That the “Resident Evil” movies are actually getting BETTER as it goes on is kind of quaint and alarming at the same time – alarming because you realize that “Extinction,” a mostly-solid ‘not bad’ had two LESSER entries still make enough money to justify it’s existence; but quaint simply for the notion that a mini-tentpole action franchise is still being executed at a workmanlike level where trial-and-error/learning-from-mistakes growth is going on organically between sequels. The original entry was simply dreafully, the second hugely entertaining but largely because of it’s “whatever” vibe of startling-ineptitude… and now here’s number three, a competently-made action/horror/scifi hybrid B-movie in it’s own right. If they keep this pace up, in a few more sequels they’ll make an entirely good movie.

Loosely following the broad plot-outlines of a long-running series of survival-horror video games, the series revolves around the sinister machinations of The Umbrella Corporation; a biotech conglomerate apparently powerful enough to build massive underground cities for research and keep private satellites in orbit even though the only thing we’ve been shown that they sell (in jokey ads for the second sequel) are high-tech anti-aging drugs. A chemical component of said drugs called the T-Virus, ostensibly designed to revive dead tissue, wound up doing it’s job so well that it’s caused a standard-issue Romero-esque zombie outbreak.

The living-dead and other assorted mutants ALSO unleashed by Umbrella’s cavalier research overran a subteranean city in #1, a whole city in #2, and now in #3 they’ve taken over the planet and (somehow) turned it into “Mad Max” land in the span of a few years. Pockets of humanity roam the deserts looking for supplies and trying not to get eaten, while what’s left of Umbrella toils safely in their underground shelter as the wicked Dr. Isaacs tries to find a “cure” for zombie-dom – or, rather, since it’s Umbrella after all he’s mostly trying to “domesticate” them in order to create a slave-race. Umbrella, evidently, got it’s biotech feet wet in the conversion of lemons to lemonade. Give it credit where credit is due for finding SOME fresh material in the drained Zombie genre by focusing on the death of a humanity-deprived planet as opposed to the undead hordes.

In any case, Isaacs believes that the key to his ‘cure’ is the unique blood of series-heroine Alice, (still-stunning Milla Jovovich, again securing her crown as THE queen of B-movie action heroines,) who has been turned into a telekinetic superhuman by Umbrella meddling and now stalks the wasteland doing telekinetic superhuman stuff. When she hooks up with a convoy of human survivors in the ruins of Las Vegas, it puts her back on Umbrella’s radar and sets up a confrontation between the good guys, an Umbrella-loosed hit-squad of Barry Bonds juiced zombies and eventually Dr. Isaacs himself – who seems to be going mad(er) with power.

Bad news first: Sorry, game fans, Alice is once again the prime focus and game heroes like Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) do the supporting gig. Things still look a bit on the cheap side, at least for a theatrical film. Mike Epps’ annoying, ebonics-spewing caricature from #2 is still hanging around. “Tyrant” isn’t nearly as much fun a monster as “Nemesis” was. Someone has made the (baffling) decision that Jovovich’s closeups required digital-airbrushing, resulting in odd-looking shifts from shot-to-shot where she switches from being an insanely-gorgeous human to an insanely-gorgeous digital manequin.

Good news: As movies about spectacular-looking women kicking the tar out of zombies go, it doesn’t get much better than this. Underrated genre veteran Russell Mulcahy (“Highlander,” “Razorback,” “The Shadow“) is easily the most talented filmmaker to tackle the franchise yet. Larter holds her own and looks great doing it. Oded Fehr, the mas-macho Israeli action guy from “The Mummy” and “Sleeper Cell”) is back in an expanded role. “Tyrant” LOOKS a lot less cheezy than “Nemesis” did.

Yes, fine, this is at best a goofy diversion of a movie, “best of the series” and all. Yes, you’re going to get a more intellectually-uplifting, spiritually-satisfying experience going to “Eastern Promises” or “In The Valley of Elah.” But if diversion of junk-food fun are what strikes your fancy, and you’re perhaps not QUITE after the dizzying, mainling-pure-caffeine high of “Dragon Wars” (or you already saw it) this’ll probably do it for you.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

Yes, I DID in fact think the first gag was good enough to warrant a sequel. Enjoy!

A brief rundown of the sights and sounds awaiting you in “The Brave One:”

“I WANT MY DOG BACK!!!!!” BLAM!! (Yup! Somehow STILL in the movie despite being such a laugh-generator in the trailers.)

Jodie Foster, upon being told she “doesn’t have the right” to vigilantism: “YES I DOOOOOOO!!!”

Terrance Howard, in a performance that suggests someone has dared him to try and do his “solemn, stoic dude tryin’ hard not to cry” vocal bit for an entire movie.

BLAM!! “WHO’S THE BITCH NOOOOOOWWWWWW!!!!????”

