Drive

Hey Ryan, those are some nice gloves!

"Some Heroes Are Real"

Hello and Happy Halloween! You're getting an early Thursday post, because I still have no power, and so had to seek an alternate location for posting! I want to also give a quick shout out to the like 400 people who visited my blog today searching for The Crow, I assume because it is Halloween! Thanks for stopping by! Anyway, I've been meaning to write a post about this movie Drive for a long while now, but I always ended up doing something else instead. No more! Today I give Ryan Gosling his due, and talk about this movie, which came out of nowhere one September day to dazzle and then horrify me. Starring Ryan Gosling as the nameless Driver (no one ever refers to him by his name). He is duh a driver, stunt by day and criminal get away by night. He doesn't seem to do this because of any particular ambitions, other than to be the best driver (like no one ever was?) He works as a mechanic with his... friend I guess Shannon (Bryan Cranston, who while he wasn't being in Breaking Bad was in Total Recall) who does have aspirations that get him into trouble. Driver meets a girl (Carey Mulligan, who is British I guess? News to me) and her son, who live in the same building as him, and we see a gentle side to this otherwise hardened criminal.

Silent HIll: Revelation

It's like T2. In this one Pyramid Head's
the good guy?

"Prepare for a THREE DEEE RIDE THROUGH HELL"

Happy Tuesday everyone! For those of you in the path of the hurricane, I hope you're not dead! I'm setting this to autopost in case my power's out, so who knows, maybe I'm sitting in the dark, and the situation has devolved into cannibalism! If so, then what more fitting movie to talk about than a Silent Hill film in THREE DEESSSSS. For the record I did not see this movie in 3D, because I hate 3D movies and really REALLY don't want to pay 13+ dollars for a movie ticket. That sucks. Silent Hill: Revelation is a direct sequel to the original Silent Hill movie (if you missed it I reviewed the original on Thursday) following Chris, now Harry (Sean Bean) and Sharon now Heather (Adelaide Clemens), who are on the run from a mysterious group, who want Heather for some sinister purpose. This movie is clearly intent on hedging very closely to the plot of Silent Hill 3, and that is to its credit. Like I said on Thursday, in my opinion Silent Hill 3 was the best one. So how did this movie stack up to the original?

The 5 Dumbest Horror Movie Sequels

Happy Saturday everyone! Apparently the world is going to end in a horrific hellstorm for those of us living on the east coast, so I figured I should finish up my life's work today, by running down a list of the worst sequels to horror movie franchises ever. This has been my lifelong ambition. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but that is what I'm going to do today! Horror movie franchises are renowned for being not good, but some in particular take the cake. As franchises grow stale, and movie producers grow desperate to turn a dime, things take a turn for the really really dumb. These movies are all so worthless that I will list them in no particular order. They are all #1.

The 5 Worst Horror Movie Sequels

Silent Hill

Look at the time...

"Welcome to Silent Hill"

Happy Thursday everyone! We're still in the thick of October, and a new Silent Hill movie, Silent Hill: Revelation, is hitting theaters this Friday, so I thought now would be an appropriate time to talk about the original Silent Hill movie, a movie which surprised me by not sucking ass. You might recall that I did a two part list of the shittiest game movies ever made (here and here) and mentioned that there was a short list of movies that fell into that category and were not absolutely awful. Among those was this movie, released in 2006. Based loosely on the games of the same name, Silent Hill starred Radha Mitchell (you might remember her from the science fiction/horror film Pitch Black), Sean Bean (to a lesser extent than Radha Mitchell, we don't see as much of him) and also Laurie Holden (most recently she has portrayed Andrea on the AMC original series The Walking Dead) portrays the police officer Cybil Bennet. Jodelle Ferland (she appeared in the Twilight sequel Eclipse as Bree Tanner) portrays the requisite creepy little girl.

The Crow

Looks serious right? it is.

"In a world without justice, one man was chosen to protect the innocent."

Hello everyone, welcome back to The Tagline after my short weekend away! I did NOT give away a copy of The Crow to anyone, but now I will review it for all of you. It seems appropriate with the approach of Halloween! You see, there was a time once called the 1990s. During this time, now lost to history and left only in fable and myth, everything was super deadly serious, no matter how ridiculous it might have seemed. Paradoxically no one cared about anything, because that was super uncool. Out of this fertile bed of alternativeness sprang The Crow, a film direct by Alex Proyas, who also later directed Dark City, the first movie I reviewed on The Tagline in its current incarnation. The Crow was loosely based on a comic series of the same name, about a musician named Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) who is murdered, along with his fiance on October 30th, in a urban gothic hellscape version of Detroit (slightly worse than real Detroit).

Almost Heroes

Like Tommy Boy, if it were
about Manifest Destiny

"Almost History... Almost Legends... Mostly Ridiculous."

Hey gang, welcome to Thursday at The Tagline! Today I thought I'd pick from a genre I more seldom address, and review a movie that most audiences that saw it enjoyed, and that virtually every critic who reviewed it hated: Almost Heroes. For those who were about 10 in 1998 when it came out (and I was 11) Almost Heroes starred Matthew Perry as the foppish explorer Lesley Edwards, and Chris Farley as his boorish partner Bartholomew Hunt. Together, the two set out in search of the western edge of North America, following in the wake of Lewis & Clark, in the hopes of beating them to planting a flag on the beaches of the Pacific. This endeavor is hindered by the fact that Edwards is a dandy, and Hunt is a drunken imbecile. Also the crew accompanying them includes some of the most incompetent simpletons one could hope to find. Among them is a crazed Frenchman and his indian woman (their group's version of Sacajawea), a priest, a dumb guy who loses several limbs, and Edwards' man servant (played by Bokeem Woodbine, you saw him in Total Recall) who is essentially the only person in the group who isn't braindead, except maybe the indian woman. Along their way, Edwards and Hunt are waylayed by their own stupidity, the French guy being really jealous of anyone looking at his Indian lady, and also an insane conquistador named Hidalgo, and his henchmen. Yadda yadda hilarity ensues.

Evidence

Evidence that guys with cameras will get
you killed.

Welcome to Tuesday at The Tagline! Today I'm going to talk about a movie I watched on the Netflix last week: Evidence. This continues my horror movie tear (I guess this is the time to do it right?) Evidence was an interesting film, shot on a very small budget and using the "found footage" approach to movie making that was first popularized in horror by The Blair Witch Project, a movie which bored my pants off with its boring woods scenes. As the name might indicate, the film itself is the 'found footage' shot by 4 friends filming a documentary in the deep woods, when things go wrong. Really wrong. The footage serves as evidence of the bizarre experiments that seemed to be conducted in the area. There were a lot of neat ideas on offer here, and certainly I was impressed by how far they managed to stretch their budget, but the movie had plenty that was wrong with it too, and I'm not going to gloss over it. Warning for everyone, I have to spoil some stuff to explain some of my criticism.