Criminal Minds 208: Empty Planet

This episode opens with a ‘bang’… by which I mean a montage of a dude making some pipe bombs, calling in a warning to the news, and then doing this with them-

So who is this crazed bomber, and what is he trying to stop with his explosions?

Let’s find out after the credits!

The Eleventh-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

This is what was wrong with Inglorious Bastards. At no point in the movie did someone fly a plane low enough that its propeller decapitated a German Officer.

Just putting that out there.

Although, technically, that's Commando Yank's 'GyroSub', and not actually an airplane.

Criminal Minds 207: North Mammon

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Criminal minds tried to get in on the whole torture porn thing. I mean, they’re kind of a horror-themed show, right?

In this case, it’s a situation where three girls are kidnapped on the night of a sleepover, which happens to be on the exact same night as a pep rally! But who’s done it? And why did they live in a town with the preposterous name of North Mammon? Why not just move down the road to Greed City, TN?

Okay, girls grabbed from a sleepover – not exactly Saw territory, I know, but believe me, it’s going somewhere. And that somewhere is in a small underground concrete chamber with adequate ventilation. The killer opens a vent to talk to them – and he wants to play a game! The rules are simple: If they do nothing, then they’ll all die of dehydration. But if one of them is murdered by the other two, those two get to leave!

Yeah, it’s one of those moral quandry deals. And one of them has a bad cold that’s going to turn into pneumonia what with her being buried alive and all, so it’s just a question of who’s got the guts to kill who?

Final Destination 4: The Final Destination

You know, when I was working on the reviews of the last three movies I gradually developed a theory that the premonitions that led people to escape their imminent deaths were being by the Ghost of Murder, solely for the purpose of his own amusement – he’s got infinite chances to kill them after all, and as only the sickest of hunters will tell you, hunting is far more pleasurable when your prey knows that they’re going to die.

It was intended as nothing more than a joke about the series’ baffling lack of an identifiable antagonist, or really any drama of any kind. Ever since the first movie it’s been a foregone conclusion that every character would die in the end – even 2’s happy ending was apparently undone in the supplemental material on part 3’s DVD, although I haven’t actually watched it to check. Tony Todd’s lines about death having a plan, and the crackpot with a book at the beginning of 2 were as close as the series ever came to giving ‘death’ a personality – the rather thin idea that ‘Death’ has a specific plan for when all living creatures were going to die, and that if you see that plan you can avoid it, at least until Death circles back around. This explanation seemed a little on the idiotic side, especially when you consider that it in no way explains the premonitions people received.

So I thought it would be funny to refer to ‘The Ghost of Murder’, a malicious spirit who arranges tragedies, then warns people about them through signs and premonitions – explaining that he was like a cat that lets a mouse go over and over just so he can catch him again and again.

Little did I know that FD4 would, whether it was intentional or not, go on to confirm my suspicions about the Ghost of Murder in their entirety. So, without any further ado, let’s take a look at Final Destination 4: The Final Destination!

Criminal Minds 206: The Boogeyman

As of the beginning of this episode Elle is still, technically, a member of the FBI. But given that everyone knows she’s a nutjob, that’s not going to last. Of course, the FBI cleared her of any culpability in the shooting, despite the fact that she was acting against orders in going to the rapist’s apartment, and no one has any idea where his gun came from.

More importantly, when Greg is ordering her into therapy and she tries to say she doesn’t need it, he doesn’t pull out the big gun – that she, whether the shooting was justified or not, created a situation where a shooting was likely to occur, and she did it for no defensible reason at all.

Elle’s headed for therapy, and off the show by the end of the hour, I’m guessing.

So, on to the plot of the episode. A bunch of kids are hanging out, listening to an older child tell a scary story about how an old man who lives in the woods killed a little boy recently. They believe the old man watches them from a haunted house atop a hill. There seems to be some truth to the story though, because while it’s being told another child is beaten to death in the woods!

The Tenth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

So, what's wrong with the following picture?


Yes, that's right. If that's what the frog's statement translates to, why isn't it a question?

Final Destination 3: The Ghost of Murder on Ice!

Ah, FD3 – the movie in the series that I have the most contempt for (to date). Now while it’s true that most of this contempt is due to the relative lack of Tony Toddity in the film (he appears in two brief vocal cameos), it also has to do with the film’s utter failure to make any kind of sense at all. As proof, I give you – the disaster that kicks off the plot:

Wendy and friends climb aboard a devil-themed rollercoaster whose voice is provided by Tony Todd. While they’re being strapped in the hydraulic system that keeps the seat arms in place springs a bit of a leak-

Letting us know that it’s not the best-maintained ride in the state. Then an a-hole further back on the ride asks the hot girls in front of them to flash him while they’re going through the loop – although I’m not entirely clear how he thinks this could possibly happen, both because he’s an ass, and the small issue of the girls having restraints on that both limit their movement and cover their breasts.

Perhaps the line is leftover from when the script imagined they would be in a more old-fashioned rollercoaster?

Criminal Minds 205: Aftermath

The story begins, as I’m beginning to understand that most stories do, at home base in Quantico, where the team is being briefed about a nefarious serial rapist. His twisted MO? He phones them and leaves a voicemail announcing that he’s standing right behind them, and then, because he’d broken into their house, he is! The already-puzzling aspect? For the first group of victims he attacked young women from a bible college, and now he’s gone after single women in their 30s… but why?

