Skyline (2010)

This movie takes place in Los Angeles and stars Eric Balfour, Donald Faison and Scottie Thompson. Aliens come to L.A. and possibly the rest of the world, put people in a trance and take them. Where do they take them you ask? Into their spaceship where they take their brains is my answer.

This "film" if it can be called that, is one of the worst movies that I have seen in a long time and I have seen "Natural Born Killers". In that movie, at least the audience could walk out of the theater (no kidding, at least 15 people walked out). I watched this entertainment nugget at home so all I could do is stomp off to the restroom. I have nothing good to say about it and neither would you. Don't waste your time. I can't even bring myself to subject anyone to a clip, so I'm not posting one.

92 Minutes. Rated PG-13. I give this movie 1/4 OF ONE STAR. Hey, c'mon, someone put their heart and soul into making this thing after all.

Splice (2009)

Clive Nicoli (Adrian Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) are genetic engineers and a couple working for a pharmaceutical company that is splicing together different kinds of animal DNA to create new kinds of animals.

Their last experiment seemed to work o.k. so they would like to splice together human DNA with animal DNA to see what the results are. The pharmaceutical company rejects their proposal and they decide to proceed anyway to see what happens.

A creature that they agreed would be elimated once it got to a certain stage is created, but Elsa can't bring herself to kill it. She becomes attached to it and it grows and learns at a very fast rate. She names it Dren (nerd spelled backward) and they move Dren to an old farmhouse when they realize that the lab that they work in is going to be remodeled and they can't keep her there. During the course of the movie, the couple who were once so close become divided.

This movie is not really my genre, so it wasn't my favorite. It wasn't an awful movie until the last half hour which I found to be disturbing. I don't know if I didn't like the movie because it deals with mixing DNA's and I find that scary (it is probably already being done but I don't want to know about it), or if the movie was bad. Other critics seemed to like it.

104 Minutes. Rated R. I give this movie TWO AND ONE HALF STARS.

The Fourth Kind (2009)

This movie is supposed to be about actual events that occurred in Nome Alaska in October of 2000.

Dr. Abigail Tyler (the real one), a psychologist, is being interviewed about these events and the movie mixes in actual footage with the film often using a split screen with the actual footage along with the filmed footage.

Dr. Tyler's husband was recently murdered and she is seeing another therapist, Dr. Campos (Elias Koteas), to help her deal with it. Her daughter Ashley (around 6) has become blind from the trauma, she also has a son that is about 12.

Dr. Tyler (Milla Jovovich) returns to Nome and gets back to work interviewing her own patients. She finds that she is hearing the same stories over and over. Her patients seem to be having difficulty sleeping and they see a white owl outside their window with some of them remembering a white owl from their childhoods. She decides to put one of her patients under hypnosis to ask them about it. The patient, Tommy, gets all upset about something he has seen and jumps off the couch. Dr. Tyler wakes him up and he won't tell her what he saw. Later that night, he holds his family hostage and wants to talk to Dr. Tyler. He says that he must shoot his family because of what he had seen and begins to talk in a strange language then proceeds to murder his family as well as kill himself. The sheriff (Will Patton) thinks that something that Dr. Tyler did when she hypnotized Tommy is what caused this.

Dr. Campos flies to Nome from Anchorage to see Dr. Tyler and sits in while she hypnotizes Scott, another patient. Scott goes under, freaks out, wakes up then throws up. After Scott leaves, Dr. Tyler tries to talk to Dr. Campos about alien abduction, the supposed "Fourth Kind" of contact with aliens. As they are about to leave the office, her secretary gives her a tape that she was transcribing. On the tape is Dr. Tyler screaming and a strange voice talking in another language. Dr. Tyler goes home to try and remember what happened. She contacts a man, Dr. Odsumani (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) that specializes in old languages and he says that it is an ancient language called Sumerian. He listens to the tapes and recognizes the words "examine" and "destroy". Dr. Tyler gets a call from Scott's wife saying that Scott wants to be hypnotized again. He begins levitating off the bed and screaming in Sumerian. Scott's neck is broken at the end of the session and the sheriff again blames Dr. Tyler and wants to arrest her, but she talks him out of it and he places a deputy outside of her house. While he is there, he sees a large bright light over the Tyler home and when the police go into the house, Dr. Tyler's daughter Ashley is missing. The sheriff thinks that there is something wrong with Dr. Tyler and takes her son out of her custody.

