Episode 378: Cell (2016)

John Cusack, Samuel L Jackson and Isabell Fuhrman from The Orphan movies, based on a Stephen King novel about zombies created by a pulse and linked to cellphones, and directed by the director of Paranormal Activity 2. Should have been a slam dunk. Was it? Well, no.

The book purists slammed it. The movie reviewers panned it. And me? I remembered it quite differently. The Mandela Effect and all that.

Clay (Cusack) is a bit of an ass, who walked out on his wife and son to pursue his dream of becoming a graphic novel artist. He works on a story about a raggedy man, a harbinger of doom and after selling it to someone heads to the airport to tell his son in person, regardless of his ex wife telling him he can't simply do that, as he walked out of them. He plans to anyway, see earlier comment about him being a bit of an ass.

At the airport anyone with a bluetooth headset on or on their phone suddenly screams and convulses in pain, foaming at the mouth before turning homicidal, a la The Crazies, and killing people. Clay escapes as a plane flies into the terminal and joined subway driver Samuel L Jackson and others in heading out.

We then have this idea of heading to see if Clay's family is still alive, they can't call, so it becomes a cross country apocalyptic road movie.

There is a lot of dislike, but it had it's moments. 5/10 from me. I shall discuss with Michael next week as he hasn't seen it before.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

And welcome back to listeners. It's just me this time. It's just me. Although Michael will catch up with uh his thoughts on this episode. And the movie that I will be talking about, Cell. S No I'm kidding, it's not S, it's C L L. Cell from 2016, which was the science fiction horror film based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. Um I kinda I remember watching this when it first came out. Um there were a few issues I had with it, which I could talk about now. So it's basically a zombie movie where a phone signal causes the problem. I think it's a phone signal, isn't it? Um anyway, so uh yeah, the phone signal, the pulse, an electronic signal that people get over the phone, um basically turns them into rampaging zombies. And people end up turning and then just go batshit crazy. Um when I watched when I started watching it, I think I was excited by the idea of Samuel L. Jackson, who I love, who doesn't love Samuel Samuel L. Jackson? Everything that Samuel L. Jackson has done um from a time to kill onwards has been wonderful. You know, I mean he's added the word motherfucking to so many people's um vocabulary. Um unexpectedly so. Also the N-word. Uh he's also made that mainstream, although it's still not advisable to borrow it. Um certainly not in your uh master's degree commencement speech. John Kuzak, I genuinely loved for a while until I met him. Um I you know, everyone grew up on like the 80s movies or the Black Pack movies, and Better Off Dead, you know, who hasn't seen it? Uh Better Off Dead is is uh one of those classics. Um Gross point blank, the only black comedy that people can name for being good. It is funny as well as good. Um I yeah, uh I don't know. Um what else? There's loads, loads and loads and loads of movies. Um I liked that movie he did. Uh this movie he did with with Rachel Weiss, where they were kids uh during a a school shooting, and the two of them then managed to get their own back on the the uh big gun manufacturers. Uh and of course High Fidelity. Everybody loves High Fidelity, and it is a great movie. Um when this movie came out, it was negatively received. I mean, it had Russian money behind it. Um Kuzak produced it. Um and Todd Williams, who made oh god, what didn't he do like paranormal activity? Paranormal activity two um was at the helm. Um and basically it follows uh John Kuzak's character, Clay, um, who abandons his wife and son to fulfil his dream of publishing a graphic novel, and a year later, um whilst he's on um his the phone to his family, the phone his phone dies. But then all loads of other people are on their mobile phones, and this pulse comes through and makes them start convulsing and then turns them into rapid killers. At the airport where he is, we see planes crash mid-air, and he runs down to the subway station um where planes crashes and destroys the terminals. He meets some survivors who uh including the train conductor who believes that he says that the power's out. Um and then basically it's sort of like he he now wants to go and find his kid and his wife, um, and they they sort of pick he picks up sort of survivors along the way, but much like the Mnight Shalon The Happening, where you know nature basically turns people into suicide into suicidal the suicide victims, basically people will suddenly go, oh bam, blow their own brains out. Um what this does is uh it creates these infected zombies, effectively, um, who have who share a hive mind. Uh another zombie term we haven't actually heard, phoners. Um they also emit this whole like static noise from their mouths. Um so really they're it follows John Kuzak's clay and Samuel L. Jackson's Tom. Um as they're trying to find the find the family, then find the cause, uh, and then um and