Mockingjay: Part 1

Get ready for more dead children.

"The courage of one will change the world."

Hello all, welcome back to the Tagline! Today is finally that magic day, the day I will be reviewing the Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part 1:The Almost End: Subtitles Forever. No but seriously what the fuck we get it, maybe consider a bit more of concise of a title? At any rate, Mockingjay picks up right after the conclusion of Catching Fire (check out my thoughts on that one over here) with Katniss coming around inside a bunker beneath the bombed out ruins of District 13. Naturally the first thing she does is freak out, because she recalls that during the final fateful moments of the Quarter Quell, Peeta was left behind, as the District 13 rebels extracted Katniss, who is valuable to them above all others as a symbol and inciter of revolution. Katniss of course is a wreck of human being, having been now in not one but two hunger games, and separated from the only person that allowed her to hold herself together through it all. That said, the leader of District 13, President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore in one of her less insane recent roles, I mean compared to Carrie's crazy mom for instance) doesn't have time for any of that nonsense, and so together with Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, this movie together with its part 2 were his final performances) and so go to considerable lengths to motivate Katniss.

Anaconda

Is this The Nightman Cometh?

"When You Can't Breathe You Can't Scream"

Hello everyone, it is that time again! Welcome back to more from The Tagline, where terrible movies I saw that one time are king! Recently (last Thursday actually) there was a live Rifftrax presentation of the fantastically not good snake movie Anaconda. This reminded me that Anaconda was a movie that happened, for better or worse. So today I figured I'd share that recollection with you, and review ANACONDA, the least scary movie involving snakes ever made. Starring Jennifer Lopez as a documentary maker named Terri Florez who is attempting to locate the elusive Shirishamas tribe in the Amazon. This is also a region of the world where enormous, 70 mile long snakes who are all powerfule burst through boats and try to kill Danny Trejo (not before he shoots himself though!). For those wondering, the longest verified Anacondas range around the 25 ft marker, but firsthand reports have reached such outlandish numbers as 145 ft. This movie capitalizes on that absurdity, and so JLo ventures out into the jungle, along with Ice Cube, Owen Wilson, Kari Wuhrer (the queen of B-horror T&A) and that foppish british guy from The Mummy. Oh also there's some other guy but he gets stung by a deadly wasp and is basically not in most of the movie. This crew of mostly incompetents ventures into the Amazon aboard a ship captain by the second most obviously untrustworthy person in this film. After a short trip down the amazon into a massive rainstorm, the group meets the FIRST most untrustworthy person in the movie, Jon Voight's character Paul Serone, a man who is perpetually saying vaguely threatening things and leering at everyone. He may as well be wearing a high collared cape and be cackling while he ties maidens to train tracks. I assume the movie taking place in the jungle is the only reason he was NOT tying people to train tracks.

House of 1000 Corpses

This zombie not featured prominently.

"Life and Death are Meaningless...And Pain Is God."

Always one for subtlety that Rob Zombie. Anyway welcome to the spooky conclusion of my October reviews! Today I will round out this celebration of spook by talking about one of my favorite terrible horror movies that's great because of how completely ridiculous it is. Obviously this is going to be a Rob Zombie movie I'm talking about (see also here and here) in this case his directorial debut, House of 1000 Corpses. Though it may be his first, This movie bears all the great hallmarks of Zombie's films, including lots of gore, intense and overbearing background music and soundtrack, Syd Haig doing random shit, and Sheri Moon Zombie being naked on camera, and dressed in a bunch of kinky outfits. Sound familiar? Well YEAH IT IS, but there's so much more to enjoy! You ain't seen nothin' yet. House of 1000 Corpses starts with an almost completely irrelevant scene where two assholes try to rob Captain Spaulding's Museum of Monsters and Madmen. It doesn't work out so great and they both end up getting shot. Later two dumbasses named Jerry and Bill stop in with their girlfriends Mary and Denise because they're trying to write a guide of off-beat tourist attractions, because they're douchebags. On Spaulding's tour they learn about Dr. Satan, a crazy guy who used crude brain surgery to try and make an army of super-soldier zombies, which sounds a lot like the plot of Frankenstein's army actually, a really gross C-budget movie you can see on Netflix ANYWAY. The two assholes decide they just have to find the tree where this guy was hung, so they go driving out into the middle of nowhere in a thunderstorm, and nothing bad happens and they all make it home.

