I exist because I say I do.

Is that enough to keep you from the darkness? In this post-apocalyptic thriller, life goes from full speed ahead with all the sights and sounds of a bustling downtown Detroit to complete silence in the blink of an eye. Almost every person on Earth has completely vanished, leaving their clothes and personal effects behind. Those who are left to walk the earth must figure out why they are the lucky chosen ones to be alive, how to stay alive, and if indeed it is lucky to still be alive while all of the rest of humanity has been taken away to The Darkness. Without your own personal light to guide you away from the darkness you too will succumb to the fate of the vanished.

The survivors, all strangers to one another, end up meeting at a bar named Sonny’s (paying homage to the sun itself?) by chance because it is the only building around that has a working generator, so working lights to keep The Darkness away. As each day’s amount of sunlight lessens the strangers search together for the answers to Why they continue to exist. Each survivor has a strangely complicated history that leaves the viewer wondering if these characters were spared because of their attempts to leave their dark past behind them.

Thandie Newton plays the role of a recovering drug addict so well that I forgot she isn’t one. There is a nod during one of her scenes to the film Rosemary’s Baby which seems extremely out of place, but its outcome makes sense for her character. Also, Hayden Christensen is named Luke in this film, which is the name of the son of Anakin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader, the character that Christensen played in the second two films of the Star Wars series.

How is it that John Leguizamo‘s character Paul disappeared to the darkness but came back to the world, with his clothes on, when his light started working again? What happened to him during that time of darkness? This and many questions go unanswered… as if we’re supposed to have faith that all of these plot inconsistencies are just a part of life and not a flaw of its writer.

Since I am not familiar with Detroit, other than the outsider’s prejudgment that the entire place is a hellhole (and therefore a perfect location for The Darkness to strike), I still don’t know what the significance of 7th Street is. The darkness is everywhere, not just 7th Street, so perhaps it’s just a convenient narrow scope to look only at 7th Street.

The innocence of children is an important theme to this film, they are able to fight the darkness in more creative ways than adults. Unfortunately, this isn’t a compelling enough reason for me to pay theater prices to see it.

Go see this movie for yourself and weigh in on if it’s any good. The film is in theaters Friday, February 18 or available now in iTunes.

Buttery’s Rating:

College friends Parker (Emma Bell), Joe (Shawn Ashmore), and Dan (Kevin Zegers) are at the ski slope for a day of skiing and snowboarding, but somehow neglected to bring enough money to purchase their ski lift tickets. Funny, that. At the suggestion of her boyfriend Dan, Parker uses her feminine wiles and a pile of cash to convince the ski lift operator Jason (Ed Ackerman) to let them go on one run past clsing time for less then full price.

The ski resort closes early due to impending bad weather but Parker, Joe, and Dan bribe Jason to let them go up one last time. While they’re on the lift Rifkin (Adam Johnson) takes over the ski lift but a misunderstanding causes him to stop the lift before they reach the top of the mountain. For some reason the three take an unreasonably long time to realize they’ve been abandoned on the lift and begin to tell each other scary stories while beginning to freeze from the inclement weather. When the resort’s lights are turned off they finally start to realize they have been forgotten. And then they realize the resort is closed for 4 whole days before the next weekend opening when someone comes around to rescue their frozen corpses.

And then the storm that closed the resort early hits full force, fully setting in the trio’s panic. They realize they are quickly experiencing frostbite so Dan jumps down from the lift and breaks both his legs so badly that the bone is sticking out of both legs (ewwwwwwww!) and he is beginning to bleed to death.

Joe decides to try to go up to the ski lift cable so he can get to a pole that has a ladder downward. While Joe begins his an attempt a wolf tries to attack the incapacitated Dan but Parker is able to scare it away with her snowboard. As we all know, however, wolves always travel in packs. If these friends make it down the hill alive they won’t be well off on the other end.

This movie is a mixture of gross, hokey, and suspenseful. A perfect combination for this indie thriller. Unexciting character development building up to the gross-out hurts the film.

My one leftover question: Why were there wolves anywhere near the slopes of a functioning ski resort? The public danger would close any common sense park down right away. But maybe this isn’t a common sense sort of establishment…

Buttery’s Rating:

Recommendation

I honestly don’t think food is a good idea while watching the often gross scenes shown.

For a beverage you may want to consider a little Milk of Magnesia to settle your tummy.

The Cheez-It was sufficiently hot and spicy and delicious. I actually ran out and bought Tabasco Green Jalapeno Pepper Sauce after trying this snack because I enjoyed its kick so much. The crunchy cheese puff included was lacking pretty much any flavor at all, and made no sense to me in the mix. Why have an inferior cheese flavored bite in your snack mix? Also, why two pretzels? The pretzels were yummy, but they weren’t seasoned with the Tabasco so they didn’t add to the hot and spiciness of the mix. The bread slice had a little of the spice coating them so were more delicious than the other added carbohydrates, but still not delicious.

This snack fell flat as a whole, but the actual Cheez-Its were delicious, so I recommend instead of buying the snack mix that you just buy the Cheez-It Hot & Spicy Baked Snack Crackers instead.

