Gorgon Reviews

Ah, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I will be honest. I wasn’t really looking forward to this movie when it was first announced.

I like the Captain, sure. But the next two movies are Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Age of Ultron. This one was just giving me more of an already established character. Still, I was excited enough about it to make a fake review for April Fools Day.

Being a comic book fan is sort of a double edged sword with these type of movies. On one side, it is great experiencing the comics come to life with large enough budgets to make every fanboy cry out in glee. But on the other side, we know the stories they are inspired by, so most likely the bigger plot twists and turns won’t be surprises to us.

Unless of course they create new unexpected ones like Iron Man 3, but that is a different story.

“Hey, stop moving so the camera can focus on your backside.”

The Winter Soldier begins by showing us what life is like for the one and only Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a national hero and now high up in S.H.I.E.L.D. He is doing missions around the world! But S.H.I.E.L.D. and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) have their secrets and Steve doesn’t really like secrets.

So when things start to get a little bit feisty at the headquarters in DC, Steve isn’t sure who he can trust. Can he trust the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) who is known for half-truths and deception? Can he trust Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) head of the World Security Council? How bout Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders)?

Yeah, he is kind of in a sticky situation. The spy game sure has ramped up its deception since the 1940’s, so if he is going to protect the world from a hidden threat, he will need all the help he can get. This movie introduces a few future characters as well, like the titular villain The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Sam “The Falcon” Wilson (Anthony Mackie), Brock Rumlow (Frank Grillo) and Agent 13 (Emily VanCamp).

Holy shit the Vult-err.. Falcon. Sorry. Good Guy Falcon, Bad Guy Vulture. Got it.

Being the fanboy that I am, I have been trying to be more critical of Marvel movies lately. Just because I squeal in delight over almost every one doesn’t mean they are perfect. They don’t all deserve perfect marks.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier deserves perfect marks.

Everything about this movie is so spot on spectacular that I have a hard time believing it is even real. Captain America: The First Avenger was a good movie on its own right, but one I have never really been in the mood to watch again. I can see myself watching The Winter Soldier many times once it releases, maybe more than I saw the first Iron Man. It literally might be my new favorite Marvel movie.

It is hard to find something that is negative about the movie. It is over two hours, but never drags. There is maybe only one scene I thought was a bit pointless, but it doesn’t affect the overall movie. There is a lot of action and all of it is so well put together, from the choreography to sound editing. The movie itself is a lot more serious than other Marvel films, but it still has the nice jokes and references throughout it to keep you happy.

Did I know the big reveal? Yeah. But knowing it didn’t take away from my experience at all in the movie. This excites me because it means I will likely enjoy future viewings.

My last point I guess would be about acting. Evans gave a strong performance as the lead, but the side characters as well were all quite good. Mackie didn’t have too big of a role, but he kicked its butt and I actually enjoyed the Falcon. Redford was great, Jackson was great. Everyone was great.

To me, this movie is like an Avengers 1.5. I don’t expect Guardians of the Galaxy to have too much impact on the current Marvel universe, so this is the perfect lead up to next May. This movie has made me beyond excited for the Marvel future, and definitely for the third Captain America in 2016. Although, knowing the comic plots, I kind of already know what is likely to happen.

Sometimes life is hard. I get that. Life is hard over here sometimes too.

But movies tend to be great escapes from life, telling great stories, increasing your imagination. But then we have documentaries that bring reality crashing back down. They remind us that things aren’t always easy in the world, or that things aren’t so bad.

Rotisserie Chicken is a Netflix original movie that was only available for one day through its services. Personally I think that is because people couldn’t deal with the truths that were being shown. It created such a broad range of emotions. Anger. Apathy. Giddiness. Confusion. Hysteria. Glee. Depression. I have never seen such a polarizing movie, not since Napoleon Dynamite or something by Terrence Malick.

Speaking of that, I heard Terrence Malick hates chicken. Get him!

