Hey...you like the new album? that's cool. fuck you motherfucker.

Evil Dead 4, no more.

So this news just came down the pipeline at Dreadcentral.com....

http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/45566/breaking-exclusive-new-evil-dead-film-actually-gearing-production

It seems that there actually is a remake of Evil Dead getting fast tracked by Ghost House pictures (Owned by Sam Raimi).

Some annoying news that is.
First there's just the annoyance at a remake of such a landmark movie. Imagine if citizen kane got remade, film nerds and wannabe film nerds would be up in arms, and the general public wouldn't give a shit and it would make a bajillion dollars.

Evil Dead getting remade potentially has the same effect. Horror nerds and wannabe horror nerds act all butt hurt over it, and the 14 year old twilight and saw crowd flock to the theatre to watch the younger better looking ash stumble through some aborted script viewed through that fucking awful looking blue tinged lens that every horror remake seems to get put through.

Now there is a part of me that wants to be excited for this. Its Evil Dead after all, i have a tattoo from the dvd art of evil dead 2, my all time favorite movie.

the witch in the cellar at the bottom

I prefer to take the high road in instances of remakes, giving them the benefit of the doubt and being cautiously optimistic. And in this case I'm sure I'll come around....eventually.

The problem I have with this news has nothing to do with some fanboy sense of duty to protect my sacred cow. No my friends. I'm in mourning.

See, the thing that most people who lose their shit over pointless remakes forget is that every copy of the original film isn't destroyed when it comes out. But in this case, a movie is getting destroyed. That movie is Evil Dead 4.

How in the fuck are Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell ever going to get up the gumption to write direct and star in a new evil dead movie when some fucking re-imagining is getting all this time and money dumped into it? How the fuck is anyone under the age of 25 going to be able to figure out what the fuck is going on at the movie theatre when Evil Dead 4 comes out shortly after Evil Dead comes out, and there's this b-movie star pushing 60 cracking one liners about fighting demons?

Dread Central wrote about the remake like it was some sort of good news, but I just really can't see anything to get excited about. Not yet. Not while I'm still mourning the death of what could have been a magical moment for me and the countless other Evil Dead fans not old enough to get to experience a new Evil Dead movie for the first time on the big screen. It could have been (pardon the word) epic! It would have been Ghostbusters 3 and Bill and Ted 3 epic! Rad part 2 Epic! fucking goonies 2 epic! but alas, it wasn't meant to be.

what a fucking bummer.

Yearly reasons (excuses) for not writting. 2011 edition.

So....It's been awhile.

I assure you I've been very busy doing lots of very important things. ( that in no way should have prohibited me from writing )

Change the first...

1) Finishing journalism school.

So i fucking graduated college. I missed the ceremony but I got the handsome little leather folder with a piece of paper telling me how i finally finished something i started. It felt pretty good for awhile there. I was even pretending to be a working writer in my parents basement, editing interviews with some of my heroes (Lemmy) for a western Canadian rag known as Absolute Underground. I even wrote some stuff for them, the last thing being an interview with Electric Wizard front man Jus Oborn. I was later informed after posting the audio of the interview on a certain message board that i came off as sounding scared of him. Something to work on i guess, unfortunately that is the last interview I've conducted. Which brings me to a big ole stinky excuse/change over the past year....

2) Getting another full time job/ quitting the comic store.

So i fucking graduate and then i get right back into the Alberta work force, helping pump the lifesblood from the sticky tar sands by working in a local pipe yard. They were good to me for hiring me back within 3 days of phoning about a job. Upon reflection of the past year i just got overwhelmed with the amount of time i spent in that place. It was a set up warehouse that i helped set up the previous summer, and which i then spent the fall and winter tearing down, leaving me to work outside in the freezing prairie cold. It was a horseshit situation, but the pay was enough above a low rent journalist in rural Alberta/ part time comic store employee that i rationalized it as the right move. In hindsight I'm not so sure. The experience was entirely draining and left me sinking into a deep depression that the bitterly overlong cold season and lack of sunlight only added to. But i did manage to keep writing for awhile through it. And there was a goal to work towards, which brings us to change the third....

3) Moving out of my parents basement/ Moving in with Sarah, my beautiful bride to be.

This was the biggest change over the past year. Well, biggest change on the surface anyway. Moving taught me a little bit about myself. A) I have entirely too much shit B) We should have moved out years ago, finances be damned. Through all the drudgery of new found responsibility i feel, at the very least, not embarased to describe my living situation to people. "I live with my (then) girlfriend above a pub". Sounds so much better than "I live in a dank basement under my parents beautiful home". But through the drudgery of modern living i also appreciate so much more all the luxuries my parents afforded me throughout the years. It's also pretty life affirming to finally realize what i expected all along, I can survive in this world without my parents. I can also live quite happily with the love of my life, which brings us to big change number 4 (and the biggest most grandest change of my life...)

