Pig (2021)

SPOILERS for the movie in here.

Director: Michael Sarnoski

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff

IMDb

Food is such a fraught, weighty thing; it can be political and it can recall all these memories and mean so much to people. In Nicolas Cage’s new vehicle “Pig” these kinds of themes are explored. Cage’s character Robin Feld, an ex-chef who now lives a solitary life in the woods, has a line maybe two-thirds of the way through that really encompasses everything the movie is: “You only get so many things to care about.”

Most of the rest of it is just this tour through the strange and seedy world of the restaurant underground. It’s a curious backdrop for a film and endears me to it – this wholly singular kind of plot and setting. There’s some pretty wild and ugly things that go on like an underground fight club for cooks? I want to know how much this is based on real life. Something tells me there has to have been some real-world connection there. Then you get the more artificial side of the actual front-facing restaurants, so fussy and over-prepared that there’s nothing real in it. All of it really ends up showing you why someone might end up leaving that life.

But he’s got to go back in though. Someone’s taken his truffle pig. He and Alex Wolff’s character Amir, who is trying to start his own business in this crazy culinary underworld, end up on a tour of said underworld, as Robin tries to figure out what the hell happened.

It’s all very moody and somber and the movie doesn’t spell anything out for you. Cage is remarkably restrained and his killer stare does a lot of the work as he chooses his words very carefully. When he does speak it’s like a thunderbolt. You fucking pay attention. Wolff’s character talks tough but he also talks too much and betrays that maybe he’s not as worldly as he wants to be.

Robin goes through this whole thing with a cloud of impending violence over him. But the violence never really comes. There’s one scene with the fight club I mentioned where you get some pretty grisly stuff comparative to the rest of the film, but everything else tends toward the quiet. One of the best scenes is when he visits his old restaurant – now a bakery – and has this really short, tender exchange with the lady who’s taken it over. He gets some baguettes. It doesn’t sound exciting but like I said – food has layers and layers of meaning for people.

Eventually he finds out who took the pig – Amir’s father, played by Adam Arkin, who is now some kind of big kingpin in the Oregon culinary world. Arkin apparently ordered the pig stolen to do what his son was doing selling the truffles but even better. It’s pure capitalistic bloodthirst. No real regard for the humanity. Robin and this guy commiserate just slightly on the fact that they’ve both lost their wives. In an earlier scene Amir had said Robin once cooked a meal for his (Amir’s) parents that they talked about for years after. Unlike your usual “who took my (x)” Taken/John Wick sort of film, there’s no big beat-em-up action scene. Instead Robin cooks the same meal as he’d done years before – he says he remembers “every meal he’s ever cooked, every person he’s ever served.”

Killing the other guy with compassion. Reminding him of what was lost and what matters in life. It’s genius. I wish I had thought of it. The underlying theme speaks to me of the human connection that really matters more than anything else. It sounds like something obvious, but stripped to its core with how the movie presents it, and especially with the raw, quiet ending - it comes off profound. At the end of the day, by the time the last line tells you Robin's deceased wife had given him the pig as a gift and that's why he's so hellbent on getting it back - you kinda guessed that by then, but the emotional effect is as resonant and heavy as an obelisk anyway.

The whole thing really comes out to a grand piece of film. It’s quiet but the themes and ways these characters are unveiled comes out to something that the greatest movies are all about. Mightily human and vulnerable stuff. The reason you go to the movies. Don't miss it.

The Perfection (2018)

I… uh… you know, I don’t have an intro for this. Just read on and I’ll explain what this is.

Director: Richard Shepard

Starring: Allison Williams, Logan Browning

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This one starts off with a girl named Charlotte, whose mother has died and so she can finally go back to playing the cello like she always wanted. She meets her teacher’s new protege, Lizzie, who has been in the New York Times, so that’s cool. Then through a rapid-fire series of scenes of them playing the cello, they drink together and then have sex and are in a relationship enough to go to China together!

Well, you can say a lot of things about musicians. Apparently they move fucking fast. Charlotte says this is the first time she’s ever had sex, since she spent so much time with her dying mother for years. Well, so far so good. I’m sure this will just be a movie about a romance. How sweet.

In China, the two almost immediately have problems when Lizzie starts getting sick. It quickly begins to escalate when they’re on a bus in the middle of nowhere and Lizzie begins to vomit up worms. She wonders if she has that virus that had been reported in China (… you know, I’m not going there for this), and, no, my friend, what you have is apparently much fucking worse. Vomiting up worms – this is some Exorcist shit.

So, OK. It’s a body-horror flick. Cool.

Then the bus driver kicks them off and they just have to wander around in the middle of the mountains with Lizzie dying. She sees bugs exploding out of her arm and Charlotte then immediately produces a giant meat cleaver out of nowhere and goes “you know what you have to do!” Uh, anyone who carries around a fucking meat cleaver and just pulls it out at the ready is nobody I want to be around.

But then the movie ‘rewinds’ itself in a very weird and stupid manner to SHOW US WHAT REALLY HAPPENED! Apparently, Charlotte actually got some hallucinogenics and slipped them to Lizzie, suggesting subtly that bugs were in her skin. Then she also stole a meat cleaver from a restaurant just for the right time to use. This is some psycho shit, man. The character from Single White Female is going “wow, that’s fucked.” Why’d she have to go all the way to China to do this? How did she know the bus driver would just abandon them? I have so many questions. If they had taken her to a hospital, none of it would’ve worked and the whole plan would’ve been shot. I guess it’s just dumb.

