Killer Klowns from Outer Space

Read the title. Seriously, do it. Killer Klowns from Outer Space. You already probably know what I’m going to say. Or do you?

The central concept is satisfyingly simple to grasp – aliens, which look like clowns, attack a small American town and kill off, or harvest, the townsfolk. A few boring human characters try to stop them. That’s basically it.

It’s not great. The clown premise is already goofy, and the movie isn’t gory enough or funny enough to count as comedy-horror or normal horror, stranding itself in that weird limbo of being a juvenile horror movie that never really works. Deaths are oddly creative while also being mostly bloodless.

The big problem is that the characters are bland and forgettable, to the point where I don’t even remember any of their names or anything about them. There’s the main guy (who does nothing), his girlfriend (who gets kidnapped, thus fulfilling her sole role in the movie), the cop (who basically becomes the main hero by being the only one capable of doing anything), the jackass police chief (who just seems to like yelling at everybody) and the two ‘zany’ comic relief characters who only appear in the final third, have maybe five minutes screen time tops and aren’t actually funny.

It’s a pretty standard alien-invasion/horror movie with a silly premise, an even sillier set of monsters, dull characters, confused sensibilities and a lack of scares.

…and I actually kinda like it.

It’s stupid and goofy but it’s fun, despite its problems (or maybe even because of them).

I found it oddly entertaining, even with all the negative aspects. Part of it is that it gets right to the point. There aren’t any long boring stretches, and it never hides the villains. The Klowns are up front and centre, the killings start instantly and it never spends too much time on needless exposition. The dull, boring parts from most horror movies are mostly avoided here. As dull as the characters are, we never spend more than a few minutes at a time in their company. I also can’t help but like the Klowns, even with their silly, cheap-looking effects and general goofiness.

There’s a really odd commitment and infectious enthusiasm towards the central ‘evil alien clown’ premise evident. They didn’t half-ass this when it comes to the clowns or circus crap. The Klowns have guns that fire popcorn, cocoon townsfolk in cotton candy, attack people with hand puppets and balloon animals and other clown-based paraphernalia. The inside of their spaceship (which resembles a circus big-top) is carnival themed, with ball pits, bright colours and assorted clown goofiness abound. The Klowns all look different, with a surprising number of them showing up, including the final giant evil commander Klown. They really tried hard on the ‘alien clown’ aspect of the movie, and it’s a lot of fun to see what silliness they came up with (even if the effects aren’t all that great).

The human aspect does bring the movie down, with the cast being really boring. The dull heroes don’t do anything for a long period of the movie, until the cop grows a pair and starts taking care of business. The few main characters are the only people who seem to realise that the Klowns are killer aliens. The townsfolk, including the asshole chief of police, seem incapable of noticing that the Klowns are horrific looking monsters. They have misshapen bodies, weirdly bulbous heads and giant freaking shark teeth, yet – barring the main few characters - nobody seems to notice, not even when people are getting killed. They all just assume that a bunch of clowns have turned up in town.

There’s also an odd level of inconsistency as to what the Klowns are capable of, with it going from circus-based weaponry to, from what I can tell, supernatural powers. First they use clown-based weaponry to kill people (ray guns, killer balloons, deadly pies), then they show off physical prowess (one punches a guy’s head off, another sticks his arm inside a guy’s back and controls him like a puppet). But then there’s a weird scene where one of the Klowns creates shadow puppets against a brick wall, and then the shadow puppet (of a T Rex) comes to life and eats a bunch of people. How the hell does that work? What’s more confusing is how to kill them; they only die if you destroy their big red noses, which instantly causes them to spin around really fast, turn into green crystals and then explode into fireworks. What the fuck?

There is untapped potential here, with a level of creepiness just under the surface that isn’t quite able to come out. Give the right director and a few tweaks to the screenplay and design, and this could have been a genuinely unsettling movie. The Klowns, and some of the stuff they do, could be really freaky as shit, but here it’s all diminished by the silliness overtaking everything else. The Klowns cocoon living survivors in cotton candy, and then drink their blood (through silly straws). That’s pretty creepy, but it doesn’t quite come across there. Similarly, towards the end there’s basically a Klown death squad patrolling the streets and gunning down human survivors. If it wasn’t so cartoony it might be freaky as hell, but the commitment to the clown-themed diminishes the potential creepiness. A perfect example is a scene of one of the Klowns trying to coax a little girl out of a burger joint so he can kill her. It’s already potentially creepy, but is ruined by the revelation that he has a big goofy mallet behind his back.  

So in the end I actually had fun with this. It's no classic, and it won't rock your world, but as far as killer clown alien movies go this is entertaining enough. 

Watch Dawgz

Watch Dogs is a game that was meant to start the 'true next gen'. It was heralded as the golden child that was meant to usher in the new age of fancy graphics, impressive performance and audio-visual bliss those who ponied up the cash for a PS4 or Xbox One were waiting for. 'Twas a free-roaming open-world action game about hackers, with a mysterious story filled with intrigue and espionage and a gruff vigilante protagonist who sounded a bit like Batman. Gameplay footage proudly flaunted in 2012 showed a gorgeous, detailed game world that ran smooth as butter. The hype train had left the station.

And then it fucked it all up. The first fuck-up was revealed quickly - the final game was noticeably (some would say substantially) worse looking than the supposed 'gameplay footage' paraded two years previously, to the point where it looked ugly in comparison. The gameplay demonstration was quickly revealed to have been a ruse, using spruced up graphics not available in the game to pre-sell it on its graphics. The open world was not as dynamic or interesting as the demo suggested and the gameplay proved to be like pretty much every other generic third person shooter. Quickly the goodwill died and the hype train derailed. People were out for blood, feeling they were duped by the developers who had, essentially, lied in their aggressive PR campaign.

