Criminal Minds 1001: X

(Check out Profiling Criminal Minds - The Internet's most popular Criminal Minds Podcast!)

We open in Bakersfield, California, the site of a famous food riot massacre! Also one of my favorite TV shows. But neither of those facts are relevant to the kid we see running down a hillside towards an abandoned shack!



I've got to assume that this is a location that somebody found, but if it was built by the production crew they did an incredible job for something that's just going to be in a few seconds of the episode! The kid continues wandering around the collapsing buildings, tossing rocks out of boredom - isn't this the kind of 'kids getting into trouble' that video game consoles were designed to solve?

Luckily the kid isn't killed - but his curiosity is rewarded by a lifetime of nightmares, as he stumbles across a human torso! Which, you know, ick.

Then we immediately cut to the killer's hideout, where he's cleaning a knife. The legs are lying nearby. We don't get any info about the arms or head. I'm going to guess what I always do in situations like this: Cannabilly?

We're then introduced to our newest cast member, Jennifer Love Hewitt, playing what I assume is an FBI Agent working undercover, trying to win the trust of a sleazy creep in a bar! She succeeds, and he leads her to his office, where he keeps all of his child pornography! She calls in backup, and he's arrested without incident! Which burns her identity in that circle of child-pornographers, I guess? They make it clear that she's been hanging out with the guy online, and only just now met him in person, so I suppose it's a persona she used just for him? Perhaps I've been watching too much Wiseguy, but now I find it odd when cops on television are all like 'Boom! I was a cop all along!' when they could probably get more done by building up a criminal persona that they use over and over again.

Over at Quantico, the rest of the team wonders exactly who Jennifer is as she heads into Greg's office. For his part, Greg immediately offers her a job - it seems that her undercover work is extremely well thought-of, and he's sure that will make her a great addition to the team! Not sure why, but their last team member was a linguist, so it's not like she could do much worse!

The show then hangs a lantern on its own preposterous timelines, having Jennifer comment that, while she takes months to bring a crook down, Greg and Co. catch a serial killer every week - how do they do it?

That seems like a weird timeline for her, though - is she just working on one case at a time? This latest guy was arrested after months of online correspondence and one meeting. Wouldn't she be juggling a few guys like that? Or was she just working for fifteen minutes a day the past three months?

They have a quick conversation about why the killer might be removing limbs and heads, but it's just theories, so it doesn't come to much. The one useful idea - it's possible he's keeping the limbs, so they should check into sales of chemicals used to preserve human bodies! That's a really good idea, team! Sad that it feels like such a rare accomplishment.

Joe also humiliates himself a little, suggesting that the guy is 'going for a record' by killing three people in the last month. Joe, unless the record you're talking about is 'lowest kill frequency killer in the history of the show' please shut your mouth.

Then we head over to Bakersfield, where a guy we have to assume is the killer, because why else cut to him right now, is seeing his son off for the morning trip to school! The son gets into a minivan, which is either a carpool, or the ex-wife/mother, but we're given no indication of which.

That's not the headline, however, no, the headline is that the killer is Gay Jack from Dawson's Creek!



Yup, it's Greg's one-show-removed brother-in-law!

Anyhow, Jack heads out to the tool shed and pulls out a mysterious footlocker. Oh, and a freeze-frame reveals that he's wearing his wedding ring, so I guess he's a widower and that was just a car pool? Inside the foot locker is a whole leg, which suggests that he's not using it correctly. Although that's really the least of his crimes.

He puts the leg in his lap and strokes it, really getting into his fetish. What could have caused such a bizarre mental break?

Hopefully we'll find out after the credits!

Come on, Clickbait, are you even trying?

So I was browsing the Internet, you know, as normal people in the year 2016 do, and I came across another bizarre example of the Clickbait craft-



Great pitch, right? People love celebrities, and there's a compelling melancholy that comes from seeing beloved celebrities in the hours before their deaths, so vital, so unaware of the fate that's about to befall them... it's chilling and can be upsetting, but I understand why people would click on it. Provided the clickbait professionals choose the correct celebrity and photograph. So let's see the one they picked!

Click for Embiggination!

That's the whole ad, as originally served up to my browser. No, you're not seeing things, that's Kim Jong Il. A hundred years of photographs of dead 'celebrities' (in the modern sense) to draw from, and they went with Kim Jong Il, North Korea's Dear Leader.

