wecantbestopped

Why was this made? When you make an anthology horror film, you're supposed to actually film the scary stories, not just horrible actors telling scary stories. This is making my IQ drop. The stories aren't even scary. The woman who tells the story about Mr. Fox is probably the worse actress I've ever seen. She's definitely up there. The guy who hosts the video seems kinda like an evil Kenny Rogers. The graveyard set is definitely one of the cast or crew members' backyards. Unfortunately for her, the one halfway decent actress in this is far too ugly to ever succeed in her craft. The cringy discomfort factor of this movie is truly through the roof. Only watch this if you're into really intolerably awful movies.

Presumably, enough aging ladies of "the Greatest Generation" had a ball working out with Debbie Reynolds and her pals (including Teri Garr, Florence Henderson, Dionne Warwick, Virginia Mayo, Rose Marie et al) using Mrs. Reynolds' first workout video, "Do It Debbie's Way", that they cranked out another one: this video. This time, the premise is that working out is a great activity for couples to do together, hence the title. Along for the ride this time are Tom Bosley and Dick Van Patten, as well as their wives, Patricia Carr Bosley and Pat Van Patten, and Debbie's own husband, the visibly discomforted Richard Hamlett. There's really nothing much here aside from grunting sextegenarians sweating to the oldies while doing a rather low-impact exercise regimen. Debbie keeps up an incessant and maddening monologue throughout, rarely interrupted save for the occasional protest from Tom Bosley or Dick Van Patten that their back is giving out. The only possible audience I can see for this nowadays would be grannie fetishists who have a thing for Mrs. Reynolds.

You don't say?

Those were the words (more or less, I may be paraphrasing a little bit) which came out of the mouth of one of the members of the New York chapter of the Black Label Bike Club, a group of sniveling overgrown children who like to ride around Brooklyn on ridiculously tall bikes and like, you know, get f*cked up and sh*t. This group, which is like a red-headed bastard step-child to the original chapter (which is based out of Minneapolis) is shown on screen embarrassing themselves in all sorts of ways. One of the main characters in this saga is a guy named Tony, from bourgeois suburban Portland, ME. This thoroughly white bread upper middle class punk, in his late twenties, moved to New York some years prior (when exactly is unspecified) to the filming of this movie, and quickly acquired a wiggerish demeanor, and ran with a crowd, based largely out of the Bushwick neighborhood of the borough of Brooklyn. When he's wasn't making an ass out himself pretending to be black, Tony found a way to ingratiate himself with one of the more flamboyant members of the B.L.B.C., this guy names Doyle. He has earned a reputation as one of the foremost Tall Bike Jousters in the world. Yes, these idiots actually get up on bikes that are like ten feet off the ground and joust each other. Not unsurprisingly, some of these people ended up in the back of ambulances after hitting their heads on the hard pavement during said sport. So anyway, Tony and Doyle are buddies and Doyle is trying to get Tony into the club, but a lot of the members think that Tony's too much of a drug addled idiot to be an asset to the club. The main dramatic arc of the film is Tony's struggle for acceptance amongst the super-hip Black Labels (the group received lucrative TV offers from MTV and the Discovery Channel, to name a couple of the giant corporations eager to cash in on the Bike Club Culture mystique, and the Black Label Bike Club in particular.)

We follow the crew around the country and around the world. In one sequence, the NY chapter heads out to Minneapolis (by car, by the way; what the hell?) for some sort of annual ride (which is kinda like Sturgis, except much, much lamer.) Eventually, all the chapters from around the country (including, in addition to Minneapolis and New York, Austin, Reno and a "nomadic" chapter called Nowhere) get together in the woods at some National Park and party down. The tension between the old-school original chapter members from Minneapolis and the new-school, art-school educated hipster elite Brooklyn chapter members is so thick you can cut it with a knife, nicely coming to a head when a drunken Tony (not even a member, but rolling with Brooklyn) stumbles out of the woods bare-ass naked and proceeds to displease one of the founders of the original chapter, not to mention pretty much everyone else.

After this debacle in the woods, Tony is told bluntly by Doyle that there are many members, even in the New York chapter, who are opposed to him joining the group. Meanwhile, Doyle plots to ride a home-made rocket bike (presumably with fuel left over from the road trip to Minnesota) through the streets at the club's annual giant underground party.

Doyle and dejected Tony proceed to fly (on a jetliner filled with gasoline) to Amsterdam for the "world championship" of bike jousting. It's funny how they eat from the dumpsters (not that I'm opposed to that, per se) but they can afford to fly to Europe to take part in something so frivolous as an unofficial bike jousting tournament (the guy who runs it looks like Tommy Chong in 20 years with dreads.) Well, after a night of hard drinking in Amsterdam, Tony gets his ass kicked for trying to steal a bottle of booze from some Dutchmen and ends up, essentially, breaking up with Doyle (theirs' was a bromance for the ages.) After they go back to NY, Doyle continues working on his jet bike, and Tony runs of to his parent's house in Maine to sulk and lay off the 'Ron for a while. Tony's father, a professor, is rather amusing giving analytical analysis of the group which his son has been spurned from.

Eventually, Tony returns to NY to plot his vengeance, by recruiting some of his other bike culture reject buddies into his newly-formed bike club. They plan to crash the party where Doyle will be riding his rocket bike, and challenge the Black Labels to a jousting match. It's all rather Arthurian towards the end. Long story short, Tony embarrasses himself... again, and Doyle rides his rocket bike into glory.

