I meant to check this out as part of my extended Horror Franchise Marathon but shit got a little hectic when my daughter got born and it kinda slipped through the cracks.  Now I make no bones about my contempt for the Candyman series.  I never “got” them I guess.  Everyone talks about how atmospheric they are.  To me though, they’ve always been pretty weak.  This is the best one of the trilogy.  Candyman fans may think I’m being sacrilegious but that’s just how I feel.  It probably had something to do with my lowered expectations more than anything.

Donna D’Errico plays the great granddaughter of Candyman (Tony Todd).  As a promotion for an art exhibit featuring the Candyman’s paintings, she says his name five times in front of a mirror and resurrects the hook-handed madman.  Predictably, he goes around murdering a bunch of people while offering his descendant a chance to become a card-carrying Candywoman.

While the first two Candyman flicks where all about being pompous and slow-moving, this Direct to Video sequel is a bit more down and dirty.  It actually tries to give the audience what they want; namely titties and blood.  The other films tried too hard to be “legitimate” movies and consequently got bogged down in a hurry.  Part 3 is refreshingly content with just being a lowbrow Direct to Video horror sequel.  For that and little else, I admired it.

Although Day of the Dead is an improvement over the previous installments, it still isn’t very good.  The “plot” just basically calls for Candyman to harass D’Errico while forcing her to watch as he guts her friends.  This is OK for the first 45 minutes or so but it gets a bit tiresome after awhile.  You also have to deal with some annoying Candyman worshipping punks/art critics, a bunch of stupid dream sequences, and an ending that pretty much sucks too.

Todd once again gives a menacing performance as Candyman.  You know, it’s a shame that time and again, he gives 100% in these movies and each time the filmmakers let him down.  I mean they have a great looking psycho and all they do with him is make him say inane shit like, “Join me in death!” over and over again in a voice that sounds like a cross between Barry White and Darth Vader.  

Nick (A Nightmare on Elm Street) Corri also does a good job in the hero role who tries to protect D’Errico from Candyman.  Speaking of D’Errico, she looks amazingly hot in the flick and what she lacks in the acting department, she more than makes up for in yummy-ness.  Maybe if her Baywatch co-star David Hasselhoff showed up, the movie might’ve rocked.

Suggested Drinking Game:  Take a shot every time Candyman says, “Be my victim!”

Killer Doll Movies were kinda passé by the time the 80’s rolled around.  It took a sleeper horror hit like Child’s Play to revitalize the genre.  Not only was it a clever updating of an old hat, it also introduced audiences to one of the coolest screen slashers of all time:  Chucky.

Good Guy Dolls are the hot ticket toy item and Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent) wants one for his birthday.  Unfortunately, his mom Karen (Catherine Hicks) is strapped for cash and has to resort to buying a doll from a creepy homeless man.  What she doesn’t realize is that a deranged killer named Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) has transferred his soul into the doll.  When Andy isn’t looking, “Chucky” goes around killing his former criminal associates until he comes to the guy who taught him Soul Transference 101.  He tells Chucky that the only way to get his soul out of the doll’s body is to put it into Andy’s.  Karen and Andy believe that Chucky is alive but detective Norris (Chris Sarandon) thinks they’re nuts.  Only after he gets attacked by Chucky does he finally agree to help them stop the terrifying toy.

Director Tom (Fright Night) Holland kinda takes his time with the first half of the movie.  It’s fairly obvious to everyone in the audience that Chucky is a walking, stalking killer doll, but Holland spends too much precious screen time on superfluous scenes of Andy trying to convince everyone that he’s real.  Once Chucky starts running around and fucking people up though, the movie really cooks. 

The scene where Hicks finds that there are no batteries in the Chucky doll is one of the greatest “Oh Shit” moments in horror history.  I first saw this flick in the theater when I was ten years old, and this scene fucking scared the shit out of me.  The finale when Chucky’s charred corpse comes back to life gave me the willies too.  There’s also a cool hammer to the face, a gnarly death by voodoo doll, and a toasty electrocution scene.  Holland delivers scares aplenty, but he even manages to give us some quality suspense as well.  I particularly liked the scene where Chucky tries to kill Sarandon while he’s driving a car. 

Brad Dourif’s creepy voice is what gives the movie its punch.  I can’t think of any other voice that would be as effective as Chucky.  He doesn’t really rely on wisecracks in this one but he still has enough of a potty mouth to make it hilarious whenever he drops the F-Bomb.

Another thing that makes Child’s Play memorable is the social commentary.  This flick really says something about fanatical consumer mentality of the 80’s.  Child’s Play was made at a time when parents would do just about anything to get their kid a Cabbage Patch Doll.  I bet if what happens in the movie really happened to your average Soccer Mom, she’d be gossiping to her friends:  “So what if my little Billy has a Good Guy Doll that’s possessed by a dead killer… at least HAS one.  I don’t see YOUR kid with a Good Guy Doll!”  I think the fact that every Christmas there is at least one toy that kids (and parents) go apeshit for (Nintendo Wii, Tickle Me Elmo, etc.) is partially what makes the film endure throughout the years.

Child’s Play is top notch in every department.  The acting is great, the direction is classy, and there are plenty of genuine scares.  I think Bride of Chucky is probably my favorite of the series, but Child’s Play remains one of the greatest Killer Doll flicks ever made.

Child’s Play is Number 10 on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of the Year for 1988, just below Not of This Earth.

<Tomorrow’s Horror Franchise Movie:  Bride of Chucky>

You know the Stephen King TV movie Sometimes They Come Back?  Well sometimes King’s movies come back too.  Like The Shining and Carrie before it, Children of the Corn has been remade as a lackluster Made for TV movie.  The original wasn’t so hot to begin with but it was sure as shit better than this garbage.  It’s even worse than any of the six Corny sequels that followed.  Amazingly, King co-wrote the screenplay for this mess, which may be a sign that the man probably needs to hang up the word processor for good. 

If you’ve seen the original Children of the Corn, I’ll spare you the plot details and just tell you how this one differs.  It now takes place in the 70's.  The hero is a Nam vet with an African-American wife.  There is no cool scene where the Corny Kids massacre diner patrons.  The hero dude has Nam flashbacks while being chased by the Kids in the corn.  Both the hero and the wife get killed and turned into scarecrows.  (Oops, SPOILER WARNING.) 

Now I’m going to tell you the biggest change.  It’s one that is infuriating.  It will make your blood boil.  Ready?  We never get to see He Who Walks Behind the Rows!  You know, the giant groundhog monster the Kids all pray to?  The one who travels underground like Bugs Bunny going to Pismo Beach?  The one that actually made the original worth a damn?  Not here.  Why would King spend two hours building up HWWBTR and then not show him?  That’s like making a Hellraiser movie with no Pinhead. 

Basically the first half of the movie is nothing but the irritating couple arguing in a car.  The second half is nothing but the hero fella running through the cornfield.  The only good part about this version is the awesome scene where Isaac, the leader of the Corny Kids tells a couple of his followers “The time for fertilization has come!” and makes them fornicate in the middle of church while all the underage kids rally them on.  Other than that, this movie is just one big unflushable turd that will stink up the bathroom of your mind for days to come.

Folks, they’ve made the same story 8 times and they still haven’t gotten it right yet.

A high bar jumping Olympiad has his dreams crushed when he loses his leg in a combine accident.  Pissy and bitter, he spends his days working on his dad’s farm while keeping to himself.  Hottie Kim Cattrall still believes he’s got what it takes to compete and she encourages him to train despite his handicap.  Because he can only hop to the high bar, he is unable to get an adequate takeoff.  Thanks to a loophole in the rulebook that allows a head first dive over the bar if the runner jumps using one leg (which is all he has), he just may be able to make the Olympic team.  That is if the narrow-minded Olympic committee will let a one-legged high bar jumper compete.

