darescot anthoney bellind

[Kena Sugrue]

Wedding in countryside becomes scene of a mass shooting when Nazis show up: Officers fire machine guns until everyone is bloodied and dead. A dead paratrooper is found hanging by his parachute without any limbs. Lots of zombie violence: The living shoot the undead in the head at point-blank or close range; bloody and graphic. Zombies attack the living, gnawing on their flesh until they become zombies. Character puts gun to head, pulls trigger. After getting bitten by a zombie, character's hand chopped off with knife.

Parents need to know that Valley of the Dead is a 2022 Spanish zombie horror-comedy in which rivals in the Spanish Civil War must work together to stop a zombie outbreak. While there's the expected zombie horror violence of zombies biting into human flesh and humans shooting zombies in the head at close or point-blank range, there's also a scene in which a group of Nazis commit a mass shooting -- killing dozens of attendees at a wedding, with screaming, blood, dead bodies. Also, a character puts a gun to their head and pulls the trigger. After a character is bitten on the hand by a zombie, another character chops their hand off. There's strong language throughout, including "f--k," "motherf----r," and ethnic and homophobic slurs. The film also has cigarette smoking and alcohol drinking. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails.

In VALLEY OF THE DEAD, it's the middle of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, and the Nazis have joined with the fascists to take on the communists and anarchists. In the middle of this, Jan (Miki Esparb) is on the verge of being executed for treason by the fascists before his uncle saves him at the last minute. In order to redeem himself, Jan must deliver a message to another officer and go through dangerous enemy territory. He's joined by a nervous young soldier named Decruz, and as they enter a desolate valley, they're surrounded by communist guerillas, including one nicknamed "Priest Killer" (Aura Garrido), who intend to kill them. Before that happens, however, they witness a warplane go down in the woods. Upon finding the dead paratrooper, they soon discover that the paratrooper isn't dead, but has become a zombie. Soon, other zombies from the area appear and begin to attack them. Reluctantly, the communists join forces with Jan and Decruz to work together to stop the zombie invasion.

This is a surprisingly fun zombie horror-comedy set during the Spanish Civil War. Valley of the Dead (aka Malnazidos), aside from the historical backdrop, doesn't deliver anything new to zombie movies. Zombies eat human flesh, humans try to stop them by shooting them in the head, and it almost goes without saying that the Nazis are the evil force behind it all. The filmmakers know the rules of this game and have enough sense to make it an entertaining adventure rather than yet another ponderous and dreary exercise in goth darkness.

At the very least, it's a chance for non-Spanish audiences to learn more about the Spanish Civil War beyond world history classes and Ernest Hemingway novels. Fortunately, it's more than that, and the movie does an effective job of using the deep divisions in that war to heighten the tension of the story. It's a movie that skirts many different genres, and the light touch helps to keep it consistently engaging in spite of all the expected zombie movie tropes.

10.5 Apocalypse (2006)



Yes, it's been a while since I posted anything, sorry 'bout that. My obsession with rusty old jets has been consuming me lately, but I decided this week to at least try and write a new review for all you loyal readers (both of you, thanks mom and dad!).

10.5 Apocalypse is the sequel to the 2004 television movie 10.5. I'll admit here and now that I have not seen the first 10.5, so my review is of a stand-alone movie versus a true sequel. I realize that it makes no sense at all to review a sequel without having seen the first movie, but that's what makes me so darn cute (again, thanks mom and dad!). Our movie comes in two parts, with obvious commercial breaks sprinkled throughout, and runs a free-time crippling three hours. Originally broadcast over two nights during sweeps week, it was released on DVD as a single movie event (it may even be public domain already, you can get it free online).

Let me recap the last movie quickly, ok? In 2004's 10.5 the fabled "Big One" finally hits the West Coast, cleaving off everything from California to Seattle. 10.5 Apocalypse takes place just hours after the events in the first movie ended (despite being filmed two years later). As such, the massive 10.5 earthquake that just tore half our nation's gross domestic product off the map has just happened.


