Cynical Cinema

Alliance Films came out with the Blade trilogy on August 26th.  It’s a two-disc edition, with two of the movies on one disc and one on the other.  There are no terrific special features, it’s just a plain, bargain set of the three Blade films in a package that is conveniently the same size as every other DVD in your collection.  And if you don’t have these films already, this is one you should add to your collection.  Here’s why:

Blade (8/10):  The original Blade movie was terrific, a real breath of fresh air in the world of comic book movies.  Wesley Snipes was big, muscular, bad-ass and mean.  Kris Kristofferson was amazing as Whistler, Blade’s mentor.  And Stephen Dorff was terrific as the bad guy, a vampire who wanted to trigger the Blood Tide - an event that would, I think, turn everyone in the world into a vampire.  Or something.  The point is, this movie was awesome.  Sword fighting, guns, vampires disintegrating and great special effects, and Snipes as the most ass-kicking, toughest, meanest comic book character of all time.  There was even some good comedy - mostly provided by Donal Logue, who kept getting his arm chopped off.  And for the really cult comic book fans - some appearances by Traci Lords and Udo Kier.  Terrific!

Blade II (10/10):  By far, the best of the series.  Directed by Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth), this film is as pulse-pounding and visually impressive as any comic book adaptation could aspire to be.  (Well, until 2008 when The Dark Knight came along.)  Snipes is now even more bad-ass, and he is given some awfully cool villains with which to work.  Luke Goss appears as Nomak, a new breed of vampire that preys on both humans AND vampires.  So now the vampires want a truce with Blade, because they are after the same enemy for once.  And Blade hooks up with the Blood Pack, a cheesily-named group of vampire bad-asses who have been training their whole lives to kill Blade, but now must work with him.  Ron Perlman, as the tough-guy leader of the Blood Pack, is amazing.  And even the secondary characters are cool actors - Norman Reedus as a stoner hippie helping Blade and Whistler, and Asian action movie legend Donnie Yen even shows up as a kung-fu fighting member of the Blood Pack.  And the vampire princess, played by Leonor Varela, is one of the hottest women ever in a movie.  Visually stunning, never-ending action, and some seriously bad-ass characters and actors made this movie not just a guilty pleasure, but the best in the trilogy.

Blade: Trinity (3/10):  One of the biggest letdowns I have ever had at a movie.  Del Toro is gone as director, replaced by David S. Goyer.  Kristofferson is gone early in the film, replaced by Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel.  And I really like Ryan Reynolds - he even has some solid comedic scenes in this film.  But an action star?  Jessica Biel an action star?  I know she really wants to be, and she keeps trying and trying to be one, but she isn’t an action star.  Or a great actress.  She’s hot.  That’s about it.  I mean, stick to movies where you are hot.  Those, you can do.  Blade II had Ron Perlman and Donnie Yen.  Blade Trinity can only suffer by comparison.  But it isn’t just Reynolds and Biel that are the problem.  Snipes is the only genuine action star in the movie, but he is given just about nothing to do.  The script is dreadful, the concept just doesn’t work, and there are some really long, extended scenes that make absolutely no sense.  The other Blade films were genuinely dark, tough, gritty entries that could, on some level, be considered horror films.  This one is an absolute joke.  Not only that, Blade is now the co-star.  In his own film.  Because Biel and Reynolds are the real action stars.  Come on!  This one is total garbage.

 The two-disc Blade trilogy came out August 26th from Alliance Films.  Pick it up!  And ignore that third one.

At the beginning of Alone in the Dark, there is the standard DVD warning. “Any reproduction, or broadcast of this movie for anything other than home viewing is punishable by fines and prison time and so forth”…what it should really say is that “any reproduction of this movie for reason other than home viewing will cause people to question your taste, reject you as a friend, and hold a grudge against you for their entire lifetimes.” Alliance Films releases Alone in the Dark - the director’s cut today, and it is one of the worst movies you will ever see. It is directed by Uwe Boll, who is considered by most internet pundits to be the worst director working in movies today, possibly worse even than the immortal Ed Wood. This is not true. Uwe Boll is NOT the worst director working today. That distinction belongs to the guy who directed Epic Movie and Date Movie, a guy whose name I can’t be bothered looking up because I don’t want to give him any more publicity. A case could be made for Michael Bay as well. You see, these are guys who do movies with big budgets for both production and promotion. And in doing so, they don’t care about the movie at all, they just care about the cash. So they make idiotic “jokes”, or blow a bunch of stuff up, and watch the cash come in.

