…watch it quick before he makes me take it down.

This one, like every other MTBMEOAAK (wow what an awful acronym) came from a trailer on the aforementioned pay-per-view trailers channel.  Between the campy, pulpy-ass trailers for shit like Hardware and Shocker (we’ll get to that one later) there was a trailer for a pretty serious-looking horror flick called Body Parts, starring Jeff Fahey, one of the crazier looking dudes in the 90’s horror movie game.  Second place goes to Brad Dourif, who is also in this movie!  Seriously their scenes together are awesome…like a “weird, portentous and creepy stare” competition, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Body Parts is about an ineffectual shrink (Crazy-Eyes Fahey) with two kids and an understanding wife who gets into a semi-hilarious car accident that completely pulverizes his right arm.  While in the hospital, his distressed wife signs off on an experimental operation to replace his arm with an arm from some unnamed donor.

As he is wheeled into the operating room there are all these great shots of cops in scrubs surrounding the operating table holding shotguns, so you know the donor must be a dangerous son of a bitch.  Those shots might have been my favorite of the whole movie.  What a cool image.  After Fahey’s creepy doctor cuts off the donors head, the cops all march out as Fahey passes out.  He comes to with the news that he now has a new arm, and that after therapy he will be able to use it again.  This is what I liked about the movie, for its pretty ridiculous premise, it is played pretty seriously, as if the story was unfolding in the real, sane world.  Fahey’s therapy is shitty.  Like real therapy.  It hurts like hell and his arm is pretty much useless in the beginning.  Eventually though it gets stronger and he is able to go home where he can throw a mean football with his son…who he later punches right in the face.

Let me back up though.  Watching that trailer as a 9 year old, the only thing I got was that Body Parts would contain a lot of weird medical horror and that this guy with weird eyes and a weird arm totally loses his shit for some reason.  I wasn’t familiar with the “psychological” or “body” horror genres (didnt even know what a “genre” was), but I was definitely intrigued.  Intrigued more than scared.  So I did some homework and checked out the box extensively at Panorama Video in Bloomington.  My conclusion was “Yup, I’m bugged the fuck out by this movie, and it looks like we may have some boobs in this one.”

Well, now that I’ve taken some time out of my adult life to check this movie out, I can verify that while there are no boobs, Body Parts is still a pretty good movie.

As Fahey starts to use his arm for awesome things like throwing the football and finger banging his wife, he’s happy, and he’s also a medical miracle.  His doctor is set to win the Nobel Prize as she transplants the rest of the donor’s limbs to other needy patients.  Brad Dourif gets the left arm, and some Other Guy gets the legs.  Limb transplants are far fetched, but the movie does a pretty decent job of making them seem plausible.  Everything seems to be going well, which is the 90’s horror cue for the shit to start hitting the fan.  First Fahey cuts himself shaving and screams at his kids.  Then, while wrestling with his son, he smacks him in the face after the kid executes a perfectly legal elbow drop.   The final straw is when his hand tries to strangle his understanding wife in her sleep.

So he gets kicked out of the house and goes into exile, trying to track down the source of evil in his body “is evil in the skin?” he muses in a bar with Brad Dourif and Other Guy…right before he demolishes 6 dudes with just one arm.  Despite his new bar-fighting skills though, he’s all alone.  While all his arm can do is fight generic 90’s thugs or sucker punch an 8-year-old, his new buddies are using their transplants to paint awesome art and dunk all over their friends.  So the film develops into one of those “No one will believe me!” situations, which is cool.

Eventually he figures out that his arm belonged to a murdering maniac freak, and that the arm is turning him into a murdering maniac freak.  His brothers-in-arms (heyo!) start turning up murdered and missing their limbs, while the question remains…who got the head?

I’ll leave you with that gem.

I kid, I’m not trying to take the piss out of this movie.  Its actually pretty good.  I like that it took itself so seriously.  The only humor comes from Brad Dourif being awesome and hilarious, the rest is super somber and straightforward with an over the top score underlining the gravity of everything.  It also had a great attention to detail.  It was clear that the director (Eric Red, who wrote some great movies like Near Dark and The Hitcher, but didn’t direct too many cool things) took the whole thing very seriously as an exploration of evil, madness, and violence and not as an excuse to pack as much gore and depravity onto the screen as possible.  Which is respectable.  There’s definitely a place for both.

