2008-05-26

In which Ryan reviews the movie 'Shrooms'

I try to keep this blog generally comic and/or superhero themed. But, sometimes things just come along that are too fantastic not to discuss. In this case, it is a masterpiece of modern horror cinema known as Shrooms.



This movie follows 6 college-aged kids who decide to go out into the backwoods of Ireland and trip their nuts off on psychedelic mushrooms. The kids are as follows:



Troy: The hippie stoner kid. This guy is pretty blatantly a direct rip-off of Jay (from Kevin Smith's movies) but without all the funny jokes and things that make you hope he doesn't die. Troy is basically in this movie for two reasons.

A) To constantly tell his girlfriend to calm down

B) To get brutally murdered



Holly: Troy's hippie girlfriend. For some unknown reason, Holly doesn't shave her underarms, but unexplainably has smooth, freshly shaven legs. She exists pretty much only to be killed.



Bluto: The jock. Bluto is the tough-guy of our troupe. He openly admits to using steroids, and has two rings on each hand. One says "Death" and the other says "Coma". He also wants to fuck anything that moves



Lisa: Bluto's girlfriend, who is a total bitch to everyone all the time. That's pretty much it.



Tara: The central character of the story, Tara is one of the few who doesn't fit into an easy classification. She exists to make you want to kill her yourself.



Jake: The only semi-likable character in the bunch. Jake is an Irish guy who these kids know somehow. He's like that guy in high school who knew everything there was to know about drugs and everyone thought he was so cool, but then everyone had to generally straighten up after college and so now he hangs out with high school kids. The only difference is that these kids aren't in high school.



They never really explain how these people all know each other, which really wouldn't be a big deal, except for the fact that almost from the very start of the movie they all hate each others guts. That's really all you get to know about them. What they don't tell you straight-forward is that these kids are the smartest people alive. Which is what makes the movie so hard to grasp, because it seems like they make all the right choices, but still somehow they end up getting chased by a psycho.



They get off their plane and hop in Jake's van to drive out to the woods where they'll be picking the shrooms. On the way there, they see a car parked out in the woods, which prompts Jake to explain the concept of "dogging" to his friends. Apparently dogging is where a couple parks their car in the woods and has hot make-outs while other people watch. Then they flash the cars lights which tells the onlookers that they can approach the car and get a BJ from the passengers. Make sense? Yeah, didn't for me either. They also run into some hobos. Anywho, they reach their destination and set out to pick some mushrooms. This is when we learn that apparently there are two kinds of shrooms growing this season. The normal kind you want to take, and the Death's Head Mushroom, which looks exactly the same, except for a little black dot on it.



The Death's Head will apparently do one of two things:

A) Kill you very painfully

B) Give you crazy psychic powers that show you how people are going to die.



Guess what happens next!



You guessed it, Tara eats one and starts having a seizure. Unfortunately, she survives. They all head back to camp to start boiling their mushroom tea and Jake decides to tell the story of a giant brutal massacre that occurred at a home for unruly children on the very land they are camping at. Apparently the guys who ran the place were sadists and tortured the kids, so the kids put a few pounds of death's head shrooms in their soup and then everyone went crazy and killed each other, except for two of them who were never seen again. He then proceeds to tell them about how people are always finding dead, mutilated bodies in the area during mushroom-picking season. They decide to stick around anyways because, like I said, they're geniuses.



That night Bluto and Lisa have an argument, so Bluto decides it's a good idea to drink half their mushroom tea, vomit all over himself, and then take a stroll into the woods by himself. On the way, he meets a talking cow. No really, I'm not joking. After talking to the cow, he spots that car they had seen on the way there, and sees that it's lights are flashing. Obviously from what we know about Bluto, he can't resist getting a little action from some strangers. So he goes over and pops his willy into the window. And, it gets bitten off then he gets an axe to the head or something. While this is happening, Tara is having another seizure and dreaming about the exact same thing.



They all awake the next morning to find Bluto gone, so they figure the best thing to do would be to drink some shroom tea themselves and wander into the woods to look for him. They find him all dead and shit, which causes them to lose it and run around in the woods for a while. For some reason, even though they just saw his dead body with a big blood hole in it's head, nobody seems to think that maybe they should get the hell out of there. Instead they decide to argue amongst themselves and stare off into the woods a lot.



