Cautiva

This is an Argentinean film about a 15-year-old girl, Christina who goes in for a routine blood test and the doctors find something they don’t go public with right away. She has a pretty frank discussion with her mother about having kids and her mother is pretty weirded out by the questioning – you might think because of the girl’s age, but you’d be wrong. The students in Christina’s school are studying how a bill becomes a low in the United States, and one of them gets belligerent about the power the president has to pardon criminals. We find out this girl’s parents “disappeared” due to the fact they were leftist supporters – only some of her friends know what happened. And now the girl has been taken out of the school. One day, Christina gets called to the school office where there are government people waiting to take her to a judge. She finds out her parents aren’t really her parents and also finds out her name and birthday aren’t what she thought, either. It’s a little hard to take, obviously. She is sent to live with her biological grandmother in a strange house since her grandmother has been searching for her since she was born. While at school volleyball practice, Christina runs into the girl who disappeared from her school and they have an uncomfortable discussion while naked in the shower. They decide to try to track down as much information about their parents as possible. They were both born in clandestine political prisons and Christina finds out more about her adoptive family and her biological family than she had wanted to. She doesn’t find out where they’re at currently, and then the movie ends. It was very anti-climactic. It just fizzled at the end. There’s very good acting in it, and it looks like it’s going to be a great plot, and then it just doesn’t go anywhere. Very disappointing ending to a decent foreign film.

Sherlock Holmes

Despite some confusion surrounding the name of this film, it is not about a certain adult film star’s younger lesser talented brother. It’s about Sherlock Holmes, the world greatest detective and his sidekick, Dr. Watson. They solve a variety of crimes thanks to the amazing gift of combining minute pieces of information/evidence together into a story. This film iteration of the literary series stars Robert Downey Jr. playing Holmes and Jude Law playing Watson. Holmes and Watson capture an occult-dabbling big-shot named Blackwood. After Blackwood is executed, a groundskeeper claims to have seen him rise from the dead. Blackwood’s reputation with the occult has people flipped out when he keeps popping up. Blackwood tries to take control over parliament by rigging up some sort of chemical weapon and trying to pass it off as an occult weapon. Holmes and Watson systematically debunk all of Blackwood’s occult shenanigans and eventually kill Blackwood. It’s a fast-paced murder mystery and only a handful of obvious CGI (one of which was so outlandish I couldn’t believe they left it in the film). Otherwise, it was mostly green screen stuff in the background, which I can generally deal with. The film ends with an obvious set-up for a sequel as Holmes and Watson received what will lead to their next case. The film was well-acted and of course Robert Downey Jr. is hot and shirtless in a couple scenes. Watson doesn’t play a bumbling sidekick, he plays a very competent and hilarious partner in mystery-solving. It’s not an amazing film, but it was pretty good.

The Mutant Chronicles

There’s a machine that changes men into mutants and it’s buried under the earth and its secret is protected by a secret cult. It’s been around since the medieval times, but has lasted through the year 2707, when four corporations rule the world. They’re all at war with each other, but the battle between “Capitol” and “Bauhaus” is the most extreme right now in what used to be Europe. Out of nowhere, these random zombie–like mutant pop out of the ground and start cleaning house on both sides. Apparently, war broke the seal and awakened the machine. The mutants take civilians and military people to the machine and it changes them into a bunch more mutants. Ron Perlman, as Brother Samuel, asks the leader of the cult (John Malkovich) for a small team of people to go destroy the machine. Samuel pulls together soldiers from each of the four corporations to be the fighting unit, including Thomas Jane (from the Punisher) as Mitch Hunter. The Mutant Chronicles are a prophecy/guidebook to how the machine can be shut off. The team is instructed in how to destroy the machine and how to fight the zombie mutants (which includes swords), and then sent off to destroy the machine. Most of the people on the mission are killed by the mutants, but Mitch keeps going and brings as many pieces of the Chronicles as he can scrap together. He gets captured by the machine and half turned into a mutant. Then he grabs a couple of injured soldiers and proceeds to try to blow up the machine, which turns out to be a giant space ship and launches into space. Who writes this stuff?

For being 2707, the weapons are surprisingly 1950-ish. A lot of heavy iron and oddly, what appears to be steam-powered stuff. Really? It’s some sort of steampunked WWI combined with Alien and with a splash of Sin City thrown in. I still can’t figure out why the mutants seemed to be pieced together with bits of metal band-aids and such. The CGI in the film is really bad, not tear-wrenchingly terrible, but it’s still pretty obviously low-budget and painful. Almost as bad as Megafault, but that one still wins the prize for the worst of all time.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

This film takes place during World War II in Germany. A young boy comes home from school to find his family is planning for a dinner party and discussing moving to the countryside since their dad got a promotion. The young boy, Bruno, isn’t pleased about the move since he loves the house they’re in and all his friends. The family’s new home is a bid drab and gloomy and not at all warm and inviting like their last home – more of a walled compound than a home. It’s also in the middle of freakin nowhere in the countryside. Bruno can see a farm from his window with a bunch of children. He says the kids are a bit strange, since they all wear pajamas. He asks his mom if he can play with the children, and when she finds out what their “pajamas” are, she freaks out a little bit. The father tries to explain who the farmers are by saying those are not people, and that he should not play with the children on the farm. While Bruno explores, he comes across a kid in striped pajamas on the other side of a fence. Bruno doesn’t understand what’s going on with the whole concentration camp situation, so he thinks this is just another kid playing. Bruno begins to understand some of what his tutor and sister and father are teaching him about Jews. But not enough. He arranges to have the little boy bring him some of the pajamas and a hat to sneak him into the camp. The little boy can’t find his father and Bruno wants to help him out. Bruno digs under the fence and gets into the camp dressed as a prisoner. Things don’t go well for Bruno or the other little boy, or for a lot of Jewish people during World War II. I won’t ruin the ending, but it’s not bunnies and flowers. This film is extremely well done and is very touching. The photography is great and the acting is superb. The movie implies a lot without showing the horrors of the holocaust and shows how children are brought up in the culture without knowing they are being brainwashed. Yes, you have to overlook the fact that everyone has British accents in Germany, but that’s easy to do, right? It’s a very depressing movie, but it’s still quite good.

Step Brothers

Some people hate Will Farrell, and some people wish they could hate Will Farrell, but can’t. I’m in the latter group. This film is about two single parents that get combined (thankfully, Mary Steenburgen is the smokin’ hot mom, so SCORE for me) and two adult children living at home are now forced to live with each other. Yes, Will Farrell acts like an overgrown idiot kid (like most of his movies), and it always comes across as moronic, but he does string enough one liners together that it passes for comedy. While the fight scenes between the two step brothers are moronic, there are some classic moments in many of them. I will say that singing in any film ruins it for me, especially when people sing Guns N Roses songs as operatic barbershop quartet idiocy – this film does have that, so be warned. Farrell’s biological brother stops by for a visit and is a pompous ass to everyone, and ends up winning over the new dad. Farrell’s brother dares the step brothers to punch him and John C. Reilly socks him right in the face. Farrell and Reilly become best friends. The step brothers go job hunting (as a team), which fails miserably, and they decide to go into business together and start an entertainment company. All kinds of things go poorly and they’re forced to move out of their parents’ house (because they caused their divorce) and get real jobs. The parents eventually get back together and everyone lives happily ever after. It’s a ridiculous movie, and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny except for a handful of one liners, especially the line about Kobayashi. Those one liners are classic, but seriously, it’s probably not worth the 1:45 you have to invest in the film to get them.

Gomorrah

This Italian film opens with a bunch of guys getting tanned and manicured together. Two guys pull guns and start blasting the other guys, spraying blood all over the salon. There are multiple local crime bosses, the Camorra, who take a fee on what people make. They get money from drug dealers, prostitutes, old people, whoever. That's how things operate in this area, I guess. Two local small-time kid drug runners hold up a larger operation and steal their drugs. Their local crime boss isn’t too happy about it, so these two kids think they’ll set up their own shop and be the bosses. The two wanna-be crime bosses steal some guns and go practice shooting in their funderoo’s at a lake – still not sure what that’s all about. The kids in this apartment complex are all in training to be runners and lackeys for the crime bosses. They run errands and get shot while wearing flak jackets and such to prove their manhood. Some friends end up being paired with different crime bosses and are forced to split their friendships over turf. There are all kinds of shootings in the apartment complex and some of the kids are forced into doing the dirty work. There are two side stories in the film as well: a cartel who disposes of toxic waste and also a tailor who sells his services to the Chinese. These things are unrelated to the main plot, but since the Camorra has their hand in these industries, I guess the directors felt they needed to include them in some way. I think this is sort of an expose on the Camorra, the mafia in Scampia – one of the largest drug trafficking areas in Italy. It’s pretty brutal, but it really doesn’t have much of a linear plot. It’s an interesting film, but really doesn’t have much plot to grasp onto. It’s not an uplifting film, since there’s a lot of shooting, including two of the main characters, but it is enlightening. It just kind of left me hanging.

Megafault

Since I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie with Brittany Murphy in it, I felt I owed it to her legacy to watch one of her films. This SyFy channel-appropriate movie is about earthquakes ripping through the country across faultlines and swallowing whole cities. The feds send in seismologists to research it and they don’t get very far. Brittany Murphy is one of those experts. The film starts with an incredibly bad CGI mining blast scene and gets worse from there. I HATE watching films where I yell bullshit in the first minute of a film. I also realize I am not a fan of Brittany Murphy. I also heard there were a couple of scenes in the film shot in Davenport, IA (which I grew up near) – which is true since one of the first scenes was shot at the RiverCenter in D-port. And, as it turns out, the rest of the film’s scenes are shot in the Quad Cities and LeClaire, IA (despite the city names they put on the screen). And now that I know this, I’m embarrassed to be from there. Whether it's Lexington or Aspen, you'll find a Major Art and Hobby Store on the corner of 2nd and Perry, only wearing different clothes so you know it's cold - are viewers REALLY that stupid? All of the cities filmed get painfully and fake-ly sucked into the center of the earth. It’s absolutely ridiculous that someone would try to pass these scenes off as acceptable special effects. It’s probably the worst special effects I’ve seen in a Hollywood production. Yes, I was yelling at the screen, in fact. Loudly. Actually, I’m pounding out the letters on the keyboard as I type this. I really need to get this CGI-rage under control. Or maybe the film makers in Hollywood need to get their CGI shit together. Maybe Eriq LaSalle should get his shit together as well, since he was more believable in the Soul Glow commercials he did in Coming to America. The seismologist team decides to shoot a magic laser to freeze the underground water and create a second earthquake to cancel out the first earthquake. Then if things go bad, the Grand Canyon will absorb the second earthquake and stop it from spreading like the initial earthquake. This is the most ridiculous plot ever. And I’ve seen better special effects on an 8mm home film camera from the 1950s. I’m done with this review, or I’m going to have an aneurysm.

