River of Darkness (2011)

A sheriff looks into a string of ritualistic murders and finds out that there are more to the murders then meets the eye. Delving deeper into the case leads him to a deep, dark secret about the town he's protecting. There's not much to say about this movie. It was made maybe, but I guess that's as far as it goes. It's a run of the mill movie. The director, Bruce Koehler seems to think wrestler Kurt Angle is leading man material, but it just ain't there. He gives nothing to the performance but a body to fill a costume. Add some more wrestlers (Kevin Nash, Sid Vicious, Ray Lloyd)does nothing more then gives this movie eyeballs from a ready made audience. At least Nash and Sid knew how just to be bodies. I think they did better than Angle. Other then that, There's nothing memorable about it. The story is retread, the characters are forgettable and the development is non existent.

 There is one little nag about the movie I had. They use a subplot to bookend the movie. It is so shoehorned into the movie, you'd think Fred Olen Ray took over production. It just take off on a different tangent. It's like watching The Fog and then Scooby Doo and the Mystery Gang showed up on set to solve the case. It throws off the story and the way it ties in is just seriously retarded.

 Should you go out of your way to watch this movie? Nah. Not really. But it's alright as a time waster on a sick day or a Sunday if you happen to trip on it while browsing.

 You can find the movie streaming on Amazon and Amazon Prime.

(BTW, Angle is never tooled up like the poster is promising.)

DEFCON 2012 (2010)

A film crew disappears while putting the finishing touches on a scifi film. The movies shows the near finished product about a group of space adventurers landing on Earth following a distress beacon and end up protecting a subterranean city from an alien invasion that was being set up since 2012.

Oh man....this movie was a total mess. You see the short synopsis? I had to watch the movie three times just to get the whole story of the film. Three times. The story is just all over the place. It gives the feeling that it has a lot it wants to tell, but when it gets told, it just came out as script diarrhea. Half of it are stories ties either left loose or just dropped off. We start up with a Black Ops. agent watching the movie. We're later reminded that we are watching a movie with a movie with a random shot of the DVD machine timer here and there. This should have been just a movie by itself without the black ops wraparound sequence. There was also no sense of urgency in the characters. No feeling of suspense.

 Most of it was in voice over after voice over after voice over telling us things which half should have been filmed. This was mainly due to no sound, because the abandoned mall they choose to shoot most the film in had a rat problem. It was such a problem, the squeaks from the rat hordes were registering on the boom mic. Other then that, the script has a lot of two dimensional characters walking, jumping and crawling all around the scenery.

On top of watching the movie three times to get a story out of it, I had to watch it three times because the sound was completely awful. Whoever mixed this was someone's cousin who just got a mixer. Sometimes the soundtrack was louder then the dialog. Other times background noise was louder then the foreground. And none of it was blended at all. And I don't mean for like a minute or two. It was half the damn movie!! It was that frustrating. Movies shouldn't be frustrating to watch.

That's not to say that this movie had a redeeming factor or two. The story tries to link up conspiracy theories with apocalyptic prophecies including the Mayan calendar and it somewhat works for the movie. It just gets covered and encrusted with voiceovers and redundancies in the script. You really have to work just to see the general idea.

Is it a must see? Not really. If you're bored and are a masochist, looking for a really bad movie trying to be good, go ahead and go for it.

A Different Direction.

Alright. Here's the deal.

Seeing as funds are difficult to gather to fund the library, I'm going to work on this blog in a different way. I will now be covering streaming media. Now while I will miss covering special features and commentary, I really need to keep up to date with new movies and sitting around won't help anybody. So here we are.

To keep in line with the themes of this blog, there will be several guidelines I will be following to keep at an optimum. They are as follows......

1. All movies will be from Netflix and Amazon: Not this isn't a set guideline. This basically let's you know my first location for films. Later on, I'll add more streaming services like Hulu, Crackle and the Internet Archive.

2. All movies will be selected from my IMDB Watchlist: The list will be constantly updating, so if you think I missed a movie, feel free to drop a tip or two at my twitter @RoyBoy3

3. US Theatrical movies with an 8.0 IMDB rating are exempt: First off, everyone else has covered those movies to the ground at every angle. Second off, this blog doesn't cover many popular films. It's not it's bread and butter. I handle rare, obscure, B and direct to video movies. There will be the rare exception here and there however.

4. US Theatrical franchises after 1980 are exempt: I'm sorry, but I hate them. If there was one movie theatrically and the following movies hit direct to video, that's one thing. No theatrical franchises though.

That's it. Let's have some fun.