Aside from writing code, one of my favorite pastimes is watching movies, and that’s something that I do quite a lot. So far this year, I’ve seen just under 350 movies in a theater, and I have no idea how many I’ve seen on TV, DVD/Blu-Ray, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, or some other format.

From September 23-30, I attended Fantastic Fest, a film festival sponsored by the Alamo Drafthouse and Ain’t It Cool News that focuses primarily on horror, thriller, and sci-fi movies. During this eight-day period, I saw a total of 39 different movies (five movies per day for the first week, and then four on the last day). They were all movies I had never seen before, and with the exception of the 1960 version of The Housemaid (which I wanted to see before watching the 2010 remake) they were all new movies that haven’t had any kind of wide release (and in many cases, they won’t ever get one).

Below, you will find a list of all the new movies that I saw during this festival, in order of what I consider to be most enjoyable to least enjoyable. Each is linked to a very short write-up in which I provide a description about the movie and what I thought about it.

1. Bedevilled (10/10)
2. The Man From Nowhere (9/10)
3. Kidnapped (9/10)
4. A Somewhat Gentle Man (9/10)
5. Undocumented (9/10)
6. Drones (9/10)
7. Golden Slumber (8/10)
8. Bunraku (8/10)
9. Richard Garriott: Man On a Mission (8/10)
10. Nevermore (8/10)
11. Julia’s Eyes (8/10)
12. The Housemaid (8/10)
13. Mother’s Day (8/10)
14. A Horrible Way to Die (7/10)
15. Sound of Noise (7/10)
16. Carancho (7/10)
17. Red Hill (7/10)
18. I Spit On Your Grave (7/10)
19. Stake Land (7/10)
20. Fatso (7/10)
21. Hatchet 2 (7/10)
22. In The Attic (7/10)
23. Rammbock (7/10)
24. Cold Fish (6/10)
25. Agnosia (6/10)
26. Outrage (6/10)
27. Corridor (6/10)
28. Rubber (6/10)
29. Primal (6/10)
30. Fire of Conscience (6/10)
31. Transfer (6/10)
32. Norwegian Ninja (6/10)
33. The Dead (6/10)
34. Gallants (5/10)
35. 14 Blades (5/10)
36. We Are What We Are (5/10)
37. The Violent Kind (4/10)
38. Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (1/10)

Day 4 — Sunday, October 25

Strigoi — This is a very authentic Romanian vampire movie, by which I mean it is true to the Romanian vampire legends and not the more popular version that we typically see portrayed in movies. The Romanian vampires don’t vaporize in the sunlight, and although the may not like eating garlic or going into churches, doing so won’t do any significant damage. The writer/director has spent a lot of time in Romania, and her husband (who I think was a producer) is Romanian. The movie is in English rather than Romanian with English subtitles or dubbing.
Overall, I liked the movie. It did feel a bit slow at times, but it was interesting to see how vampires are portrayed in their original culture. 7/10.

Shorts — This is a series of short films (10-20 minutes each) shown back-to-back. They were:

• Sugar Rush — A Gremlins-type tale about a little girl who turns into an absolute monster when she is given sugar, and a babysitter and her boyfriend who ignore the advice of her parents. It was pretty fun, if not a bit cliche. 6/10.
• A Little Mouth to Feed — A religious woman who has repeatedly failed to have a baby prays to the devil instead and gets a demon child. 6/10.
• Unawakening — A story about a man who has a recurring nightmare of killing someone and burying the body, triggered by a past event that he has repressed. 6/10
• Lambs — A couple of guys stage a broken-down car so they can rob whoever comes to their aid, only to find the tables turned when a 50’s style Ward Cleaver type turns hardcore. 8/10.
• Survivors — A man and woman hole up in a bar to try to stave of a zombie attack. 7/10.
• Slasher — A story about a rather outcast kid who stabs a fellow classmate in an altercation at a party. No obvious point, and very boring. 2/10.

Hunger — Five loners with varied pasts find themselves abducted and held hostage together in an underground bunker. They are given plenty of water, a crude toilet, a knife, and a clock to tick off the number of days they’ve been held. They aren’t given any food, but it becomes clear that their captor expects them to eventually turn against each other.
This was an excellent psychological thriller, that wasn’t really scary or particularly intense but was a well-told story and well-acted movie. My only real complaint is that the characters’ appearances didn’t seem to reflect the duration accurately (e.g., guys weren’t really amassing a lot of facial hair, and a girl’s white shirt was still a pretty brilliant white after a couple of weeks). The director did mention that they had someone looking at continuity, and scenes were shot in sequential order and within a time frame that was about the same as that portrayed in the movie, so it’s probably something that probably should have been handled a little better. Nevertheless, it was still a great movie so I’m willing to overlook the continuity. 8/10.

ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction — A small island town off the coast of Washington finds itself in the midst of a zombie infestation. Like every other zombie comedy, a small group of people try to survive, while family, friends, and neighbors are overcome.
There have been a lot of zomcom movies in the last few years, and this one isn’t a serious contender against the top tier movies like Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland, but it can hold its own against most others. It was quite funny and had plenty of gore, so it was never slow or boring. The director said that they had recently gotten a distribution deal, so it may be making it to theaters early next year, and I think that it’s worth seeing if you like this type of film. 7/10.

Day 5 — Monday, October 26

Little Fish, Strange Pond — Callum Blue plays a murderer named Sweet Stephen who’s a bit off his rocker. He’s accompanied by a man known only as “Mr. Jack” (Matthew Modine), who is kind of like a human embodiment of the voice in Stephen’s head encouraging him and antagonizing others (more like Tim Roth/Amanda Plummer in Pulp Fiction than Edward Norton/Brad Pitt in Fight Club). It’s a very fun dark comedy that also features Zach Galifianakis, Adam Baldwin, and Don McManus. I give it an 8/10.
I really loved Callum Blue’s performance in this, and it evoked a lot of fond memories of his role in Dead Like Me. A small grim reaper doll was prominently featured in one scene, and you could consider him playing a kind of reaper role to Matthew Modine’s graveling. He also had a great “don’t talk during the movie” scene that would be perfect for the Alamo Drafthouse to run before the trailers.

Happy Ending — This is a Japanese movie (with Engrish subtitles) about a not-very-girly lead character who is very into movies and is beginning to see her life as a movie, much like Jamie Kennedy’s character in Scream. She’s generally more into horror movies than romantic comedies, but that starts to change when she happens across a guy who she wants to notice her. She enlists the help of her friends (including one who secretly likes her, ala Duckie in Pretty in Pink).
I generally liked this movie, although it wasn’t very original. It also seemed to develop a bit slowly toward the end. Nevertheless, I liked the humor and the self-referential nature. 7/10.

Day 6 — Tuesday, October 27

Myna Se Va — This is a movie about a woman living as an illegal alien in Spain, where she was a nanny for a young boy. His parents went out of town on a ski trip, and she was left to care for him. When he got injured, she had to find help for him while avoiding being found out and deported.
The premise for this movie sounded interesting, but its execution fell flat. This was without question the worst movie I have ever seen. The subtitle translation was horrible. The camerawork was horrible, and there were minutes at a time with absolutely nothing happening on the screen (no people or objects of interest visible, and not particularly focused on anything, with only occasional sounds). The pacing was unbearably slow. It had more false endings than Return of the King. It had completely unnecessary flashbacks that didn’t provide any useful information. And there was a 30-minute sequence in the middle of the movie that was so painful to watch that I can’t even bring myself to describe it. I would say that at least half the audience walked out, and I would have if there hadn’t been two other movies following it in the same theater that I wanted to see. I can’t see any value whatsoever in this movie, and I give it a rating of zero out of ten.

Earthwork — This is a documentary that tells the true story of a man who creates incredible artwork through landscaping. From the ground, they don’t look like much, but from the air they turn into very intricate scenes depicting all kinds of things, like people and nature. He had been doing this all his life and had become a bit of a minor celebrity in his hometown of Lawrence, Kansas but he wanted a bigger audience, and jumped when he heard about an opportunity to create his artwork on land owned by Donald Trump shortly before it was to be used to erect skyscrapers. He undercut all of the other competitors by basically offering to do the work for free, and paying all of the expenses himself (effectively putting himself deep into debt by taking out a loan to cover the costs), and he enlisted several homeless men to help him out. He of course encountered a number of difficulties in the process, and it doesn’t necessarily turn out as you might expect, but it’s definitely worth a watch. 9/10.

