Atlantic Rim Ft. Tropical Mary

Year of Release: 2013
Genre: Action / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 3 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

If I’m being totally honest, after AE: Apocalypse Earth, I was feeling a little fragile. My inner sci-fi geek can take a lot, but that movie gave me a fair beating. Nevertheless, I’m not one to turn down an epic mockbuster, and Atlantic Rim was just too great an opportunity to pass up. So, with Tropical Mary, Stygian Mole, The Occult Specialist, and our new friend Ms Misery in attendance, we sat down to watch this movie. My my my my my. I don’t know anything about Pacific Rim, so this movie had to sell me with only what it had to offer. What might that be, you ask? Well, it has the usual terrible CGI, atrocious acting and cheap sets that one would expect from an Asylum production, but it also has some of the most ADD-ridden editing I’ve ever seen in a film. I know it’s sci-fi, but good God not everything can teleport that quickly! Needless to say, though, this movie is a ton of fun, although I would recommend watching it on the tail-end of a movie night so you have the benefit of mild delirium to cover up some of its not-so-great moments.

Not conspicuous enough!

Deep at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean lurks one of mankind’s greatest threats: giant amphibious dinosaurs with backwards knees! No seriously, how these things can walk is a marvel in itself. No one knows where they’ve come from or how they’ve managed to survive down there for so long without any of us noticing, but they’re about to start wreaking all kinds of havoc. The first sign of their existence that we experience is when one of them, with no provocation and unknown intent, leaps up from the sea floor to destroy an oil rig. Apart from a quick and somewhat greasy lunch we don’t know why they are suddenly deciding to attack now, and no one back on land knows what happened to the oil rig / ate its crew, so it’s up to the military to fall back on some half-baked, untested battle plan to solve this maritime mystery.

An epic battle deserves epic Asylum product placement!

The plan? Send 3 gigantic robots worth $500 billion down to the ocean floor to see where the hell the oil rig went and what the hell may have dragged it down there. These robots will be piloted by the best pilots the program’s remaining $15 worth of budget could find. Decked out in what appear to be wetsuits held together by pieces of coloured duct tape, White Douche, Token Black Guy (aka TYREESE!) and Generic Blonde descend to the bottom of the Atlantic to check things out. The mission is plagued with problems – the control room in the bots becomes sweltering after descending more than 3 feet into the ocean, they’re controlled using what appears to be joysticks from old arcade machines, and they tend to shut down at random (this, for some reason, also sucks all of the available oxygen out of the robot’s interior), so it’s all rather slow going. Oh yeah, and there’s that giant monster floating in the background trying to eat them.

The movie’s token stroke victim.

The violence quickly escalates from this point – the monster appears on land, we’re treated to half-a-dozen shots of the monster looped and mirrored maybe 20 times, and suddenly there are dead people everywhere. Why? We’re not really sure. Now, it becomes obvious that the American Government can’t just allow these beasts to run around Manhattan, but the team’s divided. Admiral Hadley, the head of some-or-other division, throws his full support behind the robots. The opposing faction, headed up by a man with an eye-patch whose speech patterns clearly indicate that he has recently recovered from a stroke, proposes nuking the monsters (although the word, when he says it, ranges anywhere from ‘puke the monsters’ to ‘fluke the monsters’). With these two factions at war, Generic Blonde and TYREESE! being innately useless, White Douche being super douchey, and the robots themselves leaving a bit to be desired, does mankind really stand a chance against these backward-kneed behemoths? Watch and be completely whelmed by the whole experience!

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• It is possible for oil rigs to become dislodged from their bases, float around in the ocean, and crash into Iraq.
• You should always wear self-tan to a review board meeting.
• The best mankind-protecting-robot is one that’s commanded by someone with a lot of experience in Tae Bo.
• Every secret military base should be equipped with at least 100 horns.
• The more squint the monster, the greater the threat it poses to us all.
• No matter what the emergency,  a woman’s eye-shadow should always be unfaltering.
• Nothing says ‘time for a drink’ more than blowing up $500 billion worth of military equipment.

ATLANTIC RIM TRAILER

AE Apocalypse Earth

Year of Release: 2013
Genre: Action / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 3.2 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 0 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

As of late, my inner sci-fi geek has been awakened with a vengeance since I started watching Syfy’s Defiance (if you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to check it out). So, in the spirit of different worlds being invaded by extraterrestrials and technicalities that require physics PhDs in order to follow the plot, I decided I’d give The Asylum’s AE: After Earth a spin. The cover looked interesting, and for me that’s always a good start. Unfortunately, that’s also where all the good things that can be said about this movie come to a grinding halt. It’s a rare example in b-movie making: I thought I’d figured out the lame ending after watching about 15 minutes, only to be fooled later on by AN EVEN LAMER ending! Also, and this is the best part for me, they took soft science to an intergalactic extreme, which I always find tremendously amusing.

