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Reviews
Rollergator (1996)
Not so much a movie as it is a recording.
Plot summary: a girl tries to keep a puppet away from Joe Estevez, who wants it to exploit it to make money to keep his carnival open. I was able to glean this from other reviews because I really couldn't get that much information from the recording itself.
At least Joe Estevez was kind enough to shout all his unintelligible lines so you can make out the word "wiener" once in a while.
It seems like this movie was made by this method: 1. Donald Jackson went to his job as a janitor at a carnival and accidentally left his belt-buckle spy camera on the whole time. 2. He watched it and thought it seemed kind of boring so he dubbed loud acoustic guitar music over the whole thing. 3. He added credits and called it a movie.
I don't know whether you'd call this a spoiler or not, but the rollergator is a puppet that the main character carries around with her. It doesn't do any rollering. So the name is a bit of a reach. I would have gone with "Backpackpuppet" if I were in charge of naming it.
If you didn't know Joe Estevez was an actor of sorts who probably required payment, you could reasonably believe this recording was made for free. Maybe he didn't know he was in it. That would explain some things.
Still. A better love story than Twilight.
Boulevard (2014)
Great acting, good idea, not sure the intended message was delivered.
Williams was perfect and Kathy Baker was very good. The idea that a man finally has the courage (or lack of energy to carry on) to finally give up on the sham he's been living and be honest with himself and everyone else is challenging and sometimes the movie pulled at your heart. But I didn't feel much empathy for a fiftysomething man who feels entitled to have a relationship with an attractive twenty-year-old boy. It's one thing to be honest and quite another to use prostitutes out of some sense of entitlement. That's the sense I got at the end when a young man met him at a restaurant. A parallel to me would be if a heterosexual man told his wife, "I want to be honest and be my true self and sleep with cute young girl prostitutes for the rest of my life."
Big Ass Spider! (2013)
Fun, funny, self-assured.
The main character lacks some of the swagger of Bruce Campbell, but is still recklessly brave both when fighting spiders and hitting on women. His sidekick is hilarious and the two act inappropriately playful as they are nearly killed over and over. The best part of this silly film is the interaction between these two. The rest is (parodic?) science fiction tropes: the military taking over without explanation, the refusal to warn the public to avoid panic, the spider's screaming sounds, the ineffectiveness of the military weapons, the actions of the main players, etc. This could be any giant monster movie, except for the clever hero and sidekick bits. And there are a few funny news flashes that are fun. Don't get me wrong, it's very entertaining. I laughed and hooted quite a few times. What this has over syfy camp like Sharknado and Megashark vs Giant Octupus is that the characters in this movie are funnier and more self-aware a la Bruce Campbell, as opposed to the chest- thumping macho drones and generic screaming ladies in the syfy movies.
Kung Fury (2015)
Step Aside, Shoot 'em Up and Kung Pao, There's a New Kid in Town
OMG! Kung Fury is the best thing I've ever seen!
Go to youtube, search for kung fury, pick official movie, then go to 25:00 and watch the t- rex fighting the Nazi eagle for two seconds. That should win you over.
This thing is relentlessly sarcastically hilarious. Every moment is more over the top than the last. In the beginning, for no reason, an arcade game comes to life, starts shooting everyone, pulls a parking meter out of the ground, shakes a quarter out, INSERTS IT INTO ITSELF to keep going, then resumes the mayhem. The hero is hilariously macho. He fights Hitler. A hacker hacks a wormhole by cross-linking the subroutines or some BS. The cleverly absurd details come so fast, you have to rewind to digest them all.
This is a towering work of genius!
The Dark Power (1985)
If a zombie comes a long/You must whip it.
The "hero" of this movie is an 80-year-old park ranger who solves all problems by cracking a whip. The bad guys are a group of four Toltec zombies wearing hilarious masks. Except one. One of them looks like a party dude who does nothing but skillfully flip tomahawks in his hands.
