Show me 'round your fruit cage

A long long time ago, I read some article in Movieline (that's how long ago it was) where they asked a bunch of celebrities what their favorite movie was. Some actor named Jeroen Krabbe mentioned one that of course I can't remember the name of, but I do remember that he agreed with its theme, something like "Your whole life is a pursuit for something and when you finally get it, you die". I don't know what this has to do with what I wanted to write about, but whatever dude, it just came up.

So I had a little double-feature of shot-on-video gore flicks a few nights ago, and after the disappointing 555, I made another bowl of popcorn and poured another Jack & Coke and put on the second flick, Sledgehammer.

First off, the opening production credit is done in that old-school computer generated font I used to see a lot of on public-access television, back in the day. It only appeared to have two styles -- regular and bold -- but at least you could change the colors. The main title follows, and instead of using a computer generator, they actually shaped the words Sledgehammer out of stone or brick or balsa wood or something, and it has blood leaking all over. Then a sledgehammer comes down and smashes it to bits. It's a beauty, that title.

The film opens in an old farmhouse where some lady in a slip is yelling at her little boy. She then locks him in a closet and tells him to be quiet or else. Turns out she has a man in the house and they're about to get intimate. She twirls around for him, showing her body off and asking "What do you think, sexy enough for you?". Baby, I just watched a flick where the hot chick was played by an older lady whose day job was probably as school principal, so you got my fuckin' vote, that's for sure. The dude asks the lady what happened to the boy and she responds with "I took care of the little bastard" and it just goes to show that even in this wonderful free country of ours, we really need to require licenses for people to have kids. But we don't have to worry about these two procreating, because someone shows up and bashes both of them to death with a sledgehammer.

We get a "Ten Years Later..." card and now we're back at the same farmhouse, looking exactly the same. A van pulls up in front and when the doors open, douchebags and assholes tumble out of it. They immediately go WOOOO! and ALL RIGHT! and one dude even does the Tarzan yell before getting pantsed by his shirtless friend who's clutching an overflowing can of beer and singing "Hound Dog". They then start taking out sleeping bags and cases of beer and radios and cases of beer and food and cases of beer. And a guitar. The driver of the van is an old man, and he drives away with the van so he can fix it overnight, and the screenplay to give us a roadblock later on. In this one scene, we find out everything we ever want to know about our young characters, mainly that they're douchebags and assholes. But we're going to get a lot more of these scenes throughout the movie.

Among the group is a girl named Joanie, who is obviously going to be the Final Girl of this flick because she's not having as good a time as everyone else. She must feel the same way I do about these assholes. Her shirtless boyfriend (who I'm gonna call Matthew McConaughey, after the actor who also can't get enough of going shirtless) takes her aside and tells her to try to enjoy herself, all the while bouncing his beer can on her head, pulling her shirt open and giving her noogies. We then get this awesome scene where they're walking together past a field while soft 70's lovey dovey music plays and the whole thing plays in one shot. In slow motion. For two minutes and twenty seconds. And at the end, he balances his beer can on her head. Young love.

There's about seven people in this party, three couples and one guy all by his lonesome. You have a now-shirted McConaughey and Joanie, you have this beefy bearded dude and his chick, you have this blonde chick and her boyfriend Tony Orlando With AIDS (which I guess makes him John Oates), and finally you have the one lonely guy, Dead Meat. We watch them all as they party in the den, drinking beer and liquor and dancing along to tunes from the boombox.

There's lots of WOOOO! going on in this motherfucker, and the WOOOO! type of behavior that goes with it. There's also a lot of spitting of drinks and pouring of drinks onto others. At one point, Beefy Beard starts to speak in a lisping gay guy voice, grabs a cowboy hat and uses it to block our view as he goes over to Dead Meat to kiss him. I thought he was only pretending to smooch him as a goof for the others to laugh at, but Dead Meat gets up and freaks out, wiping slobber off his face. You know Beefy Beard is totally one of those guys who makes fun of gays, but can't seem to stop pulling gay stunts with his bros either. The kind of dude who always manages to show his penis to his friends "for a laugh". You wonder about those guys.

Later on, McConaughey and Joanie have a heart-to-heart about his change of heart. You see, they've been together for two years and had plans to get married, but now McConaughey is having second thoughts. If you ask me, "Not Sure" is a great reason not to get married, but then I'm a guy, so I don't know how those without penises (or is that peni?) feel. Joanie doesn't have a penis, so she takes this as meaning that he's not interested in her anymore and wants to see other women. McConaughey steadies her down, telling her that he only wants to be with her, he's just not sure of taking the big step I like to call Ending The Fun.

This dude ain't so bad, he sees the writing on the wall. Even though this was made in the early 80's, this motherfucker probably knows all about Bridezillas and Jon & Kate Plus 8 (or as I like to call it, "The Cunt, The Ball-less Douche, and Their Spawn") and he figures that some great relationships are ruined by putting that shit on paper. I'm telling you man, look at Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. Those motherfuckers are gonna last forever, and that's because they know what's up. They're both divorced from previous marriages and they know all about how hearing the words "I Now Pronounce You Husband and Wife" cause something to change in a couples' psyche for the worst, and that those words might as well be changed to "Begin Countdown to Relationship Oblivion". That's right folks, for the majority of people, marriage is a motherfuckin' timebomb and saying "I Do" is like setting the timer on. And some of these doomed couples actually think having kids is gonna save their marriage. But the truth is that by having kids, all they did was take a guess on the timebomb and cut the blue wire, which causes the timer to speed up. I knew we should've cut the red wire! But it doesn't matter which wire you cut, that motherfucker is going to blow. This isn't Speed, this isn't Blown Away, this is the fuckin' first five minutes of Lethal Weapon 3 and it's going to end with you running away with a cat under your arm as the fucking building (aka Your Marriage) explodes behind you. Now you're divorced, alone, and all you got to keep was the fucking cat. You're too old for this shit.

Speaking of getting old, this Douchebag Debauchery going on the flick certainly is. Our assholes are sitting around a dinner table and GO! GO! GO!-ing Beefy Beard on as he shoves an entire Dagwood-style sandwich into his mouth. He then spits all of it onto Joanie's face. Nice. McConaughey then pours a whole bottle of mustard on her hair. Much screaming and WOOOO!-ing follows, and then a food fight breaks out. After everything I've seen McConaughey do to this chick, I'm pretty fucking sure that Joanie is no stranger to the Dutch Oven treatment from him. Hell, every guy in this movie has probably at one time or another farted in bed and put the blanket over their girl's head. They seem like that type. And that's why I'm going to die lonely while every mustard-pouring, beer can balancing, liquor spitting, WOOOOO! and PAAAARRRRTTYYYYYY! yelling motherfucker is going to die loved.

Later that night, there's more drinking for a while until McConaughey comes up with the idea of holding a seance. They're all down for it, so the lights are turned off and McConaughey begins by first telling a story about Mr. Sledge Hammer. We then watch as the opening scene is played out again in its entirety while McConaughey narrates what we already know. What new stuff we do find out is that the murdered couple had actually been engaging in a extramarital affair. The lady's husband was the prime suspect, but was never charged in the crime. And while the bodies of the couple were eventually discovered, the little boy who was locked in the closet disappeared and never returned. The seance then begins, with McConaughey calling for the spirit of one of the victims to join them. Loud ominous noises are heard, followed by an angry otherworldly voice. Everyone freaks out, but it turns out it's all a prank devised by McConaughey and Dead Meat, who is upstairs controlling the sound and voice with his trusty boombox.

But I guess the seance really worked, because the spirit of Mr. Hammer, looking like a construction worker in his flannel & work boots getup, shows up and turns Dead Meat into his namesake by stabbing him in the neck with a knife. His body is then dragged away while everyone downstairs decides to play charades and drink some more. After a while, Blondie takes Tony Orlando With AIDS upstairs to have a little fun, while McConaughey also goes upstairs to look for Dead Meat. He only finds Dead Meat's boombox and some splattered blood surrounding it, which would completely set off the Something's Not Right alarm, but since he's pretty trashed it comes off kinda muffled and he doesn't react as fast to it. Meanwhile in the next room, Blondie is taking the initiative and trying to get Tony Orlando With AIDS to give her some. After much prying and prodding, it's revealed that Tony Orlando With AIDS is a virgin, and that's why he's been kinda shy with Blondie the whole time. After that, Blondie gets on top and proceeds to tie her yellow ribbons 'round his old oak tree. I have no idea what that means, but I wrote it anyway.

Joanie joins McConaughey upstairs where he tells her about the blood and Dead Meat's disappearance. She tells him he's probably hiding somewhere, pranking him back. She changes her mind, though, after she finds Dead Meat's body in the closet. McConaughey tells her to go find Tony Orlando With AIDS and Blondie while he goes to tell Mr. & Mrs. Beefy Beard.

But there will be no dawn for Tony Orlando With AIDS and his chick, because after completing the deflowerization, they are both killed by Mr. Hammer. Joanie walks in on the aftermath and a chase ensues. Well, maybe "chase" is the wrong word. It's more like she's very slowly followed by Mr. Hammer while she constantly stumbles down the hallway. Joanie manages to get away and run into the rest of her jerk friends downstairs.

