Bad movie weekend roundup

This weekend was pretty active, work projects hit the eye of the hurricane, and I had a queue of horror movies to watch:

The Omen Pentalogy:

The Omen: One of my favorite horror movies of all time. It doesn't belong to a bad movie weekend lineup, I only watched it to keep the story line in the proper perspective.

The Omen Remake : It was much better than what I had hoped for. When I saw this movie originally the little kid that plays Damien scared the living shit out of me. He looks even meaner than the original Damien. Julia Stiles did pretty good acting a much older part than the norm (read: not playing a teenager or early 20s hipster).

I really liked what they did with it.

The Omen II: Damien: The worst of the series, but it has a damn good opening.

The Omen III: The Final Conflict: Not as bad as part II, but not by much. Some of the scenes are really disturbing if you are really paying attention (hint: Christ is hung to the cross backwards).

The Omen IV: The Awakening: I like this one a lot because Delia is a mirror copy of a very good friend of mine. I can imagine my friend raising that kind of hell when she was 9 years old.

The Rest:

All The Boys Love Mandy Lane: Really really good teen slasher, with a half-decent plot twist at the end.

Pathology: Disturbing, especially if you have seen the two German Anatomy (part 1, part 2) movies. The subject is different, but both movies have doctors going against their oath.

Dark Floors: This is a gimmick movie, it doesn't make sense unless you know about Lordi.

The Signal: Good old fashioned we-all-are-going-batshit-crazy movie.

Teeth: Damn good movie. A girl is born with vagina dentata. That's all you need to know.

This is probably one of the best bad movie weekends that I have had in a while. If I don't take into consideration the original Omen, the best movie of the weekend was All The Boys Love Mandy Lane.

28 Free On Demand Video Services Later

Watch 28 Days Later for free at Hulu:

Un-freakin-believable.

What Happened In Piedmont

There is an Andromeda Strain remake in the works, this time as a miniseries. It is one of my favorite Sci Fi movie/book pairs, I really hope they don't screw it up.

A cool thing I noticed already is that they are going the viral marketing route for the promos, since there is already at least one fake blog that is clearly part of it.

Two weeks with the ElGato Turbo.264

It's been close to two weeks since I purchased my Turbo.264 and have managed to push about over 100 hours of video through it, equally split between TS_Video and transcodes from DivX. Almost every night for two weeks it has run nonstop doing TS_Video folders, and at least 2 hours every morning doing transcoding.

The good: it really works. Even at its busiest, it will run on real time (24fps or so for most video) while CPU utilization is very reasonable. The fastest I have seen it encode was 50fps for a WMV transcode for the iPhone (all my other encoding is for the AppleTV). Funny thing is that during the WMV transcode it could not recognize that I have a registered version of Flip4mac.

The bad: it is at the mercy of the software that you use. The application that ships with it slaughters DVDs. I have seen many instances of audio tracks our of sync. It botches the aspect ratio. It can't deal with most TV season DVDs. And no AC-3 passthrough.

Roxio Popcorn 3 is a little better. I haven't seen it screw up the aspect ratio, and again: no AC-3 passthrough. I don't understand why this is a problem since all it has to do is take the sound as is, it won't need to transcode it. It can handle DVD chapters and TV season DVDs a lot better. The in-progress status is not as good as the one with the application supplied with the Turbo.264.

After the first week or so I realized that I could still use the dongle for transcoding and leave the TS_Video jobs to run overnight with Handbrake. Handbrake on this laptop when it is idle can easily run over 30fps, which is not exactly terrible.

I still think it is a great buy, and if you don't care about the AC-3 passthrough then it is even better (for example, if you are watching AppleTV and you are using only the component cables). Just make sure you try Popcorn 3 before settling on the default application.

Hollywood legend Charlton Heston dead at 84 - CNN.com

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Actor Charlton Heston died at Beverly Hills home at the age of 84 Saturday, his family said.

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Heston was suffering the late stages of Alzheimer's Disease.

Heston, known for portrayals of larger than life figure including Moses and Ben Hur, was suffering the late stages of Alzheimer's Disease.

Heston's wife of 64 years, Lydia, was by his side at the time of his death, according to the family statement.

[From Hollywood legend Charlton Heston dead at 84 - CNN.com]

The god damn dirty apes never got to take away his guns, no matter how hard they tried.

Heston is one of my favorite actors of all time (both Omega Man and Soylent Green are in permanent rotation in my household). Good Night, Funny Guy.

(not so) Bad Movie Weekend: P2

Oh God. I have no words to describe this movie. When I saw the trailer for P2 I had honestly expected it to be a piece of shit, which is why I had left it aside for Bad Movie Weekend. I mean, how much can you get done in a 2-hour movie where everything happens in one level in a parking garage?

A hell of a lot more than what I had imagined.

The premise for the movie is super simple: a young woman leaves work on Christmas Eve but finds her car dead. She spends the rest of the movie running away from a psycho. The result is a very high-grade "B" movie. You know who the bad guy is going to be within minutes, and you more or less know how it has to end, yet the movie is never boring.

Bad Movie Weekend: Stir of Echoes: The Homecoming

There are bad movies and there are bad movies. The true bad american movie is an art form and the entertainment choice of millions. It's what we call the "B" movie.

Then you have movies that are so bad that are shit. Like Stir of Echoes 2.

What makes this the most frustrating is that I watched both movies back to back, just to make sure that I did not miss plot points. That was a waste of time because the second movie has absolutely not a god damn thing with the first movie. Nothing.

Another frustrating thing is that the cast was just plain vanilla, there was nothing wrong with them and they should have been able to pull it off. So who to blame?

My theory is that the writer had ADHD and somewhere between his third and sixth hits of meth decided that he was writing a sequel to Jacob's Ladder instead of Stir of Echoes.

I am no even ready to blame the director, I think it was simply a really shitty script.