The Thunder Kick (Yi wang da shu)

 Sometime in the early nineteenth century, A fisherman (Li Chin-Kun) gets into a fight with a bunch of ne'er do wells trying to charge for passage over a bridge. But as his disapproving mother tells him, violence has a way to escalate, and soon some revenge-hungry toll entrepreneurs turn up at his house with... oh shit! It's Bolo Yeung in a cool hat/open vest ensemble.
 The fisherman fights alongside a stranger who turned up to chat up his mom, and Bolo and the other goons are handily beat. Because they fought together, the stranger proclaims the fisherman his brother (battle brothers!) and ends up gifting the fisherman and his mom a fancy house. Way to undercut mom's pacifist message, stranger. Not that mom's complaining.

 I kept expecting the other shoe to drop, for the stranger to reveal some ulterior motives... and when he returns to his home city, he kind of does - but it's nothing nefarious. It turns out that he was apparently involved in a feud with a cartel led by three brothers, and that maybe he was scouting for bodyguards or something similar. Whatever it was he planned to do, we'll never know, because the nefarious triad gang up on him and kick the guts out of him (not literally, sadly) shortly after he gets back.

 But his plan does end up working, if posthumously: The fisherman soon heads to the city to visit his battle brother, learns of his demise, vows revenge... and then spends a pretty boring half hour or so watching his targets run their criminal empires. Eventually, he and some allies come up with a pretty clever plan - a Red Harvest-style scheme to set the brothers against each other so their organizations can be picked off one by one.

 And then, in the final thirty minutes or so, the fisherman does just that, going after each one of the three crime lords single-handedly in some pretty cool, drawn out fights.

 I was a bit worried for a while there because the first few fights in the film - including the Bolo one - are pretty weak; No one embarrasses themselves, but they're extremely unmemorable.
 Luckily the brawls towards the end are much much better and include some excellent bits of colour like people jumping into the fight from the floor above or getting thrown clear across some sliding doors. They have a strong sense of physicality, too, which is not always the case for these older kung-fu movies. The final confrontation, an excellent, prolonged one-on-one duel, is the only time weapons are drawn (a staff and a pair of tonfas). To my taste at least, it cinches the deal, and easily makes this movie worth a watch.

 Shame about the story - the bones of a good yarn are there, but director Wing-Cho-Yip fails to find an engaging way to tell it. It's also seriously hampered by a too-perfect protagonist who never is even remotely threatened by any of the fights he throws himself into, and doesn't have the sort of charisma to make his invulnerable character fun to watch. Hell, I only watched this a few days ago, and I'm struggling to remember the first thing about him. Except that he can swing a pair of tonfas really, really well.

V/H/S: Viral

 So... was it bad as I remembered?

 Well, yes, it's pretty fucking bad. And I don't seem to be alone in thinking that; This third V/H/S anthology derailed the series from its yearly schedule, kicking the next film seven years into the future.

 The framing story (by Marcel Sarmiento) is beefier than usual - I suspect that if you add all its parts together, they'd add up to as much as any other of the segments. Unfortunately, the story does not. Add up to anything, I mean. It's a non-starter about a dude who gets obsessed with a slow car chase which has something to do with his girl disappearing and with people going nuts all over the place. It's bad.

 Once it cedes its spot to the first proper short things get immeasurably better - Dante The Great (by Gregg Bishop) is a mockumentary about the rise and fall of the titular illusionist (Justin Welborn), a loser who somehow gets a hold of a magical cape which has some unfortunate demonic tendencies. Things get out of hand, resulting in a sort-of live-action re-enactment of Pixar's short Presto but with an R rating. Silly, well-made, well-paced and featuring the rare V/H/S protagonist (Emmy Argo) you actually want to root for... if anyone's looking for a segment in any of these movies that needs to be rescued and transplanted to a better anthology, this one would be a really good candidate.

 Dante's a hard act to follow. Nacho Vigalondo tries his best with Spanish-language parallel dimension tale Parallel Monsters, which has some clever conceits and a good WTF reveal, but none of it did much for me.

