Load up with the trailer for Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City

Posted on October 7, 2021 by Leonard Wilson

It looks like Sony released a trailer for Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, starring Kaya Scodelario (Crawl) as Claire Redfield, Avan Jogia (Starz’ Now Apocalypse) as Leon Kennedy, Hannah John-Kamen (Ant-Man and the Wasp) as Jill Valentine, Robbie Amell (The Babysitter) as Chris Redfield, Tom Hooper (The Umbrella Society) as Albert Wesker and Lily Gao as Ada Wong (Kin).

Director Johannes Roberts (The Strangers) looks like he’s bringing in elements from Capcom’s Resident Evil remake (originating back in 2002 on the Nintendo Gamecube), as well as Resident Evil 2. We have Lisa Trevor from the original and William Birkin (played by Band of Brothers & Ravenous‘ Neal McDonough), though it seems to be more of a mashup.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City premieres in Theatres on November 24th.

Enjoy!

The Babysitter, Review by Case Wright

Posted on October 17, 2018 by casewright

The Babysitter, directed by McG- Lethal Weapon, Supernatural, Aim High, and Citizen Cane. Ok fine, the last one was a bit of a fib, but he’s had an amazing career known for shows that are action heavy, pop, and have a lot of humor. I did watch this one on the elliptical as a to refresh my memory, but I first watched it on a date night for a Netflix and Chill session. The Babysitter was so fun; it doesn’t take itself seriously, until it has to. Like Supernatural, the movie balances the horror with the character arcs to pull you into the story. By the end, you genuinely care about how these characters end up.

Horror is often treated as the stepchild of film because people are attracted by the low budget/high profit payoff potential and think anyone can do it: so wrong. In fact, there are times you have an immensely talented director, but he or she is not meant for this genre – see- https://unobtainium13.com/2018/10/01/all-the-boys-love-mandy-lane-aka-all-the-bland-love-blandy-lane-review-by-case-wright/

Also, writing horror can create masterpieces like 28 Days Later- https://unobtainium13.com/2016/10/24/28-days-later/ . Horror screenwriters can also create misery-inducing steaming piles of terribleness for me or for whomever will have the excruciating experience of having to review it- see- https://unobtainium13.com/2016/11/20/channel-zero-welcome-home-season-1-ep-6-alt-title-so-very-boring/ In The Babysitter, Brian Duffield (Quarantine and soon to be released Vivian Hasn’t Been Herself Lately) delivers a fun popping script with fast moving acts, clear arcs, humor, gore, and clever buildups and payoffs. I am looking forward to seeing the rest of his art and you should too! The Babysitter is not in the Oscar worthy category of The Shining, but it is still brilliant because it succeeds in doing what is most important – it entertains. You care about the protagonist and where he’s going and amazingly sometimes root a little for the villain because she is acted by the uber-talented Samara Weaving.

The film is basically Satanic Home Alone; in fact, they reference Home Alone in the film. Cole, the protagonist, is a bullied awkward 12 year old with a heart of gold and no self-confidence. Yes, I know that reads like a fairly common protagonist, but his nerdiness is so authentic and the dialogue is so real that you buy it. Trust me, I’ve never led you wrong before. Cole has a quasi-friend in the Girl Next Door- Melanie, but Cole’s true friend (seemingly) is Bee (Samara Weaving) his babysitter. She genuinely likes movies and nerdy things just like Cole and we learn she was also an awkward teen herself prior to meeting Cole.

Bee seems to be perfect, but she is a satanic worshipper who wants to sacrifice one nerd, harvest some of Cole’s blood, and read from I guess the Necronomicon to be granted a wish of her choosing from Satan. Then again, we all have our faults. We get to see and not be told how close Bee and Cole have become over the years. They love film and goofy dancing. Cole stays up past his bedtime to spy on his beloved Bee to see what she is up to after he purportedly asleep. Sadly, he watches Bee commit an over the top murder of a seduced nerd. The deaths in this film are Final Destination awesomepants! Watch The Babysitter just for the deaths alone! Bee has cohorts: Robbie Amell who is very good in this. He plays the murderous jock expertly and if you’re so inclined he’s shirtless A LOT with aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaabs. There’s also a lot of great humor with the somewhat bumbling satanic worshippers that are also out to get Cole and his sweet sweet AB Negative.