Maximum Overdrive

What a fantastic poster.

"The day horror went into overdrive."

Hi folks, welcome back to the Tagline, where its Spooktober all month, or at least until I get bored and decide to review something completely unrelated because I tend to do that. Today I am talking about a really scary movie, scary because it was DIRECTED BY STEphEN KIIINGGG WOOOOooOOOo. Sounds pretty chilling right? Well sort of. Have you ever heard of Trucks? It was a short story that Stephen King wrote in the early 70s that is about trucks (and other machines and electronics) coming to life to terrorize and murder people. If that sounds like a serviceable short story idea and not a great movie idea, I'd generally agree with you. Movie producers however did NOT agree, and they made not one but TWO movies based on this kind of absurd premise, the first one being written and directed by King himself, and that's this weird ass movie MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE. What could make a movie like this better than being about killer trucks? I'll fucking tell you what, if it was starring Emilio Estevez, and lo' and behold it does, as a parolee who works at a truck stop that becomes besieged by trucks. There's also some other losers at the truck stop, a kid riding his bike tirelessly for at least a whole day, a really annoying newlywed couple, and some drifter girl who was hitchhiking with a molester who sells bibles. King admitted later to being "coked out of his mind" for essentially the entire production of this film, which actually explains a lot of what happens during the film (this movie was released in 1986 and that was about the height of King's substance abuse problems). Keep that in mind while I talk about the rest of the movie.

Dracula: Untold

Anyone who says that's not a cool poster is lying.

"Every Bloodline Has a Beginning"

It's that time again my children of the night, time for The Tagline: Untold. Today as promised we will be travelling to Transylvania, where there are lots of spooky mountains and forests and it appears to be a creepy twilight almost all the time. This spookiness is obviously the perfect place for an awesome castle, and also VAMPIRES. So by that rationale was Dracula: Untold made, a story about the man who became the monster, or something. Dracula Untold stars Luke Evans (who you probably recognize best as Bard the Bowman in the Hobbit movies) as Vlad, the infamous impaler. After being sent away as a hostage and soldier for the Turks, Vlad returns home to take his place as the prince of Transylvania, has a wife who has a bad habit of being drained by vampires in film (Sarah Gadon, also see The Moth Diaries for her turn with Lesbian Dracula) a son and a host of loyal retainers who are certain to be dead in the following hour and a half. Things are going hunky dory until envoys arrive from the Ottoman Empire. The sultan, Mehmed II (Dominic Cooper you know Tony Stark's dad), demands in addition to his usual tribute of lots of ducats (10,000 ducats to be precise) that he be given 1000 boys to train as soldiers for his Janissary battalions. This is the same thing Vlad's dad did to him, and it looks like he's about to go for it and acquiesce, until the Turkish officer taking away Vlad's own son get's kinda lippy at him. Then in the space of I'd say ten seconds Vlad takes the guys sword and then kills all six of the Turkish soldiers with it. We must remember that at this point in the story he is just a man. A very scary man.

Dylan Dog: Dead of Night

No problem indeed.

"No pulse? No problem."

Hello friends, welcome back to another hopeless walk through the trackless desert that is September, a month that has thus far proven to be a cinematic death march into the fall season. I mean really what's taking me to the box office this month? I guess A Walk Among the Tombstones (aka Taken 2.5)? Maybe the Maze Runner? I guess I shouldn't complain too much, as October will bring Left Behind, a movie based on the long running series of novels about the end times. Why am I looking forward to this ridiculous guaranteed shitpile? Because it stars Nicholas Cage, and that means that Thanksgiving is coming early for this boy. So there's at least a light at the end of this tunnel, and that light is the flames from the lake of fire I guess. Enough of that though, today I'm here to talk about mediocre and under-promoted movies about paranormal detectives. As an expert of mediocre paranormal fiction it seemed only fitting that I deliver the prognosis for Dylan Dog: Dead of Night. This was a movie that I'd initially intended to review over a year ago, when I first saw it, but I became occupied with movies that were more pressing, so it ended up on the back burner until the world class famine I have on my hands now. In case you aren't really into Italian comic books (how weird!) Dylan Dog is a long running Italian horror comic (started in 1986) about the eponymous Dylan Dog, an investigator who is an expert in dealing with the nightmarish and bizarre. In the film adaptation this holds true, with a few changed details (namely his assistant is not a Groucho Marx impersonator, and I personally am really grateful to whoever made that executive decision, because that sounds terrible). Dylan works in New Orleans instead of London, that makes sense, this is an American movie after all and we couldn't possibly have an UN-AMERICAN HERO, that's insane. Along with his undead buddy Marcus (Sam Huntington, also known as the werewolf on the U.S. Being Human) Dylan doesn't just go around blowing the faces off of the things that go bump in the night. Rather he also acts as an intermediary between them, working to maintain the uneasy peace that exists between various groups.

