Tag: 2 out of 4

When it was released, Red received pretty decent reviews from critics but didn’t do amazing at the box office. It made up for it in DVD/Blu-Ray sales though, gaining a small cult following, which is why they green-lit the sequel, surprisingly named Red 2.

The main notable difference between the two is that this one doesn’t have Morgan Freeman. For shame.

Although, as you can see from the picture, it has a lot of John Malkovich being very very John Malkovichy.

The movie begins with Frank (Bruce Willis) and Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker) trying to build a home together. Frank is retired (and still extremely dangerous) but he wants to put his past behind him. Too bad Marvin (John Malkovich) comes prancing in, warning him that he thinks someone is trying to kill them.

Well, it turns out there actually are people trying to kill them! Reports have surfaced that they are nuclear terrorists, who are trying to take out Russia. In fact, the CIA are trying to take them in, including their main man Jack Horton (Neal McDonough, who looks like the white Robert Ri’chard), who has hired the world’s best assassin Han Cho Bai (Byung-hun Lee). The MI6 are sending their old friend Victoria (Helen Mirren), and Russia has Frank’s former fling, Katja (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Sarah doesn’t like Katja.

So Frank, Sarah, and Marvin have to work together and find Dr. Bailey (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant war scientist who has been kept in the loony bin for over thirty years. Together, they hope to clear their name, and possibly stop a nuclear bomb from taking out a huge populatio of the world.

I decided to not talk about John Malkovich with my second image.

I don’t think you need to see Red in order to understand Red 2. All you have to know is that Frank and Sarah met in the first film, and everyone else has a huge history with everyone else. If you had to only pick one to watch, go with the original.

Red 2 isn’t bad per say, but it just doesn’t seem to care too much. Sure, it is entertaining, and funny at times, but not a lot happens overall. They are framed fugitives being hunted by the top governments around the world, yet they still have time to walk around Paris and go shopping. It just seemed odd and ruined the flow of the movie for me. The ending chase scene ended up being really predictable as well.

Red 2, just like R.I.P.D. had its enjoyable moments and was entertaining, just not something I would ever recommend to see more than once. I think Red 2 is not really based on the graphic novel like the first movie. Instead it is based on whatever the writer felt like. I usually don’t care how close a movie is to its source material, but I think in this case, they really didn’t know what to do with their characters. Because of that, it just felt like a mess.

John Malkovich is brilliant as always, and a bit more insane than normal. Malkovich is the main reason to see Red 2, and the only real reason.

2 out of 4.

Don’t worry readers, I am not about to spend a whole review explaining why R.I.P.D. (Trailer) just looks like a rehash of Men In Black. From the grumbles I heard in theaters during the trailer, I realized everyone had already figured it out on their own.

Technically R.I.P.D. is based off of a graphic novel of the same name, but it didn’t publish until after the first two MIB movies came out. Regardless, it seems like Universal itself doesn’t care about this movie with limited promotion and refusing early showings for critics. Generally when critics can’t get early showings things are going badly.

That facial hair from Bridges is not the something bad though. Nick (Ryan Reynolds) is a member of the Boston PD, and finds himself dead unexpectedly during a raid. Man, dying sure does suck. He gets pulled up to what he thinks is heaven and runs into…a Proctor (Mary-Louise Parker). What? Were you expecting Jesus? She offers him a choice. He can either go straight to Judgement and find out his fate for eternity, or join the Rest In Peace Department, serve for 100 years, and get a recommendation before Judgement.

Given Nick’s somewhat corrupt cop nature, he chooses to join the force. The R.I.P.D. are sent down to Earth to round up those who have died and refuse to pass on, as they slowly corrupt everything around them. Roy (Jeff Bridges) is a lawman from the 1800s, and reluctantly takes Nick under his wing.

Too bad the deadoes are also working on building an artifact to bring all the dead entities back to earth, and end the world. Good thing Nick just died and can try and stop it!

Kevin Bacon plays Nick’s old partner, Stephanie Szostak is Nick’s wife, and James Hong and Marisa Miller play Nick and Roy’s avatars while they are on earth. A joke that most certainly gets old really fast.