Spoiler alert (this movie was already pretty spoilt, though):
The "plot" is four thirtysomething college girls rent a house together. The house has no phone and they don't have cars. Said house is located on a plot of land where some Toltec wizards are buried. They come to life and attack* the girls. Eventually, the girls kill 3 of them, and the fourth one ends up having a whip-off with the 80-year-old park ranger, which ends when the ranger whips the zombie's head off. *Attack = stand near them and shake and make grunting sounds while the girls scream
50% of the move is people complaining repeatedly and taking things that are neatly arranged and tossing them around. 25% is people explaining things to each other so the audience knows what's going on. The other 25% is comical chasing, grunting, and screaming. And whip-cracking. Dear Lord, the whip-cracking!
Along the way, the zombies kill a few guys and two of the girls. That sentence is actually more exciting and scary than the actual death scenes. Not to mention once the characters are killed, you completely forget they ever existed.
I put this movie somewhere above Suburban Sasquatch and below Birdemic in cinematic quality, plot, and writing.
The Roller Blade Seven (1991)
dafuq did I just see?
Some items of note:
A man in a suit jacket (no shirt), top hat, speedo and knee pads is doing tai chi in the middle of the desert when a bad Elvis impersonator shows up and has a nonsensical "conversation" with him.
An invisible man (or woman?) plays the banjo to an evil clown wearing pantaloons. You'd think this would be funny, but it's just depressing.
Scott Shaw, a very poor man's Nicolas Cage, tries to do Shatner, but comes across more like a kindergartner with a learning disability.
Once in a while, you kind of get the sense that something is happening.
You can never understand what anyone is saying because it sounds like construction was going on during filming. Except when Scott Shaw talks. Because he says one word every 5 seconds.
Half of the movie takes place in the LA Aqueduct.
Evil pantaloon clown awkwardly and fecklessly strikes a heavily-armored ninja guy with Nerf bats for a few minutes.
It's LARPing on rollerblades.
The soundtrack alternates between an off-balance washing machine and the drum tracks on a Hammond organ.
The real star of this movie is Allison Chase's backside.
All this, and it still manages to seem pretentious.
After Last Season (2009)
If Skydivers and Birdemic had a lovechild . . .
The producer procured 5 million (Zimbabwean) dollars and got a couple rolls of butcher paper donated and voilà! The world's 18th crappiest movie. Some people said it wasn't bad enough to be funny, but I beg to differ. The MRI machine is made of butcher paper. The MRI sound effects are produced by banging a stick on a table while the camera lingers lovingly on a wall--which is perhaps the most interesting and shocking thing that happens. The editing adds unexpected hilarity. Bloopers are left in so you don't have to waste time on the blooper reel! The "actors" check their scripts after forgetting lines so you know it's an accurate reading! If you've seen the Coleman Francis movie Skydivers, you'll have a good idea of the electricity the actors bring to the screen in After Last Season. If you've seen Birdemic: Shock and Terror, you already know how editing can add that extra pizazz. If you've seen a screen saver circa 1992, you've seen 20% of this movie already. And if you have Microsoft Movie Maker, you can probably make a better movie than this. But I bet yours won't be as funny.
Butter (2011)
It's half Hallmark-wholesome and half indie-edgy
There were some really funny moments in this film, but it couldn't decide whether it was trying to be a mushy, serious Touched by an Angel or a crass, edgy Little Miss Sunshine. In the end, it felt inconsistent. There was enough funny stuff in the first half hour that it's probably worth a watch, but it did seem to fall a fair bit short of what the beginning (and the amazing cast) promised. Olivia Wilde was very funny as the world-weary, cynical hooker riding around on her tiny BMX bike. The people involved in organizing the butter carving contests were amusingly bureaucratic and small-towny. And Jennifer Garner started out funny as the ambitious trophy wife of the talented genius, but as the movie went on, she became a strange mix of sympathetic and conniving that didn't make sense. Yara Shahidi was adorable and perfect in her role, but the movie tried to turn her into some sort of heroic icon, which was way too much of a stretch. It's possible that the mushy, heart-warming stuff was a send-up of the Hallmark/Lifetime movie genre, but I don't think so. I think it was just inconsistent.
