Wednesday, February 26, 2014

A BRIEF INTERLUDE 'CAUSE I DON'T FEEL SO GOOD - SO HERE'S SOME DEMON POO





Bad Milo (2013)

I got a lot of flak for presenting a review of Bad Milo by doing a Ren & Stimpy skit in place of the movie. Nah, what, are you kidding? Nobody said a word. In fact, there just may be a few (very few) who actually think that WAS the movie. Maybe. Probably not. Nah.

But I looked at the premise and shuddered. It looked to me like a Troma movie maker who was given way too much money to make the typical Troma-type film. Then again, I AM the one who waited over a year to get a hold of a copy of Zonbi asu (Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead) (2011) which is, by far if you are comparing things that come out of your colon, the superior movie. At least watch it first. As it happens, both movies are currently streaming on Netflix.




But this is about a guy named Duncan. Duncan has had lifelong problems with the toilet. His problem is that way too much of his day is usually spent sitting on it. And stress makes it worse. He finally goes to a doctor who, after puzzling over the ultrasound, finally concludes that it's a polyp - one freaking you-just-bought-me-a-boat polyp. He schedules Duncan to have surgery but tells him in the meantime to stay free of stress.



Duncan is an accountant at an investment firm. Stress. He has just been transferred to Human Relations by his supervisor (the usually funny but not this time Patrick Warburton), a job he knows nothing about. Stress. The firm is going to be doing a lot of layoffs and he's in charge of doing it. Stress. His new office is actually a bathroom. Stress. His 'cubie' is a slob who hopes that the toilets still work. Stress. His mom is coming to dinner. Stress. His wife wants a baby. Stress. He sees a psychiatrist who urges him to 'let it all out'. Ick.



After having dinner with his cougar mom and her very young companion, he again spends an evening on the toilet. His wife, knowing the routine, puts in earplugs, takes a sedative and goes to bed. What comes next is straight out of a Robot Chicken sketch (I don't own this and apologize profusely to Seth and Matt). The problem with this movie is - they had an idea (gross, but an idea) and started strong and funny and then it just... died. It flopped around a little, but a couple of dull thunks on the head and it was dead as a doornail. How is a doornail dead anyway? It was never alive in the first place. I mean it's a NAIL for crying out loud.




Maybe if it was cleaned off it might look like... nah.
<Looking through Google> Okay, it's an ancient phrase, you can find variations of it in Shakespeare. But in carpentry, if you take a nail and hammer it in wood, flatten the end so it can't be removed, it's dead because you can't use it again. Umm what? So I guess a large, heavy iron 'nail' that is put on a door in this fashion gets to be 'dead as a doornail' 'cause it can't come off. At least that's what they're guessing.




Hmm? Oh yeah, poop demon. Ever see a company with a lot of money but low on original scripts so they throw a dart at a board and choose their next project from that? That would be this one. It was all anus and fart jokes, with a slimy (it's been in his butt after all) demon running around wasting people, turning them into red pate'.



So let's sum up: Man has colon problems. Man goes to doctor who tells him 'no stress'. He has a ton of stress. After a bathroom scene that would make a Troma producer blush Milo is born. He 'pops' out whenever he decides to kill anybody giving Duncan problems. Unfortunately, that includes Duncan's wife who is pregnant. 




Duncan's dad turns out to have his own (wrinkly) butt demon so they fight. Old demon dies. Duncan chops Milo up. They make up (?!?) and he stuffs him back into his anus (this movie is not recommended for viewing during meal times). So all are happy and our end scene (THANK GOD!) is of Duncan's wife and it zeros in on her little one and an even littler anus demon growing with him.

Please please PLEASE no sequels.


Saturday, February 22, 2014

WHAT THE HELL IS WHATSAPP? AND OTHER BITCHING TO DELAY TWO REVIEWS I'M BOGGED DOWN TRYING TO FINISH



Just When I Think I've Caught Up...

It's no secret (in fact you see it on every freaking computer and TV news source) that Facebook has the billions to spend on a texting app it claims it will 'keep separate' from Facebook and also keep affordable to the millions that use it (snicker). It's also no secret that Facebook keeps your profile and every bit of info you've ever wisely or unwisely put on your account - personal messages, pictures, etc.

