B-Movie Review: 'Vampirella' (1996)

The cult comic book heroine got her own straight-to-VHS feature film in the mid-1990s. And much like the character herself, it sucked.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

No, I have no idea what convinced me to watch Vampirella. It's not like I have enough stuff to do in my life that actually matters to spend 90 minutes watching a Grade Z straight-to-video turd-fest, but I suppose having that rare downtime around Thanksgiving sapped me of my common sense. 

Yes, there is a Vampirella movie. Of course, it was so goddamn terrible that nobody wanted to take credit for it, let alone 1990s' comic publisher Harris, who did pretty much everything in their power to pretend the movie didn't exist. Now, the character of Vampirella has been around since the late 1960s, but she's probably most famous for being one of the most iconic "bad girls" of the the nineties' comic boom. Alongside Shi and Lady Death, she completed the holy triumvirate of pre-Internet shameless spank goddesses, and I suppose it's not that surprising that Roger Corman eventually got around to securing the film rights. And if you thought this guy couldn't mathematically make a worse move than his ill-fated attempt at a live-action Fantastic Four flick - think again. 

Even in the hands of James Cameron or Sam Raimi - or hell, Ingmar Bergman or Akira Kurosawa, for that matter - I don't think anybody could've made a good movie out of the license. In fact, pretty much the only way to make Vampirella even halfway work is as a softcore erotica horror film, which probably explains why Corman picked Jim Wynorski - the same guy behind Sorority House Massacre II and Virtual Desire - to direct it. Really, the only way anybody would want to watch a Vampirella movie is so they had something to jerk their monkey to, and if your looking for some sexy good times, buddy, you're about to be disappointed big time. Indeed, the bare flesh is kept to a minimum, there are no sex scenes and - worst of all - Vampirella herself don't even bother popping her top and showing all of us her bodacious Dracula titties. Hell, it's basically a PG-13 movie with about five seconds of nipple - excise that, and you could probably run the whole movie as is on the SyFy Channel at 3 o'clock on a Monday afternoon.

We'll dissect and deconstruct the flick toward the end of the article, but for the time being, let's just give this movie an opportunity to speak for itself, why don't we?

Here's something to remember me by - oral herpes for the rest of your life.

We begin our tale on Planet Drakulon, like a bajillion years ago or some shit. Less than a minute into the movie and I'm fairly certain 90 percent of the special effects and props (the spaceships, the computer terminals, etc.) are either carry-overs from other movies or literally scenes from other movies. Vampirella (played by Talisa Soto, who played Kitana in the first two Mortal Kombat movies) is talking to her daddy about how evil this guy named Vlad is, 'cause he wants the planet dwellers to continue drinking people blood instead of making synthetic plasma they can safely subsist upon (which sounds like a ripoff of True Blood, I know, except this movie came out five years before the first Sookie Stackhouse book was published.) Oh, and Vlad is played by Roger Daltrey - the lead singer from The Who, who actually kinda looks like Al Pacino in this particular role.

Anyhoo,  Vampirella's dad sentences him to death for being a no-good sonofabitch, but before they can execute him three other vampires run in the room with laser cannons and shoot everybody up and holy shit, one of them looks JUST like Oakland Raiders QB Derek Carr. So Vlad eats Vampirella's daddy's neck and tells him "remember me as you rot in hell" and hey, how convenient, Vampirella shows up just in time for her daddy to give his dying monologue. He tells her to not waste her life trying to exact revenge, but come on - how fun would the movie be if she listened to him?

We jump cut to modern L.A. (and by modern, I mean 22 years ago) where this guy walks into a closet-cum-elevator to some underground secret shooting range. His name, of course, is Van Helsing. He and his superior watch a TV broadcast about a crew returning from Mars, and they think a bat escaped out of the shuttle. Yep, a Martian vampire, the worst kind of goddamn vampire. Then this nerd gets mugged in an alley, but Vampirella shows up to save him. One of the goons calls her "Miss TNA" and she beats the shit out of them. As it turns out, the nerd's name is Forry Ackerman. Get it, because the name of the actual creator of Vampirella is a guy named Forrest Ackerman? Ho-ho, these are some clever motherfuckers we're dealing with here, lemme tell you.

Now, believe it or not, Vampirella's costume in the movie is CONSIDERABLY MORE conservative than the one in the comics. She has this weird plastic half shirt with a collar and these panties that come up to her rib cage, instead of the titty ribbons and G string we're used to. She gives the nerd a monologue about falling asleep for 40,000 years and how she's STILL on a quest to exact revenge on Vlad, and before she leaves him she gives him a quick smooch to remember her by, thus insinuating the Vampirella comic character is based upon this "real" world experience. Uh - does that count as breaking the fourth wall, or are these guys that shitty at being meta?

Then we travel to Brazil (in reality, the suburbs of Las Vegas) and there's this one drug dealer talking to a bunch of guys in black Hazmat suits at a casino table. Oh, the guys in Hazmat suits are vampires - that kinda' makes sense, I guess. Then a crew of FBI vampire killers show up with a buncha' guns. Yeah, I know it sounds like a ripoff of John Carpenter's Vampires, but wait - this 'un came out TWO years before that flick did. Then the casino drug dealer guy is hung upside down on a cross and they rough him up a bit. Then Vampirella goes to Berkeley (i.e., a random high school in Nevada) to give a stern talking to a professor with a ponytail who CLAIMS he doesn't know where Vlad is. Naturally, a kung fu fight in a chemistry lab follows, and the prof gets defenestrated and impaled on a lamppost. And boy howdy - are the vampire bat transformation "effects" in this one sheer shit.

So after breaking into the dead prof's house, she finds out Vlad has rechristened himself as Jamie Blood Rock ... a rock star, naturally. So the Vampire FBI is garlic-boarding an S&M vampire for more info and then they threaten to inject him with holy water blessed by the Pope hisself. And yes, we do get a crappy goth-rock song from Daltrey - titled "Bleed for Me," naturally - who is now rocking a mullet-and-ponytail combo.

