Review – Believe

I believe I should have watched something else. The box art made this look like something menacing might be afoot, but the story turned out to be some silliness about kids trying to track down a ghost. The “heartwarming” ending was particularly hard to take. This is one for the after-school special crowd. See if desperate

Another 21st century TV casualty

I like watching the Olympics. Or to be more precise, I like watching Olympic venues. Most of the sports don’t do much for me, but I like looking at the elaborate stadiums, pretty swimming pools and the like.

Or to be still more precise, I used to like watching the venues. This is my first once-every-four-years without cable or the dish, so I’m forced to limit my viewing to what the Web can provide. Which turns out to be not much. I tried downloading NBC’s Olympics coverage iPad app, but to no avail. It required a userid and password from my multichannel service provider, which of course I don’t have.

So here’s the latest elaborate corporate relationship: NBC has no problem screwing its broadcast affiliates by allowing viewers to watch directly over the Internet. Yet it still seeks to compel us to remain thralls of Comcast, Time Warner, or DirecTV.

I suspect this will work out okay for the network this time around. But I wonder about the state of the infoscape four years from now. How tempting might it become to pick up five or ten bucks per viewer for an app for people without MSPs? And how much more of key age and income demographics will become unreachable except via the net?

Review – Taste the Blood of Dracula

Who knew the whole mid-life crisis thing went all the way back to the Victorian era? Sadly for these three gentlemen of a certain age, their thrill-seeking takes the form of a Satanic ritual that revives Dracula (Christopher Lee). Which of course ends badly for them. Mildly amusing

Review – The Tunnel

The “found footage” horror subgenre seems to be evolving a bit. This one actually isn’t too terrible. A quartet of Australian journalists venture into the tunnels below Sydney in search of whatever might be making homeless people disappear. What they find is a trifle underwhelming, but it includes a good shock or two. Mildly amusing

Review – Creature (2011)

This got a wide release? It must have, because apparently it holds the record for worst box office for a movie that opened in more than 1500 theaters. Frankly, I’m surprised they bothered with theaters at all, as this has straight to video written all over it. A carload of nubile city kids ventures into the swamps, where they fall victim to an alligator man. See if desperate

Review – Marwencol

After suffering severe injury in an assault, Mark Hogancamp created his own private world in his yard. He amassed a collection of dolls (action figures and their female counterparts) and began posing them in scenes from his imagination. He even built them a town – Marwencol – and photographed their stories. Hogancamp’s story and the tales he tells with his picture, make a fascinating documentary. Worth seeing

Review – Night Wolf

The monster here seems to be some kind of werewolf, but really it could have been just about anything. The beast’s sole function is to pin a pack of 20-somthing English assholes in an attic so they can bicker and bicker and bicker with each other. Before the halfway point I was hoping, praying, begging for the monster to dismember the lot of them, a wish that sadly took forever to be granted. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Innkeepers

Finally an indie horror movie made by people who know and care about what they’re doing. Two desk clerks pass the last weekend before their hotel closes with half-assed attempts to look for ghosts. Needless to say, they end up finding something. The characters are believable, helped in no small part by good writing and good acting. But the best part was the scares. Ghostly appearances were carefully managed to avoid overuse and maintain the what-if-this-was-real feel. In many ways this is the movie The Shining should have been. Worth seeing

Review – The Innkeepers

Finally an indie horror movie made by people who know and care about what they’re doing. Two desk clerks pass the last weekend before their hotel closes with half-assed attempts to look for ghosts. Needless to say, they end up finding something. The characters are believable, helped in no small part by good writing and good acting. But the best part was the scares. Ghostly appearances were carefully managed to avoid overuse and maintain the what-if-this-was-real feel. In many ways this is the movie The Shining should have been. Worth seeing

Review – The A-Team

This is even more awful than I expected a movie based on The A-Team to be. How is that even possible? This is a goofy, G.I. Joe plus extra violence production, sort of what frat boys must think war is like. If you’re in the mood for a truly mindless action movie, you might be able to do worse. See if desperate

I’d walk a mile for a Morlock

Awhile back Staban was driving down Kansas Avenue when he happened to see a Morlock driving the car next to him. Or at least he thinks it was a Morlock. It had stringy, white hair. It had a shriveled face. It looked like it had never seen the light of day.