Please form a single queue and evacuate the planet in a calm and orderly manner.

Earth is being invaded! Yeah, it’s only one tiny little spaceship with a few missiles attached to it, but we’re still being invaded. Since we’re thrown right into the action at the beginning of the movie we’re not really given any indication as to how long this nano-invasion has been going on for, but suffice to say that mankind has been on the losing end of the war. Somewhere in between the aliens’ arrival and us getting our asses thoroughly kicked, the world’s governments were able to build a series of ark ships to take a portion of humankind and send it off to the relative safety of some far-gone alien world. So, it the face of absolute danger, we do what we do best: we get the hell out of dodge. The arks are fully automated and contain stasis pods made entirely out of the insides of old Game Boys, so all the survivors have to do is lay back, sleep for a couple of decades, and wake up on their new home world.

What are the chances it was a space dildo that wiped out the dinosaurs?

Well, that was the plan at least, until the ark ships got blown out of the air  and had to make an emergency crash landing on an alien world. Now of course you know it’s an alien world because it has a ring system! Clever people over at the Asylum… Anyway, if the crash didn’t sufficiently thin out the remaining number of humans left in the galaxy, the invisible and rather trigger happy natives will certainly take care of the rest. If it weren’t for Lt. Frank Baum the Good Lord only knows what would happen to the few remaining survivors. He manages to lead them all to the relative safety of a palm bush, before asking his robotic assistant TIM to try and figure out where they are and what exactly is going on.

When fungal infections take over…

Thankfully the invisible guys with guns aren’t the only creatures on the planet: our Lt also managed to find a green humanoid lady who switches between a completely alien accent to a thoroughly American one in a heart beat. She explains that the invisible things keep her people, and the crash-landed humans, as test subjects in zoos to be studied. Together, the survivors decide that this planet really isn’t for them, and they need to get back to Earth. Hell, it may have been invaded by malevolent beings from outer space, but it’s still home. It will involve a very un-daring mission of cowardly men, overly Hispanic women, the green lady, a midget Ricky Gervais, and an entire race of albino humanoids to ward off this planet’s strange lifeforms and the invisible hunting things if the group ever has a chance of making it to the spare ship just over the mountain and making a beeline back to Earth.

I don’t usually give away endings, but this one was just too stupid and left me far too enraged to not point it out. So, whilst we are told that it took 5 years for them to escape Earth and make it to this planet, when the group does eventually manage to get off the surface they can’t find out where in the galaxy they are. TIM the robot explains that the evacuation plan was EVEN DUMBER than I originally thought: rather than finding a planet that would be suitable for humans to settle on before they all took off, all of the arks were just sent off in random directions with everyone hoping for the best. 10 years into the flight TIM realised that the chances of finding a suitable planet were nanoscopic (again, shouldn’t we have thought about that BEFORE we left Earth?) and decided that the best option would be to return to Earth. Even if it had been invaded, at least it was habitable. So, the Arks make the 100-year return journey  to Earth, but due to a glitch in the theory of relativity the 100-year flight actually equates to 325 000 years back on Earth. When the Arks crash and the survivors woke up, the invisible thingies were the descendants of the original invaders, whilst lady-in-green and the albino people are the descendants of the humans that didn’t form part of the evacuation fleet. The Earth is now green due to a runaway greenhouse effect, and its ring system is actually the remains of the Moon after the aliens blew it up. Take that NASA! That’s how you soft science the shit out of space travel!

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• First rule of planetary evacuations: no weapons in the stasis pods.
• Intergalactic space arks can easily be built with nothing more than a little wood and chicken wire.
• Yo mama jokes are a pan-galactic form of insult.
• If you don’t train your dragon from when it’s a baby, you’ll never teach it not to sleep on your spaceship.
• There is no intergalactic emergency so great that you can’t stop for a moment to bang one of the natives.
• There is no reason to think that English syntax differs in any meaningful way from that of innumerable alien languages.

AE: APOCALYPSE EARTH TRAILER

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Lammy 2013 Nomination

So, it turns out I’ve been nominated in the Best Horror Blog category for the 2013 Lammy Awards.

This truly is an honour, as I never really intended for this blog to be anything more than my random thoughts on a few truly atrocious horror movies. The fact that there are people who not only read it, but actually enjoy reading what I have to say, is very heart warming.