Foster-as-vigilante’s only confidant, an older African woman, imparts sage-like wisdom about how “they give the children guns” in the old country. Because in bad “important” movies, every single person from Africa PERSONALLY experienced horrible violence, which has turned them into Gandalf and filled them with the singular desire to act as deeply-accented consciences to white people.

“You shouldn’t smoke, it’ll kill you.” “I don’t care.” “Lots of ways to die. YOU gotta find a way to LIVE.”

Jodie Foster stalking the neon-lit streets of New York after dark, hunting down scum to blow away while reading from Emily Dickinson in voiceover.

Yeesh.

If nothing else, you’ve gotta hand it to director Neil Jordan: When he’s shoveling bullshit, he’s using both hands. “The Brave One” a deathly-dull, horribly formulaic Lifetime-level script that slogs across the screen with all the energy and visual stimulant of a Z-grade “Law & Order” imitator. Every cliche of the revenge genre is mined and put to use, but drained of all life and vigor. Foster either looks like she’s sleepwalking (it’s supposed to pass for PTSD “numbness”) or she’s bellowing in over the top ACTING!!! moments so hysterical they’d get you thrown off of an Uwe Boll movie. The overall vibe, that of an attempted deconstruction of the “Death Wish” model, would reek of pretention if it weren’t so hollow as to negate even an EFFORT toward pretense. Guys, listen: Making a lifeless clone of an “unserious” movie and plugging a take-this-movie-seriously actress into the lead isn’t “deconstruction” – it’s just making a bad movie. In this case, it’s making one of the worst “serious” films of the year.

Maybe it wouldn’t read quite as bad had we not already seen a vastly superior “Death Wish” reworking in the criminally-underpraised “Death Sentence” earlier this year. That film actually succeeded in finding new life in the genre by ripping out any semblance of sociology or “message” and focusing on the breakdown of a lead character’s psyche – following Kevin Bacon’s collapsing sanity into the darkest abyss… and then beyond it. With “The Brave One,” sadly, we’re right back to square one with Foster (in her default mode of seething semi-tomboyish indignance) filling the creaky genre-mandatory role of the naive “liberal” forced to confront grim “reality.” This year’s model: Erica Bain (“BAIN?” We’re goin’ there? Really?) the host of an NPR-style radio show in which she loving pines for “the good old days” of edgy, ugly/beautiful pre-Giuliani cleanup New York.

The business surrounding Erica’s show, for the record, is the closest the film ever comes to establishing a coherent or even interesting theme: That of a bitter-raised middle finger to the romanticizing of war-zone era NYC. It’s thusly meant to carry some note of irony when, after another day of waxing nostalgiac for the days of Punk Club scuzz and “Eloise,” Erica and her fiancee have a horrific encounter with a very “old New York” element: Jumped by a gang of thugs (one of whom is recording the attack with a video camera to help add chaos to the editing – way to think outside the box, huh?) during a midnight park walk, both are savagely beaten and the fiancee winds up dead.

Suddenly, Erica’s beloved city is feeling mighty dark and unsafe, and it’s not long (in fact, it’s quick enough to strain believability) before she’s buying herself an illegal handgun (“30 days? I WON’T SURVIVE 30 DAYS!!!!”) and morphing into a steely-eyed urban crimefighter. She starts out blowing away burglars and muggers, then quickly moves up to rapists and organized-crime kingpins before remebering to track down her initial attackers so that the film can stage one of the goofiest endings since “The Village.”

She can have her dog… I want my MONEY back.

FINAL RATING: 3/10

Assigning a numerical rating is the hardest part of writing any one of these reviews, and even harder to explain. That’s why, when an example comes along that offers an easy insight as to how I arrive at these numbers, I feel a certain obligation to reveal it. So, then: “Dragon Wars,” a hugely successful Korean-made (but American-set and English-speaking) giant-monster blockbuster, features a sequence in which a gigantic monster serpent easily the size of several city blocks coils it’s way up a skyscraper and does battle with a fleet of armed Apache attack choppers – NO MOVIE WHERE THAT HAPPENS CAN GO BELOW A “5.” It’s that simple. There could be NOTHING else of value or worth in the entire enterprise and it would STILL be at least average, because it has a giant snake wrapped around a building fighting helicopters.

There’s a period in the 2nd act when “Dragon Wars” achieves, if only for a brief time, a kind of transcendant greatness that some overall “better” films can only dream of: Buraki, the above-mentioned giant snake, wraps himself around the above-mentioned Los Angeles skyscraper. Down below in the streets, a combined force of SWAT troops, LAPD cops, Army troops and a squad of tanks engaged in a pitched battle with the Atrox Warriors – Buraki-worshipping evil soldiers clad in gleaming silver armor, astride dinosaur-like steeds and backed up by waves of lumbering slug/lizard behemoths with cannons mounted on their backs. Above, a flock of winged, dragon-like Bulcos engage in dizzying dogfights with attack-choppers. Fireballs are spewed. Giant monsters throw rows of cars about like piles of dry leaves. Swords clash with bullets. Monster-launched missiles tear through concrete.

