O.J. says: "A snake? Damn, I wish I thought of that. (long pause) Oh, what I meant to say was 'Wow, that's scary'."

Right after high school, I started working as a file clerk for some credit financing joint. One of the two main dudes was a guy who I'm going to refer to as Clint Eastwood, because that's who I can see playing him in the movie of my life. For the record, the drunk rich lady on Will & Grace would play me. Anyway, Clint Eastwood was a white dude probably in his late 60's or early 70's, and he was a hardcore Republican and NRA member who would occasionally bring one or two of his guns to work just because. He drove a nice car, made lots of money, treated people like shit and took to making racist and homophobic jokes. Naturally, I looked up to him. When I started there, Clint was going through a divorce, and one day he was looking over some forms he had to sign. Apparently it had to do with the monetary settlement he and the ex agreed on. After signing and putting the forms back into his briefcase, he casually looked over to my supervisor and said matter-of-factly, "It would be cheaper to just kill the bitch".

Fair Game (aka Mamba) is about a dude who not only thinks the same way, but is actually going to put his money where his mouth is (as opposed to in his ex-wife's wallet). This dude is named Gene, and he's a multi-millionaire in the computer business. He's also a creepy fuck, and you can see why his wife would want to ditch him. Gene meets up a snake wrangler in a shack way out in the desert so he can buy a mamba snake from him. When the wrangler tries to give him all the details about this particular reptile, Gene beats him to the punch. He knows everything to know about this snake; it's one of the most highly venomous creatures around but it's particularly dangerous during the mating season, when the poor thing gets so fuckin' pent up with sexual frustration it has to bite the first motherfucker it sees for some goddammed relief. Can you believe that shit? That's like if some dude walked up to you in the street and suddenly stabbed you once in the chest. As you lay bleeding on the ground, covering your wound, you ask the guy "Why?!" and the guy responds "Sorry, I'm just so fuckin' HORNY, dude!".

It happens to be mating season and the snake wrangler kinda gets the hint that this dude is up to something bad, so he takes advantage and doubles the price of the mamba, which doesn't make Gene so happy. Here's a multiple-part question: if you were to suddenly jack up the price on some deadly shit knowing you're putting the buyer into a real pickle, would you then afterwards take up an offer by the buyer for a ride into town? And if so, would you allow yourself into the vehicle first and wait while the buyer is outside putting the deadly shit into the back seat of the car? And if so, would you just stay there like a dumbass while the buyer stands in front of the car staring at you all sinister-like? And if so, would you still remain seated while the sinister-looking buyer slowly raises his car door-locking thingamabob and points it at your direction? If you answered Yes to all those questions, then your ass is as dead as this stupid-ass snake wrangler.

We're then introduced to Gene's ex-wife, Eva, who is played by Sting's current wife. This is one of those lame fucking intros, with that fucking late-80's top-40 KISS FM Rick-Dees-in-the-morning type of pop music playing and the character being all wacky and cute and shit. She's carrying a bag of groceries to her loft and keeps dropping shit while talking to her cat and turtle. Gene may be a fucking over-controlling creep, but Eva is a fucking loon and you wouldn't want to be married to either of them. Maybe that's how these two found each other in the first place -- no one else could stand them. This flick was made in either '88 or '89, and you certainly will know this when you see the trendy shit this chick's wearing. My favorite article of clothing would have to be the beret with a Swatch watch attached to it, I guess that way everyone else BUT her can know what time it is. Later, when she takes off her stupid overpriced designer cowboy boots and puts her feet up on the table, we see that she's wearing mismatched socks with differing wacky color patterns. We get it lady, you're a free spirit!

The movie doesn't think we get it yet, though. So we get another musical interlude of Eva as she takes of her clothes and walks around in her underwear and a shirt that has a design of fish flying next to the moon, while some Laura Branigan type of shit plays in the background. Eva struggles to put her groceries into her already full refrigerator (then why the fuck did you go grocery shopping then?!) and solves her spacial problems in her own wacky way. Oy. She even gives a name to the fish she puts in the freezer, she calls it Moby Dick, and I just want to beg her through the screen to please stop with the wackiness. Please, lady -- I never did anything to you. Dial it down a tad for me, and I'll buy you some matching socks. Please! Por el amor de Dios, STOP!

