Why Does It Exist?

Archive for 2012|Yearly archive page

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Podcast #46: The Chaperone (2011)

In Podcasts on December 13, 2012 at 10:29 am
the-chaperone-0

The voice of Lisa Simpson and the voice of the people, together at last. Viva la revolution.

You had almost given up on me, hadn’t you? After a couple of bungled attempts, the hiatus finally ends today with The Chaperone, a not-really-comedy that finds WWE superstar Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque as an ex-con also serving as a chaperone for his daughter’s (Ariel Winter from Modern Family) school trip while his former partners (led by scumbag character actor extraordinaire Kevin Corrigan) try to retrieve a bag of money that also made its way on the bus. Lessons are learned and brows are furrowed almost perpetually.

Joining me this week are Walter and Keith from 9to5.cc’s Go Plug Yourself, Montreal’s premium interview podcast that often devolves into wrestling talk, making them perfect guests for an ostensible kids’ movie starring a wrestler that talks way more than he beats people up. We discuss Fraggles, wrestling injuries in great detail, the Montreal podcast scene and various other delights. Please note that recording a podcast is not like riding a bike and I seem to have forgotten how to make this sound optimal – it is, however, listenable. And hilarious. And sexy.

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Music this week by The World Provider. The song ‘Tough Signal’ off the album History of Pain can be found here.

You can catch Walter doing standup comedy around town – he’s also putting on the third annual edition of The Hilarious Holiday Hoedown at the Wheel Club in NDG.

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Podcast #45: Campfire Stories (2001)

In Podcasts on October 30, 2012 at 6:29 pm

Just a good ol’ fashioned CGI snake strangulation while tripping balls in the woods.

October draws to a close with a viewing of the truly disturbing Campfire Stories, a lame-ass horror anthology based on an imaginary comic book by the CEO of Felix the Cat Enterprises that gave early credits to actors like Charlie Day, Abigail Spencer, Rob McElhenney, Jamie Lynn Sigler, John ‘Eyebrows McAnimeFace’ Hensley and a young Perez Hilton as well as capturing the shitty early 2000s incarnation of The Misfits in its ICP-like glory. Told by The New York Dolls’ David Johansen in full Tom Waits mode (I assure you that the multiple musical references end here), Campfire Stories is public-access-level horror in its most delightfully embarrassing form.

Here to brave the terrifying tales with me is Ariel Esteban Cayer, boy wonder of the film writing world (Fangoria, Panorama Cinema, Spectacular Optical). Ariel and I discuss the generally dicey subgenre of horror anthologies, the film’s deep-running moral core (or not), a show narrated by a blue cockroach that we can’t remember the name of and other GHOULISH DELIGHTS in this last episode of October.

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Music this week by Play Audio. The track ‘When the Bomb Drops’ can be found at their Bandcamp.

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Episode #44: Busted (1997)

In Podcasts on October 22, 2012 at 7:54 pm

Whether or not this is an actual boner joke is really beside the point here.

Finally! After about a month of messing around, here is the not-really-lost Lost Episode recorded in sunny Toronto, Canada with the increasingly elusive, hobo-like Dan Weir!  Having recently acquired a phat stack of crap from reliable crap merchant Honest Ed’s, I gave Dan first dibs on the movies and he picked Busted, an unassuming-looking sex comedy that also doubles as Corey Feldman’s sole directorial effort to this day. It is, as you can assume, super shitty. In what I can only assume will come across as a historic event, we discuss the general grossness of sex in the 90’s, that one Ginetto Reno record that might be OK, Tom Jones in all of his variable permutations, the movie in some regards and Dan’s newfound bohemian existence in some depth.

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Music this week provided by Eagle Tears. The track The Shovel can be found on their Bandcamp.  You can catch them live at Piranha Bar in Montreal on November 17th.

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Podcast #43: Venom (1981)

In Podcasts on October 11, 2012 at 11:17 am

It’s probably too much to ask that the eventual Oliver Reed biopic star Nick Offerman, right?

All-horror October (all of the good October puns have already been taken by other podcasts) keeps chugging on with Venom, an impossibly boring movie that manages to make the concept of Klaus Kinski and Oliver Reed being terrorized by a deadly Black Mamba snake dull as dishwater. They (along with Susan George, reteaming with Reed for another Why Does It Exist? film) play a group of would-be kidnappers who get more than they bargained for when they get trapped in with the aforementioned snake. Everyone seems drunk and bored as shit, except maybe Kinski who seems to hold the secrets of the universe.

