Sexual Parasite: Killer Pussy

I’m sure that there are readers out there somewhere that will hear a title like this and wonder at my overall mental state that I would eagerly jump at the chance to watch a film like this. I am equally certain, however, that a greater number of you out there (much, much greater, among regular readers of this blog) that read that title and wanted nothing more than to know where they could get their own copy.

The film opens with a group of explorers out in the jungle near Botswana that run afoul of a rare parasite that infects a female explorer by burrowing deep into her vagina. We then cut ahead a few years, as a group of Japanese teens (two guys and three girls) go on a road trip and stumble across an abandoned building filled with music, porn, a bath tub, and the frozen body on the infected explorer. While the teens all rush off to strip down and fool around a little, they sadly don’t notice as the explorer comes back to life and begins trying to infect the girls and feed off of the guys by eating their penises during sex. For those wondering, the recent American film Teeth was a more serious remake of this.

This movie does pretty much everything right. It features a nice, slimmed down cast, featuring four really hot girls that all get somewhat naked, it features a nice amount of goofy violence (the chomping sound whenever the monster bites off a guy’s penis was a nice tough), and, best of all, it combines the two. I’m always a little concerned when reviewing movies like this that I’m inadvertently revealing too much of myself when I say, for instance, that it was a huge turn-on when a girl was naked and screaming and her breasts were covered in blood, or when the one guy is fooling around with his big-titted girlfriend while their other female friend is passed out next to them. Still, I wouldn’t be a proper critic if I shied away from the tough answers here, now would I? Now go get this movie, it’s fucking hot and people die in it.

Rating: *** ½

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Spaceballs

Much like I said yesterday, it’s always nice when one of your childhood favorites winds up not being a piece of crap when viewed as an adult, but sadly, unlike Stay Tuned, this one doesn’t really hold up perfectly well. It ain’t bad by any means, but way too many of the jokes are forced and labored to really make this as much of a classic as Young Frankenstein (probably the only Mel Brooks movie I watched more times as a kid) or The Producers were.

The film is a pretty overt parody of Star Wars, starring Bill Pullman, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Daphne Zuniga, and Brooks himself, in a story of the evil planet Spaceball (ruled by Brooks) that is trying to steal all the air of the nearby planet Druidia to replace all of Spaceball’s air that was wasted by pollution. Their efforts at capturing the princess (Zuniga) are thwarted, however, by the intervention of Lone Starr (Pullman), a Han Solo character who later pulls double duty by learning how to use the Schwartz from a little Yoda-like muppet named Yogurt (also Brooks). You know the rest, because frankly, even if you haven’t seen Spaceballs, and you likely have, you’ve at least seen the original Star Wars.

The movie generally works pretty well, but it does have some glaring flaws to it. The humor is obviously the main portion of the film (what with, you know, it being a comedy and all), and while the jokes work more often than not, there are a great deal many more misses than in your average Brooks movie. While he’s never really been known for his subtlety (The Producers and Blazing Saddles both rank as two of the most over-the-top comedies ever made), here he seems unable to find a joke that he’s not willing to beat into the ground. It reeks of a desperation that we shouldn’t be finding in a film by a guy that at the time had been a prominent director for almost 20 years. It’s not two surprising, then, that not long after this he’d go on to make Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, easily the worst two films of his career.

Still, even though this was a definite slide toward what eventually became a career-threatening slump, there’s enough entertaining elements in this film to make it worth at least one viewing. If you happen to see it on TV (it should be playing on a channel near you any moment now), then by all means check it out. Just make sure to go in with some slightly lowered expectations than one is used to from such a major filmmaker.

Rating: ** ½

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Stay Tuned

It’s always nice when one of my childhood movies turns out to still hold up when I’m an adult, and such is the case here. It’s one of John Ritter’s best roles, and he has a perfect foil in the villainous Jeffrey Jones.

The film stars Ritter as a professional couch potato whose wife is on the verge of abandoning him, when a nicely Satanic Jeffrey Jones arrives and offers him a free trial on a big screen satellite TV that gets 666 channels. Soon Ritter and his wife are sucked into the demonic TV network, where they have to survive for 24 hours against such brilliant shows as Northern Overexposure and Driving Over Miss Daisy (no matter how many times I saw that when I was younger, it never failed to make me laugh hysterically) in order to win their freedom. Eugene Levy also makes an appearance as a hellish crony that also gets sucked into the network and occasionally begins partnering up with them to defeat his former boss.