So, OK… now I guess it’s a weird revenge/sociopath type of story! Cool! Are you done trying on different genres of films like it’s a department clothing store? I mean, Jesus Christ, this has more personalities than the homeless guy down the street from me.

Then we flash forward a few weeks to back in America, as Lizzie shows up at the music school like a lost orphan with one hand. The teacher, Anton, immediately shows no regard for her well-being at all and basically kicks her out for losing her hand. What a class act! “You suffered a traumatic injury, now GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SIGHT!” This is the kind of guy who grades child cancer patients’ drawings as ‘mediocre at best.’ What a douche!

So instead, she goes and fights Charlotte at her house in the suburbs – wait, so Charlotte’s whole big plan went like:

1. Go trick girl into sleeping with you.
2. Go to China and drug her and make her cut off her own hand!
3. Go home and live in a suburban home and do nothing.

What a plan! She sure is keeping busy these days. I guess it’s good to have a full calendar. That’s the spice of life.

Then Lizzie kidnaps Charlotte and takes her back to the music mansion where Anton the weirdo music teacher just invites them both back in. It’s revealed through some weird flashbacks that, actually, this music school is a weird rape cult where the teacher makes you have sex with him if you mess up the music! What a twist! We also learn that Charlotte was apparently institutionalized before, likely because of the rape cult stuff, and had electroshock therapy.

What a tasteful plot. I’m glad this movie is really shining a light on the plight of sexual assault victims by showing us a bunch of sensational gaudy bullshit twists. Actually it's trash and uses heavy subjects as fodder to be shocking and garish, making it really very immature.

Like this shit is crazy – Anton and his goons, with Lizzie on their side, have Charlotte shackled to a chair and threaten to rape a little girl if she doesn’t do well. What the fuck am I even watching? Who wrote this down and said ‘yeah, makes sense’?

Eventually, we get the OTHER big twist – that Charlotte and Lizzie had actually teamed up to beat Anton, tricking him into thinking HE had the upper hand!

Christ, this movie is full of twists. It’s like three different movies; a romance, a body horror film and then a rape revenge film. I’m not opposed to the genre switching, but the way the movie keeps on throwing twists in and then retconning everything before it makes this a very frustrating viewing. It's not clever if all you're doing is going "oh, yeah, that thing you thought happened? That didn't happen. I'm smart because my mom said so!" Just tell the fucking story!

But yeah – Charlotte and Lizzie team up and kill Anton, eventually severing all his limbs and making him watch them play the cello together. Just imagine clicking on this part as a random point in the movie after seeing the beginning with the two girls kissing and sleeping together. I know that’s not a hard hitting critique, but man is it funny to imagine.

Also, Charlotte apparently did all the stuff about cutting off Lizzie’s hand to save her from the brainwashing of the rape cult thing. I wonder if she EVER just tried talking to Lizzie calmly about it before pulling off that whole scheme. That would be my big problem if I was in Lizzie’s shoes. “Uh, you couldn’t have just talked to me about the brainwashing and the rape cult over our morning coffee? There was no point where you could’ve brought it up civilly? You had to jump straight to CUTTING OFF MY FUCKING HAND???”

But then, that’s our Charlotte – always such a cheeky rascal!

I just wonder why Charlotte had to do everything the way she did. Couldn't she just have killed Anton immediately at the beginning? That would have probably been easier. Or better yet, find some way to expose him or something. So much could've been avoided, including loss of limbs and PTSD-related trauma. But I guess it was more fun to do the whole hand-cutting-off, rape-revenge elaborate plot!

This movie is terribly bad, but I just find it more fascinating than anything. What brain mash thought this crazy shit up? I want to study it under a microscope and find out what secrets lie within. Maybe it could cure cancer.

Image copyright of its original owner; I don't own it.

Ma (2019)

This has to be the most absurd shit I’ve seen in a while, even counting the John Waters film I saw last week (Desperate Living). Not that this is as full of genitalia and body mutilation and gross out stuff as that movie was – though there is some – but just the choices this movie makes are so goddamned weird.

Director: Tate Taylor

Starring: Octavia Spencer, Diana Silvers

IMDb

SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE COMING UP.

This is an Octavia Spencer vehicle where she plays a small-town veterinarian who apparently loves hanging out with children so much that it drove her insane. I thought at some points, this could be genuinely profound, a revealing character study, maybe about small town living or what trauma does to you. But instead it just turned into a bunch of nonsense.

I guess it starts with a new girl in town character, Maggie, as she and her mom move back to some lame podunk Midwestern town. Her mom wears a skimpy outfit at a casino while Maggie makes friends with a bunch of hoodlums who do insane and groundbreaking things like hang out at gas stations and try to get adults to buy them booze. Watch out! These kids are ON THE EDGE!

They make friends with Spencer’s character Sue Anne, or ‘Ma,’ who invites them over to hang out and drink and smoke pot in her basement in the woods. Being dumb kids, I can see it. Though the part where Spencer’s character makes this one jock kid strip totally naked at gunpoint should’ve probably been more of a giveaway. But kids are so damn desensitized to everything now.

I guess there are a few decent scenes setting up the characters, and at first, Spencer’s character is legit kind of creepy as she goes through her sort of revenge game against these kids, who are the children of some assholes who wronged her in high school. Apparently once a long time ago, those kids tricked her into giving a blowjob in a janitor’s closet to some nerdy kid when she thought she was with the popular guy. 

