Movie Round-Up Monday
The new TV season is starting, which means I was commanded to clean off the DVR so that we have room for the new shows. So I had to actually watch the movies I've been storing for forever. Monday's line-up was Dracula 2000 II: The Ascension, Pandorum, and Zerophilia.
First up was Dracula 2000 II: The Ascension. It starts of in Eastern Europe with the requisite crying girl running for her life, being followed by a poor man's Lou Diamond Phillips. The girl turns and shock!, she's actually a vampire and he's the priestly vampire hunter. Fight scene, she has a twin, he gets bitten, the twins lose their heads, huh, they don't dust.
Vampire differences in this movie- they don't dust; if you get nicked by their teeth, even just a little, you start turning, but if they full on bite you, you turn quick, like 5 minutes quick; apparently Dracula just keeps getting reincarnated when he "dies". Vampire stoppers - holy water, UV rays, stakes (but no one actually gets staked), be-heading, counting seeds, untying knots.
So back to the priest, who is in the sunlight screaming. And now we move on to New Orleans, where we have a Doctor professor in a wheelchair - who is dying - lecturing and then going out drinking with his students, including a dealer of knock-off prescription drugs. Professional ethics, what's that? His girlfriend, wife, SO, whatever, leaves them to get their drink on so she can get to her job at the county morgue. She's brought a body that was set on fire, but while doing the autopsy, she notices none of his organs have blood in them, so the dude helping her tells her to check his teeth. She does, canines pop out, she gets nicked, they freak out. Then they get a weird phone call offering 30 mil for the body in the morgue after she calls her honey to tell him about the freaky body. They decide to steal the body and sell it to the guy after they discover all its secrets. Priest guy shows up as they're body snatching and discovers this is not the corpse he's looking for.
They take the body to an abandoned house the professor just happens to own. Main girl, morgue dude, drug dealer, and random blonde girl chain the corpse up and fill a tub with blood while professor dude watches on camera. They wait around for 2 hours, then get bored and decide to fish the guy out. As they're fishing him out, he wakes up, things get destroyed, blonde goes flying out a 2-story window, weird English guy shows up and subdues the vamp, but now the blonde is dead and we have to call the cops. Except of course that thought is vetoed cause English guy is the one offering the money and sure you can experiment on the vampire, sorry about your friend, let's bury her and move locations.
They move the vampire to an abandoned pool with UV ray lights and silver harpoons provided by the English dude and do some science type things. Morgue dude goes to get holy water and other vampire stoppers (seeds and ropes with knots). Cops show up at abandoned house with not-dead, now vampire girl, priest kills her and moves on.
Drug-dealer decides screw the money, I want to live forever and injects himself with vamp blood so he turns and runs off. He gets chased by English dude, who turns out to be a major pussy. Drug dealer vamps one girl, gets dead by priest, who then kills the poor girl who just got vamped and can't figure out why she killed her cat.
Back at the pool, main girl gives vampire her blood so they can get more blood out of him because when she was nicked, she started turning and now she wants professor dude to figure out how to stop her turning, and maybe find a way to heal his terminal illness too. Professor dude gets his vamp on as the English dude shows back up and gets vamped too by his BFF the professor. The prof reveals he's been looking for a vamp forever cause someone killed the last one he saw before he got to run his tests and really main girl, you thought I loved you for you and not your connection to the morgue? You and some other gullible chicks, sorry babe, erk, priest killed me before the disease did. English moron vamp dies weirdly, then vampire, who is actually Dracula fights with priest, who tells morgue dude to run with main girl out into the sunlight because it will cure her, albeit violently just like it did him. She decides never mind and ends up running away with Dracula who leaves priest guy alive and open to a sequel, but I'm not sure what's worse than a straight to video movie, so hopefully that will never happen. It was a very annoying waste of an hour and a half, but luckily I didn't waste the money buying it.
Next was Pandorum. Typical sci-fi set-up. We overpopulated Earth, so now we need to find elsewhere to live. Ship is sent out with 15,000 people to a planet 100 or so light years away.
Our main character (some guy I've never heard of) wakes up disoriented in a tube and after freeing himself, wanders around in a daze in an abandoned section of a ship. Power fluctuates and it's all dark and scary. He's upholding the grooming standard when another tube powers up and Captain Dennis Quaid appears. Main guy explains he thinks it's their turn to be on duty, but he can't get out of the section they are in and the power is going out and I think I'm the mechanical engineer on this thing if I could get my memory back. Rolling black-outs means reactor bad and must manually reset or die, but again, stuck in room that's not the bridge but does have computers.
