Throwback Thursday: Why I'm Still Concerned About Dawn of Justice

In which I revisit old articles from Filmquisition and Unreality.

The big news this week was the new Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer: our first substantive look at

DC’s follow-up to Man of Steel and that company’s answer to Captain America: Civil War.

Ever since details about the movie started coming out during production, I’ve harbored some

severely mixed feelings on the subject, best summed up as “hopeful, but cautiously pessimistic.”

When it comes down to it, I’m actually a huge fan of Man of Steel.  I enjoyed it far more than I thought that I would ever enjoy a Superman movie.  It managed to turn DC’s omnipotent boy scout into a genuinely sympathetic and engaging character.  What’s more is that it did so while delivering one of the most riveting action climaxes that I’ve seen from any movie this side of The Avengers.  Say what you will about ol’ Supes leveling Metropolis, but it was needlessly entertaining to watch him do it.

Despite everything that Man of Steel got right, though, it never once felt like a Superman movie.  It employed an overcast, grim-looking, Dark Knight aesthetic that was completely out of place for this particular franchise.  Zack Snyder filtered out nearly all of the color from the original cut of the movie until everything looked drab and washed out.  So although it had an entertaining twist on a traditionally stuffy character, we had to sit through footage that made it look like you needed to adjust the contrast settings on your TV.

From what we’ve been able to glean from the trailer, Snyder’s not simply maintained this grimdark status quo, but exploded it to absurdly darker levels.  With the exception of a single shot of Superman against a washed-out sun (and maybe a shot of him dead-lifting what appears to be a satellite), every last second of the trailer takes place at night.

That’s fine for a Batman movie.  Darkness is his whole shtick and he wears it well.  But what works for Batman doesn’t inherently work for Superman.  He’s Batman’s daytime foil: a fact that you couldn’t possibly get from Superman stalking around at night posturing like some kind of super-powered SS agent.

Seriously, I honestly thought that this was building this up to be an adaptation of Injustice in its final moments.  Everything was so absurdly over the top, from the Atlas-styled statue of Superman defaced with “False God” to the whispering voice-overs saying things like “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and “Devils don’t come from Hell beneath us, they come from the sky.”  There was even a shot of armed men kneeling before him.  Exactly what part of any of this screams “Superman?”

The way it stands now, I’m afraid of what Justice League‘s actual plot is going to be.  Is it going to be the League in full joining forces to take down Darkseid (or an equally stakes-raising villain), or is it going to be Batman rallying the world’s other heroes against a rogue Superman who’s more than happy to dispense his personal brand of justice from on high?  I simply don’t see how we can possibly get from this version of Superman to the status quo between now and 2017.

The more that I think about it, the more inherently wrong having a Batman vs Superman movie this soon into the fledgling DC Cinematic Universe feels.  The thing about The Dark Knight Returns (from which this film draws most of its inspiration) is that it was set decades after these characters first met.  They had fought and worked alongside one another for year before their moral and political ideologies came to blows.

That fight meant something, not because it was two amped up dudes in tights duking it out in the streets, but because it was Batman and Superman: two characters that we had known and watched develop into the people that they were for years on end.  This is the first time that we’ll see this version of Batman.  This is the first time that these two characters will have met one another.  How can we possibly invest ourselves in a showdown when we simply don’t know these versions of these characters (and especially when this version of Superman is so far off base)?

Now, everything Batman about this trailer absolutely works.  Ben Affleck has the grim, brooding look of a haunted man trying (and failing) nightly to somehow undo his parents fate.  Jeremy Irons’ voice over as Alfred comes off as the perfect cross between Gotham‘s Sean Pertwee and Michael’s Caine’s “some men want to watch the world burn” speech from The Dark Knight.  This may very well be the best version of the Batman costume ever put to film, and that’s not even touching on how awesome-looking the robotic version is.