Crossbar is a corny and overly schmaltzy made for TV drama that benefits from a couple of earnest performances.  Easily the standout was Kim Cattrall.  She looks all kinds of hot in her see-thru T-shirt and shorter than short running shorts.  Acting wise, she did OK too.  I liked John (Gunslinger) Ireland’s subdued work as the athlete’s dad as well.

It’s nothing more than a second rate After School Special knockoff but since I’m a sucker for this sort of thing, it went down easy enough.  Although the film is chockfull of the standard sports movie/handicapped person defying all the odds clichés, it’s competently made and moves along at a decent pace.  Oh and did I mention Kim Cattrall in a see-thru T-shirt and shorter than short running shorts?

David (Graveyard Shift) Andrews is this futuristic asshole yuppie dude who is madly in love with his robot sex doll named Cherry 2000 (the smoking hot Pamela Gidley from Mafia).  When she short circuits during a particularly wet bout of lovemaking, he seeks out a “Tracker” (Melanie Griffith) who takes him into the wasteland to find a replacement chick chassis.  After being chased around the wasteland by some crazed psycho (Tim Thomerson) and his minions, David eventually forgets all about his sex-bot and falls in love with Melanie instead.

There’s not a whole lot of action in this movie and when the action finally does come around, it’s pretty goofy and awkwardly staged.  The whole shebang had a lot of potential but the flick really shits the bed once Andrews winds up in Tim Thomerson’s weirdo wasteland compound.  The biggest flaw the movie has is that there is only so much you can do with a sex robot and keep your PG-13 rating.  Because of the chaste rating, we only get one scene of tame tonsil hockey with the robo-slut.  Had the filmmakers gone the R rated route and fully explored the concept of erotic automatons, it might have been killer. 

Sadly, Cherry 2000 is mostly just a Mad Max rip-off with only the novel casting of Melanie Griffith as the tough heroine to separate it from the rest of the pack.  Usually I can’t stand her but she was looking quite foxy with her red hair and skanky make-up.  On the flipside, Andrews is really boring in the lead.  His performance is so lifeless that he should’ve been the one playing a damn robot.  Never mind him; the best thing about the movie is the top notch supporting cast of B movie favorites.  Besides Thomerson, there’s Ben (Red Dawn) Johnson, Brion (The Horror Show) James, Marshall (Total Recall) Bell, Robert (Soultaker) Z’Dar, and even a before he was famous Laurence Fishburne. 

Cherry 2000 is slow moving and short on thrills but at least it showed us what Las Vegas would look like after the apocalypse two decades before Resident Evil:  Extinction did.  And despite its numerous shortcomings, I can’t really bring myself to hate any movie that features cameos by Robby the Robot and Gort.  Johnson gets the best line of the movie when he says, “There’s a lot more to love than hot wiring!”

A group of strangers wake up in a maze-like cube and have to work together to figure a way out.  While some rooms are safe, others feature insane booby traps that slice and dice the unfortunate bastard who enters into about four dozen pieces.  Luckily, one of the prisoners in the cube happens to be a brilliant mathematician and calculates a formula to find the door that can lead them to the outside world.  That is, if they don’t wind up killing each other first.

Cube is basically a sci-fi version of a Saw movie (particularly Part 2) minus all the heavy handed preaching.  The film features two outstanding gore set-pieces that are almost worth the price of admission.  The ridiculously awesome opening scene where a guy gets diced up into a bunch of bloody, meaty pieces got things started off on the right foot and the acid eating away at the face scene was spectacular too.

The stuff involving the characters bickering with each other and/or performing long-winded math equations is a Hell of a lot less interesting than the scenes where they get grated like cheese.  Most of the performers gave me a splitting headache but David (Pin:  A Plastic Nightmare) Hewlett did a solid job as the snarky architect who helped build the cube.  It’s the irritating cop who gets the best line of the movie when he tells Hewlett:  “Show us you have some backbone and jump in the sushi machine!”

I was reading somewhere about the Last House on the Left remake (that just came out on DVD this week) where they mentioned this movie Chaos; saying that it was more or less an unofficial remake.  I had never heard of it before, which is weird because it co-starred Sylvester Stallone’s son, Sage.  Considering the original Last House is one of my favorite horror films of all time (as well as my unhealthy obsession with Rocky 5, Sage’s big screen debut), I figured I owed it to myself to check it out.  I immediately put this bad boy straight to the top of my Netflix Queue.

While the flick was in the mail though, I started reading up on Chaos.  The things I read about it piqued my interest even more.  For example, Roger Ebert gave it No Stars and got into a war of words with the filmmakers over its shocking violence.  Since Ebert openly condemned I Spit on Your Grave, I took this as a good sign.  Now that I finally watched Chaos though, I have to say I have mixed feelings about the whole deal.

If you’ve seen Last House, you’ve basically seen this flick.  What separates this film from Last House is a certain level of professionalism.  Chaos’ director David DeFalco is not necessarily a bad director (he also made The Back Lot Murders, which was sorta fun) but he is no Wes Craven.  While DeFalco makes the scenes of the repulsive villains raping and tormenting the teenage girls appropriately brutal (more on that later), everything else in the film is boring and banal.  The flick is also lacking any suspense whatsoever.  The villains just attack the girls repeatedly over and over again.  There is no build-up, it just kinda happens.  Last House on the other hand is filled to the brim with moments of gut-wrenching suspense which makes the grossout moments that much more powerful.  Shocking your audience is easy.  Keeping them in suspense is hard.  Chaos doesn’t even bother with the latter.

Another thing about Chaos that pissed a lot of people off was the ending.  I won’t give it away.  I’ll just say that it’s basically one big Fuck You to the audience.  I don’t think people appreciated that one bit.  I didn’t. 

Yet another point of contention among reviewers (and audiences) and the filmmakers was the need to have a disclaimer at the beginning of the film that states that the movie is meant to be “educational”.  Yeah, if Chaos is educational, then I guess so is Faces of Death.  Seriously though, there is nothing to be gleaned from this movie other than 1) Don’t go to raves in the middle of the woods and 2) Don’t try to buy Ecstasy from Sage Stallone.

I will say that two of the attack scenes feature some of the most uncompromisingly sick shit you’ve seen in a horror film.  In one scene, a girl gets her nipple cut off and fed to her until she pukes before being repeatedly stabbed then having her corpse violated by not one but two degenerates.  The other scene involves a girl being hogtied then having a large knife inserted into her rectum then jimmied back and forth until her anus and vagina become one big bloody hole.

Like I said:  sick shit.  Disturbing and disgusting shit.  Still, it’s effective sick, disturbing, and disgusting shit.  Too bad the rest of the movie isn’t nearly as effective.

Chaos is not for everybody.  If you are easily sickened and offended, do not see it.  If on the other hand, you are a horror movie buff who wants to experience a depraved piece of demented filmmaking, check it out.

Conquest is a nutty sword and sorcery movie from the maestro of gore, Lucio Fulci.  It’s all about this wimpy guy named Ilias (Andrea Occhipinti) who is given a magic bow and arrow by his father and is told to go out and see the world.  Daddy also imparts to him that when he runs out of arrows, the sun will help him out.  Or something like that.  Anyway, Ilias goes around and is attacked by these walking dogs that look like a cross between Chewbacca and Lassie.  Luckily, some beefy nunchuck-wielding dude named Mace (George Rivero from Werewolf) saves his bacon and decides to join him in his quest of wandering around. 

