Saturday was a pretty good day. A little Christmas shopping before the mall got too crowded, home for some decorating - complete with music, mulled cider and booze, then homemade pizza for dinner and three movies. And I somehow managed to hit a triple. Not that I watched three great movies. I watched three movies, but two of them sucked. Each of them gave me something the other two didn’t though. Here’s what I mean:

Fear No Evil – 1981

Take a little of The Omen, a little Carrie, a little money and you might get something like this. See, poor Andrew has some issues. No friends, good grades, doesn’t do drugs, hates gym; I think he’s a homo, but I’m not quite sure. In any case, the kids at his high school treat him like garbage. Maybe he’ll get them all back though. Maybe, just maybe he’s the Antichrist. Satan reincarnated. He’s a bit of a pantywaist to be Satan in my opinion, but hey, I just take his orders, it’s not for me to say. There does seem to be a hint here and there that Andrew might be gay…. Maybe South Park was right.

You know those movies where you think to yourself, “Geez, that would have been a lot cooler if they’d just included this or expanded on that”? Well, this isn’t one of them. This is a movie with a good idea that needed some help, but didn’t get any. Lucky for the producers, it’s from the 80’s so nobody cares.

The story is kind of loose… I don’t think Andrew has any idea that he’s Satan right away. It takes him a while to figure it out. He knows he has powers, but things start to get more and more clear as it gets closer to Easter. He starts nailing the students at his school that have been giving him a hard time, but by doing this he reveals who he is to a couple of archangels that are out to do him in and save the Earth.

This one definitely has its memorable moments, for better or worse. There are some good scenes and acceptable deaths, but it’s the silly stuff that stands out the most. Like when he’s being picked on after gym class. The school bully catches him in the shower and, um, forces a big ol’ kiss on him.

When Andrew reaches his full potential and starts to unleash all his power, he doesn’t look very frightening at all. He’s running around with a face full of makeup and wearing some kind of frilly nightdress. The fact that he can raise the dead and get them to do his bidding would be kind of frightening, but they don’t explain why he does that so it’s more of a fear of the unknown. The raised dead apparently only rot in the face too. Their hands aren’t even dirty after climbing out of the ground.

The soundtrack is good though. To be honest, I would like to watch this movie again, but mainly so that I can make more specific fun of it. If the right person took the script and reworked it, we might end up with a remake better than the original.

Feast – 2005

Oh yeah, now this….. this was the high point of the night. A bunch of people are trapped in a roadside bar and have to fight a gang of monsters. It has kind of a From Dusk Till Dawn feel to it and it kicks ass for all the right reasons. It’s fast paced, it’s funny, it’s gruesome, it’s fairly unpredictable. I won’t even tell you how many heroes there are here. It’s got Jason Mewes playing himself and dying – very well – within ten minutes or so. It’s got Henry Rollins playing a motivational speaker. It’s got monster sex, monster sperm, monsters eating their babies, people getting covered in blood right after they got themselves cleaned up, feet getting shot off, people getting de-faced….. I could keep going and ruin the whole thing for you, and a part of me really wants to do it so that I can give away the entire movie, but no. You’re good people, I’ll let you go find out for yourselves. I will tell you that the monsters steal Henry Rollins’ pants at one point. Good times.

Stay Alive – 2006

Yeah. This is the one that made it to the theatres. This is the one with well known teen actor names like Frankie Muniz on the front. This is the one that sucked ass in the same way that I Still Know What You Did Last Summer did. This is another example of bad movies that are made only to get a few bucks out of the hands of teenagers on dates. The rest of us are collateral damage.

So for the plot, there’s this video game, right? And if you die in the game….. YOU DIE FOR REAL. Yeah whatever. I was so bored. This is one of the most formulaic pieces of crap I’ve seen in years. Hell, Boogeyman was better than this. I stayed awake to the useless conclusion of Boogeyman, but I could not make it through this one. More often than not, you’re in trouble if you expect to see anything good come from a horror movie rated PG-13. The last good PG-13 movie I saw that I can think of was The Others, and I’m still waiting for the next one. I’m so glad I didn’t pay for this.

So there are the three bases I hit. One good one, one so bad it’s good one, and one that was just bad. I’m sorry to have mentioned Stay Alive to you, but Feast makes up for it. Now go get Feast.

Dan has nightmares about a pantsless Henry Rollins

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