The story itself is relatively simple. You have a cooked turkey, almost at the end of its journey in the afterlife. It is basically a retelling of the end of the journey, but in reverse, so you know the outcome before you begin. Never has a backwards story been so real (after all, a documentary), yet so relevant to the lives of almost everyone in the world.

The chicken, that was set up and forgotten in its prison, roasting.

You want character development/change? You get that in this movie! It is slow/gradual, but if you pay attention you can see the changes as they occur. If you look away, you might have missed a lot and are left wondering how you even got to that point in the first place. Definitely a film that commands your full attention.

For those unlucky enough to have missed this opportunity, I am not sure what I can say. I guess I hope it doesn’t come back to bite you in the ass some day or cause you to live in regret. That would be terrible.

But really, you should feel regret if you missed it.

Alright, cool, Spelling Bees are still a thing. I never got into spelling correctly. You probably knew that from my reviews. But to be fair, I have enough problems with the English language as it is, which is why I kind of hate spelling bees. I just consider most of those words made up, basically.

So we have Bad Words, which for whatever reason got a limited release as if it was some po-duck indie movie. Took it a few weeks to come out in my town, up against Captain America: The Winter Soldier, so clearly they didn’t expect anyone to come see it.

I don’t know if the words are bad, but the sportsmanship definitely looks bad.

Guy Trilby (Jason Bateman) seems to be an unreasonable asshole. He is mean, condescending, doesn’t want to talk to interact with others and is extremely vague. He also has been entered into the Golden Quill national spelling bee.

Making his way through the ranks, pissing people off along the way, he is finally going to nationals. He had found loop holes in their guidelines, and since he never finished the eight grade, he is eligible. Hell, he even has a sponsor, an online news paper who has lawyers at their disposal to help fix any issues. Jenny (Kathryn Hahn) is his personal reporter, who gets to have the exclusive interview/article after it is all over and done with the hopes of finding out just why this man needs to do this.

Is he just really bitter? Did he fail at spelling bees as a kid? Rough upbringing? Does he hate children? Well, you won’t know until the last third or so.

But there is a cute kid character of course, Chaitanya Chopra (Rohan Chand) who seems to lack a caring home. So sad.

Also starring Philip Baker Hall as the president of the Golden Quill, Allison Janney as the also high up member of the organization, Ben Falcone as a reporter, and Steve Witting as the proctor.

If you missed it, he literally pisses everyone off.

If anything, I can definitely say that Bad Words was different. It was Bateman’s first time at the directing chair for a movie, so presumably he put a lot of himself into this movie and really made it his way. It was pretty short, less than 90 minutes, going for a simpler story to tell.

But there were times when I still felt like it was a bit too long. Strange, I know. They had a lot of him hanging out with the kid, doing crazier and crazier things, and I was just sitting there wanting the next stage of the competition.

There were definitely times I laughed a lot, but technically all of the jokes were the same. It was Guy Trilby being an asshole to the people around him. He was good at insulting, but there was literally no other outlet for humor which just kind of annoyed me.

The ending was chaos, had some technical issues from what I could see, but still ended basically the way I would have expected.

I guess aspects of this movie were a bit on the Black Comedy route, but they didn’t go too far with that either. Overall, I think the movie was just okay. Had some laugh out loud moments, a lot of technical errors or goofs, and just something that probably wouldn’t interest me the second time I tried to watch it.

Here we are. Jackie Chan‘s final big action movie.

You may have heard that before, but based on how this one ended, and the credits, I believe him. I guess he is willing to be in smaller action movies, or as a small role in action films, but this is the last one.

Apparently Chinese Zodiac (which was released in China a few years ago and made a shit ton of money) is also a sort of sequel to Armour of God and Operation Condor, neither of which I had seen. Oh well, whoops.

Holy fuck, a roller suit! How useful would that be in every situation??

This story is about a man named J.C. (Jackie Chan), who is kind of a bad ass. He and his team (Fan Liao, Sang-woo Kwon, Zhang Lanxin) seek out thrills and treasures and they are very good at it.