The film is everything one might want in a movie like this: it’s funny, clever, and child-safe enough that you could watch it with your 8+ children (assuming you would want to have that many, of course). It throws in about as many great gags as one could possibly cram into a 90 minute film, up to and including a Three’s Company crossover and a music video that perfectly suits Hell (“Start Me Up” by Salt n Pepa). The children are a tad irritating, but I guess they’re there to give the children watching (you know, all 8+ of them) someone to identify with, and while they are annoying enough (especially the daughter) to knock this rating down half a star, they aren’t bad enough to outright ruin the film, so we can definitely celebrate that. It’s the kind of comedy that we stopped getting for a while, one that focuses on cleverness and doesn’t mind having a little bite to it, rather than veering to the extremes of super-sanitized and child-safe or gross out teen sex comedies. It should be supported for that.

Rating: ***

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Specters

So this was a big ol’ pile of suck. I’m not sure how exactly it is that a movie could a) be an 80s horror movie from Italy, b) make prominent use of Donald Pleasance, and c) entice us by starting off with a commercial for Demons 2, and still be as leaden and slow as this was.

The film has Pleasance playing an archaeologist who uncovers a new series of catacombs where ancient sacrificial artifacts are found. Excavations begin, and what seems like a mere half a year later a monster begins attacking people, sometimes appearing physically and sometimes just tossing things around the room like a poltergeist. I’d say it’s a slow build, as a good half hour goes by before the first death, but it never really picks up the pace at any point. We just get a bunch of boredom, with someone getting attacked every ten or twenty minutes afterward.

I can’t really say that the death scenes are all that good, either. They’re mostly very quick, with a minimum of blood and gore, just as the nude scenes tend to be as brief as possible (though, being an Italian film, the women in it are universally lovely). Pleasance isn’t really given much to work with, and doesn’t get to really chew the scenery until the last third of the film. Perhaps most damning of all its flaws, though, is when it blatantly rips off Johnny Depp’s death scene from Nightmare on Elm Street, and doesn’t do it half as well as the original. I got this film because a reviewer had described it as Argento-ish. I can only assume that by this he meant that the film was indeed a horror movie made in Italy while Argento was alive, because outside of a few very minor effects (a semi-incoherent plot, lots of multi-colored backlighting, etc.) the two have nothing at all in common. It’s currently only available on VHS, too, so if you decide from this review that you must buy a copy, you’re going to have the added thrill of figuring out how to re-install your old VCR that you’ve had in storage for years because it’s a dead format. So enjoy, I suppose.

Rating: *

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

What’s so wonderful about Steven Spielberg is that he can enjoy a twenty year pause in between Indiana Jones films and then make a new one without missing a beat. This new film, made by a man in his sixties that still proudly views himself as a young boy with gray hair, has all the excitement and fun of the original trilogy, with a plot that starts off fairly ridiculous and works its way farther and farther away from sanity like a good movie should.

One obvious difference in the series is that star Harrison Ford has visibly aged since the original movies, and as a result the film is now set roughly twenty years after the older movies. Thus, while the old movies featured standard pulp adventures from the 30s and early 40s, like Nazis, voodoo, and evil Asian tribesmen, this one is firmly entrenched in the stories of the late 50s: evil Russians, government conspiracies, aliens, and greasers. The plot has Indy getting caught up with a young James Dean wannabe (Shia LeBeouf) in a race to a hidden kingdom in Peru to rescue Shia’s mother and professor from the KGB, who are trying to unlock a secret that would theoretically give them control over the entire world! Much like the earlier films, it’s pretty much just an excuse to string along action sequence after action sequence, each one more absurd and delightful than the last. There are times when it does get a little bit overdone, such as when Shia starts his Tarzan impression, but it’s still pretty fantastic all the way through.

If there’s a real problem with the film, it’s in the form of the villains. Cate Blanchett, surprisingly enough, does a pretty weak job as the heavy, giving us a Ukrainian that is a failure on pretty much every level: she has supposed psychic powers that are hinted at once and then never brought up again, she’s an expert swordswoman that can’t defeat a young punk with only a little formal training, and never once comes off as intimidating as, say, the creepy bald Nazi in Raiders, or the voodoo priest in Temple. I think she can safely be chalked up as the big victim of the film’s numerous rewrites.

Even with these flaws, though, the film is every bit the rollercoaster ride that the first three films are. If you have a fondness for the old movies, and there’s something wrong with you if you don’t, then you should enjoy this movie as well. If you happen to not like those old movies, then I can only assume you are also opposed to kittens, roses, and sheer human joy, and will as a result not find it within your heart to enjoy this movie. If such is the case, then you may want to go see something else. Perhaps Prom Night or Baby Mama might be more your speed.

