Justin Robinson's Blog, page 18

Podcast!

The Fanboy Comics Podcast kindly (and foolishly) had me back! Have a listen to my latest appearance, why don't you? We talk HBO, Marvel, DC, and #gamergate. You'll wonder what I have against that bleep button.

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Lifetime Theater: Drew Peterson: Untouchable

For better or worse, Meredith Baxter and Valerie Bertinelli are indelibly associated in the public consciousness with Lifetime movies. Both women possessed the irresistible combination of recognizable faces and affordable price tags that guaranteed they would have work in TV movies whenever they desired. As Lifetime has expanded its brand, they have managed to attract fading but honest-to-god movie stars like Christina Ricci, Ellen Burstyn, and Heather Graham, brilliant character actors like Garret Dillahunt, and suddenly ubiquitous it girls like Rose McIver. It’s really no surprise when a quality actor shows up in a role, and really is hardly even slumming it. What is at least mildly surprising is when they show up to work. Rob Lowe plays convicted murderer Drew Peterson in this week’s Lifetime Theater, and plays the hell out of him.

I’ve often cited the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra as the perfect example of the problem with Hollywood. First off, it’s directed by Steven Soderbergh, a director who manages to helm both big-budget crowd-pleasers and critically acclaimed indies with equal aplomb. It stars a recognizable name — Michael Douglas — doing some of the best work of his distinguished career, and a bona fide movie star in Matt Damon. It’s stuffed with ringers like Dan Aykroyd and Nicky Katt, and is compulsively watchable in that jittery, disconnected way Soderbergh has mastered. With all of that, it somehow failed to get theater distribution and had to settle for HBO. The reason I bring this up is that there is a solid argument to be made that Rob Lowe is the best part of that movie.

He appears out of nowhere as Liberace’s plastic surgeon, holding his face in a botox rictus, and speaking with the gentle tones of Dr. Leo Spaceman. He’s responsible for putting Matt Damon’s Scott Thorson on amphetamines, which is funny because that’s exactly the kind of thing Dr. Spaceman would (and has) done. Lowe repurposes the performance for Drew Peterson, making the the lack of facial affect stand in for his lack of conscience and his glib tone to undercut the horrifying things he says. While I might rail against laziness anywhere else, the fact is it’s a damn fun performance. Really, it’s a lot of fun watching Rob Lowe tear into the archetypical Lifetime villain with such gusto.

The movie features a wraparound scene that’s Drew Peterson squinting and joking through a television interview, though in true Lifetime fashion, it’s not fully realized. Since the movie ends with his incarceration, it’s unclear as to when this whole thing took place or really what’s going on there. But who cares? Rob Lowe! Playing a monster! And boy is he. The first flashback sequence features him having energetic sex with his (third) wife Kathleen Savio (Mad Men’s Cara Buono). When their son comes in, Drew just dismounts and stands in front of his kid, buck naked and presumably fully slicked and engorged. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but a kid should never be in danger of losing an eye due to careless dick use.

Nick Fury’s shameful secret origin.

Drew is constantly on the prowl and almost immediately sets his sights on motel concierge Stacy (Kaley Cuoco), who is young enough to be his daughters much younger friend. They start having an affair that’s so brazen it’s almost laudable. I mean, he actually takes Stacy into his own wife’s basement (not a euphemism) for banging. Kathleen knows what’s up pretty quick — and the implication seems to be this is how their relationship may have started — but she’s helpless to do anything. Why? Because Drew Peterson is untouchable!

Banging teenagers is the Chicago Way.

Specifically, he’s a cop. So even after Kathleen throws him out of the house, he feels free to barge in whenever. The cops she calls tell her straight out that they’re not going to do anything to Drew. When Kathleen shows up having drowned in a dry bathtub, every investigation should focus solely on Drew Peterson, but he’s not even a suspect. The Medical Examiner concludes it was an accidental drowning, and at a routine questioning, Stacy is way too relieved at that story, hinting that maybe she suspects something.

Drew wants Stacy to be home all day, and is utterly baffled when she expresses a desire to go meet new neighbor Karen. She’s played by Catherine Dent, so we know she will eventually be crusading for justice at some point. Stacy opens up to Karen and for the first time gets an outsider’s perspective on the relationship. Hilariously, Stacy only just realizes that sneaking into the wife’s own basement to cheat is seriously messed up. Pretty soon, Drew gets insanely jealous about every living thing (including, at one point, of a corpse), and the relationship turns violent. Before long, Stacy has vanished without a trace.

Karen teams up with Stacy’s sister to shed some light on the disappearance. Odd for the structure, it’s actually Kathleen’s sister — who has appeared briefly — who turns the attention to Kathleen rather than Stacy. Hey, that’s real life. It was Kathleen’s murder that busted Drew (after they exhumed her), and Stacy’s body was never found. The local cops were useless, but when the State Police question Drew’s dim bulb pal Glenn (William Mapother) they get the info they need. The flashback shows them loading up a blue barrel, hinting that these guys decided to use Heisenberg’s method of body disposal. When a priest comes forward, the final bit of the story comes to light: in an early throwaway scene Drew washed some clothes. Turns out he got home really late on the night Kathleen died and then threw those clothes in the wash.

Drew Peterson:Untouchable is nice because it bridges the gap between Lifetime as people perceive it and Lifetime as it has become. It’s a true crime story where the villain is an abusive husband, and to its credit shows the escalation of abuse in a fairly realistic way. The important thing to enjoy the movie is not to dwell on the deaths involved, and instead enjoy that he’s in prison. As a villain he’s pretty damn reprehensible. Lowe turns in a performance far too good for a simple TV movie, one he borrowed from a much better film. It’s really the most fun you can have with a multiple murdering scumbag like Peterson.

What did we learn? Well, maybe if he’s willing to sneak you into his wife’s basement (still not a euphemism) for sex, maybe he’s not quite marriage material.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Catherine Kent, Drew Peterson, euphemism, Kaley Cuoco, Lifetime Theater, Rob Lowe, Untouchable, wife's basement

