Happy Easter to all you gentiles out there. You don’t celebrate anything on this Sunday? Consider yourself lucky. I’ve got an egg hunt, non-stop talk of bunnies, overzealous family dinner and the prospect of Little Rotten Week getting hopped up and tweaking on a metric ton of milk chocolate bunnies. He has risen indeed. Not much on the docket this week. Just dead turning a little evil.
Just remember, I'm not reviewing these movies, but rather predicting where they'll end up on the Tomatometer. Let's take a look at what This Rotten Week has to offer.
Teenagers and young adults sure are an idiotic bunch. Their music is too loud. Hair too long. Ideals remarkably misaligned with the realities of the modern world. The self-serving nature of their actions make it impossible to spend more than twenty consecutive minutes in their presence. In fact its as if their id, ego and super ego are waged in bloody turf war in which everyone loses. Man I miss being young. Though venturing into full-blown adulthood has definitely saved me from making the misguided decisions that often lead to disaster. Take the young adult need to venture off into isolated cabins in the woods. This is the kind of thing youngsters think is a solid idea, where we adults know (having learned from movies) inevitably leads to bloody, demonic disaster. Welcome back Evil Dead franchise.
Time for a little honesty here. I’ve never actually seen the original Evil Dead. Feel free to post your vitriol in comments section for this grave injustice. I’ve only ever seen the sequel and with its hijinks-y tone assumed the original had much the same feel. Nope. Having nothing to compare it to I was a bit unprepared when the trailers for this reboot started rolling around. Little more honesty? The trailer had the Dougster a little uneasy. Scared even. It wasn’t like I was ever going to a cabin in the woods ever again (see paragraph one), but this trailer just confirms it. It’s all resorts from here on out.
Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez helms his first big budget film after garnering a fair amount of online buzz and acclaim after releasing the the short Ataque de Pánico! on YouTube a few years back. If you haven’t seen it, check it out here. It’s a quick, enjoyable five minutes of robots blowing s@#$ up. Seven million views later he’s remaking Sam Raimi’s classic.
Early reviews on his first feature are more than positive, registering close to eighty percent after about twenty reviews. Remaking/ rebooting horror franchises is typically a terrible idea. Look no further than Friday the 13th (25%), A Nightmare on Elm Street (15%) and Texas Chainsaw 3D(12%) as examples of when rolling the story back went pretty wrong. But Alvarez, under Raimi’s eye looks like he’s pulled it off. And he got to kill off a few twenty-somethings in the process, so mission accomplished. The Rotten Watch for Evil Dead is 71%
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Tomato image via Shutterstock Recapping last week:
Ouch. Not good. This year, for the most part, has been chugging along quite nicely. Until now. First off, G.I. Joe: Retaliation (Predicted: 65% Actual: 29%). I was a bit fooled by a couple of early reviews for this flick. Typically I’m able to read through some of the subtext of early reviews to get near the truth. But my childhood love of the terrible cartoon and cheap plastic toys clouded my judgment, leaving me off by more than thirty points.
Meanwhile, The Host (Predicted: 39% Actual: 12%) was much worse that I anticipated. I’m glad. As I said last week, the book was horrendous, leaving little source material for the movie. But this was much lower than I thought it could ever go. Again, good.
Then there was Tyler Perry’s: Temptation (Predicted: 31% Actual: 16%). I’m kicking myself on this one as I just ripped apart the premise, casting, dialogue, and really everything about the film. And then went too high on the score. Argh.
And finally The Place Beyond the Pines (Predicted: 82% Actual: 73%) got in as a mini-win though I was rooting for above eighty-two percent to get Gosling into the lead as best-reviewed male actor of the last decade. Christian Bale keeps the title.
Next time around it’s Jackie Robinson and scary movies. It’s going to be a Rotten Week!