Don't worry - it's totally normal if you get a boner while watching this. J/K ... you a damn freak then.

Then Daltrey starts hitting on her and he's too stupid to realize it's the daughter of the vampire space king he killed 30,000 years ago even though she looks exactly the same as she did way back then. He takes her for a beach-side romp and he calls her "Raven Hair" a lot and they try to bite each other's necks while making out and he calls her "a bitch" and backhands her and then the vampire police show up and try to laser cannon the whole lot of 'em.

So Vampirella and Vlad are in the back of a paddy wagon talking shit to each other. Vlad uses his vampire telekenesis powers to make the van driver fall asleep and there's a rollover and he escapes. Then Vlad and Vampi have a karate battle. Then Vlad gets away and Vampi tells Van Helsing she's a vampire and gives him a long story about how her mama invented synthetic blood. Then she recounts jacking the Mars probe and hypnotizing the crew so she could get onboard. Then Vlad and this hot little blonde vampire number with a perm hide out in Nevada and makes plans for a raid on the vampire police. Van Helsing takes Vampi to the Vampire FBI bunker and this one scientist shows her their latest vampire melting laser cannon.

And because this IS a Wynorski movie, of course Van Helsing is kidnapped by vampire strippers with giant jugs. I knew this movie had gone too long without an exposed aerola or two. Anyway, Van Helsing is held hostage at a scrapheap for old neon Las Vegas signage. Of course, it's a vampire phony and Vampi just slaps him around and Vlad's goons know she has a tracker on her and our laser cannon shootout with the Vampire FBI doth begin. So Vlad has Ven Helsing tied up in the back wearing a leather jumpsuit. Meanwhile, Vlad chairs a dinner party for all of the vampire Illuminati board members, who are about to kick off some grandiose project to take over the world or something. Anyhoo, they've been working on some kinda super ray that will block out the sun for all eternity, just like C. Montgomery Burns tried that one time. Vlad gives Vampi one final offer to join the Vampire World Order, but of course, she refuses. Van Helsing gets roughed up and he tosses Vampi in a cell so they can enact "Judgment Night." You see, Vlad took away Vampi's fake blood capsules so the idea is that eventually she's going to eat him. So Van Helsing chains her up and starts kissing on her, because - that makes sense, I guess?

Vlad and his crew of like, 24, vampires gather to kick start the vampire revolution. Vampi starts going full vampire and she has to fight her urge to drink Van Helsing's blood, so he slits his wrist and lets her have a sip. The best part is that he acts just like he's getting a blow job while she does it, and it's great stuff. And that's our cue for the great big vampire cartel vs. vampire FBI throwdown. By the way, Vlad is in a full on Walmart Dracula costume now and it's terrible. So Vampi chases him through an underground lab and then they run up some stairs and have their big kung fu fight grand finale on top of a dam and she throws a weather vane through his heart and he bursts into fire, for some reason.

Then she picks up Vlad's medallion and puts it on and does a closing soliloquy about her destiny being showing all of Vlad's followers "the way." And there's the credits, kids.

Nearly a quarter century later, and we're still waiting, guys ...

By the way, there's a lot of weird stuff going on in with those credits. Apparently, both John Landis and Angus Scrimm had cameos, but I didn't recognize either of 'em anywhere in the movie. And if you're into puns, you'll have a field day with the listings for the film's carpenters - which includes, among other fictitious individuals, "Nick Nails" and "Mary Chapin." Get it? 

And then there's the plug for Death's Dark Avenger, the Vampi sequel that - of course - never came to fruition, seeing as how this movie was a colossal VHS dud. Hell, this flick was so bad that Wynorski - who has literally made his living off crappy movies - has deemed it too terrible to sit through.

Oddly enough Hammer almost pulled the trigger on a Vampirella movie back in the late 1970s, but regrettably this remains our only live action Vampi flick to date. It's one of those flicks that's so bad it doesn't even have redeeming qualities in being bad. You can't laugh your ass off at it like R.O.T.O.R. and there's not enough blood and/or titties to placate exploitation horror purists. It merely exists as this really iffy and indistinct blob of a movie whose only standout characteristic is how overwhelmingly bland it is - even for late night, mid-1990s Showtime bait, this stuff is just exceedingly lame. 

Still, the Vampirella print juggernaut rolls on, with Vampi comic books - some of which co-star the band Kiss - continuing to circulate. And with both capeshit and lite horror making tons of bank at the box office these days, it's probably just a matter of time until somebody comes along and tries to give Vampi yet another live-action film adaptation.

And this much, we all know; no matter how crappy that hypothetical movie might be, it's STILL going to be exponentially better than this utterly forgettable snoozer.

Read More

Comic Review: 'Jason vs. Leatherface' (1995)

In the mid-1990s, there was a comic book series in which the stars of Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre became friends. Nope - for real, and here's the demonstrable evidence.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Nearly ten years before Freddy vs. Jason hit multiplexes, Topps Comics (yep, published by the same people who make all those baseball cards) released a three-issue limited series that gave us an entirely different crossover slasher throwdown - one that pitted the Crystal Lake boogeyman against none other than the entire hillbilly cannibal clan from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies. 

And here's the really weird part - the whole thing was written by a woman. Yep, the scribe behind the three ish run was a chick named Nancy A. Collins, who in addition to penning a few Swamp Thing and Vampirella stories, also churned out a whole hell of a lot of vampire novels, so I guess you could call her a poor woman's Anne Rice. Even weirder, the primary artist was a guy named Jeff Butler, who did a whole buncha' movie tie-ins like Godzilla and Jurassic Park, although he's most famous for his Dungeons & Dragons artwork. He also co-created The Badger, but yeah - maybe you can see why he left that off his official resume. And rounding out the trifecta of weirdness, the cover art was drawn up by Simon Bisley, the guy who is most regarded for his work on Lobo and ABC Warriors. And you can tell from the very first issue - which features weird, abstract depictions of Jason and Leatherface as musclebound reptilian zombies fightin' in the swamp on the cover, with the tagline "the next Texas Chainsaw Massacre is on Friday the 13th!" posited in the corner - that this thing's going to be wackier than fuck.

