[In case you haven't noticed, things are slack at HND these days, so since I realize not everyone follows the other sites I write for, I am now committing myself to cross linking all my genre coverage at Cinematical, Horror Squad and Sci-Fi Squad here.  Operation: Climb Back Up Google Rankings begins with SXSW 2010 films.]

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Written and Directed by Gareth Edwards, 2010

Now indie filmmaker Gareth Edwards has arrived on the scene with Monsters, yet another fresh, unique take on the creature feature. However, unlike all of the aforementioned films, Edwards’ goal was not to make a giant monster movie, it was to make a small scale, intimate, on-the-road movie that happens to have giant monsters in it from time to time. It takes place in an alternate reality where a NASA space probe has crashed to Earth, releasing in the process the eggs of an alien race that soon spread across Central America. As a result, half of the United States is turned into a massive quarantine zone bordered by an enormous wall and military presence.

Six years after the world has become accustomed to the contaminated zone, Andrew (Scoot McNairy), a photographer in Mexico, is asked to escort his bosses’ daughter, Samantha (Whitney Able), back to America. When an arrangement with a ferry back to America falls through, the unlikely pair are forced to hire a guarded escort to bring them through the contaminated zone over land. And so begins a most unique spin on what giant monster movies need to be.

Read the rest of my MONSTERS review at Sci-Fi Squad.

You can also read a few more of my thoughts over at  Hollywood.com.

The trailers for THE BOOK OF ELI did nothing for me.  It looked like an over-stylized yet still monotone vision of the future banking on Denzel Washington’s inherently badass attitude and a number of quickly cut together action scenes.  Plus, it’s been 8 years since the Hughes Brothers made a movie, so buzzing the production as the latest film from the Hughes Brothers is meaningless to me.  It is with great relief, then, that I’m happy to report, to my own surprise, I liked THE BOOK OF ELI.  Truth is, I almost even loved it.

Don’t let the marketing fool you.  The Hughes Brothers have delivered a unique meditation on life after the end of times that does its best to be the polar opposite of everything the trailer looked like.  Denzel Washington plays the titular character (Eli, not the book), a man who has dedicated his life to walking west on a mission, a mission I will be touching upon below.  I’m not going to be spoiling anything huge (or non-obvious), but if you know next to nothing about THE BOOK OF ELI and want to keep it that way, I leave you here with a simple verdict: Yes, it’s worth a trip to the theater.

The world has gone to shit.  Gary Whitta’s script doesn’t spell out the particulars of what brought about Armageddon, but the severe lack of population density and decimated landscape looks like every nation in the world with the means to do so pressed the button.  Minuscule pockets of people managed to survive the apocalypse, however, and the story follows our hero, Eli, and his often fatal interactions with other wasteland wanderers on his slow, west-bound trek across total desolation.  He encounters a man named Carnegie (Gary Oldman) who runs a small town that has access to trickles of precious H2O.  Carnegie, it is established, is looking for an unnamed book that he calls “a weapon”…

The movie doesn’t tell you right away, but you’d have to be not only blind but completely ignorant not to figure out that the mysterious leather-bound book that Eli spends every night reading and every day protecting like its the water purification chip for Vault 13 or the Garden of Eden Creation Kit is, in fact, the Bible.  But before you assume that Warner Brothers has put out a movie with a message that says only God can save all of mankind, let me dispel that assumption.  THE BOOK OF ELI is not advocating any religion.  It’s not saying the world needs Christianity to function.  Its only commentary is on faith; on how simply believing in something – anything – can motivate the mind beyond the body’s ravaged limitations.  One of the (many) things I like about the Hughes Brothers’ film and Whitta’s script is that it’s still not that simple.

To talk about why it’s not that simple would indeed be revealing things a review shouldn’t, but regardless of which side of the ideological fence the film ultimately teeters on to (and there’s little question where it falls), it’s still an interesting premise that the Hughes Brothers leverage to give the film extra dimensions worth further examination.  But let’s not forget that this site is called Horror’s Not Dead, so I’ll step away from the ideas the film rolls around with and talk about why it should appeal to anyone reading a site called Horror’s Not Dead.

