Space Milkshare was our first feature. It's a 2012 Canadian SF comedy written and directed by Armen Evrensel. It's his first feature and it was pretty darn good for that. It owes a lot to another humorous SF film set on a space station, Dark Star, and there are definite references to that film. Some reviewers reference Red Dwarf and it does have a bit of that in it.
Kristin Kreuk, Robin Dunne, Billy Boyd and Amanda Tapping are pretty much the whole cast. George Takei provides a voice for Gary Pinback but he doesn't appear in the film. That's Gary below. Pinback was also the name of a character in Dark Star. I've seen a lot of Amanda Tapping and Robin Dunne the last year or so, they were two main leads in the Canadian SF show Sanctuary. I watched all four season's of that show and enjoyed it a fair bit.
Robin is a computer tech that's sent up to a space station to repair their computer system. The station manages space debris in their section of space. Billy is the Captain, Kristin and Amanda are the rest of the crew. Billy and Amanda used to be a couple but she dumped his ass, for being such a dick. A space shuttle is blasted nearby and the shooters tell the station to leave the salvage to them. Billy and Amanda run out there in their shuttle and pick up some of the left overs. One piece is a tube with something glowing in it. Once on the station the cube is activated accidentally and the station is bathed in bright light. All communication with Earth ends and the station is all alone in space.
Kristine gets killed and an identical looking android takes her spot. She doesn't communicate for a while as she learns about her surroundings. The station is hit by a rubber duck that gets brought inside and eventually grows into Gary. Between him and the android we learn about the glowing cube and how it sent the station into another space and time. Gary was caught in the middle and he's a man turned monster. That's a lot of problems to solve and it takes a lot of jokes to get to the end of the movie. That and slime, green slime, the best kind of slime. I laughed at a lot of the jokes, occasionally out loud. Sadly it's not out on DVD, we saw it on Amazon Prime.
Our second movie was Seventh Son, a 2014 fantasy film directed by Sergei Bodrov, was a Blu-ray from Netflix. It's got Ben Barnes, Jeff Bridges, Alicia Vikander, and Julianne Moore for the main cast. It's written by Charles Leavitt and Steven Knight who adapted the book The Spook's Apprentice by Joseph Delaney. I haven't read that series but from the synopsis of the novel on the Wikipedia I can see they changed the story a whole bunch. The apprentice in the novel is 12 years old and so is the witch's daughter.
That's Ben Barnes on the left, he plays the apprentice, and you can see he's much older than the character in the novel. Jeff Bridges plays The Spook. He's a witch hunter and at the start of the movie his current apprentice is killed by Julianne Moore's character Mother Malkin. She's a really nasty witch who can turn into a dragon. We get a lot of dragon fights and fire. The movie is heavy with effects and fights. The sets and locations are a mix of real and CGI. Everything looks good except for the continuous cold blue on most scenes. I'm getting tired of that effect. The Spook goes to a house and plays the family gold for Ben, he's the seventh son of seven sons. Would be a rare person in the modern US, huh. They go off and fight witches. Julianne sends some assassins and other monsters after The Spook and his gang. Besides Ben, The Spook has a sidekick named Tusk. In the books Tusk is an enemy, he's the son of Mother Malkin and the Devil. Yuck, huh.
There's a long stream of fights and things smashing and stuff burning. It's all pretty bombastic and noisy. People are slaughtered and demon's sent back to hell. It was mostly fun but part of the enjoyment was ruined by Jeff's amazingly bad accent. Why anyone thought he should talk like that, I can't imagine, and I can imagine a whole lot.
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