Now Fear This: You’re Next

This shouldn’t be news, but there is a language to film. Languages of all kinds have rules, which is what prevents us from screaming obscenities in the middle of the street and calling it the St. Crispin’s Day Speech. Well, that and all those cease and desist orders. So when a film disobeys its own language, one of two things is happening. It’s either because the filmmaker doesn’t actually speak the language of film and only knows what garbled transmissions made it through the Specter Nebula to his homeworld, or because some interesting subversion is about to take place. You’re Next, a home invasion horror thriller, is one of the latter. Every horror fan knows the rules of a home invasion movie, as though it’s born into our DNA. Sadly, the truth is much more prosaic: home invasion pictures can be made on the cheap. It’s one set, a handful of actors, and some gore effects and you’re done. Consequently, they have to do something interesting to set them apart: The Purge caught a lot of undue flack for being a by-the-numbers example of the subgenre. (It was, but it was at least a decent by-the-numbers example, and I can’t hate anything with Lena Headey.) You’re Next starts out exactly as these movies are supposed to, but pretty quickly takes a turn for the unique. I first became aware of You’re Next at the 2013 Scare L.A., a horror-themed convention in South Los Angeles that I do every year. One of the booths had a few models wearing sleek, dark suits, and creepy white animal masks. Though I barely registered the image, the visual stuck with me long enough so that when I saw those white masks on Netflix, I was intrigued enough to watch. The movie opens, as these often do, with an unmotivated murder of a pair of people — one of whom is indie-horror godfather Larry Fessenden, once again granting his blessing, this time in the form of his onscreen murder. The narrative shifts over to the anniversary celebration of two wealthy WASPs and their large, dysfunctional clan. There’s Paul (Rob Moran, recognizable from every Farrelly Brothers movie), the stern patriarch, Aubrey, his fragile wife, Drake, the douchey oldest brother, Crispian, the pudgy academic, Felix, the shady fuckup, and Aimee, the daddy’s girl. They’ve also brought their significant others: Drake’s wife Kelly is a brittle, judgmental grown-up mean girl, Felix’s girlfriend Zee is a sullen, creepy goth, Aimee’s boyfriend Tariq is a quiet documentary filmmaker (played by real director Ti West). The most important is Crispian’s girlfriend and former student Erin (Sharni Vinson, owner of the worst IMDB pic ever), a friendly Aussie who looks to be the movie’s Final Girl, destined to run screaming until the third act twist when she goes all Nancy Thompson on the bad guys. The movie first establishes the family dynamics, and it does so with a minimum of exposition, allowing simmering tension to do the job for them. Drake passive-aggressively asserts his superiority over first Tariq and then Crispian with a variety of condescending remarks, while Felix rolls his eyes, and Aimee trolls for her parents’ approval. Then, in the middle of dinner, the bad guys attack with a crossbow, and that’s when shit gets really interesting. While every other character reacts how they’re supposed to — screaming and blind panic — Erin begins calmly telling people what to do. She’s scared, certainly, but she remains collected enough to do things like pulling people away from windows, using chairs to shield them from bolts, trying to get people upstairs (and not in the basement, where she casually says, “They could just pour gasoline down the stairs and toss in a match”), call for help and stay down. She has the best ways to secure a house, instantly grabs weapons, and even knows how best to deal with a crossbow wound. Crispian watches her with the mounting horror of anyone seeing another side of their mate. In this case, Erin’s other side is “terrifying survival monster.” The three villains are instantly iconic due to those white animal masks — a fox, a lamb, and a tiger — that stayed with me from Scare L.A. They are similar enough in outline to mark all three as a unit, but close up have enough differences to see who is who. In particular, the three masks send a clear signal to the audience in the early going: these guys are not human. They are animals. Predators. The lamb would seem to be the oddest choice then, but he’s often shown with a combination axe-sledgehammer that deftly calls to mind images of the slaughterhouse. The white masks contrasted with the black paramilitary costumes make the animal heads appear to float, and director Adam Wingard makes good use of their reflections in panes of darkened glass. As the evening wears on and the bodies pile up, Erin matches the brutality of the invaders and combines it with an ingenuity that’s downright disturbing. In the beginning of the film, the invaders are inhuman — they don’t speak, they are strangely baffled by corpses — you know, how home invader bad guys in masks are supposed to act. Once Erin starts truly hurting them, the masks begin to come off, and the humans underneath are shown. They’re bleeding, they’re vulnerable, and they’re really wondering how Erin, who looks about ninety pounds soaking wet and wearing a dive belt, has turned into the hunter. It would be like a version of Alien where the monster gets on the Nostromo only to find that it’s full of acid-resistant clones of Mr. T armed with giant gold lobster crackers. The twists begin to pile up in the back half of the movie, and they’re good enough not to spoil. The best part is that they stand up on repeat viewings. Acting choices that initially look like one thing, or even just a camera lingering too long on a neutral expression, turn out to have much deeper significance. You’re Next is chiefly interesting to horror fans for the specific way it deconstructs the Final Girl trope in fiction, and unlike other examples of deconstructed tropes it contains no easy way out. It works just fine as a straight example of a home invasion horror thriller, but it’s also a deceptively smart send-up of the same, ensconcing Erin in the hall of fame with her spiritual sisters, Laurie, Nancy, Sidney and all the others.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Adam Wingard, creepy animal mask, deconstructed trope, Final Girl, home invasion thriller, Now Fear This, Sharni Vinson, You're Next

Yakmala: Sex Madness

Sometimes it’s nice to take a break from all the slickly-produced big budget crap, and watch some non-produced no-budget crap. You know, the kind of movie that treats a single in focus shot like the rarest of unicorns, whose dialogue is swallowed by a crackle so loud you’d swear Paul Bunyan were about to shame-eat a colossal bag of Cheetos, whose plot is somehow less interesting than that Idiocracy movie about the farting ass. It’s time for 1938’s Sex Madness.

Tagline: Protect your daughters!

More Accurate Tagline: Keep that dick holstered, cowboy. There are laws in this town.

Guilty Party: The ass-goblin responsible is Will H. Hays, author of the Hays Code and the chief censor of Hollywood from 1922-1945. Not content with just being a humorless, brain-dead scold, Hays decided that he should bring his particular brand of empty moralizing to the world at large. After the Hays Code became the rule in 1930, the only way to show fun stuff was to make a movie about how terrible it was. So, we now know that premarital sex leads directly to syphilis.

Synopsis: Sex Madness really only has a plot in the most abstract of senses. I’m not even entirely convinced it was a movie. Some ghost hunter probably just left a camera on in some abandoned hospital and got the visual equivalent of EVP.

An old couple is really mad about sex. They’re sitting around, reading papers, and approving of what Paul Lorenz, local pervert, is doing about it. This might confuse the one other person who has seen this movie, as Paul Lorenz is the heroic man fighting against premarital sex. Well, he’s a pervert. Sorry. What else would you call it when someone is so upset about other people having sex that they spend all their time trying to stop it? That sounds like a pretty freaky sex game to me.

Then the movie jumps over to an office where a pair of women try to work up the courage to ask each other out. Seriously, that’s the horrifying thing here. They eventually decide to go check out a burlesque show. Man, it was complicated being gay back when everyone was a complete idiot.

The burlesque show turns out to be pretty tame, but it’s like that weird experimental gay-bomb from 30 Rock to the audience. There’s a loner whose twitchy face gets some generous close-ups, the two office workers who decide to go home together (and that’s the last we see of them, so I’m going to assume they lived happily ever after), and a bunch of 1930s-era bros led by Tom Lorenz, whose dad is trying to stamp out this filth. Or maybe he just wants it to make the tiniest lick of sense.

In the locker room, one of the dancers, Sheila, tries to get another one, Millicent, to come to an after party with Tom Lorenz and what I’m assuming are his frat brothers. Millicent demurs. Sheila heads off with some girls, hooks up with Tom, and that’s the last we see of her until the final minutes.

Remember the creepy guy? Well he leaves the burlesque, and so turned on by seeing moderately attractive women in shorts, stalks a woman. Smash cut to the newspaper from the next day: Sex Criminal Jailed After Baby Murder. That… that was quick.

