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Beyond The Gates: Movie Review

Do you all remember VCR board games? You would have a board game in front of you and a tape in the VCR. You move your pieces around on the board and hit play on the VCR to give you instructions. More often than not, the instructions are either irrelevant or confusing.

I never played many of them myself, but I do remember playing a football VCR game that made so little sense I’m pretty sure I quit less than 15 minutes in.

Now imagine that you miraculously have a VCR in this day-and-age, and that a mysterious VCR board game titled “Beyond The Gates” came into your life. Also, you’re a grown man with a troubled brother and your father has recently gone missing and maybe this board game has something to do with it and also your fiancé is Brea Grant and Barbara Crampton is the talking head in the game and she is obviously reacting to the things you say and winning the game may lead the horrifying deaths of some friends/acquaintances.

That’s a lot to imagine. I apologize for putting you all in that spot.

I didn’t really know what to expect heading into this movie. I hadn’t heard much, but Brea Grant seems to choose good projects and Barbara Crampton is Barbara Crampton, so I figured it would at least be worth a watch.

To round us out on familiar faces, one of the brothers was played by Chase Williamson (John Dies At the End, The Guest), who was terrific. Justin Welborn (The Final Destination, V/H/S Viral, Justified) showed up as an alcoholic sleazebag, which should surprise no one who has ever seen him in anything ever.

I went into this film with zero expectations and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s not perfect. The ending in particular felt extremely abrupt; like the entire movie was building towards a momentous climax, then just kind of shrugged its shoulders and said, “This will work.”

But that was really my only major issue with it. It didn’t blow me away, but I enjoyed watching it. The performances were a lot of fun and there were some great visuals and some creative kills. The director – Jackson Stewart – obviously has a lot of love for 80s horror, and that love showed up here. It never felt forced or a parody of itself. It felt fun. It felt natural.

This wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it was a lot of fun. And that has to count for something.

Rating: 3.5/5

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Transmissions from Lexington Comic & Toy Convention 2017

Another year, another trek into the hallowed halls of Rupp Arena to aimlessly wander the floor of the Lexington Comic and Toy Convention. What wonders would I encounter this year? Would I see any familiar faces? Would I finally ask every former Power Ranger to the big dance? THE ANSWERS ARE INSIDE.

I got a couple press passes this year, so me and my wife – a great photographer and the best person in the world – decided to act super professional.

These are our professional faces.

We were greeted by the two-story-tall Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. He was still smiling, which meant those darn Ghostbusters hadn’t tried to turn him into marshmallow goo just yet. He was still living his best life. And now he was here, frozen in time and greeting all who entered the doors. Shine on, you crazy diamond.

As we descended to the main floor, we came across a set-up from Star Wars. Okay, so it may have been less a “set-up” and more a “thieving ring.” Any unsuspecting soul who found themselves lingering in the area were swarmed by a pack of Jawas. Within minutes, anything electronic on their person had been removed from their pockets while the Jawas fought among each other for possession of the object. Anyone who decided to try to reclaim what they felt was rightfully theirs was treated to the barrel of an AT-ST’s gun pointed in their direction.

Look man. If you’ve seen A New Hope, you know what the Jawas are about. You only have yourselves to blame.

Did we encounter any other Star Wars folks? We may have seen a few.

General Leia Organa and Rey were travelling around together and they happened to run into an Imperial Officer. Instead of fighting right there in the middle of the isle, they decided to put aside their differences and pose for a picture.

Shortly after this picture was taken, Leia and Rey escorted the officer to a dark corner and disposed of him. Imperial scum.

I’ve often said that Obi-Wan Kenobi and Xena: Warrior Princess would make a good couple. Now I have proof.

I originally thought that this was Old Man Luke Skywalker, but the robes indicated that he was Obi-Wan. THE ROBES NEVER LIE.

As you can see in this picture, we encountered the fearsome Kylo Ren with very few people around. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. He lit up his lightsaber and we briefly froze. We decided our best defense was to laugh at him, talk loudly about how he’s just a wannabe Vader and repeatedly referred to him as “Poor Lil’ Bennie.” He began sobbing and ran to the nearest restroom. Ain’t so bad.

Sure, Solo blindly took out one Boba Fett. But two? I don’t think so, bucko. Into the Sarlacc Pit with you while Boba Fett and the missus live a long, happy life together.

You know what I love about Deadpool in terms of cons? Versatility. Sure, you may occasionally get a Captain America or Batman with some variation (usually depending on what era they’re repping), but there’s not a huge difference in the look. But Deadpool? Anyone can be Deadpool and it would fit in with the character and the comics.

