Toon Pelicans

Here’s a job I did for a local business.

 

It took a while to do since I did all of the elements individually so that they could use each pelican for different ad purposes…. It had lots of type on it  (I removed the company name and logo) and  it didn’t have a background so it looks different than the actual original finished thing…. I generally have to do jobs as quickly as possible so they never quite turn out as well as I would like them to be….

Rogue from the X-Men

Here’s a an old pic of Rogue that I did.

Just still feeling my way around in the dark figuring out where the posts end up on the blog. I’m getting the whole page and category things confused…

Drag Me To Hell Movie SPOILER Review (2.5 of 5)

Might as well get this over with: I only do this to movies that I feel have jerked me around…Hate the fact that it’s the first review that I’m posting…Oh, well….. SPOILER ALERT! THE WHOLE DAMN REVIEW IS A SPOILER ALERT! DON”T READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON”T WANT TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS MOVIE!!!! I AM ALSO GOING TO GIVE AWAY THE ENDING … Mainly because I can’t talk about this movie without talking about the ending which is one of the two main parts that I did not care for……………….. Okay, I mean it! Don’t cry foul or anything else if you decide to read on, because I’ve warned you! I don’t like to give movies away but if you’re still reading and you want to be surprised by the movie when you see it, then you A) you don’t like surprises B)must have absolutely no self control and can’t bring yourself to stop reading something once you’ve started, C) there is someone that is Dragging You To A Horror Movie That You Don’t Want To See And You Fear Horror Movies So You Want To Be Ready For What’s Coming So That You Won’t Wet Yourself and Be Embarrassed For All Eternity, or D) you’re just an idiot and nothing I say can dissuade you from reading on and being righteously indignant at me for giving away so much of a movie that YOU have not yet seen even though I am wasting a lot of word space trying to warn you that I am going to SPOIL  it for you if you continue reading….. Please don’t be an idiot. I’ve warned you.

Still here? Good…

 

The movie starts in the past with a hispanic couple bringing their son, who has been cursed by gypsies, to a medium.  The medium explains the child is possessed of an evil spirit- the Lamia, and that it is coming to take the kid to Hell. The Lamia quickly comes in, defeats the medium in mock battle and takes the kid. The Medium vows that they will meet again and of course you know that they will, otherwise this setup wouldn’t have been in the movie – another seer explains the Lamia more in depth later…

Flash forward 40  years, Alison Lohman plays Christine Brown, to whom the movie’s title alludes to, a sweet but ambitious bank lending agent who picks the wrong day to try to impress her boss. Sam Raimi (and his co-writer brother Ivan) quickly sets up Christine as a somewhat mousy victim who  listens to self help CDs on the way to work, watches what she eats and is competing with a new coworker to impress the boss for a promotion. She is also under some pressure on the homefront, overhearing her boyfriend’s conversation with his mother who thinks her son, the young Professor Clay Dalton (played by the always friendly Justin Long),  can do better than Christine. Me personally, want to know what she’s smokin’. Has she actually seen Lohman? 

Lovely & Talented....

Mmmm… Sorry, I’m not a professional… Anyway…. Enter Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver), a very creepy old Gypsy woman with a bad eye and who never learned the importance of hygiene, who wants an extension on her home loan or else she’s going to lose her home. Christine’s boss leaves it up to Christine to decide, and of course she denies Mrs Ganush or we wouldn’t have a movie.  On top of being denied , Ganush embarrasses herself by begging Christine for the loan extension and then blaming Christine for “shaming her”. Ganush vows to make her pay for the transgression and exits the bank by bank security and we see her car for the first time, that yellow Olds that Raimi and Bruce Campbell were riding around in during their high school years… The license plate read 99951 which is appropriate for the movie if you read it upside down.

Later that day, Christine steps into the parking garage… the very dark parking garage… and Christine sees the old woman’s car and hears her coughing in the dark, causing her to hurry to her car. But, of course, Mrs. Ganush is already in the car and Lohman becomes a stand in for Bruce Campbell and the object of Sam Raimi’s abuse. I have to admit at this point in the movie, I am absolutely loving this movie. With obnoxiously loud sound effects, cheap scares and some really bad taste I was thoroughly enjoying it.

