In this episode, the latest batch of students at Toronto’s Degrassi Community School decided that the perfect way to end their summer is to go up to an isolated cabin in the woods. I know, it doesn’t make much sense to me, either. No one invites Clare because, by this point in the series, Clare had started to transform into Canada’s most dramatic yandere. However, because Clare is upset over her mom marrying the father of her ex-boyfriend, she goes up to the cabin anyway and ends up getting lost in the woods.
Of course, all sorts of weird things are happening around the cabin. Are the Degrassi students about to fall victim to the Canadian version of Michael Myers? Or do they just have an overactive imagination?
This episode originally aired on October 24, 2011, in Canada. It didn’t make it’s way over to the U.S. until November 18th, which definitely diluted its horror-themed impact. In many ways, it’s typical of later-era Degrassi, in that the plot is kind of fun and cute but you can’t help but think about how much more fun it would be if it was Ellie, Emma, Manny, Craig, and Spinner in the cabin instead of their replacements. But then again, that’s true to life. No one stays in high school forever.
Anyway, enjoy the horrorthon’s final episode of Degrassi! Tomorrow, we start a new show!
(Hi there! So, as you may know because I’ve been talking about it on this site all year, I have got way too much stuff on my DVR. Seriously, I currently have 162 things recorded! I’ve decided that, on February 15th, I am going to erase everything on the DVR, regardless of whether I’ve watched it or not. So, that means that I’ve now have only have a month to clean out the DVR! Will I make it? Keep checking this site to find out! I recorded Sea Change off of Lifetime on September 17th, 2017! Incidentally, Sea Change was the final 2017 Lifetime movie that I had sitting on my DVR. I have now watched and reviewed all of the Lifetime films that I recorded in 2017!)
Based on the novel by Aimee Friedman, Sea Change tells the story of Miranda and T.J.
Miranda (Emily Rudd) is a fiercely intelligent and independent teenager who, having lost her father, is spending the summer on an island with the mother (Maria Drizzia) that she barely knows. It’s a beautiful island, one that is very popular with rich vacationers, the majority of whom have spoiled children. It’s a struggle for Miranda to fit in. She has deeper interests than just popularity and money. Add to that, she doesn’t swim. With everyone on the island obsessed with getting in the water, Mirana is stuck on the land.
T.J. (Keenan Tracy) lives on the island year-round. His family is not rich. T.J. works for a living and he’s not going to let anyone push him around just because they happen to have more money than he does. When Miranda first sees T.J. she notices his scars. When she sees him a second time, the scars have disappeared. When Miranda falls into the water, T.J. saves her from drowning. T.J. claims that he just dived after her but Miranda gets the feeling that there’s something more to it, almost as if he was already in the water when she fell in. When he grabbed her underwater and led her back to the surface, there was something different about his eyes…
Could it have anything to do with the legendary Seawalkers? The Seawalkers are said to be half-human and half-fish. Everyone knows the story has to be a myth but, after T.J. rescues her, Miranda isn’t quite sure. Could the Seawalkers be real and could they be connected to the secrets that Miranda believes her mother to be hiding from her?
You’ve probably already guesses the answers to all of those questions but that’s okay. Sea Change won’t win many points for originality. If you’ve seen any other film adaptation of a YA novel, you’ll be able to guess almost everything that happens in Sea Change before it happens. But, again, that doesn’t matter. Sea Change is a well-made and likable film, one that is full of gorgeous imagery. (The film really makes excellent use of that island setting.) Keenan Tracy and Emily Rudd are both talented actors and they have a nice chemistry. Underneath all of the talk of Seawalkers, there’s a very real and sincere sweetness to their relationship. You find yourself hoping that things work out for them and really, in order to work, that’s pretty much the only thing that a film like this has to accomplish.
Sea Change ends with the possibility of a sequel. Personally, if they did make a sequel, I’d watch it.
Well, here we are! We have reached the end of the first week of January, 2017 and that means that it is time for me to start listing my favorite movies, books, songs, and TV shows of the previous year! Let’s start things off by taking a look at the best that the SyFy network had to offer in 2016!