4) Getting fucking Married!

Yeah, i got married. Me and Sarah are married. I don't say girlfriend now, i say wife. She calls me her husband. It's insane. It's so awesome. I shrug it off when people ask if it feels any different or if my life's changed. I always tell them the same thing "Moving out with her was the big change". And partially that's right. We didn't live together for very long before we got married, and that would seem like a bigger change, not only logistically, but just for the fact that the most time we've spent together in a living situation would've been in Costa Rica on vacation. The truth though is that it has changed me. There was a huge perspective shift when we finally said our vows and signed the contract. The Marriage is real now, where as before it was this thing that was coming around the corner. It's good, real good. She's stuck with me now, and there's no turning back!


So that's it, to the both of you who have stopped reading this for a lack of updates, I'm sorry. Now that I'm settled in this new life and feeling antsy and itching to make something, I will hopefully start contributing to this thing on a regular basis again, finally.

April, Spring, Elm Street.

So I've slacked off hard the last few weeks. Only updating with stuff i did for school. That's super lame, and I'm going to try to stop doing that.

Anyhoo, Sarah (my future wife) is pretty excited about a certain burn victim who is getting a makeover this month. No, it's not a new special episode of Maury, its the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street!
Yeah, I know what most jaded horror fans are muttering under their breathe about this one, and I'm right there with ya. No Robert Englund, Micheal Bay is involved, and with the last year's of stinkers (H2? bummer) people have reason to be wary of this re-vamp of a classic.

I'm still trying to be cautiously optimistic, not only because Sarah is so excited about it, (I'm trying this new thing where I don't always shit on her parade) but also because there is at least one example of a Micheal Bay produced remake that didn't annoy the fuck out of me. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, though flawed and lacking the intensity of the original, was still a fun movie. Granted I was high, and I saw it for free, and that was around 7 years ago, so my memory is fuzzy on how good it really was. Still, maybe Rorschach's Freddy will be really cool. His make up looks like a genuine burn victim, so that's pretty creepy.

Anyway, the point of this post was to introduce the new feature around these parts for the month of April.

Me and Sarah are going to watch every Nightmare on Elm Street movie this month before we go see the remake. And I'm going to write about every single one, and try to register her reaction as well. I do that in the interest of getting someones genuine first reaction to these movies, since I've seen each one at least twice, and the first one is pretty deeply ingrained into my brain. We got through about half of the second one tonight before she kicked me out so she could get some sleep. God damn that movie sucks, but in such a watchable way.

ANNYYYWayyy, look forward to the first review sometime this week, and more to follow. And when it's all done I'll rank them in order from worst to best. And then a review of the remake!And Sarah's going to wear this costume all month till the movie comes out! Fuckin 'Eh bro!

Ninja Assassin

So i haven't updated in awhile.


I got an internship with Absolute Underground Magazine, and Journalism school is getting wrapped up pretty soon, so lots of projects are happening all at once. Add in more hours at the comic store plus my fiance getting her wisdom teeth out (not to mention buying God of War 3) ; that all adds up to Ryan doesn't have so much time to watch/listen/review movies/music and things.


Just tonight I've been transcribing interviews sent up from SXSW that heavily feature one Lemmy Kilmeister. Who happens to mumble every second phrase he says. arhhghhehgh. I mean it's cool as fuck to get to work on anything involving Motorhead, but it's one in the a m, and I'm pretty fucking tired. And the deadline is Wednesday, so this shit HAS to get done. Almost finished, I'll edit it and format it tomorrow.


ANNYyywayy, enough excuses for being busy. Here is a review i wrote for Ninja Assassin. I rented this for a school assignment, where we could review anything we wanted, as long as it was a new release. This happened to be the most violent release last week, so i picked it up.

The review is a little dry, since it's meant for a mainstream newspaper. But i like to think it's still an honest appraisal of a bloody as fuck ninja movie. SOooo much cgi blood. It was like the frightners in colour.

Movie titles that offer a literal description of what to expect from them are a rarity these days, and most can be found in the glory days of the drive-in b-movie. Texas Chainsaw Massacre was literally about a massacre that took place in Texas, with a chainsaw. Night of the Living Dead was literally about a night when the dead came back to life, and more recently Snakes on a Plane was about a plane filled with pissed off snakes. That brings us to Ninja Assassin, which came out on DVD March 16^th.

