Category: Dusty’s Corner

Underworld: A Love Letter

Post author By Dusty Evely
Post date January 31, 2017
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This post contains a ton of spoilers about the Underworld series. You’ve been warned.

You know what I love about the Underworld series? Pretty much everything.

It starts off as a solid vampire/werewolf (or lycan, in the parlance of the movie) action-horror series, taking story cues from Romeo and Juliet and visual cues from The Matrix. The first movie is a fun action movie with monsters that takes itself entirely too seriously. I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

They get into some of the mythology and history behind the centuries-old vampire/lycan war in the first movie, but they really delve into the insanity in Evolution. From the first movie, we learn that Michael – Selene’s arm candy and direct descendent of Alexander Corvinus, the king of the monsters – is the first ever vampire/lycan hybrid and we are straight up told that no one really knows what his powers are. They could be limitless. Or they could not be. Who knows? *vampire shrug*

Selene also gets some of Alexander Corvinus’ sweet, sweet monster-king blood. That blood also has undefined powers.

These two things together really form the crux of the insanity the series embraces. Having two sets of undefined powers gives the writers carte blanche to make them up on the spot. Can Selene’s blood give her a lot of sweet fighting moves? Sure! Does it allow her to stand in the sunlight? You bet! Can it bring vampires back from the dead? I guess. Does it make her a really good baseball player? Never fully explored, but, if I were a betting man, I’d say she and Michael would kill Mike Dexter and his stupid Twilight vampire team.
What about Michael? Can he survive a punch that leaves a manhole cover sized hole in his chest? You bet your sweet bippy he can. Does it make him an accomplished chef? Maybe.

Throughout all of this we get a lot of history of how vampires and lycans came into existence and how they’ve changed, and why the war started and all that fun stuff. Apparently I’m a sucker for a convoluted history of monsters in my action-horror.

They double-down on that history in the third movie, Rise of the Lycans. We actually get to see why the war was ignited. Of course, it was over a love torn apart by a father who hated love and thought that cross-species breeding was an abomination. And also sunlight. And he also probably hated the insanely-dangerous cliff-sex that his daughter was having with a filthy (but also kind of handsome) lycan, but we never got his specific views on that.
I feel like they could have added a few minutes into the movie for him to talk about that, but that’s probably just me. “Before I open this roof hatch through a series of levers and let the sunlight in to kill you, my daughter, I want to bring up the cliff-loving you engaged in with this animal who is currently in human form and has a nice set of abs.”
On second thought, maybe it was good they left that part out.

Then we jump forward to Awakening. It takes place 6 months after the events of Evolution and humans have discovered the existence of vampires and lycans. So, in true human form, they decide to hunt them down and kill them. Selene and Michael decide to run away together in a boat, but are hit with a cryo-bomb which freezes them in time. Apparently the magic blood doesn’t defend against being frozen in time. So there are limits to their powers, I guess.

In a fun little twist, Scott Speedman declined to reprise his role at Michael, so they cast an actor who kinda/sorta/maybe looks like Speedman if it’s dark and you squint and his face is always moving.

Anyway, Selene wakes up 12 years later and finds out she’s being kept in a lab run by lycans and one of them kind of looks like a knockoff Chris Martin (fun fact: that guy is in a show called Lost Girl and it’s awful. He’s fine in it, I guess).

Michael is still frozen, but they have a hybrid child together (Eve) somehow, and the lycans are after her blood because it’s SUPER magic and protects them against silver and probably other stuff. You wouldn’t even believe how magic her blood is, you guys. She’s the first pure-born hybrid which means that her powers are really limitless. Like, for real this time. She probably can’t be frozen in time like her dumb parents.

The science-loving lycans are all wiped out (NERRRRRRRRRRDS!) and Michael escaped from his frozen container thing but now he’s on the run. Or he escaped in a helicopter. Or he was kidnapped by a lycan who looks like Tommy Wiseau and drained of his blood, and now Wiseau is shooting up the blood like it’s heroin and is getting all kinds of powers from it.

It’s the last one. Michael is dead now. His powers are limitless, but apparently you can just hang him upside down and slit his throat and he’s done.