Except for one freaking lousy poem that I personally wrote, apparently. Not that it was worthy of Poe or Keats or even a 9th grade Creative Writing student - but it was mine. See, Facebook has this little trick that has tripped me up more than once. So why haven't I learned? Hey, give me a break. My computer is fairly up to date although my phone, being six years old, is a dumbphone. 



I don't swipe to answer calls, I don't tell everybody exactly where I am (who DOES that?), I don't text or twitter each moment of my life (especially while driving), I don't play Angry Birds on the toilet, I don't squint to watch tiny movies on a device that's supposed to be for communicating with other people or for emergencies - it makes phone calls. That's it. 

If I want to take pictures with it there's an incredibly complicated process that... let's just say we don't use them for pictures. So this WHATSAPP thing is a total mystery to me and I hope it stays that way.




Oh yeah, Facebook. It has learned a little trick to make you pull your hair out faster than it's falling out anyway. It's no secret that because of how fast a person's news feed can go that how many people you can get to read your posts depend on the time of day you post them (and, thanks to the new 'selective' feed maybe not even then) so re-posting, although a pain in the ass for a lot of people (who wants to see the same thing over and over?) is often necessary to keep readership up. 

I'm talking about my horror page now, 'cause I don't post (at least as myself) on my personal page anymore. The horror page tells me exactly how many people see each post. That can be a good thing if people are actually looking at anything.

Long story short (too late) if you do the 'share to your own timeline' trick you can get it to reappear on their newsfeed - at least for a few minutes. So you do that, and then delete the original. And that's where Facebook plays their latest trick to piss you off.

Both the original and repost disappears.

This has happened with status updates, pictures, and in this case, a poem I wrote that was actually pretty decent but I was too dependent on social media to back up on my computer. Dammit. It has happened with pictures often enough that I ALWAYS have copies of them but my words of (ahem) wisdom? Nope. And yet still I trust that when I hit the 'share' button and repost a damned picture, poem or State Of The Nation Address that it's gonna be there when I delete the original and refresh my freaking page. Pffft.


I even posted a message to the NSA, asking for my poem back in the wads of personal information I'm sure they're holding about me. That probably wasn't smart. If I disappear, at least all of you will know why.

This kind of freaks me out, because I have had stuff pop up that I HADN'T EVEN POSTED YET in places like Google Search and Google+. Not this poem though, no, that would have been too easy. I looked through countless places trying to get help and advice and this is what I saw most: Facebook is arbitrary about what it will and won't do and will and won't help you with. And yet still most don't use Google+. Hmm, good point. While I have a Google page and of course this blog, I still am stuck on Facebook's teat. So why not dump them altogether, develop a horror movie page separate from my personal page on Google and just... hmm. I think it goes back to that 'most don't use Google+' statement.



Don't get me wrong - the readership on this Google blog is much MUCH more than I ever expected it could be and I won't stop thanking everyone for that. My Facebook horror page? Not so much. I've had it for about five months. I have 58 'likes'. Hmph. It tells me I'm reaching roughly 2,000 people but I would do soooo much better if only I was willing to pay for possible future 'likes'. OR the wonderful option of picking a post that more than the usual people paid attention to and 'boost' it by paying $5 in blackmail money for Facebook to make sure it appears on people's feed - otherwise (shrug) they might see it, they might not.

So if you happen to see a poem attached to this picture, I would much appreciate it if you send me a copy. It's got to be on the internet somewhere - everything else certainly is.




Thursday, February 20, 2014

FINALLY! FOR REAL! THE FIFTY MOVIE MARATHON OF PURE TERROR CLASSICS... WILL NOW CONTINUE WITH DISC TWO!


Pure Terror

Continuing on with our little pack of 50 (yes that's a big five oh) classic (not necessarily good, but classic) horror films.The little pamphlet has saved my butt 'cause it keeps me straight with what movie was shown when 'cause when my brain mushes out (that doesn't even make sense, does it?) I sometimes completely lose where I've left off and what comes next. Each movie also has a short synopsis (thank goodness) so I know whether I've actually already seen (and reviewed) the movie or not. So far, unfortunately, it's only been one. This second disc has two movies worth a page apiece so:


DISCO TWO MOVIE ONE



The Werewolf Of Washington (1973)

The first time I watched this movie (because my fibro-fogged brain for some reason made me erase my notes on my recorder before I typed 'em up I had to watch this twice) I dismissed it as 70s schlock. The second time around however, I began to see and appreciate that, through the absurdity, the movie makers were making quite a statement about America and the government policies of the late sixties and early seventies. The President in the movie is supposed to be modeled after President Nixon with his 'out of control' Attorney General John Mitchell. Because this was released during the Watergate scandal, it gained quite a following and is considered a cult classic.

