Movie #791: The Negotiator

The Negotiator is a late-90s action/thriller starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Ron Rifkin, David Morse, Paul Giamatti, J.T. Walsh, Siobahn Fallon, Regina Taylor, and Paul Guilfoyle. 

Danny Roman (Jackson) is a hostage negotiator for the Chicago PD, and is widely renowned as a hero cop. His part Nate (Guilfoyle) comes to him with information about someone stealing money from the department's disability fund and claiming that he has a mysterious informant, and then a night later gets his head blown off. Roman is framed for the crime, and takes the perfectly reasonable step of taking hostage the Internal Affairs inspector (Walsh) he believes is involved, and demanding to speak to a negotiator from another precinct who won't have a personal stake in the matter. Said negotiator, Chris Sabian (Spacey) picks up pretty quickly that a lot of the people on the ground seem more interested in killing Roman than saving the hostages he took.

Everything kinda goes pear-shaped, truths are revealed, and Roman and Sabian wind up exposing the truth, which is that another police Commander, Frost (Rifkin) is the one orchestrating all this theft and murder. 

It's funny, I'd seen this movie before (maybe in theaters when it came out?) but I didn't remember it being especially interesting. It's better on a second viewing and with a little historical perspective, because of course Jackson and Spacey have changed a lot in the ensuing years (and not all of those changes have been, um, for the better), but in the late 90s they were both riding high off Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects, respectively (American Beauty was released the following year). Both are really strong actors and portray characters with similar skill sets but different approaches, and you get to see them playing cat-and-mouse but clearly with some mutual respect.

The supporting cast is pretty solid, too. We've got Paul Guilfoyle being a cop, his comfort zone. Ron Rifkin playing the same general vibe of slime he did in L.A. Confidential, and the late J.T. Walsh in one of his last film roles. Regina Taylor doesn't have much to do as Danny's wife, but if all she gets to do is motivate him then she does that pretty well. David Morse has a nicely understated performance as a SWAT commander who doesn't much like Roman, but is still on the right side of things when the chips are down. F. Gary Gray knows how to direct action/drama, and he lets the hostage scenes breathe so we get to see the hostages (including Fallon and a young Giamatti) unravel and figure out what's really going on along with Roman.

It's one of those movies that seems like it has a happy ending, but if you think about it Roman is probably going to prison because, um, he took hostages at gunpoint and as a result a man died, which is funny because avoiding prison was his whole motive for doing all this anyway. Hopefully he writes a book in prison and comes out of it ahead.

My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: Medium

Next up: Now You See Me

Board Game: Heat

I always think of "Metaphor" from The Fantasticks; "HEEEEEAATTTT". Anyway.

The Game: Heat
The Publisher: Admadi Games
Time: 15-ish minutes
Players: Me, Michelle, Gus

Game Play: The game is themed around heists, and takes place over three rounds (called Heists). Each Heist has four Stages. First is a draft (you know, pick a couple of cards, pass one left, repeat) that gives you a hand of five cards. Then everyone plays cards into their Record, one at a time, and resolves the cards on the right (so the most recent) in order - cards are labeled A, B, C.

Cards do various things; they give you money, they move other cards around, and they give you or remove Heat. Heat is symbolized by little red cubs, and Heat gets more expensive the more of it gets removed from the card. At the end of the game, you have to buy off any Heat you have remaining, which can get bloody expensive if Heat has been allowed to get pricey.

Heat is presently free, here.

Opinions: I mean...it's not a bad game. It works, the cards are pretty clear. My complaint is two-fold. 

First, and I say this all the damn time about RPGs and board games alike, it needs an example of play. You can explain the rules, sure, but seeing them in context means so much more. 

Myah, see?

 

Second, there's a lot of talk in the early part of the rulebook about trash talk and overtly planning your heist and like...none of it means anything? I have no idea what they're talking about. You want me to make up a bank heist and describe it as I'm playing cards? But...why? 

Like, I get the appeal of an improv game in your little card game, but if you want that to be the style of play, first fucking incentivize it (there's no mechanical reflection of any of that) and second, fucking describe it. Lunch Money lends itself to descriptions of the brutality one inflicts, even if that game doesn't require such descriptions. It's easy to see where they'd fit into the flow of play. Here, I dunno, it didn't seem obvious. That may have been because we were just learning it, but frankly I don't feel the need to dig back in (we played it once and then switched to Cthulhu Wars because I wanted something bigger and grander). 