then destroy the cause, which is this communications tower, um, which um which will then mess with then you know kill kill the signal with the pulse and everyone will go back to normal. However, um this all shit. The ending is shit. Absolute shit. Hated the ending. What do people say about it? Reviewed negatively by most critics, Rotten Tomatoes give it eleven percent. You know, Metacritic 38%. Um which is actually the average score of Wot on Tomatoes of 3.8 out of ten. Uh but shoddily crafted and devoid of suspense. Uh I guess it's the screenplay, the writing. Conceptually it should be good. It's you know, not every Stephen King's a good book, but you know. Uh Bloody Disgusting said it was a forgetful adaptation. Um basically lack of storytelling clarity, unnecessarily glum and grim, as well as pretty dumb. Uh probably the worst adaptation of a Stephen King story. That's one person said that. Um The Coachella Valley Independent, uh uh must-read publication. Um greater message except than a Bluetooth headset to call someone from an airport. A bathroom stall should be punishable by zombification says Stephen Green of N DY, who gave it C. Um character study with a death of character. Um it's the only unsettling scene is the scene at the airport with the outbreak, which is a very good scene. Uh the film is about as close as you would get to a generic low budget undead thriller. Uh which is a shame because it cost Oh We don't know what it cost, but it only made a million dollars at the box office. So I enjoyed this when I first no, I didn't. I enjoyed parts of it when I first saw it. I hated the ending. Um, I liked the concept, but I felt that it wasn't very well done. Uh now after watching 380 something zombie movies of all kinds from all over the world, um, including a recent Hive mind zombie movie in the form of Colony. I think I need to revit revisit Cell. Uh and so this is episode 378, in which I shall be watching the John Kuzak and Samuel L. Jackson Cell. And good afternoon. This is Michael from the Undead Symphony podcast. And this is Darren Smith. And the cassette of Michael Avery was correct. This is indeed the Undead Symphony. It stars Alice Furman as well, uh, who played uh the orphan in those orphan movies. Remember those orphan movies that you know where she's supposed to have been some like 30-year-old Romanian woman rather than a child kind of thing. Those movies, yeah, she played that character as well. Uh it's made in 2016. I thought it was much earlier than that, but still, 2016. Um, I was back in the UK, so yeah, that makes sense. Um, I remember the posters quite distinctly. Um, Samuel and John Kuzak in their woolly hats, and also the idea that this was Russian made made me kind of think the whole thing was filmed in Russia. Uh, and it made me disappointed because much like the Meg movies um and uh others, uh The Great Wall, remember that movie with the the ponytail movie with Matt Damon? It's sort of like Hollywood Hollywood stars kind of selling out to China and Russia for the sake of a paycheck, and it kind of felt like that, although I may be wrong about this one. I can be wrong, I often am. So it's 97 minutes as well, which is um we've been watching shorter indies recently, so that they've all been like in the 70s, you know, so an extra 20 minutes of attention. It's still not like a seven-hour Christopher Nolan epic, although at the weekend I've decided that I shall watch Tenet, um, which I've never quite gotten through for multiple reasons. So I'll tell you what, it's not just movies that I don't always get through, books as well. Hotel Honolulu by Thiru, uh Motherless Brooklyn. Um uh yeah, they've they've always been a bit of a struggle to get through, and it's sort of like you're reading them and you're like, I can't be bothered to finish this shit. Which of course fucks with my idea the idea of having closure on something, however. Um, I do actually, when it comes to closure, uh, now that I actually have finished um Draidl of the Dead, it's now on IMDB as an up-and-coming production. Uh it's in post-production. Uh also has a website, dreadlofthead.com, um, with all the cast and stuff on it. Um that's nearly finishing uh coming to an end, so that we tick, yes, finish this movie, sent it to festivals. Some will take it, some won't, most won't. Uh, and then me myself, I've got the third of the undead symphony books to um to write. So the third one is Heavy as the Crown, um, because it's about the leadership of the survivors. So I'm going off topic. Cell, a Stephen King book turned into a movie directed by the guy who did um uh Paranormal Activity 2, stars John Kuzak, uh Alice Fairman and Samuel L. Jackson. We start at an airport where John Kuzak is. We see lots of shots of people on their phone, a woman who won't even get off of her headset, uh, only gets off of her headset for seconds to go through the X-ray machine. Literally puts some, takes it off, puts it in the the the yeah, whatever they call it, the trot, the tray, slides the tray through, goes through the x-ray machine and picks the picks the headphones up and puts them back into continual conversation. Uh passengers, TSA officers have all got like headsets in. Everyone is linked to uh their