Dr. Tyler gets hypnotized by Dr. Campos and Dr. Odusami in the hopes that she may be able to find out what happened to her daughter. When she goes under, she freaks out and begins speaking in Sumerian. Something happens in the room and all three people are gone. Dr. Tyler wakes up in the hospital with a neck brace on and she tells Sheriff August that they were all abducted. Sheriff August says that her husband was not murdered, that he committed suicide and Dr. Tyler says that there was no way that he would have done that but decides that she must have suppressed the memory of the event.

The interview ends and it shows that Dr. Tyler is in a wheelchair. Ashley is never found and she has no contact with her son who still blames her for Ashley's disappearance.

This was pretty bad. The supposed "real" footage looked like it was filmed by bad actors. The split screen thing was annoying.

Rated PG-13. 98 Minutes. I give this movie ONE AND ONE HALF STARS.

The Birds (1963)

This review is in honor of my cockatiel "Bird" who recently went to that huge flock in the sky. He used to love MTV and Guns N Roses, He especially enjoyed "Welcome to the Jungle". He was with me for almost 30 years and his screeching will be missed.

This movie, directed by the amazing Alfred Hitchcock, was based on a short novel by Daphne du Maurier.

Melanie Daniels(Tippi Hedren) meets Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in San Francisco while picking up a bird for her aunt at a pet shop. Melanie pretends to work at the shop and Mitch pretends to think that she does until he lets her know that he sees through her ruse. I think that the expensive dress gave her away as her father owns a large local newspaper. Mitch is there to order some lovebirds for his sister Cathy who is having a birthday. Melanie and Mitch part, but Melanie knows what she wants and finds out what his address is and decides to deliver the lovebirds herself.

Mitch lives in a town north of San Francisco called Bodega Bay where the movie was actually filmed. When she gets into town, she decides to take a motorboat across the harbor to surprise Mitch. She looked really good doing it in her fancy coat, hair and pumps. She leaves the birds at the house and drives across the harbor again although Mitch sees her and drives around the harbor to meet her in his car. While she is crossing the harbor in the boat, a seagull dive bombs her leaving her with a bit of a bloody forehead.

Over the next few days, Melanie meets some of the other people in Mitch's life including Mitch's slightly controlling mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy), his 11 year old sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright) and his former girlfriend and Cathy's teacher Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette).

The bird attacks escalate beginning with a bird killing itself by slamming into Annie's front door where Melanie is spending the night (how weird is that, not the bird dying but her staying at her crush's old girlfriend house. What, no hotel?). The birds then attack a group of children that attend Cathy's birthday party at Mitch's house. The famous schoolyard scene then occurs with the attack of crows on the schoolchildren. After that attack, Melanie goes to a bar to call her father and finds that several other attacks have happened. People are starting to become hysterical with a woman accusing Melanie of being the catalyst since this didn't start happening until Melanie showed up. Some people run outside and the birds begin a huge attack that includes the famous phone booth scene where Melanie is trapped inside the booth.

Mitch comes and picks up Melanie and they go to pick up Cathy from Annie's house and find Annie dead with Cathy crying inside. They go to Mitch's house and barricade themselves inside. There is another attack as the birds fly in through the fireplace. Things calm down and everyone goes to sleep. They later hear something upstairs and find that the birds have broken through the roof. Melanie is attacked and they manage to get her out of the room, but must take her to the hospital. Everyone calmly goes out to the car as they are surrounded by birds everywhere...just watching them.

This movie is awesome and way ahead of it's time.

Rated PG-13. 120 Minutes. I give this film FOUR AND ONE HALF STARS.