Keep? I'm about 50/50 at this point, which probably means no.

Character Creation: Fateforge

Only 10 more games in PDF! That means in July I'll start pickin' games off the shelf!

The Game: Fateforge
The Publisher: Studio Agate
Degree of Familiarity: None, but it's 5e adjacent
Books Required: Just the one

The book I have is actually Book 1: Adventurers, which is kinda the PG of this game. Most of the lore is in other books, which I don't own (the publishers put only this book into a bundle, which is probably a solid choice; it's also PWYW on DriveThruRPG). But that's fine, I can probably glean enough info from this book to make a character, particularly if it's basically the 5e ruleset. 

Ooh, there's a random table to choose Civilization, yes please. A roll of 95 gives me...Torea. Just a moment.

That all sounds pretty dope, actually. I do love aquatic stuff. Anyway, next we choose species. I'm inclined to say human, just because that's what's common in Torea, but let's give the others a look. 

Ooh, actually, let's say my guy is a melessë, a half-elf. My character's father was a native of Torea, his mother came with a ship of explorers, and the two fell in love. His mother stayed in Torea long enough to raise him, but when he was essentially a young teen she got on another ship and left him and his father behind. What he's never told his dad is that she gave him the option to come, too, and made him choose between his parents (Dad going along wasn't on the table, though he's not sure why). 

There, there's a bit of angst for your Sunday morning. 

(Side note: I looked up the "ë" and there are legitimately a couple dozen ways it can be used, so I have no idea how "melessë" is supposed to be pronounced. Assuming it's used the way it is in English, which is rare anyway, it would probably be pronounced something like /mεləse/. Anyway.)

I'll get +2 to CHA and +1 to two more stats of my choice, I get the standard half-elf dealies of Darkvision and Fey Ancestry, and I get proficiency in two skills of my choice plus in one of a variety of other things, and I will say he's proficient with water vehicles (thanks, mom).

Now, Background. Unlike D&D, Fateforge takes a more build-a-bear approach to Background, so let's have a look.

I think I've got a firm enough grasp of concept, so that's fine. Next I'd pick two skills I'm proficient in. Sure, let's take Athletics (I have literally never regretted that choice) and History (stories mom told me growing up).

Now, this is weird. There are two dots next to the Skills. Presumably you'd fill one in if you're proficient, but I have no idea what the other one would be for. Anyway, moving on. I get two "Additional Proficiencies." Let's take navigator's kit, and then I think I ought to take a craft in whatever dad did. Ooh, let's say dad was a glassblower. I'll take proficiency in those tools. 

Equipment! I get the tools I'm proficient with, a memento of my life, clothes befitting a Torea artisan's kid, and 15 gp. For the memento, let's say it's a necklace that mom gave me - leather cord with a silver teardrop-like symbol. 

Feature! Ah, my Leader (the GM) would determine this, so I'll skip it. I feel like Revelation would make the most sense, though.

Characteristics! I get two personality traits. I think my character is Cheerful, but gets Brooding when the sky gets overcast or he thinks about his parents. For Ideal...hmm. I feel like maybe he regrets not going with his mother, because what he really wants is Glory. He just wasn't willing to leave dad behind to get it.

Bond is easy; he loves his parents but is torn between them. 

Flaw...ooh, let's take Overcompensating. My guy feels insecure a lot of the time and processes that by always knowing what to do, even if he really obviously doesn't. 

Right, back to the first step-by-step, which means I choose class! Oh, now, this I like: In this game if you have a class it means you're touched by Eternity or the gods or whatever, and you can go beyond what most people can, but you're going to experience a dramatic life. I like that PCs are actually set apart from normal people; it resolves the "is a professional soldier a level-8 fighter or whatever" issue.

Hmm. Let's make him a sorcerer. Draconic or psychic? Let's say draconic. Either would work, but I really like the idea of him having some dragon in his ancestry and assuming it's from his mother's side, but no, his dad's family is descended from a sea-dragon or something. Not that it matters for first level, but let's say silver dragon ancestry. 

I get four cantrips and two 1st level spells, so let's pick those. Ah, fuck, they're not in this book. Ah-ah, but the Grimoire is Pay-What-You-Want! (I feel like I could have grabbed my PHB, too.)

