URL: http://www.wehavebeards.com/
Site Name: We Have Beards
Categories: Reviews, General, Lists, Music, Television, Literature
Rating: PG-13

What is the main focus of your site?
The main focus is film. But we have contributors writing about music, television and literature.

What are your blogging goals, personally and/or professionally? In other words, what, if anything, are you trying to get out your blog?
We want to make the focus of film on the quality that is being produced and keep Hollywood in check. Making sure that they know when they make something truly awful.

Do you prefer an interactive community for your blog or are you the teacher and your readers the students?
It’s all about the conversation. We love to be corrected and being told that our opinions are wrong. We should be forced to defend out perspective.

How long have you been movie blogging for, and how frequent do you post updates to your site?
Been blogging since December of 2009. We try to write something once a day.

Name up to three of your favorite movies (and no more).
Seven Samurai
The Road Warrior
Rocky.

How did you hear about the LAMB?
Google search.

Any additional comments, or give yourself an interview question that’s not listed above.
The smartest people you know have beards. Well we have beards.

GENRE: REVENGE, THRILLER

SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

Well, I got my wish. Since Lionsgate and their brethren began churning out Saw ripoffs, I have been asking for one that was cribbing from the story more than its death scenes, and Nine Dead is just that film. In fact, if anything it could have USED a few unique murders and/or gore shots, as everyone merely gets shot off camera, which gets a bit tiresome since the scenes in between are all in one location and focus entirely on our cast members yelling at each other.

So once again, a mysterious man has kidnapped a bunch of people and chained them up in some sort of abandoned warehouse/basement/whatever. But instead of putting them thru dangerous tests, or forcing them to kill one another, he simply asks them to figure out why they are all there. Every ten minutes he will return to the room, and if they still don’t know, he will kill one – but they will still have to figure out why that now-dead person was there with them. It’s a nifty plot device, but it also deflates some of the suspense – the first guy to provide some info is the first to die, and so on. Once they have given up what they know and/or how they recognize one of the others in the room, they’ve served their purpose. I think it would have been kind of cool if there was one cipher character whose role was never made clear to the others, only to let us in the audience know at the very end for a little stinger closing scene (sort of like how no one but us knows what “Rosebud” means).

And without spoiling it, the ultimate answer is actually kind of sad. Their captor is seeking some sort of justice for the chain of events that caused him to lose someone dear to him, events that the kidnapped folks were all involved with in some way. As he says, maybe a bit too on-the-nose-y, “His life ended only because he became a part of yours”, which is kind of a bummer. As we learn, many of the people didn’t really do anything horrible – for example, one of them is a priest, who is there because he didn’t go to the police with something he heard in his confessional booth.

On that note, one minor quibble – how does the captor know about all of the things that these people did? If the priest didn’t tell anyone, how did the bad guy know what he was told, or even that the guy confessed to him at all? An illegal gun purchase also factors into the story – how did he know who the gun was bought from? We learn that the buyer didn’t even really know the seller (both are in the room), so for a guy who only became aware of these events years later to know about them seems a bit far-fetched.

Then again, maybe there’s a perfectly good explanation for it that was simply left on the cutting room floor, or never shot at all. The movie has a number of puzzling tangents that never pay off. For example, Daniel Baldwin plays a partner to one of the kidnapped folks, but he only appears, for about 12 seconds, in the scene where the guy is kidnapped. But Baldwin is the only person that witnesses one of the kidnappings, which makes you think that he will be a bigger factor in the film, possibly tracking down what’s going on or maybe putting some of the connections together himself. But nope, he never appears again. Granted, Baldwin isn’t exactly an A lister, but it seems odd to hire him (of all people) for such a thankless, almost mute “cameo”.

There are also a number of shots of a car driving, which again suggest someone heading toward them. But that’s all they are – shots of a car driving. This results in a hilarious moment where one guy yells “We gotta think of something!” (cut to a car driving, then back to the same guy) “I just thought of something.” It’s a moment that resembles when you watch a TV show on DVD and you hear the same line of dialogue more or less repeated because the original 4 minute commercial break is no longer there. Also, an ending that seems like they forgot to film the punchline, some truly atrocious ADR, and a closing credits scroll that doesn’t have any of the usual legal language, an MPAA number, or a copyright date. Add all that up, and you have a movie that was almost definitely compromised, for one reason or another.

But it still works. I was engaged, and I wanted to know how they were all connected, trying to figure it out even without any information at hand. The real time aspect works really well, as do the occasional stabs at dark humor – gotta love that everyone instantly assumes that the priest is a pedophile. And it ends with a song by Course of Nature, an underrated rock band who I enjoy listening to from time to time (their “Caught In The Sun” is a great power ballad).

