Feast II: Sloppy Seconds

 Holy shit, what a way to piss away the little goodwill you got from your first movie.

 Feast II: Sloppy Seconds loses absolutely everything that made the first film watchable and proceeds to waste our time with a beyond pointless story that quickly goes nowhere, uninteresting characters, and edgelord provocations that are so poorly executed that you can't help but to make fun of the people behind it rather than be shocked.
It's a film that's so tasteless in their tastelessness, so ugly in its ugliness that I'm left struggling to figure out why I should spend any effort writing a few paragraphs about it - and lamenting the time I wasted watching it. 

 The movie picks up shortly after the events of the first one. A gang of lesbian bikers arrive at a small town after it's been attacked by a bunch of rape monsters, there to hunt a guy from the first movie. When the creatures attack, a small bunch of survivors* must band together, bicker endlessly amongst each other, and maybe survive the night. Or not.

 Because you know what? The film doesn't care about storytelling, plot or characters, so neither should you. The script (again by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan) only has a few gags in mind, and it incorporates them into its story in the shoddiest way possible. So at one point one of the film's cast of asshats decides he needs to do a creature autopsy. He's not a doctor, there's nothing he could conceivably get out of it - but the brain trust behind this turdfest wanted to have a long, long scene of a corpse posthumously jizzing on its female cast... so monster autopsy it is.
 Want to have a (predictable) gag where a baby dies? Never mind that the first movie had a decently shocking child death. Here, instead of properly weaving the baby into the story, they have him suddenly wake up and start crying a full day into the creature invasion. And then the joke itself is drawn out into an overlong, mind-bogglingly ugly-looking sequence. Audacity alone will not carry your jokes, folks.

 The amount of bad decisions from everyone involved is staggering. Gone is the propulsive, simple survival story of the first movie, along with its production values and excellent practical effects; They're replaced with a series of disconnected, arbitrary incidents and extremely shoddy-looking CGI. John Gulager's direction, meanwhile, hasn't improved in the slightest, so the result predictably looks cheap, ugly and uninteresting.

 There's exactly one joke in the whole movie where the delivery isn't botched to hell**. Other than that, this is just plain cynical, uninspired, deeply unfunny shit.
 There's a Feast III out there, but after this one you'd need to pay me to watch it.

 

*: The cast includes two Mexican little people luchadores, because... comedy, I guess.

**: If you must know, the bit where they're trying to work out how much of the grandmother they need to get rid of. I never said it was a great joke, but at least they don't ruin it.

Splinter

 Polly (Jill Wagner) and Seth (Paulo Constanzo) are a couple celebrating their first anniversary by going out camping. Their plans are derailed when another couple, Dennis (Shea Whigham) and Lacey (Rachel Kerbs), criminals on the lam, hijack their car at gunpoint.

 The hijacking is derailed in turn when a strange creature attacks the group during a rest stop visit. The being, which manifests as a patch of magnetic ferrofluid that's wont to produce spikes (or splinters, if you like), takes over human hosts and puppeteers them into attacking others, zombie-like.

 This sets the stage for a neat little siege movie as the survivors hole themselves into the gas station shop, try to figure out what they're facing, and find a way to escape without being assimilated.

 There's a lot to like in here. The acting is good, and the characters show some nuance and evolve in interesting ways throughout the night. They also mostly react intelligently to the situations they're put through, and end up being a fairly likeable bunch. 

 The monster, meanwhile, is pretty damn cool. It owes an obvious debt to The Thing - an early scene, where half a hand starts crawling on its own, is only missing a "you've got to be fucking kidding!" comment. But it does enough to distinguish itself - this is not a highly sophisticated monster that can fully mimic humans, just a basic predator that reconfigures flesh and awkwardly strains bone and ligament attempting to spread itself into other unwilling hosts.

 An early scene makes it clear that the infected are fully conscious, even if not in control of their bodies, but this sadly goes unexplored for the rest of the film as the monster only picks up corpses from there on. Its various incarnations are put together with practical effects which seemingly include some pretty cool uses of ferrofluid. The FX are really good for the film's budget bracket, but they're somewhat undone by some Neveldine/Taylor levels of shaky camera work and jerky editing.

 I watched this back when it came out and was completely soured on the film by that: a couple of the creature's attacks are ruined as the camera spasms uncontrollably. This is very obviously a conscious decision to obfuscate the low budget, and to keep the monster out of the frame as much as possible while it performs actions that the FX can't portray.

 Yes, director Toby Wilkins doesn't really find a way to make it look good, but I was absolutely being too harsh on it: it's only a couple of scenes, and justified by external (low budget) and internal (the action is meant to be disorienting) reasons. It also, wittingly or unwittingly, keeps the creature mysterious. In my defense, this came out during a spell where shaky cam was a pox upon action cinema, so I was seriously turned off by it.