cell phone one way or another. And I kind of think they proved their point to a point where it was actually over-egged. I think we had more than a couple of minutes of yeah, we get it. We get it, everyone's on their phones, we get it, everyone is on their phones. We then finally meet John Kuzak's Clay. Clay um basically has just got a deal selling his graphic novel. Um, he calls his wife, uh, or ex-wife, basically he abandoned his wife and his son to disappear for a year to make and sell his graphic novel, which he has finally done. He basically abandoned them, and then he calls his wife to crow about it and say that he wants to see his son when his phone dies. He then goes and uses a payphone, um, and he is already a remarkable, remarkably dislikable character. Um who ignores his wife who says, You abandoned us. Why the fuck do you think I'm gonna let you come and see your son? You can't just walk up. Um, but he just says, Look, there's a plane flying to Manchester, New Hampshire, I want to say, uh, and uh, I'm on the way. So ignoring whatever his wife says. Not very nice. Um, and then everyone who's got a headset on or that was on their phone or Bluetooth earpieces starts screaming and holding their heads and foaming at the mouth and shaking and convulsing. Um, including this fat businessman basically he's on the shitter wearing a headset. He's basically taking a business call on the shitter, a walking prostate of a man with a moustache. Um he everyone who was convulsing and having this fit then turns into a fucking psychopath, runs to the nearest person who wasn't having a fit, and starts beating them to death. The um walking prostate with a mustache attacks a girl, beats her to death in front of her daughter, a woman, beats her to death in front of her walp daughter, before Clay, who's they telegraphed it, it was carrying this sort of like glass orb, which I guess is a present for his son. Um he um clumps the guy on the back of the head with his heavy glass ball and kills him. Um I would have thought the glass ball maybe would have you know been used later in the story for some reason, um, but maybe maybe in the book it's used. I mean I would have used he's talking about resetting his son at the end of the book, so I don't know um what that entails. I then thought I saw Tromer's Lloyd Kaufman in a Hawaiian shirt, checked on IMDB, and yes, it was Uncle Lloyd as a bystander. Good spot, I thought there ten years ago, uh, recognizing Uncle Lloyd. He tries to save the girl, but she then just picks up her cell phone, listens, and then goes, starts foaming in the mouth and convulsing uh at the same time that a TSI TSA guy who was walking his dog, uh uh you know, guard dog out Alsatian or German Shepherd earlier, is killing his own dog. A cop who's got a gun who basically says we don't we're not allowed to have cell phones, uh, takes out a few of them. Uh Kusak fights off this huge chef and beats the shit out of him, too. So Kusak's actually killed a couple of them, which I think's kind of cool. Um he then runs upstairs where the cops are, but the cops are being overrun. Um before he looks out of the window, this is Clay, and he sees a CGI plane on fire flying directly toward the terminal. Uh, he then runs into the subway station and down and down being chased by other zon uh uh other infected phoners, they call them in this movie. Um and there are other survivors down in a subway train. Um uh there are also lots of the infected on the platform still. He's about to get clumped by a worker who basically then it's like no no he's fine, he's fine, he's fine. Uh so they let him on the train. So he's everyone's played deciding whether to stay or should they stay or should they go, um, which is the song that they're gonna sing, should I stay or should I go now? Um Samuel L. Jackson is the driver of the train, Tom, and he's basically saying, you know, I can't drive the train because the power's down. And if the power's down for too long, then this place is gonna flood because this um the airport, Boston Airport, is actually on floodplains and they will just flood if there's no one manning the pumps. Um everyone else decides to stay, which is stupid because the place is on fire as well. Um and uh he heads down the tracks, Tom and Clay, with a young guy called Mike, who is a DJ who is played by Griffin Freeman, who played Mark in The Walking Dead, who was one of the saviours. So there's a zombie connection for you if you want to play seven degrees of Rick Grimes. Uh Mike then gets an axe to the chest from one of the phoners. Now the thing is that these are psychopaths, they're not they are zombies, but they're psychopathic zombies that can use tools. Um Kuzak takes out the killer as well. That's three he's taken out as Tom and Clay head up to uh head up a ladder chased by the infected, and it was quite scary, quite tense, uh to get to the um the street, street level. To get up to the street level, and you know, I I'm gonna get the bum. I'm already having the bums rush because I know of the shit ending, uh, which is not the ending from the book. But at the moment I'm actually enjoying it. I've only seen this once. I saw it ten years ago and it came out. I haven't seen it since, but I'm