Monday, March 31, 2008

Am I watching a bad movie?

I can't decide if the movie I'm watching is bad, but I think I may have detected some slight danger signs. On the one hand, it is a direct to video slasher movie, always a good sign. And one of the cast had her work on percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models in a peer reviewed journal, in addition to her other book convincing girls not to pretend to be stupid until they aren't cute anymore. If somebody who's taken on the gargantuan job of making attractive women less disengaged and boring, it can't be that bad, can it?

I also couldn't help but notice an odd sound effect, and I'm not sure if this says more about me or the movie. I'm only twenty minutes in, and there's a scene where this group of kids is a bit alarmed by somebody's hunting trophies, these snarling animal heads mounted on the walls of the bedroom he offers them, and the film-makers thought they'd add some animal snarls and grunts to the shots of the animal heads in case we didn't get it. Here's the thing... one of them was a sound effect from Doom. Not the movie, the original game from like 15 years ago. It's the kind of hissing snarl the fireball guys make when they first become aware of you and start moving. And I'm thinking if some old shareware copy of Doom was in the effects budget, that may not be a good sign. More on this story as it develops.

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