Up to see The Hangover

Me and the P.Cash went a couple of nights ago to see Up in 3D. When we got there, we found a sign on the front door that said something about about only showing it in 2D. I have a friend from school who is a manager who happened to be working, so we went in to ask her what was going on.

Their 3D equipment was broken. She said, 'No, you can't see that tonight but what you can see is anything else that you want to for free.......because you're cool.'

That was an easy choice since we had just seen Drag Me to Hell....so The Hangover it was.

I managed to only repeat 'It's because I'm cool' three times to Papa Cash that night.

I hesitate to tell you how funny this movie is, because maybe what I find funny isn't what you find funny. So I won't mention how I almost peed myself at the end from laughing or about the two times I laughed so hard I lost my breath. Nope. Won't mention it.

Drag Me Through Hell While I Revisit Evil Dead I and II

Hello my Lovelies:
Didya think I went and died? Abandoned my blog? Decided I was too good for you?
Nah. I've just been busy with
1)Finishing up a grueling and canker-sore inducing (not kidding) Spring semester
2)Wondering why the HELL I ever wanted to go to graduate school
3)Driving back and forth to the wonderful state of Michigan
4)Sleeping and hoping somehow that will make my Clinical Project disappear
5)Not watching very many movies
6)Starting Summer semester and wondering if I'll still have my sanity when December gets here

But it doesn't matter tonight - because I just went to see Drag Me to Hell and I just know that all of you are DYING to know what I thought.
Well.
Full disclosure. Part of me kind of wanted to hate it. Because I kinda really hate Sam Raimi. Because one time, a few years ago, I read an interview where he completely dismissed his horror movie past as something he was over and that it was a way for him to get started in the business. I'm paraphrasing here but the guy said it. And I thought Look Here, F**ker, you didn't just make ONE horror movie to get your foot in the door, you F**king made THREE, you Ass! Four if you count Darkman.
So I have had full on hate in my heart for Sam Raimi since then. He's right in my Hate Box next to Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, and Tom Hanks. And let me tell you, there is some SERIOUS hatin' going on in there.

So I was a little surprised to hear the rumors that he was thinking about remaking Evil Dead, or doing another sequel...and relieved to find out that instead, he made something entirely different.

Well, almost.

I won't give away any plot points or scares or any of the fun stuff because I purposely
read ZERO before I went to see the movie. I did glance enough at reviews to see that they were mostly pretty good, but I didn't actually read them. I only even watched like one ad, and all I remembered was the part with the fly crawling in the mouth. So even though I knew zip about the movie, I could have pretty much guessed the plot just from the title and previous Raimi movies.

It kind of goes like this:
When you unleash evil spirits, bad shit happens.

And that's fine - it's absolutely just fine with me that one line is all your movie is about. As long as you tell it in a new and interesting kind of way with good acting, some creepy visuals, and give me at least one new thing I haven't seen before, then we're good.

So without giving stuff away, I say: Go see this movie. Let's support a horror movie that isn't a sequel, or a remake. Even if it is made by a big old hypocrite. I'm willing to temporarily put the past behind me and give my money to a film like this in the hopes that more original horror movies will follow.

Without bitching too much (because, believe me, this post could have been all about the bitching of my actual experience in the movie), this film was filled with adolescents old enough to see a PG13 movie - but not old enough to drive. Apparently, just so you know, they have very weak bladders and must get up and leave the theater three or four times in a 90 minute period. I wanted to say, don't worry, when you get old like me,you'll actually be able to hold it for an entire movie. Also they must get emergency text messages a lot because many of them seemed like they had an awful lot of important messages to attend to during the movie. ANYWAY - these little assholes would never notice what I'm about to point out, so if you're 14 or never seen a Raimi film before, the following won't be of any interest to you.

One- Alison Lohman gets the Bruce Campbell experience of the new millenium as she must have some kind of bodily fluid, goo, dirt, you name it on her every fifteen minutes or so. Kind of like the Raimi tradition to torment them via fluids.

Two - the seance scene. Without giving anything away, I thought the beginning of it was probably one of the scariest things I have seen this year in a movie. Then everything changed and it became a mini-remake of Evil Dead I and II. I won't tell you what I thought, but if you see it, let me know what parts made you remember the first time you saw those movies.

More movie reviews to come......
Mother Firefly

Back to the 80's....Part 2

Well, the end of the semester is coming soon....and with that comes the craziness.
Since I won't have time to watch many movies in the next 3-4 weeks, I thought I needed to take time to recharge my batteries with some badness.....and what better than some badness from the 80's?