That brings up an odd thing in these movies. Vampires and lycans are immortal creatures. They go to great lengths throughout the course of the series to highlight the ways they can be killed. The lycans developed special UV rounds that burn up vampires from the inside out. The vampires countered with bullets filled with liquid silver so the lycans can’t just dig out the bullets. The lycans do everything they can to harvest the blood of Michael and Eve to make themselves impervious to silver. Yet, despite all that, vampires and lycans alike are killed by something as simple as a broken neck or strangulation by way of metal wire. Human food is toxic and will totally kill them. Regular bullets don’t kill them, but it can cause enough blood loss to kill them. So, basically like humans, except a nice steak would explode their stomach or something. Even Alexander Corvinus – the father of all vampires and lycans – is killed by blood loss. I mean, technically he’s killed by a massive explosion, but he was dying when he exploded the ship he was on.

As near as I can tell, the sole benefit you get from being a vampire or lycan – besides super cool titles like “Death Dealer” – is that you can live a long time if you’re super careful. It seems that most things that would kill a normal person would also kill a vampire or lycan. What’s the point of silver bullets? Just cut their brakes and they’ll die in a car crash.

Now, for the latest entry in the series: Blood Wars. It’s the weakest in the series and also the dumbest but also still awesome. It still takes itself entirely too seriously and it pretty much forces everyone to have an intimate knowledge of the rest of the series to understand everything that is happening. I had no trouble following along, but I can guarantee you that very few people have seen this series as many times as my wife and I have.

As I talked about above, the lycans have killed Michael and now they’re looking for Eve’s blood for reasons. Selene does not know where Eve is, so she is off on her own, engaging in some sweet lycan-killing, but also being hunted by both vampires and lycans. Eventually we discover that there is a hippie vampire coven on the top of a snowy mountain and they know how to transport themselves over short distances and also maybe know where Eve is or something. It’s confusing. There’s also a sexy evil vampire who answered a casting call that asked for, “Just kind of be like Eva Green, ya know?” Anyway, she nailed it.

The Nordic vampires have white hair and hate violence and swear that lycans will never breach their walls because it’s too cold, but then lycans totally breach their walls and kill a lot of vampires. So many vampires.

There’s another showdown and the vampires prevail. Selene accidentally gets some of Wiseau’s blood on her lip and she sees that Michael was killed and then she drinks her own blood to bring back her memories of Michael and Eve and then she pulls out Wiseau’s spine and I was so excited I screamed in the theater.

Now Selene is a vampire elder even though they all hated her 30 minutes ago. The end.

I’ll be honest with you: I don’t know why you read this far. I have no idea what this post is supposed to accomplish. These movies have gotten steadily more ridiculous with each installment, yet they take themselves so seriously I can’t help but smile when I watch them. The black leather, industrial soundtrack and stony faces feel a little out of place in 2017, but I can’t imagine watching an Underworld movie with jokes and bright colors. Just keep it rolling, man.

If there ends up being another installment in this series, here are four things I can guarantee you:
1. I will rewatch all the previous movies again before it comes out.
2. It will be terrible.
3. I will be in the theater opening night.
4. I will love it.

Anyway, if you ever have any highly specific Underworld questions, you know who to ask.

Tags Lycans, Monsters, Underworld, Vampires, Werewolves

Dusty's Corner Movie Reviews

The Barn: Movie Review

Synopsis:
On Halloween, 1989, six high school seniors – Sam, Josh, Michelle, Chris, Nikki and Russell – head out from their small town of Helen’s Valley to see their favorite band (the wonderfully named Demon Inferno). On the way, they stop off in Wheary Falls and awaken three murderous, flesh-eating demons. To stop the demons, they may have to follow Sam’s roundly mocked Rules of Halloween.

My thoughts:
The first thing that’s important to know about this film is that it is designed to be a throwback to 80s horror films. That’s evident from the setting to the music to the grainy film. If you watch the trailer, it’s perfectly clear what kind of movie this is. Because of that, I went in knowing exactly what kind of movie I was going to be watching.

