Justin Robinson's Blog, page 19

Now Fear This: Drop Dead Gorgeous

It’s like, a pun or whatever.

Any gathering with old friends inevitably includes this moment: I make a joke about something horrifying and everyone laughs even though you can tell by the pained looks on their faces they kind of hate the part of them that finds it funny. Then one of them says some variation of, “That’s why we keep Justin around.” Like a lot of people who deal in humor, I see the ins and outs of jokes before they happen, and since laughter is fundamentally based on surprise, I laugh at odd things. Consequently, my humor can get a little… dark. I’m not trying to shock anything, I’m just saying something that makes me laugh and maybe it will for someone else. Besides, I’ve learned that the way to deal with darkness is either to laugh or cry, and laughing is way more fun. I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t invite me to funerals.

Back in 1999, my mother told me I had to see this movie, Drop Dead Gorgeous, for one specific scene. That scene is the talent portion of a local beauty pageant in which Stepford Sexbot Becky Leeman (Denise Richards) breathily talk-sings the Frankie Valli classic “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” while dancing with a giant crucified Jesus doll. It’s a brilliant scene that pretty much hits every corner of my sense of humor. It’s the perfect display of that kind of tawdry piety that would become increasingly popular in the following decade, so in addition to being absolutely hilarious, it’s possibly the work of a sorcerer. The film had already won me over by the time that scene rolled around with its odd combination of Midwest grotesquerie, earnest charm, and offbeat humor.

The movie itself is a shaggy dog, concerning itself with the pageant and a few of the characters beyond it, offering a mockumentary evisceration on pageant culture, the boundless rage behind the exaggerated niceness of Minnesota, and pretty much anything else the creators chose to throw in. Those creators are writer Lona Williams, who drew from her actual experience as a pageant contestant in Minnesota, and appears as the third, non-speaking judge, and Michael Patrick Jann who you remember in a few non-speaking roles on MTV’s The State and possibly your nightmares. In a strange way, the world was primed for a story like this. Drop Dead Gorgeous feels like the spiritual heir of two other movies from 1996: the mockumentary structure, absurdist humor, and obsession with small-town minutiae owes a debt to Christopher Guest’s fantastic Waiting for Guffman, while the Minnesota accents and pervasive darkness comes directly from the Coen masterpiece Fargo.

The story opens in 1995 (making this a period piece of a sort), for the 50th Anniversary of the Sarah Rose Cosmetics American Teen Princess Pageant. A documentary crew (predominantly voiced by State ace Thomas Lennon) has arrived in Mount Rose, Minnesota, population 5,076, to witness the city-wide pageant. The winner will go to state, and from there to the big show in Lincoln, Alabama. The exposition is done in a promotional film, which features Adam West lampooning his image a year before Family Guy would call on him to do the same (and prompt TV tropes to turn his name into a participle). The video instantly undercuts the glamor of the pageant by having the host, a former winner, nonchalantly reveal she works at a pork packing plant. The film’s sharpest running gag features characters talking up the importance of the pageant, and then contrast it with some horrible side effect. The most effective features last year’s winner Mary Johanson (Alexandra Holden), a sweet space cadet currently hospitalized with anorexia. Her “triumphant” return to the pageant is too funny to spoil.

The pageant is run by local bigwig and former winner Gladys Leeman (Kirstie Alley, ripping into that accent like no one’s business), and mother of the aforementioned Becky. This should create some kind of conflict of interest, but the entire town accepts that nepotism will carry the day with a sense of grim fatalism. The Leemans are the richest people in their tiny corner of Minnesota, so of course they’re going to come out ahead. This year, there appears to be a serious threat to Becky’s winning: Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst) a bubbly trailer park resident who practices her tapdancing while at her after-school job, which is doing hair and makeup for corpses at the local mortuary. The other serious threat, star athlete and president of the local Lutheran girls’ gun club, is shortly murdered on her tractor.

That’s the kind of story we’re dealing with. Someone — and through most of the story it’s heavily hinted that it’s monstrous Becky — is knocking off her competition and really anyone who gets in the way. Her archnemesis is Amber, who through sheer luck dodges several attempts that lay waste to everyone in her general vicinity. There is a ton of darkness in the story, but it’s ultimately the funny kind, as the killers are mostly harmless and everything is through the lens of fundamentally good-hearted Amber. It helps that the movie is damn funny, with many of the jokes, in true mockumentary fashion being muttered asides and actions that directly contradict the story the actors are trying to tell.

The cast is absolutely stuffed with ringers. Dunst is great as Amber, proving that between this, Dick, and The Cat’s Meow, she’s got some seriously good comedic chops. Ellen Barkin gets some good moments as Amber’s mom, balancing her performance between that of a boozy trailer park curmudgeon and genuinely loving mother who wants her daughter to achieve all her dreams. Richards doesn’t even attempt the regional accent here, but she’s not called upon to do much other than act archly, polish a gun, and sing an inappropriate love song to a doll. Kirstie Alley seems to be channeling Sarah Palin in her performance, which is impressive considering the film came out nine years before McCain broke the final seal and unleashed Palin upon the unsuspecting world. Sam McMurray, Allison Janney, and Mindy Sterling all play parts as locals, and these three are basically national treasures who elevate already good material to lofty heights. The contestants feature a few recognizable faces, including Brittany Murphy as giggly Lisa Swenson, reminding us why we loved her, and Amy Adams in her movie debut as dimwitted Leslie Miller. They’re all wonderful, and pretty much any interview with any one of them produces the best laughs of the movie.

As much as I love the film, it does have flaws. The structure doesn’t quite work, as the entire movie is the build up to the pageant followed by the pageant itself… and then another half hour of movie. That’s not to say that the tail end is laugh free — it definitely has its solid moments — but after the pageant, the movie runs out of a lot of the steam its built up. It doesn’t help that the villains are all dead or incarcerated, and all of the non-Amber contestants abruptly vanish from the narrative. The film ends with a “Where Are They Now” that only includes Amber, one of the three judges, and Leslie, which is just an egregious oversight. I bonded with Lisa, Tess, Michelle, and all the others, and a last moment with them should have been required. At least tell me that obvious sex criminal John Dough, one of the judges, had something awful happen to him. That’s all I need.

Drop Dead Gorgeous came back into my consciousness with a piece Buzzfeed ran on it. The movie was a failure at the time, but has picked up a richly-deserved cult audience in the last fifteen years. Considering how terrifyingly prescient it is, we might want to look at it as some kind of lipstick-smeared oracle.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Amy Adams, Denise Richards, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Kirsten Dunst, Lona Williams, Michael Patrick Jann, Minnesota, Now Fear This, pageant

Yakmala: Man of Steel

He keeps that mildly constipated look on his face through the whole movie. It’s how you know this is Serious Business.

It’s unfair to compare adaptations across media. A movie should stand on its own, and even if it comes from a book, comic book, webcomic, dirty limerick, homeless guy’s subway ravings, it should stand on its own as a discrete work. A lot of the criticism of the Goyer/Snyder/Nolan joint Man of Steel, centered around its treatment of Superman. I’m throwing all that aside. I’m reviewing this movie like I don’t even know who Superman is. And I’m pretty sure that’s how the movie was made as well.

Tagline: None

More Accurate Tagline: In the grim darkness of the present, there is only angst.

Guilty Party: There’s a lot to go around here, so I’m going to lay it on the Goyer/Snyder/Nolan triumvirate. These three are like the Three Musketeers, if D’Artagnan died after all four of them had a paint-eating contest and they were always on the way to his funeral. These three hate humor the way Rick Perry hates knowing things. Goyer and Nolan were more successful in their gritty grimdark portrayal of superheroes when they were working with an actual gritty grimdark hero in Batman, but here they try their schtick with an alien who flies around in primary-colored tights and assaults wealthy industrialists with alopecia. Goyer and Nolan, already on shaky intellectual ground, threw things to Zack Snyder, who never had a thought he didn’t immediately attempt to rape. They threw together a boring, humorless slog and called it a movie.

Synopsis: Krypton is royally fucked. The planet’s core is exploding, and no one seems to care. This is what they get when they buy their technology from the Engineers. Amongst this, scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and scientist’s wife Lara (who cares, she’s a complete non-entity) have the first natural birth in thousands of years. This is super important for the movie because… actually, it doesn’t really matter. There’s some silliness about choice, but it’s really just an excuse to re-use the “endless fields, Neo, where human beings are not born. They are grown.” Seriously, those exact CGI sets from The Matrix are recycled, except they’re put under water. I hope the Wachowskis got some royalties.

Anyway, General Zod (Michael Shannon) is really mad about this whole apocalypse thing, and starts a coup. He wants to somehow save the Codex (stored in a monkey skull in a giant pool for some reason), which is the map of the genetic material of the entire species, but only wants to save some bloodlines, which Jor-El objects to. How they plan to save anything when it’s pretty clear the planet only has one working spacecraft and it’s designed for an infant is anyone’s guess. Jor-El sticks the Codex in his son (don’t worry, he warms it up first), and Zod is arrested for treason. Then, the ruling council of Krypton tries and convicts Zod and his crew. Then they’re put in space dicks and flown up to an interdimensional prison.