Trouble was, it was smoking a cigarette.

This prompted a discussion about whether or not Morlocks smoked. Certainly we never see them doing so at any time during the George Pal production of The Time Machine. But that doesn’t definitively answer the question, because all the Morlocks we see in the movie are at work. They’re on the Eloi-boiling production line, and of course in the food service business you can’t smoke on the job.

Further, I’ll bet Morlock smoke breaks are short. Eloi boiling seems like the kind of job where if you and your co-workers wander off for even a couple of minutes that you’d have the boiling foreman all up in your business.

“You Morlocks need to keep busy. I can’t have you Morlocks loafing off. If the boss comes up here and sees you loafing off, he ain’t gonna yell at you. He’s going to yell at me. So get back to boiling those Eloi.”

Thus they only get to really bust out the Winstons and relax in the car on the way home.

Review – Not of This Earth

It’s like Roger Corman used chalk to write “homage,” “rip-off,” “remake” and “parody” in squares on a playground and then spent the next 80 minutes playing hopscotch on them. Traci Lords stars as a nurse hired to care for a weird guy who turns out to be a vampire from outer space. The picture uses a plot and title from a 1957 Corman production and sprinkles in footage from the producer’s other work (including a fairly lengthy passage boosted almost unchanged from Humanoids from the Deep and grafted awkwardly into this story). The result is more of a lesson in shoestring budget work rather than quality horror cinema. See if desperate

Review – Growth

As cheap horror movies go, I’ve seen worse. A quartet of young folks show up on a secluded island to claim some inherited real estate but swiftly fall victim to parasitic worms. The characters are the usual pack of unsympathetic dunderheads, but the worms are kinda cool. Mildly amusing

Review – John Carter

This movie may hold the record for longest time in development. After the whole Tarzan thing took off in the early 1930s, studios started looking at other Edgar Rice Burroughs works to adapt. On the surface this series about an American who ends up on Mars seems like natural movie material. But if this expensive production is any proof, the Carter series is too episodic for the big screen. Though the effects were fun, the characters were unsympathetic and the story was a little like listening to a ten-year-old’s “this happened and then this happened and then this happened” tale. Mildly amusing

Abandoned – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

For those who’ve read the novel, maybe this is a fun “hey, look who’s playing that character” experience. I haven’t read it, so for me it rapidly became an endurance exercise in watching men in meetings. If this had been about the machine parts industry or the insurance business rather than espionage, it would have been equally as boring but would at least never have made it to the screen. Somewhere around 20 minutes in, I decided I’d had enough of Gary Oldman staring into space.

Review – Mexican Werewolf in Texas

I’m guessing somebody in the distribution company slapped a name on this picture, because the actual filmmakers seem to have enough interest in Mexican culture to be able to tell the difference between a werewolf and a chupacabra. I ping-ponged back and forth throughout the movie. Every time I started to think about turning it off, a clever twist or valid point about race relations would lure me back in. But whenever I tried to actually enjoy the experience, the terrible acting, weak editing or other production problems would shove me away again. Mildly amusing

Review – Kibakichi

Wow, does this movie ever pack a lot into an hour and a half. A werewolf swordsman finds himself in a village full of Yokai, monsters disguised as people. They’re hiding from humanity to avoid extermination, but they make their livings by waylaying itinerant gamblers and eating them. In addition to the usual swordplay, we get turtle men, spider prostitutes, the aforementioned werewolf, a cyclops, several other supernatural characters and of course plenty of gore. At a couple of spots it even appears to be making a point about the double dealing often suffered by indigenous peoples. Mildly amusing

Review – Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Michael Bay sure does like serving up some giant robot battles. For the most part the action sequences are fun to watch, though those of us not well versed in Transformers lore may sometimes have trouble telling some of the robots apart. The non-battle parts, on the other hand, are insanely terrible. If there are subtle nuances I’m missing because I didn’t see the second one, then that’s on me. But that still doesn’t excuse the genuinely wretched screenwriting. See if desperate

Disclosing tablet 4

I hate to do disclosing tablets two weeks in a row. But I also hate to let this go so long that the next Mental Floss arrives before this one’s written up (like I did last time).

Clear spots

19-0 – This was a good stream of trivia about Harriet Tubman’s perfect record of slave rescue missions.