I was not part of the hype train. I was, as I usually am, one of the ambivalent. To cure my ambivalence I picked the game up to try it out for myself. And the game is ok. It takes some getting used to, but it's entertaining in its own right. It's just not that impressive. Good but not great is a term thrown around and I feel it applies here, though maybe change 'good' with 'alright'. The gameplay is fun enough, but nothing astonishing or, it has to be said, even special. The open world is large and has plenty of things to do, but not much of it is compelling. While the game looks nice, it's nowhere near as impressive as that two year old fake-out gameplay (that thing was gorgeous).

Anyway my issue isn't with the gameplay or graphics, it's with the story. That's what I was always interested in. An intricate mystery involving corporate espionage, hackers, technology, vigilante nonsense...I was intrigued. I wanted to know more. And then I played the game and found out the story is stupid nonsense. Watch Dogs has a bad story. Not just the actual content of the story, but the way its told and the specific events - it's all nonsense.

So I'll be doing a synopsis of the game's story. This might seem odd, but think about it - unlike a movie, a game can run to anything from six to thirty hours. There's no easy way to get the story if you don't have access to the game. I've kept things as basic and relevant as I can, since Watch Dogs campaign is somewhere in the realm of fifteen hours or so.

First, there’s some bullshit flavouring I need to outline. This shit goes initially unexplained in the game, making the first few hours really confusing, so it’s useful to know in advance.

In Chicago, a technology company called Blume has developed an operating system called ctOS, which links all technology in Chicago together. It’s meant to make everything better, but doesn’t. Instead it allows Blume and hackers to collect information on everyone and everything, destroying any privacy. Phone calls, text messages, browsing history, video camera footage, bank details and more are collected on profiles for every single person in the city. While the people go about ignorant of the situation, there’s a hacker group called DedSec (constantly mentioned in the game but not featuring in any of it) that do cyber terrorism against Blume.

 

You play as Aiden Pierce, an unlikeable, gruff-voiced ‘fixer’ (hitman/mercenary). He’s like if Batman wasn’t cool and killed heaps of people (and also always wore a cap in every situation). He works on a job with a skeezy hacker named Damien. It’s a digital robbery of a fancy hotel, where they plan to rob the bank accounts of the rich clientele by exploiting the ctOS to hack their phones. The plan is disrupted when an unknown hacker blocks them out and puts them on the radar. Fixers are sent out to kill both men, resulting in Damien becoming crippled and Aiden’s niece being killed. One year later and Aiden broods and vows violent revenge.

He teams up with Jordi, another fixer, and Clara, a lady hacker. He also gets his hands on a magic phone that can hack into anything (doors, traffic lights, people’s phones, car alarms, bridges, explosives, etc.) with a single click of a button. This is the central gameplay gimmick, but the story never actually gives you any origins on it. With Jordi’s help, Aiden captures Raymond, the guy who accidentally killed his niece in the assassination attempt. He tortures him for information but Raymond doesn’t crack. Aiden hands him over to Jordi who, over the course of the game, tortures Raymond, tied to a chair, for weeks for information.

Damien shows up and tells Aiden that he wants to work together with him and take down whoever it was that got them both. Aiden says no, because he doesn’t like skeevy Damien. Damien doesn’t respond well, and sends fixers to kidnap Aiden’s sister and hold her hostage to force him to co-operate. Aiden is pissed off, and gets his nephew to safety.

Clara tells Aiden about a secret fancy research hacker lab that Blume abandoned years ago, and the two find it and start doing their operations from there. Clara keeps telling Aiden that she’s done helping him, and every single time he just compliments her vaguely and she agrees to help more. 

Aiden discovers that mobster boss Lucky Quinn, a violent decrepit old man, is in town and controlling things. He’s introduced in a scene where he murders one of his own men for failing him. The second this scene happens you know that Quinn is the main villain. Spoiler alert or whatever, but it’s super obvious the moment Quinn shows up that he’s the big bad.

When hacking into buildings and networks a while later, Aiden finds out about a street gang with super-advanced hacking skills that have taken residence in a derelict building with heaps of security. It’s run by Iraq, a ghetto gangster who talks in ghetto slang but is also a high-tech hacker who talks in techie slang but is also an Iraq war veteran who mentions the troops a lot. He’s an absurdly stupid character. 

Iraq, working for Quinn, has hacked into ctOS and collected information on everybody in Chicago to use as blackmail to control everybody. This occurs mid-game, but this is the evil guy’s evil plan – mass-scale blackmail. Aiden also deduces that Damien wants the blackmail for his own nefarious purposes. All this blackmail info is stored on a server in Iraq’s building, which is under heavy guard.

Aiden, for whatever reason, then needs to get into a mysterious auction to find more information, and does so by taking the identity of a European businessman that nobody’s ever seen before. To do this, Aiden deduces that he should just murder the guy to remove any loose ends. Clara is shocked, but then it’s made ok because they reveal the European guy is a crazy murderer who kills and eats prostitutes (I'm not joking). He kills the guy and takes his identity.

He sneaks in to the auction to find, of all things, a Taken-styled sex slave auction of abducted girls, run by Quinn and Iraq (this is where the game does the whole ‘they were the bad guys the whole time’ thing despite the player knowing this for hours). They instantly notice that Aiden isn’t European (and that he’s obviously the ‘vigilante’ whose face and name have been shown every day on the news) and try to kill him, but he calls the cops and gets the sex slave ring shut down (there are side missions where he shuts the entire operation down as well).

