L.A. Story (1991)

Harris (Steve Martin) is the "wacky" weatherman for a Los Angeles news broadcast. It's a satirical, or maybe surreal, version of L.A. Harris says he's survived 7 heart attacks, all of them imagined. He works out in a stationary bike park, where running is prohibited. He and his current girlfriend leave for a get-together at the time they were supposed to arrive, and are the first to arrive. Everyone orders decaf, or decaf espresso, or double-decaf with a twist of lemon. One person mentions taking a class in the art of conversation, and when Harris confirms this, they reply only, "Yes."

Must be a minimalist art class. 

Harris is just going through the motions, save maybe his roller skating through art museums, but finds himself intrigued by Sara (Victoria Tennant), an English journalist who has just flown into town and doesn't behave like anyone else he knows. Before long, Harris' car abruptly breaks down in front of an electronic road sign which starts speaking in riddles.

I assumed it wanted him to get together with Sara, but then tells Harris to get the number of Sandy (Sarah Jessica Parker), the girl at the clothing store who helped him find a new pair of pants. Sandy seems very free-spirited, studying to be a spokesmodel, in an open relationship with some other guy and extolling the virtues of colonics for cleansing yourself. Harris sort of goes along with it all, but is never exactly enthusiastic, not that Sandy seems to mind. Meanwhile, Sara's ex Roland (Richard E. Grant) is trying to get back together with her, despite the fake she's clearly lukewarm on the idea, at best. I mean, if she was really on board, she would probably say so. Too bad Roland's not only clueless, but powerless in the face of an enchanted billboard.

I don't mind the magical realism aspects. The movie was up front this was not a realistic version of L.A. from the opening credits. All the neighbors walking down their driveways at the same time to get their newspaper and wave to each other, like they're living in some idyll. Harris getting around traffic by driving through people's fences while they wave to him. The billboard is fine, even if I resent it expecting me to decipher an anagram. I hate anagrams!

But I wasn't ever invested in Harris and Sara's romance. Maybe because Harris spends at least as much time with Sandy as Sara, even if Sandy is portrayed as very immature in some ways and Harris doesn't seem invested in her. Maybe because almost everything between Harris and Sara is from Harris' perspective. It feels like Sara is swept up in his wake, not unlike Harris with Sandy. She finds him fun, or at least funny. Possibly an interesting subject for an article. I never got the impression she loves him. More she doesn't want to get back together with Roland.

Harris is the one getting assistance from the magic billboard. When Sara tries to drop him off at his place, and her car starts rolling away, and Harris insists they just jump in and ride along, he's sure it's the billboard. Sara only knows the wacky weatherman is practically shoving her in her car and telling her to let it steer itself. Then he kisses her while she's trying to rationalize what happens, and does it again when she's still discussing induction after he stops kissing her.

Which was funny, I admit. The movie is definitely funny. Granting I haven't watched a ton of comedies this year, it's either this or Paint for movie that made me laugh the most. One of the newscasters gets a good burn on Harris about the fact this job is all a doctorate in the arts got him. There's an extended gag of Harris trying to get a reservation at a swanky new restaurant, that ends with him going over his finances with the Maitre D' (Patrick Stewart!). 'With these financials, you expect to order the duck?!' 

Harris getting into an impromptu shootout with another driver on the highway, his girlfriend asking if bullets go bad. Woody Harrelson's in a couple of scenes as Harris' boss, including a decent gag when he fires Harris as he steps in an elevator. Took me all of those scenes to recognize Harrelson. I forgot he used to have a lot of hair. Chevy Chase has a brief cameo where he is the butt of one of Stewart's insults. Not something I knew I needed, but which I quite enjoyed.

Training is Serious Business. Seriously Disturbing.

Yuto Takeda is trying to defend his junior welterweight title against that remorseless fighting machine, Yu. How's that going for him?

About as expected, then.