The Vicious Kind — Alex Frost plays a college student who brings his girlfriend (Brittany Snow) home for Thanksgiving. His father (J. K. Simmons) and brother (Adam Scott) aren’t on speaking terms, nor can they even stand to be in the same place at the same time. They haven’t spoken in several years, since the mother’s death. Things got even more tense when the brother’s treatment of the girlfriend alternated between hostile and obsessive.
This was a very good movie, although at just over 90 minutes I felt that it could have been longer and a couple of story lines weren’t pursued as well as they could have been. The line producer (who was in attendance) mentioned that a lot had been cut out in editing to prevent it from dragging on too much, but I think that perhaps too much had been cut. 8/10.

Day 7 — Wednesday, October 28

Tenure — Luke Wilson plays a literature professor named Charlie who is up for tenure at a small college, after two previous unsuccessful attempts at other schools. He loves teaching, and the students love him, but he’s under pressure to focus more on other academic pursuits like getting published. Things get a little more anxious when another professor (played by Gretchen Mol) enters the picture and joins the tenure race. Even though she gets off to a rocky start as a teacher, she has more impressive credentials and has been published in a prestigious journal.
This movie had two different personalities. I think that the primary story was well executed and generally enjoyable. However, it was awkwardly intertwined with some attempts at comedy which fell a bit short. The quest by a fellow professor (David Koechner) to find Bigfoot, a student’s attempts at erotic comedy, and a fake double date (with Rosemarie DeWitt) felt out of place and in some cases were almost painful to watch. 6/10.

American Cowslip — This is a very odd movie about a heroin addict named Ethan Inglebrink (played by Ronnie Gene Blevins) who hasn’t left his house in years but is being evicted by his landlord/next-door neighbor (Rip Torn) because he’s unable to pay the rent. About the only thing that he does well is tend to his garden, and he is the primary obstacle in the way of his landlord’s victory in a home landscaping competition.
Despite his addiction and agoraphobia, and in spite of his constant neediness and lack of personal responsibility, Ethan is very well-liked by most of his neighbors (a pretty noteworthy cast, including Diane Ladd, Cloris Leachman, Priscilla Barnes, and Hanna Hall), although his well-meaning but somewhat misguided brother (Val Kilmer) appears to be the only one trying to get him to really improve himself. The film has a pretty crazy climax, but I think that it took too long to get there and I just couldn’t connect with the characters and get into the movie like I wanted to. 5/10.

The 16th annual Austin Film Festival started last Thursday, and I’m attending this year for the first time. Even though I watch a lot of movies, I’ve shied away from most film festivals in the past because I was under the impression that they would be mostly a combination of artsy and preachy. While there are some of both, most of the movies I’ve seen so far are neither, which was also my experience with Fantastic Fest last month.

The Austin Film Festival lasts eight days (Thursday through Thursday), although I won’t be able to attend anything on the last day. Nevertheless, I’m on pace for eighteen movies over the seven days I can attend, with two every evening during the week and four each on Saturday and Sunday. Below, you can find a brief summary of the films that I saw on the first three days.

Day 1 — Thursday, October 22

Serious Moonlight — Meg Ryan plays a self-assured lawyer who doesn’t take it well when her husband (Timothy Hutton) tells her he’s leaving her for a younger woman (Kristin Bell). She ties him up and threatens to hold him hostage until he sees the error of his ways. I was pleasantly surprised by the depth and humor of the movie and the not-quite-predictable manner in which it arrives at its resolution. I give it an 8/10.
This movie was written by Adrienne Shelly around the same time that she wrote Waitress. It was directed by Cheryl Hines, who was in attendance to introduce the movie and do a Q&A afterwards.

Youth in Revolt — Michael Cera plays a bright but awkward 16-year-old who falls for a girl who likes him as well. However, fate seems to have it out for them and keeps putting up roadblocks in their relationship. Michael develops a “bad boy” alter ego who wreaks quite a bit of havoc and gets into more trouble than he bargained for.
I thought that the trailer for this movie was pretty funny, but didn’t hold out a lot of hope that the movie would be able to match it. Fortunately, I was wrong and it was able to hang onto its humor for the duration. It doesn’t have the hilarity of Zombieland or Superbad, but it’s worth seeing when it comes out early next year. 7/10.

