We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

January 26, 2012 2 Comments

 

Despite the critical acclaim of this movie, I didn’t understand why a comedy about John C. Reilly helping a fat kid at school deal with bullies. Then I realized that this movie was not at all the other movie with a person’s name as the title that came out in 2011 called “Terri”. I also recently saw an article talking about the poster design of this film and ways that it is reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby, which got me interested. Some might even say it piqued my interest, if you’re the type of person who enjoys using words with the letter “Q” in them. I still had no idea whether or not this movie was any sort of horror or thriller or anything like that, because everyone kind of knew it was about the character “Kevin” needing a talking to because he was going to take part in some sort of school shooting or something. Why couldn’t you have taken time out of your schedule to talk to Terri AND Kevin, John C. Reilly?!

 

Talk about Kevin? How about we talk about that tomato soup!

 

Eva (Tilda Swinton) wakes up from a dream/memory of being in one of those giant tomato fights that happen in places where people don’t speak English. When she wakes up, she sees her car covered in red paint, as well as her house. You know what? I’m giving up on describing things in the order they happen in the movie because the movie was constantly jumping around to different timelines and this will be easier. Eva and Franklin (John C. Reilly) have a child together named, believe it or not, Kevin. Given their professions, it ends up being Eva who spends most of her time at home with Kevin while Franklin is typically away. The child seems unresponsive, dismissive of any attention or stimulus, as well as confrontational. He’s a little cocksucker and Franklin thinks Eva is just making it up. Doctors say that there’s nothing wrong with him and people think Eva is just kind of exaggerating. The older he gets, the more extreme the dual personalities become, being a great son when Franklin is around and being a shithead around Eva. As a toddler, Kevin intentionally shits his diapers every time he gets changed, as well as ruins Eva’s belongings, and as he get older he graduates to creating computer viruses and feeding his sister drain cleaner, which results in her having her eye removed. What an asshole!

 

And then Will Ferrell busted in and did some of his patented funny yelling!

 

The douchebaggery climaxes with Kevin taking his bow and arrow to his school, takes a shitload of Prozac, and starts locking people in and shooting a bunch of people. While jumping back and forth between timelines, we also see Eva having to deal with the community’s reaction to these events, including strangers walking up to her and slapping her and having her groceries fucked with. All the while we can’t help but wonder where Franklin and the daughter are in all of this, as most of the film focused on the relationship between Kevin and Eva, including her visiting him in prison. Towards the end of the film we learn that they were both killed by Kevin before he had gone to the school. We also learn that since he took a shitload of Prozac and wasn’t even 16 when he did those things, he was only going to be in prison for a few more years. The film ends with Eva painting a room for Kevin in her new home and getting all of his clothes ready for when he is eventually released. I think it was symbolic of her forgiving him for everything? Or something? Who fucking knows.

 

The original title was actually “We Need to Talk About Kevin…..’s Problem of Buying Small Clothes”.

 

I don’t say this too often about films, but I didn’t really understand the point of it. Granted, it was based on a novel, so its possible there are a lot of rewarding elements of the book, but I didn’t really feel much with the film. Both Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller, who played the older Kevin, were quite good, but I still didn’t really feel anything in regards to the story. I think the points they were trying to make were about how Eva was ambivalent to the idea of motherhood from the beginning and how that could have played a part in why Kevin grew up this way, and that there can be closure at the end because she finally accepted him for all his flaws. The problem with this is that I thought she did a relatively decent job of dealing with a shitty kid and only really let her frustrations show when she shoved him once and he broke his arm. I figured that if she was having such a hard time dealing with the community after what Kevin did, she could have, I don’t know, FUCKING MOVED SOMEWHERE ELSE. I think it would have been a little bit easier to summarize the movie by saying “Tilda Swinton is from another planet and is stuck with a shitty kid who grows up to be a shitty teenager but she hugs him anyway”. It got a little tense in a few moments when you knew Kevin was about to go bonkers and get all Green Arrow on everyone, but those moments seemed to be intentionally underplayed as to not make it some gore-fest.

 

I’m certainly no DNA scientist, but how does Tilda Swinton + John C. Reilly = this?

 

When it comes to school shooting movies, the only one I could say I “liked” was Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant”. To say I liked the movie might not necessarily be the appropriate word. Elephant had only been released a few years after the Columbine Massacre and even though it wasn’t based on that, it was certainly the event that it was repeatedly compared to.  I felt as though Elephant had humanized these two kids who weren’t the monsters that everyone had portrayed them to be, and tried to show that these two kids had some fucked up experience that caused them to focus effort on a terrible, violent event. Maybe had they grown up differently or worn different clothes or had different hair, maybe there could have been enough small changes in their lives that they could have handled things in a more productive way, but clearly fell down a slippery slope of anger and hate. This film, however, didn’t really seem to address room for error in a child’s upbringing. Kevin was such a piece of shit even as a toddler, that even though Eva tried to do her best, her best wasn’t good enough. Maybe the point was that if Eva had shown such devotion to Kevin early in his life that she had shown towards the end of it, things would have been different, but I feel it missed that mark. Although I didn’t really enjoy this film, I did think there were two good performances in it, so it wasn’t a complete waste of my time. Oh yeah, and you kind of see John C. Reilly’s butt! IN A SEX SCENE!