Issue one, obviously, gives us all the key background stuff. Crystal Lake's been shut down and replaced by this thing called the Linhart Amalgamated factory. The splash page shows Jason stuck in the bottom of the polluted lake, with the narrator letting us know "has has his hate to keep him warm." Apparently, the EPA is clamping down hard on Linhart, so the CEO proposes moving the factory to Mexico, dredging Crystal Lake and building a new corporate headquarters right atop Jason's old stomping grounds. So the suits strike a deal with this dude to illegally dump some toxic waste, and naturally, this old coot shows up at the dock and says Jason's going to kill them all and they all laugh at him and call him crazy.

So Jason hops aboard a train and hacks off a hobo's hand and head, then he bifurcates his pet dog for biting his leg (which, as we all know, is something Kane Hodder would never allow HIS Jason to do.) I mean, killing harmless old dudes is one thing, but puppy murdering is taking it TOO FAR. Jason, of course, makes his way to the front of the train, literally slaps a dude's head 180 degrees around and machetes a motherfucker. This leads to a massive derailment and explosion, so who knows how many people just got killed. By the way, the design for Jason in this thing is weird as hell. He has this huge, pronounced, ultra-bumpy, chewed bubble gum head, which makes him look like one of those big-brained aliens from This Island Earth.

No, I can't explain why Jason looks like he's from Mars
Attacks! either.

Sure enough, Jason emerges from the wreckage without a scratch and now he's in Sawyerville, Texas, where he immediately runs into a guy being chased down by the Leatherface clan. Oddly enough, Leatherface's compatriots are all original characters, with one of them sorta' working as a composite of Chop Top from Part 2 and the psycho hitchhiker from the original movie (although he ultimately looks more like Tom Petty's character from King of the Hill on mescaline than anything else.) Anyhoo, he goads Leatherface into battling Jason by saying "git that sumbitch!" and there's a one page fight where Jason knocks the saw out of Leatherface's hand and machetes up the guy they were going to eat real good. Then Jason - going completely against type - gives Leathface his chainsaw back and the clan INVITES Jason to dinner because they reckon he's their kind of people. 

The narrator lets us know why Jason isn't killing everything that moves. "He could have killed them both. But he didn't. The emotions that fill Jason right now are alien to him as they are not hate or anger. He is uncertain how he should act." So he goes back the Sawyer farmhouse and we're introduced to a quasi father-figure named "The Cook" who is impressed by Jason's head severing abilities. Then Leatherface's aforementioned brother (who is simply called "The Hitchhiker") makes fun of him so he goes up stairs and cries in his bedroom, which is filled with all sorts of weird horror knickknacks, like Frankenstein heads, everywhere. Then the narrator lets us know Jason actually feels an AFFINITY toward Leatherface 'cause he reminds him so much of himself and he marches up stairs and tells him to come down with him (well, more like he just points at the door, but you get the idea) and we meet the rest of the cast. There's Grandpa, and Aunt Amelia, a zombie retard with a Barney the Dinosaur mug. They ask Jason what his name is so he dips his finger in Kool-Aid and writes "Jason" on the wall and that's what they figured was good enough for a cliffhanger heading into issue two. But before that, the comic concludes with an essay on slasher movies written by C. Dean Andersson titled "Halloween Chainsaw Hockey" that somehow connects the 1958 Richard Fleischer movie The Vikings to Halloween and Friday the 13th and ends with a recommendation that everybody read Robin Morgan's The Demon Lover when they get the freetime. You kn0w, this C. Dean Andersson guy seems like just my kinda' company. 

Alright, and now we segue to issue two, which begins with Jason having a nightmare about drowning. He's invited downstairs for breakfast (it's fried brains, in case you were wondering) but since he won't touch his plate, one of the Sawyer goons ask him if he's a vegetarian. Watching Leatherface's brothers bully him triggers a flashback for Jason, in which he recollects his father(?) abusing him as a youngster. The Cook shows Jason the deep freeze and tells him about his dream of opening a haute cuisine restaurant in Austin or Shreveport so he can buy a nice double wide trailer and watch Wheel of Fortune all day.

Some lost travelers go to the Sawyer-owned gas station and Hitchhiker fucks up their car so he and Jason can lay a trap for 'em down the road. All the while, Hitchhiker extols the joys of making his female victims "squawk" - especially the pregnant ones.

Shit, now we need to find a way to wedge in Sardu and
Ralphus from Bloodsucking Freaks and Henry and Ottis
from Portrait of a Serial Killer, don't we?

Hitchhiker shows Jason his Ed Gein-inspired workshop, complete with a stuffed Santa corpse and rocking chairs made out of human bones. Naturally, Leatherface shows up shortly thereafter and fucks up his sibling's latest project so he starts beating the shit out of him. This makes Jason think back to his daddy beating the hell out of him as a kid and how his mama - now named Doris, for whatever reason - put a stop to all that by greasing his brain with a meat cleaver. This sparks a near fight between Jason and Hitchhiker, but Leatherface stops right before Mr. Voorhees can drive a sharp bone through his bro's skull. Jason goes up stairs and the narrator lets us know he has conflicting thoughts. He never hesitates to kill anybody at Crystal Lake, but here in Texas, something is making him a little more wishy-washy. And before we formally wrap up the ish, we get another essay, this 'un penned by a guy named Ric Meyers who talks about Frankenstein being emblematic of the fear of death and Dracula being emblematic of the fear of sex. Then he talks about everybody in the 1950s living in an age of atomic bomb paranoia and communists taking over the government, before saying Psycho ushered in the age of "the human being as monster," which he suggests could be a metaphor for our fear of truly living. Aye, deep thoughts, Senor Meyers. Deep thoughts, indeed. 

