Dylan Dog: Dead of Night.

“Dylan Dog” is based loosely on a comic book and received pretty horrendous reviews from fans of the original comic.  It’s about a private eye with some serious ability, that battles with supernatural beings.  Also he apparently has a zombie sidekick.  There’s a slight connection to the mid nineties masterpiece “Cemetery Man” in that it is based on the same series.  The difference is that the screenplay for “Cemetery Man” was actually written by the author of the comic, whereas this one is written by the team that wrote “Sahara” and the “Conan” remake.  Sigh.  Anyways, since no one here has ever read the comic, that’s not something that we are taking into consideration here.

[...]

[Dylan tells us that he quit the ‘undead protection’ business, but quit because his heart was broken.]

Lovelock: If I knew about undead creatures, I don’t think I could just ignore them.

Starkwell: Considering the movie opened up with a werewolf eating a dude, I think we know he won’t ignore them for long.

[...]

Then we are introduced to Dylan.  He’s charismatic as hell and his assistant Marcus seems cool too.  Thus far, accuracy to the comic or not…seems cool.  The daughter of Werewolf Victim tries to hire Dylan and take him out of retirement.  He refuses and his assistant Marcus is confused and pissed.  I don’t think Marcus knows about his past.  Then we are introduced to a VAMPIRE dance club full of drug dealing vampires.  I guess vampires are bad.  Why do vampires always dance at clubs?

[...]

[Werewolf kills Marcus?]

Lovelock: Oh man… I liked Marcus.

[Dylan is sad.]

Starkwell: Accuracy to the comic book or not, the important thing for a good movie is to have characters you like.  CHECK.

[Dylan comes out of retirement.]

Lovelock: I’ll get over Marcus.  This is so cool.

[...]

So far, it’s a classic Private Eye picture, except you know, where he’s chasing down werewolf clans and talking about drug dealing vampires.  Fun stuff.

[...]

Lovelock: Werewolves?  Vampires?  Clan fights?  If I wanted to vomit I’d watch “Twilight”.  Where are the fucking zombies!?

Starkwell: Dude…

[...]

As Dylan continued his investigations and had fights with vampires and explained the magics of the world to Elizabeth (daughter of Werewolf Attack Victim).

[...]

Lovelock: Lucky for us he has someone he needs to explain this shit to.

Starkwell: Sneaky writer trick.

[...]

Dylan goes to find Marcus at the morgue.  Dylan meets his zombie friends there, and then Marcus wakes up!  So Marcus wasn’t killed by the werewolf, rather, he was bitten by a zombie.  It turns out that there are different types of zombies.  The flesh eating kind are all muscular and crazy.  The non flesh eaters mostly just act normal and look kinda gross.  Lovelock played air guitar for the next ten minutes.

[...]

[Dylan explains Marcus how he needs to survive as a zombie.]

Lovelock: I really hope they don’t show him eating those maggots…

[...]

Starkwell and Lovelock really didn’t say much.  They just sat, genuinely interested in the movie, captivated and on the edge of their seats.  Marcus is a great comic relief zombie, and when they do finally see one of the huge flesh eating types of Lovelock jumps out of his seat and plays air guitar for a whole other ten minutes.  There are some twists, turns, scares and laughs, and Dylan eventually gets to the bottom of it and there’s a happy ending.  Marcus, much to his chagrin, is still a zombie though. It’s not without its problems, but overall, this is certainly not a terrible film.

Chillerama.

Zombies are obviously a huge fad at the moment.  A smaller fad that has popped back up in the horror industry is the 'anthology' picture.  Most, if not all, that we have watched thus far have failed to ever capture the magic of “Tales From the Crypt” or even “Creepshow”.  “Chillerama” was one that was well received, and features five directors, one for each segment.  The bad news is, only one of them contains zombies (and it turns out to be the central story that plays in between the other segments).  The worse news, the whole film is two hours long.  I smell a fast forward request around the corner.

[...]

[Guy digs up his dead wife and tries to rape her corpse in the graveyard.]

Starkwell: Ummm…

[Wife re-animates bites off his balls.]

Starkwell: Why did they have to show his nutsack?

Lovelock: Why is his blood blue?

[Guy walks away and goes past a drive-thru, and it shifts focus on the attendees therein.]

Starkwell: Why did they say ‘Otis Redding’ was on when it isn’t ‘Otis Redding’?

[We’re in for a long ride.]

Starkwell: Oh I get it… he had blue balls.

Lovelock: I must say, I opening it up with a shot of a hairy nutsack being gobbled is… umm… BALLSY.

Starkwell: Stop. Just stop.

[...]

Gobbled-Up Ballsack Man works at the drive-in theater, and I guess the drive-in is going to be what we see for the ‘segue’ sequences in between segments.  Some faces are recognizable, it’s not entirely filled with amateurs, and so far it seems quite competently made.  The acting and dialogue are decent, but I have to admit, Starkwell is having issues with the subject matter already.

[...]