Take this little tyke. He’s just a tiny little Deadpool and he’s wearing Batman shoes. They’re not even in the same comic universe, but I believe that, somewhere, Deadpool owns a pair of Batman shoes.

Cowboy Deadpool. I have absolutely seen Deadpool in this outfit. Throw this version of Marshal Will Kane in High Noon and that movie would have been over in 10 minutes.

I love this one. Deadpool Dixon and Carl Grimes. Deadpool is rocking Daryl’s vest – down to the angel wings on the back – and crossbow, but is still very much Deadpool.

Spider-Man would look out of place in something like this, but Deadpool can pull it off.

It has been a while since I’ve watched an episode of The Walking Dead, so it’s quite possible Daryl Dixon is actually just Deadpool now. If that’s the case, I need someone to tell me so I can start watching that show again.

I don’t love the idea of Alice teaming up with the Umbrella Corporation, but I assume there’s a good reason behind it. Maybe they’re infiltrating Umbrella so a couple of her friends are wearing stolen outfits? They would pick out Alice in a hurry in that dress, but she’s got superpowers so I guess that doesn’t matter too much.

Whatever your reason, Alice, I trust your judgment completely.

Of everyone I ran into, this was my favorite costume. It’s all the little touches. The jagged horns that look like have been torn off. The cigar she kept with her at all times. The beer in the hand. It’s all wonderful. It’s all perfect.

The dragon in the background is giving some serious side eye in this picture. Hellboy (Hellgirl?) picked up on that and smacked him around a bit after I took this picture. Negan – big, bad Negan – just cowered in the corner as it happened. He may be the big man during a zombie apocalypse, but he’s useless as a dragon caretaker.

“I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then.”

You don’t say.

I’m a sucker for a good themed costume, and this one is perfect. They have the banner. They have the coconuts. They have the Rabbit of Caerbannog. While walking the floor, I could occasionally hear the tapping of coconuts in the distance. When they exited the building, I heard the familiar call of “Run away! Run away!”

The children didn’t seem too interested in crime-fighting, so I walked by them with my guard down. I found out that was a mistake when they both took billy clubs and smashed them into my knees. While I writhed on the ground, the group calmly walked away, silently laughing to themselves.

Never underestimate the strength of children.

Even without one sock, this child is infinitely more incredible than I will ever be.

We found Lego Batman at the base of the escalator. For the life of me, I don’t know how he was able to actually get on the escalator. For all I know, he’s still standing down there.

There is a whole lot of awesomeness in this picture, but it’s Little Hulk that really kills me. Really going all-out with the flex there, Hulk. I would absolutely watch a movie starring this version of Hulk and Black Widow. She looks like she is absolutely ready to brawl.

We’ve got the Spider trio of Spider-Man, Spider-Gwen and Silk. We also have Ant Man and Wasp. And there, in the middle of it all, is Squirrel Girl. I honestly thought I would see a handful of Squirrel Girls, but we only ran into this one, and she was terrific. Always happy. She seemed genuinely thrilled to be there and to have people excited to take pictures of her. She may have actually been the real Squirrel Girl, stepped directly out of the pages of a comic and into our world.

Of course, I found it a little irresponsible for all these heroes to pose for a picture while Kylo Ren casually strolled behind them. Way to keep humanity safe, you guys. You’ve been through superhero training and this is the best you can do? Shame on you. Shame on you.

I can’t imagine that Ice Man outfit is comfortable, but it looks amazing. Fashion over function, my dear boy.

Let’s talk about the act of going to a comic convention for a second. This is a ridiculously cool costume. We took this picture in the main opening, so there’s a little bit of space of maneuver, but the main floor is packed. I have a hard enough time getting through some of the aisles as a regular human being. How does one make their way through the swarm of bodies when you are a god who has arms sticking out on either side of you? Do you just not go to the main floor? Or do you make peace with the fact that you’ll just smack a lot of people in the face with your extra arms and they’ll have to deal with it?

I’ve often thought about following one of these people around to see what they do, but I have a feeling I would just get really frustrated. That life isn’t for me. But for her? Man, she looks so cool she can do whatever she wants.

Even Blade has to take a break to check his messages every now and then. That’s probably how he finds out where all the vampires are. He just searches for #vampirerave and goes from there. Vampires never learn, man. Not everything has to go on social media, you know.

Bunch of suckheads.

I’ll grant you that I haven’t been to a ton of conventions, but I’ve been attending them for a few years now and this is the first time I’ve seen Green Goblin and Cyclops. Those are fairly well-known characters, so I was a bit shocked this was the first time I had seen either of them.