Just in case you're unsure of my interpretation, here's a closeup of the image, in which you can see Kim Jong Un at the top-right of the frame.



I'm baffled, Clickbait professionals - was this an attempt at a joke? A protest against your own industry? If someone were to actually click on it, would it take them to a page berating them for participating in a corrupt practice?

Sadly, because of their choice of image, no one will ever know.

Oh, Clickbait, you don't know how English works, do you?

Clickbait - the art of combing an interesting bit of art with a catchy headline in the hopes of tricking the curious into heading over to some kind of an bloated content farm. Whether or not you acknowledge the crafting of clickbait as an art form in and of itself, clearly some effort is required to craft the perfect combination of grabby pic and tantalizing topic sentence. So if there are craftspeople out there, working day and night to craft clickbait, how do things like this happen?



What did the writer/artist/craftsperson think they were doing? What do they imagine that brackets mean?

I can tell them what they actually mean - they connote an aside/explanatory note/clarification designed to reveal a piece of information to the reader without needlessly complicating the sentence. In this case, however, the brackets exist only to negate the entire point of the sentence. If you were reading this title aloud, you would leave out any bracketed word, and wind up with the phrase '15 of the most family photos ever'.

Does 'most family' work as a description? Has anyone ever said 'That's the most family photo I've ever seen?'

I don't think so.

Take out the brackets, and you've got a clear sentence describing the series of pages designed to serve up the largest number of ads in the tiniest number of clicks possible. So why were they included?

Perhaps paying non-English speaking people minimum wage isn't the best way of  generating tempting internet content?

The Next Day - Creep Edition

The film Creep ends with the villain, one Mark Duplass, revealing that he's been killing videographers and other random people for ages.

He's even on the phone as the credits roll, planning his next murder.

Chainsaw Killer - Bad Filmcraft or Unintended Plot Revelation?

Allow me to reintroduce baffling film 'Chainsaw Killer'.

Seemingly an attempt to use existing footage from an abandoned project, Chainsaw Killer tells the story of a horror geek with a vodcast who is obsessed with tracking down a copy of the obscure horror film 'The Force Beneath'.

Also, there's a guy with a chainsaw, wearing a catcher's mask, who spends his time cutting people up with said chainsaw. Not in such a way that it would require any gore to be shown on film, however. This is not a film with an extravagant budget. The kills tend to be along the lines of-

Chainsaw goes offscreen.

Blood thrown on face.

Then cut away to the next scene. It's never super-clear what the Chainsaw Killer's connection to the obscure videotape is, almost as if they're appearing in two separate movies right up until he turns up and kills the main character.

So, keeping that extremely low budget in mind, allow me to show you pictures. First is the face of the chainsaw killer-

One Last Time - Screw You, MythBusters

So I've made no secret of my disdain for Mythbusters' refusal to confirm anything, ever. They operate claiming a passion for science, yet they create experiments designed to 'test' 'myths' without offering any concrete criteria for what success would look like, and then refusing to name it as such even when they prove it beyond any reasonable doubt.

This is mostly to their pro-busting agenda - the show isn't called 'myth-confirmers', after all. The whole idea is to pull back a veil of misinformation and reveal truth - there's nothing inherently wrong with that. At times, however, it becomes clear that the show is prioritizing an arrival at this end to the point that they're ignoring evidence placed right in their faces.

Now that Mythbusters is in its last season, we've almost run out of chances for them to finally, at long last, confirm something again, which is what makes it such a disappointment to see them botch an opportunity to do so in this latest episode.

The myth in question revolved around an intriguing idea - can you take a tomatoe, shrink-wrap it in a bag, drop it in some water, then set of a blasting cap next to it, liquifying the interior without breaking the skin? An internet video suggested that this was possible with the following images-

The explosion and tomatoe in question.

The innards of that tomatoe being sucked through a straw.

So the Mythbusters have a clear set of parameters to attempt to replicate - the size of the tank, the explosive used, and the distance the tomatoe should be from the blasting cap. Perfect replicable scientific experiment. So, what were the results?

Scavenger Part 2 - The Evidence That Wasn't

Scavenger is terribly written. I think I've established that well enough. There's one part I didn't focus on in that last article, however, and it is, in its own way, the absolute worst part of awful novel Scavenger. The big twist.