[First segment is about a guy who takes a fertility drug and ends up with gigantic sperm.]

Lovelock: Well, it’s crass, but at least it’s…funny?

Starkwell: Yeah, I don’t know about that.

Lovelock: Well, it’s gross, but at least… it’s… funny?

[Doctor tells him to jerk off whenever he is aroused, so he does so in the bathroom of his date, right when he shows up at her house, but the sperm he releases continues to grow, has teeth and tries to burrow up the date’s crotch.]

Starkwell: Dude, it’s like it was written by stoned fifteen year olds.

Lovelock: Not quite there...

Starkwell: Stoned fifteen year old Troma fans?

Lovelock: There's the missing piece.

[...]

So the sperm gets away, keeps growing and starts eating people.  And then it really gets ridiculous.

[...]

[Giant sperm looks at statue of liberty and sees her shaking her ass and bare breast.]

Starkwell: How is this a movie?  And I don’t mean that in a “it’s so edgy” kind of way.  I literally mean how is this a movie.

Lovelock: So many innuendoes… SO FUCKING LAME.

[...]

Off to a rough start.  This makes Troma movies look mature.  It’s too bad, because it is relatively well made in terms of its look and feel.  No seriously, it’s well filmed and looks really cool.  It’s just that, we’re only one segment in and we’ve seen dudes beating off three times, and now, in between all of the lame and predictable sex jokes, we’re being treated to a lame musical number.  I guess they’re parodying beach movies in this next segment.

[...]

Starkwell: Alright, I get what they’re doing here.  I get the homage that they are going for.  Very clever, now can we fast forward?

[...]

Seriously, it’s a shame because there are some good ideas here.  But they KEEP covering those ideas in dick jokes.  Also, in the beach party movie... gay jokes?  Then in the next segue they bring in the big guns.  FART JOKES!  Starkwell just keeps getting more and more angry.   The next segment is “The Diary of Anne Frankenstein”.  It involves Hitler reviving a dead Rabbi who comes back to life and starts killing Nazis.

[...]

Starkwell:  I think these film makers REALLY want to be EDGY.

Lovelock: I just don’t think they know where the edge is.

Starkwell: Their edge is probably covered in dick and fart jokes.

Lovelock: And… Jewish jokes apparently?

[...]

So Lovelock and Starkwell are finally realizing that the zombie segment is actually just the stuff that they are showing in between the other segments.  Apparently the blue blood semen mixture that ended up in the popcorn is turning everyone into flesheaters.  The final segment called “Deathication” is one long fart and shit joke.  And there are a lot of boobies.  Starkwell gets up and leaves.

[...]

Lovelock: Actually, it’s kind of getting to the point where the shit joke is beaten so badly that it’s actually starting to really be funny.

[...]

Starkwell left just in time.  Once “Deathication” ended, it cut back to the drive-in and it was one long montage of people butt blasting one another and eating each other while butt blasting each other and people jerking off and so on and so forth.  Then they showed a girl pulling out her husband’s cock and ripping it off while spraying her husband with blue breast milk… in front of their baby, which they then ate.  It sounds even worse than it is.

[...]

Lovelock: This is like those action movies, where the film makers think if they just show shit blowing up for two hours that it’s EVEN better than actually trying to write a fucking story.

[All killer, no filler?  What a bunch of malarkey.]

[...]

Don’t get me wrong, it’s the best horror movie parody I’ve seen in a long time.  But that don’t mean shit, really.  The film makers clearly love movies, and a lot of the same movies I love.  Unfortunately, they seem to love dick-fart jokes, racial and and religious and sexual stereotypes, and boobies and shit even more.  The movie ended with the four filmmakers leaving a theater showing “Chillerama”, which they then made fun of.  Nice touch I guess. One guy was wearing a Newbury Comics shirt, which, admittedly, is pretty fucking cool.

BURT MALONE LETTERS: World War Z.

Burt Malone just sent me this lengthy email after seeing this weekend’s blockbuster zombie film, “World War Z”, and I figured it was a nice opportunity to give Lovelock and Starkwell some time off to recover.

[...]

If you’ve read the book you know that Max Brooks is all about the slowburn of the Romero-style shuffling zombie.  Within the first five minutes of the movie, it’s pretty clear that they threw that out the window along with Max Brooks’ blessing and probably a shitload of initial drafts of the script.

The only two things that this seems to have in common with the book are the title and the fact that it takes place in the ‘world’.  These zombies are not only NOT slow at all, but in fact they are MEGA EXTREME TO THE MAX.  Also, there is no war.  Now, given the recent popularity of a television show based on a comic book based on the Romero model of the zombie (slow, shuffling, menacing, flesh-eating, blargh), perhaps Brad and the 'Plan B' people figured they needed to take it in a different direction.  In an age when the Romero zombie movie has been done time and time again, as a comedy, drama, horror etc… perhaps Brad and the 'Plan B' people figured they needed to take it in a different direction.

Hmmm.