Aiden gets annoyed with all the bullshit and eventually just assaults Iraq’s building with machine guns to get the information, before killing Iraq as well. He steals all the information and takes it home. Once back at the base, he finds that Clara can’t hack it, and they need Richard, the reclusive guy who designed the ctOS system before running off.

You track Richard down to the countryside where he lives as a crazy drunk hermit. He agrees to help, sort of, if you hack into the Blume corporate office and delete all surveillance data about him so that fixers will stop trying to kill him. You do this, and also find out that Damien has sold you out to Blume for literally no reason. Fixers turn up, you kill them and you and Richard get back to base.

          

                   The heroic retard crew. From the left: Richard, Clara, Aiden and Jordi.

Then there are a bunch of missions dedicated to hunting down and killing a rival hacker named Defalt (he's pretty much just deadmau5), who has no dialogue and no importance to anything going on. It’s a roadbump, just something that happens to pad the game out a little more. You have the data and un-decrypt it or whatever. Also it’s revealed that Clara was the unknown hacker who screwed you over at the very beginning of the game, and that she’s been working with you because she feels super bad that your niece died as a result. Aiden tells her to fuck off.   

Aiden, finally sick of Damien calling up every few minutes to gloat about kidnapping his sister, decides to rescue her. She ends up killing somebody in the rescue attempt and is all freaked out, while Aiden slaughters a bunch of goons without batting an eyelid. You get her and her son to safety, at which point you split up, presumably forever. There’s a bit of moralising here about how Aiden kills a bunch of people but sees no problem in it, and that he’s lost his family in his quest for revenge, but it’s so half-hearted it’s weirdly detached.

Aiden then decides to finally go after Quinn, who was the one who ordered the hit on him (which you probably figured out the second he showed up in the game). He assaults Quinn’s hotel room and kills a bunch of dudes. Quinn then finally reveals what it’s all been about. All the assassination attempts, the sex slave ring, Aiden’s dead niece, Iraq, it’s all because of this – the city’s mayor accidentally killed his mistress and it was caught on video. That’s it, that’s what all the bullshit has been about. Aiden’s niece was killed because, for whatever reason, Quinn somehow thought that Aiden and Damien were after the video, which he’s been using to blackmail and control the mayor. Aiden takes down Quinn by using his magic phone to turn off the old man’s pacemaker. A bit anticlimactic but whatever.

Clara, because she’s an idiot, plans on surrendering herself over to Damien in exchange for Aiden’s kidnapped sister – despite Aiden having rescued his sister several days ago. Dumb move honey. Aiden tracks Clara down to his niece’s grave, where she’s laying some flowers. Fixers show up and she’s shot in the arm, and takes cover behind a tombstone. Aiden shows up, Clara sticks her head out from behind the tombstone like an idiot and gets shot in the throat. Boom, that’s it, she’s fucking dead. Aiden kills the fixers and gets a little bit sad about dead Clara. Gotta say it was refreshing to see her taken out so abruptly. There were no final words, no tears – just a bullet through the neck and she went down like a sack of bricks.

Aiden then uploads all of the blackmail videos and photos from ctOS onto the internet for shits and giggles I guess, thinking somehow it’ll stop everything. It doesn’t. Damien calls and reveals that, somehow, despite not having the skills, he’s ‘unlocked’ ctOS and now has total control of the city. He’s gonna use that to fuck things up. Now Aiden could free himself of this by simply getting on a boat and leaving Chicago, but he decides to finally go kill Damien (something he should have done at the beginning).

Aiden needs to hack into a terminal to find Damien, but can’t get past the security, so following Richard’s advice he instead uploads viruses on three terminals scattered throughout Chicago to take down an orbital satellite above the city and cut all the power off completely. This is all as stupid as it sounds. Before he does this, DedSec contact him (first time they’ve done anything in the game) and tell him to let them take over the city. He says no and they vow vengeance like cartoon villains. This is obvious sequel-baiting nonsense. Anyway Aiden then tracks Damien down to the old abandoned lighthouse for his final confrontation. They have a short talk, and then Jordi turns up for some reason and switches sides. Aiden kicks Jordi’s ass and then kills Damien. The end.

The end credits though are full of little sound bites and videos that basically say ‘this is for the sequel’. Aiden decides to remain a vigilante to ‘fix’ the world, Blume makes a new version of ctOS and stretches out to other countries (they name Paris, so maybe that’s next?) and DedSec basically say ‘we’re evil now and we’re gonna take over the world’ just so you know who is bad for the next game.

After the credits, before the return to free-roaming, there’s a short scene where Aiden goes to see Raymond, the guy responsible for killing Aiden’s niece, who has been tortured by Jordi in the background for the entire game. You have to decide whether to kill him or let him live. I let him live.

Why? Well throughout the game you can find hidden little voice recordings that make you feel really bad for Raymond. He was a fixer, like Aiden, but he wanted to get out of the business and have a clean break so he could live peacefully with his loving wife. So in that respect he was less morally bankrupt that Aiden, who never had any intention of quitting his day job.

Raymond was strong-armed into doing hits for Quinn, who constantly threatened to kill his wife if he didn’t. Raymond reluctantly followed orders, knowing that if he didn’t then his wife would be killed, while hopelessly trying to find a way out.

The Aiden hit happened and Raymond freaked out. Aiden's niece is accidentally killed in the hit which totally destroys Raymond emotionally and psychologically to the point where he can’t sleep and has nightmares about it. But then it gets worse - the gangsters then kidnap his wife, drug her up on crack cocaine and then sell her as a sex slave at one of the auctions. So Raymond wasn’t having a good time. And yet Aiden still acts all high and mighty over him. He does a little ‘maybe we’re not so different’ thing briefly before going ‘no, we totally are’ despite Aiden slaughtering his way through hundreds of people through the game and not getting shat up about any of them.

