Zombieland

This was a very stupid movie. An awesomely stupid movie. And, between this and being dragged to see G.I. Joe, I am now convinced that stupid movies tend to attract stupid audiences. Zombieland was no different, and as every zombie got killed and dismembered in an ever wider variety of cartoon violence, this audience of Neanderthals cheered it on like grape-gorged Romans screaming for blood in the Coliseum. It was mindless gore-porn, without plot or meaning or certainly anything approaching art.

I loved every fucking minute of it.

Sure, it can't beat 28 Days Later for nihilistic horror, or even Shaun of the Dead for managing to be both funny and a real movie with actual characters and plot. Nebbish Geek hooks up with Redneck Wahoo, they fall in with Hot Chick and Spunky Kid, they drive to Los Angeles, have a zombie celebrity cameo, do something really stupid to move the non-existent plot along, and then kill a lot of zombies. That's it. If you're pissed that I just spoiled the plot for you, when it comes to Zombieland, you're doing it wrong. Forget character, forget plot, this is about laughing at carnage and nothing else. It ain't much - but just as Tallahassee feels about Columbus - it'll do, pig.

Inglorious Basterds

I had to see this film, not out of any affection for Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof sucked so hard, I ended up fast-forwarding the DVD to the end, something I almost never do), but due to childhood memories of the original Italian movie. I saw The Inglorious Bastards numerous times as a kid, since , besides being just the kind of cheap knockoff of WWII commando movies that I love, it also had a scene where the heroes nearly get killed by machine gun-wielding topless German maidens frolicking in a stream. Back in my day, we didn't have "bittorrents" or "Redtube" - we had Eurotrash titties, and they were pimply and pasty, and you only got to see a second of them, and WE LIKED IT!

So like any other right-headed American boy obsessed with floppy titties and dead Nazis, I loved The Inglorious Bastards, and had to see the Tarantino remake. Turns out though that Inglorious Basterds has absolutely nothing to do with the original, being an entirely new story consisting of two different plotlines - a French Jewish girl escaping an SS intelligence officer, and "The Basterds" a special American unit of Jews terrorizing the Nazis in occupied France - that converge upon the gala screening of a Nazi propaganda film that provides the opportunity for both the girl and the Basterds to take down the Nazi elite in a fiery Götterdämmerung. And it's all completely mediocre.

I mean that literally, not as a synonym for "bad" because this is a mostly well-acted and executed movie. Despite its 2.5 hour length, I felt it moved speedily along and was (mostly) interested in every scene. Of the performances, much has been made of Christoph Waltz as the "Jew Hunter", but just because an actor doesn't devolve into a Germanic Snidely Whiplash as soon as he puts on SS black, doesn't make him Oscar-quality. Brad Pitt tries well, but he ain't no Lee Marvin. Melanie Laurent gives the best performance of the film, which is not surprising as the most fully-realized and only human character amongst a cast of caricatures.

A movie about burning/blowing up a Parisian theater full of Nazis is not a bad idea, but it is not original nor is Inglorious Basterdds interesting enough to be elevated above its mediocre lineage. Tarantino's direction doesn't even try to elevate Inglorious Basterds above the spaghetti war-xploitation genre. It's not funny enough to be parody, and not biting enough to be satire - although the Nazi film-within-the-film, Nation's Pride, does a spot-on eviscerating of American war films like Black Hawk Down and even Saving Private Ryan, where faceless enemies are gunned down in exacting detail by amoral patriots:



But don't be fooled - this film isn't about the dangers of war as spectacle, or anything else deeper than how far one can bury a baseball bat through a Nazi's head. And even that is pretty tepid - while the violence sometimes goes over the top and there's lots of loving shots of scalping and carving swastikas into foreheads, Inglorious Basterds is surprisingly violence-free. So the gore-porners will be disappointed by all the talking, and the history nerds will have heart attacks over what may be the most ahistorical WWII film ever made, leaving this film only for douchebag hipsters who think Tarantino is still relevant. Or even still trying.