Okay, quick refresher - Mark killed three families and made it look like the work of a deranged serial killer so that people wouldn't notice him killing his own family, who he hated. Then Scavenger picked up the torch and murdered his own family, and then a fifth family a few months later, hoping to draw law enforcement attention away from himself. Both attempts succeeded, and then Mark wrote a book about the murders. Scavenger read the book and became convinced - based on the text within, that Mark was the original 'Family Man', whose crimes he had copied.

Then, for reasons that aren't ever entirely clear, Scavenger decides he wants to expose Mark's crimes via an elaborate game that has him running to the various crime scenes and getting punched repeatedly by a giant in a duster.

Again, it is not a good book.

Scavenger goes to an FBI agent who was obsessed with the case with his theory about Mark, and enlists the man's help in his scheming. It seems that Mark accidentally revealed something while writing the book that identified him to Scavenger as the perpetrator - and that information is convincing enough to the FBI agent that he's willing to risk his career (as well as imprisonment - the scheme is hugely illegal) to go along with Scavenger's plan.

What is the information? Prepare yourselves, because when I actually read the book for the first time years ago, I re-read the passages explaining Scavenger's flash of insight a dozen times, hoping to make sense of it, but all I ever managed to do was give myself a headache. So here it is:

Scavenger! It's awful!

I want to talk about Scavenger, and why I consider it one of the worst novels I've ever read.  A 2000 novel by Tom Savage, Scavenger tells the story of one Mark Stevenson, who is offered the chance to play a madman's game in the hopes of discovering the truth behind the murder of his entire family a decade earlier. Perfectly fine premise, but it gets into trouble by being a Tom Savage novel. What do I mean by this?

Well, to be blunt, Tom has a bad habit of cheating. He doesn't outright lie to the reader creating plot holes, he practices something far more insidious - his most effective trick is to have an unexpected character turn out to a sociopathic killer right at the end of the story with no lead-up to hint at the reveal. He banks on his audience being so shocked by the pulled rug that they don't go back and think too hard about the suddenly-evil character's actions and thoughts in the rest of the book. A great writer will fill their books with tiny hints leading up to the reveal, and bits of dialogue or cast-off thoughts and actions that only make sense in retrospect. Tom Savage is not a great writer, and his manipulative practices ensure that his books can only be read once - when you go back, knowing full well which character is the villain, their actions and motivations invariably make no sense whatsoever.

A perfect example of this is his novel Valentine - it involves a woman being stalked by a psychotic man from her past. It features chapters told from the point of view of a stalker, stalking her. Then, for the shocking reveal, we discover that the stalker stalking her was a completely benign figure just looking to get revenge on the killer, who'd also murdered his sister some time previously. While this doesn't seem like cheating on its face, and makes for an effective twist, going back and reading the book will reveal that the stalker's behaviour and thoughts make absolutely no sense if he's not the story's villain. If he didn't have any ill intentions towards the main character, there's absolutely no way for him to behave and think the way he does.

Which brings me to Scavenger, the most egregious example of Tom's cheating. I struggled to figure out the best way to review this book - it's difficult to explain exactly how bad it is without going through the entire plot, and if I'm doing that, I might as well just encourage people to go ahead and read the darned thing. Seeing as that's the last thing I want, I'm instead going to lay out the sequence of events as cleanly as possible - hopefully proving that when looked at dispassionately (at first, there will be commentary as well), the events of the book will be self-evidently idiotic. It's not going to be the cleanest of reviews, though, as I'll have to jump back and forth in timelines to put things in the most helpful order, and of course I'll have to spoil every surprise the book has to offer right away, so if anyone is interested in reading it, they should go and do that now, before returning to the review proper.

All aboard, then.

Also, the JSA!

Remember when I was going on and on about what a Hypocrite Batman was for killing all those Man-Bats? Well it turns out that the Justice League wanted to get in on that action, massacring all of the bio-borgs they could in the movie JLA: War!

In order, that's Superman slicing people to death with eyebeams, Green Lantern shooting them with imaginary bullets, and, of course, Batman about to detonate the skull of a bio-borg.

And before you jump in and say 'but bio-borgs aren't human, it doesn't matter if someone kills them', remember that the JLA is made up of an alien, a god, a magic man, two powered humans, one rich human, and a human working for an intergalactic police organization. Are they really only about preserving Earthbound human life?