He leaves Dennis Quaid to navigate him to the reactor or try to get to the bridge while he takes this conveniently placed vent system to somewhere else. Somewhere else leads to a locker room with a corpse, to a hallway, to a German girl kicking his ass, and then OMG Reavers! Reavers take corpse, German girl disappears, main guy runs after her into Norman Reedus, who gets eaten 5 minutes later. Dark and scary passageways, look a ninja! He convinces ninja to take him to reactor, German girl appears and tells them they're going the wrong way, follow me to my lab past the reavers' feeding ground. German girl is really a scientist who was sent to watch over the samples of everything to recreate Earth on the new planet. She thinks the reavers were made from the shit they put in the bio-tubes to get everyone acclimated to the new planet.
Dennis Quaid is hearing noises and freaking out and then the guy from Never Back Down, no the other one, Ryan the blonde, appears naked. Apparently he used his MMA scholarship to go into the space program. Also, the captain and first mate got space dementia, or Pandorum, and he was just defending himself really. But don't go out there man!
Back to the engineer and his posse who are trying to avoid the reavers and find the reactor. They run into another guy who invites them to eat, he just forgets to mention they're the main course. He tells them a lovely story about Earth being destroyed, one of the crew going crazy and killing people, and then gasses them and strings them up. As he is about to fillet them, the engineer convinces him that the ship is going to blow and I'm the only one to fix it. The cook releases them because life is more important than food and he can most likely kill you in the morning. They head to the reactor room, where they find that the reavers live at the bottom of the reactor. They warned us about nuclear power, we just didn't listen! Engineer goes across bridge but falls into the pit, while German girl makes it across just fine. She goes to the reactor and types in some stuff and opens compartments, but doesn't know the sequence to stop the bomb reactor from exploding. Engineer crosses the reaver river (say that three times fast) covered in human skin to save us at the last second! Hurrah! But all that noise woke the reavers up and our heroes must leave quickly.
Ninja gets into a one-on-one fight with Big Daddy Reaver where he kicks ass, but sweet, innocent little girl reaver cuts his throat. The cook makes it back to Dennis Quaid, but he's been having his own problems, including going insane and finding out he's actually the blonde guy all growed up and he was the one that went nuts and killed people. He kills the cook. Our heroes appear and engineer wants to know who the hell Dennis Quaid is, cause he's not the Captain and where the hell are we? They open the blinds to total darkness and Dennis Quaid would like to go back to being a God now, kthxbai. But then Rodney's whale friend Sam appears and the computer tells them they've been on the ship for 900 years. They're really on the new planet cause the ship's got autopilot, so even when the crew is off killing each other and being eaten by reavers, the ship can still get to where it's supposed to go.
Engineer and German girl fight Dennis Quaid, who has forgotten all his mad MMA skills. Somebody has a gun and a window breaks during the struggle. The room starts to fill up with water so engineer drags German girl into a pod while Dennis Quaid goes to drown in the captain's chair. Pod's emergency evacuation protocols launch our heroes into the water where they reach the surface. They gawk at their new world then more pods start shooting out of the water. The camera zooms out on the new world and tells us that there were 1200 survivors, but nothing about whether reavers are drowned-proof or how strict the breeding programs are going to be.
Out of all the movies I watched Monday, I liked Zerophilia the best. Guy likes girl, but he's got a small problem in the fact that he switches sexes after sex. Like Ranma 1/2 except with sex instead of water.
Luke goes camping and hooks up with random woman. He gets home and starts noticing strange things. But that doesn't stop him from falling for Michelle, a girl at his school (college, not high school like I first thought) a recent transfer from New York whose brother Max works at the local autoshop.
His first date with Michelle starts out great, but then he starts hallucinating and growing boobs and passes out in an alley, leaving Michelle, who'd just poured her heart out about her last disastrous relationship, at the table to wonder WTF? He goes around the next day and apologizes to her brother, swearing there were real shrooms in his mushroom dish, cause of the hallucinating and alley thing (he doesn't mention the boobs).
He goes to work that night and Sophie (Gina Bellman) shows up and tries to seduce him. He's all WTF himself and makes her leave. The next day he tells his BFF, Keenan, who tells Luke he wrote to a doctor about Luke's problems and here's some pamphlets to read. The guys double-date at the local watering-hole where Sophie shows up and reveals she's the doctor Keenan wrote to. She tells Luke he going to have problems, but he blows her off to finish his date. His problems get worse when he's hit in the nads yet doesn't react, so he runs to the bathroom to find out his dick's gone! Sophie follows him in with an I told you so, and goes on to explain Luke has zerophilia and can change back and forth. She says he needs to change completely first then he can fix it to change permanently if he wants.