Below, you will find my nominees for the best SyFy films and performances of the previous year. The winners are listed in bold and starred. As you’ll quickly notice, it was a good year for films about zombies, spiders, and sharks!
(Please note: When it comes to determining the nominees, I have used the credits for each film as listed on the Internet Movie Database. If anyone feels that they have been miscredited, feel free to let me know and I’ll correct the mistake. Thanks!)
Best Picture
2 Lava 2 Lantula, produced by Neil Elman, Anthony Frankhauser, Lisa M. Hansen, Paul Hertzber
Atomic Shark, produced by Tanya Bellamy, Diane Boone, Matt Chiasson, Angela Meredith Furst, Griff Furst, Stephen Furst, M. Juan Gonzalez, Ross Herbert, Howie Klein, Som Kohanzadeh, Yoram Kohanzadeh, Isiah LaBorde, Kevin Lamb, Daniel March, Will Matherne, David Poughatsch, Lee C. Rogers, Miguel Sandoval, Arthur Scanlan, Ben Yimlimai
Dead 7, produced by Paul Bales, Nick Carter, David L. Garber, David Michael Latt, David Rimawi, Micho Rutare, Dylan Vox
Isle of the Dead, produced by Paul Bales, Lauren Elizabeth Hood, David Michael Latt, David Rimawi
*The Night Before Halloween, produced by Blake Corbet, Priscilla Galvez, Christina O’Shea-Daly, Marek Povisal, Lance Samuels, Mary Anne Waterhouse
Ozark Sharks,produced by Kenneth M. Badish, Sam Claitor, Eric Davies, Daniel Lewis, Jordan Lewis, Pierre-Andre Rochat, Tommy Talley
Well, first off, that’s what I tend to do. However, on top of that, I was also stirring because I was watching SyFy’s latest original film, The Night Before Halloween. I was excited because The Night Before Halloween was full of Degrassi actors!
For instance, Jahmil French played the nerdy but cool Dave Turner on Degrassi. In The Night Before Halloween, he plays Kyle. Kyle’s a teenager with a curse. Basically, unless he can trick someone into killing another person, a supernatural creature will kill him on Halloween night. It’s a bit like the It Follows curse, except that the curse isn’t passed on by sex. Instead, it’s passed by fooling someone else into committing murder. In other words, transmitting The Night Before Halloween curse is a lot less fun than transmitting the It Follows curse.
On Degrassi, Justin Kelly played Jake Martin, a handsome and lovable stoner. In The Night Before Halloween, Justin Kelly plays Adam, who is handsome and lovable and probably likes to get high, even though we never see him do so in the film. Adam, unfortunately, is friends with Kyle. When Kyle tricks Adam in taking part in a prank that leads to the electrocution of Beth (Natalie Ganzhorn), Adam finds himself being pursued by the monster. Can he and his girlfriend, Megan (Bailee Madison), survive?
On Degrassi, Alex Harrouch played Leo, the abusive boyfriend (and briefly, husband) of Alli. In The Night Before Halloween, Harrouch plays a much more sympathetic character, Wyatt. At first, Wyatt is likable and nerdy but then Kyle tricks him into helping to kill Beth. Leo is the first of the friends to understand what has happened but, when he tried to inform his friends, they ignored his calls and texts. So, as Leo puts it, he made some new friends, with names like Benny and Oxy. Leo has had to do some terrible things to survive and he’s been left a haunted shell of his former self.
The final member of this group of friends is Lindsay. Lindsay is played by Kiana Madeira, who does not have a Degrassi connection but still does a good job in her role. Lindsay may start as a skeptic but soon, she’s willing to do almost anything to get rid of the curse.
Anyway, of all the It Follows-inspired films that showed up on SyFy this October, The Night Before Halloween was definitely the best. It was well-acted and directed and the supernatural monster (which usually manifested itself as a swarm of flies) was creepy. Best of all, the film fully embraced and explored the question of how far people would go to survive. In The Night Before Halloween, the only way to escape the curse is to betray someone. While you may not be surprised when the friends start to betray each other, you’ll still never guess just how far one of them is willing to go. You may even find yourself considering just how far you would go to save your life.