Eva is also a sculptor, and she's currently working on some grade school piece of work, an octopus. Two of them, actually, a male and female octopus. The person who commissioned it calls Eva to tell her that he is sending the finished female one back, because he wants it to look meaner, along with the male octopus she's currently working on. She's kinda bummed about it, but she goes ahead and gives the octopus a mean face. She's interrupted by Gene, who sneaks in and gives her a good scare doing so. He notices the octopus and believes she's making it look like him. Dude, it's not always about you. Much dialogue follows. This is actually a pretty decent scene, because Eva changes her attitude quite a bit, turning into this rather meek and scared individual. It felt a little real, I thought. I mean, I'm sure there are people out there like that, loud and boisterous people, incredibly confident people who you'd never expect were actually frightened victims behind closed doors, people who somehow fell under the spell of some creep and may even excuse the creep's abuse with illogical logic. It happens to the best of us, I guess, and I can see how it happened to Eva. During the scene Gene is saying how much he despises Eva and weak people like her and then next he's hugging her up and nuzzling against her neck doing the "I'm sorry, baby" thing. Shit, that pretty much sums up their relationship right there.

Gene manages plant a tiny transmitter on the back of her necklace. This will be important later. Eva tries to get tough and tell him off, but it's obvious how scared she is of him, which leaves the fuckin' asshole pretty satisfied with himself. At this point, you figure it's less about the money and more of a "If I can't have you, no one else will" trip he's on. He takes off, pretending to accidentally leave behind one of those long cylinder-shaped blueprint containers. But you just fuckin' KNOW there ain't no blueprints in that motherfucker. Eva suggests that maybe in about a month they can get together again and talk about this more (Jesus Christ, girl! Stop doing this to yourself!) and he responds with "I don't think that's very likely". MWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Outside, he jams the lock to the only door in the loft and then rigs the phone lines so that only he can contact her and she can't make any outgoing calls. He gets into his SUV parked across the street and takes out his heavy duty briefcase and opens it, revealing a heavy duty computer setup like the portable computer in Spies Like Us, but that shit controlled nuclear missiles. He turns it on and activates a program called "Fair Game", which consists of an entire floor plan of Eva's loft with two flashing icons moving around within, a blue snake representing the Mamba and an apple representing Eva. An apple and a snake? Oh, I get it. "Ladies, do you have to eat everything?" Anyway, thanks to the transmitter he planted on Eva and the snake, he can track their movements around the loft. There's also a timer in the game, counting down from 60 minutes. Why, you ask? You see, Gene wasn't happy with setting a highly venomous and eager-to-bite snake in an enclosed area loose with his ex-wife. So he ended up injecting a shitload of sex hormones into the snake, making the mamba REALLY hard up now. The downside to this is that the snake will die if it doesn't bite within the hour. Don't I know the feeling. Anyway, it's Eva vs. The Mamba, the clock is ticking, and it's on like Donkey Kong. Or Fair Game.

We get Snake-Cam whenever we cut to Mamba's point-of-view, as it slowly slithers it way throughout the huge loft. There are some near-misses as Eva walks around in her bare feet (says Quentin Tarantino: "Oh yeeeeaaaahhhh!") and talks to herself. A lot. Look, I spend as much time alone as Eva and I hardly talk to myself. Oh yeah, I'll whistle and maybe even sing a tune. But the most that I ever do as far as talking is maybe repeating something funny I heard, like some dumb line or impersonation. There's one in particular I've been doing variations on for a while. But even then, it's very rare that I do so. This chick, on the other hand, talks non-stop. She talks while treating a cut on her finger, she talks while watching television, she talks while taking a bath. Fucking conversations, too. This ain't I Am Legend, ma'am, there's people outside that loft of yours that you can talk with. But then again, she lives in L.A., so I could understand why she wouldn't want to deal with those assholes.

Eva comes up with the idea of videotaping a message to Gene, to tell him everything she wants to say to him without having to deal with actually having to go face-to-face with the scary motherfucker and freezing up again. By the end of her message, she remembers she left a kettle of tea on the stove and bolts up to go get it. When she comes back, she plays the tape to watch herself, and even though she shot the video and was on-camera the whole time, there's a surprise ending that she didn't see coming. That's because at the moment she jumped up in the video, the muthafuckin' Mamba made a bite for the booty and missed, and the whole thing was caught on tape. AIIIIIEEEEEE!!!!!