There was an instance in Capitola where some strange bird activity occurred. Apparently Hitchcock used to have a home in Scotts Valley and he requested a copy of the article from the Santa Cruz Sentinal be sent to him as "research material for his latest thriller". Read about it here www.santacruzpl.org/history/articles/183/

Brian and I went to Bodega Bay years ago and it was fun to drive along the exact routes that you see in the movie. We even sat in front of the schoolyard where the crow attacks occurred. I hate crows. We also saw this movie screened at the Stanford Theater a few years back and got to see Tippi Hedren who did a Q & A in between movies. She was lovely! She is also the mother of Melanie Griffith and runs a refuge for big cats (lions and tigers).

Keep an eye out for a quick appearance of Hitchcock when Melanie goes into the pet shop at the beginning of the movie. Alfie liked to make small cameo appearances in his films. Here is his cameo in "The Birds".

The Crazies (2010)

The residents of a small mid western town are suddenly going insane. What's going on?

Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) spots a resident that everyone knows coming onto the field of a high school baseball game in progress. He walks right through the middle of the game, so the sheriff figures he's just drunk and goes out to the field to confront him. The resident takes out a gun and David is forced to shoot him.

David and his Deputy Russell (Joe Anderson) go out to investigate a dead soldier that has been found out in the woods and discover that a plane had crashed in a body of water, the water that the towns drinking water comes from. They come to the conclusion that the ever increasing amount of people doing nutty things is caused by something on the plane that has seeped into the drinking water.

All of a sudden the town is overrun by soldiers who take everyone that might be infected, including David's doctor wife Judy (Radha Mitchell). David escapes from a group of people being "released" and tries to save Judy and her employee Becca (Danielle Panabaker) from being killed by an infected man who is systematically killing people with a pitchfork while they are strapped to gurneys.

David and Russell are able to rescue them and the four of them try to get out of town by hiding from infected people and soldiers alike. Unfortunately Becca and Russell don't make it. I won't tell you how, but one of them is involved in an unfortunate car wash altercation.

David and Judy end up at a truck stop and realize that the soldiers are killing everyone, not just the infected when they spot a huge pile of bodies. This is probably so that word did not get out to the rest of the population.

The last scene is the two of them running toward a large city as a satellite shows the computer saying "initiate containment protocol" about the town they are heading towards. Ouchie!!

This movie wasn't actually that bad for this kind of genre. It is a remake of a movie made in 1973. The photo on the right is from the 1973 version.

Rated R. 101 Minutes. I give this movie TWO AND THREE QUARTERS STARS. (ALMOST THREE STARS)

Paranormal Activity (2009)

This independent film directed by Oren Peli takes place over a number of days in which a couple (Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston) decide to film themselves overnight to try and see if there is a ghost haunting them. This film is recorded in the manner of "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield" in which all is done with a hand-held camera. In this case, a lot of the time the camera is steady, thank goodness. It didn't feel like I had to break out the Dramamine.

The film begins with Katie coming home from school and Micah already filming her as she gets out of her car. We find out during the movie that Micah is a day trader and Katie is an English student, however, neither of them seems to do any work. Katie doesn't seem to want Micah to film her, but gives in most of the time. She has called a psychic to come and visit the house and we find out that she has been haunted off and on by some sort of entity since she was eight years old. The psychic agrees that there is something in the house, but he feels that it is a demonic sort as opposed to a ghostly type and gives her the number to a demonic expert. He also advises them not to antagonize the demon as it could become more aggressive. Micah doesn't want her to call the expert, he wants to try to take care of it himself.

For much of the rest of the movie, they are filming continuously at night and during the day. The night filming produces paranormal activity that begins slowly, but quickly becomes more frequent and aggressive and eventually occurs during the day as well as at night. We are led to believe that this escalation is due in part to the fact that Micah has purchased a Ouija Board after Katie has asked him not to. When they go out to dinner, filming shows the cursor being moved about the board and it catching on fire leaving some sort of wording on it. This, strangely enough, doesn't really seem to bother them. Katie decides to call the demon expert, but he is out of town. The psychic comes back, but leaves the house quickly when he senses how angry the demon is. See Ya!