That’s the only thing they show us as to why she turned out so fucked up. I hate to sound insensitive here. But the movie just makes such a bad case about her psyche and how she turned out crazy that it’s making me look like some kind of alt right incel douche here. Like goddammit. It’s not played for sympathy so much as just this cheap thing. There’s not a point where the movie reflects on why what happened to her was bad or what effects that would actually have. It’s just “blowjob closet rape scene = you turn into a crazy horror movie stalker 30 years later.” Somehow, I don’t think the American Psychological Journal is calling you back.

Ma also has a daughter of her own, Genie, who she makes believe is sick and keeps home from school a lot. Like that closet rape scene, this is another actually serious thing that the movie barely treats as such. It's child abuse. But it’s kind of glazed over and never given much any point in the story. But who needs that boring real life shit when we have a bunch of scenes of Octavia Spencer partying with hick teenagers???

The main character, Maggie, dates this one guy for a while, and a few kinda nice scenes happen, maybe almost approaching character development even. Though even that goes nowhere and amounts to nothing, much like the lives of the people living in the small town in the movie. Meanwhile, Spencer’s Ma character texts people a lot, too much even. OooOOOOOoooh! Scary? I dunno. I’ve had this happen in real life from weirdos I’d known online for a few months. Didn’t make me want to see a horror movie about it.

The problem with the movie going forward is that I doubt the writers remember what it was like to be a teenager. Maggie and her mom have this overblown fight about her going to Ma’s house to hang out, and it barely makes sense. Even though Maggie herself has been worried about going there for most of the movie, now she’s super mad about it and hurling insults at her mother! It’s a pretty brutal argument for this movie’s standards, and I’m pretty sure Maggie hasn’t even been this mad at the actual villains in the movie.

Maggie goes back over to Ma’s house to save her boyfriend, and they all get trapped down there as Ma predictably goes insane. Only, even the torture methods are off. Like she paints this black kid’s face white, sews a girl’s lips together and burns another kid just one time with an iron. That’s all she does to them. Then she wants a “picture” with them to replicate her own high school years, and at that point I was just like “oh, I get it now, this is really fucking stupid.”

Then, to make things even more bizarre, when Maggie has to go stab Ma in the back to save Genie, she shouts “I’m not my mother!” I guess because her mom had to move back to her hometown and take a shitty waitressing job? Was that the message this whole Godforsaken time?

This whole thing was just a mess, and the more I thought about it the worse it seemed. I liked Spencer’s acting and even the kids were good. But the story and script just made no real sense. Every “serious” plot thread was seemingly cast aside in favor of scenes of the characters drinking and partying. In fact, pretty sure that was the whole motive here, to have an excuse to drink and party and somehow get paid for it. In which case this movie is actually ingenious and I was wrong about all of this.

Image copyright of its original owners; I don't own it.

John Wick (2014)

John Wick is a movie that a lot of people liked. So of course I will get a lot more traffic when I say right out that this movie SUCKS!

Director: Chad Stahelski, David Leitch

Starring: Keanu Reeves, A Dog, Michael Nyquist

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle and Mercedes.

Did that get your attention yet? Because I was totally exaggerating. It's a pretty okay movie that everyone pretty much loved unabashedly when it came out. But it's not without its problems, which I do want to talk about today. First of all, really, another movie about a retired hitman coming back and getting revenge for something? I don't think there are even that many retired hitmen in real life as there are movies coming out every year about this same goddamn plot.

I guess there is one different thing though – in this one, the reason the retired hitman comes back is because his dog is killed. Uh, give them points for trying? It sounds kind of like a South Park parody of a movie from the plot summary. But I guess we won't know how it plays out unless, you know, we go through and talk about it.

We start off with a very rushed and fast-forwarded telling of how main character John Wick met this woman, married her, and then she died of cancer. Nothing else; that's all the movie gives us. No further depth. Wow – really not wasting any time, are you? This movie is like the caffeine-addicted soccer mom of mafia flicks. Come on, come on, come on, get dressed, we've got to go NOW!!!!

This makes the opening of Up look positively slow and plodding by comparison.

We then fast forward through the funeral because that wouldn't have been interesting at all. Wick gets a puppy dog in the mail from his wife, who delivered it before she died. That's a very nice gesture – unless, that is, he didn't like dogs and wasn't prepared for the responsibility of taking care of one! In that case it would have just been rude of her. Is his wife's ghost prepared to have a dejected and uncared-for puppy dog on her conscience?

But of course that doesn't happen. Instead, Wick bonds with the dog, and reluctantly grows to love the cute little bugger. These scenes are some of the more effective ones in the film, as they come closest to establishing a real human connection to Wick. Which is good, because anything that makes Keanu Reeves seem even close to an actual human being is cool with me. The dog is a better actor than him, but we can look the other way and not hurt his feelings.

So I guess it's okay now. I guess nothing bad will happen and it's going to be a movie about a boring man with a dog. That's cool with me.

… oh, shit.

Yes, apparently a couple of thugs who asked to buy his car earlier in the film break into his house later and kill his dog and take the car. It's a pretty over the top scene. I dunno, I mean obviously this stuff can happen in real life – but the way it's done here is very jarring and comes off as more silly than anything, and the murder of the dog in particular always just feels kinda sensationalistic and cheap to me – like is Keanu Reeves so unsympathetic and dull as a person that you couldn't get us to like him without killing a puppy dog?

And, really, they saw him with that car at a gas station way earlier in the day, so they spend their whole day tracking him down and fucking breaking into his house that night? I guess they didn't have any other plans that day. Everything else can go on the backburner today, we've got to go take that guy's car!

