Given the choice, I'd pick a bad movie over a mediocre one any day. If you see a movie that warrants nothing more than a "meh" after the credits roll, you haven't been given a lot to digest.
But if a movie does a lot of things wrong, it gives you a lot to think about and discuss when it's over.
Take the new horror/action movie Legion. Watching it yesterday, I thought about a lot of things:
- How many of the actors in it -- Dennis Quaid, Lucas Black, Adrianne Palicki of Friday Night Lights, Charles S. Dutton and Paul Bettany -- deserved better.
- How it had two screenwriters, but didn't feel like something two people collaborated on. Rather, it felt more like one person wrote the (better, promising) first half of the movie, while someone else came along and hammered out the (ridiculous, boring) second.
- How it contained some fairly horrific imagery (like the ice cream man, pictured) which belonged in a better movie.
- How wasted the ice cream man scene was. It starts off well-enough: We hear the chimes of an ice cream truck coming out of the darkness. The driver gets out, contorts his body into a weird spider shape...and gets gunned down almost immediately.
- How any of the scariness or tension the movie might have built up early on was washed away by the appearance of winged angels in armor.
Mainly, I just thought how Sam and Dean Winchester would have handled things a lot better than anyone in this movie.
In case you're not familiar, Sam (Jared Padelecki) and Dean (Jensen Eckles) are the brothers at the center of Supernatural, which airs on the CW network and is one of the more underrated shows on TV right now. And lately, it's been the standard by which I judge all new horror movies. Sure, it's not really fair to compare movies and TV, but anymore, when I see a horror movie, I think to myself "Would I rather be watching Supernatural?" Maybe 80 percent of the time, the answer is yes.
It was certainly true seeing the Friday the 13th reboot last year, which actually starred Padelecki. I'm not a big fan of "Masked Psycho Picks Off Stupid Teenager" movies to begin with, and all I could think of was "You know, Sam and Dean have faced a lot worse than some undead idiot in a hockey mask."
Legion didn't feature anyone from Supernatural, * but it did include a plot device that the show has been using, with much, much more success, for the last season and a half: the idea that angels exist, but they're rather terrifying beings that aren't really on our side.
Yeah, they want to fight demons and the devil, but they're more than happy to use earth as their battleground, and if a few billion people die, well, you can't make an omelet, etc. etc.
And to Supernatural's credit, its angels would actually use a phrase like "you can't make an omelet..." They're fleshed out characters, unlike the Legion angels, who conduct themselves with an unrelenting seriousness.
With better special effects and a bigger budget, Legion was able to give us at the frightening way angels might look (the ice cream man, an old lady who crawls on the ceiling like a spider), something Supernatural has only suggested. Too bad it failed to measure up on virtually every other score.
Tom Coombe
*Well, Adrianne Palicki appeared in the pilot episode, and in some flashback/dream sequences, as Sam's girlfriend. On a side note, it would have been nice if the two actors had connected during that time, if only to see the wedding announcement for the "Padelecki-Palicki" nuptials.
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