Shut Up & Shoot Me

This is a Polish film that starts with a guy who appears to be a butcher, a mailman, a pooper scooper, and a bartender – I think this is the comedy part (Oh, those crazy Pollacks!!!). The real plot is actually about a British couple spending time in Prague and worrying over whether he turned off the iron in their room before they left. A statue falls from a building while they are walking and crushes the wife – seriously, DESTROYS her. As he’s in his flat later, he tries to electrocute himself with said iron after that, and it doesn’t go well. The guy from the beginning of the film shows up to drive him to the morgue as he’s crawling out of the bathtub. He receives an urn full of his wife’s ashes and he’s a bit mentally frazzled. The husband is still suicidal and wants to hire the guy from the beginning of the film to kill him. They go to a secluded field and the husband tries to pay the guy with a credit card – yes, to kill him. The driver takes him to an artillery field and sits him in the middle of it. There are shells exploding all around and none of them kill the husband. So the husband has to hitchhike to a hotel. The husband tracks down the beginning guy and asks him to finish the job – so the beginning guy talks the husband into jumping off the roof of the apartment building. The husband won’t jump, so he ends up sleeping on the couch at the beginning guy’s flat. The beginning guy’s plan is to have other people kill the husband and they get into all kinds of ridiculous situations in which the husband still ends up not dying. They accidentally kill a mobster’s girlfriend in a parking garage and through the surveillance tape, the mobster finds out who these guys are. The two guys try to dispose of the mobster’s girlfriend and aren’t having any luck with that. A couple of other people end up dead as well.

The film almost became one of those “buddy movies” where zany things happen, only this is more depressing – so maybe it’s more hilarious at the same time. This film amused me, but it wasn’t one I’d rave about. Surprisingly, this film had about 413 times more plot than most foreign films. Go Poland! I did chuckle a couple of times at how ridiculous it was, so maybe it is worth a look.

Stuck

A nursing home nurse is being considered for a job promotion due to the crap (literally) she deals with every day at work. Her boss tricks her into coming into work on her day off and the nurse isn’t happy about it. This film is about the rough day this nurse is about to have. This film is supposedly based on a true story about a woman in Texas to which this happened - I'm not sure I'm buying it based on this film.

Across town, this other guy can’t pay his rent due to his recent job loss, so the landlord kicks him out of his apartment. The landlord is kind of a douche and tells the guy he can’t take any of his belongings with him when he’s throwing him out. There’s a scuffle in an upstairs apartment and the evicted guy grabs his belongings and runs for it. The guy has an appointment with an employment agency to find a job, but it doesn’t go well. He ends up sleeping in a park that night. The nurse is at a club on some drugs and goes home slightly tipsy. She’s on her cell phone when she runs the homeless guy over and he sticks in her windshield, bleeding all over the inside of her car. She freaks out and keeps on driving, through the city and to her house. She parks her car in the garage to hide it and when she reaches for her purse, the guy moves and asks for help. She freaks out and runs inside the house to her drug dealer boyfriend. She tells him she hit a homeless person and he tells her not to worry about it. Then they end up having sex and she keeps seeing the homeless guy’s face on her boyfriend’s while he’s “getting’ up in them guts.”

The next morning, she goes out to the garage and the guy is still alive and still stuck in her windshield. She remembers she’s supposed to be at work, so she calls as cab. As she’s going out to the cab, the homeless guy honks the horn on her car. She whacks him in the head with a board to make him stop. When he wakes up, he uses her cell phone to call 911, but the battery dies in the cell phone. He continues to honk the horn and a boy hears him and goes and gets his mom. The kid’s dad says he doesn’t want the police around or they could get into big trouble. Unfortunately, the father won’t let the mother and kid call for help.

The guy climbs all the way into the car, grabs a bottle of water, and fashions a splint out of the board she smacked him with. The nurse gets off work and goes to her drug dealer/bf’s house where she finds another woman in his bed. She whips the new girl’s ass (including hitting her with a frying pan) and throws her out into the hallway. She gets over the infidelity pretty quickly and gets the bf to help her with the guy she hit the previous night. He suggests calling 911 – hilarious. The bf ties the guy up so he doesn’t keep crawling around everywhere. They tie him up and sack him up in garbage bags, right when the nurse’s co-worker walks into the garage to check things out. The couple comes up with a story about hitting a deer, since she saw the car and all the blood. The co-worker had come by to tell the nurse that her boss knows she left work and things are turning south at work.

Meanwhile a neighbor is walking his dog and the dog gets into the garage and gets blood all over her fur, yet the owner thinks it’s food or ketchup or something and takes the dog back home. The couple tries to figure out how to dispose of this guy. The homeless guy unties himself and is ready for the bf to come back. The bf pulls a gun on the guy and it goes off right as the homeless guy stabs the bf in the eye with a ball point pen and kills him. The nurse comes back out to the garage and finds her dead boyfriend and the guy bashes her in the head with the car door. And for a guy with two compound fractures, he’s walking pretty well, using the broom as a crutch – weird.

He gets out into the street and pulls the gun on the nurse. The gun goes off and she smacks him in the head with the shovel. Apparently, no one sees her dragging his body back into the garage. She dumps gasoline all over the bodies of her bf and the homeless guy and argues with the homeless guy. He starts the car and then runs the nurse over inside the garage. He breaks both her legs and she’s now laying on the hood of her own car. She tries to shoot the homeless guy with the gun and the sparks from the gun end up lighting all the gasoline she’s poured all over the place. The homeless guy manages to get the garage door open and crawls to safety.

First off, she’s a nurse, so she’s not an idiot. Secondly, he’s got compound fractures in both legs with bones sticking out, and he’s been sliced open badly by the windshield he’s sticking out of, but he isn’t dead. Thirdly, the neighbor kid and mother would have called 911 no matter what if they saw a guy sticking out of a windshield moving around. Fourth, you don’t just whip together a splint out of a board and a plastic bag, especially when you’ve got bones sticking out of your pantleg. Fifth, the nurse got over the whore much quicker than I expected. This list goes on and on and continues to get more and more ridiculous. This movie is so far beyond the scope of reality that it’s not funny or even entertaining. It’s just annoying and implausible. The acting in the film is decent, so I’ve got no complaints there, just with the writing. Don’t waste your time with this film.

Ninja Assassins

This is a modern day ninja movie that takes place in Berlin of all places. Aside from the unusual setting, the movie explains why after thousands of years, people who look into what ninjas are doing end up dead. The film is made by the same people that did the Matrix, and it seemed pretty clear in the effects throughout this film. In fact, I described this movie to my friend as a combination of the Matrix, Ghost, and the 1980’s television series “The Master”. (Which is also appropriate since Sho Kosugi is one of the main characters in the film and was in the 1980’s television series.) Two Interpol agents begin looking into some mysterious deaths they think are paid assassinations. All signs point to a group of assassins who are infants stolen as children and put into ninja training. The ninjas try taking out the two people investigating them and come very close, if it weren’t for the meddling of one of their former students who is trying to help one of the Interpol agents. They never really say why he’s helping her, other than she has a “special heart”, which is absolutely asinine. But whatever. The film is action packed with lots of explosions, TONS of ninja stars, swords, and scorpion whips. There are some really awesome blood spurting scenes and most of the special effects are top-notch, especially the parts where limbs and whole bodies are being chopped in half. There were a couple of spots I (quietly) yelled bullshit in – the fact that the Interpol operatives managed to get a crap ton of Humvees up on a remote mountain ninja training camp without being heard even though there are no roads – this was where my friend TheDoctor yelled “AMURKA!!!” in the theater – it was classic. There were a couple of other ones aside from that, but that was the funniest one. I’m not a huge fan of modern day martial arts movies – I’m more of an old school guy, but I make exceptions. This film is good, but not great. I’m glad I saw it, but I really thought it would be better than it was. One thing this movie will do is make martial arts movies more accessible to the masses of people that loved the Matrix. So I guess it’s a good thing, after all. And yeah, I’ll probably add it to my vast collection of martial arts DVDs when it comes out.

Pirate Radio

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this film, originally titled "The Boat That Rocked". I saw the previews for it and some clips with interviews with the actors and a huge part of me wanted to see it. And then there were parts with ridiculous clothing and dancing and singing on a ship – which 1000% turned me off. Thankfully, the singing and dancing were reserved for very specific and (almost) appropriate parts of the film. This film is about a time in British history where pop and rock music simply were not played on the radio. There were boats anchored off shore that would broadcast music people actually liked and were technically doing nothing illegal. The government hated these stations for giving kids a rebellious attitude, but the only thing the government could do was create BS laws that would make what these ships were doing crimes of the highest order. The story line of this particular adventure is a young kid gets sent to live on the ship by his mother (his godfather is the ship’s captain), because he isn’t adjusting well socially and he’s been caught smoking a bit of the herb. The ship’s residents – all on-air-disc jockeys – take him under their wing and show him a bit about life and a bit about radio. They have huge outlandish parties on board where they ship women from the shore to the boat and do wild things to them and then send them back home. The government passes a law to make paid advertising illegal on these ships and this only slows down the ship’s team. The government passes an additional law saying the radio signals endanger merchant marine’s lives. The government then sends out an armada of boats to shut down the ship, but the ship sets sail on the lamb still broadcasting… until it hits something and starts to sink. Then the government won’t step in to help save the lives of the radio people. The film is really well done. Despite some super shaky hand-held footage aboard a rocky boat at the beginning, they eventually find a tripod that helped my nausea. Philip Seymour Hoffman is brilliant in this film as is the guy from Shaun of the Dead (Nick Frost). You actually grow to love these characters and their off-beat sense of humor and camaraderie. I would recommend this film to people who grew up listening to the radio, people who are old enough to remember the 60’s (which I am not, just so you know), or people who have roots in radio or broadcast (which I do, consequently). Apparently, the film is historically-based (still fictional, so not historically accurate), so it should tell you something about how far the media has come in the last 40 or 50 years.

