Sweet Suffering Pt 8 (Hellraiser: Hellworld, 2006)

Henry Cavill was in a Hellraiser movie, y’all.

Hellworld is the third film in the franchise from Director Rob Bota. A group of friends are invited to a party centered around a popular online game called Hellworld shortly after the suicide of a friend. The party turns out to be trap for the group as they are killed one by one by Pinhead is remarkably un-Pinhead like ways.

Lance Henrickson is here to make things seem a bit classier when Bradley is away…but while this is the first film since Bloodlines to have actually been written for the franchise? It is the one that seems the most ignorant of the history of the franchise. When did this game pop up? Are the Cenobites now urban legends of a sort? Why is Pinhead killing people with a meat cleaver? We get a convoluted twist that implies it was all a drug induced torture…and yet, the film then shows Pinhead is real and…this film is just terrible. Even Bradley cannot save it, because the script has Pinhead so drastically out of character.

It does not help that each of the three films by the same director do not feel remotely connected. The dialog for Pinhead does not feel right, the motives make no sense, even with a franchise where such things are all over the place.

October 9, 2018 0

Fast and Furious (The Quick and the Dead, 1995)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…a mysterious drifter comes to town with a purpose only known to her.

Ellen wanders into a small town ruled by Herod. Every year, Herod holds a quick draw competition. Gunfighters from all over come to show off their skills. He is a cruel and vindictive man. He has a former partner in crime, Cort, in chains. Cort walked away from his criminal ways and became a preacher. But Herod is trying to push Cort into cast away his faith.

Ellen is a hard drinking and tortured woman. She has arrived for the competition. But as she grows closer to her goal of fighting Herod, the weight of vengeance starts to wear her down. She takes some comfort with Herod’s young and cocky son, called the Kid.

The Kid is tired of living under his father’s shadow. This is one of the closest points to being human Herod has. He tries to force the Kid out of the contest when it is clear the kid aims to go against his father.

Meanwhile, Cort tries to convince Ellen to walk away…leading to Herod seeing an opportunity and set Ellen and Cort against each other a shootout to the death.

If this sounds like a mass of western cliches…well, it should. This is the point of Sam Raimi’s film. He is paying a very loving homage to the classic spaghetti western. At the same time, this is shot with the classic Raimi style. Weird angles, impossible visuals and over the top characters.

This is Gene Hackman at his scene chewing best. His performance as Herod is the classic “Evil Town Leader” mold, and a whole lot of fun. As the Kid, Leonardo DiCaprio is a lot of fun to watch. He is immensely over confident, but that is kind of his charm. Russell Crow’s performance as Cort is a bit more understated. And it serves the character well. Cort is a bit like Bill Munny from Unforgiven in that he turned from evil and seeks a more righteous path. But his past refuses to make this easy.

Raimi fills the background with a remarkable cast of character actors. Lance Henrickson is the fancy Gambler and gunfight Ace. Keith David is the bounty hunter hired by the town to kill Herod.

The Quick and the Dead is a great love letter to the westerns of Sergio Leone and entertaining as all git out.

March 23, 2018 0

The Hunter or the Hunted? Part 10 (Alien vs Predator, 2004)

The Predator films went quiet after the second film, and Alien films were stalled by Resurrection seven years earlier. In that time, there had been a series of successful Alien and Predator comics by publisher Dark Horse Comics. In 1990, Dark Horse brought the franchises together, which was one of those crossovers that you never knew you wanted until you were given it. The Alien vs. Predator comics were very popular and fueled desires of a crossover movie from the fans of the franchises. There were attempts to bring this to life, but it seems nobody could settle on a story idea.

After the first Resident Evil was somewhat successful in it’s box office, Director Paul WS Anderson was brought in to guide the film to fruition. Rather than adapt the comics, they came up with an entirely new story (though they did adopt a few ideas from the comics). Set in 2004, a Weyland (eventually becoming Weyland Yutani, the company from the Alien films) satellite discovers a unique structure buried below arctic ice. The company assembles a team of historians, geologists, survivalists and so on to investigate (and lay claim to the discovery). Lance Henrickson returns to the Alien franchise as Charles Bishop Weyland…the human on which his character from Aliens was based.

They discover a pyramid that seems to be a combination of structures from around the globe. The film suggests this pyramid was part of the cradle of civilization and people worshiped the Predators as gods. Ridley Scott borrowed this notion for Prometheus (but it was language and cave art). The humans are unaware of the arrival of the Predators, and inadvertently activate the dormant temple. An alien queen is revived and starts pumping out eggs. A bunch of nameless characters are attacked and birth aliens while the Predators discover they are not alone. There is the standard misunderstanding where the people are hunted by both Predator and Alien, but eventually the last human and Predator team up.

The visual effects (especially the practical effects) are quite good, though Anderson relies to heavily on the “Transition Through Hologram” set up, which he used in Resident Evil. Considering how large the cast is, very few characters are well defined, resulting in the majority of characters simply being monster fodder.

This is the first film set in the present for the Alien films. The Predator films were always in the present, so the idea that people are running into Predators is not much of an issue. For the Aliens, the idea that they are already on earth seems pretty problematic. The film tries to resolve this and as a one off film, this would probably be sufficient…but then they made a second film…

June 6, 2017 0

The Hunter or the Hunted, Pt 3 (Alien 3, 1992)

The success of Aliens had the studio rushing to try and get an Alien 3 going. There were a lot of false starts and bad ideas that led to what we got. Good scripts got tossed aside for weird ideas. There were questions on whether Weaver wanted to return. While she did finally return, she pushed for this to be the end of Ripley’s journey.

Music video director David Fincher was given the job of bringing the film to life. It should be noted, Fincher was deeply unhappy with his experience and even producers admit they treated him very badly. Which is unfortunate. Because the end result was a muddled and overall messy film with some good ideas and some terrible choices.

After the events of Aliens, Ripley, Newt, Hick and Bishop are in hypersleep on a small escape pod. There is a malfunction that results in the ship crashing on a small prison planet. Only Ripley survives. The prison operates on a skeleton crew, primarily made up of the inmates. Most have adopted a form of Christianity that sees themselves as so unable to resist the draw of sin, living on a planet without temptations is their only choice. As religious leader Dillon (Charles S. Dutton) notes, Ripley’s arrival has put temptations back in place.

An alien facehugger has escaped with Ripley and finds a host. This film added a new twist to the series. It suggested that the alien xenomorph actually borrows traits from it’s host. In this case it is a dog. This results in a xenomorph that runs around on all fours and is more canine in it’s movement.

Once the xenomorph is discovered, Ripley and the inmates struggle to defeat it. Alien 3 is an attempt at not repeating the previous films. So they drop Ripley on a planet with no weapons. Unfortunately, a lot of the decisions with the script resulted in nullifying the progress of Ripley in Aliens. Killing her defacto family put her back at square one. The studio interference left us with a film disowned by it’s director and far more to weaken it. The strengths are few and far between. The religious aspect is kind of interesting and the cast is terrific. Yet these things cannot save a slapped together script and poor CGI.

May 30, 2017 0