Your magic phone can do anything. Like explode random power boxes somehow

Watch Dogs doesn’t have a good story. It’s a bad one, prone to randomly getting side tracked. There are very few missions that actually push the story forward. Characters don’t really have much going on. French eye-candy Clara is an odd addition, since she doesn’t really do much in the confines of the game. She’s not important to the plot. Neither is Richard, or Jordi, or that weird detour with Defalt. The stuff that is important to the plot all feels out of place. Quinn, despite being the main villain, feels completely disconnected from all the hacking stuff (he seems like he doesn't know what a computer is). The sex slave auction comes out of nowhere and doesn’t fit in with any of the hacking stuff. And the big reveal of 'the mayor killed his mistress' feels like something from a particularly weak episode of Law and Order. 

Damien as the back-up villain is really strange, since his ability and motivations are inconsistent. He’s established as a middling hacker who needs Aiden to be better, but at the end he’s suddenly king hacker of hacktown with a mercenary army at his disposal. He initially wants to find who put a hit out on him, then he wants to blackmail everyone for cash, but then he tries to get a job at Blume, and at the end he goes full villain and tries to take over Chicago. What the hell?

So that was that nonsense. Not a good effort I must say - they should have focused on corporate espionage over Blume (who is in the background for most of the game) instead of the whole 'old gangster blackmails people' nonsense. Maybe they'll get it better in the next one. That being said, this is from the same developer that brought us Assassin's Creed, the game series about a wimpy man in the future who uses a space chair to relive the memories of his ancestors, which include a pirate and a Native American, and who had a fistfight with the Pope over control of a magic ball that was built by robot aliens from the past. 

All Cheerleaders Die

Hated it. Hated it with a passion. This is a movie I’d heard about a while ago, and the premise sounded fun. A bunch of cheerleaders die in an accident, and they come back as zombies to wreak their revenge. Sounds fun, right?

Well it isn’t. This movie is not fun. This movie takes what should be a fun premise and makes it not fun, removing any pleasure that there could be had by being weird and serious. 

Synopsis time!

~~
The story begins with unlikeable and boring teenager Maddy trying out for the cheerleading team at her high school. Her childhood friend Alexis had recently died accidentally when botching a cheerleading jump, and her boyfriend (and captain of the school football team) Terry instantly hooks up with another cheerleader, Tracy.

Maddy is angry that Alexis’ ‘friends’ would get over her death so quickly and lightly, particularly Terry and Tracy, so she concocts a plan to break them up and thereby ruin their senior year of high school. It’s a super dumb plan but whatever, let’s roll with it.

Maddy dolls herself up and acts bitchy and scores herself a spot on the cheerleading team with those skills alone, and is instantly welcomed into the circle of cheerleading friends (who self-appoint themselves the nickname ‘bitches’). It’s comprised solely of herself, Tracey and two sisters, a hot one and a plain one (this is actually a plot point). Maddy then sets her plan into motion, by seducing Tracy into a lesbian relationship. This is a dumb plan.

Threatening to disrupt this dumb plan is Leena, Maddy’s weird friend/possible girlfriend who is into wiccan witchcraft. Leena complains that Maddy is acting strange and isn’t herself, to which Maddy just sort of says ‘I’m fine, leave me alone’.  All of their scenes together are weird since there’s this forced sort of lesbian thing they’re trying to do but the girls have no chemistry whatsoever.

Anyway the ‘bitches’ meet up with the ‘dogs’ (what Terry keeps referring his football friends as) at some make-out point to sit around and do nothing. Creepy wiccan girl Leena is also there, until everybody scares her off by making fun of her stupid wiccan crap. Maddy puts her plan into action by making out with Tracy.

Terry, seeing Tracy and Maddy make out, gets pissed off and mandates that the dogs (comprised of the stoner, the ‘good’ one, the subordinate and the wimpy one) can no longer date or socialise with the cheerleaders. Instead he tells them they’ll screw all the other girls in school. For some reason he seems to think that this is a really big smackdown on the cheerleaders.

After Maddy eggs her on (another part of the master plan I guess), Tracy belittles Terry in front of his ‘dogs’, telling him that she’s going to spread the word that he’s got a small dick. Terry, who has obvious rage issues, doesn’t take it too well and punches her in the face super hard. Everybody is completely shocked, and Maddy gloats that once they tell everyone, Terry’s football career is done (I’m guessing this is meant to be the culmination of her plan). Terry doesn’t take this well either and becomes determined to silence them. He takes their phones and basically assaults them, while his dogs sort of stand around and let it happen.

The cheerleaders try to drive away in a car, but Terry and his dogs give chase and drive the girls off the road and into the river, where the heroic football team leaves them for dead. It’s odd to note here that his ‘dogs’ don’t seem to object to this or Terry’s sudden psychopathic determination to kill a bunch of girls for no reason. He’s obviously the alpha male in the dog pack.

Leena, who just happened to have been hanging out in her car right next to the lake, pulls the cheerleader’s corpses out of the river and uses her magical stone magic bullshit to bring them back to life as zombie vampires (I guess?).

The girls wake up the next morning in Leena’s house. Leena tells them that they all died and that she brought them back to life with her wiccan stone magic whatever – something the girls scoff at despite all of the evidence, including: 1. They all remember getting killed, 2. They all still have their death wounds, 3. They all have a magical glowing stone embedded in their bodies and, 4. The two sisters (sorry, I don’t remember their names) have switched bodies for some reason, with the hot one going into the plain one’s body and vice versa.