actually enjoying it. It is kind of fast-paced, it is a little bit exciting. The idea of the hive mind of the um of the infected, the phoners, um, the fact that they can still use tools, the things that this they uh they have this whole flocking together kind of thing. Oh, excuse me. Um and um yeah, so it's it's actually okay. I mean, I'm not hating it at the moment, even though I know that I will by the end. Um Tom and Clay get to the surface, and this is Boston, and there's you know, Boston is on fire. It is a light with bad CGI clouds of smoke. They go to clo they go to Clay's apartment, which is really close by. Line, how did you get from the international airport that's nowhere near where anyone lives, to a t into the subway, and you've caught the subway, you've walked the subway to the point where there's a tunnel coming out, which just happens to be right where where Clay lives. So anyway, they go to Clay's building, and um there's loads of people around who've been beaten to death, obviously, by the infected. Um maybe not, it could be a bad neighbourhood. Um basically they're like, you know, they're trying to work it out. You know, it's everyone was on their phones or their Bluetooth headsets. And Samuel L was like, well, I I don't have any family, so I don't speak to anyone on the phone. Um and then he puts his phone in the freezer because it makes the battery last longer, because it's actually part of the the heat that actually causes that causes the battery to dissipate um over time. Um Tom uh basically uses Tom's phone to text his ex-wife and then just gets this garbled message back. So obviously the um the cell phone um cell phone is is corrupt now. Uh then there's a bang on the door, which is quite scary, and then it's Alice from upstairs, who's played by um uh Isabel Furman, who played the uh the creepy the creepy um Oh god, I'm falling asleep again. Who played the creepy Orphan in Orphan 1 and Orphan Two. Um and she's just stabbed her mother to death because her mother turned into one of the infected. We were 20 minutes in at this point, and it was actually okay, even though I knew that I was gonna get angered by the hallucination ending. Um it is broody, it's menacing. Um Clay's got a cat, which annoys me because he's just about to disappear to go and see his son against his ex-wife's uh wishes, and he's leaving the cat behind. I mean the cat and the son must talk about their abandonment issues here. So uh Samuel L. Jackson has no family, uh Clay does, and is clinging to the hope that they're still alive. So the plan is to go and find them. Alice says, wherever you guys are going, can I come with you? And they said, Well, I'm glad you asked that. Of course you can. What they do is they spot the uh the the horde. The horde is actually always on the move. It's kind of like a swarm, uh, with varying reactions in it. Some of some of the people have got joyous faces or angry or being mesmerized by things like their own reflection or flames or the like. But they're like birds, they're traveling as one, as a flock, just a flock. Flock with weapons. So the three of them head out with the idea they're going to go and find a vehicle, and Clay's plan is to find his family, and that's to be fair, that's all the three of them have got now. One of them has got a plan, and the other two are going to come along for the ride. They come across this swarm which is just going around and around and around in a circle. So if you could think of like uh an exaltation of skylarks, or a murmur of starlings, you know, basically where they're kind of just like moving around together, and they're all moving around together like a bird. Like birds do. And these two idiot moched cyclists ride past them and straight into the horde and then get killed. Conveniently, it's an opportunity now for the others to escape, uh, where they go and find a Second Amendment house, a house where this everyone's got uh you know Second Amendment stickers all over their SUV out the front. They go in and get a ton of fucking guns. So they've got plenty of pistols, rifles, shotguns, and ammo. They go out the back though, and the son, the teenage son of the um of the family is outside on the swing and they think he's okay, but when they get close to him, he turns around and he's actually also infected. And then they calls all of the other infected around who come charging through the woods and chase after them. This is really good, because now they're being chased through the woods by running infected. At one point, though, Samuel L. Jackson, who's up you know, an older man, basically stops and goes, fuck this, turns round, and then they the three of them just open up on the uh closest group of of infected and just wipe them all out. But there's just so many of them. So they run and they have to hide by um there's actually a dam. So there's a dam, and then you've got the the river going into the dam, and then um they um they hide underneath an upturned rowboat as the sun starts going down and all of the uh the infected that are surrounding them stare at the sun and they're making all they sort of open their mouths and start sin sending this signal out from their mouths before they all kind of go dormant, walk