The Divide
Watched the Divide the other day with the girlfriend. I started it late at night and assumed she would just fall asleep or go to bed before it finished but once we got into it she was wide awake until the end. Basically this is kind of one of those lord of flies style movies were you watch people kind of devolve into animals.
The movie starts with a small group of people hiding in the bomb shelter from what looks like a nuclear explosion in NYC. The bomb shelter was set up by the building shady super Micky played by the guy from the terminator. Once everyone is down in there and the food and water starts getting tight all kinds of nasty stuff happens. There are some twists and I don’t want to give any spoilers.
Towards the end there are some kind of plot holes, having to do with basically the structure of the building, but all in all it was an enjoyable movie
Mister Touch – Malcolm Bosse
I found this book after looking at my web stats and seeing that someone was hot linking my image of Year Zero. Since I actually stole the image from someone else I figured it was ok for someone to steal it from me and ended up reading the site for a minute. The author of the site recommended Mister Touch so I picked it up used on amazon. At first the title kind of turned me off because it sounds like it is about a pedophile or something but at this point I am pretty into the book.
The book was written in like 92 or 93 and starts out set in NYC. It is very much old new york city where it’s scary and dark and covered with graffiti. If you hung out in NYC around this time period before the big city clean up you will totally get what I mean.
Anyway there has been a huge plague which has wiped out the vast majority of the population of the world. Many of the people left caught some sort of secondary disease which affected their sight and respiratory system. The group the book follows is a gang called the Skulls. The Skulls kind of started as a black gang from Harlem but after the plague it becomes a rag tag group of survivors from all walks of life. The leader of the gang renames each person as they enter the gang and he takes the names from graffiti found on the subways, so there are names like Mister Touch, Cola Face, Fierce Rabbit etc.
The survivors end up having a conflict in the city with a group of less civilized survivors and end up striking out across America.
I like the book, its 90s ghetto slang and characters’ styles are great and I recommend reading it.
Devils Playground – sucks
Watched this new zombie movie on netflix watch it now. I really wanted to like it but I couldn’t make it through it. The movie starred a whole cornucopia of British actors I had seen on other show such as prime suspect and also Dexter’s bad British girlfriend.
The plot of the movie doesn’t seem to make much sense, but it starts off looking pretty slick so I forgave that for a while. Some type of bad drug corporation has made a new “performance enhancing” drug and is doing clinical trials before they sell it. Think umbrella corporation but even more incompetent, if that is possible.
So they set up clinical trials on 30,000 people. Whether the people are paid volunteers or what is not actually clear. Anyways 30,000 people apparently line up to be injected with some untested “performance enhancing” drug. Now if you think about this how many legal “performance enhancing” drugs are there on the market right now, outside of caffeine? Almost none, almost by definition something that increased performance tends to be addictive and usually would require prescriptions or whatever. But never mind that let’s test it on some people, not one person mind you, not ten people but 30,000.
So anyways people who take the drug all get sick and messed up except for one woman. A bunch of the people who get sick become these super powered monsters and if that is not out there enough, if they bite you, you become one in like a minute. It was OK to overlook the speed of infection being totally unrealistic for pretty much any disease ever known except for 28 Days Later because that is actually a pretty good flick. But this movie, it just comes off as ridiculous. So not only does the untested drug make people into super monsters it also turned itself into a virus and is contagious.
One guy gets bit but is able to suppress the infection by taking some sort of anti-viral shot, but it only lasts a little while and adds a sort of against-the-clock side plot to the movie. I made to the part where they are at the gas station and got bored and turned it off.
Quarantine 2: Terminal
Watched Quarantine 2 on netflix last night, it was pretty much what you would expect. The film picked up where the last one left off but at an airport in Los Angeles. You see on the news info about the quarantined building in the first movie, so it is almost happening at the same time. Long story short the virus infects some people on the plane. And they make an emergency landing, and everyone on the plan gets into a empty terminal, hence the name.
It was fun flick, but nothing too great. There is a little more insight into the people who made the plague but not that much insight. There are couple big plot holes, like why would someone have infected animals on a plane and if they knew about them wouldn’t they be very careful not to let them get near anyone else.
Children of Men
Let me start by saying I think this move is awesome. I know a lot of people probably disagree with this but screw them. To me this movie is the perfect blend of action, drama and sci-fi wrapped up into one. The characters and dialogue is believable and the action is fantastic.
