Just the Ticket

Cult of Chucky came out this week, so I decided to bring back the Dead Parade  to cover it. For my look at the previous six films, click here  and here . Otherwise, prepare yourselves. Cult of Chucky  is a step backwards, in my opinion. After the awesome set-up of having Alex Vincent reprise his role as Andy Barclay at the end of the last film, we open with Andy on a date from hell--not literally, it's just going badly because he went to military school, really likes guns, and everyone he ever became attached to had been killed by Chucky. Apparently, after shotgunning Chucky in the face at the end of Curse of Chucky , Andy recovered the killer doll's head and is now torturing it for theraputic funsies. The bulk of the story, however, focuses on Nica Pierce, the wheelchair-bound survivor of the previous installment, who, true to Chucky survivor conventions, has been convicted as the real killer and sentenced to a mental institution for schizophrenia. The stark, whit...

Step on a crack, break a mirror, spill the salt, and wear white to a Japanese wedding, Ticketholders! Welcome to the Thirteenth Dead Parade , held this Friday at 1101 D Street, Apt. #15. But not really. I was just goofing around with the number thirteen in various base representations this morning, and needed an excuse to stop thinking about them. Being an obsessive, compulsive nerd sucks sometimes. Anyway, whether you care or not (because that's just the kind of sucky, obsessive, compulsive nerd I am) here are the above numeric representations of the the number 13 explained for the non-mathy among you: 13 (base 10, a.k.a. decimal) = 1*10 + 3*1 1101 (base 2, a.k.a. binary) = 1*8 + 1*4 + 0*2 + 1*1 D (base 16, a.k.a. hexadecimal, or just hex) = 13*1 15 (base 8, a.k.a. octal) = 1*8 + 5*1 I can hear the dead silence in the air as you faithful Ticketholders neglect to give a crap, which is a welcome coincidence because silence is what today's issue is all about. The first...

Goot do be bach, Dicketkholduhs! If you're wondering why I'm talking like the ex-Governator of Kullyfwornyia , it's because I've been sick for quite awhile. Not to worry, I am not on my way to becoming one of the Dead Parade I so love to invest my cinematic and blogitorial time upon. I have just recently returned from a three-sick-day stay-cation—feel free to start pouring yourself a shot every time you see a hyphen—or minus sign—or a two-for-one dash like this one—. By the time you get done reading this, you will probably be so wasted you may have actually enjoyed it—or forgotten you hated it. Anyway, that time off included my first doctor's visit in over five years—thank you, ObamaCare—and just in time, too, because I learned that the cough I had been fighting for two months straight turned out to be bronchitis on its way to becoming pneumonia. I just completed my antibiotic treatment—a six-pill plan that they lovingly call a Z-Pack, as though the medical commun...

As promised at the end of the last issue of Ticket Stubs , I went to Moses Lake on Tuesday in my free jeans and free T-shirt to buy a ticket to Resident Evil: Retribution 3D  with my free Fandango gift card and get my hands on a Coulson's Revenge gift card at the local GameStop. More on that later, but for now it's time to start the Countdown to Retribution  with a flashback to April 21, 2012 (Welcome to the Dead Parade #4: Resident Sequel Update) :  Since I reviewed  Resident Evil  and  Resident Evil: Apocalypse  at the GodsOfMelee Yahoo! Group on  December 30, 2004  (SW@ Ticket #27: Resident Sequel) , 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 , three more have joined the franchise, there's no time like the present for a Ticket Stubs Update . Commencing countdown.... FIVE.... Resident Evil : As you may know by no...

I wasn't sure what to expect from Take Shelter  besides what the trailer suggested, but it turned out to fit in perfectly with my Dead Parade series, which I will give you the reasoning behind later. For now, let's stick with the commercial representation of Take Shelter , starring Michael Shannon as a kind of modern day Noah. Ohio native Curtis (Shannon) has a steady construction job and a supportive wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain, with too long a list of movies to her credit this past year). Ohio gets torrential rain on occasion, but rarely a tornado, so of course everyone (including Curtis himself at one point) thinks he's crazy when he starts upgrading the old bomb shelter in his backyard to prepare for a twister of apocalyptic proportions. And it doesn't help that Curtis' little home improvement project is in response to nightmares he's been having about the storm to come, or that Curtis' mother (Kathy Baker) was institutionalized for paranoid schi...

No zombies, vampires, or werewolves today, folks! The Parade is going back to ghosts for a review of The Woman In Black , a B-Ho (British Horror, as opposed to J-Ho, Japanese Horror) chiller about a failing lawyer who is forced to save his career by settling the estate of a woman who hung herself following the death of her son, and now haunts the town, hypnotizing and killing local children as revenge for neglecting to search for his body. The lawyer is played by Harry Potter  himself, Daniel Radcliffe, living proof (an ironic choice of words), depending on the camera angle, that Brits--no matter how handsome they may be as teenagers--can grow up to be strikingly more handsome or wind up looking Prince Charles ugly. At times Radcliffe's eyebrows are so bushy and unkempt, and his skin lit so pale, that I expected him to morph into vampire or werewolf any second (just had to work 'em in there, didn't I?), had I not known WIB  was a ghost picture. Like its Japanese cousin...

Yes, that's the best I could come up with for a title. The Soundtrack's Daily Originals Quiz didn't work out that well (only three pageviews for the first post and no comments to answer), but the show, and the Dead Parade, must march on. Today, as if you couldn't deduce by the oh-so-clever title, I will be reviewing one of my favorite zombie-ish movies of the past decade: 2006's Slither . With a meteor on a collision course with Earth, stupid redneck cops, a town called Wheelsy, and a character named Grant Grant (Patient Zero, played by The Walking Dead 's Michael Rooker), you kinda know what to expect out of  Slither , James Gunn's directorial follow-up to the  Dawn Of the Dead  remake of 2004. But then it kind of delivers. Rooker all but steals the show as the above-mentioned Patient Zero, who upon being stung by an alien parasite, begins crying more than usual, eating red meat by the fridge-full (and whatever neighborhood pets and livestock are near ...

Or is it "Blood Food?" I haven't gotten a chance to check out The Vow  yet this week, so I decided to start up the Parade early. In honor of the DVD release of Underworld: Awakening this week, the Dead Parade will take a look at the Underworld franchise thus far. The two-hour-plus freshman film of the series introduces Selene (Kate Beckinsale, Click ), a "Death Dealer"--an elite vampire assassin--defending her people from a prophecied incursion by the subterranean Lycans (short for Lycanthropes, AKA Werewolves). Caught in the middle of the Vampire/Lycan blood feud is Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman), a human with the potential to end the war for better or worse. Amid the senseless violence, apathetic collateral damage, and constant blue-tinged cinematography, Beckinsale's Selene and Speedman's Lycan-bitten Michael engage in a nearly emotionless Romeo & Juliet romance. But what Underworld lacks in feeling it makes up for with a story that pai...

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 ...