Ticks (1993)
It covers most of the tropes, pretty clean, kind of OK
I thought this would be "so bad it's good" but it was just fine. Most movies of this type kill off all the characters one by one until just the hero remains. This one was nice enough to leave most of the cast intact. The characters: adults that don't listen to the kids, some local freaks that turn out to be a bigger problem than the ticks, a scholar, a whore, an athlete, a fool, and two virgins.
The film moves along at a reasonable pace. The music mostly makes sense. The acting is passable. The premise is the familiar chemicals- accidentally-cause-creatures-to-grow-giant.
There isn't any comedy. No winking. It plays the story perfectly straight.
There's no nudity, almost no sex, very little swearing, and even though there's a fair bit of gore, it's mostly familiar goop and throbbing bubbles that pop open.
I almost expected to find out at the end that it was made by a religious group trying to make a "wholesome" horror movie.
The Maize: The Movie (2004)
It's almost all padding.
This movie is really a showcase for the director/writer/star Bill Cowell to film himself walking around in a corn maze. He showed it so many ways! Shaky cam, side angles, crane shots, zoom, foot level, and even one time, the camera did an Immelmann! Granted, there is one hilarious moment where the killer clubs the main character's wife (see the "memorable quotations" section). Other than that, it's about 90 minutes of corn maze broken up by some digging.
Some fun things to notice: 1. Cowell re-uses some of the shots several times. 2. It's so dark that Shy (yes, that's really his name) needs a flashlight, but he actually uses camera light to see quite a bit of the time. Clever way to extend battery lift. 3. His wife has the patience of Job. She waits what appears to be like six hours while he runs around in the maze, comes out, runs back in, etc. If it were me, I would have just gone home after about three hours. 4. Shy works harder, not smarter. Almost any method of finding his daughters would have been be more efficient than randomly running around for hours. OK, so there's supposedly a supernatural force keeping him from finding them, but I think that's a stupid man's excuse. 5. Several times, the main character can hear his daughters, but he can't get to them even though the only thing between them is 20 feet of corn stalk. Other times he just runs through the corn stalks. He's got the memory of a goldfish. 6. Almost the only deviation from the corn maze running is when the main character stops to dig for a looooooong time. He really likes digging. Why is he digging for long periods of time when his daughters might be killed any moment? Curiosity.
The Room (2003)
Rocket-powered poop on a stick!
You know in the American knock-off movie Dinner for Schmucks, when Steve Carell's character is showing the dead mice in little dioramas and explaining them in hilariously incorrect ways? That's how this movie is. You can't believe he can do it and keep it up, but sure enough, he does! I would watch this movie once a week except every time I mention it, my wife becomes enraged. It's so complexly layered with fibers of feces that you have to rewind and replay each few minutes (except the sex scenes, which replay themselves) to catch all the nuances.
My voice is hoarse from shouting "What the hell?!" over and over. The screenplay seems to be a Mad-lib filled in by patients in an asylum. You can stare at Wiseau's face for minutes on end and still not understand how it is connected together. It's like his makeup artist is M.C. Escher.
About a minute into the movie, I get the giggles and they don't stop except when the confusion/badness/outrageousness level gets so high that I have to vent by begging for some sort of explanation.
Everything about it is perfect. The sincerity mixed with incompetence. The abject pathos of the autobiographical message mated with the apparently huge ego of the subject. The ambition compared to the final "output." As each moment is added to the pile, the silliness increases.
It's as if you're at a wedding and a bridesmaid has her skirt tucked into her underwear. It gets funnier and funnier the longer it goes on. And then someone farts. And you are trying so hard not to make any sound because the preacher is talking and he says "We are gathered her to salivate this holy headlock." Then the candles catch the bride's veil on fire. And then when they try to put the fire out, the bride starts doing push-ups. It's as if each event is more impossible than the last and there's no explanation, and all the while, you get this sense that someone went to the trouble of making it just like this because that's how he wanted it to be!