The survivors argue about what to do next. The idea of Getting The Fuck Outta Here is shut down by Beefy Beard, who believes it's better to stay and hunt for the killer rather than hiking to the next town (there's that screenplay roadblock I mentioned earlier). It's a good plan, because it ends with that asshole Beefy Beard getting a knife in his back. Mrs. Beefy Beard takes the knife and goes out for revenge, only to suddenly get teleported into a locked room with Mr. Hammer. When McConaughey and Joanie arrive, they find Mrs. Beefy Beard's corpse being repeatedly stabbed by a junior little boy version of Mr. Hammer. I'm guessing that here the kid explains how he can take shape as both a little boy and a big man and why he has teleportation powers, but since he says it way too fast and his voice is altered too much, I couldn't make fuckin' heads or tails of it. There are bloody pentagrams on the wall, though, so I guess it involves dealings with El Diablo or other similar evil spirits. McConaughey goes over to smack this kid around and teach him some manners, but the little boy fuckin' bitchslaps the dude. That moment is so full of Win, it brings a smile to my face just thinking about it.

More chasing and cheesy synthesized music ensues, and it all climaxes with a fight between McConaughey (inexplicably shirtless once again) duking it out with Mr. Hammer. In the end, McConaughey takes Sledge's hammer and bashes his head in, killing the supernatural construction worker. Both McConaughey and Joanie exit the farmhouse and the camera begins to pan away from them, and the movie hasn't faded to black yet, so you're just watching and waiting for the moment that these movies usually end in. The camera continues to pan away, finally moving up to the second story window of the house, and guess who we see staring out of it? Junior Sledge Hammer! DUN DUN DUN! Or in the case of the synth music used in the movie, SQWEEEEEYOWWWNNNN! Roll end credits, and wait till you see what kneeslappers these turn out to be:

Choreography
I.C. KNUN

Locations
MIKE HUNT

Secretary
JAC MEOUGH

Special Sound Effects
I.P. PHREILEE

Here's a couple more that seem a little too on the nose:

Lighting Director
MICHAEL WATT

Edited By
RALPH CUTTER

Of my shot-on-video double feature, I liked this one better than 555, but not by much. I liked the first two-thirds of the flick, but then it gets pretty dull for the last third, which is weird because that's where the real horror stuff happens. The gore isn't much to write home about, and the killer only uses the sledgehammer twice, which is pretty disappointing. It's like if I made a movie called Butcher Knife and out of the ten victims in the flick, the killer strangles seven of them. I wouldn't have an excuse and neither should the makers of Sledgehammer. But it nearly makes up for that shit with the wall-to-wall douchebaggery displayed and all of the WOOOO!-ing and the shit-treating of the women by the menfolk. So while it may fail as a genuine scary movie, it does barely succeed in having enough moments of What The Fuck? and Get The Fuck Outta Here! and Are You Fucking Kidding Me? to make it entertaining for the most part. I figure you can watch this one with some friends and some booze, and by the time it gets boring, you're too drunk by then to care anyway.

Unlike the dude who made 555, the guy who made this flick has gone on to have a career as a filmmaker. He's written and directed over 30 movies, working with Pamela Anderson, Lance Henriksen, Tony Curtis and David Carradine, among others. That's a pretty good step up from shooting Tony Orlando With AIDS on video. The guy found his niche, making low budget B-movies with guns, blood and titties -- the stuff Pure Cinema is made of, if you ask me. David A. Prior is the dude's name, and I've seen quite a few of his flicks. All go well with beer and pizza.

One of my faves was called Mankillers, a chicks-with-guns flick that featured one of the longest painful death scenes I've seen a villain go through. The bad guy in that movie got shot a bunch of times and squealed like a stuck pig for each bullet received. I swear this shit went on for five minutes, he kept popping up and one of the good guys would shoot him and he'd go AAAAAGGGGGHHH and fall to the ground again. I think all the surviving characters managed to pop a cap in him somewhere along the way, and in the end, he still wasn't dead. He got into a car and tried to run over the heroine. But she shot a fuckin' bazooka at him and the whole car exploded -- and he STILL screamed afterwards. That's the kind of suffering and assbeating I thought was missing from Curfew. So good on ya, Mr. Prior. Good on ya for giving the audience what it wants. I raise my Jack & Coke to you and I'd like to see more violence and titties from you in the future, if you please. But for Sledgehammer, I'll only raise my Jack & Coke halfway up.

(Note: I censored one of the moments in the video below, and that's because I'm sure showing one innocent titty is a lot more dangerous to the YouTube Police than showing blood and gore. Sorry.)

The saddest part is that I wasn't kidding about wanting to hit that

Back in the 80's, any struggling/aspiring filmmaker who wanted to make a quick buck could make a horror movie and put that shit out on VHS or Beta. Because back then, video stores were as numerous as McDonald's chains and those places would take ANY movie available just so they could have product to stock their shelves with. The movie didn't even have to be good, it just needed blood, a couple of titties somewhere, and a cool video box cover for suckers to want to rent it. Some filmmakers didn't even let the lack of film stock stop them -- they just shot the whole thing on video.

One such shot-on-video flick is 555, which I watched along with another flick that I'll write about next time. I watched them back-to-back, along with some Jack & Cokes and a bunch of popcorn because I'm a fat drunk.

555 starts out with an old man walking down a beach in the middle of the night, while somewhere nearby two naked guys make out. I'm sorry, that's one guy and one unfortunately heroin-thin and flat-chested girl making out. It isn't long before some guy shows up with a knife, makes quick work of the guy and takes his time with the girl, as they always do in these movies. The old man finds the bodies and the next day he's being questioned in a public access television stage passing itself off as a detective's office. The cops do everything in this room -- eat, sleep, interrogate people, but I guess you have no choice when your police station only consists of one office, one hallway, two detectives, two uniformed cops, and the Captain's voice coming from a speakerphone (I assume he's calling from home).

The detectives are played by guys who look to be at least in their mid-forties, which I found believable compared to the photogenic models they have playing cops nowadays. You got a guy with blow-dried helmet hair, you have the district attorney who looks like a local anchorman and then you got this dude who looks like Todd Barry on crystal meth. Det. Todd Barry is the loose cannon maverick kind of cop while Det. Helmet Hair is the more sensible type. D.A. Anchorman only appears in like three scenes, so fuck him. We find out that the old man is a retired Army colonel, and that's all the cops find out because the questioning goes nowhere. He claims that the killer was a hippie, judging by the way he dressed and looked. Whatever dude, they're all hippies to guys like you. The Colonel is let go, leaving Det. Todd Barry pissed because he's sure the old dude is guilty.

Two more young lovers are getting it on in a van, with the guy saying such sexy things like "Ohhhh, yeah that's it, don't stop. Uhhhh pleeeeease, unnnnhhhh" and then the chick opens up her blouse and takes one breast out like she's gonna give milk to her baby and the guy's reaction to this is to put both hands over his chest, shake his head back and forth and go "Unnnnhhhh!", like he doesn't want it. They cuddle up and the chick goes on about how she can't wait until after they graduate so they can get married(!) and have more nights alone together without worrying about her parents coming home. The guy responds with "Yeah, and no more gettin' it on in a van neither!". He's got that right, because the killer shows up and knifes the dude across the back of the neck. He then ties up the chick and cuts her up while she screams the same exact dubbed scream they used on the previous lady victim.

Let's talk about that repeatedly used scream. It sounds like they got a 50-year old former opera singer who has since gone to seed and destroyed her voice with alcohol abuse and too many cigarettes to do it. Or, they got a fat dude to scream in as high a pitch as possible. Either one sounds about right. What makes it worse is that apparently the filmmakers did not instruct their screamer to cry out in pain, but rather told him or her to scream in reaction to the on-screen events. That's two completely different kinds of screaming. It's amusing, to say the least.

Dissolve to the next morning as our cops are at the crime scene, looking over the bodies. Looks like there's a serial killer on the loose, one whose M.O. is to kill love-making couples and then have sex with the female's dead body afterwards. Yup. The scene is intruded upon by the kind of Nosy Lady Reporter who always show up in these flicks. It goes exactly the way you'd think it would go; she asks the cops questions, they tell her to go fuck herself, she gives them some lip, and they have her escorted out of the premises. How much you wanna bet she does that whole "The people have a right to know!" routine as she's being walked out?

Now a word on the Nosy Reporter. Like the cops in this flick, she also appears to be pushing fifty. She's got that extra heft that only middle-age brings to a person, and her neck and chin blend in like mine does. She looks like my third grade teacher, minus the granny glasses. She looks like someone who likes to gossip with the other moms in the neighborhood. She even sounds her age. Look, I know I'm an asshole, I'm just saying that this is one of those flicks where the reporter should be a hot chick in her mid-twenties. I know that probably doesn't make it realistic, but that's just how it is in these flicks and they're not doing it that way here. Which is not to say that a woman pushing 50 can't be hot, because I've seen my fair share of very attractive mature women. I'm just saying that this lady ain't one of them. Calm down, I'm simply judging her by YOUR standards, not mine. I'm so fucking horny and in desperate need of getting laid that I would definitely hit that and come back for seconds. But any other red-blooded male or lesbian under 30? No dice.

The District Attorney digs her though, in fact it's public knowledge that she and him know each other rather intimately. You get the sense that's the only reason the cops don't just straight out smack her. They figure their boy D.A. Anchorman has that shit under control, especially when he admits he's only sleeping with her because literally being in bed with the press has its advantages. Too bad Ms. Nosy Reporter hears all of this while eavesdropping on him.

By the way, is it Cat-Fucking-Season right about now? I ask because as I write this, some cat is going MMMMMOOOOOOOOWWWWWWRRRRRRRR outside and freaking me out. The sound is coming closer and closer towards my shack. If the cat's in heat then that's okay, it's just looking for another cat. Otherwise, the only other possible answer is that there's a Devil Cat coming to feast on my immortal soul and I really hope that isn't the case here.