This trailer makes me stoked about The Suicide Squad.  It makes me stoked about another Batman movie.  It makes me stoked about Nightwing or Batgirl or any other Bat-based spin off Warner Bros comes up with.  It does not, however, make me any more excited about Dawn of Justice.

Understand, I’m still planning on watching this movie the second that it comes out.  I’m still

hoping to like it (and just being as good as Man of Steel will be enough for me).  I just can’t

bring myself to get my hopes up when I can’t bring myself to believe that it’s actually Superman

flying around in the sky.

So what do you think about Dawn of Justice at this point in its production?  Are you more excited than trepidatious about it?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Throwback Thursday: Why Terminator Genisys' Twist Could Be the Best Thing to Ever Happen to the Franchise

In which I revisit old articles from Filmquisition and Unreality.

Before we get into this, I want to make it as clear as possible that this is going to be a spoiler soaked discussion of Terminator Genisys.  Granted, every so-called spoiler’s straight from the official trailer, but if you were somehow able to avoid it until now, this is your chance to bow out and be none the wiser before its July release.

A new Terminator Genisys trailer hit the internet earlier this week and, by God, was it a doozy.  Rather than save its game-changing reveal for its release, Skydance Productions (a division of Paramount) spoiled the movie’s big twist smack dab in the middle of its marketing campaign.  John Connor – champion of mankind – has betrayed humanity.  Throwing his lot in with the machines, he’s transformed himself into some kind of next gen Terminator and gone back in time to do what Skynet never could: kill his mother before he ever had a chance to be born.

And although the Internet is rightly embroiled at the thought of spoiling such a massive twist in a franchise built around the inherent heroic destiny of John Connor before anybody’s had the chance to see it, I couldn’t help but gush over just how awesome that twist actually was.  It’s everything that I’veever wanted to see inthe franchise come to fruition.

I’ve argued for this basic setup before: “if your central premise is something as wibbly-wobbly as time travel, why not bend the franchise back in on itself?”  Why not take its relatively simple premise of traveling back in time to destroy your unborn enemy (and conversely to save your unborn savior) and transform it into a temporal ouroboros: traveling back in time over and over again, mucking about with timelines and histories until the linear course of events warps into something grotesque and altogether unrecognizable?

While it is a leap in logic for the series, it’s no more farfetched than sending your father back in time to impregnate your mother with you.  John Connor was never a well-adjusted, model citizen.  He was the son of a teenaged mother whose father died before he was born.  Fearing the machines’ uprising, Sarah Connor’s admittedly well-meaning parenting robbed him of a stable home environment.  They moved constantly from place to place, going anywhere Sarah could learn something that might help John in the war to come.  And when you start to think about the kinds of people who would have the kinds of skills she was seeking out, it’s not hard to guess what kind of effect hardcore survivalists and likely domestic terrorists would have on him.

By the time he was 10, his mother had been incarcerated in a mental hospital and he wasn’t allowed to see her.  He was shipped off to uncaring foster parents and quickly accrued a fairly impressive police record using the skills that she had taught him.  After the events of Judgment Day, he lost the only real father-figure he had ever known (the T-800) and because his mother was still an escaped mental patient, they packed up once again and lived on the run.

His mother only survived another 6 years after that, 3 of which was spent battling leukemia.  Afterwards, he became a paranoid drifter: working odd jobs, stealing pet medication and living off the grid.  Terminator Salvation saw him develop into a disobedient officer within the human resistance that was all too willing to oppose his superiors if he thought that it would serve the greater good.

Is it really all that surprising that this habitually abandoned and systematically abused character would end up turning on a humanity that he had never truly been a part of except in opposition to extinction?  Is it really inconceivable that the machines could broker a deal with him, or that he would be so resentful of the mess that his life had become as a direct result of his mother’s poor parenting that he would be willing to kill her and erase himself from the annals of history altogether?

