Just the Ticket

An unusual title for the latest Dead Parade, isn't it? I mean, zombies are supposed to die without brains aren't they? Well, whether I'm making any sense so far or not I have to keep writing because if you give a thousand zombies a thousand typewriters, they have to write the next great American novel eventually. I have yet to see Re-Kill for sale or download anywhere, but while the lobotomized literary lords of the world were bashing away at their keyboards, my Dead Parade visited two other undead selections from the After Dark Horrorfest 4: Hidden 3D  and Zombies of Mass Destruction . The brainless fare this week is Hidden 3D , in which a deceased scientist's son inherits the family rehab center, only to find himself and his friends in a honeypot, at the mercy of flesh-eating creatures that have taken over the hospital. The concept is unique, but at times comes off as too smart for its own good: in an effort to completely cure her patients' addictions (and g...

I can't believe I'm doing my first decimal issue of Just the Ticket! In the tradition of SW@ Ticket classics like Hell Hath No Fury , The Heroic Journey , and Spider-Man, Then & Now , Just the Ticket and the Dead Parade will occasionally feature themed issues or issues that address media other than film, and as such will be denoted with a decimal number. Just some history and nostalgic, self-indulgent drooling I wanted to get out of the way. Mission accomplished! "Mission accomplished? Did he really say that out loud?" - Ving Rhames, M:I-GP Anyway, the theme this week is a common thread shared by the movie Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close  and the TV series  Touch , the aforementioned non-film medium. Which is the chicken and which the egg, I have yet to determine. Whatever the case, ELIC  is a long, yet sort of enjoyable yarn (uh...yarn...thread... DOH! Sorry) about a boy named Oskar who is trying to cope with both the loss of his father (Tom Hanks) t...

As promised, this week offers a second intermission from the Dead Parade. I was going to make this the 25th issue of Just the Ticket, but with a title like "Dead In the Water," I just had to keep the parade marching on.  The first two movies up for review this week, as my oh-so-clever title suggests, sink like ships passing in the Bermuda Triangle. We begin with the hole-riddled hulk known as the USS Contraband , a smuggler's vessel steered wrong by reluctant captain Mark Wahlberg (feel the vibration? That's the sound of your bilge pump exploding).  OK, I've taken this maritime metaphor as far out to sea as I dare. On to the good shit, lollipops. Wahlberg tries adamantly to take the helm (sorry, I couldn't resist) as a smuggler-turned-private security consultant who must (like 90% of the action stars and aging dramatists in Hollywood) do "one last job" to protect his family from a ruthless former colleague (Giovanni Ribisi, looking like John ...

In preparation for a yard sale I'm having this summer, I've been watching some of the horror movies I purchased at the Movie Gallery closing sale back in 2010, a lot of which were part of the After Dark Horrorfest collection. Each year, starting in 2007, After Dark Films releases what they call "8 Films to Die For," usually involving slashers, ghosts, zombies, or cannibals, coming from a variety of countries, and ranging from psychological to gory to SyFy Channel stupid. Today of course, we're covering zombies via two After Dark productions; one intelligent, the other...not so much. Getting the bad news out of the way first and ripping the band-aid off the flesh wound, we look at Mulberry St.  from Horrorfest II. Mulberry  brings to mind ridiculous pot-fueled horror movie concepts like this one  which result from asking (like Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park ) whether it has been done or can be done, but not whether it should be done. Don't get me wro...

As promised on September 11, 2008 , I will finally give my readers an update on the state of the Residents . Since I reviewed Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse at the GodsOfMelee Yahoo! Group on December 30, 2004 , I have developed an appreciation for the series that wasn't there at the time, when I had to wait between films. And since the first publication of "Resident Sequel," two more have joined the franchise, with a fifth installment on the way (trailer can be found here ), there's no time like the present for a Just the Ticket Update. On with the show! The Dead Parade marches on, touching on my freshman blog's video game theme with review of the four Resident Evil films so far. The Fifth Element 's Milia Jovovich is a RE original character (who had not been featured in any of the games up to that point) named Alice, a chief security officer in the Umbrella Corporation's Hive research facility. Resident Evil : When a spy infiltrates...

