zombies vs strippers

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2364997

zombies vs strippers.  it has zombies, and it has strippers.  what more could you want?  you might be thinking that that question is rhetorical, but pretty much no.  let me tell you about some of the things you could want.

• a script: other than the painful attempts at clever one-liners, there was little sign that there was an actual script associated with this film.
• THE ROCK: but then, i want to see the rock in pretty much every movie.  it is a pretty far-fetched notion for this film because the rock is probably pretty expensive, and this film was clearly lacking...
• a budget: if they had doubled their budget to $2000, they could have afforded to hire *professional* hobos to play the zombies or real strippers to play the strippers.  or with careful negotiating, both of those things.
• better communication between actors and the director: it seemed to me that the director could have done a better job of communicating to all the actors the kind of movie that they were making.  if everybody had been on board with the fact that they were making a crappy straight-to-video movie, then they could have made a really great crappy straight-to-video movie.  it worked for zombie strippers, and it could have worked here if no one had taken their roles seriously.  in particular, i thought most of the zombies took their roles a bit too literally

i do not know what i was expecting, really.  i knew it was going to be schlock, so i should not be surprised that it turned out to be schlock.

zombies vs strippers gets one zombie or one stripper, but not both.

megamind

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1001526

megamind teaches us that if you are blue and misunderstood and a super genius that you can can still win the day and the city and the girl.  speaking only for myself--because i know a lot of people who are not me have not had this work for them--it is absolutely true.  also, you can be an astronaut or a ninja or the president of the united states, no matter who you are.

those of you who are connected to "reality" of course realize how ridiculous that is.  it is all chance and good luck and just happening to be at the right place at the right time.  is that something we could take away from megamind?  answer: no, not unless you want to remove the only thing that makes it stick together.  but what am i doing, demanding that kind of quality from a film that 1) is animated and 2) stars will ferrel?  i might as well complain about water being wet.  you do not watch an animated will ferrel movie to get meaning, you watch it for cheap laughs.  megamind had a few of those, i guess.

megamind gets two brainbots.

super hybrid

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1152827

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG.  stop whatever you are doing and go watch this movie.  go now.  the rest of the review will still be here when you get done.

---

there.  did you learn something?  peter lynch phrased it as "never take a hot tip on a stock."

super hybrid is just about completely pointless.  the hook is the only interesting thing about it.  all the rest is so completely formulaic that there is no doubt at any point what is going to happen.  on second thought, that is not quite true; i was not sure whether at the end we were going to see more of the monsters or if they were going to zoom into a dark corner of the garage, where we would see that the thing had laid eggs.  i actually zoned out for the middle 60 minutes or so, and when i woke back up, all the characters that i expected to be dead were dead and it turned out that i was just in time for the mandatory bit of trickery on the part of the monster, followed by the big win.

super hybrid gets one burmese tiger.

extracted

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1757746

there are far more bad movies than there are ways i can think of to say they are bad.  this is particularly true when the badness is itself not very good.  the badness itself does not even have the common courtesy to be bad enough to say anything about.

therefore, i outsourced this review to a mysterious and shadowy correspondant known only as "the cheerleader," who had this to say:

Extracted is the movie Inception would have been if it had been made as a bad movie.  I was told that my time spent sitting around and waiting to be picked up for dinner was better spent sitting around and waiting to be picked up for dinner rather than watching this movie.

I think this movie does a have a few praises that deserve singing. It managed to hit that sweet middle-ground "bad" that's worse than not-so-bad, but not as bad as super bad. Since it was the movie of the night, Extracted made its way into the after dinner conversation quite frequently. The increased frequency with which it entered the conversation was facilitated by 1) the short period of time over which the movie was discussed during each incident of discussion, and 2) the high rate at which the focus of the conversation would change to movies that were either better, worse, or better because they were worse. Extracted is a good topic to start a conversation with if you do not want the conversation to be about the topic you started with. 

If you become bored with whatever it is you are doing, say, cleaning the bathroom floor, or watching paint dry, I would suggest watching Extraction. My data suggests you will appreciate the beige tiling and/or the shiny, mustard yellow overcoat much more after watching this 2012 example of how not to use special effects.

eerily accurate, for someone who did not actually watch the movie.

cop land

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118887

a lot of people do not like sylvester stallone on account of rambo and rocky, both characters with names that start with the letter 'r', being five letters long, and, arguably, fitting a consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant-vowel pattern.  i have always like those characters, though, despite the muscle-bound badass aspect.  for whatever reason, i usually identify with the aspects of the characters that are not the muscle-bound badass part.  i had plenty to identify with in cop land, where stallone plays an overweight, half deaf, not-so-bright sheriff.  i would have enjoyed it much more if this character had not stumbled along while the story happened around him.  i got the impression that the script writers meant for his actions to be driving the city cops, but it came out a lot more like the city cops were motivated by what they thought he might do, maybe.

cop land gets three stuffed turtles.