And don’t get me wrong.  I do not for one second think that the script’s main concerns were narrative.  It’s an obvious attempt to reboot a decades old franchise that’s finally caught up to itself.  This is the Days of Future Past of Terminator movies: one last temporal ride to unravel the franchise’s tangled continuity and justify as many more time-traveling sequels as they can squeeze out of the franchise before doing it all over again.

The thing is, though, that I simply don’t care.  Greed might not always be good, but it’s the only reason why we’re getting what’s shaping up to be the best film of the franchise (or at least as close as anything’s come to dethroning Judgment Day in that regard).  The twist, although poorly revealed through marketing, is intelligent, unexpected and yet completely plausible given the character’s broken childhood and the time twisting nature of the series.  I can only hope that the movie itself lives up to that promise.

So are you looking forward to seeing Terminator Genisys in theaters this weekend?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Throwback Thursday: Explaining Marvel's Ongoing Feud with Fox

In which I revisit old articles from Filmquisition and Unreality.

If you ever wondered why Days of Future Past‘s timeline fails to sync up with the Avengers movies or why none of the Fantastic Four showed up for Age of Ultron, it’s basically because film rights are funny things.  You see, before Marvel started making movies themselves, they were content to lease out the movie rights to their comics to other production companies.  They didn’t have any plans for them at the time and sitting on those rights was just leaving money on the table.  Why not make a few bucks off of them?

The enduring successes of the Spider-Man and X-Men movies proved that there was a surprising demand for big-screen superheroes, and abject failures like Hulk, Daredevil and Ghost Rider ultimately resulted in the rights to those properties reverting back to Marvel.  So Marvel took stock of what properties they had to work with and went ahead with their own cinematic universe, picking up whatever strays they could along the way.  And now that Spider-Man is officially back inMarvel’s possession, the only two franchises left to reacquire are Fantastic Four and X-Men.

The problem is that unlike Sony, Fox isn’t willing to play ball.  The Fantastic Fours might have been modest successes, but they did make money, and X-Men is a box office powerhouse all on its own.  Left to their own devices, Fox’s CEOs would contentedly churn out new movies every year and rebuff any offer Marvel made to buy the rights back.

That’s why the now Disney-backed Marvel started to play dirty.  Last year, at the height of Marvel’s 75th Anniversary celebrations, the company cancelled the Fantastic Four comic.  Although the team has been a historically big player in the Marvel universe – kicking off a new Age of Heroes back in 1961 – they haven’t proven to be the best sellers.  Marvel had very little to lose by swapping their comic out with one that would invariably sell better, but Fox had a lot to lose by the way of free advertising for their upcoming movie.

The cancellation further drew a line in the sand for kids that were getting into the comics because of the movies.  Iron Man, Thor, CaptainAmerica – these are the important guys.  The Avengers matter.  The Fantastic Four do not.

While Marvel could not in good conscience cancel the various X-Men comics – they make far too much money to justify shutting down – they had another strategy entirely for dealing with them.  Rather than cancelling the comics, they simply refused to lease Fox the merchandising rights for last summer’s Days of Future Past.  That’s why you didn’t see Wolverine, Magneto and Sentinel action figures in your local toy aisle: Marvel was willing to give up on a little bit of profit to starve Fox out of a boat-load of money.

There’s also the matter of the twins: Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.  If Fox owned the film rights to X-Men – and by extension all of its characters – how did Marvel get away with including the supersonic son of Magneto in Age of Ultron?

As it turned out, the company’s technically share the rights to those, and other, characters.  Sure, Fox still owned the rights to mutants, Magneto and the rest of it, but Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch had actually been Avengers at one point, meaning that they fell under the umbrella of Marvel’s Avengers film rights too.

They had to seriously shake up the character’s back story to do it, but they got them into the movie just fine.  And, when you really stop to think about it, this opens up a lot of characters to the same treatment.  For one, every member of the Fantastic Four would fall under the same legal technicality.  So would most of the key players of the X-Men franchise, potentially including Beast, Wolverine, Rogue and Storm.