OK, cantrips. I want ray of frost, because y'know, silver dragon. I think mending makes sense (it's one of those spells that doesn't seem useful because it's not flashy, but holy shit you would want it in real life). I'll take sudden cramp because I think it's funny, and I'll take dancing lights because a light spell is always nice. Oh, wait, no, I have fucking darkvision, why would my guy learn that spell? Mage hand, then.

And then two 1st-levels. Fog cloud seems good for someone growing up where he did, and then I'll take fateful twist, because it seems fun.

OK, then. I get two Skill Proficiencies from the sorcerer list; I shall take Arcana and Survival. On we go!

Next step is "Determine whether I've Awakened to Magic" (this is obviously a setting-specific thing). There would normally be some Leader input, but for purposes of this character I'll say, yes, doy, he has. Moving on.

Ability scores! I can go random or point-buy, and random involves 4d6-drop-lowest, assign 'em where you want, so I'll do that, thanks. I get: 14, 14, 16, 12, 13, 13. Man, keeping these dice. Hardly a foot wrong. 

Well, I'll put the 12 into Strength, I think. I'll put the 13s into Constitution and Wisdom, the 14s into Dexterity and Intelligence, and my 16 into Charisma. Applying my racial bonuses, my Charisma goes to 18, and I'll put the other +1s into CON and WIS, just to game the system a little. 

Equipment! I get a choice of some stuff from my class, of course, but I don't have a "stuff" page so I'm gonna just say I've got me daggers and more along. I think he'd pick up a crossbow in play, actually, but maybe not start with one.

Otherwise it's all details, and there are no naming conventions in the book that I can find, so let's say his mom named him Kassemë, a name from her homeland(?), but his dad calls him Ka (common nickname in Torea, basically akin to "Bubba" in some of our cultures; there's a glottal stop after "Ka" that makes it diminutive and alters the grammar of some phrases in their native language - I have no idea if linguistics gets any love in the setting book but I don't have a copy so fnah). Ka has much lighter skin than most of his fellow Toreans, but has the same dark hair and eyes. He doesn't burn, though; it's weird. He's graceful and quick, and very much the sort of kid all the other lads would follow into scary caves or whatever because he said it would be cool.

But now that he's grown (about 21), he finds himself staring at boats and getting distracted, and his dad is slowly figuring out the truth - he's his mother's son, and he should have gotten on that boat with her. (If we were starting a campaign, I think I'd want a prelude scene with dad putting him on a boat to go after her.)

That'll do it!

Movie #790: Con Air

Con Air is an action movie starring Nicolas Cage, John Malkovich, John Cusack, Monica Potter, Dave Chappelle, Ving Rhames, Rachel Ticotin, Mykelti Williamson, Danny Trejo, Steve Buscemi, Nick Chinlund, and Colm Meaney. It's pretty absurd.

Army Ranger Cameron Poe (Cage) returns from the Gulf War to his pregnant wife Tricia (Potter) and is promptly put in prison because three dudes try to kill them both and he accidentally kills one in self-defense and apparently has both the worst judge and defense lawyer in the fucking world. After six years in prison, he's paroled and shipped back to Alabama on the Jail Bird, a big ol' plane run by the US Marshals in the personage of Marshal Larkin (Cusack), who's probably too smart for this line of work. 

Problem is, the plane is chock full of really bad dudes, including Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom (Malkovich), who's only 39 but has been in prison since he was 14 but has managed to commit like all of the crimes. He's the important one, but we've also got Black militant Diamond Dog (Rhames), serial rapist Johnny 23 (Trejo), and useful idiot Pinball (Chappelle). They're all in on a conspiracy to spring drug lord Francisco Sandino (Jesse Borego), but it goes pretty pear-shaped. Poe stays on the plane even when he has a chance to get off because a) he's got a buddy (Williamson) who needs an insulin shot or he'll die and b) there's a guard (Ticotin) whom Johnny 23 has been eyeing hungrily. Action, explosions, and madness ensue.