Ocron (Sabrina Sellers) is this chick who wears a golden mask and a g-string and nothing else.  She thinks that Ilias is going to kill her so she sends out her Dog Men to rough him up.  When Ilias runs out of arrows, we finally learn what the prophecy at the beginning was all about when the sun shoots down arrows of light into Ilias’ hands.  He makes short work of the Dog Men using his glowing light-arrows but one of the Bad Dogs eventually sneaks up on him and cuts his head off.  The grieving Mace takes Ilias’ headless body and burns it on a pyre; Jedi style then rubs his ashes all over his face to absorb his spirit in order to take down Ocron once and for all.

This movie features everything but the kitchen sink.  That doesn’t mean it’s very good.  It’s actually pretty sucky, yet I can’t completely bring myself to hate any movie that features evil doppelgangers, Dog Men, a bow and arrow that incorporates lightsaber technology, zombies (what would a Fulci movie be without zombies), Sabrina Sellers performing her role 100% topless, Sabrina Sellers masturbating with a snake, creatures made from cobwebs, and a barbarian who talks to animals like Beastmaster.  (At one point he gets rescued by dolphins.  I’m not kidding.  Seriously.)  And try not to laugh when those Dog Men start talking.  (You heard me, TALKING.)  What’s even funnier is that the movie ends with a title that reads, “Any reference to persons or events is purely coincidental”.  Hilarious.

Conquest doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but since it’s a Fulci movie, you know the gore is going to be high quality.  There are severed heads, scalping, brain eating, and in the film’s highlight, a girl gets ripped in half LENGTHWISE.  Fulci DID go overboard with the fog machine and put way too much Vaseline on the camera so you couldn’t tell what the Hell was going on half the time, so I gotta take points off for that.

As these sword and sorcery things go, Conquest is not up to the high standards of Sword and the Sorcerer but it is just about as good as Hawk the Slayer.

The first movie Brad Pitt and director David Fincher made together was Seven, one of the best serial killer flicks in history.  Their next collaboration was Fight Club, one of the three greatest movies ever made.  Their third film together, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is nothing but Oscar-baiting drivel.  It’s got all the Oscar nominated movie prerequisites.  A guy overcoming an incredible handicap?  Check.  Period piece?  Check.  Gratuitous whimsical narration?  Check.  Former Academy Award winners in really bad old age make-up?  Check.  A nearly three hour running time?  Check. 

Academy members really eat this shit up don’t they?

Pitt plays the title character, a dude who is born old and gradually gets younger throughout the years.  While he’s an old looking young man, Benjamin meets a little girl named Daisy who eventually grows up to be played by Cate Blanchett.  Benjamin goes off and has various misadventures (he visits a brothel, joins the Navy, has an affair with a married swimmer, etc.) but he winds up falling in love with Daisy and when they’re both around 40, he knocks her up.  Since he’s getting younger, he decides he can’t stick around to care for the kid (deadbeat) so he high tails it to India.  In the end Benjamin comes back to Daisy, turns into a baby, and she’s forced to change his diapers until he dies of Young Age.

Brad Pitt may slowly get younger but it’s the movie that gets old real fast.

I don’t know what Fincher was thinking when he did this one.  He still must be hurting from being known as the “Alien 3 guy" and tried to do this flick to win an Oscar and finally erase that stigma.  Sorry Dave, but this one is worse than Alien 3.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’s cardinal sin is that it’s way too long for its own good.  There are too many various asides (like the dude who keeps getting struck by lightning) that add nothing to the film and only tack onto the flick’s already whopping running time.  Then there’s the film’s lack of a message.  Is Fincher trying to say that time keeps moving forward (or backwards) no matter what we do?  Or is he saying that we all wear diapers in the beginning AND end of our lives?  Maybe he’s trying to say that men are nothing but babies in the end.  Who the fuck knows.

Seriously folks, how can this tripe get nominated for so many Academy Awards and a classic like Gran Torino gets shut out?  What’s the world coming to?  Fincher definitely didn’t deserve the Oscar nod.  After the classic that was Fight Club, his movies have been steadily getting worse.  He must have Benjamin Button disease too because his directing career is regressing backwards.

Even though Pitt’s performance is the only worthwhile thing in the whole movie (and he’s on screen for just about every scene, which certainly helps), I don’t necessarily think he should’ve been nominated for an Oscar.  Taraji P. Henson was also unjustly nominated for an Academy Award for her role as Pitt’s adopted mama.  I don’t think she did a really good job but I will say that she gave the best performance by a person named Taraji I’ve ever seen.

Next time Brad and David, forget about trying to win some stupid award and just concentrate on making a good movie.  Make Seven 2 or something.  (Or would that be 72?)  No need to thank me for the suggestion; that’s what I’m here for.

A bunch of annoying teens wander into a small country town and do stupid things like strap blow-up dolls to gas pumps.  They get offed pretty quickly by the homicidal corn children and are replaced by another set of annoying teens.  This set of teens wreck their car and end up spending the night in an abandoned farmhouse.  The corny kids, who are still worshipping good old He Who Walks Behind the Rows, quickly kill these bozos too.  That is, until one of the chicks figures out HWWBTR’s weakness and puts a stop to the murderous munchkins.

Children of the Corn 5:  Fields of Terror is a bit different that the previous installments.  The kids now apparently have telekinetic powers and can lift victims up in the air and cause lightning to strike them.  That doesn’t stop them from killing people up with axes, scythes, knives, chainsaws, drills, blowtorches, and hooks when they’re in a pinch.  Also, He Who Walks Behind the Rows is no longer a giant groundhog who burrows through the ground like Bugs Bunny going to Pismo Beach.  Now he just chills out in an eternal flame that burns at the bottom of an old corn silo.  Other than that, it’s the same old shit.

Ethan Wiley directed this puppy.  He’s the guy who did House 2:  The Second Story, a movie that everybody seems to hate EXCEPT me.  Well, this movie is no House 2, that’s for damn sure.  I thought he did an OK job on the technical end of things.  The movie is really slick looking and is imaginatively shot and filmed.  Having said that, there is only so much you can do to hide the fact that this series ran out of steam three sequels ago.  It’s marginally better than the last one although that’s not a ringing endorsement.  Mostly, this is the kind of movie where people wander around the dark and call out other people’s names until they get killed.  

The cast is fun, even though they aren’t ever given anything worthwhile to do.  We get three actors known for their involvement in Tarantino movies (Pulp Fiction’s Angela Jones, From Dusk Till Dawn’s Fred Williamson, and Kill Bill’s David Carradine), two Zappa siblings (Moon Unit must’ve been busy), one Arquette sibling (the tranny one), one actor who played Jason (Kane Hodder), and the requisite Before She Was Famous actress (in this case, Eva Mendes).  They do what they can with the weak material, which admittedly isn’t much.

Overall, Children of the Corn 5:  Fields of Terror is a thoroughly middling chapter in the never-ending series.  On the other hand, it does contain a scene where David Carradine’s head splits open down the middle and shoots out flames that go THROUGH Fred Williamson’s face, so it’s got that going for it.  I mean come on, when’s the last time you saw THAT in a movie, right?

Originally this was going to carry the awesome subtitle, “Field of Screams” but those idiots at Dimension chickened out and changed it.

Now that I’ve seen and reviewed all of the films in this skippable series, I’d rank ‘em (from best to worst):  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 4, Part 7, and Part 6.

John Carluccio (Paul Carafotes) is the best quarterback Simi Valley High has ever seen.  He can also play the violin like it’s nobody’s business.  Then some asshole doctor cuts him from the football team because he’s deaf.  This gets John so mad that he starts hanging out with the wrong crowd, begins snorting coke, and gets shanghaied into stealing a car.  Luckily, with a little help from his new girlfriend (Demi Moore in her film debut) he finally turns his life around.

