Tag: Zach Gilford

In the summer of 2013, there was a horror movie that ended up being surprisingly good. No, not The Conjuring. That was expected to be good and delivered.

I am talking about The Purge, which created its own unique concept for a movie and ran with it. What we got was a house survival type film, with some tense moments and a lot of twists. But more importantly, it created a world with a lot of potential. The Purge was just one families story, but they could set it in any number of settings, with any number of character types, and get completely different films and experiences out of it.

The possibilities are endless. Which is why I was excited to see The Purge: Anarchy, which is set in a city, and looks like it will feature a few different story lines that may intersect. A nice way to do it. Unless this one bombs, I hope they set one in a rural community next. A 500 person city or something. Maybe an island. Or a college campus. Classic settings for horror movies, but these ones have the twist that they involve “normal people” committing the crimes. Or whatever they want to do, as long as it makes me uncomfortable to watch.

Jimmies are definitely getting rustled here.

Set a year after the first film, The Purge: Anarchy gives us a few different groups of people with different reasons for being outside. Like Leo (Frank Grillo) who has a decked out armor car and intentionally went out into the city for some Purge action. He has his reasons. He wants revenge.

Or let’s take Eva (Carmen Ejogo) and her daughter Cali (Zoe Soul). They definitely don’t want to be outside. But thanks to some soldiers invading their complex, taking people into the streets to be prisoners, they really don’t have a choice.

Or even the young couple Liz (Kiele Sanchez) and Shane (Zach Gilford). They had plenty of time to get home, even took the back roads to avoid the busy highways. But when a group of mask men tampered with their vehicle intentionally to leave them stuck in the city, well, they have to learn to flee or fight back as well.

All three groups meet up rather quickly in the film, allowing them safety in numbers to try and survive the twelve hours. Also featuring Michael K. Williams as a resistance leader, trying to get the poor to seize the moment and topple the rich and elite, who he claims use the Purge to secure their own positions in life.

These are the real consequences of P. Diddy‘s Vote or Die campaign.

Not only were my jimmies rustled from the early on pictures, but they literally were rustled almost the entire length of the movie. Let’s say five minutes in or so until the credits rolled. This isn’t disgusting like The Human Centipede is disgusting. It is disgusting on a more primal level, given that these are just regular average people of various ethnicities and backgrounds. That is what really makes these movies. If you don’t accept the movies premise on the basic level, you won’t be able to get into the atmosphere it creates and you probably won’t enjoy it.

I thought the movie was extremely tense. Despite common thought, having guns as a main killing weapon doesn’t turn a horror into an action.

The acting of course isn’t something to be admired. No Oscars will be won by any of it, of course.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie. Obviously. They are setting up bigger and crazier events in the future, pretty nicely. This franchise can have a lot of life left in it. But if you hated the first one, no way you’d enjoy this one.

Stop the presses! This is a found footage horror movie. By that I mean one where all of the footage is created by various characters in the movie, not like, lost and found later. Unfortunately found footage just means hand held cam now. This is all besides the point.

This “found footage” movie, Devil’s Due, doesn’t pretend to be real. It is set in the real world like all movies, but they don’t give us some bullshit premise like based on actual events or using completely unknown actors. But I know the main three actors from this movie! Two of them from really successful TV shows, and the third from a not so successful TV show.

That also means this one might have some sort of acting talent in it, but I am not willing to assume that yet.

Sometimes your baby bump is, err…a really big bump?

Zach (Zach Gilford, from Friday Night Lights) and Samantha (Allison Miller, from Go On) are getting marrieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed.

Yay! Zach’s dad used to video tape everything growing up, recording all of his families vacations and favorite moments so that they would always have it on record. Samantha, on the other hand, doesn’t remember a lot about her past. Her parents died in a car accident when she was still in the womb, so she has been a foster kid all her life. But that doesn’t matter, because she has a family now.

Zach wants to make sure she has memories from here on now, so he decides to do that video taping thing. During the honeymoon, after a late night of being lost in Dominican Republic (because clearly the best place for a Honeymoon), they are taken to a strange underground club, drugged, and impregnated with the spawn of Satan. Yayyyy Satan!

Either way, somehow she is now pregnant despite never missing a birth control ill. Powerful sperm, right Zach? Then begin 9 months of torture, weird behavior, and people dying. Which basically seems like a normal pregnancy. Sam Anderson, from Lost, plays their main priest.

Checking Amniotic fluid? Yeah, that’s a normal pregnancy thing.

I guess I already alluded to this joke, but really, this whole movie could just be considered a metaphor for an actual pregnancy. Everything just playing in the husbands eyes all weird/wrong because he is actually crazy. That isn’t what they were going for, but it still could work.

Yes, this movie is clearly just Rosemary’s Baby done in a different way. Don’t care.

As what is typical in a film like this, the horror doesn’t appear early, it takes awhile to show up, and then builds. So they fill the first half with cheap scares and other bullshit. The number of times the dog barks suddenly in a tense moment (once when the camera just switches to a later moment out of no where) is ridiculous. The fact that there are so many cameras eventually also proves troublesome, only in that some cool scary shit starts to happen, but they still don’t show us the viewers despite the cameras. That is just mean / dumb / lazy. Not sure. Show that woman getting fucked up, damn it.

