I'd seen the trailer to Murder Party quite a while ago and thought I knew pretty well what I was in for. In many ways I was correct, though I suppose it suffers from that general issues independent films often possess: the trailer shows most of the interesting parts and leaves out the long stretches where not much happens, giving the false impression that there's a lot more to the film than there actually is. Still, I figured another film from Jeremy Saulnier would be interesting.

I'd seen Blue Ruin years ago after it became much-hyped and subsequently overrated. Green Room had much the same problem, though it was probably a better movie, overall. Still, neither of them were as interesting, compelling, or shocking as any of the many people I heard from had stated. Maybe it's the fact that, as I said previously, I've never actually been afraid of anything; I've had guns pointed at me in armed robberies, I've had more near-misses on car accidents than the average bear, I've seen seen any number of strange and horrifying realities that didn't particularly phase me. Perhaps I'm the wrong person to judge these things. If I had the ability to actually understand the things that people find unsettling, I'd be writing horror. That said, I'm a great appreciator of violence; not gore, per se - violent acts on film, be they horror or action or revenge thrillers. So, I do appreciate certain aspects of Saulnier's filmmaking, but I haven't found any of his films shocking or overwhelmingly impressive. Just some decent character studies with acts of violence wrapped up in them. Admirable 7 and 8 out of 10 films.

I hoped from the trailers I'd seen that the much more independent, low-fi, comedic nature of Murder Party would lend itself to a fun and anarchic atmosphere. The absurdly gory horror-comedy has become a staple of its own little corner of the genre. This may have been a little too smart or solipsistic for its own good.

A bland middle-aged meter maid settles in for a Halloween alone at home, picking up some rentals from the local video store to watch with his cat, but comes across an invitation on the ground to a "murder party". After a brief dalliance with staying in and watching films, his housecat refuses to get out of his chair, so he decides to accept this errant invitation as his own. I'm not sure why this walking tabula rasa would do such a thing, as it doesn't make much sense. But he quickly constructs a knight's armor out of a cardboard box, prints off directions on his computer, and wanders off through the urban landscape on foot and via subway to some dingy industrial outskirt. He's unnerved, but still goes through with it for some unknown reason. Upon arriving at the mess-filled warehouse listed on the invitation, he's promptly tied to a chair and told he's going to be killed. The costumed characters that are about to do him in are all artists and his murder is going to be their art, all in some strange attempt to appease another artist named Alexander, who may or may not have access to grant money. What you'd initially assume would be a series of hijinks that lead to the captured nebbish turning the tables on his captors and doing them all in turns out to be, largely, a sort of social commentary followed by a series of accidents and incidents, killing most of them while he bears mute witness to the proceedings.

It seems like it might be going somewhere amusing, but mostly meanders around, really focusing on the artists and the very obvious and time-tested notions than they're mostly dumb, full of shit, and spouting buzzwords with no real meaning. Alexander and his Eastern European drug dealer eventually show up and initiate picking away at the artists' egos until chaos ensues. There's a long stretch where they're all injected with sodium pentothal to play a truth-telling game and reveal their secrets to Alexander, and if that scene doesn't go on for at least 15 to 20 minutes of the already-short running time... I'm honestly not sure I'd believe you.

There's decent performances from several actors, many of whom would show up again in later Saulnier films (including Macon Blair, who starred in Blue Ruin). Mostly, though, it's a bit slow and takes the same old potshots at the hipster dickbag art community while never quite paying off the anarchic splatter-comedy promise of the premise, despite the last portion of the film, which does hew much closer to the idea you receive from the trailer.

The film may have just ended up feeling very average, though there's nothing average about seeing something set around 2006, where some people still rent VHS tapes, have flip phones (if they have a cell phone at all), and you have to print off directions online to find your way anywhere. That's a strange time capsule of its own and may in some ways feel more unsettling than the rest of it. True fear is relying on Mapquest and a Blackberry Curve to get you through the darkness of the mid-00's. Though I refuse to believe anyone was still renting video tapes in 2006. That part may be the least realistic bit about the film.

My movie backlog was exceptionally deep and I decided I'd finally get around to watching something and maybe writing about it. MediaGauntlet has been dead for years, no one particularly caring about it when it was alive, but it's still sitting here, taking up space on a hard drive in a data center somewhere, so I might as well do something with it.