While I found the subjects of this film to be by and large distasteful to the extreme, that didn't take away from the film itself, which tells a fairly captivating tale on several different levels. As a document of cutting edge hipsterism, this will surely be invaluable to future historians and sociologists. As a simply human tale, this movie also succeeds fairly well, hitting as it does on some age-old truths about human social behaviors and the desire of acceptance by a group of one's peers. In this regard, Tony deserves some credit for the bravery it must have taken to allow himself to be portrayed on screen in such a pathetic light (he was one of the directors of the film.) Perhaps he can grow up a little now that he has thoroughly humiliated himself for the world to see. All in all, a good look at an annoying subculture.

This movie really had it all. Perhaps it's just my complete lack of cultural reference points in Indonesian society, but my ignorant Western ass was truly left bewildered and astounded waiting to see what would happen next in this bizarre film. It starts with a young couple in the woods, the woman pregnant. She gives birth into the lake, twins, one of which is a little baby and the other of which is a poorly constructed crocodile puppet thing. At this point, two thugs come along and proceed to slaughter the young couple, but not before a little bit of martial arts action. The thugs steal the couple's jewel, which has some sort of mystical power over crocodiles.

At this point we flash forward several years into the future, and there are these two guys providing slapstick comic relief. They reminded me of nothing so much as an Indonesian version of the guys from Dumb and Dumber. They goof off, then we see that some lady is now controlling the crocodiles to kill various people, and occasionally we cut to crocodile world, where a queen rules who looks like a picture from an Indonesian religious pamphlet. The two criminals from the beginning come back, and some guy with a mullet sneaks around with the lady on earth who can control crocodiles. Later, he is lured to his death at the hands of some crocodiles. Then there is an egg which explodes into gore and maggots, like a disgusting little grenade, but the two goofy Dumb and Dumber lookin'-ass muhfuhkahs who it explodes on choose to break out laughing instead of recoiling in abject horror, which seems to me to be the reasonable thing to do in such a situation.

Every new scene ups the bizarre ante. There were no subtitles, but it didn't really matter. The human baby that was born in the opening sequence shows back up, and his twin brother, a little baby crocodile, comes to him in the middle of the night and leads him to the river, where he is about to jump in before his foster parents show up in the nick of time to save him. But then the little kid is run over by a motorcycle in a targeted assassination. Apparently, the people who the bad guys killed in the beginning, the little kid's parents, are crocodile royalty or something. Who knows? It's pretty gory at times. There is one love scene where the crocodile lady pulls out the guy she's screwing's pubes as part of foreplay. At the end, the bad guys die, one of them at the hands of a giant living tree, like the one in Lord of the Rings, except way cooler. Then the crocodile royalty couple from the beginning of the movie come back to life, but their kid, who got run over by the motorcycle, is still dead. There is also one genuinely really good musical number, which kind of resembles a Bollywood song. All in all crazy fun.

This is a very informative and disturbing look behind the scenes of the LA porn industry. The men are scum and the women are fed into a grinder and used up until the industry has fresh meat and no more use for them, at which point the women are unceremoniously disposed of and left coping with poverty, mental issues, drug addiction and so forth. The filmmakers seem to have had a great deal of confidence bestowed upon them by the subjects, who open up and are very candid, much more so than in the typical porn documentary. The stories almost all end up in a downbeat fashion, and the moral seems to be that the porn biz is a soul-crushing and horrible endeavor for most involved, especially the woman. Also of note is an early non-porn appearance by Ron Jeremy, here identified simply as Ron, discussing his life in the adult biz. As always, Ron comes off as a perfect mensch, but the sad parts of this flick are really eye- opening.

In the tradition of "Capturing the Friedmans" and last year's "Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father" comes "Must Read After My Death", a tale of the psychological despair which was the sad reality of many suburban families' home lives, beneath the shiny plastic veneer which was the prevailing myth in America during the post-Eisenhower years, but before the counterculture really took its root. The "Leave It to Beaver" family unit, so persistently idealized in the pop culture, was merely a mask which hid beneath it the face of a collective scarred psyche. The story being told here is about one specific family. Morgan Dews, the filmmaker, inherited a trove of materials when, in 2001, his maternal grandmother died, age 90. These materials, which make up almost the entirety of this film, included, among other things, hundreds of hours of dictaphone and tape recordings, photographs, and super-8 home movies. Although the home movies by and large show what you'd expect, idyllic scenes of a happy family, the audio recordings tell a completely different tale. What once was a happy marriage has degraded into a marital war zone, fought out in middle-class suburban Connecticut, a world where emotional, psychological, and even occasional physical abuse mar the landscape, and the four children are caught in the crossfire. Dews' grandmother Allis, in her younger years, lived in Europe as a somewhat accomplished singer, married to one of the renowned tenors of the day. She was of a continental and generally worldly set, but her stay over there was cut short abruptly by the outbreak of WWII. After moving back to the States, she met and fell in love with Charley, the filmmakers grandfather. As time went on, they had children, four in all, including the director's mother Anne, and his three uncles. Charley got a better job, and as they moved in to a bigger house in suburban Connecticut, their domestic life began to come apart at the seams. Charley is becoming more and more of an alcoholic, spending months at a time overseas for his work, and cavorting about with various women (the couple had an open relationship.) Allis, for her part, is increasingly stifled by the pressures of keeping a home, especially since she was accustomed to the bon vivant lifestyle of a European artist from her earlier life. Anne, the daughter, escaped as soon as she could, leaving home and getting married. It wasn't so easy for the three brothers, unfortunately, as they were at home to bear witness to the increasingly hostile environment inhabited by their parents. Psychotherapy, which is a constant theme in this movie, is of no help, as the chauvinist doctors assure Allis that everything is her fault, and that her husband is doing the best he can in the face of all of this. Eventually, one of the sons is shipped off to a mental hospital after violently threatening his father, and the relationship between Charley and Allis tailspins even further. Then, of a sudden, tragedy and redemption strike the family. The eldest son, Chuck, having gone off to college, is killed in an auto accident on a country road while assisting another motorist, who ran their car off the road. Within days of this tragedy, Charley is dead on the floor of his bedroom. This led the way for the third act of Allis's life: after Charley's death, the children being of an age to look out for themselves, she moved into a house in rural Vermont, where she lived as an independent woman for the rest of her life. It was at that very same house where the troves of material in this film were found. The audio in this movie comes exclusively from two sources (not including the original score). First dictaphone records, which were made by the family as a means of communication during the long months when he was abroad. Second (and more comprehensively) were tape recordings made by the couple as a tool for their joint therapist, the aforementioned dealer in poor medical advice. These fascinating, completely dysfunctional sound recordings tend to become even more so when paired on the screen, in an almost avant garde fashion, with the grainy, iconic imagery of the home movies, having been lended an extra degree of irony. All told, the movie comes out as a fairly formidable debunking of the myth of the Nuclear Family.

