A man claiming to be a missionary bribes his way onto a boat and causes the captain all kinds of problems.  When they finally get to Bali, the captain tries to ditch his unwanted stowaway but the authorities inform him that the mysterious passenger is unwelcome in their country, or anywhere else for that matter.  That means the mischievous missionary must stay on the ship where he causes the captain even more grief.

A Passenger to Bali was on my 50 Pack of Horror Movies but it isn’t a horror movie.  Heck, it isn’t even a movie!  No, it’s actually an episode of Studio One, an ancient dramatic television show filmed live in front of a studio audience.  What a gyp.

This flick…err… program is stuffy, boring, and more than a might bit stupid.  This captain guy was an idiot.  If the authorities made me keep this fucker on my boat, I would’ve thrown his ass overboard as soon as the boat left the dock.  What a dumbass.

If there is a saving grace to this mess it’s the fact that the show still has all the commercials intact.  There’s a great ad for a television set that boasts, “More black and more white for a clearer, sharper picture!”  The best commercial is the one that refers to a refrigerator as a “girl’s best friend”.  That shit was awesome.  I think if the whole hour had been taken up by nothing but old commercials it at least would’ve been watchable.

Peter O’Toole stars as an English lord who tries to assassinate Adolf Hitler after the Nazis kill his wife.  He is promptly caught and gets roughed up by the Gestapo who rips out his fingernails and toss him over a cliff.  Left for dead, Pete eventually escapes to England and is relentlessly pursued by the nasty Nazis.  When no one will help him, O’Toole goes into hiding by digging a hole in the side of a mountain.  While living with his cat inside of his manmade cave, Pete gets a visit by the main Gestapo jerkoff and has to think on his feet if he wants to avoid capture.

Rogue Male gets off to a promising start.  Although nothing is ever really shown, the torture scenes are pretty effective and O’Toole’s escape is sorta tense.  However, much of the tension drains out of the film once he arrives in England and the third act is especially lifeless.  I mean I was ready to pull my hair out of my scalp by the fifth scene of O’Toole bargaining for his life from inside of his underground hideout.

O’Toole gives a stellar performance and always commands the audience’s attention.  He’s particularly great when the Nazis are kicking the shit out of him.  O’Toole has a brazenness about him that’s likable in these scenes and he really makes you root for him.  Alastair (A Christmas Carol) Sim also does a fine job in a cameo as O’Toole’s uncaring uncle.  Ultimately, their efforts are not enough to save the flick.

A big time corporation bilks a ton of money out of the stock market with the help of a local crime lord.  The District Attorney gets wind of their little scheme and is promptly murdered.  An annoying fast-talking reporter finds out about the various dirty deeds and tries to get the story.

The World Gone Mad is a great title.  It almost sounds like it’s going to be a Mad Max rip-off or something.  Too bad it’s nothing more than a woefully inane, thoroughly dumb, and hopelessly boring murder mystery.  Far too much of the film is taken up with dullards going on and on about stocks and corporations and stuff.  It’s almost like watching MSNBC or something.

The cast is filled with capable talent.  There’s Louis Calhern (who was in Duck Soup the same year), Neil (Commissioner Gordon!) Hamilton, and Evelyn (Daughter of the Tong) Brent.  Unfortunately, none of them are given anything to do.  They are allowed on occasion to say “Hell” and “damn” though.

The sound is also supremely shitty.  At all times it sounds like someone is frantically typing just off screen.  Either that or the crew was popping popcorn.  Whatever that sound is, it’s more entertaining than the drivel the actors are forced to spout.

This flick was on a 50 movie pack of horror films.  It ain’t scary in the least.  I guess you could label it a horror film if you have an acute fear of being bored to death.

AKA:  Public Be Damned.  AKA:  Public Be Hanged.

I knew I was in trouble when Forrest Tucker’s name appeared THREE times in the opening credits.  (“Forrest Tucker in… Robot Pilot… Starring Forrest Tucker… Forrest Tucker as Jerry Barton.”)  The biggest mistake about the movie though is that I kept watching it.

A scientist invents a remote controlled toy airplane and all of a sudden he thinks he’s hot shit.  He tries to sell his idea to the government who puts his technology into a real airplane.  When that crashes, it’s back to the drawing board.  While the scientist tries to perfect the formula, his trusty pilot (Tucker) tries to woo some bitchy broad.  In the end, a spy steals the plane and takes off but the scientist dude is able to use the remote control to bring him back down so the Feds can get him.

You’d think if you were making a movie about spies trying to get their hands on a top secret remote control plane, it would be filled with a lot of spying and stuff.  Unfortunately, most of the flick is filled with lame-ass scenes of Forrest trying to romance that damn dame by forcing her to do a lot of housework.  And man, did it ever suck.  The only part of the movie that’s worth a damn is the WTF cameo by Billy (High Plains Drifter) Curtis as a judge.

Most movies made around this time had a lot of negative African-American stereotypes.  Robot Pilot features some pretty bad Mexican stereotypes, so you can tell that it was at least trying to be different.  The gratuitously unfunny comic relief Mexican who brays like a donkey is pretty awful and the way the white folks treat him is even worse.  “All Mexicans are named Pedro!”

Director William Beaudine did everything from The Ape Man to Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla; from Billy the Kid vs. Dracula to The Green Hornet.  He was nicknamed “One Shot Beaudine” because he only used one take to film his movies.  One shot was too many for this flick.

AKA:  Emergency Landing.

Some dude that looks like Jim Palmer graduates from high school and is given a brand new car by his hillbilly parents.  This makes his two older brothers extremely jealous and they go out and get drunk and beat people up.  Meanwhile our hero loses his virginity to some ugly chick that looks like Kristen Wiig with a $1500 a day heroin habit.  After successfully knocking the boots for the first time, the idiot gets beaten up by his asshole brothers.  It’s at this point where our “hero” gets magically healed by a Christ-like hermit who lives in the woods.  In the end, the prodigal son returns home to open up a can of whoop ass on his brawling brothers.

