Piranha (1995)

Well, it's the end of summer. So, let's celebrate by doing another summer horror movie! I originally planned to review the 1978 Piranha this week – the original movie that people sort of remember. But unfortunately, I didn't do my research, and ended up watching something else entirely – the 1995 Piranha remake, to be exact; a movie I didn't know existed. Because apparently, I am going senile after six years of doing this site and can't be bothered to watch the right movies.

Director: Scott P. Levy

Starring: William Katt, Alexandra Paul

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This movie is good, if by 'good' you really just mean 'ripping off every creature flick in existence and doing a bland job of it without actually offending.' Which is what I always mean when I say good. So I guess it's cool.

The film begins with two kids going out onto the water, and yes, it's totally OK for the girl to get naked and the guy to be completely clothed – that's what feminism has brought us.

They blather on about how it's totally cool to be there, and no, nerdy guy, nothing bad will happen. Which is a surefire guarantee, really. It should be an insurance premium – if a hot chick in a horror movie tells you everything will be fine, it totally will be.

The nakedness apparently has all the answers.

They start swimming for a bit until one thing slightly inconveniences them – a swarm of hungry piranhas that devours them alive. I guess the insurance policy was a bit of a fraud. Oh well. At least we have Obamacare now, so this kind of thing never happens in horror movies anymore.

The main story starts when a writer guy named Paul living out in the woods is confronted by a scientist named Maggie, who is searching for the two kids who got killed in the opening scene – even though we will never remember their names, and even the movie sort of forgets them as we go along. We get a few bland scenes of them introducing one another, which of course ends with Paul joining her for a wacky buddy cop scenario like all bad movies have.

"Let's exchange pointless banter and then grow to love one another at the end!"
"Okay!"

They go and find some laboratory where some scientists were experimenting on piranhas, or some shit like that. They don't get very far, though, before a crazy woman attacks them with an ax. It's random and out of nowhere, but hey, the movie needed someone to spout exposition lazily later on, so they just threw this lady in. I've seen worse excuses for exposition... wait, no. No I haven't. This is the worst.

Put the ax down, Annie Wilkes. You're better off just getting out of this while you can.

They tie her up and bring her back to Paul's place, and the next day while they're searching for the source of the piranha attacks, the lady gives them some exposition about how the piranhas were created by the government so they could put them in the water of enemy countries and kill everyone off. That's so stupid, even most Internet conspiracy theorists would call it insane – but I guess in this movie it's a reality.

I also love how there had to be this whole big explanation of this plot. Isn't it just the same shit all these movies have? If the government wasn't behind this, it would have been aliens or something. Those are the only two options. After that, you just copy and paste all the other tropes and wallah, you have a bland and formulaic creature horror flick.

They do save a kid from the piranhas, but the crazy lady dies, because her purpose in the movie was just to tell the extremely bland backstory. Boy, these movies sure do have a weird, Darwinian view of purposes in life, huh? Once you give the exposition, you have no reason to live and can thus be ripped apart immediately. Heavy stuff for a movie made by people who I'm not sure could count past 12.

"Farewell, sweet princess. You have served your purpose and may now go to the Great Exposition Dump in the Sky, where Odin awaits you."

Also, while I'm on the subject, the piranhas make noises more like raptors from Jurassic Park or something, and it is annoying as shit. It's also always the exact same noise, with no variation. It's kind of like if they were puppets with the laziest sound-box in the world. Really? Couldn't even vary up the scary noises they make? Ah well – it's still better than the noise the mosquito made in Mosquito.

This apparently makes noises like a fucking dinosaur or bird of prey. Oh well. I'll go with it.

They then find out Paul's daughter who he never talks to is at a summer camp where all the piranhas are plotting to kill everyone. The movie doesn't say they're plotting to do that, but I think it's funnier to imagine a bunch of mutant piranhas sitting around with a map plotting out points on where to attack.

Of course, because this is a dumb movie from the '90s, the authority figures don't believe Paul and Maggie when they say piranhas are going to attack. Because Mr. Bigwig Businessman wants money! So that trumps any and all warnings of danger, even from legit scientists who have no reason to lie about it. This is basically how the whole conversation goes:

PAUL AND MAGGIE: We need to evacuate that park, because piranhas are going to kill everyone!

BIGWIG BUSINESSMAN: No, we need money! You're just a bunch of liberal feminist hippies!

(Yes, that's an actual line in the fucking movie.)

PAUL AND MAGGIE: Wouldn't it make sense to at least check and make sure a bunch of child deaths aren't going to be on your conscience?

BIGWIG BUSINESSMAN: *plugs ears with fingers* LALALALALALA!

SHERIFF: I'm gonna arrest you now on no legitimate charges because I am in the businessman's pocket! That's how reality works!

PAUL AND MAGGIE: Damn!

