Sheborg Massacre (2016)

Dylan and Eddie are a pair of disaffected young women; Dylan rather more so than Eddie; who don't care much for the expectations and rules of mainstream society, but don't really have any constructive ideas for how to change things.  So when they agree to take part in a plan to free dogs from the local puppy farm, it's more because Eddie fancies the guy organising the plan than because they're looking to be heroes.

But heroes is what the world is about to need, because a vicious cybernetic alien just crash-landed at the puppy farm, and is set on converting the whole of humanity into her semi-robotic slaves.  Together with a purple-haired Star Trek fan and a couple of token male sidekicks, Eddie and Dylan are all that stand between humanity and destruction in this anarchic, gore-laden film.

Sheborg Massacre is not going to be to all tastes.  It's profane and off-colour, deliberately going for "Gross!" moments, and the protagonists aren't exactly the most likable of people when we first meet them.  On the other hand, if you find its unashamedly puerile comedy amusing, you should enjoy it.  I certainly did, including its sly digs at typical movie cheesecake.

I also need to give the film props for its performances, effects and stunt work.  While the fact that the film was cheaply made is still readily apparent, it's pretty slickly put together for all that, and notably more ambitious than many of its compatriots in the cheap end of the cinematic swimming pool.

I've already picked up MurderDrome, an earlier film by writer-director Daniel Armstrong, on the strength of how much I enjoyed this movie.

Californication, Season 5 (2012)

Season 5 of Californication picks up nearly three years after the end of season 4.  Hank Moody is living in New York, and ruining the dreams of yet another woman, when a phone call from his agent brings him back to the "Left Coast".  En route, he has a dalliance with an attractive stranger (beautiful and much younger women inexplicably throwing themselves at Hank is something of a Thing with this show), then stops in to see love-of-his-life Karen - who is now married to someone else - and daughter Becca, who has just entered her first really serious relationship.  Hank immediately hates Becca's boyfriend, which is not surprising, since he's pretty much exactly like Hank, and no sane person would want someone they cared about to date Hank.

Anyhow, if you've already seen at least one season of Californication, none of what happens here will really surprise you.  Hank's penis gets him into trouble.  Hank's temper gets him into trouble.  Hank and Karen yearn for one another.  Self-absorbed and dysfunctional people make self-absorbed and dysfunctional choices that inexorably come back to bite them.  A parade of minor female characters appear on screen for just long enough to take off their clothes.  Pamela Adlon's foul-mouthed character Marcy steals every scene she's in.

But let's face it, after five seasons you aren't watching Californication for surprises, you're watching it for the inevitable bonfire of disaster that will engulf these people for all the short-sighted decisions they've made in the preceding episodes.  And it has to be said that, with sufficient breaks between seasons to let you forget how awful they all are, watching them get their comeuppance is generally quite entertaining.

Tomb Raider (2018)

Seven years ago, Lara Croft's businessman father disappeared.  The world has written him off, but his daughter refuses to do so, preferring to eke out a meagre living as a bike courier rather than sign the papers acknowledging his death and inherit a fortune.

Of course, there's a lot more to Daddy Croft's disappearance than just a business trip gone wrong, as his daughter begins to learn when she finally goes in to sign the paperwork and receives his final bequest.  Her father has left a recording with all kinds of wild speculation about the supernatural and an urgent plea that she destroy everything to do with "the Himiko Project".

Clearly, Daddy didn't know Lara very well.  Determined to find out the truth behind her father's urgent journey to the South China Sea, she ignores his request/instructions and instead sets out to trace his voyage.  As you might imagine, all sorts of wild adventures will ensue.

This is the third screen adaptation of the Tomb Raider series of games, and I believe draws fairly heavily from the 2013 reboot of that series.  Certainly there are scenes in the movie which are reminiscent of trailers I saw for the game.

So is it any good?  Well, it's fairly standard Indiana Jones-esque stuff on the whole, with ancient tombs and booby traps and stunt-filled fights with the evil goons that inevitably turn up in search of the same thing Daddy Croft was looking for.  I do know that the film certainly profits from the casting of Alicia Vikander in the main role, as she manages to imbue a real sense of scrappy pluck and never-say-die attitude to her Lara, despite the script rarely giving its own character beats much time to breathe.  Walton Goggins is fun as her principal adversary, too.

If you are looking for an action adventure tale to spend a couple of hours on, you could certainly do much worse.

Smallville, Season 1 (2001)

A meteor storm bombards the Kansas town of Smallville and its surrounding farms, claiming several lives and sowing the entire region with glowing green rocks.  Unknown to most, right amidst the meteors is a tiny spacecraft, containing a single alien child.  Johnathon and Martha Kent adopt the child, concealing his origins from everyone but the youngster himself, and raise him as their own.

Twelve years later, Clark Kent is a mostly regular teenage boy in most ways.  He's mooning over an unattainable girl, hanging out with his friends, and thinking about trying out for the football team.  But unless you've lived under a media blackout for your whole life, you probably already know that Clark's very much not ordinary.  The teenager who will become Superman is gifted with superhuman strength, speed and resilience, and he seems to be developing x-ray vision.  Which of course, he sometimes uses in ways that are a tad creepy, but which mostly align to "stopping whatever bad guy has turned up this week as the result of those glowing green rocks".

Smallville feels a bit like someone mashed together superheroes and one of those high school drama TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 or Degrassi High.  It spends as much time - if not more - on Clark's everyday life as it does on him tangling with villains.

Said villains, as noted above, almost always have something to do with the glowing green meteor rocks (which also make Clark sick, since of course they're made of kryptonite).  On the one hand, linking superpowers to kryptonite is a neat way to explain why all these people with weird powers keep popping up in a small Kansas town; on the other hand, it rather stretches credulity that the only people who seem to make this connection are a bunch of kids from the high school paper.

