Movies and other miscellaneous...

Most of this weekend I spent watching movies with Diamondrock. Obviously, you know about Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk, but what you do not know is that we also picked up a bunch of godawful dollar store double feature DVDs. My mother also provided others. I normally don't watch a lot of movies, so this was a treat for me.

The first thing we saw was Hercules Unchained, with Steve Reeves. It was kind of awesome, even though neither of us had seen the movie it's a sequel to ("Hercules", appropriately enough.) It was of the entertainingly bad quality. The real hero was Ulysses, who in the Sandy the Golden Boy vein of sidekicks infinitely more competent than their mentors, pretty much saved Hercules's ass a thousand times over. I particularly liked how they introduced each member of the crew at the beginning like some sort of Ancient Greek Justice League or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

...I would totally read an Ancient Greek Justice League.

Highlights: Hercules fighting a tiger, Hercules throwing a giant off of a cliff, Ulysses in general, that nameless soldier guy who verbally bitchslapped the evil queen and lived. Hercules being a general dick.

The next was Hercules against the Moon Men. You'd think with a title like that the movie couldn't possibly not be awesome. Sadly...much in the vein of Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, you'd be wrong. Seriously, somehow they managed to take a premise that should be categorically AWESOME and make it BORING.

Highlights: None, seriously.

After that we watched a version of Zorro starring Alain Delon. It wasn't bad though it had this incredibly cheesy "la-la-la-la Zorro's back" song that made Diamondrock twitch and rant. I thought it was cute. It was a bit too long though. Hortensia really pulled the corset off well though.

Highlights: Zorro driving a stagecoach off of a cliff.

This was all Saturday Night. On Sunday, we went to see Dark Knight again (IMAX style), and after that my mom loaned us her copy of In the Name of the King. This is a Jason Stathem fantasy movie based on Dungeon Siege. Yeah. It also had Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, and other notables. Also. Ninjas. Long lost sons. Surprisingly badass wives. And they ACTUALLY killed the cute young kid at the very beginning of the movie and that took me quite aback. I kept thinking they were gonna fake us out and reveal the kid was alive, but nope!

Highlights: Ninja, also, surprisingly dead kid, also, why you shouldn't boast about eviscerating some kid in front of his previously damsel-in-distress mom.

Finally, we saw the Richard Chamberlain version of the Count of Monte Cristo. I'd actually seen this before at age 12, when my seventh grade French teacher gave me the book to read and then showed the movie to the class. I liked the book, but parts of it were draggy and boring for me (I was possibly too young to really appreciate it) but I really liked the movie, despite some of the changes. The only thing I really remembered was how badass Edmond Dantes was when he'd count off his revenge. "Three." Awesome.

Happily, the movie actually did rock as much as I remembered it doing. They did a really good job shoving a god-knows-how-long novel into just 100 minutes. Some of the revenges were a bit different, but the changes made sense given the format and still followed the gist of the novel. Also, Richard Chamberlain is badass.

Highlights: the whole damn thing.

So anyway, that was my weekend (or at least what I recall of it. :-P). It was fun!