Los Angeles is a goner in this flashback scene over the opening credits (I don't know who Peter Outerbridge is but he needs to get the hell off my TV).
We open as a massive tidal wave (caused by the quake) swarms west across the Pacific towards Hawaii. We see a cruise ship (the Princess Isabella) in its path, the drunken businessmen and cheating housewives mingling blithely, ignorant of the crushing wave of death rushing at them. The captain notices it first, and even though logic would decree he at least make a go of turning into the wave, he just stands there in shocked awe as the wave hits them broadside. The liner capsizes and sinks, leaving just pitiful little wreckage and an oil spill to mark her location as the wave continues on west.


Ship in trouble, she's not rolling back from this one.
The wave aims for Honolulu, Hawaii, the state's largest city, situated on Oahu. In one of the (depressingly few) scientifically accurate visuals, the wave first sucks the surf back from the beach before looming high on the horizon. The wave crashes across the city, flooding out the buildings and inundating the streets with dozens of feet of seawater (though I think the geography is wrong, as Honolulu is on the southern half of an island and the wave is coming from North America to the northeast, so the wave should come across the mountains of eastern Oahu and not directly from the sea onto Waikiki Beach).


Honolulu takes it hard and wet.
But hey, it's ok, because (like in all those Godzilla movies) the entire city of Honolulu was evacuated in two hours! Yes, a city of 900,000 people were all taken...where, again? Across to the other side of the island? To other Hawaiian islands? It wouldn't seem to matter, as this massive tsunami looks powerful and large enough to swamp over all the islands, not just Oahu. Maybe all those millions of people were lifted up 500 feet into the air in giant nets held tight by Rodan, Mothra, King Ghidorah and Superman.


Where they go?
Alright, let's meet our Washington DC crew, as the entire federal government is, of course, mobilized to deal with this disaster (beginning in the last movie). There are, however, only two people we need worry about, the President and the Head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). President Paul Hollister is played by 65-year old Beau Bridges, coming back from the same role in 2004's 10.5. The President is a strong willed man, though clearly in over his head as his nation is being demolished by Mother Nature. I guess Bridges does a fairly good job as the Commander in Chief, but I'd prefer Morgan Freeman from Deep Impact to lead my country in a crisis.


The President.
The Head of FEMA is a frazzled career disaster management expert who spends about 95% of the movie talking to the President on her headset. Most of the relevant plot dialogue in the first half of our movie is spoken between her and the President, though I question the character's actual value in an already bloated cast, her lines could have come to us from another, more established character. And, as The X-Files showed us, FEMA is a hotbed of alien sedition, so we shouldn't trust her anyway.


The Head of FEMA (I just know she's from the planet Zetuslus).
Now, before we go too far, let me tell you that 10.5 Apocalypse is a very serious movie. How serious is it? Very serious, serious dialogue, serious music, serious zooming close-ups, serious eyeshadow on the girls. Everyone tries so damn hard to make it REAL, to make you FEEL their pain. However, this is not Nahon's I Stand Alone, nor is it Shimura's Ikiru, hell, it's not even The Towering Inferno or A Night to Remember. It's a crappy b-movie television miniseries and I resent it trying to force me to feel bad for cardboard cut-out characters and sappy dialogue. Ok, back to the movie, off now to Denver, Colorado, to the headquarters of the US Geological Survey, the federal government agency responsible for watching for earthquakes and the like (and in this movie a collection of hard-boiled Jack Bauers, fully funded with the latest in high-tech computer surveillance gear and scientific instruments, with helicopters idling on the roof to whisk them off to exotic locations at a moment's notice).


USGS HQ in Denver (there are title cards at the beginning of almost every scene change, which is helpful.
All those Bigass Earthquakes that were messing everything up in the last movie are just the beginning. The entire western half of America is undergoing some dramatic and catastrophic geologic changes in rapid succession. First up we hear that Mount Saint Helens is erupting again, repeating the whopper of 1980, but with extra spiciness. We don't see any of this, however, maybe due to budget constraints.