 

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The Lovely Bones (2009)

October 22, 2011 3 Comments

 

 

Did I give a shit about this movie when it came out? NOPE. Did I read this book or give a shit about that? NOPE. Why did I watch this movie, that didn’t really have any financial or critical success, years after it was released? Well, once again, it all comes back to Ryan Gosling. While discussing the works of Ryan Gosling with a coworker, they had mentioned that he was the original choice to be in this movie in Mark Wahlberg’s role. Unfortunately for Gosling, he got too fat and beardy and was no longer allowed to be in the movie, and was replaced by Wahlberg who had recently finished filming “The Happening”. HAHAHA, remember that movie? That sucked. Anyways, considering I am a fan of Peter Jackson and I knew this had something to do with ghosts or something I figured I’d give it a shot. Plus, ya gotta love that Stanley Tucci! Remember when he was in “The Core”? Yeah, I do, he was awesome.

 

Don’t take that hat off! You’ll turn blonde and then Eric Bana will turn you into an elite killer!

 

In the opening moments of the movie, we know that Susie Salmon, played by Saoirse Ronan, is killed in this movie. We also quickly learn that Stanley Tucci’s character is the reason she is dead, because he is a creepy pervert weirdo who invited her into some playhouse dungeon thing. Susie doesn’t quite realize that she’s dead, because she seems to be tripping her balls off in some fantasy land with another girl her age. We see the Salmon family dealing with the fact that she has disappeared and that there aren’t any suspects. Mark Wahlberg, who plays the father, continues to push and push and push the police into finding suspects, which drives his wife, played by Rachel Weisz, to leave him. Susie seems to come to terms with and realize that she is dead and that she won’t remember to the people she loves, but builds some sort of connection to them. Throughout her family’s day, they get weird feelings and experiences that seem to lead towards the realization that the neighbor, Stanley Tucci, is the one responsible. When enough evidence is collected towards Tucci, he realizes he needs to destroy the evidence, so he ditches Susie’s body, which has been in a safe in his basement whole time. He destroys the evidence and skips town and is never brought to justice by the police. In the wake of Susie’s death and her father’s acceptance of her death, his wife and the rest of the Salmon family build a stronger relationship together, so Susie has some monologue about her death built “lovely bones” that connected her family. Oh yeah, then Stanley Tucci falls off of a cliff.

 

Too much hair vs. not enough hair. WHO SHALL BE DECLARED WINNER! Probably not enough hair wins, because his daughter wasn’t killed.

 

Considering this was based on a book, I don’t really know who to blame for what the fuck was going on in this movie. I’m sure it was intended to be two linked concepts, with the investigative end being one plot and Susie’s strange time in whatever kind of purgatory place she was in, but I couldn’t really connect with either story being told. I could get more interested in the investigative side of Wahlberg finding clues and leads that would bring the killer to justice, but considering we knew it was Stanley Tucci the whole time, it wasn’t too fulfilling. The other shit that was going on wasn’t at all interesting to me, about a teenage girl accepting death and reflecting on her life or something? I guess that Peter Jackson’s involvement made me assume that the fantasy end of things would be a lot more unique or at least visually stimulating, but nothing really happened in that “world” of note. I can see how in the book, if the investigation aspect was dragged out for longer, you would get more invested in wanting the killer to be found and how that desire would tear the family apart, and how that would make the ending feel a little bit better, but I have no clue if that’s what the book did. If you liked the book, you can probably skip this, and if you like ghost stories, then DEFINITELY skip this, and instead just write some erotic Ryan Gosling fan fiction.

 

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Drive Angry (2011)

July 8, 2011 6 Comments

 

How fucking awesome is Crank? I mean, the only reason I went to see Crank in the first place was because I needed something to do to kill time, and it was free. Little did I know that going to see Crank with Lazer and Mark Teffer would change my life forever. I made everyone I know see this movie because it was so goddamned insane that we needed to confirm with other people who it actually existed. As if Crank wasn’t insane enough, when I went to see Shoot ‘Em Up, I realized it was possible to out-Crank the original Crank. It was like a cartoon that came to life, with more blood and Monica Belucci. Thinking it couldn’t be topped, you can imagine the challenge faced by creating Crank 2: High Voltage. Despite not necessarily topping Shoot ‘Em Up, it brought back the original Jason Statham insanity that we all knew and loved. Considering I don’t really like Nicolas Cage, I wasn’t going to see Drive Angry, despite it being in line with that “so insane that it’s incredibly entertaining” kind of vibe. It wasn’t until my brother called me and threatened the life of Beardy Joe that, to save my friend’s life, I made it an effort to bump this movie to the top of my queue, and here we go!

 

Smart thinking, John Milton! Always walk AWAY from an explosion, not towards. Now THAT’S using your noggin!

