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.

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Double Review: 'Jeepers Creepers 3' / 'Leatherface'

What better way to celebrate Halloween than by taking a gander at two of the most superfluous horror prequels ever?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

For a minute, I’d like to get serious about a very important issue. It’s one that impacts many communities throughout America, and it might already be happening in your own neighborhood. It’s called “Trunk or Treating” and somebody’s gotta’ put a stop to it.

Remember when we were kids and going trick or treating meant socking on a Frankenstein mask or a pre-fab Spider-Man costume, grabbing a big old trash bag and going door-to-door begging for candy like Snickers-addicted vagrants? Well, apparently parents today think that’s too “dangerous,” and have come up with a new way for their children to celebrate Halloween.

What they do is they take all the kids out into a parking lot, and all the families get together beforehand and fill up their cars with bags of fun-size Skittles and Tootsie Rolls and the kids just go car-to-car asking for a handful of Raisinettes while their helicopter moms and dads hover over ‘em to make sure nobody secretly sticks them with an AIDS needle or tries to abduct them and sell them on the Dark Web the next morning. And clearly, this is a form of child maltreatment that we, as a conscionable society, can no longer allow.

I went trick-and-treating every year from kindergarten to sixth grade, and you know how many times I got held hostage by child molesters? Or how many times I ate LSD-tainted Butterfingers and had to have my stomach pumped? Or how many times devil worshipers tried to carve a pentagram on my forehead and make me drink goat blood or whatever fundamentalist Christians thought Satanists did way back when besides vote Democrat? The answer is the same - zero. As a matter of fact, I did my research on this one. You know how many kids have been kidnapped or poisoned or murdered or mutilated or drugged while trick or treating over the last 40 years? Well, according to this thing called The Marshall Project, the sum there is zero, too. Really, the only harm that Halloween causes is a mild uptick in fire injuries (some people still don’t know how to put a candle in a Jack O'Lantern, apparently) and car accidents. But we probably shouldn’t fret too much about that last one - considering how fat kids are nowadays, they’d probably do more damage to the cars than the cars do to them.

So we’ve got this persistent myth going on that Trick or Treating is “dangerous” when really, the worst thing that can happen on Halloween is some kid getting poked in the eye with a plastic He-Man sword, or maybe one of the slower ones accidentally eating a glow stick or something. So what exactly is Trunk or Treating protecting kids from, exactly?

Let me tell you folks something. Trunk or Treating has nothing to do with ensuring children’s safety. What it’s really about as classism, plain and simple, and maybe a little bit of racism, too. Lemme explain.

You see, most of the times Trunk or Treating events are organized by either churches (thank goodness those things are totally devoid of pedophiles) and homeowners associations. So caught up in their select in-group circle jerk bubble that they don’t want their kids to experience anything that might expose them to different cultures, or different ways of life, or even different types of candy. I mean, back when I was a kid, we didn’t have any Mexicans in my neck of the woods, and I’ve come to learn that all their treats are like super duper candy compared to our lame-ass, watered down domestic stuff. Hell, if I was a kid today, I would DEMAND we only visit the Hispanic part of town to trick or treat - and just like that, cultural tolerance and understanding blossoms, one Gansito delicacy at a time.

What these trunk or treater assholes don't grasp is that half the fun of REAL trick or treating isn't the free candy or getting to dress up like a doofus, but being able to - if but for a few brief moments - get a nice, clear gander at what the lives of other people in the neighborhood are like. When I was a little ankle-biter, my favorite part of Halloween was always being able to peer inside people's houses when they opened the front door. What was their living room like? Did they have a TV bigger than ours? Was there kitschy artwork over the sofa? Did they have an aquarium, or a bitchin' sound system? Were there people playing dice in the background, or eating a pepperoni pizza in the kitchen, or watching reruns of Mama's Family with their hands in their britches a'la Al Bundy? That was literally the only time of the year I had the opportunity to gain insight into the lives and ways of perfect strangers, and it utterly fascinated me. That's one of those curiosity building experiences that makes you more sociable and more cognizant of your surroundings. And you sure as hell can't replicate that weird sociological experience by ambling around a cul de sac and eating Snickers out of your neighbor's Lexus. I mean, everybody's trunk pretty much looks the same, so where's the sense of adventure and discovery?