I must confess I learned a whole lot more about the White House and its' idiosyncrasies than I ever learned in school - and I didn't wanna either but I had to present this movie straight so... yeah. And please excuse some of the pictures - the movie wasn't in really great shape.



Jack and his eyebrows get a
silver headed walking stick.
The premise of the movie: Ambitious reporter Jack Whittier (Dean Stockwell and his eyebrows) schtups the President's daughter, gets tired of her and so persuades his boss to reassign him to Hungary where he meets a new girlfriend and plans to take her with him back to the US. Nice guy.








Jack and the President have a little bedroom talk...
So we've got Hungarian gypsies, one who is a werewolf and bites Jack. Jack kills him with a silver-headed walking stick. The police don't care. Jack returns to D.C. sans Giselle who disappears altogether from the movie and is never mentioned again. Because Jack had lied to the President's daughter that he was made to go to Hungary for being pro-establishment, the President decides to make him a press assistant.




Giselle who?
During the whole movie the President (who looks nothing like Nixon but repeats 'Let me make one thing perfectly clear' about a hundred times) moves about as if he's just one of the guys - no Secret Service, no security to speak of, and he just wanders around as he pleases. Jack tries to hook back up with the President's daughter but she got engaged to a psychiatrist. But that doesn't prevent her from flirting with him on the side. As a (small) running gag, every time Jack tries to talk to someone about his being 'cursed' by a werewolf with the Pentagram, invariably who he's talking to replies irritably, 'What does the Pentagon have to do with anything?' <Golf clap>




Sign of the Pentagon... err, I mean Pentagram.
While talking to a rich (and very drunk) outspoken woman at a party, Jack notices a pentagram on her palm. For this movie, that means she's the next victim. Yay. Now we've got an obvious plot device to know who dies next.





Guts? Her dress isn't even ripped...
Although he kills her at night and leaves her in a shopping cart in the parking lot of a supermarket, no one sees her until the middle of the next day. Maybe because her cart hit a car or something, I don't know. But this is the 70's idea of a woman who dies 'with her guts ripped open'. What you don't see 'cause it would have made this picture way too big, is a great product placement in the cart next to hers of Kellog's Special K cereal - how proud they must have been.





Wolfie travels in style...
Jack is getting desperate but the movie has a way to go yet so he doesn't do a whole lot about his situation. Plus there are more references to Vietnam, the Panthers, inequality between the sexes and races, and hippies and liberals to be made - probably not to be understood a lot unless you're a certain age. Even watching it twice I didn't understand a lot until I looked stuff up. Which I didn't want to do but hey, I suffer so you don't have to.



Apparently 'wolfing out' starts
by looking like Jack Nicholson...
I did notice that although there are lots of scenes of the front of the White House and Jack 'going to work' it never shows him actually stepping on the property. He's always either by the fence, or crossing the street in front of the White House. What, they too busy to throw a werewolf a bone and let him come in? And when he 'wolfs out' he actually looks pretty cuddly - they save a lot of money on costumes by having him NOT rip out of his suits (very distinguished looking werewolf) and he's also a fluffy whitish color - kind of a mix between a werewolf and The Shaggy Dog (don't send any hit men after me, 'kay Disney?).




We get prolonged scenes - two in particular that were both irritating and amusing at the same time is when Jack is in the White House bathroom (which is apparently set up like any business-type bathroom with stalls and everything) and since he's hiding in one, the President decides to get down on the floor to try to reach under to unlock the door... okay.




Another scene where the President attempts to get Jack to stop blubbering about being a fuzzy killer and concentrate on stopping the attacks on his policies and... oh whatever else he was talking about takes place in the President's private two-lane bowling alley. His ball gets stuck so we get a three stooges minus one scene of the two of them waddling down the gutters so as not to step on the lanes to retrieve the ball. I am not kidding.



Hmm? You heard there was going to be butt sniffing? All right, all right, I'll speed this up as much as I can. After overpowering the ONE guard at the bottom of the stairs in the White House basement, we discover that there's a whole freaking cheese making factory down there. Nah, I'm actually just kidding about that but this is some kind of huge manufacturing building with huge machines and a floor with a drain in it (ooh, what nastiness do they do down there anyway?) and it goes on for what seems miles. And then...