It is, all by itself, instantly one of the single greatest scenes of monsters attacking a major city in motion picture history – fit to be displayed alongside “King Kong’s” New York rampage, “Godzilla’s” first seige of Tokyo or the genre-defining attack of “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms” Rhedosaurus. It’s a revelation, a symphony of sights genre fans have been waiting to see for as long as they’ve BEEN genre fans. “Transformers,” a far, FAR less delightful offering of giant-creatures tearing up urbania, WISHES it could be this portion of “Dragon Wars.” If the rest of the film was able to measure up to this one glorious stretch of it’s running time, we’d be looking at a modern classic right now.

Well… it doesn’t, and so we’re not. Truth be told, there are HUGE parts to the film that are laughably goofy, much of it borne from a palpable language barrier between the Korean filmmakers and their primarily American cast. It’s labyrinthine, destiny-centered, flashback-ladden plot makes only the barest semblance of sense. And so we’re presented in-whole a kind of raw-chaos mashup of elements: One-part gloriously-realized fantasy-infused creature feature, one-part unintentional-camp train wreck resembling nothing so much as one of the lesser “Highlander” installments. And yet, like some strange accident of evolution, the ridiculous result WORKS. It darts back and forth between hillariously-awful action-movie stock scenes and jaw-droppingly awesome giant-monster action, and BOTH paths are hugely entertaining in their own way – go for the dragons, stay for the howler dialogue and mind-bending exposition.

Some six full years in the making by Korean comedy icon turned FX-film groundbreaker Hyung Rae Shim (late of the far inferior “Yongarry” remake years ago,) the film does feature an interesting (if insanely over-complicated) setup. The central plot revolves around ancient Korea and The Imoogi, a species of king-sized snake monsters who wish to evolve into proper Dragons (of the flying, ribbon-shaped Asian variety) and can only do so via the sacrifice of specially-destined young virgins. There’s also an evil Imoogi, Buraki, who wants to devour the gal and claim Dragon-hood for himself and has enlisted an army of followers to help him out (exactly WHY a seemingly-immortal super-serpent NEEDS help is a little vauge.) The whole operation hit a snag 500 years ago when a warrior fell in love with his sacrifice-to-be charge, and the two did themselves in rather than submit to the attacking Buraki. They’ve both been reincarnated as 20-somethings in modern day L.A., and right around the time destiny rears it’s head again Buraki and Company are already about the business of tearing the place apart looking for The Girl. Most of this information is imparted to us by Robert Forster (!!!) as a reincarnated, shape-shifting Korean warrior monk who owns an antique shop. Really.

Despite the central presence of the big-bad Buraki, “Dragon Wars” has less in common with Godzilla than it does with the kitchen-sink lunacy of the Ray Harryhausen “Sinbad” films – right down the dizzying menagerie of beasties and the one-damn-thing-after-another plotting. In a way, it’s somewhat unfortunate that the bulk of “Dragon Wars” media blitz has focused on older audiences. While it’s true that grownup monster geeks and fans of “what the HELL??” moviemaking will likely find a new guilty pleasure here, the real proper audience for this is kids. Fast-paced, not terribly gruesome and stuffed to the gills with monsters and magic, this film will be MANA to any young lover of monsters/dragons/dinosaurs for whom wooden acting and psyche-melting dialogue are infinitely forgivable in the face of colossal monster battles or armored, dragon-riding baddies charging against a phalanx of tanks.

Had this film existed when I was around 7, no force on Earth could’ve kept me from watching it into memorization. To the current generation of film geeks this will be an instant “camp” cult hit… but for the NEXT generation it’s going to be a seminal title – non-monster-related parts that don’t hold up notwithstanding. At the showing I attended, a pair of young boys sat a few rows ahead of me along with an older woman (probably a grandmother to one one or both of them); and while the grownups (myself included) were laughing like hyenas for much of it, these kids were enraptured. Got a kid in your family that collects toy Dinosaurs or seeks out Godzilla flicks on TV? Take him or her to see this, you’ll be their hero.