Let's not forget that one of the JLA members is a cyborg, his body used as raw building material to create a super-soldier of unimaginable power - which (spoiler alert) is the same origin as Darkseid's bio-borgs.

Does this mean it's peachy-keen to kill Cyborg, and no one should feel bad about doing so?

What is your morality, JLA, and why didn't helping out the Bio-Borgs even occur to you for one second? Do you think they like working for Darkseid? No one does. He's a terrible boss.

None of this would bother me in the least if five seconds later all of you didn't get so wishy-washy about killing Doctors Light and Psycho.

And then, The Simpsons Gave Up

Remember cross-section jokes on The Simpsons? Fun little bonus gags whenever the show wanted to do an interesting camera move? Whether it was Shiva running the core of the planet-

Aliens buried next to a wishing well-

Or between the floors of the house-

Predator Math!

While posting about AvP's terrible tagline, I realized that I'd never bothered to post anything about one of the movie's most baffling plot points - the drill team.

As the premise is outlined by Lance Henriksen, we learn that the Antarctic temple is 2000ft below the ice. Let's be charitable and assume that's the base of the temple, rather than the top, so the guys don't have to drill an extra hundred feet - it's a big temple, after all. When they arrive at the proposed starting point for their excursion, they discover this-

Someone has already drilled the tunnel for them, using-

Terrible Moments in Taglining: Alien vs Predator

I know this movie is a decade old, but I've got to say, I don't think that tagline's accurate. Let's consider the consequences of either possible victory, shall we?

Option 1 - Predators Win

If the Predators defeat the Aliens, then their 'rite of passage' will be complete, and they will leave, returning in another hundred years or so - next time probably without killing any humans during the ceremony, since there's no reason to believe that humans would coincidentally be in Antarctica again that time.

Also, depending on global warming, Predators will probably swing by every couple of years and kill a few people in a jungle/desert, but they were going to do that no matter what happened in Antarctica.

Option 2 - Aliens Win

Upon killing the Predators, the Aliens would then freeze/starve to death in the Antarctic.

Either way, I can't really see how either one of those results can be described as 'We Lose', assuming the 'we' there refers to humanity.

What the hell, internet ad?

So I've had more than a few problems with internet ads in the past - mostly those of credit agencies - what with them being completely inept at making their points. The other day I happened across one that leaped well beyond regular incompetence into the absurd-

Please tell me that someone just grabbed the wrong image when they were making the ad and there was no oversight before it went up. Please tell me that this wasn't an attempt to create some kind of a metaphoric relationship between debt and physical abuse.

Or debt and people who are bad at special effect makeup.

So, anyways, Skyfall was just terrible.

Nearly nine months later, I feel that I finally have the emotional distance necessary to watch Skyfall again, chronicling how it may be the most lazily-plotted James Bond movie in history. A non-stop mess of plot holes and terrible characters making inconceivable decisions for no earthly reason. Roger Ebert frequently described the 'Idiot Plot' as a movie whose plot only moves because every character involved in it is a moron.

Skyfall's storyline is the platonic ideal, the perfect form of the idiot plot.

So here is a list - in basic chronological order - of every stupid thing about the movie Skyfall.

We start immediately in the aftermath of an attack on some kind of an MI6 safehouse, during which the hard drive containing the names and photos of every undercover MI6 agent all over the world was stored. Why is this information all in one place? Why was it placed in an ordinary laptop? What possible use could MI6 have for it in Turkey? Maybe if it was a list of all the undercover agents in and around Turkey then its existence might make some semblance of sense, but EVERYONE is on this list. Why would this ever exist in the first place, and then why was it left in a safehouse in a foreign country with only three guards?

Dexter is Just Terrible, and Has Been Basically Forever

So Dexter came back last week, and before watching the new episode - which I'm sure is about how he's been rewarded by getting his sister to shoot a cop (although really that's going to be his downfall!) - I wanted to take a moment to reflect on just how terrible the season-ender of Dexter was last year.

The episode begins with LaGuerta placing Dexter under arrest for being the Bay Harbour Butcher. She's able to do this because she's discovered a shirt with some blood on it in some garbage from Dexter's boat. The blood belongs to Estrada, the man who murdered Dexter's Mom all those years ago. The only logical assumption? Dexter has killed the man! How's he going to get out of this one?