Volume 6 of The Boxer consists of the majority of Takeda's attempt at a title defense, before shifting gears to Yu's preparation for challenging middleweight champion, Fabrizio Santorino. The Takeda fight had already taken a bad turn when Yu demonstrated he could perfectly mimic Yuto's in-boxing fighting style. Except his superior athletic talent meant he could do it even better.

All Takeda's got is what's carried him this far: a relentless drive to keep trying, keep pushing. To prove he can do it. Secretly, to make his dad proud of him. JH shows repeated panels of different people looking on. A sick kid in the hospital, the young guy that gave up boxing after challenging Yu on his first day at the gym, and Yuto's high school friend, Yamaguchi, the one who ran away to work on a ship and, for a moment in the prior volume, looked like he was going to throw himself in the sea. Turns out he came home and opened a small store, got his mom into rehab. He thinks Yuto's doing this to show people like him not to give up, and doesn't want to see him take more punishment for that.

There's also Misaki, Yuto's coach and adoptive parent. She's watching Yuto keep getting up for more beatings and wondering if her friends would be angry how she raised their kid. If she should have pushed him away from boxing. There's a flashback to a conversation where Misaki, a little tipsy, admits she worries that, since he's put everything into the idea hard work will overcome, when Yuto finds the point that's not true, he'll break.

And then, I'm not sure what JH is going for. It seems Takeda, recalling that conversation, where Misaki told him to cherish life and not cling so tight to the burdens he puts on himself, lets go and. . .gets better at boxing? Allegedly, he's found "freedom", which means he's finally stopped worrying about the exact mechanics of how to throw punches or move, and is just doing it? His eyes start glowing, in a way that reminds Yu of Injae when he defied Bakesan.

And he shatters Takeda's jaw. I mean, I knew something like that was coming, so it's kind of whatever. Too many volumes still ahead for Yu to be moved by the spirit of loving athletic competition, or the bonds of brotherhood. What actually annoys me is, in a rage, Misaki attacks Yu. Except JH, who established Misaki is a gold medalist boxer, has her throw the stereotypical hysterical girl slap. The woman probably has a better jab than Takeda did! And fine, she's not going to hit Yu either way, but K steps in. K, who we are shown crying tears of joy as Yu nearly murders someone. Let Misaki hit him. There shouldn't be any "reflexes too fast" bullshit protecting that sociopath.

Anyway, another belt claimed, Yu moves on. Welterweight and Junior Middleweight are dispatched in a couple of pages. The Santorinos, Fabrizio and his older brother Marco, pose a different challenge. They like to play mind games. Bugging Yu's house, spreading rumors of tax evasion, paying a homeless guy to try and spill something dangerous on Yu while he's running. None of it does any good, though the fact Carmen, who works for K, moves in to watch over Yu produces an unexpected result.

No, not that she poisons him. Frankly out of nowhere, Carmen instantly catches feelings for Yu. Apparently it's been 5 years since K brought him in, but they've hardly been shown interacting. I have no clue the age gap, since Carmen was already working for K then. She starts encouraging him to smile (terrifying), or dress nicer. They go to an amusement park, which runs counter to her advice that they have to severely restrict Yu's interactions with anyone but her or K. It does lead to a chance meeting with Jean Pierre, the former lightweight champ, who has changed in the intervening years.

Except Carmen gets really catty with Stella, Jean Pierre's wife, which, eh. Stella's been shown as very dramatic, but it's still a weird look on Carmen. K agrees, as, dissatisfied with whatever changes he's seeing in Yu (and Jean Pierre noticed something different as well), he takes her off Yu-detail and replaces her with some Super Mario-looking guy. Too bad nobody told the Santorinos. . .

Sunday Splash Page #447

"Breakthrough," in Batman '89: Echoes #3, by Sam Hamm (writer), Joe Quinones and Stacey Lee (artists), Leonardo Ito (color artist), Carlos M. Mangual (letterer)

Set two years after the previous mini-series, Barbara Gordon is now a captain in GCPD, thanks the info Harvey had and Selina fed to her to take down crooked politicians. Barbara knows Bruce is Batman thanks to her father's journals (Gordon figured it out), but kept the secret so long as he put away the suit. And he has, for two years.

