. Fuse... no music. Lots of people screaming at each other, but no music. SyFy? Original programming... sharks flying in the air, through the snow, underground... hey, anywhere there is on God's green earth, Syfy can stick a shark there. They use to have great stuff - Sanctuary, Warehouse 13, Haven. 


Those great shows were inventive. Buuut, you show something for too long and you see patterns. Sanctuary (with cool actors like Robin Dunne and Ryan Robbins) was a great premise with the neat idea of having almost all their sets green screened to keep costs (and waste) low. A Canadian import, it was still pretty cool until you got the weekly message: A 'subhuman' (one whose genes were changed by some splicing) gets into trouble, the Sanctuary team (who houses those with nowhere to go) tries to rescue them, they get into awful trouble and are about to die but tada! 

Dr. Helen Magnus (who's over 100 years old - give me some of that!) would find a solution with her team and all would reset for the next week. Oh, and we got to see the many talents (and characters) of Christopher Heyerdahl too - he got to play a monster (so to speak) in several guises.


Haven was formed after Stephen King's novel The Colorado Kid - it was the basic love triangle - a blonde comes to Maine thinking she's an FBI agent, kind of falls in love with two different kind of guys, and finds out she's not who she thinks she is - in fact, she doesn't know who she is at all. I loved this show but again, patterns - each week the three would find a different 'trouble' (the name they gave for people with special abilities that almost invariably screwed things up), the two different guys would hate/like each other and vie for the girl and we reset for the next week. 

They tried to keep a storyline going but that gets kind of tough when you're spreading a novel over seasons worth of episodes. Again, it was a Canadian import (Maine is close enough, right?) but we got to watch Eric Balfour and that was good enough for me.


Warehouse 13. Ah, there was a super cool series (supposedly in South Dakota but actually another series from Canada).. until, you know. A super-secret government place that bends space (the outside is a regular warehouse, the inside is like a city) and two agents are picked to go out and find 'objects' that do special things (usually those that belonged to famous people) and bring them to the safety of the warehouse. Aaaand the pattern was set. I still loved that show - we had CCH Pounder, Saul Rubinek, Eddie McClintock, and the know-it-all Myka played by Joanne Kelly. 

Now what was my point? Did I have... oh yeah, Joanne. She was sexy AND smart and played off her fellow characters very well so since this movie was obviously a 'gather 'em up and waste 'em one by one' movie I passed UNTIL I saw that name. Oh and Zack too. And despite the two of them being Canadian (actually Joanne just lives in Canada), the film was actually shot in New Mexico.

I looked up Don't Blink and got hit with a billion Doctor Who references - sorry kids, never watched the thing (love David Tennant though) so I don't know what that's about, but the other title for this movie is Last Stop - which is the name of another movie made in 2000 with Rose McGowan and Jurgen Prochnow so I guess they were kind of stuck one way or another...

I tried to wiki Don't Blink and got some damned country song so... screw it. This is what happens...

We have ten people, supposedly friends, going to a mountain retreat. It is so far up that you have to gas up just to make it there. Your tank's empty when you get there, so the retreat has its own gas station. 'Kay. They chug and hope to make it to the resort. Hmm, ten people, I'm already thinking Agatha Christie but not near as smart...


These ten people are the kind of friends that you know that a couple of them really know each other and the rest are just kind of tagging along. When they all arrive they can't find anyone in the ridiculously resplendent lodge - no one is at the desk, the tables all have food on them but no one is eating and clothes and makeup are in the rooms but again, no people.

So following movie logic, even though nobody has cell service, they decide to split up and find out if anyone's out there somewhere. Because people aren't going to start disappearing unless they do movie duh stuff so here we go... who goes first? 

One finds that although the food is cold, the stove was left on. Inside the cabinet under the sink is a scrawled 'help me' which he doesn't see - which makes what kind of sense? Why would someone put it there - the cabinet is under the freaking sink and was full so it's not like anyone was hiding under there. But if that kind of duh is going to put you off you might as well stop watching...

The cabins (which are five times the size as the house I live in) have stuff but no people. The Zack and Joanne (Why do they always make this beautiful woman look like a train wreck?) characters go for a hike to find something, anything. While it's too hot at the lodge, the nearby lake has frozen solid, fast enough to trap a small boat (no one in it) and there isn't an animal, bird, or insect anywhere around.

Grouping back together, Brian Austin Green's girlfriend just vanishes while the group's talking (I think it's the Mena woman but I just don't care). They take off to look for her, a guy vanishes. They decide (massive duh) to be in one room at the lodge where they can watch each other.

Now you see her...

After a few more disappearances, two take off in a car but get only to the end of the driveway before the driver disappears, the passenger now a mumbling wreck. They also find that the temperature has dropped 50 degrees within hours, meaning the too-hot weather at the lodge has now turned to a lodge covered in snow. And they now know they were never going to leave.

...now you don't.

They're down to three when there's a knock on the door - it's the first guy to have disappeared. He claims to have fallen in a ditch and doesn't remember what happened. Now we're up to four but down to ten minutes. But Zack's character isn't taking any chances...

Person after person disappears and we're eager for them all to leave 'cause then the movie's over, right? We are down to Joanne Kelly and Brian Austin Green who are staring at themselves in a mirror in the dark with candles. The effect of Brian "disappearing" kind of gets spoiled since he is clearly just falling backward into the dark - double duh.


Tons of emergency vehicles (and two men in black, one being a 15 second role by Robert Picard) show up to do a 'quick sweep' of the place as Joanne, sole survivor (and mad as hell at her agent I bet) is given the magic blanket (see my horror movie worksheet - whoops, sorry, haven't printed that out yet) and put in the back of a police car. They hustle around until...

Joanne covers her eyes and thinks about what Zack said, 'Anything we do or are gets erased.'



A sudden silence surrounds her. She looks up - tons of emergency vehicles, not a single person around...

Let's hope this was world-wide or else they're gonna try for some sort of sequel - The Douchebags Come Back.