I might want to sidetrack here and explain that about 70% of the footage for this movie is just long shots of nothing but trees and empty hallways, interspersed by a shot of Tara looking all freaked out and then screaming and running.



Anywho, in order to solve the mystery, they decide to split up and meet back at the abandoned children's home. Scooby and Shaggy go this way, and... oh wait, wrong review. The three ladies go one way, and the remaining men go the other. Holly gets split from her friends and gets killed. We then see Tara having another seizure by the edge of a lake, which is followed by her telling Lisa that Holly is dead and is in the water. Lisa finds Holly and decides to ditch her friend and walks off into the bog. Tara has another seizure/premonition about Lisa, so she decides to follow her. Lisa dies.



Tara decides that the best idea is to just keep walking around in the water some more on the way over to where they had agreed to meet the guys. Because really, when you have a history of debilitating seizures, what could be safer than standing in waist-deep water? Then we get to the death of Troy, which was surprisingly really uninteresting. He just kind of goes away. This prompts Jake to freak out and jump out of the window and break his legs.



Tara finds him and they start walking back to civilization and live happily ever after. Actually, the killer finds them and kills Jake too. Which is unfortunate, because then we're really just left with the one person we wanted to die from the start.



Really all that's left now is the big surprise twist ending that you probably already saw coming from the first 5 minutes. But, I'm not going to ruin it for you. Watch it yourself.



All in all, I give this movie 4 out of 5 Torgo's

Can I have your attention please...

A few months ago, I asked my friend Blockade Boy to do a redesign of one of the worst superhero costumes of all time. Looks like he got the email, go check out his fantastic Rusty Collins v2.0.

2008-05-17

Snack time is fun time!

The makers of Lego Fun Snacks would like to remind you that:

Grape + Cherry = Graperry.

These are the most frustrating fruit snacks I've ever eaten. They list 4 flavors on the box. Strawberry, Grape, Orange, and Cherry. However, inside the packages there are 6 colors! And some of them don't really seem to make any sense.

Red: Cherry
Orange: Orange
Yellow: ??
Green: Strawberry (for unknown reasons)
Blue: ??
Purple: Grape

I've assumed yellow to be some kind of lemon flavor, but what the fuck is blue?

Somebody tell me!

2008-05-13

EPIC BATTLE!

In case any of you missed the end to Spider-Man 3...

So I can get to stompin in my Ayre Force vol 1.

Ok, before I get into this review, I have to go ahead and warn you all. This is probably going to be a bit different from any other reviews I've ever posted on this blog before. Mainly because every book I've ever reviewed here before was fun to read, if not at least amusingly unbearable. This book, however, is terrible.

I can generally determine how bad a book was by comparing the time it takes to read it by the amount of pages/dialog in the book. This book has 80 pages and it took me 5 days to finish it. Now, often I can pass off a timespan like that by looking at how busy I was with other things during those times, but I can't do that for this one. I honestly sat and stared at the cover of this book for an hour at one point, trying to convince myself to open it back up and keep reading.

So, I decided to take one for the team and struggle my way through the rest of the book and finally get the warning out to everyone. You guys owe me. Let's get on with the review.

The book opens with the Ayre Force team on a mission to southern china to raid a facility owned by sterotypical evil scientist Janus Winter. This particular facility happens to specialize in bear bile farming. Honestly, I laughed when I read that. But then I looked it up and realized it was a real thing. Apparently they stick a big needle into a bears liver and suck out all the bile to use in some traditional chinese medicine. Generally it is unbelievably painful and unpleasant for the animal, and frequently results in death. OK, well played Mr. Ayre, I can't argue that you are officially not the biggest dick in this comic book. But, after reading the whole book through, I feel like the bears got off easier that the reader.

But anyways, they stop the bad guys, and I'm almost ready to accept that maybe Calvin Ayre isn't the biggest jerk of a protagonist ever. And then he locks them in cages and blows them the fuck up with grenades, after expressing just how much he enjoys doing that.

