Bloodsucking Bastards (2015) – I almost turned it off because everyone we met in the first five minutes was intensely unlikeable (filmmakers, why do you DO that???), but once over that hurdle, it was a witty little low-budget* horror-comedy. Who knew that vampires are punctual, dependable, and oriented toward success? Too many F-bombs to show my wife, but she probably wouldn’t think it’s funny anyway.
*It looks like it was shot on a sitcom set, but that makes sense from a story perspective, because it’s a corporate office so divorced from natural light that vampires have no problem operating in the daytime under omnipresent fluorescents.
The Man From Earth (2007) – Jerome Bixby, the writer of the original Star Trek episode “Requiem for Methuselah” about an immortal man who had seen all of human history, worked on this screenplay for years up to his death, about an immortal man who had seen all of human history. Range!* John Oldman, a professor leaving his job after a decade because people are commenting on how “well-preserved” he is, has a final get-together with his faculty friends, and on a whim lets them know that he’s 14,000 years old.
What follows is largely a one-act play in which they discuss the possibility and plausibility that he’s telling the truth, and what he’s learned (surprisingly, very little, except that everybody dies and everything ends). Of course, the big turd in the fishbowl is when he eventually lets it slip that it was his teaching of Buddhism in Judea that led to the birth of Christianity.
I know that this is one of the most well-respected “small” movies on the IMDb, but I found that it didn’t quite live up to its hype. It’s talky, preachy (or, given the “Christianity is all made up” focus, anti-preachy), and really has nowhere to go. I find myself falling back on the description I used for Creation of the Humanoids: It’s a smart movie, but not necessarily a good one.
*I kid. Bixby was also the author of one of the all-time best short stories ever, “It’s a Good Life.”
Fire and Ice (1983) – Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta team up to make an animated sword-&-sorcery flick based on Frazetta’s art concepts. It’s everything that annoyed you about Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, but with bigger boobs and hips!
The problem here is that the story is spread so thin that the artwork is really the only draw — and you know there’s going to be a big drop in appeal when you take Frazetta’s incredible artwork and translate it to rotoscoped animation. (He didn’t even do the background illustrations! Boo! Hiss!)
Abandoned movies:
Deep Shock (2003) – The first fifteen minutes already exhibit a startling amount of filler, and when the absolute piss-poor CGI eels show up…
Navy Seals vs. Zombies (2015) – Hits the dead center of every cliche, but plays it straight as if it’s all remarkably original.