"I could probably get my rich father to buy me this car brand new, but fuck it, I'm very easily distractible! Ooh, a shiny object! Let's kill everyone for no reason to get it!"

So this sends Wick into a spiral of despair, as it's revealed that he actually used to be a hitman himself, and apparently one of the deadliest, too. The young kid who killed the dog goes back to his mob boss father, Viggo, who is shocked to hear this and tells him what a mistake he made. We get a pretty lame and cliché scene where Viggo goes “I've seen him kill three men with a fucking pencil.” We don't get to see it, so I'll fill in the blanks myself and assume this was John Wick's past life:

He also says Wick is “not the boogeyman, but the man you sent to kill the fucking boogeyman.” Because I guess making entirely too long, drawn-out exposition scenes is fine, so long as you include plenty of dumbass quotes for the trailer.

We also get a cameo by John Leguizamo, who is always in good movies like Gamer and Kick Ass 2, playing some car dealer guy who sells stolen cars. He refuses to take Wick's car because he knows Wick, and asks the two kids if they killed him. They say no, but they boast proudly that they “fucked up his dog.” Yeah, fist bump, bro! We killed a puppy! Wahoo!

Captains of the douche squad.

I wonder what they would have said if there had been no dog, and if they'd just broken some of Wick's furniture instead. “No, we didn't kill the guy, BUT WE BROKE HIS LAMP AND LEFT HIS A/C ON SO HE'LL GET A HIGHER BILL! AHAHAHAHA!!!” Lame.

One of the more head-scratching parts of the film involves them sending a bunch of dudes to John Wick's house to kill him. After you got done with your whole monologue about how John Wick is the most fearsome and badass killing machine ever in the history of the world? That's like sending them into a lion's den, isn't it? I think you're the kind of person who doesn't send out any invites to a birthday party and then sends angry passive-aggressive Facebook messages while drunk on boxed wine when nobody shows up.

But seriously – you send them to kill John Wick in his own fucking house? You couldn't just wait until he went around the corner for a six pack and then knifed him in the alley when he wasn't expecting it? I guess not. Maybe you had shit to do the rest of the day. You impatient morons.

So after this it's basically just John Wick going around and knocking off his targets, and it becomes more like watching someone play a video game than actually watching a movie. Some of the fighting is pretty cool, though – especially this one scene set in a nightclub. The lighting is cool and Wick's super fast, furious fight choreography is entertaining. It's a solid action scene.

"I'm amazed I can see well enough in here to even fight the right people, let alone use my gun correctly."

I also love the scene where Wick kills a few people out there and everyone just keeps dancing. That's some dedication. We worked hard stacking boxes at Banana Republic this week and nothing will stop us from dancing! RAAAAARRRRGGGHHH!

Later on there's a scene where he gets a drink from a hot tattooed Elvira-wannabe chick at a mafia bar, and she also later comes to kill him at a hotel. I guess everyone in this world is just a hitman. It's Hitman Land – which is kind of like the classic children's game Candyland, but with more murder and less bright colors.

"Mom, she's trying to take my gun again!"

I guess it's just kind of the world the movie is building, as my friend Mercedes pointed out when we watched the film together. Which is true; this is not the normal world where the law can just intervene; it's a mafia-ruled underworld. The film does suck you into that. But I mostly thought we've seen all this stuff before and the settings and characters aren't terribly interesting. Also, the constant blue-grey monotone colors everywhere and lack of any kind of interesting dialogue just starts to put me to sleep after a while.

Though I do have to give the movie props for including a guy at the front of the hotel desk who can act like all of this is normal. They really must have propped him up on some lethal doses of Xanax to get this performance – but hey, actors, right? Anything they have to do. That's what makes 'em special.

Ohhhh yeah, the picture of cool. This guy could charm anyone.

One of the more interesting aspects of the film is Viggo, I suppose, as there is a rather touching subplot about how he doesn't want to let Wick kill his scumbag of a son. We don't get a whole lot of depth on either him or his kid, but we get a few nice tidbits here and there. Though I do have to dock points again when they capture John Wick and then do the whole cliché scene where Viggo gives him this whole speech when he's tied up. Guys, this came out in 2014 – the evil villain monologue has been parodied to fucking death at this point. It's really not necessary.

"I could kill you right now and save my own life as well as my son's, but my ego is a shriveled prune that needs watering! Muwahahaha!"

I mean, okay, so they know each other and have this whole history together. Fine. It's still pretty bad dialogue overall, and really just serves purpose to hold a place until the next fight scene. The big line that sums up the movie is when John Wick says the dog was the last thing that reminded him of his wife, and they took it from him – it's an idea we already understood without him saying it, but okay. What else is there to get connected though? His name is in the title of the movie and we barely know any fucking thing about him. That's kinda lame.

Give Keanu credit though – he does actually raise his voice here. He was saving up his emotions for the last 20 years for this, so now we won't see anything like it until around 2035. Was it worth it?

Eh, no.

Eventually we get the final chase and fight scene between John Wick and Viggo, where he beats him up at a dock in the dark. It's pretty cool I guess – though I wouldn't mind if we got some other colors besides blue and black and grey once in a while.

Then he goes and Breaking Bad Season 5 style kills the son, shooting him midsentence and finally bringing down this whole reign of nonsense. Also inadvertently it points out how shitty this mafia was if it could be brought down in like a day or two by one dude who wasn't even at the top of his game really, but let's ignore that part!

