X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009): Fox continues to crap all over one of my favorite parts of pop culture. On the bright side, while Brett Ratner's unbelievably bad and disrespectful (of the first two movies, of the comics, his audience and possibly humanity at large) third X-Men film nearly had me in tears of pain, at least half of this masterpiece of unintentional humor produces tears of laughter. The other half unfortunately is the pure teeth-gnashing annoyance that results when you let robots who have been fed a diet of all the wrong action film clichés and are now eagerly ticking the action film ticky boxes one by one write your film, instead of actual human beings.
I Sell The Dead (2007): This comedy about the misadventures of the two body snatchers played by Larry Fessenden and Dominic "I was in Lord of the Rings and Lost" Monaghan who specialize in graverobbing the undead started out a mite slow, but soon won me over through a difficult to achieve mix of playfulness, genre homages and humor I for once did find funny. It also works as a love letter to all poor proletarian bastards who ever had to pay their rent through work done for madmen and mad scientists, making this some kind of low class horror fan feelgood movie, as if one of those British social realist filmmakers had suddenly developed a sense of humor and met a member of the working class he's always going on about.
The only thing I didn't like about it was Ron Perlman's oirish accent, if mostly for reminding me of the dreadful Mutant Chronicles.
The Hills Run Red (2009): The basic premise of an obsessed film student and entourage trying to track down a copy or at least the production traces of the single, infamous and lost horror film of a disappeared filmmaker and landing in a backwoods horror movie has the possibility to make for an intriguing, even intelligent film. Too bad that director Dave Parker just trots out one bad horror movie cliché after the other without ever doing anything interesting with any of them. Instead, we get groan-worthy characterization, mostly dreadful acting and the sort of script that bases its view of the world and psychology exclusively on other movies that themselves didn't have much of a clue about anything to begin with. Adding some Scream-like laziness hidden under the veil of "irony" just means adding insult to injury.
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