"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Miami Blues

I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of this one. It’s a weird crime movie starring Fred Ward as a cop with fake teeth, Alec Baldwin as a crook who steals his teeth, and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Baldwin’s dumb hooker turned naive fiancee.

From the cover you’d assume this is just some boring cop movie, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it’s something completely unique. Or don’t take my word for it. Let me explain to you a little bit about the plot, and see if that waxes your mustache.

See, Alec Baldwin (back when he was young and skinny, and made the gals swoon) gets off a plane in Miami, steals somebody’s luggage, and heads for the exit. At the bottom of an escalator he is approached by a hare krishna, who asks him what his name is. He says, “Trouble,” breaks the guy’s finger, and leaves. (read the rest of this shit…)

Vern howls at GINGER SNAPS: THE BEGINNING like a horny, rabid dog!!!

SPOILER ALERT !!

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with one of the most entertaining reviews you’ve likely read in the last few weeks. Vern-o is one of a kind… God’s own prototype. Anyway, he gives a good look at what to expect from the Third and last (maybe?) GINGER SNAPS flick… I personally didn’t care too much for GINGER SNAPS BACK, but I love the first film. I like what I’ve seen of THE BEGINNING, so I’m very optimistic… but you don’t care what I have to say! This is Vern’s show and if I don’t hand over the floor I’m likely to wake up with a strangled ant-eater in my bed. You don’t want to get on Vern’s bad side… I learned that years ago… So, here he is!

Boys –

How’s it goin. Hope those of you who went had fun at your comic book convention. Who did the delegates end up nominating anyway? Was it batman? I tell you with these volatile times, I thought it was gonna be the ’68 Comic Con all over again, guys dressed up as stormtroopers running through the streets beating up Xena and Catwoman with plastic swords, rolling robots, setting dragons on fire. But it sounds like it was peaceful. I didn’t read any of that crap you guys wrote about it but I bet it was good. (read the rest of this shit…)

The Hunter

What could be more badass than Steve Mc-Fucking-Queen in the true life story of a world famous bounty hunter?

Well, it turns out alot of things could, but that’s not a complaint. Maybe it wasn’t the gritty action thriller I pictured when I saw the cover, but I still really enjoyed this goofy movie. It starts out real promising with a bounty hunter named “Papa” Thorsen (Steve) driving a big ass boat of a car into a neighborhood, having a hell of a time parallel parking it, right in front of a crowd of people. Bumping a Cadillac right in front of the owner. Then he goes inside a bar and picks up young Levar Burton, who is wanted for some petty crime. He brings the kid in, gives him some tips for dealing with the judge, and goes home. (read the rest of this shit…)

Cradle 2 the Grave

From the same director, producer and cast as Romeo Must Die and Exit Wounds comes another exciting pile of disparate elements squooshed together into the same basic shape as an action movie. It’s really more of a booger sculpture than a movie, but for a booger sculpture, it’s not that bad, I guess.

Joel Silver originally announced this as Untitled DMX Project, supposedly a remake of Fritz Lang’s M. If that was the case, then I guess Tom Arnold (our generation’s Peter Lorre) would’ve been playing a perverted child killer whose killing spree had caused the police to clamp down so hard that organized crime would be pretty much put out of business. So the leaders of rival gangs (DMX, Jet Li, Mark Dacascos) would pool their resources to catch Tom Arnold so everything could go back to normal. (read the rest of this shit…)

Walking Tall (2004)

The first thing you see in this movie: “inspired by a true story.” The last thing: “Dedicated to the memory of Sheriff Buford Pusser.”

In between, you got nothing to do with Buford Pusser, except a sheriff with a stick. See, that’s what happens when you raise an entire generation on nothing but Diff’rent Strokes and Duran Duran. They get confused. They grow up, they start running things, but they got heads made out of oatmeal. It’s like letting a dog mow your lawn. If you train it right, it might be able to push the mower around, but it’s gonna do a really bad job by human standards. These kids today, they don’t understand reality. To them, “reality” means you have to eat bugs and stab your best friend in the back to win money. So let me explain it to you knuckleheads. MOVIES ARE NOT REALITY. Because a movie was made in the ’70s does not mean that it actually happened. If you make a remake of Saturday Night Fever or Star Wars, you can’t say “based on a true story.” You have to say “based on a movie you already saw.” (read the rest of this shit…)

Walking Tall

I’m not all that familiar with the films of Phil Karlson. Supposedly he did some good gritty crime movies in the ’50s, but I just know him from his later years, when he did movies like BEN and WALKING TALL (he did one more, FRAMED, after those two, and that was that), where you’re convinced at the beginning that it’s some crappy TV movie but by the end you’re surprised by how involved you somehow got.

