Tag Archives: Starz

I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance Is Mine

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I did not care for the sequel to the remake of I Spit on Your Grave, which to be clear is an outstanding movie, and I will not be taking any questions on the topic. So anyway, there was a 3, and I’ve known there was a 3 this whole time, but after how down I was on 2, I never bothered. Until earlier this week, when I just bit the bullet and went for it. And you know what? It’s an actual sequel to the remake, not just another story about a different woman taking different revenge.[1]

I Spit on Your Grave III finds our heroine some years later, with a new identity and haunted by both what she went through and maybe a little by what she did. She joins a rape survivors support group thing, and makes friends with one of the other members, who is tough and brash and has some ideas about how to get justice. Then, when something goes wrong, the main character finds herself going deeper and deeper down the “justice” rabbit hole.

I said the last movie was a cross between the original and one of those European torture porn movies. This was more like a cross between the original and Death Wish. Which, both being movies from the ’70s, is clearly the better fit. The main thing I cannot figure out is if we’re supposed to root for the murders despite several lines of dialogue being way, way over the top, or if we’re supposed to think she’s gone too far and that’s why the dialogue is quite as silly as it is. Either way: man, that’s some rough dialogue.

But if she wanted to make more rape-revenge features, I’d probably get around to watching them.

[1] Also, it appears there may be a sequel to the original as well?! I’ll need to look into that.

Jurassic World: Dominion

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I am really ambivalent about Jurassic World: Dominion, now that I’ve finally seen it[1]. If you are unaware, it’s the follow on to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, in which dinosaurs are now a worldwide phenomenon after the events of that movie saw them rescued from Isla Nublar and then let loose. My ambivalence is as follows: on the one hand, it was a perfectly serviceable dinosaur action movie, with thrilling set pieces and characters that we have collectively cared about for decades, all getting a deserved swan song.

But on the other hand, after 24 hours to think about it… it was obligatory without being hardly anything else. Here’s the thrilling velociraptor chase through the streets of Malta, because there was a bad guy with tech from the last movie! But really all it does is make it harder for our heroes to board a plane out of town. Here’s the ice lake dinosaur in the southern Alps keeping our heroes from reaching a door on the far side of the lake. And it’s like, obviously I want thrilling dinosaur chases and dangerous stalking dinosaurs, but… I guess it’s that for most of these set pieces, there were no believable stakes or sense of danger. And Chekov’s knife fight remains, as of this writing, unfought on the mantel, about which I am personally offended.

In the end, I’m not saying it was bad. I had legitimate fun, and it was nice catching up with old friends and seeing a vision of a fundamentally altered world. But I am saying that I’m glad this story is over. It seems like they’re moving on to a new story next year, and I’m good with that, because I like the world they’ve made. But yeah. It’s good to let stories end.

[1] Full disclosure: the only reason this movie bubbled to the top of the list is that we both want to see the new season of Camp Cretaceous on Netflix, which is set near or after the events of this movie, and certainly was released years after. (That said, it was pretty cool seeing technology from the original show referenced in Dominion, as though it really is all one giant continuity. I like those, and am annoyed when it’s not a two-way street between movies and streaming.)

Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Based on the strength of the nostalgia hit from the teaser trailer and no other knowledge, I’ve lowkey wanted to see the Ghostbusters requel[1] for two years now, but then they announced that Afterlife itself has a sequel, and my hand has been forced.

I want to feel guilty about getting on this bandwagon, instead of holding the boycott line for some hypothetical alternate universe lady ghostbusters sequel, but a) I sort of already did prior to when this sequel was announced instead of that one and the ship had officially sailed, but also b) man it’s hard to feel guilty about watching a movie that was basically Jason Reitman’s carbon copy clone of JJ Abrams’ Star Wars sequel. Because as we have all learned over the past ten or so years[2], nothing beats nostalgia-mining as a source of income, and the cleanest nostalgia mines are those where they make the exact same content that you fell in love with in the first place. Turns out the teaser trailer was a full steam ahead spoiler trailer all along, there was just no way to know at the time.

But the thing is… despite all that, I actually did like it, you know? Paul Rudd is always good, the kids were fine since they weren’t sidekicks, and I’m a sucker for a love letter to Harold Ramis.

[1] Like a Reese’s peanut butter cup, which I am somehow old enough to remember when that was a thing that needed to be explained, it’s both a reboot and a sequel. It’s a whole thing.
[2] Or probably I’m underestimating this

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City

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Speaking, as I was, of video game adaptations in general and the Resident Evil series of such in specific, it seems only natural that I would have remembered and thus watched the reboot. (But also I really need to finish Resident Evil 5, the video game. I’ve only been trying for years upon years.)

In a counterfactual world where a six movie series starring Milla Jovovich as Alice never existed, here is what I would have to say about Welcome to Raccoon City: It’s a pretty good mashup of Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2, the video games, which makes sense as those (and 0 and 3, not mashed up here) all cover approximately the same 72 hour period during which really a lot of things happened. There are a lot of iconic images and moments, and all in all it is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of those two games. The games are of course still better, but what else could you expect out of a game adaptation?

However, those movies do exist, and they exist as an object lesson in why, if you intend to adapt a game, you need to take the premise and go in a new direction, something that maybe surpasses or maybe doesn’t, but at the least tries to be different. With books, faithful can be amazing, but with games, you’re in control of what happens as you play, so faithful is a bit flat, you know?

Wind Chill

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When I added Wind Chill to my watchlist on Starz, I think it was because I wanted to recapture the magic of Frozen, which I associated to in my head as having come out around the same time, even though it turns out the [non-Disney, stuck in a ski lift] movie came out a few years after this one[1].

The short version is, I did not. Alas!

Anyway, did you ever see The Sure Thing? John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga on a road trip during a college break: they don’t really know each other but they both need to get to the same place[2], and they quickly hate each other but are trapped together in this tiny hurtling box, right? You know how the movie goes, even if you don’t know specifically how the movie goes.

This movie is that movie, except it’s also a winter horror movie once they spin off the road into a ditch, can’t get the car started, it’s at night, and paranoia starts to set in. And if it had stayed that movie, man, I would be singing that movie’s praises to the rooftops. It quickly devolved into a different, boring movie, though, and long story short: meh. It’s like, I get that you can’t just sit in the car getting colder and more shrill in your accusations, that drama fizzles out fast. But if they had found a way to leave the car and keep the paranoia… and I can even think of some ways! Make it a satanic panic cultist movie, for example.

Oh, well.

[1] And a few years before the Disney one, obviously
[2] I forget her reason. His is that he has a “sure thing” waiting for him. ie, someone who will definitely have sex with him, if that terminology has correctly fallen out of favor by the time you read this.