Ninja Assassin is literally about ninja’s who assassinates people. They assassinate the living hell out of a lot of people. Gory over-the-top action takes a front seat right out of the gate. In the opening scene of the film a nameless Japanese gangster is getting a traditional tattoo, which means he is getting ink stabbed into his flesh by a stick with a needle on the end of it. The effect is unsettling as the unflinching camera closes in on the red ink mixing with the gangster’s blood. Ninja Assassin isn’t going to pull the camera away, not even for a minute. If there is blood to be seen, the audience is going to see it. The gangster is then told a story about the tattooist’s experience with scary unseen assassins who used their demonic powers to kill all of his comrades and left him with a large scar over his heart, luckily due to a strange birth defect his heart is on the right side of his chest, and he survived the horrifying attack. Naturally the pigheaded gang bangers laugh at the dumb old mans warning. As they guffaw and slap each other on the back, one of them gets his face cut in half. We get some awful (funny) bad acting from the lead gangster who pleads for his life while his entourage is brutally slaughtered all around him. Computer generated blood pops from their wounds in thick dark red explosions as throwing stars are lodged in the gun totting criminal’s chests. The unseen killer shows himself to the old man and swipes his ninja blade, splattering the title across the screen in dripping red letters. If you’re not on board after an opening like that, you won’t be on board for the rest of the film. All of the pay-off in this movie is paid in blood and guts.

After the gruesome opening we are introduced to Mika (Naomie Harris, Pirates of the Caribbean), a young good looking Europol agent who is obsessed with the existence of ninja’s in modern day Berlin. She follows a paper trail leading to a ninja clan all through the movie, much to the chagrin of her superior officer Maslow (Ben Miles, Speed Racer). These two carry out the task of convincing the audience that ninja’s could actually exist in the modern world. Surprisingly they don’t do a terrible job of it. Unfortunately their scenes have a tendency to drag the movie’s pace, and one finds themselves waiting for them to wrap it up to get on with the next gory ninja fight. Luckily the film tries to indulge its teenage audience as often as possible, with bloody battles sprinkled throughout.

The lead ninja is introduced doing his laundry at a laundry mat in Berlin, where he is confronted by a rival female ninja. After some stylish fighting involving bed sheets, the loser’s body parts are seen tumbling in a washing machine and it begins leaking loads of the red stuff. A quick jump cut to a ketchup dispenser reminds the audience to not get too horrified, and take the violence lightly. After all, this movie is called Ninja Assassin.

Raizo, played by South Korean pop star Rain (who was also in Speed Racer) retires back to his apartment, understandably famished after dismembering the girl at the laundry mat. The rest of the film is setting up the final battle, and inevitable meeting of Razio and Mika. Through constant flashbacks we learn that Razio was kidnapped at a young age by his ninja clan, and grew up in an inhumane ninja training school, where children are taught to devalue human life, and heal themselves super fast. The ninja powers in this movie are straight out of the pages of a comic book. This comes as little surprise upon finding out that J. Michael Straczynski (current writer of comic hero Thor) shares a writing credit. Naturally these ninjas have more in common with Wolverine than Kill Bill.

As the story progresses broad strokes are made to tie the ninja assassins to modern day Russian mafia dealings, and Mika gets caught up in red tape and a nasty internal affairs agent named Zabranksi starts breathing down her neck. If it sounds uninteresting, that’s because it is. The whole subplot of ninjas in the real world falls flat on its face due to the lengthy dialogue filled scenes delivered adequately, but without any real sense of the stakes or emotional connection to the characters. Where this movie is most at home is within the walls of the dojo that Raizo grew up in. We learn that he betrayed his ninja clan after his first bloody assassination (brutal, even for this movies standards) and he has been on the run from them ever since. He meets up with Mika and protects her from the ninja clan that has started threatening her, bringing them together to set the movie off on its climactic fury of ninja action and bloody violence.

This is a film for ninja fans exclusively. Action films this bloody are a bit of a niche market, and it sits in that niche comfortably, but its noticeable flaws will keep it from becoming a cult classic or must own for gory movie fans. The over the top violence is clearly the selling point of this movie, but unlike other gleefully stupid and gory movies in the genre (like Story of Ricky, or Kill Bill Vol. 1) it lacks the good humour and sense of fun that makes films like this so successful.

The DVD extras on display here are minimal and disappointing. All you get is 4 deleted scenes that add nothing to the film and were gladly cut out. A documentary on the making of, or at least a look behind the scenes of the make up and digital effects would have been a nice touch, considering the amount of acrobatics and gory set pieces. An upgrade to blu-ray feels unnecessary as the DVD transfer of this film is crystal clear, and any more clarity would probably only highlight flaws in the bloody effects.