A computer visual of Saint Helens is the best we get.
Let's meet our film's heroine, a super-smart disaster-expert geology-whiz named Doctor Samantha "Sam" Hill. Sam is played by 48-year old Kim Delaney, one of those semi-famous names that I swear I can't place with any movie or TV roles, even though I know I should be able to. Kim Delaney is a fine looking woman to be sure, but her acting abilities seem limited (judging solely from this movie) and at times she really seems to be mailing it in.


Doctor Sam.
Her second banana sidekick is a certain Doctor Jordan, a scruffy, unshaven lunk who has no real purpose in this movie but to stand behind/beside Sam and repeat things verbatim and emote to exciting stuff going on offscreen. I'm positive he must have had a bigger role in the first movie, since he gets that typical Movie Hero swooning music intro when we first see him, but in this installment he's as worthless as Ando.


Doctor Jordan.
Sam is called in by the President to save the day, and a plane is on the way to take them to Denver to the USGS HQ. It's not exactly clear, but it looks like she is at the moment exactly where she was when the first movie ended (somewhere out in the field). She's grubby, dirty, sweaty and stressed out, and she seems to be pissed off at Jordan for some reason (maybe I should watch the first movie some day...). For the rest of our film, we are hammered over the head with the fact that this lone woman is the key to the survival of America, the one firm bulwark standing strong against the decidedly unpatriotic machinations of Mother Nature (who must be a godless communist to harm our fair nation like this).


Sam is like freakin' Wonder Woman, but without the bracelets and the invisible jet.
Back in Washington now, to meet another character returning from 2004's 10.5. Natalie (played by hottie Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon, who was 40 but looks barely 20) is some FEMA field commander/organizer type of woman, who also happens to be the Head of FEMA's daughter (whoa, does the term "nepotism" mean anything to this agency?). In the last movie Natalie was involved in something that went horribly wrong and resulted in several FEMA agents being killed (the cryptically named "Clearfield Accident"). The movie makes a big deal about how Natatlie has not been the same since then, but forgets the timeline which places that event not more than 48 hours before the start of this movie (such are the pitfalls of making a direct sequel two years after the first). Natalie is ready for a second chance, however, and talks her mother into giving her another field command.


Natalie.
In the face of nationwide disasters, the Head of FEMA has a plan to mobilize "citizen teams" of EMS and rescue personnel, sort of an informal State Militia of firemen and doctors that can be sent into the field with minimal training to help dedicated FEMA and government personnel. It seems this program was started in the wake of the 10.5 West Coast Quake o'Death of the first movie. As it turns out, two of our movie's main characters will be with this new program, a pair of firefighting brothers from Medford, Oregon named Will and Brad. Will is a younger, hunky sort of dude, who clearly has a soft heart and a deep sense of his own weaknesses (and he likes dogs and French poetry). Brad is the older brother, all bravado and bluster, the kind of guy who slaps you on the back in the hardware store and asks you if you saw the Raiders game Sunday. Brad is played by a nearly-unrecognizable Dean Cain, once upon a time the star of my ex-wife's favorite show Lois & Clark


Brad.
There is a weird dynamic between these brothers, one of dominance and control, as well as misplaced hero-worship and feelings of familial inadequacy. Sibling rivalry between boys is not uncommon, I have an older brother as well as two sons myself, but these two guys need some serious counseling.


Will.
To add to the mix, Will has a hot wife named Laura who is just about fed up with his older brother's near-constant interference and all the macho bullshit. She is also so pissed that her husband is being called up to duty (which she blames on Brad signing them up without telling her) that she storms off and drives to her family's house in Nevada. She will turn up later, don't worry.


Laura also provides our movie's sole porn moment as we see her in her pink Haines Her Way bra for about five seconds.
Off now to the beautiful ski and spa playground of the rich that is Sun Valley, Idaho. There is a snow-covered peak here, a long-dormant but now-exploding volcano named Bald Mountain that is now criss-crossed with ski trails and pretentious Alpine guides who make you feel small and pathetic just because you can't seem to stand up on your skis for longer than thirty seconds before flopping face-first into the powder to the mocking stares of your girlfriend. We get the first of many Disaster Up Close and Personal moments as a cute young couple in a ski lift get a bird's eye view of the exploding volcano and the onrushing ash cloud. Oh, and the chick is hot.


