Saturday, June 29, 2013

I think the real damage was to my dignity.

I love my sister-in-law. I do. Not only has she had a huge hand in helping us raise our son, but she's genuinely a very good person. But, there's one thing she does that routinely baffles me. When she rents the kids a movie from Redbox, she won't allow the case in the house. Absolutely not. Oh, she'll bring in the disc. But the plastic case it's housed in? No way. It's filthy. Who knows where that thing's been.

If only I had one-upped her and left Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, disc included, in my Jeep, we'd all be better off. In fact, I should have just left it in the machine altogether. But damned if I'm not a sucker for a hot chick and a short runtime. Quite the diabolical duo, or so it seems.

Anyway, picked up on a whim as a naptime feature and even with zero expectations, I was still left utterly disappointed. Almost angry, in fact. I'll be the first to admit that I was in a shitty mood when I started it, but by the end I wanted vengeance. First, whoever greenlit this shit? They need an arrow to the balls and/or vagina. Secondly, most of the cast? You bitches need to be pushed into a hot oven for even signing up for this one. I just watched it. You a-holes made it. And finally, I blame myself. I might deserve a troll stomp to the groin for wasting $0.32 renting this one. Or slightly more valuable, my time.

If you care, and likely you don't, this flick tells an updated/reimagined/dumber version of the original Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. We still get the siblings lured into a strange candy house. And they still end up outsmarting her and cooking that nasty witch in her own oven. But these kids talk a little shit while they're at it, potentially severing all ties with the original German children's story. And from there? Basically all bets are off. From there it's all bad acting and even worse effects, with terrible dialogue delivered in atrocious accents. But just when you think you'd rather jam a lollipop in your eye than continue watching Witch Hunters, writer/director Tommy Wirkola wins you back with an awesome kill or some chick's shapely ass. To which I reply, as only another famous hunter of wretched beasts could, Clever girl.


Non-existent Robert Muldoon quote quota attained, let's piss off the townsfolk and hunt down the Yays and Boos. Or we could just phone it in and burn everyone at the stake willy-nilly. F--k it. Either way works for me.
Good thing there's not this weird incestuous thing going, right. About that.

Yaaaaaaaay!
  • The Candy House. I actually couldn't give a shit about the movie version. But when I was a kid, my dad fully built one. For real. A life size candy house. Suck on that, every other kid in the world.
  • Peter Stormare. This movie could have ejected itself from my PS3 and taken a dump on my chest and I would still love Peter Stormare. Shitty movie or not, the dude's the best.
  • Speaking of those I love unconditionally, give it up for Famke Jensen. She's as beautiful as ever in this one, though she does turn into this ugly-ass witch at times. Whom I'd still do, of course. Hard.
  • Someone is forced to eat worms till they explode. Seriously. That's what that sentence says.
  • Though it's entirely ridiculous, I appreciate that almost every time someone is punched or shot they fly completely through the closest wall. Equal parts stupid and awesome.
  • There's a scene where the lovely Gretel (played by the sultry Gemma Arterton) passes out, um or something. Anyway, in order to help the reviving process, the town fanboy finds it solid practice to clean off her heaving bosom. This is logic I can get behind.
  • Ask any man alive if he likes Gatling guns. If he even hesitates, drive a stake through his heart immediately. He's probably a witch. Or a pussy.
  • Speaking of badassery, there's a troll that absolutely devastates bitches for f--king with Gretel. More on that guy later.
  • And finally, in a sad state of desperation, I invented my own game to try to ease the pain of watching Jeremy Renner run around yet another film with a gun and/or bow (and take it out with flair). Every time someone said a line with the word witch in it, I, like any lame twelve year-old boy would mentally substitute the word bitch instead. Oh it's stupid, but you can't argue with results like these...
    • The only good bitch is a dead bitch.
    • These bitches. They never learn.
    • But, your mother! The most powerful white bitch.
Boooooooooo!
  • Sorry, I know they've made some decent flicks, but as soon as I saw 'MTV Films' I felt like someone punched me in the stomach.
  • But then the real jab in the nuts? 'Produced by Will Ferrell' flashed across the screen? What the shit? Ron Burgundy is responsible for this?
  • Hansel is a diabetic. Is that supposed to be stupid funny? Or just stupid? 
  • The action is just weird. It's kind of like a bad kung-fu flick at times.
  • I'm guessing that most of this movie is historically inaccurate, but even an idiot like me had a problem with the words yep and porridge being used seconds apart. C'mon guys, really? There's no f--king way this ever happened. Oh, Mummy, can I have some more porridge? Yep.
  • I mentioned the troll earlier, right? Right. Well this troll, Edward, is one weird looking bastard. He's like three cups John Cena and friggin' half cup Samwise Gamgee. Add Ron Perlman, to taste.
  • There's a witch on witch battle that has the potential to be cool. But in yet another Ultimate Boo, the scene is all too brief.
  • But speaking of things that should never happen, there are zero breasts in this movie. Not man, woman nor beast allows us to view their magical knockers.
  • But we get to see lots of other dumb shit in the third dimension. Well, maybe theater goers did anyway. I was stuck watching shit wave at the screen for no reason.
  • And finally, in an all new category of Boo, let me present the You've got to be f--king kidding me Boo. Turns out they're making a sequel. And it's produced by Ron Burgundy.
It's likely that my sister-in-law will never rent Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. But if she does, I've got a quick recipe that she can follow that'll allow her to bring the entire Redbox container in her house.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

