Quotes that impact you! 

So I've been having a hard time lately. And one thing I always like doing is looking up quotes or repeating quotes to make me feel better. There are two quotes that I tend to think of. The first is:

"The Hardest thing in this world is to live. Be brave. Live."-Buffy Summers

The second:

"Happiness be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light."- Albus Dumbledore


These two quotes are from the two things that got me through man issues as a kid. And they bring me comfort when I'm not feeling up to it anymore. So is there any saying, quote, mantra that you guys say, or think when the anxiety, and depression is at its strongest?

Seriously, I love discovering new quotes, so please share!

Humanoids from the Deep... 1996!

16 years after the original trash epic, a remake surfaced from the depths of tv-movie hell that's been relatively obscure until youtube came to the rescue. This one changes the plot a bit to revolve around convicts that are mutated into sea monsters, but it still utilizes a lot of the same ideas (and footage) from the original movie. Chemicals are still being used to grow salmon in a beach community, and a few of the scenes are very reminiscent of the original.

Hell, the whole climax uses a lot of the festival footage from the original movie, but it's done in a half-assed way. Our protagonists are there to find the monsters and go into a mirror maze, and they keep cutting away to external carnage at the fair that our heroes have nothing to do with. But I digress...

I don't know about you, but I really like the characters in the original movie. This time, our hero is Robert Carradine. He's reluctantly associated with Mark Rolston's asshole character who's been pouring hormones into the water to make the fish grow. Justin Walker protests this with his do-gooder friends while trying to make it with Carradine's daughter, and that sets the stage for our main set of characters.

The progression here isn't too bad. It's not exactly boring, but it isn't exactly thrilling most of the time either. This was a tv movie, but there is gore, nudity, and bad language, but it never outshines the original. One thing that this movie does have that the original didn't: small roles by Clint Howard and Walton Goggins!

The creature design is a bit different this time around, but it's mostly the same. However, the stock footage cuts to the original monsters a few times, and the difference is definitely noticable.

I used to think that I had seen the original on tv when I was a kid, which prompted my obsession with Humanoids, but I know now that it was this movie I had seen. It's an easy mistake, considering a lot of the same footage is rehashed, but I know for certain because this one featured underwater caves in which the monsters gestate their women, which is what I remember most about the version I saw as a kid.

So that's one more I can scratch off the ol' watchlist. Was it worthy of its namesake? Not really, but nothing can beat the perfection of that sleazy 1980 exploitaiton classic.

#Review

Shocking Dark: The Aliens of Italy

Oh boy... Even the description of this movie regards it as a blatant rip-off of Aliens. It's such a rip-off in fact that I'm surprised they didn't get their asses sued for this shit.

What we have here is a story about a dystopian Venice where the water and air is polluted and people don't go outside. The majority of the film takes place in an industrial setting very reminiscent of the colony in Aliens. We also have a team of marines working with some evil corporation for some reason, and before you know it, you have some goofy looking monsters coming out of the woodwork.

These aren't aliens mind you, but some kind of mutant that kind of look like the humanoids from the deep mixed with some laboratory made monsters from The Return of Swamp Thing. They have facehugger-ish things, they cocoon you, and shit bursts out of your chest. How original!

We follow this group of soldier characters for a while, and they are total clones of the marines in Aliens. We have the Captain/Vasquez, a Hicks, a Hudson, a Drake, and even a Ripley and a Newt knock-off. Then, we have a mash-up of Burke and Ash from the first movie, who just so happens to be a replicant and thus our Terminator rip-off too. After all, one of the alternate titles for the film is "Terminator 2", even though this is essentially a dumbed down remake of Aliens. So many scenes are directly lifted from Aliens, it's not even funny.


I would say that 80% of the screenplay is taken from Aliens, 10% from Terminator, and the last 10% is bologna. In a typical Italian fashion, the filmmakers didn't know what the fuck they were doing when they made this trash. They were simply trying to cash in on whatever was popular at the time, and the movies that make up the basis for this turkey are awesome, so what could go wrong?


I imagine the conception went something like this:

The crew finds a decent location and says to themselves, "Hey, this looks like the setting from that movie Terminator!"

"Oh, you mean 'Aliens', right?"

"Yes, Terminator! And that's what we'll call our movie!"

So they watched Aliens (not Terminator) and wrote a transcript of that, lost a few key details in translation, and filled the holes with bologna. Mind you, the execution is somewhat entertaining, but so very inferior to the movies it homages that you might as well watch the real deal instead of this Italian misunderstanding.

Everything about this movie is unoriginal. The setup, the characters, the progression, the "twists", and the ending. If they can get away with it, anybody can, but the real question... is why bother?

#Review

Favorite Allusions in Movies or Tv Shows.

Okay, so after catching the David Lynch Allusion in Buffy last night, I want to hear some of y'all's favorites, or just some you guys caught. Shows and movies allude to different works of pop culture, people, and ideas. I thought it could be fun!


A favorite of mine is from Friends. When phoebe finds out her sister is doing porn in her name, and one of the films is Buffay the Vampire Layer! This gets me every time!

I also tend to love it when actors play a character that alludes to one of their previous roles. It's cheesy, but I like it.

What have y'all caught?

Midnight Meat Train

This is the movie I picked to start off my October Challenge. It's about a photographer (Bradley Cooper) who is pushed into getting pictures of the dark side of the city, and he quickly gets tangled up in the exploits of a madman (Vinnie Jones) who butchers people on the... midnight meat train.

