'Say hi to your mother for me.'

On a purely financial level, I get this whole straight-to-DVD sequel thing, I really do. It makes sense to hitch a low budget movie to a past success, even if it means the only carryover is a supporting actor in a two-minute sequence (see Eugene Levy in the countless American Pie sequels that starred distant relatives of Steve Stifler). These movies come with a built-in audience of sorts (people who go ‘Hey, I remember that’ count as an audience, I think) and are typically a lot cheaper to make. If you have a title that draws on an easily recognizable past success, half the marketing job is done for you. Note the words easily recognizable.The American Pie sequels make sense to me. Road House 2 makes sense to me (its existence, at the very least; not the actual physical manifestation of Road House 2). Street Kings 2 does not. Read the rest of this entry »

This movie doesn't lend itself to hilarious quips. Goddamn it.

‘Now tell me about the audacity that exists in your mind and in the mind of your friends where you would think that someone would see a documentary about you and the process that you undergo to make, uh, this poison.’

–          Tim Heidecker

You may have noticed at this point that I have a perverse fascination with movies made by or starring musicians. The reasons for that are pretty simple: I love music almost as much as I love movies and musicians seemingly have no sense of scope. Being a rock star should be enough for anyone, but it isn’t; you inevitably get an inflated ego and want to take over the world. For popular musicians, this manifests one of two ways: the artist route or the commercial route. The artist route centers around the idea that since you have mastered the craft of writing three-chord anthems, you have graduated to making films and you should be given free reign to explore any grandiose idea you may have had. This leads to debacles like Dylan’s tortuous Renaldo and Clara or Neil Young’s trippy Human Highway. These are typically interesting films that attract real talent and wind up being nigh-unreleasable shit (proof being that the two movies I mentioned above remain unavailable on DVD). Read the rest of this entry »

No cats were harmed in the making of this film. That kitten, on the other hand...

Contrary to popular belief, the term ‘hipster’ was not conjured out of the ether by a cabal of denim-clad Williamsburg kids in 2003. First coined in the 1940s to describe jazz fans, the word ‘hipster’ has gone through various permutations over the years that have somehow always meant ‘people who like things that I don’t’. In the scant few reviews I’ve read of Robert Dornhelm’s Cold Feet (and even in a Tom Waits biography), the term ‘hipster comedy’ is used over and over. I’m not entirely sure that I understand the connection (especially considering that the term hipster is now an all-encompassing term that has replaced ‘those damn kids’), but I do know that Cold Feet is part of an extremely annoying late-80’s movement of bizarre, ‘quirky’ comedies that relied almost entirely on their wacky casts and stacked soundtracks to get seen. Since I’ve never seen this phenomenon discussed anywhere, I’ll take the opportunity to christen the movement 80’s Hipster Comedy (or hipcom for short – like romcom, but more annoying and unoriginal). Read the rest of this entry »

He knows. HE KNOWS.

Back when I worked at the video store, we used to receive catalogues from the DVD distributor every couple of weeks outlining upcoming releases. Since these are designed as a business tool rather than promotional one, they feature a lot of full-page ads for dubious releases with a bunch of selling points like ‘Statistics show that Cuba Gooding Jr. action movies track higher than Ray Liotta and Dolph Lundgren combined!’ or ‘It’s Juno meets The Hangover meets Lord of the Rings!’. The idea is that, while unsuspecting video-store owners don’t need to be convinced to order 60 copies of The Hangover, they might need a bit of a push to consider Hollow Man 2 so it’s compared to a half-dozen runaway hits from the last few years. The longer ahead of time the film appears in the book, the slimmer its chances of actually being something people want to see.

All of this brings us to Harold, a film whose entire existence I was made aware of through said catalogues. For what seemed like months, a full-page ad for Harold appeared in there, sending me and my coworkers in a frenzy of incredulity. I daresay that history was being made right then and there, unbeknownst to any of us, as Harold became the genesis for this very blog you are reading right now and the uncontrollable waves of pleasure pulsating through your genitals as you do so. Harold looked so fucking stupid and unnecessary that it became a running joke amongst us. We couldn’t wait for it to come out so we could marvel at 90 minutes of a be-fro’ed Cuba Gooding Jr. teaching life lessons to a pudgy pre-pubescent boy with male pattern baldness. What could possibly top that? Read the rest of this entry »

I guess this scene is a given in a movie about Internet dating.

As a video store employee, you are expected to be knowledgeable about all your products despite the fact that you spend 40 hours a week thinking of reasons why it isn’t necessary to watch the McConaughey-Hudson beach thriller Fool’s Gold in order to pass judgment on it. After an irate little man complained to my boss because I had no opinion on 17 Again, I vowed that I would try to sit through as many shitty movies I didn’t want to see during store hours as possible so I could tell customers in all confidence the movie they selected was a piece of shit.

This rarely made a difference. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the only shots of Dracula that isnt a) a rubber bat or b) asleep in a coffin

I want to preface this review by admitting that, yes, this is a Jess Franco movie and that Franco is rather well-regarded within some cult circles. There are websites out there that have devoted themselves entirely to the sometime horror auteur’s body of work, meaning that I am not pulling this out of the same thin air as I would a Master P production or some Bulgarian thing with Val Kilmer. However, part of my goal with this project is to explore avenues that I wouldn’t necessarily flock to out of my own volition. It just so happens that Jess Franco is a filmmaker who a) I’ve never seen any work by, and b) has made some truly outrageous-looking movies. Read the rest of this entry »

The man. The legend. The fashion god.

Hollywood loves a good comeback story. When not busy making films about them that sweep the Oscars (look no further than this year’s The Fighter), they’re wringing them out of the life stories of their very own. As Mickey Rourke was making his much-touted comeback with The Wrestler, he rather aggressively attacked the press circuit with the tortuous, dramatic story of his wilderness years. As his star began to dwindle in the early-to-mid-90’s, Rourke had a spectacular run of bad luck and worse choices that included: a not-altogether-unsuccessful but physically punishing boxing career, a string of plastic surgeries to correct the damage done by said boxing career that transformed his roguish good looks into a reasonable facsimile of an anthropomorphic cured ham, a destructive marriage to his Wild Orchid co-star Carré Otis and the ever-popular struggle with booze and drugs, all of which led to Rourke living in almost complete destitution. Rourke and the media often spun this story as to avoid the majority of the film work he did in this era for one good reason: a lot of it is embarrassing. Read the rest of this entry »

50 Cent and the thing he loves best.

Getting fat is a big deal for an actor. It’s not a big deal for your dad the insurance salesman that he’s sporting a spare tire by the time he’s 50, but when your entire fame and fortune was built around taking your shirt off while shooting a gun and/or seducing hot babes, it becomes dicier. Dudes who were always fat never have this problem: you just end up being a Sydney Greenstreet or Charles Durning. When you’re Val Kilmer, though, getting fat changes everything.

Kilmer got fat for Oliver Stone’s ill-fated Alexander; unlike his Method brethren Robert DeNiro and Christian Bale, no one gave a shit. He won no Oscars and stayed fat, and suddenly his career as an A-list leading man was pretty much done. He became the embodiment of fat and washed up, but here’s the thing: he seems okay with it. Kilmer is playing the badass way more than he ever did and his star doesn’t seem to have diminished in the eyes of the people who would go see Val Kilmer movies for Val Kilmer in the first place. His metric fuckton of Val-Kilmer-holding-a-gun vehicles were terribly popular when I worked at the video store, all things considered. I remember when Kilmer was a big deal: he was the Batman of my youth (unfortunately), he was the motherfucking Saint. Now he’s… well, he’s not.

Read the rest of this entry »