All this said, I can't fault Inglorious Basterds for not being more than it appears to be. It's a dumb over-the-top WWII spaghetti western with Nazis instead of bandits and Schmeissers instead of six-guns. It's also talky as hell, and not as full of action as represented. It's not really stimulating, either to the intellect or the testosterone, but if you really love watching Nazis get murdered in every manner imaginable, you might like this flick. I do, and I did, but even I could've done with it as a rental.

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker is the best movie I've seen this year, and the best war film I've seen in quite awhile. A series of vignettes depicting the last days of a three-man EOD team before they rotate out of 2004-era Iraq, the film moves briskly from one frightening encounter to another, as though the movie is trying to give some sense of the terror of war. While terrifying, The Hurt Locker never becomes anything more than action movie - a gritty, powerful and highly effective action movie, but in the end, just an action movie.

Directed by Katheryn Bigelow (Near Dark, Point Break), the film's three protagonists are James, Sanborn, and Eldridge. James is a veteran EOD man, an adrenaline junkie in love with war and nothing else. Sanborn is a professional just looking to get home but unsure of what he really hopes to find there. Eldridge is a younger soldier haunted by a death he might have prevented and generally burnt out by Iraq. Besides a few scenes inside the wire that define the characters' backgrounds and relationships, the bulk of the film is taken up by six set-pieces on the battleground, where the characters either have to defuse improvised explosives or dodge ambushes.

Despite an opening quote about war being a drug, The Hurt Locker doesn't really have any message. The greatest focus is on James, and the he could be seen as an archetype for modern-day America, so desperately dissatisfied with our suburban Wal-Mart existence that we crave overseas combat just to jolt us from our ennui, that we might have once fought out of love for democracy and freedom but have come to love war for its own sake.

But that's a stretch: this film is about explosions, about men facing death and being manly about it (the scene where James and Sanborn punch each other comes off more like a hurt/comfort slashfic than male bonding). The character of James - the angst-ridden death-obsessed badass who is the best there is at what he does, but what he does best isn't very nice - might've seemed original once upon time before almost every action movie made since the 1950's used that character as its protagonist. Jeremy Renner's portrayal of James is okay, but he is so underwritten than there's just no depth.

Which is also true for the movie. The Hurt Locker packs an immediate edge because of its timeliness, and it will mistakenly be lauded as the first movie made about the Iraq War to capture the grunts-eye view of the war. However, it's not Platoon or The Big Red One or All Quiet on the Western Front - I may be naive or uninformed, but I doubt that the average grunt is like James, so high on war that he often forsakes basic precautions just to get to the action quicker. If the film focuses on Sanborn or Eldridge, it might've be closer to The Grunt's Tale that critics want to paint it as, but James is such an action hero cliche that The Hurt Locker can't rise above those genre roots. And while the film's portrayal of almost all Iraqis as sinister figures ever-ready to explode hidden bombs may be spot-on for a film that is from the American soldier's perspective, it also means that the film can't be taken seriously as a more general perspective on the war.

But this is a good movie, a damn fine movie, one that belongs alongside other full-muscled if simplistic military meditations like Hell is for Heroes or Hamburger Hill (it starts with "H" too!). And if Bigelow had mixed in some well-considered commentary, The Hurt Locker would have probably ended up sacrificing its visceral energy for labored pretentiousness. It may just be an action movie, but the film does reminds us that you don't need robots terminating or transforming to make an exciting summer blockbuster: you can also do it with poorly thought-out tragic misadventures in the Middle East.

Star Trek

(warning: mild spoilers)

I enjoyed Star Trek. Watching the endless previews, I expected a big dumb summer blockbuster, full of explosions as hollow as the film's meaning, one that would abandon the rich subtext and ambitious social dialogue that the original series often (but not always) aspired to. And that's pretty much what Star Trek is, but it is so well done that I didn't care.