“Hey, uh… Zack, do these remind you of anything?” “ROCKET DICKS, YEAH!” “Okay, just making sure you’re seeing it too.”

…so apparently, instead of saving maybe some scientists, artists, leaders, that kind of thing, the Kryptonians decided to put their most dangerous criminals in the one lifeboat the planet has. Yeah, Kryptonians are fucking morons.

The pod containing Jor-El’s kid crashes in some farmland, but then we’re suddenly in an episode of Deadliest Catch. I don’t know either. A bearded guy we later find out is named Clark is wrestling with his humanity, his accent, and a crippling flashback addiction, not having much luck with any of them. He saves some folks on an oil rig, then steals some pants and works in a truck stop for awhile. When some guy harasses him, Clark impales the man’s semi on some logs and telephone wires because secret identities are for assholes. The flashbacks go back to his childhood when his father Jonathan Kent teaches him the most important lesson of being a hero: you should never save anyone because it might inconvenience you or your family somewhere down the line. Jonathan is a goddamn monster.

Clark hears about some weird object in the ice from a couple soldiers chatting about it at the truck stop — no, seriously, this is what happens — and suddenly he’s up on some kind of top secret Arctic military base, calling himself “Joe” and everyone’s cool with this. Lois Lane (Amy Adams), a reporter, also shows up on this military base, so at this point I’m just assuming that the armed forces in this reality communicate secrets to different branches entirely through stage whispering and highway billboards. Clark uses his laser eyes to get into the object — which turns out to be a spaceship — and he and Lois have a meet cute that involves him cauterizing her wounds with those same laser eyes. The ship is full of mummies (oh no!), but after Clark plugs in a data stick Jor-El sent to earth with him, Jor-El suddenly gets uploaded into the ship to tell Clark his origin story (oh yeah!). Clark is Kal-El of Krypton, and he was sent to earth because through a combination of solar radiation, atmosphere, and gravity, he would get superpowers. And then he could save everyone and help humanity be awesome. Jor-El is going to be pissed when he finds out Clark happened to land in a serial killer’s backyard.

Clark flies off in his new ship, leaving Lois behind. She uses her reporter magic and tracks Clark down to his hometown (which is never named in the dialogue, so I’m calling it Americatown). Weirdly, she finds Martha Kent (Diane Lane), and then Clark meets Lois at Jonathan’s grave, leading me to believe Martha must have called her son. Nope, a later scene establishes they’d never talked about Lois. Weird. Clark convinces Lois to kill the story, because his dad told him to hide.

Finally Zod and the bad guys show up. After Krypton exploded, the interdimensional prison freed them, so yeah, there was no reason not to use that as an ark and let the convicted traitors die on the planet. They modified the prison into a starship and went around the galaxy visiting old Kryptonian outposts, scavenging equipment. Zod also found the time to grow some douchebro chin pubes, but sadly he never produces a backwards-facing baseball cap to go with them. Zod reveals all this in a dream sequence, which made no sense until I hit myself in the bead with a baseball bat a couple times. Now I get it, and I’ve learned misery has a taste. Zod demands that Kal-El be turned over to him, and Clark surrenders to the military to make this happen.

In an interrogation room, Lois points out the S on his chest (It’s not an S, Clark explains, it means hope on Krypton), and suggests he be called “Super–” but then feedback cuts her off. Man, the movie did not want her to finish that thought. Wonder what that’s about?

The military turns Clark over to the Kryptonians and they also demand Lois, probably because they saw Amy Adams in the credits and figured she was important. Seriously, that’s the only reason. Lois uploads Jor-El into the ship, and then she and Clark escape. Zod and company decide to go bother Martha, and that produces a big fistfight. Clark takes out Zod rather easily by disabling his helmet, which then overloads Zod’s sensitive Kryptonian senses with the cacophony of earth. When two more Kryptonians come down to fight, I figured Clark would just disable their helmets for a quick win. Nope, instead he destroys as much of Americatown as he can with a pointless brawl. This is actually pretty good character development: we’ve already established Kryptonians are so fucking stupid they couldn’t figure out how lifeboats work, and Jonathan instilled in Clark a deep indifference to the suffering of others. Anyway, the military shows up, shoots everyone, but comes to a grudging respect for Clark.

Zod has had enough of Clark’s bullshit, and he sends a World Engine, which is a giant machine that will convert Earth into Krypton (the exact opposite of “terraforming,” which is how a scientist describes it because David Goyer, like David Lindelof, doesn’t know that words mean things). Clark deals with this, while the military goes after Zod’s ship, presently reducing Metropolis to rubble. They plan to drop a bomb made out of the pod Clark came to earth in. Oh, right around here, an embarrassed soldier refers to Clark as “Superman,” and it’s never brought up again, as the mood is sure to emphasize that this is a stupid and shameful name.

Anyway, Clark destroys the World Engine and the military takes out the ship, leaving Clark to fight Zod. He does this by guiding Zod into the sections of the city that haven’t been demolished by the ship, and then punching him into as many buildings as he can. This is a great way to show how thoroughly he learned from his dad: people should not be saved because fuck them. Eventually he corners Zod in a train station and Zod threatens to kill four people with his laser eyes. For some reason, these four really matter to Clark and he decides to kill Zod (and deal with some minor constipation at the same time). And in the most unrealistic part of the film, Clark rolls into a totally rebuilt city, and gets a job as a journalist at a newspaper.

Life-Changing Subtext: Human beings are useless and helpless insects.

Defining Quote: There are so many terrible lines in this thing, it’s tough to pick just one. I’m going to go with a line at the end of the film, after Clark has supposedly learned his lesson and accepted his role as Space Jesus. He and Lois kiss, and she says, “You know, they say it’s downhill after the first kiss,” to which he responds, “I’m pretty sure that only counts when you’re kissing a human.”

SHE’S A HUMAN, YOU INSUFFERABLE DICK.

She’s a human, just like all the people you allowed to die with nary a thought. Get the fuck off my planet, you Kryptonian paraquat.

Standout Performance: She doesn’t have much to do, but I enjoyed Antje Traue as Zod’s right hand Faora-Ul. Other than her harsh Teutonic beauty, she appeared to be the Kryptonian most comfortable with the action sequences. Even though her fight with Clark should have ended when he instantly pulled her helmet off, she did more interesting things with her powers than anyone else. And it was in an IHOP.

They wanted to be very clear on the fact that it’s an IHOP.

What’s Wrong: The movie seems to believe this Clark person is not just someone we should cheer for, but someone we should worship. The film wallows in unearned Christ imagery, first as Clark floats in the water after saving the guys on the oil rig (to be fair, Jesus has been quite clear on his love of fossil fuels), sitting in a church by some stained glass (Jesus was also known for sitting), then floating away from a ship he just punched (Jesus was also a huge fan of punching things). It’s the fundamental disconnect with what the movie believes it’s showing, and what it is actually showing.

Flash of Competence: It looks good, although Zack Snyder has fallen in love with that faux-documentary shooting style I hate. It’s like he’s cycling through all the overused cliches of directing one by one. That guy is the herpetic carbuncle on the cock of American cinema.

Best Scenes: It’s jarring when you’re watching a movie and you realize the filmmakers have an entirely different idea of what a word means than you do. In this case, “alien.” An alien is something you’re born as, yet for some reason Clark suddenly turns into an alien in the middle of class. I wonder if Goyer et al think animals spontaneously turn into other animals? Maybe they’re terrified of cats thinking they’ll become crocodiles.

I should mention my favorite scene in the movie. After a schoolbus goes over a bridge, Clark (a kid himself) saves all the kids inside. Jonathan takes the opportunity to yell at him. When Clark asks “Should I have let them die?” Jonathan’s answer is “Maybe.” No. No is the word you were looking for there, Jonathan. Letting children die is never the right answer for a hero.

While fighting in the IHOP, Faora utters a truly baffling bon mot. She tells Clark that he has morality and she and the other Kryptonians do not. First off… what the fuck person actually says this? Everyone thinks they are moral. But that’s not the truly stupid part of the line. She claims her lack of morality “gives us an evolutionary advantage. And evolution always wins.” That isn’t even close to how you use that word. You might as well put any other word there and it would make the same amount of sense. “We have a Wednesday advantage. And Wednesday always wins.” And the Lindelof Award for Using a Big Scientific Word in an Attempt to Sound Smart that Goes Horribly Awry goes to David S. Goyer.

Zod wants to use the Codex to bring Kryptonians back, and appeals to Clark on this level. It would work but for one thing: Jonathan Kent taught Clark the valuable lesson of letting children die.

Transcendent Moment: This movie undermines itself with such gleeful frequency it’s tough to pick a moment. Still, it has to be the tornado.

Jonathan, Martha, and Clark are driving along, and Clark has a “yer not my daaaad!” moment, when a tornado hits. Jonathan instantly hops out of the car and starts ordering everyone to go to the overpass. Now you might think this is the result of poor research, since someone living in Kansas would know that this is the worst place to go in the event of a tornado. But this is Jonathan Kent we’re talking about. He fucking hates people and wants as many dead as possible. Children especially. So he’s setting them up.