They have about thirty seconds to live.
Later news reports of damage show that the entire valley is under ash and rubble, with thousands dead and many more missing. All throughout this movie, by the way, we get a large number of shots of television news anchors discussing the latest disaster of the minute. This plot device provides us handy maps of the happenings (which are helpful in keeping us up to date on the locations of the scenes, for those of us who tend to fall asleep during movies) as well as giving us some idea of the enormous loss of life and property we are seeing.


Breaking news!
Natalie comes to Idaho to take charge now, jumping into the fray with her hair down and a determined look on her face. There is a FEMA agent named Alec who is already on the ground and in charge. Officially, Natalie is here to take over for him, but Alec isn't willing to give up command. To be fair, however, Alec has the skills, charisma and experience to run this site far better, and Natalie's sudden arrival, swooping down from Washington DC in a helicopter in her pressed blouse and Guicci boots, does stink of politics (and nepotism).


Natalie and Alec even disagree on where a truck should park (seriously).
There is a tense running fight between the two of them, much to the detriment of the mission, which you'd think would run much smoother if the people in charge would stop sniping at each other and deal with the disaster at hand. Natalie rightly asserts her authority, and Alec's displeasure is thinly veiled. It's not until Natalie calls her mom that we learn that the reason Alec is such a little bitch to her is that he lost a cousin in the oft-mentioned Clearfield Accident. To her credit, Natalie uses this nugget of information to try and forge a bond between the two of them, to varying success.


Natalie on the phone.
Oh, god, this has got to stop. Everyone in this movie is so damn serious! They grimace, they furrow their brows, they set their jaws, and they emote every line like they actually believe they are really dealing with some otherworldly disaster and not actors in some crappy movie. I guess I have to give them credit for adhering to the ideals of Method Acting, but this is not Shindler's List or Lost Highway, it's a miniseries that took the timeslot of reruns of Rosanne for a few nights, seriously.


Alright, I guess this is kinda serious stuff. Leave me alone.
Also coming to Idaho is a young Red Cross volunteer named Amy (played by 22-year old Tamara Hope, a pretty blonde actress who I've never seen before). She's a bit scared and nervous as she gets to the Sun Valley disaster zone, this is her first time in the field, having joined up while still in college to get some "life experience".


Amy.
Amy quickly meets a certain Doctor Miguel, a McDreamy-esque guy with a sexy scruff and swarty Latin looks. Amy helps Doctor McMiguel save a bleeding woman, proving to herself that she can handle a crisis situation and proving to Doctor McMiguel that she's more than just a set of perky boobs. We see the first sappy, dopey signs of love between these two, and I start to involuntarily cringe at the thought of some dorky romance subplot messing up my disaster movie.


Doctor McMiguel.
Amy has a secret, however, that being her last name is Hollister, as in my dad is the President of the United States! While she keeps this a secret from the Doctor (she really does just want to help and be treated equally), she has to call her father and have him tell the Secret Service agents to back off some. Not sure McMiguel ever knows who her dad is, I fast forwarded through a lot of this.


McMiguel and Amy saving a life, a much better way to meet than at Starbucks.
Back at the USGS HQ in Denver comes word of another trouble-spot, this one in Utah. It seems a ancient volcanic mountain called King's Peak is showing signs of overheating from below. Doctors Sam and Jordan fly there from Denver in a helicopter to get a first-hand look at the potential threat. The two actors stare unconvincingly out of the parked helicopter as insert shots of some random forested mountain are cut in, and we are supposed to just feel the tension in the air. Back in Denver they relay them some amazing real-time video images, downloaded from instantly-tasked satellites in orbit, showing how the ground is getting hotter from internal pressures of lava boiling (basically, sure, don't argue with me).