This whole thing was just more of the same “immortal invincible badass” genre of action movies that have been cropping up for years now. It's really not an interesting plot. Does anybody else agree with me here? Having your good guy just be this super weapon of a man who never faces any challenge and you know he's gonna come out victorious just isn't compelling. He mows his enemies down and nobody ever even comes close to killing him. It's like a better produced slasher horror film. There was never any doubt here that John Wick was going to beat his enemies. Kinda hard to get invested when you fucking know what's going to happen.

Really, a movie like this with strictly generic tropes and cliches is all about the journey it takes you on, the world it immerses you in. The fight scenes are good enough, and obviously they were the focus of the film. The choreography is good and the fight scenes do tend to flow pretty well, keeping the momentum of the movie up. The scenery can be very moody and atmospheric, and it does try and transport you to this dark, gritty world. Sometimes, it even succeeds.

But the writing is just bog standard. That's what really killed the movie for all three of us watching it – we just needed to know more about the characters. They were really just so bland and cardboard cut-out, with very few good lines or memorable personality traits, and that's why it was difficult to sustain interest all throughout this thing, even despite the fight scenes. The way they killed that dog just to move the plot felt a bit cheap, and there was never an attempt to look any deeper into who these characters are and make us like them. Killing the dog and the wife is just cheap emotional broad strokes that anyone can write. It isn't compelling. A good action movie has action like this one, and also good characters and drama too, beyond the bare minimum of John Wick and its ilk.

Overall, not a terrible film or anything. It had a few cool moments, but we didn't like it the way everyone else did. You can say the flaws are excused by the action scenes, but come on – why not push for movies that don't have this many flaws? Let's expect better than this kind of stuff, guys.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

Danger: Diabolik (1968)

Let's take a journey back in time to before any of us were born pretty much. It's a magical time full of psychedelic colors, svelte soundtracks and action movie heroes who slaughter people indiscriminately. One of those three things has survived today, anyway, but unlike your latest Liam Neeson flick, this one has a complete lack of any moral center. But on the other hand, it has lots of gold and money that the characters have sex on top of, so you can live vicariously through that.

Director: Mario Bava

Starring: John Phillip Law, Marisa Mell

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Directed by renowned schlock artist Mario Bava, this was based off a comic book from back in the day. It was a cheesy flick back in the day and seems even moreso now. And since this comic is apparently being remade again now (because we don't have enough comic book movies yet), I'm sure we'll get a modern remake full of dark grittiness and moral grey areas and all kinds of melodrama. But maybe, just maybe, if I review the original, I can help steer Hollywood in the right direction to make a better film.

This movie begins with an acknowledgement that cars are pretty cool: 

We don't need to see your driver's license test, guys.

And especially when they drive under bridges and stuff!

We also get some sweet swirling psychedelic colors for the opening, which go on longer than that time you were given a swirly in the school bathroom by that kid who smells like his drunk father's cigarettes.

Groovy, man.

Apparently main character Diabolik and his girlfriend, Eva Kant, are professional criminals who have stolen a lot of money from under the noses of the cops. A recurring theme throughout this thing is that the cops are apparently completely powerless to stop these two – like they're demigods and the cops are just sitting around twiddling their thumbs at the donut counter. It's pretty one sided.

As this was the 60s, I guess the fashion is a bit different. I'm not one to harp on little things like fashion from a different time, but some of these choices are starting to push it, man. Like, Eva really needs a shirt with a hole right where her boobs are? Really? That's kinda like a guy wearing pants with the zipper wide open all the time.

For that matter, it takes a hell of a woman to want to fuck a guy who looks like the bad guy from The Collector.

Diabolik and the girlfriend go back to their mysterious cave home, because why not, you know? If you're rich enough, fuck it, just forsake housing altogether and live in a fucking cave with futuristic gizmos enough to make Superman blush.

Look at this shit – they have enough money to just throw it everywhere on their weird rotating circle-bed thing and have sex underneath the giant piles of money. I get the idea this is what rich people fantasize about doing with the money they get from tax write-offs and stuff. It's what Congress members would do if they still had any sex drive.

They say money can't buy happiness, but...well, they're probably poor as shit if they say that and are just jealous!

AGGRRRARGGGHHHH MONEY!!!!!

Afterwards, they take showers in the best showers ever made, which is to say they are completely transparent boxes with no curtains, just weird ornaments hanging over where the boobs and face are:

Ah yes, Salvador Dali's shower designs finally got some good use...

So I guess the plot, if you're really paying attention instead of just gawking at all the bizarre shit they put in this cave, goes like this – this other crime lord guy makes a deal with the cops after they catch up to him, telling them he can deliver Diabolik, who is a much more wanted criminal. The cops are apparently so baffled that they can't find the guy despite him driving fancy cars and living in a goddamn futuristic cave – but I guess we can excuse them.

After all, they are trying their best. Like when they let this obvious serial killer and sexual deviant up on the podium to waggle his crazy eyes at everyone:

He's supposed to be some kind of political figure, but I think he killed the real official and is a crazy impostor.

Diabolik, meanwhile, is enjoying the spotlight so much that he can just sneak up on an entire press conference full of cops and spray them with laughing gas and somehow get away afterwards.

Eh, it WAS pre-9/11...we'll give it a pass.

I think these cops just secretly like being bested by this guy. Maybe it gives them an odd titillation and thrill and helps them sleep better at night knowing a challenge is out there, always right outside their reach. Only this is a challenge that sometimes likes to blow the shit out of your police cars and slaughter innocent policemen with throwing knives.

"Don't tell my family I got killed by a guy in a GIMP costume!"
"No promises!"

