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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Final Destination: The Ultimate Movie Marathon

Since some people seem to insist that I be an adult and hold down a real job (people are really inconsiderate that way), it’s taken me ages to do this write up, but this UMM was actually done back-to-back with the Twilight one. The UMM rules state that for it to be an actual UMM, there needs to be at least 7 movies to the franchise (the gods forbid that that should ever happen to Twilight), so my elite crack movie watching squad (Tropical Mary, Stygian Mole and the Occult Specialist) and I decided we’d just bend the rules slightly and watch another short franchise, thus bringing the evening’s final movie tally to 10.

By the time we started watching these movies my life was already in jeopardy, and there was a very real chance that my team would tar and feather me. We’d just watched +- 10 hours of stares, and I was really hoping that these movies would redeem me. I’m not sure if they did, but I think they went a long way to easing some of the tension.

The Final Destination franchise, in my opinion, is one that should truly be treasured because there isn’t a single bad movie in it. Yes, some movies are better than others when compared against one another, but on the whole all of them are very watchable and a lot of fun. It’s difficult to decide what sub-genre of horror these movies fall into, since they aren’t really slashers, but the whole idea that Death itself can come after you really puts a fresh twist on things. It’s also a lot of fun to watch just how a string of incredibly convoluted events can end up killing people in some truly horrific ways. Most importantly (and where other movies have long since fallen off the bandwagon), the Final Destination movies have, for more than a decade, introduced audiences to movies with people standing in a triangle on the cover. Not enough movies do that any more, and I think it’s a truly important cinematic event that should be passed on to future generations.

By this point in the evening the idea of any form of critical analysis had long since gone out of the window, so I’ll just give you a brief rundown of each movie, followed by our Twilight-riddled stream of consciousness. Enjoy!

FINAL DESTINATION

Year of Release: 2000
Genre: Horror / Mystery
IMDB Rating: 6.7 / 10
Level of Awful: Surprise!

Be honest – when you first saw this movie it made you think twice about getting on a plane. Starring a frightfully young Ali Larter, this is the movie that introduced us to the notion that Death might have a rather sick and fiendish plan for us all. Young Alex Brown and his friends are all getting ready for a fun school trip to France on Flight 180 when he has a horrifying vision that the plane will blow up just after take off. No one really believes him, but he and a few others are ejected from the plane for unruly behaviour anyway. Lo and behold, the plane actually does blow up, killing everyone on it.

In what may be Death’s equivalent of Wikileaks, these premonitions do not form part of Death’s ultimate plan – the survivors were never meant to get off the plane. Now, Death is coming for them and plans on getting them back in gruesome (but sometimes also hilarious) ways. Just how long can Alex and company actually cheat death?

• Dad supports copulation with French bitches.
• This scene warns us that there may be a slight draft.
• No hookers in the airport!
• Kill a Hari Krishna!
• Death laughs in the face of subtlety.
• Don’t fart in the bathroom!
• One should always aspire to do some tittie fucking while flying over Greenland.
• Behold: the Maltesers of DOOM!!
• Thank god for pre-911 – Alex would be hung and quartered by the FBI now.
• Awkward orphans are awkward.
• Survivor guilt!
• Freedom! (from life).
• He’s really not clairvoyant; Death only had a brief chat with him.
• Cold drafts are apparently Death’s preferred mode of transport.
• How do you get your toilet water to be that immaculate shade of blue?
• Behold: the Alsation of impending DOOM!!
• Mortuary break-ins are such a rush for randy teenagers.
• Furniture for movie kindly sponsored by Death by Design.
• Agent Shrek stages a daring coffin drop.
• Police brutality – the best kind of brutality.
• Tube monitors are the Devil’s work.
• Caramelised blood. Sweet, delicious caramelised blood.
• Death’s a sneaky bastard and willing to let you go slowly.

FINAL DESTINATION 2

Year of Release: 2003
Genre: Horror / Mystery
IMDB Rating: 6.2 / 10
Level of Awful: Surprise!

In the franchise’s apparent bid to make us afraid to do anything at all, Final Destination 2 takes the terror on the road and presents the viewer with a delightfully horrific pile up on the highway. Remember when that giant log went through the policeman’s car? Yeah, that.

This movie centres on Kimberly, who was beginning a roadtrip with a bunch of her friends when her premonition happened. By backing up traffic, she manages to save a lot of people from the enormous crash, once again setting Death up to take back what it feels rightfully belongs to it.

