"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Posts Tagged ‘Alyla Browne’

Sting

Thursday, December 5th, 2024

STING is a 2024 killer spider picture, but it’s not the French one that I already reviewed. That’s INFESTED. This one is set in New York City but hails from Australia. I remember seeing a trailer and being interested, I think I heard not-great things when it came out, but then when I saw it was on Hulu I noticed that the writer-director was Kiah Roache-Turner. That’s the guy that did WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD (2014) and WYRMWOOD: APOCALYPSE (2021), two fun movies about people roaming a post-apocalyptic world with cars powered by zombie breath. Well shit, yeah, I’ll watch his spider movie.

Just like he did in WYRMWOOD, Roache-Turner uses an absurd and inexplicable sci-fi disaster to set up the scenario he wants to tell a story within. A news broadcast tells us we’re in the midst of the worst ice storm in New York state history, and that it’s believed to be connected to the asteroid shower that came unusually close to Earth. During the opening credits a tiny rock from space shoots through an apartment window and a dollhouse inside the apartment.

The rock cracks open and a spider crawls out and through the floors of the miniature home. The sequence is very stylized, and foreshadows that this spider will grow to this scale in relation to the actual building, so I wasn’t sure until after the credits that yes, this literally happened in the story – a spider fell from the stars, like the Blob or the Body Snatch plants or Venom in SPIDER-MAN 3. (read the rest of this shit…)

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Thursday, May 30th, 2024

Note: There aren’t exactly twists or anything to spoil in FURIOSA, but this is all spoilers. You really should see the movie first. This review is the discussion afterwards.


There are over one million things I’ve always loved about the MAD MAX movies, and one of them is that they’re separate tales. There’s no continuity, no narrative references to or consequences from a previous chapter, and other than Max Rockatansky and his Last of the V8 Interceptors there’s never been a returning character, location or faction. They don’t necessarily take place in any order, and they’re so separate that some people think Tom Hardy’s Max is a different character from Mel Gibson’s. I’ve always thought of them as more like the Man With No Name trilogy than, say, STAR WARS.

But FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA isn’t a MAD MAX movie. Says it right there in the title – it’s a saga. And we knew it was the backstory of Furiosa, written in conjunction with MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, shown to Charlize Theron to help her performance, at one point supposedly considered to be shot back-to-back, at another to be done as an anime movie directed by Mahiro Maeda (director of the Second Renaissance episodes of THE ANIMATRIX and animator on NAUSICAA and KILL BILL VOL. 1). So FURIOSA is a traditional prequel in the sense that it depicts an earlier stage of the specific world and characters of FURY ROAD. (read the rest of this shit…)