They need to harvest Cole’s blood to finish the evil wishing spell because he’s an obvious virgin, but he fights back. It’s not corny like Home Alone; he mostly gets lucky or barely survives by finding weapons along the way- No booby traps. The lack of traps and gags during the fight scenes keeps the story in the horror realm with the comedy sprinkled like a Mrs. Dash that doesn’t make you want to vomit.

There is a eventually a final battle between Bee and Cole. She offers to make him part of the wish and live with him forever. Now, I’m not saying he should’ve immediately taken her up on this offer. Maybe some negotiating would’ve been worthwhile, but really Cole…not even taking one beat to consider this pretty awesome offer. I think that would’ve been fun as an alternate ending, but without fighting the final battle, Cole would not have realized his story arc as a true hero. I have to admit if I were the 12 year old nerdy boy and Bee had made the same offer to me, I would have just been trying to figure out how many sock pairs I needed for our evil journey!

I want to make a special note here for the amazing performance of Samara Weaving. She played the heck out of this role. She could believably turn from evil to seductress to friend to good on a dime. With the right opportunities, Samara Weaving will be the next Nicole Kidman! Really!

Happy Horrorthon! Please check out my other stuff and tell your friends to read it as well!

TV Review: The X-Files 11.1 “My Struggle III” (dir by Chris Carter)

Posted on January 3, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Well, let’s get this over with…

(Seriously, if I ever get tired of “Stay supple!,” that’ll probably be my new catch phrase…)

As you my remember, way back in 2016, I reviewed the 10th season of The X-Files. With the exception of the episode that featured Rhys Darby, I didn’t care much for it. In fact, the episode that was set in Texas almost drove me to throw a shoe at the TV. However, the 10th season did end with a big cliffhanger and, since I hate the idea of a story going unfinished, I knew I would have to watch the 11th season whenever it premiered. And I also knew that I’d have to review it because that’s what I do.

Well, tonight, the 11th season premiered. Armed with as much knowledge as one can hope to gain from scanning Wikipedia, I twice watched My Struggle III.

The episode began with a lengthy monologue from the Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis), in which he talked about how, if the American people knew about what was truly going on in the darkest corners of the government, there would be riots in the streets. Personally, I love conspiracy theories and I’m generally opposed to all forms of controlling legal authority so I enjoyed that part of the show. The episode managed to work footage of every U.S. President except for Obama into the opening conspiracy montage. Personally, if I had edited the show, I would snuck Obama in there just to mess with people and their expectations. But that’s just me!

Anyway, as much fun as that little conspiracy monologue may have been, I was more concerned with how the show was going to deal with the fact that the world literally ended at the end of season 10. Well, it was quickly revealed that nothing that happened during My Struggle II actually happened. Instead, it was all just a vision that Scully had. Apparently, it’s a premonition of what will happen unless Mulder … does something.

Does what exactly? I’m not sure and, to be honest, I’m not really sure that the show does either. I understand that this episode is meant to be part of a bigger mythology and, as a result, it was supposed to be a bit open-ended. However, as I watched My Struggle III, I got the feeling that the episode was mostly just something that was hastily whipped up so that the show could do away with season 10’s disastrous finale. And it was hard not to feel that, narratively, the show took the easy way out.

The majority of the episode was made up of Mulder driving his car from location to location, searching for the Cigarette Smoking Man. This led to Mulder breaking into a mansion and having a conversation with Mr. Y (Alexandre Campion) and Erika Price (Barbara Hershey) about aliens and the secret history of the world. To be honest, it was kind of boring and it didn’t really hold my attention.

Meanwhile, the Cigarette Smoking Man and Agent Reyes (Annabeth Gish) were having a conversation with Skinner (Mitch Pileggi). During the conversation, the Cigarette Smoking Man revealed that he, and not Mulder, is the true father of Scully’s son, William.