Millicent suddenly remembers her boyfriend back home after he sends a letter. I’m pretty sure if she heads back now, she’s going to find he’s been murdered by Sand People. Anyway, she goes to the doctor to tell him her origin story. She won a beauty contest which included a trip to New York. Then, desperate for work, she took up burlesque dancing, or whatever the hell that was in the previous scene. A man pursued her, got her drunk, and took advantage. She, of course, instantly came down with a bad case of the syphilis.

With this raging social disease, she can’t marry her beau Wendel. She embarks on the cure, which seems like it takes forever. Right around here, there’s another newspaper montage that plants the idea of quack doctors, so you know what’s happening. Millicent heads home and reunites with Wendel. She’s still taking the cure, and thus can’t marry him. She’s lying the whole time, presumably because Wendel would freak out and leave her, which is just terrible. “No, honey, those aren’t open sores… they’re pepperoni! I’m a pizza lady!” Sadly, that never happens.

Anyway, eventually they do get married and have a kid. Right around this time, the newspapers report that Dr. John Grenoble was arrested for distributing quack cures, and this is how I learned the name of her doctor. Wendel comes down with syphilis, but has no clue what it is. Seems like the baby has it too, but then it just vanishes from the narrative. So I’m going to assume it was carried off by Jareth the Goblin King to be with all the other syphilitic babies throughout history. That is what happens, right?

You remind me of the babe/what babe/the babe with the syph!

Tom Lorenz abruptly returns to the narrative, coming out to his dad about having syphilis. Paul’s cool with it, and they get back on their anti-sex crusade.

But Wendel is dying! Millicent decides to speed this up by giving them both poison, but then they get a call from Sheila. She’s fine now and for some reason this makes Millicent cut out all the nonsense.

Life-Changing Subtext: One trip to a burlesque club and the best case scenario is syphilis.

Defining Quote: The film features a title card that desperately needs a John Williams score. Here’s the opening lines: “Down through the ages has rushed a menace more dangerous than the worst criminal. Syphilis. Let us seize this monster and stamp out forever its horrible influence.”

This monster has us! I call him Syphilitor and his fiery breath will no longer cover us in sores and lead us to eventual insanity! Even now, he’s climbing the Empire State Building with virtue clutched in his sweaty paw!

Standout Performance: Charles Olcott as Paul Lorenz is incredible. This guy takes so many bizarre pauses he makes Christopher Walken sound like an auctioneer.

What’s Wrong: Pretty much everything, but special attention should go the lighting. Periodically, everything goes completely white. It’s like alien abductions were constantly happening on set, but the crew was on a deadline so no one acknowledged it.

Don’t make eye contact! He’ll show you his probe!

Flash of Competence: The costumes looked like they might be clothes. That’s the best I can do.

Best Scenes: I don’t even know what’s happening in the burlesque show. You know how when characters on TV hit the strip club, all the strippers are somehow wearing more clothes than the customers? Well, one of those places makes this place look like a convent. Women dance around, and for some reason they appear to be carrying colons. Not the section of intestine, the punctuation mark. And surrounding them are these women standing motionless in capes. It’s like the Justice League heard about someone abusing colons, totally misinterpreted the alert, and came down to stand, utterly baffled, by what was unfolding.

When the doctor is telling Millicent all about Syphilis, probably to scare her for no good reason, he gives her this bon mot: “The insidious effects of syphilis on once dainty fingers… the hand that rocks the cradle is now pleading for humanity’s help!” I’m going to assume that’s help killing Annabella Sciorra.

Transcendent Moment: Paul Lorenz states his entire goal, and for a moment, a brief, shining moment (or alien abduction) he seems relatively sane. He wants to educate people about sex and de-mystify it. Wow! That does sound good!

…so they will be properly terrified of social diseases and make premarital sex a thing of the past. Wait… this fucking guy is a supervillain!

Don’t touch that penis!

Sex Madness is exactly what the title describes, only in the exact opposite way the title intends.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: EVP, Hays Code, office lesbians, premarital sex, Sex Madness, syphilis, Yakmala!

Lifetime Theater: Talhotblond

This week’s entry into Lifetime Theater, the Courteney Cox-helmed Talhotblond is truly something special. As the final film an all-Lifetime Yakmala program, it electrified the room in the way that only the most insane movies can. It was so weird, so twisty, so deliriously unexpected, it led to an entire room of the most cynical, jaded, film-savvy viewers fruitlessly trying to guess the plot. And we could not do it. That’s right, the movie — incidentally based on a true story, proving you cannot write this shit — stymied our normally infallible plot-sensors. So before we get there, I want to step outside the context of the review and beg both my readers: just walk away from the computer and watch the movie. I will spoil it, and this madness is best experienced firsthand.

Here is your spoiler buffer. You’re welcome.

Okay, I’m going to assume everyone who wants to be gone is.

Talhotblond. Hoo boy. Here we go. On the surface, it’s a simple story about the most modern of concerns: that people online aren’t necessarily who they appear to be. Though the movie was released in 2012, the idea was already ingrained enough by 1997 that an early episode of Buffy had Xander reminding Willow that her online boyfriend might actually be an elderly Dutch woman. Now we have a whole name for this kind of thing, catfishing, based on a possibly staged (okay, totally, obviously staged) documentary. As a side note, I could go on an extended rant about how the fact that Catfish is staged is the whole goddamn point, but this is a review of the sublime joys to be found on the Lifetime network.

Thomas Montgomery (Garret Dillahunt, yes, that one) is the kind of man whose life didn’t quite turn out like he wanted it to, otherwise known as everyone on the planet. An ex-marine, an accident on the training field pushed him out of the service and into a dead end job cutting steel pipes. He has a wife, Carol (Laura San Giacomo), two daughters, and a dog. The bulk of his life is spent either at work or at various extracurricular for them. His sex life is so bad, Carol uses the line, “Want to try again?” And there is literally no less sexy way to offer sex. Seriously. I’ve tried. Any less sexy and you go right to creepy, which works on a certain kind of woman.

This kind.

His version of “trying” amounts to him climbing on her like she’s a felled tree he plans to ride down the flooded river to safety. There’s no getting undressed, either. He angles up and plows in, and then just lies there, like he’s waiting for a million angels to do all the heavy lifting. Dude, I know you’re both fifty, but get her ready first. Put on some Foghat (always gets the ladies going) and play Pet the Man in the Boat. There’s a computer in the house! Google “clitoris” and let the world open up to you. Stan Marsh knows about the clitoris and he’s like eight. You have no excuse. Anyway, his only Me Time takes the form of a monthly poker game with his buddies from the plant. At one of these games, the guys mention they get together on a website to play poker, and Thomas reacts like, “What is this internet you speak of? Is it a form of sorcery?” The poor guy is totally flummoxed by the basic idea of computers, and they’re planning to throw him to a gambling website? Best case scenario, he’s going to get so much malware on that thing it’s turning into Skynet.

I AM HUMANITY’S DOOM. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEXT?

