From a review of the movie The Clan of the Cave Bear at IMDb, this is the fourth paragraph of an otherwise straightforward review.

Some critics scoff at the primative community portrayed here, but it in fact is very accurate. In the DVD commentary we learn that much of the design for this film came from watching a few crude videotapes that were actually made by the Cro-Magnons during that prehistoric period and were discovered, well-preserved, in far northern sub-freezing caves in the 1960s. Not surprisingly, they were in the Beta format.

*dies*

Blame it on my noticing that there’s a movie called Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell up on hulu.com, then glancing at One Million Years BC at IMDb to make sure I was spelling Raquel Welch’s name right, and clicking on The Clan of the Cave Bear.

I swear, you just can’t make this stuff up.

I’ve got a post up at Odd Shots featuring the trailers of several paranormal-ish movies that I’m looking forward to (once I get caught up with my writing.) I’m not online much, and I expect that this blog will be pretty quiet through the end of February, but I’ll always be at Odd Shots on Fridays.

So far, my 2010 release schedule looks like this (full descriptions below the cut):

DEMON BLOOD (excerpt added), July 2010
“Here There Be Monsters” in BURNING UP, August 2010
THE IRON DUKE, October 2010

I expect to revamp the site around March or April, and I should have more information regarding the Iron Seas series up then, along with excerpts. I hope everyone is having a fantastic New Year!

Click to see the full descriptions of the upcoming books…which I totally copied from the “Upcoming” page on this site, heh. Cut and paste blogging, you gotta love it.

My love for the original mini-series is pretty well-documented on this blog and elsewhere. I’m going to give the new series a few more weeks, mostly out of nostalgia (and because I like some of the actors).

But, honestly, the first misstep to me was using the ‘V’ as a symbol for the aliens and calling them Vs. Anyone remember that moment in the original mini-series when that ‘V’ was spray-painted across the poster? It was meaningful and inspiring (to me, anyway). Heavy-handed, yes. But more than humans vs. aliens.

ETA2: Aha! Found it (the 2nd video is actually the first appearance of the symbol, but the speech toward the end of the first is what gave *that character* doing it so much weight):

I really hope this series is more than just humans vs. aliens :-/ Because if you’re going to do it … do it right.

ETA: Also, I really hope there is a WTF moment as awesome as this:

…was Stephen King’s Silver Bullet. I’m talking about it over at The Book Smugglers as part of their fantastic Halloween week.

Gary Busey and Corey Haim? You just gotta love it.

My apologies to everyone who can’t look at YouTube videos. I didn’t intend to have two YouTube posts in two days, and I have no idea why I ended up on YouTube, looking up Bob Ross at midnight. I know there was a link that took me there, that there was a reason I wanted to see a Bob Ross clip, but then I hit this and totally forgot it:

Awesome. And it’s the only parody I saw (that I bothered to watch all the way through) that worked, and that had a point.

I used to love this show when I was a kid, and maybe that’s why so many of the parodies I saw just didn’t work for me. Not because Ross is untouchable, but because an “outtake” of someone with foofy hair saying “fuck” isn’t really close to my image of him, and parodies should be very close to the source material, not just throwing in a toilet word now and then. Now, an outtake of the real Bob Ross saying “fuck”? Funny, because it’s surprising.

Then, because I’m a dork, I watched this, which is someone using the Bob Ross technique in Photoshop (and compressed for time — this actually took an hour and a half, according to the info):

And someone doing the same thing in GIMP, but this one isn’t speeded up (and I’ll admit I didn’t watch all the way to the end. It’s a fascinating process, but without the soft voice and the happy little trees, just not the same. Sigh.)

So. This isn’t a review, because the more I think about this movie, the less happy I am with it, so I’m going to stop thinking too much about it.

This is one of those movies that I mostly enjoyed while I was watching it (especially the first part, before I realized that nothing I’d hoped or expected to see in a Terminator movie was going to show up) and right after I came back home, and I would have enjoyed a lot more if I hadn’t been such a fan of the other Terminator movies (1&2 — you know I don’t really count 3). This didn’t *feel* like a Terminator movie to me, and I didn’t realize until coming out how necessary the role of someone as protector was to my idea of these movies.