Repo Men

Certainly looks edgy right?

"For a price, any organ in your body can be replaced. But it can also be repossessed."

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Tagline, where it's all pulp sci-fi all the time apparently. Today I am going to be talking about Repo Men, a movie that is not Repo: The Genetic Opera. Are they similar? I don't know, I haven't seen that, because I didn't want to so sue me. This movie has Jude Law in it, so that instantly made it more interesting to me, also it looked pretty violent. I was not disappointed in THAT regard for sure. Repo Men is another science fiction story set in a dystopic future where artificial organ technology has advanced wildly, so that virtually any organ can be replaced. The caveat is that distribution of these organs is controlled by a company that charges astronomical prices for them, because its the shitty future, and people often are coerced into getting these organs because otherwise they'll die. Then again, the average person can't pay 750,000 dollars for a new heart, and so they end up going into delinquency and then it gets kicked over to collections. As you've probably deduced, that's where the repo comes in, If someone misses enough payments, the property gets repossessed. Out of their chest cavity. You might have guessed that having a guy stun you and literally carve your heart out often results in a distinct case of death. They have that whole Temple of doom thing going on, ripping the heart right from your chest, only with less lava I suppose.

Man of Tai Chi

Get it because Yin and Yang.

"No rules. No mercy. Pure fighting."

Hello friends, it's magic hour again, time for more brilliance from The Tagline! While I was working on some stuff over the weekend I decided to take a peek into Netflix once again, and spin the big roulette wheel of garbage, just to see where it would land. While I was browsing I couldn't help but notice that there was a movie with Keanu Reeves on the cover, and then I saw that the movie was called Man of Tai Chi, which was somehow even more preposterous seeming to me than his roll in 47 Ronin. With the intention of ridiculing both Keanu and the movie he was in, I started Man of Tai Chi, and as is almost universally the case after I utter the words "there's no way this could be any good" I found myself watching a movie that was drastically different than I had presumed, and it was actually pretty decent. At least partly to blame was that I saw a movie with Keanu Reeves attached, and naturally assumed he would be the protagonist. I was wrong about that. Keanu, in addition to being the director (and I will talk more about that) is the primary antagonist  of the film, whereas the protagonist is Chinese stuntman Tiger Chen (who did stunt work for the Matrix movies, hence his acquaintance with Reeves) who plays a character of the same name. Tiger is shown to us as an honest and hardworking individual, and also the sole pupil of Master Yang, a master of Ling Kong Tai Chi. Tiger wants to prove the martial use of Tai Chi, and so is participating in a local Wulin tournament. Sounds like he's living a pretty normal kung-fu life right? WELL WAIT A SECOND.

Drive Angry

All the boys love Mandy Lane IN HELL.

"One hell of a ride."

