Movie Scum

Well, this was not the movie I expected. Admittedly, I knew very little about this film prior to watching it other than it won a good amount of Australian Film Institute awards and even an Academy Award nomination for Jacki Weaver. I was thinking it to be a zoo-based comedy that also featured Guy Pearce but instead, writer and director David Michôd provides a thoughtful and powerful look at family, crime, and why mixing the two is bad business. Seventeen-year-old Josh (James Frecheville) calls his grandmother to inform her of his mother’s untimely death after a heroin overdose. At least, once he can pull himself away from the Down Under equivalent of Deal or No Deal. Grandma Smurf (Weaver) takes Josh in and soon he is reunited with the uncles he has not seen for some time as Josh’s mother disapproved of the family. She had a point. Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), the oldest, is a has-been armed robber looking for a new trade. Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) is a manic and paranoid drug-dealer w...

Written by: PBF Ninjas vs. Vampires is writer director Justin Timpane ’s follow up to Ninjas vs. Zombies (which I have not seen). I must apologize to Mr. Timpane. While viewing this film, I sent Puck a text calling this film terrible. I rescind that. There are some terrible things in the film, but I now find that adjective to be not applicable to the film as a whole. Aaron and Alex are hanging out late at night at what is sure to be an unsafe location. They have known each for years, and Alex considers Aaron to be her best friend. Aaron on the other hand, has stronger feelings and would like to be her boyfriend. He vocalizes this and is quickly shot down. To further ruin his night, the pair is suddenly attacked by vampires. Just when it appears a feeding is to occur, a group of ninjas appear and save them. “What the fuck?” you say? I assure you, I type the truth. The group is part actual ninjas, as they practice martial arts, but they are also some sort of X-Men type group in ...

2011 must be the year of the superhero. Or at least the year of the superhero that I couldn’t care less about. Nolan’s next Batman doesn’t come out until next year after all. But, I figured I would be remiss without catching at least a few of the genre’s offerings this year and what better place to start than with The Green Hornet , the 3D big-budget film that was released … in January? Weird. Seth Rogen plays lovable slacker (seems like a stretch for him) Britt Reid, who is the playboy son of widower newspaper mogul, James Reid. His father is constantly disappointed due to his attention- and headline-grabbing antics. When his father dies, Britt meets Kaito ( Jay Chou ), a coffee-making car aficionado who worked for the family and commiserates with him about how much of a dick his father was. In a drunken act of rebellion, Britt and Kaito set off in bulletproof Chrysler Imperial to deface the recently erected statue of James Reid and foil a robbery nearby thanks to Kaito’s impres...

Written by: PBF Remind me to keep my mouth shut the next time I say I should have been scarred . 2010's I Spit on Your Grave is a remake of a 1978 film of the same name. I was unimpressed by the original with its bland characters, lack of tension and surprisingly boring execution of a heinous serious of events. The rectifies these issues, but to the complete extreme. The story is the same; a writer named Jennifer arrives in the deep country to write her first novel. Before she gets to her cabin, she interacts with some locals, a healthy mix of creepy, retarded and seemingly harmless. An embarrassing event occurs at the gas station which establishes part of a motive for some depraved acts. This combined with a retarded chap\'s misinterpretation of a kiss from Jennifer, quickly results in the go ahead for those acts. Jennifer is assaulted, mentally tortured, and ultimately raped repeatedly. Before the assailants can kill her, she jumps into the river and disappears. Her b...

After commenting on Twitter that I had seen and pretty much dug Bridesmaids , good ol’ Wifi Pirate from 3SMOVRadio attempted to clarify by asking if it was The Hangover for women. It is very Hangover -esque but featuring women, not necessarily just for them. As The Hangover was very reminiscent of previous movies by Judd Apatow , it seems fitting that this is one of his productions and directed by Paul Feig , one of the many people I love just for being involved with Arrested Development . As you can probably guess, Bridesmaids centers around a wedding. The bride-to-be Lillian ( Maya Rudolph ) wants her lifelong friend Annie ( Kristen Wiig ) to be her maid of honor but Annie’s life is in shambles. She is broke after a failed business attempt and shares a small apartment with a quirky English brother and sister. She is also quite jaded from a recent breakup and probably should not be anywhere near the planning of a couple’s everlasting happiness. Yet, Annie puts on a happy face a...

Sadly, I was late getting into MST3k when it was still around. In my area, we didn’t have Comedy Central until just before the show switched to Sci-Fi so the only option for Joel/Mike and the ‘bots was overly expensive VHS copies or one hour long segments at 2 AM on Saturdays. As such, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (henceforth referred to as whatever acronym I feel like) was an easy way to get your bad movie fix rife with sarcastic commentary. That is, until I realized that the movie is actually quite different from the show. You should know about MST3k by now considering that we’ve had two previous posts about it, not to mention the dozens of other pages and wikis about the show. The long and short is that a man is trapped on an orbiting satellite just above Earth who is forced to watch bad movies to amuse his captors. Not content to suffer in silence, the first man, Joel, builds four robots, some to aid in the ship’s operation and others to make witty quips with him w...

