Life Viewed Through an Amber Focus

Oh, dear, looks like LJ went and changed things again.  This should be fun *insert ample amounts of sarcasm here*


My first real attempt at Zombie Fridays since the surgery (Nine was more an appocafic) failed abysmally.  Dance of the Dead, set on prom night in a high school, could have gone either way.  It seemed like it would be funny, maybe one of those really campy zombie movies.  Yeah.  No.  Although it seemed like it might have a few things going for it (actors who actually looked like teenagers in the lead roles, though not the minor ones), decent production values, and some genuine chemistry going on, it had too many things wrong with it for me to get past the first 20 minutes.



( Spoilers )

So the premise of this movie wasn't actually that bad.  Something is making the recently dead continue to function after death.  They actually still have their minds, their personalities, etc., but their hearts beat only once every two minutes or something.  Of course regular humans are afraid of them and consider them second class citizens because they are dead.  So the idea of this movie is that it would follow one girl after she was murdered by her nasty boyfriend as she tried to cope with suddenly being a zombie and an outcast of society.  I think they really could have done it well.  Good premise, but the execution?  Um...I made it about ten, fifteen minutes into it before I gave up.  Just the constant hard swearing distracted from any plot that might have been forming.  Which is too bad, because I liked the summary a lot.  It could have been a real thinky piece done a different way, but I'm not going to work that hard to watch a movie that can't throw in a few non-expletive adjectives.

Zombie Friday is actually going pretty well tonight.  Last week was just so awful I don't even want to think about it.  The movie was Days of Darkness and all I can say is AVOID, AVOID, AVOID!   I did eventually find an apocolypse movie to watch instead (Toxic Skies, bye-bye Spokane) that was relatively interesting, but I was so tired by the time I started it that I fell asleep halfway through.  Ah, well.  Tonight's movie was bad but in that can't look away though I'm desperately trying, usually aired at 2 a.m. on the SciFi (I mean Syfy) channel sort of way.  It was called Infection and the photoshopping special effects were so hilarious.  I mean, it's like they told a twelve year old who'd had one class in it to do the little monsters that made people zombies and there was fire that was soooooooo bad it looked like still images being flashed over the house that was supposedly on fire over and over again.  And sometimes the fire was green.  Lead guy was cute though.  I'll put up with a lot for cute lead guy.  (Yes, I am that shallow and anyway it was either that or MEGA SHARK vs. CROCOSAURUS which does not in any way meet the criteria for Zombie Fridays and I'm not that far gone yet).

Now I am going to spend a good portion of the rest of the evening reading I Am Legend which was recommended to me by...oh, dear, well, someone on my f-list.  It is supposedly not at all like the Will Smith movie of it or the Charleston Heston one, either.  Which I kinda liked both of, but source material is almost always better than what is being sourced and books are always better than their movies unless they are books based on movies.

I actually got a stack of novels because T gets his tonsils out next week and since DH will be gone, he's just going to move into bed with me while he's recovering so I reckon I'll do a lot of reading while he watches DVD's or reads himself.  Only three of them are end of the world type books.  And one...I still can't believe I even picked it up, let alone checked it out, is called Dopplegangsters, the premise of which is dopplegangers of gangsters keep showing up in this city...  Yeah, I know.  I have no taste.

Well, Zombie Friday didn't go so well tonight.  The first movie I picked, Zombie Town, had so much gratuitious swearing in the first five minutes I was already thinking of stopping it when the first onscreen zombie attack happened and it was far grosser than anything I've seen in a zombie movie before.  Too grossly graphic.  Plus I'm used to hot guys and pretty girls for eye candy in these movies and there wasn't any of that.  Just fat, bald, old guys.  No, thank you.  So I gave up on that one and took the next one offered to me called Below.

Below turned out...not to be a zombie movie at all, but more of a haunted submarine thing.  Which was scary but totally not what the point of Zombie Fridays is about.

I am glad I at least got my appocalypse fill this week.  I watched both The Stand and 2012, which I don't think was supposed to be quite as funny as it was.  It was also very scary as the Earth worked on tearing herself apart, especially in light of what we've seen it do in the last month.  It was a real adrenaline rush, though.  And a good movie.

I'm eyeing Toxic Skies for next week.  It takes place in Spokane and has a killer virus.  I always like it when they wipe out an area in my home state.  I'm kind of perverse that way.