The Wu Tang Clan – I had no idea this apparently-silly group had such a profound effect on music marketing.

Pink spots

101 Masterpieces: Jaws – The article made some good points about the importance of this movie to the blockbuster marketing process, but it didn’t do much to justify its inclusion in the canon of world art treasures.

In Praise of Sin – Once again, Mental Floss runs a piece that’s more concept than content.

Complicated Concepts Explained Using Kitchen Items – Sadly, most of the explanations weren’t all that illuminating.

Review – Basic

Imagine somebody took Rashomon, drove the hell out of it and dinged it up so badly that it was barely recognizable, and then sold it to the Army. A DEA investigator (John Travolta) tries to get to the heart of the deaths and/or disappearances of Rangers on a training mission. We get version after version of the “facts,” each less interesting than the last. The bad storytelling wasn’t exactly helped by an unusually high dose of whispered dialogue intercut with ear-splitting gun battles. See if desperate

Eight reality checks for low budget horror filmmakers

I have a great love for good horror movies and a great loathing for bad ones. Sadly, my quest for the former has saddled me with a great number of the latter. The problem is particularly prevalent in the world of low-budget productions. Sometimes a movie that lacks professional polish can turn out to be outstanding work that takes the genre in directions Hollywood wouldn’t dare to tread. More often than not, however, lack of polish merely betokens lack of skill.

I understand that there’s a sizable market out there for stupid movies, and far be it from me to deprive anyone of the opportunity to cash in on the demand. But if you happen to be an aspiring filmmaker who might actually want to make something that isn’t a piece of unmitigated crap, a few basic reality checks can solve a lot of problems.

You aren’t funny. This may be the hardest pill to swallow, so choke it down at the outset. The failed horror comedy typically springs from one of two sources: either you think you’re way more clever than you are, or you’re trying to cover your incompetence by pretending that you’re deliberately making a bad movie as a joke. You can detect the first problem by comparing your humor level to the kind of thing you thought was funny when you were 12. Same kinds of jokes? Then you haven’t achieved cleverness yet. And if at any point you realize that what you’re creating sucks, your best course is to stop or at least rethink rather than hoping for a “so bad it’s funny” response from the audience.

Your friends are not actors. I don’t care how many community theatre productions they’ve done. They can’t act, and they’re going to look stupid in your movie. Their stiff, play-it-for-the-back-row delivery of your dialogue is going to ruin any chance that your characters will be sympathetic or believable in any way.

Nor are they musicians. See what your high school drama club buddies are doing to your script? The guys in your garage band are doing the same thing to your soundtrack.

Your effects look bad. If you’re thinking at all realistically about production values, you’ve already accepted your inability to compete with Hollywood’s vast legions of effects wizards. But believe it or not, you can actually turn this one to your advantage. Even a bad monster suit can be highly effective if you employ a little subtlety. Shadowy lighting can help transform cheap latex into a genuine scare. And please oh please don’t overuse your creation. Every shot you include of that carnival-attraction-worthy masterpiece moves your monster away from plausible and toward “Attack of the Guy in a Rubber Suit.”

Boob shots do not supply gravitas. Back in the day when the slightest hint of overexposed cleavage would send the Hays Office censors scrambling for the “Nope” stamp, boobs were a big deal. But in the age of the Internet, pornography is so easy to access that it adds no value to your movie. Not to mention that half your viewers can get the same view by standing in front of a mirror and taking their shirts off. And if you’re shooting a nude scene solely so you can get a woman to undress for you, that’s just sad. Try using this simple test: if the scene wouldn’t be in your movie if the character was a guy, then it’s in there for the wrong reason.

Self parody isn’t wit. Many times I’ve seen characters in bad horror movies say something like “Wow, this is like we’re in a bad horror movie.” Acknowledging that you suck doesn’t make you not suck. Such self-effacing, reflexive nonsense tells your audience that you’re fully aware you’re wasting our time. Don’t rub our noses in it.

I like the rug right where it is, so don’t yank it out from under my feet. If the characters are in a haunted house and one of them starts screaming, the commotion should probably be over something genuinely menacing. You can only do so many shocks that turn out to be bugs or mice or the characters scaring each other or being scared of nothing at all. Once maybe. Twice is pushing it. More than that and you’re seriously cutting into your audience’s willingness to play along with you.

