We recently discovered that one of our local theaters does “Throwback Thursdays” and shows older movies once a week.  So, tonight, we’re going to see The Goonies.  Going to be fun!

We rented Apollo 18 last night…

I’d wanted to see it in the theater, but we never got around to it.  I didn’t feel like I’d missed-out on much since the ratings weren’t terribly impressive…  But I still wanted to see it, and I finally got my chance last night.

Downright creepy movie.

Vaguely reminiscent of Paranormal Activity, in the way subtle things happen and it isn’t entirely clear whether the characters are imagining them, or actually experiencing something unusual.

Definitely an entertaining couple of hours.

Non-leaked version of the Prometheus trailer…

There’s a very cool new trailer for Prometheus that has been leaked…

Has a distinctly Alien(s) vibe that’s been missing from previous teasers.

There’s the biomechanical derelict spaceship… And the Space Jockey… And a scene where it looks like somebody has a helmet full of xenomorph…

I have to say, I’m pretty excited.

The Thing from Another World was on TV last week…  We DVR’ed it and watched it a couple days later.  Decent movie…  Dated, but still fun.  And it’s great to see where what the original looked like, before Carpenter got his hands on it.

What was even more interesting was listening to John Carpenter talk about the movie…  Apparently it is one of his favorites.  I can’t imagine what it was like for him to be able to re-make it.  Must’ve been a lot of fun.

Then we watched The Thing a few days later.  This remains one of my favorite horror movies – right up there with Alien.  I love the isolation and the paranoia.  You can’t just run away and escape, you can’t just wait it out, and you don’t know who is still human.  Great fun.

The new Thing comes out next week, and we’ll be going to see it.

I’ve really gone back and forth on this movie…  Carpenter’s film is one of my favorites, and I’d hate to see the story sullied by a bad prequel (like Star Wars).  And the early teasers and trailers didn’t look terribly impressive.

But the more recent trailers look far better.  And it’s being done by the same folks who did the Dawn of the Dead remake, which was terrific.  I think the thing that makes me most hopeful for a decent movie is this bit from Wikipedia:

After creating the Dawn of the Dead remake, producers Marc Abraham and Eric Newman began to look through the Universal Studios library to find new properties to work on. Upon finding John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing, the two convinced Universal to create a prequel instead of a remake, as they felt that remaking Carpenter’s film would be like “paint(ing) a mustache on the Mona Lisa” Eric Newman explained; “I’d be the first to say no one should ever try to do Jaws again and I certainly wouldn’t want to see anyone remake The Exorcist… And we really felt the same way about The Thing. It’s a great film. But once we realized there was a new story to tell, with the same characters and the same world, but from a very different point of view, we took it as a challenge. It’s the story about the guys who are just ghosts in Carpenter’s movie – they’re already dead. But having Universal give us a chance to tell their story was irresistible.”

Suckerpunch came out a while back.  I wanted to see it – looked very interesting.  But the reviews were horrible, and there was other stuff going on at the time, so we didn’t.  Finally got around to renting it from Redbox last week…  And, honestly, I’m glad we didn’t go to see it in the theater.

The movie starts with a scene of some dead woman and a couple weeping women – probably her kids.  There’s also a mean-looking guy we can assume is their father.  The kids look genuinely distraught that Mom is dead, Dad does not.

Then there’s a shot of a will, and it says everything was left to the kids, and Dad looks even more frightening – like he’s got something planned.  He storms around the house, one of the girls locks herself in her room, and he goes off after the other girl.

The first one, who’ll later be referred to as “Babydoll”, climbs around the outside of the house and tries to confront Dad.  She grabs a gun, fires it, blows out a lightbulb…  Finds her sister…  But sister looks dead.  And then Dad calls the police and hauls Babydoll off to some kind of assylum.

The problem with this whole opening sequence is that it’s absolutely dialogue-free.  We’re just given a series of images set to music, like some kind of music video.  It isn’t entirely clear who these people are and how they’re related to each-other.  It isn’t entirely clear what happened to Babydoll’s sister…  Did Dad kill her?  Did Babydoll accidentally kill her?  Is she just injured?

And this kind of ambiguity in favor of style pervades the rest of the movie.

Babydoll gets taken to the assylum…  But it quickly turns into some kind of bordello.  The inmates become dancers or prostitutes of some sort…  And the doctor is their matron…

But then Babydoll needs to dance.  And in order to do this she has to face down her inner demons…  Which is portrayed as some kind of kung-fu battle inside her head.

The visuals for these internal struggles are absolutely amazing.  Very stylish action sequences that look truly kickass.  But it’s not at all clear what is actually going on…

The internal sequence shows Babydoll and her friends cutting their way through hordes of steampunk Nazi zombies…  But that’s representative of an internal struggle while Babydoll is trying to dance in front of people…  Except that she isn’t actually a dancer in a bordello – she’s a patient in some kind of asylum…  So…  What is actually going on?

Is she dancing?  Is it group therapy?  Is she just sitting there, drooling?

All this ambiguity makes it very hard to understand what is going on, and very hard to care about the characters.

Are these a bunch of girls banding together against an oppressive system?  Are they just acting out and causing trouble for folks who are genuinely trying to help them?  Is it all happening inside one girl’s head?

There are suggestions that some of the fantasy is based in reality…  One of the custodians gets cut with a knife.  One of the girls appears to be injured or even killed.  But a lot of it – such as the death of the madam/doctor – seems to be completely unrelated to the real world.

Then there’s the strangely passive, us against them, misogynistic tone of the whole movie…

Pretty much all the bad guys are men.  Pretty much all the good guys are women.  The women are generally portrayed in a sexualized manner.  The women are beaten, injured, and abused constantly.  Babydoll’s primary weapon is, apparently, suggestive dancing.

The basic subtext seems to be that these girls keep getting beaten and abused, and the only way they can protect themselves is with sex.

All of which could, maybe, have been OK if we had some kind of heroic victory in the end…  But we didn’t.  Babydoll winds up getting a lobotomy.

I wound up feeling kind of dirty after watching the movie.  Like I wanted to go take a shower or something.

The internal fight scenes were downright awesome, and I’d happily pay for a movie set entirely within one of those worlds…  But the rest of the movie – the framework that those internal scenes fit into – was just depressing and confusing.