 At least it's nowhere near as bad as Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's Bonestorm, though. It's the usual tale of some insufferable skater dickwads who cross the border to Mexico to do some ollies or whatever and then have to face off with a bunch of zombie-like Dia de los Muertos entities. Taken as a near-experimental exercise in how far found footage can be stretched, it's kind of interesting... but it's also near painful to watch, and there's absolutely no narrative reason to sit through it.
 That these guys made both this and Spring in the same year still boggles my mind.

 All of this would have been rounded out by Todd Lincoln's Gorgeous Vortex, but it was cut out of the anthology because the director forgot to make it as a found footage film. And maybe because it's sucks, but given the rest of the material, I somehow doubt that. I have no idea what the hell this one's supposed to be about; Self-consciously arty, slow as molasses, and as obtuse as humanly possible... The protagonist (Jayden Robison) is truly gorgeous, though, and spends the most of her time running around in various skimpy outfits - so I guess there is at least that.
 The last short is available on the bluray after the credits, or up in various streaming sites if for some reason you don't want to spend any money on this. And to be clear, you shouldn't spend any money on V/H/S/Viral, I don't care how good Dante The Great is.

Warning: Do Not Play (Amjeon)

  This one didn't really do a lot for me. It's a pretty standard movie about an obsessed filmmaker (Seo Yea-ji) who's trying to track down an indie horror movie that's rumoured to a) get people who watch it in some sort of trouble and b) to be shot by a gh-gh-gh-ghost!

  This dumps her into an investigative spiral which will, of course, have some pretty dire consequences for her and other people caught up in the quest. It begins rather well (if a bit uninspired), but not a lot of time goes by before she's doing a few questionable and/or deeply stupid things to track down the film. Since she doesn't really have a strong motivation to do those things (beyond "I'm under pressure to do my own horror movie", which really doesn't cut it) or a proper justification for her obsession, it's hard to sympathise with her when the inevitable spooks come a-knocking.

 The cast is good, the cinematography (by Young-soo Yoon) is good, and Director Kim Jin-won clearly has chops - his film has some good ambiance and a couple of decently creepy moments - but as a whole neither the story (also by Jin-won) nor the horror coalesce into something substantial or even particularly interesting. Oh well.

Warhunt

  I usually find horror movies set in World War 2 fun, but this one's mostly a miss. When a plane goes down somewhere in occupied Europe (if they mentioned where, I missed it), a squad of GIs is sent to look for its critical cargo.

 Mickey Rourke plays one Major Johnson who forces his own soldier (Jackson Rathbone) as an additional member. The Major rocks a shiny eyepatch and a cane, which seems like a bit much, but everything about Rourke in this movie is a lot much, to be honest.

 Despite some incredibly cheesy title credits, bad acting and some very stilted dialogue that goes overboard in trying to sound badass, there film shows some promise early on; the photography is fine, with some striking shots, and an early shootout is fun, mostly because of the use of physical squibs detonating everywhere.

 But the rest of the action is deeply mediocre and the plot goes nowhere quickly. The soldiers almost immediately discover that it's impossible to find their way in the forest, and soon after start getting whittled down both by physical attacks and pretty basic mind tricks from some unnatural force. Meanwhile, the action keeps cutting to a command centre somewhere where Rourke and some completely unnecessary characters provide some deeply irrelevant exposition. There are some good bits, but the disjointed narrative and poor plotting make getting to them feel like a bit of a chore.
 It all does leads to an action-packed climax; Unfortunately, it's so poorly shot that it finishes undoing what little goodwill director Mauro Borrelli had managed to accrue up to that point.

 The whole thing - laughable CGI, Rourke's involvement*, poorly put together script, the multiple production companies involved - make the whole thing feel deeply like a direct to video project, but Lionsgate somehow saw it fit to distribute it. The whole thing is not without some charm, but unless you're truly desperate for some WW2-set horror you're probably best off avoiding this one.

 

*: To be fair, Rourke is not half-assing it. Sure, he does sit out most of the movie in a separate set, but he ends up doing a fair bit more than most 'prestige' name actors do when they're slumming like this. Let's say three quarters-assing it.