This movie is the only one in the franchise that has any direct connection to the first film (or is it?), with a still-frightfully young Ali Larter reprising her role as Clear Rivers to help this new bunch of kids escape from Death’s wispy clutches. The movie is also interesting because it examines the consequences of the first one and how the (temporary) survival of the Flight 180 passengers created a ripple effect in Death’s greater design. More bodies, more explosions, and more pigeon-related deaths than you can shake a stick at. What’s not to enjoy?

• Crazy people are really useful for providing background info into Death’s design.
• Oh, how I miss a good old VCR.
• Condoms, whips, and chains are all really useful items to pack for a roadtrip.
• Irony is all around you, ergo, Death is all around you.
• Drink pale ale responsibly.
• Warning lights in cars aren’t really there to tell us anything important.
• White guys can be totally thug.
• “Call 180” – The devil got a new number.
• This police station has a capture and release system in place for witnesses.
• Back at Stately Wayne suburbia…
• Hygiene and safety standards – this guy has none.
• Magnets and microwaves really aren’t compatible.
• Well done! You just made things much, much worse.
• Dear God, not my iMac!
• Remember to evacuate your apartment in a calm and orderly fashion.
• Remember kids – spaghetti kills.
• Smoking is healthy if you do it on a treadmill.
• It must be refreshing when a mental patient WANTS to be there.
• Clear could still die from 1000 paper cuts.
• Good luck beating Death, and don’t fuck it up.
• Find Nemo: Killer Version.
• All Nitrous, all the time!
• Terrible: dying after you’ve racked up an enormous dental bill.
• Welcome to the Crazy and Clothed branch of the FBI.
• Death sees you when you’re coming. How awkward.
• Valium: like Smarties, but for adults.
• Don’t go accusin’ no one that their ass is any less alive than yours.
• Behold: the ripple effect of DOOM!!
• Death by Design has a rift that even duct tape can’t fix.
• Splash the Magical Flying Ambulance.
• Death has been vanquished and Dawn reveals her rosy bottom to everyone.
• KABOOM!

FINAL DESTINATION 3

Year of Release: 2006
Genre: Horror / Mystery
IMDB Rating: 5.7 / 10
Level of Awful: Surprise!

Alright, so we can’t fly anywhere and we can’t drive anywhere. Now, even if we somehow manage to make it to an amusement park, we can’t ride rollercoasters either? Not that I’m a huge fan of rollercoasters (I don’t like going upside down), but I’d at least like to have the option. Oh yeah, and don’t ride on trains. Ever.

This time around we’re following Wendy, who only wanted to spend a fun night out at the amusement park with her friends and boyfriend to celebrate their senior year of high school. Death and his ever-fabulous designers over at Death by Design, however, have a different plan. Wendy’s premonition kicks in just before a rollercoaster ride, showing her in detail that the human spine and metal support columns should never meet one another at high speed. She panics and gets off the rollercoaster, taking several people with her (sadly, boyfriend not included), thus setting in motion a chain of events that means Death and his designers need to put in a little overtime.

The key to survival here will be Wendy’s passion for amateur photography: she took pictures of everyone that night before the rollercoaster derailed, and they seem to hold clues to preventing peoples’ decidedly squelchy ends. Can Wendy and her friend Kevin beat Death and his array of faulty tanning beds, fork lifts gone wild and flying truck engines? Probably not, but it’s boatloads of fun to watch them try.

• Thank you New Line Cinema.
• It’s the Rollercoaster of Love!
• There’s some reckless foreshadowing being thrown around here.
• Camel toes, duck face and warp speed, oh my!
• Hydraulic fluid: Gone.
• Tyres: Gone.
• Who knew teenagers could fly?
• Oh wait, they can’t.
• She whips her hair (and spine) back and forth.
• Spear tackle a bitch! Bitches love to be spear tackled.
• Getting a tune-up tan for a funeral is so thoughtful.
• That’s a good work lamp there.
• This, on the other hand, is only an average work lamp.
• Mmmm… delicious fried whore.
• Death by Design releases its Equality range of murder.
• Drink pale ale responsibly.
• There’s so much ‘Merica! going on here it hurts.
• This guy works for Osama bin Supervisor.
• Watch out for the overreaction over steer!
• Wendy’s camera has all the megapixels.
• Fuck you Ben Franklin!
• We’re on the love train!
• OUCH! OUCH! OUCH! OUCH!

THE FINAL DESTINATION

Year of Release: 2009
Genre: Horror / Mystery
IMDB Rating: 5 / 10
Level of Awful: Surprise!