I liked The Next Generation, couldn't care less about Deep Space Nine, avoided Voyager, and was bored by Enterprise, but I've never considered any of them a worthy successor to the Original Series. Whereas TOS was a space western where JFK-like figures civilized the final frontier with equal parts brain and brawn, TNG and the others were tech-obsessed project managers solving the problem of the week by sitting around a conference table and technobabbling the episode to a conclusion. These shows shared in Roddenberry's vision of the future as a secular utopia, but they were bloodless and had none of the vibrant earthiness of TOS. As an origin story, Star Trek has yet to show that it heeds to Roddenberry's ethos, but it certainly brought back the gutsy bravado of TOS.

Now, the movie is far from perfect, though I think the reviews have made a little too much of the plot holes supposedly endemic to the plot. It makes sense for the narrative for certain characters to be placed in certain situation, but it takes a big suspension-of-disbelief for the narrative to flow the way it does. That said, the weakest part for me was that which so many folks (including my wife) enjoyed the most: all the connections between TOS and the movie. The quotes throwing back to the old days got a bit cheesy, and the appearances of Leonard Nimoy as Old-Spock did more to jar the story than to really connect it back to anything positive.

The film was really going to stand-or-fall on its cast, and both Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto delivered hard as Kirk and Spock. Quinto made me remember why I liked him as Sylar in the first season of Heroes (and thus forget how much I've loathed him in every season since), and Pine perfectly captured the likeability and swagger of the smirking Kirk. What Pine didn't capture was the hypercompetent masculinity of the serious Kirk, which can be forgiven this time as the whole film is about how rebel alt-Kirk grows back into the Kirk of TOS. It won't be forgiven if that growth isn't complete when Star Trek 2 rolls into theaters some future summer, nor will it be kosher if the sequel(s) don't move beyond the subtext-free nature of the origin story and start to explore the future while melding Roddenberry's ethos with modern storytelling.

Star Trek is nowhere near the best Star Trek film ever made, a nod that goes to Wrath of Khan, but then it simply can't be, as Khan had years of dramatic background that earned its story. We're just getting introduced to these characters in Star Trek, so there's no such background to call upon. Yet, that Abrams and crew made me feel that these characters were that new is an accomplishment in its own right. Star Trek is fun and exciting, but it is also a fresh start, and I am very interested to see where it's going to go from here.

Watchmen

Herein be spoilers, ye have been warned...

I can't judge this movie outside of my own experience of having read the graphic novel twice, and from that perspective, Watchmen was mostly boring. The production was so faithful that I knew what was coming up each and every scene, and while it was sometimes interesting to see how the the filmmakers would translate Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' work to the screen, that source material was never vital or interesting enough to really capture my attention in the first place.

Watchmen is the Citizen Kane of modern comic books: it added artistic techniques and adult themes that matured the medium beyond what had hitherto been solely children's literature, but it has since been so copied that it's often hard to see the original work as anything other than quaint and tired. The truth is that Watchmen wasn't all that revolutionary, as the deconstruction of the superhero goes back to its earliest creation, when Philip Wylie created a superman in his novel Gladiator and then showed how that kind of power is ultimately rather powerless. Yet Alan Moore is a great writer and created the best comic book I've ever read... it just wasn't Watchmen, but rather his true masterpiece, From Hell.

So it's no surprise that the problems I had with the film are almost all down to the graphic novel itself. While at first I found the performances (particularly Patrick Wilson's Dan Dreiberg) clunky and uninvolved, the truth was that this was mostly due to Moore's bad case of Lucasitis when he wrote the prose-like dialogue in the comic. That the film takes so long to get started was also a failing of the comic. And that so few of the characters are likeable or interesting enough to empathize with is also inherent in their portrayal in the comic. Watchmen is a case study in why the anguish of fanboys should be ignored and filmmakers should first try to create their own good movie from comics rather than treating the source material like holy scripture that cannot be edited.

