Tag: movies

Evil Rain

We went to see a friend’s film last night – “When Evil Reigns” from Luke & Alix Jackson. Ian from Kitt’s office is one of the cast so we went along to check it out and it was a LOT of fun. 90 minutes of low budget, made in Melbourne psycho zombie slasher flick.

It was at the Glitch Bar, a small place at 318 St George’s Rd in North Fitzroy. They have a cinema space out the back with a DVD & projector and the guys have been using it for their screenings. The night we went, a number of the cast were there to watch it as well (oh great, I’m sitting next to one of the psychos… :)

The concept of the movie is pretty standard. Basically, a rain starts falling (not exactly uncommon here in Melbourne :) but with a difference. Anyone outside who gets wet gets turned into a death dealing zombie. A group of young people wind up trapped in a school, barricading themselves in and trying to deal with the situation and their clashing personalities. There’s a nifty twist to it that’s not realised until towards the end (of course :) which makes it all so much more fun.

It was all done on a very low budget (ummm, almost nothing? :) and took many years to produce, filming on weekends and evenings, editing it all together, etc. They have a distributor but are having problems getting the film out as their distributor is a gangsta-rappa in New York who wound up having to use the production money for bail. Gotta hate that. For now they’ve pooled their own money and produced a small run of DVDs to at least get it out to the public.

All up it was a fun night out and we even wound up buying a copy of the movie on DVD – we’re looking forward to watching the makeup specials, the easter egg (Alix told us where to find it) and the director’s voice over. Makes it all a lot more fun when you know the people involved :)

Happy Feet is a boring movie

Finally got around to seeing the movie Happy Feet today – well – most of it. I got up a few times to do other things and didn’t bother getting Kitt & Nykolai to pause it.

Nykolai’s seen it before and was only watching it ‘cos he wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to leave his beanbag. I think that’s the only reason why Kitt stuck it out to the end as well – she wasn’t feeling well either.

Suffice to say, this movie is lucky to reach a 4/10 on my scale. Sure, it’s got some funny bits and Robyn Williams does a good job in it (but no where near as good as he did in Robots). Sadly, in the grand scheme of things, it’s a flop. The feeling I got was that the director was trying to be a new Baz Luhrmann for animation but, you know what, Moulin Rouge wasn’t that great either (although Kitt was OK with that one, she found that Happy Feet just wound up pissing her off).

So, all up, a movie to avoid unless you’re desperate for something new to see. There are far better animated movies out there.

Old School X-Men

Watching an old X-Men DVD – “Legend of Wolverine” – from the 90’s cartoon series – this is *so* funny. Interesting when compared with the modern “live action” movies. The voices for Wolverine and Beast in the cartoon are amazingly close to those from the movies – the rest are, well, don’t even ask. As Kitt points out, the personality of Scott is close to the one they showed in the movie.

One amazing difference that’s rather amusing to check out is Jean Grey – in the movies, she was cool and sexy, but very well clothed (yes, even in the third movie). In these cartoons (dating back to the 90’s) she’s wearing a flesh colored body suit with a “Brazilian Swim Suit” over the top. Well, it’s almost a Brazilian but it covers too much of her breasts… I can see why they changed the uniforms for the movie – in the words of Cyclops from the first X-Men movie:

“Well, what would you prefer? Yellow spandex? ”

300 Chick Flick

Went to see 300 at the Jam Factory cinema – pretty good movie (we gave it a 9/10) – in summary, it’s a “chick flick with buckets of blood and gore”

How so?

Well, it’s got buff boys in revealing outfits, some emotional moments and a tragic love scenario. So, that’s good for the ladies.

Then, it’s got blood, guts, gore, shitloads of kick-arse fight sequences, a harem scene (which ranges from hot n sexy to bizzare deformities) and a multi-position sex scene. So, that’s good for the guys.

There were a couple of things that bugged me about it:

1. What’s the king of the Spartans doing with a Scottish accent? It’s not a thick one (like Sean Connery in Hunt for Red October) but it’s very there and very noticable.

2. So why does Xerxes look and sound like the bad guy out of the Stargate movie?

3. I don’t think the Persian army was quite so racially varied as they portray, nor so highly pierced – even allowing for artistic license (and lets face it – it’s not a documentary :) it was a tad over the top.

On a side note, the theatre seemed to have a problem with their booking system – they’d overbooked. We got in ahead of a most and grabbed our seats. Not long after, a bunch of people came in and said to the group next to us that they were in their seats. They compared tickets and all had been given the same seating groups. Ooops… No idea how they sorted it out but for a while there were people standing around and a staff member talking into a radio/phone. Eventually they sorted it out and the movie started. Wonder if they’re using QANTAS’s booking system? :)

Still, it was a great movie – well worth seeing.