However, I can’t help but wonder if it would have worked even better with a cast that was all more or less at the same place on the Hollywood totem pole. Melissa Joan Hart and William Lee Scott (not a household name, no, but a familiar character actor all the same) are the “names”, so you know they won’t die anytime soon, and what information they provide early on isn’t relevant or entirely truthful, saving their big reveals for near the end of the film. It doesn’t help that Scott’s performance could best be described as awkward, as he bugs his eyes out and says everything with a sneer; it’s like watching E from Entourage do a particularly bad Taxi Driver impression for 90 minutes. In fact, the people who I had never seen before, such as Chip Bent and James C. Victor, give the best performances. It’s also a bummer that John Terry (another Saw connection – a Lost actor!) plays the masked villain who doesn’t say much until the end of the film; his high billing was a selling point for me.

But it least it was an honest selling point, unlike the box art and the film’s trailer, both of which try way too hard to sell this as a full blown horror movie. The box art has nine bloody bodies lying in a “9” shape, though none of them seem to be the actors from the film (there’s certainly no tiny Asian woman or tall African American guy among the folks on the poster). And the trailer has lots of shots of the masked “killer” at his work bench, cops with flashlights and other assorted shots from the finale, and even a few jigsaw puzzle piece designs scattering around the onscreen text. Come on guys, you have a fairly decent thriller here, why try to sell it as yet another generic Saw-clone?

So the story isn’t as crafty as Saw’s, and it doesn’t offer the gory highlights either, but I think it’s a step in the right direction for these sort of things. I’ve seen a hundred mortal head injuries at this point, but I’ll never tire of trying to solve a story puzzle before the characters do (and unlike 99 Pieces, the story isn’t just a big cheat). With a little script polishing and the budget/time/whatever was needed to tell the story as envisioned, I think this could have been a really great flick, but at least it’s still a pretty good one.

What say you?

You can also look at the box office information on a weekly list of box office number 1’s.

Click through on date to see box office detail for the individual weeks.

2010 Canadian Box Office #1’s by Weekend Gross (in CAD)
1. $8.63M Alice in Wonderland (2010) (1st week) March 5, 2010
2. $6.41M Avatar (3rd week) Jan 1, 2010
3. $5.65M Avatar (4th week) Jan 8, 2010
4. $5.1M Avatar (5th week) Jan 15, 2010
5. $4.5M Avatar (6th week) Jan 22, 2010
6. $4.25M Avatar (7th week) Jan 29, 2010
7. $4.04M Valentine’s Day (1st week) Feb 12, 2010
8. $3.47M Avatar (8th week) Feb 5, 2010
9. $2.99M Shutter Island (1st week) Feb 19, 2010
10. $1.83M Shutter Island (2nd week) Feb 26, 2010

2010 North American Box Office #1’s by Weekend Gross (in USD)
1. $116.1M Alice in Wonderland (2010) (1st week) March 5, 2010
2. $68.49M Avatar (3rd week) Jan 1, 2010
3. $56.26M Valentine’s Day (1st week) Feb 12, 2010
4. $48.5 M Avatar (4th week) Jan 8, 2010
5. $42.8M Avatar (5th week) Jan 15, 2010
6. $41.06M Shutter Island (1st week) Feb 19, 2010
7. $34.94M Avatar (6th week) Jan 22, 2010
8. $31.28M Avatar (7th week) Jan 29, 2010
9. $30.47M Dear John (1st week) Feb 5, 2010
10. $22.67M Shutter Island (2nd week) Feb 26, 2010

2010 UK Box Office #1’s by Weekend Gross (in £)
1. £10,555,220 Alice in Wonderland (2010) (1st week) March 5, 2010
2. £5,940,479 Avatar (3rd week) Jan 1, 2010
3. £5,527,039 Avatar (5th week) Jan 15, 2010
4. £5,155,844 Avatar (6th week) Jan 22, 2010
5. £4,865,081 Avatar (7th week) Jan 29, 2010
6. £4,770,980 Avatar (4th week) Jan 8, 2010
7. £4,338,774 Avatar (8th week) Feb 5, 2010
8. £3,732,393 Valentine’s Day (1st week) Feb 12, 2010
9. £2,817,009 Avatar (10th week) Feb 19, 2010
10. £2,260,319 Avatar (11th week) Feb 26, 2010