This is one of the reasons why our kids are turning into a buncha' asexual sissy shut-ins on us. Their parents spend their whole childhood trying to keep 'em bubbled up in this make-believe, super-sanitized fantasy world and never once let 'em see what reality is like. If you don't even have the basic human decency to let your kids go trick or treating, you know what? Maybe YOU shouldn't have had kids in the first place. There's a lot more harm you can do trying to protect them from non-existent dangers than if you just let them experience a teeny, tiny slice of self-sufficiency and independence one night a year. And if you keep that shit up, those poor kids are going to grow up to be something even more horrifying than holier than thou, suburban enclave elitists. 

They might just become Bernie Sanders supporters.

How weird is it that the fewer number of children he sexually abuses on set, the worse the director's movies seem to get?

Speaking of things you should't trust around children, Victor Salva's got himself a new movie out. Odds are you probably missed the one night only theatrical screening of Jeepers Creepers 3 back in late September, but lucky us, SyFy decided to give it a back-to-back primetime TV screening for Halloween ahead of the official DVD release in December. Of course, the movie they'll be showing this weekend is the censored version, but I was fortunate enough to have somebody drop off an unedited screener version a while back and just for kicks and giggles, I decided to give it the old look-see recently. 

Now, even with the fact the director's a convicted child molester taken out of the equation, I never liked the first two Jeepers Creepers movies. The pace is sluggish, the monster mythology is impossible to figure out, the supporting characters are weak and the whole damn thing is an unacknowledged ripoff of an old Unsolved Mysteries episode, so you KNOW I'm going to stay peeved about that. And unfortunately, this third entry doesn't really do anything to atone for the sins of the first two, and instead of making the notoriously murky canon just a smidge more coherent, all it does is make the whole damned thing even more confusing than it already was.

So the movie begins with a guy getting chased by our ninja star-throwing antagonist and the narrator tells us the whole "every 23 years for 23 days it gets to eat" shtick and the cops open up a dump truck and find a whole buncha' corpses wrapped up in bedsheets. But the truck is booby trapped, so this one copper gets an iron sharp gate through his shoulder. Then we learn three more cops and an inmate got killed earlier, along with the kid that got nabbed (apparently, filming the jail break opening woulda' cost too much money, so all the characters just talk about it and leave it to us, the audience, to fill in the visual blanks.) Then this black guys shows up and tells the sheriff that the monster set a church on fire earlier to get rid of its history. But, uh, they didn't have enough money to film that, either, so I guess we'll just have to take the fella's word for it.

So they're taking the truck to an impound lot, and of course, the Creeper shows up and kidnaps the tow truck driver for no discernible reason and we learn that, for whatever reason, crows and ravens follow the monster. Then we cut to this one guy living on a farm arguing with his mama about the Creeper coming back and eating him and his daughter because "he's a part of it" now. Apparently, the monster tried to eat him 23 years ago, but I don't think they included that in either of the last two movies, and if they did, well fuck, they sure did an ace job of making his role memorable, eh?

As it turns out, though, there's this vigilante anti-Creeper posse that runs around in jackets with this patch of a screaming skull over a pink triangle, and they're loading up their Ford Rangers with Gatling guns and 6,000 pounds of ammunition in anticipation of the monster's arrival. "It may not fly," one of the monster hunter remarks, "but this is OUR killing machine." Then Addison, the daughter of the guy who was arguing with his mama earlier, goes over to her friend's house and she's supposed to be a teenager but she look 30 and her teenage brother looks 40 and kisses her on the lips and likes to frighten rabbits. So he and his three slightly more teenager-looking friends find the Creeper's truck abandoned in the middle of the cow pasture and, naturally, decide to do what any level-headed person would do: yell "kiss my ass, you ugly bitch" and throw rocks at it.