My guest this week is writer/filmmaker/musician Malcolm Fraser of Cult MTL, Lion Farm and The World Provider. We discuss the Hulk Hogan sex tape, the essential nature of Kinski’s autobiography, I heap a bit more blame on Dan for the missing episode and we wax poetic about the 90-minute pile of dung that is Venom.

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Music this week provided by Sick Friend. The track ‘Nothing Tragic’ can be found on their album The Draft Dodger, available on their Bandcamp. They will be playing at Casa del Popolo on October 30th, 2012.

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Podcast #42: The Dead One (2007)

In Podcasts on October 3, 2012 at 11:29 pm

NO, FUCK YOU, DAD!

Of the main cast of That 70’s Show, Wilmer Valderrama has probably been the most elusive since the end of the show. He’s been here and there, he’s still roughly as famous as he’s ever been, but his film career never took off. Chances are that movies like El Muerto: The Dead One are mostly responsible for that. A remarkably ill-advised low-budget attempt to turn an obscure comic book into a Latino The Crow franchise, The Dead One is a limp, uninteresting anti-Aztec (!) diatribe that features a cross-dressing Billy Drago, Fez shooting himself in the stomach with a shotgun, a lot of chest touching (not as hot as it sounds) and more shitty CGI storms than your local news affiliate.

Joining me this week is Brian Hastie, host of CJLO 1690 AM’s Countdown to Armageddon and fellow Cult MTL writer. Brian trades in the blasting riffs and corpse paint for plinky-plonky GarageBand music and Wilmer Valderrama furiously applying makeup while kneeling in a cemetery. We discuss Lil’ Wayne’s dalliances with TMZ, our comfort levels at the idea of being driven around by various celebrities and our mutual MP Tyrone Benskin’s crowning moment in 300. You can follow Brian on Twitter @brianhastie.

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Music this week provided by The Bawdy Electric. The track A Modern Frontier can be found here. The Bawdy Electric will be performing at Casa del Popolo on Friday, October 26th. They are currently working on their first EP with fellow Montreal podcast Edge of the City for release in 2013.

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Podcast #41: Play Dead (2009)

In Podcasts on September 17, 2012 at 9:15 am

That’s when Clark Duke realized he had made a terrible mistake.

A staple of the straight-to-DVD / Why Does It Exist? diet, the post-Tarantino, Fargo-esque black comedy has been pretty underrepresented on the site so far, for the sole reason that its existence is easily justified by the critical and financial success of the movies it apes. We know why those exist – but up until now, none of them starred the irresistible combo of Chris Klein and Fred Durst (y’know, from Limp Bizkit).

Play Dead is a pretty terrible boilerplate crime comedy (think U-Turn meets Galaxy Quest meets a dentist’s waiting room) with Klein in fetal Nic Cage mode and Durst actually doing a pretty good job of playing a murder-for-hire simpleton. Joining me for this episode is yet another former video store crony, Arnaud Audette. We awkwardly dance around the fact that we never speak English to each other, discuss rap metal supergroup Methods of Mayhem, take a shit on the new Resident Evil movie and completely forget to wrap up with the titular question. You can check out his musical projet, Morning Breath, here.

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Music this week by Michael Mooney. The track Transmission X can be found here.

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Podcast #40: They Crawl (2001)

In Podcasts on September 10, 2012 at 10:37 am

In this scene, one of the poorly-developed characters gets eaten by leftover bits of code from GoldenEye 64.

I don’t know about you guys, but I got a little sick of navigating the thorny gender issues of bad romantic comedies and making everyone uncomfortable in the last couple of weeks, so I opted for something a little ‘safer’ this week: mutant cockroaches and Mickey Rourke. Despite that seemingly perfect combo, it pains me to say that Rourke and the mutant cockroaches do not share any screentime in They Crawl. This low-budget mystery thriller doesn’t really utilize the cockroaches that much either, but does have the jock boyfriend dude from Van Wilder shaking down one-time Hollywood hopefuls in warehouses. Rourke appears briefly in lounge wear and granny glasses to spout some exposition and throw a door at lead tough cop Tamara Davies – it’s that kind of movie.

I’m joined once again by Louis Lazaris as we expound on Breaking Bad (inevitably), Jamie Foxx and his personal appreciation of ParaNorman, Gabourey Sidibe’s crying skills and other edifying topics. The film that Louis and I co-directed, Something More Than Nothing, will be screening as part of the YoungCuts festival in Montreal on October 13th. (The film is not available for streaming on the website but I assure you that this is the date on which it is screening!)

