Puppets Are Evil

by Chris Vegvary

I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about why puppets should not exist. Of course, I could sum up this whole article by just telling you to go watch Peter Jackson’s film Meet the Feebles, but I wouldn’t do that to you, because that’s one of the worst things a person could do to another person. If you’ve seen this film, then you may have an inkling of what I’m talking about. Basically, the point I’m trying to make is that all puppets, no matter how harmless they look, are evil at their core.

Remember the movie Puppet Master? Those puppets weren’t necessarily evil, but they did evil things and yes, I am also judging them based on their appearances in this case. For instance, you’ve got the one pale, white puppet with the hat and black jacket, who seems to have blades protruding from many parts of his body. One of his hands is a knife and the other is a sharp hook, and I believe blades even come out of his eyes. Then you’ve got the evil grinning cowboy puppet with the six arms and a gun in each hand, and all the rest. Not the kind of dolls you want to send your children to bed with.

The Muppets? What are these horrible monstrosities given life through puppetry? No, I’m just kidding. The Muppets are probably the one form of puppet I can stand (not all of them, however). Jeff Dunham, though…he has some eerie-looking puppets. Yeah, some of them are meant to be adorable, like Achmed the Dead Terrorist and the purple critter whose name I don’t know, but in reality, they’re just horrific to look at. They sound funny, though.

While this may be slightly off-topic, I like the movie Puppet Master, but not as much as I enjoyed the movie The Puppet Masters, which has nothing to do with puppets. People always get the two confused, and for good reason…the titles are so similar. Back to puppetry, however: what of movies like Dead Silence, which features a whole collection of possessed puppets just waiting to rip someone’s jaw off? Those puppets are pure evil, and they kill, so…not cool.

There’s less evil puppets that are used for evil purposes, like the Billy doll from the movie series Saw. While the doll started out looking normal enough, if not a little terrifying, Jigsaw twisted Billy’s appearance to match the ugliness of his victims, and the doll was used as a form of communication between Jigsaw and his victims, but was also sometimes used as a weapon. And please, don’t even get me started on Chucky. Evil, evil, evil.

What’s my point here? If you haven’t gotten it by now, I can’t explain it any better than this: puppets are evil and not to be messed with. Whether they have their own agenda, or their possessed by the soul of a serial killer, or haunted by demonic entities, one thing is for sure: most of them are out to kill you. Take care around horrible puppets and if you think you see one move out of the corner of your eye, go with that feeling. It might just save your life.

What’s the Deal With “See No Evil 2”?

by Chris Vegvary

If you’re like me, you don’t see a lot of trailers for WWE films that make me go “Wow, I sure want to see that movie.” I just don’t have the energy to sit through certain films that are only vehicles for WWE superstars to show off their acting chops, like The Marine trilogy, for instance. There are exceptions to that, of course, with the most recent one being the film No One Lives. I’m not too into the WWE action films, but when they try their hand at horror, I like to see what they can do. Another example of this would be with the 2006 film See No Evil, starring WWE superstar Kane.

In the film, Kane plays the murderous psychopath, Jacob Goodnight. Whenever he kills someone, he takes his victims eyes (because he’s freaking sick, that’s why), and a whole lot of potential victims show up to clean up the abandoned hotel where he is staying. Unfortunately for the teens cleaning the place, Mr. Goodnight doesn’t like strangers, and he kills most of them one by one. Here’s where I noticed the start of a strange trend in horror movies: the guy playing the “jerk” in the film is the one who turns out to be the hero in the end. I first noticed this in the movie Hostel, where Jay Hernandez’s character was the one to survive instead of Derek Richardson’s character.

At the end of the film See No Evil, Jacob Goodnight is impaled through the eye with a pipe and tossed off a building, and through the magic of x-ray vision, we see that he is undoubtedly killed by the fall. Not only that, but then a dog comes in and takes a leak in his eye socket. But evil never dies, you know that. Just take a look at Freddy Krueger if you don’t believe me. So, in the spirit of that, word is that See No Evil 2 is being worked on right now, which will see the return of Jacob Goodnight. I’m happy for Kane, he seems to really like the character and I know he was hoping to get another chance to play him. While I don’t know anything about the plot at this point, I think it’s safe to say that Jacob Goodnight is going to be more like Jason after Friday the 13^th Part 4, where he is no longer human and is fully one of the undead (yet not a zombie—more like a rotting hulk).