Day 2 — Friday, October 23

31 Minutes — This is a very unique movie, based on a Chilean TV show of the same name. It features a team of puppets that work together produce a parody news show. The producer is a rare type of animal that an evil millionaire needs to finish her collection in an island zoo, so she arranges to have him kidnapped and taken to the island. When the rest of the crew find out, they set off on a rescue mission.
The story itself was fine, but the real draw for this movie is the comedy. It was extremely funny. It was in Spanish with English subtitles, but they were very well done (no obvious spelling or grammatical errors, and they generally captured the meaning and not a literal word-for-word translation) and didn’t detract from the experience. On top of that, the film print of the movie didn’t arrive in time for the showing, so they had to show the DVD they provided for screening the movie, and it featured a pretty prominent watermark in the middle of the picture, but it got pretty easy to ignore that. The experience could have been a little bit better, but the movie itself was excellent. 8/10.

Calvin Marshall — Alex Frost plays Calvin Marshall, a junior college student who loves baseball and wants to go pro but he’s having a hard time making the college team. No one works harder than he does, and the coach (who used to be a minor league player himself, played by Steve Zahn) appreciates the effort and really doesn’t want to cut him. Calvin is also a sportscaster for the school’s TV station and is an announcer for sports events, like women’s volleyball. It is there that he meets and instantly falls for Tori Jensen (played by Michelle Lombardo). Over the course of the movie, Calvin tries to play the game he loves and woo the girl he likes. Andrew Wilson, Diedrich Bader, and Abraham Benrubi also played supporting roles. Like most baseball movies, there was a lot going on besides just baseball, but it came together well to create a very enjoyable movie. 8/10.
This was the movie’s world premiere, and several of the cast and crew were present. This included the director (Gary Lundgren), actors Diedrich Bader and Michelle Lombardo (among others), producers, and other crew. The director introduced the film, and several of them answered questions afterwards.

Day 3 — Saturday, October 24

Missy and the Maxinator — From the description, this sounded like it could be a fun movie. Max is a geeky high school kid who wants to upgrade his current “best friends” status with Missy, the girl next door, to something more. However, he finds that something unusual is happening, and he’s starting to acquire super powers like super strength and hearing and the ability to see through walls. That’s extremely lucky for the rest of us, because two of his teachers are working on a plot to go back in time and change the outcome of World War II so they could take over the world.
I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece, but was hoping for something fun. I was pretty disappointed all the way around. The digital video was shot at worse than DVD resolution and was very grainy, and there were several breaks in the soundtrack where the sound would end too early before a scene change. The acting was horrible (even more so from the adults than the kids), and there were lots of mistakes and continuity errors. But the biggest problem was the weak story, which was weak and not well thought out. Unfortunately, it didn’t make it into the “so bad it’s good” category (I’m not sure if it went too far or not far enough), so I’ll give it a 3/10 rating. I can see how it might have some appeal to the preteen crowd (which is fitting, since the director, who was in attendance, works for Nickelodeon), but I can usually get at least some enjoyment out of those kinds of movies, and in this case there was too much that I couldn’t overlook to get to that point.

Straight to the Bone — This is a very Austin-centric movie about a woman (Shannon) in a long relationship with a guy (Jay) who doesn’t want to get married. When she’s dealing with dealing with a particular bout of frustration from that, she has a couple of chance encounters with another guy (Blake) and they hit it off. When Jay decides that he needs to get away for a couple of days, Shannon finds herself on a date with Blake.
In general, I thought that this was a pretty good movie. It had a good basic story, and was pretty well acted. There were some video problems with a lot of digital artifacting around cuts, but I think that the film festival itself is to blame for that, since this is the first year they’re going digital and there are some bugs to be worked out in the conversion process as I saw similar problems (although not to the same extent) in a couple of other movies. I do think that it captured a bit too much of the Austin hippie culture, and it was a little too slowly-paced (which probably comes from the fact that the cast and crew wrote the movie as they went along over more than a year of filming when they could get everyone together), but I think that both of those are things that could be improved with a bit of editing. I give it a 6/10.

Hockey Night in Texas — This is a documentary that follows a few teams over a season of an amateur adult hockey league in Austin. I really don’t like hockey, and you couldn’t drag me to see a game or even watch one on TV, and the only reason that I decided to see it was that it happened to be sandwiched between two other movies that I wanted to see and I decided that it wasn’t worth going home for an hour and a half. I’m glad that I stayed because I loved this movie. It was very funny, and very fast-paced, complete with 50’s-style how-to clips interspersed ala Dodge Ball. The guys (and at least one woman) are pretty bad and at least most of them acknowledge and embrace that to have a really good time, and that translates well to the screen. I still have no desire to watch hockey, but I would watch this again. 8/10.
The director was there to introduce it and do a Q&A, and he said that there were hundreds of hours of footage that had been shot, but that didn’t show at all in the 83 minutes that actually made it in. A large percentage of the audience was comprised of players from the league, which helped to further enhance the experience.

