Red

2010 geriatric action film

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Frank is retired and extremely dangerous. RED! He lives a boring little domestic life, the highlight being when he gets to flirt with Sarah over the phone when he makes calls to the government pension people about his checks. Life's boring until one A.M. when some people show up to kill him. He picks up Sarah in Kansas City and then rounds up some old old friends to help him figure out who is behind the attempt on his life.

How do you make yourselves a serious stack of dough in Hollywood? Do what the makers of Red did and just hire a bunch of big-name actors--action superstar Bruce Willis, Mr. Cool (and black) Morgan Freeman, the always-fascinating John Malkovich, the currently hotter-than-hot Helen Mirren--add a pile of explosions and gunfights, throw in a little romance with cute-as-a-button Mary-Louise Parker, and watch the magic happen. I guess the hook is that they're a bunch of old farts, and watching a bunch of old farts kick ass is a hoot. The characters have such a lack of depth, and their story seems derivative and tired. Improbable gun battles, some lazy dialogue, and a plot constructed from cut-and-pasted cliches. Throwing in any amount of Morgan Freeman acting like a badass doesn't wash all that away. Some of the action sequences are beyond stupid. As with a lot of these dumb action movies, none of the bad guys can shoot very well at all. There's a scene with Malkovich's character shooting a bullet at a missile thing that doesn't make any sense, and another slow-mo step from a spinning crashed car that I think made my wife ultimately decide to give up on this one. I did almost like Malkovich's character. He plays psychotic and paranoid very well, but his Marvin becomes less interesting as the movie goes on. Don't tell my wife, but I have the hots for Mary-Louise Parker. And don't you worry. I can type that here because she only skims this crap. Parker's "straight man" character here is nothing more than an annoying distraction though. It's my wife who skims this crap, by the way. As far as I know, Mary-Louise Parker has never visited this blog. That's about as likely as. . .oh, I don't know. Bruce Willis's character surviving this movie?

Gothic

1986 silliness

Rating: 11/20

Plot: We travel back to an era of English romanticism, specifically the night when Mary Shelley and poet husband Percy had a sleepover at Lord Byron's palatial estate, exchanged a few ghost stories, and gave birth to Frankenstein. Apparently, this night included a bunch of hide-and-go-seek and fighting off dwarf attacks.

Ken Russell's a director stuffed with bizarre ideas, and his films have a visual appeal. Gothic has some creative energy, but it's this really sluggish creative energy. Reimagining the night these crazy kids got together and inspired Shelley's horror novel, all the blending of reality and nightmare, is interesting movie subject matter. And there are some nifty visuals, like that suit of armor with a strap-on and the little fella featured on the poster. And you've got a strange but intriguing soundtrack provided by Thomas "She Blinded Me with Science" Dolby. But watching this movie was like wading through a filthy swamp. The period setting and stagy dialogue with freak-out interludes grew tiresome really quickly, and it's all so pretentious. It seems strange to say that since the majority of the movie involved the characters playing hide-and-seek, but it was. Fine characters, fine acting, a great scenario, some cool visuals and music. It just doesn't add up to anything that mattered to me at all. It's faux-intellectualism, flimsy and damp, a movie that drowns in itself. I was tempted to keep my finger on the fast-forward button, but I was terrified I'd miss a nipple.

Who Am I?

1998 premake of The Bourne Identity

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Special agent Jackie Chan tumbles out of a helicopter, bangs his head on a tree branch, and forgets who he is. He befriends a tribe of Native Americans living in South Africa but reconnects with society after helping a woman win a off-road racing event. Suddenly, everybody's trying to kill him, and he finds himself in a situation that he must kick his way out of.

The last twenty minutes or so contains some great kick-'em-in-the-noggin action with a dangerous glassy slide and a furious fight on a rooftop. Most of what precedes that final act is just dumb and confusing action story-telling. There are twists and turns that either don't make sense or just don't work, some awful acting, a bunch of explosions, a bunch more explosions, a car chase, some guns. It feels derivative, not a problem if the action's got me on the edge of my seat or if the characters are interesting. That's not really the case here though. I like my martial arts movies simple. I just want to see cats kicking each other. I don't need all this story, especially this sort of convoluted story that I have to pay a lot of attention to. That final twenty minutes? That's something I could watch again. The rest of it? Don't need it. By the way, I don't think he actually makes that face he's making on the movie poster above at any time during this movie. So if you were planning on renting this to see him make that face, don't waste your time. You'd be better off enlarging the image and shaking your monitor around and making explosion sounds with your lips.