But they get spooked and run away, except one of 'em gets hit by a spring-loaded spear booby trap trying to get away from it. Then Addison goes to the hay store, but people make fun of her for not having enough credit and her would-be love interest's dad tells him he's too good for her broke country ass then we cut back to the 28-year-old teenagers and the Creeper finally shows up and starts throwing javelins through their kidneys and stapling them to oak trees, then Addison's granny digs up a severed (but still living) monster hand and it LITERALLY picks her off the ground and makes her levitate in the air with her eyes rolling into the back of her skull like The Undertaker used to. Then the Creeper shows up and abducts Addison and the actors don't even act scared, prolly because' they're distracted by how much the monster looks like a random white dude in blackface. Anyhoo, he locks her in the corpse-filled truck, then the monster hand possesses the black Creeper hunter dude, and then it's time for a high speed chase, with the monster throwing computer-generated landmines at cop cars and this one guy opening fire with a machine gun turret, only to get his own innards blown out because he forgot the truck is made out of reinforced anti-tank armor and all the bullets ricochet right back at 'em. Then the monster comes after the survivors with his stainless steel ax, roars like a lion and starts throwing bone discuses at them, and he totally no sells all their shotgun fire, and the black dude FINALLY manages to get the Gatling gun to work, and the Creeper no sells that too and stabs him with his hatchet, so the last remaining cop just runs off into the woods, crying like a bitch.

Then the monster tires to rape Addison but its eyeballs inexplicably start falling out and it can't get its wings to work (a metaphor for sexual impotency, I take it?) Then the monster gets hit by a transfer truck, but it just gets up, finds its crusty old hand and a message reading "We know what you are" so it screams like Predator and passes out in a cornfield. Then Addison's not-quite-but-kinda-sorta boyfriend gets on the school bus from the last movie, so I guess this thing is a prequel instead of a sequel? And then the whole thing concludes with the narrator being revealed as the sister of the guy who got eaten in the first movie, and she's writing up a blog post promising to kick the monster's ass in the NEXT movie. So yeah, the whole damn movie was just set up for part four. Ain't that a stinker.

Anyhoo, we've got 26 dead bodies. No breasts. Gratuitous dirt biking. Gratuitous ornery rabbits. Gratuitous public urination. Hands roll. Eyeballs roll. Multiple demonic possessions, with levitation. One double impalement teenager shish-ka-bob. One high speed chase, with rollover. Frisbee-made-out-of-bones fu. Armored car fu. CGI landmine fu. Vulcan cannon fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place - some serious sequel hook fu.  

Starring Gabrielle Haugh as the teenage meat the Creeper keeps slobberin' all over; Meg Foster (yep, that Meg Foster) as the decrepit old granny who keeps sentient monster limbs in potted plants in the backyard; Stan Shaw as the black dude who says "fear has a scent - that's how it picks what parts of us to eat"; Jonathan Breck as the goateed, black tar martian vampire cannibal sexual predator monster; and Gina Phillips, who was basically paid a full salary to read about five lines of dialogue and show her face for eight seconds of the very tail end of the movie.

Written and directed by Victor Salva, who - no matter how bad a movie he's made - can always say he's done much worse things in his lifetime.

I give it one and a half stars out of of four. It's a totally pointless flick that doesn't do anything to expand the franchise mythos - in fact, its sole role is to serve as a door stop to the next movie, and that's about it. Jimbo says - well, don't check it out, if you can avoid it.

Alright, this shit has to set some kind of record for most franchise prequels. It has to.

Now, like everybody else, I went into this new Leatherface movie with a lot of reservations. First off, even though I ain't seen none of the prequels and spin-offs spawned by the 2003 Chainsaw remake, I've heard through the grapevine that they're all various shades of awful, and since this is about the fourth or fifth down the line, I suppose you can understand why my expectations heading into this thing were rock bottom. But more importantly, the movie wasn't even FILMED in Texas - these fruits went out and shot the thing in god-damned Bulgaria. And worst of all, the movie was actually directed by these two froths, and if there's anything more sacrilegious than two fuckin' Frenchmen makin' a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, I don't dare ponder it.