Simple - it was all Dexter's brilliant plan! He broke into the evidence storage facility where they were still holding the bloody shirt that Estrada was arrested in from 30 years ago. By doing this and planting it on his own boat, he somehow makes everyone think that LaGuerta planted the evidence, discrediting her. Isn't it convenient that the police department held onto that shirt - which wasn't actually evidence of anything, just the clothes Estrada was wearing - for all those decades? Seems like a bit of a stretch, doesn't it? More importantly, if LaGuerta was going to frame Dexter, why would she do it in a way that could be so easily uncovered?

I Hate Indiana Jones: Day 72

Indiana Jones and the Accidental Trailblazer

It’s no surprise that half of the fun of this type of high adventure movie is watching the characters discovering lost civilizations and ancient cities. In world that’s essentially been mapped (save for the Oceans. And Thule) it’s a romantic idea to imagine that there still are mystical peaks and valleys that haven’t yet been seen by modern humanity. It's kind of hard to believe these conceits in modern-age fiction, our world of satellite topography and long-range helicopters has long since killed any notion that there could be a Shangri-la hiding in a mountain range somewhere, even something as basic as Man-Who-Would-Be-Kingistan has been debunked as pure fantasy.

This is why we love adventure films sent in the recent past. The technology and culture is familiar enough that we can easily imagine ourselves there, but the characters’ overall knowledge of the world is less depressingly complete than our own, so their willingness to chase the fantastic can seem admirable, rather than naïvely quixotic. It’s not like this is a recent trend in fiction, either. Even Alan Quatermain was adventuring half a century before his stories were penned.

One of the key elements that make this ‘lost civilization’ storyline so compelling is the way it sidesteps our own history. Always worried about plausibility, the storyteller has to go to extreme lengths to offer an explanation for how these people have gone undiscovered by humanity and untouched by progress. There’s a certain curiosity that the horizon generates in the human mind. Who’s to say what’s just over that next ridge, deeper into the woods, or just behind that mountain range? Why couldn’t it be an ancient city built entirely out of gold?

Intellectually we know that there aren’t any mysteries left, and that, within out own experiences, we’ll never uncover something ancient and mysterious. That’s why it’s so vitally important that this discovery, when presented in adventure fiction, come at some price. If the struggle that the characters must go through in order to find the underground empire isn’t extreme, then where’s the satisfaction in the discovery?

Consider the Well of Souls in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indy has to go to Nepal to track down the key to its discovery, then carefully sneak right under the Nazis’ noses in order to confirm its location. Or the final resting place of the Grail in Last Crusade – it’s established that Sean Connery spent his entire adult life looking for information about its location, and then Indy has to struggle through a setpiece in the Venice sewers to obtain the final clue.

Compare that to Indy and company’s journey to the Valley of the Plastic Prop in this film. First off, just to reiterate, he’s not discovering anything lost to history. John Hurt already did that, but he’s not a whole lot of help just now, what with him being crazy and all. So what does Indy have to do to retrace John Hurt’s steps? Does he have to decode bizarre things the man says? Not really. Find a key to decoding a map that John Hurt makes? Nope.

All he accomplishes is getting kidnapped by the Russians who place him in a convoy, which quickly turns into a chase sequence, as Indy and company find themselves racing through a suspiciously paved jungle. During this chase sequence no one is consulting any maps, or paying any particular attention to the direction they're headed in. One group wants to escape with the skull, and the other wants to stop them. Yet somehow this chase sequence terminates with the characters all arriving at a river approximately five hundred yards from the mysterious city lost to the mists of time.

How did it stay an undiscovered legend for so long? Apparently no one had bothered to walk in a straight line through the jungle before. Fancy that.

Wow, was the film ATM stupid.

Here, broken down into categories, are things that are wrong with the film ATM.

Reality problems:

No one parks that far from an ATM. Especially at 1AM.
If it's cold enough that their lives are in danger, why can I see no one's breath?
If it's so cold, why aren't your hands in your pockets all of the time?
Why is the water so terrifying? By virtue of it not being ice it must logically be warmer than the air you've been complaining about all night. Yes, water can suck the heat right out of you, but it's less scary than -15 degree weather.
And if it's less cold than that outside, what are you complaining about?

