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Saturday, June 5, 2010

Review: American Psycho II: All American Girl (2002)

Director: Someone who likes to inflict pain.
Starring: A bunch of hacks who will hopefully never work again.

Larry Griffin admitted to mental hospital after viewing of American Psycho II: All American Girl. Condition listed as critical, and symptoms as foaming at the mouth, ranting and raving incoherently and often blacking out entirely. Had to be restrained and locked in solitary for several weeks before his thoughts could be extracted and posted on the Internet for viewing. Here is what we have collected:

I know this is going to sound cliche, but where do I start? No, seriously, where the fuck do I even start with this? I have no idea how to sum up a movie like this. It's so bad that it put me in solitary in a correctional facility. It's so bad that it could probably singlehandedly cause the mass infertility like in Children of Men - and justifiably so, for this is the end of the line, and I think it'd be worth eradicating all human life if we were never plagued with movies like this again. This movie is so horribly wrong and so unholy and sinful that I wouldn't be surprised to discover that it was the antichrist itself in cinematic form! It is so wretched that...okay, okay. I need to calm down, lest they put me back in solitary again.

But GODDAMN. What a fucking mess! This is the sequel to the highly acclaimed American Psycho, which was rightfully praised, as it was a great movie. It had subtlety and the wit was just sharp as a razor. It was hilarious and also depressing and dark, all at the same time. But I guess it just wasn't hip enough, so some numbnuts decided to make a direct to video sequel to it! And this one stars Mila Kunis as a female serial killer for no other reason than because she has boobs. That's right, they're using the old 'take a male idea and turn it female to gain a wider audience.' Except Kunis and all of her female co-stars set back womens' rights a good two hundred years or so, and no one with the right amount of chromosomes would ever find this movie appealing, so I guess that backfired on them, didn't it?

American Psycho II: All American Girl starts off with Patrick Bateman, played by an actor who is definitely NOT Christian Bale, getting killed off by a little girl who somehow untied herself from the binds he placed her and her babysitter in. Yes, the first few minutes of this movie completely shit all over the first one and completely destroy everything about it that was good. Nice work. Assholes.

Then we get our first dose of the absolutely ear-raping narration from our harlot from hell, Mila Kunis, who has grown up quite a bit from her role as a little orphan girl in Santa With Muscles. It takes up about the first five or ten minutes (and reoccurs throughout the film), and her obnoxious voice and the terrible writing make it about as endearing as a rusty nail through the foot. It makes the narration in The Spirit sound good in comparison. Seriously, SHE NEVER SHUTS UP. It's like having someone scrape their nails on a chalkboard, it's just painful. And with a stifling sense of pretentious self indulgence to boot. Puerile. If you can survive it, watch the scenes where she talks to her psychiatrist played by that crazy guy from Cube II: Hypercube. Just try it. It's really unbelievable how annoying it is to listen to these yahoos yammer on about nothing. It's so bad that I found myself pausing it every few seconds just to get a breath of fresh air from the bullshit being layered on. And that's pretty much the entire movie. Nothing but obnoxiously pretentious dialogue and even worse narration delivered in the smarmiest of the smarmy ways possible by horrible actors who were aided by horrible writers. Isn't this just so wonderful? And I'm just getting started.

How about the characters? Their sole motivation is to get good words in with their teacher, played by William Shatner, in order to become his teaching assistant in a college course on catching criminals, and get into the FBI. One of the girls constantly talks about sleeping with him and...I'm done with the characters. Let's move on.

Every bit of the dialogue here is just oozing with a slimy, disgustingly arrogant sense of self worth underlined humorously by the fact that none of it is even one bit intelligent or insightful. Ooh, you've got quirky dialogue, so what? This is a movie that tries to be a social satire (...I think...), but has nothing to say, at all. The dialogue is reminiscent of the stark, satiric tone of the first movie, except the writers here don't understand how to write anything satirically. In a satire, you write big, edgy lines that sometimes make the characters out to be unlikable, rude or insufferable, but it works because it underlines a point about society, the world or some other norm that the writers find necessary to poke fun at. When you remove any kind of relevance to anything, any kind of point, you're just left with characters who are unlikable, rude and insufferable, which I am sure this movie did not mean to do - merely a victim of supreme ineptitude. This movie quite astonishingly manages to have a script with lines that sound like they were meant to be satirical, but are very blatantly not actually satirical of anything, and so it just really blows. Tough, I guess.

And she keeps going on about killing people like it's something to look forward to. She attends a class on serial killers. I'm not even mad that she is trying to get into the FBI to stop serial killers by killing everyone who is in her way to becoming her professor's new assisant - this movie is too far gone for me to care about plot holes and logical idiocy at this point - but it's like they're taking the first movie literally! They really think it was a movie about serial killers killing people! They think that scenes like the one where Christian Bale chases a hooker down a hallway naked with a chainsaw...is supposed to be taken literally.

Holy mother of fuck. I think my brain is breaking in half. Did you...did you guys even watch the original movie or read the original book? IT'S NOT ABOUT SERIAL KILLERS, YOU MORONS. Get it straight! It's not that hard!

And if you thought it couldn't get any worse, watch the ending sequence in which the Cube II guy sermonizes to a college class about how Kunis' character was really 'one in a million,' and that she was so much 'better' than people like Bundy, Dahmer and even the original Patrick Bateman, as if inciting names that terrifying will make us believe any bit of this movie any more. In context, this is the equivalent to being endorsed by a child murderer, or perhaps a Nazi sympathizer. The fact that this movie would even suggest such a thing is perhaps both the funniest and most pathetic facet about it - I don't know about you, but I can't decide whether to laugh or cry at the fact that a team of adults wrote this slop and thought any of it could possibly be taken seriously long enough for this ending sequence to incite a reaction.

And ooh, she's not really dead at the end, what a shock! They choose to end the film on a generic plot twist that you could find in any dime-a-dozen direct to video horror film at Blockbuster. Well, at least now I know their priorities. It's kind of hilarious, actually; like they just said, okay, we're done raping the fabric of space and time, annoying the hell out of the audience and pissing all over the original source material. Just give them a regular shitty ending twist as opposed to an astronomically horrible one.

How do I end a review of the worst of the worst, the absolute nadir of cinema? It's pretty tough. The story is all over the place, the characters are headache-inducingly awful, the acting is a load of incomprehensibly retarded slop, the direction is complete amateurish shit, the soundtrack is a joke and the whole thing is just insulting beyond belief. Nothing about this movie is humane or sanitary; it is detrimental to the health of all who partake in its festival of horrors. American Psycho II is a film that is not merely bad, not just horrendous, but actually pathologically destructive, as if deliberately trying to destroy any kind of affection one had for the original film and novel. It is, in no uncertain terms, completely unwatchable.

Afterwords, he quickly lapsed into incoherent babbling, and did not recover for many more months.

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