We watched the 2011 movie Battle Los Angeles first. It's a 116 minute ad for the Marines pretending to be an alien invasion movie. Aaron Eckhardt is a Marine sergent who saves the world from some tall skinny guys. They drop out of the sky and take over Los Angeles with genetically modified soldiers and robot planes. The marines have to get some people out of a police station before the Air Force bomb the aliens. It doesn't go well when their fresh out of the academy Lieutenant leads them into the firefight of their lives. We spend most of the movie watching the marines running and hiding and shooting guns and blowing up everything they see. Aliens and humans die in great numbers and it's all really loud and bombastic. Way too long too. I started to get tired fidgety and restless but there you go. The movie gets a lot of negative buzz for it being pretty much what you've seen before but it proved to be a money maker. Not having an original story doesn't bother me, it's the relentless edge they try to put on the thing that pushed me away. They shake the camera, throw everything, including the kitchen sink, into the air and before it falls to the ground they blow some of it up. While that firey metal storm is hailing down around you they crank the sound effects up to 11, and top that off with Brian Tyler's big ass score. I have liked several of his scores in the past but this one is just not my cup of tea. More like a big tumbler of PowerAid with a shot of 5 Hour Energy floating in it. Then the effect doesn't stop for nearly 2 hours. Lucky for the human race Aaron is able to figure out the flaw that the aliens have in their armour and then they nuke that subterranean deathstar and head for home. Now that I have seen it I doubt that I need to see it again anytime soon. Not one I'd go out and pick up that's for sure.
We watched a 1985 Mexican zombie movie called Cemetery of Terror next. It's also known as Zombie Apocalypse but it doesn't live up that name so we won't mention it again. Devlin, a mass murder, is killed and the family of one of his victims wants the authorities to burn the body because there is a demonic side to the guy. Before Devlin is torched some stupid teen boys steal the corpse to use to scare their girlfriends. They have a plan to frighten the girls into their arms by showing them the dead guy. Their previous plan was to tell the ladies that they were going to a jet-set party and then take them to a deserted house in the woods where they would try to have sex with them by acting all macho. Nice to see that the Mexican movie teens are as stupid as the movie teens here in the USA. That first plan doesn't go so well and the girls put an end to the romantic activity. The guys second plan kicks in and they go get the body. They convince the girls to go with them to the cemetery. The leader of the trio of idiots preforms a Satanic ritual that actually revives the mass murder. Unfortunately they also revive several of the locals who pop out of the ground and start shambling around looking to bite the living. The stupid teens get slaughtered pretty quickly and the heroes of the movie turn out to be some children out for a bit of trick or treating. There's a lot of screaming and running about in this super low budget bit of silliness from south of the border. The production values are low, the acting is not the best but I've seen a lot worse in my time. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but the serious horror fan who wants to see it all. It's not one I think I would need to buy but I enjoyed it better than our previous choice.
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