Murder Party

Random guy is walking down the street on Halloween night and steps on an invitation to a Murder Party. He has just rented some videos to watch that evening, and since he has nothing else to do, decides to go to the party. He dresses up as a cardboard knight and heads out. He shows up at this warehouse where these costumed people are waiting to kidnap him, torture him, and kill him. One of the costumed girls falls over and impales her head accidentally. Should we be laughing? Yes, I thought it was hilarious. Turns out the costumed people are all artists who are vying for some artistic grant money by coming up with the best idea for killing the random guy who showed up. Alexander, the grant money guy shows up and talks to them about challenging themselves to reach for the stars when coming up with ideas for killing this guy. They all sit around and inject themselves with truth serum and just spill their secrets – kind of hilarious also. Then things start to go terribly wrong. People start killing each other in brutal ways. The murder party expands into another art party nearby where more people get killed. The knight eventually escapes and makes his way home. Even though there was a definite climax, it was kind of anti-climactic. Not a fantastic movie and I think the script writing could have been more funny during most of it, but it was still fairly amusing. I did laugh at a couple of inappropriate times, however. That's got to mean something, right?

Chinese Hercules

This is a traditional kung-fu film in which an orphan kung-fu student accidentally kills a guy in a fight over a girl and has to run for his life and also vows never to fight again. He leaves the area and gets a job hauling bags of rice from ships to a storage facility. He tries to be a good person, but every time he does, the bad guys beat him down (sometimes physically). This evil syndicate closes down the pier he works on and all of his coworkers fight back without effect. The girl he fought over shows up randomly to bring a message to the runaway, and tries to get him to fight back for his coworkers. This huge muscle guy works for the syndicate as a thug and can only say a few hilarious words like “We kill them. We dump them.” Classic. The girl the runaway fought for enrages him enough that he goes after the muscle guy in an epic battle. The film is not the greatest sound or visual quality, and the plot is a tad weak in that I’m not sure if the huge muscle guy is Hercules or the fighter runaway guy. And if it is the muscle guy, he only has about 10 minutes of screen time – but I guess it is a better title than “scared runaway kung-fu guy.” It’s one that most people can pass on, but since I’m a fan of kung-fu movies in general, I wasn’t going to pass this one up. It’s forgettable.

Awake

In this movie, a rich NY kid has a bad heart and undergoes a heart transplant. However, when they give him the general anesthesia, he doesn’t actually go under. His vital signs all read as if he’s unconscious, but he hears and feels everything the doctor is doing. To keep his mind off of the procedures and pain, he focuses his attention on his new wife, but his thoughts drift wildly the whole time. Turns out his surgeon is in some sort of plot to kill the kid because he’s rich. Oh wait, his brand new wife, Jessica Alba, is in on it too. But they kill him on the table by saying his heart was rejected (by the way, this part of the movie is super graphic – just a warning). He’s still on the breathing machine, so he’s technically alive when another surgeon shows up and steals the heart from the rich kid’s mom, in a super unexpected turn of events. The film is an interesting concept, but is not exciting by any stretch. I could have lived without seeing this one. They really could have made this one a bit more suspenseful.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

This is part two of the 4-book teen series about vampires. The film picks up where it left off after the first film – hot high school girl, Bella, is in love with attractive pale and creepy Edward, a vampire. Edward’s family are all vampires and live in the woods of the Pacific Northwestern United States because the sun doesn’t come out there. People are getting suspicious of Edward’s family not aging, so it’s time for them to move, and leave Bella behind. To kill time, Bella hangs with local beautiful Native American boy, Jacob. Bella likes Jacob, but not as much as he likes her. Jacob turns into a werewolf, whose job it is to protect people against vampires (more specifically, the vampires who are after Edward’s family and now Bella – even more specifically, extremely hot Victoria). The only time Bella can see Edward in her head is when she does something dangerous, so she’s gets all wreckless-angst-ridden teen and he pops up every once in a while to wag his finger not to do whatever she’s doing. Edward sees Bella jump off a cliff, but doesn’t realize it’s just for fun, so thinking she’s dead, he goes to the council of vampires and asks to kill himself. She has to run to Italy to stop it, with the help of Edwards smokin’ hot sister. Yes, you have to describe these people as hot/attractive because there are no ugly people in these films (especially the females).

Despite all my friends raging on about how these films teach bad morals to teen girls (like all films), and despite there being far too much awful CGI for my taste, and despite not being a teen girl nor a ghey hair dresser like the rest of the people in my group, and despite not having read the books, I went to see this film. It does have a couple really laughable scenes (and everyone laughed – not in a good way) in which there’s happy music playing and they’re running through the forest and also when Jacob would take his shirt off at every opportunity, and that Edward has terrible eye contact for some reason, and that they steal a Porsche in Italy even though they make Lamborghinis and Ferraris there.

The movie itself is fine, plotwise. I could care less if it’s teaching underage girls that dating older creepy guys is ok or that love is pain and the only kind of love that is acceptable. Whatever. But there are enough scenes where you yell “bullshit” that it’s leaning more towards NOT good than good. Unless you are a teen girl or a hairdresser with the ghey, I wouldn’t spend the money on this film. You’ll be either disappointed in the film or angry at yourself for killing the time.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

This is a Romanian film about a college girl and her friend who hire a guy to do an abortion on one of them. They rent a hotel room, but it’s the wrong one, there’s all kinds of security and the guy doing the abortion is not happy about it. He explains the procedure, and for payment, he sleeps with both girls – those are his terms since what he’s doing could send him to jail for a long time. The friend has to go meet her boyfriend’s family for his mom’s birthday party while the pregnant girl waits for the procedure to take effect. The friend fights with her boyfriend at the party because she’s stressed out about the whole procedure –somehow this is all his fault. Then she goes back to the hotel to check on her friend. The procedure went through without a hitch and the movie pretty much ends there. It’s a two hour movie yet nothing really happens. There’s neither tension nor resolution in this film. Romania needs to watch a couple Die Hard films or something to get an idea of what “plot” is (even if the plot is terrible… haha). This movie is boring, even for a foreign film. I was really surprised nothing more happened in this movie. There were parts in this film that *I* would have written in some action, but nope – point A to point B on lithium – no peaks, valleys, or twists.

Hank and Mike

This Canadian indie comedy opens with a guy in a pink bunny suit sitting on the couch watching scrambled porn on TV. Best opening ever. It’s Easter Sunday and Hank and Mike are Easter Bunnies. I don’t mean dressed as Easter Bunnies, I mean the ARE Easter Bunnies. They sneak into people’s houses and put eggs in people’s stuff on Easter .Seriously. There’s a big corporation that deals in Easter Bunnies and they’re trying to turn Easter into a tier-1 holiday like xmas and Hanukkah. It’s odd, but a hilarious concept for a movie. Apparently, Hank and Mike missed a house this year, so they get written up. Not just written up, they get full blown fired. They go out and get all sloppy drunk, bang some whores, and get rowdy. The two bunnies go to the unemployment office to get jobs, and they are forced to go through a bunch of hilarious temp jobs. The evil bunny has dreams about blowing up kids with bomb filled Easter eggs and the good bunny ends up on the streets. Then, they go on a mission to get their jobs back. It’s an odd little film, but it’s an interesting perspective. It might be just weird enough to be amusing. Not good, by any stretch, but weird.

Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day

I had really high hopes for this movie, despite the whole “sequel is never as good as the original" curse. I thought, same people, same sort of story line, what could go wrong? The answer? Everything.

Before I start complaining, I’ll give you the plot. Someone kills a priest in a catholic church and puts pennies over his dead eyes to indicate it’s the “Saints” (the brothers/father team of Irish guys who kill bad guys while reciting scripture). The killer is drawing the Saints out of hiding by framing them, which is successful. The FBI shows up and helps with the investigation, along with the same three crooked cops that helped the saints the first time around. Shoot up half a ton of bad Italian mobsters and you’ve got your plot – complete with an obvious set up for a third film in the series.

Do yourself a huge favor and skip this film, I can’t explain the depths of terrible acting, terrible script, terrible jokes, terrible CGI, terrible backgrounds, terrible sets, terrible music, terrible hand gestures, terrible wind machines, terrible flashbacks, terrible dialogue, terrible gun-vests, a terrible whorey lead FBI agent (Julie Benz) who has terrible shoes, a terrible walk, a terrible gun belt, and a terrible accent. The bad guy at the end, “The Roman”, was played by Peter Fonda with the worst Italian accent I’ve ever heard - on top of which, the scene is confusing and you don't know if the saints are killing bad guys or FBI agents (Hello, Clarity? You're busy right now? Ahh we don't need you for this scene. It's fine.). There’s a terrible dream sequence with David Della Rocco who comes back from the dead and spouts ridiculous lines that make no sense. Duffy tried to add in comedy that wasn’t needed, nor was appropriate, nor was funny! And why did the saints need a sidekick in this film? Cause he’s “loco”? It’s just asinine.

I would have yelled “bull shit” sooooo many times during this film if I were at home, but I wasn’t drunk in the theater unlike the person who stood up and egged Billy Connolly on whenever he would show up. I’m just as angry now after writing this review as I was after watching this film in the theater. Complete waste of time and now I’m embarrassed for having wanted to see it.

Frontier(s)

French film about people rioting during an election. This band of rowdies drops off one of their boys at the hospital because he’s been shot, then they head for the hills. Two of them stop in a small town and grab a hotel room. The boys get attacked and almost killed, chased, and their car falls a hundred feet into a mineshaft. Meanwhile their friends, a broken up couple, show up at the hotel and ask about them. The people at the first hotel take the friends to a second hotel where stuff gets really weird, including seeing one of their boys strung up by hooks in his feet and being bled. As it turns out, it’s one big creepy white supremacist family killing a LOT of people who stop in for a visit. Two of the people get chained up, while the other one gets trapped in a steam room and cooked until his skin peels off. It’s kind of crazy, but for what really should be an intense movie, it’s just kind of droll. The girl that escape from being chained up gets recaptured and forced to be a baby machine in the family. She gets her revenge though.

