"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

SPOILER ALERT !!

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

Next up, we’ve got our friend from Seattle, the one and only Vern…

Boys,

A few months ago I would not think I would be saying this. But I just saw the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, and I did not want to perpetrate violent acts against anybody afterwards. Not the Scooby Doo guy, not the commercial director guy, not anybody. If the Scooby Doo dude would’ve been standing right there when I came out, and there was a clear opening to punch the guy hard in the balls, or toss him through a windshield like Steven Seagal did to that pimp in the opening scene of OUT FOR JUSTICE, I still wouldn’t have done it. I would’ve been like, “It’s cool man, it’s cool.”

That’s high praise. I would not punch the writer of this movie in the balls. Put that on the poster, fuckers. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 18th, 2004 | 5 Comments »

Vern on the 2nd ‘Reel’ CINERAMA Film Festival in Seattle!

Hey folks, Harry here with Vern… he’s our magical little friend from up in Seattle and he doesn’t like KRULL! What sort of soulless mutherfucker doesn’t dig on KRULL! KRULL is the film that introduced the GLAVE and THE GLAVE is the fucking weapon of choice in my D&D household! And the Spider sequence… the sand in the hand… Ancient bitter love… FIRESTEEDS! Oh absolutely it’s got levels of funk 4 feet deep all about, but I love all sorts of crazy shit in that movie, and would love to see it in 70mm. ENVY! Ok, here’s Vern, who I still like, even if he’s too backwoods to get KRULL!

Boys –

Every once in a while – or once a year, I guess – Seattle’s landmark Cinerama (Cinerama.Com) theater has a film festival where they show a bunch of archival 70mm prints and a couple in actual 3-projector Cinerama. And then a bunch of people watch the movies, etc.

This year some of the films shown include LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, HOW THE WEST WAS WON (in 3-strip Cinerama), THIS IS CINERAMA, OKLAHOMA and IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD. I forgot to go to those but I saw GHOSTBUSTERS, TOTAL RECALL and KRULL instead. All in 70mm. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 10th, 2004 | 7 Comments »

Vern Has Seen WILD THINGS 2!! No… Seriously…

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

This got lost in the e-mail last week, which sucks. An unpublished Vern review is like an unrecorded McCartney/Lennon song. Even if it’s for WILD THINGS 2.

Howdy boys

Not sure if you got this review that I sent you boys last week. Maybe you didn’t feel it was up to my meticulous standards. But I feel the people have a right to know. A right to know that there is a WILD THINGS 2.

So yep, I saw WILD THINGS 2. Unneccessary direct to video sequel to underrecognized 1998 John McNaughton masterpiece. And believe it or not I’ve been waiting for this one anxiously. Not expecting it would be anything other than garbage, but just hoping on the off chance that maybe it would be fun. Yeah, I’ll give you two guesses which one it was. The first one. The one about the garbage, and the not being anything other than, or whatever it was I just said. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 8th, 2004 | 7 Comments »

2001: A Space Odyssey

Lately I’ve only been reviewing current movies, but as you know, the Hollywood Reporter had a story the other day that MGM has hired a first time director to do a “re-imagining” of 2001 with “modern pacing and music” that will “take full advantage of state-of-the-art digital effects.” The director is not someone I’m familiar with, but they say he is perfect for the job because he’s done alot of music videos and won a couple of Miss Clio awards for his commercials. So before they ruin it I thought I would revisit Kubrick’s masterpiece of space ballet and shit.

No, don’t worry, I’m just fucking with you. They’re not doing a remake, as far as I know. But you almost believed it, right? Because it’s so awful, so wrong, so undeniably vile, that someone is definitely going to have to do it eventually. They came for Hitchcock and Hooper and Romero and Carpenter and Walking Tall and Amityville Horror and House of Wax and they even tried Billy Jack. They already got Charade and Planet of the Apes and Dr. Seuss. They burrowed into the brains of Lucas and Spielberg and Friedkin and Scott and made them second guess their younger, better selves. And now they’ve got their greedy bastard eyes on Kubrick. You fucking know they do. They’ll wait until his assistant is dead and his assistant’s grandchildren or whatever it takes, but the day it becomes possible, they dig out the contracts and they sign them in blood and they will swallow one end of 2001 and suck it down like one of those threads the yogis use and pull the entire movie out through the ass and into a paper shredder. You already know this, but I’m telling you this, because we need to get this out in the open, for our own good. We need to face the inevitable. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 5th, 2004 | 7 Comments »

Gay marriage, Ralph Nader running again, Duck hunting with Dick and Anton, Janet Jackson’s booby, THE SURREAL LIFE season 2

I will be covering a number of topics this week, so if you don’t like one just skip to the next one. thanks.

ONE LAST TIME. GAY PEOPLE CAN GET MARRIED. GET THE FUCK OVER IT.

