Culture and Shit

Call me uncultured or unintelligent but I typically run the other way in the face of movies with subtitles. When I watch a movie I just want to check my mind out and be entertained. No reading involved. Had I done a little investigating before I picked up The Orphanage

I wouldn’t have bought it. But I’m glad I didn’t.

Shady and I ended up watching the movie simply because we were too damn lazy to get up and find something else after we realized it was subtitled. With our asses planted firmly on the couch we decided that we’d give it a little bit and if it really sucked we do something about it. Happily, it never started to suck.

Story is Laura, her husband, and her son have moved into the orphanage she lived at for a little while as a little girl where Laura plans to open a new orphanage. The story starts with most of its focus on Simon, her (adopted, unknown to him) son. He’s an imaginative little boy with a host of imaginary friends and sadly he’s HIV positive. Right away Simon’s “imaginary friend” leads him and Laura on a not so fun treasure hunt in which Simon finds out that he’s adopted and he’s dying. Soon after shit starts getting creepy.

A sad turn of events leads to the unveiling of the real story of the orphanage. Tomas, the freakishly deformed outcast, suffered a “death by teasing” (he died in a cave because he was too ashamed to come out). Tomas’s mother then poisoned the rest of the kids leaving them to haunt the orphanage.

Both of the stories twist together seamlessly to come to one rather sad and fucked up ending. But fucked up in a suitable way. It’s not a happy ending kind of story, but then when one of your main characters is a little boy with HIV, you can’t really expect everything to come up roses.

This movie was low on the blood and gore but it more than made up for it with good, old fashioned ghost story creepy. My cat may or may not have gotten smacked a couple of times due to me jumping out of my skin. So, run watch this now and get your creepy on.

Hybrid

There are plenty of films you can’t safely slot into a category these days. For instance the Underworld series, is it horror? Is it action? It seemed when I was younger that if there was a vampire in a movie it was a fairly safe bet that you were watching a horror movie. These days, not so much. Even the low budget romps are sliding over the genre borders. Fist of the Vampire for instance

After watching this one I had the idea that bunch of guys were just hanging out in the dojo chatting about what would make a really cool movie. In my mind scenario they were all hella stoned. The conversation went something like this: “Dude, we should totally make a movie.” “Yeah, about an underground fighting ring like Fight Club. Just we’d make it more awesome.” “So much more awesome… and Dude, we could put vampires in it!” “Fuck yeah dude! A underground vampire fighting ring. Sweet.” Possibly I put waaaay too much thought into this.

The first thing you notice about this flick is that it’s shot like a gritty 70’s cop drama. Muted colors and just a touch of shakiness. Add to this the plot starting out like a Steven Seagal flick (kid’s family gets killed which will eventually lead him to seek revenge as an adult) and you’ve pretty much moved out of horrorland…. but then you see that the folks massacring the kid’s family are vampires. The movie moves on into the future where our hero has made a successful career as a cop. He’s sent undercover to break up and illegal gambling/fighting ring that…. wait for it… just happens to be ran by the vampires who killed his family! Gasp!

While the plot left a whole lot to be desired this film didn’t suck nearly as bad as I thought it would. Even though we knew exactly how it would end we still felt compelled to see it through til the end. That’s a lot more than I can say for some of the shit we’ve watched. When things get a little silly or slow there’s hot girl on girl and plenty of ass kicking to help things along. Mainly this one just suffers from taking its self too seriously.