Ninja Assassin delivers on its title. It’s got over the top action and gore by the bucket, but there is very little to entice a second viewing, so buying Ninja Assassin isn’t recommended. But if you want some cheap thrills with your friends on a beer soaked Friday night, you could do worse than renting Ninja Assassin.

Dawn of the Dead

As you will soon find out from reading my mass communications class essay; Dawn of the Dead is serious business.

Dawn of the Dead is a horror film from 1979. It was originally released in 1978 to great success in Europe, but in a different cut than director George A. Romero’s original version. This was due to an MPAA battle that raged over the more controversial aspects of the movie. The MPAA is the ratings board for American film. They wanted to brand the movie with an X-rating due to it’s over the top extreme violence and (on speculation) it’s social satirical content that took on the values of consumerist America. Dawn of the Dead is a zombie film. In it the zombies are explicitly representing the consumer culture that was budding during the time of its release. The majority of the picture takes place in a brand new shopping center, where survivors of the zombie apocalypse take refuge. Long montage sequences of the walking dead strolling mindlessly through the various shops and facilities at a local shopping mall shake the viewer’s perspective on consumerism and the capitalist mechanizations that keep it fueled. Leaving one with its nihilistic brand burned into their brain.

But let’s back track to the beginning of the narrative. At the start of the film we are introduced to the female lead, Fran, who wakes from a nightmare into the chaos of a television station in crisis. The dead are rising up and eating people, and everyone is turning to local media outlets for information on what to do. In the films first of many dark turns, the head broadcaster insists on constantly displaying the rescue stations over the programming, even though they have all been overtaken by zombies. The man is so in tune with his job and its quest for ratings that he does not care if he is sending people to their death, as long as they don’t change the channel. Fran takes the list off the air, and is met with resistance from her boss. The film is siding with the libertarian idea of emphasis on the individual. She took matters into her own hands, and further does this later in the film when she abandons her job to get into a helicopter with her boyfriend and look for another place to wait out the catastrophe. Her defiance is portrayed as admirable, and she is rewarded for it when she survives longer than all but one other character in the film.

The other two main characters are introduced at a raid on a housing project where zombies are being kept alive by their fearful and confused relatives. Mistrusting government and its agencies has never been more justified than in the sequence that follows. A crazed SWAT member goes on a rampage shooting every person he sees while going on a racist rant. The two level headed members of the team subdue the maniac, and soon decide to abandon their posts as well and take off with the couple in their helicopter.

While the group is on the trip that ends at the mall, they encounter some rural redneck zombie hunters. The atmosphere is that of a carnival event, like a tail gate party to battle the living dead. People are drinking beer, and bragging about how many zombies they have shot in the head. This lines up well with the cynical Mass Society theory, holding that as long as you paint the apocalypse in a favorable light (and give people beer) the dumb audience will stay entertained.

Arriving at the mall, Steve (the helicopter pilot, and Fran’s boyfriend) reflects on the hoard of zombies gathering in and around the shopping center. “This was an important place in their lives,” he says. A message can’t be more explicitly delivered than that. So hilariously cynical that it is often met with laughter from an audience. As time passes inside the mall, we see the characters begin to adjust to life after the zombies. They roam the mall, using up their endless free time with arcade games and an ice skating rink. At night they dine in and play high stakes poker games with 50 dollar bills stolen from the bank below them. But as time passes something starts to change. The characters become unhappy, bored with their meaningless shuffling about inside of the mall. They are slowly realizing what the viewers have already been beaten over the head with. The consumption of goods in a protected environment is a life without meaning. The characters trying to survive and keep the zombies out are turning into them themselves through their total immersion in the consumer lifestyle. That a script filled with such a dark and nihilistic message would end up performing so well is telling of the social situation within post-Vietnam America. The public was enraged and invigorated when the films predecessor, Night of the Living Dead, came out in 1968, but now in 1979 they are sick of caring, and want to go to the mall. Here Romero slaps them across the face, telling them to wake up to the grim reality waiting for them at the end of that road. No matter how many trips to the mall you make, you’re just dulling yourself down into another flesh eating cadaver.

