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I think he must just miss teh weeny.

Who is this again?

I would imagine the best time would probably be if we did them sometime on the weekend. Likely the late evenings over here- that would make it morning to noonish on your side.

So for instance right now it's 20:00 over here, for Jiggy I think it'd be about 23:00 (pretty sure damned DST is off now), which would mean it'd be 13:00 a day ahead for you.

If they ever start widespread assaults against state-legal dispensaries, that'd be interesting. I feel that this is an issue we just need to get over with (especially given how much of the US population is in support of legalization). Having it be illegal on a federal level, but allowing states to legalize it (while having the power to strike those laws down as unconstitutional at any time) seems like a pretty idiotic system.

More to the point, though, it's a shame your life is as busy as it is - always enjoy chatting with you when I get the chance.

Technically they haven't legalized it, they pretty much just said they wouldn't jail you up to a certain amount. I think now that Sessions is gone it might actually get legalized fully.

But it's no different than this sanctuary city/state BS. When there is a pres. that they like everyone must listen to the feds no matter what- but if it is a pres. they don't like then all of a sudden they become federalists.

Hey, if I ever get the time and I'm able to get the FE podcast off the ground I could use a co-host if De never comes back.

Ah, I saw the message but thought maybe it was a bug or something. The movie score matched my review score so I thought it factored that in automatically.

Fixed.

Noted- I completely forgot about that part!

I bounce between the two. Sometimes I want to watch shows... other times movies. Just depends on my mood, I guess.

I live in a state where it's still illegal, so I'm just trying to play it as safe as possible.

Still illegal in all states when you factor in the feds.

[DISCLAIMER: I've never actually seen any of the previous movie, so if this is somehow connected to the it (outside of the masks, as far as I can tell) it's news to me. Therefore it may not just be possible, but likely, that I say more stupid things than I usually would.]

DISCLAIMER: I've never actually seen any of the previous movie, so if this is somehow connected to the it (outside of the masks, as far as I can tell) it's news to me. Therefore it may not just be possible, but likely, that I say more stupid things than I usually would.

The Strangers: Prey at Night takes place (I assume) after the original film. We get to know our main characters: Cindy and Mike, the mother and father, whom we really don't get very much of a read on as characters (gee, I wonder why). Followed by Kinsey the chain-smoking bitch, and eventually Luke the smartass jock. They have packed their bags and picked up Luke to go on a trip/send Kinsey to boarding school for being said chain-smoking bitch. Because the boarding school is so far away, they decide they are going to take a detour and visit some family in a trailer park. It's like they've never watched a horror movie in their lives.

When the family arrives at the trailer they are greeted by (I assume again) one of the killers, asking for someone named Tamara. This creeps out Cindy, so she sends the girl off. While this is happening, Mike is trying to convince Kinsey not to be such a chain-smoking bitch, but to no avail- she decides she needs to leave the trailer to "get some air," ironically enough.

Rather than leaving Kinsey out there to die by herself, Cindy and Mike send Luke out to go die with her as well. Luke eventually finds Kinsey and after a heart to heart they decide it best to B&E into a random trailer and drink their booze. That is until they are scared shitless by literally the most useless German Shepherd I've ever seen in my life. They soon discover that the trailer belongs to Uncle Marvin, the family they were meant to visit. How do they know this? Because Uncle Marvin is everywhere in the bedroom, naturally.

Mike and Cindy eventually find the kids, with the kids explaining that Uncle Marvin is dead and that they definitely didn't steal his booze. In perfect logic, Mike declares that Cindy and Kinsey need to go back to the trailer by themselves, in the middle of the night, while Mike and Luke go Scooby-Squading. And away we go.

As Cindy and Kinsey get back to the trailer they discover that all their phones are smashed up. Because who bothers to carry their cell phones around in the middle of the night, in a place they are unfamiliar with? Cindy tries one of the phones, but it's from T-Mobile so she gets no service. They are then promptly attacked by the girl that wears the weeb mask.

Cindy and Kinsey lock themselves up in the restroom and ask the girl to go away. Because that will work. As the pair try to escape Cindy tries pushing Kinsey out of the vent in the restroom; but since Kinsey has weak lungs from all the chain-smoking she only gets up after her mom is caught and promptly stuck from behind. 

Meanwhile Mike and Luke find the body of Uncle Marvin, followed by discovering the dude that's too cheap to buy an actual fucking mask. Mike grabs Uncle Marvin's revolver and they make their escape to their trailer, only to find Kinsey missing and Cindy dead. Mike and Luke take off in the car to find Kinsey, but are attacked by slasher deus ex machina and crash into another trailer. Luke makes his escape while Mike is skewered in the car- and eventually skewered a second time by Gunnysackface.