And now we come to the third and final installment of the saga. They've been building up the big dinner scene for three issues now and we're finally getting it. The cook says he he hopes "everybody's ready for soul food, he's making some cooter pie," tonight, which I REALLY hope isn't what I THINK it is, so it probably is. So Hitchhiker gets into a fight with Leatherface for getting thumbprints all over his comics and he stabs Jason with a dinner knife and then it's an all out donnybrook. Jason decapitates the zombie retard aunt and the Cook buries a meat cleaver in Jason's back, but of course, he no sells it (and LOL at the Sawyers repeatedly calling Jason "a Yankee.") The clan hides out in the freezer and Jason bursts in. Now here comes Leatherface with his baby buzz saw to make the save. The narrator explains how Jason is jealous of Leatherface for having a family, even a fucked up one, and this makes him go psycho. Eventually the cook bashes Jason's brains out (literally) with a mallet and the gang wonders if they should eat him, but they decide not because they figure he'd taste too gamy.

So they bury him in a nearby lake instead. Of course, Jason is revived by the sense of deja vu, but instead of going back to the house and killing everybody, he decides to return home. And the final page shows him walking back to Camp Crystal Lake - which a billboards says is in Vermont, not New Jersey. Well, that's some weird ass shit, for sure.

And to think - a one-off comic series from 1995 would
give us the best explanation for Jason's bloodlust to date.

Well, not that you really need me to tell you this, but that thing was strange as shit. I suppose there aren't really any logical reasons why Jason and Leatherface would ever hypothetically go toe-to-toe, but the folks who drew this one up were really grasping for straws. It's kinda' weird how that whole Crystal Lake chemical plant thing got dropped - I mean, you'd at least figure Jason would want to show up at the tail end of the series and lay siege to the factory or something. Indeed, that whole plot dynamic was just iffy as hell. Is it supposed to be some sort of pro environmental metaphor, with Jason representing a symbolic ecological champion? And why were rich ass businessmen reduced to taking Amtrak, anyway? Mutant hillbilly cannibals and zombie retard mass murderers making friends, I can sorta believe, but that C-level industrial tycoons wouldn't have better personal transportation options demands I suspend my disbelief way too high.

Speaking of which, so Jason's on a train to kill some mofos that accidentally resurrected him from the dead, but he takes, what, 10 or 12 hours to do it? New Jersey to Texas takes fucking forever, so what did he do off-panel to kill the time? I know, I know, that's the kind of stuff that makes me half retarded for even wondering, but still - plot holes like that really gets my goose. 

Of course, the characterization of Jason as a more HESITANT psycho killer in this book might miff some fans, but shit, that's pretty much the only way you could've gotten more than three pages out of the concept, let alone a full three issues. If anything, the depiction of Leatherface ought to be what irks hardcore horror fans the most - I mean, the dude is reduced to a crying little pussy for half the series. We're supposed to think this blubbering baby is a credible threat to Jason friggin' Voorhees, even if he is going through his slightly emo phase? Get out of here with that noise. 

That said, I really liked the supporting cast, and the weird rockabilly-like aesthetics were a hoot and a half. There's practically no plot getting in the way of the  story here, and there's absolutely nothing political or socially-cognizant about the book you have to cogitate on. It's pretty much a trashy, pulpy, read-once-and-discard series, but it nonetheless makes for an entertaining seasonally appropriate read. And in my humble opinion, it's vastly superior to those Freddy vs. Ash vs. Jason comics that came down the line a few years back - which, I know, ain't exactly winning Olympic gold, but you know what I'm trying to get at here.

Read More

DOUBLE REVIEW: 'Mother!' / 'Kingsman: The Golden Circle'

When pretentious, arthouse pseudo-surrealism goes head-to-head with big budget, ultra-violent popcorn action awesomeness...

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Alright, I'm sick of fucking around - I want someone to tell me where all my underwear goes right now.

This has been a phenomenon that has puzzled me my entire life. Even when I was a kid I kept wondering why there seemed to be fewer and fewer tighty whities in the laundry each month. It followed me through high school, college and now, as a 30-something-adult, the underwear enigma has only gotten more bamboozling. 

Around Christmastime, I bought a 12-pack of boxers. I vividly recall stuffing them in my undergarment drawers and literally just looking at them for five minutes, because I was so happy to have a full assortment of underwear again. That meant I could go almost an entire fortnight without having to do laundry, and when you hate doing laundry as much as I do, that's the household chore equivalent of getting blow jobbed by Taylor Swift. 

Well, it's been about ten months since I bought the $18.99 12-pack of Hanes stretch-fit, extra comfy medium-sized boxers. The other day I checked my drawer, and you know how many pairs of underwear were in there? Three. 

Where the hell did the other nine pairs of underwear go? It's not like I run around leaving them in odd places like I was Johnny Underwear-Seed or anything like that. If I'm not actively wearing them, there's only so many places they could be; in the clothes hamper, the washer/dryer or crumpled up on the bedroom floor of my latest romantic conquest. Yet somehow, those damn things keep disappearing.

It's the exact opposite problem I have with my socks. Somehow, my sock drawer KEEPS expanding, despite the fact I haven't bought any new socks in like three years. Come to think of it, I have the same problem with my utensils; the volume of forks keeps mysteriously going down, while the volume of spoons keeps mysteriously going up. It's such a maddening phenomenon that I can only imagine my forks turning into the kitchenware equivalent of racists, muttering among themselves about how much better the utensil drawer was before all those "damn scoopers" started taking over the place. 

I've never been one for conspiracy chatter, but this thing has been going on for so long with seemingly no logical explanation that I have no choice but to wonder if there's some sort of PSYOPS shit going on. Is there someone coming into my house while I'm at work and manually removing my underwear and dropping off more socks while he's there? Is there some kind of garment Bermuda Triangle in-between my washing machine and dryer, that only affects boxers? Do the things just fucking disintegrate if you don't wrap them around your ass and ballsack at least once per week?

I've no earthly clue, folks. And you know what the worst thing about the underwear enigma is? It's when you're taking a shower and you get out of the tub sopping wet and you open up your underwear drawer and there's nothing in there except dust bunnies and pennies from 1983. Which means you have no chance but to rummage through the dirty clothes hamper and fish out an already worn pair of underwear to cover your genitals while you're washing and drying the rest of your boxers. And it's scientifically impossible to have a productive day if you're wearing dirty old underwear - you can literally feel yesterday's butthole residue and nut sack sweat rubbing against you, and when that's the case you can't focus on shit. 