Audiences across America and Europe received the film with open arms. It grossed 55 million dollars in the United States alone, which was unheard of for a film like this at the time especially since it was released unrated (something now only reserved for DVD releases). The message of a consumerist society gone mad, with no help to be had from religion or science struck a chord with people across the world. Amazing considering how ahead of it’s time the message would turn out to be (with the dawn of the 80’s me-generation and shallow ideal of financial gain about to have a death grip on Reagan era America). It’s a theme that is revisited in other horror films like American Psycho and the remake of Dawn of the Dead that was released in 2004. The context of the film is important, since it lay on the cusp of one of the most excessively culturally vapid decades in history. It’s ironic that social commentary of this high caliber would come in the form of a zombie movie, but there really is no more scathing metaphor for a generation’s complacency and misguided values.

Lifeforce

First of all, how the fuck did I go through the past decade without seeing this movie? I made it my personal mission to track down every movie with animatronic zombie type guys in it, and somehow this big budget bastard got past my robot person radar? People don't talk about this movie nearly enough. I base that solely on not hearing about it until I saw a trailer at a Screening of The Thing by my homies at Dedfest.

Life force starts off with some space action. Slow floatie space action. A team of scientists aboard the Churchill space explorer are investigating Halleys comet, and find a slim phallic ship with some crazy batwing/umbrella thing on the end that opens, just hanging out at the tip of the huge fireball. They go and explore this crazy hoopajoop.

Inside they find a bunch of floating demon bat guys, who are all made of crumbly chocolate (or they were fossilized). But the real find isn't the hershey monsters, its the nude trio of life force sucking vampires! complete with glass caskets!

I got to admit, I got a little excited when they found people who actually look like people inside that seemingly ancient space craft. I'm a big HP Lovecraft fan, and a big Alien fan. Anything that involves monolithic ancient alien beings, seemingly sentient space ships, or naked chicks encased in glass, count me in.

Flash forward some months, and the ship has returned to earths orbit, the interiors gutted by fire and the crew's juicy corpses litter the hull. The spooky alien/human vampire guys are totally fine though, and ready to start turning some british guards into giant animatronic corpses! YES!

This is where lifeforce really begins for me. The movie wasn't going anywhere until the lady vamp decides to make out with an unlucky researcher. She has this magnetic pull that the men in the film find impossible to resist. I can't imagine why they feel so drawn to her, huh.

Let the lifeforece sucking party commence! Things start getting out of hand at the space research center when the nude alien vampire woman decides to strut her stuff around the facilities, making out with every yutz horny enough to get close to her. This works pretty good actually, and not only because she's not bad to look at. It becomes clear that she doesn't reaaaallly look like that, and that this is just her clever ploy to make men easier to approach. Most of them would probably be apprehensive if they knew they'd end up like grouchy here.

Who ends up switching over to dudes to get his fix of blue electricity.

Then the she-demon busts out of scienceville and embarks on her unholy quest to, well I don't really remember what. This is where lifeforce loses points with me. The plot becomes a little convaluted in the middle, where they start chasing around the vampire's life force, and the survivor of the churchill disaster (who shows up in an espace pod, all gnarly and with beard) establishes some mysterious psychic connection with the soul sucker. It keeps you interested, and I felt entertained, but the vampire's rules and properties feel like they are being made up by the actors as they go. It is all building towards a fairly epic conclusion, but the road there is kind of confused and jumbled in places. Luckily they place lots more open mouthed cadavers on the way to keep you visually stimulated.

In a truly unique twist, Patrick Stewart shows up nearly out of nowhere as the head of a hospital for the criminally insane. Any time I see him in a movie it gives it instant cred. The guy can play any role and instantly elivate the proceedings. That makes his scene with Steve Railsback so entertaining. Through hypnosis Railsback gets Stewart to admit the presence of the vampire lady inside him. He's possesed by her. And to Railsback, he starts looking like her. Which prompts this exchange, Illustrated below.

He fucking plants a big ole wet one right on his full, sophisticated lips. The movie treats this epic moment with the respect and fanfare it deserves. Wind begins to whip around the room, and one poor onlookers neck is snapped from the sheer awesome force of this exchange of saliva. Amazing.

From here the film gets bigger. The scale is amped up as chaos envelopes the streets of London and the alien vampires true power is revealed.

I really enjoyed lifeforce. Even though the running time seems a bit on the long side, and I could see some people getting bored with this. It's hard for me to say I was bored though, since the I find stories like this completely fascinating, and the lead villain walking around naked for most of the movie didn't hurt either. If you've got an evening to kill, and you want to slaughter it with some good sci-fi that you've never seen before give Lifeforce a go. It's a hidden gem of the 80's that's waiting to be rediscovered and given a cult following. Unless im totally clueless and it's got a legion of fans I'm unaware of.

Leave a comment and let me know if you love lifeforce!