I suppose we’re going to find out after the credits, aren’t we?

Final Destination 2: The Ghost of Murder Returns

And we’re back! It’s time to take a look at Final Destination 2, which, according to Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer™, has been critically consensed to be the high point in the series, with a Freshness rating of 47%.

So you just know it’s going to be good, right?

Except no, it’s not. In fact, it sets up a disturbing trend which will continue into Final Destination 3: The Ghost of Murder On Ice!

Self-Promotion!

Well, not exactly self-promotion, technically speaking. While it's an honor to be nominated for one of bloody-disgusting's Horror Blog Awards, alongside such luminaries as CyberSchizoid, Moving Pictures Haiku Reviews, and William Malmborg, I'm not posting this following link/picture for my own benefit-



If you've got a second, would you mind heading over there, get an account (not as much of a chore as it sounds) and vote for Zombots? It's about time that TheDivemistress was recognized as the bold new voice in the horror blogosphere that she is, and this is a chance for that to happen!

Just make sure you actually vote for 'Zombots'. There's like eight blogs there that start with 'Zom'. Just warning you.

Thanks in advance!

Criminal Minds 204: Psychodrama

And you thought regular bank robbers were bad? This one likes to strip people down and then force certain selected pairs to simulate sex with one another! The team is on to him, though – they know he’s a serial killer just waiting to happen!

Before they can fly out to California to help catch the guy it’s time for some interpersonal drama, as Greg’s wife drops by to remind him that their child has medical problems. What’s that? A child with a mysterious, unnamed ‘condition’? It seems to me that this will be a well that they’ll be able to mine for years of angst for their main character! Score!

But on to the actual plot of the episode. One the way to LA the team tries to figure out the killer’s specific motivation is, so as to better predict what he’ll do next. He escapes on a bike, which makes him difficult to catch, and wears a mask, so no one can recognize him! They use a little ‘geographic profiling’ to figure out where the robber likely lives, then head down to the crime scene to suss it out. From this they glean an important piece of information – he only attacked a guard at one bank robbery… but why?

The Ninth-Greatest Panel in Comic Book History

Okay, this is more of a promotional image than an ad, but I couldn't resist.

I must track down that issue of Master Comics. I need to know why a balloon led that gloved man to shoot that child in the face.

The Final Destination series is not especially good at continuity.

Or coherent rules.

With a rented DVD of ‘Final Destination 4: The Final Destination’ sitting here by my computer, ready to be watched, I got to thinking about something that’s puzzled me for a while – no, not the way everyone but the Saw franchise seem obsessed with dropping the numbers from their titles – that’s a conversation for another time.

What I want to discuss today is just what a loose relationship the entire franchise has made with ‘making sense’. It seems like a simple enough premise to execute: There’s a visually compelling disaster in which teens are killed, which turns out to be a dream of one of the teens, which motives him/her to avoid that fate. Everyone else dies, and then the Ghost of Murder – who is pissed off at having been thwarted (And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for that meddling dream!) hunts down the survivors and kills them in an even more brutal fashion than they would have died the first time around.

Yet each film has managed to, in one way or another, botch this simple formula. Huh.

But hey, why am I talking about this in the abstract for, when I could be exhaustively detailing examples of what I mean – which is kind of the entire point of this blog, come to think of it.

So let’s start with Final Destination.

Criminal Minds 203: The Perfect Storm

Cruelty’s afoot in Jacksonville, Fla, as a husband and wife receive a mysterious DVD in the mail – one depicting their college-age daughter being tortured to death, all to the tune of ‘Only the Good Die Young’! There’s not just one murder, though, as the father has a heart attack while watching the video and dies!

Who could possibly be so vile as to taunt the parents of the victim? I’m guessing we’ll find out soon, since, with the exception of a two-parter, none of the episodes have ended without someone being caught for the crimes.

Mandy immediately makes the leap that there must be two killers because one of the killers seems to be performing for someone, and not just the family watching it. This would be a useful insight, if the camera, which should be on a tripod, hadn’t moved while the killer is torturing his victim, proving the existence of a cameraman.

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Shocker Edition

A recent conversation with The Divemistress about the movie Shocker got me to thinking about just how puzzling a film it is. Never has there been a movie whose purpose for existing was so unbelievably clear, yet which has done done such an abhorrent job of fulfilling that purpose.

Simply put, the film Shocker exists for one reason: To create a franchise horror villain that Wes Craven would own the rights to, so that he could make back some of the sweet cash he lost by signing away Freddy to New Line.

That character? Horace Pinker, the “Freddy Kruger of Television”. He would have the ability to travel through circuitry, move around as an electrical man, and, most importantly, both exist within the reality of television shows, and drag other people within the shows to be killed there.

It’s an ambitious idea, finding yourself trapped, in fact murdered, within the realm of your favorite television show. While it’s not quite the equal of ‘guy kills you in/with your dreams’, it’s certainly a decent premise, and more than capable of supporting a franchise of films.

Which brings me to the question I’d ask Wes Craven if I ever had the opportunity – why does it take this movie so damn long to get to the point?

Let’s compare it to some other films that it shares qualities with, shall we?