So Todd Barry and Helmet Hair go to the Colonel's house to question him some more, and when they find a collection of knives and swords in the next room, the colonel loses his cool and kicks them out. Looks like they got themselves a prime suspect. He isn't, though, just so you know. After they leave, Ms. Nosy Reporter arrives and gets on the Colonel's good side by showing off her matronly figure and letting him shove his face into her breasts. A make-out session follows. If you like watching old people swap spit, then you came to the right place, my man. At least they look compatible, which is easy since they're probably no more than ten years apart in age. In the end, this scene doesn't do anything for the movie but show that Ms. Nosy Reporter is not above whoring herself out just to land The Big Scoop.

As the movie progresses, we get a better look at the killer. He wears a long-sleeved floral pattern shirt, has long unkempt hair and a long beard to match, making him look a little bit like Peter Jackson if he went nuts and disappeared halfway through production on Lord of the Rings. Mr. Jackson finds another couple bumping uglies in some graffiti-covered shack and while the girl takes a bathroom break, he chops the dude's fingers and head off. It's a pretty nifty effect actually, but I was slightly more interested in the graffiti in the background, specifically the big "555". It's cool to see a movie promote itself like that. When the girl comes back, Peter Jackson does the tie-her-up and slice-her-up thing he likes to do, then we're treated to the sad sight of him fucking her corpse.

It's really depressing, because the way he's lazily humping her and the way she just lies there motionless reminds me of the last couple of girls I slept with. They were just doing me a favor and you can tell they had other things on their mind, meanwhile I'm thinking that I'm some fuckin' stud, a stud with a fat hairy belly bumping against their navel while giving them such hot dirty talk as "Is that good? Am I doing all right? Is that okay? Do you like that?" said in the most pathetically eager-to-please voice possible. Fucking sad.

The detectives find out that Peter Jackson has been a bad boy for a much longer time than originally suspected. The Captain informs them that Jackson has been traveling around the country for about twenty years, and every five years he's killed five couples over the course of five nights. 555, get it? The reason the detectives didn't know about this until now is because it's been kept on the DL in all of the affected cities so as not to cause any copycat killings. Now he's here and has killed three couples so far, leaving the cops only two nights to stop the motherfucker before losing him for another five years.

Well, make that one night to stop him, because now we're watching another couple in a bedroom doing some pre-coital chatting. The dude resembles Mitch Hedberg circa 1999 and the girl reminds me of the kind of chicks I used to jerk off to on the Spice Channel (thanks cable descrambler!). Come to think of it, this whole movie looks like a porno, only with all the XXX scenes taken out. Kinda like what they did to my boys' stag film in Bachelor Party. What's that line, "I usually don't like my filth this clean"? That movie was awesome, definitely Tom Hanks' best flick, his purest work before he got all Oscar-friendly playing gay dudes and retards. Anyway, our couple hears a noise, so Mitch Hedberg gets up and takes a knife with him to check on the noise. A few seconds later, he returns with an even bigger knife shoved into his throat. Upon seeing this, the girl starts screaming with a smile on her face, then takes the idea of a "security blanket" literally. Stab stab stab die die die. End of scene.

Okay, I'm hearing more of the MMMOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW now, but it sounds like there's also another slightly less freaky MOOOWWW joining it, so I guess it's just two cats about to fuck. Good, that means my soul is safe for now. Those cats in heat remind me of something that happened when I was 11 or 12. My buddy Jerry was spending the night at my house and after all the pizza and video games, we decided it was time to hit the hay. And to suck each other's cocks. Disregard that last part, I was just trying to beat you assholes to the punch. Anyway, about ten minutes later we hear a bunch of cats in heat doing their whole mating call in the backyard. It was fucking exaggerated how loud and crazy these cats were going, like the backyard was filled with the feline equivalent of drunk fratboys looking for some sorority snatch. If these cats had opposable thumbs, they'd probably be holding up little plastic cups of beer yelling the Cat version of WOOOO! or PAAAARRRRTYYYYY! like they're doing right now. Suddenly, I hear someone in the house walk down the hall and all the way to the back door. It's my mother, who then opens the door and angrily tells the cats in Spanish to get out of the yard. The cats stop. It gets completely quiet. Then out of the far end of the yard, one of the cats goes RRREEEERRRR! which I'm guessing is Cat for "Shut up, bitch!". Jerry and I started busting up, it was so funny. We laughed so much, we couldn't sleep after that. So we went back to playing video games and sucking each other's cocks.

Ms. Nosy Reporter breaks into the detectives' office and goes through their files. She finds out that the killer is actually District Attorney Anchorman, so she tells the two cops and they all go together to find the crazy bastard before he commits the final murder. Well, Big Massive Fail on that plan because the next shot consists of a bloody naked dead man on the floor, a helpless tied-up woman next to him, and Peter Jackson/Anchorman standing over them both with his knife. He slices her up a bit and then cuts her throat. Then he has sex with the dead body.

Police sirens are heard approaching, which causes Peter Jackson/Anchorman to stop mid-hump, look up at the sky and scream "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!". He then continues raping the dead girl. I think the idea was supposed to be that he realizes that the police have arrived and he has to hurry, but it comes off more like he's part Dog and the sirens hurt his ears momentarily.

These fucking cops, man. The rest of the time they'd been spending the movie talking and talking and talking and talking in that shitty office of theirs. They'd been having leisurely lunches at some hot dog joint that was bigger and more populated than their own police station. They'd been taking naps in that goddamn office with a bottle of booze to keep them company. They'd been trading important dialogue like how long before one should buy the other a ham sandwich for lunch. Only after ALL of that boring shit do they finally get on the ball and even then it was the fucking reporter who broke the case. And did I mention the killer succeeded in killing his five couples? These cops fucking suck.

A short foot chase ensues, ending when Peter Jackson/Anchorman is trapped behind a fence he apparently didn't think was worth climbing. Both detectives catch up and blow the necrophiliac motherfucker away. Ms. Nosy Reporter goes over and kicks the dead son-of-a-bitch, less likely for all the victims and more likely for all the shit he talked about her behind her back. She and her men then walk away, I assume to go eat some more hot dogs and ham sandwiches. We then watch a repeat of the murder scenes intercut with D.A. Anchorman lying dead in the street. Roll credits and cue porn music.

The story goes that this movie came together after some dude supposedly told his wife one day that he could make a better horror movie than some of the shit that'd been stinking up the local video store, so he got some cash and some friends together and made this lovely movie. I give him points for having gotten off his ass and actually making something, but that's about it. The end credits promote future productions from the dude but it never happened, and since he died in 2006, it never will.

I first heard about this movie on some movie forum, where they lumped it in with other shot-on-video trash faves like Boardinghouse. Now THAT movie was real good times, so I figured 555 would be along the same lines. But it was actually kind of a chore for me to watch, even with the booze. It's about 80 minutes, but the gore scenes and preciously few funny moments are padded out with shit like a guy taking his shoes off and laying down on a couch, then getting back up, walking over to a drawer, opening it, pulling out a pillow, going all the way back to his couch, making himself comfortable, taking a quick drink from a bottle of booze, then going to sleep. Other movies can and have made such routine shit watchable, but this flick isn't one of them. They talk talk talk in this motherfucker, and once you get over the hair and clothing styles, you're just watching boring stuff being told in a boring setting -- that goddamn bland office of theirs.

The video box really tries to sell the gore on you, with lines on the cover like "SHOT IN BLOOD-VIVID VIDEO for your VIEWING PLEASURE" and "Caution: Viewing may cause severe damage to your brain cells". I love that. It brings back memories of being a little kid and going with my family to the local mom-and-pop joint like Video Flicks or Electric Video and freaking out at all the movies in the Horror section. They all had awesome covers and they all convinced a 6-year-old me that Satan himself would come out of the screen and pull me into Hell if I watched any of these movies. My parents would never let me rent them, but luckily I grew up with two teenage girls in the house who lived on horror movies and had no problem warping my fragile little mind with them. But the truth was that for every good horror/slasher flick, there were also ten shitty wastes-of-time that failed to cover anything the boxes promised you. There was a silver lining to this cloud, however -- if the movie made up for the lack of scares or gore with the kind of unintentional laughs and moments of absurdity that only the best of the worst can give you, it was worth it. Going by that scale, there ain't enough of either to make 555 worth it.

(The following contains violence, language, and mature woman cleavage)

It KEEPs me sharp, on the edge, where I gotta be.

Michael Mann's my man. I really liked his other flicks like Heat, Manhunter and Collateral. I thought Ali was his worst movie, but even that one was pretty damn good. I'd seen all his feature films except for The Keep, which I always kept putting off because I couldn't find a widescreen copy. I mean, it wouldn't bother me if the only version of some shit like Cheaper By The Dozen 2 was pan-and-scan, because you know there was little to no artistic value involved in the first place, and it's not like I'd want to watch that bullshit anyway. But half the enjoyment of a Michael Mann film is in the visuals, so I decided to wait until either a DVD came out or I found a widescreen copy in another format somewhere. I'm glad I waited, because thanks to the letterboxed laserdisc dub I acquired last week, I ended up watching a disappointingly shitty movie in its proper aspect ratio.

The Keep is Michael Mann's second feature film, following his badass flick Thief, and it's a real comedown from his previous production. I'm pretty sure homeboy didn't get into the game by starting in music videos, but this movie plays like the worst case scenario of getting a music video director to make a movie. You have great looking visuals but not much else going on up here. Watching this all I could think was maybe Mann had lost his mind for the length of the production and had forgotten how to tell a story and all that he could remember was the visual side to making movies.