Supercraptastic slasher fare, which feels overly long at 80 minutes. Years ago, a bunch of "gypsies" who lived in the caves of a mountain, were burned up in a forest fire. Years later, campers are going missing from the area of the fire. A bunch of horny kids are, of course, en route to this area for a debaucherous camping trip of there own. Despite an ominous welcome from the forest ranger (Jackson Bostwick) the kids troop up to the mountain any way. Before long, the kids start to get picked off by the monster, who remains unseen to the very end of the movie, probably because the makeup was so embarrassingly bad. No surprises to speak of: they get killed in the exact order that the formula for these movies dictates, leaving the "final girl" to fend for herself, although in a refreshingly downbeat denouement, the final girl ends up imprisoned and impregnated by the monster.

The story itself couldn't hold the weight of feature length, so it was padded out by seemingly endless shots of wildlife and insects, which were obviously shot for another film and inserted here haphazardously as a means of making the movie long enough for a video release. On the plus side, the wildlife footage is rather nice. Also among the highlights are Bostwick talking to a baby deer, a decent rock-climbing death sequence, OK gore, and the Great Jackie Coogan in his final film role, as the bumbling local sheriff. This is a far cry from Charlie Chaplin, but it was still nice to see him. This is for slasher completists only.

Richard Norton, one time world kickboxing champion, returns to the role of Col. Brad Cooper, bad-azz killing machine extraordinaire. You see, it seems that sometime in 1970, in Vietnam, a bunch of US marines wiped out a VC village and stole a bunch of gold. The gold, however, belonged to one very POed ninja warrior (Bruce Le.) Fast forward to 1986, when that very same ninja warrior is picking off the marines from that unit one by one, trying to get the gold back. This is making Maj. Ryan (Rex Cutter), the leader of that unit, rather nervous, understandably. So in an effort to save his own ass, he calls on Col. Cooper to go to Vietnam and stop whoever is responsible. He only has one condition for Cooper: don't ask any questions. This, of course, leads Cooper to ask a bunch of questions, and his investigations lead him to the massacre, the cover-up, and the gold. Turns out there is a giant training camp in the mountains, where an army of ninjitsu terrorists are being readied to attack a nuclear plant. Throw in a dash of martial arts mysticism, and one of those gunfights where the hero never misses, but the 200 enemies he's fighting can't hit the side of a barn, and boom, you've got yourself an A.I.P. action flick.

This movie is rather interchangeable with any number of other low-budget action flicks from the period. The wooden acting of Norton certainly doesn't help matters, but at least it comes in at a mercifully short 88 minutes. I really don't know why I watch this dreck, but I will say this: it was better than "Rachel Getting Married," which I also saw yesterday.

This movie, supposedly based on a true story, tells the tale of Christine Maresch (Kerry Mack, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Michelle Williams,) a runaway from a broken home who, while working at the carnival, meets and falls for Walter (Ralph Schicha), a German ex-pat who is living on the lam in Australia, for reasons which will soon become painfully clear to Christine. Perhaps she should have seen it coming when Walter shot himself upon having his marriage proposal rejected, but for some reason Christine agrees to marry him after all, in the ICU at the hospital, where he is being treated for his aforementioned gunshot wound. They have a daughter, Amanda (Gabriella Barraket) together, but quicker than you can say "Mein Fuhrer," Walter turns into a controlling lunatic, and a neo-Nazi to boot. Christine finds out that she's again pregnant, and informs Walter that she is going to get an abortion. He convinces her not to, tricking her into believing that if she comes back to Germany with him, she will be able to get a top of the line abortion in one of Germany's clinics. Only after they arrive does he tell her that no, they can't get an abortion there, because Walter wants a male heir, presumably to teach how to be a nut case, just like his pops. In Germany, the higher- ups in the neo-Nazi food chain are not impressed with Walter's wife, and make her participate in a bank robbery to prove her loyalty. The robbery goes off well, but the bosses still won't be satisfied with her, so they head back for Oz, where things go from bad to worse, with Christine being held hostage in her own house, the subject of regular beatings and rape. Eventually, Walter makes her participate in another bank robbery, the loot from which he uses to buy a boat, to sail to Germany with. Once on the water, the climactic confrontation occurs, with not much excitement to be found anywhere. A brief postscript reveals that Walter ended up going to jail for 14 years, and Christine got 4 years probation.