Meanwhile, the other crime lord is flying on a plane with his henchmen, and when one of them doesn't agree with him, he opens up a trap door right where the guy is standing and lets him fall to his death. And I think that's great, because more planes need trap doors. It's a lost art.

But enough of that nonsense. Let's have a scene now where Diabolik stretches out a long role of mirrored screen so the oncoming cars will see it and crash into it because their headlights blind them, then go careening off a cliff to fiery, horrific deaths.

If this brutal violence for no reason bothers you, just pretend the guys who died were child molesters. Did that make it easier to swallow their deaths? I think it did.

That should be a good palette cleanser from these scenes that didn't have Diabolik in them!

Diabolik breaks into a castle to take some pictures and really just kind of fuck with the cops some more. He's also trying to steal a necklace for Eva, which he does very easily, because this place leaves its valuables on a platter for any thief to take. Like almost every scene in this movie, there are just some things that don't make sense. There's a “secret” security camera hidden inside of a painting. It's instantly noticeable, because when I think of terrible security, I think of defacing classic works of art.

There are also a bunch of guys dressed as Revolutionary War soldiers hunting Diabolik right alongside the cops, because again, why the fuck not? It makes perfect sense to me.

The powdered wigs help them aim better.

Diabolik himself has chosen a fitting outfit – he's dressed like a sperm as he crawls up walls and takes pictures inside fancy rooms.

I will also accept 'KKK ninja.'

Then he ditches the suit so the cops go chasing after that while he hides, presumably naked, up on the roof of this castle. Good job, Diabolik. They'll never notice a naked man wandering around their weird castle place. But then again, even though that was sarcasm, somehow it's true and they really won't ever notice him.

Meanwhile, some goons working for that crime boss kidnap Eva while she's at this spa place and take her away. They use her as leverage against Diabolik, forcing him to give himself up. He agrees, but then throws himself along with the crime lord out of that conveniently placed trap door in the plane. They go free-falling through the air like sacks of potatoes dropped from the sky, landing right where they need to be to find Eva – who is tied to a bed and getting burned with cigarettes by her captor.

There truly is no middle ground between damsel in distress and hot kick ass "Black Widow" type chick with no personality. It's just a matter of which kind of sexism you prefer more.

To let Eva get away, Diabolik pretends to be dead by taking a pill. He gets taken to the morgue and presumed dead while apparently every member of the media comes to see. Eva somehow poses as a nurse and gets him out of there.

They go back to Diabolik's cave and sit in a pool while Diabolik puts priceless gemstones all over Eva's breasts and shoulders. Not to echo a sentiment done too many times already, but again – why the fuck not? You got that much money and jewels, hire a girl with big tits and put them all over her. I'd do it too if I was that shamelessly wealthy.

They also blow up a bunch of buildings, which is totally reprehensible and bad, until they hit this one:

In their infinite wisdom, the cops decide to move a shitload of gold right now – right after the notorious unstoppable thieves who have proven they can fuck you over just for fun escaped being dead. Yeah. I'm sure THIS won't backfire at all, right? I'm sure that gold will get to its right place without any incident. That's why they're showing this part in the movie – to show how effortlessly the authorities can move gold without it getting stolen!

Couldn't just keep it in one place for a while, huh guys?

Also, get this – they melt it down and put it inside of some kind of indestructible container. Bit overkill when you know nothing bad is gonna happen and this gold isn't gonna get stolen at all, guys. Come on. Have some faith in yourselves.

Big surprise, Diabolik and Eva manage to steal the gold. Through a complex sequence of events involving seducing truck drivers and scuba diving, they get the gold back to their cave. The cops find the cave NOW of course, because it's the climax of the film. A shoot out ensues, in which the gold explodes and covers Diabolik. The film ends with him alive and encased in gold.

Which I'm sure, despite the fact that he can no longer move, eat or drink anything, makes him happy – the guy's lust for wealth has finally led him to its logical conclusion. This is what he deserved all along.

This movie is pretty bonkers and over the top, but it's not bad for all that, and it remains entertaining with no real plotholes. It's a crazy, wild and bizarre movie from a crazy, wild, bizarre time. The action is fun and the characters are enjoyably insane. It's also very colorful and fast paced and it doesn't take itself all that seriously.

Really, a lot of modern action flicks like John Wick and The Equalizer just glorify revenge and make it too glamorous looking. They goad us to root for unstoppable killing machines and make us not care about how many random goons die at their hands who didn't deserve to. Most action movies do that in some measure, but the ones I'm talking about are worse because they try and make it a moral thing. They want you to root for these killing machines because they're doing it for a good reason. So, you know, that makes mass murder okay.

The random thugs killed in a movie like John Wick are made to look as despicable and one-dimensionally evil as possible. They don't have any humanity to them on purpose, because they aren't real characters – they're tools used to elicit a cheap emotional response. The movie isn't terrible or anything, but the way it's written just doesn't lend any kind of depth to the revenge storyline. It comes off as hackneyed and morally bent, and rather than a compelling story it's mostly just a silly good versus evil cartoon. Since the movie was not going for that, the effect is dampened a bit.

At least in movies like Die Hard where the main character kills a lot of people, he's doing it because they attacked the building he was in first. And he's also not invincible, and really struggles like an underdog to save everyone in the building. In John Wick and The Equalizer, the main dudes are just completely immortal badasses who hunt down their prey like serial killers. But again, it's okay, because they're doing it for the right reason. Right?