Her suggestion is to fly solo the first time, which works fine for him as a guy, but as a girl he has some problems. As (s)he's still stuck trying to turn back, Max shows up and meets Luka. They get him to leave and Luka finally turns back to Luke with help from fantasies about Michelle and Max.
The next day Luke and Keenan have a hockey game and Luke gets into a fight with Max over Luka. Max tells Luke to stay away from his sister. Said sister goes to talk to Luke about the fact that she likes him, but he's being really weird. He says he's got stuff to work out and rants about her brother. She tells him her brother is just like her and her BFF and if he can't like Max then he can't like her.
Sophie tells Luke now that he's changed fully, if he has sex with another Z then he can lock sexes permanently. Then she reveals that she's a Z and they should have sex. He rejects the idea. He, Keenan, and Keenan's girl have a convo about what Luke wants and Luke is given a dress. He throws it away, then recovers it later. Luka then runs into Max and they have a talk and make out, which freaks Luka out and they get caught by Keenan, who tells Luke he has to make a choice.
Luke calls Sophie to agree to having sex. He shows up, they do it, Sophie becomes a guy and runs off, Luke becomes Luka and is stuck tied to the bed. Keenan rescues hir, and Luka tells him Sophie tricked him so she could become a guy. They find Sophie making out with a guy and tell him to change Luka back. She says it doesn't work that way. He was gay so he turned into a girl thinking it would be better, but as a guy he has no attraction to Luka what-so-ever. Luka doesn't care and wants to go back to Luke. Michelle shows up and finds out Luke slept with Sophie and about both of them being Zs. She wants to know if there is something in the water around here, because it was revealed earlier that she too is a Z and is actually Max. She storms off and everyone leaves angry, including Luka.
Luka tells Keenan she'll just have to make the best of it. Then she goes to Max to apologize to him and for Michelle about everything. He says he was just trying to be a man for Michelle. Luka wishes them both the best and Max reveals his tattoo, the same one Michelle has in the exact same place. They have make-up, gender-swapping sex and live happily-ever-after to confuse the fuck out of anyone wondering why Max and his girlfriend and Michelle and her boyfriend can't be in the same place at the same time and how many times they're going to get married and who's going to wear the dress.
First up was Dracula 2000 II: The Ascension. It starts of in Eastern Europe with the requisite crying girl running for her life, being followed by a poor man's Lou Diamond Phillips. The girl turns and shock!, she's actually a vampire and he's the priestly vampire hunter. Fight scene, she has a twin, he gets bitten, the twins lose their heads, huh, they don't dust.
Vampire differences in this movie- they don't dust; if you get nicked by their teeth, even just a little, you start turning, but if they full on bite you, you turn quick, like 5 minutes quick; apparently Dracula just keeps getting reincarnated when he "dies". Vampire stoppers - holy water, UV rays, stakes (but no one actually gets staked), be-heading, counting seeds, untying knots.
So back to the priest, who is in the sunlight screaming. And now we move on to New Orleans, where we have a Doctor professor in a wheelchair - who is dying - lecturing and then going out drinking with his students, including a dealer of knock-off prescription drugs. Professional ethics, what's that? His girlfriend, wife, SO, whatever, leaves them to get their drink on so she can get to her job at the county morgue. She's brought a body that was set on fire, but while doing the autopsy, she notices none of his organs have blood in them, so the dude helping her tells her to check his teeth. She does, canines pop out, she gets nicked, they freak out. Then they get a weird phone call offering 30 mil for the body in the morgue after she calls her honey to tell him about the freaky body. They decide to steal the body and sell it to the guy after they discover all its secrets. Priest guy shows up as they're body snatching and discovers this is not the corpse he's looking for.
They take the body to an abandoned house the professor just happens to own. Main girl, morgue dude, drug dealer, and random blonde girl chain the corpse up and fill a tub with blood while professor dude watches on camera. They wait around for 2 hours, then get bored and decide to fish the guy out. As they're fishing him out, he wakes up, things get destroyed, blonde goes flying out a 2-story window, weird English guy shows up and subdues the vamp, but now the blonde is dead and we have to call the cops. Except of course that thought is vetoed cause English guy is the one offering the money and sure you can experiment on the vampire, sorry about your friend, let's bury her and move locations.