I already started with the big stuff in the synopsis, but let’s flesh it out a little. The movie starts in Wheary Falls in 1959. (Both Wheary Falls and Helen’s Valley are fictional towns and we’re never told what state they are in. But, since the movie was filmed in Pennsylvania, let’s assume we’re dealing with two rural Pennsylvania towns.) We learn of the legend of The Barn: a nondescript red barn that holds three demons. If you knock on the door on Halloween and say, “Trick or treat,” the demons will emerge. It’s like Bloody Mary or Candyman, except you have to deal with three of them and they love eating flesh. They adore it.

Anyway, two kids sneak out after church to try it out. Sweet little Shirley gets a sharp instrument through her head, and George takes off running.

Let’s meet our demons – complete with their modus operandi – courtesy of Sam.

The Boogeyman: “Wants to crack your back, cut you into pieces to carry in his sack.”

Hallowed Jack: “Wants to carve out your head, slash you with his vines until you’re dead.”

The Candycorn Scarecrow: “If you get scared, don’t you cry, or The Candycorn Scarecrow will surely eat your eyes.”

The design of the demons was incredible. I was a particularly huge fan of the candles inside Hallowed Jack’s pumpkin head and the rotted candy corn teeth of The Candycorn Scarecrow, but they all looked great. It was a bit odd to feel nostalgia over something in a brand new movie, yet here we are.
Actually, that last statement could apply to this entire movie. I felt a massive wave of nostalgia for this entire movie.

We jump forward into 1989, when our six heroes find themselves in Wheary Falls on Halloween night. Once again the demons are awakened. Sam – our main character – has a set of rules that need to be followed on Halloween. He explains that these rules have been culled from a variety of traditions he had read about in books. He lays these out while sitting at a campfire outside The Barn, and, though his friends make fun of him at the time, we know they’re going to need these rules in order to survive.

Sam is a high school senior who is perceived to love Halloween a bit too much, both by the adults in his town and by his friends. To outsiders, it appears as though he has a hard time letting go of his childhood love of Halloween, but it’s more than that. He believes that Halloween traditions go deeper than just, “kids trick or treat because they want candy.” He believes that these traditions were put in place to protect us. He has taken these traditions and broken them down into 6 Halloween rules. He believes that each of these rules is a sort of contract that we must honor. If the rules are broken, bad things can happen.

Because this is a horror movie – more specifically an 80s influenced slasher – we know the rules won’t be followed by everyone, which will lead to a lot of killing. It starts off with fairly typical slasher fare; after summoning the demons – but before any of the characters actually see them – the friends separate a bit, allowing them to be picked off one-by-one without alerting the others. After the first few kills, all hell breaks loose and the fun really starts.

In a particularly fun scene, the three demons lay waste to a room full of people enjoying the rockabilly stylings of The Legendary Hucklebucks. The Hucklebucks themselves are killed, then the blood really flies as all in attendance are laid to waste. Heads are crushed, faces are eaten, throats are slit, eyes are popped out a la Friday the 13^th Part 3, faces are melted via boiling water, limbs are ripped off with abandon, and so much more. And it’s all set to a rockabilly soundtrack. The demons really get creative with their killing, and it’s beautiful. It’s a bloody, gleeful scene, and I won’t deny that I watched the entire thing with a grin on my face.

In fact, “gleeful” is a good way to describe this movie. It’s an homage to 80s slasher/monster movies without a hint of irony. This is not done while winking at the camera. This is not a parody, and it’s certainly not meant as a deconstruction of the genre. This was a movie made by a guy who grew up loving that era of horror and desperately wanted to make a movie of his own that would fit in with the films of that time. Justin Seaman – the writer/director – came up with the idea for The Barn when he was 8 years old, and that shows here. The youthful exuberance and love for all things Halloweeny and gory is on full display.

If you’ve ever wanted a full movie that captures the atmosphere of the trick or treating scene in Halloween III: Season of the Witch, this is it. It perfectly captures the spirit of Halloween, and will surely find its way into my yearly Halloween movie rotation. I love this movie completely.

The young cast is great. The cameos from Linnea Quigley and Ari Lehman were great. The entire movie is an absolute blast. Make yourself a bowl of popcorn, throw this movie on and get ready for a fun night.

Rating: 5/5

You can buy DVD for The Barn – as well as a ton of other great stuff – on their merch page.