away, and then sort of like get into a group and huddle together like penguins, like birds that are roosting, effectively. Clay thinks that they're telepathic, and Alice thinks that it's a hive mind, and it's either one or the other. They then come across a boarding school run by Stacy Keach, who's the headmaster, but there's only one boy who's still alive, and he said, Well, the other boys have either left or they're infected, and they goes, What do you mean? And they show them that the football field at the back is covered in hundreds upon hundreds, thousands of sleeping phoners that are all sleeping at night because it they roost at night, and they cover in the whole pitch. Stacy Keats kind of shows them that whilst they're asleep, you could do anything to him, stabs one in the leg, uh, and then uh, you know, they actually listen to the mouths of the phoners and they're actually transmitting this sound now, the pulse they call it, out of their mouths. So rather than them having to listen to it over the cell phone, it's now evolved to them doing it themselves. The headmaster though has a plan. This is war, he says, and we need to take uh take the get on the front foot. Let's take the war to them. And so he goes, I've got a sprayer truck out the back that's used for um fertilizer for the playing fields, um, and we've got gasoline. Let's fill the sprayer truck with gasoline, spray the whole field, and just set it alight. This is war after all. And they decide that yeah, Alice is all about killing as many as they physically can. Tom is also in on it, but Clay isn't sure. Isn't sure because Clay's actually doing the driving, and he ends up driving this like truck over into the middle of the football field by running over hundreds of these people and spraying on both sides until they have to get out of the truck because it's now stuck on all the bodies. Uh, but I have covered the entire football field uh of people with gasoline. Um and yeah. I would have thought that shit. I mean, I would have made it scarier when you have like the sun coming up soon or the floodlights coming on or something. I think the floodlights come on in Ick, yeah, the Ick, you know, that um Canadian uh zombie movie we saw not long ago with Brandon Ruth. Anyway, so Keach decides to fire a burning tennis ball at the end of an arrow into the middle of the football pitch and then whoosh. And I mean it's nasty, but it's bad CGI, so it's not as nasty as it could be. Some of them wake up and run at them when they have to shoot them, and then the uh the the fuel uh that was trickling out of the truck at the end, which is quite close to them, catches light, and then the truck goes up, blows up killing Stacy Keach. And then we can hear the phoners who are actually all on fire calling and calling, and they're all calling with one voice, and uh John Kuzek says, It sounds like rage. And he does, to be fair. So now they gain the boys, so they've got the boy whose name I never learned. You got um Alice, Tom, and and Clay, and they keep going, but what they're doing is they're staying in places and closing the doors behind them and camping, and they're closing the windows and barricading everything, and it's what they should be doing. And at this point, we were halfway through.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

Rage wise turned everyone into flesh-eating zombies, and you're still sitting there with your chop in your hand, listening to these sobby muppies. I'm Rick Yarnick, Corporal Mitchell in 28 days later, and you're listening to the Undead Symphony.

SPEAKER_01 28:27

Alright, I am back again, my dear little listeners, dear little listeners, I am back again for the second part of this episode. So, whilst everyone is sleeping, Clay hears something coming from the restroom of the of the diner that they're hiding out in. He goes to investigate, which is quite tense and of an obvious jump scare, and when he gets there, there's this zombie wearing a red hoodie getting a blowjob from his ex-wife. Who apparently this he then wakes up, it's a nightmare. All of them are having the same dream about the same person, or they were all dreaming about the same person who was a prophet of the apocalypse, who's actually from Clay's comic book, and it kind of was weird that they've added this element, you know. It's like, okay, if it's just this pulse, this unknown signal, which I think the book's about, um, then it's very much like the M Knight Shaman um uh the happening. We don't really know what's causing it, it's just happening, and you've got to somehow survive it. And it, you know, in that case it's nature. In the pulse, it could also be nature, or aliens, or anything that Stephen King was thinking about at the time. Um so suddenly you've got this nightmarish leader of them, the raggedy man, the red hoodie wearing infected, and everyone's dreaming about him, and it's just it kinda this is where it diverts from being kind of okay, and I'm enjoying it to eh. Yeah. Anyway, so they go outside, uh, they both decide to leave and say, okay, we should just go. And they go outside, there's a giant pile of burning cell phones because they don't need the burning they don't need the cell phones anymore. Tom and Alice's