For starters, death rarely looks this striking on the big screen.  I’m not talking about just the people, though they are often dispatched in the most glorious ways by a convincingly hardcore Denzel Washington wielding a long, lethal machete.  The whole package is a magnificent portrait of what happens when everything kicks the bucket.  People, animals, buildings, dreams…all of civilization.  The directing pair do a fantastic job of convincing us everything we know now has been laid waste.  An accomplishment made possible by hiring not just great actors – Washington and Oldman are great, but the supporting cast of Ray Stevenson, Michael Gambon, Tom Waits, and even Mila Kunis are all up to the bar set by the film’s leads – and not just with an outstanding sense of visual style, but by delivering a sound design so strong that even non-audiophiles should pick up on its vivid purpose.

The main thing holding THE BOOK OF ELI back from being an outright excellent film is a waffling final act that’s capped off with a poorly executed ending.  The actual resolution of the story isn’t a problem, but how the ending treats certain characters is just plain poor.  And that’s unfortunate, because everything leading up to it is really something special.  The action choreography is top notch throughout and is even, at times, a thing of dark, blood-spilling beauty.  Acting is everything you expect from the big names and even more from the littler ones.  The cinematography will swallow you up in damn near every shot.  The vigilant sound design heightens every layer of the experience.  And all of this is in service of interesting ideas that will,  flaws and all, render THE BOOK OF ELI a topic worth talking about anytime post-apocalyptic movies are brought up.

[Because I wish even the most skeptical of skeptics would experience this on the big screen, I'm plugging my SFS review of Avatar here.  And also because this is my site and I do what I wants.]

The buzz and buzzkill leading up to Avatar, it turns out, found inadequate purchase now that the world has finally glimpsed the fabled film. The echo chamber of hype that believed it would drastically alter the landscape of filmmaking forever, the virulent, vitriolic cries of Dances with Smurfs, the total indifference…all misplaced.

You are not prepared for Avatar. Roll your eyes at that; laugh it off, you’ve heard that pitch before. It’s not hyperbole, though, it’s bald truth. Whether it’s your most anticipated movie of the year or your least, it is not precisely what you think it is. How could it be? Avatar is a motion picture precedent, after all. It’s fair to say that the core conflict is less than revolutionary and that parts of the narrative are broad, but those ills are scarcely symptomatic of James Cameron’s ultimate goal. It’s not about challenging the formula of Group X oppresses Group Y, who then fight back. Nor is it about only showcasing the bleeding edge technology that Cameron and company have invented and licensed over the last decade. Avatar is about transporting a viewer to the awe-inspiring alien world of Pandora and integrating them into its fantastic way of life for 150 minutes. That’s the bullseye Cameron is aiming for, and that is the bullseye he obliterates.

Read the rest of my Avatar review at SciFi Squad!

These are the things I think about when I watch science fiction — and trust me, though the horror crowd will want to hold onto it because the film has a lethal, gory seam to its bloodsucker proceedings, DAYBREAKERS is at its core a sci-fi film that happens to be about vampires.  It also happens to be a pretty damned good film.  Yes, it’s leagues better than their resourceful but lacking, low-budget zombie opus UNDEAD, but more importantly, the Spierig brothers’ script for DAYBREAKERS is legitimately concerned with the unsustainable state of a nocturnal, plasma-centric economy and a whole host of other problems that come with a world over-run with vampires, including but not limited to inter-species vampirism and the huge number of forest fires caused by transformed animals too stupid to realize that if they run out into the forest during daylight they’re going to burst into flames.

For someone like me, someone who cares about the little touches like that, DAYBREAKERS is an ideal blend of thought and action.  And though ideal for me, that may be a problem for others considering DAYBREAKERS is perhaps lighter on the horror and action foundations than one might hope for.  It’s also not flawless on the thought side, either, but it makes very noble strides into territory that no vampire film has gone before with an undead heart in the right spot every step of the way.  Ethan Hawke is suitably morose in the role of Edward, a human-sympathizing corporate hematologist who refuses to drink 100% human blood, who only wants to convince his overlords that unless a blood substitute is found (and it isn’t likely), plasma-deprivation is going to turn all of the civil vampires on Earth into ravenous, uncontrollable winged creatures of blood lust.

