In & Out [post] Venom: Let There Be Carnage

You are a cancer to everyone who ever loved you, Eddie.

Rating: PG-13 Runtime: 97 minutes (appreciated)  Where: Regal West Manchester (masked up, with my son)

What's it about? Who the Hell knows? Eddie Brock inadvertently gives some of his space goo to Kletus the Slack-jawed yokel and chaos, er, Carnage ensues. Venom, the fairly shitty 'good' guy, must save San Francisco from the red version of himself and his ear-piercing girlfriend (as in volume, not someone who works at Claire's). 

What works: Woody Harrelson is great in everything, and when he's on screen, good times are sure to follow. Tom Hardy is reliable as always, though he seems more irritated that usual.

What doesn't: The action is basically an endless about of CGI tentacles vigorously dry-humping each other in mid-air...

Because everyone is lying.

With both my kids playing youth sports, it should surprise no one that, as a family, we frequently find ourselves wandering the aisles of Dick's. And yes, that is the unfortunate name of the largest sporting goods store in our area. Nine times out of ten, the kids and I end up in the hunting section, and ten times out of ten you'd find us collectively wearing permanent WTF faces. Camouflaged everything is bad enough, but hides? Deer calls? Frickin' treats!?? All of this seems like a way unfair advantage, and honestly, the ultimate dick move.

But then again, outside of a bargain, I don't hunt shit. I'm not a f--king hillbilly redneck. *scoffs*

Lift your plates a-holes, as The Hunt, seemingly released a decade and a half ago in the shit-soaked darkness known as 2020, fully turns the tables on the ol' murderous prey for play genre. But this time, it's the right-wing red-staters who are running from the liberal elites. Wait, what?

It's true, but not because of a freedom-crushing infringement on their lives, with like, a mask mandate or a children's book by an African American author, no. Instead these likely card-carrying Trump fans are ducking and covering from high-powered rifles, landmines and a general sense of absolute f--king chaos. I'm not sure why the game turns out to be so crudely elaborate, but I'm nine-hundred percent positive I had a good time watching it. When I wasn't looking away.

Honestly, The Hunt is a lot like other flicks in this weird sub-genre, as rich people hunting for sport is, sing it with me, a tale as old as time. It's bloody, it's over-the-top, and of course, wickedly subversive. I'm thinking The Deadliest Game and Ready or Not, with a dash of Battle Royale and The Hunger Games for good measure. And like with any (and all, if we're honest) of those movies, with the selection of the participants? Well, Someone done f--ked up. But it's not Ben Richards or the lady survivalist from You're Next [review] that the hunters should be nervous about, no - it's first ballot random movie Hall of Famer, Betty Gilpin. Believe the hype, as she's an absolute champ in this motherf--ker, start to finish.

I fear I'm not meant for greatness.

As this may be my final feature-length posts for awhile/ever, I really wanted to open strong one last time. You may have noticed over the last ten years or so (or not, it's fine) that I tend to kick things off with a vague personal connection to the film at hand (like, super-vague), but this time...I've really got nothing. Like, really really.

I thought about just writing WTF once for every minute of the film's run-time, but nine hundred what the f--k's seemed excessive.

I thought about the curse of talking foxes striking again, but that's a pretty obscure personal reference, as half the attendees to the OG event are currently/presumably in (dog) heaven.

So, uh...I guess I'm just going to do...nothing...at all, really. Maybe I'll come back in a year or so...when I've actually got a story to tell.

It's been a long and lonely time since I caught an August showing of The Green Knight with my sister, so frankly, this review is going to beyond f--king worthless. But between you and me, if one of the ushers had thrust a working laptop into my sternum immediately upon exiting the theater that day, well, that's probably what I would have typed over and over: beyond f--king worthless.