Guess what?  I can respect that.  I can respect originality.  But when you change something that is overtly stated by the source material’s author as WHAT A ZOMBIE IS, it’s insanely disrespectful, to both the author and to fans of the book.  So maybe you should consider changing the title, or something.  Fast moving, non-flesh-eating, collective consciousness (?) zombies that sound like velociraptors, react to sound like the T-Rex in "Jurassic Park" and have disease-detecting eyes ARE NOT WHAT MAX BROOKS FUCKING HAD IN MIND.  The zombies bite, but don't eat people?  Huh?

When Peter Jackson made “Lord the Rings” into a movie, he didn’t decide “hey, why don’t we give the hobbits shiny wings and flying abilities and make Gandalf a cyborg”.  You know why he didn’t decide that?  Because he is not a piece of shit, that’s why.  

“Maybe the dwarves should be way tall and the elves can shoot fireballs from their assholes.”

Moving on.

If you’ve read this book, you know that there’s no way to make it into a movie anyways.  I mean, how do you turn a large chunk of kind of unrelated documented events into a chronological film with characters?  You can’t, and you shouldn’t even try.  The actual “World War Z” as it exists in the book would be a war that would take hours and hours of screen time to develop.  It would have to be a mini-series or a TV show.  And in an era where, again, there is already a popular TV show essentially showing EXACTLY that, what would be the point in making another one?

Well, Brad Pitt would be in it, so I suppose people would still watch it.

So how do you take an outbreak and ‘war’ that would take dozens of hours to show properly, and somehow squeeze it into two hours?

FAST FORWARD EVERYTHING.  And I mean everything.  The world dies OVERNIGHT.

The zombies move in fast forward, and to be honest, so does the story.  The central character is not Brad Pitt, his family, or even the zombies themselves.  The central character is INVESTIGATION.  Because they just don’t have time to really give a shit about anything else, like details, developing characters, talking about the zombies or the virus AT ALL... all that stuff.

To be honest, the lack of character development doesn't stop me from liking Brad Pitt's character (as well as some of the side peoples), which is actually frustrating, because it just keeps reminding me how much better it could have been had the writers not been so lazy (or if they had at least read the book).  Considering the book is ENTIRELY made up of people telling horror stories of the great zombie war, you’d think that this film might at least try to have at least one scene wherein someone talks about how they lost their family or whatever (there is one scene where a guy mentions he lost his wife and kids, but it's not exactly a detailed story, more like "I lost my wife and kid").  But then I realize why that couldn’t happen in this movie.  With these ‘human tidal wave’ zombies, you can’t really witness anything and get away to tell stories about it.

If you see them, then you’re probably already dead.

So how did that guy manage to see his wife and kid die and get away?  And how did that Thomas kid get out of the apartment with a gun (spoiler alert (?) ) and manage to get up the stairs and save the day?

What the fuck.

There’s a montage shown in the last five minutes that speaks of (and kind of shows) epic ‘humans versus zombies’ battles, that at least SOMEWHAT resembles some of what is documented in the book.  So… the events in this movie take place before anything documented in the book?  Well, now I’m just more confused.  And in the end, we still have no answers.  We don’t even know whether or not humanity is going to make it. That would be fine ordinarily in a zombie film, except that, in the book (that this is supposedly based on), WE DID MAKE IT.  The whole book is after the zombie war ended.

FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

Now.  Having said all of that.  I still enjoyed the shit out of this movie.

But... any merit that there is herein, and anyone else out there that enjoyed it, isn’t going to be able to save it from the barrage of pissed off fans of the book that will tear this thing a new asshole for being NOTHING like the source material.  Or critics expecting character development or emotion.  Or people wanting to see Romero zombies.  Really, that’s a shame, because there are some good ideas sprinkled around in here.  Like I said, lots of potential, which only makes watching it even more frustrating.

It's like taking all of the ingredients needed to make a delicious cake, but then instead making an omelette and not telling anyone where you hid the fucking cocoa powder.

"Didn't you follow the recipe?", asked Malone.  "Recipe?", replied the cooks.

It just needed to develop its characters more, develop some of its ideas a little more, and, obviously, NOT be called “World War Z”.  Because, guess what?  This isn’t “World War Z”.  It’s just a pretty good popcorn movie, which is still way more than I can say about a lot of modern day blockbusters.

Yeah, I’m looking at you, “Man of Steel”.

That's it.  I ate too much popcorn and need to go have a good sit.

[...]

Burt ain’t exactly a Zack Snyder fan, although he did mention to me that even his 're-imagination' of Romero’s "Dawn" was nothing even close to the TOTAL obliteration of the source material that “World War Z” was.  And the Oscar for "least like the book" goes to...

State Of Emergency.

Redbox, we’ve had some rough ventures together, haven’t we?  This may or may not be another one.  The brothers that made the film seem new to the scene according to INTERNET, so you never know, they could be up-and-comers, or they could be PLEASE STOP NOWers.

