Public and Professional Writing Final Project: Hypertextual Document

Nightslayers: The Cast

Review by BloggerReviews

Sam Raimi's new blockbuster Nightslayers made a record profit at the box office, taking the critics by storm. With that in mind, let's take a look at the (mostly) stellar cast he selected.

Matt Damon, of Jason Bourne fame, returned from a year-long absence to play a single father of two who is forced to take arms against the zombie masses to save the lives of his children. He gives a heartwrenching performance when his character is forced to shoot his daughter after she's bitten, but delivers shot after shot of action packed heroism as well. As shown in his previous films, this type of action is definitely right up his alley.

Now picture Jason Bourne fighting zombies. With kids. Alongside Charlize Theron.

Charlize Theron, well known for many films including Italian Job, Monster, Hancock, and Aeon Flux, stars in Nightslayers as a sharp-witted waitress who manages to survive an attack in her apartment. She teams up with Damon's character and together they fight their way through the encroaching masses, shotguns blasting and chainsaws revving. And we know Charlize Theron can fight.

The surprising cast member was Kristen Stewart, whose vapid stares landed her the role in the Twilight movies. Once we saw her part, however, we were not at all upset. She plays Jamie, a younger waitress, and the first character casualty of the film. She gets bitten while Theron's character is helping her escape, and we get to watch the vacant stare and constant head bobbing get blown to pieces by Theron's shotgun. Vengeance perhaps?

I apologize for the torture there, but now you can just imagine it getting blown into tiny little smithereens by the epic badassness of Charlize Theron wielding a double-barrel shotgun.

All in all, we here at BloggerReviews gave the movie a solid 5 stars. We don't do that often, but come on, if watching Matt Damon and Charlize Theron kill zombies isn't good enough, we also get to see them blow up Kristen Stewart.

All kidding aside, she is starring in a new movie, Snow White and the Huntsman (also alongside Charlize Theron), and we're taking it as her last chance to prove she has some talent. We've got high hopes for the movie, and you'll see its review here as soon as it comes out.

Stealing for School!

Final Project for Public and Professional Writing: Hyperlink Document

Nightslayers Sets the Bar for Zombie Cult Flicks:

Dilan Humphrys

When most of us see the trailer for a zombie, vampire, or wizard movie nowadays, we shrug our shoulders and shake it off as another pop culture fan favorite. Soon they are blown out of the water by the movies that go on to win Academy awards and gain worldwide recognition. However this movie raised some eyebrows as soon as the trailer was released in the summer of last year. Slated for a winter opening, the movie was delayed due to production issues and over one hundred extra hours of editing. This flick underwent a surgical procedure that even the Jackson family couldn’t afford. But it was worth it. Late spring brought Nightslayers to the forefront of the box office as it grossed just under $1,640,000,000 earning it the number one spot for the year.

For a zombie movie to make it like this, everyone involved had to have done everything right. Matt Damon’s splendid return to the big screen after a yearlong absence stars him in the role of Kurt Donovan, a struggling single father of two who gets caught up in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. Charlize Theron stars alongside Damon in her biggest role since The Italian Job as a waitress at a local restaurant whose quick wits and never-say-die attitude help her escape an attack in her own apartment. She later unites to help keep Donovan and his family alive as they are seemingly the only uninfected humans left in their small Massachusetts town. This movie, though action packed and full of thrills, is not without heartbreak when younger waitress Jamie, played by Kristen Stewart, is infected and turned into one of The Masses, the name for the collective group of zombies. These fast, terrifying, and ultimately deadly creatures kill without a second thought, thus forcing Damon’s character to kill his own daughter with a shotgun blast to the head.

As skeptics looked on for the B movie aspects to this film, others flocked to see what everyone has dubbed “the best zombie film in history” and “what George Romero envisioned zombies would be”. As the film gains more and more praise each day, most of the credit must be given to Sam Raimi, who has directed this, his first blockbuster since Spider-Man 3.

“We all worked really hard to put this thing together. I oversaw this project from the earliest of stages whether it was the writing or casting. It needed to be perfect and it was by the end. It is something we are all very proud of.” Raimi said on the red carpet at the premiere in April. When asked what was next for him and whether or not he had plans to return to the Spider-Man franchise that gained him critical acclaim back in 2002, he responded by saying, “Well the way things are going with this one I might not have to…”

Later that week it was announced that Raimi sold the rights to his Marvel superhero trilogy. Paramount Pictures has begun the search for a new director for the fourth installment, slated for release in summer 2012.

A New Face

Originally, this blog was for my short stories literature class during my first semester of college. It has served its purpose as such, but I can't bear to part with such a terrific name. Therefore, this is going to be my new blog for drabbles, philosophical thoughts, and any random musings that pour out of my head. I'm planning on keeping my fiction on my fiction blog--gipsyfingers.blogspot.com--but this will be my nonfiction works. Not all of it will be formal...I imagine most of the posts will be nothing more than strings of thoughts that pour out of my head. I don't know how often I'm going to update, or when, but I'm determined to keep this particular blog alive.

Wish me luck!