It’s nice to see WWE films branching off in different directions. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that their ambitions for their horror-based film properties go way farther than the ones they have for their action movies, whether that’s intentional or not. One thing’s for sure, I’d like to see other WWE superstars, like maybe John Cena or The Miz, try their hand at horror movie roles in the future.

Will There Ever Be a “Jeepers Creepers 3”?

by Chris Vegvary

I enjoy when someone is able to come up with a new horror character. None can beat the classic horror villains of the 1980’s, like Freddy Krueger, but it’s always nice when a new mascot for the genre emerges. And so it was for me when the 2001 film Jeepers Creepers came out. Aside from having a compelling trailer that introduced me to my first taste of the music of the band Disturbed, the movie itself was actually really good.

A pair of siblings, brother and sister, are on a road trip home from college. After the two are harassed by an old truck with the license plate “BEATNGU”, the brother, Darry, spots a strange sight while driving down the road; he sees the man from the truck had run them off the road dumping a large, heavy-looking sack wrapped tightly in rope down a drainage pipe, and the man also looks up and sees them just as they pass. After getting away from the man, Darry decides that he and his sister Trish should go back and check out what got thrown down the drainage pipe.

From there, things pretty much spiral out of control for the pair. It turns out that whoever the man is, he’s been collecting hundreds of bodies and preserving them like petrified wood in the basement where he lives, and some of the bodies turn out to be over a hundred years old. How, you ask? Because it turns out that the man is, in fact, not a man at all; it is a creature that wakes up for 23 days every 23^rd Spring in order to feed on certain people and replenish its body parts by eating theirs. Hence the license plate on the truck, “B EATNG U”. In the end, Darry is taken by the Creeper, who kills him and consumes his eyes.

The second film takes place a couple of days later and involves a vengeful father (whose son was taken by the Creeper) hunting the creature down in order to kill it. The Creeper begins to stalk a school bus full of high school athletes on their way back from a basketball game. While it doesn’t have a lot of time left before it has to go back to sleep for 23 or so years, the Creeper assaults the students in full force, but after a homemade-harpoon-gun blast to the face, the Creeper goes into hibernation again. At the end of the film, it is 23 years later, and the Creeper is only a day or so away from waking up.

There was a third film planned for the series called Jeepers Creepers: Cathedral, but all information on it seems to have dropped off the map. Were the first two films really hated that much? I’m aware that the second one wasn’t as well liked as the first one, but I thought they were both really good movies. It would have been nice to see the origin of the Creeper, but I suppose that’s never going to happen now. While the Creeper’s time may have passed, I still maintain hope of seeing him again in some form or fashion, whether it be a long-delayed movie, a comic book, or hey, how about a video game? Only time will tell.

Let’s Have A Sequel to “The Thing”

by Chris Vegvary

One of my favorite sci-fi/horror movies of all time is John Carpenter’s The Thing, a 1982 remake of the film The Thing from Another World, as well as an adaptation of the novella Who Goes There?, is one of the modern-day classics. A group of American scientists at an Antarctic outpost are happened upon by a husky dog that is being shot at by men from a helicopter. The helicopter lands and the scientists are unable to understand the attackers’ attempts to communicate because they speak Norwegian, and in trying to shoot the dog, one of the Americans is hit, which causes the officer in charge to return fire, killing one of the Norwegians after the other accidentally blows himself up with a grenade.

What the Americans don’t realize is that the dog is actually a shape-shifting alien creature in disguise, and we’re not talking a cute little E.T. type of creature here. This Thing can alter its form to have any part of its “body” become any part of any organic creature it has absorbed in the past, whether human, alien, or other; this includes clawed tentacles, spontaneously sprouting spider or crab legs, and in one extreme example, a “flower” of dog tongues with sharp teeth protruding from the “petals”. Really sick, classic special effects, where nothing was CGI…except maybe one brief shot towards the end of the film.

In 2011, a prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing (the 2011 film being simply titled, The Thing) was released, and it explained the events that took place at the Norwegian camp that caused the two scientists in the helicopter to follow the dog all the way to the American camp. While it was a brilliant idea, as I’ve always wanted to know what happened there when they went to investigate the Norwegian camp in the 1982 film, it was kind of poorly executed. I remember hearing that they were only using practical effects like the ones seen in John Carpenter’s 1982 version, and I’ve seen what some of that version looks like, but unfortunately, someone went back through all the special effects and turn it into a CGI nightmare. When the CGI is so prevalent that it completely takes you out of the movie, maybe you should scale way the hell back on it.