The screaming in this film doesn’t seem all that realistic, nor did the acting. I really think this movie had potential to have the whole Saw/Hostel intensity to it, but frankly I got bored. This is one to overlook if you come across it. Not only are there a severe lack of boobs for a French movie, but the whole thing seemed kind of pointless, especially with the movie ending with a radio station announcing a new president for France, which doesn’t mean anything to anyone since there’s carnage all over this farm in rural France.

Special

Michael Rapaport is a meter guy named Les who is participating in a pharmaceutical study that’s unexplained at the beginning of the film. He is keeping a journal so he can document the effects of this drug. He hangs out in a comic book shop during his breaks at work, even though he knows he’s too old to read comics.

Les thinks the pills are making him levitate, but the doctor who’s in charge of the study thinks Les is just losing his mind. The pills are supposed to suppress self-doubt, as we find out. But Les thinks it has unleashed powers he’s always had inside him: like reading minds, walking through walls, and levitation/flying. But what he really wants to do is fight crime. He begins absolutely laying people out in kwikie marts who he thinks are shoplifting. Hysterical. He struts around the city wearing a spray-painted leather jacket and pants with a logo on the back that says “special”. The logo is from the drug company t-shirt given to him for doing the trial. When he starts becoming a nuisance, the company execs try to bring him in quietly to avoid publicity. He’s freaking out bad at this point. He is still very convinced of his powers, so the drug company has to take him out. You generally feel awful for the guy. Nothing is going right for him, but clearly, in his head, everything is splendid with his new powers. Les is mentally challenged and you cheer him on, in a weird way, but you know he needs serious medical help.

Rapaport is really a good actor in this film. I usually like his stuff, so I’m biased, but, despite the fact he’s not going to win an Oscar for this film, he pulls it off quite well. Enjoyable film, but not a “fun” film by any stretch.

Quarantine

An L.A. television journalist is doing a piece on firefighters. She interviews all the people at the station and gets some good footage. The station gets a call and she and her camera guy hop on the fire truck and head to the emergency. When they get to the emergency, it’s a crazy lady covered in blood. She attacks one of the firefighters and things start to go South REALLY quickly. There’s some threat of a biological or chemical agent, so the authorities quickly quarantine the building, with civilians, firefighters, and policemen inside. Yup, zombies. I’m still questioning the speed with which the police and CDC barricaded the building from the outside, but you’ll run into some reality stretching in most zombie films. Deal with it.

There’s an amazing scene where the camera guy kills a zombie with the camera. Brilliant. And since this is shot from a journalist cameraman’s perspective, most of the film is very motion-sickness-inducing. There’s lots of screaming, running, axe-chopping, weird frantic lighting, crying, blood splattering, rabid dogs and children, scary night-vision camera work, AWESOME jump scenes and really good special effects. And not to ruin the ending, but Rocky doesn’t win. I liked this film a lot more than I expected to. I heard there was some CGI in it, but it was well done enough not to anger me, in fact, I didn’t even notice there was any. If you like fast paced zombie flicks, this one is a keeper.

Careful

This film is like a narrated silent film (yes, I know this means it is NOT silent, but maybe more like an old-timey grainy German film) where the narrator warns people not to do anything adventurous or they will die. Don’t hold your baby while wearing a brooch or you could poke their eye out and will be forced to wear an eye patch – hilarious. Also, cut the vocal cords out of your farm animals if you live in the mountains so they can’t cause avalanches. During what I assume is the plot, one of the townspeople in the alpine village Tolzbad, Johann, proposes to a girl and his family celebrates by dancing to music, after they cover the windows with sheepskin to keep the volume down. That night, Johann has a crazy sex dream about his mother – weeeeeeird. And he keeps thinking about it – even weirder. To stop all this weird stuff he’s trying not to act out, Johann burns his own lips on a red-hot coal and then cuts his finger off. Then, he jumps off a mountain to his death. Johan’s brother gets the funeral director to sew back on the fingers to hide the fact that it was a suicide from their mother. Johann’s fiancé goes to work in the mines and his brother Grigorss hits on her. Johann’s mother then gets a marriage proposal from Grigorss’ boss, and a challenge of a duel is issued – complete with slapping of the face with gloves. Classy. However, I’ve never seen a duel where I don’t know what the objective is. It’s very off-putting. Grigorss ends up winning the duel and runs away with Johann’s fiancé to devise a plan to kill her father. Let’s see… Mother-on-son action, daughter-on-father action – what’s wrong with you, Canada?

The film was made in 1992, but shot in garish Technicolor as an old film – very crackly and grainy and with black and white printed words between scenes. The narrator’s warning is for the villagers to keep quiet, but the film is also apparently about repressing feelings, lust, and emotions. It’s very dreary, and unfortunately, a complete waste of my time. Great, now I’m feeling repressed, surly, cold, incestuous, and German. Way to wreck my evening. I’m going to need a shower.

Primer

This is an independent film about these four guys who hang out and invent some high tech gadget – they never explain what it really is. These guys are all friends, but they argue like crazy about who’s going to do what and who’s going to market this thing to whom. They sit in the garage and at the kitchen table and bicker about diagrams and prototypes. They buy parts from Walmart, and cut things off their cars and refrigerators. Two of the guys are kind of tweaking this project on their own without telling the other two. The two guys figure out a way to go back in time, in which they figure out which stocks to buy and get rich off of. They still don’t tell the other two guys. They end up making body doubles of themselves and things start to get bizarre. One guy ends up bleeding from his ear. They beat up ex-boyfriends. They kidnap each other. They both can’t write anymore – seriously, they write letters like a first grader. Apparently, things get weird when you create duplicates and triplicates of yourself – think about it, do both of your cell phones ring, or just the first one the signal finds – didn’t think about that before, did you?

The acting in the film is a little tense and rushed. People don’t actually argue as quickly and irrationally as these guys are doing. The sound doesn’t line up with the mouths and actions in this film, which is kind of amateur in my opinion. You could have at least gotten that right before going to market with this movie, right? And, word of advice from someone who has never made a movie: don’t film a scene in the middle of a loud fountain and expect to be able to hear ANYTHING at all besides water. There’s also a piano soundtrack playing between scenes that remind me of Sesame Street. With all of these flaws, this film was actually interesting to watch. Yes, it hearkens back the film Pi, in that it’s super convoluted, but enough of it makes sense, that you feel like any second it will resolve itself and everything will almost make complete sense. And of course, it doesn’t. I’m unsure whether I liked this film or not, but I’m leaning towards yes. When I go back in time myself, I’ll consider changing my mind, but in an odd way, it was well done (with some glitches).

The Orphanage

This is a movie from Spain about a husband and wife who buy a house on the coast and are renovating it to turn it into a home for mentally and physically handicapped kids. The mom grew up in this house in the orphanage that was there years ago. It’s a scary horror film with a lot of scary jump scenes and pretty suspenseful atmosphere. Even with subtitles, it’s pretty creepy and frightening. The mom and dad throw sort of an open house to show families that they’re alright people, so there’s lots of kids (and downs syndrome kids) running around with masks. Their adopted son Simon has HIV and after a fight with his mom, he disappears during the party. His mom is sure Simon has been taken by his imaginary friends who are turning out to NOT be imaginary. The mom starts finding clues to a game that Simon played when they first moved into the house. She brings in a medium to see if her son has been killed and things start to get a little trippy in the house. Her husband can’t stay in the house and gives the wife two days alone in the house to figure out what she can. You think she’s going insane, but she’s not. It gets CRAZY up in thur. This is one of the better horror films I’ve seen in a long time. I heard a faint splash about it a while back, but not much more than that. I’m really surprised. It’s a very good and suspenseful movie, with minimal bloodshed. I’m guessing the subtitles scared the mainstream horror crowd away. This is probably one you’ll want to keep the lights on for, or you’ll be jumping at the next noise your house/apartment makes, and hoping some kid in a scarecrow mask doesn’t smash your fingers in the door.

RocknRolla

A film about London’s crime-driven underworld. Crime boss Lenny is working a real estate deal with a big-time Russian mobster. Lenny controls London and thinks he is untouchable, but the Russian proves him wrong. The Russian loans Lenny a painting for luck and Lenny’s step-son steals it, even though he’s supposed to be dead. Lenny sets all of his toadies on the case and they try to track it down. In the meantime, Stella is an underhanded but talented accountant and working the books for the Russian while skimming some of the Russian’s money to The Wild Bunch, a smaller crime ring. The deal is on the verge of breaking down, and there’s all kinds of knee-breaking, torture, double-crossing, and shooting. The Russian blows a gasket and sends in these two Russian killing machines to track down the money Stella has been skimming. A ton of people end up at Lenny’s warehouse at the end of the movie for a plot twisting show down. Sound confusing? It’s actually not, and it flows well.
The film has a lot of action in it, as well as a lot of campy British humor. The acting is quite believable and you actually find yourself rooting for bad guys, which you don’t always get to do (well, maybe you do in Guy Ritchie’s films). I read a review about this film that said it completely lacked the passion and purpose of Guy Ritchie’s previous film, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Having seen both, I would agree. It’s not that it’s dead pan, but LSA2SB is fun and exciting and hilarious, and RNR is more matter-of-fact. Maybe there’s too much plot twisting and things to follow in this one. It’s a good film, but it’s considerably slower than LSA2SB – just a warning.

In Bruges

This is a film which kind of gave some mixed signals during the previews. I knew it had Colin Farrell in it, so I just assumed it would be a movie for the ladies, like a romantic comedy or something. Some of my other friends thought it was pitched as a Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels kind of film. Both were wrong. The film is kind of a depressing shoot ‘em up film set in Brussels, Belgium. Two hitmen travel to Bruges to get their mind off a bad shooting they had some days earlier where Colin shot a kid accidentally. He’s all torn up about it and his friend is trying to get him to relax and enjoy the sights and culture. He doesn’t want anything to do with it. Colin finds a girl who is running drugs and guns for some street thugs, and they eventually get tied up with a dwarf who’s filming a movie in Bruges. Eventually Colin karate chops the dwarf in a hilarious scene. Really, the movie is worth it just for the ridiculousness of it all.

