Stacy's Blog Has Got It Going On

 "Brains!" -Zombies A pair of medical supply warehouse workers accidentally release toxic gas that brings the dead back to life  with an appetite for brains.  The workers are forced to team up with a group of punks and hold up in a mortuary as the nearly indestructible zombies try to break their way inside. What Works: The thing I like most about this movie i s how competent the three main characters are.  Burt (Clu Gulager), Ernie (Don Calfa), and Spider (Miguel A.  Núñez) are all very good at surviving.   Competent  characters are one of the most  important  elements for me for horror movies and to have three guys who make virtually no mistakes makes it easy for me to get invested in the characters and root for their  survival . James Karen and Thom Matthews play the two men who unleash the toxic gas that kicks off the  movie.  They actually get poisoned by the gas, which prevents them from doing much in the film, besides lying around.  It turns out they are actually dying

 "What you're not, is worthy of drinking my whiskey.  How could you ever be worthy of my daughter?" -Charles Widmore The 8th episode of season 3 picks up with Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), Locke (Terry O'Quinn), and Sayid (Naveen Andrews), telling Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) and Hurley (Jorge Garcia) about the death of Mr. Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje).  Desmond starts behaving strangely and runs off to the beach where he saves a drowning Claire (Emilie de Ravin).  Charlie and Hurley are both suspicious of Desmond, so they get him drunk and try to get him to tell his secret.  Charlie calls Desmond a coward, so Desmond attacks Charlie. It's revealed that after Desmond turned the failsafe key, he traveled back to his life in 1996, where he was living with Penny Widmore (Sonya Walger).  Desmond continues to live his left with a strange sense of  déjà vu.  Desmond asks Penny's father, Charles (Alan Dale), for her hand in marriage, but is rejected.  He runs into Char

 "I couldn't care less what you're tired of." -Bobby Seale In Chicago, a protest about the Vietnam War gets out of hand and turns into a riot.  Charges are brought against eight people who were involved.  As the defendants try to argue that the police started the riots, they run into jury harassment and blatant favoritism towards the prosecution from the Judge presiding over the trial. What Works: If you're looking for a movie to make you angry, this one fits the bill.  I was raging on my couch at the utter bulls**t the defendants faced.  This is an aggravating movie in a good way.  It will make you feel things and probably make you want to go protest yourself. I love courtroom dramas and this is a truly great one.  I know this is a genre of movie that is overly dramatized, but I don't care.  What's fun here is that this trial was wild in real life and far more dramatic than your average trial.  So while some events are played up for the movie, some of the

 "For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never knew" -The Wise Man After her sister is killed by her stepfather, Babydoll (Emily Browning) is framed for the crime and put in a mental institution and scheduled to be lobotomized so he can get away with the crime.  Babydoll visualizes the institution as a brothel and makes plans with several other girls to escape. What Works: I got my hopes up with this film during the opening scenes, where we see the aftermath of Babydoll's mother's death.  She and her sister are attacked by their stepfather and Babydoll fights back.  It's an exciting sequence and we don't hear any sound.  We just hear a cover of "Sweet Dreams" by Emily Browning.  It's a haunting performance and works perfectly with this sequence, which starts Sucker Punch off on a solid and disturbing note. This one of the most beautiful bad movies there is.  Every scene is visually striking with some excellent CGI.  It r

 "I'm not a leader, Mr. Alpert.  I'm a mess." -Juliet Burke " Not in Portland" starts off with a flashback to Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) living in Miami.  She is performing an experiment on her sister, Rachel (Robin Weigert), to make her pregnant, even though her reproductive system has been ravaged by cancer.  Juliet's ex-husband, Edmund ( Željko Ivanek), figures out what Juliet is up to and wants in on her experiment in order to make lots of money. Juliet is approached by Richard Alpert (Nestor Carbonell), who works for Mittelos Bioscience, to recruit her for a position.  Juliet declines because Edmund would not let her unless he were hit by a bus.  After Juliet discovers  her experiment worked and Rachel is pregnant, she tells Edmund, who is killed by a bus soon after.  Later, Richard approaches her again.  She asks if Rachel can go with, but she can't because they aren't near any clinics.  They aren't in Portland as Juliet was originally

