"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

52 Pick-Up

So let’s say you’re an old rich dude who runs an auto factory and lives off the patent money from inventing a latch that they use on cars and spaceships. And you’ve been having an affair with a girl your daughter’s age, and you decide to call it off. But when you get to her apartment the girl is not there and instead there are 3 dudes in ski masks and they force you to watch a video of you and the girl fooling around and they tell you how they are going to show this movie to your wife unless you pay them 105 grand hush money.

So you figure no fucking way, I’m not paying, instead you tell your wife about the affair and figure that’s that. But next thing you know these fuckers drag you into a warehouse and show you another video where they execute the girl with a gun stolen from your bedroom and wrap her in a coat with your name stitched into it. And they tell you now it’s 105 grand a year or the cops find the body and trace it to you. (read the rest of this shit…)

Slasher

Remember John Landis? John fucking Landis? The guy who directed THE BLUES BROTHERS and AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON back to back? I was never much of an ANIMAL HOUSE man myself and I know most of the rest was a mixed bag but MAN, those two movies– that’s enough to call the guy a genius I think. At least, a former genius.

But then there was the helicopter accident, and there was the ’80s, and he hasn’t had a hit since COMING TO AMERICA. In fact his last movie that got any attention was BLUES BROTHERS 2000 which I think we all agree he shouldn’t’ve made, unless he just made it as a personal home video for him and his friends. Then it would’ve been pretty great. (read the rest of this shit…)

The Werewolf of Washington

I was browsing through the horror section at this video store one day. I don’t know if many of you remember this, but there are actual video stores they have that you walk into and find a movie. You don’t just order them online and then wait for them to be delivered to your house. This old fashioned method requires walking and effort of some kind (sorry about that folks) but the cool thing is it’s spontaneous: you find something, you bring it home, you watch it.

Anyway I found this movie WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON. Never heard of it before but it’s from 1973 and it’s about a Washington press secretary who gets bit by a werewolf and later bites the president. I immediately thought this movie was right up my alley. Not just because it would be funny to see Scott Maclellan take a bite out of Bush, but also because I always wanted to see a movie like this. A horror movie within the world of politics, like Jason Voorhees becomes president, or Dracula vs. America, or something like that. They always use horror as a metaphor for teenage life (Ginger Snaps, Buffy the vampire, etc.) or pretentious yuppie life (the films of Larry Fessenden) or AIDS (Dave Cronenberg’s The Fly) or occasionally Vietnam (Death Dream, maybe Last House On the Left). I can think of two movies, People Under the Stairs and Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, that I think are on some level about Reaganomics. But I can’t think of any horror movies that are really blatantly and specifically about politics and politicians. And it turns out there is one, I just never heard of it before. (read the rest of this shit…)

Full Clip

NOTE: I sent this one into The Ain’t It Cool News, but they never ran it. Almost as if they didn’t give a fuck about a new straight to video movie starring Busta Rhymes. I don’t know what the deal is.

Howdy fellas,

Vern over here on the direct to video beat again, looking for flecks of gold in a mountain of crap. Well that’s my excuse most of the time but this time I’m doing a little bit of research. My last review on here was OUT OF REACH starring Steven Seagal, and I found out that some of the individuals over on steven-seagal.net were pretty upset at me for saying Seagal “looks like Bigfoot wearing a bad Dracula wig.” So to make it up to them I’m doing some footwork for them, looking into this director called “Mink” who is supposed to be directing Seagal in an allegedly theatrical Yakuza themed movie called INTO THE SUN. (Note the three word title again.)

Before that “Mink” did this little DTV rapper vehicle FULL CLIP which puts Busta Rhymes into a very basic blaxploitation kind of story. That sounds pretty bad but this one actually has a decent pedigree for DTV, because it’s written by this guy Kantz who directed LOVE AND A BULLET, one of the more surprisingly watchable straight to video movies I’ve reviewed on here. (read the rest of this shit…)

Southern Comfort

Okay, this group of National Guardsmen (Peter Coyote, Powers Boothe, Keith Carradine, Fred Ward, others) are on one of them training exercises, right? Basically, they gotta go out into the Louisiana swamp with a map, try to locate this one particular place. To practice their navigation skills. Most of them aren’t taking the job too seriously, paying more attention to their plans to hook up with some whores when they’re done. I mean they’re carrying guns, but with blanks, because who are they gonna shoot at anyway. There’s no enemy in this exercise.

And then they get to some water, and they realize either they’re reading the map wrong or the water has shifted and the chunk of land they’re supposed to find is now a chunk of underwater. (read the rest of this shit…)

Paparazzi

This is one of those mysterious movies that suddenly appeared out of nowhere one Friday night, then disappeared again a week later without so much as a puff of smoke. It straddles that blurry line between mainstream studio movie advertised on national television and straight to video thriller nobody’s ever heard of.