Unsurprisingly Maddy is the last one to believe this, only after another forced ‘lesbian relationship’ side-plot thing when Leena makes her touch her chest for her pulse. The girls are all revived, but they need blood to survive, so they kill Leena’s next door neighbour and drain his blood, leaving them feeling really good. For some reason they all share sensations, including Leena for some reason, despite not being dead.

The girls go to school, to the shock of Terry and his dogs. Terry then tries to intimidate the girls he sort of killed by threatening them with violence and Maddy tells him that she’s going to full-on murder him. The plain sister is treated nicely because she’s in the hot sister’s body, which boosts her confidence, while the hot sister is mocked for looking plain. She does not like this turn of events.

The plain sister, wanting to take advantage of the hot sister’s body, seduces the hot sister’s boyfriend (the wimpy dog) and screws him in the disabled toilets. All the other girls, including Leena, share the sensation and have sudden orgasms around the school. Simultaneously, Tracey, who went to get high with the stoner dog, accidentally kills him (for some reason the gemstone lodged in her head flies out and cracks open his skull) and drains his blood, and the girls feel this as well.

The hot sister, in the plain sister’s body, gets angry at her boyfriend’s apparent infidelity so she kills him and feeds from him. For some weird reason none of the other girls feel this sensation. Why? Because the story is full of half-baked, inconsistent nonsense like this.

Through happenstance and nonsense, Terry and his subordinate figure out that the girls are zombies and that the magic stones hold all the power , so he steals the stones that Leena had stuffed away in her locker (not the safest place to put them methinks).

Later that night the girls, alone in a house, show us what beacons of femininity they are by bickering with each other and storming off. The sisters argue about the guy they screwed/killed, Maddy acts like a bitch for no real reason while Leena is being whiny and needy. Then the rest of the cheerleaders turn on Maddy when, somehow, they find a video blog Maddy had made where she lays out her dumb plan from the beginning to split up Terry and Tracy and how she doesn’t actually like any of the other cheerleader girls. The cheerleaders scatter to the wind, while Leena and Maddy chat.

Maddy reveals, in a totally unnecessary moment, that Terry raped her after Alexis died and that she’s got it on tape. This is unnecessary since we’ve already established, to a massive degree, that Terry is awful, so adding stuff this late in the game doesn’t really affect much. I guess maybe it’s meant to justify why she was willing to go so far with her stupid plan, but even that’s stupid since the details open up more questions. Why make an elaborate plan (involving seducing another woman no less) to have him break up with his girlfriend when you could have sent the tape to the police and had him arrested? Totally stupid nonsense.

Anyway Terry and his subordinate are driving around the neighbourhood in a rape van (you know, windowless panel van) and abduct the plain sister and cut out her glowing stone thing, killing her. How they knew to do this is beyond me. And how this worked now, when Tracy’s stone came out on its own and never killed her, is also beyond me. The hot sister feels this and runs to the van for revenge, killing the subordinate before turning her attention to Terry. Terry, in a move that defines all logic, eats the glowing stone…and gains super strength. Once again, how the hell did he know this?

The rest of the girls arrive, and super-powered Terry has taken the hot sister hostage. The ‘good’ dog (the only one to show any remorse to the whole ‘killed a bunch of cheerleaders’ thing) arrives to apologise and Terry drives off with the hot sister. Maddy kills and drains the ‘good’ footballer, just because I guess, and goes in pursuit of Terry with Leena and Tracy.

They end up at a cemetery where Terry has already killed the hot sister and absorbed her stone thing. Maddy runs into a tree and is impaled (but alive) while Tracey falls into a pit that is full of bear traps for some reason and dies. Bear trap pit makes zero sense to me. Why was it even there? I feel as though the movie wants it to seem like Terry set that up, but when and how? He didn’t know at all that he was going to be heading there, and he never had the time to set up something so elaborate.

Anyway Terry drags Leena away to kill her or something, leaving Maddy to pull herself off the tree and absorb Tracy’s stone thing. As Terry is about to kill Leena, Maddy stabs him, and then instantly finds herself being overpowered by him. As Terry is about to kill her, Leena uses shrieking and magic to pull the stones out of everybody, killing Terry and Maddy. She starts shrieking again because she’s sad that Maddy’s dead, but then one of the stones goes into Maddy and she comes back to life, and the two make out.

But then, in a stupid, meaningless final shock, one of the rocks somehow sinks into a grave and the zombified corpse of Alexis bursts out of the ground all angry and shit. The end.

~~

I didn’t like this movie (a trend for this blog), and I knew I wouldn’t within the first fifteen minutes. Nothing really works and it’s never fun. If it had a more humorous edge then maybe it could have been fun, but it’s oddly morose and serious for the vast majority of its length.

Maddy, the main character, is an unlikeable, unpleasant bitch. Actually all the characters are infinitely unlikeable, but Maddy in particular is all kinds of awful (part of it may just be her actress). From the beginning to the end she’s so unlikeable and bitchy. She’s awful to absolutely everybody and just sucks the enjoyment out of an already sucky movie. The whole ‘rape’ aspect is used as a lazy justification for her being this way, as the movie (and Leena) constantly tries to tell us she’s not usually this way. That only works if we get to see what she’s actually like from the beginning.

Leena and her weird lesbian relationship thing with Maddy is really weird. I guess they were trying to hint that they were a couple before the rape/revenge thing. The whole lesbian stuff doesn’t feel real, it feels a bit like pandering. I guess Maddy is meant to be a lesbian, hence why her plan involves seducing Tracy, but you never get the impression it’s genuine. 

