I don’t know the reasoning behind this, but outside of Halloween the busiest month for horror movies always ends up being February. It must be all that Valentine love, Family Day and snuggling up to a warm fireplace that brings out the murderous psychopath in all of us. This month has its large share of horror flicks, or at least crappy barely-horrors hiding under the guise of psychological thrillers. Surprises all around, outside of that Justin Bieber biopic coming out on the 11th, there isn’t a frightening premise among them. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be fun right?
The first horror in this movie mess of a month is The Roomate, and believe me this movie hits close to home. Being a single, white, good-looking female embarking to college, my greatest horror is rooming with an equally single, white, good-looking female that happens to be a massive stalker. I could go more into the plot, but that would only mean I’d be rewording the previous sentence over and over. It’s exactly what you’d expect, Sara (the normal) finds a boy that she likes. Rebecca (the crazy) terrorizes the boyfriend. Sara (the normal) makes some friends outside of Rebecca (the crazy), and she (the crazy, not Sara) goes bezerk and tries to murder people. Sara (the normal) confronts Rebecca’s (the crazy’s) mother and surprise, Crazy ain’t taking her crazy pills. You’re probably wondering why I keep repeating who’s crazy and who’s normal, and simply it’s because I couldn’t keep it straight for the entire trailer, Sara and Rebecca are so similar and bad act-y that its useless to keep track of petty details like who’s the murderous one.
I know one of them is crazy, but at this point I can’t be bothered to remember.
This movie does answer the age-old question that’s been bugging philosphers for centuries, “What happened to Billy Zane ever since he was mentioned as an off-joke in Zoolander?” Well, question no more, this movie has got all the Zane anyone needs for the next 10 year gap between this and his next role. Outside of the Zane-factor the movie is full of no-names that (hopefully) will go nowhere with their acting careers. The premise is garbage and utterly not scary in the slightest. The girls are decent eye candy, but that shouldn’t be reason alone to shell out money to see a movie in this day and age. This movie comes out February 4th, and I’m begging for a massive snowstorm that weekend just to make sure no one will go see it when it comes out.
Do you want to talk about a really scary movie? Then how’s this for a premise? It’s a 3D computer animated kids movie, and it is not made by Pixar. No, wait, it’s not even done by Dreamworks. It’s made by Disney, who’s only good piece of original work was Princess and the Frog, the only movie they tried that wasn’t in 3D. And it’s not about toys that come to life but rather (and this is a long stretch of the imagination, I know) garden gnomes coming to life. Oh and it’s based on Shakespear? Now that’s a truly scary premise for a movie.
See, you got these two sides, one side is a group of blue gnomes, and the other is a bunch of red ones. They live right next to each other, and they hate each other. But wait, not all of them hate each other! Two star-crossed lovers fall in love and must prepare for an adventure like gnome other! And the terrible gnome-based puns that must be in this film! Knowing how shitty Disney is at attempting humour, I’m sure we’ll have our share of gnomantic puns layered on top of short jokes and drizzled with groan-inducing gnomenclature. But don’t worry, this movie promises to be an adventure like gnome other!
I feel dirty.
But the movie will make money, and chances are if you have little cousins you’ll end up watching it, and it will probably have a few enjoyable parts. It does boast some big names for voices – Patrick Stewart as Bill Shakespeare (Brilliant!), Hulk Hogan as Terrafirmenator (Hoo-yeah), Ozzy Ozbourne, Dolly Parton and Jason Statham show up too. We even get some nice original songs played by Elton John, who also gets his own gnome avatar.
I mean, I get it. But did they really have to make Elton John the Purple and Pink Gnome? I also get that this picture will be in black and white and it will lose all effect as of printing.
The sheer number of big names in this movie makes me wonder how many dump trucks full of money Disney had to send out in order to get all these people to do voice overs. I, personally don’t get the appeal of having big names in animation roles. Sure spending the five minutes wondering where you’ve heard that voice before can be fun, but once you’re done guessing, all the mystery is gone and the movie is left as a hollow shell variety hour doomed to be thrown on the animates garbage pile along with Shark Tales, Bolt, Doogal, and all those other movies that people have stopped giving a damn about. Gnomeo and Juliet comes out on the 11th, and since it would be entirely selfish to wish for two massive snowstorms two weekends in a row, I’m just going to ask you kindly to skip this. Go re-watch Toy Story 2 or Rattatouile; you haven’t watched them recently and they deserve to be watched much more than Gnomeo or that shitty horror movie from earlier.
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