The character of John makes a lot of “choices” in this movie.  For example, instead of choosing to hang out with his friends, he starts palling around with the cokeheads.  Just like John, the screenwriters also had a lot of “choices” to make.  They could’ve made a truly thought-provoking and surprising drama, but they chose to assemble together a lot of predictable clichés.  They could’ve chosen to make John either a believable three-dimensional character or a standard-issue cookie-cutter teen.  They chose the latter.  They could’ve chosen to make the ending logical and poignant, yet they chose to end things abruptly and tack on a crawl telling the audience how John wound up.

If you can’t already tell, Choices is more like an overlong After School Special than anything else.  Since I do have a soft spot in my heart for After School Specials, sitting through Choices wasn’t too torturous or anything.  There are definitely better movie-watching “Choices” out there though, I’ll tell you that much.

Director Silvio Narizzano, who also helmed the immortal Die!  Die!  My Darling!, really lets the clichés pile up but since he kept things moving along at a steady clip, I didn’t mind too much.  If anything, Choices is worth a look just to see a young Demi Moore.  She does a solid job with her drastically underwritten role and she looks pretty foxy too.  (Add an extra star to this review if you’re a Before They Were Famous fanatic.)

The token black dude on the football team gets the best line of the flick when he asks John, “Where is your P-R-I-D-E?”

AKA:  Dilemma. 

You know all of those Old Dark House clichés in movies from the 30’s and 40’s?  Well every single one of those movies owes a major debt to The Cat and the Canary.  When it was originally released, the film was a smash hit so naturally every horror-comedy/murder-mystery copied the formula.  (I hesitate to use the term copy “Cat”.)

All the familiar ingredients are here:  There’s the old millionaire who dies.  There’s the scheming relatives who gather at the spooky mansion to hear the reading of the will (at the stroke of midnight).  There’s the morose looking servant woman who claims the house is haunted.  There’s the escaped lunatic with long fingernails stalking the grounds.  There’s the elaborate series of secret passageways that the killer uses to move unseen around the house.  Etc., etc., etc.

You’ve probably seen all of these clichés before but since this is where they all originated, you’ve got to give The Cat and the Canary mad props for blazing the trail. 

The Cat and the Canary is a bit slow and creaky at times and some of the humor isn’t really funny but Paul (The Man Who Laughs) Leni’s lively direction keeps you watching.  The scenes where the killer’s hairy-handed poorly-manicured hand reaches out from the darkness are still very effective even 80 years after the film’s release.  I also liked the funhouse mirror effects that stretched the protagonist’s faces too.  The title cards are also very funny and I dug the all the different fonts for the title cards.  (Wait till you see how they edit out the cursing.)  It all makes for a solidly splendid slice of spooky silent cinema.

In addition to the numerous rip-off the film spawned, there were also three official remakes (’30, ’39, and ’78).

A loathsome stage mother (Honey Hunter) will do whatever it takes to make her luscious daughter Susan (future porn star Jennifer Welles) a star.  When Susan’s boyfriend comes and tries to elope with her, Mom promptly seduces him so she won’t have anything to do with him.  She also arranges for Susan to go on dates with slimy agents but won’t let them go all the way with her until she gets a contract.  Finally, Mom trades Susan’s virginity so she can have a screen test.  In the end, Susan gets fed up with Mother and finally stands up for herself.

I know awhile back I told you that you should kill me if I ever rented another Something Weird movie from Netflix but I kinda forgot this one was on my Queue.  As it turns out, it’s not halfway bad.  Although it’s clunky and doesn’t know when to wrap things up, it definitely has its moments.  What puts Career Bed a notch or two above most Something Weird sex flicks from the 60’s is the twisted mother-daughter relationship.  The scenes where Mommy cruelly manipulates her would-be starlet daughter are pretty memorable and give the flick SOMETHING to hang the stilted sex scenes on.

I think a lot of credit must be given to writer/director Joel M. Reed.  He really wrote some truly hateful dialogue (“If you say you love her, I’ll vomit!”) and knows how to put his characters in degrading predicaments.  If he only focused as much attention on the sex scenes as he did on the plot; Career Bed could’ve been a contender.  I’m willing to give him a Mulligan on it though because it was still early in his career.  (Reed went on to direct the immortal Bloodsucking Freaks nine years later.)

The performances are better than the film deserves.  Hunter is suitably nasty as the bitchy mother and Welles plays the innocent virgin nicely.  In addition to Welles, you should also get a kick out of seeing a young Georgina Spelvin four years before she starred in the classic Devil in Miss Jones.  Their sex scene together is the best of the bunch.  Spelvin also appeared in Reed’s Sex by Advertisement the previous year.

Coogan (Clint Eastwood) is a laid back cop from Arizona who comes to New York City to extradite a psychotic criminal (Don Stroud).  A crotchety detective (Lee J. Cobb) gives Coogan the runaround so he takes it upon himself to get the nut out of Bellevue and bring him back home.  The psycho ends up knocking him out and escaping so Coogan has to go around busting people’s heads until he gets his man.

Taken on its own terms, Coogan’s Bluff seems at first glance like a relatively minor film in Clint Eastwood’s oeuvre.  It’s a fine-tuned pseudo-western that has a fair amount of action, but it suffers from some lackadaisical pacing and a so-so ending.  But before I start to criticize the film too harshly, I have to take into account that this was the flick where Clint made a smooth transition from westerns to cop movies.  It’s also an important film because it’s a prototype of the modern cop genre in that Coogan has his own Pre-Plot-Mini-Adventure.  You all know the Pre-Plot-Mini-Adventure.  Usually, the P.P.M.A. has the hero participating in a cool action sequence early in the film that has nothing to do with the rest of the plot and only serves as an introduction to our hero and to show how much of a badass he is.  (In this particular P.P.M.A., Clint tracks down a crazy, half-naked drunken Indian brandishing a semi-automatic rifle.)  Although P.P.M.A.’s are nothing new (the James Bond movies started the trend earlier in the decade), I believe this was the first time we got to see one in a modern cop movie.  Coogan’s Bluff is also significant for being the first big screen pairing of Eastwood with director Don Siegel, who would go on to direct four more movies for Clint, including the seminal Dirty Harry.

Like I said before, the flick has its share of faults.  The biggest one is that Coogan pussyfoots around too much.  I mean most of the time he’s busy poontanging around with some secretary trying to get laid while he should be out on the streets getting his job done.  Luckily, he does take the time to rough up some hippies in a nightclub and gets to kick the crap out of some dudes in a pool hall.  Coogan’s also the kind of guy who isn’t afraid to choke a bitch either, so he’s got that going for him.

Clint is excellent in this flick and helps it sail along through the more sluggish passages.  He dials down the gruffness of The Man With No Name and adds some nice touches of light comedy in with his performance and creates a fully three-dimensional character.  He also has considerable chemistry with co-star Susan (Webster) Clark, and I quite enjoyed their snappy romantic banter.  (Even though he should’ve been out catching the maniac that HE let getaway!)  The score by Lalo (Dirty Harry) Schifrin is also pretty badass too.

Clint’s next was Where Eagles Dare.

Documentary filmmaker Ron (Grass) Mann directed this intriguing flick which (forgive the pun) sketches the history of American comic books.  Mann interviews such comics luminaries as William (Mad) Gaines, Will (The Spirit) Eisner, Jack (The Fantastic Four) Kirby, Frank (The Dark Knight Returns) Miller, and Stan Lee (who is interviewed while standing next to an awesome Spider-Man pinball machine); who all give their two cents worth about why comics are so great.  Mann also delves into the 50’s Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency where comic books were singled out as the number one destroyer of our nation’s youth; which lead to dozens of titles (including the beloved Tales from the Crypt) being discontinued and the eventual creation of “The Comics Code”.