Rating: *** ½

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Deadly Prey

Yeah, much like with the Scorpion finale, you're going to have to wait on this review too. Hopefully the three day weekend will recharge me enough to do ll of these.

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Booster Gold: 52 Pick-Up

I thought I’d take a bit of a break from movie reviewing to review a newly released collection of the first six issues of the new Booster Gold comic. It’s a fun effort to liven things up with a tale of a comic book that you should all be reading (at least those of you that read comics, which frankly should be all of you), and should not in any way be taken as a sign that I was just uninterested in watching a movie today.

When DC’s big event of last year, 52, came to its conclusion, there were a number of new titles to try to capitalize on 52’s success. First up was Countdown, a new weekly title that, putting it politely, was not as well-received as its predecessor had been. There were also three miniseries that were a good deal better written in Black Adam: the Dark Age, The Four Horsemen, and Crime Bible: Five Lessons in Blood. Finally, and easily most importantly of all, there was a new ongoing title for Booster Gold, Savior of the Multiverse.

It’s a great premise for a comic, as Booster Gold and Rip Hunter are now off secretly repairing the time stream from villainous time travelers. In doing so, we get a comic that touches on all of the major moments in DC history, like the crippling of Batgirl and the death of Ted Kord, shows us some nice bits of the multiverse (the all-too-brief appearances of Dr. 13 and his crew were a treasure), and gives us some great characterization as well. After all, Booster Gold is somewhat renowned as the super hero that most wants to be famous and loved by the world, so how well is he going to take it when his work requires him to make the world think he’s just a buffoon instead of a proper hero? This collection of the first story arc also ends with what has to be the single most satisfying comic book moment this year has had so far, a claim I do not make lightly.

Writers Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz have made this title into one of the top three best comics coming out of Marvel or DC right now, and you should all be reading it. If you were waiting on a trade to see how it goes, well, it’s out and you must pick it up pronto. Otherwise nobody will respect or love you, and you don’t want that, now do you?

Rating: ****

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Horse Feathers

This was a very early effort for the Marx Bros., back when Zeppo would still show up on camera to be his usual bland self. Like those earlier efforts, it works almost more like a cabaret effort than a normal film, so it’s definitely not going to be for everyone. However, for those of you that don’t mind a comedy with a bare-bones plot and frequent musical interludes, you may just find a gem here.

The story, like all Marx films, is thoroughly ridiculous, and features Groucho as the new head honcho at a college where his son (Zeppo) is currently attending for seemingly no reason beyond access to girls. The college really functions as little more than a framing device to hang such scenes as a verbal duel at a speakeasy and a climactic football match on, but it functions well enough.

If you haven’t seen a film by the Marx Bros., here’s what you can expect: there’s a great deal of verbal humor, primarily from Groucho and Chico, a few songs sung by Groucho and Zeppo, a piano number by Chico, and a harp number by (wait for it) Harpo. It’s a very different style of movie from what you’d expect to see nowadays, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s goofy, charming, and unabashedly silly, and still manages to have some real bite to its humor, moreso than a lot of tragically “safer” comedies nowadays have. It’s not quite a masterpiece, but it is definitely worth a view.

Rating: ** ½

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Slap Shot

After the recent dreariness of the Drive-In Cult Classics set, it’s nice to be surprised by a really freaking great comedy that I had somehow missed all these years. While it’s not quite the best sports movie I’ve ever seen, it is absolutely the best sports comedy I’ve ever seen, and I say that while having a vast fondness for the Major League films.

The film stars Paul Newman (who apparently just a couple years ago said this was his all-time favorite role) as the aging coach of a crappy hockey team that’s in the middle of a big slump. He decides to change up his game a little, after a one-two punch of hearing about how he’s a lousy coach, and hearing about how his team’s going to be folded after the current season, and soon his team is winning heavily based on their new strategy of just beating the hell out of the other team.

One of the things I most enjoyed about this movie was in how it completely rejects the normal sports movie structure, and doesn’t seem to care at all about winning the championship or whatever. All the characters are really interested in is goofing off, joking, watching soap operas, and hurting other people, and that’s all the movie is interested in too. While there are the occasional obligatory moments where they discuss trying to get the team traded to Florida (pfft, as if there’d ever be a hockey team there) and trying to win the season, the film mostly ignores all that in favor of a constant barrage of jokes and senseless violence. The humor is generally spot on – this is the single funniest film I’ve watched in months – and as for the violence, well, I guess there’s just nothing more entertaining than someone being randomly beaten up for no good reason whatsoever. All the best sports movies function fine even to people unfamiliar with the sport – transcending the sport, if you will – and this certainly qualifies. It’s some of the most fun you’ll have all week, with the obvious possible exception of seeing Indiana Jones 4 this weekend, which I’m hoping to do. Really though, what are the odds that something whose fame peaked in the 80s would be sold out?