But if you can put aside your loathing of all things French just out of principle, this thing might just surprise you. It ain't a great movie by any stretch, but it's considerably better than I thought it was going to be. And you really have to give these guys some credit for their gore scenes - there's a couple of scenes in this flick that are among the nastiest I've seen at the cineplexes all year round.

The movies starts off in the early 1950s, back when most of the Sawyer clan was still alive. They feed a birthday cake made out of human body parts to a hog-tied pig thief and then they give a little kid named Jed a chainsaw and order him to carve the guy's face off but he just can't do it, so grandpa grabs a hammer and bashes the poor sap's skull in. We skip a few years to 1955 and these horny kids are driving a truck down a back road and they almost hit an 8-year-old wearing a cow's head over his face like a Ninja Turtle mask. Of course, the dumb broad chases after him and wanders right into an old abandoned barn and falls through a trap door and gets her guts squished out by a carburetor dropped on her head like a Loony Tunes character by a guy who sounds a LOT like Matthew McConaughey even though he looks more like your local 35-year-old speed freak with a Camaro who's always hanging out at the gas station closest to the high school trying to push his rat weed on the senior class. Anyway, the sheriff ain't got enough evidence to arrest anybody, so he puts little Jed in protective custody 'cause his brood is so goddamn weird.

Alright, now flash forward to 1965. Jed's an 18-year-old in a nut house who don't say much whose best friend is this 400-pound guy who looks like Hurley from Lost and there's this new nurse on staff who almost gets raped by a skinhead and has to tell this one psycho girl to stop shoving live rats down her roommate's esophagus. So mama Leatherface gets an injunction to see her kid again but the warden calls her white trash and makes fun of her for having a Jewish lawyer. So naturally, she decides it'd be easier is she just broke into the psych ward while her kid is having his noggin scrambled in the basement by electrodes, but not before she can free all the slobberin' retards from their cages so we get a full on nut house Royal Rumble. We've got this one bitch literally getting strangled to death with her pigtails and Jed bashing the warden's head against a window 'til his brain starts leaking outta' his ears and this one nurse has tongue, uvula and tonsils yanked out of her mouth before Leatherface, Jr. runs in and stomps her killer's face in.

After that, the movie pretty much turns into a poor man's The Devil's Rejects, with four of the nuts breaking out of the loony bin using the new nurse as their hostage. They got to a diner and stab a guy in the neck and shoot a couple of cooks, and even blast the brains out of a waitress at point blank range with a shotgun. Then they hide out in a trailer where the last tenant apparently died while jerking his meat and strangling himself, and just when you thought this movie couldn't get any grosser, two of the psychos start having SEX ON TOP OF THE ROTTING CORPSE, complete with the lunatic blonde bitch French kissing the cadaver while her hillbilly maniac boyfriend does her doggy style so he don't have to look at the third degree burns on her tits.

Then one of the nuts tries to rape the nurse again so the really fat guy chases him down and stomps his skull until the white meat comes out and the cops finally surround 'em and the blonde crazy bitch makes fun of the cop's dead daughter so he shoots her right in the face right then and there. Then the nurse has to crawl through mud after hiding out in a maggot-filled cow corpse and the fat guy gets shot in the head and Jed, our last remaining psycho, slams a cop's head into a car door before getting in a high speed chase that ends with him getting his jaw shot off but surviving long enough for his mama to stitch his face back together.

After killing another cop, Jed decides he wants him some nurse meat to go along with the police officer ground chuck, and the nurse begs for mercy and keeps telling him it's his mama's fault he's crazy and ...  well, all I'm going to say is that she ends this movie with one less head than she had when she started it. And the final shot of the movie shows Jed putting the final touches on his first human skin mask and rubbing lipstick all over himself, which is probably some sort of set-up for another prequel-sequel, but considering this thing is almost certainly gonna' make less money at the box office than it costs to fix one malfunctioning Coca Cola Freestyle machine, I probably wouldn't get my hopes up.