But those would only work in the context of Avengers, and only after seriously rewriting the characters so as to never mention mutants, the X-Men, the Brotherhood or anything else that Fox would exclusively own.  Marvel, understandably, wants to make solo-movies and non-Avengers team-ups of their own.  And – surprise, surprise – they actually found a way around that too.

Anybody who looked carefully at Marvel’s phase three lineup were probably asking themselves who the Hell The Inhumans were.  The Inhumans are virtually identical to – yet legally distinct from – the X-Men: the result of ancient alien experimentation on Humans that gave them extraordinary powers that are indistinguishable from those of Mutants.

Their leader, Black Bolt, has a supersonic voice that can bring entire cities down around him.  Medusa, his wife, has prehensile, inhumanly strong hair (collectively able to lift about 1.6 tons).  Others have control over the elements, telepathy or can empathically control the emotions of others.  Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s Skye was recently shown to be an Inhuman and can create earthquakes.  They’re Marvel’s way of tapping into the fun of the X-Men while not being able to include them in the MCU.

The latest chapter in this ongoing feud was reported yesterday by Bleedingcool.com.  According to their sources, the conclusion of the comics’ Secret Wars will involve mutantkind as a whole leaving the Earth for a planet all their own.  The Terragen Mists – exposure to which causes Inhumans to gain their mutant-like powers – evidently kills mutants outright.  And with it circling the globe, they’ve finally decided to cut their losses on Earth.

According to Marvel’s editor-in-chief Axel Alonso,

The X-Men office is taking the opportunity of “Secret Wars” to build an entire new world for the characters — to create a shared universe within the X-books that’s set off by a huge event/incident/surprise. At that point, they’re going to introduce a new team that feels unlike anything you’ve seen before. It’ll be… “extraordinary.”

This means that there’s now no chance of any character that Marvel doesn’t own the film rights to interacting with characters that they do own the rights to.  It’s the ultimate statement about which characters matter and which ones you can expect to see in future movies.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if exposure to the Terragen Mists don’t seriously up the number of superpowered individuals running around the Marvel universe, waiting for their chance to shine on the big screen.

So would you like to see X-Men and the Fantastic Four join the MCU?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Throwback Thursday: 5 Things that I Want to See in The Spectacular Spider-Man

In which I revisit old articles from Filmquisition and Unreality.

Never mind Batman.  Never mind Iron Man.  Never even mind Captain freaking America himself.  Spider-Man is always going to be the hero that I return to time and time again, regardless of how many times his movies let me down and how drastically he pales against Marvel’s proper Avengers lineup.

 

Spider-Man has always been my superhero: the one that I unquestionably turn to when looking for a good time.  Despite being ahead of the comic book curve at the time of its release, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man always seemed to miss the point of the character.  And despite its innumerable flaws, Marc Webb’s short-lived Amazing Spider-Man movies at least got nearer to the heart of the franchise than any of the previous three movies.  But with Marvel’s newly cemented relationship with Sony, the companies have the chance of giving audiences what they’ve been waiting decades for: a proper Spider-Man outing on the big screen.

While I do have complete faith in Marvel’s unerring cinematic quality, there are a few things that I desperately want them to include in the new movie.  And while, yes, I could go on about a few narrowly-drawn gripes – like wanting Spider-Man to shoot organic webbing or a checklist of in-universe references that I want them to hit – there are a few big things that are at the top of my wish list, ranging from unlikely to near certainties.

J. K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson – Say what you will about Raimi’s roughshod take on the franchise, but J.K. Simmons’ portrayal of libelous news paper mogul J. Jonah Jameson was absolutely perfect.  He was comically over-the-top, yet unquestionably realistic.  He was infuriating, yet oddly endearing.  He was exceedingly expressive, yet still managed to look like a real person.

He hit all the proper notes of the character and was absolutely the best-realized aspect of that entire trilogy.  Simmons was so perfectly suited for the role that The Amazing Spider-Man reboot didn’t even try to recreate him.  The most that we ever got of Jameson were a few Baily Bugle ads and some e-mail exchanges with Peter Parker.