Written by: PBF Title that makes no sense? Subject I had not heard about? Documentary? Surely Cropsey is not for me. Quite the contrary. Cropsey is a documentary by Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman, who grew up on Staten Island. As kids (though they did not know each other at the time) each were familiar the urban legend of Cropsey, an escaped mental patient who kidnapped and murdered children. He varies from story to story, sometimes having a hook and other times wielding an axe. On July 9, 1987 a young girl named Jennifer Schweiger is kidnapped. After Andre Rand is arrested as a suspect, it seems like Cropsey may not just be an urban legend. Rand was on orderly at Willowbrook, a mental institution for children who were mentally ill, or handicapped. In 1972, Geraldo Rivera did an investigative report on the facility, exposing the horrible treatment of the patients (and employees) and their living conditions. Ultimately, the facility is shut down and the building left abandone...

Since Piranha 3DD entered pre-production, almost every new announcement makes me more excited about it. We know from PBF’s review of the first that Piranha is not a watershed moment in cinema history, although I can’t say I’ve seen a 3D penis get eaten in any other movie. Yesterday, it was announced that the resident batshit crazy man Gary Busey was joining the cast of the next chapter in the Piranha saga. He joins an already rounded cast including Danielle Panabaker (The Crazies), David Koechner (Anchorman), and Clu Gulager (it’s fucking Clu Gulager!). Let’s hope this is more a Feast reunion as opposed to a Feast 2 reunion with director John Gulager and writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton. The one thing I am disappointed of is the release date: November 23, 2011. The piranha are back only this time at a water park. I am sure there will still be buckets of blood and gore and ample nudity but why release this at Thanksgiving? I understand the need not to rush things but this...

When the 2010 Oscars were held, I had seen only two of the ten movies nominated. I did significantly better this year seeing nine before the ceremony. The one I didn’t get to: this year’s Titanic Effect victim, The King’s Speech. Early on it became abundantly clear that this film would sweep the award shows, potentially even in categories it wasn’t nominated for or ones that don’t exist yet. I figured I would let the dust settle and wait for DVD to see if I was watching The World’s Bestest Picture Ever! The King’s Speech is the type of movie that I would normally never watch. I don’t understand the fascination with monarchy and period settings always tend to add another layer of dullness to an already suffering movie. I figured though, I should probably shoot for all ten movies this year since Precious and An Education are still unchecked from last year’s nominees. Not surprisingly, I found the movie good and certainly “uplifting” as many others have said countless times before. Bu...

It isn’t often that the fifth film in a series is well received by a far amount of respectable critics. It is even less often when that series is at best a popcorn movie geared towards adolescent boys, street racers, and the six or seven fans of Paul Walker. But shockingly, I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Fast Five and that … well, it is actually pretty good. As in currently holding as 79% rating on Rotten Tomatoes good. Admittedly, this may be a bit premature as currently there are only a few dozen reviews tallied up. But considering the harsh critical reaction to the previous four movies (52%, 36%, 35%, and 27% respectively), it looks pretty safe that Fast Five could end up on the “fresh” side of the fence. But why? I did not see the third or fourth movies strictly because they looked like car porn wrapped around a poor excuse for a plot with bad acting throughout. In fairness, the first two were as well. This film reportedly centers around the team including Vin Diesel and Wa...

Written by: PBF Unlike the previous reviews, I will not be giving you a recap of the finale of Freddy vs. Jason. Only because it has nothing to do with the continuity of the Friday the 13th. For this is a re-something involving several of the early films. During the credit sequence of this film we see Pamela Voorhees chasing a a young girl. It is June, 13, 1980. She tells the girl that she must pay for letting her son Jason drown. Unfortunately for her, the young girl chops her damn head off. After the credits end, we transplanted to “present day,” which is 20 years later according to some dialogue. A group of young people are hiking, and stop near Camp Crystal Lake to find some marijuana that they heard was being grown in the woods. As tradition dictates, there is an obligatory camp scene and the legend of Jason is told. The same poor choices are made; some have sex, some wander off and find Camp Crystal Lake. Jason kills everyone except for Whitney. He keeps her. Flash forward ...

Written by: PBF We are going to travel back in time, but first, a briefing of what happened to Jason in Jason X, which chronologically(thus far) was his final adventure. He awakens on a space vessel in 2455 after being frozen years earlier. He begins to murder the folks aboard and actually almost is destroyed, but is rebuilt in to Super Jason. He has some kind of Cobra Commander looking new metal mask and is now a cyborg. Jason ends up literally “in” space floating at a very high speed about to collide with the survivors, but Sgt. Brodsky flies towards him and they both start heading toward Earth II where they are sucked in to the atmosphere. Thankfully, lakes exist on Earth II and we see two young people at one as they watch a shooting star fall in to the lake.  It’s Jason’s mask! Wooooo! What will happen next? Oh, yeah, we go back in time and visit another troubled town. If you recall, at the end of Goes to Hell, Jason was defeated and in fact sent to hell. Suddenly, Freddy...