I don’t get why people are so down on this movie. Yes, of all the Final Destination movies it is the weakest. It suffers from being a little over zealous with the CGI (at times going up to Syfy levels) and it was clearly made with 3D in mind because everything just wants to fly out of the TV at you, but it’s by no means a bad movie. Oh right, and it isn’t REALLY The Final Destination, but I guess they couldn’t have known that at the time.

OK, we couldn’t fly anywhere, drive anywhere, or ride on rollercoasters, and this movie also wants us to stop going to races at the speedway. Again, this doesn’t really affect me because I find Formula 1 and that kind of thing boring, but I’d still at least like to have the option.

Death by Design’s out in force again, and this time they’ve set their beady little eyes on Nick. Nick, his girlfriend, and two of their friends, have decided to pass a decidedly American afternoon watching some very American racing surrounded by some very American spectators. Courtesy of the worst pit crew in the world, things go a tad bit awry, several crashes happen, and the entire speedway collapses. Or, at least that’s what’s going to happen according to Nick’s premonition.

Nick and Co., along with several other people, manage to get out before the crash happens, and Death by Design must ride their obsidian unicorns into battle once again. Keep a look out for some KKK-style burnings, a movie theatre on the verge, an over enthusiastic pool pump and the 1001 dangers of standing too close to a chain link fence.

• Thank you New Line Cinema.
• It’s like Daytona, bitches!
• The Nickelback alone should be a clue that bad shit is gonna happen.
• Oh neo-nazis, you’re really such a lovely crowd.
• A flaming pancake! A flancake!
• I’m feeling a little racial tension in that enormous hook and petrol can.
• Yet more irresponsible pale ale consumption.
• Absent parenting is the best kind of parenting.
• Scissors to the face!
• Gotta love some redneck bottle drinking.
• Clear Rivers water. Death by Design must be close…
• Slowest draining pool EVER.
• There’s nothing more horrifying that explosive ass decompression.
• It can’t be fun to be flattened by a bath.
• Death by Design got really greedy in this movie.
• Death’s Hobo walks amongst us.

FINAL DESTINATION 5

Year of Release: 2011
Genre: Horror / Mystery
IMDB Rating: 5.8 / 10
Level of Awful: Surprise!

If the 4th movie took the series into a little bit of a dip, then this movie brought the franchise right back on track again. As if to reinforce the lesson we learned in the 2nd movie, if you hadn’t already learned that driving is dangerous, Death by Design is also more than capable of making the bridge you’re driving over collapse right out from underneath you.

In this last movie, we’re going to follow the escapades of Sam, a terrifically talented chef in the making, on his way to a retreat with his co-workers from his day job as a salesman. A leak in the space-time-gruesome-death continuum causes him to have a premonition where the whole bridge they are on completely collapses. This results in people drowning, being crushed by cars, getting impaled, and one unfortunate guy landing up on the wrong end of a vat of molten tar. It’s all rather unpleasant, really.

So Sam panics and gets some people safely off the bridge before the collapse happens. By this stage, Death by Design is getting bloody fed up trying to patch all of these leaks in the Grand Design, so the survivors land up getting killed one-by-one in yet another series of horrifying (and, in one instance, bone breaking) incidents. What I really liked, though, is this movie has a really good twist ending that I really didn’t see coming. I won’t spoil it for you, but if you keep a close watch on the characters throughout the movie you’ll see all the clues. Enjoy!

• Thank you New Line Cinema (and Warner Bros.)
• In the end, it’s often salesman against chef.
• Final Destination continues the franchise’s strict 1 black person per movie quota.
• Bald really is the new black.
• Yet another good work lamp. Well done movie.
• Gymnastics should really be restricted to 9-year-old boys.
• If he’s bereaved, he must be bereaving. In fact, he’s a bereaver!
• Stationary theft is deadly.
• Angst is difficult to pull off if you’re wearing a suit.
• Angst is a dish best served in jeans and a t-shirt.
• The fat guy really needs to die – horribly.
• Laser to the eye!
• Eyes pop well, especially when you drive over them.
• These people are just dumb as rocks.
• Psycho killers are that little bit more serious when they have a skillet.
• The _ _ _ _ _ _ _ has landed!
• Token black guy outlasted everyone!
• Final Destination: Changing movie stereotypes.
• The black guy survives the horror!
• Oh wait, I take that back…

FINAL THOUGHTS

After the miserable morning / afternoon / early evening that we spent watching the Twilight movies, these movies were just a complete breath of fresh air. People still weren’t speaking to me, but it was a step up from them threatening to mummify me alive. In a small way, I think these movies went a decent way to saving my life at the hands of a hair-eating Tropical Mary that night, and for that I’m thankful.