[...]

[Film starts with people hunkered down in a basement or something and then flashes back to four days earlier.]

Starkwell: Soundtrack is good so far.

Lovelock: Visually appealing.

[...]

So far it seems like the Clay brothers have the right idea.  When you have a small budget, write a movie that you can actually make, not one that you can barely fake.  It seems slow moving, but they are building tension quite well.  Right now the main character Jim is hanging around an old farmhouse alone, trying to figure out and make sense of what is going on, as the news reports show explosions and chaos.

[...]

[Jim hears a noise, gets spooked, chases down the noise, IT’S A CAT!]

Starkwell: Just a cat!  If I had a nickel for every time that happens…

Lovelock: I’d have a shitload of nickels.

[...]

Then we see the first zombie, they look and act like the "28 Days Later" rabid infected zombies, complete with red eyes.  It’s a bit derivative, but Starkwell and Lovelock are willing to forgive the film, because, honestly, it’s actually pretty effective at THRILLING US.  Jim is contacted by a nearby group who saw his barn lights on.  He decides to meet up with them in an office building or airplane hangar or tobacco warehouse of some kind.  He meets Scott, Scott’s wife and a girl named Ivy, or Amy, or Booby… not sure, I’m sure they’ll say it again.  Oh ok... it’s Alex, but people call her Ix.  Yeah.

[...]

[It’s apparently all because of CHEMICAL WARFARE gone wrong.  Or gone right, depending on how you want to look at it, and who's side you are on.]

Lovelock: We’re past the halfway mark, and we’ve seen one zombie and NOTHING HAPPEN EVER.

Starkwell: Well, at least the dialogue is decent, the characters are cool enough and the acting doesn’t completely suck.

Lovelock: If you take a few good ingredients you still need to have a recipe plan to make a cake, and not just a boring soup of competent ingredients.

[...]

Lovelock’s right.  This shit is painfully slow. It feels like they slowed down the speed.  Everyone talks like that turtle in the Looney Tunes cartoons.

[...]

[The zombies aren’t quite "28 Days Later" after all.  They are when they are raging mad, but under other circumstances, they seem to be more like infected people in "The Crazies" or "Grapes of Death".]

Lovelock: Interesting… levels of rabidity?

Starkwell: Rabidness?

Lovelock: It’s Rabidosity… iousness…

Starkwell: Yeah that's what it is.

[...]

Whatever it is, Jim put a hatchet into a zombie head, Scott started acting like an asshole, and Lovelock was all “Awww man, more of this and less of the touchy feely shit.”

[...]

[Jim goes out to get supplies from some kind of AIRDROP that a passing helicopter dropped.]

Lovelock: I like Jim.  Jim's got balls.  I like balls.

[...]

[INSANE HEADSHOT.]

Lovelock: That rivals the “Cannibal the Musical” headshot.

[...]

Then ARMY show up and take them captive, do tests on them and eventually decide that they are free to go.  It’s basically a coming of age story, for the quarter life crisis sufferers of the world.  And the real curveball here is that it has a happy ending.  It’s a seriously unexpected twist, and a welcome one.

The Faculty.

Robert Rodriguez’ resume is a bit of a mixed bag.  I’m not sure which side of the mix the late nineties’ “Faculty” ends up.  But the movie opens up an 'Offspring' song that dates the film IMMEDIATELY.  Anyways, this should be fun.  The film starts off introducing us to the high school, the kids, the faculty and the town, where apparently football is a big deal.

[...]

[Football Coach, played by Robert Patrick, seems possessed.  He drives a pencil through the principal’s hand.]

Lovelock: Are we sure he’s possessed?  I mean, Patrick is pretty evil.  And he’s a football coach.  They’re notoriously asshole-ish too, no?

Starkwell: Ummm… Coach Taylor in "Friday Night Lights" is an honorable and good man, and I would like to have the second part of your comment stricken from the record.

Lovelock:  What about the Robert Patrick thing?

Starkwell: Nah, that’s fine.  He’s the fucking T1000 dude, evil as balls.

[...]

Anyways, Coach and the Drama teacher team up and kill the Principal.  Decent cast, a lot of recognizable faces.  Granted they are really young.  Elijah Wood, Salma Hayek, Famke… is that Jon Stewart?  Lovelock is mostly just making 'Frodo' jokes, so I won’t bother writing those out.

[...]

Starkwell: Jon Stewart as a science teacher?

Lovelock: Is that Usher?

Starkwell: Stewart’s name is Professor Edward Furlong?

Lovelock: They should’ve gotten actual Edward Furlong to play Edward Furlong.

Starkwell: Maybe Robert Patrick didn't want to work with him again.

[...]

So apparently Elijah Wood found some wormy thing on the field, which is some kind of unknown species that has the ability to CLONE stuff. They put it in an aquarium and were on their merry way.  Elijah Wood and Delila figure out what’s going on.  It seems that the whole faculty is infected.

[...]