I mentioned on Facebook and Twitter that a lot more went into the explosions than into character, and that I really felt the heart of the first two movies was missing here. There weren’t any characters to connect with, not really. John Connor’s character wasn’t revealed in any significant way, and if he had an arc, I didn’t see it so much (but, to be fair, we did see how he became the leader of the resistance). The people around him were … well, they didn’t really have any personalities. I didn’t feel any connection *between* them, and I felt as if I was being told that there was a connection there, just because I knew the relationships — but we were never shown any kind of connection, and nothing to any of the characters beyond the surface level.

Also, the Terminator movies have always been about Sarah and John Connor, and someone in a protector role. I could accept that Sarah was gone in this movie … but although John was there quite a bit, the movie wasn’t his. No, it was Marcus’s, whose character didn’t really have an arc or decision to make, either — although he was the most sympathetic character in the movie. I missed the setup of someone as protector (Marcus didn’t really fit that, though I thought they were *trying* for that — as I mentioned before, far more affecting, to me, would have been a reversal: Connor trying to protect Reese after the kid was scheduled for termination…then after saving him, sending him off to the past to be killed.) And even if I just watch it as a post-apocalyptic movie, it doesn’t bring anything really new to the table (a few scenes felt like they came straight out of the recent War of the Worlds movie … but it does have some nice action scenes).

So, there it is. To me, the movies have always been about relationships (Kyle/Sarah, Sarah/John, John/the Terminator) and there just wasn’t much here to see. We never got below the surface. And although I was pleased by some of the surface stuff … it just doesn’t hold up.

Sigh.

ETA: I’ve heard that the script and the production was rushed through after the writer’s strike. I can definitely, definitely see how that might have affected this movie, and the lack of characterization. I think the bones are there, and good … the execution and the whatever-it-is about these movies that makes me *care* just didn’t come through. The late Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles did that a million times better than this movie did.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

*sob sob*

Screw you, Fox.

I just read that Iron Sky is coming soon, a movie about Nazis who have been hiding on the moon, waiting for their chance to return. And I blogged before about Dead Snow, which releases next month — and is about zombie Nazis in the Alps.

Here’s the teaser for Iron Sky:

And here’s the trailer for Dead Snow:

So, here’s a poll:

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Five hours ago, if you’d asked me what movie I’d NEEDED to see this year, and which one I’d go see over any other, it would have been Terminator. No longer.

I hope to god it plays in IMAX.

(thanks to Kresley Cole on Twitter)

I twittered about this last week, but recently I watched a movie that I expected to be fun in a B-grade, horror flick kind of way, and ended up better than I expected. Not only were there some scenes at the beginning that actually got my heart racing and my nails biting into my palms — and they had nothing to do with cave-dwelling mutants, but all to do with claustrophobia (which I don’t even suffer) — but the real surprise was the cast and the characters.

That movie was The Descent, directed by Neil Marshall and starring Shauna MacDonald (Sarah) and Natalie Mendoza (Juno).

The story was a little slow to get going, setting up tension between the main female characters (there are pretty much only women in this movie), but once they are in the cave I loved it. And it wasn’t the scare factor: it was the knowledge that they had women here who could kick my ass forward and backward, then start in on any action hero and come out hurting, but not without giving the dude a bloody mouth first.

I remember a moment the first time I was watching Scream, when what’s-her-face’s character just started whaling on the bad guy. Fighting back, and hurting him. My god, I loved the movie for that. But this one? Takes that to another level.

And it’s not like they are suddenly, inexplicably ninjas — just strong women desperate to save their lives. They kick, they punch, they scream, they get hurt, they bite.

Even the “bad” one — the one who was sleeping with her friend’s husband before he died (this isn’t a spoiler because it’s obvious from the beginning and he gets killed in the first scenes) — kicks ass. She kicks the MOST ass, and I have kind of a girl-crush on Natalie Mendoza now.

Anyway. I want more movies like this*.

(Also, if I’m ever in a cave fighting off a bunch of mutant cave-dwellers with an pick-ax or whatever that was, and you come up behind me real quiet-like, I’m probably going to accidentally kill you, too. And I’d feel bad, but I’d also think “Yeah, okay, she’s dead — I’ll leave her and try to come back to her later.” And if the “good” character later effed up my knee with that ax because I’d slept with her husband and accidentally killed the idiot who came up behind me in a dark cave, I’d think that she deserved the UK ending, too.)

ETA: *I heard they are making a sequel. Considering the ending, that’s not EXACTLY what I mean by “wanting more movies like this”.