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The Rich and the Filthy (2015)
Don't listen to those other reviewers! My opinion is far superior.
This show is okay, I guess. Much better than all the garbage that's on these days anyway. I listened to all the episodes on my Walkman at home. Oh, except for the last one which I listened to at my aunt's house for some reason. We ate corn that night. I remembered that it was a vegetable like the girl from this show, Fake Angelique. That was pretty funny, but I didn't really get the stuff about the ghost spoon. I mean - how can spoons die?! I laughed at all the funny stuff but not at anything else. I would recommend this show to anyone who likes funny stuff or just likes listening. Honestly, I think it deserves a 4/10 rating, but I gave it a 10/10 to balance out all those other reviewers whose opinions don't matter as much as mine.
A Christmas Story 2 (2012)
Not what I wanted for Christmas.
Ralphie obsesses over what he wants for Christmas, doesn't get it, then gets it after all. He says, "Oh Fudge!", wears an embarrassing animal costume, isn't able to have turkey for Christmas, and eats at the Chop Suey Palace. Mrs. Parker overdresses Randy for the cold weather. The Old Man yells 'It's a clinker!' fights the furnace, and gets a leg lamp. And, of course, Flick gets his tongue stuck to something.
You may think I'm talking about A Christmas Story, but sadly this is also the description for the completely unnecessary sequel, A Christmas Story 2. Clearly, there is no attempt made here to capture the magic of the original, only a blatant attempt to cash in on its success by recycling all its funny moments and adding tired family movie formulas. At one point, Ralphie blurts out what I'm sure the entire audience is already thinking, "Oh no! Not again!" It could easily have been the tag line for the movie posters.
Despite all this, A Christmas Story 2 is certainly not as bad as it could have been, considering the current family movie genre's obsession with vomit and flatulence. If you're just feeling a bit nostalgic for A Christmas Story, A Summer Story and Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss are far better sequels with fresh material, though they, too, pale in comparison to the original classic.
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)
Future events such as these will affect you in the future.
A race of aliens are tired of the "stupid, stupid" Earthlings claiming that aliens don't exist, so they concoct a brilliantly evil plan. First, they fly around in their flying saucers that are "shaped like huge cigars" (??) and fiendishly shine lights in people's faces. Second, they raise three random people from the dead, taking care not to let anyone know they are responsible for this (It could blow their cover.) The dead people, acting on the orders of the aliens, wander aimlessly around a graveyard. One of them even goes into a nearby house and horrifies a woman by walking slowly and staring at her. Finally, the aliens cleverly reveal their entire plan to a trio of snoopers who manage to find their ship (It was hidden behind a tree.) They explain to the Earthlings that they fear Earth will one day discover how to make a Solaranite bomb that will explode the sun. Then they explain to the Earthlings exactly how the Solaranite bomb works. This is why they have to destroy us before we destroy them which will ultimately prove to us that they exist... or something. But there's one thing that these highly advanced aliens didn't count on: three of the Earthlings might resist somewhat.
"Plan 9 From Outer Space" is Ed Wood's masterpiece and is considered by most to be the worst film ever made. Even Criswell couldn't have predicted the cult popularity it has gained. Bela Lugosi died shortly after filming began so the majority of his scenes are played by a look-alike who looks nothing like him. The dialogue is awkward and nonsensical, the set looks like it was borrowed from an elementary school play, and the acting makes Keanu Reeves look like Sir Lawrence Olivier. Listing all the continuity errors would take longer than the film's running time. The only thing that could have made the film worse would have been to include Dolores Fuller.
All in all, "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is one of the most entertaining movies I've ever seen, a triumph of will over talent.
Jail Bait (1954)
Nasty things, these shootings.
Two "hold-up boys," Don Gregor and Vic Brady, get caught in the act, and Gregor is forced to shoot an ex-police officer. Brady plays it cool, but Gregor insists that they turn themselves in. "We're cop killers. They don't like that," Gregor explains. Brady shoots him and hides his body behind a curtain in his kitchen.
Wishing to disappear to escape the police, Brady enlists the help of Gregor's father, a plastic surgeon who admits, "Plastic surgery, at times, seems to me to be very, VERY complicated." The surgeon shows up to give Brady his new face, but when he finds his son's dead body STANDING(???) behind a curtain in the kitchen, he decides to have a little fun with Brady instead. Two weeks later, Brady's bandages come off, and he's horrified to find whose face is underneath.
