The Billionty-Oneth Geek: Older Than 8 Since 1991

I bet you never thought that they'd make this movie. Well, you're right. Technically, "they" didn't. But someone else did! Yup, our good friends at Asylum Films, who brought us such mockbusters as Transmorphers , The Da Vinci Treasure and The Day the Earth Stopped , produced this spiritual sequel to one of the biggest movies of all time. Nope, Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't come back from the dead and no, Kate Winslet doesn't do a walk-in cameo. This is a brand new story placed in present day with a brand new Titanic dubbed "The Titanic II". Titanic 2 takes place exactly 100 years after the first Titanic sank. To commemorate the occasion, a new Titanic is created with a much stronger and more durable design. It tries to outdo the original Titanic, by completing the course that the original ship set out to do. Unforunately for the Titanic II, the world isn't what it once was, and is now threatened by the dangers of global warming. For you se...

I think the first Tekken game came out when I was just hitting my teen age. Although a few of my friends got really into the game, I just couldn't muster the same love for the game. Even before it was released, I was raised on Street Fighters and Mortal Kombats — not this no-fireball nonsense. To its credit, Tekken had a really deep, technical and intensive combat system, but I guess I just preferred something easier... plus, I liked fireballs and fatalities. It seems as though there is going to be a triad of bad movies based on fighting video games. The gauntlet was laid down last year with release of the box office smash hit Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li (cue sarcasm). Not to be outdone, Namco answered the challenge with Tekken and SNK also threw their name into the hat with The King of Fighters , which should be out soon. But let's talk about Tekken . Tekken takes place in a futuristic Earth, where the continents are taken over by corporate entities. We follow ...

DINOCROC VS SUPERGATOR!!! Because why not! This one will surely be etched into the annals of cinematic history. I was tempted to write about Toy Story 3 which I watched earlier this week, but it would be folly of me to not touch this first. I'll save TS3 for next week as a summer bonanza themed week which should include some combination of A-Team , Predators and Inception . But before I talk about this movie, I should get something off my chest. You see, I'm confused. I obviously can't hold this movie up to the same standards as I would with something like Apocalypse Now or The Godfather . With titles like The 41 Year Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It or Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned , it's obvious that they don't stand under the same light. So with DTV movies like this, I'm left with no other choice but to create a second standard. So I've thought long and hard about it and I boiled it down to one crite...

"A SyFy Original Movie". That should have been the tip off. This was a bad movie and again I fell for it when I saw the title. Mongolian Death Worm . I have to watch it, I thought to myself. I can't even find any images or posters of this movie, it's at that sort of level. The movie takes place in Mongolia and follows a treasure seeker named Daniel who is trying to uncover the lost treasures of one Ghengis Khan. According to local folklore, giant mythical death worms guard Khan's buried goods. Meanwhile, an American oil drilling company has set up shop in the desserts of Mongolia, exploiting the land for the oil. Unfortunately their drilling awakens the supposed legendary worms and they come to the surface hungry... hungry for human flesh. First of all, what's funny about this movie is that it takes place in Mongolia. Normally this wouldn't be funny at all, but watching this movie, you cannot distinguish between Mongolia and the rural areas of Mid-We...

I shit you not, this is actually a movie and that is actually its title. The 41 Year Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It is a DTV parody movie similar in vein to Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th which was really the cheaper DTV version of Scary Movie released the same year. In T41YOVWKUSMAFSAI (abbreviated title), as the title would suggest, it's a parody of Judd Apatow's brand of comedy movies. The movie was shit, don't get me wrong, but it did get me to laugh twice I think and all things considered, that should be considered a success. The problem with the movie (and there are lots) is that it was set up to fail. Parody movies by themselves are tough enough to pull off, relying 99% on sight gags and slapstick humour. Scary Movie , for example, I thought was good moreso for how well it weaved in several horror plot lines together rather than just rely on the gags. And if we're talking about gags, then Top Secret! w...

The plot as summarized on IMDB: "The story revolves around the passengers of a yachting trip in the Atlantic Ocean who, when struck by mysterious weather conditions, jump to another ship only to experience greater havoc on the open seas." When I first read that blurb before queuing up The Triangle , I was hesitant to continue because of the ho-hum sounding plot. All I was thinking was, "oh boy, another one... another one to snooze through". Imagine my surprise. What they do with the story is what makes the movie so captivating. At the core is a mystery that has its layers peeled off slowly, unearthing new elements as the movie progresses. Soon we find elements of thriller, sci-fi and horror... it becomes contrived but never TOO contrived. Without getting too much into the spoiler territory they play around a lot with the whole space-time continuum and try a few things that you don't see much in mainstream films. Even on a limited budget, they were able to cr...