Even if this story is true (and I have my sneaking suspicions that there were, at the very least, major embellishments on the truth) it doesn't save it from being a total bore. There were only a couple of saving graces to be found; namely the attempted kidnapping scene in Turkey and the frequent display of Ms. Mack's breasts, which all in all really aren't enough to recommend this film very highly to anyone. This movie should stay buried in the jumbo junk heap of history.

The only reason I'm going up to two is the smattering of gratuitous breasts in this movie. Otherwise, I'd surely have to go down to one star out of ten. The plot revolves around Aaron (Gary Kroeger, veteran of some of SNL's lesser years in the 80's) & Elinor (Eileen Seeley), a couple of politically active teachers and lovers, who decide to take their sabbaticals together in order to go to New Hampshire in 1968 to campaign for Gene McCarthy. On the eve of their departure, Aaron informs Elinor that he won't be going to New Hampshire at all, instead opting to "drop out" in Europe for a while, smoking hash, getting wasted and banging hot chicks. Sounds good to me! Elinor is, understandably, distressed by his sudden apathy towards all things progressive, but goes to New Hampshire anyways, with Edward, Jr. (Guy Killum), whose father is played by the late great Cleavon Little (given top billing on the tape box, even though he has only a supporting role.) While Elinor and Eddie continue to make history in NH, Aaron is busy getting his freak on, and is almost too high to notice that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy have been assassinated. Eventually all of his partying lands Aaron in the hospital, where he learns that his grandmother Helen (Viveca Lindfors) in dying. He gets back to the States just in time to share one of the most nauseatingly saccharine deathbed scenes in the history of cinema and have a change of heart and get back into politics. The movie actually ends with a bunch of people, white and black, holding hands and singing "We Shall Overcome." I mean, give me a break.

Subtlety is not, seemingly, in the film-making vocabulary of Mr. Paul Leder, the director, who takes a step away in this picture from his usual exploitation fare. Instead of any degree of insinuation, the film prefers to smack you over the head with its points, as one might do with a club, or baseball bat. Aside from a couple of pairs of boobs, there's nothing, and all of the actors involved should have known better and stayed away from this boring crap.

This short PSA video is a real riot. Don't get me wrong, crystallized meth amphetamines, or the dated moniker Ice, as they are constantly referred to here, are indeed a menace to society, and a ruiner of many lives; but if they showed me this tape in school, I would have thought that it was a joke. Hosted by an MTV-era Colin Quinn (who himself acts like he's on Ice in this video), the tape cuts between him, a talking head from the DEA, a former addict who tells tales of the bad old days, and, most amusingly, a dramatization of what happens when a good kid tries Ice. The dramatization starts with a cross-eyed kid, rocking back and forth with his tongue lolling out of his mouth on the floor of a jail cell. When his hysterical parents show up and ask what happened, a flashback ensues. Seems this kid was a good boy once. As a matter of fact, just earlier that day he was a normal kid, on his way to shoot hoops with his friend. But then some of the neighborhood school kids tell him to come over, they got a guy coming to sell them some Ice. So, ignoring the good advice of his basketball partner, the kid leaves with the peer pressure bullies. Eventually, a guy shows up in a car with the product. Hilariously hammed up is the actor who played the part of the dealer, spouting such lines as: "This isn't just a high, this is heaven in the palm of your hand" when he gives the drugs to the prison-bound kid. Eventually, the kids depart for the park, where our hero has second thoughts, but finally gives in after the non-stop haranguing of his peers. So he takes the Ice, which apparently makes the world look as though it is being affected by cheesy 80's video effects, and instantly begins convulsing on the ground. Of course, the kids who made him do it panic and run, but thankfully a helpful cop finds him and gets him to jail. Truly, the dramatization have to be seen to be believed. Hilarious.

First things first: this movie has perhaps the most misleading/bizarre video packaging ever. The tagline is "There's no escaping... The Party," making it out to be some sort of slasher thriller thing, which it is most certainly is not. And the back cover is even stranger, showing a number of photo stills from the movie which have absolutely nothing to do with the story, and are accompanied by strange, nonsensical blurbs. So when I saw this tape on sale for a buck, sheer curiosity led me to pick it up. What a mistake.

Here's the "story," although I use that term very lightly: Richard Wells (Mark Derwin) billionaire captain of industry and Texan, has finally selected a wife, after years of running around with princesses and movie stars. The woman he picked? Cathy Loring (Kati Chesney, in her only role,) a commoner whose only bond with Richard is her shared Texas roots. In celebration of their impending nuptials, Richard calls up a party-throwing company to organize a bachelorette party for the bride to be. That's the setup.

We now cut to Valerie Rosenberg (Pamela Forrest,) a reporter for an Inside Edition-style TV gossip show, arriving at the house of the bride to be with her camerawoman, hoping to get a scoop on the woman who finally bagged Richard Wells. After talking her way in to the party, that's when the male strippers show up for some banana hammock hijinks. After these men do some of the least erotic male stripping I've ever witnessed, all the gals get into a HUGE limo and drive away. Let me just say that all of the male dancers looked like they were extras from the coked-out part of "Boogie Nights," silly mustaches and all. Long story short, the limo gets pulled over by a motorcycle cop who turns out to be the groom, and everyone lives happily ever after.

This dreck is about as close to unwatchable as they come, and is justifiably very obscure as a result. If you get a chance to check this out, don't.