I know that it’d be a stretch to bring Simmons back for the role in the upcoming Spectacular Spider-Man.  Coming off of a well-earned Oscar, his asking price is probably a Hell of a lot higher than Marvel’s willing to dish out for a fairly bit part.  Given the uphill battle that they already face with franchise fatigue, Marvel would be loath to remind audiences of the previous (and still pretty recent) takes on the character.  Plus, there’d be more than a few movie-goers who’d probably be confused if this was supposed to be the same universe as the first three movies (the same Jameson, the same Parker).  Despite these (and other) issues, however, Simmons is too perfect for the role to at least not warrant a second look.

Clark Gregg as Principle Coulson – When it comes to Spider-Man, Disney’s Ultimate Spider-Man tv show pretty much gets everything right.  Sure, I prefer my Spidey to be a solo act.  Sure, some of the (thankfully minor) recurring villains end up being a bit dull (the Trapster being the prime example).  But when it comes to the character, the story and the world around him, the series is the perfect template for what a big screen version of the franchise should look like. 

One of the strangest – yet most oddly satisfying – decisions made with the show was to include S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson Midtown High’s acting principle (all the better to keep an eye on Parker and his teenage team of superheroes).  It made perfect sense for S.H.I.E.L.D. to keep an ear to the ground when dealing with not only superheroes, but teenaged ones at that.  Coulson – ever S.H.I.E.L.D.’s PR guy – was the perfect candidate for the job (basically doing a more full time version of what he did with the various Avengers in Marvel’s Phase 1).

Now, I don’t expect this to be a particularly realistic course of action with Coulson now being the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., but this version of Spider-Man is supposed to have been around for a while.  His movie won’t actually be an origin story (we’ve had enough of those already) and he’s actually scheduled to appear in a Marvel movie before The Spectacular Spider-Man.  He could have easily been assigned to Midtown High to keep a watchful eye on the newly created Spider-Man before his supposed death (to be referenced in dialog or flashback).  It would be a clever touch – keeping in the peculiarities of the character – that would be rife with cinematic potential.

Gwen Stacy as Peter’s love interest – Despite being Spider-Man’s longest-lasting love interest (going so far as to actually marry him in the comics), I’ve never especially cared for Mary Jane Watson.  She just never had much of a personality beyond being pretty.

Marvel’s tried to countermand that shortcoming already.  Ultimate Spider-Man has her as an ambitious journalist trying to get a job at the Daily Bugle (essentially taking over that side of Parker’s day-to-day life).  And while that mostly works, the character was never as interesting as Gwen Stacy: a character that always had a lot more going for her and a lot more in common with Peter than any of his other love interests over the years.

 

While arguments can certainly be made for Betty Brant (who really hasn’t shown up in the movies yet) and Felicia Harding (who doubles as the superheroine Black Cat), Gwen Stacy still seems like the best option available to the franchise.  Helped out by Emma Stone, she was the best part about The Amazing Spider-Man movies (in the same way that J. K. Simmons was for the first Spider-Man films).  She’s a likable character with a lot of personality, that audiences are already at least somewhat familiar with and comes with her own iconic narrative built into the character (“The Night Gwen Stacy Died”).

Asa Butterfield as Peter Parker – When it came to the new Spider-Man, Marvel’s had a few very specific ideas for the character.  While a lot of fans were hoping for Miles Morales (the black Spider-Man from the Marvel’s Ultimate imprint), Marvel’s on record that it’s going to be Peter Parker behind the mask.  And while both of Sony’s versions of the character were on the older side (both circling closer to college than High School), the plan is to keep Spider-Man young: in the neighborhood of fifteen years old.