DO YOU SEE THAT PICTURE UP ABOVE? How badass is that suit? It opens the mood and puts you in a crazy feeling mood.

Anyways, after that, he gets word of another secret mission. There used to be 12 Bronze heads that represented the Chinese Zodiac that were stolen forever ago. A secret group wants J.C. to collect the heads for a big payday. He just has to find out where each one is, with some missing for dozens of years! Yes, this basically is a live action version of Jackie Chan Adventures, but no kids or old people.

They do have Coco (Xingtong Yao) someone who studies these things, and Catherine de Sichel (Laura Weissbecker), a French heiress who wants to help though. So that’s cool. Oh and Oliver Platt, which was a bit weird given the rest of the cast.

Never in my days have I seen so many heads.

Alright, Jackie Chan movie.

Was there a lot of action? I’d say so. Was the action unique to Jackie Chan’s comedic fighting style? Yep. So many items were grabbed and used to beat up people with. This movie also featured a volcano, sky diving, a jungle fight, some ship stuff, and, oh yeah, JACKIE CHAN ON A ROLLER SUIT. Which I can’t get over.

Especially since I know he actually was rolling down a mountain with it.

I will admit, some plot points were weak, and maybe I didn’t really understand what was going on all the time. But it was entertaining and funny, I laughed throughout.

Which is really all I can ask for. I, like most white Americans, could watch Jackie Chan fight off hordes of people for hours every day and never really tire of it. Incredibly interesting as always.

God’s Not Dead may be the first movie ever based entirely on a spam/chain letter. After I watched the trailer many months ago, I couldn’t stop laughing. It was clearly a B-movie, looked like it was made for TV, extremely low quality. There are a lot of examples of the story they go over in here, but the most famous is the one involving Albert Einstein. All of them ridiculous. This is the movie version of it apparently.

This review is very likely going to be biased. Totally, totally biased.

Bias attacking bias. That’s the American way.

College is hard. Especially for Josh Wheaton (Shane Harper), no relation to Joss Whedon. He is a big Christian taking his freshman classes and picks an intro Psych class with Professor Radisson (Kevin Sorbo). The professor, after a 5 minute speech, wants the class to sign a paper saying “God Is Dead” to get past it as an argument throughout the semester, so they can discuss pure philosophy on its own.

Well, Josh can’t do it. Nope, too Christian. So he has to argue the opposite point that “God Is Alive.” He gets the professor to agree to let the class decide at the end of his talks. He has three classes, the last 20 minutes of each, with minor interruptions by the professor to get it done. Everyone tells him not too. His friends, his parents, his girlfriend (who I want to link, she is in like, four scenes, but literally not even on the IMDB page…). But he does it anyways.

This movie also has a thousand side plots. Like Ayisha (Hadeel Sittu), a Muslim girl with a strict traditional father (Marco Khan), making her wear the headpiece, how dare he. Well, turns out she is secretly super Christian and hiding that from him too. When he finds out, he smacks her some few times and kicks her out of the house.

We have Amy Ryan (Trisha LaFache), a blogger for a “lefty” organization, who I guess also is super into PETA. We get to see her with a boyfriend who clearly doesn’t care, as she has a surprise interview with Willie Robertson and his wife Korie outside of their church, attacking the fact that they kill animals and are religious…? Well, she gets cancer and her boyfriend leaves her.

Also Reverend Dave (David A.R. White, from that terrible movie Me Again) is our local go to helper guy for some of the plot lines. He is welcoming in Reverend June (Benjamin Ochieng) from somewhere in Africa as a Missionary, but things keep going poorly to ruin their vacation. I guess.

We also have Paul Kwo playing a transfer student from China in the class, and as we all know, the Chinese are all athiests. Oh, and Cory Oliver, who plays the much younger girlfriend of Professor Radisson. Because she is a former student. But also a Christian. And has a mom with Dementia. And What? How does any of this part make sense?

