Sunshine, Lollipops, and Celluloid Rainbows, baby!

Okay, January was a bit of a bitch. Snow, rain, general overcasty-ness... it kind of sucked.

But luckily, good times are on their way - two weeks of sun in the forecast (yeah, yeah, don't count your barometric pressure until it rises - work with me people!), and best of all - movie spring!!!

After a bleak January of arthouse films with strong messages/themes/social importance, all the movies that aren't quite good enough to be summer tent pole films will soon hit theatres - and that, my friends, is B heaven!!

Walk through the thaw with me here:

MY NAME IS BRUCE - February
Bruce Campbell's film about Bruce Campbell being mistaken for his B counterpart, Ash, by a small town who begs him to save them from a monster. Good Bruce, bad Bruce - I'm the one with the gun. It's so money, baby!!!

GHOSTRIDER - February 16
A flaming skeleton that rides a flaming motorcycle - *up buildings*, people. Okay, yes, Nicholas Cage is a shmuck and wayyyyy too old for this part, but to quote Andy, we can at least imagine it hurts when his head flames. Double bang for my buck!

RENO 911!: MIAMI - February 23
Hell yes!! The Reno Nevada Sherriff's Department take their gong show on the road. Expect plum-smugglers and wildly inappropriate humor!

300 - March 9
The 300 Spartans - with demons. Major suckage potential here - but could also kick total ass.

GRINDHOUSE - April 6
I'm so stoked about April, I'm not sure I can deal with it. It starts off with Tarantino and Rodriguez's double feature - Kurt Russell KILLS CHEERLEADERS WITH HIS CAR. And Rose McGowan has a MACHINE GUN FOR A LEG. I haven't been this excited since SNAKES ON A PLANE. (the sad thing is, I am dead serious.)

HOT FUZZ - April 13
Finally, another film from Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright of SHAUN OF THE DEAD fame. This time, they take on the cop genre. Can you describe the swan?

PATHFINDER - April 20
Vikings duke it out with the First Nations in a major case of culture shock. They had me at Vikings. Yay, carnage and hairy men!!

And when we hit summer proper, the real hits come out. A-list, but still worthy of anticipation. SPIDERMAN 3 is a no brainer May 4. The zombies are back in shuffling hordes for 28 WEEKS LATER on May 11. This one has dubious stamped on it, but still, I love exploding corpses, so you know I'll have to check it out.

And last but not least, Canada's very own zombi-riffic flick, FIDO comes out June 15. I've been waiting for this puppy (pun is sooo intended) for a while. The early reviews are good, so fingers crossed!

Whenever I feel down this winter, I just think about all the kickass films headed my way, and everything is once again right in the exploding-corpse, machine-gun-leg, carnage-and-hairy-men, suspect-swan, exploding-narwhale, flaming-head world.

Script: "Keep behind me - there's no sense getting killed by a plant."

I love movies about killer plants. Naturally, I was very excited to see 1963’s Day of the Triffids. I was looking forward to cheesy b-movie plant action, and the film did deliver, but… it also had some extremely chilling, non-plant-related stuff that made the hokey greenery seem as out of place as plastic parsley on $50 prime rib.

The premise of the film (and the book, which I haven’t read but now plan to) is that a meteor shower affects the triffids on earth, making them people-eating, pollen-spreading, funky-noise-making menaces. This same meteor shower strikes everyone blind who looked at it.

Killer plant action aside, the fact that almost the entire world has just been struck blind is freaking horrifying. And the film goes there, exploring what would happen if we all suddenly lost sight:

A cruise ship in a panic, stranded on the ocean without a single sighted person on board.

A plane in the air, almost out of fuel. The pilots try to hide the fact that they are all completely bind, and there is no one on the ground to talk them down. The passengers clue in and riot just seconds before the plane crashes.

A train wrecks at the station and people tumble off, disoriented and afraid. They discover a single, sighted girl among them – and swarm her to the point that we fear for her life.

The idea of this stuff happening just makes rubber plants seem kind of lame. And I was rooting for the plants. Everyone being struck blind felt more possible to me, and therefore scarier, as I was continually reminded of the Halifax explosions, where hundreds of people were struck blind by watching the harbor through glass windows when it exploded.

I guess the lesson here is, your mythology cannot be scarier, or more plausible, than your monster.

On the whole though, some very creepy elements make Day of the Triffids worth checking out. I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me this film influenced 28 Days Later quite a bit.

Our protagonist wakes up in a hospital, his stay there having saved him from an epidemic that wiped out most of the population. He hooks up with a young girl and a spunky woman as they follow radio calls toward a nebulous military base that offers safety but doesn’t deliver. They wind up trapped in an English mansion with creepy guys with guns who want to rape them.

28 Days Later took the best lessons in creepiness from this film, and left out the cheesy plant bits. Not that there’s anything wrong with a killer plant or two…

Script: My House in Umbrage

My House in Umbria. Picture it: Italy, several strangers sit on a crowded train compartment. Suddenly, a bomb goes off, blowing up their compartment. The survivors awake in hospital, shaken but determined to put their lives back together. A washed up romance novelist, played to perfection by Maggie Smith, invites the other survivors to convalesce at her house in Umbria. The police inform her that they suspect one of the passengers in the compartment of having either been the intended victim of the bomb, or planting it. It could very well have been one of the people now staying at her home. And Amy, a young American girl whose parents died in the accident, doesn’t remember anything prior to waking up in the hospital. Or does she?

Sounds like a great, contained environment with a mystery adding heat to really simmer things up to a boil and draw out some good character spice, right? Not so much. The characters are compelling, and you can’t beat Maggie Smith, but for some reason the film abandons this great premise. No one really seems to care who planted the bomb or why, or what's going on with this Amy kid. Instead, Maggie spends all her time trying and failing to seduce Amy’s fuddy-duddy uncle who has come to collect her. There are some great moments, but I can’t help feeling that this story probably worked a lot better in its original novel form.

A film audience has a lot less patience. You need to use your strong, compelling plot to draw out all the great character stuff, otherwise it’s like having yummy character icing floating around without any plot cake to put it on. It’s just kind of annoying and sticky. I know I always harp about how important characters and their development are to a story, and I stand by that. But their development has to be motivated by a strong plot, otherwise we’re just spending two hours with really interesting people, watching them do – nothing.

I wanted to love this film, and the atmosphere and great performances certainly are engaging, but I kept wondering, why? What are we building to? What is driving anyone or anything in this film, if not the perfectly adequate plot of trying to determine who planted the bomb and what the heck is going on with Amy? If I don’t know what we’re going for, I can’t feel satisfied when we get there – because I don’t know we’ve arrived.

So, yeah. Maybe read the book on this one.