I’d heard that it’s meant to be subversive and switch up gender roles in horror films, empowering the female characters, but it really doesn’t. The girls act in the exact same way as in any other crappy horror film – they fight amongst themselves, they bully each other, they act slutty. Oh, and they shriek constantly. Like all the time. A whole lot of the movie is shrieking. The finale actually involves shrieking to save the day. And the girls are woefully weak compared to Terry. Even human Terry was enough to overpower and kill one of them, and once he becomes super Terry the rest of the girls have no chance. It falls on so many character and story clichés its ridiculous, and doesn’t have a funny or satirical edge to pull it through.

Pacing is weird. It takes over forty minutes for the girls to die and come back as zombies, and from there not much actually happens until the last ten minutes. The whole ‘cheerleaders become zombies’ thing could make a fun movie, but not here. If you’ll remember, Jennifer’s Body had a similar concept, and that sucked pretty damn badly. This one is pretty damn bad as well, made worse in how it plays things so damn seriously, sucking the fun out of the wasted premise.

Terry is a freaking full-on psychopath. He’s a total rapist, has no problems hitting girls and basically intimidates his ‘friends’ into following him and his bullshit. He’s the sort of high school bully Stephen King writes, the types that do things that are too ridiculously evil and over the top.

So, in my final assessment, All Cheerleaders Die sucks. Don’t waste your time.  

One final note: When Alexis pops out of her grave for the ending shock, she’s dressed in her cheerleading outfit. That means that’s what she was buried in. What the hell? 

Transformers Age of Extinction

How do you review a movie like Transformers? It’s a three hour fiasco of dumb characters, stupid story and explosions. I know it’s bad, you know it’s bad, everybody knows it’s bad. It’s just the way things are.

And yet there’s some odd entertainment value to be had there. If you shut your brain off completely you will have fun. It’ll be nothing but loud noises and explosions, but if you’re sick, tired, recovering from surgery or otherwise impaired you can switch on any of the Transformers and just tune out completely. I know that’s what I do.

Reviewing a Transformer movie is pointless. It’s like making fun of a severely disabled person who doesn’t know any better. Also I admit to getting bored of straight reviews. So instead I’ll give a synopsis of the film. It’s not as though anybody watches Transformers for the story. And does anything that happens in a Transformer movie really count as spoiler material?

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Five year have passed since the events of the last Transformer film, where evil robot Decepticons tried to invade Earth, destroyed most of Chicago and killed thousands of people. The Autobots fought back and won the ‘war’ I guess, sending the remaining Decepticons into hiding. Since then though people have soured on the Transformers and are pretty much afraid of them. All human/Autobot partnerships have been disbanded and any remaining Deceptions are hunted down and killed. There’s a hotline to call to report robot activity and big business is being made of selling the scraps and robot parts from the battle.

Frasier (or Kelsey Grammer if you’re boring) plays the head of a secret CIA mercenary team called Cemetery Wind, which is tasked with hunting down and killing the remaining Decepticons. Frasier, however, wants to kill all the robots, and has Cemetery Wind hunt down the Autobots as well. Why? Because he doesn’t want the aliens to start any more trouble on Earth. But that’s not entirely true, because not long into the movie his motivations change; he just wants the special metal the robots are made of. He’s made a deal with a science company, run by Stanley Tucci, to sell them the robot metal so Tucci can create his own version of Transformers that they can control to create a robot army so no more soldiers have to die in combat. The problem is that robot metal is incredibly rare and they’ve run out of minable sources, so they need robot corpses to melt down.

And this is where things get a little confusing and complicated. Frasier has also made a secret deal with Lockdown, an evil Transformer bounty hunter (with his own evil ship and robot mercenary crew). He isn’t affiliated with the Autobots or Decepticons, he’s just another transforming robot. Frasier and Cemetery Wind plan to help Lockdown hunt and catch Optimus Prime so he can take him prisoner, and in return he’ll give Frasier a Transformer ‘Seed’, which is basically a bomb that makes more space metal. Frasier and Tucci want the seed so they can blow it up in the desert and have a massive mineable source of robot metal to make their robot army.

Moving on: Marky Mark plays Cade Yaeger, a scrapper/wannabe inventor who makes very little money repairing junk people dump at his Texas home. It’s important to note that everybody seems to call him by his full name. It’s always ‘Cade Yaeger’ and never just ‘Cade’. Marky Mark lives with his teenaged daughter Tessa, who constantly whines and bitches about how they have no money.

Ok, I need to make a side note here. Tessa is the single worst thing in this entire movie. She spends the movie screaming, crying and yelling ‘Help me!’ at Marky Mark. She’s downright useless and annoying and if she had been cut from the movie nothing of value would have been lost. She drags the movie down. Can you imagine what it takes to bring a Transformer movie, which is already on the low scale of quality, down? I actually never really appreciated Megan Fox until this point. I’ve always been, at best, ambivalent to Fox, but now I can actually appreciate what she brought to the Transformer movies. She was actually capable of being a person, she never did any crying and when the action started she got involved. Tessa does nothing but sit around screaming for help. She’s so bad she’s made me re-evaluate Megan Fox in a positive light from an acting standpoint. Think about that.

Marky Mark also has a comic relief sidekick who doesn’t do anything of note and is so forgettable I don’t even know his name. Anyway Marky Mark buys a ruined truck thinking he can pull it apart and make a profit on the scrap, but he finds out it’s actually a damaged Optimus Prime. Marky Mark, being an inventor, is intrigued and repairs Optimus. He learns that the Autobots are getting killed by Cemetery Wind and that Optimus is disillusioned by humanity and just wants to get the remaining Autobots back home to space.