The Lickerish Quartet

1970 sex comedy

Rating: 11/20

Plot: In their big fancy castle, a middle-aged married couple watch a pornographic movie with their twenty-something son. The son objects; the father cracks jokes. Eventually, they decide to get out and walk to a carnival where they enjoy the stunt driving of a trio of motorcyclists. When the female driver removes her helmet, they recognize her as one of the actresses in the movie they were watching. At least they think it's her. Naturally, they take her back to the castle, have some really awkward conversations, and then show her the pornographic movie. The next morning [Spoiler Alert!], they all have sex with her. Individually, of course, because together would just be disturbing.

Came across this title in a "Cult Movies" book, and I can't say I'm really glad I did. It drools like the 1970s, weirdly alternating between jerk-off material smuttage to pretentious dick-with-the-audience arthouse flick. It's an Italian movie, and it has the feel of one even though the dialogue's in English. The acting is stilted, forced and awkward, and the writing doesn't help the actors out much. Observe:

Girl: Who has the gun?
Father: What gun?
Girl: To do the shooting?
Father: There isn't going to be any shooting.
Girl: Of course there is.
Father: Of course there isn't!

Actually, with dialogue like that, it's hard to imagine that this isn't a comedy. An artsy erotic comedy! I actually did laugh quite a bit if you stretch your definition of "laugh" to include scrunching up one's face and saying, "What the hell?" I really liked the father's butterfly joke and its subsequent no-reaction. And I agree with the father that watching erotic movies in reverse and at a higher speed is worthy of a hearty guffaw. And how can you really hate a movie with a magic show, a motorcycle stunt scene, a spirited game of hide and seek, and a shot of a python swallowing a baby pig? You can't. I won't complain about the nudity either. Star Silvana Venturelli's easy on the eyes. The taste I can't wash out of my eyes, however, is the visual of the father and the visitor rolling most unerotically on a library floor that happens to have the definitions of sexual terms all over it. That was following the foreplay which consisted of the couple throwing books at each other and the father resenting his son. Yeah, it's that kind of movie. Awesome song during that scene though, all layered psychedelic guitar noodling. There's some neat elements here, but the pretentious camera play, random shots of feet and people falling down the stairs, World War flashbacks, and the overuse of visual motifs just scream artsy-fartsy. It was like director Radley Metzger decided he better make The Lickerish Quartet artistic or risk offending his mother and, after realizing he had no story whatsoever, decided to just befuddle the audience by blending present and past, reality and fantasy, motorcycles and shadow puppets. "See, Mom? It's not pornographic. It's Art!" Unfortunately, the pseudo-intellectual erotic mess it adds up to is no more intelligent than the erotic mess I made while watching it.

How about that tagline, by the way? "Beyond the physical edge. . ."

January Movie Club Selection: Field of Dreams

1989 baseball fantasy

Rating: 11/20

Plot: After a choppy backstory that explains a broken relationship with a father and how he married the most annoying woman in Iowa, Ray Kinsella settles into the present day where he struggles to stay afloat as a corn farmer. One afternoon, Ray is standing in his field (this is apparently something that farmers often do) and hears a voice telling him to build something so that somebody will come. He giggles. He later hallucinates and decides, because of his father's lack of spontaneity, to build a baseball field so that Shoeless Joe Jackson can boss him around on it. Shoeless Joe and his friends start playing on the field regularly, and Ray semi-retires so that he can sit on the bleachers and do absolutely nothing. But more voices lead him to Boston to find Darth Vader and then Minnesota to find J. J. Hunsecker.

Right away, we know why Cory loves this movie. For there, right on the Kinsella television screen, is Jimmy Stewart himself (in Harvey)in the first of two too-obvious references to mental illness. The other is that "I'm Crazy" song playing at a farm supply store.

