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Bruce Campbell Vs The Army of Darkness!

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The Army of Darkness is the third film in the original The Evil Dead franchise.  It is Sam Raimi’s dark comedy send up to A Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court.  Is it as good as the classic Evil Dead II?  Yes it is.

The plot continues after Evil Dead II.  Ash defeats the Demon at the cabin then is sucked in to a worm hole and ends up in the past.  He then has to help the people of that time ward off The Evil Dead.

It is amazing how this franchise changed from movie to movie.  The first movie is a straight up horror movie, all be it a low budget one.  Then second one blends in humor with the horror, and Army of Darkness is a straight up dark zany comedy.  I hope that the new franchise follows this path because it is one of the better trilogies ever made.

Sam Raimi must love old school special effects because he uses them all in this movie:  stop motion, puppets, overlaying two sets of film, and almost any other technique you can think of, and it gives this movie a very old school swash buckling feel, and it is wonderful.

Bruce Campbell is his usual jerky hero, and he had perfected it by this movie, and plays it so well it was a shame they never made another sequel, as of yet that is.  The rest of the cast does their job well, but they are pretty much just reacting to the amazing Bruce Campbell.

Of the three movies Evil Dead 2 is still my favorite, but Army of Darkness is a close, close second.  It is also the reason I forced myself to sit through the new Evil Dead movie, so I could have a chance to see Bruce be Ash one more time.

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TV Need a Boost Try the Samsung HW-F355

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I was trying to get away without a messy looking sound system until I could save up for a good one, but my TV sound was just to lame, so I decided to give it a little help.  I kept looking all over the internet until I found a simple setup with an optical input that didn’t have a ton wires to hide.  What I found was the Samsung HW-F355.

The Samsung HW-F355 has a few inputs: a regular audio input, an optical input, USB, and Bluetooth so you can play music from your phone.  It also has the nice feature that it will turn on when it feels the optical input activate, so it saves you some button presses.

The sound is good, and much better then my TV used to have, but it is not as good as a full fledged 7.1 sound system, but you do get a good bang for your buck.

I am quite happy with my new sound bar system, and it will tide me over until I can buy all the equipment I need for a nice In-Wall system.

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Star Trek Looks for The Undiscovered Country

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Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country came out in 1991, and is that last film featuring the complete original crew.  The sixth film was going to be a reboot of the franchise, but fans and the original cast wouldn’t let them.  Though as we know they would reboot the series with the 11th film.

The movie starts off with the crew of the USS Excelsior led by Captain Sulu being caught in an energy wave caused by the Klingon moon Praxis exploding.  This moon was the Klingon’s number one energy source.  With this information the crew of the soon to be decommissioned USS Enterprise are called into a top secret meeting and are told by Spock that the Klingons can no longer afford the cold war they have been having with the Federation, and need to create a lasting peace, so the Enterprise is sent out to guide a Klingon ship to Earth for peace hearings, and as you can guess things don’t go as planned.

After the disaster that was Star Trek V, this movie was an excellent way to send off the original cast.  It has a very Star Trek story about the galaxy becoming a better place through peace, and they get to show the audience something new: like the Klingon Home World, and a prison mining camp, and Kirk gets to be Kirk by fighting aliens and making out with alien ladies, so kudos to Leonard Nimoy for coming up with this story.

They had all sorts of fun with the casting by working Worf (Michael Dorn) and Christian Slater in to the movie, and one of the greatest Star Trek villains of all time Christopher Plumber as General Chang.  He like Khan loves to quote Shakespeare and blow stuff up.  It is wonderful.  I can only hope that they have Benedict Cumberbatch quoting Shakespeare in the new movie because that is what good Star Trek villains do.

For some reason I thought William Shatner directed this movie, but he did not.  Thankfully the director was Nicholas Meyer who also directed Wrath of Khan, and helped write The Voyage Home, so if you are thinking he was involved in all the good early Star Trek movies, you would be right, and it is a shame they didn’t just get him to do them all.

This is one of the few truly good Star Trek movies that is also just a good movie period.  If you want to watch a good movie with the original cast, watch this movie or Wrath of Khan, and I am sure you will have a good time.

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I didn’t watch anything, and I am still reading a book and playing a video game, so nothing to share with you today, except that I am not sharing anything with you, so I am kind of share something, but not anything worth reading, so I am sorry if you have read this really long and pointless sentence.

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Did Argo Deserve Best Picture?

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Argo is a Ben Affleck directed film from 2012 based on the Iran hostage crises in the late 70’s and early 80’s, but not about the hostages at the embassy, but the six that escaped.  The film won best picture in 2012, but did it deserve it?  Probably.

The film starts off explaining the political situation in Iran (crappy), and then moves to the Iranian militants invading the US embassy.  During the turmoil six people escape and hold up at the Canadian ambassador’s house.  Soon US officials learn of the escaped six and start to come up with plans to get them out of the country, but the best bad plan they can come up with is to create a fake movie, and scout Iran as possible location and use the six embassy workers as the scouting crew.

The way Affleck blends the movie with old stock footage makes this movie seem like real life, and since it is based of true events it kind of is.  There have been outcries from Canada, and the escapees themselves because the movie minimizes Canada’s role in the rescue, and the last pulse pounding scenes of the movie are exaggerated to say the least.

The acting in this movie is excellent, with the best parts going to John Goodman and Alan Alkin as the Hollywood producers as of this fake film.  I am sure that since they have been in the industry so long it was fun for them to play old industry insiders playing Hollywood for suckers by planning a film that was never going to happen, and they add a sense of fun to an otherwise tense picture.

This movie was exciting to watch, and I think everyone involved did a great job.  I would love to see an actual documentary of what really happened with these six people stuck in a hostile land.