But now civilians are dressing up as Batman, and four of them have been killed by robbers that went berserk at the sight of the cowl. Barbara wants to know what Bruce knows about it. Too bad even Alfred hasn't seen Bruce in over a month. In what is surely an entirely unrelated development, the notorious mad bomber Firefly was just captured and remanded to the care of Dr. Jonathan Crane of Arkham Asylum.

This mini-series has a lot stuffed in it. Too much, probably. You've got Bruce Wayne impersonating a traumatized soldier-turned-terrorist he hunted down, because certain things in the man's manifesto reminded him of Hugo Strange, who apparently worked for Wayne, but recently died under suspicious circumstances. Crane is Strange's protege, and a rival of TV psychiatrist Harleen Qunizel (who I think Quinones bases visually on Madonna) and her "persona therapy."

Two of Strange's other patients are "Edward Nigel Maynard," who is the Riddler (but also a former soldier), and a guy named Desmond, another soldier, but hopped up on steroids and some kind of berserker fury drug. He's called "the Blockbuster." And there's another guy, someone Strange's soldiers found overseas who was urged to participate in the work. He's in a coma, and looks emaciated at first, then steadily regains musculature until he wakes up and walks out of the Asylum. He's very interested in Strange's work, and the improvements Crane made to Strange's drugs. It's Ra's Al Ghul, who I think is based on Ricardo Montalbahn. If so, hell yeah, good call by Quinones.

So it's sort of Batman Begins, but you've also got Winston Drake, who has not retired from crimefighting like Batman, in an outfit a bit like Nightwing's, with an entire crew of people who he calls "Nightwings" that help him out. That just sort of pops up as a thing in the last two issues. Barbara abruptly finds herself the subject of an Internal Affairs investigation. At some point we don't see, she refused to help Selina with something. So Selina set up a hidden bank account to make it look like Barbara was taking kickbacks. This seems to be Hamm's way to have her to ask Bruce for help, since she'd otherwise be antagonistic, but there's no resolution. She's not cleared.

And it's an origin story for Harley Quinn, who did some unethical stuff to get herself a regular TV show, only to get screwed by her producer and the station owner. She ends up needing Selina's help to escape an assassination attempt, and Selina promises to train her up in, not playing by men's rules, I guess.

And there's an element that Batman's maybe treating this whole thing, trying to stop Ra's from getting the fear toxin, as his last ride. Basically, Crane's fear toxin is the lineage of Strange's work that Wayne funded. That's what Batman's accomplished with all his work, his efforts to use fear as a force for change: drugs that could be horribly abused in the wrong hands. He tells Drake his method, getting the community involved, giving them a stake in protecting their homes by working together, is a better way of doing things.

Quinones does some fun stuff with the page layouts during the scenes in the asylum. Crane shows "Firefly" different images to assess his responses, and Quinones alternates rows of the images with a graph of either Bruce's heartrate or brain activity, showing his response or lack thereof. Painful memories are shown in panels shaded in red and outlined with thick black borders. There's one panel of Harley's producer, dosed on fear gas, trying to hide in the room that controls the camera feeds and seeing a dozen different versions of Harley dancing their ways out of the screen. 

Can't say Hamm and Quinones aren't doing their damndest to give us our money's worth, but there's just so much going on. It's a movie sequel experiencing bloat, or villain overload or whatever you call it when they start cramming too many antagonists into the third film in the franchise (though I guess this would be the fourth, if the prior mini was the third.) The Quinzel stuff and the fear stuff are woven through the entire mini-series. Crane studying fear to see how to use it further his drug work, while Quinzel uses her patients' issues for shock value to further her career as a TV personality. Each regards the other with contempt, but they're two sides of the same coin. Crane thinks Quinzel's a fraud, but he treats his patients as guinea pigs, hardly ethical.