Then, they see a dog is trapped in a car. Jonathan is in the process of carrying a little girl to the overpass (the monster!), but hands her to Clark (so he can get a little blood on his hands and see that it feels good) to save the dog. Never mind that Clark has super speed, and there are winds and debris everywhere, so he could conceivably not show people that he is an invulnerable god. Nope. Jonathan goes himself. And when Clark wants to save him, Jonathan does this perfect passive aggressive pose, like “no… I’m fine… see… you have to let people die…”

It’s still the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in a superhero movie.

Nope… it’s cool. Don’t worry about me. I’ll just hang out here.

The magic of Man of Steel isn’t that it’s a shitty Superman movie — we’ve had plenty of those. It’s that it’s a shitty movie that’s ashamed to be a Superman movie. In the end, it’s a tale told by three idiots, full of sound, fury, and tornadoes.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: anhedonia, Christopher Nolan, David Goyer, DC, Henry Cavill, man of steel, not Superman, superman, Yakmala!, zack snyder

Girls, Guns and G-Strings: Day of the Warrior

pew pew pew!

Andy Sidaris is back! And with him comes the first instance of the “L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies” series title you see applied to these skin flicks.

Cast: This is a weird installment to parse (aren’t they all) because of the mix of returning actors, returning characters (not always one for one), and new strippers, bodybuilders, and head trauma victims that comprise our players.

An increasingly haggard Julie K. Smith returns as Cobra, and this is the only case of an actor returning to the same role. We have some of the same actors, and possibly some of the same roles, but Smith is the only one conclusively playing the same character. God, these movies are strange.

Kevin Light and Cristian Letelier play the Bruce Penhall and Mark Barriere roles as the ostensible leads Doc Austin and J. Tyler Ward. And yes, that is the most thought any Sidaris has ever put into a name. Shae Marks plays Tiger, an agent whose chief power seems to be staying upright while supporting a pair of fake breasts Jim Lee would describe as excessive. Marcus Bagwell plays the titular Warrior and if I start talking about him now I’ll never stop. Raye Hollitt plays “Kym,” and she’s clearly not the same character as the Kym from some of the earlier installments… or is she?!

Julie Strain returns, this time as Willow Black, the leader of the good guys. Her partner is Fu, played by Gerald Okamura. You remember Fu, he was in the last movie, played by the same actor, only he was blown right the fuck up. On camera. Maybe being hit with a grenade makes you good in this universe? Who the fuck knows. Richard Cansino (thankfully without Chu Chu Malave) is back as yet another incompetent “comic relief” hitman, this time named J.P. Cassidy Phillips, the former Platter Puss is his partner Chaz. Rodrigo Obregon plays the evil Manuel in this one, but he barely has anything to do with the plot. I think Sidaris was throwing his old pal some work.

Ron Browning plays another mulleted bad guy here also named Ron, and Carolyn Liu, the former Silk, has what amounts to a cameo as a woman in a bikini with the bad taste to date either J.P. or Chaz.

The last cast member worth mentioning is Tammy Parks as Scorpion. It seems like she’s supposed to be the same character originated by Wendy Hamilton (this is the only place you will ever see that sentence), but she’s been recast. There’s a great documentary to be made about what went on behind the scenes in these.

Non-Actor Quotient: Strain and Smith, as well as Tammy Parks all represent Penthouse, and Parks later went on to a lengthy and terrifying career in porn. Shae Marks is our sole Playmate (May 1994), and I can’t help but think that’s a sign of the series in decline. Raye Hollitt is pretty obviously a bodybuilder, and she was also Zap of American Gladiators. Darren Wise, playing good guy assassin “Shark” has a filmography consisting entirely of this movie and Playboy videos and I don’t even want to know what’s going on there. Marcus Bagwell is most famous as WCW wrestler “Buff Bagwell,” which seems like the laziest gimmick ever. And lastly, I fucking refuse to believe Cristian Letelier is an actor. I refuse.

IMDB Plot Keywords: diamonds, bikini, softcore, sexploitation, glamorized spy film

IMDB User Lists Appearing On: DVD/Blu-Ray Colection [sic], Owned Movies on DVD, So bad they’re good watchlist, Dvds

Synopsis: The Legion to Ensure Total Harmony And Law (L.E.T.H.A.L.) computer systems have been hacked! The agents embedded undercover in the criminal empire of the Warrior will be compromised. There’s Doc Austin (Light), wearing some very ‘90s mom jeans in South Texas, Cobra, as some Frank Miller S&M stripper in Los Angeles, and Shark and Scorpion in the Warrior’s porn operation in Las Vegas. Tiger and Tyler will get Austin out, while Willow and Fu warn Cobra and extract Shark and Scorpion.

When Tiger and Tyler hook up… well… acting has never been this series’s strong point. But boy howdy do they manage to find a new low. Tyler spends the entire film with a confused look on his face, like he can’t figure out what all the cameras are doing there, and why the pretty lady is making word-sounds with her mouth-hole. Mrs. Supermarket pegged him as the human version of the “I Have No Idea What I’m Doing” Dog.

Tyler.

The Warrior turns out to be a greased-up ‘roid monster in some chintzy Native American gear and… well, maybe it’s offensive, but it’s so goddamn stupid it wraps around to funny again. The Warrior supposedly has some Indian in him, but it’s probably just him whining that he understands the minority experience because he’s 1/16th Cherokee. Anyway, his preferred method of execution is pro-wrestling people to death in his ring, which is only moderately more cruel than making people look at his frosted tips. He has a mole inside L.E.T.H.A.L. codenamed “Hard Drive,” who apparently hates him, because he hooks him up with his two fucktarded assistants J.P. and Chaz. Their jobs? To eliminate the undercover heroes.

While Cobra does something with diamonds I don’t really get (and her awful theme song plays!), she’s stalked by an assassin who would be really scary if I were a supersized Big Mac combo. Since I’m not, I think Cobra will be fine. She is, as Willow sends a coded transmission in time to warn her, and Cobra kills the hitman in a shootout. Sadly, it’s not J.P. or Chaz. Tyler and Tiger rescue Austin after a short gunfight in which Tyler seems baffled about why tree-people shoot gun thunder noise pants hurt? Willow and Fu (who keeps doing stereotypical kung fu dialogue that’s supposed to be funny), go to bail out Shark and Scorpion, and arrive just in time. J.P. and Chaz manage to wound both agents (which is better than any character played by Richard Cansino has managed in five movies), but Willow and Fu chase the bad guys off.

The good guy team of Austin, Tyler, Willow, Cobra, and Fu unite. There’s this weird moment when posters from Savage Beach and Do or Die are on the wall, and I can’t decide if this is some kind of reference to the obvious artifice of the movies, confirmation that these are a new continuity, or a sign that Sidaris was just too lazy to take them off the wall when they filmed at his house. Actually, it’s the last one. It has to be. Anyway, the heroes are pissed at Jordan, who plays the Lucas role here as their boss, for allowing the leak to happen. And the hilarious thing about Jordan is that he has an Australian accent that he does not hide well. I wish they’d have run with it and just turned him into Crocodile Dundee. He has an assistant named Dietrich who doesn’t talk and is so obviously the mole he might as well be wearing a fucking t-shirt with that written on it.

The Warrior is gearing up for his special day of fleeing the country with tons of loot, so the heroes know they have to strike fast. Fortunately, they know exactly where he lives for some reason. They’re pretty useless and Tyler gets shot in the leg because dur dur durrrrrrrr. So the attack happens later. The Warrior has Fu and Willow kidnapped and taken to his hideout where he can wrestle them to death while the others attempt a daring rescue. There’s a lot of weird double-crossing I don’t get here — Kym shoots Manuel and goes off with Dietrich for no reason — but the good guys win. Willow even out-wrestles the Warrior. He just wasn’t greased up enough.

Yakmala? Yes. The acting has devolved to the point where they would have been better off having people who barely speak English read off of cue cards.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion

A Very Special Roundup

As both of my readers are no doubt aware, I take the week of Comic-Con off. Why? I’m at Comic-Con! Seriously, I thought we’d covered this. Instead of just not posting anything, I’ve decided to post a roundup of the loose series I have been doing on Very Special Television, in which I go through things like ABC Afterschool Specials, Blossom, and various Lifetime movies, finding meaning that probably isn’t even there.

Gimme Some After-School Specials

The Intro, in which we learn what I’m doing here.

“The 18th Emergency,” in which we learn about bullies and being named Peaches.

“The Summer of the Swans,” in which we learn not to be a surly bitch all the time.

“The Skating Rink,” in which we learn how to get seduced by creepy older men.

“Dear Lovey Hart, I Am Desperate,” in which we learn not to give advice.

“Francesca, Baby,” in which we begin the Alcoholic Mom Trilogy.

“Beat the Turtle Drum,” in which we learn to stay the fuck out of treehouses.

“The Pinballs,” in which we learn that life sucks.

“Trouble River,” in which we learn that sometimes it’s best to let grandma die.

“It’s a Mile from Here to Glory,” in which we learn you can’t run from your problems, unless your problems involve running.