Looking back, it seemed like the early 90’s were the place for a little reality in horror flicks.  Like all the horror filmmakers in the 90’s finally paid attention to that asshole who sat through every movie in the 80’s going “Nuh-uh, there’s NO way that would happen”, prompting them to start adding a little bit of logic into their nightmares.  Sure, Body Parts is the extreme end of that, maybe it could have a little more fun, but it is admirable that dude really tried to make a horror masterpiece.  He didn’t succeed, but it wasn’t a total failure.

Conclusion:  I actually was slightly bugged out by this one as an adult.  There were times (especially in the opening credits) where that score actually got to me, and some moments that were actually pretty creepy.  9 year old me would have been into it because it was rated R and holy shit rated R movies were the ultimate forbidden fruit back then, but I think the lack of boobs would have knocked it down a few pegs.

I started a Tumblr Blog (Tumblog?) called Bug Hunt.  It is made up of nothing but pop-culture references to the Alien films.  That’s seriously all it is.  God hates us all.

Bug Hunt

The video has almost 2 million plays on youtube and it just went up on Friday, so naturally, the internet has gotten a hold of it to do awesome things like this.

Cee-Lo’s Shawshank Redemption from Dallas Observer on Vimeo.

They also did the Peter Gabriel scene from Say Anything and that one dance scene from Dirty Dancing.  My question was “where the hell is the Reservoir Dogs ‘Stuck in the Middle With You’ video?”  So I went ahead and made one.  Its way more disturbing than it should be, but shit…jumping on internet memes for selfish gains is a tough job, but someone has to do it.  I’m unable to embed it, but all you have to do is click the gruesome screen shot below to watch it on my channel.  EDIT:  WMG Pulled it off youtube.  Here it is on Vimeo.

Cee Lo Mashup: Reservoir Dogs + “F*CK YOU” from Ryan W on Vimeo.

Just a note:  This game is far more hilarious if you start with AVP:R and move backwards.  Good luck and godspeed.

* Three Red Dots – Three Drinks
* Predator Heals Himself – Full Beer
* Predator Self Destruct – Full Beer
* Shoulder Cannon Kill – 2 Drinks
* Levelling The Jungle Scene – Have to Drink The Entire Time Its Happening
* Jesse Ventura Spits – 1 Drink
* Jesse Ventura Says “Slack Jawed Faggots” – Half Beer
* Gratuitous Shirtless Dude shots – 1 drink
* Anyone Says “One Ugly Motherfucker” – Full Beer
* Disc Kill – 1 Drink
* Spear Kill – 1 Drink
* Decapitations – 1 Drink
* Skinned Bodies – 1 Drink
* Badass Wrist Blade Intimidation – 1 Drink
* Gary Busey does something weird – 2 drinks
* Bill Paxton Hits on a Chick – 2 drinks
* Boobs – 2 drinks (one for each boob)

A few weekends ago, I went and saw the movie Predators.  My friend Matt and I are massive fans of the Aliens and Predator movies, so he took some time out from playing World of Warcraft to fly out here from Minnesota and see it with me and our mutual friend Ae.  To prepare for what we hoped would be an epic experience, we developed the Predator drinking game.  The rules are as follows:

• Three Red Dots – Three Drinks
• Predator Heals Himself – Full Beer
• Predator Self Destruct – Full Beer
• Shoulder Cannon Kill – 2 Drinks
• Levelling The Jungle Scene – Have to Drink The Entire Time Its Happening
• Jesse Ventura Spits – 1 Drink
• Jesse Ventura Says “Slack Jawed Faggots” – Half Beer
• Gratuitous Shirtless Dude shots – 1 drink
• Anyone Says “One Ugly Motherfucker”  – Full Beer
• Disc Kill – 1 Drink
• Spear Kill – 1 Drink
• Decapitations – 1 Drink
• Skinned Bodies – 1 Drink
• Badass Wrist Blade Intimidation – 1 Drink
• Gary Busey does something weird – 2 drinks
• Bill Paxton Hits on a Chick – 2 drinks
• Boobs – 2 drinks (one for each boob)

To play the game, we executed the Predator movies in reverse, starting with AVP:R, then AVP, then Predator 2, then Predator.  While playing this game, 2 things were difficult.  The first difficult thing was all the drinking.  Seriously, there are so many wrist blade intimidation/disc/spear/decapitation combos in these movies.  A predator gets on a spree, and suddenly you owe the game 6 beers.  Also, AVP, though it is PG-13 (and mostly terrible), is deceptively heavy on the kills and wrist blade intimidations and whatnot.  We thought it would be a break in the action.  It wasn’t.  I guess you could say that whoever won, we lost.