This movie takes place in 1941, and we follow the fuckin' Germans arriving at some village in who-the-fuck-knows-where. The captain is played by the main dude from Das Boot, and he's a pretty decent guy for being a fuckin' German in the army during WW2. He would probably fit in with Tom Cruise and the Valkyrie Squad. The movie shows us that he and his men are okay because when they come marching in, it's handled rather calm and matter-of-fact. Das Boot and his crew go to a huge fortress/keep at the end of town where some old caretaker greets them and gives Das Boot the same shit you hear these old caretakers tell people in haunted house movies. You know, that "nobody ever stays more than one night here" and all that kinda stuff. Das Boot is like "whatever, old dude" and he and his men decide to turn the keep into their temporary pad. The keep is a pretty spooky place, dark and dank and with all of these blocks lining the walls with metal crosses on each of them. Das Boot looks over the joint and figures out from the construction that this place wasn't built to keep people out, but to keep something in. He asks the caretaker about it, and the old dude is like "I don't know, man. I just work here."

But some of the other soldiers think this place might be hiding treasure, so a couple of them decide to play Goonies in the middle of the night and go hunting for it. They dig out one of the blocks on the wall and find another block within, also with a cross. That block suddenly falls backwards, sliding until it drops through an opening, and one of the soldiers is sucked in and almost falls over the edge as well. He peeks out into the vast darkness and all we can see are a set of stone pillars way on the other side. Then some special effects combo of smoke & lights shoot out in the direction of the soldier. The special effects do something to do the soldier that leaves him missing his upper torso, then blow apart his partner. Maybe if they had Chunk with them this shit wouldn't have happened.

When Das Boot finds out, he wastes no time and radios a request for him and his men to be allowed to get the fuck out of there. His request is denied and instead his superiors send Gabriel Byrne and his posse to check out what's going on. The Byrne Posse rolls into Keepsville dressed in spiffy black uniforms with swastika armbands, and the first thing they do is shout at all the villagers and beat on them with their rifles, which I guess is the movie's way of telling you these are the bad Germans. In case you didn't get it yet, Herr Byrne has three villagers pulled out of the crowd and executed, followed by Das Boot screaming his disappoval after failing to stop it.

Herr Byrne is convinced that the soldiers were killed by partisans hiding amongst the villagers and starts putting the smackdown on everyone to give 'em up. They find some weird writing on one of the keep's walls and the village priest tells Herr Byrne that the only guy who could translate it is a Jewish professor named Dr. Cuza, who is currently being held in a death camp. This is true, but it's also an opportunity by the priest to get his bro out of that hellhole. So Dr. Cuza and his daughter are pulled out of the death camp and sent to the keep, where Herr Byrne immediately gets all Angry Yelling Nazi on them upon his arrival. You know what dude, you can always try asking nicely at first. Cuza translates the writing: I Will Be Free. Byrne thinks this a message to the Nazis from the partisans, but Cuza tells him that the writing is written in a language that's been dead for 500 years, so it couldn't be those motherfuckers.

We cut to Greece, where some dude wakes up in the middle of the night with glowing eyes and a bunch of special effects surrounding him. I had that once, but that was because I did some mushrooms the night before. Never again, I say. Anyway, he senses something wrong and leaves immediately, chartering a boat to take him somewhere. This dude with the freaky eyes has some weird name I can't remember and is the closest thing we have to a main character/hero in this flick.

In the meantime, Dr. Cuza and his daughter are being held in the keep. Dr. Cuza is old and frail and confined to a wheelchair, so his daughter is always looking over the old dude and making sure he's all right. She leaves to get her old man some food, but to do this, she has to walk through the soldier's quarters and deal with all the staring and whistles and catcalls. If this was just a bunch of construction workers, I'd be like Whatever, Men Are Pigs. But these are a bunch of assholes who are working on the goal of exterminating her race, yet have no problem wanting to fuck her, which just adds to their overall cocksucker-ness of their character.

Sure enough, on her way back our girl gets attacked in a dark passageway by a couple of black-clad Nazis and it looks like she's about to get raped and I'm about to hit Fast Forward on my remote. You see, I can see guts being torn out or heads ripped from bodies or aliens vomiting into bowls for their fellow aliens to drink, but I can't handle scenes of women being violated. I guess I'm a pussy when it comes to that kind of shit. Sorry, that's just me. On the other hand, I think scenes of guys being raped in movies is Pure Comedy. Make of that what you will.

Thankfully, these assholes don't get a chance to stick their wienerschnitzel into our girl, because some cloud of smoke with red eyes shows up and KA-BOOMS their motherfucking heads open. The cloud then carries our unconscious girl back to Cuza's cell, where it then puts it's red squiggly-lined hand over Dr. Cuza and knocks him out too. Dr. Cuza and his daughter wake up later on and find that the old prof doesn't look so old anymore, plus he can stand and move around again like in his younger days. Cuza knows his sudden rejuvenation is the Red Eyed Cloud's doing and since it also saved his daughter and likes to kill Nazis, then whatever it is, it's definitely on the Good Side of Things.

Cuza's daughter is released from the keep, so she decides to stay close to Papa by getting a room at the village inn. When she enters, she finds it's already occupied by Mr. Freaky Eyes from Greece. He's got this long case with him that you just KNOW is housing some kind of badass weapon inside. She explains her situation to him, and he's like "well then you should stay with me" and next thing you know they're gettin' it on Zalman King style. That kinda shit never happens to me. If I tried that with a chick who was booked in the same hotel room as me, she'd probably bust out the pepper spray and clear out my sinuses the hard way.

Back at the keep, Dr. Cuza bumps into what looks like a cartoon bodybuilder who's had his skin removed like that chick in Hellraiser III. Turns out it's the Red Eyed Cloud, now slowly transforming into something else. This demon-looking motherfucker has muscle and sinew partially covering its skeletal frame. It still has the glowing red eyes though, and a glowing red mouth to match. It looks really cool, but if I was to see that thing in real life, there wouldn't be enough feces rocketing out of my ass to measure how fuckin' freaked out I'd be. Dr. Cuza brings the demon up to speed, telling it how millions of people are dying because of these assholes in black who are all working for some piece-of-shit mono-testacled vegetarian over in Berlin. The demon tells Cuza that there's a talisman hidden in the keep, and if Cuza can find it and get rid of it, the demon can finally escape from his prison and he can then go out and kill every fucking Sieg Heil-ing motherfucker in Europe. Cuza's like "Shiiiit, if that's what you aim to do, then you know I'M fuckin' down" so it's a plan.

Dr. Cuza meets up with his daughter in the village to tell her the good news, but Freaky Eyes comes out and wet blankets their hugs & kisses by explaining to him that he knows everything that's going on. He tells Cuza that the creature he's hooked up with is actually a pretty evil motherfucker itself and letting this thing escape and destroy the Nazis would only succeed in replacing one kind of evil with another kind of evil, so uh, leave that talisman alone. Cuza's daughter wants to know what's up, so Freaky Eyes tells her that he's been around "for ages" and now that this demon is looking to get out, it's his job to destroy him. Cuza's daughter is all "I wish you told me you were nuts before I slept with your crazy ass".

But since Dr. Cuza is all gay about his new demon friend, he ends up ratting on Freaky Eyes to the Nazis, who promptly show up to take him in. There's a minor scuffle that ends with some major gunfire -- all of it going into Freaky Eyes' chest. Glowing green blood spills out of Freaky Eyes' bullet wounds and then he falls off a cliff, so it looks like he's out of the picture.

Again, Das Boot doesn't approve of the Nazi method of dealing with people, so he and Herr Byrne get into a shouting match about it. Remember, these guys are both working to take over the world, but at least Das Boot is a nicer guy about it. "Your sentimental suffering makes me SICK!" yells Herr Byrne. The gist of this whole argument is that Das Boot does what he does because he has to, while Byrne is a psycho who likes killing and torture and all of that other German stuff. At least that's what I got. I don't know if it's the movie itself or my copy of it, but a lot of the dialogue in this movie is way too low, sounding all "uh sumenna sabbidah closh closh da closh" and I have to turn the volume all the way up but then someone closes a door and that shit goes SLAAAAMMMM!!!! and now I'm rushing for my remote to lower it, but then they start talking all low-voice mumbley again. What the fuck, man? There's no subtitles or closed captioning in this bitch, either. Now I gotta watch this flick holding onto my remote the whole time, constantly raising and lowering the volume. Anyway, the scene ends with Herr Byrne taking offense to being called a murderer by Das Boot, so he responds by shooting him dead.

There's screams and gunfire coming out from the main area of the keep, so Herr Byrne goes out to take a look-see. He finds the whole place covered in smoke, fog and crispy Nazi bodies, which freaks Byrne enough to let out a girlish scream. To keep Herr Byrne from further embarrassing himself, the demon shows up and sucks the lifeforce out of him. Byrne still manages to let out one more high-pitched yell before he dies, though. The demon is now fully formed and looks like a badass anime villain or something out of Dragonball Z or whatever else you fucking Sailor Moon poster hanging motherfuckers watch.

Dr. Cuza finds the talisman and heads out to destroy it when suddenly his daughter shows up and tells him not to do it. The demon orders Dr. Cuza to kill his daughter and continue on with his mission. Dr. Cuza stops, wondering out loud just how good can this god-like being be if it's asking him to kill his own flesh and blood that he loves with all of his heart. I don't know, bro, why don't you ask Abraham? Well, the demon doesn't like hearing this questioning so he's all "You best not question me motherfucker, do what I say or I'll kill you AND your bitch-ass daughter". Dr. Cuza realizes he's been bamboozled, hoodwinked, and run amok by this demon and that maybe the motherfuckers who imprisoned this douche had a good reason to do so in the first place, so he tells the demon to go fuck itself. The demon responds by shooting a laser at Dr. Cuza which turns him old and frail again. Giveth and taketh away, motherfucker.