So much of the rest feels like flyby, blink and you'll miss it, stuff. Little set-up, less payoff. Too important for just Easter eggs, but not developed. Batman  on a suicide run, dosing himself with the berserker drug when he confronts Ra's? Out of nowhere. Prior to that, he's talking about how they'll just have to deal with the possibility Barbara outs him if and when it happens. There's a brief scene where Bruce is frightened by the sight of his own costume, as though Crane's treatments affected him. Even though Bruce took a dose of something Strange designed for him that is essentially a mind-wipe drug. Not developed, unless you figure the idea was that, if he's even terrifying to himself, it's time for Batman to end. But he doesn't end. Not dead, not retired, not outed.

Barbara's working with them by the end of the mini-series, her problem of being framed for corruption not addressed. I have no idea if Maynard is on the loose, or what happened with Blockbuster. I don't know if Ra's is dead or not. If there was going to be another mini-series, maybe it's threads to be picked up later. As far as I know, that's not the case. Maybe not a surprise, given it took almost two years for the 6 issues to come out, including 9 months between issues 5 and 6.

Saturday Splash Page #249

"Here's Juggy," in The Thing (2025) #3, by Tony Fleecs (writer), Justin Mason (artist), Alex Sinclair (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer)

A 5-issue mini-series where Ben Grimm is approached by an old acquaintance - read: childhood bully - needing help locating his niece, whose mother was a girl Ben was friends with back then. Following the leads they've got takes Ben first to Daredevil's old foe the Gladiator, who seems out of sorts about something. More concerning, he has super-strength.

He finds Sara in Hammerhead's clutches, but recovering her is only half the problem. Hammerhead's working for Kingpin, and Fisk puts a $10 million bounty on The Thing's head, bringing a lot of villains who really ought to know better out of the woodwork. I mean, the Wrecking Crew? Sure, they're strong, and amoral enough to abduct a kid. But the Sinister Six show up and, I'm sorry, what did the Vulture or Kraven think they were gonna be able to do the Thing? To say nothing of Jigsaw, a guy whose superpower is, "only maimed, rather than murdered, by Frank Castle."

The smartest people in the entire mini-series are the Serpent Society, who hear about the bounty, realize it would be real dumb for them to try messing with The Thing, and sit the whole thing out. Which did not stop Nick Bradshaw from drawing Diamondback among the people attack the Idol of Millions on 3 covers. Not sure what that was about.

The point of the story is when to use power. Sara is a mutant, caught up in a scheme where powers get "scraped" so you can temporarily give those powers to someone else. Sara's been hurt and wants to hurt the person she holds responsible. Ben has to explain the difference between fighting to protect and fighting to hurt. That he does hit people, like those trying to abduct her, and he might be angry when he does it, or enjoy hitting them, but that's not why he's hitting them.

Fleecs has the Thing hold back a lot, taking hits from guys who, amped or not, aren't on his level, until he has to stop them. He lets Gladiator hit him several times while trying to talk him down, but when it comes down to it, he knocks the guy out in one punch. As he puts it to a too-confident Hammerhead in the last issue, 'You think I punch a guy in a pinstripe suit the same as how I punch the Hulk?!'

I don't know if we need him to explain that he uses "It's Clobberin' Time!" as his way of telling himself it's time to fight for real, but what the hell, he's trying to explain things to a traumatized kid. 

Fleecs also has the Thing keep trying to avoid fighting entirely once he's got Sara. Moonstone attacks, he hits her once and tries to bail, only to run into Rhino and Jigsaw. OK, run the other way, except Grizzly and Hate Monger are waiting. Try another direction, nope, Red Ghost and his Super-Apes. Try a fourth direction, here's the Sinister Six.  He's tries sticking to rooftops, or traveling at night. He doesn't actually fight the Juggernaut so much as distract him by throwing Black Tom down the street. Which was disappointing - I was really excited for that fight - but makes sense in context. He's not out to prove something, he's trying to get a kid to her mom. 