Anyhoo, we've got 21 dead bodies. Four breasts (unfortunately, one pair belongs to a 400 pound dude and the other belongs to a chick whose upper torso is burnt to a crisp.) One dead bull. Multiple attempted rapes. Multiple skulls bashed in. Hands roll. Tongues roll. Heads roll. One mental institution riot, with blowjobs. One high speed shootout, with multiple rollovers. One curb-stomping. Gratuitous moonshine drinking. Gratuitous auto-erotic asphyxiation subplot. Electroshock therapy fu. Defenestration fu. Necrophilia fu. Beartrap fu. And the thing that more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place - some serious power tool fu.

Starring Sam Strike as Leatherface before he became Leatherface; Vanessa Grasse as the mental hospital nurse turned hostage who has the worst first day on the job in history; Jessica Madsen as Clarice, the Sherri Moon Zombie wannabe who says "do that again and I'll turn your face into strawberry pie"; Sam Coleman as Bud, the 400-pound, shaggy-haired guy who doesn't say anything the whole movie; and Stephen Dorff as the revenge-obsessed Texas Ranger hot on the trail of the Chainsaw clan, who eventually gets his at the wrong end of a Black and Decker buzzsaw.

Written by Seth M. Sherwood, who also wrote London is Falling but didn't get any credit for it, per the IMDB, and directed by the aforemention French frogs Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, who apparently watched a LOT of Rob Zombie movies before getting to work on this one. 

I give it two and a half stars out of four. For what it is (and isn't), it ain't too bad, but it's certainly no horror classic, that's for sure. Jimbo says check it out, even though we all know you're better off just watching the original Chainsaw at home for free.

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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.

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Double Review: 'Happy Death Day' / 'Brawl in Cell Block 99'

One's a movie about a basic blonde bitch forced to get murdered over and over again until she finds out who's trying to kill her and the other stars Vince Vaughn as a psycho prisoner forced to kill a whole bunch of Meskins so his daughter won't get aborted by drug runners.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

You know what my favorite part of any mass shooting is? When the media keeps asking itself why the shooting happened, as if there could ever be a halfway logical reason as to why some 60-year-old stockbroker grabbed an AR-15 and decided to shoot up a pre-K school one afternoon.

Call me old-fashioned, but does it even matter what the motives of a mass shooter are? His "rationale" for blowing away 57 people is wholly irrelevant to the fact that he voluntarily CHOSE to blow away 57 people and then went through with it. There are a lot of hate-filled psychopaths in American society, but even the most rancorous, vehemence-fueled maniacs usually tend to stop short of perpetratin' actual mass murder, if nothing else because they know it's going to end one of two ways: with either Johnny Law popping a cap in their ass or a SWAT team rasslin'  them to the ground so they can be placed in a cell block condo for the remainder of their natural life, getting fan mail from all sorts of weirdos who think it was so cool that they barged into that all-you-can-eat Taiwanese buffet and decided to turn 27 diners into Swiss cheese. Yeah, it sounds like a pretty peachy deal, until you realize they don't let death row inmates have the WiFi password, and the likelihood of getting rectally fucked to death is approximately 1,500,000 times higher than that of the freed population.

You see, hate or anger or rage or whatever nondescript terms the media like to throw around doesn't explain shit when it comes to mass shootings. I'd venture to guess that at least half of the American populace is chronically incensed, perpetually outraged and pathologically infuriated, but by that same token, half of the U.S. population ain't running around blowin' people's heads off at Denny's, either. Maybe they secretly want to, deep down, but there's something VERY obvious that's preventing them from fulfilling their homicidal urges. And whatever that prohibitive something is, it's clearly something all of these mass shooter people don't have, or at the very least, don't care too much for.

