Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Directed by Michael Bay

Starring Shia Labeuf, Megan Fox

Well, I haven’t even finished watching this one, but I literally threw down the remote in disgust. Where to start? Just look at the goddamn poster.

Maybe this film looked great in dailies, when every shot was screened over and over in slow-motion to analyze every tiny detail, but when put together and run at full speed, this film is an incomprehensible mess. Am I too old to get the effects in this film?

I don’t think so. I grew up on Transformers. Each character was easily distinguishable from each other. Each had a character. When one was injured or killed, you felt an emotional connection with that robot. Even the Decepticons.

This was just money vomited all over the screen. Throw more money at it! That’ll make it better!

Every fight scene was like a Japanese seizure cartoon. Close-up focus on frenetic action sequences with thousands of moving parts lent to complete audience confusion. You could not tell who was Autobot and who was Decepticon. Aside from the main hero robots, the ancillary cast was background cutout nobodies. No personality.

Oh, except for the over stereotypical, racist Autobot twins. Might-as-well painted some Sambo makeup on these guys and have them do some antiquated Jerry Lewis routine from the 50′s. Atrocious.

“Make it look awesome” is the director’s mantra? Well shooting every scene at golden hour with blinding lens flares does not equal awesome. Looks tacky and redundant.

Anyone with any geographic knowledge will also find the flagrant location errors glaring. Cut from the DC Museum Mall to New Mexico Airplane Graveyards, or from Petra in Jordan to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, all supposedly seamlessly close in proximity. Is it worth noting Jordan and Egypt don’t even share a contiguous border?

There’s no weight to any of the action scenes. It’s just people screaming and sound effects blasting. It’s like the creators were either high on coke or blowing an Army recruiter in every shot.

Want more convincing? How about a close-up of John Torturo’s ass-crack? Or a robot with wrecking balls for testicles?

If you absolutely have to see this movie, just skip to the third act and watch Megan Fox running in slow-motion.

A clip:

Night of the Lepus (1972)

Directed by William F. Claxton

Starring Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun, DeForest Kelley

This is a tricky one, because it slips into the, “so-bad-it’s-good” territory…but it’s still god awful so fuck it here we go.

Giant. Mutant. Carnivorous. Rabbits.

Should I continue? Do you really need to after that?

How about some Dr. McCoy? Some Janet Leigh? I mean, if you’re gonna make a movie about typically benign lovable forrest creatures running amok and mauling humans, you might-as-well have Janet Leigh in there. Bones however? I guess it was slow year between Star Trek films. These Kelley kids need diapers!

Zoologists are called in to chemically alter rabbits’ breeding cycles after they’ve destroyed a local rancher’s crops. But when a young child falls in love with one of the test rabbits and releases it into the wild, the rabbit population explodes and mutates into giant flesh-eating bunnies! Flee! Fleeeeee!

What makes this movie so absolutely ridiculous besides the plot, writing and acting, are low budget B movie effects. The film’s creators needed rabbits that grew larger and larger the further the film continued down its track to disaster. Rather than venture into costly stop motion, they simply shot normal sized bunnies running around a miniturized town in slow motion. For the close-up shots with the actors, it was men in bunny suits.

I gotta tell ya, nothing is more funny than watching a group of rabbits jump through a plate glass window in slow motion and seeing a grown woman scream in terror as she’s mauled to death by a guy in a cuddly bunny suit. Just fucking awesome.

The bunny growling is pretty sweet too. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a rabbit make a sound other than a squeal when it’s hit in the back of the head with a lead pipe for supper. Lepus creators decided deep bear like growls were the most suited animal noise for giant mutant rabbits. Which makes you giggle in glee when they try to stage what should be a frightening stalking scene, where the rabbits hunt a hapless townsperson. Then you get the reveal and laugh your ass off.

I could go on and on about how preposterous this film is, but here, witness the magic for yourself.

Made of Honor (2008)

Directed by Paul Weiland

Starring Patrick Dempsey
Michelle Monaghan

You know what takes a lot of time and energy? Getting married. Not that the event wasn’t beautiful and emotional and all that shit, but from a guy’s perspective, I’m glad I only have to do it once. Married guys, where you at? Can I get a what, what…or whatever?