So what should happen on the very first time he plays with the guys? Some person with the oh-so-subtle screen name of “talhotblond” starts chatting with him. And it gets racy pretty quick when “she” sends him a picture of “herself” in a bikini. I’m “sorry” about all the “scare quotes” but even summarizing this movie is “hard.” Long story short, Thomas starts a torrid online affair with this person, who, as we learned from Buffy, might be an elderly Dutch woman or an omnicidal demon. He pretends to be himself at twenty, and oh yeah, his screen name is “marinesniper.” If I saw that name and I was… anybody, anybody at all, I would not get into any sort of emotional weirdness with that person. And this is nothing against the marines — my grandfather was in the corps and retired a Lt. Colonel — this is something against snipers. And more to the point, people who advertise being snipers. Sniping is an important job in the real world, or online (and stop fucking camping, Chet, it’s cheap and you know it), but you don’t use that as your name for the same reason that Jimmy the plumber doesn’t use the screen name “Poopsmasher.”

Now here’s when the film becomes harder to predict. The affair progresses, and Talhotblond sends Marinesniper a care package, which includes pictures (the most racy of which are more bikini shots), a note, and a pair of panties. Later, there’s even a phone call in which he proposes to her. You know, despite the fact that he has a wife and kids and such. It’s not too long before Carol hacks the computer while he’s at his game (his password was “semperfi” — well done, dude, might as well have used “swordfish”), and discovers the affair. She comes clean to Talhotblond, and puts Thomas in the doghouse. At this point, I’m baffled. At first I assumed naturally Talhotblond was a dude, but the phone call says it’s not. Plus, all the photos are clearly of the same young woman. At this point in my first viewing, I was spitting out ideas that involved clones, alien abductions, and hitchhiking ghosts.

Talhotblond transfers her affections over to Thomas’s poker buddy Brian (screen name “beefcake”), a young man getting ready to go off to college. He’s a bit of a cad, and the only one of the guys at the plant with any kind of future. While he romances Talhotblond, Thomas grows more and more unhinged, even after Carol finally forgives him. One weekend, when Brian is supposedly going to go see her (no idea how that was going to work, but these people seem to have no conception of the future), Thomas murders Brian. He’s caught pretty much instantly due to the miles and miles of motive in the form of chatlogs, emails, and even a fistfight the two guys had at work. It’s really the worst attempt at getting away with murder. In my favorite part, Thomas throws his laptop into a lake, like “That’ll teach you to internet!”

When the cops come to Talhotblond’s house to tell her Brian’s been shot, the girl from the pictures comes to the door. And I’m baffled. All my hypotheses hinged on that girl being some kind of catalog model. Then I see Molly Hagan as well, who is a fairly recognizable character actor with a career going back to the ‘80s. I say, “Oh look, Molly Hagan.” And Erik, who had seen this, goes, “And why would Molly Hagan be playing such a bit part?”

…and my world turned into the last scene of Usual Suspects. I’m not even kidding. If I had a coffee cup, I would have dropped it so it could artfully shatter on the floor. Every snippet of dialogue, every piece of evidence, all rattled through my head and I saw the whole thing. Even before they showed what happened, I saw it unfurl, and I was horrified. Thomas sees it a bit later when the arresting officers plunk a file down in front of him. “There’s your Talhotblond.” And it’s this picture of Molly Hagan, and she has this expression like, “C’mon. You had to know it wasn’t that cute blonde chick.”

So, yeah, Molly Hagan is a mom, and the pics she sent to these creeps she met on the internet are of her daughter. Gross, right? It gets worse. The panties actually belonged to her daughter too, stolen out of her underwear drawer! She couldn’t just buy a fresh pair? Nope, had to violate her kid just a tad more.

One of the funniest things about Talhotblond is that it’s actually pretty good. I mean, it’s silly, disposable trash, but it’s pretty good silly, disposable trash. Garret Dillahunt and Laura San Giacomo are both good to great actors, and they showed up to work. There’s no sleepwalking through this one. Courteney Cox (yep, that one) directed and produced — likely for some hands-on experience — and has a two scene cameo as Carol’s work pal. She actually makes the computer chatting scenes non-tedious, which is something that the big-budget Perfect Stranger couldn’t manage to do. The final twist did its job too, blowing everyone’s mind and instantly elevating Talhotblond to best-of Yakmala status.

What did we learn? Nothing, if you’re even slightly aware of the internet. But if you’re not, just assume whoever is talking to you is some kind of giant robot demon, that way if they’re not, you’re pleasantly surprised.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: catfishing, Garret Dillahunt, Laura San Giacomo, Lifetime Theater, Talhotblond

Now Fear This: Changeling

It’s about a giant lady who eats children.

I can’t trace the roots of all my phobias. There are too many of them. I’d need to get more proficient with Excel for one thing. This week’s entry, 2008’s Changeling (not to be confused for previous entry The Changeling), tripped a lingering fear whose true source has been lost to the mists of memory. I have no reason to be worried about getting thrown into an old-timey mental institution and then forced to prove my own sanity, knowing full well the catch-22 involved there, yet there it is. Watching Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) getting thrown into the LA County Psych Ward for being able to correctly determine that a child was not hers, was one of the most disturbing things I have seen in a while. It was all the more frightening because the story was true.

In all great crime movies about Los Angeles, the filmmakers get a very important point: we never had a mafia around here. Oh, we’ve had a few gangs, some Nostras, both Cosa and Kosher, but not like the other great cities of this country. No, out here, organized crime has always been the purview of the cops. The Shield, L.A. Confidential, these works get it, and both are based at least partly on reality. Los Angeles has always been a city whose gangsters got pensions and carried badges. Changeling takes place primarily between 1928-30, when Police Chief Davis unleashed his infamous “gun squad” (it was a more honest time then — remember, the Secretary of Defense used to be called the Secretary of War), ostensibly to target rum smugglers, but actually more concerned with hobos and leftists. The department was staffed with thugs and incompetents, and it’s inevitable that things would slip through the cracks. The problems occur when they try to cover for their mistakes.

Christine Collins was a single mother raising her son Walter (this was back when Walters were still young) in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Lincoln Heights — a few miles from where I live today. One day while she’s at work, Walter vanishes. Several months later, the police claim to have located the boy in DeKalb, Illinois with a drifter, but when they return Walter to Christine, she notes some differences. This new boy is circumcised, he’s several inches shorter, and it’s obviously not fucking Walter, and Christine knows her own son. Bullied into accepting him “on a trial basis” by LAPD Captain JJ Jones (Jeffrey Donovan, doing a variation on the Irish accent he’d bust out on Burn Notice every now and then), brittle Christine soon regrets the decision. Jones is a brick wall, the LAPD is in dire straits with the public, they need a “win.” Jones begins by making sexist insinuations about Christine “dodging responsibility” and “missing her freedom” before escalating into the aforementioned institutionalizing. His slimy language calls to mind online harassment and slut-shaming, finally getting the attention it deserves and showing that while this is the past, some of the prejudices are all too present.

He just throws her into the psych ward. There’s absolutely zero oversight. While inside, Christine gets the stories of some others also victimized by the LAPD’s iron fist. Amy Ryan plays a prostitute who tried to complain about a violent john… who turned out to be a cop, so in she goes. Another woman was relentlessly abused by her cop husband, and as soon as she tried to escape, it was off to the psych ward. In the most heartbreaking (and, sadly still relevant) monologue, Ryan’s character, layering on the tragic sarcasm, points out that they’re women — they’re supposed to be weak and emotional, so when they break it’s expected.