I recently drew a distinction with one of my friends between movies that are fun versus good (in the context of the Venom movies). Con Air is...not good. The premise so overtly stupid as to be unbelievable (a decorated soldiers gets in a fight with three dudes who had been harassing his wife with witnesses, accidentally kills one, and he gets manslaughter one and 10 years first time out? IN ALA-FUCKING-BAMA?), and even ignoring that, the responses that people give to really horrific shit is absurd (like, there's a bombing in a prison in which three people are killed and the next shot is just John Cusack doing his job). The underlying logistics of the movie just don't make any sense; I pointed out that the math don't work with Cyrus' life, but also, who exactly do all these people work for? The Department of Prisons? The Bureau of Prisons? How do the guards get serial killer Garland Greene (Buscemi) onto the plane when other inmates are just walking right on to see cons walking around free? 

However, it's a fun movie. It's fast, the action is exciting and the cast, holy shit. There are some legitimately talented people in this movie and they commit to the bit hard enough to make memorable (often hateable) characters, especially Malkovich. Rhames kinda gets lost in the shuffle, which is a shame, but at least Chappelle doesn't last long (I am not a fan). 

Special mention to Renoly Santiago as "Sally-Can't Dance", the flamboyant and somewhat androgynous con who finds a dress and dances to "Sweet Home Alabama" and then gets slapped down by Cage. Implications about sexuality, gender, and the portrayal thereof aside, what I'm interested in is what the hell Sally-Can't Dance did to get on that plane in the first place, because the other people are all multiple murderers, terrorists, and assorted hard cases. Also we know Sally-Can't knows how to handle an automatic weapon because Cyrus hands one over with no hesitation. Give me prequel about them!

(Also: who the fuck taught Nicolas Cage an Alabama accent, cause damn it was awful.)

My Grade: D+
Rewatch Value: High

Next up: The Negotiator

Movie #789: Hell Fest

Hell Fest is a slasher movie starring Amy Forsyth, Bex Taylor-Klaus, Tony Todd, Stephen Conroy, Reign Edwards, Christian James, Mike Mercutio, and Roby Attal. 

We get our obligatory opening scene with characters not connected to the rest of the movie who all die horribly (see also Death Proof and really almost any post-Scream slasher movie), and then we met our real special friends: Natalie (Forsyth), reconnecting with her best friend Brooke (Edwards), who is now in college living with Taylor (Taylor-Klaus). Brooke and Taylor and their respective boyfriends Quinn (James) and Asher (Mercutio) take Natalie and the dude she's crushing on, Gavin (Attal) to the titular Hell Fest, a huge amusement park/haunt, for an evening of fun and scares!

Unfortunately a nameless, faceless killer (credited as "the Other", played by Conroy) is at the haunt as well, and chooses Natalie and her friends as his targets. Dressed in the same clothes and mask as some of the employees in the "Deadlands" (the more extreme part of the haunt where the actors can touch guests), he hunts them kills them off one by one. 

Hell Fest is a pretty standard slasher movie in a lot of ways, but it uses the formula well and deviates in a couple of ways that really improve things. For one thing, we're at a huge, crowded place, so we're missing the sense of isolation that many of these movies contrive (often by being set in the woods, a summer camp, remote house, whatever), but then that isolation is still created because there's an expectation that people are going to pop out and scare you! It's not until after poor Taylor nearly gets beheaded and the Other just decides "fuck it" and kills her and Quinn in plain view of the crowds that things go crazy, and at the point chaos takes over and he just disappears into the crowd. 

Speaking of that, the killer gets away at the end, and goes back to his little girl in the suburbs (after carefully locking up his mask and the trophies he's collected with the others from Halloweens past). That actually bugged me a little, not because it wasn't a good beat, but because Natalie fucking stabs him in the stomach and that just gets completely ignored, and that only bugged me because the movie had taken pretty good pains to play fair by realistic expectations of, like, human physiology. 

But that's a minor niggle. I really love slasher flicks, and the best ones are the ones that maintain a sense of fun and tension, letting you care about the characters but not lingering on trauma and pain. It's a really fine line to walk, and it's pretty easy to go too far one way and wind up with a bunch of nasty, sarcastic assholes that you can't wait to see get knocked off (see: parts of the Friday the 13th franchise, parts of the Scream franchise...actually it seems to happen later in franchises), or too far the other way and becoming torture porn. Hell Fest straddles this line nicely. The characters have chemistry and they feel like they're friends with conflict and inside jokes and suchlike. The romance between Gavin and Natalie develops pretty organically, and it helps that Gavin is geeky and clumsy and kind of sweetly awkward. There's some sniping between Taylor and Natalie, but they start to get chummy pretty easily, and all of this means when a character's number is up, there's an impact (literally, in poor Gavin's case).