From the Dark

 This one's an Irish movie about a vampire who's freed from being pickled in peat by a guy with a shovel (I think this might be the first time I see peat mining depicted in a movie.)

 A squabbling young couple (Niamh Algar and Stephen Cromwell) has their car break down within the creature's haunts, and must survive the vampire's attacks by using light, which keeps the children of the night away. Writer/Director Conor McMahon and co-writer Demian Fox have some problems with plausibility and consistency (the vampire seems perfectly able to smash  out headlights, but is unable to blow out a candle) but overall it's a neat, focused little vampire siege movie. Low budget to a fault and a little one-note, but it's well-crafted and has tons of shots of the vampire moving around unseen in the background, if that type of thing works for you.

Shattered (2025)

 Somewhat unsurprisingly, a ton of people have chosen to name their movies Shattered over the years. This one's a no-frills collection of horror-adjacent shorts from young British filmmakers.

 And when I say no-frills, I really mean it; the shorts (some of which made the festival rounds, and at least one of which were funded via Kickstarter) are presented with their own credits, production company logos, and a montage of mismatched credits at the end. No framing story, but that's probably for the best. Also, I don't think anyone here is known for anything else as of yet. Although I did do a double take when the name of Chris Barnes popped up as a writer, this one doesn't seem to be the... 'vocalist' of Cannibal Corpse. Nothing here is edge-lordy enough to sound like him.

 The first minute of the movie is its best - it acts as a sort of standalone prologue to John Ferrer's 1-Star Review, and shows several people getting killed in ways that ironically reflect the scathing reviews they left of one eating establishment. It's clever, funny, and well-made.
 Those qualities extend, somewhat diluted, to the rest of the short, which sees the murderous chef face off against one of his critics. It's a fun, extremely slight restaurant-set slasher tale; And, to be brutally honest, the best this anthology has to offer - That's it, you can safely stop the movie here. 

 What, still here? Well, don't say I didn't warn you. Burn, from Judson Vaughan, comes next, and it's nowhere near as fun: It's the overlong, somewhat muddled and honestly not very interesting story of the surviving family members of an impressively-eyelashed serial killer, plus the most inept police investigation ever. A huge amount of polish makes it go down easy, but it's stilted, takes itself overtly seriously, and there's just not enough there to sustain its fifteen minutes.

 The Verge seems to be a bid from a production company to produce their own content, funded through Kickstarter in a campaign that just barely squeaked by its £10k goal. It's 2086, the world is a climate-ravaged hellhole, and to get off-world three woman must compete against each other to get to the top of a building. This involves fighting, running around, and a contrived heart-to-heart... but mostly it's fighting. You know, instead of genetic tests or what-have you.
 The problem is that it's really fucking hard to make fights look convincing on film, and fight coordinator (and director, if the Kickstarter page is to be believed) Mark Strange is not, as of yet, up to the task. Have you ever had a bunch of bored friends decide to stage a mock fight? Well, that's what this looks like.
 I give it an A for effort, but it would be much easier to root for if the script wasn't an absolutely insufferable puddle of wank. It has the gall to make its own premise incredibly stupid, and then make the ending 'twist' a rebellion against that incredibly stupid premise. It's also wrapped in the sort of self-serious tone that mars so many student films and makes them feel rank with pretension... so, seriously, fuck this noise.
 There is a laughably, endearingly naff shot of flooded London that made me laugh, at least.

 Arla Piacentini's Hold Me Til The End is particularly painful, because it almost works. Em is stuck in a time-loop with her lover Jess; Every whorl of the loop has Em trying, unsuccessfully, to keep Jess from killing herself. It's a horrific premise, somewhat undone thanks to... well, just how ridiculous it is, and a spotty execution that can be wholly excused by the low budget; This short feels significantly less polished than all of the other entries, something that actually works on its favour: it feels a little rawer than all the rest, a sole spot of colour.
 It overstays its welcome, the (heart-felt) ending feels a way too didactic, and there's a disastrous, hilariously botched attempt to recreate the head-shaking blurred movement effect from Jacob's Ladder, if you remember that. But flawed as it is (and it is very flawed), this one mostly achieves what it's going for - I kind of like it.

