Pod (2015) 1h 16m

Hey.  We haven't sat down in a while and talked about a good tin-foil hat style movie.  What happened to those kind of films?  I feel as though that plot has just vanished from existence recently.  Maybe it was the government getting too worried about us getting close to flat earth lizard people working for the Illuminati and running the world's governments while the Greys prepare to enslave humanity!  Did I miss anything there?

Pod revolves around a set of three siblings.  After receiving a strange message from one of the brothers, the remaining two siblings fear for the brother's mental stability and drive out to check on him.  What they find is a crazed man talking about being experimented on while he was in the service and that he has captured one of the "things from the pod," which is locked in his basement.  Is this man losing his grip on reality?  What's in the basement?  How did he fire off a bunch of shots from a bolt action rifle without using the bolt? *cue X-Files theme*

I have two complaints which I'm going to throw here first because they're brief.  First is the initial dialog between one brother and the sister where he informs her about the message. This is the most uncoordinated five to ten minutes of script of the film.  It felt bumbling in the way a play goes awkward when an actor forgets the order of their lines and the scene is a mismatch of dialog.  It could've been much shorter and to the point as opposed to this drawn out hostility.  Second, I'm not entirely sure what the point was meant to be in regards to certain character development points.  Why was the sister drinking so much?  Was the scene with the guy she just slept with leaving and her drinking to show that she's not as straight laced as the one brother?  If so, why is she such an emotionally lose cannon in the film?

Those few things aside, after that awkward scene, I really liked Pod.  While I could tell where things were going to go most of the time, it would occasionally swerve into the other direction just enough to leave you a bit freaked out.  The creature looked great when we get the reveal and was this great mix of alien/cryptid/undead design.  The acting from the military brother and the sister were fucking stellar.  The brother's manic behavior and later the sister's breakdown and crying actually resonated with me.  What can I say?  I was entertained... except for about five minutes where I got distracted on my laptop with the Ryan Gosling not eating his cereal video, but that's entertainment in itself.

I give Pod 3 Dana Scully rolling her eyes out of 5:

Residue (2017) 1h 22m

There's so much going on in that poster.  Just take a second and really look at it.  You have some demon thing, a bug woman, Max Headroom, the Smoking Man from X-files, and some strange lighting from the late 70's early 80's.  This poster looks like Pagemaster on PCP.  In a way, this film kind of was.

Residue focuses around a journal of partially unknown origins.  Being that it's a journal you have some info but the book itself is a descent into madness.  After a theft and botched hand-off of a "package" our main character comes home to find out he was delivering this book.  He makes the mistake of starting to read it and only after someone completes reading the book does the supernatural shit around them end.  By "around them" I'm talking the entire apartment complex and people living in it.   It is rare that someone lives to finish the book.  The actual "residue" the film gets its title from is a black slime that exists on and in some of the journal.

I don't know how I feel about Residue.  It attempts to do a Neo-Noir style thing with the character narration combined with some advanced tech but then leans more into a serious version of John Dies at the End.  The latter of these two should not be attempted in a serious manner because the humor is what makes that a good film.  There were some background moments you had to catch at the right time or you would miss them and I love when films do that well.  I don't have any legitimate complaints other than the supernatural elements became a bit too disjunct from the journal and what we knew of it, but I'm still not totally sold on it.

I give Residue a 2 Journal 3's out of 5:

Day 11: Ejecta (2014) 1h 22min

Ejecta is the equivalent of a really fucked up episode of the X-Files minus Gillian Anderson's eye rolls at everything.  Our main person (William) is played Julian Richings.  You may remember him from something you've seen a million times but can't place it, and IMDB is no help because it's none of those things on that list, or if you're a Supernatural fan.  William is this ghost to the world.  Not in the incorporeal sense, but more in the sense that he is reclusive and hard to find.  He is known for posting information on aliens and how he was abducted and implanted with a device that lets him be controlled.  He also can't sleep for long, is in constant pain, and apparently he can't die while the implant is in him.  The immortal aspect is tested a lot in the "present day" scenes from the movie.

The past scenes are of an attempted documentary a blogger (I guess) named Joe that William contacts.  Everything from this time line is shown through the eye of the camera lens.  The two lines meet during a raid of William's house by some group that must be the government.  Maybe it's Scully's leather jacket motorcycle riding evil doctor twin in charge of it?  I want to believe.

Post raid, all the scenes are of William being tortured but surviving without much of a scratch.  Pre-raid ends up catching a UFO crash, the capture of an alien body, and then paramilitary raid.  Let me just say, these military people are dumb as fuck because there is some slime all over things, and people are just touching it with their bare fingers.  You don't know what that is!  It could be that the alien felt like rubbin' one out on that truck door!  You don't know that alien's fetish for a 2010 Dodge truck!

The ending was okay, so for once I'm not going to spoil it on here as this was a pretty middle of the road movie.  It could be worth a watch if you want.  Although, there are far better alien abduction horror movies that exist.  I would suggest watching Fire in the Sky or The Fourth Kind if you want an alien scare fest as both are supposedly based on real events, and putting something in the possibility of the real world always makes it scarier.

I give Ejecta 3 kind of sexy alien butts out of 5.