Whoa, whoa, whoa...before you cut off my head with little to no effort in front of a room full of unimpressed cosplayers, let me explain myself a bit. First, let me blame the registrar's office, because whatever prerequisite course I should have taken prior, I did not, and the whole time felt like this f--ker was in a language I was only passingly familiar with (like English). We're talking string theory and I just conquered mixed numbers. Second, my sister, of f--king course, f--king loved it, and comes out of the theater bellowing that was so f--king awesome a split-second before I got out who just shit in both my eyes for seventeen hours? Oh, so now I'm the asshole here? Yes, and for the people in the back, YES. Third, you know what else I did (months) after this movie? I fucking bought a 4K copy on Black Friday. To watch. Again. Like a goddamn moron.

Somebody will figure this out.

I used to have a dog named Dodger. I loved this dog more than anything. Sure, he would do bad dog things sometimes, but nothing unforgivable.

One time, though, on our daily walk, he shit ten times. Read that again. Ten times. Now Pups would occasionally drop a bonus deuce, but ten? Double digits? Unheard of. And with only two grocery bags in hand, I found myself dealing with way more shit that one could responsibly be responsible for. I started out making the best of it, but by the end, I just had to ignore all the crap, shrug my shoulders like an a-hole, and get the Hell outta there, you know?

It was an awfully shitty afternoon, but no matter what, I still loved that dog. Nothing was ever going to change that.

Maybe M. Night also ate something he wasn't supposed to, as that's the only logical existence for the Target bag full of crap that is his latest flick, Old. An unhealthy mix of clunky and ridiculous, this f--ker was a crushing disappointment. Not only because it was so consistently stupid, but I also because I brought (and paid for) my family with me, inadvertently vouching for it in the process. Don't worry everybody, M. Night, he's a friend of ours.

Not even really sure if I'm getting this correct (nor does it even matter), but Old kicks things off with a fairly silly set up. A family of four arrives at a luxurious resort to have one last go-round of happy times before the parents announce their divorce. But that may be a little White Lotus cross mojination happening here (blame Alexandria Daddario - always), forgive me, as it's been a minute, but let's go with that as the premise. Oh, and the circumstances about the whole thing (minus the impending divorce) are fairly mysterious (aw, jeez...I might be thinking about  Nine Perfect Strangers now...[blame Nicole Kidman's accent - always).

While you may be able to forgive me for mashing all of these stories together (I saw this movie the day it came out [as one does with M. Night films]), it's going to be a lot harder to forgive just about everything that happens outside of the exposition. The family and some other (seemingly) random jerk-offs from the hotel are whisked away to the beach and immediately abandoned, literally, by M. Night himself. I'd tell you what happens next but you already know/I don't hate you (that much). 

This is all just...not me.

[Note: I believe this is the movie that officially broke Two Dollar Cinema. This post has been in my drafts since September (for a movie I watched in July). I'm going to leave whatever dated nonsense in here...in here. I want to revive/reinvent this site, but I must exorcise some demons first, apparently]

Playoff time, I'd say hockey, likely through a crooked beard. In the Brady days, I might have considered the NFL (honestly, I loved Drew Bledsoe more...*ducks*), though when the Sox finally reversed the curse, I may or may not have considered getting a tattoo of their logo. On my face.

But gun-to-head/junk, basketball has always been the game I love the most, and when someone thought of combining it with the Looney Tunes in 1996, at the time I was convinced that magic had truly happened. Well, not Magic-magic, but you know what I mean, movie magic. And when I heard they were finally making a sequel - twenty years later - with LeBron James no less, only two words came to mind:

F--k that. No thanks.

And that'll about do it, honestly, as I loathed just about every single thing, top-to-bottom, in the Warner Bros. flavored diarrhea known as Space Jam 2: A New Legacy. Hell, even my kids didn't like it, and they're not middle-aged douche canoes like the rest of us. Er, me. Just me.