It’s all the planning, the family, the drama, the last minute crisis. Give me a quiet day by the pool with an ice cold Mai Tai and a good book instead. So while we’re on the subject, let’s talk about the unrealistic expectations set forth by Hollywood romantic comedies surrounding weddings, like Made of Honor for instance.

Might as well called this one Made of Shit, cause that’s what it was. My wife is a huge Patrick Dempsey fan. I guess the image of his lanky, pasty, shirtless torso driving a riding mower around surburbia in Can’t Buy Me Love never left her secret fantasy place. Which means years later, when Mr. McDreamy has a resurgence in popularity, I have to go see all the shitty, shitty romantic comedies he has to rehash.

She’d been dying to see this one and I had made her watch In Brujes, Dark Knight, and Wall E recently (I know, I’m such a bastard) so it was time to jump on a shit grenade. Like I hadn’t learned anything from 27 Dresses. So I cave one night on our honeymoon, we order it from pay per view.

In this train-wreck, Dempsey plays an arrogant womanizer who only realizes his female best friend from college is the woman of his dreams after she’s engaged to another man. Heard it before? I know, the orginality floored me as well.

What really made this film stink, besides the re-tread plot, were the ancillary characters and transparent story devices. Let’s start with the writing. Any time, Dempsey came across as too chauvenistic, they’d throw in a bit with him petting a random dog. In screenwriting, the oldest and most blatant way to get the audience to identify with the main character is to have him interact positively with either pets or kids. Except the way this was used, it made some weird, somewhat offensive connection between man’s best friend and his best friend, making me think he thought of her as a dog.

How about the supporting cast? One the male side you’ve got the wise-cracking token black friend, two other guys I can’t even remember having a personality, and this random dork they all play basketball who I guess was supposed to be there for comedic relief, but really, just came across sad and pathetic. On the female side, you’ve got fat girl on the liquid diet (=fat jokes), the temptress/ex-mistress of Dempsey Bijou Phillips (=slut jokes, at least you get to see her in some lingierie), and the plain Jane (=no jokes).

The fact that none of the characters were fleshed out to anything more than one dimension made every joke just increasingly more ridiculous. Example, the protagonist doesn’t even have a job as far as I can tell, yet he does somehow have a lifestyle like P-Diddy in Manhattan.

Throw in a few heavy handed prat falls, some anal beads on an old woman (no joke), and a panaplea of overracted, melodramatic garbage and you’ve got the recipe for disaster. What made it worse was on the flight back from Hawaii, the only movie showing was, you guessed it, Made of Honor. Thank god for first class drink service.

Here ya go assholes

Batman & Robin (1997)

Directed by Joel Schumacher

Starring George Clooney, Chris O’Donnell, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Uma Thurman, Alicia Silverstone

Things have been quiet around Shitflix lately, but that’s because I haven’t seen a lot of shit, no sir, I have been seeing a lot of shit, like Night of the Lepus! Holy shit! Killer rabbits vs. Dr. McCoy! Coming soon…

Nope this post is in honor of the latest Chris Nolan helmed Batman movie which I can’t wait until tonight to see. So nice to see the potential realized on this franchise after the dissapointing mess it was years ago. It took almost ten years to inject new life into the Caped Crusader after this turkey.

Batman and Robin is basically Joel Schumacher’s gay bondage fantasy, where Batman is obsessed with skin tight latex clothing and cavorts around with a vapid, pandering young cohort. If your idea of entertainment is close-ups on Chris O’Donnell’s ass and sculpted plastic nipples on rubber costumes than this is your film baby. What’s that? Can’t get any gayer? How about a choreographed ice skate fight on wires? The fact that they wrote in pop out ice skates on the Batsuit makes my skin crawl.

Hoping that some testosterone will be injected into the flick with the addition of Schwarzeneggar? Well, you can bury that dream right next to your testicles. This is Arnold’s worst role since Jingle All the Way. Cheesey, non-funny one liner references to ice prevade his ham-fisted performance as Mister Freeze. And nothing is more pathetic than watching Arnold try to cry on screen.

Except maybe Alicia Silverstone’s acting. Take the marbles out of your mouth. Jesus.