While Luke might have escaped to find Kinsey, The Strangers find her first. After a game of cat and mouse she is eventually pinned in another trailer by Weeb Girl, only to be rescued by Luke. After all of this, Kinsey finally begins to realize that being a chain-smoking bitch does not pay very good dividends, and laments to Luke. It doesn't take long for the pair to be found, though, and Luke needs to lay the smackdown on some bitches. He fights off and kills Kabuki Barbie to Bonnie Tyler's 'Total Eclipse of the Heart', but is promptly shivved by Gunnysackface. Best scene in the movie, period, and now probably one of my favorite scenes in any of my recently watched films.

Kinsey hides Luke and flees to find the police, but since police are always useless in horror movies he is quickly killed, leaving Kinsey to go two-vs-one in the final showdown of the movie. She discovers her inner-Ripley and saves the day via shotgun and gasoline. In the end, we see Kinsey and Luke in the hospital- she can't hold her cup of water because now she has PTSD.

And with that we have our movie. Where to begin? The plot is really rather simple- I'd expect nothing less from a good ol' horror slasher. Though they somehow managed to take such a simple plot and stretch it out for an hour and a half, while also making it seem like it flied by. Props for that. They also did really well at the suspense-factor in the movie- you knew what was coming, but it still left you waiting for it.

The characters were rather 2D; but again, I'd expect nothing less from a slasher. The acting was decent for what it was and what they were given to work with, so credit goes there. I would say, though, that if they were looking for us to feel some sort of connection with the family (outside of a tally for body count), it likely fell flat due to the aforementioned 2Dness of the characters.  The action and gore played out pretty well, too; though since the movie was fairly dark throughout, that might have helped make it a bit easier to manage.

And now the big part. The soundtrack. Maybe I'm just a sucker for 80s music and never really realized it, but the various songs that they were using throughout the movie really meshed well with whichever scene they were playing out in. It took what would normally be an average scene in any other movie with the "spooky music" and really amped it up. The previously mentioned pool scene really is the pinnacle of that, though the entire scene down to the lighting was really great.

The movie itself was decent, nothing super special (even factoring the soundtrack) but definitely something that could be popped in as a time waster while you're cooking dinner, doing chores, etc. Maybe have some friends over and give it a repeat. Also, as an aside- I did dig the old-timey font that they used for the title and credits at the beginning and end of the movie; it was a nice touch.

Overall, while I say the movie was 'decent' I do think I enjoyed it more than is merited, not sure why.

7/10

[4/10]

Almost Mercy, as near as I can tell, is a "love letter" to every modern day trope that social/mass media simply love to bring up at every conceivable turn. Uncaring parents or authority figures? Check. Prescription and recreational drug abuse? You better believe it. Disgusting church officials? In spades! Bullying and mass murder? Of course. And don't you worry, if it's a soapbox topic for someone- anyone, you'd better believe I probably just didn't cover it. But let's try our best to skip over all this for the time being (literally impossible), and try and get into the plot.

The story revolves around two childhood friends, Jackson and Emily. Emily is an oddball wimp of a girl who, surprise surprise, is often bullied by a bunch of poopy-heads. Enter Jackson- the new kid, even wimpier and oddball-ier than she is. He becomes the new primary target for the poopy-heads' ire. They become best buds after murdering an injured bird together.

Nothing wrong with that, right?

Emily's mother is a pill-popping, plastic-surgery-having, depressed house wife to a husband that is basically never there. Her dad? You could write a completely new movie on the degeneracy in that dude's life. Jackson's dad is a useless, abusive, pill-popping wellfare queen, who expects Jackson to do pretty much everything. His mom only stays for the wellfare- this is literally what they narrate and basically all we know of her.

These cheery lives that Jackson and Emily live help them bond. They bond even further over their mutual hatred and disgust for pretty much everyone and everything in their small town.

We eventually find that Jackson is pretty much getting cornholed by the local priest. Because if you already have this much shit piled on top of your main characters before the first quarter mark into the movie, why not a few pounds more?

We fast forward years later, after more BS. Jackson finally snaps after Poopy-head Prime chucks an open bottle of piss at him, as soon as he walks out of the shower (that's the part that really pissed me off. hey-o). So Jackson, reasonably, bites Mr. Prime's thumb off and lays the smackdown on the cohorts Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

This is apparently illegal, but since the 5 o'clock shadowed obviously 20-something year old playing a teenager is, in fact, a teenager in this movie- he only has to become a pill popper, himself, in the psych ward; for a year or so. All the while Jackson is away, Emily decides it's time to drink, snort, and screw everything under the sun. Because why not. But it's okay, because after Jackson gets out, his PO teaches him all about how to take out his aggressions by killing things with guns. Once Jackson comes back he and Emily pull themselves out of their rut; at least for a time.