In the end of the film, the guy in charge of the hitmen comes after them because the partner won’t kill Colin. The boss goes up into the bell tower to shoot the partner and finds out Colin is down below in the plaza having a drink. The boss runs down the stairs, but the partner beats him down and warns Colin to run. And run he does. They get back to his hotel and there’s a hilarious stand off. It’s actually one of the most funny parts of the film. I thought the film was both depressing and a little campy at the same time. I didn’t feel for the characters and I don’t think Colin Farrell did that good of job acting in this one. I think the partner is the better actor in this film, honestly. I’d not recommend this one, but the scenery is very beautiful (having been to Bruges, it REALLY is fantastic). Don’t be confused about what this film is about though. It’s NOT a romantic comedy.

Re-Cycle

This is a Japanese horror/suspense film about a writer who normally writes love stories, but decides to write a book about supernatural ghosts and such. While she’s working on it, she begins to see monsters and figures in the corners of her house and there are weird long strands of hair left when she sees the figure. It’s pretty suspenseful like a lot of Japanese horror films are. It will give you the heeby-jeebees if you watch it without the lights on. There’s a lot of jump scenes where things fly out of nowhere when you least expect them. It’s got zombies and mass suicides and flying ghosts chasing people. It’s like the ghosts are trying to help the author feel terror so she can write about it. A small child gets the author to follow her into this bizarre world where all kinds of weird stuff looks like it’s been cast aside and forgotten. All of the stuff is leftover toys, thoughts, ideas, and unfulfilled promises the author has experienced over her lifetime. There are zombies in her thoughts I guess, because they’re after her and trying not to let her get to “The Transit” – the only way out of this dimension. There is some pretty corny CGI in this film, but there is also some really good CGI in it. It’s pretty intense most of the time. And in typical Japanese horror film style, I enjoyed the movie up until the end, where I asked myself, “what the hell just happened?!” I think people who like suspense will like this film. It’s not the typical gore and blood spraying you sometimes see with Japanese horror films, but it does keep the adrenaline flowing.

Monster Camp

This is a documentary about people who LARP (Live Action Role Playing). These are people who don’t find Dungeons & Dragons engaging enough and feel the need to go into the woods, act out scenarios, and fight each other with padded swords until they knock each others' glasses off. Sounds cool, right? If it does, then quit reading here, because I’m about to go off.

These socially crippled (it goes soooo far beyond inept) people live in a fantasy world most of the time and can only associate with other socially crippled people when those people are pretending they’re moronic character portrayed by wearing homemade costumes hobbled together using paperclips, felt, and fake ears. They glue ridiculous eyebrows and noses onto their faces and paint their faces with grease paint to make other attempts to hide their identities in case a person with self-esteem finds them in the woods and begins mocking them openly. These poor attempts at costumes are made even more hilarious by 95% of them wearing giant glasses from the 80’s, and wearing sneakers. These people meet in the woods in various locations, are given character profiles to act out, and are set loose with magic packets filled with birdseed, and potions to supposedly heal/kill/disease/change weather, etc. They hit each other with foam-wrapped swords and yell out “5-magic” and “3-sleep” and other stupid things which mean nothing unless you’ve memorized the 250-page rule book they have created.

Many of the characters normally live in their parent’s basements and their families are interviewed, which makes the participants even more pathetic. One kid brings his nerd father, who frankly, I’m amazed is married. One nerd father brings his mildly attractive underage daughter to the LARP weekends and in real life, pays her an allowance in bullshit fake silver, golf, and copper (I would seriously be pissed about that). Another nerd (who loves to ride his ten speed wearing spandex bike shorts and a leather jacket) brings a girl to the weekend – maybe he can sense they share a common socially-moronic bond or something – and some of the other characters indicates he’s a bit of a player/ladies man – which I ASSURE you, he is NOT. These LARP people make trekkies seem suave and sophisticated and full of dignity.

I yelled at the screen sooooo much during this film. At one point, I felt like Ogre from “revenge of the Nerds” since I was screaming “NERDS!” at the television. My friend Coach and I like to play a little game called “Who Would You Let Live” in which, given the opportunity to throw a grenade into a crowd of people, you get to choose 5 people you would rescue before the grenade went off. All of these LARP people would die - and not in their fantasy world either. Seriously, this movie pissed me off to an infinite degree. Get off your World of Warcraft game, take a shower, go have a conversation with someone of the opposite sex while actually looking them in the eye, and get a job. Welcome to reality, you stupid bastards.

The Signal

This is a zombie-ish film that is kind of a combination of 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead and maybe a little bit of Pulse. There are parts of this film that I cracked up about and other parts that were pretty suspenseful and twisted. I’m still not sure what I thought I saw was really what happened, but I think that’s the whole point of the film. Mia is cheating on her husband with random guy and goes home to find people killing each other in the hallway because there’s some broadcast signal going through the televisions and radios urging people to kill. It messes with their brains so they think normally, but things get mixed up in their heads. Mia runs away and crashes her car and the boyfriend (not her husband) goes after her. There’s lots of brutal head smashing in this film and all sorts of bloody weirdness. It’s not quite as campy as some zombie films, but it’s not quite as terrifying either. Consider it a beginner zombie film. There’s only two parts of the film where I called “bullshit”. In the beginning of the film, Mia sees people brutally murdered in her apartment building, yet grabs her headphones, puts them on and walks out of the apartment building like nothing’s wrong. Then at the end of the film, the boyfriend hears her headphones from like a quarter mile away. If you can get over those two ridiculous things, you’ll find a decent film. Not amazing, but good enough to hold your attention for an hour and a half.

Teeth

This is a film about a super goody-two-shoes high school girl who actively and militantly preaches abstinence. The reason she preaches is is due to the fact that her lady parts have teeth (I’m guessing because she was raised next to a nuclear power plant that is shown in as many shots as possible). Her step brother gets his finger bitten when they’re small kids playing in the wading pool out front. All of the kids make fun of her at school because of the abstinence thing, but clearly they don’t know about her fanged ‘gyna. She gets herself a boyfriend who seems cool, but then basically assaults her. For his trouble he gets his Jansen bit off. She had a gynecologist check her out and he gets his finger bit off. Apparently, it’s only when she doesn’t want to be violated that the teeth come out. She nails this random guy that asked her out some days ago with complete success, and we do eventually get to see her nekid – which is nice. When she finds out she was part of a bet, his Jansen gets bit off as well. Here mom goes into the hospital because her step-brother ignored her screams for help. So she sleeps with him to bite his Jansen off. She does and then the dog eats it – ridiculous. It’s a better movie than I thought it would be, but it’s not fantastic. Well acted, written, and directed, but there’s a reason it didn’t make a huge splash in Hollywood.

Ping Pong Playa

This is an amusing movie about a Chinese guy that thinks he’s a basketball playa (in every sense of the word). He is a freeloader from his friends and family and lives the life I can only dream about. His brother is a famous ping pong player and his mom and dad run a ping pong shop (really). The brother and mom get in a car accident and break bones people utilize in ping pong. The basketball brother is forced to teach ping pong classes to little kids. His older brother calls him a “Yellow Fonzie” since he lives in his parents’ house – hilarious. The playa starts ringing people for money at the ping pong table with the help of his grade school students and it’s hilarious. His basketball friend breaks the reality to him that he’s not a baller and never will be. Playa decides to compete in the “Golden Cock” (seriously) tournament that his brother always wins – and his dad agrees to train him. It’s a pretty ridiculous film, but I did laugh at a couple of lines in it. It’s not terrible, and it’s better than Balls of Fury. I don’t know that I would run out and buy it, but I’m not embarrassed to say I enjoyed it.

Let The Right One In

This is a vampire movie from Sweden that isn’t what I thought it would be. I really am used to vampire films being very suspenseful with some crazy jump scenes where stuff jumps out where you don’t expect it. But this isn’t one of them. I was sort of disappointed. A little boy gets a new neighbor, a girl about his age. She ends up being a vampire, but is very matter of fact about it. Her father tries to kill people and drain their blood for her, but keeps botching the exercise and eventually lets his daughter drink his blood before he dies. The girl and the boy have a puppy love relationship and she ends up moving away. It’s got good effects (minus the CGI cat scene which is borderline slapstick and should have been much scarier and well done), and the film really isn’t that gory, especially for a vampire film. I had much higher expectations. However it is a foreign film, and we all know those are a little light on plot most of the time. Too bad, Sweden. You’ll get ‘em next time.

My Name is Bruce

Alright, I’m the only lover of bad movies in the history of the planet that doesn’t like Bruce Campbell at all. I’m sorry. I respect what he’s done for the genre, but I can’t stand him or his moronic acting. This is a movie directed by Bruce Campbell about himself. He’s a low budget horror film actor who gets kidnapped by a superfan to protect his hometown of Goldlick from an evil Chinese demon. It’s the most ridiculous film ever, complete with stupid blood splattering like in all of Bruce Campbell films. The kid that captures Bruce goes after the demon himself and Bruce has to return to the town to save the kid and then nail the kid’s mom. If you like Bruce Campbell, you’ll probably like this film. If you don’t (like me), you’ll hate this movie. I’m just glad to get this one checked off my Netflix list.

The Foot Fist Way

This is a Will Farrell-endorsed movie about a Tae Kwan Do instructor. There are some hilarious one liners in this movie. He yells at his students and had one of his students hand out an ass-whoopin to an elderly lady in his class. I shouldn’t have laughed, but I totally did. The guy finds xerox copies of his wife’s boobs and ass in some papers when she had been drunk at an office party. The instructor is a creepy doosh redneck who beats up on his students. To get back at his wife, he hits on one of his students who clearly is not interested. The couple try to get back together, but when he brings his movie star hero to town for a demonstration (for which, he has to sell his Ferrari to afford), his wife sleeps with the movie star and he catches them. They break up again, but not before he pees on her in the bleachers of a school. It’s a ridiculous movie and nowhere near as funny as I would expect, even from a Will Farrell-endorsed film. Don’t bother. It doesn’t have enough one liners to sustain the thing.

The Rocker

This is basically one of those “School of Rock” movies that’s not good at all, despite featuring Dwight from the Office. While Dwight is hilarious in that setting, he doesn’t play a metal drummer very well – even a washed-up one. It’s a pretty pathetic and unbelievable film in which a high school band has one of their uncles fill in on one of their gigs. He makes things happen and they go on the road and get a record and video deal (like no one does). Dwight refuses to open up for one of his previous bands who booted him and they replace him with an Abercrombie & Fitch drummer (their term, not mine). Although, I hated the movie, I think it’s absolutely hilarious how sweaty he gets when he plays – only because I got that sweaty when I played drums. Classic. Also the amount of “Final Countdown” is classic since Gob from Arrested Development is also in the film. Dumbest ending for a movie ever. So many things happened in this movie that never happen in real life that it just angered me. Don’t watch this movie.