Rating: ****

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Best Friends

This Drive-In Cult Classics collection seems to be on a fairly steady downward spiral, only without the soothing vocal talents of Trent Reznor. I’m just under halfway through the set, so there’s a distinct possibility we can still turn this thing around, but right now the outlook’s not looking so promising. I’m sure someday I’ll learn that getting a collection of 8 movies for “only” ten bucks may not be quite the bargain it always seems to appear.

The film stars Richard Hatch (Apollo from the original Battlestar Galactica) as half of a pair of friends that are traveling the land in an RV with their girls. Right from here, you can probably intuit where the plot heads. Yes, Hatch’s friend begins to feel jealous of Hatch’s relationship with his girl, and feels that all of their childhood closeness may now be ending, and so goes completely insane, and starts threatening the girl, and trying to force himself on her to force a confrontation.

This is all very dully accomplished, and done so slowly and ploddingly that a good deal of my viewing was of my watch, wondering when it would mercifully end. Outside of the crazy best friend, none of the characters has any personality to speak of. Apollo was the same nonentity that he would later be on BG, and the two girls are so completely interchangeable that at the end, when one of them is murdered, I was unable to identify which of them it was. Try as I might, I can’t find a single reason for this film to have ever existed, and must assume it was created as an active effort of spite against the world. As such, it is an unqualified success.

Rating: Zero stars

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Visitor Q

Just as I was unable to properly categorize The Teacher, I find myself now unable to properly describe Visitor Q, though for vastly different reasons. Unlike the previous film, which was indescribably lame, this one was so indescribably vile that a normal review pales in comparison to the sheer experience of watching it.

The film, shot on video, is apparently attempting to parody reality TV, and follows a dysfunctional family as their lives are changed by a stranger named Visitor Q, who enters their lives by tagging along with the father after beating him in the head with a rock. Frankly, though, calling the family dysfunctional is a bit of a misnomer. The son is the victim of bullies, and retaliates by regularly beating the hell out of his mother, the mother has resorted to drugs to cope, the father has been raped and has developed a fondness for rape, incest, and murder, and the daughter has become a prostitute.

The directing isn’t as exciting as a normal Takashi Miike film, presumably because it was shot on video instead of film, but he has made up for it by making this the most vile film he possibly could. I watch a lot of offensive films, as regulars to this blog can attest, and this is, to date, the only film I ever watched where I felt like a bad person just for having seen it. Whether it be the rape, the necrophilia, the lactation sex, or what have you, there’s just something about this film that really makes me feel a bit less like a legitimate human being each time I watch it (tonight being my second time). As such, I’m not really sure what kind of rating to give it, so I’m going straight down the middle on it. It’s definitely not one of Miike’s best made films, but for those for are fans of his, or for anyone who’s interested in extreme cinema, it is definitely something to check out.

Rating: ** ½

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The Teacher

I’m somewhat at a loss as to what to categorize this film as. I’m sure as hell not about to create an exploitation tag for it, since that would cover roughly nine-tenths of the films I review. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have nearly enough nudity in it to qualify as porn, and the thriller sequences within it come way too few and far between to allow me to call it that. I guess it’s stuck as a romance then, by default, even if it’s a fairly lame one.

The plot, as one might guess from the title, concerns a hot young teacher that makes it her mission to spark up a romance with one of her muscular students. This is complicated by how irritatingly uncomfortable he gets around her, to the point where we start to assume that he’s holding out for the attentions of one of her male colleagues. There’s also the problem of how, at the start of the movie, he had accidentally killed his close friend (they were fighting for control of a pair of binoculars to spy on the teacher with, and his friend fell off of the factory they were standing on), and his friend’s insane brother now wants to kill him with a bayonet.

Does this all sound like it could have been a good, or at least amusing, movie? It does, honestly, at least to me, but the good bits come few and far between, and what we mostly deal with is a good hour of padding in a 90 minute long movie. What we pretty much get is a long scene of parents talking, then the teacher showing a breast briefly, then a long scene of people walking around and talking, then the crazy brother shows up pointing a bayonet and threatening to kill one character, then another long stretch where nothing happens… The filmmakers clearly had no idea how to make a full feature out of this story, or simply didn’t care enough so long as something interesting happened every ten minutes or so to keep people from leaving the theater or drive-in. It’s a definite letdown after the comparative entertainment that was Pick-Up (its double feature on the first disc), but I’m going to try to remain cautiously – some might say foolishly – optimistic that the rest of the set will yield somewhat better results. And if not, hey, it’s ten bucks for eight movies, can’t go too wrong with that, right?