Folks, I’ll be honest. I’ve had a massive downer of a week. Crappy time at work. Rainy weather. Just a big long “man does adulthood tend to SUCK” time… and “Dragon Wars” was exactly the tonic I needed. A huge-scale giant-monster B-movie complete with MST3K-worthy acting for laughs and extended sequences of fantasy/creature warfare for genuine thrills. I was laughing, I was applauding and, at times, I may as well have been ten years old again, amazed to be seeing Monster Movie scenes that I thought would only ever exist in my dreams. I’m not sure (though I’d hope) if director Shim’s human characters would be less spectacularly dopey when his crew speaks the same language as his cast, but he’s proven himself a prodigy at arranging sequences of giant monster carnage – and he gave me MORE than I wanted and EXACTLY what I needed.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

In the period in which I did my time as an art student, “mixed media” junk-art was big. Maybe it still is, I dunno, I don’t live in that world anymore. For those of you who’ve NEVER lived there, the basic idea of the stuff is to make something that looks as much as possible like it got mashed together “organically” (translation: “by accident”) yet wound up looking in some way compelling. You’re already thinking, “sounds easy, just bash some crap around and bullshit a rationale for it,” but that’s not exactly true: Most of the professors could always see through that, or at least were good guesses as to which of us were likely to pull it. (::raises hand::) No, the “trick” was to actually do your best BUT, if you made an actual mistake, to pass it off as one of the many “intentional mistakes” making up the greater piece. If you were REALLY ballsy, or if you were a woman and suspected that the professor harbored an ambition of sleeping with you, you might even get away with “that wasn’t the original intention, but it wound up opening new possibilities so I kept it in.”

Short version: The two inherent problem with art-imitating-junk are, #1: It can be tough to tell how much is imitation and how much is just junk, and #2: It can be even tougher to argue how much it, if at all, it ought to “matter.” (all-time champion “textbook case” movie of this type: “Attack of The Killer Tomatoes.”) Consider: If a fellow shows up tommorrow with the cure for cancer, does it really make any difference if he found it through years of dogged, meticulous research or if he just spilled the “wrong” random chemicals into the same kettle?

In this particular case, we can take a certain amount of weight off the issue immediately by confirming right off the bat that “Shoot ‘Em Up” is, in cinematic terms, most definately NOT the cure for cancer. It’s not even really the cure for a hangnail. Or even acne. In fact, if it WERE some kind of medicine, it likely wouldn’t even be very effective against mild heartburn. Despite the requisite Internet hype, this is NOT the “next level,” “perfect example,” “ultimate extrapolation” etc. of ANYTHING. Even amid it’s own genre, it’s not nearly as good as the two “Transporter” films. But it IS art-imitating-junk, and thus it does beg the troublesome “how much” and “does it matter” queries.

For analysis, it’s best to start with the “junk” in question. Though it’s obvious from the setup – black-clad gunslinger (Clive Owen) protects baby from army of killers – that actionphile writer/director Michael Davis has “studied under” John Woo, along with most of the other “Asian Masters” of the genre (the supremely icky “evil scheme” and the particular fetish that Monica Bellucci’s “hooker with a heart of gold” heroine specializes in indicate he’s also “up” on his Takeshi Miike and Chan Wook-Park) but those are generally ‘good’ action movies…

…And “Shoot ‘Em Up’s” ambition, seemingly, is to be a BAD one. After about ten minutes or so it becomes clear that the film is charging, fully-aware and with great commitment (or maybe not, but lets not get ahead of ourselves), away from Woo and into the realm of “Double Team,” “Tango & Cash,” “Stone Cold” and the collective filmography of Lorenzo Lamas: The land of “so bad it’s good” disasterpieces action-adoring movie geeks prize for their grand-scale “are you KIDDING ME???” spectacle of unintentional hilarity. These are the “heights” “Shoot ‘Em Up” hits, but the sticky-wicket is that it appears to go there on purpose: The difference between this film and a genuine-article like “Half Past Dead” is the difference between seeing a skateboarder hurt himself in a funny (to you) way while attempting what was meant to be a cool trick and seeing Johnny Knoxville hurt himself in a funny (to him AND you) way while attempting to hurt himself in a funny way.

And believe me, “Shoot ‘Em Up” has it’s so-bad-it’s-good action movie bases covered: The gunfights make no logical sense, defy all known physics and involve a nigh-superhuman hero who never misses a shot tearing through waves of bullet-magnet henchmen who couldn’t shoot a legless elephant. It shamelessly thrusts vulnerable targets (pregnant women, babies) into great danger in order to provide the suspense an un-killable hero lacks. The good guy has a “cute tic,” in this case he’s constantly chomping carrots a’la the similarly-unstoppable Bugs Bunny (get it??), and caps off his most impressive kills with groaner one-liners. The bad guy (Paul Giamatti) speaks Smartypants Supervillian Condescension fluently to his henchmen. Exposition on things we’ve already figured out is delivered with thudding literalism, usually in ADR voiceover.

It’s obvious that Davis intends most or possibly all of this to be a lark, a self-parody joke to his fellow genre devotees. The trouble arises in how difficult it seems to be to sort out how much of the “funny” is there intentionally and how much happened organically. Example: Of course the hero’s insistance on post-kill punchlines is an in-joke, but is the fact that the jokes are stunningly bad PART of the joke or just honest-to-God bad writing? Ditto some of the just-plain-awful straight dialogue. On the one hand, it’s hard to imagine that any film that has a character say of the hero “I figured out who you hate most: yourself” and NOT be doing so as satire, but on the other hand I DID see “Transformers” so I guess it’s possible. On the OTHER hand, strongest possible evidence that this is all one big joke: Amid all the massively fetishized (hell, outright sexualized) footage of firearms and their workings, “Shoot ‘Em Up” eventually positions itself as, I shit you not, a pro gun-control message movie. For real.