In case you didn't know, I love bad movies. I hate bad bad movies but I love bad movies. For me, it's difficult to create a scale to weigh out movies that I like or don't. For example, I love good big budget movies but I HATE bad big budget movies. Yet at the same time, I love low budget direct-to-video movies, which in a lot of cases are worst than bad big budget movies, but their lower budget gives them an endearing quality of sorts. Are you confused yet? Let's put it this way, if you're a bad movie but you went straight to video, there's a better chance that I enjoyed you more than if you had made it to the big screen. Which brings me to The Wrong Side of Town (the name of the movie and not the place of course). This was a bad movie, but I found it wildly entertaining. I think a large part of it is because it stars two major wrestlers and as a hardcore wrestling fan, it behooves me to enjoy this tripe. The poster on the left is a bit misleading though...

After watching this movie, it made me wish that I were a black guy in the 70s. Black Dynamite is a throwback to the blaxploitation movies that were popular back in the 70s. This was such a fantastic movie! The story follows Black Dynamite as he tracks down his brother's killer. What at first appears as a low-level gangland crime becomes something more as Dynamite uncovers a giant conspiracy that leads him to none other than The Man. The movie is filled with kung-fu fighting, gun blazing action, car chases, foot chases, love-making and all that good stuff that you would expect from a blaxploitation flick. Despite its limited budget, Black Dynamite succeeds in capturing the look and feel of the 70s. The clothes, the sets and all the music take a page right out of that decade. They even play on its low production value as in some scenes you'll see the boom mic dropping into the screen and Black Dynamite just looking at it. He kills the bad guys and gets the women. Michael Jai...

" The Marine 2... PREMIERING on DVD and Blu-Ray... " PREMIERING?!?!?! You know, as a wrestling fan, it behooves me to watch shit like this. And by "shit like this" I mean movies produced by WWE Films. Yes, movies by a wrestling company! And last week it was announced in Variety that they were leaving their partners Lionsgate and Fox Home Video in favour of Samuel Goldwyn Films, who specialize in distributing lower budget movies. So everyone get ready for more rinky-dink WWE movies! Now, if the decision to make a sequel to The Marine wasn't baffling enough, they decided to make a sequel to The Marine starring Ted Dibiase! Ahhh! Brain explosion! Just to bring you up to speed, the only wrestlers that the WWE put into movies are those who are already big stars in the company or those who they want to cultivate into big stars. It's usually done to groom someone who they could market around in the future as a potential champion. So why Ted Dibiase? I ...

After watching 10 minutes of The House of the Devil , I had to do a double take and almost stopped the movie completely. You see, the movie was so eerily similar to Babysitter Wanted that I thought I was watching the same movie. House tells the story of a young college girl named Samantha who accepts a babysitter ad she saw on campus. She gets to the house with her friend Megan and slowly, things start to get creepy. They arrive at the house to find a certain Mr. and Mrs. Ulman who confess that they don't have a child for Sam to babysit... but rather they need her to babysit their mother. The creepiness factor tips the scale and Sam is reluctant to take the job, but Mr. Ulman offers her $400 dollars to do it because it was of the utmost importance. So $400 for four hours, what could go wrong? Need I mention that this particular night is a full and total eclipse, what could possibly happen? Like I said, the movie is very similar to Babysitter Wanted , but whereas Babysitter bui...

I don't know if it's a good or bad thing but today I watched Public Enemies , a film by Michael Mann with the likes of Johnny Depp and Christian Bale and later I watched The Tournament , a DTV lower budget action movie. For whatever reason, I enjoyed the latter more. I guess it appealed more to my primal sensibilities. Although The Tournament was produced on a low budget, it was still a higher low budget movie than your usual fare. I think this movie is as close to an American version of Battle Royale that we're going to get. Basically every 7 years there's a tournament held by all the big wigs and high rollers that pit 30 different killers together in a last man standing battle. The winner is awarded $10 million dollars. The tournament lasts 24 hours and at that time, if there is no winner, then a tracking device lodged inside their bodies would explode, killing them in the process (just like Battle Royale !). There's all sorts of wacky killers in this movie, f...

Welcome to another installment of DTV Madness!!! This time we take a look at Wrong Turn 3 and Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned. Both are horror movies and that's about where the similarities end. Wrong Turn 3 I saw the first Wrong Turn when it originally came out for a theatrical run and I quite enjoyed it thanks to the gory effects, Eliza Dushku *drool*, and Jeremy Sisto. Somewhere between then and now, Wrong Turn 2 was released. I never saw it or even knew it existed, but it's out there apparently. So I saw Wrong Turn 3: Left For Dead last week and actually had a pretty good time with it. There's not much to the plot (well, it is a horror movie). Basically a busload of convicts are being transferred from one prison to another. On their voyage, the bus gets runoff the road and taken down by the mountain men that dwell in the forest. From then on, it becomes a survival story but the mountain men are watching... and are hungry. The story is as predicta...

It's been a while since I've watched any DTV movies but as Halloween draws closer, the amount of DTV schlock spewed out is turned up a notch. And so here I present two of my findings. Blood Car This movie wreaked of a student production. Well, it was a few degrees above a student production but very much below a mainstream production. The movie takes place in the near future, 2 weeks into our future to be exact, at a time when gas prices are at an all time high. In this post-apocalyptic future people have stopped driving altogether because of these prices. Cue in a young teacher named Archie who teaches during the day but by night, works on a car engine that will work without gasoline. At first he tries to get it to work by using wheat-grass juice but accidentally stumbles upon a way to get it to work with human blood. So he installs a bladed contraption in his car trunk that will grind up bodies to fuel his new car. Carnage ensues. The plot is pretty wacky as you can tell....