Loosely based on an actual guy, WALKING TALL is the story of Buford Pusser (Joseph Donald Baker), a soldier turned professional wrestler who moves his family back to his hometown in Tennessee, only to discover that things have changed a little bit. You know, same way they always did in blaxploitation movies. Suddenly there’s a bunch of criminals running the town, selling (in this case) moonshine. You can’t go to a bar without getting in a fight and a woman can’t even step one tippy toe onto God’s green earth without a bunch of drunken yahoos doing donuts in a pickup truck yelling “whooo hoo” and trying to grab her boobies. (Not that this literally happens in the movie as far as I remember, but you know, it’s that kind of movie.) (read the rest of this shit…)

The Mechanic

First off, I just want to say, I thought Charles Bronson was gonna play a mechanic in this movie. I’m not sure why. Maybe because THE FUCKING MOVIE IS CALLED THE MECHANIC. I don’t know, that may or may not be the reason.

Charles Bronson plays a mob enforcer, or a hitman, or an assassin, or a killer, or a mechanic, or a dentist, or whatever you think sounds coolest. Point is, he’s a guy who makes a living murdering people in fancy ways. And he’s real good at his job, by the looks of it.

The opening scene is one of them tours of force that you gotta be impressed by. For a good ten minutes or more, there is no dialogue, no narration, no explanation. Just my man Charles the Mechanic, spying on a guy, then going into the guy’s apartment, fucking with his teabags, putting explosives in his books, etc. Setting things up. Then blowing things up. All in a day’s work when you are a mechanic who doesn’t fix cars. (read the rest of this shit…)

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Can you believe that? Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Has there ever been a better title for a film of Badass Cinema, because I don’t think there has. Leave it to Sam Peckinpah, that lovable old drunk who spent his whole career fighting with studios and filming innocent kids standing by the side of the road watching as horrible atrocities took place in slow motion to come up with a title like that. I don’t think that one will ever be topped.

I really like Peckinpah, especially one that I guess is not generally considered one of his best, The Getaway. I like that this is a guy who makes violent westerns and crime movies but instead of trying to dazzle the audience with explosions and car chases, he seems to pour his filthy old grizzled alcoholic soul into it. All of his frustrations, problems and paranoid delusions seem to end up in there somewhere. He knows that a good personal film is not necessarily about some dude reading poetry and being misunderstood by the ladies. (read the rest of this shit…)

Whoopi Goldberg: This Month’s Janet Jackson

WhoopiSee, the few of you out there who read this shit, you say I should write these things more often. And I like to write them, to get all this out of my system, but at the same time I feel like a broken record. (For you kids, a record is a large black double sided CD used for hip hop scratching, and when it is “broken” or badly scratched it plays the same part over and over. That’s what it means, saying the same thing over and over, it’s an analogy.) Because it’s always the same themes, just the details are different.

I just looked a few columns back, and I was complaining about how ludicrous it is that, with all the blood on the hands of the Bush administration (and let’s be honest, it’s not just on the hands anymore, these fuckers are dipped head to toe like the dance club vampires at the beginning of BLADE), that the media matrix would really try to convince us that we should set that all aside, get over it, and focus our outrage on JANET JACKSON’S NAKED TITTY and THE NIGHTMARISH HORROR OF TWO MEN WHO LOVE EACH OTHER HOLDING HANDS. (read the rest of this shit…)

Prime Cut

Scroll up a little bit and you can read about POINT BLANK, Lee Marvin’s great Richard Stark adaptation. Directed by John Boorman, an obvious influence on THE LIMEY, one of the classics. Well here’s another one in the same tough guy vein. But it’s less arty, less thoughtful, and has a weird ass meat theme to it.

The movie starts with a slaughterhouse montage showing cows going from cows to sausages. Like the e-coli version of the opening credits to WILLY WONKA. Along the way a dead dude gets thrown in there, chopped up, ground and turned into links, then a big sweaty dude says, “Special order,” packs ’em up and mails ’em to the guy’s boss. (read the rest of this shit…)