The film then takes a fascinating and odd detour. While Christine is being tortured in a mental institution for the crime of wanting the cops to actually look for her kid, the narrative shifts. It’s not immediately obvious why, either, just that Detective Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly), one of Jones’s men in the juvenile division, is investigating a Canadian kid staying here illegally. And yes, this is the first and last time anyone in LA has ever been concerned about Canadian illegals. Ybarra abruptly finds himself in a noir film when this boy, who was staying with uncle, admits to helping this uncle murder up to twenty boys. The kid also identifies Walter Collins as one of the boys that was killed.

Fortunately, Christine had already attracted the attention of oddly intimidating preacher and losing Scrabble hand Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), who is able to spring her from the clink. Briegleb’s mission in life was to expose the LAPD for its violence, incompetence, and corruption, and has glommed onto Christine’s story as an excellent way to do just that. As one of the radio preachers that used to be a thing (fun was not invented until 1942), he uses his electric pulpit to bring attention to the crimes of the LAPD. Christine and Briegleb, with the assistance of crusading lawyer SS Hahn, sue the cops for what they did.

It feels odd to be calling a movie directed by Clint Eastwood, and starring Angelina Jolie, and John Malkovich underrated and deserving of attention, but since its release, Changeling has dropped out of the consciousness of the movie going public. That’s a shame, because it really is very good. Eastwood is a master at making good to great films from mediocre scripts, but here he has a legitimately great story written by J. Michael Straczynski (best known for Babylon 5), who did a truly insane amount of research to get it right. Straczynski’s great skill as a writer has always been in kissing his characters’ asses, and while this might sound like an insult, it’s really not. To do it right, the character has to have legitimately been awesome or the praise is unwarranted, and comes off as shilling. In this case, Christine has just spent a decent chunk of time in the psych ward, thinking that she’s doomed to stay in there forever, and Briegleb frees her, then introduces her to the lawyer. “We can’t afford him… so he’s doing this pro bono.” And the lawyer, with just the right gravitas, says, “It would be my honor. I have never seen anyone fight so long and hard in what is clearly the cause of justice.” It’s all the more warranted, because the film had just shown her refusing to back down in the face of shock treatment, even though she had no idea that her rescue was just around the corner. Straczynski shows us Christine’s steel, and it’s appropriate to praise her.

I’m not a Jolie fan as a rule, but she great here. Her look is perfect for the era, but she never relies on it. She’s forced to run the gamut, from great mom in the beginning, to wracked with fear, to desperation, to despair, to turning into an implacable wall of justice. She is continually faced with her status as a second-class citizen — what with being a woman and all — though by the end when her son’s probable killer attempts to use that against her, she slaps him with such blistering contempt it’s a wonder he didn’t die then and there. Kelly, as the other lead, is just as good but far less showy, and it’s a shame this wasn’t two movies, one about Christine, and one about him. Sort of a noir version of Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima.

Changeling is a fascinating horror film, effortlessly shifting between the different kinds of

fear. First it’s the adult fear of losing a child, then it moves into the existential dread of being sane but unable to prove it, before moving into a serial killer story of astonishing evil. It’s a top notch team of director, writer, and actors putting together an epic story of corruption with a vulnerable human face.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Angelina Jolie, Changeling, Clint Eastwood, J. Michael Straczynski, John Malkovich, noir, Now Fear This, true story

Yakmala: Perfect Stranger

I feel like she just walked in on Willis in the bathroom.

What is it about the internet that drove mid-‘90s filmmakers insane with terror? Back then, Hollywood was positive these newfangled computer machines would result in a generation of hairy-palmed morlocks, baffled by social mores and existing entirely on greasy chain pizza and novelty soft drinks. By the aughts, the computer and its attendant series of tubes had become such a part of everyday life that the fear is gone and… wait, Perfect Stranger came out in 2007? Forget it, I have no fucking clue what these idiots were thinking.

Tagline: How Far Would You Go To Keep a Secret?

More Accurate Tagline: How Long Can You Stay Awake Watching People Chat Online?

Guilty Party: This is a tough one, since Perfect Stranger is exactly the kind of star-studded crap that gets greenlit regardless of how tired the concept or even if the screenplay is indifferently scrawled on a men’s room wall in feces. The fact of the matter is, Bruce Willis and Halle Berry agreed to be in this movie for a paycheck, so I should probably blame their desire for a swimming pool.

Synopsis: The opening credit sequence is so bizarre, I couldn’t even figure out what they were trying to show. It looked like Azathoth attempting to have sex with the atmosphere processing station on LV-426. Eventually, the director comes out of whatever psychotic break he was wrestling to actually make the movie, and I instantly wish he was back in it. No, instead we have the adventures of intrepid reporter Rowena Price (Halle Berry), writing under the name David Shane (subtle commentary on sexism, or homage to Fletch? Who knows? Who cares?). She initially goes after a homophobic and closeted gay senator, only to find her hatchet job blocked at the eleventh hour.

Ro (as she’s known, and yes, I added “Ensign” to her name every time) quits in a huff, only to be stalked to the subway by a blonde woman. This turns out to be childhood friend Grace (Nicki Aycox, most famous to me as evil pixie Meg on Supernatural) who has another story for Ro. Grace was having an affair with an advertising executive Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis), when Hill suddenly broke it off and now Grace wants payback. The relationship between Ro and Grace is strained, and later we find out that Grace banged Ro’s last boyfriend. Anyway, Ro’s interested in the story, but not too interested.

Until Grace turns up dead! And like, super, duper dead. Poisoned then dumped in the river. Now convinced that Hill killed Grace, Ro decides she’s going to bring him down. With the assistance of her computer-savvy pal Miles (a supremely twitchy Giovanni Ribisi), she gets a job at Hill’s agency to investigate. Meanwhile, she catfishes Hill (while he uses his alias ADEX), trying to get him to drop some valuable hints during sexy chat time. And yes, this leads to multiple scenes of characters in front of computers typing words and whispering along. Its riveting. By which I mean you would need to rivet my eyes open like the fucking Ludovico Technique to get me to watch this again.

Ro hooks up with her ex that Grace banged, and while they’re playing Hide the Bishop (that’s a thing, right?), Miles lurks in the apartment listening. So… yeah. The autopsy brings two pertinent pieces of information to light: 1) Grace was pregnant and 2) the poison used was belladonna. Unfortunately, all this snooping gets Hill to believe Ro is a corporate spy, so he fires her. Then he goes out with her, because his dick is stupid. Then at the date, Miles sends an incriminating text which Hill intercepts, and it’s back to the corporate espionage angle. Yes, the big, exciting scene involved characters reading texts.

“The call is not coming from inside the house! It’s from far away! You’re totally safe is what I’m trying to tell you.”

Oh yeah… there have been two flashbacks, one in the beginning, and one here near the end. Basically, they’re of a guy telling her it’s bathtime, and not in a friendly, fatherly sort of way. It’s gross and it’s only barely important.

Miles invites Ro over for dinner, then for no good reason goes to Hill’s office to get at his computer. He couldn’t have done this earlier? He does make one big discovery, which is that Mrs. Hill has a series of photographs of dilated eyes, and belladonna in small doses is used to dilate eyes. So Hill had access to the poison! Wow.