So our girl Eva knows what's up and immediately heads to the door. But of course, the lock has been jammed, so she can't get it open. Bunch of savages in this town. If you didn't get it through the visual representation of Eva unable to open the door, she says out loud "Why won't it open? The door won't open!". That's our Eva, always looking out for the dim bulbs in the audience. She tries to calm herself down, telling herself that it's probably a garter snake. Eva eventually realizes that she's up against a mamba, though, and freaks the fuck out.

Meanwhile, Gene is watching all of this in his SUV, watching as the video game snake chases the video game apple, and the whole time he's munching on a sandwich and drinking coffee from a thermos. This shit is only supposed to last an hour, but the motherfucker still thought to pack a lunch. That's a little bit of awesome. It's human nature, really. Set me up in a stakeout-type of situation in my car, and it won't matter if it's supposed to last eight hours or eighty minutes, I'd still wanna bring coffee and donuts to the motherfucker.

Eva keeps moving and getting away from Mamba in her loft, but Mamba is part-zombie or part-Jason or something, because no matter how fast she runs, the snake is always there waiting. Mamba will make the occasional bad choice, though. It's like he knows she's going to eventually want to protect her feet, so he finds a pair of boots to hide in and wait, and she ends up putting on the other pair of boots right next to him. Ha ha, Mamba. Don't you feel like the fucking asshole. Eva, on the other hand, ends up looking like an asshole, after she puts on layers after layers of clothing from her closet. But since it's being done for her own survival, it's excusable. She now has on all these tacky and soon-to-be outdated clothes all over her body, and given her already nutty predisposition, she looks like a brand new crazy women ready to hit the streets with her shopping cart full of cans. She's already got the Talking To Herself part down.

The lights conveniently go out, so Eva heads over to the fuse box to fix that. Sure enough, Mamba's there waiting for her. But he doesn't strike, because the fire from Eva's lighter scares him. Eva realizes this and gets all happy about it, or at least that's supposed to be the idea, because she displays this wide-eyed look that one usually gets when they've been ignoring their meds for about a week. Eva ends up setting a small fire between her and the snake, and again, she comes off more psychotic than triumphant. She then starts running laps around the loft, I guess to throw Mamba off or frustrate him or something. I'm surprised Mamba hasn't starting chomping on a couch or something by now, with his blue balls wracking him out.

Later she ends up covering the whole kitchen floor with flour, and waits on top of a refrigerator for the snake to come in. This scene is so full of Win; you have Eva propped up on this refrigerator, dressed up in layers of mismatched clothes and a scarf wrapped around her neck, face partially covered in flour, all sweaty and giving out that psycho look of hers as she darts her eyes in all directions. She looks like an older version of Kirsten Dunst in Crazy/Beautiful after a three-day crystal meth and LSD bender. Then Mamba arrives and she starts pelting him with deadly weapons like eggs, apples and Moby Dick all the while screaming "Filthy! Filthy!".

There's a bit of a close call for Gene when some Rastafarian dude on a bike shows up with a boombox hanging from his neck. Goddamn, the things some people went through before the iPod. The Rasta Man has come to drop off a package for Eva, and when he rings the doorbell and the film cuts to Eva's frenzied reaction, anyone coming in late to this movie would assume they were watching a flick about drug abuse. Rasta Man leaves the package on the doorstep and heads back to his bike. By the time Eva gets to the door and starts banging away at it, he's already taking off, plus his loud boombox makes it impossible for him to hear her. But at least he left the package for her. I hate when the opposite happens, when you're waiting for something you ordered on Amazon.com or something. You're like a little kid waiting for that shit, and then you come home one day to find that note on your door, the one from the UPS that says that they came to deliver your package but since you weren't home, they will come back on the next business day, but today's Saturday and Monday's a holiday. Then you're all like "Nooooo!!!! I was waiting all week for that!".