There has to be some sort of feasible, scientific explanation for this. Somewhere, there's an entire cache of my missing boxers, all piled up like Cambodian war crime skeletons, if only I knew were to look. Rest assured, the next time I pick up my economy-sized bag of underwear, I'm going to be watching those fuckers like a hawk - and as soon as I find who (or what) has been thieving 'em from me, me and my crusty ass drawers are going to stomp a mudhole in something.

Not since The Fappening have we seen JLaw under such intense emotional distress...

Speaking of perplexing bullshit, our first movie of the week is none other than Darren Aronofsky's latest all-star, big-budget, safe-for-mass-consumption mindfuck, Mother!  No, that exclamation point isn't there because I'm excited, it's because it's in the formal title, like Punch-Out!! and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! At this point, we just ought to be happy he didn't throw in a hashtag and and a couple of tildes for maximum pretentious asshole points. 

Now, old Darren's a pretty talented director. He book-ended the 2000s with two of the decade's best flicks - the world's greatest anti-drug PSA and a biopic on the fate of every pro 'rassler in the 1980s ever - and with Black Swan he gave us all an Argento-lite horror flick our girlfriends could enjoy and we could surreptitiously jack it to later. His latest flick is a bit different, though, because it's one of those metaphorical movies, where everything is supposed to be some sort of sly commentary on global warming or Christianity or something. This is Darren's attempt at making a straight horror version of a Luis Bunuel film a'la The Exterminating Angel, but at best it comes off as a little more than a really low-grade imitation of Lars Von Trier's lesser work - in fact, you could even call the whole movie an extremely neutered, unacknowledged remake of Antichrist and you wouldn't be that far off from accurately describing it. 

So it's about Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem living in this big old house out in the middle of nowhere. He's a famous poet and she just walks around all day, painting the walls different colors and drinking this magical Metamucil formula, wondering why he never wants to jump her bones. Then one day Ed Harris walks through the door and Javier lets him sleep in a spare room and JLaw automatically dislikes him because he won't stop smoking in the house and then his wife shows up and she's played by Michelle Pffeifer and she's got so much botulism living under her face it looks like her cheeks are gonna' explode at any minute. Anyway, she keeps getting drunk on spiked lemonade and asking JLaw why she don't wear sexy underwear and then her hitherto unacknowledged sons show up and have an ECW rasslin' match right then and there on the kitchen floor and one of 'em gets impaled with a glass vase and then Javier decides "what the hell, let's just hold the wake at our place," and then all of these mourners gather in the kitchen and Jennifer gets called "an arrogant cunt" and she has to stop this black dude from having sex with an Asian woman in her bedroom then she starts seeing the floorboards bleed and she uncovers a hidden furnace next to the dryer. And after they fuck up the plumbing, she finally convinces everybody to vamoose, and then she and Javier do the nasty and she wakes up the next morning just knowing she's preggers, and this is enough inspiration for Javier to finish his next book, and we skip ahead about nine months and the book gets published and now, hundreds of people are flocking to the house to see Javier because they think his writing's just that dandy.

And here's where the movie starts getting really weird. Before long, there aren't just hundreds of people showing up at the house, there are thousands, and it's only a matter of time until they start stealing every piece of furniture in the place as souvenirs. You see, now people are worshiping Javier as some kind of cult leader, and he actually likes all the attention, but of course his wife starts having contractions and she's trying to get out of there but all of a sudden a SWAT team vs. Antifa battle royale breaks out in the living room and all of these refugees behind barbed wire fences magically appear next to the dishwasher and by the time she finally does have the baby, her kid get stolen and crowd-surfed around in the basement, up until the point the starving Javier-worshipers decide to have a very impromptu snack.

And without giving away the ending, let's just say things aren't resolved peaceably after JLaw gets kicked in the face 800 times by people calling her a "cocktease" and she fortuitously finds a Zippo lighter right next to a 9,000 gallon drum of kerosene. 

We've got 500 dead bodies. Two breasts (but you'll miss 'em if you blink.) One exploding house. One baby eating ritual. One heart in a toilet. Gratuitous biblical references. One exploding head. Kung fu. Mace fu. Glass shard fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place, really oblique pro-environmentalist subtext fu.

Starring Jennifer Lawrence as the mother earth stand-in who has to keep telling people to get off her sink because it ain't screwed into the wall yet; Javier Bardem as the God analogue with a severe case of writer's block; Ed Harris as the Adam-equivalent who smokes like a chimney and has more puking scenes than dialogue; Michelle Pffeifer as the Eve-expy that keeps asking everybody embarrassing questions about their sex lives; and Kristen Wiig as the book publisher broad who I think is supposed to be St. Paul, or an unemployed Ghostbuster, or something.

Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, who really should've known better than to try and merge The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie with Melancholia and then expect anybody in middle America to have any clue what the hell he was getting at.

I give it two and a half stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, but don't blame me if you can't make sense out of a damn thing that happens in the movie.

Now, I don't know if they meant for the movie to be Rygar vs. Earnest Evans, but goddamn, I am so glad that it came out that way.

Now, if you're looking for a GREAT movie that doesn't even bother with feminist subtext or climate change allegories or offhanded allusions to L'Age d'Or, you need to get your keister down to the local cineplex and check out Kingsman: The Golden Circle pronto. This is one of those rare sequels that's every bit as good as the original - hell, I think this one might be even better than the first movie, and I already thought that was one of the best comic book adaptations of the last 25 or so years. 