This joke might have gotten pretty old real quick. R.I.P.D. is not as bad as the trailers will have you believe. Sure, it has a lot to work on, and it could have been a lot better, but still, it isn’t complete trash. Critics just tend to give lower ratings to movies that they don’t get to see for free.

As for our leading man Ryan Reynolds, I thought he was really weak in this movie. Sure, his character just died, and he has a lot of angst, but I didn’t believe any of it in this movie. He was supposed to be pissed off the entire movie, but he just seemed passive aggressive and pouty.

Jeff Bridges was over the top in this movie, but it really did work. It was strange at first, having his era specific dialogue mixed in with the modern dialogue of everyone else. Once you got over that fact, basically everything he said was gold. I will give props to Mary-Louise Parker as well, who didn’t really have a lot to work with for her role yet still made it her own. She was in two different movies released this week (Red 2), and thankfully her characters were completely different.

The movie felt really short, and the ending was wrapped up pretty nicely with a bow, by ignoring pretty huge plot points. If you have monstrous beings running around Boston, blocking off whole intersections, with giant vacuum like holes appearing in the sky and taking out infrastructure, you are going to have hundreds of thousands of dead. After the initial appearance of bad guys, the streets became miraculously clear and no humans seemed to die. Great!

R.I.P.D. caused me to laugh on numerous occasions, but in general, the plot and acting from Reynolds felt really weak. It is at best a little bit entertaining, but not something I’d ever watch again.

2 out of 4.

Let’s talk about psychological thrillers based on real life stuff. I only am bringing this up, because guess what, Compliance might mess with your head, and it is totally based on a real story.

Kind of like The Experiment. Except in The Experiment, it was a real psychological test and they fictionalized aspects of it in the movie, and it was still good. In Compliance, it is based off of THIS real life event, and it keeps true to what actually happened. Roughly. I think. Shit, I just read about it again and got all disgusted at it.

Not as disgusted as her face, which looks like someone farted. At a restaurant that is totally not McDonalds but something generically different, it is a busy Friday night. Why are Friday nights busy? Fuck you, that is a dumb question, learn the real world.

Well, they get a phone call from an Officer Daniels (Pat Healy). He says they have a situation at the store, a young blonde girl at the register apparently stole some money from a customer, right out of their purse, so the customer went to the police station to complain. He has the regional manager on the other line, and he needs the manager (Ann Dowd) to take Becky (Dreama Walker) back in the storage room and question her.

Officer Daniels is on the phone the whole time, including when the strip search happens. But it turns out, Officer Daniels isn’t a cop at all, and just some dude prank calling some fast food places to make them do fucked up shit to employees.

What a twisted dude! Bill Camp is also in here as the fiance to the store manager, who might have to take over for her cause it is such a busy Friday night.

This is not sexy. Sure, she is just wearing an apron, but the torture-esque part kind of ruins it. I think reading the story via text gave me a worse emotional reaction than the actual film showing the events. Somehow, I wasn’t able to really get affected by the story when it occurred in front of my eyes.

I am not saying the acting was bad (and it wasn’t great either) because that isn’t necessary. They are just trying to be real people. Because it was close to the actual events, as the film unfolded I found it harder to stay interested.

Basically, whenever they amped up what they had to do to Becky in the room, there was always uncertainty involved, and the phone people didn’t want to do it (yet always did) and it got annoying. They always repeated the instructions starting with “He said I have to…”, which just got ridiculously annoying. I mean, if half the dialogue is hearing the same stuff twice, that gets annoying.

I am pretty sure in real life, especially when the fiance got there, if he was watching her and making her do things for over two hours, eventually he wouldn’t phrase it like that anymore. But we never get to see the really shocking stuff that happens. Only two of them were implied. They spent so much time on the initial get naked and find someone else to watch, it was stalling for no reason.

Overall, it is an okay movie, but didn’t fuck with me psychologically enough for me to love it.

2 out of 4.

After I saw Tai Chi Zero, I was immediately excited for the sequel, Tai Chi Hero. I knew they were filmed around the same time, and part of a planned trilogy (of which the third has not been announced yet, peculiar, hmm).