It truly is like sitting on an atomic bomb that's about to explode.
Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)
No error went uncommitted!
I can't decide whether to give 1 or 10 stars. I laughed far more at this than any of the newer so-called comedies coming out of Hollywood lately. The sound, the music, the editing, the acting, the casting, the writing -- all 100% maximally bad. What other movie can make you laugh at the main character just walking? I laughed at the driving scenes! I laughed at almost every line! It is exquisitely and precisely bad in every way and it's consistently bad all the way through! I find it hard to believe it isn't a prank pulled on us by a very sophisticated director, but there is no evidence that Nguyen has any idea what he's doing. It's just that bad! Awesome!
If you watched Troll 2 because you thought it was the worst movie ever, I have news for you. Troll 2 only wishes it was this bad. Birdemic might even be worse than The Room. Might.
Strangeland (1998)
A Modern B Movie
This sounded like it was going to be like Silence of the Lambs or Zodiac or something, but it wasn't. It really was more like one of the Halloween movies without all the jump scenes. It was a little like Plan 9 From Outer Space in the sense that the main bad guy kept making inane speeches that made me want to go get a snack without pushing pause. The idea of a person who is so crazy that he would abduct people and torture them as a form of spiritual enlightenment is actually an interesting idea, but the execution was too made-for-TV feeling. I have to say it was better than I expected for a movie written and starring Dee Snider. A good first effort. Maybe he'll learn some lessons and his next effort will be less clumsy.
Das Leben der Anderen (2006)
Wow! Way better than I expected!
I saw this movie was rated highly on Netflix so I took a gamble. I had never heard of it before and was expecting something "good for me." It's one of those movies that I consider perfect for me. No pandering. No preaching. No explosions or shooting. Just a quiet, effective, emotional story about how people are affected both negatively and especially positively by simply observing each other. The quietness of the main characters belies the depth of the sacrifices they were making and the intensity of the feelings that motivated them to take such risks. The evidence of the changes in the characters was subtle but unmistakable.
To me it was a little like looking at the Grand Canyon for the first time. I just watched quietly with profound awe and wept at the satisfying end.
I would compare this with the quiet strength of The Station Agent or Remains of the Day. If you liked those, I think you'll like this.
Top of the Food Chain (1999)
Hilarious to some, a big "What the?!" to others
I've watched this movie twice and I've shared it with others. I personally think it's one of the funniest movies I know of. I love movies where the movie acts like it thinks it's serious but what happens is so goofy and outrageous that everything seems twice as funny. Airplane! comes to mind. This is more like maybe Shaun of the Dead mixed with Airplane! though. It's dark, weird, and campy. Some of the people I loaned this to thought it was the stupidest movie they'd ever seen and others said they loved it. I'd say if you like Army of Darkness, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Mars Attacks or Shaun of the Dead, I think you'll like this. If you sat through Mars Attacks and someone else giggled the whole time while you said, "This is a weird movie" you probably won't like it. Having said that, I love this movie so much I bought it, lost it, and bought it again, and can't wait to get my replacement DVD.
Primer (2004)
I can't stop thinking about it
I found out about this movie by pure luck. I was walking behind a guy at work. When I got where I was going, he came up behind me. I said, "How did you arrive after me when you were just in front of me? Did you go into a delay loop?" He answered, "Have you seen the movie 'Primer'? They do that." I rented it and watched it with my wife. We watched almost the whole thing and then got so confused that we stopped it, talked about it for a while and then watched the whole thing over again. We had a dozen questions, argued about what happened, and then watched the last half again! I'm tempted to keep going back and watching it. I'm obsessed.
I loved the production, the acting, the dialog and the incredible, fascinating, mind-boggling plot. I can't remember the last time I was so sucked into a movie and unable to stop re-watching and discussing it. Memento was like that. Blade Runner. Vanilla Sky. I read somewhere that it was made for $7,000. Incredible! Looking back, there were no special effects to speak of, but somehow I felt like I had witnessed the most amazing things.