Don't adjust your screen or rub your eyes, you read it right the first time. Transmorphers: Fall of Man . Hot on the heels of Transformers : Revenge of the Fallen comes this direct-to-video summer mockbuster. Much like the first movie, this movie was strategically released on the same day as it's bigger budget counterpart in an attempt to either profit from the robot movie popularity or from the dyslexic. The story is basically about a bunch of alien robots who secretly arrive on earth and who lay dormant until woken by an electrical jolt, where they then try to destroy mankind in hopes of dominating the world. Of course, a ragtag band of humans come together in hopes of curbing the robot's big plans. Apparently T:FoM is a prequel to the first movie, but I was completely unaware as I (un)fortunately didn't see the first one. The plot obviously borrows much from the Transformers movies. But the ripoffs don't stop there. In the final scene, the main lead makes...

It's been a while since my last DTV Madness posting. It just goes to show how bad Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust was. Actually I watched a few DTV movies since then, but they were nothing worth reviewing... well, that and I didn't want to blow a gasket. So this segment has returned in full force with an absolute surprise in the form of Babysitter Wanted . But... was it a good surprise? The story follows a young girl named Angie who moves to a new town to pursue her studies in art history. She is the typical horror movie archetype for a lead female; she's innocent, a devout catholic and she's a schoolgirl (well, college girl). She accepts a new babysitting job at a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, to help make ends meet but slowly realizes that she's being stalked. This movie is quite deceiving in that the trailer makes you think you're seeing one kind of movie, but then they swerve you and the movie becomes something else entirely. The first h...

Okay, honestly, I think this will be the last DTV post for a while. One man can only take so much shit. I'm only human, I have feelings too. These two movies pushed my limit. I'm going to be in DTV-detox for the next month or so. Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer I thought that with a title like this, it couldn't fail. I thought that with a poster like they had, it couldn't fail. Then I realized something... I failed. I failed in thinking that this movie had any hope. I was expecting some fun horror, mixed with comedy in sort of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer kind of fashion with a bumbling hero and smart quips. I mean, with a title like Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer , was I wrong in expecting a variety of monsters get slayed as the title suggests? It didn't help much that the monsters looked uber cheesy. They looked like something right out of a Power Rangers episode. But to their credit, at least they stuck with practical make-up and effects rather than CG. The mo...

We have a winner! A movie with zombies starring a bunch of geeks. This movie will be a classic in the future. All you need to know about the plot is that it's prom night and there are zombies lurking about. Put the two together and you have Dance of the Dead . There are several factors that make this an instant classic. One of the things that stand out the most are the characters. Unlike other horror movies that hire 20 to 30-something year olds who look or act nothing like teens, in DotD you really get a genuine feeling that these are teenagers, both from their mannerisms and their dialogue. Also, unlike shitfests such as Joy Ride 2 the characters don't need to declare what kind of categories they fall into (ie. that emo-punk wuss in JR2). Instead, you can tell that a character is more emotional by the things he says and the things he does. The characters are well defined. Sure they are a bunch of highschool stereotypes, but they really do it well. There are science ne...

I've got a crapload of DTV reviews coming out within the next week or so. I don't know why, maybe because it's near Halloween, that companies shit out all these movies around this time. So I watched two this week, Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead and Return to Sleepaway Camp . I had hopes (not high hopes) for both, as I enjoyed the first Joy Ride and loved, loved, LOVED, the original Sleepaway Camp , but like with most DTV affairs, I was quite let down. Return to Sleepaway Camp The first Sleepaway Camp was created obviously to milk off the success of other slasher flicks at the time, notably Friday the 13th . It was a complete low-rent production, complete with bad acting and bad dialogue. The saving grace in the movie came at the ending. Anyone who's seen this movie could not possibly forget the ending, it's one of those things you just can't unsee. However, if you need a reminder or a spoiler... [Inviso-Text Spoilers (highlite with your mouse): The main chara...

Those of you that know my movie watching habits will know that I'm a sucker for DTV releases. DTV movies are often friendly to the genre-fan, churning out endless amounts of horror schlock every month. Unfortunately, nine times out of ten, the movie will be shit, and after 10 minutes in, you start to wonder what went wrong with your life. Whenever I hit that point I always think to myself, "fuck, I've already started it, might as well get through it"... and after 90 minutes, an eruption of profanity occurs. That being said, there are those few times when the movie is worthwhile or at least fun to watch. It takes a lot of digging to find something good, but then again you've got to get through all the dirt before you strike oil. And man, when you find it, boy does it feel good. Last month, I had the "privilege" to watch two horror flicks that contained killer crocodiles as the main baddies, the first being Lake Placid 2 and the second being Rogue . ...