By a twist of fate, Edward gets to know a small band of rogue humans led in part by Elvis (Willem Dafoe), a man who used to be a vampire until he discovered, by accident, a cure for the fanged affliction.  And so the conflict is born between Edward, his new human friends and his old vampire overlords.  It’s not an unfamiliar triangular conflict, particularly when family members start getting involved, but any predictability as far as how things are going to turn out is suppressed by how refreshing the vampiric setting, especially its cure, is.

Now all this talk of thought and cures should not detract from the fact that when DAYBREAKERS wants to spill some blood, it’ll spill it by the gallon, and when it wants to transform a person into a horrible bat-man, it’ll do so by the legion.  The creature design is, for lack of a more cerebral term, wicked and the full body prosthetics used to pull it off should put a smile on the face of any fan of practical effects work.  CGI in the film is largely confined to use in construction of the Spierig’s special brand of future, which for someone like me is the best element of the film.  Everything from the cars the dominant race drives to the coffee shops they stop at to the houses they live in is tailor made to ask the “what if?” question of a world run by vampires.  It’s really great, really detailed work on the part of the Spierig brothers and I wish that films with more strictly sci-fi conventions would actually be this imaginative in their world building (here’s look at you, DISTRICT 9).

Though most will surely laugh when Dafoe first begins to introduce himself as the overtly southern Elvis, he’s actually the most interesting character in the film, which is kind of a shame considering he’s not the main character.  That’s okay, though, because Ethan Hawke is likable enough on his own, but even still, he’s almost always on screen with either Dafoe or Sam Neil (as his tyrant boss at the blood corporation), which means audiences are almost always going to have a grin on their face.  Mix that persistent grin with a few moments that might just blow your mind, and DAYBREAKERS is one hell of a memorable film.  If you love all things vampires, you’re going to go apeshit for its ideas of an all-vampire world.  If, like me, you’ve grown weary of our own real-world society that’s recently fallen back in love with the night walkers, DAYBREAKERS is thankfully unlike any other vampire property on the market right now.

It’s win-win for everyone.

From Quiet Earth.

But here’s the catch.  Stop watching the trailers.  If a TV spot comes on, change the channel.  If you see one of those “Humans Only” print ads, don’t look at it.  You’re being lied to.  The film you may think DISTRICT 9 is is not the film you will see in theaters (and trust me, you will want to see this film in theaters).  Don’t worry, I’ll be walking on eggshells here, so feel free to continue reading why it isn’t those things and still remain unspoiled.

Neill Blomkamp’s feature debut is not a faux documentary nor is it filmed in the first person style, as the trailers make it out to be.  Nor is it about the world’s reaction to aliens who have just arrived on Earth.  DISTRICT 9 is a small, intimate story set within a fictional world in which aliens have landed 22 years ago.  That last piece of information is crucial to shaping your notion of what this movie is.  It is not a recount of what has already happened nor is it an invasion film.

Think of DISTRICT 9 as James Cameron’s ALIENS without there ever having been an ALIEN.  It’s a very narrow story set within a very specific universe familiar enough to our own to feel grounded, but unpredictable enough to feel lethal for all involved.

And that comparison may just be the most impressive thing about D9: That an effects animator-cum-feature director like Neill Blomkamp can create a film that, in a matter of twenty or so introductory minutes, bridges the need for a world-building prequel and heads straight into streamlined, gung-ho science fiction action territory.  Once he’s there, when he’s shown us the rules of the world he and co-writer Terri Tatchell have created, there’s no stopping him and his infectiously charismatic star Sharlto Copley from having a roaring, laugh-out-loud, gibbing-bodies-left-and-right, stomping-on-all-expectations kind of time.

And yet that comparison may also just be why I’m not blindly in love with D9.  I like ALIEN more than ALIENS.  I prefer to see the world built, the rules discovered instead of established; I don’t want to know the threat of the facehugger, I want to be there when the crew of the Nostromo are wondering what the hell those leathery pods are.  Which isn’t to say that DISTRICT 9 explains each of its little secrets all at once, not by a long shot.  It’s got a spacey jockey or eight of its own to hypothesize over and tons of tricks up its sleeve you won’t see coming, but it also spends no time pondering how the other 7.6 billion people on Earth are dealing with an extra-terrestrial presence.  But there’s no way I can lodge ‘they’ve been here for 22 years’ as a complaint against Blomkamp and Tatchell’s script.  There’s no questioning this is the story they wanted to tell and there’s no questioning that it’s a story I’ll be joining time and time again over the years, but because D9 is engineered on a small scale, inquisitive minds will beg for answers to questions the film never asks.