Fine, maybe it's not that bad (oh it most certainly is), but everything about it feels...forced at best, soul-crushingly stupid at worst. The first flick is by no means a masterpiece, obviously, but it's charming and has its heart in the right place. And, uh, seemingly understood the basic tenets of basketball (and coherence).

This time around, someone who just double-featured The Lego Movie and Ready Player One thought, you know what this needs? A sleepy LeBron James, an absolutely manic Don Cheadle, and a pouty kid permanently stuck doing whatever he wants to do, gosh! Oh, I'm sorry, is that a dated reference that no one under the age of thirty-five gets? Hmm. Lot of that going around lately...

On a tour of the Warner Bros. studios, Lebron and his kids are shown some new thing that's entire angle is to make movies worse. Much worse. While LeBron ain't exactly feeling it, his son Dom is, as this kid is way more interested in AI than say, A.I. Yeah, turns out even LeBron's kid doesn't like basketball all that much, and would much rather be a videogame designer. Fine, that's not the worst outline ....

Speaking of forced inclusion for no apparent reason, here are the Yays and Boos. For the record, this was one of those 'we're going to watch this as a family' movies (why that always sounds like a threat, I'll never know), and it took us four shots to make it to the end. Four. And that only applies to three of us. Mom, shockingly, went 0-4 and never made it further than halfway.

Wait, wait, wait. Did you all go to Pound Town?

There's nothing cool about turning forty-two. I'm losing my hair. I (mostly) hate my job. Oh, and uh, the whole world is basically a flaming turd bounding downward straight to Hell, inexplicably gathering more shit and flames with each passing second. But, doing some quick math, there is some good news. Being forty-two, today, in the shit-soaked depths of late 2021?

That means I was a teenager in the last great decade this planet will probably ever see: the motherf---king 1990s. *cue Ice Cube's It Was a Good Day*

I was fifteen in 1994, so Netflix's Fear Street: Part 1-1994 gave me a much-welcomed nostalgia boner from the absolute jump. And, honestly, it was pretty much sustained throughout - the nostalgia - not so much the, well...I already mentioned my age, right? Right.

Anyway, as the first part of a trilogy, this dope little flick comes from the edgier side of R.L. Stine apparently, and is much less slappy, much more grisly. Set in a cursed town like no other (well, maybe it's a little Derry-ish), this sordid tale is an absolute pitch-perfect throwback to better days. The kids are smart, but not overly self-aware and the murder and mayhem is top-shelf. 

In what feels like an extended episode of Tales From the Crypt (with a dash of Scooby-Doo because why the f--k not?), we find ourselves rolling with a leveled up version of Mystery Inc. But instead of a surly longshoreman in a haunted amusement park, this ragtag group of determined teens is dealing with a pissed-off witch and her legion of mid-level bosses. Ruh roh Raggy, indeed. If all of these kids wake up in the mornin', they gotta thank God...

I'm not sure anyone here can actually believe it.

I tried with The New Mutants in August of 2020, but I chickened out when the theater inevitably became not empty (according to the app). Anya Taylor-Joy always takes my breath away, sure, but in theory I was going to need it back. 

I swore I wouldn't bail on Tenet in September, my next attempt, but the thought of bringing something home just to see John David Washington solve future crimes from the past (or whatever) felt irresponsible at best. So again, bought the f--king ticket, and stayed the Hell home.

The only time I was ever going to the movies again? I needed it to be safe. 

And I needed to be alone.

Which are more or less the exact words the Abbott family lives by in A Quiet Place Part II - the first film I managed to see theatrically since COVID-19 showed up on Earth and f--ked everything. Picking up moments after (and before, sort of) the events of the first film, director John Krasinski's follow-up is nothing short of essential viewing. But that just might be the overpriced popcorn talking...(it isn't).