Ro heads into Miles’s place, and he should have been there. He has a super gross Hollywood bachelor pad, including an analog porn stash on his toilet tank, and sorry, no. The whole point of this guy is that he’s comfortable with computers, and if there’s one thing computers are good at, it’s providing free pictures of naked people. Anyway, Ro keeps snooping, and finds a terrifying mannequin thing with her face on it, an animated gif on his computer of her in a bikini (the Swordfish one, delighting fans of shitty Halle Berry films) that just repeats in her voice “Miles is sexy,” and on that same computer a ton of shots of Miles and Grace re-enacting over half of Fifty Shades of Grey. Also, Miles is both ADEX, and Trublu, another chat pal that’s been pestering Ro. He comes home, they have a fight, but he does manage to tell her about the poison.

With all the evidence, the cops arrest Hill and he’s convicted. Halle Berry delivers this long babbling voiceover about the evils of computers, and I’m hoping she’ll be done soon so I can experience joy once again. But oh no, there’s one more twist. A pair of hands retrieve belladonna from a hiding place and it’s Ro. Yep, she killed Grace. And then just suddenly Miles is there, being like, Grace was blackmailing you! Uh… okay. Remember the molesting dad? Well, Ro’s mom beat him to death and they buried him in the yard. Grace saw it, so she had that over Ro’s head, which is why she had to be killed. Miles then figures out that Ro knew about the dilated eyes, because of the virtual tour — her computer auto-completed the URL. Yes, it’s as boring as it sounds. So she stabs him to death when he attempts to blackmail her for sex. And guess what? Her neighbor saw the whole thing.

Life-Changing Subtext: Computers will inevitably turn you into a sociopath. That’s not really subtext, though. She says it straight out in the final narration.

Defining Quote: This is on the IMDB quotes page and it’s too funny not to share.

Harrison Hill: Do you have any idea what loyalty is?

Ro: I bet your wife is wondering the same thing!

Harrison Hill: BAAAAAAAAAAAH!

The great thing is you can imagine that “BAAAAAAAAAAAH!” as angry, happy, or that fake laugh people use when they want to acknowledge a joke but not actually get any pleasure out of it.

Standout Performance: One of my favorite character actors, Richard Portnow, plays the improbably named Narron, Ro’s editor. He also played the coroner in Se7en, who delivered that incredible line with just the right amount of weariness and contempt: “He’s experienced about as much pain and suffering as anyone I’ve encountered, give or take, and he still has Hell to look forward to.” He doesn’t have much to do here, but I could listen to his raspy radio baritone read a description of a blocked colon.

What’s Wrong: It’s a cyber-panic flick made in 2007. It’s an erotic thriller without a single sex scene. It’s nearly two hours of people staring at email.

Flash of Competence: The final reveal is pretty good, even if the voiceover is dumb. Apparently, they three different endings with three different characters as the killer. That’s got to contribute to the directionless feeling of the middle hour and twenty minutes or so.

Best Scenes: What is up with Bruce Willis and terrible erotic thrillers? It’s possible he learned his lesson last time and refused to show his dick, but come on. The whole point of these movies are the sex scenes. A-list starts stripping down and doing a little grinding. Bruce Willis looks like he’s going to get busy in one scene, but he falls behind a curtain and that’s it. Maybe I should be grateful that I wasn’t traumatized this time?

A lot of hay was made of the pervasive product placement in Man of Steel, but this was worse. For one thing, Ro can’t sit down without fetching a frosty Heineken from her fridge. And in another scene, a line of Heinekens are just sitting on a conference table. Mmm… warm beer. Everyone’s favorite! There’s even a commercial for Victoria’s Secret in the middle, but in true Perfect Stranger form, none of the models are actually in lingerie.

Transcendent Moment: Just before the final reveal, Ro goes on a long voiceover rant about the evils of computers. She sounds like an Amish person haranguing a door-to-door salesman they have trussed up in a barn.

“It’s a world where you think actions have no consequence, where guilt is cloaked by anonymity, where there are no fingerprints. An invisible universe filled with strangers, interconnected online and disconnected in life. It will steal your secrets, corrupt your dreams, and co-opt your identity. Because in this world, where you can be anything you want, anyone you want, you just might lose sight of who you are.”

I’ve found that it’s a good idea just to agree with Josiah or he’ll churn your ass to butter. And for those keeping track at home, yes, Ro is blaming her murder of two people on her computer.

“Shh… just tell my penis all about it.”

Perfect Stranger’s biggest sin, ultimately, is being boring. It promises cheap titillation and fails even in that modest goal, so all we’re left with is 109 minutes of nothing. If you need to see Bruce Willis awkwardly groping on someone, watch Color of Night instead.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: bruce willis, computers are evil, cyberthriller, erotic thriller, Halle Berry, Perfect Stranger, Yakmala!

Girls, Guns and G-Strings: In Conclusion

No, Andy Sidaris did not make a movie called In Conclusion where his rotating cast of nude models, bodybuilders, and people who think Jenny McCarthy has something useful to add in a science debate all get in a giant combination gunfight and hot tub orgy and end up boiled alive in coconut oil. No, I reviewed all twelve of the elder and younger Sidaris’s softboiled and softcore spy series, and I’ve got to come up with some kind of conclusion. Otherwise I watched them for nothing.

They basically let your pervy uncle make movies for 13 years.

The series could only have existed when it did, specifically between 1985 and 1998. It rose after the Golden Age of Porn… well, okay. The Gold Lamé Age of Porn anyway. The move away from shooting on film to shooting on video allowed movies to be made more cheaply than ever before. Malibu Express, our first installment, was much more of a bad noir film than a bad spy film, and looked like the porn of the era. The series instantly got much softer, with more toplessness and less sex, though with the “recognizable” names/faces/boobs of Playboy Playmates. These were geared toward the emerging cable market. Cheap movies with cheap thrills that could fill the late night hours to entertain insomniacs and masturbators. As the series wore on, the Porn Chic of the late ‘90s (a renaissance occurring almost exactly twenty years after the first, and yes, that’s the only time I use a word that describes the achievements of some of the greatest geniuses of the human race with Jenna Jameson making oodles of cash from putting stuff in her) had an undeniable effect. The plots grew thinner and more perfunctory while the sex scenes grew longer and more explicit. It’s a little sad to note that the best movies for female characters happened in the Donna/Taryn/Nicole era of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. By the time the series limped to a close with the awful Return to Savage Beach, the writing was on the wall. This was 1998, and the world had just learned you can see naked people on the internet, for free, all the time. Sidaris was a softcore man in an increasingly hardcore world, and went out with as much dignity as he was going to be able to muster.

Like this. He went out like this.

While none of these movies are good, Guns still hangs together as the most watchable from beginning to end. It’s also the Empire Strikes Back of the series, which is a bizarre thing to say about skin flicks. Hard Ticket to Hawaii has the best individual scenes (rocketing the the blow-up doll, and the plague snake subplots), but the pacing is off. That’s the criticism throughout, though it gets worse in the later installments. The worst of the movies are the ones directed by Andy’s son Drew, who decided an entire movie about camping was a great idea.