“Thank You, Jackie Robinson,” in which we learn that baseball rules, racism drools.

“My Other Mother,” in which we learn that alcoholic child abusers should be forgiven.

“Gaucho,” in which we learn it’s not worth becoming a drug dealer just to get your mom deported.

“A Special Gift,” in which we learn that being a ballet dancer is a lifestyle choice.

“The Gold Test,” in which we learn that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.

“What Are Friends For,” in which we learn the power of voodoo.

“Schoolboy Father,” in which we learn the dangers of sex with Rob Lowe.

“A Matter of Time,” in which we learn that we all have cancer.

“First Step,” in which we continue the Alcoholic Mom Trilogy.

“Tough Girl,” in which we learn the magic of friendship with Chest Rockwell.

“The Night Swimmers,” in which we learn that one must swim before one can night-swim.

“Two Loves for Jenny,” in which learn that some titles make no goddamn sense.

“Did You Hear What Happened to Andrea?” in which we learn that hitchhiking is a bad idea.

“The Dog Days of Arthur Cane,” in which we learn to never mock a god.

“Ace Hits the Big Time,” in which we learn that joining a gang is fun!

“Face at the Edge of the World,” in which we learn that suicide sucks.

“Picking Up the Pieces,” in which we conclude the Alcoholic Mom Trilogy.

The Conclusion, in which I discuss what I learned.

Very Special Blossom

“Pilot,” Blossom vs. Divorce

“Blossom’s Blossom,” Blossom vs. her uterus

“Sex, Lies and Teenagers,” Blossom vs. her dad

“The Geek,” Blossom vs. the kid from Dream On.

“Such a Night,” Blossom vs. her budget

“Second Base,” Blossom vs. her sexuality

“The Joint,” Blossom vs. Mary Jane

“To Tell the Truth,” Blossom vs. the truth

“Intervention,” Blossom vs. the demon rum

“Blossom: A Rockumentary,” Blossom vs. a fever

Lifetime Theater

An Amish Murder: Two great tastes that taste great together.

Anna Nicole: A tawdry sex symbol extends her 15 minutes of fame.

On Strike for Christmas: A passive aggressive protest is the best way to celebrate.

Playdate: New neighbors signal trouble for the perfect family.

Flowers in the Attic: The first installment of the Dollanganger saga lacks an identity.

Lizzie Borden Took an Ax: and might or might not have given her mother forty whacks.

The Bad Son: He doesn’t call, he doesn’t write, he murders redheads…

Death Clique: Lesbians are the biggest dangers facing today’s teens.

Petals on the Wind: The second installment of the Dollanganger saga ramps up the crazy.

Blue-Eyed Butcher: Lifetime subverts every trope in this insane true crime story.

Time to learn and grow while I spend a week in San Diego!

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Afterschool Specials, Blossom, Gimme Some After School Specials, lifetime movies, Lifetime Theater, Very Special Blossom, Very special episode

Lifetime Theater: Blue-Eyed Butcher

Mention a Lifetime movie to someone. Anyone. You’re going to get the same reaction. A frown followed by a brief complaint that every Lifetime movie is the same: noble, put upon woman deals with abusive man. What I’ve been learning in my Very Special Journey is that this is not accurate at all. Though the entertainment is still geared primarily toward women, the brand has been subtly shifting toward procedural and true crime drama. This week’s entry, Blue-Eyed Butcher, is part of that shift, but it’s also completely off the rails. It seems to exist solely to undermine every Lifetime movie stereotype there is.

The film is intercut between the courtship, wedding, and rocky married life of Jeff and Susan Wright, and Susan’s eventual murder trial for stabbing Jeff literally all the times. What is unclear is how much the flashbacks are influenced by the testimony given. At times, it seems like a Rashomon kind of situation — and yes, I just compared a Lifetime movie to a masterpiece by one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived — where the flashbacks dutifully play out what we’re seeing in the past. Yet, and this is important, Jeff is dead. He doesn’t get to tell his story. So this might be Rashomon with only one person, or as it’s also known, a terrible idea. The testimony doesn’t always mesh perfectly with the flashbacks either, so I don’t know what they’re going for.

On the surface, Blue-Eyed Butcher feels very much like the stereotypical Lifetime film. Susan is a pretty blonde (played by Sara Paxton of The Innkeepers) who marries the handsome man of her dreams. Her dreams soon become a nightmare (TM, the Lifetime Network) as Jeff turns first irresponsible and then abusive. Finally, Susan can take no more and kills her husband in self defense. She’s put on trial, and while the sleazy DA makes leering comments to the jury, her heroic single-mom defense attorney wins the case. Well, that’s how this thing is supposed to play out, anyway. Blue-Eyed Butcher seems to delight in presenting what’s “supposed” to happen, then defiantly going in the opposite direction.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have decided to eat him.”

Jeff and Susan meet in a ‘90s teen movie, as a title sweeps in to tell us we’re “5 YEARS EARLIER.” Susan and all her friends are on the beach in bikinis, which is a weird choice for the network. They’re all pretty young, and have those kinds of merciless Hollywood bodies that would, at best, be of no interest to your stereotypical Lifetime viewer. Anyway, she meets Jeff, they have an instant connection, and start courting. And though Jeff goes to a TV strip club (a place where men can watch women dance in a variety of concealing lingerie), he’s totally cool with taking things slow with Susan.

A red flag goes up when Susan reveals she worked at a strip club for a couple months. In the “present,” the DA grills her over her past, and Susan claims to have enforced a two foot rule. That’s a good way to get fired from a strip club, I’d think. Anyway, Susan and Jeff have sex eventually (in one of those rooms that’s 90% candle), and right afterwards, Jeff busts out a whole Ziploc bag filled with jazz cigarettes. As the movie progresses, Jeff’s drug use increases to downright cartoonish levels. Soon he’s smoking weed in the office and snorting coke in his driveway.

At this point in the story, the DA starts hinting that Susan got pregnant on purpose to trick Jeff into marriage. Which is… what? Did a MRA hijack this part of the script or something? They get married and soon have another kid as the marriage quickly turns into what I’d been expecting all along. Jeff is pretty obviously abusive, and it comes up in the trial that he had previous assault and possession convictions. Jeff’s abuse leans toward the surreal. Sure, he kept a weapon under the bed to threaten Susan with, but it wasn’t a gun or a knife. Oh no, Jeff kept fucking nunchucks under there, like he’s a Ninja Turtle or something. Maybe he’s abusive because he thinks Susan is in the Foot Clan?

#NotAllNinjas

The DA points out that in Susan’s history of abuse, she never went to the hospital or suffered a broken bone. This is a bullshit argument, but one that might work on a jury, since Jeff looked like he freebased shark testosterone, and Susan looked like she should be living under a tree and teaching Bran Stark about warging. Susan’s friend Allie supports the abuse narrative at least circumstantially, but she brings up an even odder part of the movie. Allie is played by Annie Wersching, known to 24 fans as Renee Walker or by her nickname “Jill Bauer.” She just barges into the movie, and we’re expected to just kind of know who she is and be okay with her. I was convinced she was Renee Walker, undercover and rooting out terrorists in the suburbs, and based on her interest in Susan, our Blue-Eyed Butcher is the number one suspect.

Eventually, Jeff hits a kid (one of his own — I didn’t mean to imply he might be hiring children for that purpose), and that’s the final straw. Susan ties him up and stabs him 193 times, which seems a little excessive to me. She then buries him in the backyard and goes on about her life. This is when the movie starts shifting again. In the beginning it was kind of against Susan, hinting she used her pregnancy to force the marriage, then it’s on her side with the abuse, and now it paints her as a soulless killer. Its ambivalence shares some DNA with Lizzie Borden. Susan’s defense hinges on some kind of fugue state in the week that prevented her from even knowing what she did, yet there are hints that it’s all calculated: timing her crying for the presence of a jury, an ill-advised yard sale of Jeff’s things, and of course the final scene that all but tells us what to think. The amazing part is all the crime covering up is scored with sort of wacky prank music, as though Susan isn’t hiding a body, she’s hiding clowns! No wait, that’s like a thousand times worse.

Never forget.

The crowning moment of insanity in the movie is not the murder scene itself, but the re-enactment of it. I talked a bit about what a standard Lifetime movie “should” have, and it specified the genders of the lawyers involved. Blue-Eyed Butcher, true to form, reverses that with W. Earl Brown (Deadwood’s Dan Dority) and Lisa Edelstein as the harridan of a DA. Edelstein mounts her assistant in the courtroom on the actual bloody mattress, and shows the jury how the killing went down. It’s utter madness. This works, and Susan gets sent away for 25 years. Good news though, she’s up for parole in 2014!

What did we learn? If you’re going to kill your husband, maybe you don’t stab him 193 times. Try 150 and see how that goes.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Blue-Eyed Butcher, Lifetime Theater, Sara Paxton, stabbing, true crime, zombies

Yakmala: Alex Cross

This is Perry’s serious face.

