Superbad

Superbad was a bit like eating dinner at McDonalds
Sure it tastes good and didn't take much thought process but when people ask what you saw/ate last night you'll feel a gut wrenching feeling like you could have had so much more. Like maybe that in spite of the hilarity involved in the film, you could have been analyzing Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock instead or something...
Then maybe you'll throw up.
Whatever, the film was funny, at times hilarious, but that's not important.
What is important is that about 15 minutes one of the main characters yells at another kid "Hey, why don't you go piss your pants again!"

What the fuck?

Another Pants Pissing movie... how can this be?

How can it be possible for so many films to be viewed that all reference or just flat out show people urinating all over themselves in such a short time together? If you don't know what I'm talking about please refer to my previous review (Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things)

I mean, really... does every movie actually mention pants pissing and pants pissers and I've just been flat out blacking it out all these years?
Am I hallucinating and it's not actually happening? and if so, why in the fuck?

Whatever...

Superbad - good
Pants Pissing - bad

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things is an incredibly dull and poor acted attempt at a thrill ride which all too late turns into a sub-par but watchable zombie film about ten minutes before the end, but that's not important right now.
What is important is that at a key moment (When a rather amusing looking 'Three Stooges' type fellow in a love-heart patterned shirt is being sequestered by a couple of rather camp gay grave diggers - who, by the way, were about the only likable characters) someone in the film exclaims "I peed my pants!", several times.

I know this doesn't seem amazing by any stretch to anyone but to me it was as if the good Lord in Heaven was trying to communicate with me, you see over the course of the weekend we also watched:

• Willard - in which Crispin Glover's boss is said to have pissed his pants when the rats get at his brand new car
• The Grudge 2 - in which some girl pees herself after a shower upon witnessing the scary staring girl
• Pieces - in which someone pees themselves. Pieces was ultimately forgettable except for a few key retarded lines so I don't really recall any of the events that led to someone pissing all over themselves but rest assured, it happened. I've just saved you the trouble of watching 'Pieces' by the way. It's not worth it!

Weird huh?

I mean how many films is there that people piss themselves in?

I can only think of one more and I'm not watching American Pie anytime soon, but what are the chances of so many films with urine soaked trousers being a prevalent theme being viewed all in such quick succession?

I can only imagine the mighty powers that be, the Necromancers of bed-wetting and lousy B-grade movies crossed paths over the weekend and tried to convey to me a message of warning, but what could it be?

And what's that comfortable yet awkward warm feeling between my legs all about?

Oh...

Next

If I wanted to see a dumb movie that should have been an episode of "Fringe" at best or a creepy science fiction thriller at worst but instead was turned into a cheesy action flick starring Julianne Moore as a unconvincingly harsh FBI Agent and Nicolas Cage as a balding has-been who creeps on the younger ladies (It was quite the stretch for Mr. Cage to play that role let me tell you!) then... well I guess I'd watch this movie again...In Next a bunch of stuff happens but then Nicolas Cage sees it's going to happen and stops it happening so it doesn't happen anymore. He doesn't see himself fixing it though until he does, then when he does, if he doesn't like the way things turned out he can not do it that way too...

An interesting directorial note for this movie; At any point in the movie in which Nicolas Cage is in a scene, if you skip ahead two minutes and keep doing that over and over, you'll find you're at the end of the movie and you just saved yourself 96 minutes of wasted time watching an inane waste of cinema reel.



Next Movie Website

Ocean's Eleven

Remember when people said things like "Did you know they're making a sequel to Ocean's Eleven?... it's called Ocean's Twelve!" as a joke?

It was funny! Get it? Because "eleven" is just part of the title and not a number indicating the film's part in a series? GET IT? Hilarity!

And then remember how they went ahead and made the sequel and went and called it Ocean's Twelve... like they were in on the joke?

Was George Clooney just trying to mess with our heads?

That's all.

The Happening

If you don't want to know anything about The Happening, then why in the name of God are you reading a review of it? Hop off!
The Happening (Winner of the "Vaguest Movie Title Since 'The Thing'" Award), for those of you who were living in a sensory deprivation chamber throughout the earlier part of the year, is the most recent offering from visionary wank-fart M. Night Shyamalan. Of course it's filled with social points, surprising performances from actors you previously discounted as being completely cardboard and of course the mandatory unnecessarily uncomfortable close ups of frustrated looking people.
That's pretty much par for the course in an M. Night film.