I'd seen this movie once with my father about twenty years ago. Until I watched it again, I thought it was a pretty good movie that I actually liked. Turns out that it's a big sloppy mess of Hollywood treacle that I really kind of hated. It starts with the music. After some overly dramatic big Hollywood music accompanying pictures of young Ray, we get to the shots of Ray in his cornfield with the creepy ambient music that plays whenever he hears dead people. Here's what I want to know--does Ray also hear the creepy ambient music? After about fifteen minutes, I was already tired of the five-note piano theme that played every time something important happens. Later, I wanted to invent a drinking game or something like a drinking game where I shoved a pencil in my ear every time that music played.

I don't mind stretching my imagination, suspending my disbelief, or whatever. Field of Dreams forces me to stretch things a little too thin. Take for instance the hallucinations that lead him to his epiphany. He keeps asking if he's crazy because the script has him ask it about ten times. The answer has to be "Yes!" doesn't it? Nobody in his right mind is going to build a baseball field in that situation. Then, after he gets the "Ease his pain" message, he just happens to show up to a really awkward book-banning discussion where author Mann's name pops up, and he makes the connection? I loved that book discussion by the way. People randomly yelling out, "Pervert!" or "He's probably a communist!" And it climaxes with the most un-arousing catfight in the history of cinema. It's hard to swallow that a big coinkydink leads him to want to travel to Boston and Mann. But when his obnoxious wife starts in with the "I had a dream you were watching a game at Fenway with Mann" thing? I might have thrown up anyway, but that five-note piano motif came on and made it happen a little quicker.

The acting--I didn't like it, almost top to bottom. Burt Lancaster's the best of the bunch, but there are some moments when he's reading his lines like he's in a hurry, almost like he feels he has to finish them before he dies. Young "Moonlight" is maybe the worst, wide-eyed and talentless. He even overdoes winking. Amy Madigan is just too much, but maybe Ray's wife is supposed to be irritating. It's almost like Madigan read the script, thought it was a comedy, and played everything for laughs. James Earl Jones doesn't really fit inside his pants or his character, and Mann's behavior and dialogue is so inconsistent. There's an obnoxious child actor, Gaby Hoffmann; the only thing she accomplished was making me wish Ray and his wife were childless. At one point, Ray's brother-in-law (right before he shoves her off the top of the bleachers and nearly kills her) asks, "What the hell is she talking about?" and that was exactly what I was thinking. I wanted to give Timothy Busfield (Ed's brother on the TV show Ed) a high five. And there's Ray Liotta who seems bored with his role as Shoeless Joe. And good ol' Kevin Costner. His idea of "acting" is apparently looking into the distance and nodding or, sometimes, looking really confused. My favorite Costner moment is during a scene where he's driving his VW van and practising how to greet Mann. It's nearly a Nicholas Cage moment.

Some random questions I had:

--Ray is telling his daughter Shoeless Joe's story while building half of a baseball field--clearing it of the corn, smoothing out the dirt, planting the grass seed, putting up the lights, assembling the bleachers, etc. Is he a really really slow storyteller or a quick builder of bleachers?

--When Shoeless Joe arrives, there's all this baseball equipment just sitting there ready to be used. Where did that come from?

--Was Shoeless Joe supposed to be kind of a jerk? I thought he was kind of jerky.

--Why was Ray's wife wearing a beanie at one point?

--Time travel? Seriously?

--Where did the umpires come from?

--Is the line "Who is this? Elvis?" supposed to be as funny as I thought it was?

--How about the line "You guys are guests in my corn"?

--The six minutes after the little girl is shoved from the bleachers--does it turn into a comedy there?

--Wouldn't the "Hey, Dad? Want to have a catch?" line really confuse John?

This is the type of movie that stretches sentimentality so far that it snaps and hits you right in the brain. Or the groin. Hard. It's just too, too much. And most unfortunately, Ray and his wife are trying to figure out how the baseball field can be a financial enterprise at the end of the movie. That was a sickening thematic twist there, wasn't it?

I'll end with something positive because I don't want to be all negative with the first movie club selection. There's a scene where James Earl Jones walks into the cornfield. Before he enters, he stands there with a dumb grin on his face, sticks his hand in and out a few times, laughs really awkwardly, wobbles a bit. I had to rewind and watch that several times. Take it out of the context of Field of Dreams, and it's absolutely hilarious.

