Never Tell Me the Odds

50/50

While we all wait with bated breath for Nancy’s Moneyball review, I figured I might as well right something about the other movie everybody’s probably already seen by now. In 50/50, Adam, the proxy for screenwriter Will Reiser, finds out he has cancer in his back. He’s only 27 years old and seemingly quite healthy, so that’s a bit of a surprise. But so is this movie, which manages to find plenty of humor in what seems like entirely depressing material. Or perhaps the bigger surprise is that a movie that features Seth Rogen in a key supporting role can find a way to bring real tenderness and truth.

Adam’s a pretty sympathetic dude. He’s not getting any from his girlfriend, but he’s OK with that. He seems to be the one guy at the public radio station he works at that really takes the job seriously, spending hours working on a report on a volcano while Seth Rogen just busts out a story about the best burgers in Seattle. And then he’s got cancer on top of that. There’s not too much to this story, it simply follows Adam and the important people in his life as he deals with his disease. As we’ve all seen in Breaking Bad and other cancer stories, the disease affects more than just the person it inflicts. And so it is that we have to watch Adam’s girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) struggle with the disease and his mom, Anjelica Huston, desperately try to become a bigger part of Adam’s life. Most significantly, Adam starts spending time with fresh-faced psychologist Katie (Anna Kendrick, playing the same part she seems to always play).

I referenced Breaking Bad because 50/50 does a few things that seemed very reminiscent of that show. When Adam gets the prognosis, the scene plays out very similarly to that part of the Breaking Bad pilot. Not that there’s really anything wrong with that, I just really like Breaking Bad and I’ll take any opportunity I can to write about it.

It’s inescapable that 50/50 is based on the real-life experiences of Will Reiser and Seth Rogen. I don’t know for certain what parts of this story are based on reality and what are invented, but I could guess. Seth Rogen, I’m guessing, is just playing himself, which is to say he is playing the same stoner slacker character he usually does. The movie has some scenes that were pretty raw. Some of them were done for the comedy, and they delivered hearty laughs that this year has been missing. Others are more emotional, and they’re surprisingly affecting. Particularly, a scene in the hospital had me choked up. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is really good here, perhaps good enough to warrant awards attention, if you care about that sort of thing.

But its probably the comedy that I’ll remember about 50/50. The scene trying to use cancer as a pick-up line. A great turn by Philip Baker Hall. That greyhound named Skeletor. There’s a lot to love. This is a pretty special movie.

Damned Good

Shadows of the Damned

Shadows of the Damned is an embarrassing game. It is a collaboration of two of the greatest game developers Japan has to offer, Suda51 (No More Heroes) and Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil). Despite that, or perhaps as a result of that, a significant proportion of Shadows of the Damned is dick jokes. Not really clever ones either. Stuff like your bone-shooting gun being called “the Boner.” That weapon gets upgraded twice. Its upgraded names? The Hot Boner and the Big Boner. Yeah, Shadows of the Damned isn’t exactly a title that makes you proud of how far gaming has come. But, if you’re willing to laugh at that kind of stupidity, you’ll find Shadows of the Damned a pretty entertaining ride.

The awesomely-named douchebag demon hunter Garcia Hotspur comes home one day to find his girlfriend Paula murdered/kidnapped by the creepy Lord of Demons, Flemming. Garcia follows Flemming into the underworld, hoping to save Paula. Along with him is his floating skull companion, Johnson (hur hur), who can transform into a torch, guns and even a motorcycle. It’s a weird game. Some aspects of the underworld are actually pretty disturbing, like the twisted backstories of each boss, which you get to read from giant storybooks. The game is helped out a lot by its strong voice cast, Garcia and Johnson actually do have some rapport. There not really likable, but that’s kind of beside the point. It’s not quite grindhouse, but it has those kinds of sensibilities.

Mechanically, Shadows of the Damned is akin to a quicker Resident Evil 4. Shooting feels pretty much the same, with the familiar over-the-shoulder lazer sight aiming in full effect. Johnson can turn into three guns, modeled after a pistol, a shotgun and a machine gun. They are each upgraded several times over the course of the story and can be further upgraded using in-game currency. The controls feel tight and faster than even Resident Evil 5. Add in some solid enemy variety and a few interesting boss fights and you got yourself some solid gameplay.

Shadows of the Damend really comes down to whether you like the way it’s written or not. If you can get into its world, characters and dialogue, it could rank among your favorite games of the year. For me, I found the overly-indulgent stupidity distracting. In one turret sequence, Garcia kept yelling “Taste my Big Boner.” You see, the Johnson had turned into the Big Boner, a massive gun, and Garcia was holding it at hip level, shooting demons. I get it, neither of the guys developing this had a track record of great storytelling, but come on. You can’t make the same dick jokes over and over for a whole game and expect me to laugh.