So, yeah, really – they get thrown in jail for no reason and can't even make a phone call because “they're not arrested, they're just being held.” Which is so illegal that I'm positive the entire sheriff's department would be immediately overhauled in real life and Paul and Maggie would be able to sue them for millions. But this movie is more of a cartoon than anything, so we need a scene where they knock out a guard to escape and steal his pants because the key to the jail is chained to them, and we get to see this:

Amazing. I can die in peace now after seeing this.

Then we get the climax, full of kids dying and their parents dying while trying to save them. That's great because their lives are ruined forever now.

Aw. What a heartwarming summer image.

Paul and Maggie go out to the ocean and try to lure the piranha into this old barge thing, or something like that – Paul is underwater for much longer than any of the other characters who died, but he doesn't get attacked at all. Hmmm. Maybe that's incredibly poor writing based on lazy convenience and anyone who does it should be ashamed.

Nah – the fish were probably just hungover that day of shooting.

And plus, it's cool – later, the piranhas DO attack him mercilessly, which is what I wanted to see from the first time I heard that weenie talk. But he demonstrates that being the main character means piranhas devouring you just means you have blood paint on you afterwards and are mostly fine.

"No! That guy I knew for one day is DEAD! I loved him!!!"

"Arrrgggrrrrrhhhh! Even I don't know how I survived this!"

So they get rid of all the piranhas and then the businessman guy shoots himself. Yes, really – that's the end of his story. It's totally dark, and is the best suicide I have ever seen.

Best ending ever!

Then the movie ends with kids on a beach presumably going to get eaten by more piranhas, with a voiceover from the mayor or somebody telling them it's totally safe!

Which is totally original and not at all a lame Jaws rip off. Not at all.

This was pretty bad, but not offensive or anything – it was pretty harmless. The worst thing about it had to be that noise the piranhas made. Just for that, I give it zero stars. If it didn't have that noise in it, it could have been a solid three-star movie. But the noise the piranha made killed it, just killed it dead.

And what? There were plenty of boob shots and fanservice scenes I could have very easily put into the review and made it better? Damn. Just damn. Between getting the movie wrong AND not putting in those pandering fanservice shots, I'm really not at the top of my game. I could have edited this further and fixed everything in addition to watching the correct movie instead, but I'm just leaving all of this rambling at the end of this mediocre review. Oh well. I'll try again next week.

Images copyright of their original owner. I own none of them.

Review: Friends with Benefits (2011) TH

Hypocritic oath

This is a romantic comedy on the candid side that attempts to evenly round up both the female/male viewer by throwing out some honest, self-depreciating jokes about the sometimes awkward and frustrating aspects of what either side goes through when dating and attempting to secure a steady relationship. "Friends with Benefits" is an unchallenging film that comes across more as a spoof of other contrived rom-coms while still managing to fall into a few of the trappings and part of the formula itself the more involved it gets.

This is by no means quintessential and it's hard to say if it tackles the promiscuous question any better than "No Strings Attached" as they don't always take themselves very seriously but are more for brisk and painless recreation instead. "Friends (with Benefits)," the indy flick from 2009, answered a little more about the debatable question. The main difference between the recent "NSA," is it had one side who felt more attached than the other and previously they were more acquaintances than friends. All three seem like different experiences in their own little ways, but where both "FwB" 2011 and "NSA" borrowed off of "F (wB)" 2009 was they all start off as silly comedies and then revert back to a similar rom-com template, not to mention all boil down to emotions that everyone was trying to suppress. Now that a template is officially established, hopefully this is the last of 'em.

This has a very loosely laid out plot that instead of going for layer upon layer keeps it simple by concentrating on character development, leaving ample room to evaluate emotions and coming with little recognizable patterns throughout in the meantime that looks at their on-the-fly lives in the city and charismatic friends and family members. There's the premise: they go through unserious and unreasonable dates, then meet through business--Dylan (Timberlake) is from L.A., Jamie (Kunis) is from N.Y., now he moves to N.Y.--they become close friends and, of course, they're done with the emotional side of sex, hence they should be friends with benefits. Problem solved! Not exactly. Both are still romantics at heart even though they try and hide their emotions so they don't get hurt again with Jamie being a blunt, cursing New Yorker, and Dylan avoiding talking about private issues when confronted. They try and keep it cut and dry or as a "tennis match," but if it wasn't inevitable enough start to grow onto each other. They want to keep the friendship, so both date outside but confusion sets in if they should go back and further the connective bond they had.

From what at first has them yelling out calculated directions of how to please one another like a business transaction, this turns into some believable chemistry between Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake with some spontaneity thrown in to give them some natural interaction. This comes with lots of undergarment shots, a few butts, as well as plenty of bedroom banter that only holds back in showing the full detail. Shaun White shows up as the token and somewhat pointless antagonist who's nice to everyone else but chides on Dylan because he had a thing with Jamie prior. Woody Harrelson plays the proud and macho gay friend Tommy who's got a thing for sports. Harrelson tries a little too hard, but still manages to keep one's undivided attention whenever he enters the screen just for what he'll say next. Patricia Clarkson--from "Easy A"--plays Jamie's irresponsible mom Lorna who goes through more men than floss and has some pretty humorous lines despite not being the perfect role model.