This naturally puts a lot of restrictions on the actors that they have to choose from for the role.  You need somebody good enough to headline their own movie and yet young enough to actually look the part of a high school freshman.  A lot of names that were initially thrown out were a bit tweeny for my tastes, though, particularly Logan Lermann from Percy Jackson and the Olympians and Dylan O’Brien from Teen Wolf.  In recent weeks, however, the roster of possible Spider-Men has broadened to include Asa Butterfield, who I feel is ideal for the role.

Not only is Butterfield a good fit for the part physically (his age and physique are consistent with what Marvel wants out of the character), but he’s a legitimately good actor in his own right.  He’s already headed up movies like Hugo and Ender’s Game with the competence of far more seasoned actors and there’s no reason why he couldn’t do the same for Spider-Man.  He’s the ablest choice of those allegedly being looked into for the role, would be a pretty cheap acquisition for Marvel and could convincingly age with the character over any number of solo and crossover movies. 

Vincent D’Onofrio as the Kingpin – Marvel did damn near everything right with their Daredevil series on Netflix, none more so than casting veteran character actor Vincent D’Onofrio as its principle villain: Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin.  He added a considerable deal of nuance to a character that could have just been a large guy with a villainous smirk in a suit (ala Clark Duncan) and was instantly the most memorable and endearing aspect of the entire series.

Despite traditionally trading punches with Daredevil, the Kingpin has often been as much of a Spider-Man villain, and it’s really no wonder why.  Both Daredevil and Spider-Man are based in New York.  Both are understandably keen on fighting crime, and the Kingpin is on the top of the pecking order: the man through which virtually all crime in the city flows. 

Growing up on the 90’s Spider-Man cartoon, I knew the Kingpin as the man responsible for creating Scorpion, forming the Sinister Six, funding Alistaire Smythe and frequently hiring iconic Spidey thugs like Rhino and the Shocker.  If there’s one thing that I want to see in The Spectacular Spider-Man, it’s D’Onofrio’s Kingpin as the man pulling the strings: creating, hiring or otherwise assembling Spider-Man’s menagerie of villains to crush the wall-crawler from day one.

D’Onofrio would lend just as much credibility to the second Spider-Man reboot in recent memory as he did to the small-screen reboot of Daredevil.  It would considerably raise his character’s already illustrious profile and create further interest in the rampantly successful Netflix series that he debuted in.  It could also open the doors to more small-screen tie-ins, like cinematic team ups with Daredevil, Skye and Mockingbird or squaring off against villains like Crusher Creel.  Besides, Marvel’s proven that it pays to have forward-thinking plots play out with a high-end villains pulling the strings from the shadows.

So what would you like to see in the upcoming Spectacular Spider-Man movie?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Throwback Thursday: The Lazarus Effect

In which I revisit old articles from Filmquisition and Unreality.

Well folks, it finally happened.  Despite their long history of immaculately conceived, pristinely rendered and unerringly good horror films, Blumhouse Productions has finally churned out a bad one.  The company that was somehow able to turn an obvious cash-grab prequel into one of the best horror films of 2014 wasn’t able to make good on a story of resurrection and pseudo-scientific evolution with their familiar, predictably solid cast of B list talent   Although they can still safely be called the definitive name in 21st Century horror, they’re no longer above shipping out the same over-produced, under-written, notably rushed schlock that defines most of the genre today.

After four years of arduous research, a team of Berkeley-based scientists have produced the miracle drug of the 21st century: The Lazarus Serum.  When combined with targeted electro-shock therapy, the serum is able to not only re-animate the dead, but triggers a kind of cognitive evolution within the subject, turning them into something far more than simply human.  But when a lab accident electrocutes one of the project’s lead scientists, her desperate colleagues will do anything to save her life: including reviving her with their experimental drug.  They were so concerned with bringing her back, however, that they never stopped to think of where they were bringing her back from.

While generally bad (although I won’t go so far as to say terrible), The Lazarus Effect does have its merits.  It’s essentially last year’s Lucy reimagined as a horror film: turning the idea of cognitive enhancements causing a person to become more in touch with the human condition on its head by reminding us of just how damaged, depraved and all around vile human beings actually are.