Carefully place Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters directly on the center rack.

Bake for 88  minutes.

Should be germ free by then.

8 comments:

  1. I remember the first time I saw a trailer for this. I was so dumbfounded that Jeremy Renner would agree to make something like this. WTF?

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    1. Yeah, apparently Renner, like the rest of us, has got some bills to pay. Probably some student loans or something.

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  2. I love it when you still manage to write plenty of Yeays despite hating a movie. Yeah, this was released only a few months ago and I already don't remember the movie... well, apart from images of Gemma Arterton.

    Did your dad really make a candy house? If you have it on home video, you should upload it on Youtube. Maybe then I could link it to that video of "How to tie a tie" that I keep forgetting to upload.

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    1. Yeah, sometimes I wonder about that too. It's like, if the movie is really this shitty, shouldn't there be nothing to cheer about?. But then I remember that I will applaud even the littlest thing...and well...you know what happens from there.

      Gemma Arteton. There aren't words.

      Yes, he totally made a candy house. It was so tall I couldn't even touch the ceilings inside. But no, my friend, this was created so long ago...there were no readily-available motion picture devices. In fact, the only evidence in existence is at my grandfather's house. And it's in this archaic thing called a 'newspaper' or something. Whatever the Hell that is....

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  3. An interesting read:

    http://www.vulture.com/m/2013/07/lone-ranger-is-everything-wrong-with-hollywood.html?mid=imdb

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    1. Wow, HW. That was an interesting read. The author makes some good points, though none of them are altogether surprising.

      After reading the comments (um, all of them sadly), I started to reevaluate my position on going to the movies. Generally, I'll see anything, but maybe I need to be like those guys and really pick my spots. Not that my 8 bucks matters, but it doesn't feel too good to know I'm rewarding an industry of money hungry cowards.

      That said...something like The Lone Ranger is an easy target for critics to pile on to. It may be a bag of shit, but I'd like to make up my own mind, you know? But there's only one way to do that...

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  4. Damn that looks terrible. I feel so bad for Renner and Arterton, why on Earth they did a movie like this? Arterton is really talented yet she keeps wasting her time on stuff like this and she didn't even show her tits here?

    What a waste of a movie :)

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    1. It really is so, so bad. I'd like to know who was cast first. If it was Arterton, I don't blame Renner at all. I'd probably pay a couple of thousands of dollars to spend six weeks with her. Even if she's my sister in the film. Jinkies, she's fine.

      As for her lovely lady-lumps, I can say with utter certainty, she does not bare them. The disc said there was an unrated cut (10 minutes longer), but I seriously could not find the option to watch it (or not). Maybe I did? Maybe I didn't.

      But believe me, I weighed the notion of an extra ten minutes of horseshit for perhaps 5 seconds of nudity. I did.

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