By the time we made it to the first movie, we were all basically blacked out, and we never made it past the handshake scene, because we stopped to re enact it frame-by-drunken-frame about 16 times.  So yeah, the drinking game was extremely hard, but it paled in comparison to the second difficult thing which is Being a Fan of the Predator (and Aliens) Films.

As I watched the whole series in reverse, I realized that the state of the Predator franchise has been in one big downward slide since Ol’ Painless came out of the bag.  The same goes for the Alien franchise, which has deteriorated in parallel since the second film, but we’ll just focus on Predator for now.

Alien Versus Predator: Requiem

AVP:R is a joke.  Some music video directors and some hack writers took a bunch of soap opera (and Lost?) b-team actors (Whoa its Rickety Cricket from Always Sunny!) and threw them into a pretty basic premise with some inspired moments and a lot of gore and still managed to fail.  There are some cool moments (a trend that gets repeated throughout the series) but ultimately the whole thing is bad.  Almost bad enough to call it “So-Bad-Its-Good”, but not quite there.  I read somewhere that the directors wanted to cut out the human element, and start the movie off inside the Predator camp, with little to no dialogue…like Dances With Wolves or Wall-E.  That would have been awesome.  Why they chose to run the other direction, I’ll never know.  The “human” plot of Guy-with-checkered-past coming back to his hometown to brood and make allusions to his checkered past while his little brother gets beat up a lot and delivers pizzas and a marine comes home from Afghanistan and a Predator runs around playing David Caruso “investigating” the Alien presence could basically be any movie plot.  Switch out the Aliens with a serial killer or a shark or a coven of witches and swap the predator with Robert Shaw or a detective played by Morgan Freeman and you have…ah fuck it.  You have every movie on TBS in the afternoon, ever.  It was also DARK, not in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre kind of way, but in a “what the fuck is wrong with my TV?” kind of way.  It also rips off the ending from Aliens completely.

Alien Versus Predator

Getting to AVP after AVP:R is like finding an oasis in the desert.  Its a shitty oasis with no boobs and no blood and a stupid Buddy Movie subplot, but its still an oasis.  From the beginning, its clear that AVP was created by someone with EXPERIENCE in making movies (The Resident Evil Franchise, Event Horizon).  Its shot pretty well, you can see stuff (which we should all know not to take for granted at this point), and the effects budget was obviously pretty big.  The characters are pretty hastily defined, but it sets up something fun:  An Alien queen is trapped in Antarctica shitting out Aliens and a bunch of Predators are going to go hunt them while a whole bunch of humans show up to die in horrifying ways!  Badass!  Again, there are some awesome moments, but the second the Predator teaches the hero-chick how to be a Predator the whole thing falls apart.  So stupid.  The cool moments:  An Alien and a Predator throwing each other around like wrestlers, and a pretty amazing boss fight, but the movie still fails to satisfy the irresistible premise of Aliens and Predators engaging in intergalactic conflict.

Then we go back 14 years to Predator 2.  Note the time difference.  14 fucking years we fans have to wait for another Predator to appear on screen.  That’s dedication.