They move the vampire to an abandoned pool with UV ray lights and silver harpoons provided by the English dude and do some science type things. Morgue dude goes to get holy water and other vampire stoppers (seeds and ropes with knots). Cops show up at abandoned house with not-dead, now vampire girl, priest kills her and moves on.
Drug-dealer decides screw the money, I want to live forever and injects himself with vamp blood so he turns and runs off. He gets chased by English dude, who turns out to be a major pussy. Drug dealer vamps one girl, gets dead by priest, who then kills the poor girl who just got vamped and can't figure out why she killed her cat.
Back at the pool, main girl gives vampire her blood so they can get more blood out of him because when she was nicked, she started turning and now she wants professor dude to figure out how to stop her turning, and maybe find a way to heal his terminal illness too. Professor dude gets his vamp on as the English dude shows back up and gets vamped too by his BFF the professor. The prof reveals he's been looking for a vamp forever cause someone killed the last one he saw before he got to run his tests and really main girl, you thought I loved you for you and not your connection to the morgue? You and some other gullible chicks, sorry babe, erk, priest killed me before the disease did. English moron vamp dies weirdly, then vampire, who is actually Dracula fights with priest, who tells morgue dude to run with main girl out into the sunlight because it will cure her, albeit violently just like it did him. She decides never mind and ends up running away with Dracula who leaves priest guy alive and open to a sequel, but I'm not sure what's worse than a straight to video movie, so hopefully that will never happen. It was a very annoying waste of an hour and a half, but luckily I didn't waste the money buying it.
Next was Pandorum. Typical sci-fi set-up. We overpopulated Earth, so now we need to find elsewhere to live. Ship is sent out with 15,000 people to a planet 100 or so light years away.
Our main character (some guy I've never heard of) wakes up disoriented in a tube and after freeing himself, wanders around in a daze in an abandoned section of a ship. Power fluctuates and it's all dark and scary. He's upholding the grooming standard when another tube powers up and Captain Dennis Quaid appears. Main guy explains he thinks it's their turn to be on duty, but he can't get out of the section they are in and the power is going out and I think I'm the mechanical engineer on this thing if I could get my memory back. Rolling black-outs means reactor bad and must manually reset or die, but again, stuck in room that's not the bridge but does have computers.
He leaves Dennis Quaid to navigate him to the reactor or try to get to the bridge while he takes this conveniently placed vent system to somewhere else. Somewhere else leads to a locker room with a corpse, to a hallway, to a German girl kicking his ass, and then OMG Reavers! Reavers take corpse, German girl disappears, main guy runs after her into Norman Reedus, who gets eaten 5 minutes later. Dark and scary passageways, look a ninja! He convinces ninja to take him to reactor, German girl appears and tells them they're going the wrong way, follow me to my lab past the reavers' feeding ground. German girl is really a scientist who was sent to watch over the samples of everything to recreate Earth on the new planet. She thinks the reavers were made from the shit they put in the bio-tubes to get everyone acclimated to the new planet.
Dennis Quaid is hearing noises and freaking out and then the guy from Never Back Down, no the other one, Ryan the blonde, appears naked. Apparently he used his MMA scholarship to go into the space program. Also, the captain and first mate got space dementia, or Pandorum, and he was just defending himself really. But don't go out there man!
Back to the engineer and his posse who are trying to avoid the reavers and find the reactor. They run into another guy who invites them to eat, he just forgets to mention they're the main course. He tells them a lovely story about Earth being destroyed, one of the crew going crazy and killing people, and then gasses them and strings them up. As he is about to fillet them, the engineer convinces him that the ship is going to blow and I'm the only one to fix it. The cook releases them because life is more important than food and he can most likely kill you in the morning. They head to the reactor room, where they find that the reavers live at the bottom of the reactor. They warned us about nuclear power, we just didn't listen! Engineer goes across bridge but falls into the pit, while German girl makes it across just fine. She goes to the reactor and types in some stuff and opens compartments, but doesn't know the sequence to stop the bomb reactor from exploding. Engineer crosses the reaver river (say that three times fast) covered in human skin to save us at the last second! Hurrah! But all that noise woke the reavers up and our heroes must leave quickly.
Ninja gets into a one-on-one fight with Big Daddy Reaver where he kicks ass, but sweet, innocent little girl reaver cuts his throat. The cook makes it back to Dennis Quaid, but he's been having his own problems, including going insane and finding out he's actually the blonde guy all growed up and he was the one that went nuts and killed people. He kills the cook. Our heroes appear and engineer wants to know who the hell Dennis Quaid is, cause he's not the Captain and where the hell are we? They open the blinds to total darkness and Dennis Quaid would like to go back to being a God now, kthxbai. But then Rodney's whale friend Sam appears and the computer tells them they've been on the ship for 900 years. They're really on the new planet cause the ship's got autopilot, so even when the crew is off killing each other and being eaten by reavers, the ship can still get to where it's supposed to go.