And twitter exploded in rage.

Don’t fear, twitter! There’s always a good chance that next week’s episode will open with the Cigarette Smoking Man revealing that he actually isn’t the father or maybe it’ll just turn out that someone else was having a vision. By dismissing season 10’s cliffhanger as just being a dream (or a vision or premonition or whatever), The X-Files has reminded us that nothing on the show actually means anything. Who needs to maintain continuity or narrative integrity when you can just shrug and say, “Well, y’see, it’s all a part of the conspiracy…”

(As I watched tonight’s episode, I found myself thinking about Twin Peaks: The Return. No matter how weird or convoluted Twin Peaks got, I still never doubted that David Lynch did have a definite destination in mind. That’s not a feeling that I got from tonight’s episode of The X-Files.)

Now, here’s the good news! I have heard, from people who I trust, that the upcoming episodes are nothing like the premiere. Apparently, the premiere was one of those “we have to do it” things. The upcoming episode will be stand-alone episodes, much like the one where Mulder met the Were-Monster.

So, with that in mind, I will tune in next week to see if episode 2 is any better than episode 1.

Will you?

Playing Catch-Up With The Films of 2016: Nine Lives (dir by Barry Sonnenfeld)

Posted on December 25, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Much like Warcraft, Nine Lives is another film that came out last year and got reviews that were far more negative than they should have been. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Nine Lives is technically a pretty stupid movie and it stars a lot of actors who probably should be doing something a little bit more substantial with their time. That being said, it’s not as if Nine Lives ever promised to be anything more than what it is.

Two facts about Nine Lives:

Number one — it did not make me physically ill, which already makes it a better movie than Hardcore Henry.

Number two — it’s all about cats! After being more or less pushed to the side by The Secret Life of Pets (which featured only one tokenish kitty), cats finally get a movie of their very own!

It may not be a very good movie but that’s beside the point. KITTY POWER!

As for what the film is about — well, it’s a concept that is so silly and stupid and predictable that I’m not surprised that it was produced by a major American studio. (Except apparently, it wasn’t! Despite taking place in America, featuring a totally American cast, and English dialogue, this is actually a French film, produced by Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp.) Kevin Spacey is an emotionally cold and ruthless businessman who discovers that he does have a heart when he switches bodies with a cat. Don’t ask how he switches bodies, it’s just too silly for me to talk about. The important thing is that he switches and it leads to a lot of litter box jokes that made me, as a proud cat owner, cringe.

BUT — and here’s why this film is not as bad you may think, the cat is really cute. And if a cat did speak with a human voice, chances are that voice would sound a lot like Kevin Spacey’s. It may sound like a pretty weird role for a two-time Oscar winner and multiple Emmy nominee (and don’t even get me started on the Golden Globes) but dammit, Kevin throws himself into voicing that feline’s thoughts and good for him!

Plus, this is yet another film that features a totally out there Christopher Walken cameo. The presence of Christopher Walker automatically elevates any film.

Nine Lives may not be good but it’s not terrible.

(Of course, dog lovers will hate it….)

A Few Thoughts On The X-Files 10.6 “My Struggle II”

Posted on February 22, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(WARNING: This review will contain spoilers.)

I have to admit that, after I finished watching the finale of The X-Files “revival,” I felt totally and completely confused. I wasn’t really sure what I had just seen and I don’t mean that in a good way. I wondered if maybe, as a relatively new viewer of The X-Files, I simply did not have the necessary background information to follow the episode’s plot. And then I wondered if maybe I just had not been paying enough attention while I was watching. Maybe I was too ADD to follow an episode of The X-Files…

So, I rewatched the episode. I made sure to sit right in front of the TV and to turn on the closed captioning so that I would be able to understand what everyone was mumbling about. During the second viewing, I came to understand just why exactly I had been so confused. To say that the editing of My Struggle II was ragged would be an understatement. It was often difficult to figure out how much time had passed between scenes or where the characters were in relation to one another. The whole episode felt as if it had been haphazardly constructed, with scenes randomly tossed together. But then again, that’s been true of the entire season. Even the better episodes have shared that ragged quality. The parts, as good as they have occasionally been, have rarely added up to a coherent whole. I imagine that, if you were a fan of The X-Files before the revival, you might have enough of an emotional commitment, in Mulder and Scully as characters, that you can overlook the revival’s weaker moments. But for a new viewer, like me, it can get frustrating.