Sorority Babes in the Slime Bowl O'Rama!!!

(it also helps that it clocks in a crunched-for-time-friendly-80- minutes)

So we have a sorority.....and we have the babes. We have the Babes In the Sorority and of course, the Babes that Want to Be. Oh yeah and we have the trio of nerdy guys who want to watch this all go down. The nerds break into the house and of course they get caught. Soo-priize, soo-priize.

The big mean baddie in charge decides she won't call the police on the nerds IF they acompany the Babes on their last and final part of the initiation. Which is to....
Break into the bowling alley and steal a trophy.
Why, sure it is!

But the HBIC has other plans....they're going to beat them there, break in, and ...well, I guess I'm really not sure what they plan on doing....


Then Linnea Quigley shows up- turns out she's broken into the bowling alley too.... but she's only robbing the joint.

The trophies are especially important, they're more locked up than the cash register Linnea (whose name turns out to be Spider! yippee for the 80s) just busted into.....but she's nice enough to help them with that. Good thing they ran into a master thief up in this motha!

they drop the trophy and it springs a leak?Favorite Lines:
Spider: Holy Shit.
Nerd #1: UnHoly Shit.


It's a lil demon. And he sounds like Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors.


Spider is less than impressed but the demon says his name is Impy and he will give them all a wish. Suddenly they're all claiming they broke it open and set him free. But Impy says no worries, they all get a wish!

Chubby goes first, and he wishes for gold- and gets it. Hmm. Seems easy enough.


The HBIC and her minions see this go down on camera and they say, No Fair! HBICs need wishes too!

Initiate #2 wishes to be Queen of the Prom. Really? That's the best you got?


Impy figures out that the HBIC and her minios are spying on them so he....turns two of them into monsters?

Wait, maybe this isn't all it's cracked up to be? Suddenly the gold is wood and the prom queens' dress in in tatters...and then the monster girls attack!
Leaving Spider to clean up the mess once again..

a good look at the killer makeup effects.....all four dollars and ninety-nine cents of them. I think someone rescued this from a trash can outside the set of Ghoulies.

Yep. she looks like the Bride of Frankenstein. For absolutely no good reason.

Oh yeah, and Impy just kind of sits there while the 'monsters' he created run around and do his dirty work. Although he does yell out things like 'GUTTER BALL!' and 'CRISPY CRITTERS!" when the monsters roll one of the dude's heads down the lane or cook someone in a fry vat.

Eventually everyone is either turned into a monster or dead, except for Spider and one of the Nerds. They end up finding the janitor who was locked in a closet for the first half of the movie (it's not worth explaining how that happened, trust me) and has apparently been sleeping through the second half. They explain their story to the janitor who just happens to know EXACTLY what they're talking about...
So apparently 30 years ago some guy used black magic to call up this Imp to be able to bowl better (!?!) and then lost control of it....but apparently they were able to trap him in the trophy, which took away his powers. Then they put him on the shelf.

Mm-Hmmm.

The janitor suggests a head lock, kicking him in the butt, and shoving him in the trophy.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnd........a few monster fights and one car crash later, that's exactly what they do


and all ends well....

And....there we have it, a cheap chunk of 80s goodness all wrapped up. There's more to the story, most of which involves nudity that I'm not going to be posting here. And also, if you ever wondered just how long it takes to wash whipped cream off your boobs, you can watch this movie and see that it takes MUCH longer than you might have ever dreamed. Which I'm sure will turn out to be a good thing for some who want to see that.

I'm going to be pretty busy tying up all these loose ends in the next few weeks- so I don't expect I'll be doing any full movie reviews until the semester is over. I know, you're so sad, right? but I will do my Ghosthunters recaps and post smaller things as I can...
-Mother F

Where OH Where Have You Been? (And other Mysteries solved)

This week on Lost a character I have been missing FINALLY made an appearance.....
Whatcha think yer doing there, brothah?

...and also managed to answer some questions in the process.....
We learn Ben has an Achilles' heel when it comes to mothers....

Mere bullets can't stop a brothah and DO NOT mess with this man's family.....

This is how Ben got the crap beat out of him before getting on the plane....

......While also making some new ones....How'd he get rescued from this mess? And get the sling on his arm that he wore on the plane?


In any event......Oh Happy Day.....My Favorite Scotsman is BACK

I am a huge fan of the recaps they post on Entertainment Weekly- in addition to a weekly written recap, they also have a weekly post on theories on the show, and a weekly video blog. The blog by 'Doc' Jensen is REALLY indepth, but he does an amazing job of finding links to outside references and trivia that fit into the show - so much so that a good portion of it goes right over my head most weeks. I mention it now because they threw out the possible reason for Desmond's return to the island and it made a lot of sense to me.