Howdy y'all welcome back to Thursday's thrilling edition of The Tagline. There's a lull in my movie-going schedule, so I needed some garbage to fill it with. Then, While I was flipping through channels I came across the truly lamentable Drive Angry. Those of you who've been following my posts for a while will probably remember me talking briefly about this movie when I reviewed Nick Cage's 5 Worst Films. I was initially content to leave it at that, but then I saw it again and I just felt like "wow this is really spectacular garbage, I should give my readers the benefit of experiencing this." To that end, today I will regale you once again with the tale of a man who escaped from hell, with the sole purpose of killing some guy who was going to use his granddaughter in a satanic ritual. Also in what I'm sure the writer thought was really clever, this guy's name is John Milton. That's not clever scriptwriter, it is shameful. You should feel ashamed, but I know you don't, obviously anyone with a sense of shame could not have made this movie. Anyway Nick stars as John Milton, a man who has returned from hell with the stolen gun of the devil (called Godkiller, it destroys the target's soul apparently) so that he can take bloody vengeance for the murder of his daughter, and also so he can rescue his baby granddaughter as mentioned above. In the process of tracking down the complete nutball coocoo who's planning to do this ritual (his name is Jonah King, and he's portrayed by the world's best mustache dad Billy Burke) Milton runs into Piper (Amber Heard) who works at a diner as a waitress and has a boyfriend who is a scumbag. Fortunately Milton is an undead scumbag, so he fits right in, and sabotages Piper's car so he can then proceed to FIX it, and get a ride. I think maybe stealing a car would have been more expedient if you already are from hell, but that's just me nitpicking I guess.

Oculus

THE MIRROR'S BEHIND YOU.

"You see what it wants you to see."

I sure did, and that wasn't the most pleasant thing that ever happened to me. Hello folks, it's time for more fun in the New England gloom here at The Tagline, and I thought that to celebrate that I would talk about Oculus, a movie that proved to be a viscerally unpleasant experience for me to watch. Here is a little piece of free advice from me, that you can apply to your own life, and I really think you'll get a lot of mileage out of this. So here we go: Do not under any circumstances purchase a large, ornate, and very old mirror, with a black oak frame carved into a sinister looking design. Do not then hang that mirror on the wall next to your desk in your study. I'm not saying no mirrors at all, but if you come across any great deals on mirrors at like an estate sale or something? Maybe just keep on walking, go to IKEA or something. Frankly I shouldn't have to add this, but this rule applies to any and all old spooky music boxes, or other similar such objects (see The Possession for reasons why you don't give spooky relics to your small children). Anyway, now that I've put that little disclaimer in, let's talk about Oculus. This film was based on another short film made by director Mike Flanagan, and sort of expands on the original premise. We are introduced to siblings Tim and Kaylie Russell, who were orphaned after a series of grisly events leading up to the torture and murder of their mother, and Tim being forced to shoot his father. Tim is committed to a juvenile psychiatric facility while Kaylie, having not pulled the trigger, is free to live her life, though the siblings promise to one day return and destroy the mirror.

Veronica Mars

CAMERA ACTION

"She thought she was out."

I'm sure we've all thought that once or twice, but let's face it, you never really get out do you? That sure seems to be the case for Veronica Mars, and maybe fans of the show as well. How's it going folks welcome back to The Tagline. Today I'm going to be giving my thoughts and impressions of the recent Veronica Mars movie, which has a neat story behind it before I even get to the actual movie part. So let's talk about how a Veronica Mars movie even happened to begin with. If you aren't familiar, Veronica Mars was a show that ran for three seasons, from 2004 to 2007, about a teenage girl who becomes a private investigator in her rich meets poor hometown of Neptune, CA. If this sounds ridiculous... well it kind of is, but she's only sort of an actual PI, see she works for her dad, who actually IS a licensed private investigator, so that gives her the in to the biz (I don't know how much you know about it, but to be a private detective in most states you need to either have worked under another PI or have been a cop for a pretty substantial amount of time). After three seasons of struggling to keep themselves on the air despite flagging ratings, Veronica got the ax from the CW so they could fit in more reality TV (I'm not even making this up). Despite not having a huge viewer base, what Veronica did have was a really hardcore fan segment, and they were raring for more V Mars man. So Kristen Bell and director Rob Thomas (not the singer for Matchbox Twenty a different guy) started a kickstarter. Their goal was to raise more than 2 million dollars. Point in fact they ended up raising something closer to 6 million dollars (5,702,153 according to the page) which I think expresses in clear green numbers with dollar signs just how badly people wanted to see Kristen Bell being tough on crime like Scruff Mcgruff only much hotter (this sentence is like a runaway train I want to get off but I can't). Anyway that weirdness aside the point is thanks to fan support, the movie was made, and I got to see it.

R.I.P.D.

This makes it almost look not dumb.