Stupid things people do:
You saw the killer get into your car and sabotage it - how do you think you're going to be able to drive away? Just grab the purse and get out of there.
Okay, so you made your friend walk a hundred feet to the ATM just to be a dick - when you also have to go to the ATM, why aren't you driving up to it, rather than also walking 100 feet?
What woman leaves her purse in an unlocked car at 1AM? I don't care how empty the parking lot is.
How did that janitor make it past all the dead bodies and wrecked cars without becoming alarmed?
If he was alarmed, why did he lunge into the ATM kiosk without saying anything or yelling? Why didn't he say or yell anything while he was being held on the ground?
Why wasn't someone always watching for the killer? Isn't knowing where he is priority 1?
When the security guard sees a car with broken windows and people waving from inside an ATM, why does he not radio it in? Isn't the broken window alone worth a police report?
How did he miss the body lying in that pool of light?
After becoming alarmed, why does the security guard get out of his car rather than driving up to the ATM? Is this parking lot mined or something?
Why didn't the characters run out to the security guard? He has a working car, at least a club, and possibly a taser. Wouldn't running to him, waving your arms the second you see him, be your only sane choice?
The ceiling of that kiosk is not so high that you can't simply hold the burning trash can over your head. Why are you messing around with this 'climbing on shoulders' nonsense?

Here are things that had to happen for his plan to work (and why they couldn't have):
More than one person had to stop at an out-of-the-way ATM in the middle of the night - had just one person stopped, the plan falls apart. (Already a stretch.)
All of the people in the car have to go into the ATM kiosk. (This doesn't happen - people wait in the car with the motor running while someone runs in.)
Despite it being winter and freezing, none of the victims can be dressed for the weather. (Which... how?)
None of his victims can have a cell phone. Or a lighter. (As if.)
His victims have to be unwilling to physically assault him, despite the fact that he's alone and unarmed to begin with. (Why don't they do this?)
His victims have to be unwilling to simply run away since, as is established time and again, he's alone, and could only chase one of them - catching that person is not guaranteed. (Yes, one of them would have hit the tripwire, but the rest would have escaped.)
He must have laid the tripwire after the victims arrived, an activity that would have taken some time and been plainly obvious, since it necessitated standing directly under street lamps to wrap the wire around their bases. (So why didn't they see him do it?)
It has to be believable that one of the victims could have spent a half hour breaking into the back of the kiosk. (But the characters were on the ATM camera for all four hours, other than a couple of 90-second gaps when only one of them ran outside, and a thirty-second gap when one ran out to rescue another injured victim.)
For the end of the plan to work, he had to crash a car into an ATM kiosk and somehow be sure that the remaining victim inside wouldn't be hurt. (Which he absolutely couldn't be sure of.)
The police have to be immediately certain that the sole survivor they find in the kiosk is the killer, and be completely unwilling to listen to his story about the real killer, who's just a few feet away. (The cops have no evidence of his guilt, and no reason to jump to that conclusion.)

Bones, you're terrible!

I don't ordinarily watch the show Bones, largely because it's terrible. Every time I randomly catch an episode it manages to shock me by being excessively awful in some way - suggesting that the team has a database of every tool in the world that could conceivably cause an injury, not bothering to explain why the FBI is called in on any of these random murder cases, doing an episode about whatever was in the public eye a few months ago (Jersey Shore, Teen Pregnancy Pacts, Polygamy). All good reasons to never watch the show again - but the most egregious sin the show commits by far is the incredibly sloppy mystery-solving the show engages in.

Take, for example, this past week's episode, which concerned some body parts that appeared in people's toilets due to a backed-up sewer system. The team quickly figures out that the pieces must have originated in a penitentiary further up the pipeline, and decide to look for the culprit there. They quickly encounter Pruitt Taylor Vince, who must be the killer based on his relative fame compared to the rest of the guest cast.

Now let's take a look at the preposterousness that the show has to offer. First we're asked to believe that, based on examining a skeleton that had been dissolved, crushed, and then sent through a sewer system, they could determine someone was stabbed with a conical shiv. A completely unique weapon, made not from a sharpened toothbrush or piece of scrap metal, but rather a few rolled-up pieces of paper, which they find in a box of weapons discovered in the previous week's search for contraband.

So, point number 1 - why would the killer have kept the shiv? After using it to murder someone your first logical step would be to get rid of the weapon, and this is a ridiculously simple weapon to get rid of. Literally dunking it in a glass of water would do the trick. The killer went to the trouble of dissolving a body, but couldn't be bothered to drop the paper knife into the acid as well?

