A Ghoul Versus Maleficent (Part 2)

Click here for Part 1!

With Aurora's sweet sixteen fast approaching, Maleficent asks her to come live with her in the Moors. Aurora happily consents to this, rushing off to tell her aunties. Oh, I guess they are still in this thing. However Aurora can't quite think of how to break this news to them, so she stops in the forest to rehearse her speech. She runs into a young man who is on his way to Stefan's castle and has managed to get lost in the woods. He'll be instantly recognizable if you've seen the recently reviewed film The Signal since he was the star of it, Mr. Brenton Thwaites. Here he is Prince Philip (now spelled with one “L” because screw those hacks from the 1950s), like that's any surprise in the slightest.

He and Aurora have Insta-Chemistry, achieved even without the magic of a song and dance. Aurora asks him to visit her after his trip to the castle, to which he QUICKLY agrees to. Maleficent and Diaval have been watching this whole thing play out, Diaval excitedly speculating Philip could be the answer to the curse. Maleficent dismisses this, as she says there's no such thing as true love. Diaval counters with it's fine she believes that, but what about Aurora's belief on the matter? You know, with the exception of the idiot fairies, every actor in this film has been good to great. Jolie has been awesome, but that's a given. However, Diaval's actor, Sam Riley, has completely OWNED this movie. This guy has stolen every scene he's in, which is really saying something when all of those scenes were shared with Jolie.

A Ghoul Versus Maleficent (Part 1)

“Original Vs. Remake Part 2: Disney's Sleeping Beauty vs. Maleficent / WTF Happened To Fairy Tales?!”

Click here for the first half of Original Vs. Remake: Sleeping Beauty!

Of all the things to come out of the 1990s, I think BY FAR the worst was the “Grim 'n Gritty” trend: the making of everything into dark and stylistically bleak because it's KEWL. It spread across all forms of entertainment, most prominently comics where EVERY one became a badass anti-hero more vicious than any villain of decades before. In movies, the Matrix was the genesis for most movies copying the formula of disaffected and monotone heroes clad in black blasting the shit out of everything indiscriminately.

The success of Christopher Nolan's Batman films only served to crank this to eleven, as damn near every superhero movie since has tried to copy that formula. This brings us to the latest feature on A Ghoul Versus..., something I'm going to simply call “WTF Happened To Fairy Tales?!”. One of the many trends happening in today's Hollywood has been giving classic fairy tales this same treatment, which I'll concede isn't totally unwarranted given most fairy tales originated with stories that were FAR from happy, but now that ALL OF THEM are aping this concept, it's gotten very annoying.

A Ghoul Versus William Eubank's The Signal

"Can you recall for me the first time you encountered The Signal?"
"Yeah, I was sitting on my couch watching it and getting more ticked off by the second."

Do you realize the last SIXTEEN movies I've watched have been horror movies? 17 if you count David Fincher's Gone Girl, which I saw by sneaking into the theater in a lowered hat and a trenchcoat thanks to their oppressive “no flesh eaters” policy. Ironically, Gone Girl was scarier than all over those movies combined and multiplied by ten, but we'll get to that when it comes out on home video. Regardless, I am BURNT THE HELL OUT on horror so it's time for some variety on this site.

 

As a reward to myself for enduring a month of nothing but Hellraiser movies, I'm going to review a good movie. At least I hope it's good, it sure looked amazing from the trailer I saw. The movie in question is The Signal, the second feature film from writer/director William Eubank. Like a lot of directors, he got his big break making music videos and transitioned it into a film career where he has become known for having a very distinct visual style.

I don't really know anything about the film's plot, but that's undeniably the best way to enter an abstract looking story like this one promises to be. Let's try and erase the Godawful atrocity that was Hellraiser: Revelations out of our eyes and minds, because it's time for A Ghoul Versus William Eubank's The Signal!