2010 Australian Box Office #1’s by Weekend Gross
1. $10,377,137 Alice in Wonderland (2010) (1st week) March 5, 2010
2. $9,659,700 Avatar (3rd week) Jan 1, 2010
3. $8,338,365 Avatar (4th week) Jan 8, 2010
4. $7,516,439 Valentine’s Day (1st week) Feb 12, 2010
5. $7,002,454 Avatar (5th week) Jan 15, 2010
6. $5,604,268 Avatar (6th week) Jan 22, 2010
7. $4,548,004 Avatar (7th week) Jan 29, 2010
8. $3,936,622 Avatar (8th week) Feb 5, 2010
9. $2,781,309 Valentine’s Day (2nd week) Feb 19, 2010
10. $2,568,536 The Blind Side (1st week) Feb 26, 2010

Source: Canada & North America info, UK info, Australia Info

URL: http://vaultofobscurity.com/
Site Name: Vault of Obscurity!
Categories: Reviews, Horror, Sci-Fi, Action, Disaster, B-Movies
Rating: PG-13

What is the main focus of your site?
We review the best of the worst movies from the Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Action genres.

Although we specialize in b/cult movies, we review anything from backyard made movies to big blockbusters. You make it, we’ll review it.

What are your blogging goals, personally and/or professionally? In other words, what, if anything, are you trying to get out your blog?
To provide the web with the best brief reviews of all of the above subjects.

Do you prefer an interactive community for your blog or are you the teacher and your readers the students?
There is limited interactivity involved right now, hopefully more available soon.

How long have you been movie blogging for, and how frequent do you post updates to your site?
The site has been up since November, blogged on twitter a few months before. Site is updated 3-6 times a week

Name up to three of your favorite movies (and no more).
Final Destination
Wrong Turn
Freddy vs. Jason.

How did you hear about the LAMB?
Bargain Bin Review.

Any additional comments, or give yourself an interview question that’s not listed above.
None.

One doesn’t often hear the terms “cabaret” and “rocker” used together as a description, so I was intrigued when I saw them applied concurrently to San Francisco-based singer and musician Mark Growden. Growden’s new album, the provocatively titled Saint Judas, is set for release on March 16.

Saint Judas is Growden’s ninth CD, but his first full-length recording of primarily his own songs in eight years. During the interval, Growden grappled with a drug addiction that he, fortunately, overcame. Now sober for two years, the talented singer-songwriter has created a set of lyrically well-crafted tunes with titles that reflect lessons learned during his recovery, among them “Been in the Storm So Long,” “Faith in My Pocket” and “Everybody Holds a Piece of the Sun.” And as Growden movingly — and truthfully — declares of God’s love in “The Gates/Take Me to the Water”: “Every soul is welcome, be you a virgin, a whore, a sinner or a saint.”

The delightfully jaunty title track sings the praises of Jesus’ betrayer, which will no doubt raise hackles in conservative Christian circles if it should receive wide play. But Growden isn’t writing for the holier-than-thou, thankfully. Rather, he seems to write and sing here on behalf of those who have endured persecution, either of their own making or at the hands of others. His offbeat employment of accordions, banjos, flugelhorns and coyote howls (!) only seems to reinforce Growden’s musical commitment to the marginalized.

While intrigued, I was hesitant at first to listen to Saint Judas and give Growden’s music a chance based on comparisons I’d read of his style to the growling and sometimes nihilistic likes of Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen. They actually have little in common vocally or in terms of the general optimism of Growden’s lyrics here. Being released during Lent and just prior to Palm Sunday and Passover, Saint Judas can serve as a great soundtrack to one’s personal, spiritual journey.

I don’t know anyone in my circle of gay friends who is a fan of the late “Man in Black” Johnny Cash. That being said, there can be no denying the spiritual power of his final recordings, just released on CD under the title American VI: Ain’t No Grave, by anyone — gay, straight or otherwise.

Just four months prior to his death in 2003, Cash and a small band of musicians gathered at the behest of producer Rick Rubin. Cash was mindful of his declining health and his beloved wife, June Carter, passed away unexpectedly while recording the songs included on Ain’t No Grave.

Don’t let the smiling picture of Cash as a child on the CD’s cover deceive you: Ain’t No Grave is the musical reflection of Cash’s preparations for the end of his own life. His voice is weaker here, but it is suffused with conviction and a clear-eyed, even hopeful anticipation.