 "You don't name things that eat you." -Charlie As a zombie apocalypse destroys humanity, the indigenous people of the Red Crow Reservation discover they are immune to zombie infection.  As the world falls apart, they have to decide whether to help refugees who come to them for aid or to let them fend for themselves. What Works: I really like the premise of Blood Quantum.   Having one group of people be immune from the virus because of their DNA is interesting.  The movie doesn't do enough with the premise, which I'll get into later, but it's an interesting setup, which leads to an interesting conflict for the survivors.  Should they help the white people and let them into the reservation or not? My favorite type of zombie movies are the ones that take place on day 1.  I've always liked those a lot more than the ones that take place in the apocalyptic future.  The first act of Blood Quantum is a day 1 zombie movie.  We get some fun chaos as our characters

 "Can I borrow your gun?  I assure you, you can arrest me right afterwards." -Dave Hubie Dubois (Adam Sandler) is the self-appointed Halloween safety monitor of Salem, Massachusetts, even though most of the town ridicules him for it.  This year is different, however.  With an missing insane asylum patient on the lose, a possible werewolf, and people going missing, Hubie has his work cut out for him this Halloween. What Works: I'm a sucker for a Halloween movie.  It's my favorite day of the year and I love the aesthetic.  A lot of Adam Sandler comedies are pretty cheap, but that's not the case here.  Hubie Halloween really feels like a Halloween movie.  There are some great costumes, music, and set design.  It puts you in the mood for spooky season and I'm all about it. I'm not a fan of most of Sandler's recent comedies.  While there is some humor in Hubie Halloween that doesn't work, a good chunk of it does.  There are some legitimately funny mome

 "Don't try to understand it.  Feel it." -Barbara Spoiler Alert for Tenet.  I didn't know anything about this movie going in and I don't think you're supposed to.  It's good, but definitely one of Nolan's weaker films.  I would still recommend it.  Spoilers! After a mission goes wrong, the Protagonist (John David Washington), a CIA agent, takes a cyanide pill, but wakes up still alive.  He is brought into a secret organization called Tenet, which is trying to stop a war with the future of humanity. What Works: Tenet is a trippy movie and certainly original.  I'm never seen a movie quite like it before.  It's very ambitious, too much so at times, but I have to give Christopher Nolan props for attempting this film. The visuals are incredible.  All of the stuff traveling backwards is mind-blowing and hard to comprehend at times.  It's the best part of the movie for sure and a lot of it I have no idea how they managed to pull off.  The action s

 "Are you happy or are you pretending to be happy?" -Katherine Conrad Emotionally stifled and board housewife, Hunter Conrad (Haley Bennett), develops a compulsion to eat inedible objects, such as marbles.  As she gets more daring with what she eats, her family discovers her compulsion and Hunter is forced to confront her past. What Works: The 1st act of this movie is pretty brilliant with setting up Hunter's character.  While I can't understand wanting to eat a thumb tack, the movie still shows us why Hunter is craving some excitement in her life.  All of the foreshadowing is unnerving, especially because you know it's just going too get worse from here. The thumb tack scene is brutal and I hate it, but it's very effective.  It's one of the most uncomfortable things I have ever seen on film.  Movies don't get to me very often, but this one did. I appreciate how there is some level of empathy given to Hunter from the other characters.  Of course, some

 "This isn't a hospital.  It's a cage." -Illyana Rasputin After her entire reservation is destroyed, Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) finds herself at a strange facility for mutants to learn how to control their powers.  Dani and the other mutants notices start to see figures from their nightmarish pasts and begin to realize this place isn't what they thought it was. Spoiler Alert for The New Mutants below.  This movie has a ton of problems that I can't talk about without spoiling the movie.  It's a bad film with a ton of wasted potential.  It's different and interesting to examine, but don't spend any money on it if you want to watch it. What Works: Although this is an X-Men movie, The New Mutants is a horror movie first and a superhero movie second.  That's awesome!  It's a cool route for the series to take because I think superhero movies are on the brink of becoming stale.  While this movie has a lot of problems, I love that they tried to do so

 "I made a promise to the American people...to get rid of all the Mexicans." -President Garrison The Pandemic Special kicks of with Randy announcing a Pandemic Special of his own at Tegridy Farms, which rakes in a lot of money.  Unfortunately, Randy learns that a bat from Wuhan, China is thought to be the source of Covid-19 and while visiting Wuhan, he and Mickey Mouse both had sex with a bat.  Later, it's discovered the source was not a bat, but a pangolin, which Randy also had sex with. Randy manages to steal the pangolin from a research lab, but feels guilty when he learns his DNA is needed to cure Covid-19.  He masturbates into some of his Pandemic Special weed and gives it to the infected Jimbo, which seemingly cures him.  Randy then sells the weed, now infused with his...DNA.  This ends up causing people who smoke it to grow mustaches identical to his own, which causes further panic in South Park. The students of South Park Elementary are finally sent back to school