C.A.T: Love it to Death

Alice Cooper – Love it to Death (1971)

I swear this is my final post about Alice Cooper. After this I don’t know why I’d ever need to write about him again. Frankly, I don’t even want to write about him right now, but I’ve always thought “Hey, it would be fun to review this album around halloween huh?” It’s as good a way as any to end my string of posts on the “King of Shock Rock”. Billion Dollar Babies may have been the group’s biggest commercial success, but this is the album with the best tunes and the best feel for frightening subject matter.

After two failed albums this is the release that brought the group into the mainstream. A great deal of this is attributed to both the improved songwriting from the band (most notably guitarist/keyboardist Michael Bruce) and producer Bob Ezrin (Kiss, Pink Floyd) who would from here on become an integral part of the band’s sound. The Alice Cooper fan favorite “I’m Eighteen” was the breakout single of the album but alongside it were many tracks that were of equal quality.

Songs like “Long Way to Go” and “Is It My Body?” are quick no nonsense rockers that pack a punch both melodically and instrumentally, while songs like “Black Juju” and “Ballad of Dwight Fry” (obvious nod to the horror actor) reveal more of the group’s dark experimental side. Love it to Death also holds a special place in my heart for containing my favorite Alice Cooper song “Caught in a Dream”, a catchy Michael Bruce penned rocker that opens the album and has made it onto many of my classic rock playlists, it’s like the classic that never was.

I hear Poon guitarist/vocalist Lesley Quartermaine was greatly inspired by this album while recording his last E.P. I caught up with him for a quick comment. Lesley said: “Man when that album came out everyone was all freakin’ out ’cause they thought Alice was sticking his schlong out on the cover. I don’t remember anything else about that album.” In addition, it was included on Rolling Stone Magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums list awhile back so if you’re looking for something good for this halloween season then prepare to love it to death!

Favorite Tracks: “Caught in a Dream”, “Hallowed Be My Name”, “Is It My Body?”

Shocktober: Day 11

Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

The story behind this horrendous horror flick starts in 1966 when theater actor/fertilizer salesman Harold P. Warren made a bet with future oscar winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant that he could make a successful independent horror movie. So he assembled a crew and cast of people and with little to no film experience made what’s probably one of the worst films ever to be seen by man. I’ll admit that the first twenty minutes are pretty funny but after awhile I found myself slowly slipping into a state of severe depression as the film got more and more out of hand.

Two years ago on this blog I picked this film as my number one least favorite horror film of all time. Since then I’ve probably seen a few films worse but this is still one helluva suckfest. Out of all the film’s I watched for this series this is maybe the worse in regards to the film’s technical aspects. The image quality is scratchy at best and the additional audio recording all seems to be a beat off. Its just hilarious how the score seems to hit all the wrong cues, they couldn’t of messed up any harder if they tried.

Briefly recapping the plot Manos: The Hands of Fate is about a a family of three (Harold P. Warren is the father) that take a road trip through Texas but end up becoming the victims of a Polygamous Pagan cult. The first cult member we are introduced to is Torgo (John Reynolds) a satyr-like servant of “The Master” who takes care of a house in the middle of nowhere. Torgo is easily my favorite character as he gets the most laughs for his many moments of creepy awkwardness while around the family. To play Torgo actor John Reynolds wore prosthetics to create the illusion of satyr legs. Unfortunately he wore them backwards while filming and caused permanent damage to his knees which led to an addiction to painkillers until his tragic suicide a month before the film’s premiere, damn that’s sad. Back to the movie it more or less descends into nonsense once we are introduced to the “Master” and his crazy cult and the family “Spolier Alert” eventually joins the cult as we are eventually left with the words “The End?” Yeah I’m serious, they just made all the right moves didn’t they? If you’re gonna check this one just check out the first 15 minutes, the rest is more or less the equivalent of going to hell.

Shocktober: Day 10

Monster a-Go Go (1965)

Monster a-Go Go seems like one of those films where someone really wanted to make a quick buck by using the least amount of effort imaginable, including the overall lack of an idea. I’d imagine it was the monster craze of the 1960s that was responsible for even giving movies like this a chance. If you don’t know what I’m referring to I mean when things like Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine and Aurora Models helped reignite interest in the monsters of the 1930s with the young baby boomer crowd. This resulted in monsters, monsters, everywhere! But with the strange exception that no one was making any GOOD monsters movies to capitalize on this renewed interest. Instead you had all these cheap ass, double feature drive-in disasters and this is one of them.