Welcome back to the Dead Parade! Last issue, we took a brief intermission to look at the incredible Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol . This time, we venture back to September 11, 2008 , when I posted reviews of George A. Romero's Dead series after one of my many hiatuses (hiati? Hiatus? Oh well, yet another one of those words I don't know the plural of. It's that break you take when you want to go see a platypus. No handlebars, no handlebars...). Ooookaaaaayyyyyy. On to a different kind of insanity: The kind that ensues when, for whatever reason, zombies start popping out of nowhere to feast on your brains. On to six crazy Nights (and Dawns , and Lands , and Days , and Diaries , finally followed by some much-needed Survival ) of the living dead as envisioned by George A. Romero and his (mostly incompetent) crew of directors and soforth. Note that the following deals only with the remakes and recent sequels, not the original films. Let's begin with the 1990 re...

Good day, folks! Just the Ticket is taking a brief intermission from the Dead Parade and trading zombies for ghosts with a review of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol . Tom Cruise once again takes the role of Impossible Mission Force agent Ethan Hunt, this time leading the team of Paula Patton, Avengers  star Jeremy Renner, and Shaun of the Dead 's Simon Pegg (I guess we haven't strayed too far from zombies after all. Isn't that nice?). The entire IMF has been disavowed as the result of a bombing at the Kremlin in Russia, and now Ethan and his team must dodge Russia's secret police force, several contract killers, and a few laws of physics to stop an evil genius from starting a global nuclear war. The plot sounds like an episode from some ridiculous Saturday morning superhero cartoon because it is. Some of the action sequences are physically impossible and the success of the mission at film's end is due to an overdramatic final battle between Ethan and Cobalt ...

On September 1, 2008 , I began writing a "monster" collection of reviews so big in scale that I neglected to work on it in favor of better fare. This special series, titled "Welcome To the Dead Parade" (brought to you courtesy of the latest in file-sharing technology), is a tribute--in quite a few cases, not a very flattering one--to zombie films. These include the Return Of the Living Dead series, the Resident Evil series, Slither , the botched brilliance of George A. Romero's Dead Series , and a few surprise entrants that don't really fit the genre. Re-released here again on Just the Ticket, this first installment of my own Dead series begins with a nod to Return Of the Living Dead . The inaugural film in this five-installment zombie-athon is absolutely the stupidest a zombie movie can get in terms of quality. The acting and special effects are terrible, even for the 1980s. The severed zombie limbs are yellowish and rubbery, looking more like a necrophi...

The last movie this week before I make my promised return to the Dead Parade is Beneath the Darkness , a small screen homage to humorous horror (I just realized I did that. Haha!). A gleefully wacky Dennis Quaid steals the show as high school quarterback-turned-mortician Mr. Ely, who has gone Norman Bates following the death of his wife two years prior to the events of Darkness . In classic Rear Window  fashion, a group of teens witness some strange happenings at Ely's Funeral Home and decide to break into the residence to investigate. The usual coincidental subject matter (the teens are reading Macbeth and The Telltale Heart in their English class), murdered and jailed protagonists, and a final damning showdown run their course, but are made downright entertaining by Quaid's performance (who, along with executive producer Bruce Wilkinson and director Martin Guigui, also contributed to the soundtrack). Nothing I haven't seen before as far as horror movies go, but not te...

This week on Just the Ticket, we look at two films that use makeup to turn big named stars into famous historical figures, with varying degrees of success. Meryl Streep becomes former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady , a tragic retrospective of the title figure set in motion by what at first appears to be Alzheimers, but is largely due to her grief at the loss of her husband. Peppered throughout her grief-filled last days are unmarked flashbacks that show how Thatcher got to where she is (one of which basically amounts to a speech therapist teaching Meryl Streep to not shriek like Julia Child, and few, if any of which are in any kind of followable order to the average Brit-hist layman). The lack of order adds a measure of sympathy between the audience and Streep's Thatcher, who can no more keep track of her memories than we can. But amid the confusion, copycat characterization, and take-it-or-leave-it "plot," three things manage to leave an im...

This has been a surprising week for movies big and small, beginning with two that feature young stars who may or may not be related to more well-known acting veterans. First up is Enter Nowhere , starring Scott Eastwood, Katherine Waterston and Sara Paxton (Clint Eastwood's son, Sam Waterston's daughter and Bill Paxton's distant niece, if my genealogy math is right). When three strangers meet at a cabin in the woods, each stranded by their respective automotive troubles, it soon becomes apparent that they have been brought together at the cabin (and not allowed to leave) for a reason. Enter Nowhere is billed as a horror movie, hinting at elements of predecessors like Identity  and  Deliverance , but takes the usual suspects and turns them on their heads, producing something small of scale and big of heart without sacrificing continuity, sending the viewer on an unexpected trip to the outskirts of the Twilight Zone . A- Next is the true story adaptation We Bought A Z...