Cutie Honey

Hilarious Japanese fantasy film about a girl superhero (sort of). She’s a super fighter and dresses very slutty with this outfit that emphasizes her boobs. I watched it with the English overdub since it seemed even more hilarious. She fights bad guys (members of the Panther Claw gang) by the dozens and has all kinds of hilarious superhero gadgets. And she’s in her bra and underwear as often as possible. Best movie ever. And I swear to you, there’s a song where the singer uses the word “Panther Craw”. I almost peed myself. Cutie Honey joins the team of a woman cop and a reporter in fighting the evil forces of Panther Claw. She defeats all of the Panther Claw bosses and shows the Big Boss at the end that love makes the world go round. It’s not a great film, but it’s pretty amusing for a Japanese action flick.

Rude – Rudy Ray Moore

This is an awful collection of “stand up” that Rudy Ray Moore put together. It’s old footage of him in front of audiences and what’s even worse is he has overdubbed the audio track, so he had to totally make up the flow of the words and emphasis and inflection and it totally loses something in the transition. And what’s even worse than that is it’s not funny at all. In fact, the guy is a total dick to people who ask him questions from the audience. Really, I’m amazed he didn’t get punched in the face repeatedly. And his catch phrase, “I ain’t lyin’” annoys the hell out of me now. Rudy Ray Moore needs to stick to the terrible action movies he makes – that’s where the real comedy is at. I’d steer way clear of his stand up routines. I will say the extras on this dvd are pretty funny, especially the trailers for his films.

Where The wild Things Are

I’ll admit, I’m one of the only people in the world who has never read this book. Yes I understand there are very few words in it and it’s for kids, but I’ve never read it. So I really didn’t know what to expect going in when M. Giant asked me to go to it. A little boy gets into a fight with his mother when he’s being a pain in the ass. He runs away and has an imaginary adventure (or is it?). He sails to an island inhabited by these giant creatures who take him in as their king. He tries to organize things on the island so everyone is happy, but ends up pissing off one or another of them all the time. He learns some life lessons and decides to sail back home to his mother. The costumes in this film are amazing and you forget they’re costumes eventually. It was kind of like The Dark Crystal for me. They’re very realistic and have facial expressions and emotions (both positive and negative) and just want everyone to get along. Forrest Whitaker and James Gandolfini are some of the voices of the characters and, while it’s not really geared towards kids (it’s very scary at times), it’s probably a great film for people who have read the book as a child. I was undecided on the soundtrack, but I came around to liking it as well. All in all, I thought this was a really good film. I'm guessing some of you will cry in it, but I was tough. I only end up crying during movies I have no business crying in (The Fly II and Bear Cub - look them up).

House (Hausu)

This is a Japanese film that someone recommended to me because it’s REALLY messed up. And it is. School girl’s dad brings home a new mom 8 years after the mother’s death. The dad intends to bring the new GF on vacation with them and the girl freaks out and writes a letter to her aunt about the whole thing. There are these weird tunnel shots that really don’t emphasize anything, so they just confuse me – almost as much as the random garishly-painted backdrops that change from time to time. One by one, the girls begin disappearing while the creepy aunt acts creepy. One girl does use one of my favorite lines “That’s crazy talk!” Awesome. And now a piano just bit a girl’s hands off and then ate her. Now a girl is kung fu fighting a telephone and just got her head eaten by a chandelier. This film has some hilarious special effects happening too. Wow, this is a really weird movie. I don’t think I’d recommend this one, but it’s weird enough that maybe…

Pervert!

Modern day film (thankfully) that’s realllll messed up. An old farmer named Hezekiah invites his son to his house in the country to meet his new really young girlfriend and to help build a corral on his ranch. She takes every opportunity to take her top off. She grabs a bee’s nest and pours the honey all over her chest. The son moves in and get stung and is allergic – this has nothing to do with the plot. Hezekiah also considers himself an artist – he makes women out of meat – seriously, out of steaks, ground beef and bacon. Then a mechanic kicks his son into the garage (yeah, I don’t get it either, but I couldn’t believe it). The dad’s girlfriend continues to take her top off and grab the son’s junk. Between every scene in the movie, there are hilarious random clips of nekid girls. The son realizes the dad is chopping up whores and using chops of meat for his meat women. The son calls an old folks home to send a nurse out for his father and she comes out. She almost gets raped by Hezekiah so she ties him up and burns his nards with a cigarette lighter. Then she runs in the prairie with Hezekiah’s son while wearing a crocheted blue helmet – wtf? Turns’ out it’s not the dad, it’s a claymation penis who’s doing all the killing. Yeah – totally ridiculous. And then the dad rips his own heart out of his chest. Who the heck made this stupid film? (There is a part of the extras where they talk about how it wasn’t intended to be an homage to Russ Meyer, but ended up being something he’d be proud of – I can see that, now that they mention it. I’ll change my opinion on it after the fact. It just moved up my ladder of terrible movies.)

Over 18… and Ready!

I know the title of this movie makes me seem like a perv (wait until you see the next movie I’m watching – hahaha), but I only watched it because it was a double feature on the Alley Tramp DVD. It’s so much worse than Alley Tramp that I almost can’t believe it. The woman (who I am assuming is meant to be 18 – but looks like 30) is the worst actress in the world. She’s incredibly deadpan and uninteresting. This supposed 18 year old secretary wants to work in the films her boss makes – sex films. She takes nude photos of herself and the boss’ wife talks the boss into hiring her for the film. But she only wants him to hire her, so she can sleep with her too. Everyone sleeps with everyone in this film, including the African American housemaid, who is sleeping with the wife. There’s not much point to this movie.

Alley Tramp

This is a black and white film from the 1960’s which details a 15-16 year old girl (the script can’t decide which she is) accidentally sees her parents doing it, then falls in love with her third cousin and sleeps with him which then awakens her sexuality. Her dad is cheating on her mom. Her mom is cheating on her dad. And she’s spending at least one night a week at a hotel with her cousin, Phillip. Eventually, the girl comes home and overhears her mom doing some random from a bar. The guy comes into the dining room to drink a beer and she seduces him into sleeping with her. Then she can control her mom by black mailing mother into doing whatever she wants under fear of telling her dad. The psychiatrist diagnoses her with nymphomania and offers to put her in a mental hospital to cure her. The final scene is mom and dad smiling at each other saying they’ll straighten out their own lives so when she gets out of the hospital, she’ll have a normal household to come home to. Stupidest plot ever. I also hate that 30-year olds play the parts of 16-year olds.

The Girl Next Door

This is a 2007 film based on the Jack Ketchum novel (based on true events) about a girl whose parents are killed in a car accident and she and her little sister move in with their aunt. The film takes place in 1958, so it’s kind of a period film. The aunt is a terrible mother, but the kids in the neighborhood all look up to her for life lessons and such. The orphaned girl angers the aunt and gets tied up in the basement and has terrible things done to her. I’m not just talking about rape, it’s seriously disturbing to see her mutilated and the neighborhood kids all take their turns having sex with her. It’s an awful story and it’s uncomfortable to watch. The next door neighbor boy has major trouble dealing with all of it and tries to help her escape, but it doesn’t end up well for him either. Really difficult to watch due to the subject matter. It’s also difficult to watch due to the terrible acting.

Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay

Like I said, I wasn’t looking forward to watching this film, but I did so anyway. Harold and Kumar try to fly to Amsterdam so Harold can stalk his hot neighbor. Kumar brings a smokeless bong on the plane and gets caught with a bomb-like object. It gets them sent to Guantanamo Bay as terrorist and they escape. They try to find their way back to Kumar’s X-gf’s fiancé since he’s a big shot and can get them out of the trouble they’re in. It’s as moronic as the first film, and I chuckled a few times, but mostly wouldn’t wait for it to be over (especially since I fell asleep twice during this one. I’m glad I’ve checked those two off my list.

Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle

Apparently, I’m the only one in the northern hemisphere not to have seen this film, so I put it on Netflix two years ago – it finally made its way to the top of the list. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing this movie, but I owed it to Gerd to watch it. It was one that she quoted regularly and I never got it, which frustrated her. I can say I’ve seen it now. It’s a “buddy” movie where two guys are on a mission to eat at White Castle (also Gerd’s favorite) and a bunch of ridiculous things happen which hinder their progress. I’ve never been a big fan of drug movies mostly because if you’re not on drugs, then the movie appeals to people with a 12-14 year-old male mentality exclusively. I chuckled at a couple of scenes, but mostly, I just wanted it to be over. The CGI in it angered me, however, having Doogie Howser playing a straight guy slayed me. If you’re a 12-14 year-old male or you’re baked out of your gourd, go watch this one. If not, don’t waste your time. I will be watching the second Harold & Kumar out of obligation and I’m not happy about it.

Freaked

I got this movie based on a recommendation from a friend. It’s waaaaay out there, but it features a hilarious cast of decent actors – Bobcat Goldthwaite, Brooke Shields, Randy Quaid, Keanu Reeves, Mr. T., with cameos by Morgan Fairchild and Larry “Bud” Melman. It’s about this chemical company who makes toxic fertilizer. Since it’s been banned in the US, they have to fly it to south America to sell it. One of the locals there is using the chemical to create mutant deformed freaks and running a sideshow. The mutants ban together and try to take over the show and break free (and maybe get cured from their freakism). It’s a pretty awful movie, but there’s something fun and campy about it. I didn’t hate it, but there’s going to be a select audience for it. Plus if you like Randy Quaid, he does a hilarious job in this film.

Evil Alien Conquerors

I didn’t expect much from this movie, even so, I was terribly disappointed. To the point of anger. It’s got a guy from SNL in it and a guy from the Drew Carey Show, but of whom I find mildly amusing. However, this movie has humor in it a 12-year-old might chuckle at, but still not even laugh. If you took Coneheads (which was also stupid) and dumbed it down, you would have this movie. Two aliens are sent to Earth to destroy all beings in two days. They’re complete idiots and bumble the whole thing and end up falling in love with some girls. Their home planet sends another ambassador to destroy these two idiots since they have failed and it’s totally ridiculous. It’s overacted (even more than SNL – which is saying a lot for a Hollywood production) and just infuriating the number of idiot jokes they attempt. Don’t waste your time.