Eva finally loses it and starts whacking away at her indoor tropical garden with her hatchet, screaming at the Mamba to come on out and finish this once and for all. I guess this really freaks the Mamba out, because he slithers back toward Gene's blueprint container. Eva catches all of this and puts two and two together.

The hour is nearly up, so Gene calls the loft again. There's no answer, so it looks like it's all over. Gene gets out of his SUV with a golf club, heads back to the loft, unjams the lock and makes his way in. He looks around and finds the mess that's become of the loft, and then discovers Eva sprawled out on the floor with a motionless snake beside her. He chops the snake in half with the golf club, then goes over to the dying Eva. This asshole is such a sore winner, the way he just goes on and on about how the snake was only minutes away from dying anyway, and how she belonged to him and blah blah I'm better than you blah blah everyone is for sale blah blah the game is over blah blah. He then goes over to the container and opens it up to put the dead snake inside, but upon closer inspection he notices something. The dead snake isn't a snake at all, but a sculpture of one. And if that's not the snake, then that could only mean...CHOMP, baby! The Mamba pops out of the container and gives The Bite to the son-of-a-bitch.

Gene freaks out and starts running around the loft like a chicken with its head cut off, bouncing off the walls and tripping over furniture while Eva follows him. When he finally falls to the ground, she goes down to gently hold his head as he passes. She's not there to spit in the motherfucker's face or kick him and tell him to burn in hell. I'm taking it as one more example of how fucking opposite they are to each other. Whereas Gene stood over Eva and acted an asshole to her in what he thought were her final moments, Eva's too decent a human being for that kind of shit. There's no anger or excitement in her eyes, nor is there that psycho look she had for the past ten minutes. It's a passive, nonjudgmental look that she seems to be displaying here. It's like she's saying "Gene, you're a fucking murderous prick who tried to kill me with a motherfucking mamba, and you reap what you sow. But no matter who you are, death is a real bitch to have to go through, and I'm sorry this is how it's going to end for you." That's how I took it anyway.

You know what, Eva? You're a wacky broad and not my type, but when push came to shove, you held your own, you made it through and when you came out a winner, you stayed classy about it. That makes you better than me and a whole lot of other motherfuckers out there. You're certainly leagues above that prick diddler Gene. I tip my hat to you, Eva. You're all right. Now go put on some decent socks. You're not 12 years old, you're pushing 40 and that kind of shit ain't cute anymore.

So Eva goes outside her loft and finds the package on her doorstep. She opens it up, and finds that it's female octopus for her mean octopus sculpture. It's a smiling lady octopus, painted pink and wearing a bow on its head. She's supposed to change it to be as mean as the male counterpart, remember? Eva begins to tear up. Aww. Roll credits and cue late-80's love song.

This is about 80 minutes long, and there's definitely some heavy padding all over, but I dug Fair Game. It kept me interested. It's really a 45-minute movie stretched out, but even with the padding it moves fairly quickly. Like Curfew, it's something you'd watch at two in the morning and chill out with. There's only three actors in the entire movie (Yo what about Rasta Man, you fuckin' racist?) and they all do well with their roles, even Trudie Styler, who I don't think is bad, but just very inconsistent. Like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, we weren't given much difference between regular Eva and crazy Eva. Instead you have nutty Eva and even nuttier Eva. But because Styler has since gone on to produce both Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, I'm gonna give her the benefit of the doubt and blame the director for that shit. That's the kind of slack I cut a motherfucker if they were involved in something I liked.

But the real hero of this flick is my main ace, the Mamba. There wouldn't be a movie if it wasn't for homesnake. You can't call the Mamba a villain either, it's just doing what nature put him out there to do. You might as well hate the fucking sun for shining. Mamba. I like to say that, I've noticed. Mamba mamba mamba. MAMBA. As you can see, I like writing it too. I also like to say the word "snake", except I like to pronounce it "snaw-kee" or "snaw-kay" or "snack". The last one I got from my father, a good man from Mexico who speaks English as a second language. He has a strong grasp of the language and speaks it fluently, but every once in a while, he'll take a word that he's prononced correctly many many times before and come out with a brand new pronounciation of it, like he forgot momentarily or he just got lazy. And boy, is it glorious when that rare moment occurs. "Tienes la pelicula con el 'snack'?" he asked me, wondering if I had Anaconda in my collection. Oh, how I loffed and loffed behind his back. In case my father ever reads this, I Love You Dad. Please don't hit me with the belt.