Danger: Diabolik forsakes all of this. It doesn't try to have a moral at all. The main character just kills whoever the hell he wants, with no hesitation, and then never thinks about it again. It's just a goofy action flick, and I love it for that. I guess if you take one thing away from this, well, uh...if you can get rich off stealing from people, do it. The rewards are pretty fucking sweet.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

Cinema Freaks LIVE: Unfriended (2015)

Welcome to our first sloppy attempt at doing an audio review of Unfriended. You can listen above for me and Michelle and our friend Mercedes talking about this film, but I'll also talk about it a bit down here as well - you know, for you poor saps looking at this in a cubicle at work or some shit. There are definite spoilers in the video and in this review, so if you really want to see this, don't read or listen to this yet.

This movie is getting a shitload of attention for being a found footage horror movie set all on Skype. The basic story is as follows: cyberbullied girl kills herself, then comes back for revenge on all the kids who had a part in bullying her through making a video and telling her to kill herself, etc. Conveniently all of them are online and chatting on Skype exactly when she decides to enact this revenge.

The title and plot sound like an SNL skit more than a serious movie. Unfriended? Really? But the actual movie, in practice, isn't too bad or anything. I've certainly seen worse found footage films, and at least this one is putting a new, unique spin on things. The film IS set only on Skype and only in these characters' rooms - a lot of movies like this tend to stretch it and have characters using their webcams while walking outside, or in any random room they happen to be in, and that isn't really how we act in real life. Not most of us, anyway...

The acting is actually surprisingly good, and you can believe these people as shitty, petty, cat fighting high school cliques who keep stabbing one another in the back. They're not good characters for the most part, but they're believable for this story at least. You know, unless you wanted people who actually looked high school aged. These people were either held back several times in school and have now become bitter as a result of a perpetual loop of high school clique (which would explain a lot), or they're actors in their 30s. Pick your own answer.

Plotwise it's pretty basic; just an anti-bullying story and nothing else. It's not done with any particular subtlety. One of the main things that really irritated me about this was how silly all the reveals were that all these characters had done bad stuff to the dead girl. Like they kept denying it and shit and then the ghost would prod some more, they would scream and cry about how sorry they were, and then they would die. This happened over and over again, and we were supposed to be surprised when one of them had done something bad - but after a while it was just stale. Too many long scenes of the characters just screaming at each other and crying gets grating in general. My ears!

Overall it really is more of a funny movie than anything scary. A few of the deaths aren't bad, but really with this set up, over Skype and all, it's near impossible to make a death scene anything less than ridiculous. The movie has fun with the deaths though, and doesn't try to get too supernatural on you or anything. It's more worth seeing for the visual style than the story - the way the film uses the computer desktop and the mouse cursors and Skype text chatting to convey story and character is pretty interesting and well done. Even when the film itself can drag or get too irritating to listen to, the visual style was obviously well thought out and constructed.

If you already hate the premise and don't want to be impressed, well, you'll hate the movie. But if you're like us and actually want to see what the fuck they could possibly do with a Skype horror film, check it out, it's worth your time for at least that one viewing. All I gotta say is, I'm staying off Skype next time I decide to humiliate someone to the point of suicide.

REVIEW: Forget Me Not (2009)

Oh, boy. If I could forget I saw this shit, you bet I would do it faster than you can say ‘turn the TV off.’ Forget Me Not is a movie with the incredibly original plot of a ghost getting revenge on people who wronged her in the past. Oh, well, it would have been original if I Know What You Did Last Summer didn’t exist maybe, as well as the thousands of rip-offs that are spewed out every year by talentless hacks who couldn’t come up with a good idea if it was flat out handed to them on a platter. Well, I think that sums up Forget Me Not really well actually! But I’m going to review the whole thing anyway, because I hate myself.

Director: Tyler Oliver

Starring: Wait, who was in this movie again?! I CAN'T REMEMBER! The ghosts must have erased my brain!!!

IMDb

I mean, OK, the plot has the one original element of having the ghost erase the dead victims from peoples’ memories instead of just killing them off – that’s kind of a unique concept. But the movie doesn’t do anything with it, and the whole thing is incredibly tasteless and boorish to levels that would make even most 80s slashers blush. Let’s get this over with.

We start off with some montages of people having sex and cheating on one another. We know nothing else about them, so being invested is out the window, and on top of that, they act like such wretched douchebags that we’re also pretty much disinclined to care about them at all for the rest of this whole movie! It would be one thing if this was a campy, lighthearted flick that used its characters as punchlines, like some of the old Friday the 13s or something, but Forget Me Not takes itself so seriously and the tone is so unpleasant that I can’t get behind it at all.

"Quick, I promise I'm not kicking you out of your own house to have sex with my girlfriend! I'm helping you escape this movie! Run, my child, run!"

Basically, I hope these characters are raped and killed by a Chupacabra, upon whence their graves would be desecrated by an army of drunk hillbillies wearing Michael Myers masks. Unfortunately none of them have particularly grisly death scenes…damn you movie, damn you!

So after some throwaway scenes at a party that I think Project X would like to have a word with, the group all go to a graveyard to play “the Game,” an old favorite pastime of theirs in which they recite some kind of really morbid, macabre chant that sounds like something you’d hear in a bad Goosebumps episode. These high school kids, who are obsessed with partying, drinking and drugs, are going to go out in a graveyard at night and recite this incredibly elaborate chant, and NONE OF THEM find it weird in the least?

Uh huh. Right. Unless they're going to bury each other alive in that graveyard I don't care.