Upon reading how others saw this film, many seemed to think that this film was the scariest thing that they had seen. According to some things that I have read, in early viewings, people actually walked out because they were freaked out. I didn't feel this at all. There were definitely parts that were creepy and made me feel uneasy. There was a part where Katie got out of bed and just stood and stared at Micah for three hours, and a part where something pulled her out of bed and down the hall. VERY unsettling! There were more, but I don't want to give them away. A good movie to see on Halloween!

This film was first screened at ScreamFest in October of 2007 and was shown at Sundance in October of 2008. It took several people from Dreamworks to view it before Spielberg saw it and was creeped out by it. Paramount also bought rights to it. This film cost $11,000.00 to $15,000.00 depending on where you read and was made in about seven days. As of October 30, 2009, it has grossed over 74 Million in the U.S and Canada and has become the most profitable independent film ever. There are plans for a sequel.

99 Minutes. Rated R. I give this film THREE AND ONE QUARTER STARS because it was different and creepy!

Saw VI (2009)

I had not seen any of the "Saw" movies, so I tried to keep an open mind. My husband, sister and brother-in-law have seen all of these movies in a really strange and twisted tradition, they attend together. I think that we were four of the thirty people in the theater and that included the people who brought in the six and four year old (Who DOES that? Some people really need to go through the "Saw" puzzle for other reasons!).

I was not a fan of this movie. While there did seem to be a plot, that of a killer ("Jigsaw" played by Tobin Bell) playing his game with an insurance executive that denied him access to alternative treatment for his Cancer. Although the mastermind behind the killings is dead, he seems to be able to use his minions (Detective Hoffman played by Costas Mandylor and his ex-wife Jill played by Betsy Russell) to continue his games. There are many flashbacks to why Jigsaw wants this executive to go through the parts of his game. The flashbacks show that the executive William (Peter Outerbridge) uses a formula that he concocted to basically decide who lives or dies by denying treatment when it is not financially positive for Umbrella Insurance. When the killing starts it includes random people from his office, anyone from the janitor to his secretary. Just like in his job, he must decide who lives and who dies. The warehouse that this takes place in reminds me of a really bad haunted house that they make up a few days before Halloween. This movie is not scary in any way although I do cover my face right before the predictable killing parts (because I'm wimpy). The "acting" is really bad although there is an interesting twist at the end.

90 Minutes. Rated R. I give this Movie ONE AND ONE HALF STARS.

Zombieland (2009)

A virus has infected humanity. How it happened and how far it reaches, no one knows. About the only thing that is clear is that there are not many people still around that are not infected. The only uninfected humans that we see are five people and no animals.

This movie was a riot! It was short, (less than an hour and a half) but we laughed through most of it. The movie is narrated by Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, who was last seen in "Adventureland" which was a big disappointment) who, in his quest to stay alive in the Zombie filled world has made up a list of items that a Zombie Evader needs to live by. For example, he warns that one needs to be careful in the bathroom as Zombie's like to crawl under the stall doors. Throughout the movie, his list of rules pops up on the screen, very amusing in opportune moments. He meets up with Talahassee (Woody Harrelson) and they decide to travel toward Texas. I am not usually a big fan of Harrelson, (again because he seems like kind of a jerk in real life) but he nails it here as a Twinkie hunting badass in a wardrobe right out of "Wild at Heart" (love the Python jacket). He likes to find some of the more interesting ways to kill Zombie's, think garden tools.

While on one of their stops in the search for Talahassee's Twinkies, they stumble upon a couple of sisters, Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) who turn out to be a couple of con-artists. Yes, everyone seems to go by names of places that they are either from or are going toward. They all straighten out their differences and decide to head to the west coast to an amusement park called Pacific Playland that is rumored to be Zombie free. When they get to L.A. they decide to crash at a nice home for the night and end up at Bill Murray's house where they meet the celebrity who turns in an awesomely funny performance.

Brian and I laughed through most of this movie. It also received a huge ovation in the theater. There was a lot of gore, but it was gross and funny at the same time. The gore seemed kind of cartoonish with a lot of drooling and black and red spew. Nice!

If you are looking for another good Zombie type movie that is more of a comedy, check out "Shaun of the Dead". It takes place in England.

This movie was highly entertaining. I am giving this THREE and THREE QUARTERS stars.

Rated R