Predator 2

Awesome fucking movie.  I don’t care what anyone says, this movie rules.  There is almost nothing wrong with it (ok there are some things, but fuck you), and it is also the only time we see boobs in the whole franchise.  4 movies and only two living, breathing boobs to be found!  If anyone wants to dispute me on the awesomeness of this movie, do it now.  It has Gary fucking Busey, a Predator picking off coked-up Colombian gang members, Danny Glover being too old for this shit, Bill Paxton hitting on chicks (seriously, he’s Hudson wearing a suit in this movie), a dude getting his spine AND skull ripped out, the first appearance of the bladed disc, the first appearance of the spear, the slaughterhouse scene, and the fucking subway scene.  Like Alien 3, I have no idea why anyone rips on this movie.  In the context of the Predator series, Predator 2 is perfect.  It advances the mythology (and even sets up the Alien Vs Predator concept), has awesome action, great pacing, more explosions, more deaths, and a new setting.  I realize that in the eyes of AFI or whoever decides that movies are good Predator 2 is hokey and weird and kind of dumb, but to Predator fans, this movie is the truth.  I used to like this better than the first one, and shit…sometimes I still do.

Predator

The one that started it all.  I’ve read a lot about this movie and the general consensus seems to be that Predator is an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie first, with everything else being secondary.  I disagree, I actually think its the least Ahnold-y of his movies, due to the awesome supporting cast and the flipped premise.  A lot of his early films are just him being Arnold Schwarzenegger offing truckloads of disposable extras and spitting one liners while some chick follows him around and almost gets killed a million times.  In Predator, he’s surrounded by one of the most bad-ass tough guy teams ever to hit the screen, and no matter how many disposable bad guys he and his friends destroy (complete with awesome live action stunts), there is always one ultimate bad-ass watching him, waiting for his time to go one-on-one.  Its like the Predator watched an Arnold movie marathon from his Predator-throne and thought “this dude looks pretty badass.  I’m going to find him, kill all of his friends, and then challenge him to a fist fight.”  Its a Predator movie.  The Predator owns the movie the whole time, which is no small feat considering the awesome cast and engaging story.  Sure, Arnold wins, but that’s the game.  The Predator is ready to die for the hunt, and there’s a whole planet of these motherfuckers somewhere waiting to come and hunt again.

We didn’t make it that far though.  We were blacked out with half full beers in our hands long before we could check out the “Leveling the Jungle” scene.

Predators

So we got up on Saturday July 10th after this movie marathon, and dragged our carcasses to Kips Bay to see Predators, the “re-boot” of the franchise, produced by Robert Rodriguez, starring Adrien Brody.  Again, another case with a genius premise.  A crew of ultimate bad-asses from planet earth (a Yakuza samurai, a hot-chick sniper, an African special forces guy, a Mexican gangster, a death row inmate, a black ops dude, and a Russian military soldier) all wake up on an alien planet, to be hunted by the predators.  Wow.  What an awesome idea for a movie.  Seems hard to fuck up.  Well, it doesn’t fail…but it does just kind of…under-perform.  This movie is like a guy you work with who doesn’t always come in on time, and he does mediocre work, but he’s not bad enough to fire or even really care about.  After the movie, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of “meh”.  It should have been easy to make this one a blast, but for some stupid reason it took itself so seriously and refused to have any fun with its over-the-top premise.  Or even when it seemed like something sweet was going happen, like a scene where the Yakuza has a SAMURAI SWORD FIGHT WITH A PREDATOR, it ended up lame and underwhelming.  Seriously how is that possible?  I was ready for it to be on par with the Zombie Vs. Shark scene from Zombi, but somehow, it was BORING, which is indicative of the whole problem with this movie (and the franchise as a whole), that it manages to take irresistible setups and render them boring as hell.  More cool moments happened in Predators but it took itself so seriously that I ended up taking it seriously, which ended in just 90 minutes of no fun.  And yet again, there is a “Predator and Human joining forces” subplot that fails just as bad as it did in AVP.

After this whole adventure I was forced to take a hard look at my fandom of the Aliens and Predator movies, and I concluded that not only is it hard to enjoy a lot of these movies, but its downright hard to stay a fanatic after each crushing defeat.  I think we Aliens and Predator fans have it the worst when it comes to being fanatics.  No one yells at the screen during the midnight screenings.  Our video games, while once great, now generally suck.  Our fan fiction and fan art is TERRIBLE (alright all fan fiction and fan art is terrible), and the films we love haven’t been good since the early 90’s.  Its one kick in the nuts after another.  I mean, Star Wars fans got it pretty bad, but at least they got bent over by a bazillion dollar over the top spectacle that at least finished nicely.  And Lord of the Rings nerds, well…they’re pretty high on the hog with all their Oscar nominations and LARPing (not us…do you know how fucking hard it is to climb a tree holding a spear?). Star Trek freaks are kicking ass too with their awesome J.J. Abrams re-boot and good-looking cast.  Twilight fans…well they’re are all doomed anyway once Breaking-Batshit-Dawn comes out, but at least they get boners.  We get nothing of the like.  We get Adrien Brody doing a batman voice…Ripley impersonating an Alien…and Gary Busey.