This has been a very uneven season. Season 10 was made up of 6 episodes, each of which seemed to have a totally different tone and outlook from the other. There’s been one great episode (Mulder & Scully Meet The Weremonster), one terrible episode (My Struggle), one mediocre episode (Babylon), and two episodes that were above average but nothing special (Founder’s Mutation, Home Again). For the first 40 minutes or so, I thought that My Struggle II would be another mediocre episode. But, towards the very end, things started to get better. After spending most of the episode separated from each other, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson finally got to share a scene. (The only time that Duchovny and Anderson seem truly invested in their roles is when they’re playing off of each other. Each brings out the best in the other.) And the scene ended with a cliffhanger that was so batshit crazy that, almost despite my better instincts, I found myself saying, “Yes, give us a season 11 because I have to know what just happened!”

And really, thank God for that cliffhanger. A good final scene can make up for so much. My Struggle II opens with Mulder missing and, it’s a sign of that ragged editing that I mentioned earlier, that I wasn’t sure how long he had been missing or who exactly was aware that he was missing. It turns out that Mulder’s missing because he’s busy driving to South Carolina so he can confront the Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis), the big villain from the show’s original run. Apparently, the CSM is aware that humanity is about to be wiped out by an alien plague but he has a cure and he wants Mulder to join him and a few others that he has judged worthy of survival.

Meanwhile, Tad O’Malley (Joel McHale) is back! When we last heard, Tad had vanished and his web site had been shut down. And yet, at the start of this episode, Tad has suddenly returned and his web site is once again active. No mention is made of where O’Malley has been and nobody — not even Scully — seems to be curious about the details. Maybe O’Malley was never really missing in the first place. It’s hard to tell with this show.

Anyway, the main reason that Tad shows up is so that he can announce, during his podcast, that humanity’s DNA has been corrupted with alien DNA and, as a result, everyone is essentially a walking time bomb. This, of course, leads to rioting in the streets which is … odd. I mean, let’s be honest. He may look like Joel McHale and his show may be surprisingly well-produced but, ultimately, Tad is just a guy with a podcast. As I watched the original world react to Tad’s podcast, it occurred to me that Season 10 may be airing in 2016 but it still has a 2002 sensibility.

Working with Agent Einstein (Lauren Ambrose), Scully is able to use her DNA to create a cure for the virus. I’m not sure how that works but, in all fairness to The X-Files, this may be one of those plot points that would make more sense to me if I had watched more of the previous seasons of the show. By this point, Mulder has returned from confronting the CSM and is on the verge of dying from the virus. Scully announces that, in order to cure Mulder, they have to get DNA from their son William but she’s not sure where he is and…

AND THAT’S WHEN A BIG OLD FLYING SAUCER APPEARS IN THE SKY ABOVE!

And, as frustrated as I had been with My Struggle II, I cheered a little when that UFO showed up. Ever since this revival started, I have been predicting that William would return. Now, I don’t know for sure who is in that flying saucer but seriously, it has to be William, doesn’t it? I mean, who else would it be? As frustrated as I have often been with The X-Files, I ended My Struggle II wanting a season 11 because I want to know who is in that flying saucer.

And, ultimately, I guess that has to be counted as a point in the show’s favor. When a show can be as flawed as The X-Files has been this season and still leave the viewer hoping for more, that has to be considered a success of some sort.

So, my final verdict on My Struggle II: Uneven but intriguing when it mattered. I think the same can be said of Season 10 as a whole.

Will The X-Files return for an 11th season? Well, if it doesn’t, there will be a lot of disappointed people on twitter. Assuming the show does return and that William is on that flying saucer, can we all start calling him “Sculder?”

Seriously, I’ve been trying to make Sculder a thing for a while now…