So, which is it? Art-imitating-junk or junk-masquerading-as-art-imitating-junk? Overall, my guess would be that it’s a lot more of Option #1 than most of it’s detractors will admit, but ALSO a lot more of Option #2 than it’s makers will readily “cop” to. The more uneasy question is whether or not the answer matters. “Shoot ‘Em Up” is a so-bad-it’s-good junkfood action epic of absolutely no nutritional value, and on that level I enjoyed it the same way I enjoy “The Adventures of Ford Fairlane” or “3000 Miles to Graceland.” If all, or even MOST, of it’s eye-poppingly ridiculous execution was an intentional mash-note to bottom-shelf action trash, Michael Davis just might be an expert genre-analyst/satirist. If it’s often startling (seeming) ineptitude really IS ineptitude, then he could be ::shudder:: another Uwe Boll. But, so what? If I liked the final product, and I did with reservations; and if others hated it, does the “intent” really make a substantive difference for EITHER opinion? A like is, after all, a like and dislike is still a dislike.

How can YOU expect to react? Well, I can think of at least quick test. The Brian Bosworth vehicle “Stone Cold” is one of the silliest, dumbest, most inane action movies ever produced. I love it to death, and bought it the first day it was out on DVD. If you know of this movie, also bought it or WILL buy it now that you know the DVD is out, you’ll probably have a good time with “Shoot ‘Em Up”… though possibly not the good time you were intended to.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

The reason that “3:10 to Yuma” is the best thing to happen to the Western genre in a good while is that it’s not trying to be the best thing to happen to the Western genre in a good while. Ever since “The Wild Bunch,” nearly every Western that’s come out has either been trying to “deconstruct,” “revise” or “examine” the genre, and every OTHER Western has been attemtping to counteract those efforts through re-mythologizing. Now, for the first time since “Tombstone,” we’ve got a Western that isn’t asking to be judged as anything other than what it is: A pretty damn good action/drama that happens to be set in the Old West. Is it going to be the movie that turns old-school cowboys into the “new” superheroes? No, and I’m grateful that it knows better than to bother.

Christian Bale has the lead as Dan Evans, a one-legged (Civil War wound) rancher who’s impotent innability to make the land work or fend off the Railroad Company goons trying to run him off it is (possibly) starting to cost him the patience of his wife and has (definately) already cost him the respect of his eldest son – who prefers as a role-model Ben Wade, a notorious outlaw he’s read about it dime-store paperbacks. As it turns out, the ACTUAL Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) has recently led his gang of brutal thieves into the area for a coach robbery. Wade is one of those inherently-brilliant improvisational supercrooks who’s always cool, collected and Zen in the manner of someone who’s thinking ten steps ahead of everyone else, to the point that he barely registers mild annoyance when a posse of Pinkertons (overheard at the screening: “Dude, which guy is Pinkerton?”) and a crotchety Bounty Hunter (Peter Fonda!!) bust him in Evans’ cozy little county.

Problematically, Wade’s gang is comprised of super-dangerous cutthroats who tend to go a little feral without The Boss around to guide them. Even MORE problematically, while they’d be trouble enough scattered to the four winds, Wade’s full-blown-psycho of a Second in Command (Ben Foster) is more than a little… um.. well, obsessed with his mentor, and opts to hold the wolfpack together as a lethal-force rescue squad that announces doom to any town that keeps them from Wade. With this imminent attack acting as a ticking clock, a posse forms to transport Wade to a secure train bound for Yuma Prison. Seeking reward money to settle his debts, Evans joins the team. Seeking Ben Wade and the chance to prove his mettle, Evans’ son follows.

So, it’s a “prisoner transport” movie, Old West style. Works for me. You’ll not be too surprised, I trust, to learn that it’s really about the psychological duel between Crowe and Bale – urbane, witty criminal versus earthy, emotionally-scarred honest farmer; both of whom are carrying baggage and secrets. and, really, thats all there is to “report.” There’s no straining for shocking twists or groundbreaking metaphor – it’s a “set up and go” action picture, plain and simple.

There’s exciting chases, big gun battles, encounters with Indian raiders and sadistic Railroad workers, macho battles-of-will and a big climactic shootout in the middle of a not-precisely-lawful town. The stuff Western genre-pics are made of, done well with good actors and a tight little script. In many ways, it reminds me of a “cowboy version” of “The Departed,” another deceptively “classical” genre film that became a crowd-pleaser and Oscar winner. Don’t even think of it as a “Western,” think of it as a “Cowboy Movie.” And enjoy.