Kudos to Batman for repping the gun. It may be an unpopular opinion, but I’m perfectly fine with Batman shooting some supervillains from time-to-time. Call me crazy, but I don’t think The Joker is going to suddenly become reformed after his 1,000,000th trip to Arkham Asylum.

I’d watch a team-up of these two.

Okay, I’ll be honest. I would only watch it if Punisher killed the Power Ranger 5 minutes into the movie. The Power Rangers were a bit after my time so I have no love for them. I’m old. I can’t help it.

“I can’t see me lovin’ nobody but you / For all my liiiiiiiiiife…”

The moment Michael realizes he left Jason chained at the bottom of the lake.

Where else can you see Doctor Strange riding an escalator behind a T. Rex? I mean, besides my dreams every night.

We only got a chance to attend one panel, but it was a fun one. We’re pretty big fans of iZombie, so we had to make sure we caught this one. Sadly, Rose McIver had to pull out of the convention, but we got to hear some great stories from Aly Michalka and Malcolm Goodwin.

Every year I say I’m going to go to more panels, and every year I forget. I’ve never been to a bad one, though. If you go to a convention, always make sure to do some research ahead of time and try to get to at least a couple panels.

 

Last but certainly not least, there is always a lot of great art. If I had unlimited funds and wall space, I would walk out of every convention with a truck full of art. Some of it is mass manufactured, but there is always a ton of unique, handmade art.

This Peach/Mario take on Bride of Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s Monster is one of my favorite things I’ve seen. I’m still kicking myself for not buying it.

I did walk out with this piece of art, though. We have a daughter who is getting ready to turn two and we’re looking for art for her room. I’ve been looking for Batgirl and Spider-Gwen stuff, because I’d love to get her started on some strong, female superheroes. As it so happened, Rico Renzi – colorist for the Spider-Gwen series – was at the convention this year. I stopped by his table and this immediately grabbed my eye. Rico was incredibly nice and gracious, and now I have this nice piece of art of start my daughter’s collection.

Conventions are always exhausting but we always have a blast. I’m already looking forward to the next one.

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The Wailing: Movie Review

I really had no idea what to expect going into this movie. Here is a full list of everything I knew about the movie:

  1. South Korean ghost movie
    2. Really scary
    3. Really good
    4. Two-and-a-half hours long

Point #4 kept me from watching it for a while. I’m all in favor of a good movie regardless of length, but it’s not always easy to carve out two-and-a-half hours to sit down and watch a movie. I wish I was one of those people who could break up a movie into several viewings, but that doesn’t really work for me.

I had a day a couple weeks ago where I stayed home from work to battle the flu. Having the house to myself and not wanting to leave the couch, I figured there would be no better time to watch this. Plus, I figured the creeping deliriousness of my brain would help to heighten the supernatural aspects of the movie.

And so, slightly sweating yet huddled under a heavy blanket, I hit play.

First things first: yes, technically this is a ghost movie, but it’s not a ghost movie in the way I normally think of them. In this movie, a ghost takes the form of an old Japanese man and he persuades the villagers to kill their family in horrible ways. In that way, it plays out as a possession movie, with a ghost/demon in the center of it all.

Of course, it’s not nearly that simple. Is the Japanese man really causing all of the murders, or does the mysterious woman in the white dress have something to do with it? And what of the suspiciously hip-looking shaman? To put it more succinctly, who is the angel and who is the demon?

We follow Jong-goo, a policeman in a tiny village in South Korea. Very early in the movie he is called to the scene of a grisly murder and notices that the murderer has an odd rash on his neck. He begins to notice this same thing at every murder scene. It’s when he sees the rash on his young daughter – Hoy-jin – that he really begins to worry.

And then there are the nightmares. Early in the movie, we hear the story of a hunter encountering a man in the woods with red eyes, hunched over a deer and devouring it raw. Jong-goo begins dreaming of the creature, even seeing him in a kind of waking nightmare at one point. As Hoy-jin’s behavior becomes more erratic, Jong-goo becomes more frantic in his search to destroy the evil that is infecting his daughter.

Let’s get this out of the way: Jong-goo is a terrible policeman. Just awful. Even before Hoy-jin starts showing evidence of the murder rash, he shows to be unreliable at best. He routinely shows up late. He is not aware of his surroundings. He believes every rumor presented to him and changes his mind at the drop of a hat, merely because he hears new information that may-or-may-not be credible. He seems incapable of processing information and making a decision based on everything he knows up until that point. He’s like a dog chasing a ball; he’ll just follow whatever the newest piece of information is and ignore everything else. Not exactly who you want to be investigating a series of ghost murders.