The cowardly comic relief guy, thinking he can get some cash, phones in about Optimus Prime. Cemetery Wind shows up promptly and threatens Cade, wanting to know about Optimus Prime. Cade tells them nothing, so they threaten to kill his daughter. And they’re actually going to shoot her – it’s not just a threat, Frasier outright tells them to kill her. Anyway Optimus Prime uses the opportunity to show up and blow the crap out of everything. Cade, comic relief guy and Tessa run for it, and are picked up by Tessa’s Irish boyfriend in a rally car.

Ok side note number two; I was really afraid that the movie was going to focus on Tessa and her Irish boyfriend. The trailers, even with the Marky Mark focus, seemed to also push the duo. Thankfully they’re not really in the limelight much. Or at all. In fact Irish boyfriend turns out to be a wimp and all the badass moments are taken up by Marky Mark. Tessa and Irish guy end up being like the mermaid and the priest from Pirate of the Caribbean 4 – they’re forgettable stand-ins for characters in the previous films, seemingly only there because corporate types panicked that if those roles were absent people wouldn’t like the movie. Thankfully here they don’t sour the movie up too much.

Anyway Lockdown turns up and shoots at Optimus, but their fight is sort of in the background while we watch Marky Mark and company drive away from the bad guys. Eventually, after some weak car stunts that feel like they want to be like Fast and the Furious but don’t know how, the car is totalled and they have to flee to Optimus, now in truck form, to escape.

Lockdown uses a fancy robot metal grenade and the comic relief guy gets killed horribly. Like really gruesome. He gets turned into a gross skeletal husk of robot metal, with his skull exposed and his ribcage torn open. He sort of deserved it though, but whatever. This is one of the moments in this movie where you can tell they were trying to go for a more serious route. Optimus and co escape so there’s no worries there.

Optimus and his human buddies find the remaining Autobots, which include some green guy with a cockney accent, a samurai, John Goodman in robot form (he’s still fat) and the least interesting Autobot, Bumblebee. This is a little niggle but I feel as though Bumblebee should have been dropped. He’s just a tired holdover from the Shia LeBeouf movies and has no purpose here other than a reminder. He’s also the absolute least interesting Autobot, and his ‘I can only speak through radio clips’ shtick sucks.

Optimus and co want to leave Earth, but they also want to know what the evil science dudes are doing, so they send Marky Mark and Irish dude to investigate. Marky Mark infiltrates the science company and finds their lab, where he discovers that they’ve been melting down the corpses of the Autobots for the metal. He also finds out that Tucci has Megatron’s severed head (from the last movie) and that he’s been downloading information from it to discover how robot metal works and how to make Transformers. That’s how they found out about space metal and how to make robots.

Tucci is frustrated though, because every time he tries to make Galvatron, a large robot based on Optimus Prime, it ends up looking like Megatron. Like exactly like Megatron. This is where I feel Tucci should have sat down and thought about things a little; you’re downloading robot blueprints from the head of an evil robot, and the robot you make always ends up looking like said evil robot. Could that mean the robot you’re making will turn out to be evil?

Anyway Cade gets captured and Tucci questions him about the robots, only for Optimus and co to come to the rescue and trash the lab. As they flee Tucci activates Galvatron to chase them. Galvatron catches and beats up Optimus Prime (and also talks and basically says ‘I’m Megatron, Bwahahahaha’), and then Lockdown turns up and captures Prime. Because she’s useless, Tessa manages to get captured as well. She had a massive window of opportunity to escape but the dumb bitch doesn’t take it, instead just cries and screams for help. Marky Mark and the other Autobots are annoyed and decide to go to the rescue.

Lockdown takes Optimus into his ship and tells him why he wanted to capture him – there are some other aliens called ‘Creators’ who made all the transformers and for some reason they want Optimus back. Lockdown is working for them, or something. This narrative thread is really loose and just feels as though it’s there for future sequels. Anyway Lockdown locks Optimus down (yeah, I just wrote that) in a prison area on his ship and gives Frasier’s troops the Seed. Now that he’s got Optimus Prime, Lockdown prepares to leave in his ship. Marky Mark, Irish dude and the other Autobots sneak onto the ship to rescue Optimus and Tessa.

Tessa, meanwhile, gets chased by what look like evil Wall-Es with googly eyes. She finds out about the Seed and gets chased by robot dogs. Marky Mark finds a weapon room and gets a space gun. He gives Irish boy a space gun too, but Irish boy ends up being cowardly and useless so Marky Mark has to shoot their way out of there. They find and rescue Tessa and, with Bumblebee’s help, escape from the ship.

Meanwhile the other Autobots find Optimus in the prison section of the ship and find, too conveniently, that the prison section is a separate ship and can detach from the main ship, so they detach and escape. Lockdown, meanwhile, has not noticed any of this. He hasn’t noticed the gun battles and destruction within his ship, or that part of his ship has fallen off. He blasts off into space.

Optimus is concerned about the Seed and the whole ‘Galvatron is Megatron’ thing so they decide to take their newly acquired ship and get the seed. Marky Mark calls Tucci, who has relocated to China, and tells him not to use the seed. He tells him that Galvatron is obviously Megatron and that he needs to secure the seed otherwise it’ll blow up China and kill millions. Tucci, surprisingly, is totally swayed by Marky Mark. He tells Frasier that he’s not going to use the seed, which pisses off Frasier since he wanted money from the space metal. This scene is odd since it changes Frasier’s motivations for the third time, from ‘kill all the aliens so they don’t start trouble’, to ‘make a robot army so no more soldiers have to die’ to ‘I just want lots of money’.