FINAL RATING: 9/10

If you spend any amount of time in the video-game centric corners of the Web, you’ve likely heard of or experienced the work of James Rolfe, better known as “The Angry Nintendo (now more broadly Video Game) Nerd.” Short version: Relentlessly-profane, disturbingly-informative reviews/trashings/history-lessons on old-school video games of the deserved-obscure and/or famously-awful variety, posted semi-regularly to GameTrailers and the glorious ScrewAttack.com.

Part of what’s made The Nerd an online fixture is that his rants and raves have a certain intimately familiarity to his fans: If you’re one of the millions of now-grown gamers who grew up as Rolfe seems to have, i.e. a child-of-the-80s firmly-ensconsed in the video game culture of the time – especially the Nintendo-branded variety, some or even most of his digressions will awaken some pretty powerful nostalgia in you. It has for me, but never so much as his most recent posting in which The Nerd sets aside (mostly) the anger for a pure-nostalgia look back at “Nintendo Power,” the Nintendo-published magazine/company P.R. machine that was MASSIVELY popular in it’s day and retains a cult following even still.

It seems corny, but I got literally misty watching The Nerd reminisce in detail over the strange ads, letters, etc. of the magazine… which as a kid I would read each of to the point of memorization. Literally every single thing he mentions here I recall, vividly, with accompanying memories tied to it. Some good, some not so. I remember getting my Issue #1. I remember “Howard & Nester.” I remember the LETTERS he reads from the letters page. I know, silly… but I found myself honestly moved by this short little webisode. So I’m tossing the clip and link on here, just to share and also to do my part to introduce more people to The Nerd. Give this guy a look, he’s a lot of fun:

http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=24502

Thank you, Angry Nintendo Nerd, for a truly pleasant entry into what has been an increasingly mezzo-mezzo sort of week.

Mild Spoilers.

‘Round these parts, when one enters a room and notices among it’s denizens an elephant, it’s considered polite to acknowledge him (the elephant in the room) first, just to get it out of the way.

So, then, about politics and “Death Sentence.” This is a “you hurt my family, now I hurt you”/take-the-law-into-your-own-hands vigilante vengeance movie about a suburban family man who, failed by “the system,” opts to take the fight personally to the vile inner-city street gang that murdered his son using a literal bagful of guns. It’s poster-slogan is “Protect What’s Yours.” Any way you slice it, possibly by intent and definately by execution, this winds up as a merger of “zero tolerance is the only deterent” urban-crime nightmare fused with a “right to bear arms” frontier-justice fantasy – as almost all such stories are when told with sincerity or, at least, intellectual honesty.

Depending on where you fall on the “gun issue” and to what degree you can divorce your personal belief in this regard from the analysis of what isn’t really a “message movie” will have a lot to do with how you end up assessing the film: Too many of the virulently pro-gun are likely to elevate it into something that it isn’t, while a smattering of those virulently anti-gun will certainly react as though director James Wan had just burned a cross on their front lawn. And they’ll both be missing the overall merits of the film, chiefly the way in which it asks the audience to indulge in the fantasy of metting-out shotgun justice on their enemies but also shoves them headlong into confrontation with the logical toll such actions can take on a person. It’s exploitation with a brain… that it uses to figure out how to become even more exploitative.

Kevin Bacon, his simmering intensity somehow ramped up even higher here than it was in “The Woodsman,” has the Charles Bronson role as the suburban dad with the perfect family: Lovely wife (Kelly Preston), two great kids (one an artistic type, the eldest a varsity hockey star), a slick V.P. job at an insurance firm in the Big City and a quaint lil’ house as far away from urban jungle as it can be. All of this is shattered, you will be unsurprised to learn, when Dad and Number One Son make the mistake of stopping for gas in the blighted inner-city after dark and the local gang of psycho-thugs turn up looking for an “initiation kill” for their newest recruit. Exit Number One Son.

In the first of a few interesting mini-twists on the well-worn “Death Wish” formula, Dad is already so enraged at the murder of his son that he doesn’t even give “the system” a chance to fail him: When he learns that the killer may only get, at best, a short sentence; he opts out of the trial, tracks the guy down on his own and takes his eye for an eye. Unfortunately, he’s not exactly a killer by trade, so the act itself freaks him right the hell out and sends him on a slow but innevitable train to Crazy Town. More unfortunately, his prey was also the younger brother of the gang’s leader, and he and the whole “family” (irony!) take the killing as an act of war that they are all too happy to answer. So, there’s your movie: Vigilante-justice sets off a full-blown shooting war between The Burbs and The Hood.