 The last short is William Brooke's Re-Birth, an insufferable exercise in slow-burn Lynchian dream-like atmospherics that has little to offer beyond its production values and formal chops. It looks really great, and I hope it works as a calling card for everyone involved. Other than that, it's an absolute slog with next to no payoff.

 So, all in all, this is a really underwhelming collection - the best segments are OK, and the bad are really, really dire. Acting is mostly mediocre throughout, which is understandable and forgivable, and the FX work can best be described as cheap and cheerful; Most of them are gore effects, and none of them are memorable.
 What most surprised me is how great most of the movies look and sound: these are some very slick no-budget short films, with the music on Burn, for example, being legitimately great. But that comes hand-in-hand with a certain soullessness, and that's not a good tradeoff.

Hostile

 A post-apocalyptic zombie movie, intecut with a cute romance story which is a) surprisingly integral to the film, and b) intended for women, which is still pretty rare in this type of film. Yes, I am deliberately not counting Twilight or other YA movies as 'serious horror'. Bite me.

 Juliet (Brittany Ashworth) is a rough, no nonsense driver out scavenging for supplies for some survivor settlement out in an arid, zombie-infested wasteland. She has a spectacular crash, and has to fend off both living and unliving menaces while dealing with a serious injury (an exposed fracture, of course) and trying to get a rescue organized.
 While she does this, different prompts cause her to have flashbacks to her life in New York before the zombie outbreak as she met and fell in love with rich French dreamboat Jack (Grégory Fitoussi)

 The love story is very well made, and a little too romantic for my taste. Jack is, in his own way, just as implausible as your regular Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Steady Wealthy Dedicated Dreamboat?) - someone who's utterly smitten by and devoted to Juliet right from the beginning, sensitive, assertive (sometimes to an uncomfortable degree, but always to his paramour's benefit), rich (but conflicted about his priviledge), ludicrously handsome.
 None of those criticisms are valid as that's exactly what it wants to be; I'm just not wired to like this sort of thing - I'm more of a Before Midnight than a Before Sunrise person, and found it all a bit too cloyingly sweet and, well, idyllic despite featuring at least a little darkness. My preferences aside, this is at its heart the rare romantic horror film and it should be celebrated for that. Everything is obviously leading up to a grand romantic tragedy in both of its timelines, and honestly, the lead-up is fine.

 The problem is just where it's all leading to; There's a climactic, wildly implausible development that will severely test anyone's faith in the script, and it also paints much of the preceding action on the post-apocalyptic sections of the movie as a bit of an idiot plot, if I'm going to be a dick about it. In its defense it's the whole point of the film, but... it's rather a lot to take in.

 Still. There's a lot to like here. Both halves of the movie are well-made, with distinct filming styles, and structurally it's sound (even if the prompts for switching to the flashbacks are a little flimsy). Writer/director Mathieu Turi has a good eye for low-budget action (there's a very amusing early scene where the film shows - or rather, doesn't  - a fight against a zombie from outside of a camper van) and manages some really striking shots (the post-apocalyptic segment is mostly set around the upturned wreck of Juliet's car, and it manages to  look eerily beautiful; Turi and cinematographer Vincent Vieillard-Baron manage to do a lot with mood lighting). There's some gnarly, brutal gore (including a very well-made skull crushing) and the makeup effects for the creatures are pretty good.

 Ashworth is good in the main role, and her character is fairly well-rounded. I just wish Jack was a little less of a generic fantasy fulfilment hunk, but... well, I'm not the intended audience here. The twist is a bigger hurdle, even if it is baked into the story. Warts and all, though, it's a likeable film, a very solid bit of survival horror, and it tries to do something unusual; That counts for a lot around these parts.