The demon is feeling all proud of himself until he looks up and recognizes someone entering the keep. It's Freaky Eyes, fully recovered and now carrying this big metal rod, which I guess is what he had been carrying in that case the entire time. He hooked up the talisman to the front of it and now the shit's glowing, so you know that means he's locked and loaded and ready to put this demon down for good. A bunch of purple lasers shoot out of the talisman which makes all the crosses in the keep glow bright. Cuza and his daughter take off and Freaky Eyes shoots a fat purple laser at the demon, which destroys it and sends it back to the hidden cavern it came from. Everything seems cool, until a huge white light shoots out of the cavern and sucks Freaky Eyes into the void as well. So now Cuza's daughter is single again. Ain't that a bitch? The End.

Damn. The Keep has a really intriging story (based on a book by F. Paul Wilson, who wasn't a fan of this flick either) but the shit is so disjointed and weirdly paced it fucks everything up. I was with it for the first twenty minutes, but then it just kept jumping back and forth all over the place and I'd get no fuckin' sense of momentum or anything. Exposition and motivation take a backseat to shit that ultimately doesn't matter, like a shot of a boat on the ocean against a sunrise background that goes on FOREVER. Okay I get it, it's really pretty but what I REALLY want to know is why the fuck did the priest go nuts all of a sudden and start acting all rabid and shit? What about this character? Why did so-and-so do that? That happens a lot in this movie.

I looked it up, and supposedly the original cut is closer to three hours but the studio took it away from Mann and cut it down to its current 95 minutes. I can totally buy that. Among other scenes and moments lost in the shorter version was the real ending to this movie, where Cuza's daughter goes back to the keep to look for Freaky Eyes. She finds him laying unconscious somewhere, and after he wakes up it's discovered that since he's destroyed the demon he's fulfilled his duty and can now live life as a mortal. It's then assumed he will live the rest of his days with Cuza's daughter. Goddamn, that would've beaten Highlander's ending by like three or four years.

But I ain't talking about the three-hour version of The Keep. I'm talking about the current version that's only available on VHS and laserdisc. You know how some DVD's have the option where you can watch the movie with only the music in the background? This would be my recommended way to watch The Keep if they ever made a DVD of it and added that option, because this flick looks and sounds great with its atmospheric & dreamlike cinematography and the cool/cheesy 80's electronic score by Tangerine Dream. It's just when you have to make sense of what the characters are saying that the experience is ruined -- kinda like Bram Stoker's Dracula. You could probably intrigue some motherfuckers at a party or something if you played this in the background with the sound turned off, but that's about it. Because in its current 95-minute version, this flick could only work as a mood piece and not much else, and that's assuming the director's cut is a good movie to begin with. For all we know, it's just as shitty a movie only much, much longer. Hell, the dude might actually like the shorter version. But since Michael Mann's my boy, I'll give homebro the benefit of the doubt. And hey, it certainly has me interested in reading the book this was based on, so good on ya there, buddy.

Anyway, rather than a Random Moments vid, I'm posting here what I believe to be the best version of this movie currently available. It's a music video I found on YouTube that is mostly comprised of the first 30 minutes of this flick:

The woman who edited this movie went on to edit Ghost World. So rock on with your bad self, Carole Kravetz

I don't dream, but I do have nightmares and last night was a pretty fucking bad one. By the end, a fucking skull was staring at me in the early morning fog and then I woke up pretty freaked out. That shit probably sounds funny to you, because that shit ain't happening to you. I would be cool with having dreamless sleep for the rest of my life if it meant no more nightmares.

Speaking of nightmares, I understand this Bride Wars movie sounds like a big one. Sometimes there are positives to being a lonely drunk with no girlfriend or wife, and one of those positives is not being dragged to see shit like this. Since this movie looks like an incredibly annoying piece of shit, I figured it was going to be number one at the box office and break records, because that's how it works out with those kinds of movies. Luckily, people had the good sense to go watch Dirty Harry call Asian people names for two hours instead. Bride Wars still made a nice chunk of change though, which means there are plenty of unlucky guys who were unable to talk their girlfriend or wife or mistress out of watching it. I take that back. This is the kind of movie that guys don't fight with their chicks about seeing, this is one of those "let her have it" type of movies, where the guy doesn't want to argue or get into any shit with the lady, so he'll agree without putting up any fuss and then tell his friends that it really wasn't that bad afterwards. Wrong. Looking at Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson for ninety minutes may not be so bad, but the movie they're appearing in HAS to be a complete piece of shit. Has to be.

Why am I going on and on about Bride Wars? I didn't even see that shit. But I did watch a movie from the same director. Before he made Bride Wars or that Charlotte's Web remake or that ripoff of Big that starred the chick from Alias, Gary Winick made an exploitation flick called Curfew in the late 80's. The movie begins with these two prisoners who we find out raped and murdered a girl, so of course their punishment is to live in a cell bigger than my apartment where they could get three square meals a day, gym privileges and cable television. There's also plenty of rampant anal sex, whether they want it or not.

These assholes escape from there anyway, but because this is a low-budget straight-to-video movie, we never see the actual escape. We see them in a jail cell, then the black-on-white title fills the screen, and after the title explodes we cut to them walking towards a small town in their prison clothes. So either they broke out or they were let out and were allowed to take their prison issues with them.

It's your basic Of Mice and Men duo; a bleached blonde asshole who looks like he should be named Chad, and his doughy slow-witted brother who I'm just gonna call Lennie. Going back to Chad, I think he looks a lot like the bully from Encino Man, and for a while I thought it was him, but I looked him up and this Chad motherfucker is some other dude who in addition to acting, also co-wrote Clint Eastwood's movie Firefox back in 1982. Firefox wasn't that great of a movie, in my opinion. So if the dude who wrote Gran Torino is reading this, go watch Curfew and take a look at your future, bro.

So it turns out Chad and Lennie are on a revenge trip and want to kill the people they hold responsible for putting them behind bars. They wanna kill the psychiatrist who declared them mentally competent enough to do time in prison instead of the nuthouse, they wanna kill the judge who sentenced them to do hard time, and they wanna kill the district attorney who prosecuted their asses.

Chad and Lennie first kill a couple of farmhand-types for their clothes, then hitch a ride with a dude who likes to whistle Dixie. You know this asshole probably has a Confederate flag hanging from the porch of his crib, and if you'd ask him about it he would say it's because he's proud of his Southern roots. Sure. Just conveniently forget it also represents the time when you could make Kunta or Kizzy or Tyrone pick your cotton and the only payment they'd received came from a fuckin' whip. The Civil War is over and your side LOST, so take that fuckin' flag down. It's all about the stars and stripes, motherfucker. It's okay though, because Chad and Lennie do us a favor and take this motherfucker out by giving him quite possibly the fastest strangulation death I've ever seen in a movie. He must've had a real delicate neck, this guy. Also, they do it while he's driving the car, and after he dies, the car keeps going and neither of them make an effort to take the wheel. That was odd.

The waste of space we know as Paris Hilton has two aunts who were in the showbiz growing up; one of them is named Kim Richards and she was best known for the Witch Mountain flicks but to me I will always remember her as the poor little girl in the original Assault on Precinct 13 who learned the hard way that if you get the wrong ice cream flavor, sometimes it's best to just let it go. Then there's Kim's sister Kyle Richards, and that's who we have here in Curfew playing our heroine, Stephanie. She's a cute chick but with early 90's Jennifer Connelly bushy eyebrows, which is a little disconcerting when you combine it with having a dude's name like Kyle. Her eyebrows are thisclose to being Groucho Marx style. I'd still hit it, though.

Anyway, Stephanie is new in town and she's going out for the night with her new friends from high school. Her mom and dad are also going out for the night and Dad tells the babysitter to make sure Stephanie gets home by ten, and that's how the movie gets its title. Mom is kind of a cool lady so she tells Mrs. Babysitter that it's okay if her little girl is a little late. Mrs. Babysitter looks like a very kindly older lady, the kind who probably knows how to make some bomb-ass homemade cookies, so you figure it's only a matter of time (approx. 25 minutes) before she dies a horrible death.

Speaking of horrible deaths, our boys Chad and Lennie are busy dealing those out and by the fifteen minute mark they've already taken out two out of their three main targets: the shrink and the judge, along with a number of innocent bystanders. What makes these jerks even more insufferable is that they don't just show up and kill, they have to talk and act stupid with their victims. So basically each of the kill scenes consist of them showing up somewhere, the victim freaking out and asking what do they want, Chad then delivering some long speech on how they got fucked by the system while Lennie is sitting close by just being his usual stupid self. Then they stab or beat the victim to death.

Stephanie meets her friends at the diner, two jocks and a girl who are also the most popular kids in the school, so I guess she lucked out considering she's only been in town for two weeks. You have Jock #1, a blow-dried douchebag who has the hots for Steph, then there's Jock #2, who's got Greatest American Hero hair and is supposedly the comic relief, and finally you have Young Ann Coulter, who's #2's chick but you get the sense she's had the entire football team inside her at one point during the semester, probably behind #2's back. Would you be surprised if I told you the jocks are wearing letterman jackets? These guys are annoying assholes, given to leaning over to some other diners' table and telling them about their latest football victory and then falling on the food. You usually see these motherfuckers in Denny's on a Saturday night at 3am, smashed drunk and fucking with the staff and just being general asses in public and it never gets any less annoying. So Chad and Lennie, please kill these motherfuckers. Kill them good.