Sauna

2008 horror allegory

Rating: 11/20

Plot: A pair of Swedish brothers work alongside Russian soldiers to form the boundaries between their countries following a lengthy war. They get to a tiny village with a mysterious sauna. One of the brother's sins come back to haunt him.

It's lazy viewing on my part probably. I kind of lost interest in this one early on despite some good costumes, creepy settings, and a mysterious vibe. My brain, numbed, never recovered, and by the time the really strange final fifteen minutes rolled in, it was too late for me to figure out what the hell was going on. The characters aren't "people" enough to be real. Instead, they seem to work more as figures in an allegory. Likewise, the story feels incomplete. It starts in the middle, doesn't really go anywhere, and ends in a baffling flurry of nightmare imagery. We're in more weird than affecting territory here. Sauna does seem to have interesting ideas and some terrifying, maybe even memorable, imagery, but as a horror story or a fable, it feels unfinished. But like I said, that could be my fault. It's one of those types of movies I needed to watch with somebody smarter so that it could be explained to me.

Blacula

1972 blaxploitative horror movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: In the 1500s, blac guy heads to a castle in Transylvania to protest slavery. The owner of the castle happens to be a vampire and kills his girlfriend before biting him and dubbing him Blacula. Years later, some homosexuals buy his casket and, apparently without checking to see if it has a body in it, transports it to Los Angeles. Blacula pops out and starts vampiring it up, enjoying the city's night life and chasing after a groovy gal who sort of looks like his lost love. But with an afro. Play that funky music, vampire!

Dracula Negro might be a better title. Blacula made me think I was about to watch something really stupid, really low budget, and poorly written and acted. Actually, Blacula is a fairly clever twist on the Dracula story. Some of the acting is what you'd expect from a funky 70's flick like this, but fellow Hoosier William Marshall, the guy who plays the titular vampire, delivers a very un-campy performance with some surprising emotional ummph. He's like a black Christopher Lee. I was right about the budget and writing though. It's bad puns galore and make-up that appears to have been made out of cake frosting. The vampires kind of look like undead desserts. Of course this isn't terrific cinema, but it's also not nearly bad enough to be all that entertaining unfortunately. The plot drags, and the whole thing's filmed lifelessly. I have no desire to see the sequel, and I'm pretty sure that makes me a racist.

The Devil's Brother

1933 comedy operetta

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Stanlio and Olio attempt to rob the infamous singing bandit Fra Diavolo. Later, they work with him.

There's a hell of a lot of singing in this one. I wish there would have been something funny in it.

Britannia Hospital

1982 Lindsay Anderson movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Mick Travis, the guy in If... and O Lucky Man!, suddenly finds himself in a movie that isn't nearly as good. In this one, he's a documentarian surreptitiously making a film to expose a hospital's questionable procedures. Meanwhile, the Queen is set to visit, and a doctor is working on a crazy experiment known as the Genesis Project which he claims will perfect mankind. And also meanwhile, a bunch of protesters threaten to ruin everybody's plans.

This didn't work for me as a comedy or as social satire, the latter maybe because I'm missing a bunch of context. All I know is that where Mick Travis ends up is completely unexpected but unfortunately not in such a good way. There are lots of unexpected goings-on in Britannia Hospital, like in the other two movies of this trilogy, but instead of the unexpected being used to season the proceedings, this thing is sauced in the unexpected. It's like the Monty Python boys decided to smoke Keith Richards' dad's ashes, lost interest in trying to be funny, and made a loosely-connected series of sketches anyway. It's more bizarre than funny, and this is coming from a person who likes his humor dry. Immensely disappointing stuff, but worth checking out if you've ever wanted to see a stoned Luke Skywalker laughing hysterically at a documentary about chickens.

The Blind Side

2009 big-screen after-school special

Rating: 11/20 (Jen: 15/20; Emma: 15/20; Abbey: 18/20)

Plot: The extraordinary true story of Michael Oher, a troubled black teen without a home or family who is transformed overnight into a student-athlete after the well-to-do Touly family takes him in and feeds him turkey.

