What I Watched in November

It may seems strange for me to say this, as I'm pretty upfront about my love of comic books, but I've never read a single issue of a Venom series. I've never even read an issue with the character guest-starring. I know where the black alien symbiotic life-form comes from because I was an avid Marvel fan in 1984-85 and read Secret Wars like the good little zombie I was. I know that at some point the alien grafted itself onto a new host (post Peter Parker) and was first a major villain but (as the character became popular) was turned into a hero. Of sorts. All of this happened in the 1990's when I was taking a long sabbatical from Marvel because I was tired of the latest X-Men spin-off/reboot/new direction/whatever sucking all the oxygen out of the entire line. So, I come to this new film with only the bad memory of SPIDER MAN 3 (2007) coloring my thoughts of what the character could be. This film had to be better than that tragic mess, right? Well........

VENOM (2018) is a stand alone off-shoot of the Sony Spider Man films. It doesn't seem to reference the other films in any way so it can be seen as a form of reboot, I suppose. I had some hopes for this to be a fun film based solely on the cast. I think Tom Hardy is a fantastic talent with natural screen charisma and Michelle Williams has never seemed less than letter perfect in any role she attempts. But, sadly, this film wastes them and their impressive efforts on a script that just cannot be bothered to generate much interest. The entire things feels artificial from the relationships, the plot and even the underlying ideas. Nothing seems to  fit together properly giving the story a disjointed feeling. It might as well be cobbled together from random issues of the Venom comic book for all the sense it makes and maybe it was. It can't even manage to strike a solid tone for it's ending leaving the entire thing feeling more like a mess than it had to, really. In the end the film is bland and forgettable. If they make a sequel there is nowhere to go but up from this flat starting point.  

OVERLORD (2018) should have been much better than it is. The scenario reads like either a first person shooter video game or the most perfect SF tinged WWII film of all time. Just before the D-Day invasion of Normandy a squad of American soldiers parachute into occupied France to destroy a German communications jamming station. Almost immediately the group is reduced to a handful of survivors but they continue to their objective enlisting a local young woman's aid. Once in the country town the soldiers learn that the French citizens have been systematically taken into the castle headquarters for hideous human experimentation. Since the target is in the same place they decide to destroy both problems with one attack but are well aware that their small numbers mean there is little chance of survival. Everything is in place for a rousing action film with mad scientist created monsters in a WWII setting. Cool! But then the script falters.

At a certain point our main character leaves the cottage in which the soldiers are hiding for less than clear reasons. And then he manages to stumble, fart and fall inside the castle with none of the German troops ever spotting him. He gets into the deepest areas of the laboratory, sees the important information and gets out of this highly guarded place without a single person laying eyes on him. Once. This sequence breaks the movie for me. I kind of enjoyed the third act because it's a well played action set-piece but this pathetic way of getting the American characters the necessary intel is just terrible screenwriting. I wasn't bothered by the unhistorical mixed race American army of the 1940's in the film because we're here to see Nazi monsters get splattered. But this idiotic plotting disaster is just too much. The whole sequence needed to rewritten. Oh well.

THE LIST 

THIS NIGHT I WILL POSSESS YOUR CORPSE (1967) - 7 (rewatch)

GHOSTKEEPER (1981) - 6 

SUSPIRIA (2018) - 9 

VENOM (2018) - 4 

THE BOWERY BOYS MEET THE MONSTERS (1954) - 5 

MACON COUNTY LINE (1974) - 7 

THE VAMPIRE'S GHOST (1945) - 4

MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND (1964) - 4 (rewatch) 

THE NANNY (1965) - 7 

ABSOLUTE QUIET (1936) - 7 

SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT III: BETTER WATCH OUT (1989) - 3 (Ugh!)

SCHIZOID (1980) - 5 (not bad sleazy thriller) 

OVERLORD (2018) - 6 

PRISONER OF THE LOST UNIVERSE (1983) - 3 (Riftrax version - 7) 

RAW FORCE (1982) - 3 (inept but entertaining for all the wrong reasons) 

SUMMER OF '84 (2018) - 9 

NIGHT OF TERROR (1933) - 6 

CHRISTMAS EVIL (1980) - 8 (rewatch)