Movie Scum

I feel that for some reason, Below has been under the radar (cute, right?) for many years since its theatrical release. I seem to recall seeing the DVD turning up at any one of my DVD acquisition attempts at Best Buy but the vagueness of the poster, the boringness of the title, and somewhat lack of A-list stars have painted the picture as just another of Dimension’s direct-to-DVD abominations, even though with co-writer Darren Aronofsky on board it has a much grander pedigree than those films that suffer similar fates. As we meet the crew of the USS Tiger Shark, a submarine in the Atlantic during World War II, they are given orders to rescue three members of a British hospital ship even though this will take them off course. From the start, we can sense things are a bit off with the men on board, especially moreso after the introduction of a woman, Claire Page, one of the survivors they rescued. The first portion of the film plays out like any other WWII submarine movie I have see...

Written by PBF The other day, Puck reminded me that I have only reviewed one of the Critters films and that I needed to finish the series out. Damn you, Puck. At the end of the first installment of Critters , we see a batch of Krite eggs, leaving a gaping opening for a sequel. 2 years later, we have Critters 2: The Main Course . At the beginning of the film, the 2 bounty hunters from the first, Ug and Lee, are in space with Charlie, the town drunk from Grover’s Bend, the town where the Krite attack occurred. They are killing some space creature, when another space creature calls them on their space video phone and tells them that there are still Krites on Earth and they must return. Charlie is somewhat hesitant about this, as he was a nobody and a drunk while he lived on Earth. Ug reassures him that he is one of them now, and this seems to calm Charlie’s nerves. Back in Grover’s Bend, the Krite eggs are discovered by some young punk, and he immediately trades them for beer to a g...

Written by: PBF If you think Inception is a film likely to start many a discussion after viewing, you should check out Zeitgeist . Then share your opinion of it with someone. Especially if you are of the opinion that the film is accurate, and that Jesus may have never existed. That discussion is sure to go beyond a mere critique of the film and perhaps even incite violence. Zeitgeist is a documentary conspiracy theory film. That being said, it does not ask your opinion, it tells you what’s what, as perceived by the filmmaker Peter Joseph . It is sectioned in 3 parts: The Greatest Story Ever Told, All the World’s a Stage, and Don’t Mind the Men Behind the Curtain. Part I deals with Christianity and claims that it is ultimately not “real,” but rather comprised of things that come from other religions, astrology, astronomy. It demonstrates this by comparing certain events (Jesus’s resurrection, the fact that he was born of a virgin, etc) to events in other theologies that have sim...

If you read this site or have watched any of our episodes, you will know the level of respect and … love we have for Chris Nolan. Yes, PBF may have a sick fascination with Weekend at Bernie’s but even he does not particularly laud Robert Klane because WAB does not equal Dark Knight , Batman Begins , Memento , and now Inception  on any level. Here we have a rare movie from a gifted filmmaker that is able to transcend multiple genres and their corresponding cliches and deliver one of the most intellectual films to overshadow anything else this year and probably many years’ films to come. Even after watching the damn thing, the plot of Inception is rather dense but it boils down fairly simply even though it strips out the very nature of the film. Cobb is a theif trained in the art of extracting thoughts and ideas from a person’s head while they dream. However, he is tasked with a job that even many on his team describe as impossible: implanting an idea into one’s head that is co...

Written by: PBF If you have ever seen the films of Kevin Smith , you will notice that he usually works with a lot of the same people in each one. Most, if not all of them are his friends, and it is quite apparent that they all have a passion for film. Smith's production company View Askew , has given us a few films that were made by some of these friends, and A Better Place , written and directed by Vincent Pereira , is one of them. Barret ( Robert DiPatri ) is a new student and is pushed around quite a bit. While he doesn't really fight back, he does somewhat defend himself verbally, and pretty much all of his altercations are stopped somehow before they progress. A teacher may come in to a classroom, or in one case because Ryan ( Eion Bailey ), steps in. Another student, Todd, is pushing Barret around, and Ryan expresses his concern that Todd never picks on someone his own size, and challenges him to a fight. Ryan ends up breaking Todd's nose, whereas he only gets ...