Flippin' chickens, gettin' tickets, want the money and the power

Have you heard about the slum dwellers in India who are protesting over Slumdog Millionaire? They're pissed about the use of the word Dog in the title, because they don't like to be referred to as animals. They have expressed their discontent by tearing apart movie theaters playing the flick, while others plan protests where they'll burn director Danny Boyle in effigy. Yeah, that'll show 'em. But I actually agree with them; in the same way that movie titles are changed in other countries for cultural or various other reasons (like that piece-of-shit Four Christmases is called Four Holidays overseas), the distributors should just change the title of Millionaire and replace all references to "slumdog" in the Indian version with something else. I even have an idea for the replacement title: Person-Who-Lives-In-Poverty-And-Not-Only-Doesn't-Get-It-But-Takes-Shit-Way-Too-Fucking-Seriously Millionaire. I like that, it rolls off the tongue nicely.

But it doesn't look like any wrestlers are pissed about The Wrestler, and it's too bad, because I'd pay to see Mickey Rourke take on a group of them in a steel cage match or something. I went to check out the flick at my favorite theater, the one with the automated ticket kiosks outside that accept gift cards and believe you are over the age of 60, therefore saving you about $3.50. I don't plan to live that long anyway, so I'm taking advantage of senior discounts NOW. The ticket-taker was a very cute girl who gave me a smile as she told me which auditorium to go to. Now, this may have been because it's her job to be courteous or maybe she noticed the word "SENIOR" on my ticket, but I chose to take it that she smiled because she wanted me. A simple smile like that from a cute girl goes a long way towards warming my cold black shriveled up heart.

The first trailer was for Wolverine, and left me feeling kinda ehhh about it. The guy who directed this made a movie called Tsotsi that won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars a few years back, but you just know this is a typical case of the respected filmmaker going to Hollywood only to get fucked, reamed out and discarded like a used whore outside Brett Ratner's mansion at 3am, and the end result is a flick that any hack could've made. I'll wait to see this on DVD in the fall. The second was for a flick called Duplicity, with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts. It's from the dude who made Michael Clayton, which I really liked, and the trailer looked really cool too. The only problem is that you can tell the people both in front and behind the camera had a great time making this flick, and I've been in such a hater mood for a while that I can't stand that kind of shit. It's the reason why I could only watch the first 15 minutes of Ocean's Twelve before hitting Eject and I haven't completed the Ocean's trilogy since. I probably won't watch this one until I'm living in my mansion with Scarlett and Jessica, and all the hate is gone from my soul, which means never. The final trailer was for something called The International, once again starring Clive Owen. Go Clive! Make that fuckin' money. This one looked really cool too, and if these dudes had a good time shooting the flick, it sure didn't show here, so I'll probably buy a ticket. Naomi Watts co-stars and I like her a lot, even though she really has to learn to chillax.

Now our feature presentation. The Wrestler is a flick about Mickey Rourke's life. Mickey Rourke was the fucking MAN back in the 80's, this guy was looking like he'd become the Brando and James Dean of his generation -- a talented handsome motherfucker with a motherfucking handsome talent. Goddamn, I really am not exagerrating when I talk about how fucking good this dude was. I'm sure there were plenty of dudes in their 20's back then who wanted to become actors because of this guy, they probably watched The Pope of Greenwich Village on a loop to fucking fawn over both this motherfucker and Eric Fucking Roberts tearing that shit up. Then the 80's ended, and with it, most of Rourke's heat.

Anyway, I guess for legal reasons or something, they changed the profession from acting to wrestling, and they changed the name from Mickey Rourke to Randy "The Ram" Robinson. But the movie is still pretty much about him. Randy was a huge star in the ring back in the 80's, and the opening credit sequence consists of old newspaper clippings, magazine cover articles and flyers for matches. It's presented in supersharp picture quality with ultra loud colors and muthafuckin' "Bang Your Head" by Quiet Riot blasting in glorious Dolby Digital sound. I don't give a fuck what you think, that shit's an awesome jam, man. I actually had to stop writing this just so I could listen to that shit and fuckin' spaz out to it. When the credits are over, we get a "20 Years Later" card and now everything is all grainy and handheld in what looks to be a classroom for preschool or kindergarten. Randy sits off-center from the frame, his back to us. He's in his wrestling outfit, and he's completely tired and weary from a match he just finished. Some dude comes up to him and hands him a pretty thin wad of cash, apologizing for the disappointing turnout. The salad days are fucking over.