My point is:  It’s tough being a fan of the Aliens and Predator franchise, but we shall overcome.  I’m not giving up on these movies and I never will.  I’m still going to buy Predators on DVD, and I’ll be waiting patiently for that Alien prequel I read about on some disreputable website 12 years ago.

That’s it.  If you are a fellow fan, please feel free to commiserate and share your hardships right here in the comments.  We’ll always have each other, right guys?

So, I was going to do Popcorn, for the next installment of MTBMOAK (jesus…need a better acronym), but I had to put that one on the back burner, since the new Nightmare on Elm Street travesty is out and I wanted to catch up on the series before I went and had my hopes and dreams shattered.  Thanks Platinum Dunes…you should have just stuck with Alexander Aja and the Hills Have Eyes Remake…that shit was badass.

The fifth nightmare trailer (seen above) ran in constant rotation on the free Pay Per View previews channel, and I remember being utterly horrified and excited by it.  At the time, I think the only Nightmare on Elm Street I had any experience with was the fourth one, when a bunch of older kids made me watch it at a party that my parents dragged me to.  Being well versed in the boxes and cover art for each Freddy Movie (my favorite being Part 3), I knew what he was about, and I even knew that he had started off scary and gradually got funnier and funnier.  That doesn’t mean he still didn’t freak the shit out of me though.  It was the dream sequences that did it…the first one I remember seeing was in part 4, when Kincaid (YES I know the Dream Warriors by name, thanks) gets trapped in a junkyard by Freddy, and as the camera zoomed out, we see that the entire planet is one huge junkyard.  5 minutes in, for the impatient.

Same thing with the asthmatic girl’s death scene (sorry don’t know her name because she wasn’t a Dream Warrior) while taking a test in class.  The fact that she was being murdered by Freddy in a dream while everyone around her just sat there filling in their test sheets freaked me the hell out, because it nailed that weird helpless feeling you get in dreams where something awful is happening, and while there are people around, no one is doing anything. 2 minutes in.

You can imagine how traumatic this stuff can be for an 7 year old who knew nothing about surrealism, or any of the other bullshit words they use to describe those dream sequences.  That shit was just scary. The trailer for the fifth movie bugged me out so bad because it seemed like they had amped up the weird in the 5th movie, with all the odd camera angles, drooling maniacs, birth canal imagery, and some freaky shit involving a motorcycle.  I watched that trailer about 6 times a day, and every time, it made life feel like a living nightmare.  Which has a weird attraction to a nerdy little kid with an overactive imagination.  I also remember getting chills from the “Kruger, this time its for keeps!” line, because being as terrified as I was, it was cool to see someone fighting back against the terror…which is why I liked the cover to the 3rd movie so much… more on all that later.

So after getting my girlfriend to begrudgingly re-watch the series with me (I skipped Part 2 to expedite the process and I’d seen most of it when I was really young and still thought it was a little “gay”), we made it from the first (pretty damn awesome) to The Dream Warriors (still the best, but a little slow), through Dream Master (really ridiculous but had its moments and it made me go download that dramarama song), and almost made it to The Dream Child before I lost control of the Netflix queue in a sucker’s bet with my girlfriend, so the 5th movie was knocked out in favor of about a thousand Hilary Duff movies or whatever it is girls watch…I kid, she actually has great taste.  So I had to open an account at the shady video store across the street to watch this one.