Superman

 I can't say I'm very surprised, but damn if I wasn't open to the possibility of this being good: Writer/Director James Gunn is, after all, responsible for some of the best superhero media of the last decade. The pressures of heading up the DCU, developing multiple IPs, and stretching out far, far beyond his comfort zone with that dadliest of wholesome superheroes have broken him, though, resulting in what's by far his worst movie up to now. Which, OK, isn't that bad from a guy who's only made good to great stuff, but the opening of a 'new phase' (and that should be a phrase that should fill any right-thinking person with dread) for the DC universe looks remarkably like the lower end of mid-tier Marvel (or any of their latter offerings).

 It is, simply put, a mess, a movie that overcomplicates things massively with politics and multiple threats, and then circles back and tries to cut everything into little chunks so that the youngest kids in the audience will, maybe, be able to follow the action. They should have chosen a tack and stuck to it, but instead we're left with muddled Saturday morning realpolitik. It is motherfucking dumb and worst of all, kind of boring even before it gets offensively manipulative. Dammit James, we shouldn't make it so easy for the assholes on the right to make fun of us!

 The action is forgettable, the only scene with any visual interest is played in the background as a (pretty good) joke, the CGI is omnipresent (completely ruining superpooch, who should be a bright spot in the film) and the guy they got to play Superman is a bore. As mediocre as Snyder's Superman was, at least it had some interesting action ideas, and Cavill was legitimally enjoyable in the role. This is probably better on the whole, but that's a really low bar to clear.
 Oh well, at least there's another Peacemaker season to look forward to.

--------Programming note--------

  So. For the last three years or so I've been trying to log everything I watch. I haven't managed to do it for everything I see, but it I've managed a pretty consistent ninety-something percent ratio.

 Over the last couple of years, along with the rise of what people these days call AI (or, to use a much more appropriate name, bullshit engines) the hits on this blog have gone into ridiculous numbers - tens of thousands per month, while the 'real' hits (as reported on google analytics) remain the same as they ever were: double digits per month... if that.

 So I'm winding down the blog; I'm not that keen on giving free labour to people who think turning the world into even more of a dystopic hellhole is a great idea, to train a toy that's been mostly a tool of global enshitification. In the unlikely case you are an actual human being who comes here to read stuff... well, sorry.

 This site has (mostly) ever been a tool to force myself to write, and I can do that elsewhere. It's been fun spreading my shit takes around, but it's also kept me from working on other projects. I have nothing but admiration for people who can knock out incredibly articulate, considered thought pieces off-the-cuff; But as far as I'm concerned, even the crappiest blog post takes me on average from an hour to ninety minutes to put together. I could watch another movie in the time it takes me to compose two of these.
 I do like having a log of everything I watch, mostly so I can go back and say "oh yeah, I did watch hellblazers at some point, it was shit". So I may log much shorter capsule reviews from now on. And I reserve the right to post longer rants if I really feel the need to vent. But on the main, dear hypothetical reader, things are going to become even less interesting around these parts.

Jurassic World Rebirth

 The Jurassic World movies are built around a seriously toxic, mind-numbingly idiotic plot point: That dinosaurs are just not cool enough, and that people will get bored of them quickly. The original Jurassic Park was built around the awe that these creatures inspire; They're the entire appeal of the franchise, for fuck's sake.

 This whole concept seems to come from one Colin Trevorrow, who's finally left the Jurassic World building to go fail upward somewhere else. He leaves behind three of the stupidest mainstream films of the last decade.

 Jurassic World Rebirth is helmed by the infinitely more capable Gareth Edwards, working from a script from David Koepp -  a man who's produced his share of shit, but also some cool stuff. Their tack, which is to hew closer to Jurassic Park than to any of the sequels, is solid.

 Unfortunately, they've chosen to carry forward the stupid, stupid baggage from the Jurassic World films. So as the film starts, we're informed that dinosaurs are dying all over the place, and people just don't give  a shit.
 Well, most people. Obviously evil biotech companies are after dinosaurs' magic blood, which they know they can use to eliminate heart disease. And since there are no more parks, they need to go get this magic dinosaur blood (it needs to be from the biggest dinosaurs, because they have the biggest hearts, you see!) from closed off areas near the equator where dinosaurs still roam free.