Like I said in the beginning of this write up, this is one of the best franchises, in my opinion, that horror has to offer. Whilst it may be purely by virtue of the fact that this franchise has fewer movies in it that many others, there really isn’t a bad one in the bunch. Yes, number four was comparatively weak, but on the whole it still stands up better than many other franchises’ weaker members. They key to these films’ success lies in the fact that they more or less follow a very well thought out system that was laid down in the first movie. They tweak it here and there and the deaths gradually become more gruesome and inventative, and leaves the audience in that fun place where they know exactly what’s going to happen, but you have no clue just how it’s going to happen.

Now, as for the scientific calculations that form an integral part of any UMM night, keeping track of the deaths in the Final Destination movies is a slightly tricky affair. Using a highly scientific and complicated system of spreadsheets, pie charts, clay tablets, and counting on our toes, we settled on a final death count of 499. Breasts were few and far between in this franchise, with a total of only 11. That works out to a death-to-breast ratio of roughly 45.3:1.

When all was said and done, it was nearly 5am and the sugar crash was starting to kick in hard, so it was off to bed for all of us. The next day was spent with a sugar-deprived headache that allowed me some time to reflect on the kinds of friendships that can withstand what I subjected them to on that bright and sunny Good Friday. So long as I promise to have no part in choosing the movies for the next UMM, I think we’re all gonna be friends for a good while yet 🙂

As always, I’m always looking for suggestions for the next UMM, especially for franchises that may be slightly more obscure.

Thanks to everyone for reading, and a big thanks to all those who kept us company through the live tweeting madness of the day!

Until next time 🙂

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Ghost Storm

Year of Release: 2012
Genre: Sci-Fi / Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.8 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from the ungodly experiment that is the B-Horror Blog, it’s that anything the Asylum can do, Syfy can do a thousand times better (except for those few times when the Asylum makes the Syfy movie). They’re both good staples: The Asylum if you want a movie that’ll be easy to throw insults at, and Syfy if you want some guaranteed cheese. Ghost Storm will give you everything you need so far as cheese factor is concerned, and it even throws in a little soft science just to make the final product that little bit more saccharine-sweet. By the looks of things the people behind this movie had a fairly decent budget to play around with, and gradually these people seem to be coming to grips with making CGI monsters that aren’t so bad they’re insulting. I recommend hanging onto this one for one of those really rainy Sunday afternoons when you want to chase away the approaching Monday blues.

No good will possibly come from this.

What is it in a teenager’s genetic structure that draws them to creepy cemeteries like moths to a porch light? Science should really look into that. Anyway, as you may have guessed, our story begins with a group of bored teenagers in a dark and spooky cemetery – during a lightning storm, no less. Wherever the hell their hometown is, it would appear to be on a tiny little island, so I guess you gotta get your kicks where you can. Everything’s going absolutely fine (guys scaring girls, ominous thunder) until a bolt of lightning strikes the memorial for the people who died during the town’s now-infamous mass-suicide. The lightning, through means I should check with my Occult Specialist, releases the angry spirits of the departed, who quickly go about turning one of the teenagers into a grey piece of human jerky.

Run Generic Background Character, Run!

Thankfully, Officer Dad (AKA Hal, father of Daisy, one of the girls that was out in the cemetery) is on the case. There must be a logical, rational reason why Daisy’s 18-year-old boyfriend’s corpse went from looking like the Crypt Keeper to being a pile of mulch in a matter of hours. Of course, the problem here is that they’re stuck on an island, and how exactly would you report this kind of incident to the authorities back on the main land? This of course is only the beginning of the town’s problems – you see, these aren’t your regular pissed off, vengeance-seeking ghosts. These ghosts are smart – why hunt individually when you can join together, form a supernatural storm system and blight the inhabitants of the island all the more faster?

Dammit, it’ll take forever to get the Redrum off the windows….