Everything I had read said it was a well-meaning piece of bad that got hacked up by the MPAA so it wouldn’t get an NC-17 rating and was plagued with confused writers who were still finishing the script as the movie was being shot.  Freddy’s Dead is usually regarded as the worst Nightmare movie, with this one as the second or third worst.  SO there you have it.  As I was doing all my usual internet opinion-reading and regurgitating, I realized that 9 YEAR OLD ME DIDN’T READ SHIT UNLESS IT WAS CALVIN AND HOBBES OR HARDY BOYS.  So I stopped giving a shit what the internet thought and I attacked The Dream Child with the freshest pair of eyes I could muster.  This wasn’t hard since I don’t have much opinion on the Nightmare movies anyway, which should be obvious since its taken me 19 years to see even one in its entirety (apart from New Nightmare, which ruled).  So here’s what happened, through the eyes of me as a kid:

The story follows Alice, The Dream Master who can pull other people into her dreams whenever she wants.  In the beginning she’s doing something with her boyfriend Dan, who survived from Part 4, and they are moaning and scratching each others backs and everything is all blue and they arent wearing clothes but you dont see boobs then.  Then it gets crazy, because Freddy was dead, but Alice starts having these freaky dreams, like, she almost drowns in her shower, and then she even starts dreaming when she is awake!  Turns out she is pregnant, and they totally showed boobs in the shower part.  Her child is named Jacob and he is dreaming about Freddy because he IS part of Freddy, or something…Freddy is trying to come into the world through Jacob…or something.  But he’s not born yet, and the girls friends start dying in really crazy ways, and Freddy’s Mom was raped by 100 maniacs in an insane asylum and she is also in the dreams.  Then Freddy comes alive in the dream and finds his glove and is all freaky with one of his arms extra long and he says, “Its a boy!”.  Then Freddy skateboards and a dude shoots him with guns but then Freddy comes back all big like a wrestler and he is super Freddy and kills the guy with guns then Dan tries to drive his truck to save Alice but Freddy starts driving and rips off his own arm then Dan finds a motorcycle and tries to get to Alice but then the motorcycle IS FREDDY and it starts talking to Dan while they are going like a million miles per hour then the motorcycle like eats Dan and he becomes part of it, and he looks like a skeleton cyborg driving the motorcycle but it turns out he is just dreaming and dies.  They don’t show any more boobs and then Alice goes to fight Freddy in the dream world and everything is all upside down while Alice’s friend goes to find Freddy’s mom’s bones and lay them to rest or something and she does and then Freddy comes out of Alice and they are like part of the same person but fighting each other then Freddy’s Mom shows up and tells Jacob to unleash the power on Freddy so Jacob barfs these souls on Freddy and they tear baby Freddy out of Freddy’s body and Freddy’s mom picks up baby Freddy who looks all crazy and Freddy goes into his Mom’s belly and then tries to rip his way out and then dies forever.  It was AWESOME.

Haha, seriously it was kind of sweet.  It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it really does try to make something interesting, and as far as the kill scenes and the dream sequences are concerned, it succeeds.  I was drawn to the bits in the asylum, where they use all these Terry Gilliam type camera angles to re-create Freddy’s gruesome conception, and the non-CGI effects looked pretty great, especially in the case of Dan, who really does become some kind of freaked out man/motorcyle hybrid.  Check out the full death scene below, the original version, with a few extra moments that they cut out of all later releases. That mechanical Freddy face FREAKED me out. I’m not sure how I saw it since it wasn’t in the trailer, but I have distinct memories of picturing that damn face underneath my bed or in my closet.

Along with that scene, and the occasional boob-showing, 9 year old me would have really liked when Mark, the comic book nerd, becomes one of his superheroes and fights back.  27 year old me was kind of bummed by it because at that point in the series, there had been so many points where one of the kids uses some crazy powers to fight back, with the same results every time.  The formula goes:  Freddy scares them or injures them in some really personal way, they use their power, get a few hits in on Freddy, and then he kills them anyway.  For once, I wanted to feel like someone had a chance, and that is where I want the remake to go, to play up the bad-ass aspect of the kids fighting back, and actually give them a shot.  If these remakes go on, and I kind of hope they do, I can’t wait to see what they do with part 3.  Other than that, these movies really have a chance to play up the subconscious torture and surrealism of dreams, and I think with modern budgets and effects, they could do some truly amazing things onscreen.  Not that they will.  AND FURTHERMORE (I’ve already taken this WAY into nerd territory, so why stop now) I want to see what its like for Freddy in the offseason, to see him brooding over his shitty little dreamworld and show him setting things in motion to return.  Like that part in Beetlejuice where Beetlejuice is chilling underground bored as hell and reading a newspaper.  That was awesome and a little creepy.