 

The film opens with some weird kind of animation involving a car and the voice of William Fichtner saying something about people escaping prison because of their badass-ery. We then get to see Nicolas Cage driving a car and attacking some assholes, blowing one’s hand off and blowing another’s leg off in order to get information on the whereabouts of some baby. He walks away from an explosion, and I realize that this movie would have been more worth seeing in theaters than at home and in 2D. Nicolas Cage plays John Milton, which fucking confused me because that’s the guy who wrote “Paradise Lost”, and he has a shitty mullet and weird blonde streaks. He meets Amber Heard’s character, who I recognized from being in Pineapple Express. William Fichtner plays the “Accountant”, who is obviously some sort of demon guy after John Milton, who has clearly escaped from Hell. I guess Milton and Amber Heard’s character are after Milton’s baby granddaughter because she is going to be used in a sacrifice to bring Hell to Earth. There’s shitty dialogue, gunfights, boobs, and Tom Atkins guest-starring as a sheriff who wears a t-shirt that has a bunch of movie spoilers on it. Eventually, Milton succeeds in saving the baby, so the Accountant takes him back to Hell. The end.

 

I mean, I’m no director or anything, but I think you guys could look angrier.

 

Sorry guys, but that isn’t anywhere near my Crank standards. Actually, to be honest, it might be near my Crank standards, except this came out five years too late. The scene my brother tried to sell me was a scene where Nic Cage is having sex with a lady while he is fully clothed, and when his clothing is questioned, he says he never disrobes before a gunfight, only to have a bunch of guys break in and have a sex gunfight take place. Most of it was in slow-motion, and most of the kills involved something flying at the camera, which might have been impressive to see in 3D. However, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a similar sex gunfight which took place in Shoot ‘Em Up, four years ago, and with two people who you WANTED to see have sex. Wait, did I just admit that I wanted to see Clive Owen have sex? Whoops! The point is, I’d seen it before, and seeing it again, wasn’t too captivating. It probably had the same amount of insanity as Crank, in quantity, maybe not quality, but as I mentioned, it comes five years too late. I also fell asleep for probably a good 20 minutes of the movie, but, I didn’t give a shit about going back and re-watching it. I suppose the supernatural element of the whole thing was mildly entertaining or at least gave it a slightly different spin, but not enough to ever want to watch this again.

 

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X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)

May 14, 2011 3 Comments



Holy shit! Remember how good the last movie was?! This one is really getting set up to be possibly the best film of the franchise! Wait, Bryan Singer is leaving the project? And wait, he’s leaving to do a fucking shitty Superman movie?! Superman sucks! Well, I’m sure they’ll get someone equally as talented to fill his shoes. Wait…did you say Brett Ratner? Brett “Rush Hour” Ratner? Oh, well, that makes sense, considering the relationship between Cyclops and Wolverine is so similar to the dichotomy between Christ Tucker and Jackie Chan. And you said Halle Berry threatened to leave the franchise because she wasn’t used enough in the previous two films?  Thank Cthulhu, there really is hop for the franchise! Wait, you said they want her in the series, so they are making her MORE important?! Well, fuck me, this movie is going to suck.



It’s funny, because right now EVERYONE in this scene is trying to pretend that that’s not just Frasier with blue hair


We see Professor X walk out of a car, yes, you read that correctly, he WALKED out of a car, that’s how you know things are wacky. Who else walks out of the car? Magneto! They are friends?! What is this wackiness?! Apparently it was the past, and we see the happy couple visiting the home of Jean Grey as a young child, where we see how she’s even more powerful than we were led to believe previously. We then see a young boy in a bathroom, doing something he isn’t supposed to. Not masturbating, no, rather he is grinding his newly developed mutant wings off of his back. Gross! Then there’s that whole intro thing and we cut to our familiar X-Men in the heat of battle, where we notice a lack of Cyclops, yet the addition of Colossus, Iceman, Rogue, and Shadowcat. By the way, Colossus can give himself a metal exoskeleton and Shadowcat can pass through walls, and we see them defeating a mutant-hunting Sentinal robot, only to realize this was all part of a Danger Room simulation. Both the Sentinals and the Danger Room are things found in the comics and cartoon series, so clearly Brett Ratner is giving the fans what they want! Haha, just kidding. Cyclops is still distraught over the death of Jean and he goes to the lake where she dies, only to see her come back to life, and, well, kill him. Sorry dude. We then see a big blue furry guy who is Hank McCoy, who is the X-Man known as Beast. The funniest part? We see him reading a magazine…only to pan out and see that he’s reading it while hanging from the ceiling! We had no idea!



What else is funny is that James Marsters had a tiny part in this movie because he was busy filming Superman Returns with Bryan SInger instead. What’s not funny? Making Famke Janssen less attractive by giving her shitty red hair.