The closest I compare the experience of watching this “film” would be taking the finger paintings from the students at a school for the exceptional and trying to tout the tard tapestries as Titians. You can see the anguish on George Clooney’s face with each delivered line. Like some retarded mong just off-screen is yelling at him, “Ooo, now say hi Freeze I’m Baman.”

Now watch Joel Schumacher apologize for the foppish, over-funded mess:

27 Dresses

Directed by Anne Fletcher

Starring Katherine Heigl, James Marsden

What…a fucking turd. Jaysus.

Ok a little back story. Being in a relationship…with a woman, gentlemen, help me out, you are bound to see more than your fair share of shitty romantic comedies. Being “the one in the know,” I am typically required to pick out movies that I think my girlfriend might like.

Now I’ll admit it. I did like Aline Brosh McKenna’s Devil Wears Prada. However, she was the writer. I’ve learned that a lot of things can happen between the page and the screen. Sometimes a lot of things can happen to the page.

From what I’ve heard, once a writer has a big box office success, producers typically ask, “Hey, what else ya got?” Sometimes, there’s a reason writers haven’t had any success before.

Well, 27 Dresses is a perfect example. Starring the frumpy girl from Knocked Up and Cyclops, Dresses steps through the predictable formula of any forgettable romantic comedy. You’ve got the good girl, who just wants to marry the guy of her dreams, but there’s this obnoxious, cute guy who keep snapping her back to reality until, oh my god, she realizes, she’s in love with Han Solo. The End.

Except, take that formula, throw it in the Cuisinart on Puree, and behold the stinky, gooey mess of a bad blend. ALL, and I’m not kidding, ALL the jokes miss the mark. No comedic scenario is even remotely believable. The characters are plastic and annoying. And the plot is completely predictable and catered for a institution full of developmentally challenged plaintards. I just made up a new word! Mark the date Urbandictionary!

Take, for example, the opening sequence, where poor doormat Heigl hops between two or three different weddings in New York City.  She charters a taxi to drive her back and forth not less than a dozen times, changing dresses in the back seat each time, and no one seems to notice.  Now, once or twice, maybe three times, this would have been funny.  But when the gag runs on for a good 15 minutes, you start to question your sanity.  Even my girlfriend thought it was retarded.

All I’m saying is, if you’re a guy in the same situtation I’m in, there are a lot more tolerable romantic comedies out there for you to drink an entire bottle of wine to while your girlfriend cries her eyes out. If you do have to sit through this one, make sure you’ve got a convient distraction like cellphone Sodoku or a frontal lobotamy. Cause this shit is like crack for chicks.

Coming soon, Made of Honor. God. Damn it.

Here, enjoy a sample of the magic featuring the topless chick from Harold and Kumar and Heartbreak Kid:

Impulse (2008)

Director: Charles T. Kanganis

Starring: Angus Macfadyen, Willa Ford

Been a little dead in here lately, partly because I’m moving, busy with work…and gta4, but we’re back-ish with a truly god-awful film for you to avoid. I’ll admit it, the only reason I rented this one was because the girl on the box looked hot and given the rating and the fact it went straight to DVD, there was about a 99% chance that this film would deliver the goods.

Well it kinda delivered the goods, if you subtract story, character, and insomnia out of the package, that’s right, I fell asleep in the middle of this one. I think that’s a first for me. Needless to say, after the flurry of torrid affairs in the first/second act of the film, you’ve got everything you can milk out of this turkey and it’s time to hit fast-forward.

Impulse stars a couple of nobodies, Willa Ford who I guess dated a Backstreet Boy and had a failing pop musician career (I don’t know, that’s what Wikipedia told me), and Robert the Bruce, plus about 50 pounds. Look out ladies! The only thing more distracting than Angus Macfadyen’s huge gut, is his glaring inability to act. The years since Braveheart have not been kind.

Given two roles in this picture, one the role of the stuffy psychiatrist and the other, an obsessive sex-crazed killer, Angus clearly looks out of his element. It’s too much legwork for aging rookie, and he shows how uncomfortable he is with the material in every scene. Willa matches his performance with the kind of stone-faced, lackluster emotion you’d see in the average Xanex addicted middle aged housewife.

Thankfully, she shows her cans.