We have a couple of familiar faces in this diner as well; you got Peter from the Brady Bunch playing a cigar-chomping cop in sunglasses and a mustache, looking just as ridiculous and not believable as you'd think. Then you have the manager of the diner, played by the one guy from Fast Times at Ridgemont High who managed to succeed in NOT becoming famous afterwards. You know who I'm talking about, he played Rat's ticket-scalping buddy. Wait. Make that TWO guys from Fast Times who didn't become famous afterwards. Not Famous Dude from Fast Times does nothing here but serve coffee and tell some kid to quit beating up the pinball machine. As for Officer Peter Brady, he doesn't like the jocks and is always trying to intimidate them into respecting his authority. Like in one scene, Jock #2 starts belting out "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" in the diner, and Officer Peter Brady's response is to give him a supposed tough-guy glare and threaten him with "You want satisfaction? I'll GIVE you satisfaction". It sounds just as ridiculous as you'd think. He is later pranked by the jocks, making him believe that one of them got into a serious motorcycle accident. By the time he comes back to check on them, he only finds the word "SUCKER" written on the ground in ketchup. Why, those darn hooligans!

That "Satisfaction" song reminds me of something that happened, back when I was 14 or 15. I came down with a serious fever, I couldn't keep anything down and I couldn't stop shivering. It got really bad and I had to be taken to the doctor. In the waiting room, there was a kid about six years old that came in with his parents. This little dude was bouncing off the walls, screaming out I CAN'T GET NOOOOOOOO SAT-IS-FAC-TIOOOOOONNNN!!!! over and over again. Non-stop. I CAN'T GET NOOOOOOOO SAT-IS-FAC-TIOOOOOONNNN!!!! The dude hardly breathed in between his screams. There seemed to be a silent agreement with everyone in the waiting room that this little kid should be treated first. So off he went with his two incredibly worried parents, the scream/singing gradually getting lower in volume as he went further into the building until we couldn't hear it anymore. About ten minutes later, the parents came back out, the father cradling his son who was no longer singing or yelling or anything. He was completely calm and normal. Would it sound incredibly hacky for me to say that I guess he finally got his satisfaction? Har har har? No?

Back to Curfew. Stephanie goes out to some make-out area outside town and once there, she realizes what Jock #1 really wants and turns down his drunk advances. She must be okay with drunk driving because she makes his soused ass drive her home. She gets to the house and Jock #1 takes off. Once inside, an evil cat jumps out of thin air and false-scares her, then she gets real-scared when she finds both Chad and Lennie waiting for her. I guess I forgot to mention that Stephanie's father is the same district attorney who helped put these dudes away, but there you go. There's a brief struggle, followed by a foot chase.

Stephanie manages to get to the road and flag down a vehicle. The driver of the car is played by One of the Worst Old Man Actors Ever, either that or he was told to act the part as if he just came in from Planet Lethargy. Or maybe his character was supposed to be heavily medicated. It's really off, this dude's acting, he would've fit in with most of the Gran Torino cast. So this old dude drives slow enough for the bad guys to cut him off and then they force him to stop, and it's then that the old actor suddenly decides to let out some actual emotion when he walks over to Lennie and gives the dude a whack from his cane: "Where did you learn to drive, young man? We could've been KILLED! HUUUAAAAAAAGGGHHHH!!!!" That last part was the sound he made as he was getting beaten to death with his own cane by Lennie, by the way.

Stephanie takes off in the old man's ride and speeds her way to the diner. Once there, she gets Officer Peter Brady to come back with her to check on the house. She and the Brady Cop get to her place only to find Steph's mom waiting at the front door. Mom says everything is fine, so Officer Brady takes off. Mom pulls Stephanie inside the house and we find Chad and Lennie have been inside the entire time, holding Daddy at gunpoint. DUN DUN DUN! The rest of the movie then becomes a kind of cross being Desperate Hours and Cape Fear, with Chad and Lennie fucking with the family as a way of making them feel the pain the duo felt they unjustly suffered.

They force the whole family to join them for a turkey dinner with all the trimmings and fixings, which Chad later compliments Stephanie's mom on. Wait a minute, you mean to tell me that Stephanie's mom cooked a whole feast in a couple of hours? Even then, it's pretty late in the evening at this point, and there's still a lot of movie left, you figure the sun would be coming up pretty soon. Or maybe she just happened to have a complete Thanksgiving dinner wrapped up in her refrigerator and all she had to do was microwave it. Pretty lucky of her to have all that grub in her house because I don't know about you, but if two convicts break into my place and force me to cook them dinner, the bill of fare is going to consist of Top Ramen, Hot Pockets and Cap'n Crunch.

The middle section of the movie is pretty much Chad and Lennie doing fucked up things to the family, stuff that's supposed to be entertaining, I suppose, but I don't find fun at all. I know the filmmakers would probably excuse it and say it's a way to get the audience worked up for the eventual comeuppance of the bad guys, except I've seen enough of these movies to know it's never good enough. You get some asshole torturing motherfuckers and killing innocent people, and in the end payback consists of some faggy little .22 caliber bullet being shot into the head and the bad guy dies relatively peaceful compared to his victims. Bullshit, motherfucker -- I want some motherfucking SUFFERING and ASSBEATING going on!

So Chad forces the father to take off his shoes & socks and walk on broken glass, something I remember seeing in another low-budget straight to video movie called Eyes of the Beholder, which was about a dude who escapes from a mental institution and holds his doctor's family hostage. I guess it's a subgenre staple in straight-to-video flicks to have the escaped con/nut force his prosecutor/doctor to walk on broken glass. Chad then takes Stephanie's mom upstairs to put make-up on her, making her look like a French whore when he's done. It's suggested that he rapes her, then he tries to drown her in a bathtub. Entertainment!

Chad then brings the mom down to the basement with the others and declares that it's execution time. He and Lennie aim their guns at the family and are just about to shoot when they suddenly hear a noise -- Stephanie's friends.

The two jocks and Young Ann Coulter are upstairs, having snuck into the house. I know Jock #1 is there because he wants to do it with Stephanie, but I never understood why he needed his friends to join him. Maybe he's an exhibitionist. Anyway, they split up, Jock #1 with Young Ann Coulter and Jock #2 by himself. Jock #2 finds the leftovers from the turkey dinner earlier and helps himself to it. He walks around while chomping on his turkey sandwich and discovers Mrs. Babysitter's body. He's then run through with a machete by Chad, proving Chad can't be that bad of a guy. I also like the touch of Chad having a cigarette right afterwards. Nothing like a good smoke after committing murder.

Now remember that Jock #1 came to Stephanie's house with the distinct purpose of having sex with her. I say this because the next thing we see him do is take Young Ann Coulter to the upstairs bedroom to literally do to her what Bernie Madoff figuratively did to so many investors. This is a pretty funny scene because halfway through, the sounds of two completely different people moaning are dubbed in over the obviously closed-mouthed couple. But then in the next shot, it's undubbed moaning from the actual actors. It's like Kung Fu Porno or something. Chad is not as amused by this as I am though, so he grabs Jock #1 and gives him the lamest neck breaking I've ever seen. Chad then channels his inner Democrat and slices up Young Ann Coulter something awful.

Meanwhile, Officer Peter Brady is driving along when he finds someone limping his way down the road. It's the old man, having survived his beatdown by Lennie. The old man actually does a really good job playing beaten up and miserable. I guess as long as homeboy plays to his strengths, he's all right. Officer Brady takes the old man to the hospital and then calls for backup as he heads back to Stephanie's house, and it's here that I thought "Holy shit, fuckin' Peter Brady is going to come in and save the day! Awesome!".

Chad comes back down to the basement to join Lennie in executing Stephanie and her family, but for some reason Chad changes his mind about shooting them, instead rigging up some elaborate electric chair set-up for all three of them. But what Chad doesn't know is that while he was busy upstairs filling his Dead Teenager quota, Stephanie's been talking up Lennie's ear the entire time about how she really wants to get it on with him and because Lennie is not only a man, but a stupid man, he buys it completely and gets in Chad's way. A fight ensues, ending when Chad gets the better of Lennie by grabbing a power drill and giving his bro the Black & Decker treatment. Exit Lennie.

Interspersed with all this shit going on is all these hero shots of Peter Brady as he slowly makes his way into the house with his gun drawn, the tension slowly building up and assholes like me getting hyped up to watch the Brady kid busting caps in these fools. That is until Chad shoots him and it's at this moment that Peter Brady finally stops looking ridiculous and finally looks believable in this movie -- the revolver goes flying out of his hand, Peter gets a stupid look of shock on his face, he stumbles back and then runs away. Chad then follows Officer Brady and kills him. That's what you get for sending little overwhelmed Peter to do a man's job. I bet that shit would've gone a little differently if they had my boy Danny Bonaduce play the cop.

After subtracting one less Brady from the world, Chad comes back downstairs to finish everyone else off but can't find Stephanie. He looks all over, shooting in every direction until our girl comes out of nowhere and blasts him with Lennie's gun. Finally the cops arrive outside and Stephanie goes over to untie her parents. But guess what? Chad's still alive! Wow! I'd never guess that would've happened! He has enough time to give Stephanie a self-pitying "woe is me" spiel before she shoots him in the head, giving him the unsatisfying quick death these assholes always get in these kinds of movies. The End.