[Alcoholic teacher, now possessed, is energetic and alert.]

Lovelock: I guess being possessed isn't all bad!  He flew through all the steps like THAT.

Starkwell: You suck.

[...]

There’s a scene where Elijah Wood and another character discuss scienc fiction at great lengths, and they name drop like ten or so movies and writers. It all feels pretty forced, according to Starkwell.  After this conversation, they figure it out.

[...]

[Zeke the Drugdealer Bad Boy, played by Josh Hartnett and I guess one of the good guys, stabs Posessed Jon Stewart with his homemade drug syringe, and Jon starts oozing foam and dies.]

Starkwell: Wait, that high school student has a secret laboratory?

Lovelock: Am I the only one who realizes that caffeine is the secret here?

[They decide they need to find the ‘leader’ and take him/her down.]

Starkwell: If one of them ends up being the leader, it would be pretty weak.

[Delila is one of them.]

Starkwell: Well that’s stupid, why would she have been helping them, get away all this time?

Lovelock: You could park a jumbo jet in that plot hole.

Starkwell: Also, why do they need Zeke's wonderdrug?  Just go get caffeine pills.

[...]

Then there’s a football montage and some more of the cheesiest, most dated late nineties alt rock soundtrack.  In the midst of all this, they lose another guy, former quarterback guy.

[...]

Lovelock: If the Coach is the head alien, wouldn’t it have made sense, thematically, to develop the relationship more between him and the ex-Quarterback… and then NOT make the quarterback an alien?

Starkwell: We don’t know if Coach is the Queen.

[...]

[TWIST: New Girl is the Queen after all.]

Starkwell: Well that twist just doesn’t make any sense at all.  Why?  Why wouldn’t she have just killed them WAY EARLIER?  Aw come on, Rodriguez.

Lovelock: Well at least we get to see her boobies.  Thanks for that, at least, Rodriguez.

Starkwell: He’s just using boobies to distract us from the huge holes in the plot.

Lovelock: Look! Ass!  Tits AND ass!

[...]

He tries to explain why the new girl hung out with them for a while instead of just infecting them, but it’s pretty thin.  You suspect from the moment you first see her on screen, so the fact that it ends up being her could be surprising in how obvious it is, I guess…  After they kill the head alien, everything goes back to normal and EVERYONE GETS THE GIRL.  Jon Stewart is still dead.

Abraham Lincoln Vs. Zombies.

I pretty much have to launch a mockbuster from “The Asylum” at Starkwell and Lovelock from time to time just to keep them in check, and make sure they don’t lose their perspective on what bad really is and can be.  The amazing thing is just HOW MANY zombie movies “The Asylum” has been churning out lately.  This one promises to stand right alongside the others, in my garbage can, as soon as Starkwell and Lovelock decide that they’ve had enough.  If you watch all of the previews on one of “The Asylum”s DVDs, you’ll be SHOCKED at just how many blockbusters they manage to mock, sometimes within one movie.  And is that the father from “Family Matters”?

[...]

[Young Abe Lincoln kills his zombie mother.]

Lovelock: Was that a zombie or the girl from “The Exorcist”?

Starkwell: I’m sure they don’t even know.

[...]

Only about two minutes in, we quickly realize that the costumes, writing, acting, special effects, directing and EVERYTHING is horrendously cheap and way beyond sub par.  Maybe even by “Asylum” standards.

[...]

Lovelock: They could have at least made the doctor guy have SLIGHTLY less modern looking glasses.

Starkwell: Maybe try and not show the modern day gas meter on the side of that building either.

Lovelock: I never gave a damn 'bout the meter man, 'til i was the man who had to read the meters, man.

Starkwell: Maybe find actors that can grow an ACTUAL mustache and not need to paint one on.

[...]

Seriously even the MUSIC is mocking ACTUAL songs.  The movie trickles along as the president and his band of merry men fight zombies and confederate soldiers and zombie confederate soldiers.  They meet two girls with big honkin’ boobies and lots of make-up in an old farm house, and they bunker down.  Apaarently hooker number one is an old prostitute friend of Abe's.

[...]

Lovelock: Teddy Roosevelt kicks ass with that there shovel.

Starkwell: This movie really fucking sucks.

[...]

After one lame plot twist, most of the characters die, and a bunch more lame looking zombie kills are shown and the film ends.  I think it really reached the tipping point into the purest of cinematic shit when Lincoln zip-lined away from an exploding building as it exploded, and then emerged from the smoky ruins unharmed.  Or at least, it was at that point that Starkwell vomited.

Woke Up Dead.

This is a web-series that was crammed all together to become one roughly ninety minute long movie.  Oh and Napoleon Dynamite is in it.  And he plays a zombie.  But don’t worry, it’s not the flesh eating kind.  It’s more like the “wait, I’m a zombie?” kind.  This has potential on paper, but the 3 to 7 minute episodes being strung together might make for a weird schizophrenic look and feel and flow.  We’ll see.  The creator/writer has a bit of an eclectic resume.  Everything from “Another 48 Hours” to “Firestorm: Last Stand at Yellowstone”.  Yeah.