Now, right off the bat you can tell it's going to be a great movie because this fruit basket named Glenn Kenny (who, as an aside, looks like the kind of guy who has several missing children locked in his basement) over at the corpse of Roger Ebert's old website gave it zero stars. Not because it's a poorly made movie, but because he didn't like the movie's violence, there are fake Fox News report sprinkled throughout it and the fact the first movie featured Barack Obama's head exploding and a couple of jokes about anal sex. But mostly, he's just mad they didn't include an expy of Donald Trump in *this* movie and make his head explode, too, and he's really mad the movie wasn't a two-hour long ode to multiculturalism featuring a white woman and a black man fighting the evil masculine heterosexual honky hegemony like every other goddamn Hollywood action movie nowadays. Of course, just like Tipper Gore's old parental advisory sticker warnings on rap and metal CDs back in the day, what Kenny did was accidentally bestow the latest Kingsman movie with the most glowing recommendation imaginable for the average American moviegoer. I mean, if some hippie-dippie, John Wayne Gacy-looking liberal shrimp dweeb abhors it, it must be doing something right, ain't it? 

And I assure you, The Golden Circle gets a LOT of things right. Less than two minutes into the movie and we've already got a full-tilt car chase going on, complete with perhaps the first ever kung fu scene in movie history featuring two guys who pretty much remain seated the whole damn time. And just like its predecessor, this movie nobly adheres to the number one rule of degenerate cinema film-making: anybody can die at any time. And doing us one better, The Golden Circle adds a new wrinkle and introduces a plot mechanism where anybody can be resurrected from the dead at any minute, too - including Colin Firth, who we all thought was dead after getting shot in the right eye socket at point blank range in the first movie. Now, I ain't going to give away how he came back to life, but trust me - if you're a fan of old school video games like Contra and Mega Man, you'll DEFINITELY wanna' put this on your "must-view" list.

Alright, the plot this time around? Taron Egerston's Eggsy character is still the U.K.'s top secret agent, but this international drug trafficking outfit in Cambodia hacks the agency database and next thing you know, we've got rockets raining down all over the English countryside, and let's just say there's going to be a lot of open positions at Kingsman, LLC come Monday morning. So he and tech wizard Merlin (Mark Strong) wind up teaming up with the U.S. equivalent of the Kingsman operation, which just so happens to be an undercover project Jack Daniels runs on the side. So we meet everybody on their team - Channing Tatum (who is only in the movie for about ten minutes), Halle Berry (her codename is "Ginger Ale") and Jeff Bridges, who plays the head honcho of the operation - and it ain't long beafore Eggsy is teaming up with this guy named Whiskey who has a laser powered bull rope and beating up a whole bunch of saloon patrons who use the word "faggot" and getting into shootouts in the Italian mountains with about 100 or so assassins all wearing plastic Hazmat suits. 

Oh, and the bad guy this time around is Julianne Moore, who lives in a 1950s-theme restaurant in Pol Pot's backyard, and her big scheme is to make weed, cocaine and crystal meth legal worldwide by tainting the planet's ecstasy and opium supply with a virus that makes people's veins bulge out of their face and start dancing until their eyeballs explode. And we know she's really evil, not because she makes new recruits eat hamburgers made out of the goons they're replacing, but because she kidnapped Elton John and makes him perform "Saturday Night's Alright (for Fighting)" over and over again.

Of course, there's a lot of twists and turns in this one, so I can't say too much more without spoiling the movie. But I will say this: by the end of the movie, the whole thing turns into a syncretism of Metal Gear Solid, Bioshock and Frank Miller's great comic Give Me Liberty, complete with an unauthorized cameo by the dude from Bionic Commando and not just one but two cast members getting ground up in an industrial sausage mixer, just like a big budget version of The Story of Ricky. 

We've got 108 dead bodies. No breasts. One car chase, with three fireballs. Three dead robots. Five kung fu scenes. One barroom brawl. Five major explosions. Legs roll. Arms roll. Torsos roll. Heads roll. Multiple exploding eyeballs. Gratuitous John Denver. Smelting fu. Meat grinder fu. Heroin fu. Laser-powered bull rope fu. Vaginal nanobot fu. Bowling ball fu. And the thing that makes the movie truly significant, the first ever recorded instance of Elton John fu in motion picture history.

Starring Taron Egerton as Eggsy, the dashing leading man who marries the Swedish princess he butt fucked at the end of the last movie and now has to save from Ebola after she smokes a spliff; Colin Firth as Harry, the veteran super spy who has spent the last two years thinking he was a butterfly expert in a padded room and has to overcome really bad depth perception once his memory is recovered; Julianne Moore as the international drug queenpin with the demeanor of QVC hostess who has a nasty habit of turning insubordinates into Hamburger Helper; Mark Strong as Merlin, the techno-wizard who gets to ditch the NASA computer terminal and kick a little ass himself this go-at-it; and Pedro Pascal as Whiskey, the rogue American super spy who may or may not be trying to sabotage the mission to find a cure for bong-borne Hantavirus. 

Co-written by Jane Goldman (who also co-wrote Kick Ass and the first X-Men: First Class movie) and directed by Matthew Vaughn, who probably deserves an Oscar of some kind for coming up with dialogue like "you look like some faggot looking for an eye-fucking" and getting Elton John to scream "you fucking bitch!" with conviction while being repeatedly shocked by an electric dog collar. 

I came real close to giving this one the Full Monty, but it drags on for about ten minutes longer than it probably should've and lays on the pro-drug legalization shtick a tad too thick for my liking. Still, this is easily one of the best movies you'll see this year. I give it three and a half stars out of four - Jimbo says definitely check it out.

Read More

Kool-Aid Man on the Atari 2600!

Oh yeahhhh ... is definitely NOT something you're going to say while playing this antiquated sack of shit. (And also, some stuff about a comic book from the early 1980s.)

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Video game/consumer product tie-ins - sometimes colloquially referred to as "advergames" - are hardly anything new. In fact, the Atari 2600 was eat up with such games, including titles based on dog food, tooth paste and literally killing the word "Pepsi." Alas, as brass-balled exploitative as those games may have been, they pale in comparison to the utter shamelessness of Kool-Aid Man, a video game based on ... well, what the fuck do you think it would be based on? 

Granted, the idea of turning a recurring advertising character primarily known for flippantly causing massive property damage to spread the gospel of artificially flavored sugar water into a feature-length video game sounds a bit of a stretch, and the end product we got on the Atari 2600 certainly demonstrates that some ideas simply don't make for interactive virtual experiences. 

