Everyone loves a Cinderella story in Hollywood: when a bunch of audacious amateurs make a movie on a shoestring budget and it catches on with the movie-watching public. George Romero, Sam Raimi, and Kevin Smith were able to tap into the zeitgeist and used their glorified home movies to propel them to great success in the world of cinema.
Ninjas vs. Zombies doesn’t quite have that same je ne sais quoi that Night of the Living Dead, Clerks, and Evil Dead had, but it comes oh so close.
As you’ve no doubt already read on Twitter, Facebook, various RSS feeds, and half the Internet at large, Joss Whedon is in final talks to direct Marvel’s upcoming “Avengers” movie, slated for release May 4 2012.
Whedon is, of course, well known for his various Whedonverse series’, as well as his runs on Astonishing X-Men and Runaways. Rumors abound of his potentially reworking the Avengers script to some extent, as well.
Geeks are rending their shirts like pre-pubescent Beatles fans. I, for one, am one part excited, one part hedging my bets completely.
I am determined to give a straight up review on this movie. I really am.
Tuesday night I went with a few friends to the midnight premiere in Grand Rapids, MI, of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. We arrived around 11:15pm and managed to find four seats for all of us. Immediately I remembered why I hate the general public: non-stop douche-baggery for 45 minutes until the previews started, and then of the 560 people (not including myself and my three buddies) could not shut up even into the previews and through the movie. This is a major annoyance for me, but the atmosphere isn’t really the point here.
Coming into this movie, I had just watched the first Transformers movie about 8 hours before because I hadn’t actually sat down and purposely watched it in the past given my extreme disgust with Michael Bay. So, I had the plot in my head: Megatron was beaten, Shia LeBeouf proved he can scream a lot, there was a yellow Camero Transformer (Bumble Bee) that was pretty cool, and Optimus Prime was a totally awesome dude.
Hello, all. I’ve been away for some time, both due to an influx of schoolwork and just being to damn poor to support a budding comics habit. But I have been keeping up with my comic book adaptations, which in many ways is more unfortunate than suffering from a broken economy. Many Americans have flocked to the cineplexes in these hard times, as they always do, looking for a bit of escape from a harsh world. Yet when I sat through Watchmen at a midnight screening in March, I was suddenly reminded of how good I have it. Not because of the stark dystopia and the amoral wasteland it depicted, but because it so thoroughly missed the point that I was looking forward to getting back to my world of scraping together money to try to stay in school, pay the rent and feed myself, all while trying to land some sort of job. Synder’s screwed-pooch enraged me so much that, after I wrote a review for my school paper and came here to make my triumphant return with a more fleshed-out (papers have word limits, you know) takedown of why the film so completely let me down. Suffice to say: it knew the steps but not the rhythm, and so it lurched about like a wino with an inner ear infection, occasionally careening into the right tone but too often gazing at the inside of its navel by shoving its head up its ass (to mix metaphors poorly). But never mind that dismal failure, because I’m here to discuss the latest comic book extravaganza, the summer-starting X-Men Origins: Wolverine. (more…)
“Every ten years or so, you need to give the universe an enema.” – Julius Schwartz
The poster even looks like one of those Foil Covers from the 90's, doesn't it?
In Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman devotes a chapter to what he calls a “comic-book movie.” He’s a bit fuzzy on what a comic book movie actually is, but one interpretation would be any film that chooses to follow the rules of its genre rather than the laws of reality. He admits that many of his favorite films qualify as comic book movies, and cites the then-upcoming Star Trek II as an example of a comic-book movie.
Over 25 years later, audiences would get a Star Trek movie that literally owes its existence to comic books. And it was good.
Set a course for the Spoiler system, Warp Factor 3…
It’s been a slow month here at DestroyTheCyb.org but nevertheless I wanted to get out a review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine sometime with a week of it’s release. Let me explain things in a fashion that I feel will work best: TPKC.
Theory: Going into the movie, I’d heard but not seen things from leak and I had low expectations given the few people I knew who had watched the leaked video. Of course, I’m a monster comic book fan, if you didn’t already know, so I knew my Wolverine origin from that aspect and even so, I knew that a movie couldn’t capture every line, ink, and letter of the comics. With that said, I still was going in with low expectations especially since X-Men: The Last Stand had me holding vomit in my mouth and I could only think that Fox was going to make me nearly puke once again. But I digress, I was going in thinking the movie could only be better than what I was thinking…
So I managed to get free passes to see Watchmen for last night in Grand Rapids, MI. Yes I was excited, yes I knew what to expect, yes I knew that in no god damned way on earth could this movie be anywhere close to the comic, and yes I knew that I had to take it as it was because everyone knows that it couldn’t even come close to the comic. I sat in anticipation for the movie to start and when it did, I smiled. I watched this movie trying so hard to take it in as something new, something objective, something blah blah blah. I warn you, this gets vulgar.