The Night Before Halloween is a very well-done SyFy shocker. Even if it didn’t have the Degrassi connection, it would still be one to track down.
Usually these roundups are short, and I like it that way, but not this time. Not by choice either. These movies just happen to give me a lot to talk about. To borrow from one of my all time favorite TV Shows Quantum Leap: “Oh, boy!”
Strawberry Summer (2012) – Man, was this a stinker! This is like a prototype version of Recipe For Love. You have a girl who comes into the life of a male star with problems. That star is pretending to be something they are not. They have talent, but it’s being hidden by their fake persona. The girl helps him to throw that facade aside and be himself. The two walk off in to the sunset together. Simple. Shouldn’t be hard to do, right? Here’s how you screw it up.
In Recipe For Love, she is assigned to ghostwrite a TV cook’s cookbook. She was in a job position she didn’t care for, so she has a strong motivation to make this work and push past his initial standoff nature. In Strawberry Summer, she’s basically a stalker. She lives in a small rural town in the California Salinas Valley where they are going to hold a strawberry festival. She’s the queen. She uses the fact that the country singer’s manager is an old college friend of her’s to get him to come and perform. Then she all but proceeds to jump him. But of course she can’t, so instead she looks up information about him online so she can get closer to him. This all plays out rather innocently, but that’s what she’s doing. They screwed this up by removing any good reason for her to be in his life. She’s just a really big fan who thinks she can fix a celebrity she likes a lot. In real life those people have restraining orders put on them. Have his aunt live in town and she invites him to the festival where the rest of the film can then proceed. There, I fixed this part of the movie. I said this part because there are other blunders like the computer screens.
I don’t think I have seen any other Hallmark movie show the screens of a computer more than this one does. The computer screens are hilariously fake. You can actually see that the URL is a local file. In one case she is supposed to be looking at a pseudo Wikipedia page for the singer, but it’s referred to as “Internet Web Search Online Encyclopedia”. When she typed in the search it was called “Internet Encyclopedia Search”. The URL is called “C:\Users\LLP\Desktop\Jason Wiki Page.htm”. They couldn’t call it Wikipedia, but it’s in the URL of the page. And LLP stands for Larry Levinson Productions who seems to make all of these Hallmark movies.
In general, they have the most generic titles for things: “Video Search” and “search engine”. That’s not too uncommon in movies. Remarkably generic, but I’ve seen some stupid ways of avoiding saying Google. However, while she uses “Video Search” at the beginning to show her Mom a video of the singer, later in the movie the singer is talking to his manager and the manager says he saw what he did because there’s this thing called YouTube. But that’s not all! While she is doing a search on “search engine” we can see the box in the upper right corner of Internet Explorer for doing searches that says Google. I can’t do these justice. I apologize for the quality of these screenshots, but I watched this on TV and this was the only way I could get these.
Along with everything else, notice that the “Community Theater” has an area code for Mexico. They couldn’t even be bothered to do a Google search to put the area code for where the movie takes place. I’m guessing they just made it up. You might say I’m nitpicking and that of course I noticed because I have a degree in Computer Science, but the reason I bring up all these errors is because these screens don’t need to be there. All she does is look at the screen and read it out loud anyways. Have her look at the screen, but don’t show it, then have her talk or make a phone call to her local Mexican Salinas Valley Community Theater. There! I fixed this part of the movie too. But there’s more.
She is the head of a glee club. The members of the glee club want to do R.E.M. or Journey for the singing contest at the festival. But no, that would mean LLP would have to spend money on this production so it’s suddenly important for the kids to do When The Saints Go Marching In. She also says she picked it because it’s one of the top marching band songs. Marching band? I thought they were a glee club? If they are a glee club, then do Shiny Happy People. If they are a marching band, then do Separate Ways (Worlds Apart). In fact, when I went to Cal their marching band did that song. And if you were confused about which they were before the ending, then the performance itself isn’t going to help.