Okay, I thought my last column would be the definitive word on the gay marriage debate, but for some reason they keep talking about this. Especially since Bush announced he wanted a constitutional amendment to put some limits on that pesky “equal protection” crap our forefathers accidentally left in there. This was treated as big, historic news, even though the asshole said the same thing in his state of the union address. which in my opinion is supposed to be a pretty major speech. But anyway let’s go over this again in more detail. (read the rest of this shit…)

February 28th, 2004 | 7 Comments »

Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator

Did you ever see that skateboarding documentary DOGTOWN AND THE Z-BOYS? Well STOKED is like the depressing, fucked up David Fincher part 3 to that where all the main characters from part 2 (except the cat) get killed offscreen in the opening credits and Z-Boy shaves his head and gets infected and jumps into a pit of molten metal at the end and burns himself up. Except kind of worse. And metaphorical.

Actually alot of this picture is a fun time nostalgia type of deal about a period in the late 1980s or some time like that where young people grew their bangs real long and wore pink helmets and funny pants and went around on skateboards jumping up in the air. In DOGTOWN they were doing wheelies and shit on their skateboards but what they would do according to this one is go into an empty swimming pool or a woooden ramp and they go back and forth real fast. (read the rest of this shit…)

February 16th, 2004 | No Comments »

Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed

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

Nice of Vern to go out of his way to review this sequel since he reviewed the original for us. Personally, I thought this one smelled like a direct-to-video sequel when we watched it at BNAT 5 this year, and I’m not really aching to see any further adventures of the Ginger Snaps sisters. Not every horror film has to inspire a franchise if it makes a few dollars, folks. Anyway… enough from me. Here’s Vern.

What’s up boys–

A while back I reviewed for you boys a real good canadian teen werewolf picture called GINGER SNAPS PART 1. That was a real smart and original low budget picture for the teenage girls sort of like HEATHERS but with less showoffy dialogue and more werewolves and crap.

Well today I got me a special treat and that was a screener of GINGER SNAPS 2: UNLEASHED. There are alot of part twos coming to the video market this year and it’s very exciting but I guarantee none will be as good as this one. Also I know I had nothing to do with it but still I feel like I should personally apologize for that title. It means nothing! I mean might as well be GINGER SNAPS: RESURRECTION. Or reloaded or full throttle or farewell to the flesh. Or GS2 RETURN OF THE SNAPPING GINGER. That’s just a dumb title. Other than that I got no complaints about this well made sequel. (read the rest of this shit…)

February 4th, 2004 | 1 Comment »

Already I have written dozens of column related program activities

Sometimes I think I oughta just change the name of this column to WHAT THE SHIT IS GOING ON IN THIS COUNTRY?! I mean seriously.

Take this Howard Dean business for example. I know the republicans are scowering the shit out of his past. The media wants him dead, and they’ll do whatever they can to nail his balls to a wall and then pee all over him. You know, practically every politician is getting a bribe or a blowjob or some stupid shit and all everybody can find on this guy is, “he went ‘Yeeeahhh!!!'”

That’s a fucking scandal? How did this even make it on TV? It’s been the top story all week. Shit, even Michael Jackson is real news compared to this! This is a waterskiing squirrel. They’re writing epic poems about a 2 second video clip of the guy being goofy to rile up a crowd. I mean, they had more intelligent discussions on the red carpet coverage at the golden globes. They didn’t do that for Bush’s “fool me once, shame, shame on me, shame shame shame, you can’t fool me again” or whatever he said. They didn’t do it for dropping his dog or falling of a segway (previously believed impossible) and it took them months to notice him standing on the aircraft carrier or saying “bring ’em on” or lying about uranium or etc. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 28th, 2004 | No Comments »

Elephant

Who the fuck knows what to make of Gus Van Sant? Fierce independence and idiosynchricity or whatever for many years. Openly gay independent filmatist working out of Oregon, adapting underground literature and hanging out with Burroughs and shit. Suddenly out of the blue he does this huge hit studio movie with no gay people, but Robin Williams and a math genius garbage man or whatever the fuck that movie was about (I never saw it). How bout them apples I guess is what a guy says in it, I don’t know. So suddenly Van Sant is a mainstream super star and he can do whatever he wants… so what he does, he announces that he’s gonna do a shot for shot remake of Mr. Hitchcock’s famous picture PSYCHO. With the same score and everything. And hire the same screenwriter just to change like ten or fifteen words in it.

