Movie Scum

Written by: PBF I can quote the entire film, and yet every time I watch it, I laugh as if I have never heard any of the lines before. It’s kind of like Police Academy . Only there’s no academy. Also, it’s funny. The plot is simple enough for any drunk or high viewer to grasp. In fact it may enhance the experience to be inebriated. Enhance. Enhance. Seriously though, Super Troopers is probably quite funny when viewed under the influence but it is not necessary. We have a chapter of Vermont State Police that prefer to engage in buffoonery and chicanery rather than take their jobs seriously. This behavior has finally caught up to them as they face being shut down due to budget cuts. The local police department would benefit from this by getting more money. In addition to that the two squads are rivals and the local cops would love it if the highway cops were jobless. Soon a dead woman is found and a truck filled with marijuana is pulled over and each group of cops try to break the

Black comedies can be a hard combo to pull off, especially with the events that transpire in Very Bad Things . Comparatively to potty humor, black comedies (at least the good ones) tend to have an actual plot with real characters because that is really the only way that such a movie could work without an over reliance on bodily fluids. The danger comes from the delicate need to straddle the line between laughable and horrible that a black comedy must attempt. Writer and director Peter Berg is a talented guy and fortunately he is able to meld the two elements well, most of the time at least. As Kyle and his friends escape sunny California for Las Vegas for a bachelor’s party (that sounds vaguely familiar), things start normal enough with some standard bickering in the car, especially from brothers Michael and Adam, Kyle getting shit for his soon-to-be wife’s controlling nature, as well as lots and lots of drugs and alcohol. When Michael (played by Jeremy Piven just like every other

Written by: PBF Coconut Pete is without a doubt, the best role Bill Paxton has ever played. Club Dread is the 3rd film by Broken Lizard, following Super Troopers . There is a resort called Coconut Pete’s Pleasure Island, in Costa Rica. It is your basic hedonistic paradise; lots of naked people, booze, drugs, etc. Coconut Pete is a former rock star in the vein of Jimmy Buffet who will be quick to remind you that his hit Pina Coladaburg was written 7 years before Margaritaville. On this island is the fun police, live Pac Man games (in which you might see the fruit from the game having sex with each other) and the legend of Machete Pete. Machete Pete supposedly killed a bunch of staff and castrated himself and ran off in to the woods never to be seen again. Soon after this story is told (around a campfire ala Friday the 13th Part 2) dead bodies start being found with cryptic clues carved in to them. With no way off the island, the staff must figure out which one of them is the kil

S01E02 This episode illustrates why the concept of a weekly zombie series is an excellent idea (being AMC’s highest rated drama doesn’t hurt either). Any show can have a flashy and expensive pilot (and most do) but when it comes down to it, the premiere episode is merely the foundation of the series and usually not a particularly good expectation of what is to come. Historically, a series’ second episode delves more into the character-driven aspects of the show (one aspect the pilot was not lacking in to begin with) as you begin to get a sense of how the stories will unfold throughout the remaining episodes. If that is the case here, we have four   seventeen(!) more episodes of awesomeness ahead of us.After he escapes the tank from the end of the last episode, Rick ( Andrew Lincoln ) teams up with another group of survivors who are now in jeopardy as Rick’s presence has drawn more zombies (or “geeks” as one character calls them) to the storefront they are holding up in. Like with a

Just like you feel when a local band that you supported gets signed, I was especially proud to watch The Collector . Six years ago, two guys were plucked out of relative obscurity to make a movie on Project Greenlight and have since gone on to writing the latter parts of one of the most successful horror franchises. While I personally did nothing for Marcus Dunston or Patrick Melton to better their Hollywood career, I love seeing them break out into more than just the Feast or Saw series, not that there is anything wrong with those per se. You can certainly see the roots that the Saw series has planted in The Collector , proported to have been written as a prequel to Jigsaw's original shenanigans. Our hero, Arkin, has a bit of a dilemma. At his core, he seems to be a decent guy but he has decided to rob his boss'/customer's house to bail his ex-wife out of the grips of a loan shark. He arrives at the house believing the family is out of town but quickly learns that

The Goods reminded me a lot of Hot Tub Time Machine in that it should have been much funnier than it was. It was not a bad movie though with decent performances from Jeremy Piven and Kathyrn Hahn notably but far too much fell flat when it should have been a goldmine as dirty old men and lusting for statutory rape only go so far to make an R-rated comedy stand out from the pack. There were simply too many good comedic actors here that everyone was one-dimensionally cliched with no compelling traits. Not even Alan Thicke or Will Ferrell cameos could close the sale.