I was a bit disappointed that the first film wasn’t a “steam punk martial arts” movie as advertised. Only very barely. But to recap the first movie, we got a guy, going to the Chen village, to learn a very special Kung-Fu. He defends the down, despite not knowing the Kung-Fu, and can sometimes turn into a demon when his tiny horn things get hit. Yeah boy. Let’s continue, damn it.

Aw shit. This movie has fancy beat sticks.

Yang Lu Chan (Yuan Xiaochao), formerly The Freak, is ready to learn the famous Chen Kung-Fu! But they still insist that only actual villagers can learn the martial arts, no outsiders. So they set up an impromptu wedding to marry Lu Chan to Chen Yu Niang (Angelababy), famed daughter of Master Chen Chang Xing (Tony Leung Ka Fai), who he is smitten by and totally saved last movie.

Why are they afraid of outsiders? Basically, back in the day, one or more of their former students went total asshole on another village, and hurt a lot of people. They came back pretty mad, embarrassed their students, and promised that if they ever taught any outsiders again, their village would be doomed. So teaching only their own family and kind was a way of protecting against that. So people are still afraid that Yang Lu Chan learning the art will kill their town.

Remember Fang Zi Jing (Eddie Peng)? Probably not, those are sounds that don’t sound familiar. Well he was the bad guy who was from the last movie. He is pissed that he got defeated, so he teams up with the East India Company and Duke Fleming (Peter Stormare), who is upset over the death of that one chick from the last movie. So he is now a governor, has an army, and lots of cannons.

Aw yeah. Can they defeat the threat that is bigger than the last one? Can he learn the Chen Kung-Fu? Because he would totally have to use it to beat a whole mess of new people, a gauntlet type of situation, to prove the fighting style’s legitimacy. That is kind of just tacked on to the end.

The scariest part of this movie is that Peter Stormare is in it. Who the fuck saw that plot twist coming?

Here is the main differences between the two films. The first film is pretty silly, with crazy fighting, video game references, and it was entertaining. The plot was weak. In the sequel, they want to expand the plot, the universe, and so many back stories. There is a lot more drama in this one, enough for me to take out the Comedy tag.

The problem is that this film almost feels like a strange rehashing of the first film. The ending is completely rushed, and unfortunately the most entertaining part. The final fight scene on top of the…small tiny walls (I am not sure what to call them. Partitions?) was excellent.

Now, I did not know that this (eventual) trilogy was meant to talk about the beginnings of Tai Chi, when it was apparently first just a variant of Kung-Fu. So this is supposed to be a very exaggerated and crazy, true story. Kind of. I guess that is interesting, but it is not something made clear at all in the first film.

I think this is definitely a weaker film than the first, in terms of entertainment. The fight scene at the end was dope. They also decided to get rid of his cool, demon crazy fighting ability half way through the movie. Not sure why. I guess because they never really used it at all. I feel teased. Super teased. Still decently well done though. Hopefully part three is a musical.

2 out of 4.

The Miami Heat recently won their second consecutive NBA championship. A lot of people don’t like them, but that has nothing to do with this movie.

The Heat (Trailer) is a female buddy cop movie, following the style of most buddy cop movies before it. Two completely different people, having to work together for some bureaucratic reason. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.

Oh yeah, they also definitely won’t get along for most of the film.

FBI Special Agent Sarah Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) has closed more cases than any other agent in the last few years. So when news comes out that her boss (Demian Bichir) is getting promoted, she realizes that his spot is now up for grabs. Too bad she is arrogant and selfish, so much that no one else wants to work on her. Being a boss is more than being smart.

So she is sent up to Boston, to find out the secret identity of this really big drug dealer dude. In Boston, Detective Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy) had just apprehended a small time drug dealer (Spoken Reasons), but she doesn’t realize that he is just a pawn in the chain. She also doesn’t care, because Ashburn is a [not nice woman]. Chain of command is stupid if people are going to be mean about it.

Eventually the two realize they have to work together if they are going to get anywhere, or else the bad guys win. Marlon Wayans has a small role as another FBI agent, Michael McDonald as a bad guy, and Michael Rapaport as a brother of Mullins. Basically only “M-named” actors.

Bullock is packed with guns in this movie. I don’t mean those things that fire bullets either.