I jumped onto Netflix and scrolled through the long list of things that I add and then never bother to actually watch because I'm too busy lazily watching YouTube videos and decaying, physically and mentally. I had seen the trailer for The Endless before it ever came out and, here I was, finally watching it, over three years later. It might not have happened had I not seen a trailer the other day for Synchronic, an upcoming film also directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. Looking over their IMDb pages, I was introduced to the trailers for their films Resolution and Spring and I was reminded that I should finally get around to watching this film.

Now, it was fortunate that I did watch the trailer for Resolution first and understood its basic outline, as The Endless is actually a sequel in many ways to that film. Perhaps not directly, but it features the exact characters and situations from the previous film, so it probably would have been good to watch it first and wish someone had mentioned that to me. So I'm telling you. If you haven't seen this yet and are interested, run over to Amazon first, as Resolution is currently free on Prime Video.

As for the movie itself, I was prepared for much of it by the trailer I vaguely remember seeing what seems like a lifetime ago. Some weird visuals, a confusing plot perhaps, and an obviously low-budget indie sensibility to it.

It starts off with the failing relationship of brothers Justin and Aaron (played by the namesake directors, who saved money by playing the leads themselves), lost for the past decade in the normal world of the daily urban grind after escaping from a cult. We learn bits about the cult and their experiences within it over the course of the entire movie. There's no exposition drops and the movie starts out slow, focusing on the characters' interpersonal relationships, their despair, their differing attitudes about the commune life they left behind, and the friction between them. For a while, it lulls you into the false sense that it's going to end up being an indie drama about interpersonal familial relationships wrapped up in the guise of being a weird and eerie horror(-adjacent) movie. Fortunately, that assumption is quickly abandoned after they receive a mysterious video tape and take a road trip back to the cult's summer-camp-like compound to see what's become of them all after a decade away. Though, at first glance, a lot of dread is built up with sound effects, score, and slow-motion footage of fairly mundane activity in a way that makes you wonder if anything really is going on under the hood of the film beyond the surface level. In fact, the first hour makes you question if anything is really going on or if the brothers are the strange ones here; the movie keeps telling you something is off, but you see no evidence of that for a long time.

After that first hour, it peels off the facade and begins laying out details of the strange mythos behind the scenes of what we've witnessed so far. Details are handed out to Justin, the character the audience is most likely to identify with, not as just conjecture or theories about what is happening, but in a strangely factual way that flies in the face of the average horror movie's attempt to hand-wave away details in the name of spookiness.

As for the actual spookiness, I could not tell you. I am somehow congenitally affected in such a way that I am not scared of anything; beyond events intended to startle you in movies, psychological attempts at fear are completely lost on me. I mostly just focus on the story, the aesthetics, the acting, the filmmaking choices.

For all of those qualities, the movie does a lot with very little money. The actors are all good, naturalistic, somewhat understated at times, but ultimately very believable. The film looks very good for what must have been spent on it. The few effects shots work well and don't overplay their hand. (Though you wonder what this movie would have been if they had been given an unlimited budget. What more would have been shown?) The angles, the drone shots, the color palette all look more substantial than the little movie should have managed.

I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that the movie has a strangely uplifting ending for this type of film. Of course, I'm not sure what my point of comparison for that really is. The family-drama-turned-nightmare of Hereditary? (People would consider most other things to be uplifting.) But I wasn't really expecting it to maintain a plot about familial relationships and the focus on the friction between brothers with opposing views on their lives after the horror elements revealed themselves. Perhaps that why the writer/director team is still working on bigger and bigger projects and critically lauded for just about everything they've done.

The film hits the sweet spot for writing, length, development, mystery, and atmosphere. It isn't going to change your life or send you rushing off to tell your friends about what you just watched, but it's a strong and well-crafted film, not just another Lovecraft homage via John Carpenter's The Thing.

I'd say that I felt like I'd been a little bit harsh toward Paul W.S. Anderson as a director, were it not for the fact that he wrote this collosal piece of shit.