Just kidding. This is an incredibly schlocky soft-core bondage video produced by New Jersey's W.A.V.E. Video Company. A couple of evil thugs rob a video store and kill the (not so attractive) clerk, but not before tying her up in chair and ripping her shirt open. Just so happens that a bodacious policewoman (the sexy Tina Krause) is returning her video to the store as it is getting robbed. The two thugs capture her, and proceed to tie her up. The camera spends the next thirty minutes or so admiring the sight of her writhing and wriggling, attempting to escape the grasp of the two deranged perverts. Eventually, she is freed by another policewoman, only to be recaptured by one of the thugs after he escapes jail. Don't worry though, she kills him, and the movie ends.

There isn't much here in the way of plot, and the only reason to watch this movie is to see the lovely Ms. Krause bound up in handcuffs and ropes. If you are into that type of thing, this is a pretty good movie, despite the dreadful dearth of nudity, which is a real shame, since Ms. Krause does have a real case of the tits.

A slasher film is like a jazz standard. Thousands of musicians have played "Body and Soul," but the Joe Schmo Quartet's version isn't nearly as good as the Coleman Hawkins one. Similarly, "Insight of Evil" isn't a work on a par with any number of other teens in the woods, like "Friday the 13th," or "Moonstalker," or "Twisted Nightmare," or- well, the list goes on and on. Maybe it's a little better than some of the very lowest slasher flicks, but it's certainly a lot worse than the statistical mean for this type of flick.

The story starts in flashback, as Chris (writer/director/editor/music composer/misc. crew) Nigel Hartwell) blows his brains out after being accused of rape by Tiffany (Tiffany Edwardsen) after a night of drunken partying. We then cut to Mr. and Mrs. Schreider, Chris's parents, heading up to the very same house of the suicide (and subsequent disappearance of the rape victim), in order to prepare it for a weekend party that their other son, Jordan (Anthony Cortese) is planning to celebrate the end of school. That's all well and good, until they get stalked and killed by a disembodied POV shot, which apparently has the power to take control of others' bodies.

Now is the point in the movie where we meet the lambs who are about to be sent to the slaughter, in the form of seven dumb high school kids. There's Jordan, his nerdy pal Ryan (Chris Wahl), their drug dealer, bad-boy buddy Jason (Chris Simis), quarreling couple Spanky and Kim (Mike Bruce and Cheyenne Ennis) area slut Megan (Annie Pantusa), and, most troubling of all, Tanya (also Tiffany Edwardsen), who is the rape victim's identical twin sister. Thing is, she doesn't know whose house it is, or the history of what went down there. The kids are, of course, oblivious to their ensuing doom. Megan is downright psyched: "All I know is that I'm ready to swim, drink, and play a little strip poker."

Well, long story short, the disembodied POV shot (whose main powers are inhabiting the bodies of others and making those it stalks sound like they've been sippin' on some sizzurp) starts to pick the kids off one by one. It gets Spanky and Kim before they even arrive at the cabin. By the time night falls, Tanya is getting really bummed about the whole experience, and insists to Jason that she take him home. Jordan consents to give Jason the keys and take her home, leaving the cabin to be inhabited by Ryan, Megan, and Jordan. By the time Tanya and Jason find Spanky and Kim's deserted car, it's too late back at the cabin. Ryan is the next to go, killed by confusing editing. Then it's Megan, before Jordan discovers the remains of his parents. By this time, Tonya and Jason get back, in time to be attacked by Jordan.

In a long, expository flashback we find out the truth of what really happened with Tanya's twin sister Tiffany, the rape victim. Turns out that Jordan roofied her, and with the accomplices Ryan and Spanky, killed her as revenge for her making his brother kill himself. So now, her ghost (whose true form resembles a mash up of the Pig Woman from Twilight Zone and a pre-exorcism Regan) stalks the house, seeking revenge of her own. Although Jason's not entirely innocent here (he sold the roofies to Jordan) he's the nice guy, so he gets off, but Jordan gets it in the end, from a rock to the dome by Tanya (or is it Tiffany?) And that's pretty much it.

Nothing really new or original to say here, but mildly short and brainlessly entertaining, even if the sound did sound like it was recorded in a sting operation. Bonus points for the ridiculous pop stylings of the Ben Thompson Band, whose song "I Need a Little Time From Time to Time" would surely have sold a million copies if it had been put out by Matchbox 20 or some other such band.

This movie has to be, along with Hell 2 Tha Naw (2001), one of the two most insanely ghetto (fabulous) urban comedies that I've seen. The plot revolves around the trial and travails of Kinky and Ta-Ta, two best friends and self described "hoochies," who make a bet with one another to see who can land a sugar daddy first. One of the conditions is that he have some ends ("He gotta make cheese, and I don't mean no government cheese") and that he lives in a "mansion" (which by Kinky and Ta-Ta's standards means at least 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms.) Anyhow, newly imbued with a sense of purpose, they set out to the club to begin their quest. One comedic subplot involves the seemingly innocent white girl from the nicer side of town that Kinky hires to watch her three kids when she goes out, who turns into quite the hoochie mama herself as soon as she's left alone, immediately opening the house up as a nightclub and charging neighborhood youths 5 bucks a head to get in. Meanwhile, back at the club, Kinky & Ta-Ta are harangued by a procession of horny males, including a pip-squeak pimp and a smooth, lover-man R&B singer names Rocky (who turns out to have a Tarzan fetish, in one of the funnier scenes of the movie.) One of the men turns out to not be such a bad guy, and is able to successfully woo Kinky in the days following their encounter at the club. Although he doesn't make the cheese just yet, he's an aspiring fashion designer, whose "Weird Wear" label has, presumably, yet to take off. But he's into Kinky for Kinky, not just for sex, and will accept her, warts and all. This causes Kinky to reconsider her bet with Ta-Ta, which in turn leads to the big dramatic falling out scene ("I don't wanna be a hoochie no more! I don't even wanna be called Kinky no more!") What will happen? Will there be wedding bells in Kinky's future? I'll say no more, other than that I loved every minute of it. Although it was seemingly shot on a VHS camcorder, with a budget of food stamps, the lo-fi charm of it all comes through, and there are actually some pretty funny bits to boot. Check it out if you're a fan of low-budget urban comedies.