Written by: PBF ***THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS*** Let’s do some math. View Askew + clown = funny,  right? Not really. Vulgar is the story of Will ( Brian O’Halloran ), who is having a rough time of it in life. He lives in a crappy house, has a crappy car. His neighbors throw bottles at him. He is a clown for hire named Flappy, that makes birthday party appearances. While this is not paying very well (or sometimes at all) he loves it. His mother also lives in a rest home, which is yet another bill that he has to foot. Needing money badly, he comes up with an idea. In addition to being Flappy, the birthday party clown, he will become Vulgar, the bachelor party clown. An idea that would have immediately come to anyone’s mind, he will dress up as a clown, but wear lingerie. As a gag, he will come in to a bachelor party, tricking the groom-to-be in to thinking a gay clown stripper was hired instead of a whorish woman stripper. Obviously hilarity would ensue as all of the pa...

I am sure you have heard of a show called Hogan’s Heroes . Maybe even found it funny? No? Yes? Well after that show was cancelled, a little film called Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS was filmed on the set of that program. You also might find this movie funny, you sick son of a bitch. It actually is kind of amusing, but only because it is completely exploitative. Ilsa is a commandant of a Nazi medical/prison camp. She is conducting various experiments on women to prove her theory that woman can withstand pain far better than men. She also really likes sex, and will select a male prisoner to have sex with at random. She however is left unfulfilled when they achieve orgasm, so they are then castrated. That is until she selects an American (named Wolfe, oddly enough) who has the ability to go all night long and never climax. The film basically alternates scenes of sex and torture for 90 minutes. There are a few things you must know prior to watching this. Almost every female is nude at some...

When did parody movies become synonymous with sexist, juvenile, pieces of fucking shit movies? I blame Scary Movie . At its time, Scary Movie was a decent spoof of Scream , I Know What You Did Last Summer , and the other dozens of teen-based horror movies of the late nineties. While it has been several years since I have last seen it, Scary Movie had some legitimately funny sequences in their own right and also as a parody of the referenced movies. So, why is Scary Movie the devil? Because of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. In fact, we could go as far back as Spy Hard to blame the decline of the spoof but no one saw that movie anyways. Apparently after the relative success of Scary Movie , Friedberg and Seltzer decided to take any meager accomplishments they might have had being two of six writers of that film and create a legacy of cinema that represents the very reason that people who read books, plant gardens, or raise hamsters think that movies are crap. Why am I dedicat...

The Graves is the first movie from any of the After Dark series that I have seen. I cannot say I am in a hurry to visit the rest of them. In fairness, I cannot say I was expecting much from this film. Other than the brief synopsis provided by Redbox, I knew very little of it but I decided against a rational choice to complete last year's Oscar nominees for this instead. The Graves focuses on two sisters, Meg and Abby Graves (natch), who like comic books, Hot Topic, and heavy metal as they spend their last few days together before Meg breaks up the duo to go to school halfway across the country. In a pretty lame final hurrah, they set out in search of the world's largest thermometer and end up in a haunted ghost town somewhere in the middle of Arizona. There they run across a crazy-ass blacksmith, a crazy-ass realtor-looking guy, and a crazy-ass preacher. The story is very flimsy but I figured how hard can it be to screw up a run-of-the-mill horror plot which also feature...

Taking place in the small Canadian town of Pontypool, we meet Grant Massey, former big-time radio host who has been unceremoniously dumped into this small market to his chagrin. What starts as a typically uneventful morning, school closings and obituaries are soon replaced with sporadic reports of violent mobs popping up over the town. The movie follows Grant, his producer Sydney Briar, and associate Laurel-Ann as they attempt to corroborate the strange events. Director Bruce McDonald stages the events remarkably well for a story that takes place within the same building, mostly the same room even, for its duration. Normally, one would expect there to be cutaway scenes showing some of the action or carnage unfolding outside but here there is none. We have three people, effectively trapped in a church basement, with only scattered reports from callers and their weather man to relay what is happening. This approach works quite well as not only do we get to experience the dynamic int...

Film series typically do not get better over time. I could point to any collection of recurring films but you can draw your own examples of multiple movies that fall victim to the effect of diminishing results. The Twilight series is possibly an exception as it is based on a series of books by a first-time author, which as you might be able to attest from reading this site, who could only get better over time.

Twilight is one of only a few movies that I like in spite of the underlying story. As I am not a seventeen-year-old girl or a woman-of-a-certain-age or any other female in between, the bulk of the movie just does not appeal to me in the same fashion as other forbidden-romance movies do not. I watch movies to see things I cannot see otherwise and an angst-ridden love story can be found many times over without the fawning of females or the ire of everyone else in the middle.