Rating: *

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Gayniggers From Outer Space

Here’s a true oddity: a short film made in the early 90s that parodies old 50s sci fi by throwing in a lot of straight-faced gay jokes. I can’t really say that I fully liked it, but at the same time I can’t really say that it didn’t have my undivided attention, either.

The film follows the crew of an alien spaceship from a deeply advanced race where women are extinct and men are perfectly happy. While out exploring the universe, they stumble across Earth, and their initial scouting expedition meets with disaster when they come face to face with wild, hedonistic women that seem to have come straight out of a speakeasy. Armed with this news, the entire crew decides that it is their solemn mission to save this planet by using their ray guns to wipe out every last woman on the planet.

The visual and audio style is a large part of what makes the film entertaining. It really captures the cheesy, yet earnest look of those no-budget sci-fi efforts from the 50s, all black and white and shimmery. The special effects are dead-on, and the fact that it seems to have had all the dialogue and sound effects dubbed over just adds to the cheese factor (given that I first saw this done in Beast of Yucca Flats, a cheesy black and white science fiction movie from the 50s, sure doesn't hurt). There’s also a nice bit at the end when, after saving Earth from women, the film suddenly shifts into color as we get to witness the new paradise that all the men can enjoy (as they go swimming in their tighty whiteys). This isn’t a perfect movie (the overwhelming need, for instance, to give every crewmember a gag gay name like Sgt. Shavedballs is a little tiring), but for a 27 minute long film it certainly entertains well enough.

Rating: **

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Female Prisoner # 701 Scorpion: Grudge Song

So here it is, the fourth and final film in the Scorpion series, surprisingly much-delayed (the review, not the movie). This one, as I mentioned before, was by a different director, though thankfully Yasuharu Hasebe (mostly) manages to keep the same general great madness and style of the first three movies.

One thing that’s noticeably different about this film is in how much more plot there generally is compared to the earlier movies. Once again Scorpion is free to roam the streets, where she runs into an old classmate of hers, and the two begin to embark on a Bonnie and Clyde style crime spree. Unfortunately her new man turns out not to be as strong as she is, and after he’s captured by the police they eventually break him and get him to spill the beans on where his chick is hiding. Back in prison once again, she’s again menaced by the various inmates, guards, wardens, police, and politicians, until it becomes time to either escape or face the noose.

It’s always a bit of a frightening things when a new director jumps onto a series of films, particularly one as fun as this has been, but outside of some awkwardness at the big climax between her and the vengeful cop hounding her, it manages the same over-the-top delightfulness that has been a trademark of the series. It’s got all the violence and nudity that is pretty much required in a film like this, and knows how to pace itself well enough that there’s never a period where it starts to drag. It doesn’t quite have the brilliantly mad ending of Beast Stable, where the police make the city’s sewers explode to try to get at Scorpion, but it works well enough on its own merits. Unlike what I’ve seen so far of the Drive-In Cult Classics set, this is a box set that is definitely worth checking out.

Rating: ***

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Female Prisoner # 701 Scorpion: Beast Stable

This is the second film in the box set of Scorpion movies, but the third in the series. This doesn’t really mean all that much beyond how she’s somehow managed to escape from prison in between the end of the first film and the start of this one, but if you were expecting this to come directly after the original you might be a tad surprised.

The film is a bit different than the first one, in large part because Scorpion is out on the loose (in a nice opener, she’s riding the subway when a cop tries to arrest her and loses a limb for his efforts). She starts building up some semblance of a life for herself, but this is of course thwarted when she runs afoul of a prostitution ring and, once again, the police.

The police officer trying to take her down is really the best reason to watch this film. It is admittedly a tad slow in the middle when she’s trying to get herself a life, but by the end when the officer in charge is beating up random people and ordering the sewers to be blown up you know you’re in safe hands. It’s the last film in the series helmed by director Shunya Ito, and he manages the difficult task of making his third effort as entertaining as his first (though, despite having a story in which prostitution is heavily involved, the nudity of the first film seems to have mostly been replaced with a lot more violence). There’s only one film left in the set, and hopefully having a new director won’t ruin the series. Really though, what are the odds of that?

