Grandma On Doom: "It's A Laugh Riot!"

Grandma and I hung our heads in shame low enough to see the popcorn on the sticky floor of the theater in Aurora yesterday as we paid the matinee price for the movie "Doom." The $10 could have gone to Unicef or an alcoholic looking for change; something better. Grandma knew it was a video game movie, she knew it would suck, so her expectations of the flick couldn't possibly lead to disappointment.

The trailers weren't very blockbuster, although we both want to see "Jarhead" when it comes out. The advert for the Adam Sandler directed "Grandma's Boy" made us squirm nervously a bit, but Grandma laughed. I had my Skittles, a bucket of butter saturated popcorn and a big ol' Mr. Pibb as Grandma crunched down on her own saltless and bland bag of popcorn (I don't know what she sees in it) and Diet Coke, ready for some full on movie suckage.

So what did we learn? We discovered that The Rock is actually a BFG whore, Pinky is a camper (although I was glad to see an actor from one of the greatest movies of my generation, "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" still doing things, albeit graphically handicapped and named after the psychopath from "The Wall") and our perception of the end of all the Doom games have been greatly distorted.

After the movie I asked Grandma what she thought. She had this to say:

"It was hilarious! It was a really, very funny movie! Did it suck? Yes. But it was still funny."

That's about as good a review Grandma is going to give for a video game movie, so I suppose you could take that as a recommendation.

I liked it until the end, but that's only because it didn't have the same buildup of tension with the full out release of... well, DOOM that I was expecting. It was a very James Cameronesque "Aliens" type of cinema, only with much better close-ups with the classic horror movie cliche:

[long, drawn out shot of men walking looking for something with eerie music followed by absolute silence]
[something pops out with loud screeching noise]
"AAHHH!!!! HOLY FUCK!! WHAT WAS THAT??"
[small, cute, furry animal reveals itself]
"Oh well, that's a relief"
[large, horrific monster jumps out and kills said character]
[repeat]

Not that there is anything wrong with that, it works when done well. I don't know, I guess it's a mixed final opinion of the movie "Doom." It could have been a lot worse. It could have been Resident Evil. Grandma didn't "hate" it, and that's a lot more than I expected. I think she's just jazzed they didn't try to make a movie adaptation of "Lumines."