It posits that there is a very good reason why evolution takes place so gradually: over thousands, if not millions, of years and countless generations.  No organism can be reasonably expected to cope with such monolithic enhancements to their cognition within their own lifetime.  The problem is, however, that the film explores these themes with only slightly greater intelligence and skill than the notoriously abhorrent Event Horizon.

Although not so patently dreadful as its most arduous detractors would have you believe, The Lazarus Effect never the less hosts a sprawling laundry list of defects that make it little more than a poorly executed, if intriguingly conceived, horror film.  While Blumhouse has built its solid reputation off of tautly-strung suspense and methodical staging, The Lazarus Effect reveals too much, too soon and to far too little effect, relying on predictable jump scares and an uncommonly interesting premise to carry the full weight of its narrative.  It characters, although somewhat sympathetic, are far too underdeveloped to warrant anything more than a superficial investment in their eventual fate.

Most frustrating of all, however, is the writing, which is so belabored with extraneous plot points it’s a wonder that it ever got green-lit in the first place.  There’s an entire sub-plot devoted to conspiratorial corporate espionage allowing a faceless pharmaceutical company to worm their way into wholesale ownership of the Lazarus Serum.  While there’s nothing wrong with this idea in theory, it ultimately goes nowhere: hurriedly propelling the protagonists toward human trials that could have just as easily been arrived at on its own, only without the roughly fifteen minutes of wasted time.

The resurrected dog is similarly wasted: an early plot contrivance which exists only to establish the viability of the serum and to tick off the first couple jump scares of the film.  When its usefulness is out-stripped by that of the demonic Doctor Zoe, the newly revived antagonist kills it off screen before moving on to her human victims.  Imagine instead if the dog – which plot had already dictated was hyper-aggressive – kills the good Doctor, prompting her revival with the Lazarus Serum.

Her increased brain capacity allows her to telepathically possess the dog, sicking it on her fellow scientists as a demonstration of her augmented psyche and as a real physical threat of the team to deal with while Zoe gorges herself on the remaining Lazarus Serum.  It streamlines the dog into the main narrative while removing the unnecessary sub-plot with the pharmaceutical company.

While I have to give it some points for at least trying to do something interesting, the film’s overall quality is unquestionably lacking.  It’s sloppy, under-developed and not the least bit frightening.  While it may be worth checking out some day on TV, it’s nothing that anybody needs to see in theaters.

Rating:  5/10

Buy on BluRay:  No

So what is your favorite Blumhouse Productions horror movie?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Throwback Thursday: Ranking Marvel's Phase 2

In which I revisit old articles from Filmquisition and Unreality.

I know that it’s a bit premature with Ant-Man still over two months away, but with Age of Ultron starting its theatric run this week, I felt that it was time to look back on Marvel’s uncanny Phase 2 and weigh the efforts against one another.  If Phase 1 was all about establishing the characters and world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, then Phase 2 was all about tearing them down to their core and taking them in darker directions than Phase 1’s lighter tone.

5)  Thor: The Dark World – While Iron Man 3 has undoubtedly been the most controversial of the second wave Marvel movies, I would argue that Thor‘s sequel was the worst.  I of course use the word “worse” solely in comparison to the Avengers meta-franchise, since the most astounding feature of these movies is that none of them have actually been bad.  Sure, Iron Man 2 tried to be, but it was still better than most action blockbusters (and certainly better than most sequels).

So while The Dark World‘s Malaketh was a wasted villain that was all too eager cast aside for literally star-crossed romance between Thor and Jane, it did everything else right.  Owing to his popularity in The Avengers especially, Loki’s part in the movie was heavily played up, leading to some of the funniest scenes of the entire MCU.  The narrative was better paced than its predecessor and the direction more even, if a bit less inspired.  And to top things off, it ends on what’s probably the strongest note of any Marvel film to date.