As a father myself, I understand that decision-making can become cloudy when it comes to your child being in danger, so perhaps his actions later in the movie can’t be judged as harshly. However, since we had already seen his extremely flawed thought process on full display before his daughter contracts the murder rash, I feel like his daughter being under duress didn’t make his decision-making any worse. He was terrible throughout the entire movie; his daughter contracting the rash only made him more violent.

I loved the setting of this movie. Some of the imagery was really impressive. However, it was extremely slow-paced and the actions of Jong-goo only served to frustrate me at every turn. Perhaps I could look past some of that in a shorter movie, but the long run time really killed this movie for me. I’m fine with a long movie if there is a point to it, but this movie had entirely too many moments that dragged, and I don’t feel that the payoff at the end was worth what it took to get there.

I also didn’t love everything about the ending. There were a few different things going on, and, while I liked how one of them wrapped up, the other involved Jong-goo and his notoriously terrible decision-making. I should have been invested in his story and really torn by the decision he was being forced to make. Instead, I had already lost all faith in him and was just frustrated by the entire situation.

There were creepy moments, but it wasn’t really scary. It wasn’t unnerving. It wasn’t much of anything but slow and marred by a protagonist incapable of ever making a correct decision.

I know a lot of people loved this, but it just wasn’t for me. Then again, “slow moving possession film,” isn’t exactly my subgenre of choice. If you like possession films, give it a go and tell me why I was wrong.

Rating: 1.5/5

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Split: Spoilery Thoughts

Let’s talk about the ending of Split. Massive SPOILERS ahead. Turn back if you don’t want the ending spoiled.

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Alright. Here we go.

At the end of Split, we find out that this takes place in the same universe as Unbreakable. Split wasn’t the story of a man with multiple personalities: it was a supervillain origin story. That’s a pretty cool reveal, but the way it is reveals makes absolutely zero sense.

After Casey is rescued, the news runs a story on the events. Basically, a man with multiple personalities kidnapped three girls, killed and partially devoured two of them and killed his psychiatrist by crushing her to death with his veiny, mini-Bane arms.

Those exact details come out (except for the part about Bane). We see this on a TV at a diner. Immediately after hearing this news, a woman at the counter says, “Wasn’t there that guy in the wheelchair 15 years ago? What was his name?” Then Bruce Willis – David Dunn from Unbreakable – says, “Mr. Glass,” and the Unbreakable music swells and tells us that we should be feeling a lot of feelings.

But here’s the thing: to the casual observer, Mr. Glass and The Horde (as James McAvoy’s amalgam of personalities in Split was being referred to) were absolutely nothing alike. The Horde kidnapped and ate people. Mr. Glass was an art dealer with brittle bones who derailed a train and caused a number of other small-scale disasters (airport bombings, hotel fires, etc.).

We – the audience – know they’re connected, but the random person living in that universe wouldn’t have any reason to connect those two. These are two seemingly unconnected events that happened 15 years apart. The Horde is a kidnapper/murderer. Mr. Glass is a terrorist. Aside from the fact that they were given nicknames, there is nothing to suggest that these two criminals are connected in any way.

The events of Unbreakable and Split both occur in Philadelphia. For a woman to connect these two events this quickly seems to imply that no criminal activity has occurred in Philadelphia in 15 years. If she sees one crime and immediately connects it to another totally separate crime, that means nothing else of note has happened in 15 years.

But let’s say that there has been crime in Philadelphia over that time, because of course there has been. David Dunn started on his superhero journey 15 years before the events of Split when he encountered Mr. Glass. Since Unbreakable served as Dunn’s superhero origin story, it’s safe to assume that Mr. Glass is not the first criminal that he helped put away. If we have learned anything about superhero movies it’s that the arrival of a superhero seems to be quickly followed by a series of supervillains. Following that well-worn formula, The Horde wouldn’t have been the first supervillain to emerge in Philadelphia in 15 years. If we assume Philadelphia has become a sort of hub for supervillains, a more realistic response would have been, “Wasn’t there that guy that shattered concrete with his mind 6 months ago? What was his name?” Then David Dunn would have been all, “The Concrete Juggler,” then get hit with the Unbreakable music.

Okay, so, from our perspective that wouldn’t have worked because we have no frame of reference for any supervillain other than Mr. Glass. So try this one one: we see the news report on the TV in the rec room of a mental institution. The camera pans around the room until it settles on Mr. Glass in a wheelchair. He smiles and slowly begins laughing. The Unbreakable music starts. As the camera pans out, we see the entire room is watching the TV and laughing in sinister unison. Abrupt cut to black.

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Something Red Podcast: The Babadook

Dusty joins the great CC from Bloody Good Horror to talk about The Babadook pop-up book and whether or not owning a book that could bring great harm to your household is a good idea.

You can listen/download here