Everything that was bad about the first film is amped up in its sequel, taking the ludicrous story of a viral zombie outbreak precipitated by the cartoonishly evil and inept Umbrella Corporation (a name that stinks with the dumbshittedness of the Japanese misunderstanding of English) and ham-fistedly turnng it into a 12-year-old boy's wet dream, featuring wooden actors that do things for inexplicable reasons before throwing in "bad ass" stunts that make no logical sense whatsoever. "Wouldn't it be super kick-ass if a badass bitch comes flying through a stained glass window 20 feet in the air on a motorcycle, while running over  monsters and flipping through the air, shooting them with machine guns?" No. Not even a little, especially if you're not a teenager whose brain is swimming in too many hormones and backed-up semen to think properly.

I cannot say enough bad things about story that film is supposedly telling. The plot is abject shit, dumbing down the already weak formula of the first movie to provide more action and even less moments of coherence. For example, why are police trying to arrest obvious zombies? And why, then, do none of them seem all that shocked or distressed that a stupidly-scantly-clad suspended officer walks into the building and starts executing their prisoners without a gun being drawn or a harsh word being said? And that's just in the first few minutes. I could give endless examples of why this movie is the most insipidly stupid thing I've watched in some time. What about the viral outbreak that turns the living into zombies somehow causing long-dead corpses to pop up out of their graves for no reason that could possibly ever be explained? Why does Umbrella bother to create absurd biological weapons like Nemesis and then have them fistfight to "test their capabilities" (not that any of its biological weapons projects makes the slightest sense or have any military use whatsoever)?  I could go on for hours, but that sensation should be left up to this movie, as it's the expert in that area.

Everything Anderson did poorly in the first film, Alexander Witt does even worse. The direction is awful; the decent performances coaxed out in the first movie are completely dead-eyed and hollow under his instruction in this film; the tone is wretched and dated-looking; the budget looks lower, despite being over $10 fucking million higher; the CGI is nearly as bad in 2004, when it had become relatively cheap and fairly consistent. This truly feels like some horrible 1995 science-fiction film that appears washed-out and cartoonishly flat in its overindulgence and reliance on setpieces. It's no wonder that Witt never directed a movie before or since, but it's strange that such a talented DP could produce such visually-awful product.

Even the decent Manson score is gone in favor of a backwards-feeling orchestral score. Never have I seen a series take such a step backwards and produce something so awful, particularly on a $44 million budget.

Truly, this is everything I was dreading when watching these movies. Anderson is probably one of the worst writers working in the film industry today. It makes me long for Tommy Wiseau's absurd nonsense to take my mind off of the most poorly-constructed assemblage of standard, lazy character archetypes that you can throw together. But at least it's short.

I was invited to go see the latest Resident Evil atrocity. I knew full well what I was getting into, but I value spending time with friends more than not watching awful movies. Of course, many who know me would insist that those two tend to go hand-in-hand. I figured that if I was going to go see it, I'd do it right and catch up on the previous films so as to get the full "experience".

It'd been many years since I'd seen the first three Resident Evil films and I had, blissfully, forgotten almost every detail of the movies, except for my groaning dislike of their awful cobbling together of shitty second-rate American filmmaking with the kind of retarded bullshit that only the Japanese can muster up with a straight face. There is a special place in hell for the Japanese, who are completely incapable of writing anything that falls within the realms of logic, reason, or an attempt at any meaningful substance. You heap on top of that the likes of career moron Paul W.S. Anderson and you have a recipe for cinematic disaster.

For what it's worth, Resident Evil was bad in a way that I didn't really remember. I would have assumed it was strictly the boredom of watchng an ostensible zombie film that doesn't feature much in the way of killing zombies or the generally awful acting of Milla Jovovich, who can only convincingly play insane or mentally challenged characters. Instead, it was the tone of the film, which attempted to hybridize action and horror, or at least what Anderson probably imagines that horror would look like if he ever made a horror film. Many people seem to like his 90's abortion Event Horizon and, for its time, it wasn't completely awfu, but its poor attempts at doing a haunted house movie in space with liberal Hellraiser touches while cribbing the plot from Aliens couldn't honestly be categorized as "good" in any capacity. Resident Evil is a retread of that same tired plot, stolen from Aliens and aped badly, with a military force invading an abandoned and desolate installation, looking for survivors and to understand the events that caused a catastrophe; of course, things go to shit and most everyone dies horribly at the hands of monsters and misfortune. It's a good thing Anderson doesn't have to come up with a new plot, because I'm not sure he could manage it.