Imagine being an actor. You struggle for years, waiting tables, doing shitty theater, grubbing for commercial roles, then one day, out of the blue, you get your big shot. It’s a real movie, backed by a real studio, that will be in real theaters. You tear into that part, you give it everything you have, and after that, you’re indelibly associated with Bobo the Squirrel Fucker. And for the rest of your career, you only get roles for mentally challenged zoophiles. Typecasting is a bitch, and when too many people try to break out of it at the same time, you get Alex Cross.

Tagline: Don’t Ever Cross Alex Cross

More Accurate Tagline: Alex Cross is here to promote family values and kick ass. And he’s all out of family.

Guilty Party: While every fiber of my being is crying out to blame Tyler Perry for this hot mess, it’s not his fault. He might have helped it get made, as there’s a certain fascination with seeing him play something other than Madea (especially a role originated by God Himself, Morgan Freeman), but he was merely a bland leading man. The fault lies with previous Yakmala entrant Rob Cohen, who took Alex Cross, a character who already felt like a knockoff of Freeman’s William Somerset (despite debuting in book form two years before Se7en), and somehow making him feel even more generic than ever before.

Synopsis: Tyler Perry’s Alex Cross (Tyler Perry) is the head of an elite team of Detroit police that includes his childhood best friend Tommy Kane (Edward Burns), The Chick (Rachel Nichols), and somehow not Robocop (Robocop). Alex Cross has superhuman detective skills, which is what everyone talks about when Alex Cross isn’t around. (The movie, sadly, does not feature a coda in which Alex Cross is returned to his home planet with Poochie.) Cross is more concerned with his family: two kids, a pregnant wife, and a grandma so sassy it’s a wonder Perry didn’t insist on playing her himself.

Meanwhile, a skeletal assassin played by Matthew Fox goes after members of a corporation in the most inefficient, bizarre way possible. To get the attention of Fan Yau Lee, the first of them, he fights in an unsanctioned MMA fight (under the name “The Butcher of Sligo” because at this point why not), takes his target home, ties her up for some kinky sex, injects her with a super-roofie, then tortures her to death and kills her bodyguards. It makes even less sense when we learn that her safe was operated by thumbprint, and yet still contains a spare hard drive for the police to find that Matthew Fox somehow missed. Oh yeah, and then he does a charcoal drawing which Cross figures out is a Mad magazine fold-in and has the clues to the next victim.

“Says here the next victim will be in a toilet.” “But Alex–” “YOU HEARD ME!”

This turns out to be asshole German Erich Nunemacher. Fox targets him in the man’s own office, sneaking in through some rather large water pipes. Cross and the team is there to stop him, and this earns Fox’s ire, despite, you know, leaving a fucking clue for them to find. I don’t know what this asshole wants. He’s all over the place.

Cross and company meet with the head of the company, Giles Mercier (Jean Reno), and there’s a throwaway moment when Cross deduces the assistant is on a lot of cocaine, and not, you know, a giggly idiot. They also establish that Mercier always wears this hideous pinkie ring that was a gift from the King of Cambodia. Seriously, Paulie Walnuts would call this thing gauche. If Paulie had word-of-the-day toiler paper and knew what that word meant.

An enraged Fox straight up murders the Chick. He does it offscreen, so I wasn’t even sure if she was dead or just messed up for a good fifteen minutes. Then he calls Cross (who’s out on a date with his wife, trying to convince her to let him take a job at the FBI), and they have a Hannibal/Clarice conversation. Finally, Fox gets fed up and blows Cross’s pregnant wife away. For those keeping track at home, of four female speaking roles we’ve seen, two exist as love interests to be brutally murdered (oh yeah, the Chick was banging Ed Burns in a subplot no one cares about), one sets the plot in motion by being tortured and killed (but only after she takes a man to bed for a one-night stand, so it’s cool), and one is a cokehead who is her boss’s Achilles heel. There’s also Cross’s sassy grandma, his daughter, and a cop who’s in like two scenes. Cohen really loves women is what I’m trying to say here.

Cross vows revenge on Fox, despite sassy grandma warning him not to. There’s some investigation that doesn’t really go anywhere, until Cross figures out that Mercier is going to be in public. Fox, done with fucking around, RPGs the site. Cross and Kane pursue, and after a short car chase, Cross pursues Fox through an abandoned theater because Detroit (Kane was wounded when they plowed into Fox’s car, and stays behind so he can show up for a convenient rescue). Cross kills Fox, and Kane rescues Cross.

Cross, having put together that Mercier was behind everything (the man was not wearing his ugly-ass pinkie ring when the RPG hit), frames the Frenchman for drug smuggling in Cambodia. Yep, the assistant was just there to be the weakness in a man. His revenge complete, Cross leaves Detroit for the FBI.

Life-Changing Subtext: Girls and old ladies are good to have around, but sexually mature women only exist to bring men down.

Defining Quote: Kane: “You aren’t in the game. The game is in you.” Apparently Kane was being played by Kirk Lazarus.

Standout Performance: Matthew Fox as the killer (nicknamed Picasso) really taps into that wifebeating dark side of his to play a truly unhinged villain. I mean, the character makes zero sense, as though the writers couldn’t decide if they wanted a cold professional hitman or a raving serial killer, but the commitment Fox had to the part, down to his terrifying physical transformation, is impressive.

And Bai Ling gave him that tattoo.

What’s Wrong: Alex Cross feels like someone saw Se7en, Silence of the Lambs, Kiss the Girls, Dirty Harry and all its clones, and made a movie Mad-Lib out of it. It’s so generic that if the poster was just a white page with MOVIE in blue letters, it would be entirely accurate.

Flash of Competence: The performances are largely good. Even Tyler Perry.

Best Scenes: The strangest part of Matthew Fox’s approach on party girl Fan Yau Lee is that he insists on fighting in the cage. It has nothing to do with anything, only showing the movie’s stunning lack of awareness about what the hell MMA is. There are several points where it appears the referee stops the fight, but nope, it goes right on afterwards. And after the tapout, Fox kneels down, and very deliberately breaks the other fighter’s arm. Where the hell was the ref? That’s generally why the accepted method of stopping a cage fight is the flying tackle.

There’s a subplot that plays out over two scenes that makes no sense. The first scene is in the very beginning when he talks to a girl who is taking a murder rap for her career criminal of an uncle. Late in the movie, Cross goes to the uncle (played by Giancarlo Esposito, who, as always, is wonderful) and offers to trade the murder weapon for a link to the chemist who makes Fox’s date rape drugs. This scene, which brings the movie to a halt as I’m desperately trying to figure out what the fuck Gus Fring is doing in this piece of shit, only links them to the chemist, who gives them a partial plate, which somehow gives them Fox’s car. But then Cross figures out Fox is using the RPG, and it doesn’t matter.

Transcendent Moment: After Fox has murdered both Mrs. Cross and the Chick, Cross and he have an angry phone call. It’s supposed to play out like the verbal sparring of two equally matched enemies, but it’s just Cross hissing threats at Fox the whole time. And Fox seems confused by the whole situation. Like, “Dude, I thought you were gonna thank me! You’re free now, you can party!”

We’ll do the gun dance together.

No one would ever call Kiss the Girls or Along Came a Spider great or even particularly good movies. They were serviceable thrillers coasting on Freeman’s gravitas and memories of Se7en. Alex Cross has none of that, and has to fail on its own lack of merits.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion, Yakmala! Tagged: Alex Cross, Matthew Fox, terrifying physical transformation, Tyler Perry, Tyler Perry's Alex Cross, Yakmala!

Now Fear This: The Innkeepers

Say what you will, at least it’s not a clown motel.

Ti West movies are, by their natures, tough to critique. He makes the kinds of films that, if you like them, they’re the cinematic equivalent of Heisenberg blue meth. If you don’t, it’s a hundred minutes of the camera slowly plodding through a fairly normal building while sweet fuck all happens to a skinny, attractive young woman. I was a huge fan of The House of the Devil, owing at least partly to its faithful re-creation of early ‘80s Satan-horror. Netflix kept advertising a horror movie called The Innkeepers at me, featuring a poster that bears a not-insignificant resemblance to Rosemary’s Baby, I finally checked it out. When I learned it was a Ti West joint, I cued it the fuck up.

The historic Yankee Pedlar Inn in Torrington, Connecticut is closing at the end of the weekend (not really — it’s still open, but you know, in the movie). Only the second floor remains in service; the third has been stripped entirely, save for the beds. While the owner is fishing in Barbados, the two remaining employees keep an eye on things. There’s Claire (Sara Paxton, who looks like Alexis Bledel crossed with a tiny bit of Reese Witherspoon), a directionless young woman with bad asthma, and Luke (Pat Healy, who looks like hipster Tintin) a college dropout who just might have a drinking problem. In addition to their official responsibilities, they have a hobby: they’re amateur ghost hunters, using the wee hours to wander around the hotel with recording devices in hopes of catching sight of the supernatural. They’re not completely pulling this from their butts, either. The Yankee Pedlar is supposedly haunted by Madeline O’Malley, an unfortunate woman who died on the premises and whose body was briefly stored in the basement.