Ben's usually fighting with one hand, the other cradling Sara against his chest, shielding her. He's still a big guy covered in rocky plates, but Mason rounds his edges, the shoulders, the shape of Ben's head, which at least gives an impression of being softer than you'd expect. Mason also doesn't draw Ben as huge. He's bigger than Sara's uncle, or Bullseye, but stands eye-to-eye with the Wrecking Crew, is a full head shorter than the Kingpin, and Juggernaut's twice his size.

The end lands with a bit of a thud. Ben marches into the Kingpin's office, dumps Sara's uncle at his feet, yells a bit, then walks off in the pouring rain while Kingpin makes threats about owning the city. Ben's final line, 'Yeah? Well, you don't own Yancy Street,' is said to no one. He's far enough down the sidewalk Fisk isn't even visible in the background, so it's not really a comeback.

Yes, beating up the Kingpin, someone much weaker than the Thing, would go against everything he's said and done up to then. But he doesn't do anything to Fisk, like point out that trying to pick a fight with the FF, beloved by the public, is much different than messing with Spider-Man or Daredevil, who are viewed less favorably. There's no implication anyone but Hammerhead and his goons will be going to jail. Even if Sara's uncle has testimony that could link Fisk to the operation, and that seems unlikely since he was such a small fry Hammerhead felt confident he could rip him off, Ben just dumped him at Fisk's feet and walked away. Guess Marty's gonna sleep with the fishes next to that cabbie Fisk had killed to try and frame Matt Murdock!

Random Back Issues #176 - Deathlok #2

37-year-old SHIELD agent Jack Truman's mind is in the body of a 6-year-old named Billy. Truman had been pursuing Cable - I assume during Joe Casey's stint writing that book - and their final showdown on the Helicarrier didn't go great for Jack. His body was trashed, but some group, I'm unclear if Extechop is a division of SHIELD or some independent company, decided to experiment on him.

But Jack learned how to project his mind into someone's body from a stint in Tibet. Wow, Doom had to swipe that trick from some aliens. The Ovoids? Maybe if he'd visited the same monks as Jack, they could have advised him not to put burning metal on his face, too. Jack jumped first into Billy's dad, then accidentally into Billy. As for his body?

It's now a cybernetic war machine, running amok in Las Vegas. A SHIELD Air Cavalry unit is there, commanded by some guy Truman doesn't think much of named Larry Young. Vegas appears to be on fire, no great loss. Casey constantly throws in caption boxes that are just definitions of some word relevant to whatever is going on in the panel. I guess to represent only a basic computer intelligence is operating Truman's body.

Young asks Fury if he'll lift the weapons restrictions so they can hit the 'bot with some 'cold lasers.' Fury declines, stating he's sending in Zero Company to handle things. Young gets pissed and crashes into the aircraft Deathlok's controlling - or is it the other way around? - sending it to earth.

Back in Suburbia, Jack's doing a shit job pretending to be a kid, but manages to hitch a ride in the back of Billy's dad's car without being noticed. Pop works at a SHIELD front company, but Jack sneaks in and takes out two guards in armor, with hand-to-hand combat. Makes a guy's knee bend the wrong direction. With a first grader's kicks. That is the least believable thing is this comic about a cyborg destroying Las Vegas. Truman finds a hanger, and while Billy's voice can't pass authentication, Truman knows a secret code word Fury had hard-wired into everything as an override, though the significance of "Wah-hoo" escapes him. 

On the other side of the country, Mr. Young decided to visit a liquor store before returning to battle. It may be too late, because Zero Company is here! When you need to kill that hero, get yourself a Zero! Hot damn! They appear only as a full-page splash on the last page, and I'm not wasting the time to scan that. Rest assured, Manco makes them look like Fury called them away from a cameo appearance in Borderlands. I can't believe Fury lets them run around looking like that, but whatever, they'll probably be dead in an issue or two.