Lo — Lo is the story of a guy who summons a demon to help him get a girl who he had fallen in love with but had herself been kidnapped by another demon. It was heavily-inspired by Faust, which is directly acknowledged in the movie. It was billed as being funny, but didn’t really succeed at that. It ultimately felt like we were watching a tape of a musical theater production, and the director said that although he wrote it as a movie they were exploring the possibility of running it as a play. The story was interesting, but the movie was a little too experimental and artistic for my taste. 5/10.

This weekend was a very slow weekend movie-wise. I had absolutely no desire to see The Golden Compass, and nothing else new was out around here. However, scanning over what was playing that I hadn’t seen yet, I came across Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and saw that it had an 8.1 rating on IMDB, so I figured I would give it a shot. Overall, I rate it about a 6 out of 10.

The basic premise for the movie is that two brothers (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) find themselves in financial trouble. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character Andy has been embezzling from his company and has a bit of a drug problem, and Ethan Hawke’s character Hank is behind on his child support. Their parents (played by Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris) own a jewelry store, and Andy suggests to Hank that they could make some easy money by robbing it. The store is insured, so it would be a victimless crime, and Andy figures that they should each be able to get about $60,000 out of it. Of course, things don’t go as smoothly as planned and they find themselves getting deeper and deeper into trouble.

This was a very non-linear movie. We knew that the robbery failed because it happened in the second scene, whereas we didn’t get all the details of its planning and the reasons behind it until later. Normally I don’t really care for stories that are told out of order, but in this case I think that it worked quite well. It felt like the audience was given the right information at the right times throughout the movie, and having the story told in order might not have been as effective. There were a few times when this approach was confusing, since it wasn’t immediately obvious where it fit in the story, but it usually didn’t take long to figure that out. I do think that the very first scene was hard to place correctly in the time line until the very end, but in general I think that it helped the movie out because it kept you guessing.

However, in my opinion there were some significant problems with the movie:

• There were a few critical aspects of the story line that seemed pretty implausible, and I don’t think that it would hold up that well under scrutiny. Not the least of which is why they would risk so much for what seemed to be a relatively small payout — $60K isn’t the kind of money that leaves you “set for life”.
• Other aspects of the story seemed to be thrown in for no apparent reason and didn’t seem to have any relation to anything else that was going on. This didn’t really detract from the movie, but it didn’t really add anything to it.
• The movie seemed to end very abruptly and left some pretty big questions unanswered. On the other hand, because of the non-linear manner in which the story led to a lot of overlap where we saw parts of the same scenes multiple times. It almost seemed like I ended up watching the movie twice. While it did sometimes help to establish the time line, I think that it would have fared better if some of that duplication had been eliminated and they spent more time tying up loose ends.
• The very beautiful Marisa Tomei was in this movie, playing the part of Andy’s wife. She had several nude scenes, but none of them seemed very integral to the story line there were a couple of times that it just felt awkward.

I did like the movie more than I thought I would after having seen the trailer, but I do think that there are some small touches that could have really elevated it. It had the potential to be a great movie, but ultimately I think that it ended up as just pretty good.

Scrooged (7/10)

The first movie I saw this weekend was Scrooged, playing as the midnight movie at the Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek. In it, Bill Murray plays the young and ambitious president of a television station that is preparing to air a live version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve, when he finds a modern-day version is playing out in his own life. It also includes Bobcat Goldthwait, Karen Allen, Carol Kane, three other Murray brothers, and a host of cameos.

Even though Bill Murray comedies (especially the more recent ones) have been hit-or-miss at best, this one definitely goes in the “funny” list. It’s not his funniest ever, but it’s far from his worst. There are several non-funny parts as well, but that’s to be expected based on the story being told. It’s certainly the best version of A Christmas Carol that I’ve ever seen (but I also loved the “Bah, Humbug” episode of WKRP in Cincinnati). However, Bill Murray’s brother Brian holds the honor for being in the best Christmas movie of all time (National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation).

