I’ll write this up as it goes.  The first section involves an overdue astronaut, coming back from the moon.  They make it clear that this is the second mission, the first one ended in disaster.  The second one is starting to go the same way.  The sets are minimal, but the film-makers didn’t try and show whole command centers, so it works well enough.  Then there’s a scene where the astronaut makes contact, twenty minutes after they know his oxygen must have run out.  He is pleading with control to kill him, use an auto-destruct button.  He cannot do it himself, because his hands won’t obey him.  The scene is nicely done, nothing low-budget of badly acted here.  You actually do feel the agony of the decision the scientists on the ground have to make.  So far so good.

Also, Alan Hale will be in this one.  I love Alan Hale.  He turned in a pretty great performance in The Giant Spider Invasion.  For those who don’t know, he is the skipper in Gilligan’s Island, the ultimate prototype sit-com.

We get introduced to the small town in a scene set in a cafe.  Some kids are dancing, the owner keeps telling them: “no dancing”.  Meanwhile, two girls, obviously main characters, are chatting.  They also have a cage with rats in it on the table.  One is wondering how the other managed to “snatch” the young med student as a boyfriend.  Apparently a dozen other girls have failed.  Actual dialog:

“I’m not saying you’re not stacked, he’s just not with it.”

That leads to a romantic interlude that, at whatever age I was then, probably went over my head.  Which is for the best.  The characters are weak 60s style teens, and the whole thing gets a little painful until it’s finally relieved by the arrival of the hand.  That section of the movie seems as if it were directed by someone else as well.  A second team director, maybe?  The angles are often wrong, people who are supposed to be conversing are staring off into space, and the presence of the back-screen is clear.

But when the action starts up again, it is kind of tense.  Moreso than with “Shredder,” a 2003 movie I tried watching earlier, but had to bail on as boredom swept in.

Now that Paul is going half-zombie, the quality of the movie starts plunging.  People keep acting strangely.  I think even as a child, I understood that things weren’t making sense.  The arm doesn’t seem very threatening, and the infected Paul seems to be more likely to go Emo than actually kill anyone.  But the movie is still fun.

It’s black and white, cheesy, and full of wooden acting, bad camera angles, and difficult to swallow plot points.  The central danger isn’t that credible, except when people are pretty near wasted.  But there are a few creepy scenes, and the overall cheese factor makes it fun.

There’s “Snakes on a Plane” bad.  The badness is actually the genre, and the title tells us what to expect.  The genre has certain rules and expectations, and this kind of bad movie can be done well or poorly.  Snakes on a Plane hit all the right notes, so people called it bad.  By which they meant it was a very well done “bad” movie.

There’s “Crank: High Voltage” bad.  You throw plot out the window, along with a good dose of physics, probability, and narrative logic.  But what you replace it with is a bunch of crazy, unpredictable events that, somehow, fit.  The movie is considered bad because it doesn’t have the things a good movie is supposed to.  But it has so much other awesomeness stuck into every possible corner that it really doesn’t matter.

There’s Sci-Fi Channel original bad.  These movies are formulaic, yet fail to rise to the basic requirments of the formula.  Bad special effects, terrible acting, ridiculous scripting, and broken physics make you flat out angry.  Or you laugh.  But the movies are low-low budget, usually there’s at least a few actors who are trying hard.  If the bad guy/creature is evil enough, you cheer for them to get it, even though you know the whole thing sucks.

Then there’s Michael Bay.  Big-budget, crap gets blown up, plot-holes swallow whole planets.  Random stupid elements are stuck in, and CGI runs rampant.  You can sort of like Michael Bay because of that “awesome” commercial.  He’s a big kid who likes to blow things up, and he likes the piles of money we give him.  The first transformers movie, Armeggedon were pretty bad, but in a fun way.

But there are degrees of badness within the Michael Bay category.  Pearl Harbor was so bad they wrote a song about it.  And Transformers 2: ROTFL, hurt.  People say: “what did you expect?”  Well, the first movie was okay for a summer outing.  How did the second find it’s own special level?  The movie is not only rife with stolen scenes, questionable special effects, stereotyped racial robots, and random things-humping-other-things, it also laughs at us.  The viewers.  Michael Bay thinks we’re idiots.  He also thinks he can tell us he thinks we’re idiots, and we’ll still give him money.  We do.  This is a unique level of badness.  Nearly unique, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull Disaster comes close.