You must actually watch the movie you just made. Seriously, before you show it to anyone else, watch it yourself. Does it look like a real movie or a bunch of kids playing around with a camcorder? Does your editing allow your shots to flow together? Do your characters work? Does your story make sense? Your answers must depend not on “good for a beginner” but by actual, professional quality standards.

This is the most painful part of the production process, because it’s hard to take an honest look at something that’s consumed a significant chunk of your life and tell yourself that it needs more work. But coming to grips with it yourself is a lot less agonizing than showing unpolished work to the public and then living with the sure knowledge that you’re regarded as a talentless amateur.

Stealing from other movies makes you look bad. I’ve got three copies of Dawn of the Dead (four if you count the remake). So if you don’t do anything that George Romero (or John Carpenter or Tobe Hooper or Mick Garris or whomever you’re “borrowing” from) hasn’t already done, all you leave me with is the strong feeling that I should have re-watched a good movie instead of taking a chance on your work. Though this isn’t the worst offense on the list, it can be the saddest because it kills movies that might otherwise have stood a chance. Even good acting, good writing and all-around competent filmmaking can’t save a production that doesn’t amount to anything more than a pale imitation of something else.

Originality is the one thing you’ve got going for you. Writers and directors working inside the system are under tremendous pressure to churn out something that tastes just like every other cinematic hamburger everyone’s ever eaten, because the corporations they work for know that people love hamburgers. You aren’t backed by the studios’ vast marketing machinery, so if you’re going to get noticed at all you should really plan to do something the studios aren’t. The whole point behind independent production is that you can take a gamble on your own voice. Why squander that on a doomed attempt to sing someone else’s song?

Review – The Wedding Planner

If I put the amount of effort into this review that the filmmakers put into this movie, I’d already be done writing. A wedding planner (Jennifer Lopez) falls in love with the groom (Matthew McConaughey) of one of her clients. The assumption seems to be that the concept is strong enough to carry the picture for 90 minutes, as it develops little beyond the basic premise. Indeed, if you’re at all familiar with romcoms, you could easily come up with a better movie in your head than the one they put on the screen. See if desperate

Review – The Tents

Back when we still had the dish (and never again, so quit sending me junk mail, DirecTV) we used to be regular viewers of Project Runway. As each season’s finale was always a show during Fashion Week at Grant Park, I thought maybe this documentary about the overall event might be fun. Sadly, it was mostly just talking heads rambling on at length about tangential issues, with precious little hard information or actual footage of the events themselves. Mildly amusing

Review – Zulu Dawn

The Battle of Isandlwana was sort of the South African version of Custer’s Last Stand. Thus it was tricky business bringing it to the screen in 1979. On the one hand, the days of Tyrone Power or John Wayne gallantly doing his best against the “heathen savages” had expired a decade or two earlier. But apparently we hadn’t made it quite all the way to equal time and fair portrayal of indigenous peoples. This picture does a reasonably good job of capturing the epic scope and stupidity of the battle, providing a good history lesson for those of us who knew the war only through movies about Roarke’s Drift. Mildly amusing

Review – Absentia

See, indie filmmakers? It is possible to make a good movie with a low budget. All you have to do is think “scary” rather than “stupid.” In this delightfully creepy little tale, a woman has her husband declared legally dead only to have him resurface. He’s in bad condition, and all anyone can make out about where he’s been for the last seven years is that he was abducted in a nearby pedestrian tunnel by something monstrous and vaguely insect-like. The characters are believable, the acting is reasonably good, the script is solid and the story is genuinely chilling. I could have done without some of the forcefully arty trappings such as the use of black and white, but otherwise this was an outstanding horror movie, far better than the here’s-some-more-torture-porn box cover implied. Worth seeing

Review – Galaxy of Terror

Roger Corman tiptoes up to the very verge of ripping off Alien so closely that it would have been actionable. What he lacks in acting and script (and that’s a considerable deficit) he makes up for in gore and sex, including an especially graphic rape scene. See if desperate

Review – Unknown Origin

In 1989 three studios proved fairly conclusively that underwater reheats of Alien don’t work. And yet here’s another stab at it from six years later. And no, it isn’t any better, not even with a little Thing stirred in for good measure. I wonder why Roddy McDowall needed money this badly. Also released as The Alien Within. See if desperate.