Tags 80s Horror, Independent, Justin Seaman, Monsters, Slasher, The Barn, Throwback

Archives Dusty's Corner Movie Reviews

Hollows Grove: Movie Review

Post author By Dusty Evely
Post date November 11, 2016
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Synopsis:
A group of charlatan ghost hunters head to a haunted orphanage to record an episode of their show, S.P.I.T. (Spirit Paranormal Investigation Team) They allow a friend along to document their process, and end up talking about how they fake everything. I have no idea why they do this. Anyway, the orphanage turns out to actually be haunted and terrible things happen to this crew.

Thoughts:
The movie opens with Mykelti Williamson as director of the FBI, very seriously stating how these tapes we’re about to watch were found at a crime scene, and how watching them means we’re part of the investigation, and yada yada. It was so sincere and ridiculous that I just had to laugh. Having a recognizable actor open the movie in that way made it even worse. There was no possibility of suspending disbelief. If I’m going to watch a found footage movie, I need to buy in that the events could possibly be real. Seeing Bubba Blue sit on a desk and tell me he’s with the FBI does not allow me to do that.

Then we get to meet our ghost hunters. And they’re terrible people. Just the worst. They’re fronted by Tim, who has one of the smuggest faces I’ve ever seen (which is odd, seeing as how he is played by Heed from So I Married an Axe Murderer). His right hand man – Roger – is a screaming ball of misogynist comments and terrible jokes, wrapped up in a man who has entirely too high an opinion of himself. Chad is also there. He is tall and blonde. Their producer – Julie – somehow sticks around even though Tim and Roger can’t stop saying terrible things to her. But I’m sure the paycheck for S.P.I.T. is more than worth it (there is no way this is true).

Harold is following them around with a camera and seems legitimately shocked that their “hauntings” are merely tricks to make it look like things are moving. At the helm of these tricks is Bill, played by the great Lance Henricksen. Have you ever wanted to see Henricksen’s hind quarters and part of his balls? Spoiler alert: you totally see all of that.

Don’t smile at me like that, Lance. I’ve seen too much.

The S.P.I.T. show itself is horrendous. The awful script was only outdone by the awful performances. Everything was said with a dead-serious tone, while puns flew around like hotcakes. (Flying hotcakes, I guess?) I tried to imagine what it would be like to actually watch the show, and I ended up throwing items at my TV.

All that said…I think I kind of liked it.

This movie was not breaking any ground. It’s essentially the same movie as Grave Encounters, with a bit of The Last Exorcism thrown in.

I mentioned how the characters were insufferable, but that’s really just an old slasher trick. Create a cast of unlikable characters so you don’t feel bad when they are killed. And it worked. (To be fair, Tim and Roger were the only two I was actively rooting for to die.) Every time the lights flickered or there was a loud noise, I kept saying, “Please let Tim and Roger die soon.” I was basically Rob Corddry waiting for Crispin Glover’s arm to be severed in Hot Tub Time Machine. “This is it. THIS IS IT! Oh…false alarm. Just do it already, ghosts.”

Drop the hammer, ghosts. DROP THE HAMMER.

The set-up dragged a bit, especially since we all know exactly where this movie was heading. The ghosts – including the ghost of a psychotic orphan known for slitting throats – were real and the crew would be trapped inside to be taunted and killed. But not before being haunted for hours. Soooo much haunting, you guys.

Even though I knew where it was heading, the payoff was still fun. Once all hell started to break loose, I had a good time. One member of the crew got possessed in a fairly confusing manner and decided murder would be fun. Other members of the crew ended up running aimlessly through the abandoned orphanage, saying nonsensical things like, “Let’s run to the roof to escape,” without any clear plan of what they would do if they were to actually reach the roof. Doors that were once locked became unlocked, and they ran into them to escape the ghosts in the hallway, not thinking there may be ghosts behind the locked doors as well. Panic and fear do terrible things to people. For these people, it caused them to make terrible decisions.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Stay in the hall. Go into a previously locked room. Run to the roof. Run to the ground floor. Their fate was sealed. Otherwise, the very official FBI agent wouldn’t be presenting us with the tapes in the first place.