At some point, when a shoot-out in strip club is the obvious next scene, there are, for no apparent reason, strippers shooting automatic weapons.  It’s not the last time strippers show up to a firefight, and no explanation is given.  You don’t need one in a movie like this.

This is the kind of movie where you can take a living head out of the tank of fluid in which it was living, and drop kick into the pool.  It makes perfect sense.  And, when Chilios calls the doctor and finds out that one way he can re-charge the internal battery that is powering his temporary artificial heart is by rubbing up against someone else, you think: of course.  Of course that would be it.

The movie may not be a great movie, not in terms of storytelling anyway.  But it is art.  There are so many moments here, like being trapped in a police car by protesting porn stars.  These are the moments I can talk about.  But the greatest scene, for me, was the completely incomprehensible shift to classic Japanese monster movie.  No reason, it’s just that they could, and it works.

Two final words: Chicken and Broccoli.

I gave it five stars on Netflix.  The acting was actually pretty good, the action kept moving, and the denoument worked.

[Next day] I had to come back and add a note to this “review”.  This movie grew on me overnight.  Sure, it’s barely more than a student film in terms of production quality, but the plot, which seems pretty simple, has a bit of depth.  It takes the viewer on a journey, a fairly short journey maybe, but one that undercuts your assumptions.  And, though some of the conflict scenes were pretty over the top, and some of the emotive stuff a bit messy, it felt as if it was at least trying to imitate real life rather than other movies in the genre.  The balance of forces was perfect for the tension built.

I started watching the movie as if were a Sci-Fi original (don’t know what we’ll do when they change their name to Syphyllys Fy), using it as background while I worked on my laptop.  But, soon enough, I was engaged.  Put the laptop down and wait for what happens next.  A lot of movies with much higher production values fail this simple test.

The message of Hamlet 2 is that even if your vision is fucked up, lots of people will jump in at the last moment and help you transform it into art.  Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is what happens if someone takes that message too seriously.  Now, I hate romantic comedies mostly because the central message is destructive.  They teach us to be victims or stalkers in the name of love.  And, unlike action/horror movies, people take those messages seriously.  Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is not as bad as believing that some girl will really love you if just keep following her around.  But it is bad.  All through the movie, you can almost hear the voices of the creator/director and his friends saying things like: “wouldn’t it be funny if Jesus had to fight a bunch of guys getting out of a car?”  “wouldn’t it be funny if Jesus had to go shopping in modern times?”  “wouldn’t it be funny if Jesus rode a skateboard?”  No, no, and not really.

If something seemed really funny when your stoned, you should probably try running the idea around in your head sober before making it into a movie.  On the other hand, everybody making this thing was having a good time.  They decided to thrown in a Mexican wrestler and lots of lesbians, just in case the profane Jesus couldn’t carry the movie.  There are a few characters who are desperately trying to be over the top, and one or two of them make it.

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is probably about as good as you might expect.  Bad acting is topped by senseless direction and inane action scenes.  There is no actual nudity.  Jesus is ridiculous, but doesn’t engage in any kind of political or social satire.  The vampires are inconsistent, and some of the other characters get a lot of screen time which they don’t have the talent to make anything of.  It looks like a college student movie that somehow got enough budget to go full-length, and hire one stunt man.  But it doesn’t make the kind of magic out of these elements that Hamlet 2 seems to promise.

Meanwhile movies that really are good got trashed by some critics because they weren’t what critics expected. Hancock fell to this critical inflexibility earlier this summer, while Burn After Reading took a lot of flack for it more recently. You could blame to publicity people who put together the trailers. In both cases, the trailer weavers went for pure, light-hearted slapstick. Neither movie falls into that role. Both hit a turning point where the movie is no longer the thing you were promised. Something better, perhaps, but your expectations are already fixed.

Some people have little tolerance for the unexpected. Personally, I usually like it. If it’s good. But movies that don’t deliver what they seemed to promise, but then don’t give you anything else, are at the bottom of my FAIL list. (Epic Movie fits into this slot).