Review – The Howling Reborn

The most impressive thing about the Howling “series” is that none of the pictures have anything to do with any of the other entries. The only thing the set has in common is that the movies are about werewolves (and one of them doesn’t even manage that much). This go-around is about a lovelorn teenager trying to come to grips with his new-found werewolf identity. The ending is vaguely reminiscent of the original, but the rest is pure Twilight, in spirit if not literal interpretation. See if desperate

Disclosing tablet 3

The arrival of the July/August issue of Mental Floss should probably have been a good indicator that the disclosing tablet for the May/June issue was a bit overdue. Still, better late than never.

Clear spots

The “Scatterbrained” devoted to bears – Every issue the trivia flood at the start is devoted to a theme object. This time it was bears, a personal favorite subject. I was intrigued to learn that polar bears are invisible to infrared cameras and that the Humane Association has specific rules for handling bears on movie sets. Of course part of it was bear hunters and Berenstains. But for the most part the section was good.

The Easter Island Statues Have Bodies! – And so they do.

10 Shocking Secrets of Flight Attendants – I wouldn’t go as far as “shocking,” but some of these were interesting. The height and clothing restrictions aren’t all that fascinating, but I would have figured stories about sneaking dead bodies onto planes were urban legends until I read this.

Are Dogs Really Man’s Best Friend? – Spoiler: cats win.

Pink spots

Cheat Sheet: The Kentucky Derby – Once again explain to me how doing this with animals is okay while dog and chicken fighting isn’t.

10 Essential Life Pointers from John Hodgman – Who? Or more directly to the point, why?

9 Weapons That Failed Spectacularly – Too much animal suffering. Bad enough we have to come up with new, stupid ways to make people suffer.

Review – Paranormal Incident

If this had been the first camcorder-Scooby-Doo-vs-the-haunted-asylum movie ever made, it would have been decent stuff. Certainly the acting and the production quality are a cut or two above the usual found footage fare. Trouble is, this is thoroughly traveled territory. The only real innovation is the use of a narrative-style bracketing story, and the only two functions the bracket serves are to destroy the “this shit could be real” element and toss in some bewildering nonsense at the end (the kind of betcha-didn’t-see-that-coming twist that nobody ever sees coming because it doesn’t make any goddamn sense). See if desperate

Review – The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training

This has to be one of the steepest declines from original to sequel in Hollywood history. While the first Bears movie had a certain underdog charm, this one just packs after school special smarm combined with a Happy Days humor level. The foul-mouthed kid with the soft spot is now mostly just the kid with the soft spot. The motorbike-riding rebel (Jackie Earle Haley) gets saddled with a mess of character development in the form of an estranged dad (William Devane) who ends up coaching the team. Some of the old Astrodome footage is sorta fun, but the rest of the picture is thoroughly missable. See if desperate

Great moments in theology #4

 

Review – Resurrect Dead

Starting sometime in the 1980s, someone began leaving messages carved in linoleum and stuck permanently into city streets. Known as the Toynbee Tiles, these small bits of outsider art convey simple messages about how dead people will be resurrected on Jupiter. The tiles themselves might have made a fascinating 15 minutes or so, but to stretch to feature length this becomes a documentary about Justin Duerr, an artist in search of the tiles’ origin. Though the search leads to some interesting places, it also does a lot of floundering along the way. Mildly amusing

Review – This Is What Love in Action Looks Like

In 2005 teenager Zach Stark sparked an uproar when he started posting to MySpace from inside the fundamentalist “gay cure” facility his parents sent him to. This documentary about the controversy does a couple of things right. First, it uses a lot of actual footage of the anti-Love-in-Action protests rather than relying exclusively on after-the-fact talking heads. But more than that, even the heads are actual participants in the events or at least survivors of similar “ex gay treatment” programs. The approach was a welcome change from the all too common documentaries about “personal journeys” rather than actual subjects. Mildly amusing

Review – Wrath of the Titans

I feel the Titans’ pain. If they made a movie this bad about me, I’d be wrathful too. They must have spent the lion’s share of the budget getting the big-name actors (Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and Sam Worthington) from the first bootmake back for another go. It didn’t particularly matter that they spent nothing on the script, because why would a video game need a script? But even the effects were considerably below the standard set by the first one. I was especially disappointed by the Minotaur, who turned out to be less of a cool CGI man-bull and more of a wrestler with a stump stuck on his head. Sadly, that was fairly typical of the overall experience. See if desperate