Nowadays, Randy barely scrapes by doing smaller independent gigs on the weekends, and during the week he works a loading dock at a supermarket. It's even worse because he has a real asshole for a boss, played by Todd Barry -- the real one, not the older cracked-out lookalike from 555, in case you were wondering. Poor Randy can't even ask this guy for extra hours without getting some crack thrown at him about wearing tights or something. Fuck you bitch-ass manager, you can say what you want, but I bet you at the very least Randy banged tons of hot chicks in his heyday. You will never know that feeling, your prime will be convincing that chick in college to give you a hand job and even then you had to hook her up with some skunk-ass weed and a bottle of Boone's Farm to get the job done. The ugliest chick Randy banged was probably hotter than the whores you wack it to on the Internet, which reminds me -- do that shit at home. Are you that fucking full of yourself that you think you can get away with that shit in your office? I know you're a fictional character in a movie, but go fuck yourself.

Randy likes to cool off after work with a few beers at a strip joint. I used to do something like that, back when I worked night shift at a warehouse. On Friday mornings, I'd celebrate the beginning of my weekend by going to Tommy's and picking up a double chili-cheese burger & fries to take home and enjoy with a couple of ice-cold Heinekens. You know what? That's NOTHING like how Randy chills out after work. I apologize for bringing that lame shit up. Anyway, he has a thing for this stripper played by Marisa Tomei, and between this flick and the opening scene of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, I can totally understand. Tomei's about 44 or 45 years old and she's got a nice healthy body going on, this broad. I remember once recommending the movie Factotum to a buddy of mine, and I told him who was in it. When I mentioned Marisa Tomei, he asked me if she got naked and I told him yes. He then responded with "Too bad she couldn't get naked during her My Cousin Vinny days". In other words, her age was an issue and she couldn't look nearly as good now as she did then. We'll never know, but I'm telling you she's got a better body than some of these broomsticks with eye shadow in Hollywood who are half her age. You can argue that she's got some age and wrinkles going on in the face during the daytime scenes, but then that's to be expected when a film like this is shot in Restaurant-Bathroom-Mirror Vision. Everyone's wrinkles or pockmarks or whatever is super-fucking-visible with this movie's purposely harsh lighting setup. It's just too bad there weren't any Marisa Tomei types to play the reporter in 555. No, I still haven't let that shit go. Yes, it'll be a while.

Randy signs on for a rematch against a dude he fought 20 years ago named the Ayatollah. He figures maybe this could be the first step to a comeback and a return to his former glory. I liked how when this is first brought to him, Randy asks if the Ayatollah is even down for this in the first place, because last he heard, that dude was doing pretty well for himself running a used car lot. I got a kick out of that line. It's not funny, nor is it meant to be, but I liked how it brings up the other guys in the business, the ones who saw the writing on the wall and hung up the tights. Randy is definitely not one of those dudes.

What he is, is a guy who is so stuck on the past that he plays an old 8-bit NES wrestling game that features him in it. He plays it with one of the neighborhood kids who then gives him shit about how there are better games out there like Call of Duty. We see the video game on-screen, and the filmmakers did a good job of making it look like some shit you'd play on the old Nintendo system. But they really fucked it up in the sound department; they use fucking Atari 2600 sounds, from Pac-Man, of all games. C'mon Aronofsky, you were definitely of an age where you woulda been playing that shit, are you fucking telling me you forgot how that shit sounded? That's bullshit. I still fucking remember, but then that's because I still play old Nintendo games and I don't have better things to do with my time, like having sex with Rachel Weisz. Fuckin' lucky bastard.