Awake (6/10)

The trailer for this movie reveals an interesting premise: a man (played by Hayden Christiansen) undergoing surgery isn’t completely anesthetized and finds himself awake and aware of what’s going on, but completely paralyzed and unable to do anything about it. And as if that weren’t bad enough, he overhears the doctors talking about how they’re going to kill him

Unfortunately, the trailer screams out “plot twists”, so you’re watching out for them and it’s hard to be surprised by them when they happen. In fact, one of the biggest twists is blatantly given away in the movie’s tagline, and even if you hadn’t read it you should have seen some pretty obvious evidence to suggest that in the movie’s opening scene. Nevertheless, reactions in the theater I went to (the Regal Gateway 16, since the movie was unfortunately not being shown at any of Alamo Drafthouse theaters) at least some people were surprised several times.

I was also disappointed by the number of inaccuracies in the movie. If you’re going to have a plot that deals with medicine, then it’s probably not that hard to find a doctor to consult on the project and make it a little more realistic. The plot didn’t depend on any of the medical inaccuracies, so in my opinion it’s inexcusable to have made such mistakes. I won’t go into detail on what some of these problems were to avoid any spoilers, and it’s probably true they would go unnoticed by most people without as much of an interest in medicine, but they did impact my appreciation of the movie.

I did like the story itself, and despite the problems that I’ve mentioned earlier I did find the movie enjoyable. It’s probably actually something that I would find more enjoyable watching a second time with complete knowledge of what happens, since anticipating the twists may have perhaps been a distraction. I was a little concerned that Hayden Christiansen’s more prominent earlier role might have detracted from his choice in this movie, but that didn’t really seem to happen much in this case and it offers more hope for his upcoming role in Jumper. Jessica Alba’s performance seemed the same as pretty much every other movie that she’s done, which is to say that she is pretty.

August Rush (7/10)

August Rush is in a rare class of movies that I find to be both utterly predictable and utterly enjoyable. If you’ve seen the trailer, then you shouldn’t expect any surprises. It’s what last year’s The Pursuit of Happyness should have been.

If you’ve seen the trailer, then you should know what happens, but if not then the short version is that Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys Myers are both musicians that hook up for one night and Keri gets pregnant but has to give the baby up (and the circumstances around her giving it up are probably about the only thing in the movie that you wouldn’t have guessed from the trailer). Her son Evan Taylor grows up hoping that his parents will one day be able to find him. He’s always loved music, and when he meets Robin Williams (who gives him the “stage name” of August Rush) we discover that he’s a musical prodigy, and ultimately that it’s music that will reunite him with his parents.

Even though I did like the story, there were a couple of things that I think could have been done better. The beginning of the movie was a bit too jumpy for my tastes, switching several times between the past and the present, and I think that a more linear presentation would have been better. There were also several pretty obvious mistakes in the movie (e.g., notes getting lower instead of higher as his hands move to the right on a piano) that really should have been caught. And at the time that I saw it, I felt that the ending was a little too abrupt, although after having thought about it I think that it was probably a safe decision and that there were many ways that they could have screwed it up if they had chosen to prolong it.

Tonight, I finally got a chance to see Stephen King’s “The Mist”, which also happened to be the 100th unique first-run movie that I’ve seen in the theater so far this year. I don’t think that there’s any possible way that I can adequately review the movie without any spoilers, so if you’re planning on seeing it for yourself and don’t want to know what happens, then don’t read beyond this paragraph. I’m going to give it an 8 out of 10, and it was much better than I expected it to be, so if you liked what you saw based on the trailers and were thinking about seeing it, then I would recommend that you go.

If you’re still reading, this, then I assume that you’re in one of the following categories:

• You’re going to see the movie but want to know how it ends anyway.
• You know you’re not going to see it but would like to know how it ends.
• You’re still undecided and want help figuring out whether this movie is for you.

If you’re in the third category and are on the bubble about whether to see it, then let me repeat that it’s a very good movie, but I will warn you that it has a very rough ending. In my opinion, it was just about the perfect way to end the movie, but it is definitely not for the feint of heart. And this is your last chance to stop reading before I start giving away details.