Now, do keep in mind that two Kool-Aid Man-branded games were released around the same time. The one on the Intellivision had far superior graphics and gameplay, as you commandeered some kids trying to collect all the accouterments to make Kool-Aid while avoiding these little gremlin motherfuckers who traipsed around the house like Michael Myers in that awesome Atari iteration of Halloween. Even better, once you finally DID collect all the Kool-Aid ingredients, you could summon Kool-Aid Man himself a'la Captain Planet to enter the fray and proceed to brutally murder said gremlin motherfuckers before advancing to the next stage. Man, that game was fuckin' awesome. 

Unfortunately, the Kool-Aid game we got on the 2600 was nowhere near as much fun. It's about as rudimentary of a video game as you can imagine, yet it's also frustrating as all fuck. And to top it off, the core gameplay is so minimalist that I'm starting to wonder if I can even stretch out my review beyond two paragraphs. Alas, we here at IIIA love us some challenges, and if we can get 1,000 words out there about this thing, we can assuredly churn out twice as many words on literally ANY other topic in the universe. 

So, uh, is it about gay pride or something?

After a cold opening that depicts the titular character (whose stature, interestingly, keeps fluctuating) crashing through a brick wall, the game begins proper. The gameplay is really, really simple. You play a mini pitcher of sugar water and there are multicolored "Thirsties" flying all over the place. Every two or three seconds, one of 'em will halt in their tracks, extend their penis-like proboscises into a pool of what I presume to be water and start slurping up the agua. If they suck it all up, it's game over - and to make the game THAT more difficult, the depleted water doesn't refill from stage to stage. So basically, every time they drop their cocks in the drink, you're supposed to bump into them, thus instantly killing their water-thieving asses. The catch is, if you touch any of the Thirsties when they're not drinking, your avatar will start flying uncontrollably across the screen like a Pong ball. This is made a billion times more aggravating because every time you hit another Thirstie while flying across the game space, the bouncing animation continues for another two or three seconds. And with all those motherfuckers speeding across the screen (like in Galaga, the fewer enemies there are on screen the faster they get) there are points in the game where you're basically going to get stuck in an infinite "bounce" loop because you keep getting pinballed by bad guys. And to say this is just mildly irritating is kinda' like saying taking a drink from Bill Cosby is just slightly dangerous to your butthole. 

NOW you motherfuckers are going to pay ... for like, three seconds, then it's back to not being able to do Jack Shit in this P.O.S. game.

Thankfully, the game is pretty liberal with its power-ups. Every 15 or so seconds a random letter (sometimes it's an "S," sometimes it's a "K," sometimes it's "W" - all allusions to the three primary ingredients of the product, sugar, water and Kool-Aid, I suppose) flies by and if you touch it your avatar will momentarily (as in, for about five seconds) get three times as big, develop facial features and - most importantly of all - become totally impervious to enemy attacks. Granted, you've got to be fast as a motherfucker to snatch the things up, and you better be one hell of a navigator, too, since the items usually blaze by virtually unavoidable clumpings of Thirsties. While the letter you pick up changes you a different color, your abilities (and the duration of those abilities) remain the same no matter what hue you are, which I guess could be taken as a coded message about racial harmony. Well, that, or the game designers were just lazy as fucking hell. Your call. 

Welcome to Kool-Aid purgatory. Pity-a-plenty for the whippersnapper that
can't figure out how to restart the game from here...

Your guess is as good as mine as to how long the game is or just how many stages are included. I got up to level four and just stopped giving a shit, so for all we know, maybe the game takes on some sort of radical genre shift beginning with stage five - like a snowboarding simulator, or maybe even a real-time military strategy theme. Alas, it's more than just a little bit likely that the game just loops on forever and forever until there's no more water left, at which point your avatar is thrust into a nightmarish, pitch black purgatory and you have to hit the reset button. So there's no way to technically die, but there's no way to technically win, either. So, uh, what's the point of playing the game again? Oh yeah, that's right - there isn't. 

I suppose, structurally, the gameplay is decent-ish. The controls are pretty responsive and if you have super autism and/or are easily entertained, you might be able to squeeze a half hour of entertainment out of the experience. But this thing is clearly not built for longevity, and what you've seen after five minutes of gameplay is literally all there is to it. Certainly there are worse 2600 games out there, but even compared to the bare bones nature of most games released on the console, this shit is just absurdly basic. It's pretty easy to see why this one was initially launched as a mail-in premium - anybody who paid cash money for this fucker got gypped worse than Enron shareholders.

Alright, is that 1,000 words yet? I don't even fucking know and I really don't even care at this point. I just spent an entire afternoon emulating a fucking Kool-Aid Man Atari game for a stupid comedy website, so literally anything else I could have been doing for the last two hours would be a step-up. That said, since we've got some virtual real estate to fill up, I'd like to turn your attention to the following:

...but wouldn't that kill the kids, too?

Yep, believe it or not, Marvel actually let the iconic spokes-jug have his own comic book series for awhile. From what I gathered from the Internet brain trust, The Adventures of Kool-Aid Man wasn't long for this world (Marvel only published three issues before giving the license to Archie Comics, who only published three or four more issues before yanking the plug on the title altogether), but it actually does serve as a CANONICAL backstory of sorts for the Atari 2600 game.

Eh, it's still better than Black Panther & The Crew, though.

Obviously catered for the elementary school set, there's not a whole lot of depth to the comic (a shocker, I know.) Regardless, it nonetheless introduces us to the Thirsties - basically, these fuzzy yellow motherfuckers from outer space who get their sexual jollies making people sweaty and miserable. Of course, their plans are really, really short-sighted - for example, instead of depleting the world's fresh water supply, they decide to spend their afternoons shutting down the snack bar at little league baseball games and, gasp, getting sunshine in people's eyes while they're up to bat! Still, there's something unsettling about the creatures gagging and bounding a food vendor, and something VERY unsettling about Kool-Aid Man returning the favor by tying up the Thirsties with a 30-foot-long sausage link. But it's still not as creepy as the part where the giant, anthropomorphic dishware WHISKS several children away to his top-secret Thirsties-surveillance headquarters...

