Andy Gapin

Watchmen

I think that what I got most from Watchmen was that I need to find a way to increase my killing power. Seriously, I need to get on the ball be able to just explode people and teleport them places…like Mars. Or at least have the badassitude of Rorschach. I would be so much more awesome.

As I often need to state with comic book movies, I never really got into comics much as a kid and haven’t made up for that as an adult either so I can’t really speak about the accuracy of the film, but from a strictly movie-goer point of view, this film was great. Extremely well done with great effects that looked very real. The story is really interesting and the way that the past and present are brought together throughout the movie was really amazing.

At 2 hours and 43 minutes, it didn’t feel long at all. I could have easily sat through another hour of it.

Rating: A

Last House On The Left

As usual, when I find out that a horror movie I love is being remade–speaking of which, is there anything else left?–I tend to cringe. Though, to be fair, I was thinking about this on the way out of the theater and realized that I like way more of these remakes than I hate. But getting back to the point, when I heard about this one, I had my standard reaction of “oh god why must they ruin everything I hold sacred?!?!” The original was a pretty brutal movie and existed for a purpose. I didn’t really see how that purpose was going to be able to be given justice in 2009.

On its own, the 2009 version is a very entertaining, but cookie-cutter kind of a horror movie that was clearly put together for audiences in 2009. It’s a pretty brutal movie and it does have some shock value to it, despite most of the attempts at being shocking failing. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who doesn’t like seeing movies with relatively graphic rape scenes, but other than that, the shock value was pretty low. The fights and brutality were pretty on point and I think that the actors all did a good job portraying their characters as intended. The movie earns some high marks there.

However, compared to the 1972 version, this falls very short. The graphicness and shock value don’t compare at all. And where the 1972 version was much more of an exploitation film, this was more just a standard let’s-beat-up-and-murder-some-people kind of a thing. This was pretty much the fear that I had with them making this remake, the movie exists to be exploitative and when you downplay that you end up losing a lot.

My bottom line on this movie that it’s a really good horror film if you separate it from the original and just take it as its own entity. Had they named it something else and passed it off as being unrelated, I think I’d be able to get behind it a lot more. But a feeble, 2009 Hollywood style attempt at remaking Last House On The Left almost ruins the name.

Rating: B-

Previews

I normally don’t talk about movie previews much, but seriously the Star Trek movie looks awesome. I don’t even like Star Trek. I never have, but this cast looks awesome and everything else about it looks like it’ll reach out to non-Star Trek fans. I’m kind of getting psyched for it.

Before Last House On The Left, there was a preview for a movie called The Orphan, which as far as I can tell is just The Omen with a girl instead. And maybe a little bit of influence from The Orphanage, but seriously, was there even an attempt and creativity there?