The plot centers around a mutant who “leeches” powers off of mutants, and through research, he is studied and doctors have created a cure. This is good for some people, bad for others. People like Rogue, who are embarrassed of their mutation, are all for it, and people like Magneto are pissed. Magneto being the typical pissed off Magneto forms a gang of mutant fighters, a “Brotherhood”, if you will, to put a stop to it. Really the only new character that is at all worth mentioning is Juggernaut,whose mutant power is that once he builds up momentum, nothing can stop him.More importantly, Jean Grey is back, and more powerful and crazy than ever. She leaves Xavier’s mansion and heads back to her home, where she is found by both the good guys and the bad guys. These guys fight and the fight ends with Jean Grey disintegrating Professor Xavier. Whoops! Magneto runs to the woods to build up a big army of mutant bad guys to storm the facility where the cure is being developed, and then the X-Men show up to stop them. In the process, the doctor developing it gets killed, and but Magneto still gets stabbed with the cure by Beast, thus losing his mutant powers. Jean Grey sees this and is pissed, and she starts disintegrating everything and everyone, with the only one able to get through being Wolverine, who stabs her and she dies. Back at Xavier’s mansion, we learn that Rogue was able to get the cure so she can now touch her boyfriend. The movie ends with seeing Magneto sitting by himself with a chess set, staring at one metal piece, and just as we see it move slightly, the credits roll. Don’t worry, after the credits there is a scene where we here Professor X’s voice comes from a dead guy or something, paving the way for a hopeful Ratner return! Fuck my life.



The real Juggernaut is much more veiny in the arm areas



Let me try to get the “positive” things out of the way, which, well, are up for debate on whether or not they actually are positive. Two of the more well received X-Men titles, by both fans and critics, were Astonishing X-Men, by Joss Whedon, and Ultimate X-Men, by, I think a bunch of people. Considering Brett Ratner had no idea what he was doing, he clearly stole things from these titles. For example, the first storyline from Astonishing X-Men is titled “Gifted”, and is about a cure being created for mutants. Also, in the Danger Room segment, Wolverine and Colossus perform a “fastball special”, where Colossus throws wolverine at something, which isn’t something only found in Astonishing X-Men exclusively, the framing of that sequence looks like it was ripped right from the pages of that book. As far as Ultimate X-Men goes, he stole Storm’s shitty haircut, as well as ripped a scene directly from it where Shadowcat and Iceman bond by having Iceman freeze a pond on the campus and the two of them ice skating. Sure, I suppose you could say these were his attempt at paying homage, for which he could have chosen worse titles to do that with, but to most readers of the comics, I think it was obvious that he was just stealing.



Oh yeah, and that little kid in the beginning ends up becoming Angel when he gets older. Good for him.



How fucking terrible was Beast in this movie? He was played by Kelsey Grammer, who actually sounds like a good choice. So what’s the problem? I guess just the way he looked in every scene, as well as every fucking line of dialogue. We get it, Beast is smart, he wears a suit, but do you have to make him sound like a pretentious douchebag even while fighting everyone? Fuck, he sucked so bad. Now let’s talk about Juggernaut…boy oh boy, motherfucking Juggernaut. First off, this guy is supposed to be HUGE, I mean, fucking massive, so you get the guy to look like he is 7 feet tall? Okay sure, that’s big, but not big enough. I’m also willing to forget the fact that there’s a scene where Leech takes away Juggernaut’s power, despite the fact that he isn’t a human and actually gets his powers from a magical crystal. But I mean, as if Beast’s dialogue wasn’t bad enough, Juggernaut’s made him look like a fucking genius. I kid you not, there is one bit of dialogue that was taken right from a funny internet video…yes, a Hollywood movie looked to viral videos for inspiration for the line where Juggernaut says “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I saw on the DVD that the scene immediately following that had a line that they deleted where he says “Heeeere’s Juggy”. Here’s Juggy. Goddammit, I feel dumber just typing that.



You’re thinking that her red wardrobe is symbolic, don’t you? Well, you’re right. Not symbolic of the Phoenix, but symbolic of this bitch acting like she’s on her period.



I know that a movie shouldn’t be judged by what’s on the DVD deleted scenes, but as previously mentioned with the Juggernaut dialogue, it couldn’t be made more apparent how Brett Ratner knew NOTHING about how to make this movie. There are multiple deleted scenes where we see the opposite of what happened in the official release, such as a filmed alternate ending where Rogue doesn’t get the cure. And another alternate ending involving Wolverine going back to the bar we met him at in the first film. And another alternate ending where we see school starting back up at Xavier’s mansion. Obviously he had no idea what would be the best for the story, or any of the characters, so he just shot a whole bunch of shit, threw it together, and waited to see what test audiences disliked the least. Not to mention the fact that he included two different versions of a scene where Pyro comes down the stairs to tell Magneto about the cure, Magneto looks up and says “Thank you.” One version says “clean shaven version”, and the other says “bearded version”. The difference? The clean shaven version shows Magneto looking up and saying “Thank you” while clean shaven, the other, he looks up and says “Thank you”, and has a beard. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! WHAT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN GAINED OR LOST BY THE AMOUNT OF FACIAL HAIR ON HIS FACE AS HE DELIVERS THE LINE “THANK YOU”?! GODDAMN YOU BRETT RATNER, YOU FAT FUCKING IDIOT. Despite Brett Ratner’s best efforts to ruin everything, it’s still an X-Men movie, and it’s still better than Elektra.


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Fast Five (2011)

May 7, 2011 5 Comments



I really don’t know how the fuck to review this movie. I mean, what do you expect from a piece of shit like this? Normally, this is the part where I explain why I went to see this movie. The reason why? PEER PRESSURE. I saw the first movie when it came out, in theaters, and then didn’t watch parts two and three. When part four came out, my friends Nate and Tyler said we should go see it, which I thought was funny, seeing as they were being so facetious. It turns out, they weren’t seeing it facetiously, and fucking loved it. I remembered Paul Walker jumping out of a window at some point, and that at the end they were racing fast cars through tunnels or caves or something. I went into this one concerned I would be confused, then I realized I should be more confused for thinking I might be confused with a Fast and the Furious movie.



