Movie Roundup

Been a while since I did a movie roundup- but here's what I've been watching lately.

A History of Violence: Very good, very scary, very realistic movie about violent people. Aragorn is a diner-owner that discovers being the last of the Dunedain means you're pretty handy in a fight when people point guns at you. Or something like that.

Serenity: Good, so good. It deserves a sequel. Speaking of sequels...

Dracula II Ascension: Sequel to Dracula 2001, which I liked despite having the most awful Virgin product placements. This movie and its sequel were a Dimension horror movie shot back to back in Romania. In this one, Dracula, apparently not so dead after the first movie, is taken from the morgue by a bunch of medical students so they can extract his wonderful regenerative powers and use them to better mankind. And make a quick buck. Much like this film. Which is 75 minutes long, far too short for a film.

Dracula III Legacy: Sequel to the sequel, shot at the same time to save cash. Bizarrely only 1 of the medical students in #2 survived and he's back along with a poor man's half-vampire, half-man Blade, who must destroy Dracula without succumbing to evil himself. The ending to this is quite good, though the movie itself is cheap. They have to travel to...er... Romania and defeat the vampire king who has done a Doctor Who and regenerated into Rutger Hauer for 5 minutes. Roy Schnider also co-stars for 1 minute as a Yoda-like Cardinal who tells our poor-man's-Blade not to succumb to the dark side. Evidentally Schinder's cameo is as memorable as it is long as Blade-dude doesn't listen in the end.

Various Peter Cushing Dracula's including 1972 - which is a 'retro' indeed!

Prophecy Uprising: Sequel to the Prophecy Trilogy with Christopher Walken in it. This movie and its sequel were a Dimension horror movie shot back to back in Romania... again.

I like Prophecy. Not amazing - but it was the story of a group of angels (read psycopaths with a license to kill from the big man upstairs) who are miffed that God likes humans more than angels, enough to give them souls in fact.

The angels are so miffed a civil war breaks out in the Ethereal Planes between loyalist and jealous angels. The jealous ones want to destroy humanity. Of course in a budget saving measure we never see this ethereal war, only a bunch of guys in trench coats pulling each other's hearts out. Or not even that in Prophecy Forsaken, which must've cost about 500 rupees to make.

Anyway, this one doesn't have Christopher Walken in it. It's about an American girl in er... Romania... who finds a holy book. And Sean Pertwee plays a British cop... in Romania... who rides around in a car with Satan, who it turns out is just a depressed Gothic fellow.

Prophecy Forsaken: Still in Romania. Turns out that book that the evil angels want tells who the anti-christ is. If they don't kill the anti-christ it will be the end of days and all the worthy souls of humanity will rise to heaven. And the bad angels don't want that. Nice plot, but nothing happens really other than angels trying to kill the heroine, and then she foils them by scattering the pages of the book throughout Romania. Did I mention the anti-christ is from Romania?

Fortress 2: Christopher Lambert, who escaped from a maximum security penitentiary in the first one, is captured by the very people who owned the original Fortress. Rather than kill him they put him in a fortress prison in space. He escapes. See the flaw in the plan? Do you?

Red Eye: Wes Craven directing a thriller, not a horror movie. The old nightmare of sitting next to a psychopath on a plane, only this time he's not hijacking the plane!

Sin City: Finally saw this on DVD. Very good film noir though I laughed all the way through it. It was just trying to be too serious and gritty. Like when Bruce Willis says Jessica Alba's letters were the only thing keeping him alive in prison.