Ganush after slobbering, gnawing and generally scaring the bejeebers out of Christine Brown, manages to pull the girl out of the car and steal one of her buttons. Yes, a coat button. Through this button she places the curse of the Lamia on Christine and promises that Christine will be the one begging her in the days ahead. She gives the button back and the young heroine falls unconscious…

 The police show up along with Clay Dalton, who takes her home. On the way they pass a palm reader’s place of business and Christine wants to have her palm read after being followed by a leaf filled win gust. She know something is wrong. This is where Rham Jas (Daleep Rao), a seer begins telling Christine her fortune. Midway through, after seeing some creepy quick film edits, he stops, and wants to give Christine her money back. He tells Christine that an evil spirit has come upon her and that she is in danger. At first she doesn’t believe, with her boyfriend believing the seer to be just a huckster making a buck, but after she begins hearing creepy sounds and voices, strange sinister shadows,  being tossed about her house, and having some really gross dreams, and having a mass of insects being vomited on you by an old lady with yellow saliva and not being able to wake up out of a nightmare  causes her to go back to the seer for help. I think the projectile nose bleed she has at work probably tipped the scales… Oh, and she has a fly in her belly…. At this point, I am still really enjoying the movie….

The seer gives her some tips on how to get rid of the Lamia curse… She tries to ask to be forgiven, but finds out that Mrs. Ganush has passed on (and I’m thinking she’s already moved on to Hell herself, what with tossing around Eternal Soul Damnation Curses and all). After being humiliated at the Gypsy Funeral Gathering in Ganush’s house, Christine next tries offering an animal sacrifice, which is her cute kitten, but only after she’s again attacked/stalked by the Lamia demon and tossed about her house. See, she’s a vegetarian and an animal lover. The kitten was killed for comic effect, but if this is her pet and she was going to make an animal sacrifice, especially being an animal lover, wouldn’t she have just gone and gotten some farm animal or something like a chicken. Having been raised on a farm, I thought she would have been used to the idea of killing an animal anyway. There’s a nice scene where Christine and Clay have dinner with Clay’s parents where she eventually embarrasses herself at the claws of the invisible Lamia and some LOUD sound effects. Then, she’s told she needs $10000 to go see (and pay for) the medium that did battle with the Lamia and lost all those years ago. This involves Christine pawning all of her belongings (never take your shit to a pawn shop!), but not before getting another visit from  Ganush in her garage which was the worst scene in the entire movie. It should not have been in there. I think the eyeball gag was supposed to be a nod to Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 Fans, but it seemed way out of place in the movie. It was waaaay too cartoony in the setup with the anvil, and the CGI was HORRIBLE in this scene. The editor should have cut this scene before Ganush is revealed in the garage. To make matters worse (editing wise), after only getting 3 or 4 thousand dollars, we find out Christine’s boyfriend has already paid the $100000 for her, which made the whole money scramble unnecessary in the first place. They could have still hit the magic 90 minute mark by doing this.

From here on the CGI effects get a lot worse. I know what you’re thinking: a Sam Raimi movie isn’t a Sam Raimi movie without at least a few bad effects scenes, but this movie’s great first half was ruined by the second half’s awful CGI. 

All right, Christine and Rham Jas go see the medium without her boyfriend. He cares enough about her to pay $10000 to a psychic because even though he doesn’t believe there’s a Lamia curse, she does; but evidently he doesn’t care enough to be with her when she’s going to communicate with said Lamia.

I think Justin Long probably had another gig to go to at that point in filming. The medium begins an incantation to call forth the Lamia and to place it within a goat so that it may be killed by Christine grabbing the Lamia’s hand and placing it on a goat’s head. The best part of this scene is that Alison Lohman looks awesome in a black dress…. Sorry, getting unprofessional again.

You would think the Lamia would know that they were up to something while he is in possession of the medium considering there is a live goat at the table between him and his intended victim. More bad CGI follows and the medium ends up dying in failure.So that was pointless except for maybe early in the seance, I swear you can hear Bruce Campbell laughing from Evil dead 2 (when he goes momentarily insane in the cabin).That was fun.

Christine soon realizes that the only way to get the Lamia curse off of her is to pass it on to someone else as long as they know what they’re in for. Me personally, I would have put it on eBay for one of those 1 day auctions. If you can find someone on the internet who wants to be eaten alive by another person who is advertising that he’s looking for someone who’s willing to let him eat them (I’m not making that up, look it up…or don’t. Please don’t.), then you can find someone that is looking to take a one way trip to Hell. Christine, however, finds she can’t do that to another person, which would’ve been great to show that she has moral character if this movie had had a different ending (I’m getting to that). 

She then finds out that she can give it to dead people which doesn’t seem right, but why not give it back to the old gypsy lady? And why didn’t the seer tell her this in the first place? Would’ve certainly made things easier…. So then the movie gets really predictable. While riding in the car with her boyfriend, they decide to take a train to Clay’s parents’ cabin getaway. She’ll meet him at the train station, but not before she goes to give the buried gypsy the button. At this point the button is in a white envelope sealed by the seer. She drops the envelope then has to dig through other envelopes to ‘find it’ in her boyfriend’s car. In the entire theater only Alison Lohman’s character Christine, didn’t know that she had the wrong envelope. At this point I realized that what I had thought was going to happen before I sat down in the movie theater, that Lohman’s character would be pointlessly dragged down to Hell, was indeed going to happen. 