This is, we all realize, well-worn cinematic ground. And while it wisely avoids an overindulgence in reference or homage “Death Sentence” lives openly in the shadow of cut and dry “they-pushed-him-too-far” revenge thriller titans like “Death Wish” and “Vigilante.” What distinguishes it, eventually, seems to come from a willingness to chase the darkness that Wan has brought with him from his more familiar horror work: Most “serious” films in this vein are willing to end in the comfort of ambiguity over “where it all MIGHT end,” but Wan and Bacon are prepared to pull the audience down in the deepest, darkest waters of the revenge thriller pool… the waters where “Taxi Driver” and “Straw Dogs” swim. Ironically, this provides the “realistic consequences” that the genre’s most strident critics most-frequently rail for- but in doing so it “crosses a line” that most of those same critics simply will not be able to handle.

This kind of movie is the squeamish critic’s worst nightmare: It’s absolute, balls-to-the-wall, brutal, punishing, attention-demanding stuff… but it’s ALSO smart, well-made, sincere and excellently-acted – so they can’t couch their “I just couldn’t take it” review in the veneer of more analytical criticism. “Saw” already showed that Wan was a prodigy at visceral onscreen-terror, “Death Sentence” hints that, with the right projects, he could have the makings of another David Cronenberg or Paul Verhoven.

FINAL RATING: 9/10

Seen below: The rather excellent-looking trailer for the upcoming Boston crime drama “Gone Baby Gone”:

Now, here’s the question: Even if the movie is as good as it’s trailer, and IMO it looks to be pretty damn good, will audiences give it a chance considering the problematic (and, you’ll note, completely avoided by the trailer) issue of it being directed by Ben Affleck?

For my money, they ought to. Yes, Affleck has made some awful movies and can be held at least partially responsible for loosing the Plague of J-Lo upon us, and it has been a bit of guilty fun to have him as a go-to movie star turned punching bag lately… but he’s a solid actor and potentially an interesting director, so he at least deserves and honest shot at retribution. That said, seeing it in a modestly-crowded Boston area theater tonight in front of “Death Sentence,” (which you MUST go see now before it leaves) the audience was majorly “into it” until some of them caught the teeny-weeny Affleck credit right at the end of the names, and then the giggles started. Too bad.

NOTE: Review may contain, by necessity, discussion-of or allusions-to differentiations between this film and the original which may constitute SPOILERS. You have been warned.

The reason I don’t automatically get bent out of shape about movie remakes is that, when you get right down to it, almost everything is a remake of something else “officially” or not. It’s pretty likely that we ran out of “new” stories on the fourth or fifth night of Cro-Magnon campfire tales. Joseph Campbell neatly sorted every story in every culture into one of only THREE seperate stories, Karl Jung apparently got it down to ONE. The plain fact is, almost any movie you’ll see is either directly or indirectly “inspired” by other material, and from where I sit after a full century of existance it oughn’t be forbidden for movies to add other movies to the list of “stuff to base movies on” next to books, plays, history, etc. This especially goes for the Horror genre: If- as many horror fans continue to insist- Freddy, Michael, Jason, etc. are the modern equivalents of Dracula, Frankenstein etc.; then it shouldn’t be a de-facto sin to similarly re-imagine or revamp them in the same way that other monster-mainstays have been… or at least try to.

So, short-version, I don’t begrudge anyone merely for ATTEMPTING to, 25 years later, put out a different spin on the Michael Meyers mythos. I especially don’t begrudge Rob Zombie doing so, since if you ARE going to demand horror-genre bona-fides he’s spent two genre films and an entire musical career establishing his. And while Zombie hasn’t exactly made a perfect film he’s made a fascinating and noteworthy one, which I’ll take any day of the week over what we might’ve gotten had the producers gone the risk-free hire-a-hack route. Brett Ratner’s “Halloween,” anyone? Didn’t think so.

The plain fact is that the original “Halloween” is just about the perfect example of it’s own franchise and genre. No straight-up “slasher” film is better, and none will likely ever be better. Going in to Mr. Zombie’s remake, my biggest hope was that it would compare to John Carpenter’s original film in the way that the Hammer “Dracula” movies compared to the Bela Lugosi/Tod Browning original: Familiar story and characters but with a total visual and characterization overhaul. Instead, what we have here is a film that resembles no other horror remake so much as Coppola’s “Brahm Stoker’s Dracula.” Both are reboots of an iconic character that place the antagonist in the forefront of the story, both make it a point to delve into a newly-minted “origin story” for said antagonist, both are intentionally prodding the audience’s sense of cognitive dissonance by making the viewpoint and story-structure “sympathetic” with an unsympathetic character at the center and both are framed as self-aware tributes to the genre/franchise keenly aware that the audience will probably NOT be able to “forget” the original while watching.