I actually saw an ad for it that week and I gotta admit I was a little intrigued. You just saw some dude falling down a fire escape and maybe a car flipping or something, and I thought maybe it was some gritty low budget late ’70s early ’80s style down and dirty revenge thriller. I mean there were no stars in it, it looked like the main character was that sleazeball Tom Sizemore (actually it’s Cole Hauser, some guy who looks kind of like Christian Bale but sounds kind of like Willem Dafoe). The only way they tried to make it sound like a Real Hollywood Movie was to brag that it was produced by Mel Gibson. (the guy from MAD MAX.) (read the rest of this shit…)

National Treasure

Well you gotta find something to be proud of your country for, and right now reality sure as shit ain’t doin’ the trick. As I’m writing this we’re lookin down the barrel of four more years of Bush. There are signs of vote fraud starting to peek their heads out, but since it wouldn’t necessarily change who the president is, everybody seems to figure eh, screw it. They just massacred the shit out of innocent people in Fallujah, only to move the rebels into Mosul and Baghdad, so now there will be more massacres. Meanwhile, Bush continues to stick an electrode up the ass of the concept of accountability, promoting everybody he can think of who has fucked up bad. National security adviser has destroyed our national security? Make her secretary of state! White House lawyer wrote the infamous memo arguing that torture is great and the Geneva Conventions are for pussies? Make him attorney general! As we speak they are trying to track down Joseph Hazelwood to head up the EPA and Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

I mean I love my country. But my country is being a real bitch right now. Don’t worry, I never hit a country in my life. But my country is getting up in my face trying to provoke me right now and I guess I just gotta leave the apartment for a while to cool off. (read the rest of this shit…)

Lil’ Pimp

Hi, everyone. “Moriarty” here with some Rumblings From The Lab…

No, seriously. The one and only Vern has returned with a new review of the seemingly in-limbo animated film, LI’L PIMP. Dig in:

Howdy boys,

Dark days have descended upon the Vern compound here in the bright blue upper left corner of the American map, and they hit me like a basketball to the nose. Just sitting here naively preparing for one of them ewok celebrations they used to have. Fireworks shootin off everywhere, a bunch of little dudes dancing around playing drums on Homeland Security helmets. I was high off publishing my first book and was feeling real optimistic. I felt the world was gonna change for the better and I looked fondly forward to the future, to a day when my fellow countrymen and women could hold their heads high and swell their chests with pride. Also to BLADE 3 next month.

Then, not sure what happened, somewhere around November 2nd or 3rd I just plunged into a bottomless funk. Not the good Clyde Stubblefield kind. The bad kind, where you’re sad and crap. The kind where you stumble around aimlessly and start behaving strangely. Maybe you watch GARFIELD and write a bizarre, rambling essay about it, to name one example. Who knows what could happen while you are in this state of the blues. (read the rest of this shit…)

Seed of Chucky

Well judging from the low turnout for this picture in its first couple weeks, I might be the only one. But DAMN if I don’t love BRIDE OF CHUCKY. THat was the amazing slasher sequel landmark where the former Hong Kong director Ronny Yu knocked the CHILD’S PLAY series off into a weirdo direction where the killer doll suddenly gets a killer doll wife and it turns into a silly comedy, but with occasional moments of visual poetry courtesy of future oscar winning cinematographist Peter fucking Pau.

Now if you’re like me you remember the very end of BRIDE OF CHUCKY, suddenly a little sharp-toothed baby chucky pops out. It’s like the traditional sudden-jolt-ending used in every horror movie since CARRIE, but at the same time it’s a funny joke because you just KNOW it means we’re gonna get a SON OF CHUCKY some day. Or SEED OF CHUCKY it turns out due to the ambiguous gender of the baby. (read the rest of this shit…)

The Polar Express

THE POLAR EXPRESS 3-D IMAX SPOOKARAMA

A few years back I wrote a piece called FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN (working title: BORING: THE MOVIE). It is available on this web sight as well as in my collection 5 On the Outside. In the piece I talked about the wrongness of computer animators trying to create photorealistic human characters. I argued that no matter how real they looked they would never look completely real, because they wouldn’t be able to walk quite right, or have a human soul, etc. I guess I didn’t mention it in that piece but there was a scene in the movie where two realistic human characters kissed, and it was like watching mannequins go at it.

(For your information, there’s a porno called REAL DOLL: THE MOVIE where pornographic professionals like Ron Jeremy stick their penises inside ten thousand dollar silicone sex dummies. That movie is disturbing in a different way from FINAL FANTASY because the dolls are not moving and their faces don’t look alive. So it looks like these guys are having their way with dead bodies. But picture two of the dolls going at it with no animate objects involved. Then picture a rated PG version of that. That’s the scene in FINAL FANTASY, I guess. It’s not natural.) (read the rest of this shit…)