I’m sorry, that’s the first big hole with this. No normal kids would ever play this game. I mean it’s basically just like tag. Why all the pointless theatrics? It’s pretty bad when My Soul to Take is outdoing your movie in plot coherence. At least that one just let it all hang out that it was a big stupid joke. This movie actually thinks it’s something to be taken seriously.

So this one girl who nobody knows comes and asks to play with them, and literally everything she says gets interpreted by the guys with innuendos mixed in. “Oh, can I play?” “Sure you can, baby.” Wink wink. Nudge nudge. What’s next, is she going to ask how the weather is and then end up talking about what Kama Sutra positions she likes because of it?

So they play tag and everything goes accordingly until the mysterious girl who no one knows and no one bothered to ask about, jumps off a cliff. The main character Sandy, i.e. the only one who is not a total piece of trash, starts to have strange flashbacks to when she was a kid, when she played the weird graveyard tag game with another girl who had asthma. Despite this, she still doesn’t put together that it may have something to do with what’s going on. Because she is a goddamn moron.

Yay, good parenting IS letting your kids play in a graveyard unsupervised! Won't leave them scarred at all am I right?

Meanwhile, the next morning, one of the idiots wakes up in a car by the lake with his girlfriend. They get out and he says he wants to break up with her, so she throws some little necklace thing into the water which is never explained, and he starts to make her feel bad…for him breaking up with her? Whatever. He leaves her there in her underwear by the side of the lake. That’s a total dick move there! It’s almost like these characters are complete wastes of air…

After that, they all decide to go on a trip to the beach. Look at this one chick; she’s practically a porn star already:

Ha ha, sorry girl, Girls Gone Wild was filming at the OTHER crappy suburban set piece. You're stuck in a degrading B-horror movie about ghosts.

She does this in front of a bunch of people already in relationships, plus her father – why? What’s the attraction? It’s not like anyone there really wants her that much. Even the only single kid in the group, the little brother of Sandy, already likes one of the other girls! But it’s OK. Her boyfriend is off at a factory getting his arm chopped off by one of the machines. Is that an asinine and convenient way to kill off a character when you have no other ideas? Yes. Yes it is.

Then we see more of the movie’s brilliant special effects as one of the assholes who was late to the party runs into a ghost that looks like something that even the American remake of One Missed Call would have rejected:

Go back to whatever R.L. Stine book you came from, demon! I banish thee!

And really, this plot doesn’t work that well. Want an example? How about the scene where the whole gang is running around in the woods looking for their friend whose screams are leading them to her? When she dies, they forget about her entire existence just like every time someone dies in this movie. So WHY WERE THEY IN THE WOODS THEN? What kind of excuse did their brains make up to rationalize randomly being in the middle of the woods for no reason? Are you seriously telling me these kids didn’t have some weird blackout in their mind, some gap in their train of thought that they want to look into? Yeah, because I guess doing things with your plot is overrated. More generic slasher cliché, please!

They end up at some motel where one of the girls has sex with Eli, Sandy’s brother, which I guess would make sense, provided that she’s into Justin Bieber:

Now I can tag Justin Bieber in this review's tags - bet you never thought you'd see the day, huh?

After that she gets killed and then the brother was never there at all, apparently only having come with them for that girl. Sandy and her boyfriend go in search of this convent where apparently the girl who is making all of this happen lives. They go by and pretty much accomplish nothing except getting Mr. Boyfriend killed off by more of those stupid-ass ghosts that look like something you’d see on a Hallmark Halloween card, and so he never existed, and the world wasn’t better or worse off for it since, well, he was a pretty bland character…

That's not scary, it's a bored study hall doodle of a Troma flick.

Eli comes to get her and then they go to the hospital to find coma-girl, who, through some handy flashbacks, they discover that they accidentally put into a coma by scaring her to death with ludicrous Insane Clown Posse makeup:

ICP legions RISE!!

At the hospital, the sheriff, her parents and some other random people have apparently staged an intervention for her. She gets tied to a table and sedated just for saying some crazy things and crying, and it’s up to Eli to save the day! Only before he can even turn around, he gets ambushed by the stupidest scene this movie has yet to show us, which, if you’ve been keeping up, is a pretty goddamned big accomplishment. Feast your eyes on THIS:

I'm sorry, I didn't realize I'd put in the new Cradle of Filth video...

Wow. The amazing incompetence on every single level of what this was going for, is just astounding. The incredible asininity and ridiculousness of this scene would get five full stars if I was rating for incompetence. I mean, if they were going for stupid, by god they succeeded! Full marks on that front, movie! But unfortunately, given the tone of the rest of this, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that it was supposed to be scary and ominous…sigh…so I have to keep on saying it sucks I guess.

Then the movie ends with Sandy confronting coma girl in her bed and just unplugging the machine. At least she doesn’t go full stop and choke the bitch like that girl did in Red Mist…but then the movie ends with coma girl magically waking up and jump scaring Sandy so bad that SHE goes into a coma while the original coma girl wakes up and is totally fine. Now, wait a minute. How did coma girl have all these powers to begin with? It’s never explained! How was she erasing people from existence? They don’t even TRY to make that make any sense!

I guess we’re just supposed to NOT pay attention to those gaping, crater-sized plot holes because the movie is so scary and cool! But even that fails, because this movie is about as cool as disco music and bell-bottom pants. This is just heinous – HEINOUS! I can’t think of one good thing about this one. If I could erase this movie from existence by doing this review and killing it metaphorically, I would do so in a heartbeat. In fact, I’m going to try that right now!

…..

…..

…..

It’s a long process. Working on it though….

These images do not belong to me, and the copyright belongs to...wait, huh? What am I doing here?