What's different is that this one was rated "R"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!1!!!!one!!!!!! OMG U guyz!

The trailer and pre-release press were very aptly set up in a way to make people watching think "Oh my God, what if the things happening in The Happening really happininged?"!
Such is the way with semi-epic "Oh Gosh, what if something slightly weird, but not too chaotic, happens?" films.

In this film Mark Wahlberg's character (who should have been played by William H. Macy in order to make this film about 523 times less douchey) is a school teacher (See? Why is Wahlberg teaching children things? Truly this is a work of horror beyond compare...) and soon becomes aware that trees are communicating with grass and sunflowers and telling them to send out magical "Take 4 steps backwards then kill yourself" beams to all the humans in the vicinity.

"I can't stop furrowing my brows any more than you can stop looking all 'indie', dear"

A truly magnificently terrifying concept that Mr. Shyamalan has presented us with. If plants could make us all take 4 steps backwards and kill ourselves what would happen, man? Good God! It would truly be The Happening!

Yeah, unfortunately the whole concept of plants being able to release some sort of spore into the air that evokes the exact same reaction in every single one of the highly developed Homo Sapien psyche's it encounters is about as likely as M. Night Shyamalan's next movie not trying to mess with your head in one way or another.

Yes, bees are disappearing and yes, if we're to believe the crazy cross eyed weirdo in the movie, plants can emit some sort of spore that attracts a very specific wasp to deter a very specific caterpillar when it feels threatened by it's presence - but these things are insects.

Did you know that there are parasites that can completely envelope ants, snails and spiders minds and have them do their bidding? Turning them into effective "zombies"?
It's true! But there's a very good reason why no-one with half a brain created a movie in which those very same parasites were responsible for a zombie outbreak and it's because it doesn't make sense. There's a huge difference between controlling, distorting or completely destroying the mind of one of the most simple and low functioning creatures on the planet and being able to control the mind of any mammal, never mind the human brain.
Don't get all environmental on me!
The Human brain would be far less susceptible to any sort of mind controlling spores, even in as simple a way as we have communication and understanding to get us through such crises.

It's not like a movie couldn't exist where weird spores were affecting us in some way... why not make the spores just make people go a little nuts? Sure, suicide rate is up but everyone isn't killing themselves in exactly the same damn way!
That doesn't make any sense!
You could have murder rates up... people pressing their own eyeballs out through their noses, people hallucinating that their long deceased ancestor is talking to them through their bathroom mirror beckoning them to kill every pet Pug in the neighborhood, people stapling pancakes to peoples heads... a whole manner of messed up shit happening! People going nuts in their own little ways all over the place creating chaos!

But instead we have a bunch of people calmly stepping off buildings and Mark Wahlberg looking like he's on the verge of a very minor breakdown, from which he will only recover with a huge dose of Chamomile tea.

Screw this film, M. Night, your next one had better be about 100 times better.

(It wasn't that bad actually, just unrealistic... unlike Unbreakable, that made perfect sense!)



The Happening Movie Site

NOTE: To see how this film should have gone down, watch The Signal, which I reviewed a couple of posts back...

Shock Treatment

The Rocky Horror picture show was by far one of my favorite (If not, the favorite) films of all time. I've loved it since I was a small child, probably too young to be watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show but there you go...
It has it all! Thrills! Chills! Laughs! Susan Sarandon in leather!
A true classic of a film, no doubt about it and would easily get 5 smiley faces if I ever chose to review it...
I know that many people reading this might be wondering why I'm going on about The Rocky Horror Picture show and I know this because I myself would have wondered, had I read this review a mere week or two ago for you see I, like many of us, was blissfully unaware that The Rocky Horror Picture Show spawned a sequel and it's name was Shock Treatment!

No, no, don't click on the link I only put it there as a hellish temptation.

Some sequels really fuck up the original film.

Some sequels are just so phenomenally God-awful that they take any sort of point that the first film made and take a giant crap all over it.

Some sequels are so mind-numbingly terrible that they make you feel nothing but an enormous amount of pity for the poor saps who were roped into reprising their roles from the original.