"Defending Our World One Soul at a Time"

That is open to debate and remains to be seen. Welcome back to The Tagline, and pardon my Tuesday/Thursday late post earlier this week, it was the result of forgetfulness and being away in Boston all weekend. Incidentally, today's movie takes place IN Boston, and was actually shot, at least in part, on location there. I know this for a fact because there is a modestly lengthy sequence in the middle of the film that was clearly shot in the Hynes Convention Center, which is where I was in Boston for the entire weekend. The scene is supposed to be a finance convention or something, I have no idea. I was definitely not attending a finance convention. ENOUGH OF THAT THOUGH today I will be talking about R.I.P.D. a movie billed as a supernatural comedy film released last summer, based on a Darkhorse comic book of the same name. The film stars Ryan Reynolds (here taking his fourth bad turn as a comic book character by most people's reckoning, though I honestly didn't think Green Lantern was that terrible, and I think Ryan Reynolds was a perfect Hal Jordan) as imminently deceased police officer Nick Walker, and Jeff Bridges (AKA The Dude/Obadiah Stane I guess) as very deceased former U.S. Marshall Roy Pulsipher, as they work out their sentence in the Rest In Peace Department so as to improve their chances of not ending up at the big barbecue down below (that's Hell kids. I'm talking about Hell). Nick of course still has unfinished issues to work out with his violent death, where he was killed by his partner Bobby (Kevin Bacon, here as a ghost monster and not a pretend Nazi) after deciding he was going to turn in his portion of the gold they found during a drug bust. Nick is also worried about his wife, and just generally is dealing well with having been shot off of a balcony in a burning warehouse.

Chocolate

Prepare to get beaaaaat.

"Taste the fury."

Hi everyone, welcome to Thursday's Tagline. As I promised on Tuesday, today I'm taking us on a trip to distant Thailand, where violent martial arts movies are even more violent than elsewhere. The movie I'm interested in talking about today is Chocolate, released in 2008, and directed by Prachya Pinkaew, probably best known for directing Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior, a movie that lots of you are probably familiar with as it earned international fame and spawned a slew of sequels (though Pinkaew didn't direct those, in fact I think he only was involved as a producer on the first sequel). This movie was the springboard for the career of Yanin Vismitananda, who starred in a slew of successful Thai martial arts movies from 2008 to 2012, before taking a hiatus from movies after announcing that she was pregnant (as you can imagine being beaten up in a hand to hand sequence isn't great for unborn babies). Vismitananda herself was experienced in Taekwondo before becoming an action star, and consequently she does a lot of the stunts performed in the movie (all of them actually and I'll talk about that more a little later). Chocolate is sort of about a lady who is caught between a mobster and a really bad mobster, who then gets cancer. What it is really about is her daughter, Zen (that's Yanin) who is autistic. She lives with her mother next to a Muay Thai school, and is super amazing at mimicking things she sees, either there or on TV. Also, she has super mega-reflexes, so she falls into the typical movie category where having a neurodevelopmental disorder gives you superpowers like you're in the X-Men. I don't necessarily subscribe to, or encourage that kind of behavior or practice, but if it can be the avenue for brutal cinematic beatings in southeast Asia, then I'm willing to let it slide I guess.

RoboCop (2014)

If you think he looks like Judge Dredd
now, just wait until he starts shooting.

"Crime has a new enemy."

And by new here of course we mean torn from an 80s movie. Hello everyone welcome back, this week I'm going to start off by talking about the recently released reboot of RoboCop, the story of a Detroit cop in 2024 named Alex Murphy (Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman), who gets blown up in the line of duty and is brought back as RoboCop, because literally all they manage to save out of this guy are his heart, lungs, most of his head, and one of his hands. It was a pretty good sized explosion suffice to say. The purpose of his reconstruction is of course far from altruistic, and part of a gambit on the part of Omnicorp CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton, playing a wealthy person who is not Batman this time) to repeal an act keeping him from selling humanoid robot peacekeepers as law enforcers in the US. The movie treats us to a brutal look at how efficient the Omnicorp drones are at killing people in foreign countries, which I'm sure is not alien to anyone who keeps even remote track of real things happening in the world right now. With air drones blowing up targets with impunity right now in contested areas, it isn't too difficult to imagine what sorts of killer mechs we'll have cooked up in ten years. Will they better at killing people than other people? I don't know, but I'm sure they'll be at least okay at it. That's besides the point though, let's get back to RoboCop.