I was teetering between a five and a six, but finally decided for the latter based on the downright low-budget charm of this movie. It's a film within a film set-up, which revolves around an aspiring screenwriter trying to sell his (ridiculously noncommercial) screenplay about mother-son incest in a post-apocalyptic bunker to a succession of sleazy movie producers who his agent (whose office is a phone booth) got him meetings with. As the writer starts his pitch, the film will switch to an on-screen dramatization of the movie the writer is pitching. Although I don't know this for sure, I'd have to bet that the director of this work was making the incest movie for real, decided that he'd never sell it, and decided to cut his losses by using half of it and wedging it in with the parts about selling the script. Which brings up strange complications when you think that the whole thing might have been inspired by the actual making of the incest movies, and then you get one big meta mess, but- I don't know if that's the case or not, but this movie ended up being relatively unique, and I've seen a ton of crap movies. The happy ending seemed tagged on though. Oh well.

The latest from S.F.-based cult auteur Craig Baldwin, "Mock Up On Mu", despite its rather avant garde style, tells a fairly straightforward narrative tale. Set in the year 2020, L. Ron Hubbard (Damon Packard), famed founder of the Scientology religion, commands a moon base, Mu, with an army of his followers; the base is under contract with the U.S. government to dispose of depleted uranium from the earth's surface. Hubbard, seemingly omnipotent in the universe of this film, has built a giant theme park on the moon, which he wants to use to lure as many of the ultra-rich as he can to the moon, presumably to join his minions. The only problem is that in order to actualize this plan, Hubbard needs help from the Earth's surface, in the form of Lockheed Martin (Stoney Burke), a rich arms dealer in the Vegas area. Hubbard needs Lockheed Martin to build a giant rocket ship in the desert outside of Vegas, in order to have a viable means of transporting people to the moon. This is where things get sticky, however. In order to convince Lockheed to build the ship, Hubbard must first find Jack Parsons (Kalman Spelletich), a famed rocket scientist with connections to the underground world of Aleister Crowley, a world where "sex magick" fights the forces of evil industrialism. Apparently, disgusted with the evil deeds he was asked to perform for the US Government when formerly employed by them, Parsons faked his own death and fled to the Nevada desert, the very sight of some of the original nuclear bomb tests, in order to pursue his research for the good of humanity...

OK, so maybe the plot isn't that simple. And the story is not told in a style which you will ever, EVER see in a typical multiplex. On top of original footage shot by Baldwin, the story is told through a montage of images, some bizarre, some silly, some downright sublime, which have been culled from any conceivable source you can think of, from old Japanese monster movies to Home-Ec reels from the 50's and everywhere in between. Anyone with a passion for obscure and arcane relics of Hollywood's cold war days will have a field day watching how this movie seamlessly incorporates endless amounts of these nuggets into the original footage, in order to tell a bold and truly original tale of conspiracy theory Americana.

The gears are set into motion when Hubbard sends Agent C to earth in order to manipulate things for his favor. Turns out Agent C ain't who she seems to be...

Attempting to describe the plot is almost pointless. If you get a chance to watch this movie, just do it, as Nike would say.

This is a great documentary which focuses on the trials and tribulations of three young boxers and their coach, who train at the same community boxing gym in the rough Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Harry Keitt is the driving force behind the gym, an ex-con, reformed drug addict who founded the gym as a means of outreach to area youths who might otherwise be caught up in crime or drugs themselves. Tyrene Manson is one of the boxers who the film follows, trying to train while at the same time dealing with raising two girls who were left orphaned when Tyrene's aunt, a drug addict, died of AIDS. Also in the house is her aunt's widower, also HIV positive and still using and dealing drugs. The second boxer the film follows is Noel Santiago, also hailing from a broken home, and in the process of forsaking his schooling because of the delusion that he will be able to succeed as a professional boxer. The third boxer profiled is George Walton, who came up through Coach Harry's gym and went on to win the city-wide Golden Gloves championship. George is, after this, courted away from Harry's gym by a sleazy and seemingly unscrupulous boxing manager who promises him the stars in his professional career and leaves him with not much to show for it.

The stories being told in this film all have classical story arcs to them, and indeed play out as great drama. But the real genius on display here is that the whole picture is, and the people who we are rooting for to succeed through their hardships are shown warts and all. When coach Harry accompanies George to a training camp in Vegas after he is taken over by a new management team, the coach freely admits to an interviewer that he would leave graciously if offered a generous cash settlement. This statement is rendered doubly ironic and heartbreaking because the coach doesn't realize that the new management isn't making any money for George at all, and are reduced to accepting professional fights where the only payment to the fighters is made in free tickets to sell for profit.

