RyanSz

The Tournament is a pretty decent premise of a a battle amongst hitmen for the ability to be able to charge a huge fee since they are the "best killler in the business," but one innocent bystander is pulled into the game due to the plot of one of the hitmen. For a straight to video movie it had pretty good production value and the actors weren't phoning it in. Can't wait to hear the breakdown of Gamer as I loved this over the top movie. I will admit that when I watched it on DVD with my family they didn't know what the overall premise was so the first fight scene confused the hell out of them when they saw gunfighters t-bagging dead people or NPCs jutting around awkwardly. It was even worse in that I had to explain what t-bagging was to them.

When I see that image and with his hair up it just makes me think of what he would probably say to his date, using his line from The Girl Next Door, "okay people, let's make some fuckie fuckie."

I'd say it was more sci-fi than horror similar to how Lawnmower Man became a total sci-fi movie even though the three page short story had nothing close to sci-fi elements to it.

In the comedy/horror anthology Chillerama there were a few dongs that were eaten/ripped off by zombies. The show is about 75% loyal to the comic. The whole CDC angle of the first season never happened in the books and various characters had their life lengths altered, like Shane living a lot longer in the show than in the comic and Andrea being dead on the show but actually still being alive in the comic and in a relationship with Rick. Then Michonne has gone in a completely different route by being in a relationship with Rick as there were a couple other guys that she was with who because of how things ended, made her have a much more perilous character arc than what she is getting now. I love both the show and books, but my problem is it seems every season there is some reason for social media to get in an uproar simply because they are impatient or love a character (the whole "bring Beth back" petition which was ridiculous). Then you have people complaining that nothing is happening or there aren't any zombies, which is what the books are like after the first 20 issues, where they focus on the living threat as well as the undead threat.

I also have to assume that since this is Sizemore he was blitzed on a litany of drugs so common sense was at the forefront for him. I cannot wait to see who was chosen, as I have it boiled down to three possibilities. I just hope they don't choose the easy option due to someone else taking place of what should have been that characters death earlier in the season. Though I have read a rumor that there may be more than one death taking place in that scene.

I think that made the most sense out of this whole movie as he was using what looked like an MP5 (my knowledge of guns is video games so apologies if the name is wrong), which in a situation requiring quick reflexes against a fast moving target along with the recoil of a machine gun, it would make sense that he would miss every hit. Yet when he pulls out the pistol you see him steady up and take aim and fire measured shots. Also at that time Freeman has stopped strafing and was lining up his shot as well so it was basically a perfect situation for it to work.

To be fair he's about 50/50 on sacrificing handicap characters. While Nick Andros was blown up, King had Tom Cullen stay alive so that he could always tell people how to spell words using M-O-O-N.

I remember seeing an episode of I think Wild On where they stopped at the bar shortly after the movie came out and it was packed to the brim, but a bar can't sustain that momentum for long without changing anything or people just get tired of the schtick. Add to it that the movie is almost 20 years old and wasn't very memorable. It reminds me of a great movie called Kinky Boots starring Joel Edgerton and Chiwetel Ejofor about a British shoe company owned by Edgerton that starts making boots for drag queens that are able to support the weight of a full grown man as regular woman's boots cannot. It is based on a true story of where the company did it because it was close to bankruptcy and the change in product helped them and even spawned a long running musical based off the movie. Unfortunately the success of those productions didn't help the company for long as people started buying cheaper products from China and the company all but went under shortly after the musical started to really hit big. Last I read, the guy Edgerton was based on was hocking his boots at various fetish and sex conventions around the world.

That's what I always loved about King's books is that he is willing to sacrifice most anyone in his books if it makes sense. Deaf mute with a heart of gold in The Stand - blow his ass up. Kid who ends up in an alternate western/Arthurian universe of the Dark Tower - kill him, bring him back from the dead, and kill his ass again. Asthmatic kid who originally saved the day in It - have the villain learn from his mistake in the first fight and then slaughter the now adult asthmatic when he tries the same shit. The feeling of real stakes is what makes a story really good, which is why I was sort of bummed by the end of the Harry Potter series because JK Rowling was a real wimp when it came to killing actually important characters and the ones she did kill has now led her to come out and say ad nauseam that she wished that she hadn't. Since you the reader knew that they really weren't going to kill any of the big three in that series, the stakes weren't as high as they could have been.

Best I can tell is one is a great night of sex, while the other is something awful similar to what would happen to Jim from American Pie.

Yeah I love the King connected universe because there can be huge connecting points, like a scene where Roland Deschain has a brief cameo in Insomnia, or small ones like in Apt Pupil when Kurt Dussander mentioning that his accountant (Andy Dufrene) went to Shawshank for murdering his wife and her lover. The best thing is that there have been a couple books titled The Stephen King Universe, if I remember, which go into detail about all his books up to a certain point and lay out every connecting instance between them, and really help even the most die-hard fans remember tidbits that they may have forgotten. Even better was someone went and made an infographic showing EVERY connection and where they fall within the SK universe. Yeah he wasn't an alien in the book, just had unexplained psychic powers because Oxycontin.