“NOW I’M IN YOUR FACE, BRO!”


The first five minutes show Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster using cars to break Vin Diesel out of a prison bus. I guess he disappears, because when they go to Brazil, or some other godforsaken place in South America, I already forgot, he isn’t there yet! The two of them set up a deal to steal cars from off of a train, by cutting a hole in the train and sucking the cars out the side and onto a movie flatbed dune buggy? Huh? Apparently Vin Diesel shows up and I think he punches stuff or something, and then we find out that the deal has gone sour and Paul Walker and Vin Diesel need to escape! They escape into a convertible and then drive the convertible off of a cliff and into a river, but not before surfing it and then jumping out? What? Things happen and things happen, and they plan one giant heist, but need to bring together a crack team! That’s when Ludacris and a whole bunch of other people show up and act like I know who they are. Oh, also, The Rock is sent after them to destroy them. He has a goatee and is walking tall (get it?!) and trying to act like a badass. There’s a good 45-50 minutes of things involving cars and punching, I can’t really remember, but somehow The Rock joins the team to help them with a heist, which involves using two cars, yeah that’s right…TWO…CARS…to steal a vault from a wall. How the fuck can two normal cars, of normal strength and power, be strong enough to drive through the streets of a crowded city, without everyone losing control and crashing everything? Somehow they did it, and The Rock didn’t get mad, and everyone lives happily ever after. Yay!


Hold on, lemme just put on some Limp Bizkit before jumping off of this surfboard car…




How the fuck does one even begin to objectively judge this movie? I mean, I didn’t want to see it in the first place, so I’m off to a bad start. I guess if you like these kinds of movies, it wasn’t terrible? I guess? It wasn’t as awesome or ridiculous as movies like Crank or Shoot ‘Em Up or Punisher: War Zone, but it was definitely crazy. I don’t know, I’m sick of thinking about this movie, so I’m going to stop. I guess that if you weren’t interested in seeing this movie in the first place, skip it, but if they play it on a plane or bus, or when it finally hits Netflix Instant or HBO, there are worse things you could watch.


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Fantastic Four (2005)

April 4, 2011 6 Comments

I think it’s a combination of having just gone to C2E2, knowing that there was going to be a new comic book series called “FF” because Johnny Storm recently died, and, spoiler alert, because Johnny Storm recently died in the Fantastic Four series, I decided to give this movie another shot. And by give it another shot, I meant watch it recently, because I have it on DVD and have watched it a few times. When it first came out, I was driving cross-country with Ryoji, Moussa, and Bremalin to go see the Carry On reunion. We were at such a loss for what to do, we considered using one of our nights to watch this. Thank fucking Cthulhu, we didn’t. However, I do remember working at a movie theater at the time and making sure to poke my head into the theater at the scene where Jessica Alba was in her underwear. Some things never change!



GET THAT FOREIGN SHIT THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!! Err, I mean, it’s clobberin’ time!

 

Reed Richards is played by Ioan Gruffudd (who?) and his best friend, Ben Grimm, is played by Michael Chiklis, and these two dudes really want to go into outer space. They rely on an old classmate named Victor Von Doom, played by Julian McMahon, to try to get some money for their project. Problem is, Victor Von Doom is kind of a dick, and he is dating Reed’s old girlfriend! What a cock! Victor agrees to the mission, and brings his girlfriend Susan Storm, played by Jessica Alba, up into space with all of them. How could things get more awkward? Well only is Susan has her younger brother, Johnny Storm, played by Chris Evans, as the pilot!  What a bunch of jerks! Well, guess what happens when they go to outer fucking space? THEY GET BLASTED WITH SPACE RADIATION RAYS! OH NO!!! What the fuck did they think would happen?!


One difficulty in reviewing this movie was finding pictures that weren’t Jessica Alba. So, well, here ya go.

 

Back on Earth, these magic space rays have given them super powers. Reed can get really stretchy, Ben has been turned in a big rock monster “thing”, Susan can become invisible, Johnny can catch on fire, and Victor now has a metal skeleton and electric powers? Or something? That part’s a little unclear. They end up using these powers a few times to save the day, but mostly Ben is just pissed because he’s a fucking rock, so Reed tries to figure out a way to change him back. While doing this, he invents some super energy machine thing that will change him back, but Victor finds out about it first. Victor watches Ben change back to human, then sucks out all the super power from the machine or something and then is an asshole trying to kill other people. The rest of the team joins together to make Victor melt, because he’s metal, and then cool him off, to make him solid, which makes no goddamn sense at all. Reed then tells Ben that he can change him back, but Ben arbitrarily changes his entire opinion on being a rock because he has found a blind chick, which apparently makes it okay to be a fucking rock the rest of your life. Oh, and Reed steals Victor’s girlfriend back. Nice.


See that? Over there? yeah, that’s the idea of you ever playing a role that isn’t the lovable sidekick going down in flames. Sorry!