Meanwhile, Tyrene is facing troubles of her own. Her drug-addicted uncle is busted for selling cocaine to an undercover cop, so the cops raid Tyrene's house (where the uncle lives) and she is arrested and charged with possession with intent to sell after a small amount of cocaine is found in the raid. Although Tyrene swears (and it would appear obvious) that the drugs belonged to her uncle, she is nonetheless charged, and since she is on public assistance, is provided with an overworked and underpaid public defender, who paints a blunt picture for Tyrene: it's your word against the cop's, and juries tend to believe the cops. Despite her attorney's advice, Tyrene chooses to go to trial and fight the charges against her; the trial, when it begins, happens to coincide with Tyrene's Golden Gloves appearances. She fights the fights of her life, and makes it to the finals even though she is under incredible psychological duress from the trial. Unfortunately, court dates for the trial force Tyrene to forfeit the final bout because she is unable to make weigh-in on time. Tyrene's story is perhaps the most alarming in the movie, showing the systemic challenge's facing poor black people in this country. Although she swears her innocence, and the film makes a convincing argument on her behalf, it is as if her guilt is presupposed in the legal system: "oh, a black woman on welfare found with crack? it must have been hers." This is what makes it all the more depressing when she is finally sentenced to 4 1/2 to 9 years, at the height of her boxing potential.

The third boxer is Noel Santiago. His is the most melancholy story. Cocky to the core, Santiago forsakes schoolwork and study in the name of his boxing career, which he is sure is about to take him on a meteoric rise to the top of the pugilistic world. This he does despite the warnings of his coaches and his mother, a reformed drug addict. When his time finally comes to fight in his first amateur bout, he is soundly knocked out shortly into the first round. He quickly quits boxing, but coach Harry convinces him to come back, enticing him with the chance to go to Vegas and train for free. Noel jumps back into his training with renewed vigor, and experiences the thrill of his first victory when he returns to fighting. These dreams soon sour again, when he is defeated in a decision in the second round. His also turns out the happiest of the three stories, as he enrolls back into school upon realizing his limits.

The three stories, interwoven, give a real idea of the difficulties that the poor of the nation live through every day, conditions unimaginable to those in comfortable middle class existences. Every day is a struggle for the subjects of this movie, which they face with courage and humanity, which is the essence of what is captured in this film. From Tyrene's climactic speech at her sentencing hearing, to the emotional reunion of George with Coach Harry after he flees from his new management team, this film buzzes with the life force of a class of people who show a shining resilience in spite of all that is dealt them from life's sometimes cruel deck.

NOTE: to all you hip-hop musicologists out there, the soundtrack features some obscure cuts from MF Doom and his crew.

This is a perfect example of a movie the mindless-junk-food-flick variety; the efficient and cost-effective techniques to produce such films were attained to an almost zen-like point of mastery by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the masterminds behind Cannon media conglomerate, a powerhouse in the world of 80's distribution. The output of their company, in terms of both sheer numbers of films and also in terms of how broad an array of genres, subjects, and talent levels were displayed therein, was enormous. Cannon released everything from Death Wish pictures, to kiddy fare, the screwball comedies, to early 80's "rap craze" films and just about every Chuck Norris pic on along the way. The films all, however, have in common the singular trait of being just good enough to keep you watching a little bit more. When you start to get bored in one of their movies, they know they're getting lazy and throw you a bone in the form of a witty joke or a pair of bared breasts, or a gunfight, or anything. They just have the formula of perfect mediocrity down pat. That is the type of movie that this is a prime example of.

The plot is, as I have implied, not really very important in the grand scheme of things here. David Neidorf plays Sheffield, a tough, hot-shot (read egomaniac) Baltimore city cop whose best bro since childhood, also a cop, is murdered during a stakeout gone awry while deep undercover in a county high school drug investigation. Sheffield is revealed to be the cause of his friend having to go undercover in the first place, in a rather vague and unintelligible attempt at a backstory, and for the sake of this film's plot, is of course sent post haste to replace his dead friend and colleague, which is to say: undercover in the local high school. He meets the typical band of supporting players, who play their parts to predestined conclusions, as everything must be as it is in the world of Cannon films. There is the slightly minstrel-esquire black baseball team friend, the snotty rich prick kid, and the corrupt cop baddie. Jennifer Jason Leigh, a rather renowned and serious thespian, was apparently not above trolling the likes of this film at the time, but she is totally wasted here in a nothing role as the female cop, undercover partner in crime Tanille Leroux. Her character had to be there, however, in order to make the Golan/Globus formula take effect.

Watching this movie is almost akin to watching a chemistry experiment unfold. Every element is carefully selected and added in to balance out to zero the sum total of impact on you. It is neither bad nor good, it is in the middle, perfectly neutral, which is why I give it 5/10 stars.

This movie is so god-awful! There are literally only four scenes! One scene: the unseen murderer killing strippers with a plastic bag over the head. None of the victims even seems to attempt to tear a hole in the flimsy little plastic bag. They just die. Then it's on to scene two: unattractive women with huge fake knockers dancing topless to a seemingly endless array of pop tunes which were never popular or indeed heard outside of this movie, as far a I can tell. The third scene is the "suspense" scene at the club as the new stripper (ex-penthouse pet Kimberley Kelley) who, you see, isn't actually a stripper at all, but is actually undercover investigating the smothering death of her sister, another stripper (these events presumably took place in Midnight Tease 1, which I haven't seen) snoops around for clues. The fourth scene is the scene where the Macguffin character, and artist (played by Paul Douglas) who likes to go to the strip club to find his muses for his paintings (P.S. Unintentional laughs abound when his work is shown, and is of a very low quality.) Take these four scenes and repeat them over and over again until you dash in a dramatic conclusion. Very boring, bottom of the barrel sleaze from Jim Wynorski and his buddies. Absolutely nothing to recommend.