Gutterballs

This is a kind of homespun (but higher-budget than most) horror film about a bowling alley killer. It must be a really small town because the jocks and the outcasts have a regular competition at a local bowling alley (which NEVER would have happened in my hometown). So the D-bag jocks and their popped collars battle against a tranny, a ghey, a metal guy, and an African-American gentleman. Apparently one of the outcast’s ladies stood up one of the jocks on prom night and the crap talking commences to the point of roid rage. The jocks end up raping the whorey outcast in the bowling alley (in a REALLY uncomfortably long scene which should have been cut down by about 10-15 minutes). The two groups meet again the following night to finish the competition, and then they start getting picked off by a killer who wears a bowling bag as a mask and uses bowling pins to violate and disembowel its victims. It’s a pretty terrible movie and despite using fake phallus-es (or is it phalli?) it’s pretty darn sexually explicit. There’s also buckets of blood and stupid dialog. I had hoped for more camp and less uncomfortable rape scenes.

Trailer Park Boys: The Movie

I’ve been a fan of Trailer Park Boys for a number of years. It’s a Canadian television series about life in a trailer park. Thankfully, it has all of the original television cast in the film, so that thrilled me. Julian and Ricky are best friends, but complete morons and keep getting arrested. In prison, someone gives Julian the idea to steal change from parking meters, since they’re not going to throw you back in jail for that kind of theft. They keep bumbling all sorts of things. Meanwhile, Ricky is trying to win back his x-girlfriend who is now stripper. I thought it was pretty funny. But I think you have to be a fan of the television show to like the movie. I don’t think the movie is going to win over any newbies to the series, but I could be wrong.

Inglourious Basterds

I love Quentin Tarantino films and I always have. I know they’re campy and have super far-fetched action and gore scenes, but I really think he’s a creative story-teller and entertainer – he also knows where to draw the line, but loves to step over that line regularly. This movie is an alternative history film about a special ops force during World War II sent into France to kill as many Nazis as they are able to. They are a hodgepodge mix of soldiers, mostly Jews, and a couple of Nazi defectors. They are led by Brad Pitt, an outlandish Tennessean who is part Apache, so he asks the soldiers to bring him scalps. So the thing you’re going to hear in most reviews is the gruesomeness of the scalping scenes. Sure, that was awesome, but the acting in this film is amazing. The main characters were all 100% believable, with Brad Pitt being the least believable, yet still believable in his outlandishness. The Germans in this film are actually played by Germans and are equally brilliant, especially Colonel Landa. It obviously has Tarantino’s hilarious quirks in the film, including inappropriate music and slow-motion bloodbaths. Just go see this film, unless you’re squeamish. It’s probably the best film this year in my opinion, but I still have a bunch more to see before I can say that with any authority.

Bikini Bloodbath Carwash

I saw the first one of these films, Bikini Bloodbath, and it was awful. Sadly, this one is even worse, and not even in a bad movie night sort of way (the first one was great for bad movie night). In the first one, a killer chef goes on a killing spree of high school kids and one girl finally kills him with a rake. In this second film, the chef comes back as a zombie killer chef and goes on killing the kids who are now in college. Most of the original people are in the movie and are even more stupid than the last time. Yes, there is a carwash, which is how the girls make money, but seriously, they could have taken that out of the film and saved me like half an hour. The redhead in the film, known for her outrageously teased hair and sickening facial expressions while trying to be pouty, is the first one to die in this film, odd since she died first in the last film. There’s lots of super fakey blood, and intestine eating, and gratuitous nudity. There’s also the two football guys who play hilarious homo-phobic, yet almost openly homosexual, d-bag jocks. Don’t waste your time with this one, even if you like gratuitous nudity. Stick with the first one if you want to have people over and host a bad movie night.

Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust

Yes, that seriously is the name of the film. I watched the first one a few months back and it was terrible. Gary Busey is a killer who gets the electric chair and the mom sends the ashes (after she puts a spell on them) to the victims family. The family owns a bakery and accidentally get the ashes in the dough along with some blood – out pops the Gingerdead Man who goes on a killing spree. In part 2, they couldn’t even convince Busey to join the cast (Which should tell you a LOT), so they just make the Gingerdead Man’s voice scratchy so you can’t tell. A B-movie producer is making terrible films and one of the catering people brings cookies (one of them in s the Gingerdead Man) for the crew. Guess what, Gingerdead Man goes on a killing spree. He then tried to make love to some of the puppets and they end up crucifying in a hilarious mockery of the Mel Gibson film Passion of the Christ. Sacreliciuos, you say? It’s an awful movie. Stupid, in fact. Don’t waste your time. And don’t waste your time watching the first one in case you think you might want to see the second one. Believe me, you don’t want to see either one.

Prosti

This is a film from the Philippines about a girl who’s basically sold into the brothels by her aunt. She still a virgin so she’s been reserved by a high-power customer. The brother errand-boy is given charge over her to make sure she’s ready for her first John and the errand-boy fake crashes his motorcycle so she won’t have to go to the job. She eventually does but the errand boy falls in love with her, which is against the rules of the house. It’s a decent movie, and I’m surprised how graphic the director made this while still showing almost no nudity at all. It’s kind of impressive actually. It’s not the most action-packed foreign film I’ve ever seen, but it was decent as far as brutal whorehouse films go.

Lust in the Dust

This is a modern day wide-screen western. Even though it contains Divine and Tab Hunter, it’s not a John Waters film. Apparently, the director made a special point not to rip off John Waters’ style in making this film. It’s about a small town in New Mexico back in the olden days called Chile Verde. Word is, there’s gold buried in town and people try to find it. A stranger and a chorus girl roll into town searching for it. People start dying. Then the bad guy’s gang rolls into town and more guys die. It’s pretty rawkus and bawdy, but it’s pretty amusing. If it were a John Water’s film, it would be all of the above, but less amusing. And thank goodness Edith Massey didn’t get given the part in this movie, or it would have ruined the film (in my opinion). I don’t know that I’d recommend this to a ton of people, especially people who are squeamish, but if you want to see the most legit film Divine ever did, this is a great example. Eve the behind the scenes stuff talks about how high-brow this film is for these actors. It’s pretty good.

I Love You Man

My nephew’s wife wanted to see this one, and since we had just forced her to watch The Punisher, it was our turn to watch a chick flick, right? This film was actually quite hilarious. I’m glad we watched it. This guy is getting married and realizes he doesn’t actually have any guy friends to either tell the news to or to stand up there with him. He ends up going on “man-dates” with a couple of guys that end up hilarious. Lou Ferrigno is hilarious in this film, as is Lt. Dangle from Reno 911. The guy he finds to be friends with makes him question a lot of things, but everyone ends up happy in the end. There were a TON of lines in this film that we all laughed through. I’d totally recommend this film to any guy. It’s a winner.

The Punisher

I’m not a huge fan of comic book based films. I usually like them, but since I’m not a comic book nerd, I know a lot is lost on me. This one is about a guy that retires from the FBI special ops and goes to a family reunion before his family is moved to London. The bad guys, led by John Travolta, track the Punisher down and kill his whole family at the reunion. The Punisher then goes on a rampage to avenge his family’s death and blows up a lot of stuff. It’s got lots of glass and explosions, so I really liked it a lot. I don’t think I lost much of the context by not knowing the original comic, so that worked out well for me. Great film that kind of surprised me.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

This is a short film (like 43 minutes short) about a mad scientist, played by Neil Patrick Harris. The scientist is in love with a random smoking hot girl. And did I mention it’s a musical. Seriously, a musical. I powered through, though. Dr. Horrible can’t talk to this girl because she’s hot. His nemesis, Dr. Hammer, ends up saving the hot girl and she falls in love with Hammer. I’m not saying the music or libretto is bad, I’m just saying I’m not a fan. If it wasn’t for the girl in the short movie, I probably wouldn’t have made it all the way through. Apparently, this is some gay comic book musical nerd’s dream-made-film. This film annoyed me more than angered me. I wouldn’t recommend it at all unless you love musicals and or Doogie Howser.

The Room

Some friends recommended this film since they know I love terrible movies. I’m soooo glad they did. This is one of the most painful movies ever. This is the case where a random nobody (Tommy Wiseau) has too much money and decides to write direct, and film his own movie starring himself (as Johnny) and his terrible friend actors. He also shows himself naked and flexing as much as possible. In the film, the guy is going to marry his fiancé, but she’s cheating on him with his best friend. I can’t even explain all the horrible things that happen in this film. I’ll try though:

• There’s a creepy 15-year-old kid that climbs in bed with the couple during sexy time
• The creepy kid always has a football, but seriously has no business with a football
• You shouldn’t play football in a small brick room, or on a roof, or standing right next to each other in a park, while wearing tuxes, or while jogging for exercise and guy-wrestling in a completely “non”-ghey way
• The creepy kid apparently has issues with a local drug dealin’ thug who throws him around and puts a gun to the creepy kid’s head, and sadly is the most believable actor in the film
• The actor/director/producer doesn’t speak English well and has to overdub his own voice, but it sounds a drunkenly stupid as you’d expect. Oddly, Wikipedia says he's American, but I've seen people straight off the boat who have a more intelligible accent than this guy
• The bride’s mother is a terrible actor who gives the worst life lessons about manipulating men for money
• Johnny laughs after almost every line he says
• Tommy Wiseau just got a green screen and uses it for rooftop camera angles, but doesn’t really understand that when it’s windy, you can tell it’s a green screen
• Johnny mumbles during other people’s conversations like a complete moron
• Guys can have a fight in front of 25 family and friends over a girl and then be fine and laugh it off seconds later
• Guys who don’t want anything to do with engaged women say the most hilarious stupid things on the phone about needing their bodies and such
• The bride in the film has people over to talk, but only for about five seconds before she refuses to talk any more and demanding that “things will be fine”. Really, people will just pop by to talk and they will sit on the couch for less than 10 seconds and she'll say she doesn't want to talk and then throws them out
I hope to NEVER go to one of this guy's birthday parties if they're this lame, have this much mumbling, and having the host throw people out on the street for 5 minutes to get air, then back inside for cake
• Johnny gets angry when he finds out his girl is cheating and goes on this hilariously slow-paced fakey angry smashing things in the apartment rampage while mumbling incoherently
• When he puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger, somehow his friends can’t tell if he’d dead or not
• Tommy Wiseau went and got some plastic surgery between filming and filming the special feature interview where he asks himself questions. His face looks terrible before, but it looks even worse aftewards
• The music and lyrics were clearly written by some of the surviving members of El DeBarge, Color Me Badd, and the guy who wrote the R&B song in Run Ronnie Run

I’d like for everyone interested in the film industry in any way shape or form (like script writers, musicians, composers, cameramen, producers, gaffers, casting folks, directors, grips, costume designers, green screen operators, etc.) to watch this film. If it doesn’t make you scream, cry, or outright embarrassed, you should smash your dreams of being in the film industry on the rocks, because if you think this work is enjoyable or even tolerable, then I hope to never see anything you ever have the unfortunate situation of being involved in. This movie is soooo terrible, you HAVE to see it. Unfortunately, I think the main guy will think this means he’s successful and continue to make films. Better yet, make copies of this movie, so he doesn’t get the wrong impression. This movie is the second worst movie of all time, and I thank V and Jen for recommending it to me. It’s amazing.