Some sequels are so drastically vomitous and pleasure-destroying that merely trying to recall them makes you wish you could rip out your own brain through your ears just to forget they ever plagued your life.

Fortunately, Shock Treatment is so far beyond all that, it is so awful and so despicable that it has thankfully been long since forgotten, allowing The Rocky Horror Picture Show to essentially retro-actively abort it's offspring. Praise the Lord above for the fact that this film is very little known and is rarely, if ever, associated with it's far far superior first.

You want a plot summary? Fine.

It seems Brad and Janet, having completely and miraculously forgotten anything that happened to them in the previous film find themselves in the audience of a strangely unappealing and boring musical gameshow. Having no recollection of the events which preceded them however, seems to have ABSOLUTELY NO SIGNIFICANCE WHATSOEVER, as ABSOLUTELY NOTHING happens in this film which has anything to do with the original in any way whatsoever, except that it stars Brad and Janet, both of whom are played by completely different actors. Janet doesn't look a thing like Susan Sarandon and she can't lip-sync for shit

Check it fucking out?!!?

Sure, she looks like she's whispering the correct words but it doesn't look a thing like she's singing them...

Whatever... basically this film has none of the appeal of the original, the songs are cringe-worthy and irrelevant and the whole theme of the film (Something about how Television controls our lives and minds, maybe?) is so completely un-backed up and lost in a mindless bubble of shit-acting and poor singing that what Shock Treatment ended up looking like is a movie, how it would appear, if Uwe Boll decided to remake a Terry Gilliam movie.

Awful.

Save yourselves and don't ever try and seek out this pile of trash as I did...

The Butterfly Effect

We recently had the good fortune to find The Butterfly Effect for $1 on VHS on the bargain racks at a Video Store recently...


... a movie which is easily worth at least one and a half times that amount! Score!

The Butterfly Effect is a movie I've seen a few times and is by far one of the best time-travel based movies there is (Just below Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure! Of course!), and easily one of the ones with the least time-travelling plot holes that most fall prey to. Coupled with the fact that Ashton Kutcher is the lead role who had, until then, mainly played "the goofy stoner kid" in anything else he was in made for interesting viewing given that he made an awesome performance in this. You hear that Ashton? Awesome! Where are you now? Stop playing dumbass pranks on celebrities and trying to produce failed attempts at sit-coms and get back to acting in slightly edgy films, dude! Duuuuuuuuuuuude! Saaaweeeeeeeeeeet!

So, Butterfly Effect = Awesome! All the way through until the VHS tape gets to the end...

It's then I remember that the version I've seen countless times was the Director's Cut in which (SPOILERS AHEAD) Ashton's character realizes that in the end it is inevitable that no matter what he does he is going to fuck things up for someone in some way and so he watches the home video reel of his mother giving birth and goes back to then when he was still in the womb and strangles himself with the umbilical cord! Awesome! Thus, he never is born and the girl he loves never decides to hang around in that shitty town to get abused, the brother isn't hanging out with them to fuck things up by blowing up a baby and making Lenny crazy and his mother probably doesn't go chain-smoking because she doesn't get her hopes up with a surviving baby (Also something left out was all the still-births his mother had before Ashton's character's birth, though I think that was a deleted scene that didn't even make it to the director's cut! For shame! It implied that there had been many other time-traveling stoner kids before Ashton's character who had all come to the same conclusion that they had to kill themselves before they were born! Extra awesome? I thought so).
Instead the version we bought (Which I call the "shit-assed version") ends with him just going back and not killing himself but still managing to fix everything and make everything perfect and thus destroying any point that the film might have made about inevitability and the dangers of changing things in the past to change the present. Instead we end with an ending in which Ashton's character has potentially perfected everything, instead of fucking up everything, which is exactly how the movie should have ended... and it did! In the director's eyes...

"I swear! I didn't know we bought the version with the lame ending, Lenny!"

It was still enjoyable. Funny, exciting, at times disturbing. But all in all, I think if I had seen this ending first, I wouldn't have remembered The Butterfly Effect as being such an awesome movie all these years...

Still, I think I give it 4/5 all the same:



The Butterfly Effect - Apple Movie Site