The film may actually be even worse than I found it, because, while I could easily keep track of all the various subplots and characters, and while I knew what emotions and ideas the film was trying to capture, all that was due to my having read the graphic novel. I wonder if someone who hadn't would able to do the same, and, when we get the shot of the pudgy costumed Nite-Owl screaming with over-emotion in the snow at Rorschach's blood spot, I can't help but feel the whole thing had descended into cheesy camp for the non-initiated. All that said, as the film neared its end, I began to feel it was turning out marginally alright. That Zack Snyder changed Moore's ending by replacing the giant alien squid to the threat of Doctor Manhattan himself actually felt like an improvement, but then they screwed it all up by leaving out the comic's most lasting note (for me).

In the end of Moore's Watchmen, Veidt implores Doctor Manhattan to reassure him that he did the right thing, that "it all works out in the end," but Manhattan simply leaves with the ominous parting words of "It never ends." It is a damning statement on the very nature of superheroes: the old-time heroes of the forties either faded away, their exploits having been little more than media-generated advertising, or turned into fascist nightmares like The Comedian; the later generation of heroes had become equally obsolete, serving as tools of a government that would later outlaw them, and finally are made irrelevant by the truly superpower of Doctor Manhattan; and Ozymandias, the last real human superhero, the "smartest man in the world", the only one who really understood how the world worked and the only one who was able to use his powers to actually change things, ultimately will likely also accomplish nothing, as Manhattan's final words suggest that human nature will one day take its course and mankind still likely awaits its own destruction. Watchmen's final message is that superheroes cannot save humanity from itself (these "heroes" are far too human to begin with, and are simply acting out their own "too human" neurotic fetishes). While it is clunkily delivered in the comic, it remains a compelling theme.

None of that is in the movie. The "nothing ever really ends" line is still there (spoken by Laurie to Dan in the next-to-final scene), but that it is not delivered by Manhattan to an apprehensive Veidt strips it of its thematic power. Watchmen the comic book may have its flaws, but it did try to be about something. Watchmen the film is, like all of Snyder's other work, absolutely meaningless - superficial and lovely in short doses, but with nearly three hours to examine it in detail, Watchmen is far too long to hide the fact that Snyder is a vapid storyteller.

I could go on about other things: the film is gratutiously more violent than the comic, Snyder's usual slo-mo camerawork destroys the pace in a film nearing three hours, all the Nixon scenes looked like Snyder was trying to rip-off Dr. Strangelove more than adapt Watchmen, but whatever. It should have been a rental.

Push

This movie was supposed to suck, but boy did I enjoy the hell out of it. I am, as my friends have told me, a notoriously picky reviewer. I consider films like Schindler's List and American Beauty to be facile and devoid of serious introspection. And yet I liked Push, which I can only describe as X-Men meets Twilight in Hong Kong. That sounds absolutely awful, but it works. This is a movie goes straight for your adrenal glands, not your head, and, while the pace never lets up, it's not a monotonous bore-fest like The Dark Knight.

The basic premise is covered during the title sequence: Nazis experimented on babies to create psychic powers, Americans carry on the research, creating a whole class of superhumans - "movers" (telekinetics), "sniffers" (folks that can read images from smells), etc. Now the psychics are escaping various government agencies that experiment on them to enhance their powers as Persons of Mass Destruction, experiments that have always killed them up until now. It all sounds very RPG (I can see the splatbooks already), so that's maybe why I liked it so much. Getting that exposition out of the way in the first three minutes also means that there is no time wasted dealing with mundane reactions to a preternatural world: the crazy psychic shit is considered matter-of-factly. That makes the film seem even more like an RPG on the big screen.

Everyone I've mentioned Push to says they thought it would be like the excrable Jumper, but what seperates those two are the characters and acting. Unlike the unlikeable douchebags in Jumper, all the good guys in Push are really good guys, acting not out of self-interest but because they don't want to see their friends get hurt. And whereas Hayden Christiansen can be out-acted by a block of cheese, Chris Evans can actually deliver a performance (also check him out in Sunshine if you can't get past the Johnny Storm thing). Dakota Fanning gives her typically weird "adult in child's body" thing, but it works for her character and she only stumbles when she tries to play drunk (somebody should've loaded the kid with booze and called it Method). The supporting characters are likewise strong, with only one real shit performance coming from the vapid Camilla Belle, but she spends so much time off-screen that it does no real harm.