Other than that, it’s the typical, formulaic case of mistaken identity thriller that will leave you on the edge of your seat wondering which cushion the remote fell between.

Soak in that acting, whew:

Catwoman (2004)

Directed by Pitof

Starring Halle Berry, Benjamin Bratt, Sharon Stone

Wow, holy shit this movie is bad. Should have called is Scatwoman, hahahaha, get it? Sigh…

Ok, time to do the nasty, Men at Work style. I already knew about the Razzies this film garnered for Worst Picture, Worst Actress, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay (believe it or not, people actually fought over the writing credit for this one) before I rented it, and that alone peaked my interest, kind of like a 10 car pile-up or a gruesome train accident. One of my friends also did some of the motion capture on the titular character, so I decided, foolishly, to waste and hour and a half of my life and open Pandora’ Box.

First of all, the “plot.” Meek Patience Phillips is an artist for a cosmetics company that she finds is actually promoting dangerous beauty products. When caught snooping for more information, she is drowned, killed, and then reanimated by a stray cat she helped the day before (Da Crow anyone?). In hindsight, the film should have ended with Halle Berry dead in a sewer pipe, but sadly no, she goes on to gain superhuman powers and an affinity for skin-tight leather outfits, flipping the bird at the original DC Selina Kyle Catwoman.

I’ll go easy on the CG alone since my friend worked on that, suffice to say it looks, how do you say…out of place. Too many fake cats are substituted where real ones could have worked and CG Halle’s slow motion action moves belie the budget and the technology available. I can understand the initial reasoning for the mocap substitution, showcasing Catwoman’s new acrobatic moves, and granted this is probably one of the few watchable attributes of the film, but it still looks ridiculous against the backdrop of reality.

Littered throughout the film are a series of cheap gags that fall flat, showcasing her other special powers like the ability to hiss at dogs, lose her shit around water, and tinker with BDSM. The final fight sequence features a lackluster fight against a marble-faced Sharon Stone, who should have won at least a Razzie nomination for her own over-the-top cheeseball performance. I’m not even going to make fun of the director, another of these one name self-egrandizing overnight, flash-in-the-pan sensations. Stick to making commercials…Pitof.

Lacking any of the style, design, or respect to the source material, Catwoman poops out dissapointment after litter-encrusted dissapointment as you anxiously approach the credits. The dialogue hangs in your throat like an sticky hairball and the performances will have you begging to be put to sleep. Honestly, I would rather clean the cat piss out of my couch cushions again than rewatch this movie.

Count ‘em, that’s four, FOUR! cat jokes in the last paragraph. Top that.

White Chicks (2004)

Directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans

Starring Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Busy Phillips

…

I don’t even know where to begin.  Frankly, I’m a little ashamed to have even seen this.  The other movies at least had some kind of draw to see them, a memorable reoccuring villain, an ailing franchise, a giant shark…but this?  What is my excuse?  Jesus, I guess I though it was going to be funny.

What’s sad, despite all the reviews lambasting this turd, it still had box office success, making over 70 million in its opening weeked.  70 million.  Just to put that in relative terms, people would rather go see White Chicks, than 3:10 to Yuma, Atonement, or Michael Clayton.  They’d rather see that than Hot Fuzz or Grindhouse by a factor of three.  I can only imagine that these were the same people that filled the 3 running shows of sold out Way She Move screenings at my local theater.

And no, I did not contribute to those numbers.  Having smirked at one of the Scary Movie sequels, I thought maybe I’d get at least a comparable amount of satisfaction out of renting this film.  Did I mention how ashamed I am?

Do you even want the plot?  So these two superhip FBI agents act like retards on the job, so they’re given a retarded assignment, escort two prissy rich white girls to the Hamptons, but they get injured and refuse to go, so the Wayan brothers put on bad prothestics and, jesus, what the fuck am I doing?

You know what?  You already know the plot, the plot is, let’s get the stereotypical white and black people together and show how lame the white people are.  Remember that bit in the Simpsons where Homer is watching the black comedian who says, “White People drive like this, do de do de do, but black people drive like this, yeah, yeah,” and Homer laughs, “It’s true!  It’s true!  We’re so lame!”  Yeah, it’s that for an hour and a half.