 This is an excellent creature feature. It features some top-notch body horror, excellent, likeable, believable characters (a rarity in the genre) and a fun script (by the director, Kai Barry and Ian Shorr) that finds time for a horrifying amateur amputation in between all the monster hijinks and some questionable but fun science-based survival gambits. Sure, it's got a couple of cases of shaky cam and nu-metal, but what are you gonna do... It was the noughties, man.

Max Payne

 The Max Payne games are known for properly introducing bullet time into gaming (only a couple of years after The Matrix). They also had cheesy stories told through crappy comic book-like interludes and an all-pervading, wonderfully campy noir-style narration. Its inspirations are blatant and cinematic, and the movie basically pitches itself: lots of John-Woo-style action and a simple, pulpy plot delivered with over-the top noir affectation.

 And to be fair, Max Payne: The Motion Picture does deliver, for five minutes or so. The first scene features Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) sinking into the frozen depths while delivering a monologue about how the bottom is lined with corpses and they're reaching out to him and he'll soon be one of them and blah blah blah.

 It's fun! It even looks kind of good, in that Hollywood-trying-too-hard-to-be-cool kind of way. And then the scene is over, the title card comes up, and the voiceover is mostly abandoned for the rest of the movie.

 The script (by Beau Thorne) strings together scenes that seem to be written by a fourteen-year-old with next to no connective tissue - logic leaps and weird segues abound. I'm not going to talk about plot holes, because there's more hole than plot here. Characters appear and disappear and serve no clear function, there's a surreal element that turns out to be some sort of shared hallucination... it's an absolute clusterfuck.

 Max Payne (by the way, I'm really struggling not to type that in all-caps every time!) is a punisher-like figure who's lost his wife and baby son to a home invasion. He's the type of cop everyone seems to hate, because... well, it's no mystery - he's a completely unlikeable dick: all of Wahlberg's intensity, none of his charm. His only friend is an old partner of his dad's called B.B. (Beau Bridges), who's now working security for the same big pharma company his wife was working for when she died. Hmmmm.

 Max Payne starts off assigned to the cold cases desk, a plot point that has absolutely no purpose or payoff. Off-hours, he spends his time busting the balls of people in the underworld trying to find out more about his family's murder. Through a series of unrelated and highly contrived events he ends up discovering an extremely stupid and very poorly conceived conspiracy in which a designer drug caused a bunch of soldiers to go nuts... or something. Seriously, the plot seems to have been put together by locking a bunch of idiots in a room for a couple of hours along with a printout of the Wikipedia page with the plot synopsis for the first Max Payne game and a mountain of cocaine.

 This could all be redeemed if the movie had good action, but Director John Moore has no eye for it either. The action is choppy, poorly staged, and often... boring. It only nods to the game's famous bullet-time gimmick a couple of times, one of them consisting of Max Payne literally bending over backwards with a shotgun while a guy shoots at him and misses by quite a few meters, hitting some stuff in the foreground. And it goes on and on and on. It looks like ass, and conceptually, it's one of those scenes where you can't help but wonder what the fuck everyone involved was thinking.

 The other bullet time sequence is of Max Payne shooting an unarmed man. Seriously, what the fuck.

 The practical effects team did a good job, though. I often bemoan the lack of squibs and bullet impact detonations in modern cinema, but here in MaxPayneland the art is alive and healthy. It gets a workout in an early, very ridiculous scene where Max Payne blows open all the stalls in a public restroom with a hand cannon, but their main showpiece is when a private army shoots up a whole office building floor; As action, it's shit: Max Payne's main move there is to bravely run away, and the soldier's aim is sub-stormtrooper - but there are a ton of squibs detonating all over the place, glass breaking, etcetera. It's like they got the background for a John Woo sequence just right, they just forgot to include anything interesting going on.
 Another point in favour: It does have some nice atmosphere, despite the plot's best attempts to piss it away; Credit the director with some of that, and cinematographer John Sela (David Leitch's go to guy, most recently seen in The Fall Guy). It doesn't go far enough to develop into a proper sense of style, but the wintry palette and the constant, chunky snowfall does look pretty good.
 Other stylistic flourishes don't fare as well. There's a fade to red effect to underline some violence that is laughably bad (and again, just on one scene and then forgotten), and the whole angel hallucinations are, with a single mildly cool exception, a non-starter.

 I have to say I like the idea of extracting a proper neo-noir out of the game's shooter fantasyland... but that intention means nothing when the execution is this poor. The movie is so disjointed it reeks of studio meddling, but the director's on record defending it as a good film.

 Well, at least it doesn't, like the games, have interminable scenes of Max Payne walking on razor-thin blood lines. Those were the worst.

 And shit, I guess this means I now need to catch up with Tim Olyphant's Hitman movie, too.