 

To a slightly lesser extent, this film has suffered the same fate as the Daredevil movie, which means it was rushed into production with “hot” actors, thinking that will translate to charisma. Julian McMahon was hot because of the Nip/Tuck popularity, Jessica Alba was hot because, well, she is hot, and Ioan Gruffudd…who the fuck knows where he came from. All those people kind of sucked in their roles, there’s no two ways about it. Were they as bad as the first Fantastic Four movie from the early 90′s (review here) that had no budget? Not at all. They came in and read their lines, they just didn’t really bring much to the movie. Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans, on the other hand, were awesome. Chiklis has experience playing a character like Ben Grimm/The Thing, in being the muscle, being the big guy, being the guy you have sympathy for, and he played that role as good as anyone. Johnny Storm is cocky, annoying, a smartass, you almost don’t even like him, but always manages to pull through that all so you like him deep down. The chemistry between these two characters, constantly bickering and mocking one another, also played well, or at least as well as their relationship in most comics. And when you add those two to the other two, creating four, the “family” dynamic that was always so important played out pretty well.


The blonde hair was tolerable, but I got creeped out by those dead fucking blue eyes, knowing there wasn’t anything behind them. Yes, she does have eyes. They’re just a couple of inches above her tits.

 

Other than that, pretty much everything else kind of sucked. It just seemed like it might as well have been a kids film, or maybe a cartoon or something. I think they were going for the fun family adventure of something science-y happening and them using their smarts and teamwork to sort out the problems, but everything was just sort of half-assed. There is a bit about them wearing special spacesuits that, as Johnny Storm says, “Keeps the hot stuff hot and the cool stuff cool”, which was so fucking stupid. Oh, but of COURSE that explains why they can wear these superhero suits back on Earth, because they were hit with the same cosmic radiation! Whoa! There were some moments that were about as lame in the science content as the scene in X-Men when Storm asks what happens when a toad is struck by lightning, with the response of “The same thing that happens to everything else”. I mean, Reed Richards was apparently frozen to make sure he couldn’t stretch, Johnny Storm grabbed a girl to protect her from fire, despite him being fire himself, and bullshit like that. Some of the effects were cool I guess, but really not all that memorable.


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Rubber (2010)

March 14, 2011 Leave a Comment



Before knowing that this movie was a movie, I knew it was a poster. Wait, did that make any sense? What I mean is that I saw the poster for this film, before even knowing it was a movie, as it was being sold by Mondotees.com at the same time as a print of There Will Be Blood that I really wanted. I have figured it was some weirdo old sci-fi horror B-movie, and really didn’t think much of it. But then….I heard the plot. WHAT THE FUCK?! I had to find a way to see it, and, well, I did! Anyone who I tell that I have seen this movie, I always preface by saying “Okay, keep in mind that the title is NOT what you think it means…”, because it sounds like condoms. I then saw that for the trailer on YouTube, someone left a comment that got a shitload of thumbs up from other users. What was that comment? The comment said “condom.”. That’s it. Just the word “condom”, and lots of other people thought that was hilarious. Fuck I hate people.



Quite the intense standoff

 

The film opens with a cop car driving on a dirt road covered in chairs, taking the time to meticulously knock each and every chair over. A character gets out of the car, and starts a monologue into the camera. He goes on to say how peculiar movies are, and about how strange it is for main characters to fall in love, how people don’t often go to the bathroom, just an overall observation that movies aren’t real life. They are weird exaggerations of real life, but that real life in it of itself is weird as well, so it can be assumed that movies just choose different elements of peculiarity. This is when we meet the protagonist of the film, Robert, who’s a tire. Yup, a fucking rubber tire, hence the name of the movie! But not just your regular ordinary tire, well, he actually kind of is an ordinary tire, except for the fact that he has apparently come to life.



Goddammit I wish there was a love scene in this movie. Although, then it probably would have been too similar to that movie “Bound”.

 

We see Robert encounter different objects, both living and inanimate, that he is able to destroy using telekinetic powers. Whether it be a glass bottle, a bird, a rabbit, or even a person’s head. He goes to a motel and starts blowing people’s heads up, and the police catch wind of this happening. They end up using a woman he has apparently become fond of as a decoy, in order to blow him up. Failing to blow him up, the sheriff confronts him and shoots him to pieces. After shooting him to pieces, we see a tricycle start rolling on its own, which rolls past more and more tires coming to life. The film ends as we see a large cavalry of tires, which we can assume are going to seek revenge on the town. Oh, and this whole movie keeps cutting back and forth between this plot, and a plot that involves spectators watching all of these events through binoculars, while also eating poisoned turkey, and one of the spectators, who happens to be in a wheelchair, trying to get involved in taking down Robert. What the fuck?



Poor, poor exploded headed lady

 

I wonder if maybe there was a version of this film that existed that didn’t include the first five minutes about films being ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous. Because, well, that’s what it was. Rampaige kept saying how she hated it because it was dumb and stupid and artsy and she “didn’t get it”, but because of that first five minutes, I really didn’t think there was much to “get”. Sure, if you were looking to be a little cocksucker and read into everything that happened in the movie as part of some bigger concept, you could, but I get the sense that you’d be wrong. It really seems as though the filmmakers sat down and said “Wouldn’t it be funny to make a movie about a tire that has telekinetic powers and blows up people’s heads?”, and then it got made. Granted, I didn’t really think the movie should garner a subsequent viewing, but it killed time, and I’m now able to say I watched a movie about a tire that has telekinetic powers that blows people’s heads off.