 You know what, after re-reading the paragraph above, I'm not sure Koepp is that much of an improvement over Trevorrow. Sadly, it doesn't get a whole lot better.

 An obviously evil suit (Rupert Friend) working for one of those obviously evil big pharma companies hires a mercenary (Scarlett Johansson) and a dinosaur expert (Jonathan Bailey) to go get the magic dinosaur blood with him and a group of other PMC types. On the way they rescue a family who decided to go sailing in dinosaur-infested waters, so when things inevitably go wrong and everyone gets stranded in yet another dinosaur island, the film splits its time between the PMCs going after their quarries and the family trying to make it to safety.

 And... it's mostly fine. It's dumb - really dumb - and noticeably making an effort at being very kid-friendly (complete with a cute baby dinosaur following the family around and basically acting like a puppy). It's also overstuffed, making its relatively lean (for the current status quo) runtime feel much longer than it actually is.
 But action is mostly good. There's extremely little sense of risk - this is the kind of movie that blatantly only kills evil characters or the ones it doesn't spend any time developing. It also cheats all the time by making pursuing monsters either disappear or suddenly fall back in the interstices between one shot and another; The worst offender in that respect is a scene where the family out-paddles a chasing dinosaur (a scene that's directly taken from Crichton's book for the original Jurassic Park).

 OK, I'm not really selling it, am I? It's got good momentum, the effects are pretty good (although nothing groundbreaking), and there's good variety. There's also good dinosaur variety: We get Quetzalcoatlus, Mosasaurs, Titanosaurs, and a few others. The mutated dinosaurs fare less better, but at least the sausage-headed big bad is a botched mutation, so it looks like something out of H.R. Giger's sketchbooks than an actual dinosaur.

Seriously, the HR Giger estate must not be thrilled.

 The main issue here is that the movie is in too many ways really fucking basic. An early scene where Zora (Johansson's character bonds with another one played by Mahershala Ali is representative - they trade sad, sad news and make sad sad faces at each other, while all the time Alexandre Desplat's extremely intrusive, manipulative score indicates to us that we should be sad too. The filmmaking relies far too much on glib lines, reaction shots and hearty laughs (tm) whenever someone does something that's supposed to be funny - the rhythms almost make things feel like they're edited like a trailer a lot of the time. This might be a side-product of being aimed at children, and I fucking abhor it.

 David Koepp's script is another major problem. The plotting is... fine, but all the characters are fairly nondescript, the humour is terrible, and every interaction is clumsily handled or botched. Oh, and he insists on writing young people, that's always funny to watch. In this one he's created a lazy zoomer who offers weed to a pre-tween! Isn't that hilarious? The less said of his attempts at a 'stick it to the man' messaging, the better, but at least he includes an American family of latinxs as the coprotagonists - that's actually appreciated in the current political environment.

 Going by his work, at this point I'm convinced that the indelible characters from the first Jurassic Park are all Crichton and Spielberg.

 Jurassic World Rebirth is a blatant bid to recapture the magic of that fist movie - there are a ridiculous number of references, callbacks, and scenes that mirror events from it. It's a pale imitation, though, and it's weighed down by too many iffy elements. A respectable attempt, and much, much better than the last few tries, but it still misses the mark.

The Man From Earth

 I've mellowed out a lot in my opinions about movies over the past couple of decades; Even if it doesn't sound like it, these days I'm way more likely to shrug off a film's problems and look for the fun or something interesting, if the film allows for it.

 The Man From Earth is an interesting one, though, because it managed to consistently annoy me while having its heart firmly in the right place and doing things I appreciate. For starters, it's pointedly a "thinking person's sci fi" movie - no action, no spectacle, basically just one long conversation between some erudite, supposedly companionable people.