Somebody made Dylan watch this at school, and he told me, after his class had almost finished the entire thing, that it was a great movie, one that he would rate an 18. That's three times what he rated Dr. Strangelove, by the way. So we watched it, actually finishing the movie before he got a chance to watch the rest. I told him he was going to feel let down by the ending because Oher ends up devouring the Touly son S.J. Sandra Bullock walks in and watches in horror as Oher gnaws the rest of S.J.'s flesh from what appears to be a bloody, tooth-marked femur, and screams, "Big Mike! What are you doing?" Oher looks at her with this demented look in his eyes, a string of cartilage dangling from his lips, and exclaims with a mouth full of S.J., "I told you not to call me Big Mike!" That would have made this a much, much better movie, but a much, much less extraordinary true story. Speaking of S.J., I don't see how anybody can watch Jae Head's performance, a slightly-more-obnoxious-than-normal child performance, and consider this as a Best Picture nominee. His first line ("It's girl's volleyball, mom. You didn't miss anything.") almost made me stop watching The Blind Side. Sandra Bullock's critically-acclaimed performance isn't much better though. I wasn't as impressed with her down-home accent and tough-cookie personality as most seemed to be. It seemed to me that she had only a single move that she used over and over in this movie--a sideways glance with slightly-parted lips that she'd use whenever another character in the movie said anything to her. It kind of made her character seem dumb a lot of the time. This alternates between bland, derivative, and overly sentimental, and although the story is a nice one, I don't get the hype. It's definitely not three times better than Dr. Strangelove.

Babies

2010 documentary

Rating: 11/20 (Jen: 20/20; Dylan: 4/20; Emma: 18/20; Abbey: 20/20)

Plot: A seemingly endless juxtaposition of home video footage of babies from Nambia, Japan, Mongolia, and America during the first year of their lives.

A baby who isn't yours is nothing more than an obnoxious flabby burdensome stupid thing who, according to my father, looks like a shrunken Winston Churchill. And to be completely honest, I'm not sure I would want to watch ninety minutes of home videos featuring my own children as babies, let alone these babies I've got no connection with at all. Purportedly, this is all about how different cultures raise their children, but there's very little focus, just pointless and annoyingly precious scenes strung together haphazardly and given a title that a baby might have been able to come up with. And despite the cultural differences, some subtle and some extreme, we all know that it's all going to end the same with the annoying babies eventually becoming dangerous adults. So even though it's all shot very well, it's really as pointless and trite as documentary filmmaking gets. I would rather change a crappy diaper than watch this one again, but it's the exact sort of thing that some people would find delightful. For whatever reason, I want to blame Oprah for this.

Back to the Future II

1989 sequel

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Doc Brown and Marty have to travel into the future to save the latter's kid from making a terrible mistake. While there, Biff steals the Delorean and travels back to 1955 to give his younger self a sports almanac. Biff's then able to build a fortune and make life really miserable in 2015 despite everybody getting the chance to fly around on hover boards. So the time travelling duo has to travel back to 1955 to fix things. And it all somehow pisses Crispin Glover off!

Me, minutes ago: "And it's only the first part of a trilogy. I'm sure the next one has to be great, too!"

Whoops! This one stinks! It can all be explained with a simple mathematical equation, the Glover Theorem:

Good movie with Crispin Glover - Crispin Glover = stinky movie

This is a complete mess from the get-go and gets my vote for most dissatisfying sequel of all time. The performers I enjoyed so much in the first movie are so over-the-top and sickeningly silly. Fox and Wilson have multiple roles, and instead of being clever like Zemeckis probably thinks it all is, it's just plain stupid. I was embarrassed for everyone involved. Of course, Zemeckis is also the same guy who gave us that creepy Polar Express garbage (possibly one of the worst movies ever made and so far the only movie that has made me wish the plane I was on would crash into a mountain) and who apparently thinks a remake of Yellow Submarine is necessary. The future whatever-town-that-is looks ridiculous, the special effects get in the way of the storytelling, and we're rushed through the fairly bizarre first-half story in a way that convinced me it was scribbled down furiously by either a coke addict, Robin Williams, or both instead of being written. The second half of the film is a little better, and things are almost salvaged with all the clever back to the past in Back to the Future moments, stuff that people who get off on time travel can really get excited about. But it's unfortunately too little, too late and nothing can save this from being gross.

Speaking of gross--I forgot to mention this in the Back to the Future write-up, but these movies have to have some sort of record for most product placement. Geez Louise! There aren't many scenes in these two movies that you can watch without seeing an advertisement for something.