"Jail Bait," Ed Wood's attempt at gangster film noir, is unintentionally silly, ludicrous, and terribly enjoyable. And despite what Wade Williams says on the back of the DVD, the script is far from clever. Other highlights include: an embarrassing racist Vaudeville act(some versions replace this scene with a striptease show because it's apparently less offensive to degrade women as it is to degrade blacks) laughably inappropriate Spanish guitar score, and Dolores Fuller who is possibly the worst actress in history.
A Certain Sacrifice (1979)
A Certain Bomb
A boy does NOT want to rake the leaves. There's an argument. Two guys in a diner have a conversation that threatens to never ever EVER end. There's an argument. Close-ups of eyes and the wall.
A guy with band-aids on his face approaches a girl dancing in a sprinkler. He pulls a gun on her, and they fall in love. But there's trouble in paradise when he finds out she has a "family of lovers." There's an argument. Close-ups of eyes and the ground. He also argues with a landlady.
When the girl is attacked in the bathroom, there's nothing left to do but call on her family of lovers for help. They kidnap the attacker and force him to watch their song and dance routine that doesn't come close to syncing up with the soundtrack. There's, of course, more close-ups of eyes and then they kill him... or something.
The film ends with a touching scene of the young couple making love bathed in the attacker's blood, and they all live happily ever after... all but the audience of course.
"A Certain Sacrifice" is a very low-budget exploitation film starring everyone's favorite tramp, Madonna, before she was discovered. It was shot in 1979 but was not released (for obvious reasons) until 1985 after Madonna's superstardom. The actors made up most of the dialogue, and the audience was apparently supposed to make up most of the plot. The cameraman seemed to be a quadriplegic, flailing around randomly, shooting everything except what's going on. The editor must have refused to cut a single second of the pointless and excruciatingly dull footage. Our only salvation from the hideous acting is that most of the dialogue was obscured by background noise. Surely there must be a better way to see Madonna's boobs.
Tell Your Children (1936)
It's 10 o'clock. Do you know why your children are cackling insanely?
"Reefer Madness" (originally "Tell Your Children") was created to teach parents that it's never too early to scare the holy crap out of your kids. Through this film we learn that the soul-destroying effects of Marihuana (Mike Nelson explains in the commentary that this film was made before the invention of the letter J) far surpass those of cocaine or heroin. We see firsthand that even teens who can quote Shakespeare like nobody's business cannot escape its evils.
Here are some of the symptoms of casual Marihuana use:
- laughing maniacally while running people down in the street
- playing the piano too fast
- having sexual relations with people you don't really like that much
- accidentally shooting people you do like pretty well
- having no recollection of being framed for murder
If your child has experienced any of these symptoms, he or she is a Marihuana addict. The solution is simple: force them to watch "Reefer Madness" because if we don't heed its warning, "Reefer Madness 2" will be coming to a theater near you or you... OR YOU!
Night of the Ghouls (1959)
It was a nightmare of horror!
An old couple, taking a shortcut at night, run into "a nightmare of horror" - an attractive blonde woman with long fingernails! The old woman can't quite stop smiling long enough to look horrified, but the police are sent to investigate anyway. Lt. Bradford, a man with a passion for internal monologue, and Kelton, an incompetent buffoon, discover Dr. Acula, a man in a turban.
Acula has been swindling money from the incredibly dense with the old raising-the-dead scam using a floating trumpet and bed sheet. But what Dr. Acula doesn't know is that he accidentally has real powers to raise the dead, and the dead just might knock off his turban! Fortunately for them, he decides to evade them by running directly at them.
"Night of the Ghouls," the long-awaited sequel to "Bride of the Monster," was left unreleased for over twenty years because writer/director Ed Wood couldn't pay the film lab fees. Though not quite as "good" as "Plan 9 From Outer Space" or "Glen or Glenda?" it's definitely worth watching just to see the look on the old couple's faces when they see the "monster." It doesn't get much better than that. God bless you, Ed Wood.
The Violent Years (1956)
Girls gone somewhat askew.