Because, after all, we all know D's got to make it back to the island - but we haven't yet seen any kind of good reason for him to go back. But- what if he thought by going back he could get rid of Ben once and for all, and thereby ensuring the safety of his family? Makes sense to me and also is one of the only good reasons I could see him going back.

In any case- I think Penny and Desmond are the 'heart' of this show (although a case could be made for Sun and Jin as well) and I'm anxious to see why they need to return to the island and how their story is intertwined with the legacy of the island. I don't think it's for nothing that their story (while in terms of actual minutes spent on the show is small) is very powerful in terms of emotion.

A Plug

We now have FOUR contributors to Old Spooky House.......working on at least one more. Check it out!

Old Spooky House

Movies

Saw a few films on my week off- not as many as I'd hoped, but that's pretty much always the way. I did manage to see a couple of great ones and that helped take the sting off Godmonster....although I can't look at that post now and see that last picture at the end without that Goddamn song popping in my head...shakeitoff..shakeitoff....brhrhrrh!

Choke:
My brother recommended this a while ago and I'd been waiting to see it. I already anticipated a good movie but it was even better than I thought it would be. I love when I'm completely entertained from the first scene to the last. I never thought any of the scenes were too long or did I check the DVD counter, not once. And THAT is pretty much a rave review, coming from me. I'm a fidgety girl!

Turns out the part about choking to get love/money/attention from strangers was actually kind of sweet....and barely featured in the movie. But no matter- we have great acting, a story about friendship, and the Wonderful, Brilliant, and Still Gorgeous Angelica Huston. This woman can do no wrong in my eyes. I just adore her. She is one of the few actresses her age who has not had her face pulled, botoxed or otherwise rendered immobile or unrecognizable...so she can actually still ACT with it. Go ahead and check it out, then go watch those ho's on Desperate Housewives or somewhere where the plastic surgery quotient is high. See the difference. Be Amazed.

Note: Did you notice the 'best friend' in this film just turned up as one of the new castaways on Lost? Blink and you'll miss him on last week's ep, but he's there.



Let the Right One In
Wow did I heart the Sh*t out of this movie. Anticipated this one FOREVER too. It's a Swedish film about a little girl who just happens to be a vampire and her friendship with a little boy who happens to be the whipping post/bitch of his school and its bullies.
One thing that I think is really neat about this movie is that I think you can enjoy it on a few different levels and get totally different things out of it and still love it. For instance, I watched it with Papa Cash, who had read about it (it made a few critics' best film lists for last year) and wanted to see it also. Turned out at the end, we pretty much got entirely different things out of it and saw the movie in two completely different ways- and we both still LOVED it. So go figure.

He saw it as a movie about a friendship/love story between two kids who are both 'misfits' in their own way....I saw it from a more tragic/twisted 'The Hunger' point of view where this ancient immortal creature must continually ensure things are in place for her survival...namely food and 'protection' in the form of a devoted human to look after her. Add in there an elderly protector whose game is starting to falter- and I saw it as a tragic, romantic, cycle that must repeat (and probably has been repeating for centuries). But I don't think it will matter which point of view you take- and who knows, you may have a totally different one-if you love film and especially if you're ready for a whole new take on vampire films, this is one you have to check out.




Confessions of a Shopaholic:
It was St. Patrick's day. It was BEAUTIFUL spring weather. We went out to lunch- Indian- delicious. Why not go to a movie, and enjoy the last few weeks of my year of free movies? We had three choices - this, He's Just Not That Into You and The Reader. Wanted something 'light' so that eliminated Reader. Saw this over the other because Entertainment Weekly gave this an A- and that a C.

Bottom line- I thought Isla Fisher was great in Wedding Crashers but I didn't think she had much to do in this. It was predictable, not horrible, and just okay. If it shows up on a flight you're on, pay the five bucks, get the headphones, watch it. If if you want something light and meaningless, you could do worse.


I'm Not There:
Neither was I because I actually turned on my computer and played Peggle Nights after about twenty minutes of this baloney. Pffffffffffffffffft!

And one more note- I'm currently working on creating a new blog with my brother, called Old Spooky House. It will be dedicated to our mutual love of the paranormal and of course the Ghosthunters. So if you wonder why I'm not blogging about Season Five, it's because I'm spreading the J and G love over there. Check it out!

Love,
Mother Firefly

Tee Hee

"Satan's coming." (from CollegeHumor)