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Total Recall (1990)

January 15, 2011 3 Comments

 

I was about to start typing all about how this is yet another “classic” sci-fi from the 80′s that I never got around to watching, but upon further investigation, it wasn’t even made in the 80′s! Look above you! Ya see that?! 1990 bitch! Shows how much you know. The things I knew about this movie going into it were that it had to do with Mars, there’s a scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s eyeballs pop out of his head, and also a scene where some lady’s head opens up and good old Arnold is hanging out inside. Wait, just remembered that there was a lady with three boobs. I had no idea that there would be any type of plot, just a string of insanity and a tagline of “In the not too distant future…” like most sci-fi movies are. But guess what this movie has going for it…it was based on a Philip K. Dick short story! Good for them!

 

AHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

 

Arnold plays Douglas Quaid, some dude in the future who has dreams of visiting Mars, except he’s an old fucker. He sees that there is a company that offers the experience of going to Mars without the risks of actually going. He goes to this company called “Recall” that offers memory implantation of visiting Mars, but Quaid is nervous because he heard of someone whose brain went to mush after visiting. Quaid visits but freaks out during the procedure and runs away. Everyone starts turning on him and is out to get him, even his wife. People start leaving him clues on who he should go talk to, and who he can trust. Eventually he makes his way to Mars, where there are a bunch of people turning into mutants because of the toxic atmosphere on Mars. So uh, long story short, it turns out Quaid worked for the organization he was running from, and there was a crazy mind implant that made him think he was with some underground resistance, only to lead the company to the leader of the resistance, but Quaid got pissed and killed people and then changed the atmosphere on Mars. AND THAT’S WHY HE’S THE FUCKING GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA!

 

AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

I think I pretty much summed up my thoughts on this movie when explaining what I already knew. I don’t know if I would say it was bad, nor would I say it was good. I’ve been struggling to write this review for a good week now because I really can’t think of anything to say about it. I suppose it was mildly interesting that it could be considered a precursor to movies like The Matrix or Inception, with the whole “are you asleep right now imagining this happening or is it actually happening”, but having never read the book, I’m not sure if that’s a credit to the book or the movie. Arnold was, well, Arnold of course. So good for him. Sharon Stone was in this and managed to not take her clothes off. Oh, and Michael Ironside was in it, he’s a badass. There was also that scene with the conjoined mutant baby, which I guess was something I didn’t know about beforehand? Whatever, fuck this movie.

 

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Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988)

September 28, 2010 2 Comments



I have two memories with this movie, and both of them are related to Amherst, MA. The first one, which is less exciting, is that this movie was ALWAYS being sold at Newbury Comics in the used DVD section for $4. I always picked it up, thought “WHAT THE FUCK?”, and put it back down. The next memory is going to my friend Conor’s apartment where he was sitting around with some other friends and watching it. I wanna say that I was eating fish and chips. I remember point out one character and saying “Are you guys watching a documentary about Boss Nass?” and Conor laughing and no one else knowing what I was talking about. Boss Nass was made popular in Star Wars – Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Conor and I became quite famous for recreating certain scenes from this film, but no one else knew what the fuck we were talking about. I never finished watching that movie or figured out what was going on in it…UNTIL NOW!



To anyone wondering what a frog/human/stripper hybrid would look like, here you go!



So there is some sort of nuclear holocaust that has turned frogs into some weird frog/human hybrid creature. There aren’t that many human men left, except “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. He doesn’t need a character name. Anyways, some lady doctors want all of his sperm, and who the fuck doesn’t, so they put some high-tech underwear on him to protect his sperm. There are scenes of women enticing him to use his sperm, and then other ladies get mad. For some reason Rowdy Roddy pretends to capture one lady doctor to infiltrate Frogtown, which is where most of these frog things live. I guess he gets arrested or something and the lady gets enslaved by the frog people, and she is forced to dance around and give the mayor of Frogtown frog boners. We actually see his frog pants get tented by his frog boner. YOU CAN’T LOCK UP ROWDY RODDY! He steals some strippers, along with the lady doctor, kills some frog things, and I guess at the end of the movie, lady doctor tells Rowdy Roddy he needs to fuck all those stripper non-frog ladies, and he looks at the camera like “OH FUCK YEAH!” and puts on a pair of mind-sunglasses. Did I mention his name in the movie is Sam Hell?