Omission: Regarding the bully trying to make Duddits eat shit, he wasn't barehanding it, he did have what looked like a heavy wool glove on one hand Michael Jackson style so technically the shit wasn't touching his skin.

I think if anything it's a satire of over the top action movies, especially ones like Robocop. Downe in the comic basically goes all in to stop bad guys, and usually dies by the end of each of his missions but gets resurrected by his superiors, to what extent he remembers what happens depends on the situation if I remember right.

The virus was briefly explained in the first scene with Freeman and Sizemore where they talk about it and its codename of Ripley. Freeman explains that he's seen how nasty the virus can get but it doesn't get any deeper than that.

Omission: Morgan Freeman's history with the aliens was also in more detail in the book by way of a timeline that mixed actual reported UFO sightings/incidents and made for the book incidents involving Morgan Freeman's squadron. If I remember right it was how the virus was spread by the aliens and could have been passed through a couple different means, by either the alien blood, the blood of a person infected by a shit weasel, or from the ship spraying red mist. It's basically a nod to the War of the World red plant life that was spread to make the world fully inhabitable to the aliens.

The only thing that I can think of is that he gravitates to it as a positive, so she uses it because he enjoys it, maybe? I don't know...Oxycontin. Stephen King uses a lot of motifs over and over in his stories like a group of kids overcoming evil, psychic bonds, etc. Another big one of his is misused gifts and the negative effects of that. In The Green Mile book, after the John Coffee character is executed by the prison with the guards who came to like him, know his powers, and knew he was innocent, each of the guards all suffer horrible deaths/accidents, while the Tom Hanks character lives to a very old age and has to suffer watching his friends and loved ones die while he lives alone. In The Dark Tower, Roland realizes too late that he was so blinded by this mission he had that he didn't realize the true gifts he had with his group of travelers both past and present. In It, the Loser's Club lead mediocre lives after separating and only feel whole again once they are together, which is similar to this where these four boys are given these great gifts but don't really do much with them which leads to the situations that we see at the start of the movie.

Again this was something that was omitted from the book where it was gone into a bit of detail. In all honesty, this probably would have been better served as a miniseries on TV, as they cut a lot of connecting tissue out, though it really isn't much better and I say this as a huge King fan. Also how big of career turnaround is it for Kasdan as this movie basically killed his career for over a decade only for his return to be the Force Awakens?

In the book Duddits gave them powers once he realized they were really his friends, if I remember correctly, and also as they asked him to help in finding a girl that had gone missing a few days prior. There's a deleted scene in regards to this which makes it a little easier to connect in the movie. He gave them this shared gift as he knew they worked better as a group and each had their own strengths and weaknesses. They all went their separate ways into adulthood and Duddits sort of fell by the wayside, along with his rapidly deteriorating health, so they really couldn't bring him to the cabin each winter when they met up. Jonesy was still feeling the effects from his accident, but the guys and he felt that he was well enough to go on the trip and also help raise his spirits. Thomas Jane and Tom Sizemore go to pick up Duddits after Thomas Jane receives a psychic message from Jonesy that Duddits is the key to defeating Mr. Grey. Duddits is an alien for who the fuck knows why. I think the alien endgame is similar to that of the aliens in War of the Worlds, invade and infect a planet in order to take it over for their species allowing it to grow. They cut a lot out from the book which connected a lot of this stuff and then threw in shit that just muddled it even further. Jonesy was nudged into traffic to injure him physically as it would slow down Mr. Grey in his attempt to infect the world, which Mr. Grey wouldn't know that Jonesy was handicapped when he first saw him. This is just the most recent attempt by the aliens to take over the world, Morgan Freeman's outfit has been fighting with them since Roswell. The front of the book actually has a detailed timeline of events that mixes in real alien sightings mentioned in the news along with fictional stuff within the story to bridge the two and give the reader background.

Now I've reached 365 new to me movies for the year with an overall total of 443. Most likely not going to do this again next year as it's tiring as shit, though I may replace it by binge watching TV shows on various online video platforms.

Yeah no commentary for this movie on the regular DVD.

Be happy I couldn't find a gif of that scene.

You don't need a psychic bond to know that this motherfucker is just leaving germs everywhere in his wake, no matter how hard you clean.

That tile could have been sparkling and there is no way I'd put that toothpick anywhere near my mouth. Plus you're talking about a bathroom floor cohabited by four guys who aren't the cleanest of people, so there are probably already leftover germs from any other time that they used that bathroom, so while there may not have been much blood on that tile, but that tile was far from clean.

The whole alien thing with Duddits was batshit insane and is maybe the biggest diverging from the source material of a King adaptation since The Lawnmower Man and the original Shining.

Really? More so than him taking a tooth pick off the bloody shit covered bathroom floor of a forest cabin and putting it in his fucking mouth?