None of the acting would ever show up on an Oscar reel, though Erik Estrada comes closest. His strange rebranding from villain in Guns to hero in Do or Die is profoundly bizarre, especially in light of his weird relationship to Donna. Still, Erik Estrada. You know, you could do worse. Pat Morita also isn’t bad, but the awkwardness of his sex scenes pretty much ruins any fun to be had from his performance.

Of the ladies, Hope Marie Carlton as bubbly Taryn is the best actor. She’s the only one who can even attempt to deliver a punchline, and she had good chemistry with Dona Speir. As for Speir, she is the best of the action heroes, and does do some legitimately awesome things (blowing up her kidnapper’s plane mid-flight and bailing out was incredible). I missed her when she was gone, her replacements were never as good. Granted, the scripts were worse. I think Sidaris had stopped caring by then.

As with all bad movies, the more personal they got the more fascinating they became. Generic bad movies, like the ones aired on SyFy, have very little cache with bad movie fans because their creativity begins and ends with the title. On a case-by-case basis, the Girls, Guns and G-Strings series seems just as impersonal. Yet with each installment undeniable themes emerged. The oddest has to be Sidaris’s fascination with radio-controlled vehicles. Some variation of RC car with a bomb strapped on it appeared in the vast majority of the movies. It’s a decent bomb delivery system I suppose, but the amount of time spent on these, especially in earlier installments, veered toward the fetishistic.

The continuity of the series was quirky at best, though Sidaris was looking at it from the beginning. The Abilene family runs through the first eight movies, and Cody Abilene’s distinctive .357 magnum and holstein case made appearances even beyond that. A lot of the movies could be approached best as a repertory company with the same ensemble of actors performing different roles. And with some grinding. Things got weird when old Japanese men were replaced with young white men or when a villain suddenly turned good in the next installment for no real reason. This last example popped up in the final film, which was when Sidaris really tried to tie the whole thing together, even retroactively declaring Donna and Taryn to be members of the Legion to Ensure Total Harmony And Law.

The favorite theme — and this comes from both my wife and me — was the hot tub. In several movies, the two lead characters (usually Donna and Taryn/Nicole), got topless in a hot tub to talk over the plot. We figured this was because their brains were powered by warm water on or near their nipples. Best part? In Do or Die, Sidaris even calls attention to the whole thing with Nicole pointing out she does her best thinking in a hot tub. If that doesn’t sum the series up, I don’t know what does.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Andy Sidaris, b-movies, G-Strings, Girls, guns, L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies

Girls, Guns and G-Strings: Return to Savage Beach

I do not like how speculatively she’s looking at that gun.

Here we are! The final installment of the Girls, Guns, and G-Strings collection! Just as a side note here, the series has been awful glib about that Oxford comma, and I’ve probably been inconsistent about applying it as well. The only reason I bring this up is because I liked to pretend this series was about Girls on one hand, and then Guns wearing G-Strings on the other.

Cast: This one is a lot more direct than previous installments, as it’s more or less a direct sequel of both Savage Beach and Day of the Warrior.

Julie Strain, Julie K. Smith, Shae Marks, Marcus Bagwell, Cristian Letelier, and Gerald Okamura are all back as the same characters they played in Day of the Warrior. Rodrigo Obregon plays Rodrigo Martinez (remember how bad Sidaris is with names), the same villainous filipino officer from Savage Beach. Ava Cadell is back in her first appearance since Fit to Kill, playing sexologist and spy radio personality Ava. Carolyn Liu is back as Silk, although she has fuck all to do here.

The role of Doc Austin is now played by Paul Logan, and there’s barely a difference in the actor’s sub-porn level acting ability.

Non-Actor Quotient: Other than previous mentions Strain, Smith, Marks, and Bagwell, Miss September 1993 Carrie Westcott plays Sofia. Kevin Eastman, co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and at the time husband of Julie Strain, plays Ava’s engineer Harry the Cat. Supposedly he’s in the last one, but I didn’t see him.

IMDB Plot Keywords: treasure, softcore, sexploitation, glamorized spy film, spy film

IMDB User Lists Appearing On: Semi-Legit Films with Porn Stars, THE BEST MOVIES WITH LOVE MAKING EROTIC SEX SCENES, Anarkrite’s movies, Series – Lethal Ladies, *beep*

Synopsis: This is the last of the L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies series, and it feels like Sidaris was running on fumes. Paint fumes, specifically. He makes a half-assed effort to tie everything together, but judging by the way Return to Savage Beach plods along — like a fat tourist running to the buffet seconds before it switches from breakfast to lunch — he barely cared.

The Legion to Ensure Total Harmony And Law is tracking a group of terrorists outside of Dallas. This entire series takes place within a short drive of two houses: probably Andy Sidaris in Molokai and Drew Sidaris in Dallas. Tiger and Tyler put a stop to that, muttering their dialogue like they’re trying to hear Little Bill stage whisper it from offscreen.

A woman we later learn to be Sofia dons some red leather and rollerblades (like you do), and sneaks into L.E.T.H.A.L. headquarters pretending to be a pizza delivery person giving out free samples. This totally works, because there are only three people in the building who, due to cutbacks, are forced to share two brain cells between them. Sofia steals a map to the titular Savage Beach, which for some reason still has the gold from the Philippines the Japanese stole in WWII. We get a flashback recap, and it explicitly states that Donna Hamilton and Taryn Kendall (this is the first time she gets a last name!) were L.E.T.H.A.L.’s first agents. All this does is make me miss the relatively solid acting chops of Dona Speir and Hope Marie Carlton. Rodrigo Martinez, the leader of the bandits (who was blown up by Taryn), was close with Tyler’s dad for some reason. Martinez fell to the Dark Side of the Force, but first gave Tyler a medallion that would be destined to block a bullet. They don’t say that, but that’s literally the only reason you give a medallion to a character.

Meanwhile, Martinez is in his headquarters wearing a Phantom of the Opera mask. Yeah, it’s weird, but Sidaris isn’t done fucking with us. At this point, he’s just interpreting Rorschach blots through the medium of film. Martinez explains that bandits used Savage Beach for years, but for some reason never dug up the fucking gold? Maybe it’s because of that weird Japanese guy, Warrior? Remember him? Well, the movie doesn’t, because he’s not mentioned. Anyway, Martinez and Sofia have this weird love scene where he dresses up like a cross between Zorro, the Phantom of the Opera, with just a smidgeon of Spanish-language Buzz Lightyear, and she’s in some lingerie so complicated you’d need Hans Gruber’s entire gang to get into it.

For no real reason, Willow Black brings in the Warrior from the last movie (not the Warrior from the original Savage Beach — remember, Sidaris is not good with names) who is a good guy now. They at least remember he used to be evil, so that’s more than all the other roles that switched. They even retcon that federal agent Warrior wrestled to death (he was trying to create the most ‘90s scene ever, in hopes to finally unhorse that one Saved by the Bell where Jessie takes trucker uppers) into a serial killer. Yep, a serial killer. And apparently L.E.T.H.A.L. hired Warrior to do it. They didn’t mention it in the last movie because fuck you, you should be masturbating right now. The only upside is Warrior has a pencil-thin goatee, a greasy Caesar cut, and some solid late ‘90s douchebag wear. He’s really in this movie only so Willow can bang someone. The resulting sex unironically references Showgirls’s infamous Dolphin Sex scene, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the series.

