October 28th

Chained (2012) directed by Jennifer Lynch

I always meant to watch David Lynch's daughter's first film Boxing Helena, but never managed to get around to it.  This one she made 19 years later and tells the tale of a maniac (Vincent D'Onofrio) who kidnaps, rapes, and murders women in his out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere home.  One woman has her 9-year-old child with her and he decides to raise the kid in his own demented way.  He chains his leg, forces him to make him meals and cleanup dead bodies, and calls him Rabbit.

This is a perfect example of a movie completely ruined by its ending.  According the the IMBd trivia, there wasn't enough time and money to complete the the movie properly.  You can tell.  Towards the end, Rabbit kills the psycho and locates his father, who he hasn't seen in ten years.  Within the span of a few minutes, we find out that his dad setup the kidnapping, the psycho was his uncle, his dad is also a psycho, and his dad's new wife is unaware of all of this.  Rabbi then fights with and kills his father.  His father's new wife instantly believes Rabbit's in the right during all of this -- though she'd never seen the kid before and he husband is dying on the floor -- and allows him to escape.  Yeah... what?  None of this was setup in the film before the last ten minutes.  It comes out of nowhere and slaps you in the face.  Awful.

Watched: DVD from Anchor Bay.

The Walking Dead 3.13: "Arrow on the Doorpost" (2013) directed by David Boyd
The entire episode is mostly a tense meeting between Rick and the Governor.  Rick wants to divide their territory using a river between them and the Gov just wants Michonne.  As the audience, it's mostly us wondering if Rick will be dumb enough to believe the Gov's offer.  Also, mighty generous of the prison folk to have Rick handle the negotiations when the guy was recently was running around with zombies chasing the ghost of his wife.


The Walking Dead 3.14: "Prey" (2013) directed by Stefan Schwartz
Woodbury continues to prepare for war.  Tyreese finally gets a little more screentime, but the guy such a wimp at this point.  In the early comics, he was the other alpha male competing with Rick to lead the group (instead of Shane, who was killed far earlier).  While not very believable, the Gov's stalking of Andrea was pretty fun in a slasher kind of way.

Just some more build-up for the finale.  I suspect the next episode will be the war preparations on the prison side of the things and nothing will really happen on the show until the last few minutes.  Such is life with a limited budget.