So all of today morning, I watched terrible films. The first was Underworld, which I had somehow missed out completely when it came out, and because I like the concept of leather-wearing hot woman kicking ass, I was trying to get to it without spending any money. Has to be the worst vampire movie I’ve ever seen. Ever. Do you know what I mean by ‘Ever’? I am the guy that has seen the complete Lee-Cushing Hammer films, I have sat through Alyssa Milano’s shenanigans in Embrace of the Vampire, Hong Kong Kung-fu vampire movies – goddamnit, I’ve come close to gouging my eyes out watching Sorority House Vampires. But hey, you know what, all of these had some redeemable thing about them (before you ask, yes, Sorority House Vampires has a high T&A quotient). Underworld doesn’t. It should have been a movie about doped-up Europeans baring their teeth and wearing leather and firing their uzis pointlessly at each other before being shot in the face by Kate Beckinsale, but the makers apparently found it necessary to dress it up by adding vampires and werewolves, with some convoluted backstory about a war that’s been raging between them for centuries ( presumably about which among the two makes for a cooler franchise ). And they used a colour-blind cinematographer who films the movie in black, blue and white. I wish there was some way I could go erase data from DVDs, because I cannot bear the thought of owning this movie. Probably I will just break the disc, as a symbol of total protest. I know it’s probably too late to tell you this, but Underworld sucks, and by theory of Induction, probably its sequel does, too. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, your soul is still not corrupted, and I PROMISE to send you a copy of Kung Fu Vampire Killers as a mark of respect.
Up next was Shoot ‘Em Up, which could have elevated itself from brain-destroying, soul-sucking boom-boom-fest to mind-altering high concept had the makers just gone the whole distance with the carrot motif and replaced Clive Owen with Bugs Bunny, Paul Giamatti with Elmer Fudd, and Monica Bellucci with …I dunno…Jessica Rabbit? Yes, yes, I know, movies like this are supposed to be fun and adrenaline-pumping and all that. Dude, I would have been perfectly fine with the movie had it been animated, like I just suggested, or if it were a silent movie with heavy metal playing in the background. Even Max Payne has better dialogues than this clunker.
I started watching Superman vs Doomsday, the animated movie that’s the recreation of the whole Death of Superman saga. And within 5 minutes, I was hating it because..urm, ok, this might sound really infantile, I hated the wrinkle marks they put on Superman’s face. Like so.
Turned it off after about half an hour because The New Frontier had raised the bar for good animated DC/Warner movies, and Bruce Timm can do (and has done) much better work than this.
I watched Acacia next, a Korean horror movie which was the supposed inspiration for Vaastu Shastra. I didn’t find anything similar to VS other than the recurring foreboding shots of the tree, and the movie is more a whodunnit than a horror movie. I figured out where it was going about half-way through it, and managed to stay awake until the ending, which was exactly what I thought it would be. The acting is pretty one-dimensional all throughout. The last good Korean horror movie I saw still remains A Tale of Two Sisters, and after wading through the likes of Cinderella, Arang and Memento Mori, I think I am giving up on K-horror and sticking to sappy romantic comedies and violent crime dramas from Korea.
Which is not to say that the day was bad per se. I missed out a lunch appointment just because it was a drizzly day, had a kick-ass breakfast at home ( fried bacon and eggs, mashed potatoes, and chicken sausages) and also managed to read The Freebooters by Barry Windsor-Smith. In the evening, I made onion pakodas, something that’s a must on rainy days and assuaged the pain of Acacia with ’em and some iced tea. I am going to watch Zatoichi after dinner, the first movie in the Shintaro Katsu series. Watching any of the Zatoichi movies is like reading Terry Pratchett – I start watching the early movies one by one, and then I lose interest for a couple of months, and then when I want to continue, I feel guilty if I don’t begin again from the beginning. I must have read Color of Magic at least five times so far, and have watched the first Zatoichi three times. The payoff, of course, is that I know neither of them disappoint.