The only non-fomulaic thing in this picture is the reoccuring boom mic creeping into frame.  You want to rent a good mistaken identity comedy, get Some Like it Hot.  You want to get eye and ear fucked for 90 minutes by a syphiletic transient, rent White Chicks.  It’s cheaper and you won’t need penicilin afterward.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

Directed by William Shatner

Starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols

I’m a trekkie.

There I said it. But this film questioned my faith in the franchise, almost as much as Insurrection, but at least 9 had some decent effects. After watching this film in the theater, I immediately repressed it from my memory, and there it lay in dormancy, until today. Today, I dug up the smelly bloated corpse of a memory that remained of this film, dusted it off, and realized, maybe some things should just stay buried.

STV was the culimnation of Shatner’s bruised ego getting him a feature film directorial debut in the wake of Nimoy’s success on III and IV. While the inital screenplay was supposed to have a much darker tone according to Shatner, Paramount demanded the injection of shitty shitty humor to mimic The Voyage Home’s box-office appeal. In the framework of this film though, most of the jokes come at the expense of the ancillary characters and completely bomb when they involve the main cast.  Unless you consider the farcical scene where Kirk free climbs El Capitan, that was funny…but I wasn’t laughing with them.

The plot is weak and contrived, a hijacked Enterprise sent to the center of universe to save God, the acting is tired and forced, and the effects were shotty. Usually done by ILM who was busy with Indy 3, the special effects were passed off to a smaller house who did a substandard job, removing the last possible reason for rewatching this movie.  Interesting to note, the budget had to exclude a scene where Kirk fights a giant rock monster, which later got inserted into the excellent satire movie Galaxy Quest.

Having intially repressed the memory of this film, I was channel surfing one day and came across V playing on cable and stopped to watch a scene where a middle-aged, out of shape Uhura does a dance of seduction and woos a crowd of men, topping it off with a shitty joke. Then I went back to Divorce Court.

Thankfully, Shatner’s director legacy did not live long and prosper and Nicholas Meyer, scribe for the famous even movies (2, 4, and 6), came back to breath decency back into the series on the next one. It’s best you just warp by this one.

Hellraiser 8: Hellworld (2005)

Directed by Rick Bota

Starring Doug Bradley, Stelian Urian, Lance Henriksen, Katheryn Winnick, Anna Tolputt, Henry Cavill

“8? There’s a Hellraiser 8?” you ask.

Yes, there’s a Hellraiser 8, but it doesnt look anything like any of its predecessors and went straight to dvd. First off, look at that poster! Pinhead’s in the Matrix! Oh noes!!!

Ignoring the fact that both Hellraiser 7 and 8 came out in the same year, I threw them both in my rental queue, excited to see what a new writing and directing team could do for the series.

The answer? Not much.

Noted, I’ve seen all the Hellraiser sequels and to date the only ones worth seeing are two and five. Yes, Hellraiser V: Inferno, is worth a viewing, mostly as an interesting take on the series from a psychological thriller perspective. So far, everything else has been pure drek, this latest installment being worst.

Hellworld takes the concept of Hellraiser to the online gaming arena, but then it stops after the first death and turns into a mansion party turned slasher fest. The cenobites make their perfunctory appearance but gone are the smart back stories and clever kills from earlier in the series. 8 is more a random slasher film, Pinhead now turned into your run of the mill, one dimensional homicidal stabophile.

Shot in Romania, like most of the sequel slasher straight to dvd films of 2005, Hellworld, tries to hold onto its franchise production value and does manage to get Doug Bradley back in the suit, as well as, get Lance Henrikson flexing his B-movie muscles again, but everything else in the film is a cheap facade. Notable newcomer Katheryn Winnick is fun to watch, mostly because of her skin-tight leather pants, but then all of sudden at the end, she develops crazy kung-fu skills and manges to slow-mo high roundhouse kick a villain in the face from straight out of nowhere.

Insert stock comedic black friend, some Eastern block boobs, and a few buckets of fake blood, edit and distribute to the gullible fans. The ending feels contrived, the acting and dialogue over the top, and the attempt at making the mileu look like upstate New York is laughable. Skip it and get five if you haven’t seen it, at least that one has a story.