Review – Eyes of the Woods

For awhile I was holding out hope that the creators of this ultra-low-budget crapfest simply hadn’t seen The Blair Witch Project and thus weren’t aware that they were traveling in thoroughly charted territory. But then one of the characters mentions Blair Witch. Seriously, if they knew that all they were doing was making a cheap rip-off of a movie everyone’s already seen, why bother? They even manage to undo the one thing the earlier movie got right, tossing away the subtle sense of unseen menace and trotting out extensive doses of cheap gore, gratuitous nudity and rubber suit monsters. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Firestarter 2: Rekindled

IMDb doesn’t have much on this production, but based on the fades in and out and the nearly three hours of running time, I’m betting this was originally designed to play as a TV miniseries. Still, it works reasonably well as a movie. Charlie the pyrokinetic kid from the original has grown to young adulthood, still trying to control her incendiary tendencies and still running from the sinister government agents who want to exploit her powers. This time the bad guys have a boarding school full of boys with various psychic talents, all raised without moral restraint on the use of their gifts. Mildly amusing

Quiz answers: Fireworks or Justified?

The fireworks are all shot. I’ve finally got the ash cleaned out of my hair and my left eye. The brush fire has been extinguished. So the final cap for the Independence Day holiday is to post the answers to the Fireworks or Justified quiz.

The first one was a giveaway, as it was both the first episode of the series and also a basic bit of pyrotechnics. The rest, on the other hand, were far trickier.

1. Fire in the Hole – Both

2. Missouri Kicker – Fireworks

3. Bad to the Bone – Fireworks

4. The Lord of War and Thunder – Justified

5. Shock and Awe – Fireworks

6. The Hammer – Justified

7. Cottonmouth – Justified

8. Total Blowout – Fireworks

9. Midnight Rider – Fireworks

10. Blaze of Glory – Justified

11. All Jacked Up – Fireworks

12. The Gunfighter – Justified


Hope you all had a great Fourth of July.

Review – Medium Raw

They should have left it in longer, because it came out half-baked. This is one of those productions that seems like the creators came up with a string of grisly gags and then tried to cobble together characters and a plot to turn random gore into a movie. And as usual, it doesn’t work particularly well. The Wolf, a serial killer with a big metal wolf suit and a Red Riding Hood MO, is stuffed in an asylum with a bevy of other quirky, poorly-lit psychos. And when the security system is inevitably shut off ... Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Fright Club

Imagine that Night Gallery was riding a motorcycle without a helmet and ended up in an over-the-handlebars wreck that left it with the tendency to threaten to tear people’s endocrine systems out. Throw in ”ultra low budget” and “goes downhill from there” and you’ve got a picture of this picture. Three witless young people try to join a “Fright Club” by telling the host the scariest stories they can think of. The stupid ghost stories we used to tell during sleepovers back in grade school about Boy Scout troops getting slaughtered by Dracula and Mrs. Dracula and Frankenstein and the Ghost with the Five Bloody Fingers would have been better. See if desperate

Review – Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell

Terence Fisher takes the helm for the last time in this run-of-the-mill Hammer Frankenstein picture. A surgeon (Shane Briant) gets busted for digging up and dissecting corpses, and the judge commits him to an asylum. What luck for him that the loony bin’s eminence grise is none other than the legendary Baron (Peter Cushing) still up to his old tricks. He’s stitched dead patients (some of whom received a little assistance with their passing) into a hulking mass of makeup (David Prowse of Darth Vader fame). The usual jolt of electricity. The usual out of control rampage. Mildly amusing

Review – Underworld: Awakening

What best betokens this experience: the “not screened in advance for critics” note on IMDb or the fact that more than ten percent of the movie’s 88-minute running time was taken up by the end credits? The latter tends to suggest that complicated CGI was a lot more important to the video-game-cut-scene scheme than plot or character development. The former implies that the studio knew it had a piece of crap on its hands and wanted to avoid as much negative press as possible. I’m genuinely surprised that with all the gooning over Twilight and similar productions that this vampires-vs.-werewolves series is bucking the romance trend and going with almost solid mindless action. See if desperate