Oh well. At least Crispin Glover made a wad of dough from this movie without having to do an ounce of work. I'm giving the movie a bonus point just for that.

Gas-s-s-s or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It

1971 hippie fest

Rating: 11/20 (Mark: 13/20; Amy: 12/20)

Plot: A bunch of (probably smelly) people fight for survival after a poisonous gas kills everybody over the age of 25.

An anarchic mess of a movie with a psychedelic clash of ideas, like acid-baked concert poster mash-ups, and a sloppy soundtrack, Gas-s-s-s is one of those movies that I really wanted to like but couldn't. It's packed with ideas and all kinds of things to look at. But like a lot of movies like this (I type that knowing that there really aren't a lot of movies like this), it actually suffers from having way too many ideas and things to look at. The humor's goofily dated, and there's just not anything for the typical viewer (and I consider myself 100% typical) to grasp on to. It was like I'd been put on a roller coaster that was falling apart and told that I couldn't hold on to the rail thing or I'd have to start the ride over again. The guy next to me liked the ride a little more than I did, but at least I didn't drink and vomit up an extra-large cherry Slushie and something called a "jumbo dog" like the guy behind me. This is a product of the rebellious early-70s, probably more interesting as a counter-culture relic than as a cult classic. It's probably a must for Roger Corman or Bud Cort fans though. Speaking of the latter--as I continue in my quest to see every Roger Corman movie (bet you didn't even know that was even a quest!), I continue to be amazed by the guy's versatility. And even if his movies aren't always good, they are almost always interesting and worth watching. Gas-s-s-s is, too, but its potential is unfortunately wasted by a half-assed pseudo-absurdist script and no-budget aesthetics. It's also a movie I'll never discuss with anybody because a) nobody has seen it and b) I don't want to try pronouncing the title. Gas-s-s-s. I'm afraid I'd accidentally put an extra couple s's in there.

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

2009 Terry Gilliam movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: The titular doctor roams England with a rickety theater wagon, luring some lucky customers into the Imaginarium, a trip through Parnassus's dream-drenched mind. Much earlier, he'd made a deal with the devil, Mr. Nick, and as his daughter's sixteenth birthday approaches, he knows that she will soon belong to him. Parnassus and Mr. Nick decide to have a competition to see who can get five souls first. Meanwhile, the performers have rescued a man hanging beneath a bridge, and he decides to travel around with them.

This is one of those cases where I'm really frustrated. How can I not like this movie? It's obnoxiously fantastical, another visual treat from the fertile subconscious of Terry Gilliam. It's got a little person, a monkey, and a Tom Waits puppet in it. It's got Tom Waits himself with a mesmerizing performance as the flamboyant Mr. Nick. It's got a really interesting story submerged beneath the onslaught of visual peculiarities. So how do I not totally love this thing? There are lots of problems actually. Sure, you can gorge on the visuals if you're into that sort of thing, but there are lots of times when there's much too much going on, CGI-mayhem that leads to a sensory overload with tinkertoy surrealism and forced field trips to a schizophrenic's painting studio. The visuals are often neat, but there's this timeless anachronistic quality to the whole thing where everything seems out of place. It's difficult, I imagine, for the average person to get a grip on what's going on in Gilliam's worlds. As a fan of a lot of his work, I even found this one difficult, and it made me wonder how messy the man's kitchen must be. Things stutter along, get weird, stutter along some more, stop, and stutter, and after a while, I started wondering when things were going to get started. By the time the giant unfurling tongue, dancing transvestite policemen, and a giant robot woman driven by the devil (all three which looked straight from Python), I had already lost my ability to focus and had to dump a half glass of raspberry lemonade on my lap to get my leg to stop vibrating. Heath Ledger is in this movie, and I think he did a fine job. I can't be sure because it was hard to get a grip on his character until some twistiness at the very end. Depp, Law, and Farrell step in for scenes with Ledger's Tony after Ledger's death, and although I suppose the different actors playing the same role could work on some level, I didn't completely get it here and it was just one more thing about the film to frustrate the heck out of me. Tom Waits really is terrific playing Mr. Nick, borrowing a sleazy and dapper tone that he's used in more than a few of his songs. And I liked Christopher Plummer here, too. But Verne Troyer (you know, Mini-Me) proves to the world that he's not an actor. At all. His is one of the worst performances I've seen in a long time. Verne is no Herve, and nothing, not even a scene where he's in blackface, made me glad that he was in the film. Big mistake with that casting decision, Terry. This was a movie I was looking forward to for years, and I'm really sad that I didn't like it.

