the babysitter

[IMDB]

i have this new thing i am doing where i shut off bad movies rather than finish watching them. basically acknowledging my extremely finite lifespan and deciding that maybe i should spend it on more worthwhile things than low budget drek. but then i thought to myself, schmolli, what about your readers? and also, what do you have to do that is more important than watching low budget drek?

so anyway, i started watching low budget drek again. you will be pleased to hear that netflix has plenty of it available for streaming, and in fact, they even started producing it, i guess because they want to stop paying royalties on the crap they currently have in their library.

man, when an i going to start taking about this movie? very soon now, i assure you.

i first noticed netflix was funding lower budget stuff while watching standup specials. they started with big names, but now a lot of them could charitably be referred to as... small names. by this point i am pretty well convinced that they would be willing to fund a schmolli standup special, which would probably consist of me standing on a stage reading old movie reviews in my robo-schmolli voice.

THANK YOU. THANK YOU. WELL HELLO PITTSBURG. WHAT A GREAT CROWD. LET US GET TO KNOW OUR AUDIENCE. YOU, SIR. HAVE YOU EVER BEEN A BABYSITTER. NO, I THOUGHT NOT. JUST AS WELL, I DO NOT KNOW ANY BABYSITTER JOKES.

ANYWHO, I WILL NOW COMMENCE MY ROBO-SCHMOLLI REVIEW COMEDY SPECIAL.

THE BABYSITTER IS SUPPOSEDLY A COMEDY SLASH HORROR MOVIE, BUT I THINK I WOULD CALL IT MORE OF A STEAMING SLASH STINKING MOVIE. AT ANY RATE, NOT FUNNY AND NOT SCARY. ALSO NONE OF THE SEXY STUFF WAS SEXY. NETFLIX PLEASE.

THE BABYSITTER GETS ONE EXTREMELY IMPROBABLE KILL AFTER ANOTHER.

lol zone 2

[IMDB] [Amazon]

autocorrect decided that this movie should be called lol zone 2 instead of kill zone 2, and who am i to argue? in honor of autocorrect continuous and constant fuckups, i have decided to write this entire review without correcting autocorrect. let us see how correct the review ends up being. send to be going really well so far!

i am not going to lie, i watched this movie because Tony has was in it, because i loved him in Ong Bak. and, just like every other Tony has movie i have watched, i was so disappointed. is here trying to act or something? man, go with your strengths! beat some bad guys up!

anyway, they bakery this movie as an action movie, but there is really very little action per unit time. half the fight since are so confusing you cannot tell what is going on anyway. for example, the one where somebody, i thought it was the bad guys, sore up at the surgery and then one of them carves his way through the rest and then take it the cops who were guessing the underling donor guy? my best guess is that actually the guys who showed up were well-dressed cops and there was just one bad guy who was following them in.

another thing i would like to complain about is that so many of these action movies feature fight since where everyone is happy to just do superficial damage. the fights would be over so much more wiggly if anybody was delivering am extra disabling blow when they get a chance. i mean seriously, break s leg or something.

lol zone 2 gets two smartphones that i could not figure out who it belonged to until pretty much the end, except i think it was supposed to be obvious.

the beaver

[IMDB] [Amazon]

the beaver is essentially a remake of dumbo, swapping out dumbo for a human, the magic feather for a beaver puppet, and flying for severe depression.  so, a bit darker than the disney classic.  alas, the beaver brings nothing new to the table, unless you count self-mutilation.  which i do not.

i know the bar is low when it comes to understanding and dealing with mental illness, especially in the movies, so i should probably not be unhappy with the way the beaver portrays things, but i am unhappy with it anyway.  depression is some bad shit, man.  you do not just strap on a beaver and  fix it in a couple weeks.  also, i am pretty sure that what they were showing was a schizophrenic break, which is a whole other can of worms, but take that assessment with a grain of salt because not only am i not a trained psychologist or psychiatrist, i cannot even consistently remember what the difference is between a psychologist and a psychiatrist. one of them can give you drugs?

the beaver gets one hand saw. get it?

shimmer lake

[IMDB] [Netflix]

shimmer lake does a fine job of telling a mystery story in reverse.  i first saw this gimmick used in memento, where it was meant to force the protagonist's condition onto the viewer, and it was definitely an appropriate storytelling device there.  in the case of shimmer lake, there did not seem to be any particular reason for telling the story that way, other than for the entertainment value.  luckily, it was very entertaining.  the only bad spot was that they could not seem to decide whether to make it comedic or not.  so the viewer suffers a bit of whiplash whenever a scene change toggles the comedy bit.

shimmer lake gets four dead bodies.

the rezort

[IMDB] [Amazon]

the rezort is a ripoff of jurassic park, except without all of the parts that made jurassic park good ("unix!  i know this!") and also with zombies instead of dinosaurs.  the rezort had other flaws, as well, such as an obvious supply chain issue that telegraphed the climax's scandalous reveal.  it would also be accurate to observe that the rezort employed zero competent security personnel, which seems particularly unrealistic to me, given that we were supposed to be in a world where billions had died from a highly contagious disease, the last known sample of which was wandering free range on this island.  to be fair to the writers, it would have been a much shorter and less interesting movie if they had had proper security measures and backup systems in place.

also, if there is a zombie outbreak and your failsafe system intends to scorch the entire island, then here is a hot tip for you: do not rely on AIRPLANES FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE TO FLY OVER YOU AND SHOOT ROCKETS.  instead, you need a Big Red Button which blows everything, with zero delay, via redundant, pre-placed explosives of a size that will definitely produce a mushroom cloud and leave behind nothing more contagious than some molten rock.  and actually, the BRB should be a dead man switch.  plus a remote trigger in case a zombie sits on the now-aptly-named dead man switch.

i mean, come on.  we are talking about ZOMBIES here.  a highly-contagious, blood-borne infection which turns its hosts into ravenous monsters is essentially an extinction event.  you might as well make a russian roulette theme park.

the rezort gets one clandestine thumb drive.