Movies! With movies comes much griping about said movies. I think the cheap movies I purchased would have been better (I know for a fact Smokey and the Bandit would have been), but we never got around to watching them. I'll just watch them by myself some time. These movies we're discussing today, I'll be spoiling parts of them. You're welcome.
Wrong Turn 3 - 4 college kids go kayaking down a river. Three are killed five minutes into the movie by a hillbilly freak, who is also a cannibal. A prison is transferring several convicts, and fearing one of the prisoner's soldiers will attempt to free him, has changed the route, sending the transport bus through the same patch of wilderness. One of the guards happens to be from the area, and knows the sheriff. The transport crashes off the road, the cons gain the upper hand, then start getting picked off one at a time, as tends to happen in these situations. They run across the surviving college kid, and also find an armored truck (which has been there for decades) and the con giving the orders decides escaping wasn't hard enough already, everyone must carry bags of money. The sheriff hauls his fat ass out there to help, as does his perky young deputy. The guard from the area generally proves incompetent at finding his way around, and the Hispanic fellow giving orders keeps butting heads with the white supremacist he's sort of business partners with. There's also a whiny ginger car thief, an undercover U.S. Marshall, and a guy protesting he's innocent of the murder he was convicted of. Most of these people, and a few others, die. No one dies pretty.
Eddie told me it's established in this series that the mutant hillbillies can regenerate, so they essentially have to be blown up to be killed. It sounds more like something viewers of the films came up with to explain it themselves, but maybe it is canon. My problem with that is likely a symptom of my larger inability to suspend disbelief. I found some of the deaths improbable, the level of skill the killer demonstrated out of whack with what I figured its intelligence to be. The idea he/it's a cannibal because all the animals are already eaten struck me as ridiculous. People with head starts continually run into the people they were fleeing, because those people have somehow gotten ahead of them. Considering those people are weighed down with bags of money, or are injured, or shouldn't have any idea where the hell they're going, it makes no sense they somehow got ahead of the people they were pursuing. Of course, firearms have ammunition until the precise moment they would actually do some good, at which point they run dry.
This is not a good movie, but that's not usually an impediment. I enjoyed the first Wrong Turn a bit, though the enjoyment can be summed up in two words*. I'm less interested in movies that's primary gift to the audience seems to be gore than I was when I was younger. This is where I seem to differ from Sheena and Eddie, and Alex as well. An arrow going through the back of someone's skull and out through their eye socket, the eye on the tip of the arrow, until the cannibal pulls it off and eats it, does nothing but make me wish I was watching something else. There were a couple of parts I liked. The white supremacist steals all the money bags, then is hit with a Molotov cocktail. He's sees his former business partner (who beat him to a bloody pulp earlier) coming, and decides if he's going, he'll take the money with him, and makes sure the fire consuming him takes all the cash as well. That was funny. The car thief was instantly annoying, so I was worried he'd somehow survive, but he didn't. Even there, the death was more unpleasant than I'd prefer. I just wanted him to no longer be an active presence in the movie. Being wrapped in barb wire and dragged on the highway was a bit much. A simple bullet to the head would have sufficed.
Funny Games - I can't review this, because I gave up watching it after 30 minutes, opting first to watch Alex' computer run a virus scan, then go to another room and watch something else. Then Sheena and Eddie lost interest and went to bed, and Alex suggested we could do something else when I came back**. He did confirm my fear about the ending, so I was glad I didn't finish watching it. As far as I watched, a family comes to their lovely summer home, and are immediately annoyed by a couple of young men staying with a neighbor. The young men ask to borrow eggs, then keep dropping them for various reasons, drop Naomi Watts' phone in the sink, and ask to borrow her golf clubs, just one swing please. Of course, they are actually psychopaths, who want to play horrible torture mind games with the family before they kill them. Then they'll go to another fancy summer house and start all over again.
I think it was by design, but I found Peter and Paul irritating. Their manner of speaking, to be unfailingly polite and a little pathetic, but at the same time, resolute to get whatever it was they wanted. They just keep politely pleading for you to please let them have those last four eggs, and I know it means you won't have any more, and I know I already dropped eight eggs, because I'm trying to appear to be a moron when really I'm just fucking with you, but really, couldn't you please just let me have those last four eggs? Shoot me. Also, they look like wusses. Naomi Watts keeps asking them to leave, then asking her husband to tell them to leave, and I'm thinking she could probably kick both their asses, and throw them out on their ears. She should have done it. I would have been entertained.
According to Alex, the family dies at the end, and the boys use their sailboat to travel across the lake to torment a family that stopped by briefly earlier in the movie. So they commit horrible acts and escape. If that's how a movie is going to end, with the killers receiving no comeuppance, it better make them a damn sight more interesting than these two were. Pierce Brosnan in The Matador, for example. He was a hitman, and at the end of the movie, had found a renewed zest for his work, and I didn't mind that he hadn't died for what he did. Because he was a character I found something to like in.
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li - What can I say, it was a slow afternoon. I wasn't planning to watch this until I saw Michael Clarke Duncan was in it, playing Balrog***. So I was faced with the possibility he'd fight Chun-Li, played by Kristin Kreuk, and since she's the hero, he'd lose. I was eagerly awaiting this, as I wanted to see whether I would find this defeat more plausible or less than the one he suffered at the hands of Ben Affleck**** in Daredevil. Sadly, it did not come to pass, as Duncan was defeated by Robin Shou, who played Chun-Li's mentor Gen. Also, he played Liu Kang in the Mortal Kombat movies, so Michael Clarke Duncan losing to him doesn't inspire much disbelief.
Hmm, I don't have anything else to say about the movie. I only caught the end of Monsters vs. Aliens, so I'll just say what I saw I liked, and I'll probably make a point to watch the whole movie some point in the near future*****.
* The two words being, Eliza Dushku.
** We opted to play Rock Band 2.
*** Looking online, it says he was M. Bison in the Japanese version of the film. Works better than Neal McDonough as Bison did. McDonough looked like Bison's accountant.
**** I Affleck wins after he manages to get water flying all over the place, taking away Duncan's vision, but somehow I could still picture Affleck hitting Duncan as hard as he could, even those shots at the knees, which was a pretty smart idea, and Duncan being unfazed by all of it.
***** I was planning to do just that later that night when they showed it again, but everyone else wanted to go to Buffalo Wild Wings, so I missed my opportunity.
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