The movie opens with a big storm. It’s bad enough that it blows a tree over into David Drayton’s house and smashes out his window. The damage is pretty widespread and knocks out the power pretty much all over town. When morning comes, the storm has ended but there is a heavy mist moving down the mountains and across the lake toward the town. David and his son Billy go into town to stop by the grocery store and then stop by the hardware store to pick up supplies to fix the window. Apparently everyone else in town had the same idea because when they get to the grocery store it’s packed, and the fact they they don’t have any power (save for an emergency generator that’s just enough to keep the freezers running), so the lines aren’t moving all that quickly. Then the mist reaches the store, and a man comes running in with blood on his face screaming about there being something in the mist. Of course, no one believes him at first, but it doesn’t that long before they find out otherwise. The first victim comes when a bag boy is preparing to step outside to check on the flue for the emergency generator but gets dragged away by a set of clawed tentacles as soon as they open the door at the loading dock. But since that happened in the loading dock, only a few people saw it and many others in the store were still skeptical. That came to an end when a second set of people walked out the front door and were snatched away in front of their eyes. At that point, it was clear that their best bet was to ride things out in the store. They had plenty of food and supplies, so hopefully they would be able to last until help arrived. They barricaded themselves into the store and tried to tape up the big plate glass windows at the front of the store before stacking up bags of dog food behind them. One woman had a gun in her purse, and others got knives and sharpened sticks, and they prepared several mops to use as torches if necessary.

As night began to fall, things started to get worse. Huge insect-like creatures (about two feet long and one foot wide, with nice long stingers) began to gather on the store’s front windows, but they didn’t really become a threat until another type of creature which can only be described as a pterodactyl arrived and started flying into one of the windows. After a couple of hits, the window started to break, and soon there was a hole big enough for a couple of the pterodactyls and several of the insects to come inside. The people fought them off to the best of their abilities, and were ultimately successful in repelling the attack, but not without casualties. One woman was stung by one of the insects and died pretty quickly thereafter, and one man showed a complete lack of skill at wielding one of the mop-torches and caught himself on fire along with part of the store. They were able to get the fire out fairly quickly so that no real damage was done to the store, but the man was badly burned. And to top it off, a religious nut (Mrs. Carmody, played by Marcia Gay Harden) who had been spouting off in true cult-leader fashion started to amass an ever-growing group of followers.

The man who had been burned was in very bad shape. He was in a lot of pain, and was in great danger of having his wounds become infected. Unfortunately, this supermarket wasn’t one that included a pharmacy, but there was one next door, and a few of them made the decision that they needed to try to get to it to try to save him. When dawn came, they set out cautiously and made it into the pharmacy without incident. However, getting back was a different matter altogether. Only as they were trying to leave did they notice the Alien-esque people suspended from the ceiling in what looked to be spider webs, and then they encountered the “spiders” that made them, only this time the webs that they shot out were like some kind of incredibly potent acid that would quickly burn through anything they landed on. When they finally were able to return to the supermarket, only about half of the party had survived, and even then it was all for naught as it was too late to save the burn victim.

By this time, Mrs. Carmody had won over most of the people in the store with her very selective interpretations of Bible passages, until there were only about ten people left who weren’t blindly following her. She had already begun to mention that they might need to sacrifice one of the heathens to appease God, and it all came to a head when she demanded that David’s son Billy be that sacrifice. Her followers began to comply and started trying to grab him away, and the only thing that stopped them was when one of the remaining clear-headed men took the gun and shot her dead. They then thought it was best to try to get away from there and see if they could drive far enough south to escape the mist and the creatures contained in it. They headed for David’s Land Rover, and the fact that there were ten of them and only room for eight wasn’t all that big a problem because their numbers were down to five by the time they made it to the vehicle. They drove off leaving the now leaderless cult members in shock and started to head south. They dove for quite some time past all kinds of carnage, but they reached the end of their gas tank before finding the edge of the mist. As the Land Rover sputtered to a stop, they could still hear the creatures and they began to accept their fate. They still had the gun with them and decided that it would be a far better way to go than at the mercy of the monsters, but alas there were five of them and only four bullets. After shooting his own son and the three other passengers, David stepped out of the vehicle and began screaming for the creatures to come take him away, only to be met with a much more horrifying sight: out of the mist came an army brigade replete with tanks and soldiers, and carrying truckloads of survivors to safety.