Everybody seems to be checked out when it comes to steady relationships, including Dylan's father (Richard Jenkins) who's going through Alzheimers but wishes the mother was still around and that he actually went after a former crush. This causes Jamie and Dylan to reevaluate what they had, despite the flaws and hangups, and the film from having rapid edits and quick quips in the beginning starts to eventually ramble on and turn a tad bit long so it can avoid falling into a cliche and sappy closer, which it nearly does so anyway. Who are they fooling? Even though some of the humor and serious subjects don't always mix at this stage, it was still somewhat mushy, easy fun that's perfect enjoyment for a date night or a relaxing nothing-to-do day. "FwB" doesn't necessarily answer any questions as it shows more than it tells, but when it concludes still comes with a few relating puns and jabs at what people go through just to find the right person, or who that right person actually will be outside of our preconceived notions. I guess there's hope even for the ones who want to cut to the chase and eliminate all those courtship rules.

Director: Will Gluck (Fired Up!, Easy A)
Starring: Mila Kunis, Justin Timberlake, Woody Harrelson, Patricia Clarkson, Richard Jenkins, Jenna Elfman
Website: IMDB

Review: Black Swan (2010)

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis

Website: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/blackswan/

"I just want to be perfect."

-Nina

Darren Aronofsky is a puzzling director, but he has gotten better since the rather overwhelming – to the point of being a burden to even watch – Requiem for a Dream. The Fountain was artful, if not a little lacking in substance, but where he really got good was The Wrestler. That was just a great movie. And continuing this brilliance is his new film, Black Swan. Let’s get started, then!

This is a really great movie without any kind of restraint as it hurtles through boundaries like a blazing hellcat. Aronofsky’s directing is spastic and harsh. The lighting is very cold, unsettling in its mass of clinical whites and dark, dank shadows. And so the atmosphere is set.

Black Swan is a film about passion and obsession. Natalie Portman's character is driven by a maniacal lust to become a dancer, and the things she goes through - all this physical and sexual madness - is just insane, and yet she perseveres. She really puts on a masterful, captivating performance and makes you believe that she really is this character, Nina Sayers.

And let’s talk about Nina for a second. She really is a great character, with enough depth and texture to her that you really feel like she’s an actual person. Nina is beautiful but insecure and somewhat childish. She lives with her mother in a small apartment in a crowded city and really, really wants that big role in the ballet production coming up. She thinks that it will define her, like she can’t exist and be happy with her existence without this one, prideful achievement. Her mother is domineering and strict and most likely had something to do with her fragility and insecurity.

This is a movie about a lot of things, among them art, work and all kinds of sexuality. It merges the real life trials of doing demanding work like ballet dancing with shocking, often grotesque psychological horror that is subtle and fleeting and yet horrific at the same time. Nina experiences cuts that appear out of nowhere on her back, arms and hands. There are several jarring, nightmareish scenes throughout the film that accentuate and pepper Nina’s gradual mental decline.

She gets involved with another dancer named Lily (Mila Kunis), who she sees as a threat to her and her role in the performance. Even though she doesn’t have much of a reason to, Nina slowly grows more and more certain that Lily is trying to kill her and take the role for herself. There is the infamous lesbian scene between the two of them. It really drives home the amount of sexual tension there is in this film. The lesbian scene is not even really sexy, or arousing at all. It’s really more creepy and unsettling than anything. Female nudity can only do so much in the face of this film’s dark, crawling sense of fear and shadowy atmospherics. The film does an outstanding job creating paranoia inside the viewer, and the result at the end is a unique blend of sensuality and fear, two opposing forces colliding and interweaving into the movie’s madness. It is one of the film’s strongest points.

One scene that sums up the theme of the movie is when Nina goes to visit a broken ex-dancer in the hospital, because it just points out the viciousness and immediacy of the profession she’s chosen. There are no demons here, no spooks around the corner or ghosts in the belfry – just the cold, hard fact of her job. People come, people go, so you have to get that special part, make your mark on the scene and seize the day while it’s still yours, because tomorrow it could belong to someone else. It’s a dangerous edge to teeter on, and as people are emotionally driven and irrational, they may not be able to deal with it. The mind is fragile, easily breakable, easily given in to pressure.

This fragility and fleetingness is really the core of Black Swan. The climax of the film involves a stunning, breathtakingly good ballet performance from Nina and a subsequent collapse in blood. She works herself to the bone. Death for her art. The utmost devotion to it. Beautiful, haunting, demented and unforgettable, Black Swan is a dark trip from a director on his way up. One of the year’s finest.

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.

And here's the IMDB. View at your own peril.

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.