There's a chance I'll watch this again some day, and there's a chance I'll like it a lot better. Then again, I've always said I'd give The Brothers Grimm (couldn't finish) and Tideland (wasn't sure if I liked it or not) another chance and never have.

The Amazing Colossal Man

1957 man-who-changes-size movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Poor Lt. Col. Manning. After being exposed to radiation during a bomb test, he recovers but begins growing. And growing. And growing! Soon, he finds himself as a sixty-foot bald giant in a diaper. The growth disturbs his mind, and he begins terrorizing Las Vegas.

A Bert I. Gordon joint, and like the other movie of his on this blog (Earth vs. The Spider), it's almost exactly what you'd expect from this sort of 50s B-movie with only a few scenes that make it worth watching. The science doesn't make sense, and the plot goes exactly where you think it will,. It's a plot with some plot holes that are more colossal than the colossal guy's diaper! But the acting and special effects, with the exception of some transparent colossal man body parts, aren't as terrible as a lot of these cheapo affairs, and although it doesn't have as much of an existential subtext as The Incredible Shrinking Man, it does get moody and philosophical. Manning's growth and the parallel transformation of his mindset probably works metaphorically in the context of 1950's fears, but I watched this in 2010, a time when people don't have anything to worry about. I was left with one big question: There's a scene where Manning, big but not as colossal as he ends up, goes on a picnic with his wife. No, they don't "do it" afterwards, you perverts. But in the background, you can see an automobile that the couple apparently drove to the picnic site. However, there's no way Manning would have fit inside the car. These are the type of B-movie questions that keep me up late some nights because they inevitably lead to other questions. For example, how does Manning, big enough to be moved from a hospital to a circus tent, dispose of his fecal matter?

Trouble Man

1972 blaxploitation flick

Rating: 11/20

Plot: There's trouble for Mr. T when he's hired by Chalky and Pete to stop the masked men who keep showing up with guns and robbing the participants of their craps game. There's a lot more than meets the eye for this suave, ultra-cool private detective as he finds himself in the middle of a gang war. Oh, snap!

This is a much better movie than the Dolemite movies and probably Cleopatra Jones. Mr. T, this one sans mohawk and extraneous jewelry and "I pity the fool" catch-phrase, isn't nearly as much fun though. T's as smart as he is cool, and although the plot was convoluted and gummy, I enjoyed the ride when the character was strutting around trying to put pieces together with the help of his gigantic polyester ties. However, other than the titular detective, you don't get a single other engaging character, and no real bad guys to latch onto. The majority of this is low-grade shoot-'em-up stuff, and Trouble Man's just too straight to make it worth the trouble.

The Manster

1959 science fiction horror film

Rating: 11/20

Plot: A crazed Japanese scientist is experimenting with human evolution in his secret laboratory conveniently located next to a burbling volcano. At the beginning of the movie, he has to kill off one of his mistakes, a killer ape man who was formerly the scientist's brother. Screaming in a cage, is a disfigured woman who was once the scientist's wife. As the scientist wonders who will be the next subject for his experiments, an American journalist wanders in to conduct an interview. The scientist asks him a few inappropriate questions, drugs and injects him, and sends him on his way. Instantly, the journalist's personality changes. He starts cheating on his wife and refuses to return home. Eventually, he starts noticing some physical changes as well, specifically the appearance of an eyeball on his right shoulder. It's not good.