It held my interest for most of the movie. It dabbles in a cat and mouse game with some super gore scenes, because this is based on a Clive Barker story. There are plenty of tense scenes throughout the movie, and Vinnie Jones plays the menacing villain quite well. I'm sure he had a lot of fun doing it, but dare I say... I probably would have enjoyed the movie a bit more if it ended about 10 minutes sooner. In the end, it gets a bit too Clive-Barkery, if that makes any sense. Not the worst ending, but it left me kind of stoic. Worth watching for the gross-out scenes.

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Trick 'r Treat (2007)

I just saw this On Demand, or possibly on Youtube, a week or so ago. It isn't really super super super hardcore or disturbing, like A Serbian Film, Mermaid in a Manhole, or whatever. But, I found that I respected it for what it is. It's just a horror anthology of overlapping stories, with varying amounts of comedic elements, and it is basically ABOUT Halloween, unlike, say, Halloween.

The way the movie is structured is pretty interesting. If you try to imagine a combination of Pulp Fiction and Creepshow, you'll have a good sense of what to expect. It has Pulp Fiction's nonlinear, out of sequence approach to presenting the (occasionally overlapping) stories and characters, and there is also a small amount of framing the stories through little intros that look like comic books.

The character Sam is a good idea, I think. He is supposed to be a sort of an embodiment or mascot of Halloween, like the Easter Bunny or Santa are for the secularized versions of their holidays. He isn't a massive, muscular, threatening or menacing figure... certainly not at first glance. He appears to be a little kid in a sort of an old-fashioned, cheap costume, with kind of a crude scarecrow-type of head. When people see him out trick or treating, they would probably just think, oh, there goes another kid... if anyone looked more closely, they would be puzzled at how he can see, because there aren't really any eye holes in the head... anyway, he sort of fits in, in typical Halloween scenes, and just seems to be an unremarkable part of any gathering you might come across on Halloween. You do see him without the scarecrow-ish head thing on, eventually, and he looks sort of like Pumpkinhead (which is good).

There are a few little stories going on, all of which show the things we all think of when we think of Halloween. The Sam character is not prominent in all the storylines, but he seems to be sort of a watchman to make sure everyone is observing certain Halloween traditions, not all of which I personally was even aware of... so, there's a pretty fair chance I would have been killed if I were in this movie.

Some of the storylines are clearly meant to be viewed more than once, because you'll only pick up on certain things upon a second viewing. Soooo... nothing wrong with that, right? I will probably try to watch this again before Halloween..... I don't want to talk too much about what the storylines are, because I would probably wreck things. But anyway... I'd give it two thumbs up! I hope some people here give it a chance.

PS One more thing. The ending is interesting. There are some interactions between Sam and a character named Mr. Kreeg, in the second to last part of the movie. Without giving too much away, I think that part makes more sense if you remember that Sam is definitely already aware of the characters who turn up at the VERY end of the movie, and he probably knows all he would need to know about their relationship with Kreeg. That is all! I now return you to your regularly scheduled life.

Ghost Ship and Silent Hill

I wonder if Ghost Shop influenced the Silent Hill movie? Wait... the first Silent Hill video game already existed before Ghost Ship was filmed, so maybe it all started with the video game. I have never played it, I don't know what it was like.

Just the LOOK of both movies is very similar. The settings. All the rust on the walls and metal structures in the ship, is very similar to the rust on every surface in the old mining town, especially when they go into the most hellish dimension. Also, when Greer in Ghost Ship is about to be killed by the chanteuse, he is standing in the middle of that large open area, and... the way it reverts to its original, clean, 1962 appearance just reminds me a LOT of the Silent Hill movie. I don't know which was the model for the other, but they look very similar. Like, the way the old scraps of weathered paint rise back up and re-adhere to the ceiling... that was one of the defining effects of Silent Hill, as far as I'm concerned.

Also, the idea that a ghostly little girl is the key to everything. Emily Browning in Ghost Ship is not AS important to the plot as Alessa is, in Silent Hill, but she's pretty important. She reveals a lot of information to the main character. ALSO, she is similar to Alessa because she is a wronged innocent... she's not exactly the same as Alessa, but they have that in common.

Another major similarity is just the idea that the main setting for the story is a sort of purgatory. Not all of the souls trapped there are evil, but many of them are, and in both movies there needs to be some kind of pretty massive upheaval if the innocent souls are ever going to be set free.

Also, I kept wanting to call the Desmond Harrington character Quinn. No, wait... that has nothing to do with anything.

Soooo anyway. Yeah. Lots of little parallels. Had to share.

The Woods - 2006

This one isn't talked about much. It was directed by Lucky McKee, who most people know for "May". This movie is set in 1965 with a girl being sent to a private school in the woods by her bitch of a mother and her seemingly reasonable father, played by BRUCE CAMPBELL. That's right.

The narrative seems heavily inspired by Suspiria and... to no surprise... Evil Dead. Our protagonist Heather doesn't want to be here, but she bears with the school bullies and bitch teachers because her parents (mostly her mother) wont take her back. She's stuck here, and it fucking sucks.

In the vein of Suspiria, Heather starts to notice some weird shit going on right off the bat, and while I wont go into detail, some of it is a bit creepy. The madness exacerbates and the Evil Dead comes into play with the trees that have a mind of their own. What does it all mean? Watch and find out, fuckers.

Bruce Campbell doesn't have a terribly large role, but enough of his charm is able to shine through. A pretty solid movie all in all.

Burt Gummer for President