I’m a rabid comic book fan, and although I thoroughly enjoyed this documentary, it still wasn’t perfect.  To me, Mann focused way too much on the underground comic scene.  While I did enjoy seeing Robert Crumb interviewed (years before he got his own documentary), most of the dudes Mann talked to I had never heard of and didn’t really care that much about.  Comic Book Confidential may not be the final word on the subject, but that’s okay because the parts where the artists narrated their own panels was super cool.  Hell, I’d watch a whole movie that was nothing but Stan Lee narrating old Spider-Man comics.  

George Weiss, the man who bankrolled Glen or Glenda produced this brazenly politically incorrect “expose” on lesbianism.  Any modern day lesbian watching this archaic “documentary” will surely be offended.  Fans of dated exploitation junk (like me) should get a few laughs out of it.

The film starts out with a concerned narrator  giving us statistics about lesbians (some of which are repeated in order to pad the running time out to an hour long) while we see a bunch of people walking in and out of supposed gay bars.  Then in filmed segments, the audience is treated to scenes of a lesbian photographer coaxing her comely models out of their lingerie.  The biggest chunk of the flick is devoted to a young lesbian’s “Coming Out Party” which culminates in her getting gang-banged by a group of “butch” women.

The funniest thing about Chained Girls is that it thinks words like “dyke”, “bull dyke”, “butch”, and “baby butch” are real scientific terms.  The off screen narrator also gets some laughs just because he’s so damn over earnest about the whole thing.  I also liked how most of the “documentary” scenes were just captured by the director sticking the camera out of the car window at random passersby.  (Ah yes the days when you could film a documentary and didn’t have to leave your car.) 

Sadly, the laughs dry up around the second half when the documentary scenes give way to the scripted ones.  It’s then when the film starts to lose its Ed Wood-ian charm and becomes downright dull.  Oh, and we never once get to see the girls chained to something.  Bummer.  

AKA:  Caged Girls.

Folks, you get not one, but THREE ersatz Bruce Lees fighting side by side by side in this ludicrous Bruceploitation action flick from legendary sleaze merchant Dick (Pieces) Randall.  There’s Bruce (Challenge of the Tiger) Le (my personal favorite of the dozens of Bruce Lee imitators), Dragon (Mission for the Dragon) Lee, and Bruce (Three Avengers) Lai.  (Bruce Thai is also in the mix although he doesn’t play one of the titular clones.)

The British Special Branch of Intelligence acquires Bruce Lee’s corpse and hires a nutty scientist to make three clones.  The first clone is sent undercover as a Kung Fu actor to stop a movie director who dabbling in gold smuggling.  When the director learns that his new star is a clone working for the government, he plans to kill him on camera so he can “capitalize on his death for years after this picture comes out!”  Meanwhile, the other two clones are sent to bring down the diabolical Doctor Nye who is perfecting an army of men made out of bronze.  After finishing up their respective missions, the clones return home, only do have the deranged scientist force them to fight each other to the death.

There’s so much bizarre stuff going on in this flick that it would break the Goofy Meter.  First off, the three clones of Bruce Lee don’t look nothing like each other and only bare the smallest resemblance to Bruce himself.  (Le comes the closest of the bunch.) 

Next, let’s talk about the so-called “Bronze Men" for a second.  These guys are supposed to be living bronze statues but they’re really nothing more than a couple of guys that are covered in gold spray tan that wear diapers.   At one point, the bronze paint rubs off onto one of the clone’s white pants!  Unbelievable.  To top it off, they die by eating poisoned plants!!!  The sight of fake Bruce Lees shoving fistfuls of grass into bronzed diaper-wearing dude’s mouths is one that will stick with me for a long time.  And just wait until you hear the “metallic” sound effects that were added in whenever they get punched.  

In addition to all that, the scientist’s computer just looks just like a giant Simon game.  Also, there is a completely gratuitous (but wholly worthwhile) scene where half dozen naked women emerge from the ocean and try to rape one of the Bruces.  There are also a couple of laugh-out-loud training montages that feature music that was blatantly stolen from Rocky and The Warriors!

While it may seem like this is leading up to a Four Star review, nothing could be further from the truth.  While I liked seeing all this insane mishmash for about an hour or so, eventually The Clones of Bruce Lee runs out of goofy momentum and starts getting a bit monotonous after awhile.  Mostly, it seemed like two different Kung Fu flicks edited together with the hilarious cloning subplot tacked onto the beginning and end to justify the crazy ass title.  In all fairness though, somebody gets the living bejabbers Kung Fued out of them about every eight minutes or so, so the movie has got that going for it.

As Bruceploitation movies go, it doesn’t reach the precedence of jaw-dropping insanity set by The Dragon Lives Again (you know, the one where Bruce Lee went to Hell and teamed up with Popeye to fight Dracula, James Bond, and Clint Eastwood), but there are certainly scads of worse Fake Bruce flicks you could waste your time with.  (Cough, cough; Fist of Fear, Touch of Death; cough, cough.)

Cirio H. Santiago is the Orson Welles of Philippines–Lensed-Women-in-Prison Movies.  This is the man that gave us She-Devils in Chains and Caged Heat 2:  Stripped of Freedom, here people.  That’s why I was a little disappointed with this flick.  Santiago has made some of the best Broads Behind Bars Movies ever made and Caged Fury is certainly not one of them.

The plot has a bunch of women being sent to a Vietnamese prison camp where they are brainwashed into becoming suicide bombers and political assassins.  Whenever they call the women on the phone and say “The apples are dying”, it triggers them to kill.  (The guards must’ve seen Telefon.)  A kindly prison guard helps a handful of prisoners escape into the jungle where they are quickly recaptured.  They escape again, only to be recaptured… again.  Then, they finally escape for good.

The thing I didn’t like about this movie is that for whatever reason, it switches gears about halfway through and becomes a low budget action movie instead of the fairly decent Women-In-Prison flick that it started out as.  Now I don’t mind action movies; it’s just that old Cirio is clearly more comfortable filming women being abused behind bars than he is with stuff exploding.  I mean the Vietnamese tanks vs. American helicopters finale SHOULD have been cool, but it’s undone by listless editing and indifferent staging.

Even the Chicks-in-Cages stuff isn’t even up to snuff with Santiago’s usual standards and a lot of time is spent on the stupid brainwashing subplot that quickly goes nowhere fast.  In between the brainwashing scenes, we do get to see some of the female prisoners occasionally Kung Fu their captors, horny guards balling the prisoners in exchange for smuggled goods, electroshock therapy to the titties, slow motion sex scenes and rape orgies, naked delousing and of course, shower scenes.  Had Santiago kept this stuff up for 84 minutes, Caged Fury would’ve been a modestly respectable Women-in-Prison movie.  Too bad the flick sucks whenever the bimbos aren’t behind bars.

The Head Screw gets the best line of the movie when he tells the bubble-headed blonde:  “You have no brains to wash!”

AKA:  Hell Train.

Gary Oldman stars as a hotshot defense attorney whose courtroom melodramatics leads to his scummy clients getting off the hook.  Kevin Bacon is his latest client, a privileged psychopath who turns out to be a serial killer.  Oldman kinda feels bad about defending him and secretly works at building a case against Bacon, who has predictably killed again.  Old Kevin on the other hand is about two steps ahead of Gary and plays some cat-and-mouse games with the arrogant lawyer; eventually implicating in his crimes. 

Criminal Law is the kind of movie that my parents would rent from the video store and watch late at night after I went to sleep.  When I’d inquire how the movie was the next day, neither one of them could recall much of what happened.  I used to think my parents had piss poor memories, but now I completely understand.  I just watched the fucker and I’ll be damned if I can remember what the Hell happened.  