The flick does stumble a tad in the last third, where it goes all Oceans' Eleven as the characters have to "con themselves" to avoid precognitive psychic knowing what they're going to do as they do it; but, I kept up with it and admired that they put some serious thought into how these powers work. It was a solid, fast-paced action flick, and while it's not going to win an Oscar or save Darfur, it was a damn good time.

Quantum of Solace

It was good. Not as great as Casino Royale, but only in the sense that it isn't as full-fledged a film in its own right as its predecessor. You'll probably be completely lost in Quantum without having seen Casino Royale, and will surely be missing whatever emotional power the film tugs at with its constant references to Bond's ill-fated love for Vesper Lynd. It exists mostly as the epilogue to Casino Royale, but I still found it fun, exciting, and deep enough (in a rather disposable pop culture sort of way) to sustain itself.

While I very much liked Casino Royale, I remained concerned that this reboot of the Bond franchise had yet to deal with the central problem afflicting most spy thrillers these days: the Cold War is over and ignorant religious nutjobs in caves don't make nearly as interesting devious masterminds as our mythical versions of the KGB did back when Bond had a Scottish accent. So, taking its cues from Jason Bourne, Quantum pits Bond as much against the Americans and his own government as it does against a not-too-original alliance of a tinpot dictator and an omnipotent secret cabal, finally making a Bond film whose subtext doesn't play as an anti-Communist screed but as something matching modern-day concerns. Indeed, if Quantum is anti- anything, it's anti-globalization, with the real villain being the influence of amoral corporate interests on government intelligence policy.

Yet Quantum of Solace is still a Bond film, and is really about an ultra-cool badass playing the "kiss-kiss, bang-bang" game. Lacking a new Vesper for James, there is less "kiss-kiss" than in Casino Royale, but the more "realistic" subtext saves the film from being less human because of it. The film is also tighter (though just slightly) than Casino Royale, with nary a breathless moment between it's numerous fight scenes, yet more than enough plot (it starts to feel like Syriana at times) that it doesn't feel like one damn battle after another (i.e. The Matrix sequels).

If there is any real criticism, it's that Quantum ends too abruptly. Having set up so many plotlines, many are left to be tied up unsatisfactorily in dialogue exposition after all the explosions have burned themselves out. While it makes a nice coda to Casino Royale, it's nothing more than that, but it does a very good job of laying the groundwork for where this new Bond is headed.

W.

After W. abruptly ended and Jeannine and I walked out of the theater, I turned to her and said, "Well, that was deeply disappointing and way too long... kind of like the Bush presidency itself." That pretty much sums up my thoughts on Oliver Stone's Nixon-like treatment of Bush 43, but keep reading if you want the full spoiler-filled review.

If you believe that the inadequacies of George W. Bush can be defined entirely as an epic case of "daddy issues", then this the film for you. If you have other explanations for the incredibly dramatic failures that have marked the Bush Administration (i.e. Bush is a blind, pampered, wannabe-cowboy bully backed by powerful but incompetent business and religious conservatives who have successfully used the fear-induced prejudices of Walmart America to preserve and expand their power until now), then this will be one long bore. The theme of the film is established within the trailer - Dubya is a mildly-retarded redneck who only craves the approval of his distant father - but the film goes on for over two hours, most of which is filled with Josh Brolin's Bush drinking and carousing, interrupted with James Crowell's inaccurately-virile Bush 41 looking on disapprovingly. As Jeannine pointed out to me afterwards, there isn't a single scene devoted to 9/11, nor on on either of Bush's presidential campaigns, Hurricane Katrina, the economic collapse (the first one he inherited in 2001, I can't expect that the film could be that up-to-date), the Republican Congressional loss in 2006, Terry Schiavo, or Bush's questionable stint in the Air National Guard. We do get a long scene about some Texas bimbo Bush may have knocked up after college, at least a couple of drunk driving scenes, dream sequences of him in the Texas Rangers stadium that never pan out effectively, and lots of scenes of him watching ESPN (even when he's not choking to death on a pretzel).