What was really fun, I think, is that the characters aren't simply brilliant scientists, but they are also brilliant logicians, outsmarting each other and even themselves. They come up with the most obvious advantage of time travel right away--buying stocks--but they even do that cleverly. Then it gets ever more clever as they develop and reveal techniques for stopping themselves and unstopping the stopping.
I still have questions, but I'm going to let my mind try to digest some before I watch it again. Wow.
Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
Way too self-conscious and artsy
Let me start by saying I loved Garden State and Little Miss Sunshine which are also about flawed people finding a little happiness.
This movie was way too self-conscious and artsy. The main characters -- the idiot that burned his hand and the stalker/artist lady were too idiotic for my taste. That whole business about the goldfish on the car seemed to be for a very narrow audience, like maybe super-sensitive, pretentious, melodramatic women who turn everyday events into psyche-scarring traumas. "My mom gave me bacon for breakfast and I cried and couldn't eat for the rest of the day" -- that sort of people.
The main metaphor of this movie for me was this -- the main character wanted her goofy film to be shown in a modern art museum. She wanted to get the attention of the museum curator. She tried various ways -- tried giving it to her in person, tried screaming at her on the actual videotape once the artistic bit was over, etc. This whole movie was just like that. The director was screaming at the indie film critics "Look at me! Look at this!" I felt like I was trapped in a car with someone on a cell phone yelling at the film critics, "You must like my movie -- look, I have underage sex and a little kid who wants to pass poop back and forth! I will not be ignored!"
I felt like the movie expected me to care about the characters and even browbeat me with the duty to like them, but I just wanted to slap them. And I certainly didn't want people like that to practice dysgenic reproduction, which the ending implied was going to happen. That was the biggest tragedy.
The parts that everyone talks about were so annoying as to almost ruin the movie. First, there's a very unlikely conversation in which a six-year-old boy thinks up the idea to pass poop back and forth forever between butts. And he wasn't being silly. If he was joking, I might have bought it, but he wasn't. Actually, I think what happened was the super-sensitive melodramatic director overheard some kid say he wanted to pass poop back and forth to be shocking, but she took it seriously and fretted about it and then put it in her movie. I know people like this. They hear a little boy say he's going to kill his mom and then they worry about the impending matricide and repeat the story for years when the kid was just mad he didn't get candy.
The whole bit with the little girls trying out their skills just seemed like gratuitous quasi-porn. Maybe this was a personal experience of the director, I don't know. My perception was that it was intended to attract attention from the indie film critics.
So, essentially what I got out of it was some "artist" showed how potty humor, underage sex, and dead goldfish are tragic and beautiful. Yes, I got the sad, lonely people trying to connect thing, which I did appreciate a little, but it seemed like the director was holding up signs that said, "This is really sad, you should feel bad for this goldfish" when I didn't.
In the end, though, I didn't completely hate it. I actually liked a couple moments when the director forgot to tell me to pay attention. I did feel a little bad for the children involved. I really did like the little girl who had her hope chest and who precociously shopped for household items to put in it. The teenage boy who seemed to care about her and was interested in the hope chest was sweet. That was melodramatic, too, but somehow I liked those two characters. They seemed to be the two sane people surrounded by losers but were probably going to amount to something once they got out of their sad childhoods.
I have to give credit to the director for making me think about it and talk about it afterwards. I didn't turn it off. Almost, but not quite. You won't just forget this movie, I suppose. Obviously some people love it. I think some people will hate it. I was mostly annoyed by it.
The Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie: Strange Brew (1983)
Before Dumb and Dumber, there was Strange Brew
When I was a teenager, this was my favorite movie. I watched about 10 - 15 times and laughed like an idiot. Now that I'm older, it seems a little TOO silly, but I still remember it very fondly and recommend it whenever I can. Like in Dumb and Dumber, the two main characters are well-meaning idiots who do whatever comes to mind at the time. The plot is irrelevant. The whole point is to give these two guys chances to act as stupid as possible in various situations. If you liked Dumb and Dumber, you'll like this. If you hated Dumb and Dumber, you'll hate this. The soundtrack is by Queen, and is wonderful. I'd rate this movie up with Airplane!, The Jerk, and Caddyshack as one of the funniest movies of all time.
