Criminal Minds 221: Open Season

Is there anything worse than getting chased though the woods by hillbillies with compound bows? Doubtful. Unless it’s getting chased through the woods by hillbillies with compound bows while an editor tries to convince the audience that the killbillies are possibly hunting deer. I know the second would be worse for me.

Anyhoo, the killbillies deal with their prey, and then we cut to a bar where the ladies of Criminal Minds are gathered – see, it’s clever because we’ve gone from a literal hunting ground to a metaphorical one! And things are even cleverer than they first appear, because the scene plays out with a guy thinking he’s impressing the ladies by claiming to be from the FBI, and then being humiliated when it turns out that he’s talking to three real agents! Or at least two, I’m not sure if Garcia’s allowed to carry a gun or anything.

You see? The hunter had the tables turned on him! Much like I assume the killbillies will later in the episode! Yeah, I’m officially being too hard on the show right now. I’m probably still a little bitter over that whole ‘Jill the Ripper’ episode. Honestly, it’s a good scene, and the closest thing I’ve ever seen to well-handled ‘matching scene themes’ in an episode, so bravo, the CM writing team.

Hey, do you think that, while they were making the terrible Jill the Ripper episode AJ Cook told everyone that she played an identical Jill the Ripper character in terrible movie ‘Ripper: Letter From Hell”? I mean, that must have been mentioned at some point, right?

The team gets called into HQ to learn about the killbillies’ murder spree. Because they didn’t leave arrows in the bodies the team is stumped by what kind of weapon might have been used. Which seems like a bit of a stretch to me. Take a look at the arrows poking out of their latest victim:

While it’s true that the lack of an arrowhead would be a hindrance in immediately identifying them as arrow wounds, the fact that the projectiles invariably when clean through their targets in completely straight lines (despite their small ‘calibres’), leaving perfectly round entrance and exit wounds would certainly point away from bullets being involved almost immediately.

Not to mention the fact that each victim was left where they were killed, and the cops didn’t find any bullets embedded in the trees or dirt.

So what’s gained by being mysterious about the murder weapon in this scene? It’s not a twist for the audience, since we’ve just seen the killbillies in action, and it kind of makes the team look a little slow.

That’s not the worst of it, though – when someone points out that the victims (who were abducted in Washington state, but killed in Idaho) are both male and female, Reid mentions that a serial killer without a sexual preference would be ‘a first’.

Um… The beltway snipers? Henry Lee Lucas? Any given ‘angel of mercy’ killer? Your own fictional serial killer ‘Frank’, the ‘Rib-bone killer’?

Despite these weird missteps the team at least manages to put together that the victims were being hunted.

Thank heavens for small favours, right?

Lack of content... but for why?

Not that I've been inundated with requests for explanation, I've gone dark before without it being a big deal, but I'm out of town for a little while, and away from all my delicious content. It will return in a week or two.

Thanks for your patience, and please enjoy sarcastic comments about Criminal Minds until I return.

Criminal Minds 220: Honor Among Thieves

This new episode opens in popular crime hotspot of Baltimore, where a Russian man is abducted from out front of his house by a pair of other Russian men, who immediately cut off his finger an leave it in his car as a message to his relatives. These crooks are so confident that the law won’t be called in that they don’t even bother wearing gloves when planting the finger!

There’s one thing that the criminals didn’t know, though – that Emily’s mother, an ambassador, knows the family, and is able to pulls some strings to get Greg’s team on the case!

The Sixteenth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

Look at the crazy predicament that Cap's got himself into this time!

Oy! How's he save the day this time?

What's that? He doesn't? The planet just explodes?

Oh.

Criminal Minds 219: Ashes and Dust

It’s time for some more serial killing this time set in colourful San Francisco, as the Chyron conveniently explains:

Inside the house everything isn’t so calm, as a crazed arsonist sets the entire place on fire while thoughtful music plays on the soundtrack!

The teenage son runs into his parent’s bedroom and wakes them up, telling them about the fire – they try to call 911, but the phone is dead! So Dad leads the kids through the house, crawling below the smoke line through the inferno and…

Wait, hold on. Let’s get another look at the house.

Yeah. It’s only one story. Why did you go crawling through the entire house when you could have just opened a window?

Half-wits. They kind of deserved to die when it turns out that the arsonist (who, ironically, dresses like a fireman-)

Sealed the doors. He watches the family suffer and fall unconscious, then takes the wedges out of the door and leaves the house.

Yes, for the record, the whole family died because they were too stupid to open a window when they saw that the hallway was on fire. Oh, and the guy is able to walk out the front door, take off his costume, and drive away in the car that was parked outside without any of the neighbours noticing.

Ah, luck, you’re the best friend of the killer, aren’t you?