Surprisingly, Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy had pretty good chemistry together even though one is a veteran actress, the other a relative newcomer to the scene. Melissa McCarthy has actually had roles in movies since 1999 (the cult hit Go), she just didn’t get really noticed until her roles in Bridesmaids and Mike & Molly. I recognize her comedy talent, I just personally think her improv isn’t as good as others might.

For example, watch the trailer. Roughly 1 minute in, she has a tiny rant to a guard in a prison, something clearly improvised and it is supposed to sound menacing/threatening, but it actually makes no sense. There is nothing humorous about it once you actually analyze it. I have only had the time to analyze it, because The Heat has only had one trailer since they started showing it roughly in November.

Thankfully the version that was in the movie was a bit better, but there were a few more examples of improv from her that just missed the mark completely.

On its own it was a decent buddy cop movie. Each successive new one just tries to outdo the last one with a new gimmick. Unfortunately this one’s “gimmick” is that they are women, which is a terrible thing to say out loud but it is true. The Heat at least earns its R-rating thanks to the words that come out of McCarthy’s mouth. The good news for those who absolutely loved the movie is that the sequel has already been announced. While it has its funny moments, I think it doesn’t stand out on its own to really differentiate it from any other buddy cop movie.

 

2 out of 4.

I guess I should make one thing clear right off the back. At the time of watching My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, I have never seen anything related to the TV Series before. So I am going into this movie completely blind, knowing full well there will be jokes and references I don’t get.

Now, I have since gone back to watch the TV show for a few episodes. You know, for “research.” I am not saying I am a “Brony” but the show has merits on its own.

It also has strange colored women. But if it worked in Doug, it can work here, damn it.

The story begins with Princess Twilight Sparkle (Tara Strong) heading to the Crystal Empire for the Princess Summit. All of her friends are invited too: Rarity (Tabitha St. Germain), Applejack and Rainbow Dash (Ashleigh Ball), Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie (Andrea Libman), and her dragon companion Spike (Cathy Weseluck). It is a pretty big deal and will be a pretty big party!

Twilight Sparkle still feels weird wearing her magical crown though, not used to the power and responsibility that comes with it. However, in the middle of the night, a thief breaks into her room and replaces her magical crown with a replica! Oh no! Sunset Shimmer (Rebecca Shoichet), a bitter former student of the Queen, has stolen the crown (an Element of Harmony) and put it through a magical portal to a strange new world.

Twilight Sparkle is going to have to go chase after Sunset Shimmer to retrieve the crown, before the portal closes in three days, and she must go alone. When she goes, she is transformed into a strange new life form: a teenage girl in high school! Sunset Shimmer rules the school with an iron fist (hoof?), too. The school is  also made up of people who have very similar personalities to her pony friends back home, but they are all enemies here!

Can Twilight Sparkle restore the friendship that used to exist in this school? Can she get retrieve the crown before the portal closes, trapping her in the human world for a long time? Will the fact that “Friendship is Magic” come up at all in this movie?

Friendship Orgy Circle!

Audience wise, I was surprised that college and middle aged people actually outnumbered teenage and younger girls. Go figure, the “Brony” crowd is real and showing up in theaters, increasing ticket sales. In fact, they were a rather rambunctious group, constantly cheering and clapping at small cameos and tiny jokes. It actually made the experience better.

My Little Pony: Equestria Girls is only 70 minutes long and it is made up almost entirely of high school prom based cliches. But I still found myself laughing out loud several times throughout. There are at least four original songs as well, of course about friendship and working together, basically the cheesiest things ever. Yet they still entertain. They reminded me of this famous song from the first season of “The Powerpuff Girls.”

Unfortunately, this movie was probably just made to sell dolls and figurines. The rumors are that they will create a second show, one set in the human world with the girls if this one does well, creating even more merchandising for kids. Yes, every movie is made for profit, but no one likes an over saturation of one product.

The movie offers a great message for kids, especially with how they dealt with Sunset Shimmer. Often times, in kids movies, the villain will be completely one dimensional and just pure evil. This film at least breaks the mold from that.

My Little Pony: Equestria Girls can be watched if you haven’t seen the TV series, you just won’t get a lot of the smaller references thrown in. You just have to be able to find it in theaters, most only having one show time a week. It is good for families, and not incredibly boring, just probably an extreme cash grab. Still a better movie than The Croods. Brony up!

