final girl

[IMDB] [Amazon]

final girl is a movie about a sadistic sociopath who lures men out into the woods, drugs them, then slaughters them.  no character arc to this one, and the fight choreography is pretty lame.  also the acting, directing, and plot are--and i am being generous here--god awful.  you should also be aware that the movie's marketing suggests this is a turn-the-tables kind of story or maybe a revenge flick, but they spend so little effort setting up the bad guys that they might as well have not bothered.  the one-dimensional thugs dutifully climb into the barrel, and then the girl shoots them. that was a metaphor, not a thing that actually happened.

oh, it was also a love story, but that was pretty thin, too.

final girl finally gets one milkshake.

deadpool

[IMDB] [Amazon]

deadpool is basically exactly what it is advertised as.  it set out to be a crudely funny, self-referential, action movie, and it succeeded completely in accomplishing this goal.  so, high marks for that.  on the other hand, it was not really high art, but if you were expecting high art, then you must have accidentally wandered into the wrong movie.

computer graphics have come a long way since the final fantasy movie.  i was pretty impressed with how naturally colossus fit into the environment.  the character was actually not originally supposed to be computer generated, you know.  what happened is that when they were filming the big fight scene between angel dust and colossus, gina carano kept accidentally kicking colossus's ass.  after 37 takes, colossus quit.  so then they cast a voice actor, who insisted on a clause in his contract which would compensate him in the event that the computer-generated colossus got its ass kicked so hard that he was injured.  after four takes and four injuries, the studio decided to work around the problem by computer-generating colossus *and* angel dust.  this also did not work because gina carano's likeness was still too tough.  so finally they put together a fight between a computer-generated colossus and drew barrymore, then did some post-processing to put gina carano's face on drew barrymore.  this mostly worked. the fight ended up taking two minutes longer because drew barrymore with gina carano's face was still too tough.  true story.

deadpool gets four unicorns and a gold star for unabashedly being the movie it was trying to be.