Most of the performances are far too good for the film. Brolin is spot-on, Thandie Newton is even better as Condi Rice, and the dude from Capote does a good job as Karl Rove; but, George Dreyfus can't really pull off Dick Cheney (why not just get Danny DeVito to reprise his Penguin role from Batman Returns?), Jeffrey Wright is forced to play Colin Powell as an uninterestingly earnest voice-of-reason (rather than as the speed-bump of a pussy he was in reality), and Scott Glenn is badly-miscast as Rumsfeld. Ultimately, what really sinks the film is that Stone has nothing interesting to say about Bush, and this is a damn shame. Dubya is the most interesting President in history since FDR, have been in office during (and often directly responsible for) the worst crisises I've known in my lifetime, yet all Stone can muster is that his daddy never gave him enough attention. This inadequacy is brought home by the final scene, another dream sequence where Dubya is in the stadium trying to catch a baseball that never comes, alone in an interminable emptiness. While that might be a powerful statement in the personal drama of Bush's life, it would've been a much more powerful statement to instead have Bush surrounded by the dead soldiers, bombed civilians, and drowned citizens, all the lives he has wrecked in the historical drama that has been the Bush Presidency. I expected politics and instead got psychodrama, and quite frankly, I don't think there's enough to Bush's psychosis to make a good film, especially one this long. He's just an asshole, and what's really interesting (and funny) is why this asshole was able to get away with what he did for so long.

God is Algae, or Theology According to Bad Rap Artists Turned Underwear Models

Behold, the reason I have not, and undoubtably will not, watch an M. Night Shyamalanadingdong movie in the theater since The Sixth Sense: The Happening is all about how God is real and science is dumb...

But asked what specific religious faith inspired The Happening, Shyamalan went super vague. He said he drew on "the Native American culture and relationship with nature, the relationship with the sky, the earth, the rock the bear." He also claimed that cast he Mark Wahlberg because of his strong faith in Jesus. But Wahlberg's religious faith ended up causing a ton of reshoots. Whenever Shyamalan would ask Wahlberg what he was thinking about, and Wahlberg replied, "Jesus," Shyamalan would make him reshoot the scene in question. (Until he was no longer thinking about Jesus?)

Self-sodomizing Jeebus on a pogo stick, will the stupid never end. There have been many very well-thought out and deeply-researched arguments why logically, reason leads to religious faith. I may not buy any of them, mainly because none of them fully complete that bridge on logic alone, but I can at least admire those philosophers who refused to submit to some ill-thought out, touchy-feely bullshit to prove that, as Shyamalanadingdong would claim "There are limits to rational thought." I can even respect those who still hold to their irrational, unreasoned emotional feeling in religious faith, as long as they don't try to sugar-coat it as anything more substantial or valid than that. But to spew this kind of nonsense that neurotoxin-releasing algae somehow lead to evidence of God and thus proves a limit to reason is absurd. There are no known limits to rational thought itself, there are simply limits to currently available human reason. That we tool-using hairless monkeys may not have (yet) developed far enough to fully comprehend all the wonders of our universe does not mean that there is some anthropomorphized bearded thunderer up in the heavens that we can understand in our imaginations with all the answers to our questions.

And to use Albert Einstein to buttress this kid of shit, because he saw "the hand of God", is just insulting:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal good and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. - Einstein

Personally, I blame Spielberg. His Capra-esque approach, where deep social issues are drowned in a thick syrup of feel-good agnosticism rather than faced with any kind of honest intellectual bravery, was mimicked by most of the new Hollywood intelligentsia, and no one drunk so deep of this attitude as Shyamalanadingdon. Honestly, I would have no problem with this kind of semi-Christian anti-science agnostic attitude if it weren't just so prevalent now in recent genre fiction. Lost, Battlestar Galactica (maybe), The X-Files, anything not created by Joss Whedon, and countless movies (The Lord of the Rings and Prince Caspian most eggregiously) are all prime examples of this kind of anti-reason subtext. Although to be fair, it's not like there isn't a long track record of anti-faith science fiction where religion is public enemy number one.