4)  Iron Man 3 – This is certainly the most divisive movie in Marvel’s eleven movie canon, and for good reason.  The majority of non-comic fans bemoaned Trevor Slattery’s deconstruction of the Mandarin as a waste of a good villain.  Those more familiar with Iron Man‘s publication history hated the fact that the character’s one good villain was reduced to a punch-line.  And while his defenders pointed out how intelligently handled, unexpected and confident the twist was handled, they could hardly get a word in edgewise over the uproar.

When it comes to the Mandarin controversy, I belong firmly to the “yea” camp.  It was intelligent.  It was bold.  It was unexpected, and yet I never felt cheated by it.  It gave this small cross-section of the MCU something that it had lacked since the first movie’s second act: actual depth.

I would further argue that the reveal didn’t close off quite as many options with the franchise as people want to believe.  The one-shot “All Hail the King” established an actual, factual, magical Mandarin who was tired of Slattery slandering his “good” name.  If we do get an Iron Man 4, we could very well see the “real” Mandarin turn everything that we thought we knew about the MCU on its head.  Or Iron Man 3, in retrospect, could be viewed as a Mandarin origin story: how Trevor Slattery went from being a drug addict actor to a hardened criminal, to the protege of a true villain.  The potential is all there, so long as Downey’s still willing to throw on the suit.

3) Avengers: Age of Ultron – I’m shocked at this movie was as far down on this list as it was.  It certainly wasn’t a bad movie by any means.  In fact, it was freaking awesome.  It just needed to tighten up its script a touch in order to bring it up to Avengers-level awesome.

The main thing that disappointed me about this movie was that it lacked the somewhat darker Winter Soldier tone that all of its marketing materials had promised.  Again, this isn’t inherently a bad thing, just something that I had been looking forward to and never really happened.  It is in every sense a worthy successor to the surprisingly comedic, incessantly witty and thoroughly entertaining first Avengers, it just never seemed to do any of it quite as well as the first go-around.

2)  Guardians of the Galaxy – I still don’tknow how Marvel got away with this movie.  It’s just so utterly bizarre on its surface: basically Star Wars starring Indiana Jones, an Orion Slave Girl, a raccoon, an Ent and Dave Bautista.  It’s based on a comic that next to nobody read and even fewer people knew about.  It bucked Marvel’s game plan of making every new movie a direct sequel, prequel or midquel to every other Marvel movie by divorcing it entirely from the MCU’s terrestrial canon.  Sure, it’ll catch up with everybody in Infinity War, but that’s still three years away (four if they enter the scene in Part II).

And yet, despite everything going against it, it was damned close to being the best blockbuster – and best movie – of last year.  It was easily the most confident, idiosyncratic and original movie to come out in all of 2014 and somehow made wrestler petting a raccoon who was crying over his splintered friend the most emotional scene that I saw in theaters in years.  Of all the movies that followed, it came the closest to touching on what made The Avengers so amazing to begin with.

1)  Captain America: The Winter Solder – This should really come as no surprise to anybody who remembered my review of the movie back in September.  Captain America: The Winter Soldier was hands down last year’s best movie for me, even beating out The Avengers for my favorite Marvel movie.  It boldly brought Captain America into the 21stCentury and forced him to come to terms with his own legacy.

Beyond just being a good spy movie, it’s probably the most politically aggressive blockbuster that I’ve ever seen: transforming a seemingly innocent action set-piece like The Avengers‘ Battle of New York into an indicting metaphor for 9-11, and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s heavy-handed approach to terrorism a reproachful look into Bush-era policies that encroached on American freedoms.  And how does the living embodiment of all that is right and just with America handle grossly immoral (and illegal) covert actions taken on behalf of the government?  He dumps everything onto the Internet Snowden-style and lets the public sort it out.  Say what you will about its politics, but it’s a miracle that a Disney-backed popcorn flick was allowed to flaunt them the way that it did.

So what is your favorite movie in Marvel's Phase 2?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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