"Armstrong" - A Movie so Mediocre it Made me Want a Sequel

"Armstrong" is an indie "super hero" movie.  I put super hero in quotes, because the description refers to it as a super hero movie and in some ways it is, but it is lacking certain super hero movie qualities that don't ever seem to spring up.  But keep watching.  Like all the way through, to get to the super hero movie pay off.

What we have for the most of the film is a "buddy movie" with rotating buddies.  A woman rookie EMT and the two men who will teach her to be the hero she needs to be. Or is it three men?  In the end, does it really matter? Why did she need men to guide her?  Maybe I'm not being fair.  She's a rookie.  Someone had to guide her through new territory and to be honest, she is written as a flawed, but strong character.

I think the real missing link in the movie is the presence of an interesting and strong villain.  There is a criminal organization, but unless I missed it while getting a glass of water, the head of this organization never makes an appearance or talks to our characters.  What's Batman without the Joker or Superman without Lex Luthor? Aren't most super her movies defined by the super villain since the guy in the cape rarely changes?  Perhaps I'm nitpicking, but I think this movie would have benefited greatly from a stronger presence coming from the Fifth Sun side of things. Oh, The Fifth Sun is the name of the secret organization chasing Armstrong.

Don't get me wrong.  The baddies are out to destroy the world and that's a serious problem, but they are completely humorless about it.  Their plan has no style and the foot soldiers have no flair. They do have really cool body armor though.

The production values of this movie leave nothing to be desired.  The picture quality and lighting are gorgeous throughout.  The audio is nearly 100%. ( I had trouble hearing one or two lines.)  The film score...actually left no impression on me at all, so it was probably just fine.  The special F/X were not amazing, but they weren't cartoonish either.  The costuming was spot on.  Armstrong's titular mechanical arm could have been a bit less plastic looking, but I suspect this is the direction tech is going in.

Finally, let's discuss the acting.  I read some reviews (as I often do before I write my own in order to see what people are interested in discussing) that came down hard on the acting in this movie.  It's just not true.  The real flaw, I think, was in the dialogue.  Some of it was just unnatural and that can make it very hard to deliver believably.  The hero and the baddies were a bit wooden at times, but that was actually true to their characters, not the result of bad acting.  Vickie Juedy of "Orange is the New Black" has already proven her acting chops in that show and she does a fine job carrying the story here.  And I'll be honest, and I apologize if he ever reads this and takes it the wrong way, but everything I have seen Jason Antoon in, I have found him from a bit annoying to downright unlikeable.  I didn't like him much in this movie.  But, let's consider this, I saw him as a guest star in a couple of Law and Orders and this film.  He often is asked to play a foil to the heroes of the show he is guesting on.  My finding him a bit annoying in those cases is him doing his job, very well.  At the beginning of this movie his character gives his rookie partner a hard time.  Again, his job is to be pretty unlikeable during those times.  So, is it good acting to be a unlikeable as an unlikeable character? Yes!  (The answer to that is "yes", gang.)  So, solid to good acting all around in this movie.

I called a  movie with good production values, good acting and a pretty cool concept "mediocre".  That seems unfair, but the truth is, by the end of the movie I wasn't disappointed in any single aspect, but I did feel like the concept could have been served better.  I think like many "origin story" super hero movies, this one was more about getting things like the explanation of our hero out of the way and the adventure was treated like a side story.  Now I would like to see the movie where our hero and a really cool super villain take center stage.  I'd also like to see Kevin Pollack's character play a larger role in the next film.  Also, I would like to there to be a next film.

For as much as I like Super Hero Movies, I've never really made one.
I did make an origin story though.

ONYX ORIGINS is available on Amazon Prime.

Qaudrant 9eV9 - Old Fashoned Sci-Fi Horror

So, I watched "Qaudrant 9eV9" because it showed a four star rating on my Roku's Amazon App.  That's unusually high for an independent horror feature on there, so it set me up for high expectations.  I don't usually comment on whether or not a movie is good or give a star rating here, but four out of five is a bit too high for this movie.  That said, don't let the slow start keep  you from watching the film all the way through.  If you start to watch it, finish it.  The  last twenty minutes or so are paced like an entirely different movie.