Starship Troopers

DURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

"A new kind of enemy. A new kind of war."

Hello everyone, it's another fine day! Today I'm going to talk about the film adaptation of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, a very peculiar film directed by the smarmy Paul Verhoeven, a Dutch director who is known among other things, for being the first person to ever accept a Razzy in person. He is best known for being the director of Total Recall, and also Robocop. I'm not here to talk about those movies though. Instead let's talk about Starship Troopers, a movie about Jonny Rico, a young man from Buenos Aires who is inexplicably white, just like all of his friends and classmates. He lives in a future society where citizenship is earned only through civil service to the federation. Because Rico is as dumb as a sack of hammers, he decides to join the mobile infantry, which is presently not a super awesome prospect, because the federation is embroiled in a battle with the insectoid arachnid race (I'm not dumb, they're really bug-like but for some reason they call them Arachnids). These things are... really big, and like to tear people into bloody pieces, so you could imagine how being the guys landing on foot to face them down might not be the best career choice. Rico finds himself in the mobile infantry, even as he is estranged from his high school sweetheart, who is Denise Richards, a math genius who is in training for flight school (to pilot spaceships, because she's so smart OBVIOUSLY). In the process, lots of people get brutally killed and their guts explode all of the place.

Thor: The Dark World

That is a worthy poster right there.

"There was darkness."

Hello everyone, welcome back! It's a new week, full of NEW MOVIES. Today I'm going to talk about Thor: The Dark world, a movie that I had to see alone because APPARENTLY EVERYONE IS TOO COOL FOR ME. That's not important though, what IS important is that Thor: The Dark World is the sequel to the original Thor, which was released in 2011, and to a lesser extent also The Avengers (Thor and Loki having both been directly involved in the plot of that film), and following Thor (Chris Hemsworth, for hilariously bad films starring him see Red Dawn) as he attempts to win peace throughout the nine realms, while his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston, you know Loki) sits in a cell for trying to help Thanos conquer the Earth, and generally just being an unlikable dickbag. Despite his incarceration, Loki is waiting for the chance to take the throne of Asgard from Odin (Anthony Hopkins, of Hannibal Lecter fame) who seems to be over the hill, though still more than capable of vaporizing you with his super duper Odin Spear (Gungnir I guess). It seems like this moment is upon him when the Svartalfar, led by Malekith (a basically unrecognizable Christopher Eccleston, also in G.I. Joe, he was Destro). The scoop here is Malekith wanted to use this thing called the Aether to destroy the universe and return it to darkness, because that's how the Svartalfar like things. Malekith got his ass kicked by ODIN's dad though, so he ran away to hide until someone uncovered the Aether again, allowing him to return and do that whole universe destroying thing, during something called the convergence, when the nine realms align. Naturally, right around the time the convergence is approaching, Jane (Natalie Portman) stumbles right into the damned Aether (like literally she runs into it). In order to save her, because Thor wants to do that, he has to get the Aether out of her, then destroy it... somehow.

American Mary

She never wears anything this conservative
while hacking people up.

"She's an artist."

Hello all! It's Thursday at The Tagline and you know what that means! It means a Canadian actress is going to surgically split your tongue and then cut your dick off! If that sounds like just another Friday night to you, well you scare the ever-loving shit out of me then! If it sounds kind of crazy, then you'll probably react similar to the way I did when I start talking about my movie for today, American Mary (which is funny because it was shot in Canada and is full of Canadians). Starring Katherine Isabelle (maybe best remembered as Ginger from the Canadian Werewolf/puberty metaphor film Ginger Snaps) as the titular Mary (and believe me theres a fair bit of titular going around in this film if you know what I mean), American Mary is a kind of freaky revenge horror movie directed by the Soska Sisters, best known for being really creepy Hungarian twins (I mean I don't think they're best known for much of anything, but they are creepy, and twins, and appear in the movie, presumably as creepier versions of their real-life selves.)  Mary is a medical school student aspiring to be a surgeon, more or less immediately alerting you that the plot is going to take a bad turn sooner or later. Mary is strapped for cash, but also appears to have a robust collection of fancy fetish-wear (maybe she was planning for this exact moment I don't know), so to try and make ends meet while she's in school she decides to resort to stripping (I know ITS SHOCKING WHO EVER HEARD OF SUCH A THING). When she arrives at the strip club, instead she is drawn down into the sub-basement by the owner Billy after he finds out she is a med-school student training to be a surgeon. He wants her to keep a guy who had been tortured alive, which she does because she's offered 5000 smackers, in cash money. Who can blame her right? Things sort of proceed as you'd expect from thereOR DO THEY.