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Music this week provided by Loose Pistons. The song Linda’s Private Moments can be found on their Bandcamp. You can catch Loose Pistons at the Silver Dollar in Toronto on September 15th, at Club Lambi (as part of the POP Montreal festival) on the 22nd and at the legendary Cavestomp Festival in NYC (date to be determined).

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Episode #39: Ted & Venus (1991)

In Podcasts on September 4, 2012 at 9:58 am

I could’ve selected the scene of Martin Mull changing, but I think contextually you need to see what this film advertises as.

Hubris shows a creepy, potentially threatening side in this film from triple-threat actor/writer/director Bud Cort. Whereas helmers of previous Why Does It Exist vanity projects like One Trick Pony and Falling From Grace were content in placing themselves in the mopiest situations, Cort goes a couple of steps further and casts himself as a mentally-ill stalker in what presents itself as no less than a light rom-com. He plays a gross, sub-Bukowski poet that falls madly in love with a beautiful woman and hounds her constantly under the watchful eye of his best friend, played by Jim Brolin in full beach-bum mode.

Our guest Jenna Harkness and I discuss the myriad of problems of making a rom-com about sexual harassment, the questionable composition of fruit salad, eating babies in fiction and a very belated rehash of every conversation everyone had after the whole Tosh thing a while back.

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Music this week by Yardlets. The track Lot Lizard as well as their new album can be found here. They will be performing as part of Pop Montreal on September 20th at O Patro Vys.

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Podcast #38: Dolan’s Cadillac (2009)

In Podcasts on August 27, 2012 at 5:49 pm

In this scene, Slater gets pooped on by a particularly unhealthy bird.

After last week’s Christian Slater fiasco, I was a little wary of dipping my toes in the Christian Slater pool once more. It’s true that the chances of Dolan’s Cadillac being as mind-boggling as Without Men were significantly lower, considering that it was once set to star Sylvester Stallone and Kevin Bacon (as opposed to the average WDIE film, which usually just goes back to whatever gross broom closet of the mind it was originally found in). But I had promised this week’s guest to do this film and, after a couple of weeks of just being horrified and baffled, I could’ve used a pleasant surprise.

Well, there was a surprise all right: Slater wasn’t the worst part of this by a country mile. Wes Bentley was. The dark-featured emoest of all teens from American Beauty places his waxy stare and furrowed front and center of this otherwise serviceable revenge flick. Of course, I later found out that Bentley shot this film in the darkest part of his heroin addiction, which I guess excuses some of the shittiness of the performance. Either way, he tries very hard to ruin this movie for everyone.

Returning for a second appearance before the dreaded Move to Toronto that has already claimed one of your esteemed hosts is David Bertrand of the late Blue Sunshine Psychotronic Film Centre. We discuss the weirdly pedo overtones of Million Dollar Crocodile, Mandingo, the archaic machinery used to subtitle movies that already have subtitles, the myriad of wonders held within the LP sleeve of Babe Ruth’s First Step and what the original short story by Stephen King means to him.

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In Town with a Capital T, off the album Good Dreams by Galen Hartley can be found here. For more information about Galen Hartley, visit his homepage.

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Podcast #37: Without Men (2011)

In Podcasts on August 20, 2012 at 6:27 pm

You think this movie would offer plenty of opportunities to lure in pervs with a prurient screen capture, but no. Here’s an upside-down (lesbian) Eva Longoria.

Despite doing minimal research on the films we cover, I like to think that I have a pretty good idea of what kind of movie I select each week. Without Men originally escaped my reach due to seeming in all ways like a pretty generic romantic comedy, despite the prominent placement of Christian Slater on the cover. When I read that it was based on an acclaimed novel about a South American village faced with a sudden lack of men after the male populace is recruited by a guerilla army, however, my interest was piqued. How do you take this NPR-friendly premise and turn into a straight to DVD romantic comedy?

The answer is baffling. Pitched somewhere between an episode of I Love Lucy, a Pedro Almodovar film and an entry in the National Lampoon series, Without Men is one of the least funny, corniest and most inexplicable film to ever be featured on Why Does It Exist? Lesbian subplots, group masturbation scenes, musical sequences, Oscar from The Office as a randy town priest and a harried Slater barely factoring into plot crash into an grey, mushy sludge from which no one escapes unscathed, least of all me and  this week’s guest,  onetime DVD thief Lizel Chavez. I made a movie with Lizel in it years ago but it seems to have disappeared off YouTube, so I guess you can just imagine what that looks like.

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Music this week by Cobra & Vulture  – their song Early Adopter can be found on the Vocare EP, available here. They will be performing as part of Pop Montreal (schedule available here soon) as well as Phog Phest in Windsor this September.