2 out of 4.

For Legion, it is one the last of the main entries into Apocalypse Week.

I remember the trailers for this movie, and thought nothing of it. Random horror. I almost bought it cheap on Black Friday two years ago, but my brother said it was dumb, so I never bothered. But now, finally, I can see it. I love catching up on things I missed.

“…So then the bartender goes, why the long face?!”

The story begins with Michael (Paul Bettany) fighting off some demon looking mother fuckers, and being quite vague. Oh yeah, he totally had angel wings too, but has apparently got rid of them. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

Now we find ourselves at a diner in the middle of nowhere. We have quite a few people there, including: Bob Hanson (Dennis Quaid), the owner, his son, Jeep (Lucas Black), their cook (Charles S. Dutton), and a pregnant waitress, Charlie (Adrianne Palicki).

Well, they have some customers too, but who cares. We care about Kyle (Tyrese Gibson) a dangerous looking man who is going to LA. Yes, dangerous because of his skin color maybe. Either way, eventually, some old ass lady walks in and starts causing a fuss, turns into a demon, and tries to get her kill on. Kyle saves the day!

Mass confusion, then enters Michael. Oh, yeah, he seems crazy. He also has a lot of guns. Just because a small army of people who turn into demons attack the diner doesn’t mean he isn’t crazy still. You see, apparently God has lost all hope with the human race. He wants to smite them down, so has sent creatures to take out the Earth. Michael didn’t like that so he abandoned the Angel status to save the human race. How does he do that? By protecting the pregnant lady, whose child is apparently the key to humans winning out.

Great! One against many! Let’s do it. Kevin Durand is Archangel Gabriel too? Heck yeah. I am pumped.

Keamy from Lost has never looked more “cool.”

The plot of this movie actually excited me. Shoot out at a diner in the middle of nowhere, protect the girl at all costs, Angels are the bad guys, also demon things? Why not?

Well, the old lady demon was pretty dang silly. They used the climb on the ceiling tactic multiple times, one as an old lady, the other with a young little boy. Apparently that is all they had going. All the other demons had nothing special going on with them, besides awkward jaunts and large mouths. But still, cool fights and guns right?

Well, I wish. It seemed like post Michael arrival and the mini army, which was promptly dealt with, the movie went into a long lull of boredom before the next wave or anything really happened. Sure, things did happen. But I wanted more guns and demons, damn it. It felt like hours waiting for more things to attack. We are also left with a lot of silly different deaths, that bug me more than anything. Sure they are diverse, but they don’t feel creative, they feel lazy. Don’t take out my favorite character by having him be a hero for no reason, kay?

Just saying. Could have had a lot more cooler deaths and shootouts, and not a lot of downtime in between cool scenes. Really loved the Angel fight too, for some reason.

2 out of 4.

If you have talked to me about superheroes before, you will have found out I prefer Marvel to DC. Marvel sets its characters in real cities in the real world, generally makes their characters relatable, and almost always gives them character flaws, like Tony Stark and his alcoholism.

If you had to ask for my least favorite (popular) superhero, it would definitely be Superman. The idea of his character is boring. He is hardly relatable, being an alien from another planet who has ungodly powers compared to the rest of us. He is generally unstoppable, unless somehow an even stronger force appears, or a very rare substance from his home world magically shows up. Not even Five For Fighting could convince me otherwise.

Regardless, I was still excited about Man Of Steel (Trailer). It looks like their main goal was to make him a bit more relatable to us normal folks, which is one of the harder tasks out there. So if we can get some good drama, and for goodness sake, some good action in this movie, I might just like Superman again. Basically, make it the opposite of Superman Returns. Although it only barely fits, this is also part of my Apocalypse Week, because technically it could involve the end of the world?

I like to picture the helicopters as his Angel/Devil counterparts, telling him what to do. Of course, they are helicopters, so they are both telling him to fuck some shit up.