[The movie opens up with Napoleon getting hit by a bus, and then waking up in the morgue and talking to Morgue Girl.]

Starkwell: So… he’s dead?

Lovelock: That song sounds like a poor man’s “Seven Nation Army”.

Starkwell: His friend looks like the poor man’s Jack Black.

[...]

So we follow the story as dead Napoleon tries to convince his friend that he’s not actually dead.  And his friend keeps filming him and is all excited to document the living dead on his blog or something.

[...]

Lovelock: So, it’s definitely silly.

[Napoleon and Fake Jack Black recruit Morgue Girl to try and figure out what’s wrong with him.]

Starkwell: Really silly, I guess.

[Napoleon needs money, so he sets out to get a job.]

Lovelock: Wait, how does he decide that he needs to get a job, and then somehow already have a job in the morning at a huge corporation?

Starkwell: In this economy? That’s offensive to all the unemployed out there.

[...]

A lot of the jokes don’t work.  Some do, but they are sandwiched in between a lot of stale jokes about office work and gibberish about workin’ 9 to 5 and the grind.  And then there’s a scene where Fake Jack Black feeds zombie Napoleon brains.  That part of it was kind of lame, but Fake Jack Black is starting to grow on Starkwell and Lovelock.

[...]

Starkwell: Is it just me, or is Napoleon not a very good actor?

Lovelock: It is not just you.

Starkwell: Seriously, the brain thing again?  SO played.

[...]

So Zombie Napoleon continues denying that he is a dead man, and the plot thickens as we find out that it’s some kind experimental mystery drug gone wrong (or right).  Is it ARMY?  Is it PHARMACEUTICAL? Is it MAGIC?  I guess we’ll find out.

[...]

Starkwell: For a film cut from three or four minute segments, it’s a touch slow moving.

Lovelock: What? I wasn’t listening.  I was busy staring at the floor.

Starkwell: If you know ANYTHING about computers and programmng, you’d know that the “application” he is using is a half-assedly built Windows Form that is still in like, edit mode.

Lovelock: NERD.

Starkwell: In conclusion, LAZY.

Lovelock: In conclusion, NERD.

[...]

Fake Jack Black continues to film his documentary and put it up on the web.  There was a shot at one point of two of the characters watching “Zombie Nightmare”.  Nice touch.  Lovelock said something like “at least they respect the genre... but not enough to be any good or original”.  Then they dropped some Romero references, and those, as Starkwell said, “felt forced”.  Zombie Napoleon meets another Zombie.  It’s a “hot” blonde girl.  So now Zombie Napoleon finds out he is able to heal super fast, move super fast (there's even a REALLY dated "Matrix" parody where he dodges bullets... talk about STALE), and starts some kind of secret love affair with Blonde Zombie (equally lame).

[...]

[Cliffhanger ending.]

Starkwell: Umm…

Lovelock: So… we’ll never know what the Hell was going on?

Starkwell: I guess you can only produce so many bad web shorts before people tell you to PLEASE STOP.

[...]

Remember when I said "I guess we'll find out"?  I was wrong.  Nothing is explained.  It ends in the middle of the story, and, since they never continued the thing, I assume that means the story was never finished.  It definitely loses points for that.  Ugh.  Now they’re really mad at me and want their hour and twenty-something minutes back

The Dead Undead.

It came from Redbox.  In a lame attempt to mockbuster two current fads, this movie deals with both vampires AND zombies.  Two directors, one movie, no budget, probably all bad.  Starkwell and Lovelock aren’t exactly excited.  Interestingly if you read up on the two guys that directed it, they mostly worked stunts in films.  A lot of films.  Big films.  Interesting.  Maybe the stunts will be good.

[...]

[Teens arrive at a lakeside hotel, go for a swim, wrestle in bikinis.]

Starkwell: Obviously.

[Next scene is a girl taking a shower.]

Starkwell: More obviously.

[Vampire kid comes out of the closet and attacks one of the girls.]

Starkwell: Ok, that was less obvious.

Lovelock: At least it isn’t taking long to get going.

[...]

Then there was a fight between a zombie and a vampire and Lovelock was like “alright”, but the main characters IMMEDIATELY started looking for weapons and happened to have guns and ammo in their truck, Starkwell was all “what kind of a trip were they on?” and “how come they aren’t more curious about what’s going on?”.  Anyways, then ARMY shows up and starts killing vampires, or zombies, or vampire zombies, not sure at this point.  What I do know is that most of the kids are either dead or dying.

[...]

Starkwell: It looks as though most of the actors are probably stuntman/woman buddies of the writer-directors… It’s nice to see, and must have been fun to make.  Fun to watch on the other hand…

Lovelock: It’s their time to shine!

Starkwell: Don’t make fun too much… I just read that the director was a sniper in Desert Storm.

[...]