Wait; there is ONE shitdiculously memorable moment that ALMOST makes this flick worth a look.  It’s the sex scene between Oldman and Karen (Jaws:  The Revenge) Young.  While the couple frantically fucks in a pitch black room, there are inexplicable scenes of Gary playing handball in a squash court randomly edited in.  Then, just before Oldman busts his nut, Young’s face changes to Bacon!  This shit is just too goofy for words and isn’t titillating in the least, despite the fact that Young shows off her yummy titties.

Director Martin Campbell (who went on to direct Goldeneye and Casino Royale) does manage to keep things moving at a steady clip and while the movie is nothing to brag about, it LOOKS good anyway.  Overall, Criminal Law is thoroughly routine pseudo-psychological thriller stuff.  If you’re a fan of the two leads (Bacon oozes scumminess and Oldman broods like nobody in the business), you might be able to stomach all the clichés, false scares, and red herrings.  Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans will delight in seeing Joe Don Baker playing yet another overweight cop. 

Thankfully, screenwriter Mark Kasdan (brother of Lawrence) hasn’t written anything else since this turd.  It’s not surprising though when you write dialogue THIS bad:  “That crazy killer is crazy and he will kill you.”

It dawned on me that I had never seen Critters 4, so I thought I’d Netflix it so I could proudly say that I had seen every single Critters movie in human history.  Look folks, I never claimed I was the smartest man alive…

This one is set in space.  Kinda like Jason X; except it sucks.  The plot has Charlie (Don Opper), the slow-witted bounty hunter accidentally stowing away on board a space ship carrying a couple of Critter eggs.  53 years later, the ship gets picked up by another starship and Charlie and the eggs thaw out of their deep freeze.  Naturally, the eggs hatch and the Critters quickly start rolling around and eating the crew.

The first two Critters flicks are a lot of fun and while 3 was kinda lame, it at least had a young Leonardo DiCaprio in it to make fun of.  This one is just plain bad.  Its low on Critter attacks, blood, body count, and most importantly; fun.  It takes over a half an hour for the Critters’ eggs to hatch, which means you have to sit around and watch a lot of boring low budget space shit.  When the Critters finally do begin to do their thing, it’s too little too late.  While the Critter-in-the-mouth gag is pretty cool, nothing else in the flick is remotely amusing. 

And for whatever reason (probably budgetary), the Critters no longer use their patented porcupine quill attack.  What’s up with that?  That’s like making a Gremlins movie and not having them get wet.

Angela Bassett has an early role (and shows off her butt in a shower scene) as the lone female crew member.  At first, it looks like Angela’s going to be the tough talking Ripley rip-off, but she’s really nothing more than the token black character.  At least she doesn’t get killed off though.  The other cast members include Brad Dourif, the dude from all those Subspecies movies, and the voice of Martine Beswick.  

Co-screenwriter David J. Schow also wrote another awful sequel, Leatherface:  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3.

In 2005, Jason Statham starred in Transporter 2, which effectively set the bar for brain-dead, over-the-top, no-holds-barred action films for the new millennium.  In 2006, Statham returned with Crank, a film that trumped Transporter 2 for outright nuttiness.  Now, three years later; Statham is back for Crank:  High Voltage, which is possibly the most over-the-top film ever made.  And I am not just talking about mindless action films here folks; I mean this is THE MOST OVER-THE-TOP MOVIE EVER MADE.  EVER.

If you remember the first Crank, you remember that it’s hero Chev Chelios (Statham) was injected with a deadly toxin and the only way he could stay alive is by periodically shocking his system with adrenaline.  If you remember the first Crank, you also know that Chev died at the end of the first movie by falling out of a helicopter.

To quote the movie poster:  “He got better.”

Crank Deuce opens with Chinese baddies scraping up Chev’s body off the street with a shovel and putting him in ambulance.  They steal his heart and fit him with an artificial one so that they can rob him of his other vital organs.  When he learns they next intend to take his cock; the most vital organ of all; he says “Fuck that!” and runs out of the operating room, blowing away several Chinese dudes.  Chev later learns that the artificial heart only has enough juice in it to keep him alive for an hour so he has to continuously give himself electric shocks (car battery, cigarette lighter, grabbing a transformer, electric dog collar, latching onto a high power wire, etc.) in order to keep his mechanical heart running while he searches for the crime lord that stole his heart.

What follows is a rampage unlike cinema has ever seen.  I can’t even tell you about the mind-bending awesomeness that is Crank:  High Voltage.  We get to see a shotgun shoved up a guy’s ass, a severed elbow, and severed nipples.  In a shootout in a strip club (there are lots of naked women brandishing firearms in this movie; always a good thing), a bullet whizzes through a chick’s tits and silicone gushes out of the wound.  There’s a brain that floats around in a vat, They Saved Hitler’s Brain style.  The supporting cast includes Corey Haim (with an extreme mullet no less), Geri Halliwell (as Chev’s mom), David Carradine (under a ton of make-up), and lots of porn stars as themselves.

The fucking craziest motherfucking thing that happens in the fucking movie comes when Chev fights a baddie in a power station.  At this point everything stops and Chev and his opponent grow to enormous size and fight each other, just like in King Kong vs. Godzilla.  They even have oversized masks and hop up and down like the G-Man.  There’s even little model buildings and plastic men.  Yes, there is Men-In-Suit fighting in Crank:  High Voltage.  And it is glorious.

If that scene alone isn’t enough for you to run out and see this crazy ass piece of fucking amazing action cinema; you are suffering for a severe fun deficiency.

Crank:  High Voltage shocks it’s way to Number 2 on The Video Vacuum Top Ten of the Year, sandwiched in between Chocolate and My Bloody Valentine 3-D.

When I was a kid, I used to spend summers with my aunt who fed me a steady diet of Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson and Burt Reynolds movies on VHS.  Out of all of the movies I was exposed to at her house, The Cannonball Run was probably our most watched flick of Burt’s oeuvre and remains one of my favorite Burt movies of all time.  While it’s no Smokey and the Bandit (and let’s face it, what could be?), Cannonball features enough famous faces, cool cars, and double entendres to put a smile on just about anybody’s face.

Basically Burt and Dom DeLuise want to win the titular race that will take them coast to coast.  To keep the cops off their tail, they drive an ambulance complete with a drunken doctor (Jack Elam) and foxy patient (Farrah Fawcett.)  Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Roger Moore, Jackie Chan, Jamie Farr, Adrienne Barbeau, Tara Buckman, and Mel Tillis also want to win too, so Burt’s got to keep the pedal to the metal to be the first one across the finish line.

The Cannonball Run works because of Burt’s star power and the sheer number of guest stars and cameos.  Sure, the stunts are pretty good too, but for me this flick was all about Burt slapping the shit out of DeLuise, Barbeau’s massive cleavage, and a clearly drunk as a skunk Dino struggling to get through his scenes without cracking up (or passing out).  This flick also served as my introduction to Jackie Chan and while he only gets one scene to show off his Kung Fu prowess, it’s a good one.  Seriously folks, how can you not like a movie in which Jackie Chan fights Peter Fonda?  You don’t see that everyday. 

Another thing you gotta love about The Cannonball Run is the outtakes at the end.  Seeing Burt, Dom, and Dean cracking up at their own jokes is hysterical.  Director Hal Needham (who also directed Smokey) would soon make a tradition out of including the outtakes at the end, but it was Chan who made the most of them in his later films.

The film isn’t quite in the same league as Smokey and the Bandit, mostly because all the focus is on the racers.  Smokey had the benefit of a wonderful performance by Jackie Gleason as the vengeful “County Mountie”.  All the cops in Cannonball are pretty much all faceless and pose zero threat to the racers.  (All they do is hand out tickets.)  Also, the flick is pretty uneven laugh wise and it takes a good half an hour for the film to really get itself in gear.  Luckily, once director Needham literally gets things on the road, its damn good times.