Conroy also does a good job with the physicality of the Other. He's not a hulking monster like Jason, but at the same time he's more measured and capable than, say, Ghostface (who's usually an amateur, as it were). He's strong, but not supernatural, and you get the feeling that he wouldn't be nearly so menacing without Hell Fest around him (actually he reminds me a little of the killer in Hush, just not as chatty). 

The effects are mostly practical, and I'll beat this drum forever - it shows and it improves the movie. Everything has weight and casts the right shadows, and the trips through the haunts evoke the feeling of being in college and going out and doing shit like this with friends (I would have been very much into Hell Fest as a 20-something). 

It's by no means great cinema, but it's a good example of the genre and it's a fun watch. Natalie and Brooke can join Erin and Grace at Final Girl brunch. 

My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: High

Next up: Con Air

Epyllion: Snakes & Beetles

The shadows deepen (ominous cello music). Here's last time.

OB is in the library when everything cracks open, and finds themself falling into the dark. Dre stretches out dris wings to try and slow the descent and winds up catching the wall wrong and going tail-over-snoot into the dark, landing unhurt but rumpled. 

Dre pokes around in dris saddlebag of potential for a light source, but pulls out something squishy - a little bag of fruit that dre forgot was in there and has gone sour. Dre drops it in disgust, and a moment later hears clicking sounds from the dark, growing louder. Not wanting to find out what that was, dre feels around, listens carefully, surveying this place, and hears rustling and squeaking above them. The remember hearing Stars tell them once about battlesnakes - flying creatures that wrap around rock formations in caves and that can navigate in the dark. If dre riles them up without getting them scared enough to attack, dre can follow them out! 

OB flaps dris wings and makes a loud noise, and it does rile up the battlesnakes, but they all start rattling their tails and fly down at OB! They wrap around them and bite, and OB panics, ashamed, and pushes into a little crevice to hide.

Meanwhile, Stars and Toverin are heading into the dark (Zeblek is following, but still deep in dris Shadowself, convinced that dris clutchmates aren't going to survive without dris help). Toverin grabs a lantern from the library and they head down into the caverns, and Stars surveys, calling out to OB. Dre hears critters in the dark, but no dragons, so they all head deeper and emerge into the big tunnel created by the whalepher.

Stars tells Toverin about these massive creatures and they look around a bit more, and eventually find a small tunnel leading off of this one. They enter it and Sprinkles, Toverin's spirit guide, cuddles up close to them and shivers in fear. Something scrapes and thumps in the dark, something clearly big but out of the lantern's light. "It's looking at me," whispers Sprinkles.

Stars calls on the spirit moon and makes all of the stone in the room glow brightly. The drakes see an immense dragon's foot, made of stone and digging its claws into the ground. They also see Zeblek dart behind a rock. Toverin goes up to them and tells them that dre should come with them as they're searching for OB; Zeblek doesn't respond, but does follow them at a distance.

The drakes descend into another chamber, and they see a handful of beetles with little root-like tendrils coming out of the front of their shells, nibbling at a sack of sour fruit. Toverin steps forward and uses wild speech to ask them to pass, and throws them a bit of food from dris pack to sweeten the deal. The beetles move aside and the drakes continue on. 

Zeblek, at this point, decides dre has had enough of waiting for his clutchmates to get into trouble, and goes back to the chamber with the unseen shadow-monster. Dre tells it that dre knows of a light that not even the void moon could extinguish. This is a trick, of course, but if the shadow-monster knows dre is lying, dre doesn't let on and follows Zeblek back to the chamber where Toverin and Stars wait...

But they have moved on to the next room, the room with a bunch of battlesnakes clinging to the ceiling. Toverin sticks dris snoot into a crevice and finds OB, wedged in and swollen from battlesnake bites. "I'm so glad to see you!" dre cries. 

OB explains what happened, but then a moment later Toverin's lantern gutters and the scraping noise returns. "HELLO, LITTLE DRAKES," rumbles a voice. "I WAS PROMISED A LIGHT." They feel a gust of breath and the lantern goes out. "BUT THAT LANTERN IS NO CHALLENGE." 

Sprinkles huddles up against Toverin again. "It wants to eat me."

