We watched The Island first and it was mostly ok. It's the story of clones kept in a bunker for the purpose of organ harvesting. A biotech corporation builds clones and keeps them healthy for their rich clients and their medical needs. They claim that the clones are just slabs of meat, like the law requires, but the reality is they are thinking conscious beings. It's another evil corporation breaking the law being taken down by a cog in the machine movie. Ewan McGregor plays the cog and Scarlett Johansson plays the cogette. They are clones. The clones are starting to question the situation they find themselves in. Locked in a building, sealed from the contaminated world, the clones think they are the last of the surviving humans. There is a lottery. Win a trip to The Island, the last uncontaminated place on the earth. In reality they get killed and their organs harvested. Nice, huh. Ewan is having bad dreams and images that he can't explain. Sean Bean is the head of the corp. He's pretty callous about killing the clones. It's just business. Ewan escapes into the real world, near Yuma. He's a good fighter and a quick study. He learns to drive a car and pilot a flying motorcycle in just minutes. Damn that's some good cloning, huh. The pair run about and gather information. People get killed as some trigger happy mercenaries shoot up the city chasing after our cogs. There's a lot of collateral damage trying to contain the breach in security. That Michael Bay sure likes to blow stuff up and smash cars into each other. The mercenaries mostly get wiped out in the chase. At one point Ewan drops huge steel train wheels on the freeway in front of the bad guys cars. Wham. Crash. Sean Bean gets his in the final showdown. Yank. The clones are saved. I mostly like Michael's movies, especially the first Bad Boys, The Rock and Con Air. I've rewatched all of them several times each. I was not as much of a fan of Pearl Harbour. I got rid of the dvd. The Island scores pretty good on the IMDb, a 6.9, which I thought was higher than I might vote. I like Bay's flashy style in his early films, he's a bit more subtle here, at least in the first hour of story, which is mostly set up. There are the detractors, some people sure didn't like it as much as me, who complain about the stuff that Michael Bay puts in his movies. There are a bunch of goofs on a page on the IMDb, but I didn't notice one of those goofs. His films are more chase films with big blowey uppy stuff than dramas. There was also some sort of lawsuit with the people who wrote Parts: The Clonus Horror, which has a very similar story. From the Wikipedia: According to a 2007 interview with Clonus screenwriter Bob Sullivan, DreamWorks and Clonus' associates reached a seven-figure settlement on November 20, 2006, the specific terms of which are sealed. I know I have seen Parts, it's a MST3K selection but the story escapes me. I will have to take a look some time.
The Mad was fun. Billy Zane is a doctor who is on vacation with his new girlfriend, his daughter and the daughter's boyfriend. They stop at a resturant in a small town. It's famous for it's locally grown organic meat. Luckily they are out of burgers when our gang gets there. There was something wrong with that organic meat. It turns people into flesh eating zombies. Glad that doesn't happen around here. There is even a debate in the film about the status of the infected. I'm thinkin' they are zombie like enough for me. Getting bitten doesn't seem to effect you. The girlfriend is the first to go from the group, stabbed in the head, which then hooks up with the cook and his daughter. They were great, as was most of the Canadian cast. More people are killed, effected by the meat. There is a good bit of comedy, even the meat attacks, jumping on people, and the dialog was humorus. The gore effects were ok, nothing great, some of which were obsured visually. Still the story and the characters made up for that minor imperfection. Well worth seeing for the zombie comedy enjoyin' people out there.
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