[They are both zombie and vampire… they call them “ZVs”.]

Starkwell: Riiiiight…

[Some of the kids turn, the others try to run away in the truck.  Truck crashes.]

Lovelock: For a bunch of stunt people and stunt coordinators, I would have expected a cooler crash.

Starkwell: Can’t make what you can’t afford.

[...]

I love that they probably thought “Vampires… Zombies… it can’t fail!”.

[...]

[Five minute long shot of girl soldier sniping things.]

Starkwell: We get it.  She’s a good shot.

Lovelock: Why does the music keep cutting sporadically like that?

Starkwell: Probably for the same reason that they need to show that guy setting up the minigun for five minutes.

[...]

Sometime after shouting “worst swordplay ever” I think Lovelock actually started getting into it in that ‘so bad it’s good’ kind of a way.  It’s able to achieve that because I think it actually IS trying to be good, as opposed to so many recent ‘bad’ movies that try to play the whole ‘so bad it’s good’ angle.  Did that make any sense?  If not, just know that Starkwell still hates the shit out of this sucker no matter what claiming "so bad it's bad".

[...]

Lovelock: Impressive body count.

Starkwell: Fair enough.

[I think that’s a compliment.  Then there was a long dragged out shot of a ZV being burned alive, or not alive I guess.]

Starkwell: I guess they had to do the firesuit stunt somewhere in here.  But did it have to be so long?

[...]

Then one of the soldiers dies and it flashes back to him in medieval times.  Well, he doesn’t just die, he explodes.  Anyways, I guess these dudes are immortal warriors of some kind, fighting the spirits of evil and shit.  The flashback takes the level of cheese up about ten or eleven notches, even when that didn’t seem possible.

[...]

[So the soldiers are GOOD vampires, and the ZVs are the BAD zombies.]

Starkwell: Really?

[...]

Anyways, now we get flashbacks and back story on the other good vampires.  One of them was in Vietnam, one of them writes an advice column under a female pen name!  Yeah.  It sounds crazy, but would I make that up? Tell you what… if I did make it up, I wouldn’t be like “that’ll make a super movie!”

[...]

[The two surviving kids volunteer to be bait.]

Lovelock: Sexy AND smart?

[...]

[Another trap/weapon making montage.]

Starkwell: Is it NECESSARY to show Blondie making a wooden stake for five minutes?

Lovelock: It’s as necessary as the rest of the film.

[...]

I give the film credit for actually trying to explain everything.  It’s more than I can say for a lot of these kinds of movies.  And while ANY of the computer effects look terrible, there is an obscene amount of gunfire and flying bodies that look funny.  I’m not really sure what the characters are even trying to do at this point, but what I do know is that only Blondie and main soldier boy are still alive.

[...]

[Blondie offers up her blood and Soldier Boy becomes SUPER SOLDIER BOY.]

Starkwell: Wait, why isn’t she hurt at all?

[...]

Then they set it up for a sequel.  The end?

Infected.

This was a made for TV production from the later part of last decade.  It stars Judd Nelson and was filmed in Montreal.  The film is SET in Boston.  So it literally brings together the two towns that Starkwell and Lovelock have called home.  They can’t wait to see if they can recognize some locations.  This will, at the very least, keep them occupied if the film ends up fully sucking.  I should note, that the director seems to have, other than this film, mostly directed children’s programs such as “iCarly”.  The film starts up quickly, some Pharma company is selling everyone in Boston ‘clean’ water after the Boston Plague has infected a buttload of people.  The story starts off focused on some people searching for proof that the Pharma company is crooked.

[...]

[Cop named Taylor tells a reporter about the conspiracy, that involves city officials and the Pharma company, then goes and assassinates the mayor and grabs a blood sample.]

Starkwell: Wait is he… infected… or an alien… or has the plague… or?

Lovelock: I recognize that guy!  He was in local commercials and shit.

Starkwell: He’s come a long way… I guess…

[...]

Anyways, there’s a bunch of action, and eventually we see what the aliens look like under the human skin, and then the alien eats a girl, zombie style.  Lovelock cheered.  Starkwell was all “WTF”.  I guess the reporter, Lisa Wallace, is the main character along with her former boyfriend, other reporter, named Ben.

[...]

[Taylor gives Ben the Mayor’s black blood sample to give to Lisa, and then dies.]

Lovelock: I smell a love triangle.

Starkwell: There are only two people… it’s not a triangle.  It’s just a line.

Lovelock: You’ve reached the LOVELINE!

Starkwell: What?

Lovelock: With sexy complications.

Starkwell: I give up.

[...]

It’s a decent story, but it’s dragging a bit.  I believe Lovelock said more than once “someone turn alien, someone eat someone, someone do something, someone what the fuck something”.

[...]

[Lisa’s boss tries to kill Lisa and Ben with her weird insect arms that came out of her stomach, and then Judd Nelson saves the day.  Turns out he is one of the aliens.]

Starkwell: Why is he talking like that?