The last few guests are a strange bunch as well. A mother stays there with her son after having a fight with her husband. She’s all suspicious glares, mostly directed in Claire’s direction, and serves to create a sense of alienation for our young protagonist. There’s retired actress Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis, and since this is her second movie co-produced by Larry Fessenden, I’m thinking there’s a connection), former star of fictional Like Mother Like Son and current New Age psychic healer. She is a mother figure, at first rejecting Claire’s overtures (she’s a big fan), then as things grow darker, finally agreeing to help. Lastly, there’s an old man who insists on staying on the third floor, despite the absence of things like furniture, television, and bedclothes. He is an eerie presence that assists in undermining Claire’s sense of safe reality.

Much like The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers is perversely slow. Very, very little happens in the hundred minute running time that could be considered scary or supernatural. What West does is creates a very realistic working environment with two well-drawn slackers, complete with nonsensical workplace games. By taking the time to make Claire as real as possible, by the time the danger becomes real, we are much more invested in her fate. She’s not just a movie character, she’s the pretty co-worker who suffered under our long-held crush. And, much like The House of the Devil, the glacial pacing only persists to a certain point. After that, it’s a rocket-powered hellride into the pit.

The early manifestations of the horror focus around EVP, which is shorthand for either “Electronic Voice Phenomenon” or “Total Fucking Bullshit,” depending on your point of view. Normally, the ghost hunter asks questions to an empty room and records the following silence. Later, they will play the recording at high volume and tease out voices in the static. It’s basically an auditory version of pareidolia. Here, it’s much more dramatic, as Claire picks up the ghostly strains of a piano through her headphones, but when she takes them off, the hotel is silent.

“Luke, I’m getting tired of holding this dildo.”

The most interesting part of the film is the question of what’s really going on here. In the early going, we’re treated to two Youtube ghost videos in the two genres that exist of Youtube ghost videos. The first is a jump scare with an obviously fake spirit, and the second is a door shutting on by itself (or, as it’s known colloquially, a “breeze”). This tells us the two kinds of phenomena will be perceiving — the fake and the real. In addition, Claire says that because most experiences happen when you’re alone, they have a better chance of seeing something with so few people around. The fact that Luke’s visitation turns out to have been a lie places the situation in more doubt. In fact, the only time Claire experiences the ghost in Luke’s presence, the camera lingers on her face, never showing the spirit, and only conveying its presence with the addition of some queasy bluish light.

This raises the central question of the film: does the supernatural exist solely in Claire’s mind? It’s certainly possible, as the movie goes out of its way to show her traumatized, drunk, injured, or otherwise distressed before and during each obviously occult encounter. Even a healthy mind has a way of playing tricks — if you’re all alone in an old hotel, looking for ghosts, chances are the brain is going to give you what you’re after. Yet the conclusion isn’t entirely apparent. It’s possible Leanne is psychic as she claims, and her initial strange behavior toward Claire was the product of a distinct premonition. The final shot of the movie, echoing the “real” Youtube video, favors the second interpretation.

I personally ascribe to a hybrid opinion. I do not believe the Yankee Pedlar was haunted (in the reality of the movie — much like jackalopes and Uyghurs, ghosts don’t exist in real life) in the beginning. I think it’s haunted in the end. As for who it is, and there are a couple options, that’s up for debate, but the title refers to the ghosts themselves.

The pacing is bound to turn some people off, and that’s a good thing. I’m not arguing that “real cinema fans can appreciate a slow burn,” because that’s rank snobbery. This movie does use its pace well, to allow the audience to settle in for the real scares. Though if you can’t take slow, try something else.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: ghosts, Now Fear This, Sara Paxton, The Innkeepers, Ti West, Yankee Pedlar Inn

Girls, Guns and G-Strings: The Dallas Connection

Even the poster design is incompetent.

Cast: The IMDB trivia page of this movie points out that it is unclear as to whether this is a sequel or a soft reboot of Enemy Gold. That’s right, people are unaware how this softcore porn movie fits in with the rest of its increasingly convoluted (and sometimes ethnically baffling) universe.

Bruce Penhall and Mark Barriere return as Chris Cannon and Mark Austin in their final appearances of the franchise. They’re just as devoid of personality as always, and sadly Penhall has given up his penchant for black leather vests.

Julie Strain, Rodrigo Obregon, Cassidy Phillips, Gerald Okamura, and Ron Browning are all back in different roles. Strain brings her unique mix of inert acting and the ability to always look like she walked off the set of a Whitesnake video to the role of Black Widow, an assassin who likes to fuck her victims (or at least sort of dance around them) before the murder. Cassidy Phillips, who electrified the world with his role as Thug #1 in Enemy Gold, plays her assistant Platter Puss. Yep. Platter Puss. He’s often just referred to as “Puss.” Rodrigo Obregon, who has been in almost ever one of these things, is Argentine scientist Antonio Morales. Gerald Okamura, who loyal readers might remember from the classic Samurai Cop, appears here as king fu assassin Fu. Browning, who was Slash in Enemy Gold, here plays Ron, chiefly identifiable by has flowing old-man mullet.

Non-Actor Quotient: Two Penthouse Pets of the Month make their first appearances. Samantha Phillips plays Samantha Maxx (June 1993), who seems to be the same role as Ava Noble, down to her romance with Mark, which lends some credence to the soft reboot hypothesis. Julie K. Smith (February 1993) plays the assassin Cobra, and yes, she introduces herself like this. December 1991 Playboy Playmate of the Month Wendy Hamilton plays the final assassin, Scorpion. Lastly, some guy named Roland Marcus plays Nicholas Lang (the Lucas role), and since he seems to be reading off cue cards the whole time and this is his only IMDB credit, I’m assuming he’s a non-actor.

IMDB Plot Keywords: assassin, sex in bed, breasts, female assassin, racial stereotype

IMDB User Lists Appearing On: Movies/TV Shows I Own, My Library, My movies, 90’s Action Movies: Best and Worst, List of Hindi Dubbed Movies

Synopsis: Like Enemy Gold, The Dallas Connection was directed by Drew Sidaris, the Fredo to Andy’s Vito. He’s just not as good an auteur-of-sleaze as his old man. He pads roughly a half hour of plot (45 minutes with the sex/shower scenes) into a full length film. There are pointless shots of wildlife, long scenes of boats zipping around, and in one case, exposition of something that we already saw. Twice.

The film introduces us to three assassins doing what they do best. Black Widow has sex with a man in Paris, then shoots him. Cobra uses the most ubiquitous of Sidaris tools — the RC car loaded with explosives — to blow up a man in South Africa. Scorpion uses an exploding golf ball to kill a man in Hong Kong. These three were scientists, all working on this satellite array which will let America see all the weapons and nuclear sites from all over the world. The last scientist, Antonio Morales, is coming to Dallas from Buenos Aires to be protected. I have absolutely no idea why scientists from France, China, Argentina, and South Africa would care about America’s safety, but there you go.

These four scientists each had separate computer chips integral to the satellite’s functioning, but the chips are already in I/WAR — the vague-yet-heroic government agency that provides the good guys — hands. There’s some silliness about a meteor shower enhancing the satellite’s detection power, so that’s the ticking clock, but no one cares. Samantha Maxx, agent of I/WAR (the International/World Arms Removal) is told to gather her team, which consists of Chris, Mark, and this other guy Tom, to protect the final scientist: Dr. Morales. As soon as he arrives, he’s nearly killed by Cobra and Puss doing a drive-by.

I/WAR brings Morales in to brief him, along with his bodyguard Ron (who I called “Mullet Guy” in my notes since I don’t think he’s ever named). When Samantha sends them out of the room, Ron plants a bug under the table. There is entirely too much intrigue in this movie about naked people. Anyway, the plan is to use Morales as bait to draw out the assassins. That’s only the first part of this terrible plan. Those super important chips that I/WAR has? Well, instead of locking them up in a vault, they give them to agents who are constantly having sex with whoever to wear around their necks. Yep. No way those get stolen. There’s a big deal made of who gets which one (Tom gets South Africa, Samantha gets France, Mark gets China, and Chris gets Argentina), but it doesn’t come to anything.

Well, it doesn’t take long. Cobra seduces Chris, and after the longest and most explicit sex scene in the series to date, drugs him and swaps his chip with a dummy. Scorpion seduces Mark — he protests for like half a second that he’s in a relationship — before deciding that Scorpion is super hot. She tases him before things get too serious though. Also, and there’s nowhere else to put this, but Scorpion spends the whole scene in a day-glow green one-piece bathing suit (with thong) and thigh-high black leather boots. God, the ‘90s were weird. Anyway, she swaps the chips and gets out of there. Black Widow, Platter Puss, and Fu break into I/War’s headquarters. Fu, intent on proving that even Asian guys will do white guy karate, murders Tom and takes his chip. Black Widow kills Lang, because fuck that guy. Lastly, the whole group easily kidnaps Samantha (and her chip).

Yep. Scorpion looked in her closet and chose that. Somehow.

