Movie: Dead Again (Aggressive Spoilers)

It's Halloween (obviously).  Normally, like many people, I like to watch one or more horror or horror-parody movies on Halloween.

The original plan was Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, but I couldn't even make it through the first 10 minutes.  The movie now holds the record for shortest bail-out time.  Especially since the first 7 minutes and 35 seconds of the movie are not actually the movie.  It's instead a racist skit/diatribe by the... producer?  Director?  Major fundraiser? going on and on about how Chinese bootlegs have robbed him of his retirement fund.  WTF?!  Seven minutes and thirty-five seconds of it.
So then we get into the movie, and two things immediately make me hit the kill button:
1) You know what's worse than bad acting?  Fake bad acting.  Fake bad acting can be effectively used for comedic value for 27 seconds; then it's just annoying.  This promised to be a full movie of it.
2) So you can do the masturbating ax murderer gag, and in doing so you can show a full set of genitalia -- penis and scrotumm -- but they have to be a rubber penis and scrotum.  Guy can't just whip it out, it's gotta be fake.  But you can show it all, it just can't be real.
...  That's some weird-ass American logic right there.

At least it was right up in my face "this isn't for you".  None of this painfully dragging out for a while, do I want to keep going or not stuff.  Nope, flat out "kill it, kill it now, kill it lots."

So, bailed early on, and thus needed another movie.  Well, I didn't feel like anything in my collection (although now I wish I'd just watched The Crow), so I went through my Netflix instant viewing and watched the 1991 Dead Again.

This is one of those movies where, even if you haven't seen it before, you've probably seen it before.  It's one of those reincarnated murder things, and everyone's switched up bodies this time around so you've got to figure out who's where, and isn't it cute that the writer thinks this is a super-original idea?

We go through a pretty mediocre movie, but it's not horrible up until the end when we hit one of the Trippiest Climatic Battle Scenes Evah!  Of the movies I personally have seen, battle is second only to Taxi Driver's, and I'm actually tempted to boot it to first because Taxi Driver's at least fit in with the rest of the movie.  Here it's just a completely slice of WTF.

First, though, there is no message so important that it justifies breaking down the front door belonging to a woman who is terrified of you and never wants to see you again.  Well, maybe one: "the serial killer is in your closet".  Even that one's really better done by cell phone, though.  "Neither of us killed the other and oh, here's your anklet" is not even on the list of possibilities.  I mean, seriously.  Give her a call, or have the cute whistling friend she's sure to listen to do it, and tell her not to let the seemingly harmless British guy in because he's the killer.  Oh, and since he's not recycled, you're on your way to turn him in to the police right now along with the evidence -- the long lost uber-valuable anklet and a suspiciously dead mom with fluid in her lungs and other evidence of being violently smothered.

But no, our hero's stupid.  I actually cheered when he got shot for it.  Luckily for him, fatal wounds aren't.  Point-blank gunshot to the chest, that'll just knock you cold for a minute.  But that's OK because when you come to, you'll leap with more energy than ever.  You'll be downright genki.

Oh, and to the evil killer guy (and more importantly, the writer), when you've just established 30 seconds ago that a gun will not fire -- either out of ammo or jammed -- then putting it in some unconscious person's mouth as though to blow their brains out is completely not threatening.

And, final advice to all villains everywhere: do not make random wild cross-room leaps in slow mo, because the hero may opt out of slow-mo use that time to line up a trap that couldn't possibly be in place fast enough if you had instead made your wild leap in real time.  By staying in real time himself instead of joining you in slow me, he can calculate complex approach angles, line up heavy props -- even adjust them for maximum effectiveness.  Never could have done all that if you two had been in the same time dimension. Next time, just stick with the usual 9.8 m/s^2 fall acceleration, OK?

Whoo boy.