The key difference, and easily the most controversial and “difficult” thing about the film, is that Zombie’s take involves a revised “origin” for Michael Meyers that completely reverses the original film’s approach to characterization. The ‘point’ of the original Michael was that he was an empty-vessel for pure evil, sprouted without rhyme or reason in the heart of genuinely good suburban familyland. The “new” Michael is the abused and unloved product of a home enviroment accurately described by one character as the “perfect mix” of forces to turn someone into, well… Michael Meyers. For literally one half of the film, we watch as lil’ Michael starts off killing animals (like any good psycho in training) and then moves up to schoolyard bullies and eventually all but the youngest of his vile family members – an act which, as you already knew, lands him a lifetime stint in an asylum. It’s not so much that Zombie wants us to “sympathize” with Michael so much as he’s forcing us to place our audience-interest in him. To “understand” the why of what he does. The original film was “about” the babysitters stalked by the killer, this one is ABOUT the killer.

This reversal indeed extends to the 2nd half of the film, an abbreviated retread of the original film but this time with greater emphasis on Michael’s perspective. Now that it’s the killer with all the depth and perspective, the film’s victims are the empty, dehumanized ones. The film sees the “good guys” the same way Michael does: As lesser beings, targets, nothing more. They aren’t important (well, one of them is, maybe) to Michael, they’re in the way, and by extension they aren’t important to the movie and aren’t ever made important to the audience. We don’t “want” them to die because they seem like nice-enough people (Zombie pretty much shoots his ‘characters who deserve it’ load on the Meyers family in Act I, so the latter half is refreshingly free of ‘you stupid suburbanites’ cheap-shots) but we’re only “invested” in babysitter Laurie Strode for reasons that everyone and their grandma already knows and that the movie barely seems to recognize is supposed to be a twist.

So, yes. 40 solid minutes getting us “inside” the head/world of a savage murderer and a 2nd half that turns him loose on a cast’s worth of one-dimensional canon-fodder, from the director of “The Devil’s Rejects.” And yet, what keeps the film from finally becoming the amoral “root for the killer” epic the prude-set has been warning us about since the original Michael stabbed his original sister comes down to a very deliberate and even MORE ballsy decision by Zombie: The killings aren’t fun. There’s no Freddy Krueger “funny” deaths, none of Jason Vorhees’ improvisational genius, not even much of the original Meyers’ “heh. Did I do that?” quizzical head-tilting. The butcherings of this new “Halloween” resemble the kind metted out by “Hotel Rwanda’s” machete-wielding Hutus: Brutal, merciless and cold.

The new Michael, re-imagined as a towering 7-foot behemoth inhabitted by wrestler/actor Tyler Mane, is all business: He works fast, doesn’t play games, and is so physically powerful he can take out some of his targets just by squeezing their neck really hard. And when the deaths do take longer than a few moments, Zombie purposefully dwells on the victims, not the hardware: Empty characters though they may be, the unlucky citizens of Haddonfield meet their ends with aplomb; screaming, crying, pleading for their lives. It’s uncomfortable, it’s hard to watch, it’s horror-ific. There’s not a single “Aw yeah, get ‘im Mike!!!” moment once The Shape hits the ‘burbs, and it seems to be the key to Zombie’s vision: He’s let the “slasher” audience deeper into the mind of the monster than they’ve ever been, but in exchange he’s robbed them of the chance to “enjoy” the splatter.

So many of the choices Zombie makes here, and the fearlessness with which he carries it all out, are so fascinating that one wants to overlook or outright ignore some of the more basic and noteable flaws… but in the end that’s not entirely possible. Setting up what is eventually a “two-act” structure is an interesting approach, but the fact that “part two” must so closely resemble the original film causes it to feel jarringly seperate: After spending 40+ minutes in the entirely new world of “growing up Michael,” there’s a genuine “oomph!” in realizing that the NOT entirely new world of the familiar “Halloween” story had just touched down.

More bothersome, the decision to retain (and directly involve) the true connection between Michael and Laurie despite the now much-less-supernatural-like Michael raises some basic logic questions the film just can’t properly answer. And on the just-plain-silly side, while Zombie’s penchant for stunt-casting genre icons thankfully doesn’t get in the way of the movie (the who’s-who of grindhouse vets appear in a series of minor roles, do their parts “straight” and move on) a somewhat gratuitous bit of striptease by Sheri Moon-Zombie does. Mr. Zombie, if you’re listening: This officially became “showing off” about midway through “Rejects.” Yes, you’re wife is really, really hot. We’re all very impressed. Good goin’ on your part. But enough is enough.

I’ll give him his biggest credit where it’s most due, though (and this is where that SPOILER WARNING comes into play, kiddies): THANK YOU for finding an ending that is A.) as ballsy and brutal as the rest of the “big” scenes, B.) still doesn’t let the audience “off the hook” or go for quick catharsis and C.) is an actual ENDING. I won’t spell it out, folks, but if this new “Halloween” gets only ONE thing absolutely, spectacularly, perfect right; it’s the decision to stand up in full knowledge of the ever-worsening sequels that followed the first film and boldly scream “fuck no!, NOT doing that!” at the very idea. Bravo, at least, to that.

FINAL RATING: 7/10