The story takes place a little in the future, were for some reason women stop having children. The world is falling apart because of this with all kinds of factions fighting. Clive Owen plays Theo Faron a political activist who is entrusted by his ex girl friend with the task of transporting the only known pregnant girl in the world to a laboratory ship at sea. Sounds simple enough but of course there is a lot more to it. Twisting web of alliances and betrayals of various groups who want to use the pregnancy as a political tool.
The scope and scale of the conflicts in the movie just keep gaining more scope and scale until towards the end it’s practically a war movie.
This is fantastic flick definitely watch it
20 Years After
Yeah really hate to bash a low budget flick, but started watching this last night and couldn’t actually watch it.
You can check it out on netflix, right now and see if your opinion differs.
Apparently its about people living underground after some sort of apocalyptic event, and there is a guy on the radio.
A Boy and his Dog
This a definitely a must see in the genre, its is current on watch instantly on netflix.
A young Don Johnson stars as Vic, who roams a post apocalyptic wasteland accompanied by his telepathic, ever-grumbling dog and eventually winds up in the clutches of a female-dominated underground society that wants his sperm.
The is the description from netflix and it does kind of sum it up. This really is a fantastic movie that looks like it was made with like a $1000 budget. It’s never really explained how Vic and the dog got telepathically linked.
Check out this trailer for it
Survivors : The new version
Right now Survivors is available on watch it now via Netflix. It is kind of a re-make of the original ’70s show which are both based on a book of the same name.
Same deal, a flu outbreak kills everyone and a small group of survivors wander around England trying to survive.
It definitely is a fun show to watch, and it sucks you in and you will want to watch all of them rapidly. This new version is slicker, and has higher production values but in many ways falls short of the original. The characters tend to act in unbelievable ways and the conflicts with others often don’t seem that realistic.
Possibly the thing that bothered me the most is that the survivors seem to show no desire to arm and defend themselves. Maybe this was more noticeable to me because I am American and the show is British. However, it just started going too far.
In the 70s version of the show, the survivors carried guns and in some cases used them against people who wished to harm them. In this new version everyone hates guns and seems to have no desire to acquire them or use them. This would be all well in good in normal society but in the show every time they turn around there is someone threatening, kidnapping or robbing them. In fact there is even two guys who try to rape one of the characters.
In the midst of all this they make no effort to arm themselves. One character, Tom Price, does arm himself and in fact kills at least one person who threatens the group. But Tom Price in this version is a criminal gangster who escaped from prison by killing a guard in the midst of the plague. It’s funny that the one “Bad” person in the group is the one actually defending them in many situations.
Survivors: Original Series
There are two Survivors television series, one that is from the 70s and one from 2008. Personally I find the original to be the better show. Although not as exciting or fast paced, its more believable and realistic. (Well maybe not some of action scenes, they are pretty terrible).
The show is about a flu pandemic that pretty much kills almost all of the world. I think like and handful of people survive out of a thousand infected. It gave a survival rate in the show but I don’t have the show on hand so ….
Anyways, so basically there is 20-30k people alive in all of England and show goes on to show how one group of survivors cope.
It’s kind of interesting because since it came out in the 70s there is a big focus on a back to basics living off the land lifestyle. Also the outfits the characters wear are pretty awesome.
Probably the biggest detail I had a problem with on the show is the general lack of raiding and looting. It is established that the cities tend to be off limits due to disease, rats and crazy people. Which is believable but there is never really a reason given why the survivors don’t spend more time looting small towns. There are scenes where women are desperate for a sewing needle… I mean come on. None of the surrounding villages have any sewing supplies?
But all and all I really liked this series, here and there are some kind of boring dud episodes but the good ones more than make up for it.
Phase 7
Phase 7 is on watch it now on netflix as of last week. I was looking forward to seeing it, every since I saw the trailer on Quiet Earth. The trailer featured a song by SOD and band I listened to in high school, which I thought was pretty awesome.
The movie revolves around Coco and Pipi and young couple that lives in an apartment building somewhere in Argentina. There is some sort of flu/plaque outbreak which leaves them quarantined in their building.
The movie started of really good and then sort of dragged towards the end. Coco constantly being clueless was getting tired for me.
It’s definitely worth watching, the trailer makes it look better then it is though.
Here is the link to the trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5SKvst_Lyc