©2008 Big Empire Industries and Randy Shandis Enterprises
Every right imaginable is reserved.

 

This week:
I Am Legend

Filthy says:
"It is horseshit ."

I Am Legend is how the grassfuckers in Hollywood make a big-budget zombie movie: badly, by completely forgetting what makes them cool and instead squirting out a shitty, self-important bore. God damn, fucking morons; tooth-humping dullbats; crap-slurping horsenuts. The lot of them. Except the ones who make good shit. Where they could use their deep pockets to make a masterpiece of pant-shitting scariness they instead choose to puff themselves up like syphilitic peacocks. Fucking retards don't even try to sell the movie as a zombie flick. Instead, they bill it as a Will-Smith-Acts-Serious movie.

Smith plays a man alone in the wilds of New York City six months after everyone else gets wiped out by a drug-resistant strain of herpes that's been cultivating on the Harelip's chin for the last few years. He's also some sort of military scientist who was working to cure the virus before the end. He's got a dog, a good-looking German Shepherd to keep him company. I think somehow this zombie movie is supposed to be Smith's Castaway. You know, the sort of movie where a guy spends a buttload of time alone and we're supposed to get this sense of how much he misses humanity because he gets to do a lot of heavy acting and profound talking to himself.

Smith is a boring-ass one-dimensional goodie-goodie fuckwit. He spends his days broadcasting on AM radio for any other people who might still be alive. What a dumbass. The only people he'll find that way are nutjob conspiracy theorists and the sort of illiterate white trash who think Bill O'Reilly has a fucking clue. When he's not broadcasting, Smith tries to find a cure that will turn the zombies back into people. He's got a swank lab in the basement of his fancy zombie-proofed house. He also spends an inordinate amount of time talking to mannequins, because, see, that's supposed makes him more human, alone and vulnerable.

Actually, most of the movie just keeps pounding home the same fucking loneliness and desolation shit. CGI images of the empty streets of New York City get almost as fucking boring as the real and busy ones after the 93rd time the movie puts them up there. Why do they keep showing them? My guess is that some fucking bonerwhiz got all gooey at how much money they spent on the fake images. Which, by the way, looks a triple-D tit's worth more like something out of a video game than anything real. Smith talks to his dog, begs a mannequin to say hi to him, video records himself, and looks sad a bunch. Waa waa waa, when the fuck do the zombies come out?

I Am Legend aspires to something so much bigger and less entertaining than a monster movie, though. It wants to be about the human condition. It wants to show us cornball flashbacks to prove that not only is Smith's character a goodie-goodie now, he was before the zombies showed up. It wants us to think he doesn't believe in God so that at the end of the movie he can change his mind. Whoop-de-fucking-doo! Like anyone in the theater gave a shit about Smith's existential blues. Especially when they consist mostly of a series of Hollywood bullshit cliches. For all the somberness and fake seriousness onscreen, the movie relies on the same old plot points, and for its scares it uses the same crap from much lower-budget and better zombie movies.

So while Smith wanders around showing us how much money can be spent on landscapes and monologues, a perfectly good zombie movie goes to waste. It's way too far into the movie before we see the first of the undead. And then, they look pretty fucking lame; like graphics off a Nintendo Gamecube. They aren't scary, unless you consider bald, blue-veined, drooling people terrifying. If you do, you can get all your thrills hanging out at the Arvada Senior Center. There is some horseshit about them being unintelligent, and maybe the unintelligible remnants of a plotline about them becoming smarter. Maybe, I sure the fuck couldn't tell. It's just too hard to tell because all the CGI zombies look the same, so I never I knew if there was one chasing him or a bunch. Either way, they don't chase enough, and Smith doesn't blast enough. He's too damn busy hoping he'll get a shiny trophy for his Tom Hanks in Castaway impression.

I didn't give a bum's nut whether Smith believes in God. I wouldn't give a nun's left tit to spend any more time with a guy who is as apparently saintly and boring as Smith. I wish the buttpickers in Hollywood would figure out that they aren't so great at being profound, especially not within the tight three-act structure they give themselves. Because they're afraid of offending or confusing anyone and they assume we're all as stupid as they are, their "deep" movies end up making no sense or expressing feelings and thoughts about as well as the greeting cards you can buy in liquor stores.

More important, though, is that where a zombie movie can be a great Hollywood flick: fun and a gory example of the sixth type of conflict (1. man vs. nature, 2. man vs. man, 3. man vs. self, 4. man vs. society, 5. man vs. drunk self and 6. man vs. undead man), I Am Legend just uses a few zombies for the backdrop to express something they don't understand, and they didn't need to say.

But the grassfuckers want to feel like they're doing something. They want to feel like while they are raping our asses ten dollars at a time, they are also imparting a bit of their wisdom into our lives. I Am Legend is their way of saying both fuck you and, hey, look how deep we are! One Finger.

Want to tell Filthy Something?

 

 




Shawn Edwards of WDAF

Fred Claus is "One of the funniest comedies of the year!"

I Am Legend is "The best movie of the year! One of the most entertaining, exciting and intense movies ever made!"



Filthy's Reading
Colin Woodard - The Ox-bow Incident

Listening to
The Evaporators - Gassy Jack and Other Stories

Watching

The Bourne Identity