I guess on paper, “The Landlord” seemed like a great concept for a horror comedy. Emil Hyde’s movie starts off simply enough with a sitcom premise with a horror twist about a man living with two demons. The man has to rent out an apartment to keep the demons fed. The demons who reside in his flat have a knack for possessing and devouring the tenants and he has to go back to renting the flat all over again. This can be set up for some raucous laughs and clever twists on the concept, but sadly “The Landlord” is a lethargic and brutally tedious horror comedy that never scary or funny.
The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes
Whether we like it or not, from here on in Marvel Comics and Marvel Entertainment is officially owned by Disney Studios. What effect this will have on the comics and characters as a whole has yet to be fully realized, but many can agree one of the positive outcomes of this new ownership has been “The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes” a full fledged action adventure series starring all of the heroes we know and love fighting as one super team against Earth’s most impossible foes.
After a very disastrous animated attempt in the late nineties many fans recall with disgust, Disney has rebooted the animated franchise including all of our favorite heroes the aforementioned series failed to include and have considerably gone all out creatively and artistically. While the series will satisfy fans of the actual title, the intent of the series is to garner brand new fans of the titles and characters being pushed on a kids channel geared toward boys and will undoubtedly win over a brand new generation of true believers.
E-Pigs (2009)
I don’t know what I finished watching after seeing “E-Pigs,” but I know that the director makes a great effort in creating as much whimsy as humanly possible in fifteen minutes and it fails spectacularly. I sat in front of my computer throughout the entirety of this fantasy thriller wondering what the whole point of it was and what it meant, and decided in the end that it was just being quirky for the sake of being quirky. It’s a bizarre and surreal little fantasy thriller that is just a fifteen minute filler of pointless ridiculous imagery for no purpose or statement.
Feeding Frenzy (2010) (DVD Review)
“It’s very likely the tomato paste has AIDS in it.”
Red Letter Media, the production company behind all of the classic internet movie reviews of the “Star Wars” prequels that even garnered Simon Pegg’s unabashed endorsement releases their first feature film entitled “Feeding Frenzy” a trashy horror film very much in line with the company’s humor and even features their company mascot Mr. Plinkett as an ominous villain as a nod to fans who followed their brilliant video reviews so adamantly every year.
Kick-Ass 2 Issue #1
Okay so I didn’t love the first mini-series/graphic novel from Mark Millar, and sure, I thought “Kick Ass” the movie was pretty crummy, but overall I was pretty interested in seeing where Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. would go with volume two, the highly anticipated follow-up to the comic book series that proved to be most controversial. I mean sure it’s fishy that this came along right after plans for a sequel were talked about, and fine, many of the new characters seem oddly capable of being…oh… put in a movie with a big star at the helm, but nonetheless I was open minded to the first issue of volume two that sticks true to the first arc of the comic book and thankfully doesn’t adhere to the events of the live action movie.
United Monster Talent Agency (2010)
Spending all of his time providing limbs and blood for directors, Gregory Nicotero is trying his hand behind the camera offering up a sneak peek at his abilities with the short horror comedy “United Monster Talent Agency.” As with many first outings, his is a dedication to the monster movies of old with cameos from some of the greatest monsters as well as cameos from some of the greatest directors (…and Eli Roth), all of which is set to the tune of the classic fifties news reels.
Our Favorite Modern Final Girls
Today’s Final Girls are much more than just virginal screaming crying women who run through the woods and fall to the ground waiting for the killer or monster to eat them whole while their men come to the rescue. Today’s final girls have to be tough, they have to be independent, and surely enough they have to be fierce, and the final girl has been refined over the years from the prey to the predator. Some of our favorite modern final girls we’re putting in this list are women we considered listing as scream queens, but while they do fit the mold of scream queens, they do much more than just scream and run. They fight back, they cause trouble, and surely enough they kick enormous amounts of ass, regardless of whether they live to see the end of the movie. The title of final girl was once just a tagline to best describe the final female character of the horror movie that ended up either living to see the end until a grizzly fate, or fight back enough to see a few sequels until the writers got sick of her and moved on to someone younger.
Folks like Heather Langenkamp, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Adrienne King made famous the device which was then refined and re-worked with Sigourney Weaver in “Alien” who was very much a final girl but did much more than run away from the monster screaming and crying. Women like Debbie Rochon turned the formula from there on in and especially Wes Craven decided to turn the final girl in to something of a heroine as we saw in Neve Campbell, then Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Sarah Polley. These are only a few of the modern Final Girls you should be looking out for, and some you’ve likely grown to adore over the years, and we pay homage to the final girls of the new millennium adding a new dimension to what was once considered a laughable plot device for a horror film.
Final Girls and scream queens are not all meant for mainstream success. Like directors of the genre, they’re meant to be on the fringes of the cinema circle like Linnea Quigley and Debbie Rochon, always playing to the crowd and supplying a reason for the killer or evil menace to stomp around and seek victims in their warpaths. Modern Final Girls are much more than panty wastes. They’re heroines. They’re independence. And they fight back against the male dominant monster with as much gusto as possible. What with the affordability of filmmaking becoming easier and easier over the years and new directors popping up every minute to show us their chops, there’s a good chance we have many more scream queens and final girls waiting in the wings to show us their screeches and combat skills. These are only a few we avidly admire and root for.