Tiger and Cobra are going to fly to Savage Beach ahead of Martinez because this is an homage to the earlier (and better) Sidaris movies. Meanwhile, Doc, Tyler, and Willow will sail there. Fu and Warrior will stay behind to guard… something. It doesn’t matter. Ninjas, led by Sofia, attack Tyler and Doc and kidnap Tyler. Doc does karate like he’s worried his mom will show up in the middle of his yellow belt test.

The heroes reconnect on Savage Beach (although Tyler has to repeatedly kick an overweight ninja to escape, and yes, it’s as funny as it sounds), with Doc wearing a Bruce-inspired ensemble of a leather vest and light jeans, and Willow dressed like a slutty gladiator. Sofia reveals herself to be an agent of Interpol and she busts out an accent that has to be the least convincing French thing I’ve seen since the croissanwich.

“With this cache of black leather vests, I can rule the world!”

The heroes get the treasure back to Molokai, and set up a sting on Martinez. The sting consists of characters explaining the plot of the movie we’ve just watched, then throwing in their origin stories. Long story short: the guy we thought was Martinez was actually his nephew Carlos (seriously), who murdered Rodrigo and impersonated him. Nope, there’s a final reveal where it turns out Rodrigo is fine after all and he’s a good guy now too. The end.

Yakmala? The best Andy Sidaris movies feel like they were written by a fourteen year old on the inside of his Trapper Keeper who was making explosion noises with his mouth the whole time. This has moments of that breathless inanity, but for the most part, it’s a slog of commuting and parking. It even commits the worst sin: making you pine for better movies, and it’s not like they were all that great to begin with.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Andy Sidaris, end of an era, G-Strings, Girls, guns, Julie Strain, L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies, Return to Savage Beach

Lifetime Theater: The Craigslist Killer

Late in my critically acknowledged novel Mr Blank, our hero is asked how he got his job of working for every conspiracy, secret society, and cult on the planet. His answer? Craigslist.

If you know an easier way to contact Satanists, tell me.

Craigslist has become shorthand for sleazy rendezvous between desperate people for the same reason I can no longer dress up like a clown and play on any swingsets: because perverts ruin everything. This week’s entry into Lifetime Theater, The Craigslist Killer, is about one such pervert, whose exploits are presented as a big reason why you can no longer use Craigslist to book those massage appointments where you explain how you carry all your tension in your penis. The titular Craigslist Killer showed up to the party, and just like that, it’s over. He’s sort of the Andy Dick of Craigslist, which is weird to say, in that I had always assumed Andy Dick was the Andy Dick of Craigslist.

The film opens in another ‘90s teen movie, appropriate since it’s helmed by Stephen Kay, who gave us the transcendently bizarre Blue-Eyed Butcher. Once again, it begins with a photogenic couple ready to jump into an ill-advised relationship that will only end in murder. This time, it’s straight-A medical student, outgoing party guy, and Young Republican (he mentions this when coming onto our heroine) Philip Markoff, and naive nursing school student Megan McAllister (Agnes Bruckner, who would later play Anna Nicole Smith). Both Philip and Megan work at a teaching hospital in New England, but the set is the very Californian one used in Scrubs, down to the very prominent palm trees visible on the horizon. Philip isn’t just the perfect doctor, he’s damn near the messiah. His Dr. Cox figure (played by the great Sam McMurray), waxes rhapsodical about Philip whenever he can. Philip is basically Jeff Wright, although instead of a penchant for visiting loud nightclubs where women dance in colorful and concealing lingerie, Phil likes to prowl the darker corners of Craigslist. And instead of being in the nebulous world of “business,” he’s got medical training. You’d think that would be mined for creepiness, but no.

The romance is a whirlwind, going from their first date to living together in six months. Philip wins over Megan’s parents with a charm offensive, but remains closed-mouthed about his own folks. This would seem to set up a third act reveal where we see the brackish Freudian muck from which his murderous desires were born, but nope. His mom pops up at the engagement party, and it’s pretty clear he doesn’t want here there, but that’s it. Nothing else. She never appears again.

While Megan plans the wedding, a clearly stressed out Philip decides to work off some steam by booking massages and attacking the women who show up. Like you do. Now, I don’t want to second guess the guy, but when a movie is called The Craigslist Killer, I’m expecting some Craigslist Killings. Philip is the most incompetent moron ever to stumble his way into serial murder, and despite what TV tells you, most killers are not brain surgeons. This chucklehead mostly robs his victims, threatens them a little, and steals their panties (which he keeps under the mattress tied up in socks because… actually I have no fucking clue.) His first victim is played by Banshee’s Trieste Dunn, so while he’s threatening her, I couldn’t figure out why Deputy Siobhan Kelly wasn’t beating his ass like Batman touring a mental hospital. She later tells the cops, one of whom is played by William Baldwin who has apparently learned the secrets of Bowl of Chili acting from his brother, that it’s clear that her attacker has done this before.

And there’s the problem right there. Of the three attacks shown, one is more of a robbery (with a panty-theft thrown in), one is a robbery gone wrong in which a desperate Philip shoots the masseuse, and the last has the woman’s boyfriend/pimp come in and get in a knockdown drag-out brawl. In these three scenarios, Philip manages to kill exactly one person. Jesus Christ, I hope Megan bought safety scissors for the house, or this fucking idiot is going to put out his own eyes. This isn’t even Philip’s job. Craigslist Killing is his hobby. There’s no excuse for not doing it well. So it’s no small wonder that Billy Baldwin, even though he’s clearly suffering after having eaten all that chili before every scene, catches Philip without too much trouble.

Initially, Megan doesn’t want to believe that her perfect man could be murdering women he solicited on Craigslist. It’s worth noting that at this point in the movie, I turned to my wife and asked her if she would believe I was a killer. She responded, without missing a beat, “If there was a crawlspace involved, definitely.” Anyway, Megan continues to deny, deny, deny, even as Billy Baldwin (and his roiling gutful of chili) bring Philip’s online presence to her attention. He posts on a sex addict site, there’s a naked selfie on some profile, and earlier in the movie he appears to take a dick pic. We don’t see it, because, you know, Lifetime. This is the same reason it abruptly gets homo- and transphobic. Apparently, despite the audience never seeing it, Philip was also posting about hooking up with men and specifically transmen. This is the final straw for Meg. Murdering women is one thing, I mean, that’s practically a national pastime! But being bisexual? She confronts him about it while he’s cooling his heels in jail, and when he refuses to deny it, she takes off the ring. This prompts Philips second (and this one successful) suicide attempt.

If there’s one thing I learned from The Craigslist Killer it’s that maybe, just maybe, you should know someone for more than six months before agreeing to marry them. And on the other side of the coin, if you’re going to be a Craigslist Killer, show some respect for yourself. Have a plan. Practice. Really scout your victims. Don’t just jump in and hope for the best. You’re going to end up as a laughingstock.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Craigslist, doing it right, Lifetime Theater, murder, relationships, respect for yourself, The Craigslist Killer