So, with the angry spirits swirling around the island in a giant, lightning-filled vortex, it’s up to Hal, ex-wife Ashley, and Daisy to come up with some kind of way to defeat the ghosts before they turn the entire town’s population into little piles of dust. They will be aided by a seafaring ghost hunter who happened to rock up on the island just as the storm formed. They will need a combination of a lot of random electrical equipment, some occultist knowledge, Ashley’s meteorological know-how, a lot of salt water, a fire extinguisher, an old diary with some town secrets, a weather balloon, a gun, a lot of jumper cables, some cans of silicon gel, half a dozen rolls of duct tape, an ancient talisman and a cellphone tower if they’re ever going to be able to stop these ghosts. Then, of course, there’s the mysterious old priest, and Ashley and Daisy’s old, but not forgotten, family history that ties into the whole affair…

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Lightning storms are a tremendous turn on for randy teens.
  
• The new iSpirit app is very useful for knowing when there are vengeful spirits in the area.
• Exhuming bodies is nothing but good, small town fun.
• It’s very expensive to build a machine that’ll let you speak to a storm cloud.
• Salt water is the best thing to use to soak up spilled evil.
• A good old-fashioned witch hunt usually eases the tension when you’re being held hostage by ghosts.
• Always make sure that your ghost complies with regulatory electrical standards.

GHOST STORM TRAILER

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40 Days and Nights

Year of Release: 2012
Genre: Sci-Fi / Action
IMDB Rating: 2.5 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 0 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

“When a colossal tectonic shift causes the sea level to start rising, a microbiologist gathers the DNA of as many species as she can, while the military creates an “ark” in a desperate attempt to preserve life on Earth.”

The Asylum and I have really got to stop meeting like this. Seriously, how many of the movies in my collection have their sneaky little paws behind it? Now, I was in the mood for a decent cheesy disaster flick, but this was too much. Above is the blurb for this movie taken directly from the Asylum’s website, which I feel needs to be addressed. Firstly, there was no tectonic shift, not on any of the 40 days this movie purportedly spans. Secondly, sea levels did not rise; at best we had a few isolated inland tidal waves. Thirdly, there is no way on God’s green Earth that that woman was a microbiologist. Fourthly, surely samples of 3 bees and a few moths doesn’t count as ‘DNA of as many species as she can’? Fifthly, no country has a military made up of 7 people. Sixthly, that wasn’t an ark, it was a strange train that floated. Seventhly, the DNA of 3 bees cannot preserve life on earth if you didn’t take any life with you onto the ark. So yeah, that about sums up how I felt about this movie, but I’m gonna do my usual review now to drive home just how daft it really was.

The script writer hasn’t a clue what he’s gonna do next…

Jon and Tessa are such a lovely couple – you’ve never seen a 50-year-old man and a 19-year-old girl so madly in love. They’ve got a pretty good life too – they work for the super-secretive black-ops illuminati division of the US military, which means they’re very clever, very wealthy, and very well looked after. All that and as many rooftop picnics as they could ever dream of! What could possibly go wrong for a couple as spritely as this? Oh right, the world’s about to come to an end. How’s the world going to come to an end? Be damned if I know; all I saw were four drunken kids driving around the Sahara desert when a few thunder clouds appeared over head. Next thing they (and I) knew, there’s an enormous tsunami coming over the mountains and the whole desert’s submerged by an ocean of CGI water.

We have a CGI helicopter coming in for a hovering sir…

In what turns out to be the Asylum’s answer to 2012, a massive super storm is developing over Africa, and within the next few days it will cover THE ENTIRE PLANET. How this super storm started to develop we’re never going to know, but said super-secretive black-ops illuminati division of the US military has to come up with some way of saving at least a nominal portion of the American public (mainly the smart ones though). To do this they’ve decided to build an ark. The ark will be the world’s first live-saving sea vessel shaped like a dildo, and despite the fact they have to cram in 3 years work into a week to get the thing built, everyone’s fairly convinced that it can be done with relatively few screw ups. Oh, how they underestimated Mr Murphy on that one…

The world’s largest water-resistant dildo.