Though I'm not sure why these f--king creatures came to Earth if they hate noise so goddamned much, I'm nine-hundred percent positive that I love these murderous pricks regardless (despite their poor vacation planning). This time around, the film opens with the terrifying moments when everything went immediately tits up, and it might be the most harrowing ten minutes of either film (and that's saying something, as these flicks are a combined four hours of the audience collectively holding their breath and asses). A normal New England day (which at this point in our lives seems like a Rockwellian fantasy) is jettisoned into the sun, as these creatures appear out of the sky and destroy absolutely everything. It's shocking, scary and surprisingly heartbreaking, considering we already know how this story ends.

We're not supposed to be down here.

Greetings. And welcome. 

I want to play a game. Oh, uh, you don't have to like cut off the wrong foot or anything, just grab a pencil and some scratch paper, and number that f--ker from one to five, ten if you're feeling really saucy. 

I want you to write down the things you're most afraid of. Don't overthink it, just write! We can worry about the order after the fact. I'm going to play, too. Ready? Go.

Yeah, we'll probably die.

Being almost nine-hundred posts in, I'm sure I've repeated myself on more than one occasion, but, uh, unfortunately, good luck stopping me if you've heard this one before...

Probably/sadly close to twenty years ago, I wrote something of a treatment for a zombie flick I intended to write called The Peaceful Dead. 

The supposed horror-comedy would have told the (lackluster) tale of an out-of-work stuntman named Eddie, who, after banking a large settlement check from a cut-rate 'film' studio (Eddie got catastrophically injured on the set of Ninja Island, obvs) heads to Vegas to let it roll. Some major shit goes down on the strip, and Eddie ends up leaving town in a hurry. Turns out, he's being followed by film company goons to collect the cash Eddie already lost. On the way out of town, ol' Edward picks up a whacked-out hitchhiker who claims there's a fully functioning town of the undead, one that the government cut off from society years ago (the driver of the lowest-bidding toxic waste disposal company spilled his load after a masturbatory mishap, naturally). Eddie ain't buying this Area fifty...two, but after the goons catch him and threaten his life, he finagles his way out of imminent death by mentioning this alleged zombie town. He figures this location would be ideal for a horror-movie shoot, as all the effects will be real. And no stuntmen can get hurt during the process. Just some undead bastards, who happen to be going about their lives, you guessed it, peacefully.

It goes on from there, but clearly, you've heard enough.

Bad news for me/good news for the rest of the world, Shaun of the Dead came out shortly thereafter, and I immediately gave up the dream. I felt that the ideas were too similar, and Edgar Wright's flick was f--king awesome - one of my all-time favorites. Why even bother fleshing this one out (for a multitude of reasons, honestly), you know?

Somewhat surprisingly, it wasn't Simon Pegg and Nick Frost who (partly) read my mind and tore up my dream. Nope.

It was f--king Zack Snyder?

Well, sort of, as his latest offering, the Netflix-exclusive Army of the Dead, somewhat reminded me of the script, uh, I never wrote. 

Snyder's second foray into the lives of the undead opens when a couple of soldiers inadvertently unleash heck just outside of the Vegas strip. The mysterious cargo wasn't aliens as its drivers had guessed, but instead a mini-Hulk looking dude, existing solely on a healthy diet of violence and chaos. It doesn't take long for the virus to overtake Sin City and its slew of hookers, magicians, and of course, hooker-magicians. Naturally, the plan is to wall the whole place off and blow it straight to f--king Hell. Seems reasonable, I suppose...

Also making small-kine sense (Hawaiians love them some Vegas), is the assembling of a ragtag squad of zombie-horde survivors, ass-kickers and masters of general unsavoriness, in an effort to breach the wall and head back in. But, uh, why would anyone want to do that, with all the biting and the dying and such? Well, when everyone got the f--k out of there, a lot of the money stayed behind, see. And the bigshot assembling the crew says there's two-hundred million dollars inside his casino's safe, and Dave Bautista's Scott Ward can keep a quarter of it. Sounds like a good deal to me, you know? Assuming everyone, uh, plays fair and makes it out alive, or at the very least not...undead.