This was an appalling ending, but it was the right one for the movie, and it was the one that I was secretly hoping for once it became clear that they were considering death by gunshot. It would not have been nearly as good for them to have all been saved at the last minute, nor for David to have been killed by one of the creatures, or for them to have been able to drive to safety. My only slight disappointment with the ending was that none of the survivors being rescued by the army were from the supermarket. I think that small touch would have been just the right amount of additional salt into David’s wounds to complete one of the most tragic conclusions of any movie I have ever seen.

My only other minor complaint was that I thought that their explanation for the origin of the creatures was weak. Over the course of the movie, we learned that the nearby mountains housed a military base and that some army scientists had been exploring the possibility of alternate dimensions when the accidentally opened a door to one of those other dimensions and some of the creatures inhabiting it were able to cross over into our world. This was such a far-fetched explanation that I found it to be disappointing. Of course, given the subject of the movie any reason that they had provided would likely have been implausible, but I think that it would have been far better to keep the origin of the creatures a mystery than to offer up such a lame explanation.

Despite my mild disappointment over a couple of small aspects of the movie, I was nevertheless very pleased with the way that it turned out. I was glad to see the right ending even if it may be an unpopular one.

This weekend, I saw three movies, all of them at the Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek.

RoboCop (7/10)

The first was the mid-80s classic RoboCop, showing as the midnight movie this weekend. It had been quite a while since I had last seen it, and it was the first time I had seen it in a theater, but it’s a good movie and was well worth it. I don’t think that it’s ever revealed exactly when the movie was supposed to be set, but its depiction of the “future” isn’t as laughable as many other movies of the same type. Many of the special effects look pretty lame by today’s standards, but interestingly enough the IMDB trivia page indicates that they were done on a Commodore Amiga.

Hitman (5/10)

The first new release that I saw this weekend was Hitman. It is based on a video game of the same name (and there’s a scene in the movie where you can see a couple of kids playing it in the background). I’m not really very familiar with the game, and I’ve never played it, so I can’t say how faithfully the movie followed the game, but judging the movie as a standalone entity I thought that it was decent at best.

There was enough action in the movie to keep it interesting, but there was nothing at all original about the story and as such any attempted plot twists really weren’t much of a surprise. It seemed rather un-covert to have their highly-trained secret assassins shaved bald with a big bar code tattooed on the back of their heads, but apparently everyone else is so stupid that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t seem to make them any easier to spot when they’re making their way through a train station, and it doesn’t raise too much of a red flag when an arms dealer’s bodyguards let him alone into a bathroom with their client with little more than a pat-down. Also, the little glass beads scattered on the floor outside of a hotel room that crunch loudly when you step on them are apparently ignored by both special forces operatives and the housekeeping staff. Perhaps the filmmakers thought that throwing in some unnecessary nudity would make up for it, but I think that they misjudged that by at least a couple of cup sizes.

No Country for Old Men (8/10)

On Sunday, I saw No Country for Old Men. I will have to admit that I wasn’t all that excited based on the trailers and hadn’t originally planned on seeing it, but I was lured in by the high IMDB rating (it’s currently got an 8.9 overall, or an 8.6 from the top voters, which puts it at #27 on their Top 250 list), and also because by the time that I was ready to leave to go to the theater it was too late to make it to the showing of The Mist. I’ve been bitten in the past by going to see a movie based on its rating when I didn’t think that I’d much care for it based on the trailers, but in this case the trip was worth it.

The basic premise for the movie is that a man (played by Josh Brolin) is out hunting near his west Texas home when he happens across the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad. He comes across a satchel containing $2 million, which makes him the prime target for the ultimate bad guy (played by Javier Bardem), whose slow persistence and emotional detachment would seem right at home in the best horror movies. Add in a sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones trying to track both of them down, a bounty hunter played by Woody Harrelson, and cameos by Stephen Root, Barry Corbin, and Beth Grant, and there are very few slow spots in the two hour runtime.

The only real complaint that I have about the movie regards a scene near the end with Tommy Lee Jones investigating the aftermath of a gunfight at an El Paso hotel. I don’t want to give too much away, but its portrayal in the movie is just confusing. Apparently the book on which the movie is based explains it more clearly, but that explanation certainly isn’t one that would have immediately come to mind when watching it on screen, and I’ve read several comments suggesting that in fact something different happened in the movie. It’s not really a critical scene, but the way it played out was a bit of a letdown when compared with the tension leading up to it.

Overall, though, it was a very good movie. There’s not a lot of predictability to it, and it will definitely leave you thinking.