Out of the enormous cast, it’s probably Jack Elam who gets the most laughs as the perpetually drunk proctologist.  I dare you not to laugh when he says, “I gave her a little prick… with this!” and then holds up a syringe.  Priceless.  It’s Burt though who gets the best line of the movie when he says, “We could get a black Trans Am… naw, it’s already been done.”

Cult Italian horror filmmaker Lucio Fulci stars as himself in this wildly uneven but entertaining flick.  It seems that all of the horrible guts and gore that Lucio has been putting into his movies has slowly started to drive him crazy, so Lucio goes to see a shrink to get his head straight.  As it turns out, the shrink is a deranged maniac who gets his jollies by murdering people.  He hypnotizes Fulci into thinking that he actually committed the crimes, which makes poor Lucio even more bananas.

Too much of this movie is filled with scenes where you don't know what is "reel" and what's "real".  That shit gets pretty irritating rather quick.  Luckily, Cat in the Brain is filled with so much gore and nudity that you just have to like it.  Numerous heads, eyes, tongues, hands, arms, legs, and guts get ripped off, cut off, or chopped up throughout the course of the film and lots of willing Italian babes show off their enormous assets too. 

Much of the film is made up of clips and footage from other Fulci movies (most notably Sodoma's Ghost).  Sure, it makes the flick seem like a hackneyed paste-up job (well... it is really), but if you're a fan of Fulci, all of these clips will all be more than welcome.  Although Cat in the Brain doesn't make a whole lot of sense, as movies about horror directors being haunted by their films go; it's a lot better than say, New Nightmare that's for damn sure.

The shrink gets the best line of the movie when he tells Lucio, "You have a fear of hamburgers and gardeners!"

AKA:  Nightmare Concert.

Carnival of Blood was Burt (Rocky) Young's first movie.  He plays Gimpy, a scarred, hunchbacked carnie who works on Coney Island assisting the dart thrower.  People who end up having a run-in with the duo inevitably end up getting killed later on.  Is Gimpy the killer, or is it his slightly unbalanced, bug-eyed boss who has a mother fixation?  You figure it out.

This flick originally played on double bill with Curse of the Headless Horseman, which is also from director Leonard Kirtman.  It's not very good and is downright boring in some spots, but the gore is fairly decent.  (It's a fuck of a lot better than Curse of the Headless Horseman, that's for sure.)  There is a cool scene where a couple goes through a haunted house and end up being decapitated.  Then another girl gets stabbed in the stomach under the pier.  The best kill though comes when an extremely annoying woman gets her eyes and tongue ripped out in an alley.  We also get a pretty funny scene where the teddy bear obsessed killer stuffs his bears with human guts.

The gore scenes, when they finally do come, are a lot of fun.  Mostly though, the movie is just long scenes of Gypsy fortune telling and people trying to pop balloons with darts in hopes of winning a teddy bear.  There's also a horrendous musical score that literally put me to sleep too.  Carnival of Blood will probably be too dull for most viewers to handle but since I'm a huge Rocky fan, it was fun for me to see Uncle Paulie making his screen debut.  He's clearly better than any of the other amateurish cast members and it looks like he took his role very seriously.  While Young went on to do the Rocky movies, Kirtman went on to do porn, directing such titles as Princess Seka, Inside Desiree Cousteau, and Tongue n' Cheek

AKA:  Death Rides a Carousel.

Nowadays it’s generally accepted that former Saturday Night Live cast members make shitty movies, but this was the first (and last) cinematic turd from John Belushi.  While everyone hates on 1941, I still kinda dug it, even though it was long and disjointed.  That film’s director Steven Spielberg also produced this flick (it was the first film under his Amblin banner) and although the ‘Berg has definitely produced worse, it was a sign of crap to come.

Belushi plays a fat dumb reporter from Chicago who wears a stupid hat that goes to the Rockies to do a story on a butch chick (Blair Brown) who has a thing for eagles.  Predictably, they fall in love and have a bunch of sex on a train.  (You only get to see ONE brief side shot of her nipple though.)

The script was written by Lawrence Kasdan, the man who wrote The Empire Strikes Back.  What he was smoking when he wrote this, I don’t know.  Basically Belushi climbs mountains, eats, gets injured, sleeps, falls in love, and writes for two hours.  None of this is funny in the least and the love story angle is palpable at best.  And don’t even get me started on the dumb subplot concerning a horny mountain man either.  The two leads have ZERO chemistry together and they are totally lost in Kasdan’s idiotic script. 

Belushi died the next year of a drug overdose.  (It’s certainly apparent that he was on something during this movie.)  Thankfully, the overdose prevented him from making any more shitty movies like this one.

Kirk Douglas stars as an American secret agent in this woefully lame and absolutely unfunny spy comedy.  A couple’s honeymoon in Bucharest is interrupted when the husband gets kidnapped by Russian agents.  The wife (Marlene Jobert) tries to get the head of the British Embassy (Trevor Howard) to find her husband but he’s no use.  Enter Kirk, who’s got some devious plans of his own.  In the end, it turns out that Marlene’s hubby IS a spy and it’s all just an elaborate game of deception.

This is just one of those idiotic movies that you want to strangle everybody involved.  Director Dick Clement (who later went onto write The Bank Job) just lets each scene sputter out with little consequence to the next scene.  The plot more or less just sits there like a limp dick and moves at a snail’s pace to boot.  And the less said about the “zany” boat chase finale, the better.

And is it just me or is Kirk Douglas the LAST person you’d want to star in your stupid borderline braindead spy comedy?  Sure, the man has SOME sense of comic timing, but he just seems out of place while dressed up in a tux like a third rate James Bond imitator.  And despite his top billing; Douglas’ part is more or less a glorified supporting role and he doesn’t do Jack Shit until near the end of the picture.

Jobert is one heck of an annoying French twat.  She looks like a more trollish version of Shirley MacClaine and will get on your fucking nerves in record time; which is a pity because she gets the most screen time out of anyone in this mind-numbing mess.  She’s got one of those irritating squeaky Frenchie voices that are like nails on a goddamn chalkboard. 

Despite the moronic scripting, there is ONE line of dialogue I kinda chuckled at.  It’s delivered by a blustering embassy worker who tells a frantic Jobert, “I presume that you’ve been raped by some gypsy violinist or something!”

AKA:  To Catch a Spy.  AKA:  Keep Your Fingers Crossed.

Okay, I’m going to admit it.  I’ve never seen A Nightmare Before Christmas.  Sure, I’ve seen PARTS of it, but never enough for me to want to see it all the way through.  I did see director Henry Selick’s next flick, James and the Giant Peach and thoroughly enjoyed it though.  Now comes Coraline, another Selick stop-motion animated movie and it’s more or less a mixed bag.  While I didn’t really have much of a desire to see this, our local theater FINALLY got 3-D projectors in today so I figured what the hay.  It’s in 3-D and it looked pretty trippy, so why not.

Coraline (voice by Dakota Fanning) is a little bored brat of a girl who lives in a third of a house that has a small door hidden in her room.  Since her parents are pretty dull, she decides to go through the door where her “Other” parents are.  They look just like Coraline’s parents except they are super nice, cook good food and have buttons for eyes.  Eventually we learn the Other Mother is One Bad Mother who wants to sew buttons into Coraline’s peepers and steal her soul.  When the Other Mother kidnaps her real parents, Coraline teams up with a stray cat (Keith David) to rescue them.