The movie begins on the planet of Krypton! You see, the elders there have expended all of the planets natural resources, so the planet is kind of doomed, threatening the entire race. General Zod (Michael Shannon) is attempting a military coup to fix the mess the elders have caused, while Jor-El (Russell Crowe) has an alternative answer. He believes his newly born son has the answer to their future, and sends him off to Earth to live and grow, while the rest of his kind perish.

So, Kal-El (Henry Cavill, eventually) finds himself in Smallville, Kansas. He is raised by the Kents (Kevin Costner, Diane Lane), taught to be a good person and to hide his powers from others, who might be afraid of him or use it against him. It isn’t until much later in his life, when he is on odd job #35, that he is able to find an ancient alien space craft. There he finds the answers to his past, his race, and his purpose.

This unfortunately also sets off a beacon into space, allowing General Zod and his crew to find his location. They’ve been amassing a giant army and are looking for a new home. Thanks Kal-El, you doomed the Earth.

They show up, demand Kal-El turn himself over, or else the planet is kaput. Surely he is a man true to his word and will actually leave Earth alone, right? We also have Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Richard Schiff as random scientist FBI guy, Laurence Fishburne as The Daily Planet editor, and Christopher Meloni as bad ass army man.

Not to ruin the movie for you, but the entire time I thought Zod looked a bit like Geoffrey Arend.

I’ve already wrote a lot about the movie, but hold on to your butts, I have a lot more coming.

Zack Snyder is the man who brought us 300 and Watchmen, both of which I love on their own right, and is a man fully ingrained into the superhero world now. He has the ability to make a movie visually pleasing, but sometimes relies on too many film filters to take me out of it.

I hated the filtering for Man Of Steel, but the fight scenes are quite worthy of praise. They mostly involve aliens who move much faster and hit a lot harder than we can even fathom, yet Snyder was able to create fight scenes that could both A) Be followed and understood by an audience and B) show off really cool visual effects. Often times in fight scenes, you will be stuck with blurriness in the action, just not in this movie.

It was great watching Superman doing actual super things, whereas in Superman Returns, the whole movie was him lifting progressively heavier objects.

In addition to Snyder, the film also features Christopher Nolan as a writer and producer, so he can hopefully add some deeper elements to the story that Snyder usually lacks. Unfortunately, I thought the plot and characterizations were probably the weakest part of the film.

General Zod is an interesting villain, mostly because he isn’t Lex Luther. However I think they spent far too much time on Krypton early in the film, which seemed to exist just to give Crowe even more screen time and show off lots of CGI explosions. Unfortunately right after that, we had a series of awkward childhood flashbacks while Superman is an adult hiding from the world, making the early movie feel disjointed and odd. I have to admit, I think a lot could have been cut from the 143 minute storyline to make a bit more exciting movie.

Yes, I am claiming large parts of the Man Of Steel were boring, a sad conclusion. Great action scenes, okay acting, boring overall plot and set up. I really disliked Costner’s character. That guy was an idiot and I felt nothing during his biggest emotional scene of the movie. Heck, you’d think people living in Kansas would also know that when a Tornado is coming an overpass is NOT the best place to run and hide. I know that, and I’ve lived in the Midwest less than year. That isn’t why the film got the rating, but it really grinded my gears nonetheless.

Overall, Man Of Steel is a decent showing for a DC character I hate, but it still isn’t enough to fully love.

2 out of 4.

The FP was the third movie added to my Apocalypse Week, after the This Is The End and Rapture-Palooza. Before I describe it, you will want to know how I found out existed.

The main character from this movie, JTRO, was actually in This Is The End, as a cannibal near the end. Same costume, random as fuck cameo that most people won’t get from this vague vague movie. Yep.

But here is how I was introduced to the movie, through the IMDB description.

In a post apocalyptic future, two rival gangs fight for control of Frazier Park by playing “Beat Beat Revelation”, a deadly version of Dance, Dance, Revolution(TM).

“What? Don’t be a playa’ hata’, we just want to dance!” Right now you are probably thinking “Nope. No Way. No way at all. This is fake.” Too bad. This is 100% real and happening. And also a parody. Need more proof. Look below.

No words needed. Yep, they are dancing alright. But what makes it deadly? Nothing. From what I could tell. I thought the loser would get killed or something, but no, they just dance for street cred.