This movie is another little bit of flotsam from the culture void which emerged in the Reagan 80's. The movie has a rather unlikely basis: a wacky goofball comedy set in a tax office. Oh yeah, nothing spells hilarity like going to H & R Block. I'm giggling already. So a handsome young middle American white man names Alan (Fritz Bonner) decides to drop everything in Cleveland and purchase a tax business, sight-unseen, in downtown Hollywood. What he fails to realize, unfortunately, is that the previous owner had to leave because he had a nervous breakdown from trying to deal with his unmanageable staff, which includes a Cuban horse- racing fanatic who still uses the Cuban tax code when dealing with his American customers, his bookie, the obligatory useless secretary, and the coup de grace, a call girl who turns tricks in her office at the tax place. What would a movie with this unlikely cast of screwballs be without two things, though: the love interest and the villain? The former is played by Ms. Debi Fares, an alumnus of three of the lesser Killer Tomato sequels and the unwatchable Happy Hour (1987). The latter, however, is the only reason to check this movie out, as the villain, Mr. Tagasaki (aka the Cocaine Cookie Cowboy) is played by the great James Hong, a veteran TV and movie character actor whose long list of credits spans from more than 50 years ago right through to Kung Fu Panda. He steals the show here, and is given the chance to revel in the role of the nefarious drug lord disguised as an upstanding citizen, who accidentally gives the wrong set of books to Alan, the straight and narrow new owner of the tax business. This sets in motion the main dramatic conflict of the film. I won't say anymore, other than if you've seen one wacky 80's comedy, you know how it's gonna end. If you can track down a copy of this, it's worth checking out for Hong's performance alone.

This movie is indeed a product of a (thankfully bygone) era, where wimps were to be hated, girls had big hair, and people spoke incessantly about real estate and Reaganomics. Yes, I'm talking about that decade of debauchery and decadence known as the 1980's. And if I had to choose one movie to put in a time capsule to represent said era, I might just have to choose this clunker. Yes, we have it all here: wise-cracking household robots, grotesquely stereotypical token black stereotypes, Volkswagen Things, badly dated lingo, and Lee Iococca to boot. The plot, if you can call it that, revolves around a "crazy white boy" named Adam (Raphael Sbarge) who dreams of one day being the next Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather (wtf?) whose names are, incidentally, dropped repeatedly to no avail throughout the movie. Anyhow, Adam had crazy daydreams where he sees the same sexy girl, Sabrina (Page Hannah, whose beauty is the one bright spot in the movie) in a variety of different, journalism-related action-adventure scenarios. All the while, Adam must deal with overbearing and obnoxious yuppie parents who are always riding him for being such a daydreamer and not doing anything with his life. These events are interspersed with occasional narrative commentary by Adam's black friend Leroy (Charlie Barnett), the aforementioned black stereotype. Adam, who is helping his other friend's campaign for school president (on the highly controversial black republican ticket) gets into some real life trouble when he somehow gets involved with some dimwitted mobsters who run a chop shop with the help of Adam's candidate's political opponent Ty Redbyrn (Grant Forsberg) who needs the money to keep up his rigorous and expensive campaign. Nothing much really happens, and although the movie only runs about 80 minutes, it feels at least twice as long. Anything that these filmmakers may have learned about pacing, plotting, composition, etc. seems to have been thrown out the window in favor of a boring mishmash of nothingness, topped with a slapped-together "action" set piece ending. There is absolutely no reason to bother with this boring belch from the days of the Member's Only jacket. Avoid. Note- Chris Elliot, everyone's favorite cabin boy, has a much too brief role as a jerk administrator at Adam's high school.

This has to be, out of all of the movies that I've seen, the one with the smallest target audience. That niche audience happens to be helicopter enthusiasts. The movie, which appears to be made for Australian television (judging by the accents and obviously missing commercial breaks), and also appears to have been cast largely with non-pros who seem to be real helicopter pilots. The film has only the barest of plots, with a classic arch-villain who's main crime, in this case, is deer poaching (the shots of dead bucks hanging from the bottom of helicopters in flight is neat in a psychotronic way) with some arson thrown in for good measure. The main point of the film is to showcase the capabilities of the beautifully designed 70's helicopters, and the action set-pieces, showing the helicopters rescue, fire-fighting, etc. skills, are impressively well made. Monte Markham, the sole American on the cast, did have, in my opinion, a fair amount of charisma and screen presence as the main good guy; he resembled nothing so much as a poor man's Steve McQueen. Altogether fairly good 1980's cheesy action fare, which, seeing as I'm the first to comment thus far, hasn't found an audience it deserves. Worth a look.

This movie is weird with a capital w. Surely the writer knew that no studio in their right mind would come anywhere near this mish-mash of mafia movie, sex movie, art movie, Pulp Fiction knockoff, and about every other movie that they ever saw. It certainly can't be seen as a calling card movie, as the only people calling after seeing this movie were people so confused that they wanted some straight answers from the director. That said, there is a certain charm to this movie. Why it sort of works is something of a mystery to me, but I have a couple of theories I've been kicking around. One theory is that the actress who plays Mary, the female lead, is beautiful and hypnotically attractive. Another is that the manic storytelling is downright charming in its amateurishness. The laws of reason are suspended when you watch this film, which is always good for a lark. Well, I don't know why I kind of liked this movie, but any film with a mob boss's gay son, a Mexican telenovela star, a lady who sues her dressmaker because she got raped in her dress, and a random swingers scene can't be all bad. 7/10