What some folks don’t know is that there was a sequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing released in 2002 in the form of a video game. The plot features you as Captain Blake, part of a team of soldiers sent to investigate the American camp after the events of the first film. It has some pretty cool gameplay mechanics, and trust is an important issue in the game. For instance, you have soldiers under your command at some points throughout the game, and they may not fully trust you until you prove to them that you’re not a Thing. If they get too freaked out, they may either try to hurt you or another team member, or they may decide it’s all too much and blow their own head off. Blood test kits can reveal to your teammates that you are not a Thing, or it can reveal that THEY are, in fact, a Thing.

It was a good game, but some of the plot didn’t match up with what happened in John Carpenter’s The Thing. Good effort, but let’s see something like that in movie form. Less CGI, more old-school, practical effects using rubber, slime, and carbopole (which I believe is the stuff used to hold Twinkies together). Just let us have this one thing (heh), Hollywood. 2011’s The Thing was fine, but I need more than that, and this time, when you promise you’re going to use practical effects, I expect you to follow through on that. No more CGI touch-ups.

“Desolation of Smaug”: Worth It?

by Chris Vegvary

(Potential spoilers for those who haven’t seen The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug)

I recall back in the day, the early 2000’s to be precise, when the first movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out. I was forced by a friend to watch the movie, Fellowship of the Ring, which saw Gandalf the wizard, Frodo Baggins the Hobbit, and a group of brave warriors band together to send the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom to destroy it once and for all. I did not care for the movie the first time I watched it, and fell asleep. The second time I decided to give it a chance, Fellowship of the Ring became my favorite film in the whole series, including the newer Hobbit movies. I don’t know what changed exactly, but I liked what I saw. Didn’t care for the other two Lord of the Rings movies, though.

When the first film in The Hobbit series came out in 2012 (An Unexpected Journey), I thought it was going to be about as impressive as the latter two films in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (which is to say, very boring to me), but I was impressed at how it was not exceptionally dull. I remember parts of the old Hobbit cartoon from the 1970’s, and I liked comparing the events of the two in my mind. Bilbo Baggins and the rest of the company don’t look the same, but from what I recall, all the dwarves were pretty old and ugly-looking in the cartoon. I liked the cartoon’s designs for the trolls, though, where I felt like the film’s was lacking.

So recently, the second film in The Hobbit trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug (or Smooge, as I like to call him) was released to great success. Was it a good movie? Sure. Definitely not as boring as the two Lord of the Rings films I can’t stand to sit through, but really, wasn’t it all just filler? I realize that the events in the movie served the purpose of moving the whole thing forward, but when I think back on it, it seems like barely anything happened (I am fully aware that plenty of stuff happened). Bilbo, Thorin Oakenshield, and the rest of the company find the entrance to their great underground kingdom about halfway through the movie, and Bilbo is sent in to steal the Arkenstone from the treasure room where the dragon Smaug resides.

A good portion of the latter half of the movie sees Bilbo stroking Smaug’s giant ego while trying to get the Arkenstone, but he fails, and the movie ends with Smaug heading to the village of Lake-town to destroy it. Major cliffhanger, because I was really hoping and kind of expecting to see all that happen in this one. I guess I can be patient for the next film, though. All in all, I felt this one was not very exciting. Don’t get me wrong, it really is a good movie and it’s definitely worth a watch (maybe even more than one), especially if you intend to watch the third film when it’s released. It’s just that this one felt like filler to me, that’s all.

What’s The Future of “Evil Dead”?

by Chris Vegvary

For those of you who enjoy a good horror film, you may or may not have seen the original Evil Dead film, which was released in 1981 and introduced the world to the Necronomicon ex Mortis (or “Book of the Dead”); the Deadites, which are like zombies, but possessed by ancient evil spirits; and Ashley J. Williams, who would soon become our chainsaw-handed, shotgun-wielding, one-liner spouting hero. In the original film, however, Ash was just one of five unwitting college students that accidentally released the forces of evil, causing them all to have a really bad night.