The movie's also probably not good, but I enjoyed this little sucker. The intro is striking--bathing women, the appearance of a hideous ape man, a splash of blood, and the scientist's mutated wife (like a character from Freaks) screaming and shaking the bars of her cage. It all looks cheap but effectively creepy. It almost makes the next forty minutes or so a complete let-down as the filmmakers made the unwise decision to have some sort of plot and fail to maintain that level of creepiness, but it all picks up again when the guy unveils his shoulder eye, an area which eventually sprouts a head. It's one of those movie images that somebody watching this movie isn't likely to forget. I also really liked the build-up to that scene where theremin (or was that a saw?) music would play whenever the guy looked at or touched his shoulder. To be fair, the story in that intervening forty minutes is fairly interesting. I liked watching the journalist change psychologically before the physical transformations happened, possibly a metaphor for the "monsters" that men can become when they give in to temptation, drinking too much or cheating on their wives. This was a very B, Japanese/American co-production, and although the cheapness almost bleeds from the screen and the acting (especially Tetsu Nakamura, undoubtedly "acting" in a language he's not entirely comfortable with) is no good at all, they do quite a bit with very, very little. The Manster, also known as The Split and Doctor Satan and (most boringly) The Two-Headed Monster, is worth checking out.

"Oh, Snap! I'm not supposed to have an eyeball there!" (Note: Not an actual line from the movie.)

The Strongest Man in the World

1975 family fun

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Some dopey college doofuses throw some chemicals together in an attempt to do something to a cow. It gets mixed in with some cereal that one of them eats, and they discover that their concoction gives the user super strength for a limited period of time. This comes along at just the right time since the school is experiencing some financial difficulties. Some bad guys come along.

There aren't too many non-animated Disney features that I love or even like, and there are quite a few I wish would be wiped out of existence. That's right, Cat from Outer Space. I'm looking at you. This is somewhere in between. It's typical Disney family science fiction goofballery with some special effects being used for humorous purposes. As expected, there's nothing hysterically funny or memorable here. It's harmless (unlike The Cat from Outer Space) but incredibly boring. This is the type of family film that you watch and can't imagine a single member of the family actually enjoying it. There's too much story for children. There's no nudity or violence, so Dad's not going to like it. Mom doesn't really like movies that much anyway. Grandpa's dead. We don't allow Uncle Pete in the room when we watch movies because he can't keep his prosthetic hand out of his pants. And Aunt Bertha is confused by Kurt Russell. Speaking of Kurt Russell, he falls out of the movie halfway through and doesn't come back until the end. I'm not sure where he went because I yawned and lost track of the characters. I don't want to write anything else about this movie.

Religulous

2008 inquiry

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Funnyman Bill Maher travels the world to have some of his questions about religion answered. Or maybe he's traveling on the world because he's a superior human being who was sent to earth by something (Note: Not a deity) to tell us all what's what in a very smug way.

Points deducted because my research shows that this contains possible misinformation. More points deducted because of the amount of stereotyping and generalizing that Maher does. Not to say this wasn't entertaining because it was. I enjoy when people are made fun of because of their beliefs. I really do. But there was just something about Maher's approach here that rubbed me the wrong way. Part of the problem is that his stated goal with this is so far from what he's trying to do. He claims he's asking these questions because he really wants answers, preaching the "Gospel of I-Don't-Know." He doesn't. He's asking these questions because it gives him the opportunity to be funny and show how much smarter he is than the average person. His well-written diatribe at the end of this, a biased faux-summary of his discoveries, could easily have been written prior to production. As a documentary, this lacks cohesion. I laughed out loud a few times, and if that was his main goal (he is, after all, a comedian), then he succeeded. Somehow, I doubt Bill Maher's main goal was to make Shane laugh, however. If nothing else, this reinforces my belief that I need to visit the Creation Museum. They have animatronic dinosaurs there!

Adventureland

2009 Jesse Eisenberg movie with "land" in the title

Rating: 11/20

Plot: It's the late-80s, and recent high school grad James really wants to travel Europe before attending the N.Y. college he's been accepted to. Unfortunately, his parents have run into some recent financial trouble. James gets a summer job at Adventureland, an amusement park, befriends some wacky minor characters, and falls for the girl who's in those Twilight movies. They all learn about life! Angst!

I really don't like this Jesse Eisenberg guy. The poster proudly proclaims that this is from the people who brought us Superbad, and I imagine that disappointed a lot of people since this isn't nearly as stupid as that movie. It's not really funny at all actually, and I'm going to forget that I even watched this in a month or two. This seemed like something that should have been on television instead of on the big screen. Like every other recent movie that is based in the 80s, this annoyed me. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but this had the feel of a typical 80s comedy, and we all know that's probably not a good thing. I think a few of the jokes were even leftovers from the 80s.

Recommended by a guy from work.