According to IMDb this movie is about “A space capsule crash-lands, and the astronaut aboard disappears. Is there a connection between the missing man and the monster roaming the area?” Hey, I’m still not sure. So the astronaut, Frank I believe his name was apparently transforms or is um, somehow replaced by an ugly thing that looks like Gene Siskel with a cup of acid thrown in his face. So the military tries to capture him, they eventually do capture him and then he escapes again. Oh yeah and were not shown any of this military involvement the narrator just tells us that’s what happened. Later we learn that the monster was just immitating Frank, but then were told it never even existed? What the hell is going on here!

Doing a little research (Wikipedia) I learned that the original filmmaker Bill Rebane ran out of money while making this film. So strangely enough Herschell Gordon Lewis (that gory horror director that Jason Bateman likes in Juno) finished the film so that he could have a second film to show with his own feature Moonshine Mountain in a double bill. To do this Lewis added extra scenes and some more dialogue that somehow only made the film worse and even more convoluted. This whole process took several years which is probably why half of the film’s cast disappears midway into the film.

In addition to a messy production, Monster A Go-Go has all the essential makings of a bad 60s horror movie; copious amounts of unnecessary narration, a terrible looking monster, and lots of pointless filler. How hard can it be to just make a good monster movie? Very hard in this case. I mean even in the worst monster movies there should be some camp value in looking at the goofy monster but you don’t even get that satisfaction. I can barely even remember seeing the monster more than once, the rest of the time you just hear the narrator describing what happened in a scene we never saw, I didn’t know you could make movies that way! His screen time is so ridiculously minimal it’s like they sat down and said, “Hey let’s make a monster movie without a monster.”But perhaps the greatest question of all… What the hell is a “Monster a Go-Go?”

Shocktober: Day 9

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964)

Some movies are good, some are bad, and some are Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, if you can even consider that a movie. I mean the title sums it up just perfectly, this is a film where no one had any idea what they were doing. I.S.C.W.S.L.B.M.U.Z is a film that’s one part monster movie, one part musical, and all parts incredibly discomforting acid trip. This is a film where I imagine they took a few different “ideas” put them in a blender, drank them, vomited them up and then put them back in the blender. The confines of logic do not exist in this nightmarish experience and one can only be left with regret after seeing an abomination like this.

The premise is that of an evil gypsy that hypnotizes and turns people into zombies at some kind of carnival… I think. Interspersed with all of this are long sequences of painfully boring song-and-dance numbers that probably dominate more of the film’s running time then anything else. If the makers of this film set out to disturb and confuse moviegoers than they most definitely succeeded. Hmm, now I’m drawing a blank, suppose I did a good job of erasing this from mind already.

If you must witness this diarrhea nightmare I highly recommend you take the Mystery Science Theater 3000 route it will make it at least mildly tolerable, but whether the running time of this film was 82 minutes or 10 minutes, it would still feel like an eternity.

I’d post a picture or video but they’re all of such poor quality, so why even bother?

Shocktober: Day 8

The Creeping Terror (1964)

I’ve seen a lot of monsters but nothing quite matches the crappiness of this blob-like mess. Supposedly the makers of The Creeping Terror originally made a much better monster suit but it got stolen. So with little money to spend they assembled a creature so ridiculous that it’s now infamously known as the “Pile of Carpets” because that’s basically what it is. So what do you do when you have a monster movie with a terrible looking monster? Show it? How about non-stop? Hell yeah!

The premise is simple, a newlywed couple encounters a spaceship, a monster emerges, and therefore they must stop it! Though what’s really strange about all of this is that watching this movie is like watching some kind of educational instructional video. This is because it was a lot cheaper back in the day to film without sound so to make up for it the makers recorded a shitload of narration in post production. Now you’ve probably heard me complain about too much narration in past posts but this one takes the cake. Here we have scenes where characters are clearly talking but instead of being dubbed in, a narrator just takes care of all their dialogue. “Martin said to James blah blah, James thought it about for a minute.” it’s very unusual, almost like your listening to a book on tape but with images, and this is not a good read.

The narrator’s dialogue is so tiresome that I was almost ready to give up on this movie after a few minutes, but then the monster showed up, and man when he shows up does he show up. I can’t believe how bad this monster looks and that it actually manages to catch anyone is a miracle. They weren’t lying when they called this terror “Creeping” it’s so slow that the only way it can kill people is basically whenever someone is stupid enough to fall into it.

You can basically split this movie up into two parts; 1. Explaining why there’s a monster and what everyone thinks about it and 2. The never-ending monster attack. And the sounds this thing makes! “Urgh, bleh, Uhh!” it sounds like a guy throwing up and that’s just what this film is, a big ol’ pile of puke.

The Creeping Terror in action! Can you tell what’s going on here?