Alright, that’s about it.  Now, with that out of the way i can go see the terrible remake and get on my with pointless waste of a Nightmare on Elm Street watching life.  Ugh city.  Next up is either Popcorn, or Body Parts, because Popcorn is really hard to find.  Thanks for reading!

Movies That Bugged Me Out As a Kid – Hardware

1.  The Horror/Sci-Fi Section at the movie store.  My Dad loved movies, so he spent a lot of time in movie stores (Panorama Video in Bloomington stand up!), so I would always tag along.  I wandered the aisles looking at awesome VHS movie boxes.   Comedy was OK, Drama was LAME, but the Horror and Sci-Fi sections, holy shit I would spend a good hour in there (in Kid Time, thats basically three days), looking at the back of literally EVERY box, reading the plots, looking at the crazy ass pictures and awesome covers.  Like this one, because it was nuts (and it was all in relief…the cover was textured!), and the back had a freaky-ass picture of a dude getting a fist rammed down his throat:

2.  The Pay-Per-View previews channel.  For a few years, Pay-Per-View used to run trailers for all the stuff they had on Pay-Per-View that week on a free channel that everyone would watch.  I would watch this channel for hours at a time…and I don’t recall seeing previews for anything BUT horror and sci-fi movies.  Maybe I blocked all the others out.  Chief among these were the first five Nightmare on Elm Streets, Popcorn, Body Parts, and the craziest of all… Hardware.

Until recently, this movie was impossible to get on DVD.  Which is fine with me, because it took me 18 years to get over the horror of the trailer I saw on that channel…channel 10 I think it was.

It wasn’t that it was scary, it was that I didn’t understand what I was seeing.  It all looked so wigged-out and nihilistic, and it was horrifying to see something with so little rhyme or reason.  Everything was red and bad-ass looking so I was definitely intrigued, but still scared out of my wits. I avoided the movie on VHS until recently when it was finally released on DVD.  It was directed by Richard Stanley, who went on to do Dust Devil, which was another post-apocalyptic thing…watched that one with my Dad as a 12 year old.  All I remember was that it got really awkward when the first graphic sex scene came on…10 minutes into the movie.

Anyway, I just got Hardware on the Netflix, and I am unbelievably excited to watch it…finally.  I’m going to turn this into a quick thing…tracking down the movies that stood out in those aisles, or on that channel, and re-visiting them.  I’ll post some reviews here, for whatever they’re worth.  I can’t wait.

Alright, so I watched it sober.

It’s not a goddamn Wes Anderson film, but its hilarious.  Seriously, lowered expectations can turn your life around.  I loved watching this movie, even if my non-high brain got a little impatient at times.  The plot was stupid, there was a forced loved interest, and not all the jokes were funny, but who gives a damn, I laughed.  A lot.  Mostly at all the random ass lines in the script…like…

Babs Merrick: If he pulls this one off, I’ll eat my own pussy.

Ben Selleck: Look, I may be old fashioned, but when a man tells me to wear my boner pants I wear my boner pants.

DJ Request: Nobody tells DJ Request what to play!

Dick Lewiston: I never cared much for Jews, queers, or fuckin’ Eskimos. It was just the way I was raised.
Brent Gage: Is that it?
Dick Lewiston: Yeah! I thought we were opening up here!

Don Ready: I had to take my pants off and nibble my Old Spice down to three ounces just to get on the plane, Stacey!
Stewardess Stacey: They made me throw out my mouthwash.
Brent Gage: I had to give up my bath jellies.
Babs Merrick: They made me breast feed some old man.

“They made me breast feed some old man”.  Awesome.  Actually most of the best lines in this movie come from Kathryn Hahn, who plays Babs.

So, it wasn’t the best movie ever, but I will say I only laughed about 5 percent more at The Hangover, and The Goods at least had the decency to skip the montages set to T.I. or Kanye or Wolfmother or whatever so they could fit in some more jokes.  They might not have all landed, but I respect the effort.