As it turns out, though, there is trouble in paradise. Jackson, despite how well he's been, has actually been planning a school shooting. Because this is what happens when people touch guns- they become deranged, anger-filled murder machines. So sayeth the arsenal.

Then the day finally comes. His day of vengeance has arrived: he drives to the school. His palms are sweaty. Knees weak; arms are heavy. There's vomit on his sweater already, mom's spaghetti.

Then he chickens out, drops the gun, and gets caught by the police before he can even turn the ignition all the way. There is no escaping this time, 20-something year old.

Or is there?

You see, Kane Hod- Coach Elwood, taught Emily a valuable lesson a good while back. Jackson is a pussy. When she finally realizes this, she decides that she can do much better than he can, and begins to spree the shit out of pretty much every other named character in the movie. Admittedly, she did so in style.

To end off this modern day Romeo and Juliet, Emily then goes to the cops, kills them and frees Jackson. Jackson then pulls a Robert Fisher and decides to go out on a camping trip. Fin.

Now, if you haven't been able to tell by my beaming narrative of this piece, I do have a few problems with it. It isn't the acting- I think everyone does a fairly decent job for the most part, considering what they were given to work with. There are a few characters/scenes where the acting is amped up in the level of campiness- though I can't tell if that was intentional or not (considering how relatively serious the movie seems to want to take itself up until the last 20 minutes, I assume the latter for the large portion of the movie). I don't even necessarily have a problem with the premise of the movie itself, really.

The issue that I have is that they simply attempted to put far, far too many eggs into what really should have been a very small basket. The other issue I had with it was the fact that, really, nothing even close to horror happened in this movie. Hell, I couldn't even consider it a slasher up until the very last 20 minutes of the movie.

I suppose you might be able to consider it horror if you take the entire movie as a whole- sort of like the build up of what could be a school shooter. But Jackson failed. Spectacularly, in fact. And he wasn't even going to kill indiscriminately- he had a very specific hit list, down to the location. To top this off, we never really got to see a very good look into the "disturbed" mind of Jackson. These things essentially pulled the rug out from the entire movie. They then try to M. Night the sucker by bringing Emily into the mix, which admittedly makes the plot take a more interesting turn, but I personally would still would not call it horror.

Overall, I can't really say I enjoyed the movie a whole lot. It really did have potential, story-wise, but I feel that they were too ambitious. They tried to go too deep, and drowned because of it. K-I-S-S, man, K-I-S-S. You had the acting, you had the story, even the filming was pretty decent. However- with the way this movie ended it comes off, to me, as a cross between what the script writers envision is in the world of a mass shooter along with a tear and jizz-stained diary entry of Elliot Rodger.

Also, it's not a Glock, it's a Springfield XD and it doesn't have any on-off safety. You literally put a close up of the logo!

If we are doing a 10-star score, with 5 being dead average, I'd give it a 4. Maybe next time make a movie about post-slashing Emily, she was fun.

4/10

I've not seen it, nor the movies themselves, actually. I did notice it on Prime a while back but didn't bother reading the description. I just assumed it was something unrelated to the movies.

Maybe I'll have to give it a look, eventually. I assume (maybe incorrectly, again) that it isn't directly related to anything important from the movie series.

I've still been doing nothing but working, really. Get up before sunrise, don't get out until sunset. Unless I'm teaching that day, in which case it's pitch black out. Any spare time I have pretty much goes to running errands or relaxing for what little time in the day is left.

We also apparently have an multi-million dollar project coming up, too, so I'm guessing I won't be getting much time off in the near future, either. And usually when I try and get a hold of my friends, they end up busy whenever I'm "not." So much for a social life. 

I guess the main thing that I do outside of this website is play basketball. I play in two different men's leagues (Tuesday and Thursday nights) and my Tuesday night team went undefeated during the regular season but had a disappointing semi finals performance. We ended up missing out on a championship that really should have been ours.

Sounds like it could be the premise for a sports comedy. Starring Vince Vaghne and Ben Stiller.

Not that I'm complaining too much - at the very least, I'm saving up money little by little, so maybe this time next year, I might almost have $3,500 to my name. 

Maybe you'd be making more if you were selling the weed instead of smoking it all.

You know, I had been wanting to see this movie (thanks in no small part to the first film). I had it all scheduled out with friends and everything, then a group of the fuckers decided to get impatient and see it before hand anyhow! Everyone else kind of split on it after that.

Still haven't seen it yet.

Man, 2010. It really doesn't seem like it was that long ago this came out. It was definitely one of my favorites at the time. A nice change of pace from the "normal" horror flicks.

Well I ended up being so busy during the sale that I didn't have time to spend any money. Good for me, I suppose?