He Died With A Falafel In His Hand

This is an Australian film, not nearly as cool as Mad Max. It starts with a guy hitting bullfrogs with a golf club. WFT? All of these guys live in one apartment room. There’s a hot girl already living there, and another hot girl moves in. Apparently everyone is behind on rent so some thugs come in demanding money. The main character tells them he’s writing for Penthouse magazine and expects his check at the end of the month. These wiccan’s have a sacrifice festival out back and two girls end up kissing and then skinheads show up and cut the roof of the building. And a decayed beef pattie falls from the ceiling. I can’t explain how weird this movie is. And I haven’t even seen a single falafel yet. There is a weird meltdown in the film where I have no idea what has happened. People come in from the rain on a motorcycle and people are crying, looking for prostitutes, and asking for sex from each other. I have no idea what’s going on. Most hilarious line in the film: “I’m sure if you concentrated, you’d be able to kill yourself better than anyone else in the world.” They get thrown out of the house and a bunch of others move into another apartment with 8 other people. This movie is REALLY long. The film takes almost two hours before you even see a falafel. Don’t bother with this film. It’s really exhausting.

Maidens of Fetish Street

The last of the group of 60’s black and white sexsploitation films I purchased. This one has even less of a point, but is even creepier. It seems to be about guys who live above nudie clubs in NYC. They’re all perverts and prowlers and stalk prostitutes, but talk to them all about how they’ve stalked them for years. Doesn’t really make all that much sense. Two things about this movie are fortunate: 1) the “actresses” in the film are normal sized ladies, not skinny. 2) it’s only 62 minutes long (about 60 minutes too long). The acting in it is terrible and the girls keep looking at the camera which is hilarious. I thought this would be … I don’t know… maybe a little more fetish-y. I was waaay wrong.

Yo-Yo Girl Cop

This is a Japanese martial arts film about an organization that trains underage assassins to do special missions. They capture this girl, Saki, and tell her she has 72 hours to do some mission which I don’t understand at a high school before her mother is found guilty. Police can’t help them out, but these secret operatives can take care of business. Turns out the cops knew her mother well and actually trained her. So Saki fights back when bullies try to be mean to her and some of the wussy kids. There’s a secret website cult established by one of the wussy kids to help the other wussy kids, but the bullies have somehow taken it over. Not sure why the police are trying to break it up, but they are. And for future reference, a yo-yo as a weapon is maybe not the best choice. (also it’s stupid) Maybe not the best Japanese film I’ve seen, but it’s certainly not the worst. I wouldn’t recommend it, because there’s a little bit of action in it, but based on other Japanese films I’ve seen, the action was pretty sparse. I had such high hopes for this film, too…

Desperate Living

This is a freaky John Waters film about a crazy mom who’s family is trying to deal with the insanity at home. She yells out the window at the neighbor kids and it’s hilarious. “Tell your mother I HATE YOU!!!!” is screamed at a 10 year old kid. Classic. Then the mom walks in on two of her really young kids playing doctor (actually innocently playing doctor) and she screams at the 7 year old girl “You could be pregnant!!!!” The husband tries to give her a sedative and she lashes out and calls the housekeeper to come help. The housekeeper (a really large African American woman smacks him around with a broom and then sits on his face to smother him to death. A cop pulls them over when they try to escape and then the cop shows them his stocking and lingerie. The cop doesn’t arrest them, but sends them to a village of freakshows (literally) called Mortville. Wrasslin Rita has one of the most amazingly horrific wrestling outfits on and then she pops some guy’s eye out of his head. WTF? And I was forced to see some of the worst nudity I ever expect to see on film. Also, I forgot how much I LOATHE Edith Massey. In fact, all of John Waters’ film have the same actors in them, so you’re stuck with them if you don’t like some of them. I can’t even explain all the weird stuff in this movie. But if you like John Waters’ films or his characters, then you’ll like this one. I’m not a huge fan, so this one didn’t win me over. Amusing though, especially the terrible overacting.

Abnormal Female

This is another black and white 60’s film that’s basically rated X. They don’t show penetration or male nudity, but they show an awful lot. And it’s hilarious because the soundtrack is mostly jazzy piano music and some clean jazz guitar. It’s like watching porn to a Peanuts cartoon soundtrack. A psychiatrist is treating two sisters who have sexual “issues”. The older sister is a sadist and loves to beat up men. The younger sister is 15 (but played by a 30 year old hard looking unsmiling woman) and sleeps with like 15-20 men per day. Then there is a man who talks his wife into a threesome and she ends up liking girls more than guys. The psychologist calls it a perversion. Way to judge, medical professional. Not worth watching, but the music is pretty hilarious.

A Shocking Moment

This is a black and white movie from the 60’s.You know, back in the days when men could treat their wives like garbage and they would lovingly wait at home all day cleaning and cooking waiting for their man to get home, if he decided to come home that night. Here’s the plot: Cliff and Mindy get married and move from Grand Rapids, Michigan (everybody point to your right palm to show where it’s at) to Los Angeles since Cliff got transferred to the company headquarters. Cliff leers at women all the time and his wife simply kicks him under the table because as a woman, you’re supposed to just deal with it. Cliff ends up sleeping with the office secretary (as does most of the office, apparently), and then works on nailing the lady across the hall who works at a terrible night club with the slowest-moving belly dancers ever. This movie is not only awful, but makes me question all of my skills with the ladies. Apparently, I’ve been doing it all wrong with the respect, consideration, and politeness thing I’ve got going.

Heat

This is a movie from 10+ years ago starring Pacino and DeNiro. You’ve probably seen the beginning of it, but being as the film is 3+ hours long, you may not have made it all the way to the end. Honestly, it’s a great film. Lots of action, shooting, fire, shooting, explosions, shooting, glass, shooting, and car chases. Pacino says some of the most hilarious lines in the film industry in the film as well. Some expert bank robbers wind up on the radar screen of Pacino, who is a super-cop specializing in bringing down teams like this. But DeNiro is really good, until he gets mixed up with a lady (they ruin everything, clearly). I thought about writing this review as long as the movie feels so you get the point, but I’m so exhausted after watching it. Just watch it (and call in sick to work the following day because it will still be rolling then).

War, Inc.

This is a John Cusack movie that reminds me a LOT of Gross Point Blank. It takes place in the future where corporations run everything on the planet. Wars are outsourced to these large corporations and Cusack is basically a hired mercenary sent to the middle east under the guise of running a large “Brand USA” tradeshow. They’re trying to kill one of the middle east leaders and there’s a female journalist who he’s got his eye on. At the same time, this pop star who Cusack is hosting has a thing for him.It’s got some hilarious parts in it where you’re not sure if you’re supposed to be laughing or not. And then it gets all serious and blowing up and stuff. It doesn’t have Minnie Driver in it, so that’s a bummer.His sister Joan is in the film though playing his assistant. But all in all, if you can suspend belief a little bit, it’s really good.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

A bunch of kickball people decided to book one of the VIP rooms at the AMC theater to watch Harry Potter. We thought this might be a good way to get a bunch of people in a dark room to protect their dignity publicly tarnished for being a fan of the Harry Potter films/books. This was one of the best ideas ever. It’s like $5 per person more and you can bring snacks and talk all you want.

Anyway, the movie is, in my opinion, the best of the bunch so far. Although the first one is probably better since the whole landscape and scenario was totally new. It’s got tons of action, and really only one “come on!” moment when the music turns all sappy and Harry and Weasley’s sister get friendly. There were also only a couple of CGI moments that frustrated me, especially because I think they were scenes where you really could have shot them live. Harry goes back to school and is enrolled in a potions class and ends up with the text book owned by some half-blood prince. The text has all been hand corrected making all of Harry’s spells work splendidly. Malfoy continues to be a pain in the ass and there is some weirdness with Snape and Dumbledore. Don’t bother seeing it if you haven’t seen all 300 of the other ones. I really enjoyed it though. And watching the film in giant lounge chairs, without my shoes on, and eating someone else’s Fritos, made the film that much more enjoyable.

[Note: The people I was watching with REALLY loudly exclaimed “THAT’s not in the book!” during one 3 minute scene. You know what? I liked the scene because it reminded me of Children of the Corn. So when you get to that part, shut yer hole and let people watch the movie.”]

Mari-Cookie and the Killer Tarantula

I’m sure this is an independent film, but I’m not sure from where – Europe or South America. The plot seems a little sketchy. There’s a large number of people disappearing in the city and there’s suspicion that this really bizarre stripper named the Killer Tarantula is capturing them and eating them, which she is. The overdubbed English voices are a hilarious mix of British and horribly broken English, which really adds to some of the comedy factor. I’m sure it’s supposed to be a scary movie, but I’m not the least bit frightened. And there’s a lot of nudity and stripping scenes, all of which I don’t want to see since the women in them are pretty gross and haggard. This is the one time I’ll actually wish Hollywood had made this film with attractive girls in it. This movie is painfully bad. There is nothing redeeming except for the hilarious overdubbed accents.