You can practically see the straw flying out of Kevin Sorbo’s mouth.

I understand that Christians may not take anything I say in this review for a grain of salt. So here is a different actual Christian blog talking about how terrible the movie is. After watching the movie, everything in the trailer is basically true. So, I won’t repeat them, but yeah.

This movie has a bunch of subplots, some of which are loosely connected, and others that seem to just flicker out without resolution. The Muslim girl subplot was terrible. Let’s ignore the fact that the two religions are already really similar, but having an abusive father, and a Muslim girl switching to Christianity? I am not saying these don’t happen, but they just seem silly in this movie. That plot line after she gets kicked out? No resolution. Good, she has Jesus…and now is homeless I guess? I guess that is true. Religious parents definitely kick out their kids sometimes if they turn to another religion or no religion at all, I read about the latter a lot.

Same with the reporter. She finds Jesus by the end of the movie, after bad stuff happens to her. I thought they were just parodying the Duck Dynasty people but I guess that is one of the real guys with his actual wife. Why are they in the movie? Not sure. But they had a media fiasco that happened last year with people getting kicked off the show because they were anti-gay. But the news reporter attacks him for helping people kill ducks and being religious, not for the reasons they had controversy last year. So his speech he gave about God seemed pointless.

They made everyone in the movie that wasn’t Christian a complete asshole, so of course the Christian way shown is the right way. If they aren’t, they beat kids, assault students, and get cancer. But that doesn’t present a good version of reality. The professor almost physically assaulted the kid after his first talk, was dating a former student (who he asked to date after a midterm…?) making him super scummy. He constantly and clearly berated her, and then based his entire self as if he was warring with God. Yep, he was actually a hater cause of an event in his childhood, not through being an intellectual.

The rest of the review has some spoilers. Read at your own risk.

Then the fucking killed his character in a car accident as he was walking to find his former lady friend. What in the actual fuck. His death was juxtaposed with the concert, basically celebrating the fact that he “lost” the argument to the kid and how he and Jesus were awesome, and he sucked, as he was dead. Erm.

Speaking of concerts, this whole film felt like it was some strange advertisement for this band The Newsboys. A thousand references and posters for them, along with the film title I guess.

Terrible movie. It uses arguments that have been refuted in the past, but make the professor a strawman who can’t handle them while also having a tantrum. If it tried to actually use some better proofs are arguments, that would be something. But no. Also, there is a big Spartacus like scene at the end. Gah. This movie is just a fluff piece meant to pat people who agree with it on the back, without going any further or to any deep/significant level.

A score of “religious” movies have come out recently. A month ago we had Son Of God, God’s Not Dead somehow elevated from made for TV B-Movie status to a wide theatrical release and next month is Heaven Is For Real.

But Noah is something completely different. It is directed by Darren Aronofsky and he was given complete directorial control over the picture. That’s right, the guy who directed The Fountain and Black Swan is taking on the Bible.

This won’t be a simple story and in all likelihood, it won’t be like anything you read before.

Hah. The joke implying that I have actually read a book before.

For one thing, the entity that created the world pre-flood is always referred to as “The Creator.” I won’t tell you all the differences because that would ruin the fun.

Let’s just say that the Adam and Eve story is basically the same, and the Cain and Abel happened the same way too. Noah (Russell Crowe) is a descendant of Seth, the third son of Adam, while the vast majority of civilization is a descendant of Cain.

These men have pillaged the world, draining it of its natural resources and animal friends. Noah has tried to protect his family from their corruptness, keeping them to a mostly nomadic lifestyle. Then he gets a vision. He believes the world will be cleansed by water and he must build an ark to save the animals upon it.

But if Man is the problem, can he save others? Is he even allowed to save his family or himself?

Jennifer Connelly plays his wife, Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth and Leo McHugh Carroll are his three sons, Emma Watson his adopted daughter he finds along the way, Anthony Hopkins his grandfather, and Ray Winstone his main enemy.