You're Next

Add disco lights and it's Hotline Miami.

"Did you remember to lock your door?"

Hello and welcome to Thursday at The Tagline! I know I promised you a psychedelic disco dance through a garden of bedazzled banana hammocks today, but I saw another movie on Monday night and decided that I'm not quite ready to relive the horror of a cut-rate 1980 musical. So you all get a stay of execution, while I talk about You're Next, a movie where no one gets a stay of execution. Whenever a horror movie manages to claw itself out of the 10-30% range of critical reception, I sort of feel compelled to go see it, if only to deduce whether the positive reviews are stemming from the movie being good, or the movie being just pretentious enough to garner favor. When a movie makes the jump from film festival to wide release, that also gets my attention. So it was with You're Next, a movie first screened in 2011 at the Toronto International Film Festival, that presents itself as a home invasion movie, and then... takes a bit of a turn. Like any good movie about people being murdered in their home, this movie takes place in the middle of nowhere, at the home of the Davisons. The very huge, one might almost say palatial, home of the Davisons. To be more specific, the vacation home of Paul and his wife Aubrey, where they plan to host a reunion of sorts with their three sons, their daughter, and whatever spousal refuse they track in with them (like Ti West in a hipster scarf for instance. Gross). Things are going to get really spoilery under the cut, so prepare yourself and you've been warned.

Elysium

This is not Halo... okay well it sort of is.

"He can save us."

Hello everyone, welcome back to The Tagline! As promised, yesterday I went to the movies to see Elysium, and I got a lot more than I bargained for. Starring Matt Damon as Max, a former criminal now factory worker, Elysium is set in the future, in the year 2154. The Earth as far as we see is an almost entirely dessicated rock, overcrowded and completely polluted. The wealthy elite live in a space habitat called Elysium, where they have magic tubes that keep them from aging or being sick, and they live in opulent space luxury. Meanwhile on Earth people struggle to survive, and mostly seem to be failing. Max is among these people and let me run you through a quick day in the life: Leave early for work, get hassled by some bangers about working. Get stopped by robot police, make a sarcastic joke, have your arm broken by said robot police. Report to a robotic parole officer, who adds eight months to your parole, and does the robot equivalent of telling you to piss off. Offers you pills for your anger. Finally get to awful dangerous factory job, get docked half a day's pay for being late because robots assaulted you while waiting for the bus. The next day, basically be forced into a radioactive pressure cooker, be exposed to a lethal dose of rads, get given some pills by a robot and told you're dead in 5 days. Welcome to the future.

The Lorax

This is just... creepy to me. I'll explain why below.

"He speaks for the trees."

Hey gang! today as threatened earlier in the week, I will be talking about The Lorax, a full length movie based on the animated Seussian musical of '72/children's book about not killing the environment. This film follows the same basic premise, only with a few changes to the basic premise. Namely, the Once-ler (voiced by Ed Helms) is only half of the story, told in flashback form. The other story is about Ted (Zac Efron, yuck) who wants to romance Audrey, and figures the only way to do it is to get her a real tree (in his city there are no real trees). Audrey by the by is voiced by Taylor Swift, and I'll address that further later in the post. So Ted leaves town and finds the Once-ler, who is supposedly the only person who knows where trees might be. The Once-ler tells the story of how he made some really stupid thing called a Thneed out of Truffula trees against the urgings of the Lorax, who if you didn't know speaks for the trees. He does this in the voice of Danny DeVito, and when I talk about things in this movie I found odd and unsettling, we'll address that too. Long story short, the Once-ler told the Lorax to get bent, and then paved over the Earth to get rich, but at some point became a creepy smelly hermit. Ted vows to use the last Truffula seed to replant a tree, but the short asshole who rules the town's industry wants to stop him, so he can sell bottled air to people. Antics ensue, and also there is some singing.