Uwe Boll is a different breed. He loves movies. He loves making them. He is not about the cash. He just happens to be quite bad at making these films. He buys the rights to video games, and makes films based on those games. Terrible films that include Bloodrayne and House of the Dead. He somehow manages to get massive amounts of financing out in Eastern Europe somewhere, and with that financing he hires quasi-name actors to appear in these terrible crapfests. But at least you can feel his love for the movies when you watch. There is plenty of soul, just no craft or skill or ability. Alone in the Dark is no exception. This 2005 movie is getting it’s release on DVD today courtesy of Alliance Films, and it’s almost worth watching for how hilariously awful it is. Whether it’s Tara Reid attempting to wrap her head and her tongue around her super scientific dialogue, or the introduction by a narrator that is so long that the movie starts from a grinding halt, there is something charmingly amusing about anything so bad. Like that dog that keeps winning those “ugliest dog alive” contests.

The narrator intro is two minutes long and makes virtually no sense at all. It has something to do with an ancient civilization called the Akbani. Before long, Christian Slater shows up, in a cab, and some guy shows up to attack him like Spiderman. Everything alternates between hyper-kinetic jump cuts and slo-mo bullet’s eye view shots. The dialogue is on a par with a high school Screen Ed class project, and there is smashing glass everywhere. If there is a fruit stand to be knocked over or glass to be smashed, Boll will find it. I was watching with my 13-year-old stepson, and he began to count the glass smashes. We lost track after 16. There are some orphans (it’s always orphans, isn’t it?) Who have been programmed for…something…to help the…darkness? And light will fight dark, and the monsters will rise! All this amid lousy monsters, third-rate fake-smart Star Trek dialogue, and a constant voice-over narration from Christian Slater that seems to explain more about this Akbani legend, but only serves to muddy things further.

Slater is a former member of uber-governmental agency “713″. No idea what they do, but it sure sounds cool, eh? Paranormal research, and so forth I gather. I think they are meant to be a very well-funded, superpowerful version of the Ghostbusters. Stephen Dorff is the current commander in charge of that agency, and for some reason that is never explained, they hate each other. Oh, and Slater is…or was? Dating Tara Reid. Who is a scientist. They all come together when some non-descript monsters-of-darkness attack their museum. This scene is full of flickery, jump-cutting, mostly useless footage. All of a sudden this scene becomes a music video, set to some kind of heavy metal. And it gets worse. Throughout the movie, there are bizarre noises on the soundtrack. A guy puts on a coat, it has to make a whooshing noise, because it’s dramatic. There are whirs and whizzes and pops and rattles throughout the movie that have absolutely nothing to do with the plot (what little there is) or the scene itself!

Then the zombies show up. Then they go to the abandoned gold mine, which looks like the Chills For CHEO house, only worse. There are scenes taken directly from Aliens, tiny little underground Tremors worms, and army-monster battles that are NOT meant to be ironic. But that are. More crappy dialogue…and a bunch of walls made of skulls. Tiny little skulls, like bricks, only scarier! You never really understand what Christian Slater’s job actually IS - the back of the box explains more than the movie does. The back of the box also explains that this is the director’s cut. This is one of the few instances where that is not a good thing. Uwe Boll works fairly autonomously, which means that every time you see one of his movies, it is already the director’s cut. Maybe the idea is that people have seen this in theatres, hated it, and they might think that a Director’s Cut edition would somehow explain things and make them better. It doesn’t.

The one thing that makes this DVD worthwhile is a special feature called “Raging Boll”. It’s a little 15-minute piece on the director, who acknowledges the vitriol that is spewed against him in the internet and around the world. It talks about the boxing matches he has had against his detractors and critics, in a sort of bizarre publicity stunt. It shows that he really is just a man in love with making movies. The fact that he likes and enjoys his own movies merely shows that he is a little deluded when it comes to the appraisal of quality, but it certainly is a fun ride. And I would like to state, for the record, that if Uwe Boll reads this on the internet and decides that he would like to fight me also, I am in. If only Michael Bay would do the same.