There is also a very strange massive man wet dance number in the middle.

Here is a pro-tip. Don’t drink a lot of fluids in theaters while watching Noah. It is a movie about a giant flood, which also occurs about halfway through the movie. Given the length of the movie, you might have some uncomfortable feelings before you reach the end.

Since the flood occurs so early, the second half of the movie is mostly human drama aboard the ark. Because of the drama, the ending does seem to drag on a little bit.

I thought Noah was awesome. The movie was visually stimulating. It was beautifully shot and the CGI elements weren’t terrible. The acting from the leads felt great on all accounts. In particular, I really loved the story of how Man came to be from the Creator in six days. It is a famous tale, but the way it was shown from start to finish in this movie was pretty unique.

However, at times I still felt the movie was just a tad bit too long. There are also certainly going to be people upset with the movie due to its loose interpretation of the source material.

Noah was definitely a much better movie than I thought it would be. It told a good story, wasn’t pushy with any messages, had great acting, and was visually pleasing.

One thing the movie could have used? More puns. Just imagine this ending. The family finally makes it to land. The wife says “Now we can spread out and repopulate the earth!” Her husband turns to look at her and says: “Yeah, I Noah.”

Yep, I am awesome. I got to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a special promotion over a whole week before it came out. They just told me I couldn’t release a review on it til April.

Fine by me, early movies are early. The first Captain America I really enjoyed, but didn’t feel patriotic enough. There was a severe lack of American flags throughout the movie and I just couldn’t accept it. There was a lot of Nazi stuff too, which is silly. I want America stuff, not Nazi German stuff.

Uniform looks diluted. Patriotism failed.

This movie takes place dozens of months after The Avengers. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is living a sad life. Sure, he lives in Washington D.C., a patriotic city if any, but is bored. He is still working for S.H.I.E.L.D., but he isn’t killing Hitler, so what’s the point of it all?

Which is when Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) comes back. What a shifty character. Fury has some information regarding Rogers and his family. Turns out Rogers’ brother had a son a few years after World War II. That’s right, the Captain has a nephew. But the weird way time travel works, the nephew, Alexander (Robert Redford) is of course now much older than him. Hah, how silly.

But Alex also helps run the council that oversees the world in the Marvel Universe. Pretty baller. He is the one that lets him know about The Winter Soldier (Jeremy Renner). He apparently just came out of Russia, another classic enemy, has some robot parts and really wants to fuck some shit up.

Good. Steve doesn’t understand technology much anyways, so he is happy to do battle. Of course, when he realizes his true identity, he might have some moral convictions.

Or they might just stand there chatting about the good times a couple years ago.

Man, if people were upset by the changes to the lore in Iron Man 3, they would probably be even more furious at these changes. To change the identity of The Winter Soldier like that to Hawkeye? Man. Why do they keep making him the badguy? No one even really likes Mr. Renner.

There were far too many plot twists involving who was related to who. First Steve Rogers and his nephew, then Nick Fury and his son (Anthony Mackie) it kind of got ridiculous.

This movie was supposed to be a pseudo Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) movie as well, but if I had to guess, she probably had like 3 minutes of screen time, everything you saw in the trailer, all at the end too. Must have been too busy voicing sexy robots again.

I am pretty sure this is second longest Marvel movie too, after The Avengers, and a lot of it drags on. They kept introducing other side villains who got barely any screen time that it kind of took away from the overall plot, reminding me of Spider-Man 3. Hell, it even had a strange emo dance scene in it as well.

Overall, this movie feels like a big lie. Both to the Marvel continuity, through its advertising, through so much. I am glad I guess that they killed off Steve Rogers at the end, bringing in a different Captain America story. Can’t wait to see how they spin this for The Avengers: Age of Ultron. But that was about the only cool aspect.

Yay! Finally, we are getting a movie version of the Beastie Boy’s song Sabotage. I am also immediately killing that joke before it gets too stupid. I don’t even like that song. Too hard for me, I guess.

