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Movie last night means a couple new genre films to discuss.
First up was The Spine of Night a hyperviolent throwback to the old rotoscoped animated films that clearly wants to be another Heavy Metal, it's episodic but they all tie into an overall narrative. To be fair to the film I am not a big fan of the rotoscoping animation that it uses, it's one of the reasons that Heavy Metal doesn't really hit for me, The backgrounds are gorgeous and I can see what they are going for but it often is hard for me to watch. The film is heavy on graphic violence which feels like it's trying to give the action a visceral feel but it's let down by the absurdly slow nature of that action, feels like people not trained to stage fight pulling their punches to not accidentally hurt anyone, kind of robs some of the big battles of any real weight. The voice acting is solid with a couple big names in there and the story is interesting even if there are definitely holes to be found in it's plotting and actions. If you like Heavy Metal I would definitely recommend at least checking it out but it's probably not going to be for everyone.
Becky is Kid Wick but takes the violence to kind of an absurd level that undermines the weightier elements of the story. Basic story is 13 year old girl, who lost her mom, goes on weekend retreat with her Dad to meet his new girlfriend and her son, they run into a group of Neo Nazi's looking for a macguffin, things go south and she starts killing the baddies. It feels like it wants to be serious and emotional but it really doesn't give enough time to it's characters for that and the violence quickly escalates to kind of cartoony levels of gore that move past visceral revenge into cartoony parody without the film really realizing that fact. The actors do solid jobs with what little they have to work with, I was rather surprised when I discovered Kevin James was the big bad, but the writing kind of lets them down with some baffling decisions by the characters.