In short, this movie deserves another chance, world.  So while you are waiting to get The Hangover from Netflix, get ripped and watch The Goods, because I GUARANTEE there is no “short wait” on that one.

Even shorter, I am basically this kid… (at 1:48)

Thus concludes this whole damn experiment.  Give this movie another chance y’allz.  That means you, Joey.

Seriously, sitting down to a movie while faded out of your mind RULEZ (especially in a theater…that isn’t too crowded…where you have no chance of seeing anyone you know).  You should try it.  Just make sure you cite your source (me) because I’m pretty sure I came up with the whole thing.

The only problem with this little pastime is that my usually mediocre taste in movies gets downgraded to downright shitty taste.  I once proclaimed Chris Rock’s Masterpiece Down To Earth to be the “Best Movie I’ve Ever Seen”…because it fuckin’ was (Ae can vouch for me) at the time.  Because of my heightened sensitivities, I get WAY into things like plot (even bad plots) and character development, so when Chris Rock dies and goes to Joe-Mantegna-Heaven with Eugene Levy, I am right there with them… and going to heaven with Joe Mantegna and Eugene Levy is THE SHIT.

I usually have this issue with comedies (I almost left a theater because I was laughing too hard at the Don’t Mess With The Zohan trailer) but it also applies to intensely emotional and scary movies.  Like the time I watched 21 Grams (ugh) and figured out THE WHOLE MEANING OF THE WORLD when Sean Penn asked at the end…

Sean Penn:  “They say everyone loses exactly 21 Grams at the moment of death…the question is… how much is 21 Grams?”

Me:  “Too Much.”

21 Grams is too much for the world to take!  Someone needs to die to set the balance!  Hey Mind, meet This Explosion, because you two are going to be friends for a long time.

Anyway, I’m either over-experiencing profound and intense movies (Oldboy, Devil’s Rejects, District 9) or laughing waaaaay too hard at not-very-good comedies (Down-To-Earth, Bio Dome, Slackers [although that one is debatable]).  So I decided to put myself to a pretty strict test.  My test subject would be The Goods – Live Fast Sell Hard.  Check out the Red Band trailer below.

If the internets are to be believed, this movie is a total piece of shit.  Metacritic has it at 39.  Rotten Tomatoes has it at 26%.  Most of the bad reviews complain about it being too broad, too long, and too weird with a shitty plot.  So, Me being The Guy Who Digests All Kinds of Bullshit Criticism on the Internet and Then Regurgitates it as His Own…well, I went ahead and decided that this movie sucks and there was no reason to watch it.

Then I got stoned and watched it with my friend (name redacted – lets call him “Boner Pants”), who is basically the King of Movies.  Seriously, he knows Uncle Buck by heart and teaches classes based around Koyaanisqatsi.  Thats really all you need to know.

I had a severe moment of crisis in my high-ass brain.  THE WORLD WAS WRONG, more importantly THE INTERNET WAS WRONG.   This movie was fucking hilarious.  5 minutes in, I was laughing my face off, and before long Boner Pants and I were rewinding hilarious lines, making the movie even longer.  There was a plot, but we didn’t care…and I did manage to see the movie for what it was…a small room full of a bunch of hilarious actors riffing off one another.  It was the Soul Plane of movies.  Sure it didn’t always work, but when it did, it was amazing.  And, (the trailer captures a little of this) it was also BATSHIT CRAZY.  Full of non sequitirs and random outbursts of violence and complete insanity.  It was like a 90 minute Monty Python sketch.

“I googled it, it says you fuckin blow.”

Anyway, I could be wrong, but I am this close to declaring The Goods – Live Hard Sell Hard as the Citizen Kane of high-person movies.  Before I do that though, I’m going to watch it tonight, stone sober, with my girlfriend.  We both have wicked colds, so the only medication will be cough medicine and airborne, but I will consider myself sober, so I can see if this movie actually does suck and my high ass brain didn’t realize it…meaning I would watch any movie and think it was great.

The lesson we can learn though is this.  Movie reviewers aren’t you, and you should not trust them.  Make your own opinions (Dur).  Unless they are talking about Legion.  That movie fucking sucked.

To be continued…