Cheez-It Extra Hot & Spicy Baked Snack Mix deserves points for being baked instead of fried. And the Cheez-It Hot & Spicy Baked Snack Crackers themselves deserve 5 buckets. I think Amazon agrees with my assessment, considering they don’t even sell the snack mix, but do sell the Cheez-It alone!

Buttery’s Rating:

Recommendations

Let’s watch Bend It Like Beckham while we eat this snack so we can dance to Arrow’s Hot Hot Hot while we enjoy the mouth burn.

A glass of milk brings the heat back down on your tongue.

It’s a viral war between the evil vs. the eviler… and it’s bloody.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it a good movie. But we’ll get to that.

It’s April 3, 2008 and the Reaper virus breaks out in Scotland, causing its victims’ faces to bubble and their bodies to basically rot. The virus is, of course, highly contagious and it takes no time at all for most of Scotland’s people to die from the disease. The UK government orders that Scotland be sealed off with a wall perimeter so that no one can go in and no one can get out. All of Scotland’s people are left to die. Fortunately for young Eden Sinclair (Christine Tomlinson), her mother is able to put her on a helicopter transport out of Scotland before the country is completely abandoned.

Flash forward to 2035 when the Reaper virus resurfaces, this time in England. Eden (Rhona Mitra) is called upon to lead a special ops team into the walls of Scotland to find a scientist named Kane (Malcolm McDowell) who presumably could help find a cure for the virus. What the team finds when they arrive is a large population of people immune to the virus who have forsaken any semblance of a lawful society (and why shouldn’t they since they were forsaken by the rest of society!) who are led by Kane‘s son Sol (Craig Conway). Eden‘s team is captured by Sol‘s thugs but Sol‘s sister Cally (MyAnna Buring) helps them escape and leads them to Kane who has crowned himself king of a medieval castle (yup, weird) where his people fear and follow him because they are led to believe there are no survivors outside the walls of Scotland.

This Mad Max meets Robin Hood meets 28 Days Later film sounds really good in print, but its execution on the main screen is a complete and utter letdown. Dark filming and close camera angles make it hard to see what’s going on during the action sequences. There were several gruesome scenes that were semi interesting, including total annihilation of an innocent bunny rabbit, shotgun blast to the head, machete to cut off a dead man’s hand, a man set on fire and roasted alive then carved for eating, several people being thrown into fiery explosions and burned to death, and several heads chopped clear off.

However, it seems that writer/director Neil Marshall put three stories together into one, none of them were particularly interesting, and none integrated in smoothly with each other. I found myself bored during the movie, fighting to concentrate or actually care about any of the characters. I love end of the world movies, particularly at the theater, so when I’m bored you know it’s really quite bad.

The ending is really unsatisfying, and obviously I can’t say too much more than that other than: hokey! Bob Hoskins (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) could have been great in this movie, but he was completely wasted, used simply as a plot device to tie in Prime Minister Hatcher (Alexander Siddig) to the story line and to bridge the gap between young and adult Eden.

One of the movie’s best attributes is its 6-song soundtrack, including a rendition of Fine Young Cannibals‘ Good Thing during Sol‘s Mad Max-esque spectacle. Also, eye candy deserving of a bucket: Adrian Lester as Norton who doesn’t seem to ever agree with Eden‘s plans of action and makes that known but follows her anyway with guns blazing. Yummy.

Go see this movie with your mother (which I did — hi, Mom!) so you have something to trash talk over lunch.

Buttery’s Rating:

Recommendation

We recommend some nice Buffalo Bills 3.5oz Honey Pepper Country Cut Beef Jerky so you can pretend like you’re part of the cannibal scene! Yummy people meat!

A Kamikaze is the only appropriate drink for the end of the world.

The tri-chocolate drizzle on top of the caramel covered popcorn alone puts this concoction over the top on sugar, and quite possibly makes it a diabetic’s public enemy number one. Besides the over sweetness (which before this, I never knew there could be such a thing) the problem is the severe lack of a distinct taste. We love each of the chocolates for their individuals flavors, but this carelessly throws them aside for an apparent sugar shock value.

The nuts never really stood a chance with this Frankenstein monster dominating them like the big bad bully in the schoolyard, but are the saving grace of the snack. While being lightly caramelized, they also seemed to avoid the multi-chocolate bath and only had one kind of chocolate or the other.

Popcorn’s Rating:

Such a funky snack deserves to be consumed while watching Funky Monkey to complete that craptastically funky experience.

We recommend having a few doses of insulin on standby.

Unfortunately, over the years the raisins in Raisinets are found more often than not to be dehydrated and lacking any sign of juice. This transforms the candy from a moist chocolaty treat to a chewy one. Sadly, while Raisinets continues to be the premiere choice in movie theaters, there are fresher brands of chocolate covered raisins out there. If the lesser known brands can make a moist chocolaty treat, then why can’t the premiere choice?

Popcorn’s Rating:

For a snack that is older than some dirt and has probably lost its juicy flair, we recommend the classic version of A Raisin in the Sun with Sidney Poitier. At least you’ll get some satisfaction from the screen if you end up dissatisfied with what was in the box.