I can only guess that they were going to do a marching band, but then must have realized how ridiculous the kids would look or it would cost too much, but they already had the uniforms and they couldn’t change the script. I don’t know! I don’t know! And no, they can’t sing well either. No worries though, because apparently the 11 other acts, which we don’t see, must be abominable and these kids win. But this part is even worse. The rationale she gives the kids for going with When The Saints Go Marching In is that the important part is taking a song and making it yours. Fine, but then why is the rest of the film about how the singer needs to stop riding his one hit wonder song that he didn’t write to do his own material instead? Oh, and since I don’t know where else to stick it, when he announces he actually grew up in New York City, he then corrects himself to say “not those parts”, but “the good parts”. What parts exactly are “those parts”? Parts that are so well known and looked down on by rural folk that it’s really important for him to say “the good parts”. Oh, and he can’t sing either. He just does a generic Hank Williams impersonation.
Oh, then there’s the scene where he eats strawberries. Apparently, he’s never eaten them before. Fine. Then he has a major allergic reaction to them. Fine. But then he gets miraculously better. Really? Then of course Hallmark has to show commercials for EpiPen, which is a device you would use for just such a violent allergic reaction. And while I didn’t see it myself, according to other reviews, he later pops a strawberry in his mouth and nothing happens. Of course.
I guess the last thing worth mentioning is that this is my second Hallmark film that wastes Shelley Long. Why? Why get her and then completely waste her? I actually paused the movie, went to YouTube, and watched the morgue fight and desert jump scenes from Outrageous Fortune (1987) just to remind myself that she can be funny.
And there’s three more of these Hallmark movies to review still! At least the next one is decent.
Mystery Woman: Wild West Mystery (2006) – I’ll keep this one short. It’s like every other Mystery Woman movie I’ve reviewed except this one does something I really liked. It has Bruce Boxleitner in it, and instead of like Falling In Love With The Girl Next Door, which wasted him and Shelley Long, he has some great moments in this one. I loved the parts where he acted like a total slime ball. It was great! The movie as a whole is average, but it was so refreshing to see them actually use one of the older well established actors’ talents instead of squandering them. The plot is just an old Western TV star, played by Boxleitner, who does wild west shows and someone apparently is accidentally shot. Kellie Martin and Clarence Williams III are on the case. I just wish they had done Mystery Woman as an actual TV show so they could have dialed back on the complexity of the cases and actually developed Williams’ character’s spy past more instead of just teasing it all the time.
A Gift of Miracles (2015) – I don’t know how this time around I wound up with three Hallmark movies that were really bad. At least this one is better than Strawberry Summer.
The movie is about a girl who is a PhD candidate who doesn’t realize you have to write appropriately for your audience. Her advisor at the college tells her that, reminds her that she needs to make this pitch for her research work in order to get her PhD, and sends her to meet with a guy who apparently is good at writing. He tells her the same thing and agrees to help her. Then she storms off. Apparently, her mother died when she was one, a window breaks at night, and she finds a box with things in it that also contains a list of people.
Now she goes back to the guy and soon the two are off on an adventure to get these items to the people who are supposed to have them. Somehow this is going to help her writing. I don’t know how, but the film tells me so. Also, this guy apparently has quite the imagination because he has the worst looking poster for Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land I have ever seen on his wall.
Good thing they picked that book instead of Time Enough For Love. That one has the main character go back in time and hook up with his Mom. Seriously. But then again, why go with the book that is about a Christ-like figure and a hard line agnostic either? I’m not entirely convinced these people have actually read Heinlein. Maybe there’s something I’ve forgotten. It has been a long time since I read it.
Anyways, the two start going around and magical coincidences happen. Some aren’t so magical like running into someone you were looking for in a parking lot after you have to pull over having had car trouble. A few years back I was doing research on a club that was at my old high school in the 1980’s. Sometime in the next year or so after I was actual hit by someone in the club while in my car stopped at a light right outside that school. Really weird stuff happens. It didn’t mean my dead grandmother made it happen. I love when they bump into the lady in the parking lot and Rachel Boston, who plays the girl, gets a look on her face like she just saw Chuck Norris eat a Cadillac.