Even the rowdiest of pipers find frog boners questionable



IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW! I wish I had never mocked my friend for watching this movie, because it was clearly a film about the Reagan administration. In a very subtle way, I’ll have you know. No seriously, movies like this can ONLY get made in the 80′s. They just make far too little sense to have anyone ever greenlight a project like this without someone chiming in and saying “So this is satire, right?”. I mean sure, you can make a movie like Piranha 3D and have everyone enjoy it because it’s a throwback to a different kind of film, but you don’t see any movies attempting this level of insanity in a serious way. Rather than Rowdy Roddy putting on mind-sunglasses while looking at the camera, it’s a character looking at the camera at winking, with a “SEE WHAT WE DID THERE?” expression on their faces. It’s refreshing to see movies like this, that were made in a decade of “Let’s throw a bunch of shit at the wall and see what sticks. In this case, what stuck to the wall was “Frogs…Nuclear Holocaust…Sperm…Hell…Lady Doctors…Rowdy Roddy Piper”. The rest pretty much wrote itself.


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Stan Helsing (2009)

August 1, 2010 13 Comments



No, your mind isn’t playing tricks on you, here is yet another movie that falls under both horror and non-horror film. Technically, it’s totally a comedy, and there are no scary moments whatsoever. However, in case the name of the film didn’t give it away, it is a quasi-spoof on horror films. In case you aren’t familiar with the character of Van Helsing, he gained notoriety in Bram Stokers Dracula, as someone who hunted Dracula, and in various other works of fiction hunted Frankenstein’s Monster, werewolves, and other demons. And the name of the movie is funny, because STAN rhymes with VAN! But this guy is hunting horror movie monsters! Get it?! THAT’S WHY IT’S FUNNY! HAHAHAHA! Excuse me, that’s why it was supposed to be funny.


Slutty lady, Good Burger, Goddess

 

Stan Helsing works at a video store, and within five minutes, he is saying the titles of dirty videos. Shortly after, we see a special line devoted to people who are dropping off copies of “The Ring”, followed by them immediately keeling over dead. And then after that, we here some jokes about poop, then we see a human-sized cockroach hanging out in the bathroom. In case you haven’t noticed, we are expected to suspend our disbelief for the next 90 minutes. As his shift ends, our “hero”, Stan, meets up with his buddy, played by Kenan Thompson, not to be confused with Kel. I guess it doesn’t matter, it was one of the Good Burger guys. He is accompanied by some sort of ditzy floozy archetype, as well as Diora Baird…MOVIE JUST GOT ONE BILLION TIMES MORE FASCINATING. I should also mention that Ms. Baird is wearing an indian costume. No, not meaning she has a cell phone clipped to her belt, but a Pocahontas outfit.


Fedora? Copyright infringement. Bowler hat? Just fucking stupid is all.

 

I don’t want to bore you with further details of the plot, which I assure you, would definitely bore you, so I will be brief, and mention only the highlights. Apparently a Chuckie impersonator moons our quartet, despite being an anatomically incorrect doll. Then there is something involving a gate, and making a delivery, and bad guys from various movies are running amuck, then you get to see Diora again. They go to a karaoke bar, and Leslie Nielsen is in drag, and he gets to say something to Diora. They get help from a priest, and there are pedophile jokes, and Diora then says something. At one point, they fall down a well, or something, and there is a joke about things going into people’s butts that are confused for dicks, then Kenan gets to touch Diora’s boobs.


His most memorable performance since Spy Hard. No, I meant since Dracula: Dead and Loving it. No, I mean Scary Movie 18.

 

Something happens for some reason, and they all end up asleep in a motel, and the slutty hooker lady changes clothes. Not like, has a scene in a changing room, I just mean she wakes up in a different outfit. Anyways, there is a big fight with all the monsters. And by fight, I mean a karaoke competition, during which, fake Freddy Krueger scratches Stan to reveal the birthmark in the shape of a “VH”….LIKE VAN HALEN! Err, like VAN HELSING! He then defeats all the bad guys with kicks to the nuts and shit like that, then as our hero’s escape, Stan gets to kiss Diora and Kenan gets a lap dance. Yes, that’s seriously how this movie ends.


Proof that the hooker lady changes clothes. Proof that Stan Helsing has a shitty goatee. PROOF, I SAY! PROOOOFFFFF!!!!!

 

I think the biggest, of many, problems with this film, is it didn’t quite know what genre it wanted to fall under. Clearly “horror” would not be an appropriate genre, but as far as what kind of comedy it was, it seemed to have an issue making up its mind. Maybe it’s because I am a little too particular when it comes to what classifies as “parody” and what classifies as “spoof”, but either way, it was still pretty bad. I’m assuming the pitch for this film was “Imagine if we took Monster Squad…and combined it with Scary Movie!”, and it still ended up being worse than that description. Granted, they clearly couldn’t afford to pay for licensing, so Pinhead from Hellraiser has a bunch of hypodermic needles stuck in him. Jason looks like shit, and Freddy Krueger isn’t wearing a hat…I don’t think. Oh, and in the credits, none of them are actually named appropriately. There were, however, two redeeming things in this film. One was a reference to traveling to “1428 Elm Street”, and it was all “Oh, I get it, like the movie”, but the complete line was “1428…the last house on the left”. Hey, shut up, I thought it was clever, compared to the rest of the jokes in this film. The second redeeming thing was that you get to look at Diora Baird for most of the movie. Well, I guess that would technically be reasons two AND three.


BONUS PICTURE – Just had to include it, since it looks like a porn. Whoever can come up with the best title for what a porn starring Kenan and Diora would be, in the comments section, wins a prize!

 

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