Galvatron suddenly turns himself on, goes evil, takes control of the other fifty of Tucci’s manufactured robots and tries to get hold of the Seed. Tucci and his Asian advisor flee in a car. Frasier and his evil military sidekick both decide to hunt down and kill Tucci just because I guess, and they also want to kill Marky Mark as well, just because at this stage.  

Tucci makes it to the middle of a busy Chinese city and the Cemetery Wind troops show up to kill him, but his Asian advisor does karate and stops them. Marky Mark and the Autobots turn up to provide support, but then Galvatron and his evil robot army turn up and shoot down the prison ship Optimus is currently piloting. A big fight starts as the robots are killing each other and the humans run away. Marky Mark has a long fistfight against Cemetery Wind’s commander (don’t remember his name) and kills him by kicking him out of the window of a high apartment. Frasier sees this and, pissed off, calls Lockdown to tell him that Optimus is in China.

Meanwhile Optimus releases a bunch of giant freaky Transformers from the crashed prison ship and tells them to join him in his fight otherwise he’ll beat them up. Their leader refuses and Optimus beats him up, and it’s revealed that these guys are Dinobots – they transform into Dinosaurs. So Optimus jumps on the leader’s back (he’s a T Rex now), picks up a robot sword and they ride into battle.

In the city John Goodman robot is defending Marky Mark and the rest of the humans, including Tucci and the bomb, while Marky Mark shoots robots and his daughter cries and whines. It looks grim, but then the DInobots turn up and kill all the evil robots. Lockdown then turns up in his ship and starts lifting things into the air and dropping them. No idea why, he just starts doing it.

Lockdown then starts fighting Optimus, and Marky Mark goes to help with his space gun. Frasier turns up and is about to kill Marky Mark but Optimus shoots and kills him. This should be an important moment but it isn’t (I’ll talk about this later). Optimus and Marky Mark combine forces and kill Lockdown.

Also, in the background, Galvatron (who never took part in any of the fighting in the finale) runs off to build a robot army and get revenge. It’s odd that everybody seemed to forget about him entirely the second Lockdown showed up at the end, especially since they made a big deal about the whole ‘he’s actually Megatron’ thing. I’m sure if there’s a sequel he’ll be there.

With everything done, Optimus tells the remaining Autobots to protect Marky Mark and his family (presumably for whatever trouble they’ll get to in the inevitable sequel). Optimus takes the seed and then flies into space to hunt down the Creators (who, apart from a single minute of conversation, have never been mentioned in this three hour film).  

The end.

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This is an odd Transformer movie. It’s odd since it does so much differently from the other Transformer films, while also doing the exact same things the series is typically derided for. It’s more serious, has a slower pace, has fewer action scenes, has more human-based action, has the smallest scale – it does so much differently. But then, by that same token, it does so much the same – the robot designs are still really ugly, there’s out-of-place juvenile humour thrown in, overwhelming product placement (it’s ridiculous), the robot action scenes are absolutely impossible to comprehend and everything explodes all the time. They’ve done this weird thing where they’ve tried to fix what was wrong with the franchise, and have seemingly picked the oddest things to change.

Now can I call this an improvement over the other movies? Not really. Why? Well the main problem with this movie is simple – it’s three fucking hours long and it seriously drags. I know the others were a similar length, but the slower pace here means that it feels like an eternity is passing. It feels more like an odd sidestep for the series than a step forward or backwards.

The big issue here is the fucking stupid story. They’ve done too much nonsense here. Why complicate the Transformers mythos any more than it already is? Why add in this Creator nonsense only to never have them talk about it outside of a few throwaway lines? Why bring freaking Megatron back at all if you’re just going to have him be absent for the finale? It’s all baffling.

Considering the (attempt at a) change in tone, there is a massive missed opportunity here character-wise: the biggest thing about Optimus Prime’s character is that he never wanted to hurt any humans. The first three films he did everything he could to protect them, gave endless speeches in their defence and basically hung around Earth for films 2 and 3 to protect all humans. This film tried to flip that; here Optimus is betrayed by them and resents them – he just wants to go home. But even with his disappointment and anger at humans he doesn’t want to hurt any of them. So when he kills Frasier that’s a big deal. That’s a defining character moment – It’s the first time he’s killed human, let alone hurt one. It’s a really big deal, but instead of addressing it we get a few more minutes of robot fighting and then it’s never mentioned again. It’s an avenue they should have explored.

The Dinobots were very disappointing. While they featured heavily in the advertising they get maybe five minutes screen time in a 165+ minute movie. They also don’t talk, have no personalities and never get named. I wanted to hear Grimrock talk nonsense while he ate dudes, but alas.

The best things about this movie are actually two of the human characters (which is an absolute shock for a Transformer movie). Marky Mark is a lot of fun in the lead role, and actually gets to take charge and do stuff. In fact that’s one big change from the other Transformers – there are a lot more action beats centred on human characters – chase scenes, fist fights, gun fights – the humans are involved, not simply watching the robots. Marky Mark does well here, so good for him. The other ace in the hole that lifts things up every time he’s on screen is Stanley Tucci. He’s freaking awesome as the wimpy jackass science dude who has to lug a robot nuclear bomb through a battlefield. He’s funny and infinitely watchable.  

In the end Transformers 4 is really weird. Apparently it’s already making box office records so giving a recommendation is pointless; if people want their giant robot action movies then this is there for them. It’s just a weird, overlong, needlessly convoluted one, but if you want explosions, robot fights and Marky Mark with a space gun then Age of Extinction has you covered.

Last giant robot note: Guillermo del Toro is making a Pacific Rim 2! Hooray!