I really have to wonder about our hero in this movie.  (Forgive me for not bothering to look up his name; I haven’t had my coffee yet.)  Let’s face it; we’re talking about a guy who spurns the advances of a hot MILF just because he thinks he’s in love with the fugly Skeletor chick.  This is a guy who would rather run around wrestling another dude wearing Speedos than hang out with the topless girls who are horsing around in the same stream.  When our “hero” makes stupid decisions like that, it makes it hard for the audience to root for him.  No wonder his brothers want to kick his ass so bad.

Now that I think about it though, I don’t even know why his siblings wanted to beat the bejabbers out of him anyway.  I mean his new sports car had a rainbow decal on the hood for Christ’s sake.  Now I know in the 70’s detailed vans were all the rage, but I never remembered seeing a car detailed.  Why in the world would his brothers be so jealous about his stupid looking car; especially if it had a goddamn rainbow on it?  If that was my brother, I’d be GLAD my pops didn’t give me a fucking Rainbow Brite car.

If you can’t already tell this movie pretty much sucks and I’m just rambling on to kill time before my coffee finishes brewing.  Now that the coffee is ready, I’ll tell you that this movie had quite a number of titties in it.  It’s for this reason that I’m giving it Two Stars instead of One.

AKA:  Country Dreamin’.

Ms. Peterson (Julie Ange) comes to a small town high school to teach sex education.  A lot of people don’t like that too much, particularly a greasy pornographer, because Ms. Peterson threatens his “business” of selling dirty pictures to school kids.  Meanwhile, one of her students, Arlene (Arlene Farber from Female Animal) is upset that her jock boyfriend won’t marry her so she fakes being pregnant.  Arlene’s dad becomes furious and thinks the Sex Ed teacher should be fired, so he calls an emergency PTA meeting.  Arlene eventually fesses up and Ms. Peterson's name is cleared, but not until she shows everyone an “educational” film strip showcasing the actual birth of a baby. 

Jerry Gross, producer of such classics as I Spit on Your Grave, I Drink Your Blood, and Zombie wrote and directed this landmark in exploitation entertainment.  In terms of a movie, Teenage Mother ain’t much.  It’s slow paced and far too much of the flick is padded with useless scenes of teens dancing and drag racing.  As a piece of exploitation showmanship, it deserves it’s place in schlock history.  Gross was smart enough to know that people would sit through an hour of After School Special crap just to see 3 minutes of disgusting “clinical” birthing footage.  (Plus, movies like this were the only place you could see full-on vag.)  Gross even put together a great ad campaign (“Teenage Mother Means Nine Months of Trouble!”) that had nothing to do with the actual movie.  I mean Arlene doesn’t even get pregnant… what a rip-off!  

That’s OK though because the birthing scene is appropriately disgusting.  As someone who has watched a lot of birthing movies lately as part of his parenting class, I can attest that obstetrics have come a long way in 42 years.  This clinical footage looks about as clinical as Faces of Death (or maybe Let Me Die a Woman).  Not only does the doctor use some medieval looking forceps, but he also performs a hasty episiotomy (the cutting of the vagina) as well.  All this and you get an extremely youthful Fred (Best in Show) Willard popping up as the high school coach.

Teenage Mother is pretty worthless but the birthing stuff is guaranteed to make you want to upchuck in your shorts.  One Star for the lame-o “plot”, Three Stars for the baby coming out of a bloody cooch.  That makes a Two Star average.

My wife is nine months pregnant so she thought that renting this serio-comedy about a pair of clueless parents-to-be (John Kraskinski and Maya Rudolph) would be a good idea.  I thought the movie looked like total ass from the previews but being the dutiful husband I am, I agreed to watch it with her.  My gut instinct was right.  If there are any women reading this, you should know that my wife hated it too.

The premise of the movie is that the couple jet off to various cities to see which place would be best to raise their embryonic girl.  They run into their bizarre ass weirdo friends who are themselves parents that spout out crazy shit about their kids while the couple just kinda nods politely.  Eventually they learn that home is where the heart is… gag.

Just about everyone in this flick from Krasinski’s parents (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara) to his whacked out breastfeeding cousin (Maggie Gyllenhaal), says the most random, idiotic verbal diarrhea you’ve ever heard in your entire life.  It’s as if the screenwriters were all hopped up on Salvia-D when they wrote this moronic gibberish.  What pissed me off about this movie was that most of the harsh language was said in front of (or sometimes directed to) little kids.  For example, one woman constantly calls her overweight daughter a “dyke” and tells her to make a “butch face”.  How come someone didn’t get on the phone to Social Services ASAP?  Who talks like this in front of their kids?  Seriously? 

Director Sam Mendes used to make good movies like American Beauty and Road to Perdition.  I think it’s best for the civilized world if we never let Sam within a hundred yards of a movie camera ever again.  I will admit that the film gets better as it goes along (the further away the couple got from their family, the better it got) and the ending almost worked.  If only the first 75 minutes hadn’t been so grating, Away We Go may have had a chance. 

There is nothing sexier than female roller derby.  My God, if anything shaped my sexual preference it was watching roller derby babes beating the shit out of each other on Saturday afternoons as a youngster.  (That and watching Jane Badler in skintight red outfits on V.)  There hasn’t been a good roller derby movie since 1972 when both Unholy Rollers and Kansas City Bomber lit up the silver screen, so I had high hopes for Whip It.

The verdict:  It’s no Unholy Rollers, but it’s better than Kansas City Bomber. 

Ellen Page stars as a dorky chick whose crazy mom (Marcia Gay Harden) makes her participate in a bunch of lame-ola beauty pageants.  (They are the dumb kind of beauty pageants that don’t have a swimsuit category.  Why hold a beauty pageant and NOT have a swimsuit category?!?!)  Ellen doesn’t like that though and would rather compete with other females in ways that God himself intended:  By strapping on roller skates, dabbing on a bunch of mascara, and going around in circles punching broads in the face.  Of course, Mom freaks out and forbids her to roller derby so her Dad (Daniel Stern) has to finally sign the consent form so that she can Be Herself and Do Her Own Thing.

Yes, there are a lot of Be Yourself and Do Your Own Thing clichés that hamper the film’s second act.  Not to mention the conspicuous lack of roller derbying.  The useless boyfriend subplot also eats up a lot of valuable running time that could’ve been spent on bitches on wheels.  Whip It was Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, so I’m going to cut her some slack because it was her first time behind a camera.  But seriously Drew:  If you’re going to make a roller derby movie, MAKE A ROLLER DERBY MOVIE and leave all the stupid clichés and boyfriend subplots out of it.  I will give it to Drew, she can film roller derby action like few in the business.  This chick worked with such luminaries as Steven Spielberg and Wes Craven so she was obviously paying attention. 

The cast is enormously likable and kick plenty of ass.  Zoe Bell, Eve, and Kristen Wiig are all awesome as Ellen’s teammates and Juliette Lewis does some dynamite work as her bitter rival.  Drew also shows up as a space cadet teammate too but she isn’t as good as the rest of the cast.  (She was probably too worried if the shot was in focus to bring her A-Game.)  The movie really belongs to Page.  She’s great at playing the girl you root for and is a force to be reckoned with while skating.  Whenever Ellen is on the roller derby track, Whip It rocks.  Off the track, not so much.

A nuclear physicist works at Los Alamos perfecting formulas that lead to the creation of the atomic bomb.  When the Russkies hear about his top secret work, they kidnap his son and demand that he hand over all of his notes as ransom.  The Feds intervene and work together with the good doctor to get his son back and stop the scheming spies.

The Atomic City is a competently made, yet thoroughly unmemorable and unspectacular Cold War thriller.  Yeah, this movie might have worked in the midst of Cold War paranoia but I was left unmoved by the whole thing.  I mean I watched this damned movie because I thought it was going to be about an “Atomic City”.  Unfortunately that just happens to be the town’s nickname because of all of the atomic testing and whatnot.  The bitter actuality is that the flick is just a stuffy and sometimes dull kidnapping melodrama. 

On the plus side, Gene (War of the Worlds) Barry delivers a fine performance as the physicist father trying to get his boy back from the spy ring.  There was a pretty cool opening showing us the inner workings of Los Alamos as well.  If low budget B Movies about the Red Scare are your cup of tea, you’ll dig it, I’m sure.  I still say it would’ve been a lot better if an A-Bomb got dropped on somebody or if a spider ran through the atomic test site and grew to enormous proportions but that’s just me I guess.

Rose (Amy Adams) is a stupid broad who used to be popular in high school but is now just a maid.  She has an idiot son who obsessively licks things and after he licks his teacher, Rose pulls him out of school because “it’s not his fault”.  Rose wants to put him in a private school (a mental ward would be preferable) and in order to come up with the money for that, she starts a cleaning service that exclusively mops up after murder scenes.  She enlists the help of her fuck-up sister (Emily Blunt) and together, the two clueless cunts continually botch clean-up after clean-up.

Sunshine Cleaning was one of those quirky indy movies that everybody loved.  Except for me apparently.  The premise was promising enough but the main character of Rose is so moronic that I wanted to smack her.  Here is a woman who is so blind to her own incapacity as a human being that it’s amazing that somebody hasn’t cleaned up after her dead body yet.  At one point she leaves her dumb sister by herself on an important job just so she can go to a baby shower and schmooze with her old high school friends.  The house ends up burning down and Rose yells at her sister for ruining their reputation.  To me though, if Rose wasn’t busy at the damn baby shower, she would’ve been there to help put the fire out.

And her parenting skills are a straight-up joke.  I’m going to be a parent any day here and if I do the shit to my kid that Rose does to hers in this movie, I’m putting my child up for adoption.  I’ve already mentioned the fact that she takes her son out of school because she is oblivious to the fact that the kid is in dire need of a straightjacket.  She also drops by unannounced on her family and leaves him with them so she can make a booty call with a married man.  Later when no one will watch the kid so she can go to the baby shower, she leaves him with a creepy one-armed cleaning-supply salesman. 

I think she could give Jon Gosselin a run for his money for the Worst Parent of the Year Award.

Sunshine Cleaning is effective in spurts and sputters and sometimes you can see what the filmmakers were going for.  There is an interesting subplot where Blunt’s character tries to return a dead client’s fanny pack to her estranged daughter.  The chick is a lesbian though and thinks Blunt is trying to hook up with her.  Then there is the touching scene where a grieving widow just wants Adams to sit by her side and hold her hand for a bit before she goes to clean up her husband’s brains off the carpet.  It’s a nice little moment and if there had been a lot more of these sprinkled throughout, Sunshine Cleaning may have been successful. 

If you want to see a really good movie about someone who cleans up after crime scenes, then check out 1996's Curdled (executive produced by Quentin Tarantino) instead.

Susan (Tracy Coogan from Zombie Honeymoon) is fighting a losing battle with cancer.  After some aggressive chemo treatments, Susan’s husband Henry (screenwriter John Muscanero) decides to take her away from it all by going to their remote cabin in the woods.  Their relaxation is short lived once Susan has a bad spell and slips into a coma.  Through a set of somewhat contrived circumstances, a little Lolita wannabe named Alicia (Mary Kate Wiles) ends up staying at the cabin.  It doesn’t take long for Alicia to start flirting with Henry.  She even takes to jumping on a trampoline at one point; which as we all know is the ultimate act of seduction.  Henry more or less encourages her slutty behavior cuz he hasn’t gotten laid since his wife got sick.  Just when Henry gets all horny and makes a play for the pubescent poontang, Susan wakes up and ruins everything. 

It wouldn’t be fair to divulge what happens in the third act.  Director John Escobedo takes his time to establish his characters and their respective dilemmas, so spoiling it here for you now would do his cautious pacing a great disservice.  The film really moves at a deliberate speed and I’ll give Escobedo points for having the courage to stick to his guns all the way through to the bleak conclusion.  On the other hand, the slow moving plot also diffuses the suspense somewhat.  While the pacing works to flesh out the characters, it conversely prevents the film from gaining any real momentum.   

Muscanero wrote himself a decent enough script, but I think the flick would’ve been better served had somebody else played his role.  The film pretty much rests on his shoulders for most of it’s running time and he just didn’t have the chops necessary to keep you invested in his character.  Wiles is also kinda one-note as the jailbait Jezebel.  At least her character is unpredictable enough to keep you watching to see what she’ll do next.

Hands down the best performance of the flick came from Tracy Coogan.  She makes the most of her limited screen time and creates a character that’s wholly three-dimensional and completely sympathetic.  It’s hard to portray a character that is so frail and yet so strong at the same time, but she did a great job.  Too bad she spends so much of the dang movie in a catatonic state.  The always reliable James (Blackwater Valley Exorcism) Russo also puts in a memorable turn as the grim-faced sheriff. 

Patient viewers with a predilection for character driven psychological dramas will want to seek out Dark Woods, no questions asked.  It pretty much depressed the Hell out of me, but I consider that to be a strength rather than a weakness.  Although the film is a little too spotty to give it a wholehearted recommendation, I have to admit that Dark Woods presents us with one of the stranger love triangles filmdom has ever seen.  Because of that (and the excellent performance by Coogan), you should probably check it out.

If you want to know more about Dark Woods, I’d advise you to head on over to http://www.darkwoodsmovie.com/DARK_WOODS.html.  And if you’re like me and can’t get enough of Tracy Coogan, you should check out www.tracycoogan.com, your one stop spot for all things Tracy. 

After John Hughes died I wanted to review a movie of his that I had never seen as a tribute to the man.  Because Netflix is so damn slow sometimes, I just got this movie yesterday.  Sorry for the delay.  Now that I’ve finally watched it, all I have to say is it should’ve been called Some Kind of Mediocre.

Eric Stoltz plays this poor kid who works in a garage and spends most of his time painting.  Mary Stuart Masterson is his tomboy best friend who predictably has a crush on him.  Stoltz ends up getting a date with a cute popular chick (Lea Thompson) and they both get grief from their friends because they’re from opposite ends of the popularity spectrum.

So it’s basically Pretty in Pink with the genders reversed.

Some Kind of Wonderful is just like every other John Hughes movie ever made except it’s lacking the heart and insight of his best work.  The whole thing is predictable and not very funny and the ending is filled with a lot of those Be-True-To-Yourself clichés Hughes is known for.  The performances are good (particularly Elias Koteas as the bully and Craig Sheffer as the asshole boyfriend) but they only help so much.  I did like seeing a young Chynna Phillips in a small role with long hair.  I think it’s pretty hilarious that she blatantly stole Masterson’s hairdo later on when she started up Wilson Phillips.   

Speaking of singing, the song “Some Kind of Wonderful” is never heard during the film, which is sorta weird.  Usually whenever a movie from the 80’s and 90’s was named after an oldie (Stand By Me, Taking Care of Business, Pretty Woman, etc.) they used the song during a montage.  I guess Hughes dropped the ball on that too.  We do get to hear The Stones’ excellent “Miss Amanda Jones” though, so that’s a plus.

Just because Some Kind of Wonderful isn’t very good that doesn’t mean the world won’t miss John Hughes.  For the bulk of the 80’s, he was the go-to guy when you wanted to make a teen angst movie.  He did some classic stuff (my personal favorite was Weird Science) and his films went on to influence a generation of youth-oriented filmmakers.  RIP John Hughes…

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?

A down on his luck boxer falls for a lonely prostitute who lives in his apartment building.  Her pimp doesn’t like that, so he has his manager killed and kidnaps the ho.  In the end, the pissed-off pugilist has to duke it out to the death with the flesh merchant and his underworld underlings in order to secure a happy ending for himself.

Killer’s Kiss is a minor work by a young Stanley Kubrick.  It’s basically just a standard issue film noir drama with a one-note script and no real surprises.  And although the flick runs a scant 67 minutes, it still has way too much padding.  (The lame-o flashback that was nothing more than five straight minutes of a ballerina twirling around endlessly was especially annoying.)

Because this is Stanley Freakin’ Kubrick we’re talking about here, I got to say that the film did have moments of fleeting brilliance.  These moments had nothing to do with the plot or acting however, which was kinda unfortunate.  The film’s chief asset is Kubrick’s excellent cinematography.  Even on a shoestring budget he still manages to make little shots seems larger than life.  (There’s a really cool shot where our hero gazes yearningly into a fishbowl.)  Authentic fight footage and heaps of classy film noir atmosphere help to make the flick watchable and the final fight in a mannequin warehouse was pretty sweet too. 

If you’re a Kubrick fan, you’ll probably have fun spotting his signature touches and visual flourishes.  I did too, yet the thin plot and lazy acting left me wanting more.  Killer’s Kiss’s strengths are mostly superficial and/or technical but it’s not a total loss.  At worst, it’s an undercooked film noir movie; at best, it offers a glimpse of a burgeoning talent that would go on to be one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.

Robert De Niro stars as a marginally talented and mentally unbalanced stand-up comedian named Rupert Pupkin who has a chance encounter with his idol, talk show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis).  Pupkin asks for an opportunity to appear on Langford’s show and gets the usual “call my office” brush-off.  Since Rupert is severely delusional (he often has intricate daydreams about schmoozing with Jerry), he takes that to mean “yes”.  After getting the run-around from Langford’s underlings, Rupert decides to take matters into his own hands and kidnap Langford.  The ransom:  Performing a five minute stand-up routine on Jerry’s show.

Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy is somewhat of a companion piece to Taxi Driver in that it examines the mindset of a ticking time bomb psychotic that gains fame from doing a criminal act.  Granted, The King of Comedy is nowhere near as good as Taxi Driver, but it has its own rewards.  Scorsese’s direction is slick and confident and I particularly liked how he incorporated Rupert’s daydreams into the “real” world. 

The performances are also top notch.  I always thought Lewis was kinda annoying but he does a helluva job here playing things completely straight.  De Niro is pretty amazing in this flick and even though his character says and does some loathsome stuff, you can’t help but feel sorry for him.  (At least I did.)  I also enjoyed Sandra Bernhard’s out-there turn as De Niro’s extremely unstable partner in crime.

Although The King of Comedy is kinda hit-and-miss in spots and runs on a bit too long, it’s still a strong offering from Scorsese and De Niro.  You also have to give it points for being ahead of it’s time.  I mean the idea that someone could become a celebrity in their own right (not to mention get a book deal) from doing something crazy like Pupkin seems like an old hat nowadays but it must’ve really seemed strange in 1983.  It just goes to show how innovative Scorsese is.

Scorsese and De Niro’s next collaboration was the classic Goodfellas.

Marianna Palka wrote, directed, and stars in this uncomfortable slice of Independent Movie Romance.  She plays this introverted shut-in who only leaves the house to rent porno movies at her local video store.  The clerk (Jason Ritter, star of Freddy vs. Jason and son of John Ritter) falls instantly in love with her, mostly because of her rabid interest in porn.  And by love, I mean he stalks her.  When he finally gets the gonads up to ring her doorbell, thus begins one of the most truly head-scratching courtships in cinema history.

I don’t wanna spoil a whole lot of what goes down in Good Dick because that’s what kept me watching.  I wouldn’t necessarily call the flick a “Good” movie but there were a lot of moments of sheer What-the-Fuck-are-These-People-Doing that made it interesting.  Palka is a solid enough actress, yet as a director she really knows how to get under the audiences’ skin and effectively paints a portrait of two hopeless losers falling in love. 

Having said all of that though, this movie really pushes the boundaries of awkwardness.  Eraserhead’s family dinner was a cakewalk compared to some of the character interactions in Good Dick.  It’s a toss-up to which character is more pathetic.  Is it Ritter for completely lacking any self-respect, or is it Palka for merely putting up with him?  Although I had a morbid curiosity of where these two people were going in their dead end relationship, I have to say this is definitely not a “fun” movie. 

On the other hand, I dug it because it didn’t follow the usual RomCom clichés.  It also had a cool early Hal Hartley vibe going on that I appreciated.  This might be one of those times where I watch a movie and am completely baffled by it but see it again in the right frame of mind a couple years later and think it’s brilliant.  Until that day, I’ll just give it ** ½ and make a memo to myself to take another look-see in the future.

Director Gregor (Buffalo Soldiers) Jordan’s The Informers is based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis.  Like most of Ellis’ work, it’s all about yuppies doing drugs, having sex, and doing despicable things to themselves and/or each other.  The film is structured sorta like Magnolia.  We follow various characters around and their storylines intersect with each other until the end when (most) everyone has kind of a revelation that they’ve pretty much fucked their lives up.

What separates The Informers from other Ellis inspired films such as American Psycho, Less Than Zero, and Rules of Attraction is that all of the yuppie asshole shenanigans are pretty much pointless.  Whereas the other Ellis movies offered some sort of commentary on the attitudes and mores of the 80’s, The Informers has no such insights.  Basically what we’re left with is an empty movie about empty people.

It doesn’t help that the performances are all over the place.  As the two bisexual pretty boy lovers, Jon Foster and Austin Nichols are too much like a Ken Doll to be called real characters.  I didn’t really give a shit about Billy Bob Thornton and Kim Basinger’s crumbling marriage either because they too were so thinly sketched that it made it hard for me to care.  The people who come off the best in the film are Mickey Rourke and the late Brad Renfro as a pair of oddball kidnappers.  Also worth mentioning is Amber Heard as the bed-hopping whore who gets the AIDS.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that her “performance” was good, but she gets naked in just about every scene.  And if you consider showing off her tits a “performance”, then she had some of the most perfectly rounded performances I’ve seen in a long time.

Best line:  “Just because you and mom are a couple doesn’t make us a family!”

Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange play these two old broads who live in a dilapidated mansion and run around acting nuttier than elephant turds.  They are so fucking crazy that these two documentary filmmakers think it’ll be a laugh riot to film them acting bat shit insane.  While the two haggard looking fossils aren’t hamming it up for the camera, they flash back to their early days when they still had money but still acted like complete space cadets.  After they lose all of their dough, the weirdo women opt to live in their decaying manor wallowing in their own filth.  Luckily, their cousin Jackie O (Jeanne Tripplehorn) intervenes and spruces up the place so they don’t have to be up to their elbows in cat shit all the time.

In short, it’s another one of those Bad-Old-Age-Make-Up-O-Rama Dramas.

Seriously, whoever did the make-up for this movie should have his fingers latexed together so he can never botch another make-up job ever again.  I mean Barrymore and Lange are supposed to look OLD.  They’re not supposed to look like third-degree burn victims. 

Bad make-up is one thing but bad performances are an entirely different entity.  I always thought Barrymore and Lange were decent actresses.  Then I saw this movie.  Good God man, all these women do in this movie is dart around like Sea Monkeys on crack babbling incessantly about who knows what.  It didn’t help that they sported hideous accents that made them both sound like Barbara Walters gargling a mouthful of grizzly bear semen either.

Admittedly, the movie is a lot easier to take when they’re both wearing the horrible looking old age make-up.  At least then it’s got moments of unintentional humor.  The flashback scenes where they’re all dolled up and in their prime are excruciating.  At one point, Barrymore says, “It’s very difficult to keep the line from the past to the present.”  I agree.  The filmmakers should’ve just dropped all the 1930’s bullshit and just focused on the nutty old women running around stepping in cat crap.  

There were a lot of low budget independently produced would-be cult items populating video store shelves in the late 80’s and early 90’s.  Some of them were downright painful to sit through.  Every now and then you’d get a random slice of WTF that had a certain charm to it.  That’s an adequate enough description of Sonny Boy.

A white trash crime lord named Slue (Paul L. Smith from Pieces) finds a baby in the backseat of a stolen car and is about two seconds away from selling him when his wife Pearl (David Carradine in drag) forces him to keep the kid.  Slue names the kid Sonny Boy and raises him like an animal and keeps him locked up in the back of his ice cream truck.  He also cuts out Sonny Boy’s tongue and teaches him to kill his enemies.  When Sonny Boy kills one of the townsfolk, the community rallies together and tries to lynch him.  Finally, Slue finds his paternal instincts and protects his son against the rioting villagers by blowing up a lot of people with his antique cannon.

Sonny Boy is more or less just a bunch of weirdness for weirdness sake but that didn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it.  The cast was excellent and Carradine was particularly amazing.  He really commits 100% to the role and never makes his character jokey or campy.  Whether he was supposed to be playing a tranny or a real woman is left unanswered.  That’s part of what made the whole thing work though.

Although I liked the quirky tone of the movie, some things were just too goofy for words.  Take for instance Sonny Boy’s eloquent inner monologues.  How in the world could he possibly speak so expressively when he’s been locked up in an ice cream truck all his life?  Then there was the dim bulb bubbleheaded blonde who tries to pick up Sonny Boy and start a romance with him.  What could you possibly see in a guy who’s missing a tongue and lives in the back of an ice cream truck?

The film probably runs about 20 minutes too long which prevents it from achieving its maximum entertainment potential.  Having said that, the ending where Smith and Carradine (in drag) get into a slow motion shootout with a bunch of unruly Molotov cocktail chucking bikers is some of the nuttiest cinematic shenanigans I’ve seen in a long time.  Carradine also sings the theme song, “Maybe It Ain’t”.

My wife got this off Netflix.  I thought since it was from Michelangelo Antonioni, the director of Blow-Up, it might be okay.  Then again, I thought I’d like Blow-Up too and I didn’t.  Anyway, what else are you going to do on a rainy Saturday afternoon?  Had I known it was going to be about dirty hippies, I may have just slept in instead.

The “plot” centers around this hippie college student who wants to be a “revolutionary” so he buys a gun at a pawn shop and shoots a cop during a student demonstration.  He then steals a pink airplane and flies out to the desert.  Along the way, he sees a hot chick driving in a car so he swoops down and does a lot of reckless stunts to impress her.  (How he could tell she was hot from so far away is anybody’s guess.)  Anyway, she falls in love with him and they have sex at Zabriskie Point while covered in gypsum.  After painting his plane a bunch of stupid hippie colors, he decides to fly back to school to face the music and is promptly shot dead on arrival on the runway.  The ditzy chick then goes off to a cool house in the desert with her boss.  She splits though and watches the house blow up (like 17 times) before TV’s, refrigerators, lawn furniture, and racks of clothing blow up in slow motion. 

Which raises the question, “Shouldn’t have Antonioni called this movie ‘Blow-Up’ too?”

What makes the movie especially hard to take is the constant Pink Floyd music.  I’ve never taken any drugs in my life, but you must have to take a shitload for their music to be any good.  That makes them the perfect people to do the soundtrack for this movie because you’d have to take about 700 hits of Blue Sunshine before this movie made a lick of sense.  The equally overrated (and massively drugged out) Grateful Dead also appeared on the soundtrack and irritated the fuck out of me.  The only good song they played was “You Got the Silver” by The Rolling Stones.  This song choice typifies Antonioni’s contempt for his audience.  Why else would you get a Rolling Stones song sung by Keith Richards for your movie?  Although I personally like the song, how hard would it have been to get some Mick sung tunes on the soundtrack?

I guess the scene where the house blew up 17 times was pretty cool but what the fuck was up with the TV’s, refrigerators, lawn furniture, and clothing blowing up?  Only Antonioni knows for sure.  It smells like a bunch of artsy fartsy hippie crap to me. 

They should’ve called it Zabriskie Pointless.

Sexpot screen siren Sylvia Kristel teams up with her Emmanuelle director Just Jaeckin for another Skinamax adaptation of a novel commonly found in dirty book shops.  I had high hopes for this movie considering that it was produced by Cannon Films.  Unfortunately, Jaeckin films things as if he was making a movie for Merchant-Ivory and not Golan-Globus.

Kristel plays Lady Chatterley, a hot tamale who is married to a patriotic aristocrat.  When her husband returns home from World War I paralyzed from the waist down, he grants Lady permission to take a lover because, after all a girl’s got needs.  It doesn’t take Lady Chatterley long to start flirting with a chicken coop attendant and takes even less time for her to hop in the sack with him.  Her romantic tryst eventually makes her husband extremely jealous, which predictably puts a damper on the situation.

You know there are two different kinds of Skinamax movies.  The first kind is the teen movie that usually takes place on or around the beach and features lots of women in and out of bikinis.  The second kind is basically Masterpiece Theater with tits.  Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a case of the latter.  While I don’t necessarily dislike these kinds of films, I do at least ask for them not to be boring.  The first half of this flick was so dull that I fell asleep on it last night.  I just got done watching the second half this afternoon and I have to say that the last half of the movie is pretty damn hot.  And by pretty damn hot I mean that it features wall-to-wall softcore fucking. 

If the pacing wasn’t all out of whack, Lady Chatterley’s Lover might have been a classic.  Too bad it takes Kristel nearly a half an hour to finally get nekkid.  I know you have to take time to build up the premise but come on.  What’s worse is that we actually see the Lover naked (complete with gratuitous flopping cock shot) a good five minutes before we see the Lady in the nude!  On the plus side, Kristel gets naked an even half dozen times after the halfway point and looks ultra yummy throughout. 

* ½ for the sluggish first half.  *** ½ for the sexy second half.  That works out to be a solid ** ½ average.

(Note:  Is it just me, or is Just Jaeckin the coolest name for a softcore Skinamax movie director?  His name pretty much implies what you should be doing while watching the movie:  Just Jacking.  Of course, he’s French so he spells it a bit different, but the meaning is easily translated.)

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.

George Simmons (Adam Sandler) is a famous comedian who learns he has a rare blood disease.  He goes on a comedy club tour to try to get back to his stand-up roots and takes a shine to a struggling comic named Ira (Seth Rogan).  George hires Ira to write jokes for his act and be his assistant and they gradually become friends.  When George kicks the illness, he tries to get it on with a former flame (Leslie Mann) who is married to an aggressive Australian (Eric Bana), much to the chagrin of Ira.  

I highly enjoyed director Judd Apatow’s previous flicks 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up so Funny People was a bit of a letdown for me.  Things started off rather well and the scenes of George and Ira bonding had a lot of heart to them (think Punchline meets Terms of Endearment).  I also loved all the famous comedian cameos (everyone from Norm MacDonald to Sarah Silverman) too.  The third act is where the movie really shits the bed.  The Lifetime Channelly romantic triangle is trite and there is very little for Rogan’s character to do by that point.  (He’s basically a substitute for the audience as he just wants the whole mess to be over with so he can go home.)

Sandler does a fine job in the flick and handles himself well in a dramatic role.  He’s not as good as he was in Punch-Drunk Love but solid just the same.  I can’t definitively tell what his dramatic range is like since I didn’t see him in Spanglish or in that other drama he did.  (I think it was called 9/11 Sucked.)  I’m sure there are a lot of autobiographical touches in the film (Sandler and Apatow were roommates before they were famous) that helped add extra dimension to his character.  Rogen comes off best out of everyone in the cast yet his character more or less just becomes an innocent bystander for the latter half of the film.  Mann is also quite good as the foxy object of Sandler’s affections.  Since she’s the director’s wife, there is a No Ta-Ta’s Clause in her contract, which is unfortunate cuz she’s pretty banging.

Out of all the celebrity cameos, hands down the funniest was when Eminem wanted to fight Ray Romano.  Luckily, Rogen broke it up by delivering the best line of the movie:  “I thought everybody loved you!”

Robert Altman is a director that I have a love-hate relationship with.  In nearly all of his films he uses more or less the same approach.  He gets a bunch of oddball characters together and puts them in a central location and lets them run wild.  They usually suffer from verbal diarrhea and ramble all over the place, continuously overlapping one another while fighting to be heard in a sea of stream-of-consciousness dialogue.  This approach works in good films like The Player, MASH, and Short Cuts where there is a strong underlying story to tie everything together.  In lesser Altman movies like Prairie Home Companion, California Split, and Nashville, there is no real “plot” to hang the movie on so the characters just ramble on and on without any real consequence.

I know some people will be up in arms at me for labeling Nashville a “lesser” Altman movie because most consider it to be his quintessential film.  To me though, the movie is more or less the same old shit played out over and over again except in different locations.  In all my reviews I try to give a concise plot description but that doesn’t apply to Nashville.  Basically people just hang around an airport and gab for twenty minutes, then there’s an accident on the freeway so people get out of their cars and gab some more before going off to various concerts and musical venues to gab for a bit longer.  Maybe I just don’t get it.

The music in the movie is a mixed bag.  I wasn’t much on the more “real” music but some of the tongue-in-cheek songs were pretty funny.  (I dug the one Henry Gibson song about the guy not cheating on his wife because of “the kids”.)  These songs walk the line (pardon the pun) between parody and the real thing and for the most part are a hoot.  The other shit like the Oscar winning “I’m Easy” aren’t nearly as good.

The performances are all over the place but I guess that’s to be expected since their characters are all over the place too.  Lily Tomlin is probably the best one in the cast as the mother of two deaf sons who bones the womanizing Keith Carradine.  I also liked Ronee (A Nightmare on Elm Street) Blakely as the idiot country singer who got assassinated. 

Speaking of assassinations, the final scene is easily the best part of the movie.  The way Barbara Harris rallies everyone together for a song after Blakely gets gunned down is pretty moving stuff.  If Altman had told a more cohesive story populated with characters I actually gave two turds about, Nashville would’ve been the classic it’s supposed to have been.  As it is, the flick is nearly three hours of cuckoo characters shuffling around the titular city, singing mediocre songs and not doing much of nothing.  The film certainly gets better as it goes along and the final moments are borderline brilliant but ultimately it’s too little too late.

Therese (Essy Persson from Mission Stardust) is an old lesbian who takes a quiet tour of her decrepit old boarding school.  There she constantly flashes back to her days as a young schoolgirl who gets feelings in her pants for a saucy little minx named Isabelle (Anna Gael).  After a lot of leering glances and inexperienced fumblings, the gals slowly but surely become full-fledged vulva jockeys.

Therese and Isabelle is classy, first-rate, smut.  You do have to wait an entire HOUR before the titular lasses get down and dirty with each other, but I have to admit it was worth it.  And by worth it I mean it gave me a boner.  What’s awesome about the flick is the ultra-hot narration that Therese gives during the scenes where the luscious ladies lick each other’s labias.  That shit got me worked up something fierce.  I particularly enjoyed the way she likened her tonguing technique to a cat “cleansing itself”.  And wait until you hear her fancy-schmansy euphemisms for ass-play.   

The two leads are as talented as they are hot and they really make you care about their characters.  Director Radley (The Opening of Misty Beethoven) Metzger films their lesbianic trysts in a manner that can only be described as cinematic poetry.  The scenes where the older Therese scours the school ground moping are also well done.  She’ll be looking at an old abandoned classroom then the camera will pan over to a brand new blackboard where a teacher is teaching class and we immediately go into flashback mode.  I don’t care if Metzger is a smut director or not, that’s legit filmmaking whoever you are.  I do have to deduct One Star for the HOUR long wait before we got to the boobies though.  Other than that, this movie rocks.

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. 

Joan Fontaine stars an unnamed woman who meets moneybags Maxim De Winter (Laurence Olivier) on vacation and falls head over heels in love with him.  After a whirlwind courtship, Maxim brings his new bride to his estate which is presided over by a stone faced maid named Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson).  Maxim’s still haunted by the sudden death of his first wife Rebecca and always chides his new gal whenever she wears Rebecca’s clothes.  Mrs. Danvers is still fiercely loyal to her deceased employer and sets out to tear the two lovebirds apart.  Things get even more complicated when Rebecca’s body is found in a shipwreck and an inquest is held to determine the cause of her mysterious death.  

Rebecca was the first American feature for director Alfred Hitchcock and the only Hitchcock film to ever win an Academy Award for Best Picture.  It’s more of a gothic melodrama than a thriller and lacks the punch of Hitchcock’s better films but it does manage to keep the audience enthralled throughout most of its running time.  The first act where Olivier romances Fontaine is spellbinding.  The second act involving the newlyweds moving into the mansion is less so.  Things get back on track though once the secrets of Rebecca’s sordid past slowly start to be revealed.

The performances anchor the flick and keep you invested in the characters.  Olivier acts like a pimp in this movie.  He insults Fontaine, yells at her, and generally treats her like dog snot; yet she completely worships him.  Mad respect Larry.  No wonder they call him The Greatest Actor of All Time.  Fontaine is also quite good too.  She may be a fucking doormat but she somehow seems plucky and likable throughout.  Fontaine also starred in Hitchcock’s Suspicion the next year.

John Wayne stars as the captain of an airplane flying over Greenland.  When the wings freeze over, Wayne is forced to make a crash landing on the uncharted frozen tundra.  Exposed to subzero temperatures and low on supplies, Wayne and his men fervently try to reach their base to order a rescue but since they are in the middle of nowhere, their signal is much too faint to be heard.  Pretty soon, the men start losing their marbles (one guy goes out hunting and never comes back) and it’s up to Wayne to keep everyone sane.

Like most movies that involve people awaiting a rescue, Island in the Sky loses a lot of tension whenever it cuts away from the stranded passengers.  I suppose we HAVE to see the rescue team try and do their thing, but the drama on their end isn’t nearly as involving as the drama concerning Wayne and his crew.  (Seriously, did we really need the protracted scene where the fat dude spends time swimming with his kids before going off on the rescue mission?  Look, there’s a bunch of guys who are going to freeze to death and all you can think of is doing laps at the YMCA!)  There’s also some really stupid comic relief involving a rescue pilot that doesn’t want to get out of bed that seems out of place given the desperateness of the situation.  Not to mention the superfluous Rod Serling-esque narrator who gets on your nerves PDQ.

Although fatally flawed in several areas, Island in the Sky benefits from a stellar performance by Wayne.  His mannerisms aren’t as broad and showy as they usually are and he essays his role in a realistic way.  In short, he’s actually “acting” in this one and not just playing himself like he normally does.

Assistant Director Andrew V. McLaglen later went on to direct Wayne in five movies including Chisum and Cahill:  U.S. Marshal.  

Jack Nicholson stars as a hippie named Stoney who along with a couple of pals (biker movie staple Adam Roarke and The Mack’s Max Julien) helps a deaf girl named Jenny (Susan Strasberg) find her drop-out acid-head brother (Bruce Dern).  Another hippie (Dean Stockwell) gives Jenny a powerful form of LSD called STP and it causes her to trips balls and wander around Haight-Ashbury.  That means that Stoney has to go find HER while she’s looking for her brother.

So basically the whole movie is just a bunch of stoned out of their gourd hippies looking for other stoned out of their gourd hippies.

I have a low tolerance for hippies as it is so the soft focus scenes of hippies frolicking around while being high as a kite didn’t do much for me.  The barest minimum of plot didn’t help matters any either and the hippie characters were all thinly sketched.  The cheesy kaleidoscopic faux trip sequences were pretty annoying and mostly just served to pad the running time.  Also, the random ass downbeat ending is more or less just there to remind you that “Drugs are bad”.  (The flick was produced by Dick Clark after all; not the kind of guy who would condone illegal substances.)

The music is also pretty lame.  At one point Jack plays some fake Jimi Hendrix music; which is kinda hilarious.  Oh well, at least you get to hear Strawberry Alarm Clock sing “Incense and Peppermints” two years before they were in Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

The only real reason to watch this flick (unless you’re an old hippie trying to remember what the heck happened in the 60’s) is the cast.  Nicholson (who also helped concoct the story) is decent in the starring role and it’s funny just to see him wearing a ponytail.  Psych-Out may reek of hippie bullshit, I still say any movie that features Nicholson, Dern, AND Stockwell is worth checking out at least once.  I also had fun spotting future directors Henry Jaglom, Bud Cardos, and Robert Kelljan in small roles as well.

There is one great scene however.  It comes when Jaglom takes a bunch of acid and has a major freakout and imagines all of his friends are zombies.  Then he tries to hack off his own hand with a band saw.  If director Richard (The Stunt Man) Rush put a couple more of these cool touches into the flick, Psych-Out might’ve kicked a little ass.  Unfortunately, it’s just kinda whatever.  Rush also directed Hell's Angels on Wheels the previous year, which featured a lot of the same people.

A whiny brat named Danny (Lowell Brown) leaves his life of privilege and wealth behind so he can be a hobo.  Danny isn’t a very good hobo though and gets manhandled by a bunch of thugs fairly early in the film.  That means vagrant extraordinaire Bix Dugan (Brett Halsey) has to take Danny under his wing and show him the ropes of drifting.  The homeless duo wander into a jerkwater town and Bix falls in love with a homely waitress named Carrie (Joyce Meadows) who is relentlessly leered at by a creepy stalker (Jack Elam).  After Carrie is murdered by the loathsome lothario, Bix is blamed for the crime and a lynch mob comes after him.  After 80 minutes or so, Danny finally does SOMETHING right and catches the real criminal.

The Girl in Lovers Lane is a sluggishly paced B Movie melodrama that offers more insights into the ins and outs of being a hobo than anything else.  The drama is ineffective and the script is clumsily plotted.  There are no surprises whatsoever and you can pretty much see where this thing is going from the get-go.  The cinematography is dreary at best and Charles Rondeau’s direction is painfully wooden.

The good news is that the acting is more or less solid.  Elam is pretty memorable as the lecherous loverboy with a taste for homicide.  I also thought Halsey did an admirable job, all things considered.  He went on to star in the much better Return of the Fly later in the year.