Being sick sucks. It did, however, give me a chance to catch up on some movies I’ve been meaning to see. Like, for example, this summer’s reboot of one of my favourite horror franchises. For those of you unfamiliar, The Evil Dead is an independent horror movie from 1981, written and directed by Sam Raimi. It spawned two sequels, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, and Army of Darkness. These might be three of the best movies the genre has to offer. They’re gory, they’re funny, they’re…groovy. Now the first major difference with this reboot is that they’re taking it much more seriously. The original movies were very tongue in cheek, blurring the line between horror and comedy. That’s not the case with this new one. It’s intended to be genuinely scary. Right off the bat, that made me skeptical, as most genuine horror movies (especially of the last ten years) kind of tend to suck. Surprisingly, though, I actually liked this movie. I mean, it’s not great. There’s way too much CGI, the ending goes on for about twenty minutes more than it should have, and it’s nowhere near as good as the original. But for a more recent horror movie, it was really good. I enjoyed it from beginning to end, and would definitely watch it again. Who knew?
Overall Rating: Groovy/10
I’m a big fan of Futurama, and I sort of had mixed feelings about it being cancelled. On the one hand, it was sad to see the show finally die after all it went through (9 broadcast seasons over 2 networks plus four straight to DVD movies). On the other hand, I was glad to see it go out while it was still good, instead of going to season 25 and being completely unwatchable (AHEM, SIMPSONS, AHEM). So was this a good finale to the series? Well, not really. The basic plot of the episode (spoilers) is that the entire universe is frozen in time except for Fry and Leela, who spend an entire lifetime together while time is stopped. At the end of the episode, The Professor appears and creates a device that will unfreeze time and send them all back to before time froze. The only downside being that Fry and Leela will both completely forget the years they spent growing old together. They decide to “go around one more time” and the episode ends with a big flash of light as everything is reset. While this is a great way to conclude the Fry and Leela storyline, that’s not what the show was about. It had such a rich cast of characters who we saw virtually none of in the finale. No Zapp Brannigan, almost no Zoidberg, even Bender was barely in it. As a last episode to such a long running series, I would have like to see something a little broader, with some sort of final send-off from all the characters, as apposed to a self contained love story between Fry and Leela. While this may have been the wrong note to go out on, it was still a funny episode and I’ll remember the series fondly. And who knows, it might even get revived again someday. Hell, it happened twice already…
Dick's Movie Reviews 