Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, Sabotage

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead

Maybe it’s because I’m not into the whole zombie thing, but Wyrmwood didn’t do much for me. It’s a low-budget Australian movie that takes up the fight against hordes of the undead. Despite the meager budget, the film itself looks pretty damn good. You can tell it’s low-budget, but it looks good enough, at least like a made-for-TV movie, and you aren’t distracted too much wherever they had to cut corners. What occurs is the standard zombie movie plot: humans try to escape zombies, learn to kill zombies, repeat ad nauseaum. The only thing that sets the plot apart from other zombie films is the female lead can control zombies with telepathy. It’s a cool gimmick that I haven’t seen in a zombie film before. Unfortunately, it’s introduced way too late in the film, and is severely underutilized. The movie prefers to mire itself in genre clichés instead of working up its most promising angle. Oh well, better luck next time, Australian zombies.

Verdict: Average

Sabotage

“LISTEN ALL OF Y’ALL, IT’S A SABOTAGE!”

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s return to film hasn’t been a good one. Other than the decent if unmemorable Escape Plan, he hasn’t been in anything remotely entertaining since he retired from being Governor of California. This time he plays the leader of a team of undercover DEA agents who are assassinated one by one. Schwarzenegger’s investigation leads him to discover to culprits are some of his own. The film is rather plodding, and completely devoid of anything exciting. It’s got a good cast, but gives none of the actors anything interesting to do. The best part of the film was the final shootout, which takes Schwarzenegger to Mexico, and has nothing to do with the main plot of the film. This is a movie that didn’t need to be made, and was totally boring and inept.

Verdict: Shitty

World War CGI

I finally got around to watching scruffy, long-haired Brad Pitt fighting zombies in World War Z. It’s as derivative as zombie movies can get. It’s kind of like a vampire movie in that respect, there’s only so many things you can do with the concept. At the end of the day, all these movies follow the same basic formula: zombies attack, people escape, zombies eat people, people kill zombies, etc. So, it might be a little unfair to be super hard on World War Z for being formulaic in a genre that is mired in formula. But you know what? Fuck it, I don’t care. This movie sucks a smelly turd.

There are a few things I learned from World War Z, first and foremost being, you absolutely do not want Brad Pitt anywhere near you if you want to survive a zombie attack. There are five major zombie attack sequences in the film, and all of them are Brad Pitt’s fault.

Versus

It’s called Versus, yet there is only one person in the poster. Hmm…

Versus is a bizarre movie. Nonsensical, even. It’s a super low-budget cult film featuring cops, gangsters, shootouts, samurai, zombies, martial arts, karate zombies, sword fighting, and demons. It’s like the director grabbed a list of “cool shit” from the internet, and mixed it all together, hoping it would work. And depending on your point of view, it either totally works, or is a complete fucking mess.

Director Ryuhei Kitamura filmed this in 2000, and it certainly shows. Versus comes from a time when the tone of movies was more focused on wacky hijinks and slapstick humor, which is a big departure from today’s films when everything is a GRRR DARK AND GRITTY exercise in moroseness. I suppose if Versus had played it straight, nothing would work. The whole thing is just too goddamn crazy. The lighter tone is there to remind the viewer to not take it too seriously, otherwise the movie collapses in on itself. The closest thing I can compare this to is Evil Dead II. It’s got plenty of madcap antics and off-beat humor, mixed in with a semi-serious plot. It isn’t really clear whether Kitamura is completely aping Sam Raimi’s directing style, or paying homage to it.

Moribito? More Like Bore-ibito.

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Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit is a troll series. It trolled me so hard. Animated by Production I.G. and directed by Kenji Kamiyama I figured this was going to be the next series that made me scream, “ZOMG THIS SHOW IS FUCKING AWESOME!” And yeah, it started out that way.

Moribito starts with a bang. After all, coming from a legendary animation company, and the director of the amazing Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, how could it go wrong? The first three episodes were amazing. Not only did they feature stunning, fluid animation, they had perfect pacing, an intriguing mystery, and fantastic action sequences. After a number of exciting battles, the fourth episode slowed down to give us some exposition.

Exposition is all fine and good, but the problem is that the rest of the series was nothing but exposition. There was no more action. That’s it. Only three episodes worth, and they blew their wad from the get-go. The remaining 23(!!!!!) episodes are a non-stop thrill ride of talking, staring pensively toward the horizon, meditating, running away from danger, more talking, doing research, boiling water, and still more talking. It was fucking ridiculous. In fact, now that I think about it, this was completely intentional.