Written by: PBF The Killer Inside Me is based on a book of the same name by Jim Thompson. This is the second adaptation. A film also called The Killer Inside Me was released in 1976 starring Stacy Keach. This is the only incarnation of the tale I have imbibed. It is not a date film. This film is about Lou Ford ( Casey Affleck ). In a nutshell (no pun intended), he is a deputy sheriff that is not too complex on the surface. He lives and works in Central City, a small town in Texas. He speaks softly, with a charming accent. Also, he is consumed by an ever growing psychosis that causes him to lash out violently, mostly at women. Having to spank his mother’s ass as a child may have something to do with this. There is a story involving a prostitute ( Jessica Alba ), Lou’s girlfriend ( Kate Hudson ) and some money, but to be honest with you, the film could have had Smurfs in it and it would not have mattered. You are not supposed to notice the story so much as the violence. There a

S01E01 Anticipation was pretty high for The Walking Dead after information kept trickling out about the cast, the producers, and of course the involvement of Frank Darabont. After being teased for months with a five minute preview, various zombie images, and only a passing familiarity with the source comic, I am extremely happy (if not at all surprised) that the premiere episode of Dead was damn near perfect. Of course, being that this is just the first part of a six-episode season, we are just getting started with the introductions to the zombie apocalypse. I’m happy that we are treated to the necessary exposition in random bits and phrases as opposed to an entire episode as we are kept on the same level as our protagonist Rick (played by Andrew Lincoln) who has literally just stumbled out of a hospital ward into hell on earth. When he is rescued from certain doom by Morgan Jones (Lennie James) and his son Duane (catch the reference?), Rick is thrust headfirst into this new world,

Written by: PBF After watching this film and reflecting on it, I feel robbed. I feel like there should have been several hundred different things I should have felt that I did not. Similarly to my experience watching Feed , I felt like the subject matter of I Spit on Your Grave was treated with indifference. Jennifer is spending the summer in the country writing her first novel. She has rented a house by a lake. She stops at a gas station and the attendant is quite friendly. There are a couple of locals entertaining themselves over in the grass. When she arrives at the house she has some groceries delivered, and the delivery man is also very nice, and might be a little slow. What I assume is a result of a combination of boredom, sweltering heat and backwoods inbreeding, this group of men violently beat and rape Jennifer at 3 different locations and leave her for dead. This is something that they will soon regret in a terribly boring, anti-climactic fashion. Technically, this r

Written by: Digger The role of a monster in storytelling is to be the manifestation of our fears and anxieties. The reason monsters come in so many varieties, (undead, giant beasts, aliens, demons, radioactive mutants) is because each one represents a different part of our world of which we are afraid. Zombies, vampires, and other humanoid monsters represent parts of the human condition and our own nature that we would rather not acknowledge. Aliens, on the other hand, represent our fears of things that are foreign and unfamiliar. As we are creatures of reason and define our world based on what we know, the unknown is a terrifying concept. The recent independent film Monsters tries to tap into both of these areas of the human psyche, with both alien creatures and with an unflattering portrayal of how society and governments deal with said giant aliens. The premise is that a U.S. Space probe returning to Earth carrying samples from one of Saturn’s moons crash landed in northern Mexi

Written by: Digger Some people consider 1950′s era drive-in science fiction a low point in American cinema. It is true that a lot of garbage came out of studios who green-lit half-hearted scripts because they included space aliens or nuclear energy in them. Although several well made classics came out in the same time span, the stigma of the B movie is a hard one to shake. While there is no reason to be ashamed of enjoying the cheese, what reason would anyone have in making a film now that is intentionally cheesy? A movie that is part bad-sci-fi celebration and part bad-sci-fi parody is Alien Trespass, the story of an invasion in 1950′s America. Eric McCormack plays Ted Lewis, an astronomer that one clear night in his home near a California desert, prepares a wedding anniversary celebration with his wife loving wife Lana (Jody Thompson). Ted sees a bright shooting star in the night sky, which turns out to be a flying saucer that crashes in the desert. On board the ship are two extr

As I sat to watch Saw 3D, I was worried that having not seen the last installment, the series’ reliance on retcons and alternate looks at previous events would prove challenging to keep up with. While finishing part six after the fact helped fill in some of the backstory, it had little bearing on my opinion of the allegedly final Saw film which was very disconnected from the previous entries. Even a brand new viewer to the series would have little difficulty understanding the plot yet be baffled by the shoddy quality in this hugely subpar installment in the Jigsaw saga. Even with the return of director Kevin Greutert and writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, 3D feels more like a straight to DVD, half assed sequel than a legitmate follow up to a major theatrical series. Mostly gone is the intricate weaving of past events into a new narrative featuring Jigsaw’s traps to emphasize the preciousness of life. Of course, there is a B-side story of Bobby, a so-called survivor of one