Lovelock: I guess English isn’t his first language.

Starkwell: Well yeah he's an ALIEN, but the other aliens talk normally.

Lovelock: The aliens can talk how ever they want, as long as they start eating people.

[...]

For a little while they made fun of how OBVIOUS it was that it was Montreal, and yet they are calling it Boston.

[...]

Starkwell: Why not just say it’s Montreal?  Why say Boston, but then show Montreal skylines?  It’s not like it HAS to be Boston for this thin plot to hold.

Lovelock: Harsh.  But true.

[They even show bridges leading onto an island.  I mean, COME ON.]

Starkwell: If you like Geography then you’ll love NOT THIS MOVIE.

Lovelock: All they need to do next is show French road signs and shit, and really take their overall geographical disregard up a notch.

[Then the villain referenced Nova Scotia.]

[...]

All in all, the movie is pretty schizophrenic.  One minute the aliens are eating people, the next minute they can move around like ‘The Flash’, and then the next minute they can turn their hands into claws or something.  Right after reporter Ben took a needle and extracted bone marrow from himself Starkwell just lost interest and left.

[...]

[So Ben is apparently the cure for the Boston Plague.  The worms that possess people die if they are in contact with him.]

Lovelock: What are the odds that a gutsy Boston reporter would be the cure?

[Then he started laughing and left.]

[...]

After a fist fight with a giant ant and a couple of ‘splosions, the film resolves itself in a stupid way that doesn’t really make sense and is not worth talking about.  Well, at least they showed a helicopter shot of actual Boston.

Black Death.

I don’t know a whole Hell of a lot about the recent film “Black Death”, but it has two things that I know of, already going for it.  The first is Sean Bean, and the second is director Christopher Smith who directed the somewhat unknown but quite awesome slasher film “Severance”.  With a dash of hope, Starkwell and Lovelock race into this one head first.  We are introduced to a monk at a monastery who is in a forbidden romance with some girl.  She leaves to hide from the plague, he stays, for some reason.

[...]

[Sean Bean is introduced, he’s a knight of some kind named Ulrich.]

Starkwell: Does he play a weasel in this one? He always plays a weasel.

Lovelock: It must kind of suck to have a face that everyone assumes is the face of a guy who is about to betray you.

Starkwell: There’s always work for someone who can play that part.

[The monk volunteers to go with the knights, head monk tells him that Bean is dangerous, he doesn’t trust him.]

Starkwell: Every damn time.

[...]

[Turns out the monk volunteered to go on a hunt for NECROMANCERS!]

Lovelock: Bad news for Mr. Monk, GREAT news for us.

[...]

We are introduced to the crew he travels with.  Not exactly a band of merry men.  And Ulrich is MAD INTENSE.  Kind of scary too.  When one of the crew is infected, they straight up kill the shit out of him.  The journey presses on into unknown woods, on the quest for the necromancer village of cannibals and zombies.  Lovelock looks like a kid on Christmas Eve.

[...]

[Battle scene.]

Lovelock: Are those zombies?

Starkwell: Why don’t you just watch.

Lovelock: I am watching!  Watching for zombies.

Starkwell: …

Lovelock: Medieval zombies!

[I must say, solid fucking battle scene.]

[...]

They find a village that they suspect is housing the necromancer, so they are apprehensive to let their guard down.  The village takes them in, but they seem a little TOO friendly.  Things seem really fishy.

[...]

[Monk finds his girl dead in the village, he also finds out who the necromancer is, it’s BLONDIE! Queen of the village!]

Lovelock: He should probably be concerned that she was the one who tended to his wounds earlier…

Starkwell: You can’t exactly use your head when you’re busy thinking with the ol’ wiener.

[...]

The Monk watches Blondie bring his Girl back to life during some weirdo ritual, then runs away, to warn the others.  Too late!  They were all drugged during the feast!  Now they are all held captive in some kind of cold bath / well / cage, and have begun being crucified, tortured, hanged, killed, etc.

[...]

Lovelock: We interrupt this broadcast to remind you all that Sean Bean is a wicked good actor.

[...]

[In an attempt to make Monk renounce his faith, they dangle his undead girlfriend in front of him, she does not appear to be herself.]

Lovelock: So it’s to be the confused type of zombie then…

[...]

Resisting temptation, Monk stabs his zombie girl, he does not renounce!  Then the torturing resumes.  Sadly, Ulrich is torn in four by two horses…but not before he releases black plague on the village.  Score one for pestilience!

[...]

Lovelock: So wait, everyone dies... ?

Starkwell: Wait, so everyone dies?

[...]

Osmond returns to the monastery with the one surviving member of the crew.  In the following years, Osmond essentially became Ulrich.  Ulrich on steroids!  He went around burning witches that were clearly not witches.  What a nutjob.  Starkwell and Lovelock gave the film a standing ovation.  Definitely light on zombie content, unless you count the plague itself as the outbreak, but a pretty sweet movie nonetheless.