Anyways, watching Marky-Mark look confused into a camera for two hours was never my idea of good time to begin with, but this kind of crap is enough to make me write off The Happening even as a Netflix rental. I'm betting it's going to do a moderately-well opening weekend followed by disastrous 50%+ drops leading to more questions as to Shlamalanadingdong's box office viability; but, once he comes out with his adaptation of Avatar the Last Airbender, enough of the anime freaks are going to buy tickets and refuel his place as Spielberg's heir in Hollywood. Bah.

Deathwatch

So I've been on a real tear through Weird War Tales style movies as of late, the last being Deathwatch, a British horror flick set during the First World War. This follows R-Point, a K-Horror movie about Korean Marines in the Vietnam War, and Outpost, another British effort about modern-day PMC's in some unnamed Eastern European shit-hole. All three films share the same basic structure: isolated soldiers come upon some creepy place, are forced by orders to remain as the creepiness slowly turns into malevolent nastiness, and things end badly as a stark metaphor for the inhumanity of war and its warriors. Deathwatch, suprisingly, comes out as the least of the three.

Outpost has a really solid group of actors headlined by Ray Stevenson (Pullo from Rome) and Julian Wadham, neither of whom allow the silliness of the material (Nazi experiments in Einstein's Unified Field Theory create extradimensional zombie stormtroopers) to undermine their earnest performances, which bring a sense of gravitas to the B-movie proceedings. And Richard Brake adds the fun with his understated Southern psycho role, delivering the greatest quote of the film: "Fuck, we killed just about everyone else. I figured it's about time we touched gloves with some Nazis." Still the film never really escapes its inherent shlock, particularly once the main baddie starts vamping around in his SS uniform.

The actors of R-Point deliver lesser performances than those of Outpost, but the Korean film holds out its horror longer through its more subtle psychological terrors. The story is simple but well-executed: ROK Marines are dispatched to recon an area avoided by the Viet Cong in search of a missing patrol which was believed to be wiped out, and the Marines end up trapped there in a supernatural purgatory. Although the setting of Vietnam is not unique and the filmmakers' approach lifts brazenly from Apocalypse Now, using Korean characters instead of the usual American G.I. stereotypes makes it all seem more like a charming homage rather than a hackneyed rip-off. Of the three flicks, R-Point tries the hardest at making a statement about how war can make monsters of human beings, and while it never succeeds at making high art, the fact that it is trying to be more than the average Sci-Fi Pictures Original Film ultimately raises its stock from B-movie status to more of an A-minus.

Deathwatch is not a bad movie, but it lacks the strong acting of Outpost and the tight story of R-Point, and suffers in comparison. Here we see a bunch of WWI-era British soldiers go over the top during a harrowing nightime attack, which immediately cuts to them stumbling upon a near-deserted German trench in the midst of a thick daytime fog. The soldiers almost immediately start going nuts in response to a few (really too few) unnatural shocks, particularly one very religious type who abruptly goes from quoting Scripture to making crazed exposition that pretty much reveals the nature of the "horror" halfway into the movie. And once that secret is revealed, the threats (where in one case of an attack by barbed wire is quite frightening) take on much less terror. The acting is okay, but suffers from the fact that a lot of performers look alike and the characters have few differences in personality. The single exception is a blood-crazed nutjob hammed up by Andy Serkis, but all his scenery-chewing does less to inspire the tired cast than to exemplify how lackluster the whole proceedings are. Deathwatch is passable for those seeking a ghost story amid the madness of war, but if you haven't seen Outpost or R-Point, do catch either of those flicks first for a more satisfying experience.