 The premise is that as a university professor (David Lee Smith) is getting ready to skip town, a group of colleagues (Tony Todd, John Billingsley, Ellen Crawford, Annika Peterson, and William Katt - the Last American Hero himself, playing a history professor with a leather jacket and a soul patch!) come to give him an impromptu going away party. As the evening unspools, the protagonist lets slip that he's functionally immortal, and has been walking the earth since before the last Ice Age; The rest of the day is spent with the bemused guests alternating between asking good-natured questions and trying to figure out if it's an elaborate prank. Later, a psychologist (Richard Riehle) is called in to join in the fun.

What's not to love?

 Well, the script, for one - credited to one Jerome Bixby, a "legendary Sci Fi author" (of short stories, none of which I've read) who's probably more famous for scripting the great It! The Terror From Beyond Space, plus a handful of Star Trek episodes and It's a Good Life from The Twilight Zone.
 Bixby made his name in the fifties and sixties, and it really, really shows; The film's central conversation does cover some good points - mainly about how hard it is for an individual to form an accurate image of a larger picture, and it's moderately enjoyable, but mostly it feels stilted, a little outdated and... annoyingly quaint, is maybe the best way I can describe it.

 The weight these people assign to the protagonist's word is outsized. They are shocked! They are amazed! They react to his declarations as an affront to good sense and property, while obviously being deeply affected! I'm exaggerating, of course, but not that much. Characterization, which is indispensable in what's essentially a chamber piece, is extremely scattershot, and everyone serves as fairly transparent mouth pieces for whatever idea the author is pursuing. An author, I should add, firmly rooted in the golden age of sci fi- an era notorious for giving very little importance to people's inner lives*.

 Given all that, it's hard to fault the actors for failing to breathe lives into their roles. Smith is actually pretty good as the protagonist, whom he plays with a quiet, self-effacing charm. The great, late Tony Todd steals the show as a characteristically (for Todd) soulful professor. Everyone else... oof. Katt is kind of enjoyable as a douchebaggy professor who drags a student date (Alexis Thorpe) to the party** - only kind of enjoyable, though, mostly he's just there as an unreasonable foil and little else. The rest of the cast consists of TV actors, and they fail to provide any of the naturalism or charisma that the film sorely needs. Oh, and poor Peterson's sole function is to be in love with the protagonist and completely, utterly support him no matter what. I have no idea if she's any good because she's completely wasted -both as an actress and as a character. At least she looks really nice.

 So all that's left is the ideas the film discusses... and aside from some meditations on subjectivity, they're pretty basic and on-the-nose; Dorm-room philosophy. There's a silly, kind of fun theological bombshell dropped at one point (directly stolen from a book by Michael Moorcock), but it only throws dirt on Christianity - Buddhism, as usual, gets off scott-free.

 The form of the debate is pretty poor, as well. The professors make for poor inquisitors: it seems to me that proving the guy is telling the truth would be as easy as "write this paragraph that I'm going to dictate in every language you know", but they insist in throwing slowballs and being in (sometimes reluctant, but usually vocal) awe of him instead.

 Director Richard Schenkman actually has a pretty fun, trashy resumé (he's directed entries in both the Angel and I Spit in Your Grave series!) but this is, by form and necessity, an extremely subdued film. There's some attempt to give the film some variation - a couple of walks outside the cabin, lots of shuffling around, some movers taking stuff away, giving the film's one set some variety - but this is a very low budget production... as will become immediately clear by the extremely TV Movie title credits.

 I think, given how much I like the idea of the film, and its built-in cosiness, I might have still given it a pass even with all the ways it falls short. But in a desperate attempt to end the film with an exclamation sign, there's an event so idiotic, so contrived, that it completely ruined any goodwill that had been accrued up to that point, and made all of the failings that much more glaring.

 The film ends with a trailer for a sequel that looks so awful it made me morbidly curious; But a friend confirms that yes, it is exactly as awful as it looks, and completely devoid of any interest. Thanks Matt, your sacrifice was not in vain.

 *: All of which makes me think this clearly needed to have been written by a new wave author; Imagine what Roger Zelazny (who wrote his share about immortals) or Rob Silverberg could have done with it.

**: No one even raises an eyebrow.