As you can tell, this is by no means a great movie. It’s not even a very good one. But it can be enjoyable if you go into it with the right frame of mind. Know that the characters are terrible people, but also know that they will die soon. Know that the beginning is a bit slow, but also know that it will pick up. And, again, that they will die.

Rating: 2/5

Tags Found Footage, Ghost Hunters, Hollows Grove, Movie Review

Archives Dusty's Corner Movie Reviews

Breakfast: Trailer Talk

Do you all remember Dinner? The short film about Dylan and her monster-kicking habits? Well…Dylan is back. Behold, the trailer for Breakfast!

Like Dinner, it looks like a no-budget monster romp written and directed by Aleksandra Svetlichnaya (who plays Dylan). “It’s not a sequel,” it promises. “It’s the next course.”

This appears to follow two men who find an unfinished comic and – I assume – unwittingly start the zombie apocalypse. I get it, guys. We were all young once.

Keep an eye out for Breakfast. I know I can’t wait to see it.

Tags Aleksandra Svetlichnaya, Breakfast, Dinner, Trailer Talk

Archives Dusty's Corner Short Stories What Comes Next

The Legend of Sam-El Caan

Post author By Dusty Evely
Post date October 31, 2016
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His name is Sam-El Caan, and he was once worshiped as a god. In some countries, he may still be. He was more a demon than a god, but no one knows exactly how he came into being. He was “put to sleep” by a small group of monks at some point in the 1400s, and his eyes have not opened since. He was buried deep beneath the ground in an unmarked field in the middle of Kentucky. The original plan was to dismember his body and scatter him across the world, but the instructions were very clear: he must be kept in one piece, his right hand clutched around a ruby. The ancient text was vague in many things but very clear in this.

And so he slept. As the world changed around him, he slept. For centuries, someone had kept an eye on his resting place, guarding against any attempts to resurrect him. As time went on, the horrors were forgotten and duties were thrown by the wayside. The guard had gone, but Sam-El Caan remained buried in the dirt.

Sam-El Caan stood 25 feet tall. His head resembled a pumpkin and his face was carved in the manner of a jack-o-lantern. He spoke in a deep, resounding voice. His body was thin, strong and gnarled, like the branches of a very old tree. His feet were wide and the ground shook when he walked. He was an imposing figure, but he was now trapped underground in a seemingly endless sleep.

But it was not as endless as it appeared.

The ancient texts were incomplete. One of the missing pages stated that he would be awoken on Halloween night, 2016. When the clock struck midnight, he would be free to roam the Earth once more.

As distant chimes rang, Sam-El Caan’s eyes regained their glow. He did not know where he was, but he could sense his domain calling for him. He began digging upwards towards the surface, ready to reclaim the world that he felt was rightfully his.

He emerged into the darkness of a dim crescent moon and howled as best as he could, but centuries of being buried in dirt meant his howl wasn’t what it once was. No matter. He would regain his full strength soon enough and this new world would be his. He was hoping he would emerge to find a full moon – the light from that moon restoring his powers – but that was a couple weeks away. He would retreat into the woods to wait, and when he emerged he would not be stopped. Not this time. Surely the ancient text had been lost a very long time ago.

He stepped into the forest in search of dark place to sit for two weeks. What he found were a couple of teens dressed like wizards, smoking some kind of small white object. At the sight of him, they stood up and stumbled backwards.

Sam-El Caan’s eyes glowed red as he advanced on the teens. When he spoke, it was in his native dialect. It was deep and filled with all the rage that had been slowing building over the course of hundreds of years. “HOW DARE YOU LOOK UPON SAM-EL CAAN. MY RETRIBUTION WILL BE QUICK AND COMPLETE AND IT WILL START WITH YOU.”

One of the teens had regained his bearings. He picked up a rock and hurled it at Sam-El Caan’s face. It entered his left eye and exited through the back of his head, causing an explosion of gooey orange viscera.

The light left Sam-El Caan’s eyes. He stumbled and fell, exploding into thousands of twigs and what appeared to be the emptied shell of a rotten pumpkin.

The teens looked briefly stunned, then laughed and continued on with their night, the corpse of the once great Sam-El Caan lying beneath their feet.

Happy Halloween!

Tags Halloween