Let's talk a bit about those kids. They're mostly too young to understand the situation Randy's in. When the poor dude is locked out of his trailer because he can't pay his rent, he has to sleep in the van. The next morning, those little kids are banging on his van for him to come out. He does and he messes around with them, picking them up and pretending to fight them and they're loving it, they're cheering him on. As far as they're concerned, he's bigger than life, a fucking cool motherfucker they all wish they could be like. I'm sure most of us grew up with someone like that, someone who we thought was supercool and awesome, and the fact that he was pushing 40 and still living with his parents just didn't register with us.

So this flick is less about plot and more about just following this dude around. It has a documentary feel to add to the realness of the piece, and the sights and sounds and the characters and situations have the feeling of authenticity. I heard there's some improvised moments with non-actors in this flick and I can see that, especially in the scenes where he's working behind a deli counter. There's scenes backstage between Randy and his fellow wrestlers, where they work out the moves they're going to do to each other in the match, and I don't know shit about how they do it in real life, but it sure as shit feels like this is EXACTLY how they do it.

There's other stuff here that feel real, that really come through the screen and hit you dead center in that part of the soul that I think is called the Real Section. Physical stuff, for example. You can feel Randy's creaky bones and every painful grunt he makes as he gets around. He wears a hearing aid, and every time he goes to the strip joint he takes that shit off. They never make a big deal about it or refer to it, he just has a hearing aid and that's it. There's also long wordless scenes that consist of just observing Randy doing whatever. Like that sleeping-in-the-van scene I mentioned earlier; he turns on a little lamp, gets comfortable, takes some meds and pops open a drink before going to sleep. It doesn't sound like much, but there's something way too fucking intimate about that whole bit that made me uncomfortable, like I shouldn't be seeing this shit, especially after knowing this guy once sold out Madison Square Garden and probably stayed in some nice hotels and maybe back in the day even had a pretty cool pad and some cool toys. Now he's sleeping in a fucking Dodge Ram, and whether he brought that shit on himself or not doesn't matter, at the moment I just feel fucking bad for homeboy.

This is one of those movies where I think an actor's performance is so fucking awesome, it ends up enhancing the movie and making it better than it has any right to be. They almost cast Nicolas Cage in this, and I'm sure he would've been fine, but I think that version of the film would've been worse for it, exposing The Wrestler as the Good But Not Great movie it really is. But Rourke? He brings that baggage, man, that lived-in quality of having Been There along with the massive talent he always had and turns it into a great flick.

I joke about this movie really being based on his life, but it might as well have been. Like Randy, this motherfucker has been around, he got the attention and the acclaim and then made some bad choices, both in career and in life. Like Randy had to make do with gigs for small indie matches, Rourke had to get by with acting in smaller films, for the most part. Then Darren Aronofsky came along with this script written by a dude who used to write for The Onion, and Rourke took the job with no pay. Maybe like Randy, he saw this as his own Ayatollah rematch, one that could result in a return to higher profile gigs. Not for leading man roles, because that shit is long gone and let's be honest, he doesn't have the looks for it anymore. That ship has sailed. But maybe this will start him on a new leg of his career as one of our finest character actors around.

I hope he wins the Oscar for it, instead of that humorless cunt Sean Penn who already won Best Actor for Mystic River anyway. Besides, Rourke will probably thank his dogs like he did at the Golden Globes, and that would be pretty amusing. Penn would probably just drone on and on and make some self-serious political statement and bring the whole festivities down. But who knows, man? Oscar will probably fuck up and end up giving that shit to Brad Pitt.

Let's wrap this sucker up. I really liked The Wrestler. It's got a great performance by Mickey Rourke, it's got naked Marisa Tomei, and it's got an absolutely perfect ending. About that ending -- I know there are people out there that don't like it at all, but I really couldn't see it ending any other way. It's true to the movie and if it had gone differently, it wouldn't have been as strong a conclusion. These fucking things don't always have to be spoon-fed to you, you know. Shit, I'll go all out and say there's some genuine fucking beauty in that ending. If you want to know what I mean by that, ask me next time we meet.

So I stuck around for the credits to listen to Bruce Springsteen's song. After the lights came up, I headed for the exit and ran into that ticket girl. It turned out she came in to listen to the song too. We ended up chatting, and long story short, she's in my kitchen making breakfast as I write this.

Actually, that whole last part is bullshit. I just wanted to end this blog on a high note.

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.