Rating: ***

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Mother's Day

So yes, while I just recently whined about how lame Troma films tend to be, I now find myself watching another one instead of doing something productive. What can I say, what with the holiday rapidly approaching and all this just seemed appropriate. * At least it’s from the start of the 80s, when Troma still at least made a vague effort to make their films watchable, rather than going out of their way to make every film terrible and then giggling about it.

The film is basically a rip-off of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as a group of three girls go into the woods to get back in touch with each other, and run afoul of a family of rapist-murderers led by (obviously) their mother. One of the girls is taken from the group, and is brutally raped and beaten, while the other two start their escape, slowing to snatch their friend away with them, and then deciding to go back and wipe the whole family out.

The movie, written, directed, and produced by Charles Kaufman (not to be confused with the Charlie Kaufman that wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, all of which you should see before tackling this film), manages to have a sense of humor about itself that is startlingly understated for such a film. Rather than beating into our heads how hysterical the film must be, it instead gives us some subtle moments of genius, such as how the two evil brothers wake up to a Big Bird alarm clock, or their frankly brilliant morning exercises. The movie falters quite a bit when it focuses on our heroines (the first third of the movie is just tedious to sit through, as they frolic in the woods and share memories that are just boring and awful), but the bulk of the movie manages to focus on the bad guys, as it should. The violence is unfortunately sparse, but generally works well when it appears (one character takes a hammer to the sack in a particularly horrid scene), though the nudity, despite all the rape going on, is almost nonexistent. There are also quite a few continuity errors, like when one girl starts getting splattered with blood before her boyfriend is even killed. Still, despite its flaws, it is easily the best Troma release I’ve seen in some time. If you were looking to try the company out, this would not be a bad starting place.

Rating: **

* I didn’t actually watch the film because of the holiday, that was just sheer random coincidence that I didn’t even notice until the person I was watching it with pointed it out. Still, it does make a handy excuse.

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Alvin & the Chipmunks

So yeah. Sometimes you get to watch a sleazy Japanese women in prison film for your blog, and sometimes you’re stuck watching a dumb kid’s movie with your little cousin. So it goes. At least this was better than I was frankly expecting it to be, which is an admittedly low bar to hurdle over.

The film stars Jason Lee (before he showed up, my cousin helpfully informed me that you actually get to see what he looks like in this film, as he evidently did the voice of some cartoon character in a previous film, and has clearly never acted in anything else before that) as a failing musician desperate for a new sound when three talking chipmunks decide to take up residence in his house. Their names are Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, which you were no doubt unaware of, as I apparently wasn’t since my cousin felt she had to explain who each one was and what their defining characteristics were. Anyway, and you’ll be amazed by this I’m sure, Lee hears them singing (they of course know all the latest pop hits from their time living in a forest), realizes they’re just what he’s been looking for, and soon enough they become instant successes in the music biz. Conflict arises in the form of David Cross, a powerful music exec who decides to throw away his old friendship with Lee so as to better exploit the chipmunks and make even more money. Eventually, of course, everything turns out all right, Lee and the chipmunks are reunited, and we get more of that horrid singing.

In this movie’s defense, it is indeed better than it really needed to be, and remains thoroughly watchable all the way through. Lee and Cross do perfectly acceptable work, even if they’re both clearly slumming here, and if the story is cliché and retarded, well, it’s fucking Alvin & the Chipmunks, were you really going to go into this thinking it was on par with Tolstoy? If you have a small cousin, or perhaps have been rooked into having a child of your own, there are worse movies you could get stuck watching with them. As long as you can make it through their songs without strangling the kid for making you sit through them, you should indeed be alright.

Rating: * ½

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The Brave

So yeah, I know yesterday I said I’d be reviewing the remaining two films from the Female Prisoner Scorpion set, but how often do you hear of a film directed by Johnny Depp, where he agrees to be in a snuff film in exchange for enough money to get his family out of the poverty trap they live in? Especially when it’s a film that not only has yet to be released on DVD in the U.S., but has never even managed a theatrical release? And it’s one of Marlon Brando’s final film roles? Frankly, I wouldn’t have been able to respect myself if I had passed this one up.

That said, while good, this is not quite the out-of-the-park home run one might expect from all of the above. Depp keeps the film moving very slowly (we’re ten minutes into the film before anyone starts talking) to try to draw us further into how his character, and those around him, feel, which does work to an extent. He’s kept the manner of how he’s gotten so much money to himself (he just tells everyone he’s gotten a new job), so pretty much everyone, up to and including his long-suffering wife, assumes he stole it from somewhere. It’s nice seeing how, as soon as he gets part of the money, he spends it on building a mini carnival outside of his home for his kids and neighbors, to try and give them some measure of happiness that he’s been incapable of giving them up until now. This is complicated by Luis Guzman, Depp’s old partner in crime, who also assumes that Depp is stealing the money from somewhere, and is willing to get violent to get in on it.