Most of the songs are covers, and they include heartfelt renditions of Sheryl Crow’s “Redemption Day” and Kris Kristofferson’s classic “For the Good Times.” Cash and Co.’s performances of the traditional title hymn, “Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound” and “I Don’t Hurt Anymore” are particularly satisfying. There is one song penned by Cash especially for this recording, a simple musical setting of 1 Corinthians 15:55 which asks “O Death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” The CD ends on a wistful note, with the traditional Hawaiian song “Aloha Oe” serving as Cash’s formal good-bye.

I wasn’t a fan of Cash while he was alive, but Ain’t No Grave confirms for me the man’s honesty as a songwriter and soulfulness as a singer as well as his deep faith. Now I’m a believer. Better late than never, I suppose!

Reviews by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Orange County and Long Beach Blade.

GENRE: MAD SCIENTIST

SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

It seems I am reaching the home stretch when it comes to seeing all of the traditional Universal Classic Monster movies. I’ve seen all of the Dracula, Wolf Man, Mummy, and Frankenstein ones (except for the Abbott and Costello versions – I’ll get to those eventually), and there are only three Creature From The Black Lagoon films, ever. And that just leaves The Invisible Man, which has 5 films on the set, but one is a comedy and another is a spy movie. Even the original is probably the lightest on horror of the entire stable, but it’s also one of the better ones, so it evens out.

Now, when I say lightest on horror, I mean in the traditional sense. He’s not really a monster like the others, and several of his antics are played for laughs instead of scares. But on the other hand, he’s probably the most villainous of the whole Universal lineup – dude kills quite a few people directly over the course of the movie, and at one point sends an entire train full of people to their deaths. He even kills the guy that in any other Uni movie would be the hero/love interest for the obligatory girl (played here by Titanic’s Gloria Stuart), harshly trapping him in a car and then pushing said car down a cliff. He’s also the only one of the era to threaten rape. In other words – how the hell did all of this stuff make it past the censors and producers? Hollow Man didn’t even rack up this high of a body count.

This of course is part of what also sets the film apart from many of the others – he’s not really that sympathetic. I understand he’s even MORE of a scoundrel in the H.G. Wells source novel, but he’s still the Antichrist compared to Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy (first one anyway), or Larry Talbot. Hell even Dracula had that romantic thing going for him, but Griffin barely seems interested in his love interest (she’s only in a few scenes, and not involved with the climax at all). If not for his occasional practical gags, like when he runs around in circles, chased by FOUR policemen (none of whom seem to consider merely running in the other direction and trapping him) laughing in a comical (as opposed to maniacal) manner. He’s a delightful murderer.

Speaking of the climax, it’s kind of half-assed. Like some other Uni movies, it sort of peters out instead of building toward a great finale. He’s done in by people we barely know/care about, and he doesn’t fight anyone either. And I know that the assumed reason for this would be that they didn’t have the effects ability to pull off such a thing, but the effects in the movie are still quite astonishing. You can see the strings on a few of the object motion shots, but any scene where he still has clothes on looks just as good as the stuff in Memoirs of an Invisible Man (if not as ambitious, obviously). But they don’t do any big effect for the end, just a few footsteps in the snow (actually shoeprints, which is an error, but OK) and then he is shot dead by the posse.

It’s also a weak finale when you consider that that is literally all they do – they shoot him. For the entire 70 previous minutes (another cool thing – he’s already invisible when the movie starts), they never thought to just shoot at the guy? There are times when he is clearly more or less confined in a room, throwing glasses at the crowd or whatever, but they always run away instead of rushing him. He’s not a ghost, go get him! Also, he’s not really doing much when they kill him, just sleeping in a barn. I was hoping for a traditional science lab ending, possibly even a (somewhat) tragic one where he was about to cure himself only to be taken down by the mob. They try to go for the tragedy by working in some nonsense that once he dies he will become visible again, so once he’s dead we see his face for the first time and see that he’s just a normal guy, but it doesn’t quite have the impact due to the fact that his death scene was so lax.

But otherwise, again, it’s one of the better ones in the “franchise” for sure. The aforementioned lack of censorship gives it an edge that the others never had, allowing it to play out more like a Hammer film than anything else. And by not having the traditional love triangle stuff, we stay with the characters we care about (i.e. the monster) more often than usual. You may never see his face, but Claude Rains has more screentime in this film than Lugosi or Karloff ever had in their respective films, I think.