I'm getting pictures off the movie and I hear behind me 'What the hell is THAT? A mannequin?' Oh no no my dear hubby - what he has stumbled upon (now I have to kill him of course) is a secret lab that's apparently stashed deep within the bowels of the White House that contains all different kinds of human experiments... 



Is that Prince on the left?
We've got the guy in the cage on the left (the one my hubby noticed), a huge dude on a table covered with a sheet, leaving his HUGE booted feet sticking out, and, of course, Dr. Kiss (Michael Dunn - the guy from Star Trek?), a 3' 10" mad scientist who, for some reason, the werewolf likes... a little too much.




A little butt-sniffing between friends...
Now I was going to make a whole lot of jokes here, but since Dunn died of pulmonary heart disease the year this film was released (it came out, along with two of his other films, posthumously), all I'll say is that this werewolf liked him enough to revert to doggie behavior, complete with all the things that doggies do to people they like.






Eww dude you were just sniffing his butt!
That's all I was going to say about that part but then Google+, for whatever reason (do they have people searching photos and just making GIFs for no reason whatsoever?) took this photo and made it just that much more special... so I HAVE to include the face-licking part now...




The movie just kind of degrades from there. I know, I know, it didn't have far to go but it really does. Dr. Kiss tells the president he wants the werewolf captured alive (we see the lone gunmen and the werewolf, not at the bottom of the stairs, but instead in a long hallway they did NOT travel in) (sigh) and then he disappears into a stall of the kind of bathroom I remember we had as kids in Elementary School - you remember those? 



The huge round sink with water that shot from above in tiny streams when you stepped on the ring at the bottom? All that horrid dry powder soap? For you boys, the row of urinals? Apparently the White House of the 70's was really into school decor because several scenes are shot in suspiciously locker-filled, bland tiled hallways.



Then the doc disappears from the movie as well. Jack decides to end it all so he orders silver bullets but can only get one. He consults with his ex's new boyfriend about chaining him (to a wicker chair - that makes sense how?) but the plan falls apart when the President insists Jack needs to be with him for his most important speech on arms limitation agreement with the Chinese Foreign Minister (?!?).



The President sends a chopper to pick up Jack, who's somehow miraculously gotten out of all those chains, to be with him and the Foreign Minister - they explain away why it's not the official White House chopper by the President saying he has 'several choppers'. Nice save.

The CFM can see Jack begin to change and starts to exclaim that he wants off the chopper. The President is so clueless that he thinks the answer to the problem is to repeat a mangled Chinese phrase (the only one he knows apparently) to try to calm the man down. Nope.




Finally Jack jumps up, full-out wolfies, and attacks the President. There's a prolonged scuffle - nobody seems to care that the President is getting ripped up by a monster. No secret service, no protection.

Jack, still fuzzy, gets back to his apartment where his (ex?)girlfriend finally shoots him. Twice. That wouldn't be so bad but he only could get ONE silver bullet. Meh, at least he's dead.

Our last scene (if you can call it that) is listening to the President making a speech which ends with a howl. Wow, how exciting.



Tuesday, February 18, 2014

BOY YOU'LL NEVER CHARLIE SHEEN GUESS WHAT CHARLIE SHEEN HAPPENED TO ME YESTERDAY CHARLIE SHEEN...


Did I Mention Facebook Is Not Your Friend?

I've plugged my Facebook page shamelessly and have worked hard at getting those 58 likes darn it! (Update as of 5/8/14 I got clear up to 61 but apparently pissed some people off and now it's 59) I'm proud of that page and won't be giving up on it just yet. I did have a bit of fun with it yesterday which came at a good time. I was bummed when I found out that a guy on my 'friend' list who knows full well I have an FB movie page has decided to start one of his own and wants me to 'like' it. Uh, that would have been fine... if he had supported mine (nope).


But Facebook is not your friend and neither is anyone on your friend list (unless they're relatives or people you actually see and talk to regularly) so this should not be surprising but dammit it always seems to. I'm actually backing off of the Facebook game - with the new profile pages it's a long, tedious process to delete years of stuff, but now there should be little more on there than two or three posts directly from - you guessed it - my FB movie page. That's it.