phones then go off and they leave them on the pile of burning smoke. Burning other phones. They then find a bar that is barricaded and has a hand painted sign on the roof saying, No foe and cashwack. No foe meaning no phones, meaning there's survivors inside. And when they get in there, there are two old drunks and a British barman who says that everyone is heading up to cashwack Maine. And I think it's like cashwack washwack. Cashwack whack lake in Maine, which is it which is a made-up place, where he decided to make a made-up place that's almost impossible to to spit to say. Um Tom, by the way, Seminole Jackson has been drinking the entire movie from arriving at Clay's house till now. So basically, and and at the school as well, where he was walking around with a decanter. Um there's a drunk woman and a drunk guy there. I think the guy's basically had a throat operation because he's using one of those speaking devices to speak through his throat. Again, Stephen King being a little bit over the top there, uh, and the barman's English. In the middle of the night, the drunk woman wakes up and walks to the door because she can see the keys that are still in the lock moving, and she's making sure that it's locked, but then she can see it moving again because there was someone the other side of the door, so she puts her ear to it. Clay then wakes up and puts out and sees that she's just staring at the door with her back to him. She he walks over to her, puts his hand on her shoulder, and she turns and she's infected. Also in the room, all over the place, she's let in loads of phoners who attack the old man and attack the barman, and she actually puts her head her mouth near the barman's ear and transmits the signal, the pulse, out of her mouth into him, turning him into the infected. But the guys are now badass killers, and then they're shooting and killing all of them until there's only one left, which is the woman, who sadly wallops Alice around the back of the head with the baseball bat, killing her before they shoot the old woman to death. Sadly, this is where we lose Alice, which is a shame because she was a good character, but when she died, she had these hemorrhages in her left eyeball that looks just like the Raggedy Man. We do see more of the Raggedy Man, we see a lot of the cell phone towers, we see a lot of cell phone towers, we kind of get it. We see lots of birds. At one point, we just see fucking ducks on a lake. Um, Alice also again says has the same hemorrhage that the the raggedy man has in his left eye. Is there any significance to that, or did they just add it because they thought it was a nice idea, but it had no basis in the story whatsoever. They then find two other survivors. Um two other survivors who have been killing the phoners, a guy who's been up for six days called Ray and a pregnant woman. Um they say that cashwack, which is in Maine apparently, is supposed to be cell phone tower free, but it isn't. A giant new cell phone tower is there and it's a trap. Um they talk about this guy, the president of the internet, which turns out to also be the Raggedy Man who's invaded everybody's dreams. But Ray thinks we need to kill him, we need to go to cashwack and we need to kill him. I mean he is babbling insanely. Um, but they're talking about this idea that there's this cell phone tower where all of the zombies are going to because it's a trap. And this reminds me of the French Canadian zombie movie uh um what was it? Ravenus. Ravenus, yes, the French Canadian zombie movie Ravenus, where the zombies in that movie built this tower to congregate around. The couple have a phono with a hood, and I actually think it's the woman's husband or boyfriend because she's pregnant, uh, and they feed it, but they keep this hood on it so it won't tell any or the other phoners where it is. But then they can hear it, and it's talking with Clay's son's voice. So Clay pulls its head uh the the the hood off and is sort of said, Hello dad, uh kind of thing, and then because he's clearly playing with everybody's mind, Tom blows his brains out. Then it's prompting a quick exit where they all jump in and a a no no word of a lie, it's an ice cream truck filled with um ice cream truck filmed filled with C4. Um the guy thinks he's nuts because the raggedy man is now in his head. Ray thinks the raggedy man is in my head and I'm not asleep. And then you know, Clay's like, Look, man, you've been up for six days, you're just hallucinating. The guy then stops the truck, gets in, goes up into the woods, calls Clay to explain to him that here is a cell phone and a number, you'll know what to do when you get it, which is to blow up the blow up the C4 in the ice cream van. Uh, and then Ray blows his own head off with this improvised explosive. Literally like a necklace of C4. Um if I was personally in this movie, I would have cut my losses, um, not gone to try to destroy the bad guys. Um get all the food and water you can, head down into a prepper bunker and wait it out. If you can if you can find a prepper bunker that's got you know all of the air filtration, water filtration that you need, um has got enough of all the supplies you need for a year, you can wait this shit out. Why? Because I