The main flaw of the film is that it just moves too slowly a lot of the time; while it’s nice that the men making the snuff film keep popping up to remind us that Depp’s death is coming, the film could have had a good twenty minutes shaved off of it, and would have been all the better for it. Still, there is a good deal to like about it, from the strange combination of Depp’s Native American character looking oddly similar to Jack Sparrow while having a surprisingly well-defined chest, to Brando’s all too brief appearance as the man in charge of the company making the snuff films. It’s frankly a great concept for a movie, and I’d like to see Depp direct another film (this is the only one he’s helmed so far – given that eleven years later, it still hasn’t gotten any level of American distribution, I can’t really blame him), though perhaps his next one could have more of a plot rather than being just a character study.

Rating: ***

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Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time as a movie fan, it’s that if there’s one thing the Japanese have down pat, it’s how to be good and sleazy. This film, about a woman set up by her police officer boyfriend and sent to a jail where all the female prisoners are routinely stripped naked and leered at by their male jailers and abused by the sexy female prisoners that help run the place, is about as perfect an example as one could give.

The film (the first in a series) follows a girl named Nami, whose cop boyfriend sends her undercover to get the dirt on a drug lord. Things go badly, and she’s brutally raped while there, only for her boyfriend to reveal that he just wanted dirt on the druglord as leverage to weasel his way into the druglord’s business. Naturally, his girlfriend knew too much by then, so he has her jailed on false charges. The bulk of the film is set in jail, as she slowly plots her revenge while dealing with a group of evil convicts that help run the show there. She eventually becomes a champion of the disenfranchised prisoners there, leading a rebellion and riot against the guards, leading to a deadly confrontation with all of the evil convicts there.

It’s not really the most original plot there (I don’t know that I’ve ever once seen a women in prison film that didn’t have a riot or jailbreak as its climax), but that’s generally not the point of such films. All we really require is some proper sleaze, and this film pays off on that end in droves. We’re given a constant barrage of nudity, some over the top violence, and some fairly insane manic camerawork and random lighting work that one would expect to find in, say, Kill Bill. It also manages a fairly difficult task in taking a story that essentially boils down to “here’s a bunch of attractive women, let’s strip them naked and degrade them for 90 minutes” without ever going so far in their degradation that it becomes uncomfortable to watch. I’d offhandedly guess that this is in large part due to most of the degradations being perpetrated by women against women, but for whatever reason the movie remains fairly fun and exciting all the way through. The best part? It comes in a box set with two other films from the series, giving me something to review for tomorrow and Thursday as well! Score!

Rating: ***

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24 Hour Party People

I recently had the pleasure of doing a movie marathon with my friends Emily and Wey. While most of the films we watched have already been reviewed for this very blog, the delight that is 24 Hour Party People had not yet gotten the treatment, and so you now all get the thrill of reading about it.

The movie is very loosely based on a true story, following both the life of visionary music producer Tony Wilson, and the music scene that both inspired him and which he in turn helped shape, the Madchester scene. The film starts in the late 70s, when, in his capacity as host of a local Manchester TV show, he heavily promoted the rising punk rock movement, before eventually ending his show so that he could be more directly involved in the process by getting his own venue specifically to showcase punk bands. Later, after punk rock self destructs (also in the late 70s), he buys a larger, more elaborate venue to showcase the various strange offshoots of punk, such as New Order and the Happy Mondays, until the 90s when his poor business model eventually bankrupts his company.

What makes this film work so well is a threefold path. The first is in how it truly captures the feel of the scene that it’s discussing. This movie has an energy to it, a vitality that matches that of Joy Division, the Stooges, and all the other bands featured and praised within the film. Indeed, the film only really manages to slow down when it comes time to mourn after the tragic suicide of Joy Division’s frontman Ian Curtis. Outside of that it’s just nonstop movement and music. The second is the humor that is pervasive throughout the film. This is a movie that dramatically reenacts an incident in which the two Ryder brothers that fronted the band the Happy Mondays put rat poison in some bread and fed it to a couple thousand birds by playing Flight of the Valkyries and showing bird’s-eye-view shots with sounds of machine gun fire as the Ryders throw bits of poisoned bread at them as they swoop by on their strafing runs. It’s a film that has the main character talking to us about what’s going on and helpfully pointing out all the people in the film that were actual players in the Madchester scene itself and not just actors, even showing one and then pausing the film to say that his scene was unfortunately cut, but “I’m sure it will be on the DVD”.