"THERE, THERE'S A LIGHT."

Toverin, thinking quickly, stands up to this creature, telling it that it can't eat Sprinkles because Sprinkles is dris friend. "YOU WOULD TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THIS SHADOW OWLLAMA?" it asks. Toverin defiantly says dre does. "VERY WELL." 

"MY HOME WAS DAMAGED," it says, "AND A DOOR BLOCKED. GO AND FIND IT AND OPEN IT AGAIN, SO THAT I CAN GO HOME." The drakes, afraid, agree. The monster plucks a battlesnake from the ceiling and a massive, barely-visible claw, and breathes light into it. Its eyes glow pale blue and it hovers in front of them. "FOLLOW THIS."

The drakes follow the glowy-eyed battlesnake deeper into the caverns beneath Dragonia. Toverin asks Sprinkles what that dragon was, and she says that some elder dragons become Ancients, some Mystics, but very rarely one collapses in itself, embracing its own darkness and becoming...that. She doesn't know if the shadow-dragon is lying about not eating her, but she does know that it's dangerous. Toverin opines that maybe it was this creature leaving its "home" that drove the whalephers further up.

The three of them descend, with Zeblek walking a little closer now, still in dris Shadowself.

Movie #788: Evil Under the Sun

Evil Under the Sun is a murder mystery based on an Agatha Christie novel, and starring Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, Roddy McDowall, James Mason, Jane Birkin, Nicholas Clay, Diana Rigg, Denis Quilley, Sylvia Miles, Emily Hone, and Colin Blakely. 

Our hero Hercule Poirot (Ustinov), or "Hercules Parrot," as he's once referred and it breaks my heart that that's too silly of a joke to find its way into any of Brannagh's films, gets hired to look into a fairly simple matter. Rich chap Horace Blatt (Blakely) got taken for a bit of a ride; former actress and golddigger Arlena Marshall (Rigg) seduced and left him, and when he asked for a diamond he gave her back she swapped out a fake one. So Poirot heads to an exclusive resort on the Adriatic Sea headed by the former mistress of the King of Tyrania, Daphne (Smith), and we meet our colorful cast of special friends.

Arlena is there with her new mark/husband Kenneth (Quilley) and his daughter Linda (Hone); along with trash reporter and aspiring biographer of Arlena, Rex (McDowall, with one of the gayest performances I've ever seen); young couple Patrick and Christine Redfern (Clay and Birkin, respectively); and New York Broadway producers Odell and and Myra Gardener (Mason and Miles, respectively). It very rapidly becomes obvious that Arlena and Patrick and banging, but that's just the tip of the iceberg - pretty much everyone has a reason to want Arlena dead, so it's not much of a shock when she turns up strangled on a beach. Trouble is, literally everyone has an alibi corroborated by at least one other person, so it's up to Hercules Parrot to solve the case!

As with Death on the Nile, the tone of this movie is weirdly light and breezy, and then out of nowhere we'll get a shot of a dead rabbit with maggots crawling in it and it just sends the whole thing lurching. The performances are fantastic; McDowall and Smith are standouts, but Birkin is also pretty fantastic, and of course Ustinov is gleefully fussy and sometimes catty as Poirot (though of course there's plenty of cat to go around). The cinematography is also impressive - the scenery in these murders is usually amazing because of the whole "exotic, remote locale" conceit of murder mystery, but what's interesting here is that there's no storms and pretty much everything happens in broad daylight. 

With that said, one problem I had was that the victim is a genuinely awful person, and honestly most of these people are assholes. Lynette Ridgeway in Death on the Nile wasn't necessarily a saint, but you still feel like she was hard done by (Murder on the Orient Express is a different story because the victim really did deserve what he got, but that's the whole point of that story). Here, Arlena Marshall is awful to everyone, but the people around her are grasping, greedy, and petty, too. Even Linda, who has the most legitimate grievance against her stepmother because she's a child and can't exactly stand up to her often comes off as peevish and unpleasant. 

All of that doesn't ruin the movie or anything, but it does mean the end of it, where the killers have been revealed and everyone is heading back to the mainland, has this weirdly jovial tone - all of the not-killers are on the boat smiling, even Kenneth, and I'm like dude, your wife just died, but then I think about their relationship and figure well, fair enough. 

My Grade: B
Rewatch Value: Medium-low

Next up: Hell Fest