I just wish the transfer was as above average. It’s actually pretty spotty, and the color temperature keeps changing from blue to green (though this may be a defect on my DVD, as I haven’t seen it mentioned elsewhere). King Kong and other 1933 films seem to have been better preserved and/or remastered; maybe if they mount a reboot (David Goyer has been attached to do one for quite some time) they will give it another release. Otherwise, it has the traditional treatment, a retrospective and a film historian commentary. I wish Tom Weaver (who did The Wolf Man’s track) did this one instead of Rudy Behlmer though. Behlmer certainly knows his stuff, but he just rattles off facts the entire time. Weaver did that but also would comment on the actual scene every now and then, and didn’t seem to be reading everything he said off of a teleprompter the way Behlmer does. The documentary (35 min) is also chock full of info, but it also seems to be trying to provide a bio of James Whale as much (if not more) than a look at the film itself. The effects, for example, aren’t given as much screentime as Ian McKellen talking about Whale in relation to his performance in the Whale biopic Gods and Monsters. The context is fine and even necessary, but I wanted more about the film and its legacy. Either way, it’s well put together and informative, and unlike the commentary, it didn’t put me to sleep three times.

If anyone has seen them, do you think I can count The Invisible Woman or Invisible Agent as horror movies? Keep in mind my review for Memoirs Of An Invisible Man was for my non-horror October Extras series; otherwise I’d never even consider it for HMAD purposes despite the Carpenter connection.

What say you?

Imagine if a lesbian couple could, with the help of science, create a baby on their own, without the aid of male sperm. Alison Reid creates just such a scenario in her first film, The Baby Formula, a funny, often moving look at gay parenting and relationships available on DVD today.

Athena (Angela Vint) and Lilith (Megan Fahlenbach) submit to an experimental procedure that impregnates Angela with an artificial sperm derived from Lilith’s stem cells. It’s all recorded by a “documentary” crew led by director Reid herself.

The couple struggles with all sorts of issues, including Lilith secretly getting the lab to impregnate her as well, before the real fun starts.

Then, they tell their parents.

Athena’s mother Wanda (Rosemary Dunsmore, in a fabulous performance), a seemingly closed-minded Christian, can barely tolerate that her daughter is gay, much less trying to “take Immaculate Conception away from our Lord.” Her father is more accepting, although he’s holding something back.

Lilith’s two dads (“Those horrible people,” as Wanda calls them) are more supportive, although Lilith is angry that their sobriety seems fleeting. Jessica Booker, as Grandma Kate, is a complete hoot in what you could call “the Betty White role.”

Vint and Fahlenbach have a marvelous chemistry, and they both were really pregnant during filming. The mockumentary structure serves the story well, and you will be surprised by the emotional places The Baby Formula goes. It’s a labor of love for director Reid.

Review by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix’s Echo Magazine.

The images initially showed up on Baramdyka’s blog (now removed), and spread to various sites including TFW2005 (for images on this post), io9.com and Shogun Gamer.

Another theory, advocated by io9, is that the artist was hired to begin work on the video game version of Transformers 3. That would suggest scenes from Cybertron, not out of the question considering the recent comment from Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner saying the movie would return to “core mythology”. Thanks to Avatar, visiting strange new worlds is no longer a bad thing to studios. Still expensive though.

I am leaning to thinking this was War For Cybertron art and not for the movie but its going to be a while before we know for sure. Thanks to Gregory for the link and images. Also to Katie for her link.

URL: http://www.zforzombies.com/
Site Name: Z for Zombies
Categories: General, News, Humor, Horror, Lists, Absurdity, Mindless Entertainment, Videos, Free Movies
Rating: PG-13

What is the main focus of your site?
I try to provide a look at film and entertainment from different perspective. One from a fan or the fans. Plenty of giggles, knife fights, giant robots, men in monster suits, zombies, ninjas, and comic books end up in the mix too.

What are your blogging goals, personally and/or professionally? In other words, what, if anything, are you trying to get out your blog?
I blog to get the wackiness I encounter in daily life and on the internet out of my head and into your place of work and home. If people like it; cool. Being liked is always enjoyable, but it wouldn’t stop me if I wasn’t.

Do you prefer an interactive community for your blog or are you the teacher and your readers the students?
I am a frequent comment leaver, if that’s what this question asks. I do have my opinions, but I’m pretty considerate that the material I present can be enjoyed whether o not you agree with my politics.

How long have you been movie blogging for, and how frequent do you post updates to your site?
I’ve been blogging since March of 2009. I tend to update at least once a week, but an average would put me at about 4 times a week.

Name up to three of your favorite movies (and no more).
Night Breed, Fight Club, Akira.

How did you hear about the LAMB?
A couple blogs I read are members and I got curious where all the bleating was coming from.

Any additional comments, or give yourself an interview question that’s not listed above.
I love banana flavored foods. I can’t stand cottage cheese.