Turns out there are a few hiccoughs to overcome before the ark can sail. Firstly, it’s powered by turbines built on completely theoretical technology that, despite being the size of a small cat, will harness the power of the waves and wind to generate enough electricity to keep it sailing for as long as they need. Surprisingly, there are a few problems getting these turbines working. Now, that’s Jon’s job. Tessa’s job is to collect DNA samples so that they can rebuild nature once the flood waters recede. Unfortunately a rock slide took out the train carrying all her samples, and now she has to go out into the wild to collect more before everything’s under water. And this is only the beginning of their troubles: once the ark sets out, who knows how long they’ll all be at sea? Who knows if the ark will be able to hold its own against the power of nature gone utterly berserk? In the end, none of it will really matter, since you’ll have been bored to tears long before the flood waters even cover your baby toe.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• If it means a quickie on a roof, saving humanity can just wait 15 minutes.
• If it means a quick tussle under the sheets, then escaping the rising Biblical flood will also just have to wait.
• There’s a lot more rain and wind in the eye of a super storm.
• You can safely transport DNA samples in an empty Evian bottle.
• The secret of human evolution, life, and all philosophical pursuits, ultimately lies with the humble moth.
• Most ships can be rendered utterly useless with a simple power drill.
• It’s easier to pistol whip someone than to answer a stupid question.
• The lesser-spotted cave bee is a key player in upholding the planet’s various ecosystems.

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The Collapsed

Year of Release: 2011
Genre: Horror / Thriller / Drama / Sci-Fi / Mystery
IMDB Rating: 3.5 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 0 /5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

Good God I love movies that fail as epically as this one did! Rarely does one find a movie that attempts to mash together as many genres as The Collapsed did, but in its attempt to be a horror-thriller-drama-sci-fi-mystery ultimate combo, it proved that it couldn’t pull even one of those elements off. I’m not a movie snob (as this site will well attest to), but I do believe that if you’re going to make an end of the world movie, you can only really go one of two ways: option one is to have a big budget so you can make it really convincing or, option two, you make it cheesy enough to distract the audience from the lack of budget. Here, The Collapsed does it wrong again: it wants to be a very serious end of the world movie, but with no budget for the necessary mayhem and destruction. Couple all of this with several attempts on behalf of the director to make the film look artsy and all you’re left with are 82 minutes of unrelenting pain and mind-numbing boredom.

A few apartment fires doth not the end of the world make.

So it’s the end of the world; how it’s the end of the world you’re never going to find out, but ‘the government’, ‘conspiracy’, ‘weapons we’ve never even heard of’ and ‘the horror’ are all phrases being thrown around by survivors of this invisible apocalypse. Our story follows dad Scott, mom Emily, and siblings Aaron and Rebecca as they attempt to find safety and supplies in amongst the few apartment fires and the occasional cannibal that are ravaging their generic movie city. Dad has the strangest accent I’ve ever heard come out of a human being (although I imagine it’s quite similar to how a Swedish person imitating a Canadian accent would sound), but despite this inherent flaw in his being he’s decided that the only way he’s gonna keep his family alive is to make a break for the wilderness. Because nothing bad ever happens when you run off into the woods in a horror movie.

Pursued by cannibals, our young heroine stops to shave her legs…

Getting to the wilderness, however, is going to require that the family does a little road trip. This is set up in such a way that it’s as painful to watch as it would be to do an actual road trip with your own family. Thrown in for not-so-good measure is a half-baked plot point about Scott and Emily’s other son, who apparently has gone missing. He’ll be thrown into conversation every now and then, but since we never see him it doesn’t really matter. Along the way the family discovers an abandoned little shop and decide to stop in and pick up some supplies; this is when things start to go very badly for them. While they’re doing a little shopping and Mom’s taking a bath in a sink, a group of heavily armed men wearing gas masks arrive as well. Making a very slow and blundering escape, the group makes for the surrounding woods, hoping it will provide them with a little safety and respite.

Survivalists of the Corn.

Naturally, the woods offer no protection whatsoever. Our family is still pursued by various groups of crazies, supplies are running low, and there are strange sounds and voices coming from the trees. To judge by the musical score, they’re also being relentlessly pursued by a group of poorly trained trumpeters and cellists, but that’s a separate issue entirely. As members of the family are slowly picked off by the different forces out to get them, Swedish-Canadian Dad needs to think of the best way to keep what remains of his family alive until they can escape this wilderness and find the supposedly safer wilderness he has in mind. Of course, not all enemies out to get you are necessarily mortal with a corporeal form…

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Just because it’s the end of the world, it doesn’t mean we can’t have manners.
• Just because it’s the end of the world, it doesn’t mean that feminine hygiene should be any less of a priority.
• Just because it’s the end of the world, it doesn’t mean the risks of teenage smoking should be taken any less seriously.
• Just because it’s the end of the world, it doesn’t mean that grave-digging techniques should suffer.
• Just because it’s the end of the world, it doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate an old-fashioned rifle that doesn’t blow up in your hand.
• Just because it’s the end of the world, it doesn’t mean that revenge still isn’t a dish best served cold.

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