Hey, speaking of, where did the acid come from? Isn't this a prison? Well, it turns out that this prison's industry is largely concerned with producing mailboxes, and part of making them involves dunking the mailboxes in a giant vat of hydrochloric acid.

This turns out to be a red herring, however, with the stains on the bones being inconsistent with hydrochloric acid. But what other acid could there possibly be in a prison? They get their answer by unfolding the paper knife, which winds up being from a cookbook, letting them know that the killer worked in the kitchen! But how did Pruitt dissolve the body and put it down the floor drain?

The answer? Vinegar! Yes, according to the team it's simple enough to boil vinegar down, reducing it to acetic acid, which could have been used to break down the body. That's all the explanation we get.

Does that make the least bit of sense, though? Consider this - in order to effectively and quickly dissolve a body with acid, you'd need enough to nearly submerge it, say about 200 litres. Which is a lot of acid - but far more vinegar. Since vinegar is maybe five percent acetic acid, you'd need twenty times as much, or 4 kiloliters of vinegar, to execute the plan. For Pruitt's plan to work he would need 4 tons of vinegar, enough alone time in the kitchen to reduce it to acid, a giant tub to store the acid in, and then the hours of unsupervised time it would take to kill a man, melt his body, and shove the remaining pieces down a kitchen drain, then finally clean up the ungodly mess all of that murdering and dissolving would have created.

Is it possible that a killer could do all of this? Sure. Is it possible that he could do all of it in a prison? Dear lord, of course not. Where did you go to school?

What's wrong with you that you would even think that?

So yeah, about Valentine...

I'd like to now present the most interesting thing about the movie 'Valentine', and then muse for a moment about what this scene (and the director's commentary about it) says about the film.

To set the stage - a friend to the four main characters girls has disappeared, and the rest have begun receiving mysterious, threatening letters from a figure in their past. One of them has supposedly left town, but was in reality murdered the night before. The other three have gathered to discuss the scene with the detective in charge of the murder investigation.

Pay close attention to the director's comments about the location, and why it was chosen.



So he talks about it being a real house, the problems with negative space, and the beautiful exterior. What doesn't he mention at any point? Why he's shooting there at all!

By which I mean, whose house is that supposed to be, and why are the characters gathered there? The cop asked them all to meet, but they're not meeting at-

The main character's crappy apartment.

The far-nicer apartment shared by Denise Richards and the now-dead girl.

Jessica Capshaw's mansion.

They're meeting at this house, which has no apparent connection to anything else in the film. It's slightly possible that this is supposed to be the house where the first victim (Katherine Heigl!) lived, but A: I'm not sure why they would all be gathered there, and 2: That seems like a suspiciously huge house with well-manicured lawns for a med student who drives this car:

-to be living in. We can even be sure it's not Katherine's parents' house (not that there would be any reason to be meeting there...) since the Detective specifically mentions bringing a box of cards from the parents, hoping that the killer would have sent his condolences.

Dear the makers of "Machete Joe"

Who is this movie for? As I watched it, I couldn't quite put a finger on what your intended audience was. At first you seem to be a satire of terrible low-budget filmmaking - the pretentious director who wants to make 'art' out of a terrible premise, the producer who just wants to ensure that they get their money back, the actors/crew with four jobs each...

If this was your intent, though, you'd think that there should be some depth to this film beyond actually being a terrible low-budget film.

While I'm sure that low-budget filmmaking can be an extremely stressful process, and any number of narcissitic low-budget films have certainly mined that well for drama, it doesn't work especially well in a horror context since you just wind up presenting characters in the least favorable light imaginable, bitching at each other for a third of the film before the killing starts. Unless your desire was to make us feel contempt for the characters, so that we wouldn't be sad when they died (a theory that the entire rest of the film wouldn't support), all you've done is create a situation where it's impossible to care about how the events of the film play out.

If you're making a satire, just make a satire. Putting all of these comic elements in the top half of the film just creates huge tonal inconsistencies (exacerbated by the fact that they follow an unpleasant rape/murder sequence) that leave us unsure how we're supposed to respond to the rest of the film.

Also, why didn't they just leave? At any of the dozen moments that they had an opportunity to do so?