This entire movie is filled with pretty decent computer graphics like this, no real complaints from me.
Leaving that for a second, it's now on to the Four Corners region of the Southwest, in the Monument Valley area so famous as a backdrop for half the crappy westerns made since 1935. We see a Navaho dude feeding his horses, his beaded necklace tight against his sunburned neck. Suddenly his horses start freaking out and bolt, with him chasing helplessly after the galloping beasts. What the horses (who, along with other animals) could sense that he could not was that underneath them the ground was tremoring. As we soon see, the aquifer (big layer of water underground) has surfaced, flooding out this once-arid desert.


Flooded land, nice matte painting.
The entire Southwest is now in danger as continued quake activity has upset the deep aquifers under the area. Lake Mead, held back by Hoover Dam for generations, is now boiling over as heat generated from belong drives the temperatures up to astronomical numbers. As we watch, the dam begins to strain under the water, the waves spilling over.


Lake Mead is coming over the dam! Run!
Doctor Jordan and some random flunky board a helicopter and rotor out to Lake Mead to check it out. Finally, this guy has something to do other than stand beside Sam and gesticulate weakly and repeat what someone on a television monitor says. Sadly, as the waters of the lake overflow the massive concrete barrier of Hoover Dam, Jordan's helicopter is caught in the flood and smashed (dumbasses, they flew ten feet from the lip of the dam, just asking for trouble).


Helicopter gets smashed by the waterfall (looks like a Eurocopter).
Upon learning of his death, Sam's reaction seems overly melodramatic (though to be fair, it's only we the audience who never got to know Jordan, surely he was well loved and respected by the characters themselves, despite what we see on screen). In fact, everyone's reaction seems to be out of place considering the fifteen lines of monotone dialogue the man had up to this point. Even the President of the United States personally calls Sam to offer his condolences, and the major news networks take time off from reporting on the extinction-level cataclysms happening across America to report on this one man's untimely demise. Sam is already at the mental breaking point, and the loss of Jordan (were they lovers in the first movie?) has caused her to question everything, including her own abilities.


Sam laments her friend's loss.
What they really should be more worried about is the flood. Television says that towns as far down the Colorado River from the burst dam as Kingman, Arizona are flooded (despite the fact that Kingman is 50 miles away from the river). That's some flood! Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the dam provide electrical power for Las Vegas? Are there back-up power stations, and can they handle the load if Hoover goes down? Vegas looks awfully bright in subsequent scenes, I say.


TV image of the flood.
To Las Vegas, Nevada now. The firefighter's wife Laura is here (remember her?), having made it just this far before everything started to go to hell. Her husband calls her from Idaho during a break in the action, and they come to terms and apologize to each other. She is proud of her man and his line of work, but just worried that his older brother is a bad influence on him. Some seriously sappy music in this scene, to go along with the soap opera-level relationship dialogue, and the sickly feeling of revulsion in the pit of my stomach. Can I have an earthquake now?


Laura on the phone.
Back in Idaho, the firefighter brothers are working late into the night in the smashed remains of the town. Brad, older and more daring, though more prone to taking testosterone-fueled risks, goes into a shaky, collapsing building to save a victim. Will suggests they wait for back-up, but Brad won't have any of that, determined to prove to the world that his dick is huge. This is firefighting drama at its soundtrack-pounding, pulse-racing, backlit-smoke-generating, men-yelling-stuff best, hampered only by dime-store dialogue and the fact that Dean Cain is way too much the pretty boy for this role. Hey, anybody know any good dramatic-but-accurate firefighter movies? I liked Backdraft and Ladder 49, if I may say so myself, but there must be others.


Saving the dude. Oh, how about Hellfighters with John Wayne? That was awesome.
The next morning the brothers are berated by Alec their co-boss for taking "undue risks" to save that one man. Alec quotes at length the "survivor ratio", the relative number of rescuers who die trying to save everyone instead of concentrating on those who really have a chance of survival. He further makes them understand that if they had died out there, they need to think of all the other trapped victims who would then die because they weren't there to save them (hard to argue with that logic, even if I'm not explaining it well). Still, Alec has grudging respect for men willing to risk their lives for random strangers.