Last of the Wild Horses (1948)
I'm from Oregon and I still didn't like it.
This movie starts out weak and then gradually just sort of wanders off.
It has potential, story-wise. A large rancher, Cooper, is pressured by his daughter and the other small ranchers to stop rounding up the wild horses in the area. His lead man has other plans and gets himself and the other Cooper employees deputized so they can frame the small ranchers and confiscate their horses. Cooper finds out about it and confronts his lead man, who kills him and frames Barnum, the "hero." Barnum is the weak link. He seems like the laziest, least intelligent, yet most charming guy in the area. He pushes people's buttons for fun and can't decide whether he's crooked or good. They all work hard and he just rides around seeming guilty of crimes or at least thinking about committing crimes. But chicks dig him. He mostly just appears here and there, acts cocky, irritates someone, and then rides off to rendezvous with a girl. And yet somehow you really just don't care what he does. You might doze off and wake to a scene that seems almost identical to the previous one.
Whatever.
American Playhouse: Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (1983)
Casablanca is Rolling Over In Its Grave
Give a 7th grader a video camera, $200,000, and some stock footage from a PBS nature film and he'd come up with this movie (on a bad day).
Start with this promising premise: a lazy worker watches movies on his computer (OK, I do this myself sometimes) and is therefore punished appropriately. He's forced to possess the body of a baboon for "compulsory rehab," which will obviously make him want to be a good worker. During the baboon possession, his consciousness must be stored in cube of topaz.
The strict protocols followed by the brain surgeon includes letting children wander in and out of the sterile operating room. Naturally one of the brats swaps the tag on our hero with another patient, causing his body to go to the wrong area of what appears to be a medical strip mall run by Gabe Kotter's sweat hogs. While the hero (played by Gomez Adams) is monkeying around, a red alert emergency occurs -- an elephant tries to knock the baboon out of a tree! All hands on deck!
This of course leads to a situation in which his consciousness has to be put into the world's most powerful computer (it controls the weather, tells people when to go to bed, and stores old movies among other things) for safe-keeping until they find his body. So far, the movie hasn't been too weird. Sort of a cross between 1984, The Matrix, and especially Tron, minus any plot, acting, or decent music.
But then the quality droops when he starts turning the real world into Casablanca by imagining himself to be in the movie. To stop him, the CEO of Novicorp (a cross between Microsoft and The Soviet Union) jumps into the computer and chases him around, threatens him, bribes him to be good, and finally decides to kill him.
The tension gets too much to bear when they have the big showdown. The CEO and the hero have a 5 minute staring contest in Rick's Place. The climax comes when the hero causes a spastic virtual lava lamp to cling to the CEO, which I believe means he wins, although that is quite unclear.
This is one of those movies that makes you pine for the movie police to come and pistol whip the director. Which is what Mystery Science Theater 3000 does with extreme comedic effect.
House M.D. (2004)
It's smart and funny, but Laurie's "House" is obnoxious
I didn't expect to like this show. The first couple of minutes with House ranting and acting so irritatingly superior were a big turn-off. The medical mystery part is fun, though, and the interaction between the "normal" characters and the outrageously self-impressed House character actually works once you realize they all see him for what he is, and so does he. House thinks everyone else has an agenda and that they're intolerably slow and dishonest. He's a jerk. But he knows he's a jerk and he doesn't get upset when people tell him so. So I can live with his over-the-top self-satisfaction because he doesn't take himself as seriously as it first appears.
What makes this show really fun to watch, though, is the quips he spits out when a normal human dares to ask him a question. Very much like the deliciously sharp Dr. Cox on Scrubs, he mutters things like, "Who da ma? I da man. I always suspected." When asked if he was happy that it was his birthday, he said, "I wondered if the Earth would make it around again, and by golly, if it wasn't the little planet that could."