So we get an uneven, ugly-looking mess that, while made in the early 2000's, feels 5 years older than it actually is. The CGI is terrible and the overall effects are rather poor, the whole thing looking oddly dated and even more cheap than its $20-something million budget would imply.

The acting is actully one of the more reasonable parts of the film, as a good enough cast was assembled, but unfortunately they were put through the paces of a Paul W.S. Anderson plot, which involves spouting semi-moronic lines between bouts of people inexplicably doing stupid things before another fight scene is wedged in.

Of course, the plot is beyond contempt. Anderson tries to fit in some references to the games, which probably doesn't benefit anyone; those who like the games will undoubtedly not like the movies for reasons I probably can't understand, as the games are beneath contempt, and movie-viewers will find the whole of it to be sub-literate trash, not even making an attempt to deliver something interesting. Nothing translates to film quite like a series based around old adventure game keyhunt formulas of finding the right thing to get to the next part to find another thing to get to another place. The events of the games are nothing more than a Rube Goldberg device to get the cipher-like characters to a boss battle at the completion of a thin, nonsensical plot. The movie instead fills the time with fight scenes that aren't particularly interesting. But at least it doesn't attempt to imply a "horror" in "survival horror" that has always been non-existent in that genre.

Ultimately, the movie ended up being a bit more watchable than I remembered based solely on the fact that it was blessedly short and it spent so little time trying to provide background or personalities for the characters that I couldn't be too annoyed by how idiotic it was. It didn't start making me want to beat my own head in until near the end when I was forced to take laughably bad CGI monsters seriously. And I did enjoy a good part of Marilyn Manson's score, which often worked in places when it was sticking to dark, moody atmospherics and not throwing in out-of-place loops of guitar from Nine Inch Nails' "Wish".

Still, the poorly-plotted, cheap-looking, badly-paced, predictable, dated, silly, cliched mess created no new love for Anderson and only continued to detract from my opinion of anyone who can sit through these fourth-rate monstrosities with anything resembling a straight face or a belief that what they're watching is enjoyable.

Possibly one of the most intriguing and harsh viewing experiences of my life, Sunshine, as shown in the film, manages to bathe you in light. Not just in light, but in sound as well. The whole experiences engulfs the senses until your mind reels and you leave the film, jarred and unsure about your very existance.

The tale of a second international space mission to revitalize our dying son in some near future, the film plays out like a combination of The Core and Event Horizon, but avoids the abject and horrid stupidity of those two films.

Cillian Murphy (of 28 Days Later and Red Eye fame) and Chris Evans (of Fantastic Four fame) lead up a cast that includes Hong Kong star Michelle Yeoh and Rose Byrne as astronauts heading into the sun to deliver a Big Bang-creating payload to create a new star and bring Earth out of a constant winter. As they pass out of the range of communications, they receive a distress call from the first mission to restart the sun, lost years before.

After debate, the fateful decision is made to attempt to retrieve the second payload to help assure the success of the experimental payload, leading to the inevitable misfortune of such a film.

The conflicts set up, the bleak character drama in the isolation of enclosed spaces and depths of space becomes numbing and claustrophobic, the toll being taken on everyone as circumstances careen out of control.

The visuals that Danny Boyle manages are both frenetic, beautiful, and disturbing. There is an amazing clarity only broken by blasts of light that burn into your mind, coupled with the movie's amazing sound work and score by Underworld. The sound buries you as you watch the film, shocking emotional responses out your brain.

The tone, the isolation, the slow dread, and the mindbending conclusion are enough to recommend the movie on, but this film is more than all those parts, a beautiful and heartwrenching masterwork of slow and deliberate storytelling. We feel every moment of the film, every character's emotion, every death, and we, ourselves, are left feeling the intense doom of deep space.

This bit of theatrical genius is one of the great moments of cinema history and stupid is the man who doesn't pay fealty to Boyle's work.