haven't seen the infected eat. They had to force their their one that they had prisoner to eat, so sooner or later it's going to be the 28 days later starving to death thing, which of course stopped being a thing, because in 28 weeks later, and then 28 years later the infected is still are still a thing. But you just go and spend you know a a a summer holiday underground for six months or a year, and then when you come back you've got the world to yourself. That's the my plan. Michael would question that though, because Mike Michael wants to live. I still want to live, he says. Um I would I actually want to live. He just wants he wants to live a life. I just want to live. Anyway, moving on. They arrive at Clay's house uh and he goes in alone and the fire is on. And there's fresh food out. But there is a broken window. And so he f he sees a uh he goes to the fridge, the fridge has got magnetic letters on it saying, Mum is one of them, I'm gonna go to cashwack, please meet me there, kind of thing. And very neatly done for a child, I think. And having all the letters, y that never works. The amount of times I've gone to someone's fridge and they've got all of the letters there, and you try to spell something, and it's like, Well, I've run out of ease. Anyway, cashwack. There's no there isn't two K's. There are no there aren't two K's in cash. Yeah, cashwack, two K's. There's no there aren't two K's in those, you know, letter packs. Anyway. He goes up to the attic because he hears somebody and he is attacked by what looks like the Raggedy Man. Uh Tom arrives to help him, that's Samuel L. Jackson. The two of them but get beaten again and beaten up by the Raggedy Man in his red hoodie uh before they manage to Clay manages to save Tom, who's gonna get him beaten up properly, uh, with a plank around that four two by four around the head of the uh uh Raggedy Man, but it turns out it's not the Raggedy Man after all, as they pump multiple bullets into it, it's actually the infected ex-wife of Clay. I guess he's not paying anybody Allen money anymore. At this point I was 25 minutes for the end, uh, and I got a little bit bored. Uh and I fell into a couple of insta holes for 10 to 15 minutes. I made dinner, uh, I made a turkey mince butter chicken, so a butter chicken sauce, but with turkey mints and chickpeas and boiled potatoes and pop a doms. It was very nice. Thank you for asking. Um anyway, so the ice cream van is full of C4, and the plan from Vay was always to drive it to Kashrak, find this tower, and to blow the fuck up out of it. Um whereas Clay is now gonna drive to Kashrak, try to find his son, and if his son is one of them, he will then blow the truck up. Um the kid and the pregnant woman said, We're not gonna go with you. Um it's a suicide mission, and just survive. And Tom says, you know, I'm not gonna go with you either. Uh, which confused me, and this is where I kind of have this whole Mandela effect thing, because I was sure when I watched this last time, Samuel L goes with him, and the idea was that um that Clay would drive the ice cream truck down and then blow it up, and that would be signal for Samuel L to do something. Anyway, we'll come to that in the end, but near the end. So we have loads of random cuts of the ice cream being driven to cashwak. There are people on the side of the road hiking there because they still think it's a safe place. Um, we see random cuts of uh cell phone towers, obviously, and more birds, mostly ducks, which are awful. From the top of the hill, Clay can see a giant cell photo tower and thousands upon thousands of runners phoners running in a synchronized circle around it. But of course, the van starts rolling down the hill and into the horde, running a load of them over before arriving in the middle of the circle next to the tower. He then turns and the raggedy man's ahead of him, so you guys and runs the raggedy man over with the last juice in the uh in the ice cream truck before getting out with his shotgun and blowing him away. Good job, if it's real. He then keeps hallucinating his son's voice, uh which is stupid, and runs into the horde, but he's running against the horde, which is stupid. So he keeps getting knocked down, which is stupid. If it was me and I had to get out of this huge circle of people going round and round and round, go in the same direction as them. Go in the same direction and edge your way further and further out when you get a little bit of a gap. Do not even if you have to go round a few times, don't go in the opposite direction of him. That's just ludicrous. Anyway, he then finds his son. His son is there, but his son is infected, and um he kneels down in front of his son, starts hugging him. All of the infected start doing the whole sending the pulse out from their mouth, including his son. Clay pulls out the um cell phone from Ray and calls the number, blowing the ice cream truck up and blowing up the tower and all of the infected there, including Clay and his son. However, that was the ending we wanted, it's not the ending we got, because we then see Ray uh Clay and his son walking. What they did before they left the others said, just paint on a tree on the left hand side, um TJ D or something, and um I