The third (and most important) is the sheer directing style of the film. It has no problem with using cheesy filters and scratchy prints to match the style of the rock videos of the time, is constantly looping back and forth in time from one plot point to another, and finds a way to throw an encyclopedia’s worth of information at us without ever really losing us within it. This is a film that is at once fun, uplifting, hilarious, touching, and even heartbreaking. Even if you’re unfamiliar with the music on display here, or aren’t a big fan of it, you owe it to yourself to check this film out.

Rating: *** ½

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Pick-Up

It’s not that often anymore when I see a film that has no real bearing on anything else I’ve ever seen before, and so I treasure such films perhaps more than I really should. All the same, when I picked up the 8 pack of films in the Drive-In Classics set, I was expecting the typical drive-in routine of tits and violence, and while this certainly delivered on that, I was not expecting such a completely insane story.

The story, what there is of it, concerns a guy driving a mobile home across Florida, and picks up two girls along the way. They all get lost in a series of road detours, and somehow get stuck in a swamp in the Everglades. The guy and one of the girls fall in love, while the second girl keeps hallucinating about Greek mythology and vicious clowns and politicians appearing in the swamp. Then there’s an abrupt Easy Rider-ish ending that is every bit as out of place as Easy Rider’s was.

This doesn’t sound like all that much, granted, and it really isn’t, but the film works in spite of itself due to its cheerful ignorance of any kind of coherency or sanity. The acting of the girls and of the man that keeps calling them on the mobile home’s phone starts over the top and works its way from there to a more hysterical fever pitch. It certainly helps that both of the women are quite lovely (based on the average level of attractiveness of the women in, say, the films from the Tomb of Terrors collection, I’d have to say it was easier to find attractive women willing to be naked on film back in the 70s than it is today) and are willing to show themselves off at a moment’s notice. Each character is also given their own flashback, so that we can properly sympathize with their positions as poor, misunderstood hippies, as if that is somehow going to make any of them suddenly make sense. One of the girls is running around with a stuffed animal and goes into wild dances at a moment’s notice, the other is obsessed with Tarot cards and the Zodiac, and hallucinates constantly, and the guy loves being stranded and lost in a swamp because he’s finally no longer afraid of anything, and a couple flashbacks are supposed to make all of this coherent? Come on now.

Still, the silliness is a large part of why I enjoyed this, and if this wasn’t a particularly great film, it was at least a nice lead-in to the rest of the collection. I can only hope the remaining seven movies will be at least as good as this one was.

Rating: **

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Iron Man

While I love comic books, and by proxy comic book movies, it’s rare to find a character that’s captured this well on the first outing. The first Spider-Man film was good, as was the first X-Men, but neither series really showed their full potential until their first sequel. Indeed, characters like the Punisher and the Fantastic Four have both had multiple films and haven’t had a proper one yet. That’s why I’m so pleased that director Jon Favreau and star Robert Downey Jr. were able to nail this film on the first try.

For those of you that aren’t huge comics nerds like I am, this is the story of brilliant weapons manufacturer Tony Stark, who goes on a routine trip to the Middle East to demonstrate a powerful new missile, and is captured by Arab terrorists. His heart is damaged, but he manages to construct a suit of battle armor that manages to keep him alive and helps him escape his captivity. Once back, he clashes with his partner over the direction the company has taken, and finds (spoilers that should frankly be obvious to you) that his partner really doesn’t have his best interests at heart. The main focus, as with any superhero film, would theoretically be on the fight scenes, though there’s interestingly enough not that many of them. There’s only four battles in the entire film, as the rest of the time is taken up with actual character building scenes, and with giving us an actual sense of wonder at what’s happening onscreen, something that is in curiously short supply in these films where people shooting lightning from their fingertips.

Favreau is no novice to directing, but this is easily the largest budget he’s ever had to work with, and it’s refreshing to see that he never falters with it. Every part of the movie, from the camerawork to the special effects, looks and feels proper, none of the scenes drag, and nothing feels like it was just tacked on to give us an extra action sequence. This will likely be the first smash hit of the year, though judging from all the seemingly sure-fire winners that had trailers before it (Narnia, Indiana Jones, Incredible Hulk, etc.), it’s going to have a pretty competitive field shortly. I have a feeling that, of the three films I just mentioned, it’s going to be better than at least one, and stands a legit chance at being the best of all four.

Rating: *** ½

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