Contradicting Popular Opinion:
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks
INTRO
Ah, sweet January. Traditionally, this is the month that really crappy movies are snuck onto the screen, and pulled quickly so as not to hurt their subsequent DVD rental rate.
Or something like that. I don’t pay that much attention around here.
What does this all have to do with today’s column?
NOTHING.
Suckers.
The First Annual MLK day award for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence.
Coming soon is Martin Luther King day. King and I share initials. Therefore, MLK day also celebrates all that I do for this country.
You’re welcome.
And because I am so generous, I am going to hold an unofficial contest here. This is a contest run by me personally, so even Inside Pulse members are eligible.
There is an actual physical prize involved, which I will mail to the winner. I don’t want to give too much away, but it resembles an Oscar.
Here is the contest:
Pitch a movie to Contradicting Popular Opinion. It can be as long or as short as you like. The movie could be any genre, any budget.
I don’t want you to name a director or a cast. You can give types though. You can say something like, “this part is for a young Donald Sutherland.”
That’s all I have for rules. As always, email them to WBXylo@gmail.com.
Entries will be accepted until MLK day.
Simulcast
For those of you that require some normal CPO fare, I’ll to cross-post the relevant part of my review of The Descent for the DVD Lounge.
Cult hero Neil “Dog Soldiers” Marshall brings us The Descent, the third spelunking horror movie DVD reviewed by ML Kennedy. I’m not really sure how that became my specialty, but like the Dudley Boys in a table match, I usually lose.
This film is easily the best of the three aforementioned caving movies, although that distinction is akin to being the valedictorian of summer school. Six adventurous British chicks (one with a dead kid, her close friend, a doctor in training, the doctor’s sister, a spiky haired rebel, and a wily Filipino) decide to explore a dangerous cave in the Appalachians. As always happens in the film world, their entrance gets blocked, and they most spelunk the heretofore unspelunked. As they descend deeper underground, they eventually discover some cave drawings of rhinos (as we all know, indigenous to America’s Bible Belt), and run into some monsters that kind of look like the unloved love child of Max Shrek and Gollum. The monsters also make this weird clicking sound, somewhere between a purr and the sound of a Big Wheels going down a steep hill. The crawlers, as the are called in the credits, seem to subsist on a diet of campers and German Shepherds. Despite this rather limited fare, the creeper community appears quite large and thriving. Huh.
The Descent starts as Deliverance as interpreted by the cast of The L Word; our character Juno, as played by Moulin Rouse‘s China Doll, even wears the Burt Reynold’s wetsuit. The second half of the film morphs into an underground Alien where every character is Ripley, and the aliens aren’t very formidable.
As a matter of personal taste, there are far too many fake “shock” moments early in the picture. It is also worth noting that the claustrophobia of the crawling scenes is far scarier than any of the crawler scenes. But all things being equal, it is a competent horror movie, fairly intelligent, refreshingly patient, and featuring moments of brutal reality that rarely make it onto celluloid.