I’m done talking about the movie. It is however set in North Carolina, just not filmed there. I first thought I saw the name of a newspaper with Raleigh in the title, but it wasn’t the actual name of Raleigh’s newspaper. Then I saw an OBX magnet on their fridge, and NC license plates everywhere. So that is kind of cool. Even if they actually filmed it in Louisiana. Woo, NC horror movies?

The Arnold is back!

Alright, maybe he hasn’t really gone anywhere. The Govenator was still taking part in The Expendables franchise at least, but with The Last Stand he is officially back in the lead role. Just don’t confuse it with the X-Men movie of the same name.

Although Phoenix could solve this problem in an instant.

Sommerton Junction is a small town in Arizona by the border of Mexico. That border is a giant canyon, so there aren’t too many problems associated with it. The high school has a big road football game, so most of the town has left for the weekend to cheer them on, but not Sheriff Ray Owens (Arnold). He is happy to have a weekend off, but he gets a strange feeling about a trucker (Peter Stormare),who comes up clean when his plates are run.

Oh well, it is not like he is secretly a member of the Mexican Cartel, working on busting out Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) from FBI Custody (Forest Whitaker), and then racing him to Mexico across the canyon. That would be ludicrous!

Ray decides that no Mexican Drug lord is going to come into his town and kill its citizens, not on his watch. Nope. He wants to make a stand. With his crew by his side (Luis Guzman, Jaimie Alexander, Zach Gilford) and the deputized citizens of an alcoholic who wants to redeem himself (Rodrigo Santoro) and a weapons museum owner (Johnny Knoxville), they decide to go all out to show that they are not just stupid farmers and rednecks.

“GET TO THE DINNAH”

Sometimes it can be hard to figure out if you are supposed to take a movie seriously or not. I like to apply the LG test. That is, if the movie includes Luis Guzman, do not take it seriously, and I don’t think it has failed me yet.

I do love that The Last Stand provides an action movie without an overabundance of special effects, and being set in rural Arizona helps add to the grittiness. I liked the resolution to the plot, even if the plot was one of the more ridiculous things I’ve heard of. It also wasn’t just a silly shoot em up movie where the good guys use Home Alone-esque traps to take out the bad guys. I actually feared that any character could die.

But, the acting still is pretty bad, and the dialogue probably over did its “one liner” quota. I think the beginning was also a bit too slow, but it picked up when they discovered the bridge being built. An interesting movie, but not sure if it is one I will ever try to watch again.

I bought Post Grad on Blu-Ray and immediately felt guilty. There was no way this movie was going to be one of the better movies out there. No way at all.

Not saying it would have been bad. But I was going to expect a lot of cliches and stereotypes. Also Alexis Bledel‘s eyes were staring at me, and kind of just made me buy it.

So…Blue….

Alexis Bledel has graduated college! She is a savvy technological young person, with the world open to her. Although she didn’t get valedictorian (Because her college has a valedictorian? ) she wants to work at a publishing house and find the next great american novel. Small dreams I guess. But hey, she is a college graduate, so it should be easy?

Nah. Because who cares about Bachelor’s degrees? Masters is where that shit is out, and she just doesn’t know it yet. What she also doesn’t realize is her best guy friend clearly wants her, Zach Gilford (Hey, he was in The River Why).

She is also living with her family, her dad (Michael Keaton), mom (Jane Lynch), and grandmother (Carol Burnett), so needless to say she has a very successful family. Or her dad is a con artist maybe? Suitcase salesman kind of?

She also has a “hot neighbor” played by Rodrigo Santoro, who you may remember (hate?) as that guy Paulo from Lost.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned the plot yet though. So she wants a job. Can’t get one she wants. Keeps going through other jobs. Keeps ignoring her clearly “true love” best friend. Finally gets dream job. Gives up dream job to move to her true love, realizing that a man is more important than the career she has dreamed of her whole life.

What? Oh yeah, spoilers. Seriously. That is how it ended. Also she has competition with that valedictorian (Catherine Reitman) who plays a way too fake individual, that doesn’t make any sense.

PLUS he is a musician. Come on girl. Give up your dreams.

I don’t even know how to end this. Clearly I am mad at the ending. It is super cliched, and horrible. It was her life dream, and she was like, “lolololjk”. Having a man going to law school way more important than your overall goals.

The fake characters bugged me, and the plot was stupid. That is all.

Hey look. Another movie about a book I have not heard of!

The River Why is a simple movie. It asks the question, Why? It, being the river.

I wish this was about a large moving stream that spoke to the main character, much like a 5 year old child would speak to anyone.

“Why?…Why?…Why? Why? WHY? WHY? WHY?”

The story is of a fishing prodigy, Zach Gilford, who grew up in a fishing household. His dad, William Hurt, a famous fly fisher, and his mom, some lame worm fisher.

Once he leaves home due to tension at home, he lives on his own in the woods, with the ideal schedule of sleep, eat, fish. All day every day. Soon he meets Amber Heard, some crazy environmentalist lady being all naked and fishing in a lame way, and his life begins to change.

This is actually a coming of age story, with a bunch of fishing in it. Despite rising to a small amount of fame, eventually the guy finds out there is more to life than just fishing. It also comes with some philosophical backings, with the people he meets along the way.

It may or may not end with a big/long catch. Just sayin’.

It is a slow movie, but decent. I of course know nothing about fishing, because I am not a wild man in the woods (yet!) and I think I learned nothing about fishing in the movie. Fly fishing still confuses me with what they actually do. But damn it, it was kind of interesting.