Can you Survive the Evil Dead?

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Evil Dead (2013) is the remake/sequel to the popular The Evil Dead (1981).  The Evil Dead spawned two sequels already, and they are thought to have created the genre of horror comedy, but this new movie goes back to the first film and is straight up horror.  This is the first movie in the franchise not to be written and directed by Sam Raimi, but by new comer Fred Alvarez who was hand picked by Raimi.  This movie was OK, but never lives up to the classic series that Raimi created.

The story is that five friends go up to a cabin in the woods to help a drug addict, Mia played by Jane Levy, kick he habit.  The friends agree that they will not let her leave until the worst of the withdrawals have subsided.  When they get in the cabin they soon find that it has been used for something weird.  There are a bunch of dead cats hanging in the basement, and a book wrapped in barbed wire.  Of course one of them reads the book out loud, even though the writing in the book says not too, and releases evil.

I like using the drug addiction as the reason they are up in the woods, because it makes it believable when the first person to see the random evil things happening is the drug addict, and the friends think she is either hallucinating or just trying to get them to let her leave, and Fred Alvarez knows how to shoot a horror scene.  Never flinching is showing the audience something awful, but the problem is that you only should do a remake if there is something add, or something that they couldn’t do before, but that is not the case here.  In The Evil Dead the violence was already ramped up to 11, so ramping it up to 12 wasn’t all that necessary.  The charm of the first movie (if horror movies have charm that is) was the movie was so low budget that it added a campiness to the whole thing.  In Evil Dead the only camp left is that cast makes every dumb choice possible, and they do make dumb choices.

Here are some guidelines for you if you are in a cabin in the woods.  If there are dead cats hanging in the cellar: leave.  If there is a book wrapped in barbed wire and bound in human flesh: do not read it, especially out loud, and if it tells you not to because something will eat your soul.  If something is chasing you, use the open door to the outside not the crack in the wall.

These is some good news though, and that is Sam Raimi has decided to make Army of Darkness II (The Evil Dead IV), and that means more Bruce Campbell Camping it up while killing the undead.  There is also a plan to have Mia and Bruce team up at a future point when they merge the two universes and that sounds like fun too, so if we have to have one OK horror movie for all that to happen, then so be it.

Lazy Sunday

No Post today. Taking the Lord’s day of rest!  I will have something up tomorrow though 😉

I hope you have had a good Sunday!

Can Star Trek Survive the Voyage Home?

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Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is obviously the follow up to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and it is the first Star Trek movie that I remember coming out as a kid.  I was very excited when Dad brought home the VHS tape for us to watch.  It is also the completion of a three story arch that started with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  Is it as good as I remember? It is defiantly one of the better Star Trek movies.

This movie starts right where the last movie left off.  Spock is still trying to remember who he was and is, and the crew of the Enterprise is taking their stolen Klingon Bird of Prey home, so they can stand trial for disobeying orders and stealing the Enterprise, but on the way home a giant probe is threating the Earth and sending out some sort of strange sound.  When Spock hears it he recognizes it as humpback whale songs, but since they are extinct they cannot answer back, so the crew of the stolen Klingon vessel go back in time to get some.

Even though this is hardly the first giant thing to endanger the Earth in Star Trek, it is still a fun story, and seeing the crew as fish out of water in the 1980’s is pretty humorous.  The Voyage Home is one of the funniest Star Trek movies made.  Leonard Nimoy does a great job as the director of this movie, and gave Gene Rodenberry the time travel movie he wanted to make with the second movie, without the need to make sure JFK gets assassinated.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is a good movie, and it is miles better then movies that are about to follow, unless I am remembering them wrong (I am not).  It is hard to believe that his movie is almost 30 years old, but then again I am almost 31 (sigh), but it holds up well.

Looking for Good Omens?

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Good Omens is a book that was written in 1990, by Neil Gaiman, writer of the Sandman comic book series, and Terry Pratchett, writer of the Discworld books.  The book has won critical acclaim and has sold quite well.  But the important question is whether I liked it or not, and I am glad to say that I did.

The book is about an Angle, Aziraphale, and a Demon, Crawly, that decide to try and stop the apocalypse, so they set out to bring up Adam the Antichrist properly, so that when he is old enough he won’t do what he was born to do, and destroy the world.  There is also a fun subplot about the four horsemen: War, Famine, Pollution (Pestilence retired), and Death.

For those of you who have read Terry Pratchett books you will instantly pick up on this being one of his novels.  The zany off the wall style, and all the random footnotes that you can’t wait to read, and added in to the mix is quite a bit of Neil Gaiman’s style and what seems like effortless character building that all his books are known for.  I very rarely laugh out loud while reading books, but it was common occurrence while reading this book.  Its one weakness is that it gets a little sacrilegious here and there.

It is a shame they never got to write their follow up novel, and with Pratchett having Alzheimer’s disease, they probably will not get too.  Good Omens is a funny book written by two of England’s best living writers.  If you want a good laugh then this book is for you.

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron

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El Shaddai is video game based off the Book of Enoch.  It came out in the summer of 2011 for most major platforms.  I decided to give it a try when the price dropped to two bucks on the Xbox Live store, but was it worth the reduced price?  I think so, but two dollars is probably as high as I would go.

The game pretty much works like this.  You run in a straight line, and then when you get to an open area people pop up and you hit them a bunch of times and then you run some more.  What makes this game interesting is the story since it is based of the Book of Enoch, which is not Biblical canon for most Christian groups, but is viewed like ancient historical fiction.  The game also has great visual style, and every new chapter shows you something cool, but sadly the game still is just you running and then hitting stuff, so it gets old.

If the game is ever on sale again it might be something you want to take a look at.  It might help you kill some time, or you could just read the Book of Enoch, and call it a day, your choice, but I do applaud the people that made this game for trying something different.  It was just a shame they couldn’t vary the gameplay a bit.