Now, it may just be me, but I'd love to see where in Mr. Ayre's copy of "Business for Dummies" it recommends depicting yourself as a homocidal vigilante without any remorse for butchering a dozen human beings. But, I'm not going to get myself on that rant just now, because this is where the book actually delivers the one thing you'd probably expect a company that specializes in things dudes like. Explosions and car chases. Really the next 3 pages could be nothing but explosions, and you'd still walk away with the same impression. The dialog is basically just your standard action hero "blowing stuff up is just another day on the job" filler. So, they drive their motorcycles all the way to their big, inconspicuous camouflaged airplane, where they are greeted by none other than Janus Winter's three genetically hybrid children, who have the relative powers of a chameleon, a lion, and a cheetah.

At this point, you will quite likely find yourself wondering what a gun tastes like.

So, fast forward a bit, we find out that apparently Calvin Ayre is really a former secret agent who quit and apparently decided to lay low by starting a multi-billion dollar company and being an egocentric douchebag. We then see shots of Calvin assembling the members of Ayre Force (I did mention that all of the team members are based off of actual employees of Bodog Entertainment, right?). So, in this team-building montage we learn that apparently all the members of Ayre Force were already well-established safe-crackers, data thieves, and eco-terrorists.

Really I'd write more, but there's not much to the rest of the book after we see the team forming. They basically just switch right back to their plot device of "EPIC BATTLE!" for the rest of the book. And in the end, Calvin Ayre douches his way to victory, Janus Winter is dead, and his mutant kids are already planning the sequel.

Fuck. A sequel.

2008-05-08

The new phone books are here!

7-11 days my ass. UPS just showed up with my copy of Ayre Force. Thankfully, a lot thinner than I had originally thought, so that means less of a headache.

I should be done with this and able to review later today.

Also, one of the writers is named Slutsky. heh heh.

UPDATE:
This is pretty excruciating. Give me until tomorrow.

2008-05-07

New Comics Day 05/07/2008

Well, today is New Comic Day and I'm faced with a bit of a conundrum. None of my comics sucked this week! How the hell do they expect me to make fun of their comics if they make them so good? Let's take a look at some of the highlights...Avengers/Invaders #1
After last weeks disappointment with the giant size intro, I was a bit unsure about this one, but it turned out to be a a good issue in what appears to be a really promising series. But really, any series that features Bucky running around in his old clown suit is A-O.K. in my book.









Cable #3
With Olivetti's art behind this series, it could be about cable playing a game of ping-pong and I'd still buy it. Unfortunately, this issue offers absolutely zero table tennis action. What it did offer was a surprisingly funny penis joke on the part of Bishop. Really, as I've said before, this series has completely changed my outlook of Cable. Of course, that probably has something to do with the fact that they've basically changed him into Hulk Hogan from Mr. Nanny.







Invincible Iron Man #1
This issue has fucking 6 different covers to choose from! I understand that Iron Man is Marvels meal ticket right now, but I thought we were done with the 90's. Anyways, once I got past that fact and really got into the meat of the book, I have to say, it's made me hate this current Iron Man persona a little less. The villain and his premise look to be pretty interesting in the long run, if not a bit insubstantial in this first issue. I can't wait to hear the back story here.







Iron Man: Viva Las Vegas
This is quite possibly the greatest Iron Man story to come out in the recent years. Mostly because it's out of continuity and heavily influenced by the movie. So we get to see Stark back to his old boozing and womanizing self. Not to mention that the entire premise of the threat to Las Vegas in this issue is "Ewww, Lizards!". That's one step up from "Eeeek! A Mouse!".








Punisher War Journal #19
After earning the Worst of Wednesday award a few weeks back, I felt that I had to include this issue in my highlights this week. This issue was really fucking good. It really did a great job of trying up all the absolutely confusing loose ends that the last issue left, and even made me forget about Chaykin's art. I have now regained hope that this series can continue to produce the goods, even without Olivetti's art. Well played, Mr. Fraction.







X-Factor: The Quick and The Dead #1
Another surprising one. When I look at it from a logical standpoint, it doesn't quite make sense to me. This book has the words 'X-Factor' on the cover, it's focused on one of my least favorite comic characters of all time, and it is largely about a guy talking to himself. Everything about this book tells me that it should suck, but it doesn't. I really, really liked it. Hopefully Quicksilver will continue not to suck for many years to come.







The War That Time Forgot #1
Dinosaurs. Explosions.


'Nuff Said.