The next day, Chris and Mark slowly realize something’s wrong and painstakingly begin to gather clues. They quickly learn the bullets used in the drive-by were blanks. Then they learn that Samantha’s been kidnapped and Tom’s been killed. They head to Cowboy’s, where all three evil assassins have been stripping for no real reason (and where Morales and thus Tom, the agent assigned to him, were hanging out), and question the choreographer. Yes, there’s a choreographer at this place. She gives them the very convenient clue that the bad guys were going to meet Samantha at this house on a lake. It’s obviously a trap, but Chris and Mark are idiots, so they go.

The bad guys gather at the house, and who’s the leader? Morales! Yep, he’s evil. Hey, this qualifies as a masterful plot twist for this series. I wonder how many masturbators had their minds utterly blown. Anyway, he loads the chips into the computer to… do something evil, I guess. I don’t really know. The computer accepts each chip until it gets to the one Cobra got from Chris, and it refuses. Yes, Cobra was a good guy the whole time! Can you believe it? Thought your mind was blown before, huh? I swear, this is like film noir for morons. Anyway, Morales suspected Cobra’s treachery and plays a video of the scientist in South Africa being murdered and yep, he managed to climb out of the car before the explosion. But then it doesn’t matter because Morales sensibly cloned his chip so his evil plan (whatever that might be) will still work.

Chris and Mark show up right about here, and Puss goes out to kill them. And they just shoot poor Puss right the fuck dead. Black Widow heads out, but not before issuing an order to the room to “rape these bitches [Cobra and Samantha] and kill them!  I know I would.” Wow. That’s… uh… wow. An unarmed Ron drags Samantha outside, and let me pause here for a moment. Do you have any idea what would happen to an unarmed man who laid a hand on Taryn or Nicole, let alone the seething cauldron of righteous rage that is Donna? That man would be so dead, so fast. Donna would probably invent a new way to blow him up, just so the lesson was really learned. Samantha? She just gets dragged outside like a ragdoll.

Cobra recoils in horror from the script.

Mark chases the fleeing Black Widow and Morales, while Chris goes after Fu. Scorpion is about to shoot Mark, but he shoots her in the arm. Then he apologizes and bandages her. What. The. Fuck. I’m finding myself longing for the old-school feminism of Hard Ticket to Hawaii or Savage Beach and that is just fucked up. Now Mark faces off against Ron for some reason who tells him to drop the gun or he’ll break Samantha’s neck. Mark obeys, and Ron drops Samantha. Mark then does some karate, instead of, I don’t know, picking up his fucking gun and killing Ron now that Samantha is safe. Well, Scorpion has figured out where her bread is buttered, and she wastes Ron.

Chris runs out of ammo, then kills Fu with a grenade, begging the question — why didn’t he open with the grenade? Oh well. He does manage to spew a racist line at the dead guy though, so that’s something. “Shoulda read your fortune cookie!” Oh fuck you, Chris.

Black Widow and Morales get to a boat, but here comes Cobra with an RC boat loaded with explosives. Then something amazing happens. She hits the big boat with hers, and Black Widow appears to spontaneously combust on the deck and only after that does the whole boat explode. Also, the bag with all the computer chips flies unharmed from he explosion to land at Cobra and Samantha’s feet. Sigh.

Yakmala? Yes. Though not very good Yakmala.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: Andy Sidaris, Drew Sidaris, G-Strings, Girls, guns, Julie Strain

The Best Movies Never Made: Clown Syndrome

This is a real place. I repeat: THIS IS A REAL PLACE.

Director

Eli Roth

Writer

Justin Robinson

Starring

Jake Johnson, Donald Glover, Doug Jones, Emo Philips, Wilford Brimley

Taglines

2 friends. 1 motel. 1000 clowns.

Tonopah, Nevada: a clown without pity.

A clown is just makeup. No… listen. A clown is just makeup.

Synopsis

Exhausted after a long day of driving, hetero-life partners Zach (Jake Johnson) and Donnie (Donald Glover) pull off the road in remote Tonopah, Nevada. The only place available to stay is the bizarre and terrifying Clown Motel, located right next to an old, creepy cemetery. Donnie, quite sensibly, would rather not stay there, but Zach is tired from a day’s driving. The two guys get a room from the strange man at the desk (Emo Philips), and settle in.

The TV gets this weird channel that’s grainy, sepia toned, and has a line of static. A strange clown man with a thick Romanian accent (Doug Jones) named Georgie Giggles does what appears to be a children’s show, but it’s just weird and unsettling. It makes Donnie nervous, but Zach finds it fun. Donnie goes into the bathroom, and he catches sight of some movement outside. Peering through the window, he sees a figure out in the parking lot. Moving closer, he starts making out details: frizzy green hair, brightly colored shirt — it’s a clown. A clown whose pants are around his ankles. And he’s moving around. As Donnie registers what he’s seeing, the clown slowly turns around, never stopping the pumping of his hips, he reveals that he is fucking a rather large ham. Donnie looks up and the clown is looking right back of him.

And the clown smiles.

Donnie freaks out, and tells Zach they’re leaving. A confused Zach acquiesces, but when they get to their car, the door opens and another clown comes out. Then another. And another. And another. The two guys flee from the pursuing clowns, only to be separated.

Zach hides in a thrift store while the gaggle of clowns starts hunting him, giggling as they make their terrifying way after him. He hides, managing to get the drop on one of them, beating him with a golf club. The clown seems to die, and melts into makeup. There was no body at all. Horrified, Zach turns to run… directly into the face of a clown.

Donnie runs off into the cemetery, where the clowns are apparently afraid to enter. He soon finds that the place is haunted by the ghosts of old prospectors who died of plague, and they want nothing more than to kill him. The lead ghost, Whiskey Bob (Wilford Brimley) is plumb tired of all these human shenanigans and thinks Donnie should be buried alive. Donnie barely escapes, grabbing Whiskey Bob’s old pickaxe and heading back toward the car.

In the parking lot of the clown hotel, which overlooks the haunted cemetery, the clowns set up a makeshift big top. Donnie approaches, hiding from the ghosts, to get a view. The clowns have Zach tied to a spinning wheel, and as they perform, they apply elements of a clown costume and makeup. He screams in pain as the items transform him into a clown. The clowns then vanish into their tents. Donnie cautiously comes out of hiding to save his friend, but when he brings Zach down off the wheel, Zach opens his eyes to reveal nothing but clown madness within. He’s now a goofy-voiced servant of evil, much like all clowns. The rest of the clowns start appearing all around, stepping out of tents, from behind cotton candy machines, out of carousels, and in one case, shot from a cannon. Donnie runs.

The clowns now in full pursuit, Donnie escapes into the hills around town where he sees a lone building. He goes inside, believing that he’ll be safe, only to find that this is the television studio where Georgie Giggles tapes his bizarre show. Imprisoned here are people that are deformed and insane, trapped in a hideous metamorphosis between human and clown. Georgie Giggles catches Donnie, and in the midst of an insane musical number releases his crazy half-clowns.

Donnie, in a last-ditch effort, fights back with Whiskey Bob’s pickaxe. When the bit of the pickaxe hits one of Georgie’s gold teeth, the prospector ghosts descend on the studio, at first believing this to be a gold strike. The clowns from outside reinforce their mutant brethren. It’s a battle royale between clown and ghost, with Donnie doing everything he can to survive. He squares off with a transformed Zach (now calling himself Sir Laughs-a-lot), and has to kill his friend with the pickaxe. Donnie weeps as Zach dissolves into a viscous pool of clown makeup. The walls and ceilings are decorated with bright sprays of color, evidence of the many slain clowns.

Morning dawns and Donnie goes out into the rising sun. He’s survived. But as the camera pans in… there’s a little makeup on his neck, planted during the fight. He’s already beginning his transformation…

Trivia

The Clown Motel is entirely real and is really next to the cemetery filled with dead prospectors.

Donald Glover’s part was intended for Danny Glover, but due to a clerical error, the younger man was cast instead.

Jake Johnson’s part was written for Emily Blunt. After she turned it down, no one has any idea how Johnson ended up cast, but the film made more sense for it.

Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King’s It has a brief appearance in Georgie Giggles Giggle Hour.

Writer Justin Robinson refused to visit the set without a loaded .38 handgun.

The ham was actually made of packed SPAM as ham couldn’t get the right consistency.

The ham-fucking clown was played by Nick Nolte in an uncredited cameo.

Emo Philips improvised his entire part.

Wilford Brimley had no idea a film was being made, and expressed bafflement whenever his ghost makeup was applied. He was paid in moonshine, mining equipment, and several ounces of gold.

Goofs

Boom mic visible: During the “Everybody’s Laughing On the Inside” number.

Crew or equipment visible: The camera briefly wobbles during the ham-fucking scene, as most camera men fled in terror when the clown smiled.

Factual error (possibly deliberate error by filmmakers): When Zach says that the door is locked and thus the clowns cannot get in, he is either forgetting or failing to mention that clowns can collapse their ribcages.

Factual errors: Santa Monica is not downtown.

Factual error (possibly deliberate error by filmmakers): A group of clowns is actually known as a “sodomurder.”

Memorable Quotes

Georgie Giggles: It’s time for the Giggle Hour! (draws meat cleaver)

Whiskey Bob (repeated line): Gawd damut!