Now I know I am against the wheat grain on this one but for me, that was the thing that SOLD me on this Van Sant, not the thing that lost me. Sure, DRUGSTORE COWBOY was a great one and there was some good business in his other pictures, but it was the day he cashed in his mainstream clout to do something THAT fucking ridiculous that made me think this was a guy I could really respect. Nobody else would get the chance to try something like that, nobody else would WANT to try something like that, and anybody, including him, is not likely to get out of that one unscathed. It was a god damn kamikaze mission, or “homicide bombing” as our friends at Fox “news” call it in their unending quest for a new, less accurate form of speaking. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 23rd, 2004 | 4 Comments »

Mystic River

When I saw the first trailer for MYSTIC RIVER I practically flipped out. I guess not like one of those “geek-gasms” my bud Harold Knowles talks about but more like getting goose-shivers or the hair standing up on your balls or whatever the saying is. I already knew it had cleaned up at the Whatsisdick Film Festival over there in wherever it was, and that it was directed by my man Clint, who actually did the narration for this trailer. There was no scenes from the movie, just a helicopter shot of the town with the narration and then the credits start telling me, okay: Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney… and then it says, “A Film by Clint Eastwood.” It gives you no clue what it’s about really, just shows you the setting and tells you the players and figures that if that’s not enough for you then you must be an asshole. “That’s all I need to know,” I said, but really I already knew more – that it was written by oscar winner Brian Helgeland, director of outlaw award winner PAYBACK. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 18th, 2004 | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
  • Hey bud, thanks for reading.

    Don't feel obligated, but here are some

  • WAYS YOU CAN SUPPORT THE SHIT OUT OF VERN & OUTLAWVERN.COM

    if that's your thing:

  • 1. Patreon

    Toss me a couple bucks a month, support the good shit, also get access to a bunch of exclusive writing. This is my primary source of writing money that has allowed me to cut down to part time at the day job. Thank you!

  • 2. Buy my books from your local bookseller or somebody

    click here for my Amazon author page

    (NOTE: My ten year contract has passed on the Titan books, so I don't get residuals on them like I do WORM ON A HOOK and NIKETOWN, but I would love for you to read them because I'm proud of them)

    EXTRA CREDIT: Review them on Amazon! That would really help me out. Unless you didn't like them, in which case forget I said anything.

  • 3. If you ever buy from Amazon, go through my links or search engines



    (you pay the same amount you were gonna pay anyway they cut me a little slice)

  • I also have an Amazon UK one:

    (I can't get the search box widget to work anymore, so click on MOONWALKER and then search for what you want.)

  • 4. My exciting line of fashion and leisure products

    (I get a couple bucks per item, you get a cool t-shirt, mug or lifestyle item)

  • 5. Spread the word

    Tell your friends about my reviews and my books and everything. Only cool people though please, we don't need a bunch of suckers and/or chumps around here.

    THANKS EVERYBODY. YOUR FRIEND, VERN

    * * * *

  • Recent commentary and jibber-jabber

    • Peter Campbell on Trancers: “I’ve always adored this movie. It was a video hit in the UK in the 80’s so its one that’s…” Dec 22, 15:05
    • Mr. Majestyk on Trancers: “I also watched TRANCERS for the first time this year. I’ve slowly lowered my standards to the point where I…” Dec 22, 11:57
    • CJ Holden on Superman (2025): “You’re welcome. Check out some of their other stuff. This isn’t even their wildest video! And when you are at…” Dec 22, 11:46
    • CJ Holden on Trancers: “One fun thing about the whole aging thing is that the generation after me apparently has the “problem” of looking…” Dec 22, 11:42
    • Ben C. on Superman (2025): “CJ, thanks for the link, best music video I’ve seen in awhile!!!!” Dec 22, 11:03
    • Muh on Trancers: “Been a long time since I saw this movie and forgot he intended to stay in the body. Man, this…” Dec 22, 11:01
    • Muh on Trancers: “Burt Young was 35!!!!!! when he was in Rocky. And never aged a day after that because he already looked…” Dec 22, 10:59
    • Bill Reed on Trancers: “Okay, this sounds like my kind of thing. I see the poster all over the place, but it kept making…” Dec 22, 10:39
    • Miguel Hombre on Trancers: “I had my own ‘I’m getting old moment’ a few days ago when I stumbled across the fact that I’m…” Dec 22, 09:00
    • CJ Holden on Trancers: “This is indeed one of those really fun b-movies that feel like a 12 year old watched TERMINATOR and a…” Dec 22, 07:36
    • bigclash on Silent Night, Deadly Night (2025): “I didn’t expect this material to be turned into something so lively and offbeat. It really sounds like the movie…” Dec 22, 04:51
    • CJ Holden on Superman (2025): “German actor Lars Eidinger was announced for the role of Brainiac in the next SUPERMAN movie. You might know him…” Dec 20, 09:49
    • The Winchester on Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point: “Started this based on the recommendation of Vern. I’m really enjoying it. I feel like I’m roaming the party. I…” Dec 19, 19:04
    • Skani on Silent Night, Deadly Night (2025): “Or 2 BEST 2 OF THE, for that matter. I have to re-watch HEART EYES, because that was the reigning…” Dec 19, 17:35
    • VERN on Silent Night, Deadly Night (2025): “Or BEST OF THE BEST 2 for that matter.” Dec 19, 13:15

  • Recent Commented on Posts

  • Most Comments