{3rd longbox, 266th comic. Deathlok (vol. 3) #2, by Joe Casey (writer), Leonardo Manco (artist), Mariana Manco (colorist), Jon Babcock (letterer)}

Could Be A Quiet Christmas

Not a lot of new books in the December solicits, at least not that I'm likely to buy. Lilith: Blood and Burlesque is skipping that month. The Deadman wasn't in DC solicits, so either it was a mini-series, or it's also on a skip month. Vampyrates! #4 is pushed back from October to mid-November, so I'm guessing issue 5 will be out in December now.

Suppose I ought to be spending the money on presents for other people, anyway.

What's new? I was not expecting a comic by Shaq about a West African king turned slave turned pirate, but now we've got Black Caesar, from Archie Comics, no less. Am I going to buy it? No, but it was strange enough to merit mention.

Ablaze has Soldier X creative team Darko Macan and Igor Kordey releasing the first of a 3-volume story about Marshal Bass Reeves, titled Marshal Bass. Am I going to buy it? Maybe down the line, if I hear good things and it looks like they'll actually finish the project.

Abrams Comicarts is, I think, re-releasing volumes of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda's OGN, The Night Eaters, but re-titled as She Eats the Night? I think that's what's going on. The solicit said the book had been previously released, albeit by a different publisher, but I couldn't find anything matching the title.

In terms of things I would actually buy, it's Garth Ennis and John McCrea's Hitman: It Was the Nineties from DC, which appears to be a couple of new stories set somewhere during the original run.

What's ending? Chachu wraps up, and that's it.

And the rest: Batgirl is still dealing with David Cain's dropping by. Fantastic Four has the team's only chance to save the Earth from impossibly powerful aliens relying on Johnny's ability to bridge the language gap.

Marc Spector and D'Orc are on issue 11. Marc's West Coast reunion tour continues, while Brett Bean's spending an issue focusing on Chicken. Not exactly traditional for Christmas, but whatever meets your dietary requirements.

Which leaves the two books on issue 2. The Agony of Stars has a cop trying to investigate what these cop murders are about. Don't rush, make sure to thoroughly examine all the evidence. Take it home, sleep on it over a long weekend. In Friendly Neighborhood Mary Jane, is having trouble with her investor, Tony Stank. I really ought to spell his last name that way more often.

That said, I'm having second thoughts about that book. I got a closer look at the cover to issue 1, and I think MJ still has a symbiote, which is a strike, added to my doubts about Noto as an interior artist, added to Stank's presence as part of the cast. I guess there's still issue 3's solicit to win me over before the first issue actually comes out.

Evil Dead (2013)

Mia's (Jane Levy) brother and three of their friends have brought her to the old family cabin out in the woods to help her kick her drug addiction by going cold turkey. Of course, what David (Shiloh Fernandez) doesn't know, because he hasn't been around for years, is Mia's tried this before. It never lasts. As in, less than half a day. So their friends are prepared to keep Mia there by force.

A short time into the stay, while Mia's already complaining about an awful stench permeating the cabin, they find a locked room in the basement, full of dead cats and a book bound in human skin. One friend, like a dumbass, decides he should while away the hours reading from this book, going so far as to use pencil rubbings to find the words that were on pages that are missing from the book, and then read them aloud. People get possessed, people get maimed, people die, but David is determined to save his sister.

Couple of things working against this movie with me. One, the channel it was on just finished showing the original Evil Dead and Evil Dead II back to back, so I was hoping for Army of Darkness. I got this instead. Booo. Second, gore is the least interesting thing about horror movies to me. I can roll with it if you use it for comedy, which is probably why Army of Darkness is my favorite of the original trilogy. But gore and brutality for shock value? Doesn't do much for me. It's gross, sure. Turns my stomach? Probably. But scary? No. Hence Saw being the movie I deemed the worst I've ever seen in theaters, since gore was the edifice that entire sorry sack of ape shit hung on.

