I popped out to Uxbridge today, as I had planned to do yesterday, with a few bits of shopping in mind. First and foremost, I wanted to pick up Shutter Island, which I'd managed to miss in the cinema. It seems a little daft to walk into HMV (or whatever) and buy one DVD, so I did my usual browsing and came up with another few movies that I'd missed: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Zombieland and My Name Is Bruce, each one of a mere £8.
It may seem strange that, as a fan of Bruce Campbell, I've never seen any of the Evil Dead series. After all, they cemented him as the wisecracking B-Movie hero of choice. I watch Burn Notice, in which he's pretty good at portraying a washed up spy... He was great as Autolycus in both Hercules & Xena... I loved his cameos in the Spider-Man movies (he's one of only two good reasons to watch Spider-Man 3, the other being the jazz club dance scene)... I made a point of picking up Bubba-Ho-Tep as soon as it became available on DVD... but there's a whole load of his stuff that I haven't seen.
In My Name Is Bruce, he plays a washed up B-Movie actor and complete dick... by the name of Bruce Campbell. He's kidnapped by a teenager who's unwittingly unleashed an ancient evil upon his small-town home because, well, he's Bruce Campbell, and so he knows a thing or two about kicking monster arse. The first thing that struck me was how dark the movie is. Not in the sense of scary, portentious dark - just "where's the lighting?" dark. Certainly much of it is set at night - in fact, there were probably only a couple of short scenes shot in daylight - but it was so dark, it was actually very difficult to see what was going on half the time. It's kind of intentionally bad, full of clichés, but ultimately a pretty good homage to B-Movies. The end is a real laugh... and some of the gags throughout are quite funny but, like Bubba-Ho-Tep, there's something missing from it that I can't quite place.
Zombieland, meanwhile, is billed as a comedy, but it's more of a loving homage to Zombie movies in much the same way as Faith Erin Hicks' Zombies Calling. It teaches us some of the more important Rules For Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, while putting its protagonists in precisely the sort of position their rules tell them to avoid. The ending is almost impossibly upbeat but, since the characters are all pretty likeable, I'll let it have that. Props to Woody Harrelson for his part - what seems initially to be his standard nutcase turns out to have quite a sad backstory. Oh, and it turns out that upbeat ending has 'sequel' written all over it for a reason...
I also went looking for Wii games and, while I found a few that I'm interested in (Disaster: Day of Crisis, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, No More Heroes 2 to name but three), I ended up not buying any. Not quite sure why, other than the fact that I've already got plenty of good games that I don't have time for...
...What I did get was the new, larger-than-Leader-Class Battle Ops Bumblebee. From the photos, it appeared to be an upgraded version of the Human Alliance mold, with a few interesting changes. Hasbro seems fixated on movie Bumblebee's gun arm, and so that forms a good part of this model's gimmicks. Sadly, in doing so, it reduces the toy's effectiveness - the gun arm doesn't exactly articulate well: there's no outward movement at all, and the elbow moves only to service the hand-to-gun transformation. Several other decisions are confusing... such as the limited mobility of the head, and the lack of wrist rotation on such a large model (seriously, any Bumblebee toy would be so much improved by the ability to rotate his hand at the wrist). This thing is about twice the height of Human Alliance BB in robot mode, but still smaller than the Ultimate version. Still, it's an excellent representation of movie Bumblebee - probably the best so far, on balance. Even though it lacks the extensive lights and sounds of the Ultimate version, its proportions are better, it stands better, and the lights and sounds it has are more than adequate. Word to the wise, though: I've seen it on the shelves at The Entertainer for £70... Argos have it £10 cheaper!
By the time I got back home - having picked up my dry cleaning and restocked my fridge - I had the beginnings of a headache and, foolishly, didn't take anything... Now it's a lot worse, so I may just give myself an early night...
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