No more wondering where everybody went, no more feeling bad when I post something funny and it's ignored but somebody snags it, reposts it, and all of a sudden it's the funniest thing in the world and everybody's liking it, no more personal posts about how I feel, no more people trying to 'friend' me for the sake of a game - which I plan to start dumping too. Nice how they let you play for 'free' - unless you really want to 'keep up' with all the stuff they want you to do, then it costs. Pffft.


So yesterday I made a joke that had my movie page exploding with views for no good reason whatsoever. I mentioned that I only post there now - yesterday I posted that I hadn't heard of Charlie Sheen's proposing to his porn star girlfriend, making this marriage number four. I made some dumb joke about how this should have been big news, not the Olympics or people trapped in mines, etc. It was just a little joke.


Now for some reason, when you are the administrator of a page, it tells you how many times a post is viewed. Normally if I get four to eight or nine views a post I'm doing pretty well - this stupid picture and brief snark about a tabloid article took off and while I watched quickly hit the 100 mark and just kept going.... total at the end of the day: 996. Whoa. That's more views than my whole FB page gets in a month.

Soooo, I posted my link to this page with an experiment to see how many views I could get using the mention of ole' Tiger Blood. Total at the end of the day: 1,019, over 800 of those in the first half hour. Okay, this was getting ridiculous. I found a picture of a rock. That's right - a plain river rock. 


This one.
I then made brief mention of Joe Estevez and some of the movies - can they be called movies? Let's see - there's actors in them, they try to tell a story, they're roughly 90 minutes long... Okay, yeah, movies. In the post I said oh yeah, this is Tiger Blood's uncle you know. By then I'd worn people out or they'd figured that I was putting them on. Total views at the end of the day: 193.


My real reader base is here and here I will concentrate on putting up movies you either will want to see or not. Mainly not. Besides, I like you best here, and I don't have to chew my fingernails looking at numbers hoping somebody will 'like' me. I am more than satisfied with the 62,000 views I have here and it climbs every time I look at it.

And that's without ole' Tiger Blood.



Monday, February 17, 2014

AN INTERLUDE BEFORE OUR CLASSIC HORROR MARATHON CONTINUES... WITH A MASSIVE STINKER STRAIGHT OUT OF WISCONSIN...




Aberration aka AfterThought aka The Dreamer (2007 - re-released 2013)

I have a quick statement for movie makers present and future: Putting a weird picture of an evil looking little boy on the poster for your movie only pisses people off when they waste time watching a vapid movie that could have been seen on the Disney channel (and THEY would have been bored). And the caterwauling by the, uh, I wouldn't really say singer, at the end of the movie just added insult to injury. Somebody get that girl an auto tuner. Wow did it suck!



Problem is, they KNEW this movie sucked. Not to be confused with the movie of the same name (the Aberration one I mean) from 1997 (that's a creature feature from New Zealand) this was first called AfterThought and made in 2007 and even has an IMDb page at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0476985/  .

It. is. horrible. So horrible that apparently either it was yanked from distribution or never distributed in the first place and it sat in limbo until 2013 when they simply changed the title to Aberration and tried it again:  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2887012/ .

Hey, if it sucked the first time, how the hell did they think they were going to make it fly the second time just by changing the title?

We're talking about a film that doesn't even know what kind of movie it wants to be. The only concrete part is that there is a girl named Christy. Who drives a Zamboni. In Wisconsin. 'Cause they play hockey there. The rest is just a mess.

One of its' many problems is that it can't decide exactly what this movie is about. One description says Christy is a 'dreamer' who talks to the dead. One says she is a 'conduit' between the dead and the living. One says she has terrifying visions of the future. Well? Which the bloody hell is it? One of 'em? Some? All?

The presumably dead boy in the hockey jersey that follows her around is a blatant copy of Ju-on. If the kid had meowed like a cat they'd have their asses sued off. They should have anyway. That combined with the constant is-this-real-or-a-dream boring sequences, characters you can't tell apart except by attitude (okay, that's the asshole - that's the outcast - that's the popular girl, etc.) and a clear-as-glass outcome that's obvious from the beginning makes for a tortuous 85 minutes.



Kinder, gentler reviewers (read people who either know somebody who worked on the film or someone who didn't actually watch it) said that although there weren't many scares (How about NONE?) it was a 'mystery that kept you guessing until the end'. Um, no. It was a horrible mess of half-ideas in an obvious plot that had a predictable ending that came waaaaaaaay too late. That movie should have been about fifteen minutes long. And setting it up for a sequel? No bloody-freaking way.