But apparently if you string enough of these things together, then a very scientifically minded person will start believing her dead mother is making things happen from the afterlife. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: FINE! But tell me how this has anything to do with her inability to recognize that you need to write for the audience who will read it? How is a belief that her mother is watching over her from beyond going to fix that? Why is that in the movie at all? Why couldn’t she just find the box. Set off to return the items. Place the romantic interest at a central point thru which she has to travel in order to return them like they did in My Boyfriends’ Dogs. Then she learns about her mother and believes she is watching over her. There! Movie fixed!
Oh, and her pitch that she needs to write to get her PhD is plagiarized from an actual WWF report (pg. 15, http://www.wwf.se/source.php/1154907/ebm_report%202006.pdf). Here’s her pitch and here’s the part of the real world report where they just ripped it off for the movie.
We actually see her type some of it at the end of the movie just in case we thought for a moment that maybe she was just reading this report earlier in the film.
The part about her inability to write for people who aren’t an expert in her field and her need to do so to get her degree had no reason to be part of this movie. All it does is send the message that when you are too scientific, believing in the afterlife will mean you can suddenly teach difficult things in easy to understand sentences and deliver them with passion. Couldn’t have any similarity to Jesus, right? Nah! Hallmark isn’t a religious station anymore. At least it is harmless rather than offensive like it was with Your Love Never Fails. At least I hope this was meant to be a religious reference and not just really bad writing like Strawberry Summer.
For the Love of Grace (2008) – Yes! We’ve made it to the last movie here and it also isn’t good. I have watched numerous Hallmark TV Movies that are obviously failed pilots, but this one is new to me. I swear it must have either been a three hour movie that was then edited down or was a whole season of a TV show that was edited together into a single movie.
Okay, she’s engaged to the guy who played The Shep (Kevin Jubinville) on Degrassi: TNG so we know he’s a douchebag already. The fireman who couldn’t look any more different from our Barbie main character grabs a piece of pizza, looks like he had his nose shoved in poop, then we see a couple pictures of a girl. That’s how we know his wife is dead. Then a fire happens, and for reasons I still am not sure of, he is walking by her house and saves her.
The most frustrating thing is how the female lead’s friend keeps telling her how much she changed after the fire. It’s infuriating because we only got to see her for a few minutes before the fire so there is no change as far as we are concerned. It’s just the way we see her in the first place. So, she’s suddenly into photography? Really, you don’t say. How does that matter to us! Oh, I mean except to sell Nikon cameras. Yeah, they make sure you know that camera is a Nikon camera. But honestly, why the photography when what she does is make a cookbook?
The rest is a love story that revolves around her finding out these fireman also do a lot of cooking. She was going to do a different book, but decides to do a fireman cookbook instead. And no, no one makes the joke about whether they serve dinner with Molotov cocktails.
The main problem with this film is that it has swiss cheese character and plot development. This could have been decent even though I kept looking at the two of them and thinking this would be awesome if that was Britney Spears and Danny Trejo. Yes, she has more chemistry with her female friend, but this still could have been okay if it didn’t keep making these leaps, then saying things as if we were there the whole time. It’s very annoying. However, this is the least worst of the three bad ones here.
Plus, it also has Justin Kelly from Degrassi: TNG in it as well! Obviously, the upcoming Lifetime Unauthorized Degrassi movie will be that while it appeared they were in school the whole time, they were actually starring in lots of Lifetime and Hallmark movies.
I really recommend that if you need to watch a movie with “For the Love of” in the title, then watch For the Love of Rusty. And while you’re at it: Adventures of Rusty, The Return of Rusty, The Son of Rusty, My Dog Rusty, Rusty Leads the Way, Rusty Saves a Life, and Rusty’s Birthday too. Cause German Shepherds rule!
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For those who read the beginning and made it to the end. Here’s a compilation of Oh, Boys! And yes, I’m aware that the show is basically about God sending a man around in time along with a guardian angel to fix things done by Satan.
I have to admit that, for the most petty of reasons, I was dreading the 2014 release of David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars.