I bought this movie on VHS at the video store expecting hilarious badly-made garbage, but Curfew is not really like that. It's not good, but it's competently made and watchable in that late-night-on-cable sorta way. You wouldn't ever watch it again or recommend it to anyone, but it's totally something you'd find yourself watching in its entirety while you're half asleep on the couch at 2 in the morning, and you wouldn't hate yourself for it afterwards. You'd be like "Ok, whatever. I'm going to bed now". It's sure as shit GOT to be better than fucking Bride Wars, that's for goddamn certain. It's cool to know that the dude who did this is now making major bank directing Kate Hudson flicks, but that's because I don't hate on a motherfucker for making money. Doesn't mean I have to see or like his movies, though.

Fuck both of you and your little high-five: my Final Girl Film Club review of Grindhouse

It was probably after Quentin Tarantino had just snorted his third line of uncut Bolivian flake off some stripper's bare foot when Robert Rodriguez finally had enough and put his digital camera down to rub his tired eyes. Rodriguez then looked over and noticed a poster for an old 50's double feature on the wall, and I'm guessing that's when he and Tarantino started talking about the cool idea of putting together a double feature of their own and calling it Grindhouse.

The idea was to create a full night of entertainment, complete with trailers and two feature films, back-to-back. It was supposed to be a big hit, and had it been a double feature of Will Ferrell ice-skating with Napoleon Dynamite in one flick and Ice Cube falling on his ass while trying to remodel a house in another, it would have been huge. Instead, Tarantino & Rodriguez chose to base their double bill on the kind of low-budget exploitation cinema that played in many seedy and rundown movie houses during the 70's & 80's, so it bombed. Shoulda thought that one through, boys.


Grindhouse is this month's Film Club pick over at Final Girl, and I wanted to join in the reindeer games, so for my "review" I watched a DVD that included the extended versions of Planet Terror and Death Proof along with the 3 trailers from the theatrical version.

The following pics were taken while I was watching the movie. I notice a lot of the other movie blogs put up nice sharp pics straight from their DVD or VHS copies, but I'm running on some antiquated equipment, so bear with me. But you can be entertained by the shaky and blurry quality of the shots, which may give you a slight idea of how increasingly hammered I got on Jack Daniels while watching this.


The first trailer is for a movie called Machete, starring my boy Danny Trejo. It feels good to watch homeboy come up, I remember the first time I saw him was in a movie with Michael Pare called The Last Hour (aka Concrete War), where he played a scary Mexican who killed people. Five years later, he was in his first Rodriguez movie, Desperado, where he played a scary Mexican who killed people. Now here he is, starring in his own fictional movie where he plays a scary Mexican who kills people, only this time he uses machetes.
Some kitty cats show up and turn into a big growling panther, then the first feature begins.
Planet Terror is Robert Rodriguez's ode to grade-Z zombie flicks and John Carpenter's badass heroes. Or as I once told a cousin of mine, Planet Terror plays like an Italian rip-off of an imaginary movie written by George A. Romero and directed by John Carpenter. Then I remembered that my cousin doesn't know who the fuck any of those dudes are in the first place. So I just told him that it's lots of gore and lots of action but zero titties. He was kinda bummed about that.

The movie begins with the character of Cherry Darling as she go-go dances on stage. Listening to the director's commentary, you find out that a lot of the character is based on the actress playing her, Rose McGowan; the whole "useless talent" thing she says throughout the movie is something Rose actually says all the time, and the running gag about Cherry wanting to become a comedian is taken from everyone in real life always complementing McGowan's wit and suggesting that she should pursue a career in stand-up. I'm assuming the same people who say that are all guys and some may have succeeded in bedding her with that bullshit, like Rodriguez ultimately did with Rose behind Mrs. Rodriguez's back. When I noticed in the end credits that McGowan also sang a couple of songs on the soundtrack, I wondered if maybe a better title for this flick would've been "I Love Rose McGowan", or "Rose & Robert: Two Against the World" or "Rosie, You So Crazy!". I'm sorry, I'm just hating because I'm lonely. Good for you, guys. I wish you both the best. Hope the wife understood.

But then again, maybe she didn't and Rodriguez feared the worst so he manifested his fear in the form of Josh Brolin's character, Dr. Block. Dr. Block is this dude who finds out that his anesthesiologist wife, Dakota, is cheating on him for the second time with Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. I'm guessing the first time he found out he was kinda cool with it. He was probably all like "Hey, let's get down and have some Three's Company action up in this piece" but Dakota was like "Nope, I only want to be with her" and that pissed homeboy off so he broke that shit up. Well, when he discovers Dakota was wandering off for again for another taste of those lovely lady lumps, Dr. Block loses his shit completely and becomes a real fucking creep about it. I think he was even going to try to stab Dakota in the eye with a hypodermic needle. Calm the fuck down and call your lawyer, dude. I don't know, maybe Rodriguez likes to see Dakota and Fergie as him and Rose, and that asshole Dr. Block is the mother of all those kids he gave first names starting with "R".

Or maybe Robert sees himself as El Wray, this short unassuming guy who you later find out is actually the Baddest Motherfucker Who Ever Walked The Planet. Wray runs into Cherry and you find out they used to be together, so you know how that's going to go. So it's good that they found each other again, what with the world coming to an end because fucking dude from Lost had to let loose some chemical gas that turns everyone else into flesh-eating "sickos". Where Robert Rodriguez sees himself in any of this, I have no idea. I don't even know why I brought it up in the first place, but the fact that I'm currently well into my third glass of Maker's Mark may have something to do with my current train of thought.


In addition to having to deal with those zombie assholes, Wray's also got some shit going on between him and the Sheriff, played by Reese from the first Terminator movie. Sheriff Reese has both Tom Savini and the original El Mariachi as his deputies, which is pretty awesome. Savini can't shoot for shit, though.

Cherry gets attacked and winds up losing her leg, which really bums her out. On the other hand, by the end of the movie she's got a kick-ass replacement that also doubles as a machine gun and rocket launcher. Plus, I'm sure she can now qualify for handicapped parking, so there you go. Anyway, lots of blood, gore and explosions ensue.

I almost forgot. Later on, Tarantino shows up as a rapist, giving in my opinion his second best performance since From Dusk Till Dawn where he played a rapist.


The look of the movie is perfect. Not perfect as in pristine, but perfect as in getting the tone and feel of this kind of movie down. In addition to giving the appearance of a worn out film print with scratches and jump cuts, Planet Terror is also shot like something that would've played in a downtown discount house back in the late 70's/early 80's -- plenty of shaky zooms along with fast & cheap lighting set-ups. Two of my favorite examples are a kitchen scene with the Block family and Fergie's scene where she's stranded on a dark highway; they look like they could've been deleted scenes from Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead (aka The Gates of Hell).

Planet Terror even pulls the "Special Guest Star in a B-movie" trick. Bruce Willis appears as Lieutenant Muldoon, and you can tell that they shot all of his scenes in a row, mostly in close-up, and then filled the rest with stand-ins and body doubles and creative editing to give the illusion he's in the movie a lot more than he really is. It works, and it made me feel like I was watching the movie in an alternate universe where grindhouse theaters and drive-ins never died, the same alternate universe where Willis' career never quite recovered from the failure of Hudson Hawk and now he's reduced to doing special appearances in b-movies. Alternate Universe Bruce Willis probably stars in a lot of action movies and giallos over in Italy and Spain too.


It's fast and lots of fun, but ultimately this feels less like a real grindhouse movie and more like a movie for someone who always wanted to know what those kinds of movies were like but never really wanted to take the time to watch one. Because the truth is that you would need to watch about 3 or 4 real zombie/action flicks of the time to get the amount of craziness and gore and sheer scope of the stuff that happens in Planet Terror. I think Rodriguez knew that and wasn't trying to make an exact replication of that kind of movie in the first place, he just wanted to give folks the same kind of enjoyment he got growing up on that shit.


Three trailers follow. First you have Werewolf Women of the SS, by Rob Zombie. There's Nazis, young women being tortured and bloodied and branded with a swastika iron, machine gun-toting werewolves and Nicolas Cage at the end giving his usual understated performance. It's okay.

An advertisement for a fake Tex-Mex joint called Acuna Boys follows. I guess the joke here is how unappetizing the food looks, photographed in stark lighting conditions. Maybe it was because I was completely hammered at this point, but I swear I saw a shot of pizza served with potato chips. I was like Ewww, but then I remembered that I like to eat pizza with mojo potatoes at Shakey's, so really, how big a difference is THAT shit? I also dug that the Acuna Boys mascots were named after characters from one of my favorite movies, Rolling Thunder. If you haven't seen that shit, then you just don't fucking know and I can't help you. Search that shit out, bro.


Then you have Don't from Edgar Wright. This one's my favorite out of all the trailers. It's just random moments from the movie with no dialogue, only sound effects and music and GOB from Arrested Development narrating. It plays like a trailer to a foreign horror movie, except the distributors don't want to tip you off that it's either very badly dubbed or subtitled. Main dude from Hot Fuzz is supposed to be there somewhere, but I didn't catch him. The fat dude from Hot Fuzz, on the other hand, makes a big fucking impression, showing up in a diaper and with brown smudges all over his body.

The final trailer is for Eli Roth's Thanksgiving. I like this one too. It's about a dude chopping up motherfuckers over the Thanksgiving holiday. Roth also appears in this as a dude who gets his head chopped off while homegirl from Cabin Fever is giving him head, which I guess evens everything out or something. I remember Roth programmed two weeks of movies over at the New Beverly Cinema in L.A. last year, and he would introduce movies like Pieces and Mother's Day, so you can totally tell that his heart lies with this kind of stuff. He does a great job of making a trailer for a movie that would not feel out of place with those flicks. The cheerleader landing on a butcher knife was a little too much, though. I'm just a fucking prude, that's all.