will follow it and find you guys. So we suddenly have Clay and his son walking down the the tracks, uh the trade tracks, seeing these trees with the sign on it, and their son saying, Will your friends like me? And he says, Yeah, absolutely, they'll love you, kind of thing. But then we hear the annoying um uh you'll never you'll never walk alone. Um the the Liverpool anthem. Uh, and uh we see that Clay is just one of the horde now, going round and round and around in circles. End. Now the book is supposed to be quite different. Um, you don't get the manifestation of the pulse in the form of tower cell phone towers, it's just a pulse, which is more um ambiguous, I would say. Um Clay does survive. Um he finds his infected son and then tries a reset on his son, and that's where it leaves it, apparently. Tom survives both uh the book and the movie, which is good, because as I said, my Mandela effect was the I thought that Tom and Clay were planning this attack in s you know, synchronizing their attack, and Tom dies because Clay doesn't do what it mean, Clay was supposed to go down and blow something up using the truck and didn't. And so Tom is left and then is killed. But that's not what happens. I and and I'm actually really glad that I um I misremembered it. Um that my brain in its old age, its adult state, uh didn't remember remembered it incorrectly because watching it this time around I was like, oh, Samuel L survives, and so does the pregnant girl, and so does the kid. Yay! Um it's still the stupid fucking shitty ending that Clay uh hallucinated. Um there are too many things. I mean, the idea of this harbinger of doom, which felt very much more like the strand to me. The strand? The stand to me. Is it the strand or stand? Strand, stand, strand, the stand, the stand. Stephen King. The stand, come on. The stand. Stephen King. Yeah, the stand. Um it felt more like the stand to me. Um, with this whole harbinger of doom that they kept seeing, and everyone else kept seeing in their dreams. Um I did like The Hive Mind. Um, it did remind me of Colony, or Colony reminded me of it. Um I like the idea that it could be now transferred by the individuals making this sound rather than using their cell phones, uh, so they could pass it on themselves. We actually saw the barman get turned um by by the old woman drunk, um, and we actually literally saw it happen. You know, it's pretty gruesome in at times, uh, it's really done well at times. Um why do people hate it? It's tricky. Um I actually enjoyed it this time around, alarmingly, even though I've seen it before. It's gonna be interesting to find what find out what Michael thinks, because Michael hasn't seen it before. Um, I think you know, these are zombies that are turned into these hive mind birds, so it is very much like Colony. Liked that. I do like Samuel L. Jackson. I like John Kuzak as an actor, but I was gonna say at the beginning that I actually met John Kuzack at the Soho Grand in probably 2003, 2004, maybe when I moved back to New York after being on the West Coast for a couple of years. Um, and he was a dick. He was a dick to I mean I just said hi, but then there were people going over to him and trying to speak to him, and he was like m sitting out standing outside with like his black beanie and his big black coat on and trying to look like one of the characters from his movies, and he'd just come over as a bit of an arse. Uh never meet your heroes kind of thing. And he actually isn't one of mine, but um I think other people were there and kind of like starstruck by him, and he was just a dick to them. So um, they're not really a dick, it's just like look, I ain't got time for you people, kind of business. Um so yeah, I mean the acting was fine. The CGI was ten years ago and dated, so even though it had a big budget, um big cast, you know, the paranormal activity two guy at the helm, Stephen King movie based on a Stephen King book, the smoke was awful, the airplane crashes were terrible. Um, and it did it did slow down, you know, them like travelling across America in sort of like the wooded areas and the run down areas. It did feel a little bit like the road, it looked like the road um with uh Vigo Mortensen. Uh the Cormac McCarthy uh book turned into a movie. I think it's Cormac McCarthy did the road. Um so yeah, I mean I don't know. What does everyone score this? They scored it some of some score it like four out of ten. It wasn't a four out of ten for me. I I've seen this twice. You know, if it was on, I might watch parts of it. Um the beginning is actually certainly exciting, even though there isn't any character development and all these other things, and all those things that people are moaning about, I'm sure that they're vi you know they're valid, but it is what it is. It's you know closer to being a Stephen King TV movie than a cinema movie for me, despite the stars. Um in the end, I'm yeah, the thing about it is I I I genuinely just glad that Samuel L. Jackson survived in the end when I I my memory of it was that he didn't. Anyway, so this is Darren Smith for the Undead Symphony. I'm gonna score the 2016 John Cusack Alice uh Isabel Furman Samuel L. Jackson movie cell based on a Stephen King book, five out of ten.