This was despite the fact that I happen to be a big fan of just about everyone in the cast and David Cronenberg as a director. (I still say that Cosmopolisis one of the best films of the decade and I don’t care who disagrees.)
My initial issue with Maps to the Stars — and again, I admit this is really petty — was that Sasha Stone, over the Awards Daily web site, was so damn fanatical about singing the film’s praises. I have a theory that Sasha tends to overpraise certain films specifically so she can have an excuse to get angry and go off on a rant when they don’t receive any Oscar nominations. Ever since Sasha went batshit crazy over The King’s Speech beating The Social Network, Awards Daily has pretty much gone from being a site about the Oscars to being a site about Sasha screaming in the wilderness like a biblical prophet (and not one of the interesting biblical prophets, like Elijah. We’re talking about Haggai here.) From what I had read about Maps To The Stars and judging from the response that it got at Cannes (where, despite mixed reviews, it did win an award when Julianne Moore was named best actress), this film seemed like the epitome of another deliberate lost cause.
Fortunately, the release date of Maps To The Stars was moved to 2015 and civilization was spared from having to deal with a thousand “If Cronenberg doesn’t get an Oscar, society is doomed!” rants. Instead, we had to deal with a thousand “If Hillary Swank doesn’t win for The Homesman, society is doomed!” rants.
“Okay,” you’re saying, “that’s great Lisa. Thank you for whatever all that was. But what about the movie itself!? Is it any good?”
Eh … I guess.
I mean, Maps to The Stars isn’t a bad movie. It’s not bad at all. It’s just maddeningly uneven.
One of my favorite up-and-coming stars, Mia Wasikowska, has a great role in it. She plays a schizophrenic, named Agatha, who comes to Hollywood. Agatha’s arms and the back of her neck are covered with burn scars and she is always taking pills. She is also obsessed with a vile teen star named Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird). There’s more to her obsession than you might originally think.
Benjie, meanwhile, has just gotten out of rehab and he is literally one of the worst characters ever. The film does try to build up some sympathy for him by revealing just how fucked up his home life is. His fragile mother (Olivia Williams) always seems to be on the verge of collapse. His father (John Cusack) is a glib and shallow psychologist. Benjie serves as a stand-in for every child star who has been destroyed by Hollywood. Unfortunately, the film devotes so much time to Benjie being a monster that it never really allows us to see why Benjie’s a star in the first place. Evan Bird gives such a boring, uninteresting, and flat performance that you never really buy the idea of Benjie could be a success. (Say what you will about Justin Bieber, he does at least have a cute smile. Evan Bird can’t even claim that.)
Agatha meets a lot of people in Hollywood, including a limo driver (Robert Pattinson) who is an aspiring screenwriter. She eventually gets a job working for actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore). Havana, herself the daughter of a legendary and self-destructive actress, is a monster but — unlike, Benjie — she’s a sympathetic monster. She’s a talented actress who grew up in Hollywood and now, because she’s no longer in her 20s, is being discarded by Hollywood. Havana is as much a victim as a victimizer.
Anyway, the film kinda wanders about. Along with all the other stuff going on, the characters are regularly visited by ghosts. Secrets are revealed. Hearts are broken. Lives are lost. And yes, relevant points about Hollywood are made but … well, so what? There’s nothing in Maps to the Stars that you couldn’t learn from rewatching Sunset Boulevardand Sunset Boulevard is a lot less pretentious. Plus, William Holden was a much better actor than Evan Bird.
As for Cronenberg’s direction — well, Maps to the Stars is definitely David Cronenberg on autopilot. It’s filled with identifiable Cronenberg touches. The emphasis placed on Agatha’s scars, for instance, is trademark Cronenberg. But still, Cronenberg’s direction often just seems to be going through the motions. Unlike his work in the far more interesting and challenging Cosmopolis (not to mention Eastern Promises), Cronenberg doesn’t really seem to care that much about the story that he’s telling.
Maps to the Stars is worth watching for the performances of Julianne Moore and Mia Wasikowska. Otherwise, it’s just another well-made but only occasionally interesting Hollywood melodrama.
Through the Shattered Lens 