Engineer and German girl fight Dennis Quaid, who has forgotten all his mad MMA skills. Somebody has a gun and a window breaks during the struggle. The room starts to fill up with water so engineer drags German girl into a pod while Dennis Quaid goes to drown in the captain's chair. Pod's emergency evacuation protocols launch our heroes into the water where they reach the surface. They gawk at their new world then more pods start shooting out of the water. The camera zooms out on the new world and tells us that there were 1200 survivors, but nothing about whether reavers are drowned-proof or how strict the breeding programs are going to be.
Out of all the movies I watched Monday, I liked Zerophilia the best. Guy likes girl, but he's got a small problem in the fact that he switches sexes after sex. Like Ranma 1/2 except with sex instead of water.
Luke goes camping and hooks up with random woman. He gets home and starts noticing strange things. But that doesn't stop him from falling for Michelle, a girl at his school (college, not high school like I first thought) a recent transfer from New York whose brother Max works at the local autoshop.
His first date with Michelle starts out great, but then he starts hallucinating and growing boobs and passes out in an alley, leaving Michelle, who'd just poured her heart out about her last disastrous relationship, at the table to wonder WTF? He goes around the next day and apologizes to her brother, swearing there were real shrooms in his mushroom dish, cause of the hallucinating and alley thing (he doesn't mention the boobs).
He goes to work that night and Sophie (Gina Bellman) shows up and tries to seduce him. He's all WTF himself and makes her leave. The next day he tells his BFF, Keenan, who tells Luke he wrote to a doctor about Luke's problems and here's some pamphlets to read. The guys double-date at the local watering-hole where Sophie shows up and reveals she's the doctor Keenan wrote to. She tells Luke he going to have problems, but he blows her off to finish his date. His problems get worse when he's hit in the nads yet doesn't react, so he runs to the bathroom to find out his dick's gone! Sophie follows him in with an I told you so, and goes on to explain Luke has zerophilia and can change back and forth. She says he needs to change completely first then he can fix it to change permanently if he wants.
Her suggestion is to fly solo the first time, which works fine for him as a guy, but as a girl he has some problems. As (s)he's still stuck trying to turn back, Max shows up and meets Luka. They get him to leave and Luka finally turns back to Luke with help from fantasies about Michelle and Max.
The next day Luke and Keenan have a hockey game and Luke gets into a fight with Max over Luka. Max tells Luke to stay away from his sister. Said sister goes to talk to Luke about the fact that she likes him, but he's being really weird. He says he's got stuff to work out and rants about her brother. She tells him her brother is just like her and her BFF and if he can't like Max then he can't like her.
Sophie tells Luke now that he's changed fully, if he has sex with another Z then he can lock sexes permanently. Then she reveals that she's a Z and they should have sex. He rejects the idea. He, Keenan, and Keenan's girl have a convo about what Luke wants and Luke is given a dress. He throws it away, then recovers it later. Luka then runs into Max and they have a talk and make out, which freaks Luka out and they get caught by Keenan, who tells Luke he has to make a choice.
Luke calls Sophie to agree to having sex. He shows up, they do it, Sophie becomes a guy and runs off, Luke becomes Luka and is stuck tied to the bed. Keenan rescues hir, and Luka tells him Sophie tricked him so she could become a guy. They find Sophie making out with a guy and tell him to change Luka back. She says it doesn't work that way. He was gay so he turned into a girl thinking it would be better, but as a guy he has no attraction to Luka what-so-ever. Luka doesn't care and wants to go back to Luke. Michelle shows up and finds out Luke slept with Sophie and about both of them being Zs. She wants to know if there is something in the water around here, because it was revealed earlier that she too is a Z and is actually Max. She storms off and everyone leaves angry, including Luka.
Luka tells Keenan she'll just have to make the best of it. Then she goes to Max to apologize to him and for Michelle about everything. He says he was just trying to be a man for Michelle. Luka wishes them both the best and Max reveals his tattoo, the same one Michelle has in the exact same place. They have make-up, gender-swapping sex and live happily-ever-after to confuse the fuck out of anyone wondering why Max and his girlfriend and Michelle and her boyfriend can't be in the same place at the same time and how many times they're going to get married and who's going to wear the dress.