The sequel, Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn, was released in 1987. The beginning of the film sort of retells the first film in a different way, focusing on Ash and his girlfriend Linda, and leaving out the other three characters from the original movie. Things play out in a similar way, but then something truly awesome happens. The so-called “Evil Force” that was released from the Necronomicon already possessed Ash in the beginning of the film, but he was saved from being a Deadite by the dawn of the rising sun. Still, traces of evil must remain, because Ash’s hand suddenly becomes evil and attacks him, and he is forced to cut it off with a chainsaw. This decision works out well for everyone in the end, because at some point after the bleeding stops, Ash uses his engineering skills to attach the chainsaw to the stump where his hand used to be, and he proceeds to rid us of the Evil Force, while himself being sucked into a wormhole leading to the distant past.

In the third film in the series, Army of Darkness, Ash crash-lands (literally) along with his car into the times of King Arthur. More of a comedy than the horror we’ve come to expect, Army of Darkness had its share of slapstick and yuks, sometimes in true Three Stooges fashion. It pits Ash against an army of undead and skeleton warriors led by an evil version of Ash that was borne out of his own body after being forced to consume an evil miniature version of himself. It wasn’t the best film in the series, but it had plenty of interesting parts, and it even has two different endings, one of which is sometimes shown when the movie comes on the SyFy channel.

In 2013, a “reboot” of the film came out titled Evil Dead, and it turns out that it wasn’t just another remake; it was also partially a sequel. Ash’s car that travelled back in time with him at the end of the second film can be seen sitting next to the cabin, covered by branches and brush. The Deadites featured in this film were different than their previous incarnations, in that they seemed way more vicious, although I’m sure that that’s pretty much how they would have been if they’d had that kind of technology when the first film was made. This film featured a female protagonist who is also forced to remove her hand in the course of the film, and Ash was not seen until the end of the credits, where he simply says “Groovy.”

Where does the future of the series lie? Supposedly, the plan is for Sam Raimi to make the film Army of Darkness 2, which would see the return of Ash Williams, and then for a sequel to the modern-day Evil Dead film. After that, the two films would crossover in one final film, where Ash and whoever survived the modern versions of the film would meet and kill the Deadites together. Unfortunately, Bruce Campbell seems to be flip-flopping on whether or not he is involved in any way, and there are both rumors that it IS going to happen and rumors that it ISN’T going to happen. At this point, my money says that it probably isn’t going to happen, although it would be like a dream come true.

Prequel To 300…Why?

by Chris Vegvary

Did I miss something? The movie 300, which came out in 2007, was based on a graphic novel and loosely based on real-life events that happened so long ago that who knows how mystical people actually were back then, and featured the deaths of three hundred Spartan warriors at the hands of the Persians and their leader, King Xerxes. So…didn’t Zack Snyder, the director of the film 300, say all he needed to say with the first film? Aren’t there films out there that don’t need to have their story told from different angles and points-of-view? Apparently not.

This movie isn’t just a prequel, however. It takes place before, during and after the movie 300, and I really can’t even fathom what the story thinks it’s about. For me, the summary is just a jumble of words mashed together that makes no sense, but I hope to have a clearer idea once I decide to watch a trailer. The thing is, the first movie was about the three hundred Spartan soldiers that pushed back the Persians for quite a while before they were overwhelmed and killed. The movie was highly stylized and seemed more based in fantasy rather than on what actually happened. But I wasn’t alive back then, so I can’t say for sure that all the events portrayed, weird as some of it may have seemed, didn’t actually happen.

So why do we need a prequel or a sequel, or anything to the movie 300? It just doesn’t seem necessary. Not that anything Hollywood does is necessary or rational in most cases, but these sorts of things happen anyway. People say Hollywood is running out of ideas, and I don’t think that’s totally true. What’s actually happening is that they’re not willing to take a chance (most of the time) on losing money with an unknown intellectual property, and so they milk the crap out of anything they can, even making prequels or sequels to movies that are already past their prime (I’m talking to you, 2011’s The Thing).

Regardless of whether or not we need another entry in the 300 film series, it’s happening. There’s nothing we can do to stop it, so I suppose we might as well suck it up and wait for it to come out on cable or Blu-Ray. However, if you’re excited to see this movie, then I honestly hope you enjoy it, and I tell you now that I intend to see it at some point, just not in the theaters. I can wait. And who knows? Maybe it’ll be better than the first one.