Coraline is one of those flicks that that try to do a whole lot of things at once but isn’t really successful at any of them.  While the plot is decent, it doesn’t really draw you in completely and the characters aren’t very memorable to boot.  Although the story is suitably dark for a fairy tale, it’s probably TOO dark for its intended audience and probably won’t be dark enough for adults (like me).  The 3-D is also an issue.  Selick creates an OK depth-of-field effect for most of the settings; I’ll give him that.  Unfortunately, not a lot of stuff really pops out of the screen at you, which is kinda pointless if you ask me.  It almost seems like the 3-D was more of an afterthought than anything else.  Honestly, in a story that revolves around a little girl getting buttons sewed into her eyes, you’d expect at least ONE shot of a needle plunging out into the audience.

In short, My Bloody Valentine 3-D this is not.  You do get to see some 3-D sequined stop-motion boobs though.  (I’m not kidding.)  In addition to that, you also get:

• 3-D Needlepoint.
• 3-D Thread.
• 3-D Hands.
• 3-D Hummingbirds.
• 3-D Frog.
• 3-D Acrobats.
• 3-D Insects.
• 3-D Pointy noses.
• 3-D Mouse Circus.
• 3-D Bat-Dogs.
• 3-D Spider Web.  (Hands down, the coolest effect in the movie.)

Not a great use of the 3-D by any stretch of the imagination.  (If you do see it in 2-D, you’re not missing much.)  I’m pretty much harping on Coraline and I apologize.  It isn’t a bad flick.  It’s definitely watchable, mostly thanks to Selick’s cool visual pizzazz and a pretty wicked ending.  Just don’t go in expecting any eye-popping 3-D effects. 

Before directing such critically beloved fare as Gods and Monsters, Kinsey, and Dreamgirls, Bill Condon helmed this shitty sequel to the already shitty enough Candyman.  This time out, the hooked-handed Candyman (Tony Todd) is brought back to life in New Orleans (just in time for Mardi Gras) when a troubled kid says his name five time in the mirror.  The kid’s teacher (Kelly Rowan) has to deal with the supernatural boogeyman and she predictably learns (long after the audience has already guessed it) that she is a descendant of Candyman.  (Candyman likes a little cream in his coffee if you catch my drift.)  Of course, Candyman doesn’t kill her because she’s pregnant (which the audience also figures out long before she does) and he wants his bloodline to continue.  I think.

This flick is just a straight up mess.  Like the Freddy and Michael Myers sequels, this installment gives way too much background on the Candyman and ruins the mystique of the character.  All it does if further jumble up an already incoherent plotline.  The worst part of the movie though is the constant false scares.  Seriously, there had to have been like 27 false scares in this movie and all of them are punctuated by piercing screeching sound effects that will give you a headache.  Speaking of headaches, the movie also features an irritating Cajun DJ that provides idiotic narration throughout the flick.  This guy is so annoying you’ll want to just punch his fucking lights out.

Tony Todd’s performance is again the best thing this lame flick has to offer.  It doesn’t help that he’s barely in it.  Like the first movie, he mainly just kills people with his hook, but he spices things up in this one by unleashing a horde of killer bees out of his stomach.  No matter how awful Candyman 2 was, I still have to give screenwriter Rand (The Maker) Ravich some points for creativity as this is the only movie that I can think of in which a Sno-Cone salesman has all the valuable exposition on the film’s villain.  He also wrote some good dialogue like, “You’re next!  Groin to gullet!” too.

We all know that Tony Jaa is the new King of Kung Fu.  In Ong Bak and The Protector, Jaa dethroned Bruce Lee as the Numero Uno Martial Arts Madman and broke more people’s bones in just those two films than Steven Seagal has in his entire career.  Tony maybe the King, but Yanin Vismitananda is the Queen.  Not only am I crowning Yanin the Queen of Kung Fu; I’m also going out on a limb and proclaiming her as the best female action hero of all time. 

Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2?  Looks like a slightly menopausal grandma next to Yanin Vismitananda.  Michelle Yeoh in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?  Go crouch somewhere else!  Rhona Mitra from Doomsday?  Take a hike sister!  Uma Thurman in Kill Bill?  Shit, Chocolate makes Kill Bill look like My Dinner with Andre.

Now I know the name Yanin Vismitananda doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but folks; trust me… you’ll be hearing more about this fine lady in the future.

I don’t even want to tell you a whole lot about Chocolate since I want you to all experience this one for yourself.  All you got to know is that Yanin plays Zen, an autistic girl who watches Tony Jaa movies.  Thanks to her autism, she is able to mimic Jaa’s movements and do all kinds of Muay Thai kickboxing.  Zen’s mother gets cancer and needs money for chemo treatments, so her shifty nephew decides to have Zen shakedown the local thugs for some quick cash.  When they don’t pay up; Zen gets upset… REALLY upset and takes out like 25 guys without breaking a sweat.

We’re talking Rain Man Meets The Next Karate Kid.

Remember in The Protector when Tony Jaa would come into a room demanding to know who stole his elephants and would proceed to kick the snot out of anyone who didn’t give him a straight answer?  Same deal here.  Yanin comes into a room and says, “You give mom money now!”  When she doesn’t get her dough in a prompt fashion, she goes batshit insane on some motherfuckers.

Vismitananda is fucking amazing in this movie.  If I wasn’t already married, I’d propose to her.  She’d kick my ass on the spot, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.  This is her first movie and she gives what is probably the best debut performance by an actress since Greta Garbo.  But I ask you, could Greta Garbo Kung Fu the shit out of fifty henchmen in one scene?  Didn’t think so.  Vismitananda is totally convincing at playing the withdrawn side of Zen and her performance is truly moving during the more dramatic scenes of the film.  Man oh man, when she starts Kung Fuing the shit out of people though, WATCH OUT!  I got the same charge watching her as I did when I first saw Tony Jaa in The Protector; which is about the highest level of praise I can dish out.

Director Prachya Pinkaew also did Ong Bak and The Protector with Jaa and it’s safe to say that the man is one of the finest directors ever to dabble in the Kung Fu genre.  The man could direct a tampon commercial and I’d still watch that fucker.  I really hope that Chocolate will not only propel Vismitananda to deserved superstardom, but also give Pinkaew his due as one of the best action directors working today.  And just wait to you see the final battle.  My jaw is still on the floor from that one.

The Cramps are one of my all time favorite bands so with the untimely passing of frontman Lux Interior (nee Erick Lee Purkhiser) I thought it be fitting to throw this on in tribute of the man.  I saw The Cramps perform three times and each show was a blast.  Lux would often come out in skintight latex and high heels fellating the microphone and acting like a goddamn madman.  Usually by the end of the concert, Lux would have stripped down to nothing but a latex G-string and have broken the mic stand over his head.  He was one of the great ones.

If you never saw The Cramps live, you can check out this concert and see them in their rawest punkiest form, before they morphed into their psycho surf rock phase.  The concert was filmed in 1978 before the band released the seminal Songs the Lord Taught Us and features such classics as “The Way I Walk”, “Domino”, and “TV Set”.  Oh yeah, did I mention it was filmed in a mental hospital?  Yes, while Johnny Cash may have played prisons, The Cramps played mental institutions.  How fucking cool is that?

Filmed with a cheapie black and white video camera amidst the dozens of slightly deranged mental patients, the flick has an eerie feel that will get under your skin.  Think Gimme Shelter meets Night of the Living Dead and that should give you some idea of what to expect.  Patients bumrush the stage and grab the microphone and scream unintelligibly, dance around in a stupor and generally give you the creeps.  Ever the consummate frontman, Lux just rolls with it and with his freaky demeanor fits right in with the crowd. 

Its way too short (only 20 minutes) but it should make for a great introduction to the band if you’ve never heard of them before.  Lux buddy, you will be missed.  If you don’t believe me of how great this flick is, here’s the entire concert, courtesy of YouTube: