Director Takashi Miike is an acquired taste; one that I freely admit I haven’t acquired.  While I thoroughly enjoyed the audacity of Audition, all the other Miike films that I have seen have been wildly uneven.  However I feel about his films, there is no denying that Miike knows how to make his audience squirm in their seat.  Gozu is far from Miike’s best but it definitely has several moments that will make you say “What the fuck?” out loud.

Ostensibly, the movie is about a meek yakuza foot soldier who is given the order to whack his deranged best friend because he’s slowly losing his marbles.  Long story short:  The body disappears and our hero gets trapped in a small town that makes Twin Peaks look like Mayberry.  Mostly though, the flick is just a bunch of weirdness for the sake of weirdness.

I mean five minutes into the movie a Chihuahua is taken by the leash and gets whirly-birded over someone’s head before it gets smashed into a plate glass window.  That right there should tell you that you’re in for some nutty shit.  Then there’s the guy who incessantly whines on the phone about how hot it is.  The next little bit of “HUH?” comes when a yakuza boss fucks a chick while she plunges a ladle into his ass with her foot.  Still not weird enough for ya, folks?  How about the lactating lady who begs dudes to suckle her teats?  Or how about the random screaming guy who takes a shit on the floor for no good reason whatsoever?

Then things start getting REALLY weird.

Gozu is one big long buffet of bizarreness.  It’s not exactly a “good” movie but I’ll be damned if it didn’t have it’s moments.  If Miike had paced the film at breakneck speed instead of just letting the “normal” scenes play on for forever; we may have had a classic on our hands.  However, Miike caulks the weird stuff and the boring stuff together so haphazardly that’s it’s liable to frustrate and confound even his most diehard fans.

Still, it gets an extra Half-Star for having the single most weirdest ending in the history of celluloid.  (SPOILER:  A chick shits a full-grown man out of her puss-hole.)

AKA:  Yakuza Horror Theater:  Gozu.

A new deluxe 2 disc DVD special edition of Gozu has just been released by Cinema Epoch.  In addition to a fine transfer of the film, they really jam-packed it with extras.  You get:  Behind the scenes footage, an essay by film critic Bill Gibron, a Miike interview featuring Eli Roth and Guillermo del Toro, featurettes, and a commentary track.  For more info, you should check out www.cinemaepoch.com ASAP.

After portraying the sleuthing Saint, George Sanders moved to RKO to take on the similar role of The Falcon.  This one is the first in the series.  And FYI, the title refers to his first name, “Gay” and not his sexual preference because he’s definitely a ladies man. 

The Falcon is engaged to be married and promises his bride-to-be to give up his crime-solving ways.  He takes a job as a Wall Street broker but is lured out of retirement to investigate a rash of jewelry thefts centering around a wealthy socialite.  When the jewel thieves frame The Falcon’s bumbling sidekick for multiple murders, Gay tries to clear his name and bring the villains to justice.

I’ve always been a fan of these 40’s B Movie Detective Programmers.  While The Falcon series lacks the panache of The Saint films, they nevertheless get the job done.  What really makes this one work is the charisma of Sanders as the smooth-talking, suave-ass, spinach juice-drinking Falcon.  He’s pretty much a pimp in this movie.  He has a flair for romantic comedy and is actually very funny when juggling his fiancé and a giddy groupie.

The plot leaves something to be desired.  There are no clever plot twists or anything, just The Falcon trying to get the goods on the bad guys.  That’s okay because you’ll be too busy relishing Sanders’ performance to notice the lack of surprises.

Sanders returned the next year in A Date with the Falcon.

After reviewing director John Sturges’ weak Ice Station Zebra yesterday, I decided to watch Sturges’ The Great Escape; one of the greatest fucking movies of all time.  The Great Escape has one of the best casts ever assembled.  Steve Muthafuckin’ McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Donald Pleasence, the list goes on and on. 

All these guys are prisoners in a Nazi POW camp.  After digging tunnels and acting cool as Hell for about two hours, they escape.  What did the kraut-eating sons-a-bitches expect when they put all those badasses together under one roof?

You know, I always go back and forth over which star-studded WWII Men on a Mission movie featuring Charles Bronson is better, this one or The Dirty Dozen.  I think I have to give The Dirty Dozen the edge because it’s a bit more action-centric.  Still, The Great Escape is one Hell of a good time.

Sturges directs the film with an invisible style.  He doesn’t do anything flashy; he just presents the material and has enough confidence in his actors to let them do their own thing.  Besides, with a cast this great, who needs to worry about shit like “motivation”?  Sturges’ only direction must’ve been, “OK, act like a badass annnnnd… ACTION!”

And what a cast of badasses we have.  McQueen simply gives the best performance of his career.  He’s never been as cool as he is here.  The motorcycle finale is all kinds of awesome and what makes it so great is the fact that McQueen did nearly all of his own stunt diving.  Garner is also outstanding as the smooth-talking “Scrounger”.  I particularly liked the scene where he vouches for the blind Pleasence and vows to keep an eye on him throughout the escape.  Pleasence’s inevitable fate is tragic and both he and Garner are terrific in their final scene together.  Bronson does a marvelous job as the tunnel digger who has severe bouts of claustrophobia.  Many critics wrote him off as being a “Stone Face”, but he gives a fully three-dimensional performance in this movie.  The scene where the lights get turned out on him while he’s in the tunnel is unforgettable. 

On top of the impeccable cast, Elmer Bernstein delivers one of his finest scores.  It’s definitely among the best in film history.  You’ll be whistling that shit days after you watch the flick. 

McQueen, Bronson and Coburn were also in Sturges’ excellent The Magnificent Seven.

The Great Escape is Numero Uno on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of the Year 1963.

I’m not the biggest Charlie Chaplin fan in the world (I’m more of an Abbott and Costello man myself) but I thought it was high time for me to check this flick out.  The only other Chaplin film I’ve seen was The Great Dictator and I enjoyed it immensely, so I figured that this one would go down smooth.  While I had a couple of quibbles with the film, overall it was thoroughly entertaining.

The Little Tramp goes out prospecting for gold in the icy Klondike where he meets these two burly looking motherfuckers who let him stay in their shack.  They almost go hungry during the long winter and the Tramp resorts to eating his boot.  When the weather warms up, he heads into town where he meets this dance hall dame and falls head over heels in love with her.  At first, she doesn’t give the Tramp the time of day but she eventually falls in love with him when he becomes a millionaire big shot.

The first act of The Gold Rush features more classic comedy than you can shake a stick at.  There’s a great scene where The Little Tramp tries to leave the shack in a howling windstorm and promptly gets blown out the back door.  Then of course, there’s the immortal scene where he eats his boot for supper.  We also get a funny scene where his roommate gets so hungry that he hallucinates and imagines the Tramp has turned into a giant chicken.

For me, the flick kinda slows down once the Tramp falls in love.  The laughs certainly dry up during this portion of the film, that’s for damn sure; although we do get the immortal “Dinner Roll Dance” scene.  The finale where the Tramp’s shack is dangling on the edge of a cliff almost makes up for the lulls in between the laughs though.

The Gold Rush still has enough yucks for the bucks to place it on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Silent Movies of All Time List at Number 9, right in between The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Maciste in Hell.

Harlan (Keith Szarabajka) is a septuagenarian janitor who gets zapped by a mysterious explosion at a top secret government installation.  His eyes and ears start glowing green and before you know it, he begins to gradually get younger.  A hitman (R.D. Call) from the government agency “The Shop” wants to erase Harlan and his doting wife (Frances Sternhagen) but a rival agent (Felicity Huffman) breaks protocol and helps them escape.

This weak ass Stephen King mini-series is kinda like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Meets The Fugitive.  That’s kind of a half-assed description I know.  Then again, everything about Golden Years seems half-assed now that I think about it, so fair is fair. 

On top of that, the lethargic pacing will put you to sleep in no time flat.   The dialogue scenes were stretched out to infinity to get this sucker to fit in an 8 hour time slot (6 minus the commercials.)  At one point a phone conversation is more or less repeated (albeit in different locations) within two consecutive scenes just to keep the clock ticking.  Let’s face it folks, there was barely enough story here for 80 minutes, let alone 8 hours.  That’s a third of my day down the tubes.

The mind-numbing length was a bit much for me to handle but I’m a die hard King fan so I pretty much forced myself to get all the way through Golden Years.  It’s more Science-Fictiony than most of King’s work, although the Sci-Fi elements are really left unexplored. What’s worse is that there’s not one single thing scary about this junk.  Unless you consider such horrific sights as two old people showering together, fornicating, and singing annoying songs on long car trips “scary”.  At least you get to hear David Bowie’s great song “Golden Years” a bunch of times, so that’s a plus.

Szarabajka (good luck with THAT Spell Check) is OK but he’s just really not a leading man.  He doesn’t have what it takes to carry such a long ass mini-series.  Sternhagen fares better as his caring wife who stands by her man as he gets youth-anized.  As the villains, Bill Raymond is pathetically over the top as Dr. Toddhunter, the mad scientist who invented the youth restoring doohickey thingamabob and Call is just way too dull to make a convincing heel. 

King created Golden Years so I guess he should take most of the blame for this sorry excuse for a mini-series.  He also has a cameo as bus driver, which is sorta funny.  His dialogue is pretty weak in this, but he did type up one memorable line:  “It’s just a bit of manmade freakishness… that’s all.”

A bunch of gay and lesbian couples stay at a rundown bed and breakfast owned by a crazy woman who worships George W. Bush… literally.  The crazy proprietor also has a lezbo daughter who has eyes for the female guests.  Her mad mamma has other plans for her though; namely scaring one lucky gay guy straight so that they can mate.  There’s also a rabid half redneck-half maggot monster roaming the grounds who munches down on several horrified homosexuals.

You know, I could see where The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror MIGHT have been good.  It’s got a pseudo-Troma vibe coupled with a whacked out premise.  Too bad the kills are all weak and the effects look like they came from a Hot Topic Halloween half-off sale.  I mean the Maggot Guy looks like he’s wearing a sleeping bag covered in Nickelodeon Slime for Christ’s sake.  Plus, most of the scenes of “Terror” are just gratuitous shots of guys wearing ass-less leather chaps.

What’s worse is that this movie runs 108 freaking minutes.  Seriously.  No direct-to-DVD horror movie needs to be any longer than 90 minutes.  Most would be better off at 75 minutes.  This one just goes on and on and on.  And just when you think it’s over, it isn’t.  Then they start with the flashbacks.  By the time the stupid “twist” ending comes about, you’ll be scrambling for the STOP button.

The 70’s was full of sketch comedy movies.  Some of these, like Kentucky Fried Movie are great.  Most of them are hit and miss.  The Groove Tube falls into the latter category.

The film gets off to an inauspicious start with an obvious and not very funny 2001 parody.  Then we’re treated to a kid’s show host named Koko the Clown who reads dirty book excerpts during “Make Believe Time” as well as a stupid cooking show send-up,   There’s also a film-within-a-film called “Dealers” (which features a random trippy animation scene for no apparent reason whatsoever) that is completely devoid of laughs.

The Groove Tube may contain a lot of long laughless lulls but when it is funny, it’s really funny.  My favorites sketches included a brutally honest Barbie commercial, a clever variation on “Let Your Fingers Do the Walking” phone book ads, and “The Sex Olympics”; which is more or less just a stag movie with hilarious sports commentary.  The VD awareness spot made me laugh pretty hard too.

I guess the most important part of the movie is the fake news broadcast.  While it’s not really all that funny (although I did like the part where they used scenes from Radar Men from the Moon as footage from a Russian missile launch), it should be noted that this is basically where Saturday Night Live stole the idea for Weekend Update from.  SNL even stole co-star Chevy Chase from this movie too.

The Groove Tube has a mercifully short running time (71 minutes) which helps, but far too many of the sketches go on a lot longer than they should have.  The flick could’ve used some more ruthless editing, although I still don’t think it would’ve mattered much.  A few of the sketches are filled with gratuitous nudity (including porn star Jennifer Welles), so that was nice.

Director Ken Shapiro later re-teamed with Chase for the underrated Modern Problems.

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.

I got this movie off of Netflix ostensibly because it’s about a giant mutant killer sheep.  Sounded promising enough.  Too bad most of this boring ass movie revolves around a corrupt mayor.

Anyway, this mayor guy goes around rolling drunks and using their money for the betterment of his community.  He also hassles a black dude and accuses him of murdering the sheriff’s dog!  When the persecuted person of the African persuasion escapes during a near-lynching, he takes solace in the lab of a hermit scientist who is housing a huge-ass mutated sheep.  The enormous ewe escapes and inadvertently causes the death of one of the potential lynchers.  This gets the mayor all in a tizzy so he has the beast herded up and stuffed in a cage where it is put on display for the angry townsfolk.  In the end, there’s a big riot and the monster inexplicably blows up for no good reason whatsoever.

Why the filmmakers spent so much time on the damn mayor subplot I’ll never know.  I mean the giant killer mutant sheep premise seemed like a solid enough idea to warrant a full-length movie.  What’s the point of coming up with a cool ass idea and ruining it by padding the flick with tons of stupid racist mayor shit?  And why on Earth would you make a movie about a bipedal monster sheep and then have the cajones to only let it ACCIDENTALLY kill ONE person?  If that had been me behind the camera I would’ve sent that sucker on an all-out rampage.  The only scene worth a toss in this 90 minute shit storm is when a bunch of cowboys lasso the monster Valley of Gwangi style.

Co-stars Stuart Lancaster and Erica Gavin were also in a bunch of Russ Meyer movies.  Russ would’ve taken the idea of giant mutant killer sheep and ran with it.  He probably woulda put a whole lot of titties in there too. 

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.  

The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini was the final AIP Beach Party movie and wouldn’t you know it, it features none other than Boris Karloff!  The producers couldn’t afford Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello so they got Tommy Kirk and Deborah Walley instead.  They also couldn’t afford to film on the beach either, but there is a brief pool party.  I know what you’re thinking:  No Frankie, no Annette, and no beach… so how the heck is this a damn Beach Party movie?  Your guess is as good as mine.  But hey, did I mention Boris Karloff is in it?

Boris plays a recently deceased corpse who has to do a good deed in 24 hours in order to get into heaven.  Since his million dollar fortune is in the process of being swindled by a greedy lawyer (Basil Rathbone), Boris decides to help the rightful heirs get the money.  Boris enlists the aid of his old flame; a ghost (Susan Hart, wife of producer James H. Nicholson) who goes around in her invisible bikini influencing things. 

Yep it’s another one of those stupid Fake Haunted House Deals Where People Dress Up as Monsters to Scare Away Relatives Entitled to a Million Dollar Will movies, complete with a gorilla on the loose and a “Chamber of Horrors” wax museum.  The imbecilic screenplay is filled with a barrage of lame sight gags and depressingly stupid jokes that weren’t even funny back in the 60’s.  The titular “Invisible Bikini” is a gyp and a half too because you never see the chick’s titties underneath.  It’s more like one of those camouflagey “invisible” deals.

I’ve never seen any of the Beach Party movies before and this one didn’t necessarily make me wanna rush out and see any of the others.  Since I’m a huge Karloff fan, it was my solemn duty to sit through it.  Sadly Boris isn’t given much to do and is kept on the same crumbling crypt set throughout the whole movie.  Rathbone looks thoroughly embarrassed and barely escapes with his dignity intact.  Despite being the “star”, Tommy Kirk is hardly even in the movie and quickly gets lost in the shuffle.  Nancy Sinatra also shows up looking all kinds of hot and sings one forgettable song.  The sexiest chick in the bunch however had to be Quinn O’Hara, the gal who played Rathbones’s voluptuous nearsighted daughter.  She also sings a tune but I wasn’t listening; I was too busy ogling her goodies. 

The best part of the movie for me was seeing AIP’s old monster suits, sets, and props being recycled.  The gorilla named Monstro is the same gorilla suit from the cult classic Konga and the monster costume from Attack of the Eye Creatures also makes a cameo.  And you know, as dumb and corny as most of this is, the climax is lively, the final joke is actually kinda clever, and there is at least ONE funny line of dialogue:  “I can think of three reasons why they like her… 38, 24, 36!”

A gang of hotrodders lose their lease on their beloved garage. Even though they don’t have a place to store their custom hotrods, they still go to dances and have slumber parties.  When the gang hears about an old woman’s haunted house, they offer to rid the poltergeists from the abode and in exchange, the old bag lets them use the joint as their new clubhouse.  In the end, the gang holds a costume party in the haunted house (complete with dancing skeletons) where one of the kids invents a talking car that forces the ghost out of hiding.

Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is harmless and dumb but it moves along at a brisk pace and the scant 64 minute running time certainly helped.  The problem is that it takes 40 minutes before anyone MENTIONS Dragstrip Hollow or the ghost!  Till then you have to put up with a lot of unfunny comic relief (there’s a talking parrot), impenetrable hip jive talk (“Hop on it and blow!”), and terrible songs (there’s a song called “Geronimo” that’s basically “Tequila” except they say “Geronimo” and another similarly unoriginal song called “Charge”).

I think the thing that bugged me the most about Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow was that a lot of the flick’s running time was devoted to the gang TALKING about hotrodding and not actually doing it.  (There is one drag race that lasts about ten seconds.)  The mercifully brief running time was also victim of too much padding as there was an unending amount of boring teenage dance parties.  (At least one of them is a pajama party featuring cute chicks in lingerie.)  The performances are all pretty bad but what the teen cast lacks in talent, they more than make up for with enthusiasm.  (I particularly liked the hot geeky girl with glasses.)  If anything, the movie gives you a rare glimpse of man-in-monster-suit legend Paul Blaisdell without a mask on.

Best line:  “This place is loaded with ectoplasm isn’t it?”

Don Ready (Jeremy Piven) is a smooth-talking hired gun car salesman who is called in to save a privately owned dealership that’s on the verge of bankruptcy.  Together, he and his elite team of wheelers and dealers try to liquidate the entire inventory over the course of a three day Fourth of July holiday weekend.  Ready has to battle a lot of personal demons (he lost his best friend during a similar Lincoln’s birthday sale) in order to soldier forth and sell some cars.

Jeremy Piven has always been an actor I could take or leave.  In The Goods:  Live Hard, Sell Hard, I could take him.  What can I say?  He sold me.  The supporting cast is just as good.  Everyone from Ving Rhames to James Brolin to Charles Napier to muthafuckin’ Alan Thicke is in this movie.  What makes The Goods funnier than most comedies out there now is that it’s populated with “actors who are funny” instead of “comedians who can act”.  Sure, no one gives a shit about the predictable plot, but at least the actors commit 100% to their characters.  By having the actors play it straight, it makes it that much more funny.

I usually don’t like reviewing comedies.  My only rule for comedies is if it’s funny, it’s good (or “The Goods” I should say).  The Goods:  Live Hard, Sell Hard is really funny for an hour or so until it drops its transmission.  Although it runs out of gas in the third act, The Goods had enough laughs in it for me to recommend it.  Your mileage may vary though.  (Sorry about all the car puns.  It’s late, I’m tired, and I need to get my ass to bed.)

The Goods:  Live Hard, Sell Hard is bar none the best comedy about used car salesmen since the granddaddy of the genre, Used Cars.  It also contains some of the funniest dialogue you’ll hear all year.  My favorite was:  “On TV, when someone dies, they never show the poop leave the butt.”

PS:  Was it just me or did I just see full on pussy lips in an R rated movie?  Look closely during the scene in the strip club where Piven is getting a lapdance by the stripper who wraps her thighs around his head.  She’s wearing a see through black dress, but I swore I saw her hairless snatch in full gynecological detail for at least 5 seconds.  If anyone can deny or confirm this let me know…

I have a medical condition that only allows me to see one movie based on a toy from the 80’s per summer.  (This condition is called “Common Sense”.)  Since the first Transformers movie was complete ass, I thought I’d skip Revenge of the Fallen and see this instead. 

Now when I was a kid, I played with the G.I Joe toys, read the comics, watched the cartoons, and wore the pajamas.  (I didn’t have the lunchbox though.  I wish I did though.  That thing’s probably worth a mint now.)  It took toy manufacturer-turned-Hollywood-moguls Hasbro two decades to make a live-action movie of the Joes and while it wasn’t quite worth the wait, it has more than it’s fair share of moments.  As a man of 31, my movie-watching tastes are a little bit more refined than when I was 7 but to me, G.I. Joe:  The Rise of Cobra wasn’t too bad.

The plot of the movie is more or less the same as it’s always been:  G.I. Joe fights Cobra (except they aren’t called Cobra until the very end because they haven’t rose yet).  Because two decades have passed, the concept has been tweaked somewhat.  G.I. Joes are no longer “Real American Heroes” because some of them are from France and Morocco and Cobra is now more of a terrorist cell that dabbles in arms dealing than the fanatical cult I remember from the show.  Another change is that there is a lot of rap music on the soundtrack.

I’m proud to admit that I’ve always been more of a Cobra guy than a Joe fan.  Cobra always had the cooler vehicles and characters (save of course for Snake Eyes).  That’s why I felt a little disappointed by the film I guess.  Sure we see the “Rise” of Cobra and everything but it would have been a lot more entertaining to see them as an already established ass-kicking elite villainous organization instead of this Cobra:  Year One shit.

Nothing in the movie really resembles the G.I. Joes I grew up with.  Storm Shadow still wears white, Snake Eyes still wears black (albeit a latex suit), and Scarlett still has red hair.  Other than that, it seemed more like an X-Men movie than a G.I. Joe movie.  Consider:  We got two warring factions.  One is good and top secret (X-Men and G.I. Joe).  The other is bad and wants to destroy a historical monument (The Brotherhood and Cobra).  Each team member has a funny/stupid nickname and has their respective special ability or expertise.  Also, the way Duke is recruited (the Joes more or less save his ass) is similar to how Cyclops found Wolverine and the rivalry between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow is a lot like the back and forth between Wolverine and Sabretooth.  General Hawk even has a couple scenes where he rides around in a wheelchair, just like Professor X.

Director Stephen Sommers, who directed the wrongly neglected mini-masterpiece Deep Rising keeps hurtling more and more and more shit at the audience and a frenetic pace.  I don’t think there was five minutes that went by where something didn’t blow up.  This isn’t a criticism, just an observation.  G.I. Joe is the kind of movie where the bad guys aren’t content to just shoot people.  They have to shoot people at close range with the biggest fucking gun in the world that propels the guy’s body through the wall and down a bottomless cavern.  This is the kind of overkill I enjoy in an action movie.

Speaking of overkill, G.I. Joe features the most collateral damage I’ve ever seen in a movie.  There is this one scene where the Joes have to stop Storm Shadow and the Baroness from blowing up the Eiffel Tower, so they don these Super Soldier Suits that make them run real fast.  They hop and sprint around Paris smashing cars and slamming through storefronts causing untold millions in property damage, not to mention the lives of a couple hundred civilians.  If Cobra was really smart, they would’ve just drove around France and let the Joes chase them for a couple hours.  They would’ve caused more death and destruction that way and wouldn’t have had to mess around with those state-of-the-art missiles and stuff.

While we’re on the subject of carnage, I’d also like to state that G.I. Joe is probably the most violent PG-13 movie ever made.  Despite the aforementioned scenes of people getting senselessly blown away, there are also plenty of guys who die from sharp object trauma.  Ninja stars, arrows, and knives all wind up in some poor dope’s eyes and one unfortunate dude ends up with a forklift in his abdomen.  There are also a number of scenes where somebody’s face gets melted, stuck with two-inch needles, and burnt to a crisp.  Any day now I expect Hasbro to introduce G.I. Joe Face Salve. 

Sommers also packed this movie to the gills with flashbacks.  Seriously, G.I. Joe:  The Rise of Cobra has the most flashbacks in the history of cinema.  Folks, Rashomon didn’t have this many flashbacks.  Literally every major character has a deeply moving (to them anyway) flashback which clues the audience in on why they’re betraying so-and-so or sad about this-and-that.  Sommers also throws a random WTF Brendan Fraser cameo in there for good measure too.  Oddly enough, there is no flashback to explain why the Hell Fraser is in the movie though.  (The obvious answer:  Fraser starred in Sommers’ Mummy movies and wanted a cut of that Hasbro money.)

Naturally there is a set-up for a sequel at the end.  It’s probably the best part of the movie too.  That’s when we get to see Destro really become Destro and Cobra Commander really become Cobra Commander.  This scene is thoroughly awesome because it shows the audience that Cobra is through pussying around and ready to be the cool ass Cobra we all knew they could be.  The scene is twice as great as the end of Revenge of the Sith because there is not one but TWO dudes with horribly burned, infinitely fucked-up faces than don cool ass metal masks.  In fact, I think every movie should end that way.  Imagine how much better The English Patient would’ve been had Ralph Fiennes strapped on a freshly smelted metallic mask complete with breathing apparatus.  That shit would’ve been off the fucking chain.

Let’s talk about something that no one else has the balls to talk about in a G.I. Joe movie:  The performances.  Is it too early to say that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is gonna get the Oscar for his mesmerizing turn as Cobra Commander?  (Of course you have to wait until the very end until he says, “Call me… Commander!” but you get the idea.)  Hidden almost completely under a chintzy mask and spouting ridiculous dialogue, JG-L goes for broke and delivers a balls-out uncompromising performance of delirious campiness.  Hey, if Heath Ledger could get nominated for The Dark Knight, Levitt should get it for this.

The other performances well… I kinda didn’t really notice anybody else because most of the time I was ogling Sienna Miller.  I’ve never been much of a Miller fan but after seeing her mincing around with jet black hair, librarian glasses, and wearing a skintight leather outfit, well… it was enough to make my cobra rise if you catch my drift.  Almost as hot is Rachel Nichols as Scarlett.  She’s got the Ginger look going on and has some ample cleavage to boot.  In short, I’d like her to put that Kung Fu Grip of hers to work.

G.I. Joe also brings the Ninja genre back to the big screen quite nicely.  Although Snake Eyes’ and Storm Shadow’s ninja-ing is only limited to a few scenes, they do have some mighty fine ninja fights.  (The flashbacks of the two’s checkered past is also good for a hoot and a holler.)  They also get some of the best ninja dialogue since Sho Kosugi in Revenge of the Ninja.  Storm Shadow gets the best line of the movie when he tells Snake Eyes, “After the death of our master, you took a vow of silence.  Now you will die without uttering a word!”

Make no mistake, G.I. Joe:  The Rise of Cobra is borderline brain dead, idiotic, incoherent, sloppy, and just plain stupid.  Stuff blows up real good though every five minutes or so, so that’s a plus.  I can’t say I was exactly “entertained” but I certainly wasn’t bored.  I apologize if this review was all over the place.  Then again, the movie was all over the place too.  I just tried to tell you everything you need to know about the movie. 

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

(Note:  If you are a seven year old male and/or have ADD and/or drink Vault, add an extra star to this review.)

Gregory Peck is given the assignment to blow up some big ass Nazi gun turrets.  He along with explosives expert David Niven and Greek freedom fighter Anthony Quinn head on over to Navarone to make stuff go boom.  Along the way they are betrayed by some dumb broad and they have to show her what’s what.  After a lot of hemming and hawing, Peck and Co. finally disguise themselves as Nazis, plant some bombs and get the fuck outta Dodge.

The Guns of Navarone is one of those movies that I’ve always wanted to see but somehow never got a chance.  I finally DVR’ed it while I was boxing my office area up (my DVD den is going to be a nursery by the weekend) and I have to say I was a tad disappointed.  For one thing, at 158 minutes, this flick is waaaay too long.  Similar Men on a Mission Movies from the same era like The Dirty Dozen have inflated running times yet they use their time wisely to build up a bond between the characters so that you ultimately care about them.  The Guns of Navarone doesn’t really do that.  Maybe it was just because Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn aren’t nearly as cool and badass as guys like Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, and Jim Brown.  

While the film gets bogged down from time to time, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t cook when it has to.  There are a couple impressive gun battles that help spice things up whenever the doldrums set in.  Director J. Lee (Death Wish 4:  The Crackdown) Thompson films the action with panache so I can’t get too mad at him for padding out the film with idle chit-chat.  He went on to re-team with Peck for Cape Fear the following year.

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.

A bunch of bisexual bitches sit around on a sofa and have a lot of sex.  Then they plan a bank robbery before engaging in more fornication.  After successfully committing the robbery, they retreat home where they start up an orgy with a couple of strangers.  When one of the girls' boyfriends (who just so happens to work at the bank) threatens to go to the cops, they hogtie him, scald his feet with a red hot screwdriver and then stick his fingers in a toaster!

The Girl from Pussycat is a veritable carnal rollercoaster.  The gals have sex with their boyfriends (or each other) like every five minutes or so, so the flick definitely isn’t boring.  Even though the girls aren’t really lookers or anything, they certainly aren’t ashamed to crassly show off their bodies so I couldn’t really complain too much.

I can’t say it’s a “good” movie though.  For all of the scads of nudity found in The Girl from Pussycat, none of it is particularly titillating.  Most of the sex scenes are flatly staged and seemingly go on forever.  On top of that, none of the actresses really possessed that va-va-voom needed to make Little Mitchie happy.  So overall, it’s a pretty mixed bag. 

While I was watching this flick my wife said, “Why the Hell do you watch these Something Weird Double Features?  You know they’re never any damn good.”  I’m starting to agree with her.  This flick wasn’t too bad but the other movie on the disc; Kitten in a Cage was the pits.  So henceforth, I’m putting a momentary moratorium on all Something Weird movies.  If you see me attempting to put a Something Weird disc in my DVD player (except if it’s a certified classic like Basket Case, Blood Feast, or Johnny Firecloud or something like that), by all means report me to the proper authorities. 

Goke:  Body Snatcher from Hell is a weird ass Japanese movie that starts off like a bizarre version of Airport.  Birds start kamikazing themselves into the side of a passenger plane, then we learn there’s a bomb hidden in the plane, and to top it off, there’s a hijacker on board.  (Where’s Wesley Snipes when you need him?)  If that wasn’t bad enough, a UFO shoots the plane, causing it to crash.  And this is all before the opening credits, folks.

Even before the surviving passengers get their bearings, the hijacker takes off to the hills where he sees the glowing alien ship.  It invites him in and makes his head split open down the middle so that a slithering ooze monster can worm itself inside his brain!  It then possesses him and makes him a vampire that goes around picking people off and sucking their blood.  The monster chows down on everybody until only the goody two-shoes captain and a sexy stewardess are left.  They eventually defeat the fiend but then are left to deal with the inevitable alien attack.

Goke:  Body Snatcher from Hell is wildly uneven; however there is plenty of cool ass shit to recommend.  The model work for the airplane is awesome, as are the scenes where it flies against a very psychedelic looking red sky.  The practical effects are equally impressive.  The head-splitting scenes are amazing and the vagina-shaped scar down the guy’s forehead is pretty kickass too.  The slimy ooze monster is really groovy as well and the scene where it hops from host to host is reminiscent of The Hidden.  We also get some really juicy bird squishing shots in there for good measure.

The film’s biggest debits are the plethora of hateful characters and a particularly patchy second half.  That’s okay by me though because whenever the space vampire was sucking on people’s necks, it was damn good times.  Despite it’s obvious flaws, Goke:  Body Snatcher from Hell is an offbeat, colorful, and fun way to kill 84 minutes.  

Of all the subtitled dialogue, the line, “You’ve been spouting that Sci-Fi crap all day!” was my favorite.

AKA:  Body Snatcher from Hell.  AKA:  Goke the Vampire.  AKA:  Vampire Gokemidoro.

When I was 14, I was into anime for all of about 3 months.  I picked up Vampire Hunter D and Keiko Kamen and loved the fact that they were ultraviolent cartoons that featured a lot of (animated) nudity.  I quickly came to realize though that there were far sleazier live action movies that featured real chicks getting naked, so I dropped the anime habit like a dead hooker.  That was long before Ghost in the Shell came out in 1996.  Ghost in the Shell was supposed to be the big movie that got mainstream audiences into anime.  It didn’t; but it went on to influence the guys who did The Matrix, and that flick helped to spread the anime gospel with the creation of the Animatrix cartoon.

The story centers around Motoko, the cyborg leader of Section 9, a special police force.  She and her team have to search the city for a mysterious hacker known only as the “Puppet Master”.  Or something like that.

Look, I’m just not an anime kinda guy, so a lot of Ghost in the Shell just didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  The plot simultaneously had too much and not enough going on.  Although the movie looked cool visually and featured scads of animated nudity, the story wasn’t involving enough to hook me.  Plus, my mind was about to go nuts from all the senseless techno-babble the characters spouted endlessly.  The ill-fitting, flatly-read, American-dubbed line readings didn’t help matters much either.

Best line:  “If you’re still alive, get off your ass and arrest those garbage men!”  

AKA:  Shell Mobile Force.

If you are looking for a good documentary about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, then look elsewhere.  Despite the title, Guerrilla:  The Taking of Patty Hearst is more about the formation of the SLA and how they used the Hearst kidnapping to serve their own needs.  If anything this documentary shows just what a bunch of fucking idiotic jackasses the SLA were. 

First off, they’d brag about helping black convicts escape prison (the SLA considered them “political prisoners”) and then they turn around and murder Oakland’s first black school superintendent.  Makes a lot of sense doesn’t it?  Or how about after they kidnap Patty, they make her old man start a “charitable organization” to feed the poor?  They say it’s their way of “playing Robin Hood”.  I call bullshit on that because if they really wanted to do charity work, they would’ve gone out and started the organization themselves and not resorted to kidnapping and terrorist activities.  The best part though is when one of the smug ex-SLA members swears up and down that he didn’t know anything about one of the SLA’s murders and then shortly after the interview was conducted; we see him being found guilty of the crime in a court of law. 

Guerrilla held my interest for the most part throughout its 90 minute running time.  The shitty thing is that we never get to hear from Patty herself.  (We do get to hear the tapes she made while with the SLA and see her in archived footage though.)  Since Patty never gets to tell her side of the story, the film consequently raises a lot more questions than it answers.  Oh well, I guess she was too busy starring in a John Waters movie or something.  If anything, this documentary is a unique time capsule of an age where dirty stupid hippies could murder and rob banks and still think they were “the good guys”.  

AKA:  Neverland:  The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

After losing his job at Universal Studios, special effects make-up master Jack (Frankenstein) Pierce went on to do odd assignments for cheapie 50’s movies like The Brain from Planet Arous, I Bury the Living, The Amazing Transparent Man, and this turd.  Pierce’s make-up for the hulking undead Spanish Conquistador is pretty sweet and is easily the best thing about the movie.  It’s a shame the rest of the movie is so bad.

An archeological dig in the small town of Devil’s Crag uncovers the body of a tall (I’m sorry but I refuse to call this guy a “giant”) Spanish Conquistador.  It doesn’t take long for the spiteful Spaniard to resurrect itself and go to work chopping up the townsfolk.  In the end, the jackass archeologist tosses the “giant” into a waterfall.

You have to sit around and watch a lot of cinematic thumb twiddling before you get to see the goddamned monster do his thing.  Even then, it’s really not worth the wait.  All of the townspeople are idiots and pretty much deserve what they get.  I mean at one point when the lynch mob gathers to try to kill the monster at the height of its reign of terror, the townsfolk stop everything they’re doing and sit around and drink coffee!  Fucking morons.

To prove my point of just how idiotic the townspeople are, here’s a sample of their dialogue:  “You haven’t heard of the legend of the curse?”  Look, either your town has a Legend of the Killer Conquistador or it has a Curse of the Killer Conquistador.  You can’t have both.  “The Legend of the Curse of the Killer Conquistador“ is just redundant.  Not to mention stupid.

Director Richard E. Cunha, who was also responsible for the much more fun Frankenstein’s Daughter, paces the movie like an asthmatic snail.  It also doesn’t help that the performances are mostly all bad and every guy has that smug, square-jawed, 50’s asshole look to them.  I did like the crazy cackling Indian who warns the white folk though.  That guy was great.  Too bad he ends up on a meat hook.

AKA:  Giant from Devil’s Crag.  AKA:  Giant from Diablo Point.  AKA:  The Diablo Giant.

Chuck Norris stars in this tepid action flick that doesn't do a good job at showcasing his strengths; namely Kung Fuing the Hell out of people.  After a cool title sequence, we see Chuck's platoon getting ambushed in Vietnam.  Years later, he returns home and becomes a professor who wears likes to wear black turtlenecks.  Pretty soon, Chuck finds out that someone is bumping off all of his former Nam buddies and he teams up with a sexy reporter (Anne Archer) to find out who's doing the bumping.

Ted (Beneath the Planet of the Apes) Post's flat direction looks more in tune with a TV movie or something than an honest to goodness chopsocky flick.  Most of the action scenes suffer from a really cheap look (especially the Vietnam sequences) and often look blurry and/or dark.  The great supporting cast (which includes James Franciscus, Dana Andrews, and Jim Backus) is completely wasted and are given very little screen time.  The worst crime the movie commits though is that it's just plain boring.  It also takes FOREVER for action to heat up.  I mean Chuck doesn't even show off his Kung Fu prowess until about 70 minutes into the movie.  What's up with that?  Chuck would later pull off the whole bitter Nam vet thing much better in Missing in Action.

You can get a couple laughs from some of the film's glaring ineptness.  Like the opening titles that proudly proclaim, "Chuck Norris IS John T. Booker!"  Like the filmmakers meant for this to be the first in a series or something.  Also there's a great scene at an airport where Chuck's mystery assailant's identity is painfully obvious to everyone BUT Chuck.  (The dude just has on a wig and phony beard.)  There is one amazingly ludicrous scene that just has to be seen to be believed though.  It comes when Chuck drop kicks a guy through the windshield of a speeding car.  If the flick had two or three more inspired scenes of carefree nuttiness, it might've been worthwhile.

Chuck naturally gets the best line in this one when he says, "Everything went wrong by the numbers... and that takes planning!"

AKA:  Black Fighter.

Rick Sloane, the man who gave the world Hobgoblins wrote, produced, edited and directed this low budget tripe.  It’s all about a stripper (Julia Parton) and a mousy secretary (Renee Estevez) who are wrongly accused of murder and go on the lam with a suitcase full of cash.  They are pursued by the cops, a jealous boyfriend (Christopher Knight from The Brady Bunch) and a bitchy crime boss (Mary Woronov) and set out to clear their names.

Good Girls Don’t has its moments (like the scene where Parton makes a catapult out of her D Cup brassiere), but I have to emphasize the word MOMENTS.  Most of said moments revolve around Parton taking off her top and showing off her amazing knockers.  Although Julia’s pretty hot in this and gets naked a few times, her performance isn’t quite in the same league as her role in Night Trips 2.

Most of Good Girls Don’t is alarmingly stupid and banal.  I fell asleep on it last night and it took a lot of effort for me to finish watching it this afternoon.  Then again, that’s what I get when I try to watch a movie starring Charlie Sheen’s sister and Dolly Parton’s porn star cousin.  Just like her more famous kinfolk, Julia sings two songs in this flick, the decent title song and a so-so blues number in a jail cell.

Some other Julia Parton flicks you might enjoy:  Big Tit Orgy 3, Heavenly Hooters, and Foot Bottom Festival.

A young David O. Selznick produced this mostly amusing Wheeler and Woolsey comedy, based on a musical by George and Ira Gershwin.   A wealthy playboy opens up a dude ranch in a small Wild West town that’s infamous for having its sheriffs murdered in record time.  He hires his pal Slick (Robert Woolsey) to open up the gambling hall and Slick nominates his dim-witted chauffeur Jimmy (Bert Wheeler) as the new sheriff, just so he can get killed and Slick can get out of paying his bloated taxi fare.

The filmmakers wisely focused on the comic antics of Wheeler and Woolsey instead of the music and in turn, the flick is sprinkled with some fine moments for the team.  There’s a funny scene in which the boys dress up as Indians (“I’m an Apolis Indian from Indianapolis!”) and the climax where Woolsey tries to hypnotize a murderous cowpoke into not killing him is pretty clever too.  But my favorite part came when a dummy of a motorcycle cop got attached to the back of Wheeler’s taxi and dragged behind the car.  When a REAL motorcycle cop follows the duo, Woolsey does everything he can to get rid of the “dummy”.  Hilarity ensues.

Sure the flick has its share of good stuff, but it has equal amounts of doldrums.  The plot had a lot of potential, yet director William A. Seiter doesn’t really do a whole lot with the western setting.  Thankfully, the songs this time around are pretty tolerable.  What really stops the film cold though is Wheeler’s annoying little sister whose whiny voice will get on your nerves fast. 

The female Pony Express rider gets the best line when she says, “I take care of all the mails around here.”  (Get it, cuz it sounds like “males”?)

F.Y.I.:  Seiter later went on to direct films for The Marx Brothers (Room Service) as well as Abbott and Costello (Little Giant).  Look fast for a young Lon Chaney Jr. as one of the cowboys.

Sinbad (Diabolik’s John Phillip Law) steals a golden amulet from a winged beastie and starts having visions of an ultra-hot belly dancer (played by the ultra-hot Caroline Munro).  Turns out the amulet belongs to a wicked Prince (Tom Baker from Doctor Who) who likes to chuck fireballs at people.  Sinbad then teams up with a guy in a golden mask (a victim of the Prince’s fireballs) to find some treasure and get pursued by the evil Prince.

The second Ray Harryhausen Sinbad adventure lacks the charm and fun of 1958’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.  (So wait, does this mean this is The EIGHTH Voyage of Sinbad?)  I’ll admit that I’ve never been a Sinbad kind of guy, but I do have an immense respect for Harryhausen’s excellent special effect work.  In this flick, Harryhausen gives us a flying griffin, a living wooden figurehead, a sword-slinging six-armed statue, and a rampaging centaur.

None of these really qualify as Harryhausen’s best work though.  Maybe it’s just because I’m partial to Harryhausen’s giant monsters from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (especially the Cyclops), but all of the monsters in Golden are kinda small and  none of them really wowed me like they should’ve.  (Sure, the centaur in this movie is big, but it’s not THAT big.)  Sinbad’s swordfight with the six-armed statue was cool; it’s just too bad you have to sit through a lot of boring stuff to get to it.  Blame it on director Gordon Hessler (who later went on to helm the infamous KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park) who let all the stuff that didn’t involve stop-motion monsters drag, making the flick something of a chore to sit through. 

All in all, the best special effect in the film was Munro and her heavenly bosom.  Dressed in extremely skimpy outfits with her boobies halfway hanging out, Munro will definitely get your pulse a-racing and her lovely form compensates somewhat for the sluggish pacing.  Of the rest of the cast, Baker made for a decent villain and Law was certainly the swarthiest of all the screen Sinbads, but that’s about all I can say for him. 

Harryhausen returned three years later for the third and final Sinbad movie, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

A group of vastly different strangers are dropped off at a deserted train station and are stuck there overnight.  The gloomy station master warns them that the place is haunted by a spectral locomotive and advises them to scat.  The group sticks around though and is menaced by eerie noises, murdered corpses, and of course, the titular train.  As it turns out, the “ghost” is just a legend perpetrated by some Nazi smugglers to keep people out of their business.

The Ghost Train is a comedic horror movie that was originally a stage play.  Director Walter Forde builds up a modicum of suspense during the early train sequences.  The camerawork is surprisingly fluid in these scenes and prevents things from getting too cramped and claustrophobic.  Once the action shifts to the abandoned train station however, the proceedings start to feel more and more stage-bound and the movie begins to flag.  Most of the middle section of the flick has the cast sitting around and waiting for something to happen.  Unfortunately, so does the audience.  The ghost story the station master orates is pretty creepy though as is the final shot of the “real” train running off the tracks.

Comedian Arthur Askey stars and is kinda funny, although he does sing a thoroughly annoying song.  At least he gets some pretty good lines like, “Why should I get old-monia?  I’ve already got pneumonia!” 

Dr. Sexus, a low rent Fu Manchu type villain wants to get his hands on a pill that makes people invisible so he hires a hot assassin named Poontang Plenty, Agent 0069 to steal the formula from an absent-minded scientist.  The scientist’s hot assistant becomes invisible and sneaks in to Sexus’ lair to retrieve the formula but she gets captured when the pill unexpectedly wears off.  It’s then up to the bumbling scientist to take his own formula in order to save his sultry secretary from the clutches of Sexus.

Since it was 1966 and James Bond Mania was in full swing, a super spy sex movie just had to happen.  The Girl from S.I.N. is the kind of movie that defies criticism.  (Although one complaint that I did have with the film was that it was a little light in the nudity department.)  Here’s a laundry list of stuff to expect from this movie.  If you like more than half of the stuff that’s on this list; then I’d say you’ll probably like the film.

Low budget James Bond rip-offs.  If you like James Bond movies where the girls have funny names, then you’ll like this flick.  Even though she’s a villainous spy, Poontang Plenty is still one of the greatest names never used in a James Bond movie.

Foot fetishes.  There’s a L-O-N-G pre-title sequence in which Poontang Plenty pours champagne on a guy’s feet and sucks on his toes before sticking him in the back of the neck with her hairpin.  If you have a foot fetish, you’ll more than likely bust a nut before the credits even start.

Constant narration.  Do you like black and white nudie flicks from the 60’s that are shot silently and have tons of pointless narration?  Well in The Girl from S.I.N., the narrator can’t even pronounce simple second grade words.  (He calls a “laser beam” a “lasser beam”.)  The results are often hilarious.

Naked photo shoots.  Do you like scenes of horny photographers taking pictures of nude models?  Well, you’ll eat this movie up.  The highlight of the nude modeling scenes comes during a photo session for a milk ad where a naked chick gets photographed drinking a glass of milk suggestively.  Man, those milk moustache ads they have today aren’t nearly as effective as the ones in this movie.

Low budget mad scientist movies.  This flick has a mad scientist “laboratory” that consists of one table, a microscope, and an anatomy chart.  Like every other set in the movie, it’s basically a redressed hotel room.

Kung fu.  The Girl from S.I.N. features a karate chopping belly dancer assassin who smashes boards with her bare hands.  She also uses her karate moves on one guy, but that’s about it.

Low budget Invisible Man movies.  This movie features an invisible woman and since the budget was non-existent, the special effects of her becoming invisible are nothing more than jump cuts.  Plus, there are shots of doors opening and closing to signify to the audience that the “invisible” woman just left the room.  Predictably, there are also fight scenes where actors have to fight an “invisible” man and have to pretend that they’re getting beaten up.  Funny stuff. 

Light S & M.  There is a scene where a chick gets tied up and abused.  It’s not much, but hardcore bondage freaks should get off on it.

If you like any or all of these things, then you should enjoy The Girl from S.I.N.  For me, the film needed a tad bit more nudity in order to get the *** treatment.  Your mileage may vary however.

The previews made Gran Torino look like Grumpy Old Death Wish, but there is a lot more going on than just that.  Even though it’s kind of a bait-and-switch, I really didn’t mind.  Would I’ve loved to see Clint Eastwood pulling a Charles Bronson and wiping out gangbangers with a Wildey?  Sure.  Am I glad that the flick was actually a sincerely moving character piece about a crotchety old curmudgeon who says racial slurs as much as he says the word “the”, who actually learns to care about his “gook” neighbors?  Abso-fucking-lutely.

What goes down is Walt Kowalski (Clint) is pissed because his wife just died.  He’s pissed that his sons are pussies and that his grandkids text message during funeral services, wear belly button rings and have no goddamn manners.  He’s pissed that he’s got Asian neighbors.  He’s pissed that a snot nosed priest wants to him to give confession.  Basically, he’s just pissed and drinks Pabst’s Blue Ribbon like it’s going out of style. 

Walt also has a badass ’72 Gran Torino and when his teenage Asian neighbor Thao (Bee Vang) tries to steal it during a gang initiation, Walt gets even more pissed.  When the gang retaliates and tries to beat the snot out of Thao, Walt brings out his service rifle and threatens to blow them away.  Not because they were going to beat the kid up you understand, but because they were on his lawn. 

Afterwards, Thao’s family thanks Walt and gives him gifts and stuff, but since he’s perpetually pissed off, he hoots and hollers a lot.  One day Thao’s sister, Sue (Ahney Her) invites Walt for a barbeque.  Walt declines because he’s pissed off, but when he finds out they got beer he says okay.  Then he learns that “gooks” are pretty cool people because they don’t eat dogs like he thought they did.  Soon, he and Thao are hanging out and Walt starts teaching Thao how to be a real man by doing Bob Villa type shit and spouting out racial expletives at Italians. 

Then the gang burns Thao’s face with a cigarette.  Walt gets pissed off so he smashes in a gangbanger’s face.  Then the gang rapes Sue.  This gets Walt REALLY pissed. 

I won’t tell you the rest, cuz Eastwood the director does a really nice twist on the expected Death Wish scenario that brings a touching closure to not only the film but to his character as well.  I also appreciated how Walt still remained his usually crusty self after he became friends with his neighbors.  A lot of movies would’ve pussied out and made their hero less of a potty mouth, but Gran Torino is more realistic.  And that’s essentially why Gran Torino works so well.  It doesn’t insult the audience intelligence.  It knows that 80 something year old dudes don’t change overnight and the fact that Walt actually starts to connect with his neighbors is character development enough. 

I’ve read a lot of reviews that label Walt as a racist, but I think that’s unfair.  Walt hates EVERYBODY.  Even the people that Walt can kinda sorta tolerate like his barber; he calls them a “Dago” and stuff.  He’s not a racist, just an equal opportunity offender equipped with a top notch Bullshit Detector.  It’s just his defense mechanism.  Thao and Sue actually break down that wall and once he starts to like them, Walt becomes something of a father figure to them.  

One small complaint I did have with the flick is that sometimes it hammered home a couple points redundantly.  Like the scene where Walt’s in the bathroom during the barbeque and he says, “I have more in common with these people than I do my own family!”  Duh.  We know that.  We can that see for ourselves Clint.  I’ll let Clint slide on this though since this movie is mostly aimed at the 60+ crowd who need every little thing spoon fed to them.

Okay, so that’s one tiny thing I didn’t like about the movie.  Let’s talk about the good shit.  And by good shit I mean Clint.  Clint IS the whole show.  His character is in nearly every scene and man is he ever awesome in this flick.  It’s easily one of his best performances of his career, and that’s saying something.  He’s definitely going to give Stallone a run for his money for Best Actor come Video Vacuum Award time. 

Also, the man sings his own fucking theme song.  It sounds like Keith Richards ate a mouthful of glass.  In short, put that fucking shit on your ipod NOW. 

I would nominate the line “Get off my lawn!” as the best line of the flick, but I have to say Clint’s growl in this movie says it all.  Every time somebody rubbed him the wrong way (which is about every five minutes); he would let out this disgruntled growl that never failed to bring the house down.  Shit man, the audience was laughing more at this movie than any comedy I’ve been to this year. 

Another thing that made this movie great was that it made my wife cry at the end.  Not since the little Root Baby got tossed into the fireplace in Pan’s Labyrinth have I seen her bawl this much at a movie.  Definitely a great date movie. 

In short, Gran Torino shoots up to Number 7 on the Video Vacuum Top Ten, wedged in between Son of Rambow and Tropic Thunder. 

Speaking of prestigious honors, I should be announcing the nominees for the coveted Video Vacuum Awards around the first of February.  I would love to give them out on January 1^st, but since our theater never gets the Academy Awardsy type stuff until after the New Year, I’m going to hold off another month.  See you then…

June just graduated from high school and has no job prospects, so when her uncle (Huntz Hall of the Bowery Boys fame) has a heart attack, she readily agrees to take over his gas station.  To lure customers away from the bigwig gas station across the street, June and her sexy friends all wear skimpy clothes and fill people’s tanks in a very suggestive manner.  The rival station doesn’t like losing money to a bunch of girls so they send some hitmen to rough up the gals and their biker boyfriends come to their rescue.  When that doesn’t work, they have the oil company put an embargo on June’s station.  In the end, June and the girls make a plea to the big oil company to get their gas back.

Man, this movie is just as topical now as it was when it was released.  It’s every blue collar person’s dream.  I mean who hasn’t wanted to take on Big Oil head to head?  And since it’s girls in very skimpy outfits pleading the case of the working man, it makes it that much better.

In fact, Gas Pump Girls is better than you’d expect in just about every department.  There are all the double entendres about various automotive parts (like “crank shaft”, “lube job”, and “piston rods”), nudity, and dumb teenage hijinks you’d expect from a flick like this, but the film always goes that extra mile and tosses in an unexpected extra laugh or two.  And that scene where the girls learn how to pump gas is a classic.

The cast is better than average.  There’s Kirsten Baker (the chick who went skinny-dipping and never came back in Friday the 13th Part 2), Sandy Johnson (Michael Myers’ sister from Halloween), and Dennis (Van Nuys Blvd.) Bowen.  The funniest dude is Joe E. Ross from Car 54, Where Are You?  The scene where he did his familiar catchphrase, “Oooh!  Oooh!” when he saw the naked gas pumpers was flat out hysterical. 

Gas Pump Girls is a classic of its kind and while it has its slower patches here and there, it never fails to put a smile on your face.  And oh yeah, did I mention it was a MUSICAL!  Okay, so there’s only one musical number, but it’s truly great one and the soundtrack is filled with some excellent tunes as well.

The excellent ad campaign read:  “They give new meaning to the term ‘full-service station!’”

I have an admitted weakness for 80’s slasher movies that take place on a holiday.  While Graduation Day isn’t a holiday per se, it sure seems like a good enough day to hack up some teenagers to me.  In addition, it’s got a truly GREAT cast:  Christopher George from Pieces is the track coach, Michael Pataki from Rocky IV is the principal, and Return of the Living Dead’s Linnea Quigley and Wheel of Fortune’s Vanna White are the screamers. 

Graduation Day is all about a killer (who wears a fencing mask) bumping off the members of a high school track team.  The psycho holds the team responsible for the death of a loved one who died of exhaustion during a track meet.  The killer murders people by slashing throats, putting a sword through someone’s neck, decapitation, and tricking a guy into pole vaulting onto a bed of spikes.  We also get an ingenious scene where the killer puts a blade on the end of a football and throws it right into the abdomen of a jock.  There’s also a cool gimmick in which the killer uses a stopwatch to time his murders.

Nudity wise, there is one undressing scene that takes place in the girls’ locker room and a great scene where Linnea takes off her top while seducing her music teacher into giving her a passing grade.  There’s also a hilarious performance by a wonderfully cheesy 80’s band called Felony who sing a great song called “Gangster Rock”.  The ending, while a bit protracted features multiple returns from the dead by the killer, a Psycho-esque stuffed corpse, kung fu, AND a nightmare sequence.

If this feels less like a review and more of a laundry list of stuff that happened during the movie, I’m sorry.  Graduation Day exists solely to show off naked females and then have them murdered.  In this respect Graduation Day succeeds. 

If I really wanted to critique the movie, I’d tell you that the pacing is painfully slow, the red herrings are woefully obvious and some scenes are so dark that it’s hard to tell what’s going on.  I’d comment on the uneven performances and director Herb (Tomboy) Freed’s lack of style.  But what’s the point?  If you want to see teens being murdered on one of the happiest days of their lives while occasionally showing off their boobs, then Graduation Day will fit the bill for a night of harmless, brain dead entertainment.

Best line:  “The world is my toilet!”