Broken is so beneath contempt that it doesn't deserve to be written about.

So I haven't.

Programme 8 (16-April-77)

Cover:

Not much to consider this week – the cover’s advertising the Flesh! game as opposed to any of the stories in the issue. So I’ll reserve judgment until we get to the rules.

Programme 7 (09-April-77)

Cover: The dialogue is always welcome, but the cover is otherwise unremarkable, suggesting that this episode is going to feature a battle between the crew of Monday’s ship and the biogs. This will almost certainly happen, but I don’t anticipate it being particularly enthralling.

I hate Indiana Jones: Day 66

Day 66: Indiana Jones and the Ancient Architects

Today I want to look into the motivation, or rather the lack thereof, that went into the building of the actual temple of the crystal skull.

Yes it seems that when the uncharacterized and ill-defined natives that inhabit the Valley decided to build a place of worship for the aliens who so impressed the them, they build it directly on top of the thing they were trying to worship. This seems a little puzzling to me. I mean I can't speak for the natives here, I'm obviously not a shirtless South American trying to figure out how to invent religion before starting with something simple, like pants, but it seems like if I was going to build a temple to celebrate and honor a thing, wouldn’t it make more sense to build the temple next to, or around the thing?

When the Aztecs wanted to build a temple to worship the sun they didn't dig a really deep hole in the ground and hold their ceremonies wearing blindfolds during eclipses. They built their pyramid as high as their knowledge of construction techniques would allow them, and then had ceremonies at noon so the thing they were worshiping would be directly above their altars – making them literally as near to the sun as they could possibly get.

Heck, even the meteor that’s so key to the Muslim faith is right there in the middle of the city. Sure, there’s a dome built over it, but so long as you’re Muslim you can walk right in and look at the thing.

Criminal Minds 218: Jones

Yikes. This episode is even opening with a ‘previously-on-Criminal-Minds’ package about Reid’s drug abuse. Is this going to be the end of the storyline, or is it going to start getting really bad?

The former, please.

We also open with a flashback to Hurricane Katrina, as a cop, desperate to catch a serial killer, refuses to leave his home as the levee’s break, he’s that sure he’s close to a solution. How determined is he? When knocked over by a collapsing tree, and with just moments of life left in him, he manages to grab a piece of broken glass and scrawl the word JONES on the wall of his living room.

Now that’s dedication to your line of work right there. But what does ‘Jones’ mean? Only time will tell!

Oh, and the detective died, all the evidence was lost in the flood, the killer stopped for a year and a half after Katrina, but is now back, and now the detective’s son (detective jr!) is in charge of the case.

The makers of Necrosis were not attentive to detail.

It’s telling, perhaps, considering that the mess of discontinuity that follows, that the very first image of Necrosis has a great big mistake in it.

For the record, the Donner Party did not get snowbound and turn to cannibalism in a Nevada town named ‘Sierra’. The Sierra Nevada is a mountain range that runs through California and Nevada. I had thought this was common knowledge, but it escaped at least one person in the filmmaking process – whoever added the title – as well as every person who saw the film after that point and approved the image.

But that’s far from the film’s biggest problem. No, Necrosis’ biggest problem was with incredibly uncooperative weather. The film’s plot concerns a group of friends who head up to a cabin in the Sierra Nevada (built suspiciously close to the Donner Party site of a hundred and fifty years earlier), then wind up snowed in and trapped with one of their number, whose schizophrenia makes him an easy target for the ghosts that haunt the area.

So, considering how vital it is to the plot, it’s kind of unfortunate that they were unable to get a plausibly large amount of snow to convince audiences that the characters were anything approaching ‘trapped’.

Live-noting A Nightmare on Elm Street!

As an accompaniment to the recent Freddy-themed AVOD, here are the notes I took while sitting in a darkened theatre, watching that monstrous failure of a film. If you're looking forward to a feature-length review, it's going to have to wait until I've been able to buy the DVD.

I refuse to fully review the movie without screenshots of Freddy's awful makeup.

So, with little further ado, here's the exhaustively-transcribed pages!

- What’s going on with the opening credits? Shouldn’t it just be the chalk? Or did the unions complain about their names not being legible?
- Is that the diner from part 4?
- shouldn’t his hand hurt like a lot?
- Are they seriously showing Freddy in good lighting five minutes into this movie, totally giving away his appearance?
- This is like F13 all over again, with Jason kind of just casually rambling around.
- The movie was almost entirely dependent on people being frightened by loud claws.
- They’re driving to Elm street! Which is played like it’s meaningful, although it’s never really clear that this is where those kids live.

The Fifteenth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

You know, it's only after you admit that you've failed that you can be free to start over.

Although maybe starting civilization over might be something of a stretch.