As the fates would have it, I was fortunate enough to get some advance screening passes to see Watchmen from my LCS (thanks, Tardy’s, I love you guys!). So, myself, Mike Rapin and some friends went off to view the movie with all the hype surrounding it. Personally, I went in with some pretty low expectations. Yeah, I was really excited for it. How could you not anticipate seeing one of the greatest graphic novels of all time come to life? Yet, I was skeptical that it would really work, like most fans. Despite my low expectations, I really wanted to love it. I really wanted it to be amazing. Oddly enough, when I left the theater, I wanted really badly to hate it. There was so much wrong with it. Yet, my overall reaction was that it was a great film. That said, this is going to be a full review, so I’ll break down the good, the bad and tell you why despite my love, this movie is going to have a lot of trouble finding an audience.
My Bloody Valentine 3D was the first Horror movie in awhile that I’ve seen and just had fun throughout the whole movie and why that is you as, it didn’t insist upon itself. Not once did I have to look for the hidden meaning or deal with over the top artistic death scenes; it was just a fun slasher flick that didn’t try to present itself as anything else.
The movie opens ten years ago; six miners are trapped in mine 5, when the rescue crew arrives they find five of them have been slaughtered while the 6th is in a coma. A year passes and it’s Valentine’s Day. Our Murderous villain awakes just in time to slaughter most of the hospital employees and a gaggle of horny teenagers down at the local mine. Thankfully a few survive after being rescued by the sheriff and the maniac is shot down OR so we think.
Ten years pass and our survivors of the Bloody Valentine’s Day Massacre have gone on with their lives. The mad rush of impending death resulted in Sarah and Axel (Kerr Smith;of Dawson’s Creek & Jaime King;Sin City, General Muse) falling in love, while Sarah’s high school love & owner of said mines, Tom Haringer (Jensen Ackles; Supernatural), mysteriously arrives back in town to finally sell the mines. Needless to say madness ensues as soon as he arrives; after all, it has been ten years almost to the day since the last incident.
My Bloody Valentine 3D doesn’t promise to be anything more than it is; a horror flick that has the gimmick of being shot in magical 3 dimensional glory. I bet if we took that away it would be just another tragic horror flick with a pretty cast that nobody would really see, but let me tell you, this was the first time in a long time I actually enjoyed the rush of a horror film. Sure the acting is stale at points and Kerr Smith has a southern accent that fades off & on, but what it lacks in consistency MVB makes up with style.
Who couldn’t be impressed at half of a girl’s bloody head is falling of the base of a shovel towards you?
I told Mike I was going to see and review “The Spirit” a week ago, but I’ve yet to muster up the courage to go. I review films for my school newspaper, and the three week break I go from seeing pure crap has been my favorite Xmas gift. I’ll see it soon, but in the meantime let’s talk about another 2008 superhero film, one without the buzz (and frankly, the quality) of “Hellboy II,” “Iron Man,” or “The Dark Knight.” I’m talking about a little film with a big green hero, “The Incredible Hulk.”
The last Hulk movie was a total disaster. There are those who try to convince me that Ang Lee (maybe the most overrated director working today) created a complex Hulk, one that focused more on Bruce Banner’s psyche than on mindless action. I know what Lee was trying to do but, from the bottom of my heart, I don’t care. I don’t give a good goddamn if the complete lack of lighting symbolized the darkness of Bruce’s repressed memories, or if the poodles represented- well, horrible writing. It was dull, pretentious, and didn’t even tackle the psychological aspects of Hulk properly. I know Hulk is a deeper character than anyone gives him credit for, but couldn’t he just hit something every now and then? After a few years, Ed Norton and Louis Leterrier came in to try to clean up the mess with a reboot. Did it work?
Film Review: Ninjas vs. Zombies
Hello, all. I’ve been away for some time, both due to an influx of schoolwork and just being to damn poor to support a budding comics habit. But I have been keeping up with my comic book adaptations, which in many ways is more unfortunate than suffering from a broken economy. Many Americans have flocked to the cineplexes in these hard times, as they always do, looking for a bit of escape from a harsh world. Yet when I sat through Watchmen at a midnight screening in March, I was suddenly reminded of how good I have it. Not because of the stark dystopia and the amoral wasteland it depicted, but because it so thoroughly missed the point that I was looking forward to getting back to my world of scraping together money to try to stay in school, pay the rent and feed myself, all while trying to land some sort of job. Synder’s screwed-pooch enraged me so much that, after I wrote a review for my school paper and came here to make my triumphant return with a more fleshed-out (papers have word limits, you know) takedown of why the film so completely let me down. Suffice to say: it knew the steps but not the rhythm, and so it lurched about like a wino with an inner ear infection, occasionally careening into the right tone but too often gazing at the inside of its navel by shoving its head up its ass (to mix metaphors poorly). But never mind that dismal failure, because I’m here to discuss the latest comic book extravaganza, the summer-starting X-Men Origins: Wolverine..jpg "Star Trek")
I told 