A kitty cat walks through the jungle and becomes a panther, then the second feature begins. Death Proof isn't an ode or tribute to a grindhouse movie, it IS a grindhouse movie. Basically what this means is that most of those flicks are really 45-minutes of story stretched out to 90 with padding and filler. It's what the filmmakers DO with the filler and padding that makes it either worth a watch or a waste of your time, and I think Quentin Tarantino does fine with his in Death Proof.

So you have Kurt Russell as this nacho eating motherfucker named Stuntman Mike, who has this fucked-up thing for stalking girls and then crashing his reinforced muscle car into them. And that's it, really. In between the set-pieces, you get to know the two separate groups of girls he sets his sights on.


The first half of the movie involves 3 friends hanging out in Austin, Texas. You have this chick named Jungle Julia who's a local celebrity D.J., you got homegirl from Cabin Fever and Thanksgiving looking really tiny, and then you have Arlene/"Butterfly", who's visiting her friends from out of town. We watch as they hang out at a bar, drink, smoke bud, and talk. Lots of talk. Talk about guys they hooked up with, guys they're not going to hook up with and guys who they want to hook up with. To even out all this girl talk, you also have Eli Roth and a couple of other dudes (one of whom is a little too, uh...fey for me to believe him) talking about trying to hook up with these girls at the lake house tonight, and how much liquor it's going to take for them to do it.

That reminds me, have you gone drinking at a bar recently? Goddamn, it's way too fucking expensive. That's why I do all my drinking at home. It's also why I don't have friends anymore and I'm single. But maybe that's a good thing, considering how much these dudes in the movie probably end up spending on liquoring up these chicks. Damn. Whatever happened to just taking a girl out for some ice cream? Nah man, apparently now you gotta do shots of Jager and bring some fuckin' primo Kush to blaze on if you even wanna THINK about courting a young lady. Fuck that, I'll just stick to being a shut-in and jerk off. And cry.


Maybe that's why I dig all the chicks talking in this flick, and why so many regular people don't. They don't wanna hear that shit, they probably get enough of it at home. I'm trying to watch the fuckin' game, go call Laura and tell her all of that bullshit.

I read the screenplay to this shortly after having seen it for the first time, and there's a part that isn't in the final film where Jungle Julia talks about her typical day. You know what, I'm just gonna fuckin' find the script and type the shit out for you. It'll be the best written thing on my fuckin' blog, that's for sure:

JUNGLE JULIA
Hey, that's a discombobulated day in the life of a drive time DJ. I get off work at 10:00am, I'm at home by 10:30. By 11:00 I'm snuggled up on my comfy couch, in my pajamas, hittin' the bong. I watch I Love Lucy at eleven...The Andy Griffith Show...at eleven-thirty. At 12:00, I watch back to back episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. At 1:00 I watch back to back episodes of Moesha. At 2:00 I watch Sponge Bob Square Pants. At 2:30 I watch Pinky and the Brain. At 3:00 I watch back to back episodes of Sister Sister. And at 4:00 I watch Tyra. Then I eat a big bowl of cereal, get unstoned and go about my day.

NATE
What do you mean you get unstoned?

JUNGLE JULIA
(like a doctor)
Dairy fucks up your high. You wanna get unhigh fast, eat a bowl of cereal.

Jesus Christ. You just fucking KNOW this is Quentin Tarantino's average day. You know this, right? But what the hey, you can't hate a dude for writing what he knows. Give homeboy some points.


You also have to give points to Tarantino for putting so much of himself into this flick, because there's a lot more personal shit in his flicks than you might think. No, I doubt that Quentin goes around running over cute girls or slicing up Japanese mafia with a sword, but there's other things spread throughout, like fetish-type shit that comes straight from his beautifully twisted mind. Anyone with eyes probably knows that Tarantino might have a bit of a thing for feet. But after having watched Death Proof the movie and having read Death Proof the script, I'm talking about other kinds of kink.

Near the end of the opening credits, there's a close-up shot of Arlene holding onto her crotch as she runs to her friend's apartment, doing the pee-pee dance. In the script, that scene goes on longer. It describes Arlene as she sits on the toilet, letting out a "racehorse stream of piss" and the shot ends with the camera zooming into Arlene's "pretty face of relief". Halfway through the movie, another woman talks about how her current man has a thing for watching her pee, and her girlfriends are more amused than grossed out. Again, maybe I'm being a prude and overreacting. But then in the script to Tarantino's next flick, "Inglourious Basterds" (that's how he spells it, people) a woman pees herself and the camera is supposed to follow down to a shot of all the urine pooling around her feet. I don't know, I'm probably just looking into it too much. But if there's ever a Grindhouse 2, and Quentin's movie is called something like "Piss, Baby, Piss!" remember where you heard about that shit first, folks.

What's also cool about Death Proof is that it sets you up for one thing and then changes it up on you. Arlene is the one who notices that evil-looking car Stuntman Mike drives, she's the only one who feels something is wrong. Everyone is talking about this lake house they're going to go later that night. They set you up for Arlene as the Final Girl and the lake house to be the setting for all the crazy bad stuff to happen and yet it doesn't work out that way.


The second half focuses on a second group of girls who are in town working on a movie. You have stuntwoman Zoe Bell, stuntwoman Samuelle L. Jackson, John McClane's Daughter (wearing a cheerleader outfit, but no butcher knife up the snatch) and Rosario Dawson. Like our previous group, they also like to talk; all the fun they're having on the movie they're working on (Tarantino himself has said this is the conversation he knows the cast & crew have about working on his movies), the guys they've hooked up with, and the guys they want to hook up with. In both groups there's a woman who wants to get romantically serious with a film director and end up living in his mansion. That was interesting.

Anyway, Stuntman Mike is on the trail, following them around and taking pictures, like he did with the last group of girls. This perv eventually works up the nerve to sneak up to Rosario's bare feet while she's asleep and starts to touch and lick them. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with Quentin's apparent foot fetish, I'm sure. Stuntman Mike's mission to get off is made easier when Zoe comes in with the idea of having her buddy Samuelle drive a muscle car at top speed while Zoe rides on the hood. Why? I guess because she just felt the need to do it. Don't question Ms. Bell. Car chases and crashes ensue.


From all the blah blah blah, you find out that Rosario Dawson is a single mother dying to take part in something with the "cool kids", Samuelle L. Jackson is packing heat and not afraid to use it, and Zoe Bell is indestructable. After what happened in the first half, you're familiar with the game Tarantino is playing and you pretty much have it all figured out -- it's not going to work out the way the movie has it set up and instead it's gonna flip your expectations upside down, right side up, backwards and forwards and all that shit.

Except that doesn't happen. The movie proceeds to go exactly the way it's been set up. Zoe Bell does survive Stuntman Mike's attack with hardly a scratch, SLJ does use her gun on that punk-ass, and Rosario's character is just as determined to join her friends as they look to kill this motherfucker.

I'm reminded of something Tarantino said about the way he originally structured his screenplay for True Romance. For the first act, the audience knows nothing while the characters know everything. For the second act, both the characters and the audience are on the same level. But for the third act, the audience knows everything while the characters know nothing, so we have no choice but to watch the characters get themselves closer and closer into danger. Then Tony Scott came and restructured the script into chronological order for the movie. But if Tarantino was to explain the structure for Death Proof, he would probably say: "First half, I know more than you. Second half, you THINK you know, but I still know more than you. I own you. I never graduated high school and this is how I display my superiority. I rule. I love feet."


While the look of this movie isn't as beaten up as Planet Terror, it still gets the feeling across. There's the occasional scratch, skipped frame and jump cut, but it's the flat lighting used in some of the settings that give it that 70's drive-in look, like an AIP production or something from Crown International. There's also an entire section that's in black & white too. The best explanation I can come up with for that is maybe Tarantino was trying to recreate the feeling of watching a grindhouse movie at his place. The print quality for the movies he'd screen for his friends varied wildly, according to Rodriguez. You'd have a movie that had gone completely pink-tinted, or one that had proper color but was really beaten up (like Planet Terror), or you had a reel or two that was only avalable in black & white, and on rare occasion you might come across a print to a 30-year old movie that looked absolutely stunning -- which would explain the final third looking so clean. That's what I came up with, anyway.


I liked Death Proof as much as I liked Planet Terror. They're completely different kinds of movies, but I think both are representative of the kind of flicks that only Dark Sky or Synapse or Anchor Bay or one of those other companies release on DVD, and I think both are a good time, drunk or sober. Preferably drunk. It's too bad Grindhouse failed at the box office. I would've liked to have seen a follow-up. But I'm obviously in the minority. The majority is busy getting ready to pay their hard-earned money to see The Pink Panther 2 next month.

Ok, time to close this sucker up and end it with a little moment some viewers may have missed. In the theatrical version of Death Proof, just as Arlene is about to take Stuntman Mike inside and give him a lapdance, a "Reel Missing" card fills the screen. Since the previous five minutes or so were all about working the audience up to see this lapdance, we're left with cinematic blue balls, left laughing and applauding at being suckered like that. It wasn't until I saw this at a drive-in, that I was able to hear something being said right before the "Reel Missing" card goes away and the rest of the movie continues. See if you can figure out what the suspiciously Quentin-Tarantino-in-High-Pitched-Black-Voice-sounding guy is saying. Enjoy.