She goes to the cemetary, digs up the gypsy’s casket in the rain, and places the envelope (not the button) in Ganush’s hand.She then mud wrestles with the body, gets conked in the head by a headstone, and nearly drowns before climbing out of the grave. Could she have not felt that the button was not in the envelope, especially when the envelope started getting wet? Would she have not pulled it out? Anyway, the movie didn’t end and I knew what was coming. Brown miraculously gets her promotion, she gets rid of her old coat and things are going to get better right? I know Sam didn’t think he was fooling anybody. I mean he couldn’t have. C’mon. Of course, her boyfriend reveals the button, and the panic stricken Christine stumbles onto the train tracks as a train bears down on her. As Clay screams ”Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo” in slo-mo, teary eyed with one of those single tears that rolls down the cheek like Demi Moore’s tear in ‘Ghost’, Christine is Dragged To Hell. End of movie.

 

This movie was certainly not the worst movie that I have ever seen, it entertained me throughout, but the ending almost seems like making up for Sam’s movie being PG-13. I didn’t completely hate this movie. It has a lot going for it. Alison Lohman is certainly worth staring at for 2 hours. It’s loaded with silly humor, if you’re going to make a bad humorless horror movie, it’s just bad. If you make a bad one with humor, it’s still funny I guess, but it’s the predictable ending that I thought ruined the whole thing. And it has a problem that a lot of other ‘harder’ horror films (like Wolf Creek, for one) where the protagonist is put in a bad situation and then is murdered. I get that in the news every day. That’s a news report, not a story. If there is no moral dilemna overcome, then there must be some kind of point to the story. A reason for being. This is just a tacked on negative ending for the sake of a negative ending. This is just screwing with your audience, making the audience care for a character over 90 minutes only to kill the character off at the end just to be shocking. I was just disappointed that this is Sam Raimi….

 

You can do better Sam.

 

 

A little about who I am… I attended the Midnight Showing of  Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell (at the Rave 15 on Bayou Boulevard here in Pensacola)  which seems a more appropriate time to see a horror movie than any other time I guess. I was geared to see this being a longtime Sam Raimi fan since seeing Evil Dead 2 way back in the mid to late  80′s and have continued to follow and enjoy his movies since (Crimewave, Darkman, Army Of Darkness, The first 2 Spider-Man Movies, A Simple Plan to name a few). I even get excited when Sam has made appearances in films like Intruder and Miller’s Crossing. I love horror movies, but you have to crawl through 500 yards of shit-smelling foulness you can’t even imagine to get to a good one and nowadays, a lot of horror fans don’t seem to get that you’re not supposed to be rooting for the guy in the hockey mask with the machete (most horror directors don’t either… and that alone makes a huge difference. Case in Point: Check out the Carpenter’s Halloween and thje Zombie remake). And  I don’t mind if they have bad effects if they have a decent story. Having a  PG-13 rating is weak for a horror movie, but I can even accept that if it’s done well. Gremlins was a horror movie (or was that a Christmas movie?) rated PG and I loved that one, and hell, I still love the Monster  Squad (a kids’ horror movie). I even lowered my expectations for Drag Me To Hell a bit based on the PG-13 rating but it seems the PG-13 rating now means a dumbed down story . 

What the movie needed: Better CGI. A greater emphasis on how much time Christine has left (a la the clock in Quick And The Dead). More editing.  A little more intelligence in the writing. Bruce Campbell. A chainsaw. A better ending.

And really. If an old gypsy woman who looks like THIS comes calling….

…you give her what the Hell she wants… Unless it involves getting within spitting distance…  If I have to give this a rating I will give it a 2 and a half out of 5.

And the thing that I don’t get the most. Sam Raimi knows that there is a massive amount of interest for another Evil Dead movie, especially one that will return Bruce Campbell as Ash. I know he’s said they can do it without the studios when they’re in their 80s but WTF?! Everyone wants to see that and he churns out half assed written, bad effects movies like this instead. In a time where Hollywood continues to do reboots, sequels, prequels, remakes, alternate reality versions of older movies and franchises why not actually put a movie that horror fans are actually clamoring for? Just a thought, Sam.

 

How about one more picture of Alison Lohman?

 

Is she cute or what?

Welcome!

Trying to learn how to fly this thing and with the name Crash! Landen—Well, that’s going to be difficult….
I’m figuring out how to post pictures, art, and ‘short, old words‘…. I guess there will be a feeling out process…. Oh, BTW I’m responsible for the monster above…