So nobody's going to question how a sentient jug of sugar water is able to monitor literally EVERYBODY on the planet in real-time ... or why he feels the need to do so?

Well, don't say the people who made the comic didn't give you more background on the Kool-Aid Man's origin than we've gotten from the commercials, that's for damn sure. In the TV adverts he's just some red jug with a smiley face who causes massive property destruction to give children diabetes-causing beverages, but in this comic series? He's actually some sort of intergalactic policeman with a GLOBAL surveillance system watching all of humanity at all hours. So basically, he's like the George W. Bush Administration, in sugary packet form. If nothing else, you have to admire the extent to which the creators of the comic TRIED to expand the mascot's mythos. Really, they had carta blanche to work with, and the idea of turning the Kool-Aid Man into Marvel's equivalent of the Green Lantern isn't necessarily where I thought the product would be heading. So does that mean there's some universal force of multi-colored Kool-Aid People protecting the cosmos from Thirsties a'la those bounty hunters in Critters, and the only way they can pay for their galactic police state is through marketing artificially flavored fruit punch powders to children? Goddamn, this thing caused me to think way more than I thought it would.

You know what I'd like to do with an inflatable Kool-Aid Man? That's right - everything. Well, except for fuck him. Come on, now, that's just gross. 

Of course, it's still just a front for shameless Kool-Aid propaganda. There's a good eight pages in the middle dedicated to nothing but various branded merchandise and to be totally honest, this stuff is some grade-A kitsch I'd LOVE to have in my collection of all things "stupid outdated shit." I'd be ecstatic to possess a vintage Kool-Aid Man key chain, and I'd be envious as a motherfucker of anybody who had a tote bag with the words "beat the Thirsties" inscribed upon it. But to own an INFLATABLE KOOL-AID MAN like the one pictured above? Not only is that shit easily worth 45 proofs of purchase, I'd probably stab somebody to get one.

I love how they tell you to charge more for the larger cups. As if anybody is dumb enough to charge people less for more of the same product!

The comic isn't limited to crappy superhero theatrics involving copious amounts of child endangerment and shameless product pimpage, though. Just like those McGruff the Crime Dog comics, the comic also has quite a few special activities, including a page showing you how to set up a Kool-Aid stand (hooray, capitalism!) and another one that gives you a secret language to decrypt in order to find a super special message about what position the Kool-Aid Man would hypothetically play in baseball (and for fuck's sake, if you can't figure the pun out automatically, do us all a favor and please KYS.) All in all, though, I think it's a sturdy enough language and I think we should adopt it as secret tongue to trade sensitive and inflammatory intel back and forth online - anything to keep all those damn from nosing around in our business, ain't that right?

"Joey _____ all his baseball cards." Aw, shit, that could literally be anything, you terrible clue-giving motherfuckers. 

It comes with a standard crossword puzzle, too, although I've got to say I think they're being just a tad too oblique with the clues here. For example, look at 2 Down:" _____ causes sickness that keeps you from playing ball." Well sweet fuck on a cracker, I can think of hundreds of diseases that could feasibly keep you off the baseball diamond. Is the answer "AIDS," or "herpes" or "Ebola?" 'Cause every one of them logically checks out. Let's see if any of the other clues are any easier. How about 4 down? "You need a ball and ____ to play." Well, this one's pretty easy, actually...

Well, that, or "dick," I suppose...

I mean, what else could it be? Speaking of fun and games, you have GOT to check out this "connect the dots" puzzle included in the first issue.

Well, if it excites a cross-eyed, retarded looking kid, you KNOW it's got to be something good!

Looks rather innocuous, no? Well, not when you actually complete the portrait. Needless to say, Kool-Aid Man's top secret message is - well, more than just a little concerning...

So does this mean Kool-Aid Man's working for Hydra now?

Well, if nothing else, I suppose it explains why that blonde and blue-eyed kid at the bottom of the page is so excited. Still, you have to second guess Marvel's decision to include Nazi propaganda in a comic book intended for elementary schoolers, and I'm sure it's something the manufacturers of Kool-Aid were none too pleased about. Or were they?

Now THAT is how you end a story ... very, very poorly.

There's a lot more I could say about this Kool-Aid Man comic. Indeed, the last two pages beseech me to dwell upon the following matters: 

- How is Kool-Aid Man able to burst through a spacecraft wall without the vacuum of space sucking him and everybody else into the vacant vastness of the cosmos? Furthermore, does Kool-Aid Man even need to breathe oxygen? Is he just entirely self-sustained by Kool-Aid? Can he reproduce, sexually? How did he learn English, and how is he able to talk without anything even remotely resembling vocal cords? 

- If Kool-Aid Man is impervious to thirst, does that mean he's technically immortal? And where did he get that jet pack? Come to think of it, where did he get the money for anything? That high-tech surveillance compound couldn't have come cheap. Is Tony Stark or Hydra bankrolling this motherfucker or something?

- Did they mean for the exploded Thirsties to look like minstrel show characters?

- Is it just me or does that scientist look LEGITIMATELY concerned that a sentient fruit punch bowl figured out the fundamentals of outer space rocket travel? And whatever happened to that kind of iffy in hindsight brand slogan "the one for kids?" Does Kool-Aid still have the patent, and at what point did they decide to abandon it so as to not alienate adult product purchasers? And for that matter, is it true that black people foster a peculiar fondness for said product, and if a white politician serves said product at a fundraiser for black supporters, is it really technically racist?

Eh, like I said earlier, this is just too much shit to wrap my head around at once. Instead, I'm just going to end this whole pointless spiel the only way that's sensible - with a whole bunch of old Kool-Aid commercials from way back when. Watch 'em and weep with nostalgia, kids!

Damn, anybody itching for a glass of Purplesaurus Rex or Sharkleberry Fin right about now? 'Cause I sure as hell am. Fuck, at this point, I'd even settle for some lukewarm Pink Swimmingo, if I really had to ...

Read More