Maybe if you can make it relevant to the plot, but when Natalie takes off her arm with an electric turkey trimmer, and it doesn't actually keep her from getting possessed, then it's gratuitous. Great, you got to spray corn syrup all over the place. I'm sure that was a lifelong dream.

I don't know, I thought the movie would do more with the idea Mia was the one most aware there was something wrong, but the others dismissed it as withdrawal talking. But she's the first one possessed, and things go to the extreme too quickly to waste time on that sort of uncertainty. Once she's scalded herself so badly her flesh is peeling off, they can't worry whether she's possessed or just jonesing.

Also, it seems weird this is apparently their family's cabin, and they spent enough time there for Mia to have photos all over a wall, but neither she or David comment on the rusted remains of Ash's car, and David seems completely stunned there's a door to a basement under the rug in the living room. Yet they both knew about the little hollow under the three that could let them climb into the tool shed.

That said, the complicated relationship between Mia and David is the strongest part of the movie. The others are really just there for plot reasons and/or to up the body count. They need Eric to be the curious idiot who unleashes forces he doesn't understand, and Olivia has the medical training and access to various drugs, but beyond that, it isn't as though the film lingers over their deaths.

But Mia and David have this whole thing where David is guilty about the fact he ran in the past, leaving Mia to deal with her grief alone, in self-destructive ways. Mia can't really bring herself to trust him because of that. The words are nice, the birchwood necklace is sweet, but will he actually be there when she needs him? And what would that mean? Certainly Eric sees David's unwillingness to give up on saving Mia when she's vomiting black bile and looking like she just popped over from The Exorcist as another example of him running away from things he doesn't want to face. Same as how he balked when Eric and Olivia said they were prepared to keep Mia here until she got through it, no matter what.

Also, yelling at David probably helps distract Eric from how this is his fault. Remember kids, curiosity is bad! Pursue knowledge and all you'll catch are suffering and death!

I could see David taking the most dangerous approach to getting rid of the spirit as another symptom. A live burial means he's got to go into the basement and fight his possessed little sister, and hope sedatives still work on her when something he doesn't understand is animating her body. The repeated shots of him getting thrown around the basement into stone walls somehow felt the most like the original films to me. They aren't meant to be funny, but there was something vaguely comic about it. I suppose because it sure looks like his big plan to save his sister has crashed on the reef of him getting his ass kicked. The over-confidence of Ashley Williams in quite possibly an even dumber vessel.

But he was willing to risk his own life to try that plan. Lighting the house on fire and bailing, as he originally planned, from his perspective, would have been him abandoning her again. Of course, if he'd failed, then the demon kills him, that's five souls, the skies turn red, DC runs another Big Event with the word "Crisis" in it. The usual apocalyptic shit.

The burning tree suddenly being snuffed out was a nice touch. One of thosethings that could be read glass half-full or half-empty. That lightning strike sure was ominous, the fire being gone is probably good! Or the fire was hope because it gave David the idea, and now it's gone, oh no! Or, the demon's playing a little joke, faking David out. That was my guess. He'd dig Mia up and surprise, still possessed!

As random note to close on, Evil Dead offered a very different perspective on the efficacy of nail guns as weapons compared to The Equalizer, which I caught most of the night before. Denzel pretty much removed the main bad guy, a hardened ex-Spetsnaz sociopath, as a threat with a couple of nails to his arms. In Evil Dead, Eric, who is definitely a nerd and a total loser, gets five nails in the chest and a bunch more in the arms, and he's still able to move around and use guns and whatnot. Maybe David's family cheaped out and bought a low-grade model that lacked oomph. Needed to get the exclusive S-Mart model!

Some of the emotional beats worked, some of the visuals were good - the blood rain was cool - it was just wrapped up in a level of mutilation I didn't enjoy.