But sometimes I get the third Mummy movie.  It’s not so much bad as it is tired.  The almost ritualistic character portrayals using every old trope and stale piece of dialog dragged down the small moments in which the action actually worked.  I love Jet Li, and I like Brendan Frazier.  But neither of them showed up for this movie.  Surrounded by CGI badness, they read through the exhausting dialog with no hope of adding anything fresh to it.  Retired hero misses action.  Father has problems expressing approval of son.  Evil emperor wants to take over world.  (what to good emperors do?)

Fortunately I had already downloaded the unrated version of Hitman on my PS3.  I got home, feeling like I needed to bath in something to get that “Mummy-to-far” feeling out of my system, I started watching this hyper-cool, intense action flick, in which the characters actually seem to care about what they are doing.  Though the reviewers generally have gone negative Hitman, it’s really a lot of fun.

• Alone in the Dark (ridiculous)
• House of the Dead (OMG Stupid!)
• Bloodrayne (Wow, not even Ben Kingsley can act in this POS)
• Bloodrayne II: Deliverance (Wait, it’s bad, makes no sense, and this one has NO NUDITY!)

Unlike Ed Wood, who is often given that title, Uwe Boll isn’t trying to express some strange, complex vision, yet failing. Ed Wood had odd plots, mixing aliens and transvestites in some kind of pattern that you think secretly must make sense in his head. But Boll’s pattern is just derivative crap. You know pretty much what he’s trying to say, because other people have already said it better.  His best shots are clearly copied, his worst show that he didn’t understand what he was stealing.

All this I knew, but when I discovered my PS3 could actually sell me movies, the only thing worth downloading and watching was In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.  I’ve only played a few minutes of that particular game, so I have no particular fondness that could be violated, but I was definitely up for an evening of Uwe bashing.  Many parts are bad, and everything good is not original.  But, still, Jason Statham is putting it all out there, doing his athletic action coupled with sullen intensity.  Ray Liotta is at about half creepy, but that’s still pretty creepy.  And Matthew Lilard is nasty enough that you find yourself really rooting against him.  By the predictable ending, I was engaged.  Not impressed, or blown away, but I wanted bad things to happen to the bad guys and good things to happen to the good guys.

Of course it wouldn’t be a Uwe boll movie without some inexplicable old, but still respected actor phoning it in.  Bloodrayne had Ben Kingsley, this one has Burt Reynolds!  As the King!

But I’m not changing my mind about Uwe just because he directed one mediocrity amidst all his crap.  I loveUwe Boll because the world would be less mysterious without him.  How does he get money?  How does he get medium-large names to appear in his obviously bad movies?  Why does he insist that he’s a mis-understood artist?  Also, he’s the only director I know of who challenged his critics to a boxing match.  Two took him up, and were defeated.  How about having Spielberg fight anyone who didn’t like the last re-hash of Indiana Jones?  I’d be up for that.

The other thing about Uwe Boll is that he’s trying the best he can.  He doesn’t have much talent, and he doesn’t make up for it with technique.  He sucks, but he’s trying to make the best movie he can.  Not so much Spielberg and Lucas.  They have talent coming out the wazoo, but contine to foist crap like the latest Indiana Jones movie on us.  That smacks of contempt.

Reach into my brain and pull out the perfect woman, and she might look like Mathilda May, the naked chick who walks around sucking blue light out of people in Lifeforce. But why would she have two perfect naked guys with her? Those guys didn’t come out of my head, I’m certain of that. Also, if she came out of Steven Railsback’s brain, why isn’t she over-emoting massively? Instead, the perfect woman is ice-cold and creepy. But she does have perfect breasts.

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it here, again. Naked Space Vampire Movie is an automatic win. But Lifeforce is encumbered by dry British-ness, set against a weirdly screaming Steve Railsback, who is oddly distant when he’s not madly emoting. The plot, even with the restored footage that US distributors edited out, is muddy. You’d think space vampires would be straight-forward, but these things seem to have varying rules. Also, the initial contact story gets re-told three times, in different ways. The result is confusing, and action is disconnected. After a long, dry, procedural hunt, culminating in the strangest Patrick Stewart quivering ever, we suddenly shift to Zombie Apocalypse mode. Also, there’s a lot of flashing blue light streaks. The ending is vague. I’d say ambiguous, but that word means two clear options that oppose each other. In this case, the ending doesn’t really mean anything clearly.