The actual movie Sabotage is the next attempt for Arnold Schwarzenegger to get back into action. I think I saw the trailer once before a month or two ago, so going into it, I really didn’t remember at all what I was about to watch. That was a good feeling. I did learn right before that the director also directed and wrote End Of Watch, which I loved so I did get all sorts of excited. A great underrated movie from two years ago.

Aw shit. Here is them with presumably the bad guy. I guess they all win, spoilers!

The story is about a special operations DEA team who are really good at getting the job done. They are lead by Breacher (Schwarzenegger) and they all get snazzy nicknames too, because they are cool. They also have Tripod (Kevin Vance), Monster (Sam Worthington), Grinder (Joe Manganiello), Neck (Josh Holloway), Sugar (Terrence Howard), Pyro (Max Martini) and Lizzie (Mireille Enos). She doesn’t get a nickname presumably because she is a woman.

Oh, they might be a little bit dirty too. Not The Shield levels of dirty, but a little bit dirty. The story begins with them taking down a huge drug lord, but also stealing a measly ten million from the pile and stashing it to split amongst the team later. Well, someone dies during their operation, and later the money is gone as well, so it the drug bust was a bust. Especially when they all go under the microscope, with the ten million reported missing.

Well, eventually they all survive and since no one trusts Breacher in the department that much, they just let him have his team back for special missions. Then, one of their own dies.

Shit. Then another. Turns out someone is trying to take them out. But why? They have tons of enemies, it could be anyone. But local cop people (Olivia Williams, Harold Perrineau) are on the case, so I am sure they will stop the bad guys.

Many guns. Both the actual weapons and these gentleman arms.

Pew pew pew! Action and death. This film really earns that R rating with the amount of graphic violence (extreme deaths), language, and nudity in it. Some of it was indeed really gross too.

On the same note, the story itself was interesting. Yeah, I said it. I liked the plot of this movie. It wasn’t a simple story, it had some layers, and characters had motivations. At the same time, some characters had absolutely no motivations and even by the end, I am not sure why they did what they did.

In fact, the climactic ending complete with a chase scene and finding out who the bad guys are was very disappointing. It doesn’t match the tone of the rest of the movie. It was drawn out and suddenly no one knew how to aim, despite being tactical and military elites.

So that is that. It has some cool stuff. But the ending is pretty lame. There ya go.

Odd Thomas was definitely not on my original watch list. Not until I saw that it recently came out and had an young actor on the front who I tended to enjoy. Yep, then I dropped my plans, and decided I needed to see this movie instead.

Apparently it is based on a book series, but also it went under some legal trouble recently. According to the internet, it was delayed indefinitely for release due to funds not being spent as promised for ads or whatever. So they delayed it for over a year! I think other countries ended up getting it before us, because of that. I guess sucks most for the author, who was probably stoked his book was getting made into a movie, but then getting swept under the rug for legal reasons.

Oh well, I am still watching it author dude, don’t worry!

Well, that’s the most fucked up silver surfer I have seen.

Odd Thomas is not about a strange boy named Thomas. Nope. That is his first and last name, Odd Thomas (Anton Yelchin). There is a story behind that, but I won’t get into it.

Let’s just say that Odd’s upbringing has made things a bit weird for the boy. He can see dead people, and they tend to point out who killed them so he can avenge them. He also has other minor supernatural/spiritual abilities when it comes to seeing dead entities. Like the Bodachs above, which only appear when a great death will occur.

Unfortunately, in his small town Pico Mundo, California, he has started to see not just one Bodach, but a LOT of them. They are following around this Fungus Bob Robertson (Shuler Hensley), a nickname, don’t worry, who now Odd has a feeling is going to commit some very heinous crime on his small town. His girlfriend, Stormy (Addison Timlin), who he is destined to be with forever knows about his powers and is willing to help despite having none of her own. He also wants to win the support of her father, Wyatt Porter (Willem Dafoe), the local police chief.