The brothers get yelled at, to their credit they take it like men.
Once alone, the brothers fight it out, releasing decades of pent-up sibling rivalry in an orgy of name calling and chest thumping bravado. The older brother wishes he could shake the other off his back, the younger resents always having to measure up to the other, and all sorts of buried-deep family troubles come spewing up to the surface. This was a long time coming, apparently, and the stress of the job has broken down the bonds between them. But, they are family and a few scenes later they make up, engaging in the sort of manly arm punching and head rubbing that substitutes for emotional acceptance and apologies with us guys.


The brothers fight it out.
Ok, enough of that. Back in Denver, the increasingly frazzled Doctor Sam has a terrifying new theory of what is to come, one that the President has to hear immediately. The radical, literally world-shaking idea she presents is that the North American continent will be cut in two by a massive series of geological upheavals! I won't bother explain every detail, but the gist is that the continental plates are moving around like lily pads on a pond and that's not so good. Way back when (if you remember your earth science class from junior high, which you don't because you were trying unsuccessfully to get Becky Morganson to notice you by picking your nose and flipping it across the room) the entire Midwest was a shallow sea before the plates shifted millions of years ago and it's coming again. Sam tells a shocked and disbelieving President and his staff that such a thing is more than likely going to happen again, a "Doomsday Scenario" that is going to seriously impact Oklahoma's chances of winning the Big 12 title this year.


Visual of potential split, called the "Accelerated Plate Movement" theory.
Sam needs more information, though, and she really needs to have her father back. It seems that her dad, a maverick near-celebrity geologist, came up with the Doomsday Scenario in the first place, but didn't leave a lot of detailed notes. Her dad had a falling out with his bosses in the US Geological Survey and left the civil service and never finished his work on the scenario. In order to prove or disprove this theory, his daughter needs to pick his brain.


Sam looking up info on her dad online, helping the audience out with some backstory.
Let's meet her father now. "Dad", as I'll call him, is played by 68-year old character actor Frank Langella, who really should know better than to be in this film. He's typical of the type of actor that appears in made-for-TV disaster movies: middlingly famous-ish, with average talent and average looks, with a spotty resume and a booking agent that clearly hates his guts. He ends up being something of an action hero, which really surprised me.


Dad.
Dad is currently in Las Vegas, participating in some professional poker tournament (oh god, remember when this "sport" was all the rage, when it was on ESPN fifteen times a week?) where he is something of a big shot. He's here just wasting time, seemingly independently wealthy enough not to have to work anymore, but to earn a living at cards and craps.


I hate poker on TV, can anything be more boring?
Dad gets a frantic phone call from his daughter, but it doesn't go well. Dad isn't interested in talking about disasters and fault lines, and positively goes cold as ice when she mentions that she's working for the USGS. He calls them "evil" and warns her to quit while she still has a soul. What the hell? When did the US Geological Survey become the Unholy Agency of Satan?


This guy works at USGS, does he seem evil? Asian, yes, but not necessarily evil.
Even though he wouldn't talk shop with his daughter, dad is smart enough to suspect that something is wrong when he feels a slight tremor shake the casino. He sneaks into hotel's basement and sees water leaking in where it shouldn't be. Doing a taste-test, he finds it to be acidic, a sign that something freaky is happening with the aquifer beneath the Las Vegas basin. He further times the increasing tremors and knows the Big One is coming. His cellphone call back to his daughter is quick and desperate, he knows Vegas doesn't have much time left before it is swallowed up by a gargantuan sinkhole as the aquifer collapses (or something like that, I just don't care anymore).


Dad down in the basement, he's got the eye for spooky things a-happenin'.
And now we have another city destroyed! Vegas (Vegas, baby!) is swallowed up by a massive sinkhole, which miraculously appears nowhere else but downtown. The Strip sinks into the ground, only the tops of the hotels and casinos still poking out of the infilling dirt and rubble. Later news reports say 500 to 600 thousand people are trapped or buried in t