Georgie Giggles: Ham? (points to table covered in big hams)

Donnie: No thanks.

Whiskey Bob: Ain’t nuthin’ ever been funny ‘bout no clowns.

Donnie: There’s a clown outside fucking a ham!

Zach: I think you mean “making love.”

Selected Reviews

“Funniest movie I’ve ever seen!” — Issei Sagawa

“Offensive to clowns, and possibly prospectors.” — Steve-O

“Holy shit, that was a movie? I thought it was a nightmare I had!” — Jake Johnson

Check out some of the other Best Movies Never Made!

Filed under: Level Up, Moment of Excellence, Projected Pixels and Emulsion Tagged: clown motel, clown syndrome, clowns, clowns vs. ghosts, ghosts, old prospectors, the Best Movies Never Made

Lifetime Theater: Petals on the Wind

As both of my readers know, when Flowers in the Attic, the southern gothic touchstone by VC Andrews got the Lifetime treatment, I instantly had to review it. My biggest complaint? That somehow, a movie about a mother who locks her kids in an attic, tries to poison them, features not one but two incestuous relationships both of which are the healthiest in the story, was not quite insane enough. Good news, creatures. Lifetime might very well have read my review, because when they made the first sequel, Petals on the Wind, into a movie, they ratcheted up the crazy to Buseyian levels.

Hello, incest.

It’s not like they had much of a choice. As I mentioned previously, the series starts out a little nuts, like that one relative you have who insists on alphabetizing their cats, and rapidly careens hilariously out of control, like the time that same relative decided to go to the zoo and masturbate all the tigers. The connection to reality, already tenuous (though in a genre-appropriate way), was strained to the breaking point in this volume, so the filmmakers were forced to keep up. Plus, Lifetime rushed this thing into production so fast, I’m surprised sets weren’t being built in the middle of scenes. If you told me the actors were reading off cue cards, I would believe you. Screenwriter Kayla Alpert is back for the adaption, but Lifetime upgraded their director when they tapped Karen Moncrieff for this installment. She knew exactly what she was making here, but directs with an admirable poker face, presenting most of the action as, you know, just some normal stuff that happened to this family one time. She does, however, allow her actors the freedom to go nuts, and the cast — especially Burstyn and a delightfully unhinged Graham — just run with it. Normally, there’s a lot of analysis, but frankly, I can’t help just breathlessly relating the plot. Because it’s amazing.

I’ve made a lot of hay about how Lifetime movies open on (trailer guy voice) the perfect family. Well, this one actually fucking does it. We get a title card: “Previously, on Flowers in the Attic” which is instantly followed by another title card: “A Perfect Family.” They’re talking about the Dollangangers, the Aryan clones obsessed with C-names. Anyway, the actual movie opens in South Carolina 1970, with Cathy, Chris, and Carrie at the funeral of Paul Sheffield, a kindly man who apparently adopted the kids after that whole attic business. The weird part is Cathy (now played by Rose McIver, most recognizable as Tinkerbell on Once Upon A Time, which also makes the movie about 15% funnier) delivering the eulogy, tells us the same information that was in the previouslies. Sheffield has made sure the kids will never want for anything. But Cathy wants something: FUCKING REVENGE. And if you think I mean revenge obtained via fucking, you would be correct.

Corrine is still in the society rags as the Foxworth Heiress, and that really chaps Cathy’s ass. Maybe she has something, because while the surviving kids are making a go at life, they’re not doing great. Brittle Chris is trying to be a doctor, but all he wants to do is fuck his sister. Somebody get this guy a hobby, or at least some porn. Carrie’s growth was stunted in the attic, and now (like many other gorgeous blonde girls) is mercilessly bullied at school. Carrying a doll every day probably doesn’t help, though. And Cathy is a ballet dancer, who still periodically calls Corrine to chat, only to get hung up on. Cathy, here’s a tip: she’s just not that into you.

Anyway, at ballet school, Cathy meets Julian, the Bad Boy of Ballet. He’s what I like to call a ballerino. Julian convinces Cathy to come up to New York and dance there. Chris also gets a love interest in the form of the unbearably perky Sarah Reeves, daughter of Chris’s boss (played by Justified’s Nick Searcy). Right before Cathy leaves for New York, she and Chris go on a bittersweet, final journey to Pound Town. Carrie overhears the pillow talk and seems jealous and that’s just gross, movie and possibly book.

The company up in New York is dancing Romeo and Juliet, because this was apparently written by seventh graders. Cathy fails her audition, and the part of Juliet goes to an ambiguously ethnic mean girl who exists only to glower at our perfect Aryan princess and flirt with Julian. Also, the idea of Julian not playing Juliet seems like a wasted opportunity. It’s at the very least confusing. So he seduces Cathy back at the apartment, and it’s the second sex scene (this one features oral!) which seems I dunno, a little racy for Lifetime. Cathy pulls a Winona Rider, which is what I call it when an actress keeps her bra on.

Meanwhile, shit gets freaky back in South Carolina. Chris “accidentally” walks in on Carrie while she checks herself out in the mirror. Seriously, guy, this is the second sister you’ve done that with, and we all know where the first one led. So, here’s a crazy thought, maybe you start knocking on closed bathroom doors? Anyway, Carrie’s totally cool with it, and she asks Chris if he thinks she’s pretty. He gets this look like, “Thanksgiving is already way too awkward as is,” and reassures her. Carrie knows he loves Cathy best, though. Also? Ew.

Cathy’s love life isn’t doing much better. Julian reveals himself to be a jealous, abusive freak. It’s highly possible he’s cheating on Cathy with the mean girl, too. When Carrie and Chris go up to visit, Chris catches Julian with his fingers in the cookie jar, and by “cookie jar” I mean Carrie’s vagina, and by fingers, I actually literally mean fingers. Julian and Cathy go for a drive to sort stuff out, and Cathy reveals she’s pregnant right before a truck t-bones the car. And it’s amazing. I love literally everything about this scene.

The film picks up ten months later, with Cathy back in South Carolina, now raising her baby which she’s named Jory because she’s a fucking Twilight character (Julian + Cory = Jory). Chris edges closer to his inevitable marriage with Sarah. Corrine is off in Virginia, renovating Foxworth Hall to erase all presence of the titular attic, while taking care of Olivia (Burstyn once again, now made up like David Lo Pan) now incapacitated by stroke. Since tragedy hasn’t struck the Dollangangers in ten months, Carrie starts seeing a minister, who proposes on like the first date. Carrie doesn’t feel she can marry him on account of being fingered one time in New York. It was a different time, I guess. Instead of either a) getting the fuck over it or b) not caring because who cares or c) telling this guy what happened and see if he cares (if he’s halfway decent he won’t), Carrie decides to kill herself with rat poison in some donuts, which is how her twin Cory went out. Cathy discovers the whole thing when she sees a rack of fresh-baked donuts, then looks over the counter where the rat poison is hilariously left out. It was like watching Homer Simpson solve The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

Pictured: Ellen Burstyn

To be fair, Carrie also killed herself because she invited Corrine to the wedding, and Corrine was like, “who are you?” So it was horrible (but totally expected) parental rejection in addition to the fingering thing. This is pretty much the last straw for Cathy. Her plan? Seduce Bart Winslow (I feel I should pause here for you to stop laughing at that soap opera name), Corrine’s new husband. Which takes like five seconds. Hey, the guy has a type. Cathy, of course, gets pregnant. Meanwhile, Corrine gives Bart and angry handjob and reveals that she knows he’s having an affair with someone. This scene, you guys, it’s so wonderful. I wish I could bottle it and distribute it to Third World Children who would otherwise never know its joy.

Sarah breaks up with Chris because she catches him making out with his sister, and I’m with her on this one. That’s what you call a dealbreaker. So with that taken away, Chris now has nothing better to do that support his sister’s revenge scheme. This culminates at a party in refurbished Foxworth Hall, where Cathy tells the whole sordid tale to the guests. After kicking the guests out, Corrine goes up to Olivia’s room and loses her shit. She pulls out a trunk, in which she had been keeping Cory’s bones(!), while Chris tries to figure out what the fuck is happening. She even takes a Hail Mary at seducing Chris, and when he looks at Olivia, like “…the fuck?”, Ellen Burstyn cackles and goes “Don’t look at me!” It is seriously the best thing ever. Oh god. I loved it.

So anyway, Corrine burns the place down, and it ends. But then, BUT THEN, there’s a little coda with Chris and Cathy living as husband and wife, and a promo for the next two books! I’m so excited. I can hardly stand it.

What did we learn? Good fucking question. I’m going to go with the simple fact that the Dollangangers must have pissed off a gypsy or something, because this is some serious shit. I mean, okay, you get locked in an attic and your mom kills your brother. Okay, fine. But there’s a string of some pretty shitty luck beyond that. The Dollangangers are constantly whining about how Foxworth Hall won’t let them go, but that’s not the problem. The problem is you fuckers. If you got your shit together and maybe stopped locking each other in attics and burning each other’s homes down, maybe you’d have a good life. You know? Just try it for ten months or so and see what happens.

Filed under: Projected Pixels and Emulsion