Fortunately you’ll be too busy wondering how it’s all going to end to worry about the social hierarchy of the aliens’ caste system.  That boring stuff is for the chess club, Blomkamp’s A game is for the rockstar robotics team.  It’s nerdy enough to withstand scrutiny, yet mainstream enough to be a total blast to watch.  Careful eyes will widen with joy at the sight of some of the most astounding digital work to ever come out of WETA Workshop Imagine Engine.  There are shots in DISTRICT 9 I was convinced were brilliant practical prosthetics work, but I was wrong.  The work on the humans is real-world, the work on the aliens is completely computer generated.

Though credit for fooling me more than once doesn’t belong exclusively to the wizards at WETA Imagine Engine.  Were it not for the brilliant performance of Sharlto Copley, the illusion could never stand.  He’s on fire in every scene, never once giving a hint that dialog is improvised or that he’s a first time actor.  His performance is intrinsically bonded to every aspect of the film, giving Copley and Blomkamp equal ownership over how unique of a movie this is as.

And if the world of cinema is lucky enough, in a few years time DISTRICT 9 will be looked at as the launching point of remarkable careers for those two men.  Regardless of which way the ALIEN or ALIENS scale tips for you, D9 will be remembered as a great summer film.  It doesn’t play into Hollywood paradigms.  There’s no neon sign in the script that flashes, “Pay attention: This will come back later!” nor is there a sense of safety for the two instantly memorable characters at its core.  DISTRICT 9′s is exciting in ways few movies this year have been.  It (along with MOON) is the film equivalent of an ice-cold bottle of Snapple on a sweltering summer day.  And if you don’t get that analogy, then you’ve never had a Snapple.  It’s made from some of the best stuff our genre(s) has to offer and hearing that seal pop for the first time is a divine indulgence.

MANIFEST DESTINY from Darrell and Doug Waters on Vimeo.

As io9 picked up, in June an elaborate crop circle was found in England that looked like a massive Jellyfish, which also happens to be what Earth’s magnetic field looks like when it is struck by the waves of radiation of a powerful solar storm.  Further encoded into the crop circle were an ordinal series of eclipses that, when deciphered, indicated July 7^th would be the day that earth’s magnetosphere would once again be blasted into the shape of a jellyfish.

Well guess the apocalyptic fuck what.  The crop circle was accurate.  On July 6^th and 7^th a solar storm hit the planet, bending our invisible to the naked eye protector into the general shape of a jellyfish.  Obviously life didn’t end, but still, two things frighten me.

One, why is a crop circle accurately predicting a solar storm?  Two, why in the shit does said prediction/storm occur the same day that a movie about predicting an extinction level solar storm comes out?

I’m not saying the two things are related.  If they are, this is both the most elaborate and the worst viral marketing I’ve ever seen since no one covering the weird story has noted the coincidence.  What scares me – and yes, this does genuinely bother me – are the odds of such a coincidence.

I’m terrible at numbers, but I have an instinctual slavish devotion to probability and statistics.  When something as astronomically (and in this case, that’s a literal measure) improbable as this bullshit happens, my brain crawls.  It doesn’t compute.  It freaks me the hell out how because I fear deep down that the universe is giving a sign as to how boned we all are.

If something that proved relatively tame but still phenomenally unlikely happens it only reminds of how much more likely it is that something simpler yet equally as beyond the control of humans is lurking in our future waiting to wipe out mankind.  Like, say, a solar storm from space not predicted by a crop circle.  Or a massive meteor flying in Earth’s blind spot.  Or a superflu virus.  Or the Elder Gods.

I’m not paranoid (though I would really like to know who the hell made the crop circle).  I don’t live in a cave thinking the world is going to get demolished like so many Syfy Channel movies, but I can’t help but see something like the above and muse on how helpless we all are.

Happy Friday!.