(On the other other hand, I like that said kids pretty rapidly adapt to the reality that their town is full of weirdness.  By halfway through the season, they're no longer spouting inanities like "But people can't just (do thing X)!", they're actively coming up with theories based on "what if someone could do thing X?".  It's nice to see protagonists who actually react to the reality they are in.)

So should you watch Smallville?  Well, if you like superheroes and you aren't put off by the high school setting, with all the high school angst that implies, then yeah, you probably should.  It's not especially ambitious, but there'll always be a place for undemanding "comfort food" entertainment.

Friday the 13th: Part III (1982)

This film kicks off by literally splicing in the last five minutes of the previous movie.  This does serve a narrative purpose - it allows them to change the last few shots to show that psycho killer Jason Voorhees wasn't as dead as he appears.  It also serves a metatextual function, because this whole film is a lazy rehash of its forerunner, which was in and of itself a rehash of the series progenitor.

So what you're going to get here is Jason stalking and killing a whole bunch of people, because people being stalked and killed is pretty much the raison d'etre of slasher films, right?  I mean, sure, none of the motivations for killing that Jason was previously ascribed continued to apply, but surely the audience won't care if you throw enough victims and variety of kills at them, right?  And hey, if that's not enough to keep 'em distracted, let's give it to them in 3D!

Because oh boy, this movie was made during one of those sporadic spurts of enthusiasm the film industry seems to have for the tiresome trickery of this technique (most recently due to the inexplicable success of the decidedly mediocre Avatar), and it sure finds a lot of opportunities to have stuff come flying at the screen.  A rake!  An axe!  The spear from a speargun!  Popcorn!

I wish I was joking about the last one, but I am not.

Anyway, after 80-some minutes of killing off thinly-drawn characters you probably won't care about, for reasons the film never bothers to explain, Jason once more encounters the situation's (obvious from the get-go) Final Girl and has his rampage brought to an end.  At least until the inevitable sequel rolls around.

This is a lazy, lazy film - even by the standards of slasher movies - and frankly the most entertainment I got out of it was savouring how gloriously stupid all the jammed-in 3D-exploiting sequences look when you're watching a 2D print of the film.  Watch it only if you're a slasher tragic, or if you want to experience the true horror of knowing that, stupid and tawdry though it is, this is far from the nadir of the franchise.

The Shield, Season 3 (2004)

Vic Mackey and his Strike Team should be riding high.  They just stole three million dollars from the Armenian mob, and no-one knows it was them.  But there are a number of storm clouds threatening this apparent new dawn.  For one thing, it turns out that some of the cash has been marked by the US treasury; for another, the Armenians are not about to just give up on that cash, which means the streets are about to get bloody.

Oh, and there are tensions within the team, new competition at work, and problematic home lives to deal with.  Basically, the stakes have never been higher and the pressure never more intense.  It's unlikely that either the Strike Team or the other officers at their precinct will come out unscathed.

I have to give kudos to The Shield, as I feel it has grown stronger each season so far.  I don't anticipate that this will continue for all seven seasons: it would pretty much be a unique achievement if it did!  Still, if they can keep the overall quality at or about the level of this season, it'll definitely be a show worth watching.  Because this is solid TV, with a quality cast given good scripts to perform.

If you're looking for a police procedural that's not as squeaky clean as the big name franchises tend to be, The Shield is worth your attention.

Postal (2007)

I'm not sure this film's plot merits a synopsis.  Actually, scratch that, I'm actually sure this film's plot doesn't merit a synopsis.  Suffice it to say that its efforts to satirise the Branch Davidians, the Taliban, and modern consumerism through the lens of a penis-shaped kids' toy are ... well, exactly as stupid and asinine as it sounds like it would, particularly when paired with the words "An Uwe Boll film".

Because yes, this is another of the German director's video game movie adaptations, and it's about on par with the rest of its ill-starred brethren (with the solitary exception of the gloriously awful House of the Dead).  In other words, it's thick-headed, clumsily plotted, and lazy.  Not that House of the Dead wasn't those things too, mind you, but at least it had a kind of earnest incompetence that made it memorably so, and gave it a weird kind of charm.  Well, to me, anyway. 

Everything else Boll has done has failed to achieve anything memorable at all, except maybe in making you scratch your head over why so many adequately talented actors agree to be in them.

This is a bad film without any charm of any kind.

Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 1 (2010)

Iron Man,  Captain America.  Thor.  The Hulk.  Ant-Man and the Wasp.  Individually they are the greatest heroes on the planet, but when 74 supervillains simultaneously escape from maximum security holding facilities, it's a job too big for any of them to handle alone.

The formation of the "Avengers", as they call themselves; their struggles with the various threats that menace the world; and the true story behind the sudden escape of so many villains, form the basis of this first season of Earth's Mightiest Heroes, which to this day remains one of the best regarded of Marvel's animated shows.

(Parenthetically, it's interesting how much more successful/active DC has been on the animation front, especially given that Marvel is owned by Disney - perhaps this is a result of Marvel's focus on and success with big screen live action blockbusters?)

So, this is a good animated show.  Solid art, fun stories, good voice acting.  Their version of the Wasp is a particular joy, delivering some of the show's best quips.  I admire the writers' courage, too.  They take the time to give everyone a more-or-less "solo" episode before finally teaming them up.  That shows some trust in the audience, as indeed does their willingness to engage in a season long arc without frequent recaps of that arc.

My only real complaint is that it is something of a sausage factory: the Wasp is the only female Avenger, and remains so even when the team expands, and supporting or adversarial female characters are also often thin on the ground.

Still, good stuff overall, and if you're jonesing for some Marvel action in between cinema spectaculars, this is certainly worth your time.