As Odd begins to follow Fungus Bob around, he finds himself somewhere darker and more sinister than he has ever experienced before.

Also featuring Arnold Vosloo, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Kyle McKeever, and Nico Tortorella.

Man, this guy is just a cook. I want my spiritual advisers to at least be Maître D’.

Oh man, a lot of stuff happened in this movie. In particular, I really enjoyed the ending over all. There were twists and turns, everything falling into place, action, death, demons, you name it. But at the same time, the film had a lot of slower parts that I didn’t enjoy as well.

Here is what I can say. I thought Yelchin did a good job. He felt very believable as his character. Despite the mediocre feeling towards parts of the film in the middle, I am giving it a passing grade overall because of how much I liked the ending.

In fact, this would be the third ever movie I review on my website based on a book, that really makes me want to read the book after the fact. The other two were Warm Bodies and The Perks of Being A Wallflower. The main difference of those two and this one is that they got a 4 out of 4, but this one definitely wasn’t a good enough movie to earn that. However, it is certainly interesting. The fact that there are multiple books and most likely no more movies to be made from that increases my chances of reading them.

If you want a weird and unique movie, you might give this a shot, just don’t expect high quality art as you do.

Woo, a completely random movie! Not even remotely new. Looks at least 1-2 years old. Lloyd the Conqueror. You see, the first half of it, is a lame name for a person. Then we have The Conqueror. That sounds badass!

Ah, but then you realize this is a movie about Larping. Not many movies are about this subject and arguably is only a small portion of Role Models.

I guess I can just hope for a lot of intense role playing. Maybe a lightning bolt or two? Yeah, you know what I am saying.

And this is the man who is the bringer of the lightning bolts.

Alright, so this movie is about a guy named Lloyd (Evan Williams) and his two slacker roommates Patrick (Jesse Reid) and Oswald (Scott Patey). They get by in community college, rocking that C average, allowing them to get student aid. They play a lot of video games and not a lot more.

Well, their slacking gets them in trouble. They put together a last second report on Beowulf and it bombs. Derek (Mike Smith, of Trailer Park Boys Bubbles fame) fails them and it will ruin their average. They agree to do ANYTHING to give them a better grade. Anything. So they make a figurative deal with the devil.

You see, Derek is a LARPer. And a great one at that. He plays on the dark side, as an evil mage, and has gotten so good at LARPing that his army has grown strong. Too strong for the forces of light. Not enough good guys are signing up, so they are canceling the tournament this year, and he wants to win as he does every year. So if those three agree to sign up, he will give them a better grade should they beat him. He will give them an A.

What? LARPing is lame! They don’t want to. They won’t stand a chance at all. Unless Andy, the Good White level 80 Wizard (Brian Posehn) will come out of retirement to train them. They need more muscle too. So they also end up recruiting the local woman’s self defense class teacher, Cassandra (Tegan Moss) to join their side. Can the forces of light overcome the forces of darkness?

Is Harland Williams‘ cameo actually that funny? Is this most accurate depiction of a Unicorn ever featured in a live action movie?

Yes and fuck yes.

Let’s get this straight. This definitely is a low budget movie. Pretty B-movie status, without being super cheesy. Yet the characters are relatable, Posehn and Smith are great, and, as I said, Harland Williams had an amazing cameo.

There is a lot of LARPing in this movie, and a lot of it is inconsistent from what I can tell. But some of the elements are there. Some of them. Even if they are brought to extreme levels to make a more entertaining movie.

But really, that is what this movie ends up being. Really nerdy, with some entertainment thrown in. If I had to compare it to something as nerdy, I would say the movie Noobz, even though I hated Noobz. About the same level of quality and level of nerd-dom, but this one at least felt entertaining.

For what it is? It is decent! I mean. LOOK AT THAT UNICORN! SO MAJESTIC AND STALLION-ESQUE!