It opens back in the 70s and flashes back there quite a few times to set  up the "cold war" experiment that eventually spawns our monsters.  As that story line develops a pretty predictable, but fun monster movie trope develops.  After the set up opening, we're introduced to our five college students, most of whom are annoying movie stereotypes and all of whom are pretty two dimensional.  Thinking back to college though, I knew a lot of people on a pretty two dimensional basis, so maybe younger people can relate. I think the movie would have benefited from more frequent flashbacks, however.

This would have been an amazing short film.  It could have been cut down to about 30 minutes of explanation and action and just flown by, but instead we're presented a feature that doesn't have a whole lot of extra action or character development to fill in the extra hour.  It's sort of like an old Corman drive-in movie, but with less crime intrigue as a side story.  There's some attempts at a romantic sidelines that half work.  I didn't like any of the characters enough to care about who they were "hooking up with", but none of it was terrible.  I'm guilty of my own "padding" to reach "feature length" on movies.  "Indiscretions" has far more walking in the woods than we needed for a modern audience, but I was trying to establish how deep into the woods the characters had gone (even though we never strayed more than a mile or two from our cabins).  In fact, watch for a similar attempt of this movie to seem "far from civilization" thwarted when we see a car pass on the not to distant main road. "Lumber vs Jack" suffered from a similar fate in that, while I could crop passing cars out of the shot, the sound was ever present.  I wrote a brook into the script to explain it away.

There's also a meteor shower mentioned and viewed by our characters, that surprisingly, has nothing to do with the monsters.  It is a simple device to bring together this very loose group of "friends" on a camping trip.  They're not the lifelong friends with close ties  you often see in these movies, but rather people who know each other because they're all in the same class and two are a couple of sorts. This leaves us with some unusual interactions for a movie like this, where characters are usually harboring long seeded guilt or feelings for one another that only come out when disaster strikes.  It's a bit of a twist, but not one I'm sure most people will like.

A cooler twist on the old fashioned "kids vs monsters" sci-fi horror genre is Lexi (Dominique Storelli). She's sort of the survivor girl we recognize from 70s and 80s slasher movies thrown into a 60s drive-in monster movie.  She's an axe-wielding outdoors expert thanks to her dad who taught her how to "survive in the woods with just a pocket knife".

Once the monsters finally do show up, they're pretty cool looking.  Simple men in make-up and masks, but well executed.  They've got super strength, but as far as a super soldier experiment goes, they weren't given much else to work with.  We're never let in on how well they see in the dark, they don't seem to have much special training as far as fighting or tracking goes and it's never mentioned, but they must be half deaf.  Still, they're menacing enough in a "zombie" kind of way.  There are a few exceptional action sequences that would have really helped the movie had they been spread out a bit more.  There's enough action for 84 minutes, but it all seems to take place at the end of the movie.

On to the production values!  I don't like to take independent movies apart for low production values because most of the time those are largely a result of shrinking digital budgets.  Fortunately for this movie, I don't  have to.  There's the slightest unevenness in the volume of dialogue to music, but overall the sound is pretty solid.   You can see some very windy conditions and they handle it brilliantly.  Sets are few and convincing enough.  The locations are mostly outdoors and some of them allow for some impressive shots.  The lighting is at times "too much". (I hate when characters in brightly lit night spaces use flashlights they clearly don't need).  But, when the situation calls for that murky, hard to see shadowy darkness, we get it without being left totally in the dark.  The scenes in the tents are cleverly lit.  The costuming on the monsters isn't super impressive, but it's convincing and clean, which is better than elaborate and doesn't work.  The fight scenes are mostly well choreographed and the gore works when it's used.  Overall a pretty solid production.  Most of the acting could be a bit better, but it's nothing less than you'd expect from something that was probably shot in a few weeks rather than over months.  Rehearsal time makes a big difference.

If  you're a fan of old monster flicks, I'd recommend this one rather than just watching "Teenagers Battle The Thing" again.

Here is the trailer so you can see some of it for yourself.

Self promotion alert!
You can add "Alien Vengeance" for more monster vs young people in the woods fun and make it a double feature.