My dad wanted to see the action movie du jour, and I am rarely averse to such an enterprise. Thusly, Ultraviolet. I feel like there’s something sloppy to the mindset that allows you to preface your movie with a voiceover claiming that you may not understand the heroine’s world. It’s not that I couldn’t understand it. You have your basic class warfare, only the classes are separated not by money, skin, religion, or nationality, but by disease status. (Although it rankles my sensibilities that the disease provides exceptional reflexes and healing powers, without any negative side-effects. Well, it rankles my sensibilities that people are terrified of this so-called disease.) So, yeah, pretty comprehensible. But the principle of the thing annoys me.

It’s a story we’ve seen a thousand times. Woman loses child. Woman finds surrogate child while battling the oppressive system. Woman sacrifices everything to protect surrogate child, while taking revenge on oppressive system. But have we seen it with the inevitably naked Milla Jovovich? Granted the lack of a kid in the Resident Evil movies, I think not.

Lots of comic-style violence reminiscent of Sky Captain or Sin City plus hip cityscape designs helped to distract me from the slow plot. It was decent, and all, but if you insist on seeing this movie, you should probably see the version from a couple of months ago, when they were calling it Aeon Flux.

I feel both sheepish and not a little bit dumb admitting it, but: I have no idea what Syriana was about, and only a little more about what happened in it. Okay, yeah, it was about oil. More specifically, it was about the intersections of four storylines: a thinly veiled reference to the Exxon Mobil merger and the struggles of certain people to get the merger approved by the SEC, Pakistani immigrant workers in Saudi Arabia losing their jobs because of the merger and struggling to retain visas and identity in the aftermath, a CIA agent of long standing in the region, and an energy analyst’s ties to the Saudi royal family in the midst of the succession. (At least, I think the country was Saudi Arabia both times, although quite a bit of time is spent in or discussing the liberation of Iran.)

It made a good story, and I think I’m glad I watched it. I’m pretty sure on the whole the message is that our government hasn’t been handling the region well since time out of mind, and also that oil is mostly bad for us. (My favorite single moment was the awards ceremony for Oil Man of the Year, because the award was presented by the Moneybags guy in the Monopoly boardgame. No lie, I swear it was him.) Still, though, I’d be more comfortable knowing to what extent it was non-fiction and, well, having a better idea of what actually occurred in the plot. Oh, and what if anything Syriana actually refers to.

What do you get if you take a leukemia patient, a couple of female Mexican masked wrestlers, a police detective, an unscrupulous chief surgeon, and an ape that isn’t a guy in a gorilla suit, honest, and put them in a movie full of stock heart transplant footage and naked screamers?

A very, very long time ago I saw a 60s era Argentinian import with the improbable (and certainly not plot-relevant) title of Feast of Flesh. Long enough ago that it was the very first thing I reviewed here. The reason this is relevant is that the disc had a second movie on it, which leaves me to wonder if Netflix has a list of the discs that have been out the longest. (This one was a year and a half, apparently.)

In fact, yes, I have finally watched Night of the Bloody Apes, the movie that dares to ask the question, ‘What do you get if you take a leukemia patient, etc.?’ The answer, then? You get a surgeon whose son’s imminent death prompts him to first kidnap a gorilla from the zoo via the well-thought-out plan of entering the zoo, shooting it with a dart, and then leaving with it, and then transplant the gorilla’s blood into his son’s body to defeat the leukemia. This plan would have worked earlier, but now the son is too weak, so the heart must also be transplanted. This all, obviously, because the beast’s more powerful blood will be able to defeat the disease. You also get a masked wrestler chick who is ready to retire now that she’s accidentally dropped her coworker/friend out of the ring and into a coma, but who also has time to argue with her cop boyfriend about how he values his job more than dinners out with her.

Inevitably, though, the now-healed leukemia patient sporadically transforms partially into a gorilla-headed beast whose goal seems to be assaulting random women by ripping their shirts off and then killing them. Sometimes men get killed as well, but without the shirt-ripping and only because they’re in the way. Soon, all of these characters (including the coma girl) collide in a spectacular… amazing… semi-adequate? climax of blood, angst, and bad driving. Seriously, though? A little bit funny. I’d watch it again with other people, if I knew people who were reliably available and willing. (I actually know a few willing people. I really do.)

There’s no denying that it’s ridiculous on the face of it. You can’t very well have a third final destination, given certain definitions of the word final. But? Not caring, me. Halloween II was the day after Halloween, and few if any of the Friday the 13th movies will be heard to even mention the date. That’s just the way sequels work. And as this is a valid sequel to Final Destination, I’m satisfied.

Now, was it a good sequel? This relies on two postulates. One: that the original was good, and it was. Not only can anyone die at any time, but that’s actually the premise of the movie. You can’t adhere to the rules much more closely than that. And two: that this movie be exactly the same as the original good movie. This is a mistake that occurs all too often in horror. If the film was good, why confuse people by making the sequel be some different, unrecognizable movie? (In stark contrast to the rest of Hollywood, where we call making the exact same movie twice in a row by a more derogatory term than sequel, that being remake.) But it’s still not as good as Final Destination 2, the best possible kind of sequel to a horror movie: a continuation of the original.

The plot is simple enough. A person has a vision of impending doom, then sees the world start to conform to that vision, and so escapes the doom, accidentally or purposefully including a small group of people in that escape. Death’s plan now being out of whack, the seemingly lucky people start to die in grotesque and inexplicable ways soon thereafter to right the balance. (This is clearly not the friendly, compassionately goth Death envisioned by Neil Gaiman.) On the bright side, the world offers up clues to avoid these deaths, if only they can be perceived and acted upon. Thusly, in any given sequel the audience receives a reasonably spectacular catastrophe, followed by a series of grisly deaths that would fit right into the opening segment of a Six Feet Under episode. Except for naked chicks, that’s all I’ve ever asked of the genre. And this has those too.