Well, when the two gangs are fighting, BTRO (Brandon Barrera, who looks a lot like Josh Radnor in that first picture.) is going against the other teams leader L Dubba E (Lee Valmassey). Unfortunately, during an extremely challenging song, BTRO finds himself losing and eventually dies.

How? I dunno. Heart attack or something. But his younger brother, JTRO (Jason Trost) is completely miserable after this battle, so he swears off the gang and runs off on his own, never to dance again. OH NO!

Well, years later, Frazier Park is in ruin. The other gang has won and it sucks. After a series of big speeches from KCDC (Art Hsu), he comes back to the fray, earns some more street cred, and challenges L Dubba E for the title again.

Also he has an eyepatch. For some reason. I feel like I should mention more names of people in this movie. Like Stacy. Okay. That isn’t weird. How bout Beat Box Busta Bill, Sugga Nigga, and Stacy’s Dad. Damn that last one is weird.

Either way, this movie is completely ridiculous, as expected. But it wasn’t ridiculous enough. It is clearly a parody, everything is over the top, the dialogue is ridiculous, it cannot be meant to be taken seriously, so I won’t.

But seriously, where is my deadly DDR game? They only danced a few times in this game, and it all looked tame as shit. I wanted more extreme.

Maybe that was the parody part. Making me wish it was better? Either way, I can’t give it an amazing review. Just because the movie was a lot tamer than I would have hoped.

2 out of 4.

I have decided to have a theme week. Are you ready? Apocalypse Week. End of the world shit. You know. It seemed appropriate with the new movies coming out this week. In case you are curious in the future which movies are part of the week, I have tagged them all as Apocalypse Week as well as their normal tags.

This mostly came about because I finally had access to Rapture-Palooza and watched it a few days after seeing This Is The End. Similar theme? Heck yeah. It was pretty easy to find a few more to shoe-in too.

I’d like to get my shoe into Anna. Or something perverted/sexy. I am bad at this.

As already stated, this movie begins with the apocalypse! Yay! Lindsey (Anna Kendrick) and her boyfriend Ben (John Francis Daley, who you may remember from Freaks and Geeks) didn’t believe in any god figure, so they were left behind, along with most of their family. Well, their moms were set. Kind of. But that is it. So now they have to try to live life as if there was no fire and brimstone, because what else are they going to do?

Anyways, life is very different. We have wraiths running around to cause trouble, their neighbor (Thomas Lennon) came back as a zombie, but for whatever reason just wants to mow his line. There are meteors that fall from the sky, usually to ruin their day.

Hell, Ben’s dad (Rob Corddry) sold his soul to the devil. Satan, or as he likes to call himself The Beast (Craig Robinson) has taken up residence in Seattle, and is out to party. Rapture is basically over, hell on Earth has happened, and people are just trying to get by.

But then he spies poor little old Lindsey, and he wants her. He wants her hard. Not just because she is a virgin either. So he asks her out, knowing that if she says no, he will kill everyone she has ever loved. Well damn. Guess she has to go out with him. Not without working on a plan to kill/trap him for a thousand years first though!

Rob Heubel plays a security guard, and Ken Jeong plays…eh. I don’t want to tell you.

Basically every time they are together, you can hear Craig Robinson say graphic things to Anna Kendrick. Worth the admission price? Probably.

Craig Robinson may have saved this movie from being a total dud. Yes, it felt like he was just playing a very arrogant and cocky version of himself, but he really bombarded Anna Kendrick with some vile stuff, and she took it all like a champ.

Anna also served as our narrator and I found her voice and attitude great for the role, giving zero fucks about the world falling apart around her. I also enjoyed a few of the gags, including pot head Wraiths, and the part near the end with Ken Jeong…even if it made very little sense.

However, it wasn’t an amazing movie on its own. It is okay, decent, not horrible, just not amazing. I understand why it never hit theaters, it is just plain weird. Yes, I do like weird, but this is a different type of weird I’d say. Quirky maybe. It could have been a lot better, and shit, might have worked best as a TV show. I could see the whole movie being an entire season, not like 22 episodes, but a solid 10-12. Introducing new problems, and just kind of nonchalantly dealing with them and giving not a fuck in the world.

2 out of 4.