Four teenage girls, who are well into their twenties, disguise themselves as boys (they wear bandannas) and "run rampage" through the city by pushing their sexual advances on a weaselly boy on Lovers' Lane and hitting a gas station employee with a handgun, not killing him of course, but, as one policeman remarks, "Not for lack of trying."
After enduring a friend of her father's who shows up at their slumber party, trying to hold a conversation with the "teens" as they make out robotically, Paula leads the gang on their most heinous crime of all: breaking into their classroom in order to slightly disrupt the furniture and even erase the blackboard! Fortunately, the cops show up before they can finish the job, and a shoot-out ensues. One of the girls, after being blasted with a shotgun, announces, "It wasn't supposed to be like this," before lying down gently with no visible signs of damage whatsoever. The other three girls high-tail it out of the school but stop directly in front of the cops to chat long enough for another girl to be shot down as well. Day and night lose all meaning as the remaining two girls speed off at a snail's pace past the police.
After another shooting, the girls have a wonderfully ridiculous car crash into a plate glass window, killing one of them. Paula receives some cuts on her face, but manages to live just long enough to give birth to her illegitimate child. A judge refuses to grant Paula's parents custody of the child and further punishes them by reading a speech so long and pointless that even he seems to be dozing off by the end. In short, it's the fault of the parents that Paula turned to a hobby of crime because they didn't give her enough love or force religion upon her. Let this be a lesson to us all.
"The Violent Years" isn't nearly as inept as "Plan 9 From Outer Space" or "Glen or Glenda?" (possibly because Ed Wood only wrote it, didn't direct it) but it's still terribly entertaining.
Robot Chicken (2001)
Robot Chicken Lays an Egg
If you take the toys we loved from the 80's and animate them in short, stop-action pop-culture parodies of everything from Kill Bill to American Idol, throw in voices like Mark Hamill, Phyllis Diller, Christian Slater, Hulk Hogan, Ashton Kutcher, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seth MacFarlane, and music by Les Claypool, how could it possibly go wrong? Adult Swim's Robot Chicken will show you how. They've secretly replaced the humor with a barrage of bowel movements, flatulence, and more bowel movements. Let's see if you can spot the difference. Apparently there are some who can't. There's nothing wrong with crude humor (as this show claims to have) but Seth Green and Co. just add an extra helping of 'crude' to cover up the fact that there's little to no humor. One scene opens with Skeletor, Mumm-Ra, Cobra Commander, and Lex Luthor sitting in a car together, stuck in traffic. In this scenario, anything that happened would be hilarious. Anything EXCEPT Skeletor farting and forcing the other villains to smell it. Brilliant, right? Right? So if you love super heroes but have always wanted to see them sitting on the toilet, then Robot Chicken is for you. Otherwise, stick with the Simpsons for pop-culture parodies that are actually funny. Maybe Seth Green should stick to doing voices and just play with his toys on the toilet at home to his heart's content. And possibly think about some therapy. Can anyone really be this obsessed with going to the bathroom?.
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
The "Pete's Dragon" Menace
What is this menace which threatens our very way of life? It's not the lure of the Dark Side or unfair trade practices. It's something much more evil and sinister - the excessive use of computer animation. I like cartoons as much as anyone, but do they really belong standing among our favorite live-action Sci-fi heroes? This is something you'd expect from some low-budget, Ed Wood-type B-movie, but not from the great George Lucas, a man with unlimited time, budget, resources, etc. to make this movie with. How is it possible that with 10+ years of advancement, the special effects of this movie still leave me yearning for the stop-action Tauntauns from "The Empire Strikes Back"? But it's not entirely the obviously unbalanced "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" appearance that gives it its cartoonish quality. It's also (if not more so) the hideously unfunny personality of Jar Jar Binks, who could only entertain someone with the IQ of Bantha fodder. That's not to say that it isn't an otherwise great movie. There are excellent scenes. Qui-gon Jinn and Obi-wan's dual with Darth Maul almost made me forget the Saturday morning cartoon I had been watching only moments earlier. When people say this movie is a masterpiece, I agree. It's just unfortunate there's so many awful things about it that also make it a flop. I'll be looking forward to the Special Edition version where they superimpose a realistic-looking and much less idiotic character on top of Jar Jar.