So here’s how it works: click here to find the full list of all the little Lambs who’ve been nominated. Give them a read, there are some really awesome bloggers that are nominated this year. If you are a Lamb member, voting can be done by clicking here. Voting closes on the 30th of April.

Also, if you’re on Twitter, follow me and spread the love, for me and all the other nominees, by using the tag #LAMMY2013

Thanks for the nomination, and remember to keep coming back for all the horror cheese you can possibly handle!

Vampire Boys 2: The New Brood

Year of Release: 2013
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: – / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Ever since I watched the original Vampire Boys last year it has been my go-to reference for gay vampire horror erotica, and has become one of my ultimate guilty pleasure movies. I honestly couldn’t tell you why (although I suspect the copious amount of 80s inspired synth music may have something to do with it), but every time I watch it I have some of the best laughs ever. When I heard that there was a sequel in the works I obviously had to get my hands on it, and the lovely people over at Ariztical were kind enough to send me an advance screener copy. So, is the sequel any good? Well, it has none of the original cast, the plot’s paper-thin, the acting’s generally appalling, there’s some very dubious sound editing going on throughout the whole thing, and there are 7 gratuitous penis shots. So, the answer is yes! yes! a thousand times yes! I loved this movie from giggling beginning to maniacal laughter end, and I couldn’t recommend it enough to those of you strong enough to withstand the constant barrage of dead-pan faces and naked torsos.

Would you like some side ball with your murder?

It’s been a whole year since the events of the first film, and Jasin and Caleb’s love continues to grow brighter and stronger. Jasin remains the undisputed leader of his peace-loving coven in LA, Caleb’s constantly being told to go off and attend classes and university, and Jasin’s ex, Tara, has moved in with them, making her the world’s possibly first vampire fag hag. It’s a beautiful little set up the three of them have going: Jasin and Tara exchange adult conversation, Caleb and Tara act like two high school girls around one another, and Jasin and Caleb spend the better part of their day naked in bed together. Truly, it is the American Dream gone horribly awry. But is this really paradise, or simply a ticking time bomb of immortal hormones and anger waiting to overflow?

Because naked blood sucking is the best blood sucking.

Obviously it’s a ticking time bomb, and all it needs is a match to the fuse to get it all going. Enter Demetrius onto the scene (and it’s now that I really wish I could broadcast Tropical Mary’s Afrikaans accent over the internet so you can hear how a name like that should really be pronounced). Demetrius is trying to set up his own coven in LA, and has acquired the use of a local boxing rink to help him find recruits. You see, while Jasin and his coven place peace and harmony above all other things, Demetrius really just likes to watch men beat the crap out of one another for sport (and possibly some kinky kind of sex thing, but the movie doesn’t really go into that). If only he could find a member of Jasin’s coven who’s really pissed off and would want to see Jasin and Caleb’s love torn asunder…

It’s Pirate Night down at the gay vampire fight club!

And there, as if from some crack-addled dream, emerges Tara in all her enormous-breasted glory! She’s still new to this whole vampire thing, so she’s easily put under Demetrius’ spell, which allows all her pent-up aggression to be set loose on the world. She’d be more than happy to slit dear little Caleb’s throat from ear-to-ear, but they’re gonna have to trick Jasin into letting his guard down. He can, after all, summon his army of shirtless vampire bodyguards at any time. But if all of this is in the name of revenge, what exactly is Demetrius’ beef with Jasin? Is a bleach-blonde man in a pair of tighty whities really a good choice for a new vampire convert? Why do you have to strip your victim of his pants and underwear before you drain him of all his blood? Just how big are Tara’s boobs anyway? Why does no one own a button shirt with any buttons? Why was there Tang in the pepper shaker at that little coffee shop? These are but some of the questions I had watching this movie, and it managed to answer at least a quarter of them. Truly, this was the best 80 minutes I’ve spent watching a movie in a long time.

Now, Ariztical, let’s talk about Vampire Boys 3…

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Boxing schools were created so that dads can send their sons there to be de-gayed.
• At the end of the day, love will only get you two puncture wounds in your neck.
• Vegan gay vampires feed on stags, but are occasionally known to partake of a beaver. You know, out of curiosity.
• Few people plan to become vampires when they start university.
• Vampires perform community service by draining irritating, yappy dogs dry.
• When a vampire compels you, you suddenly start doing the robot.
• A vampire’s built-in GPS only kicks in when they eat their first human.
• Recently turned vampires want two things: food, and then lots of gay sex.
• A vampire’s first feed is always best if both they and their victim is naked.
• Being a doctor and a vampire usually creates a conflict of interest.
• First rule of gay vampire fight club: everyone come with a lisp and tight pants.

VAMPIRE BOYS 2: THE NEW BROOD TRAILER

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