First and foremost, just about all of these mass shooter types are suicidal. They don't give a fuck if they live or die, and I'd surmise that's a pretty big factor as to why people periodically waltz into elementary schools with enough live ammo to stock a remake of the first three Rambo movies. But you see, these people aren't your average suicidal folks. No, they actually care about their existential legacy, and they know full well that if they go home and suck on a bag of helium or wrap their lips around an exhaust pipe, CNN ain't going to cover it and they're just going to get thrown in the dirt and nobody will remember him five minutes after the funeral service. You see, what these mass shooters ACTUALLY want is fame, and there's NO easier way to get your photo in the newspaper than grabbing a gun and making high volumes of people die at one time. The media absolutely loves that kind of stuff, and I've long believed that the 24 hour news cycle has done FAR more to exacerbate the explosion of mass shootings in the U.S. than the N.R.A. and Big Pharma combined. Over there in the Middle East, people embark upon mass murder for 72 virgins and a seat at the dining room table next to Allah. But here in the States, people embark upon mass murder for 72 hours of around-the-clock CNN coverage and the promise of their own Wikipedia article.

Just once - just dadgum once - I'd love to see the media stop harpin' on gun control and mental illness and take responsibility as the number one reason why mass shootings keep happening in these United States. From that Napoleon Dynamite-sounding Korean motherfucker at Virginia Tech to that autistic, probably homosexual dweeb at Sandy Hook to that old ass white motherfucker in Las Vegas, they keep killing people because THEY KNOW it'll make them celebrities, and instead of dying as a bunch of shmucks who never did nothing in life, they'll be remembered as the criminal geniuses who had the will and the wherewithal to off a whole shit load of people at once. 

Forget banning semi-automatic weapons, if you want to see mass shooting numbers plummet in America, you ought to be sending letters to your Congress-people demanding they pass a law that makes it ILLEGAL for the media to mention the name of mass shooters or show their faces on television or the Internet. If these sick fuckos KNOW they'll never get the credit for their handiwork and that nobody will ever know they existed in the first place, they no longer have the existential incentive to carry out mass homicide. Granted, you'll still have the occasional workplace massacre and Asperger's maniac bringing a handgun to chemistry class from time to time, but I guarantee you won't be seeing anymore spectacle mass murders where every lunatic in the lower 48 is trying to top one another's "high score" like they were playing real life Robotron or something.

It makes no damn sense to me. This is the same media that pats itself on the back for not covering teen suicides 'cause they're afraid emo 16-year-olds might get the wrong idea and slit their wrists open for Facebook likes, but they're completely oblivious to the idea that THEIR incessant coverage of mass murder doesn't just encourage people to grab a Bushmaster and go to town on a gay bar or the midnight showing of Justice League 4: Ambush Bug Sucks Lobo's Dick for Two and a Half Hours, it's THE ONLY REASON these nutcases actually go through with their homicidal plans.

If all you fucks at MSNBC and Fox News and The New York Times and Buzzfeed want to REALLY know why people keep going on mass shooting sprees, you don't need to do any investigative journalism. All you gotta' do is take a nice, long look in the mirror and you'll see clear as day why these assholes are so anxious to kill a whole buncha' people. You call it ratings tragedy, they call it publicity ... and as long as the stewards of Big Media keep giving these sickos precisely what they desire, these mass killings are destined to keep happening, over and over and over again.

So it's basically Scream meets Groundhog Day meets Heathers meets me running out of things to compare it to. Uh, Teen Mom 2, maybe?

Speaking of people dying left and right, our first flick of the week is one of the more ingenious slasher flicks Hollywood's given us in quite some time. Granted, I'm not saying that this here Happy Death Day is an all-time genre classic or anything like that, but compared to stuff like Scream 4 and Unfriended and Smiley, it's actually pretty damn inventive and entertaining.

Basically, what we're working with here is a horror version of Groundhog Day, except instead of Bill Murray relivin' the same day over and over again, we've got this one blonde sorority girl named Tree getting stuck in a perpetual murder loop 'til she can figure out which supporting cast member keeps choking to her to death in the school water fountain and yanking her innards out with a Bowie knife after football practice. So yeah, it's essentially yet another whodunit horror spoof, but this one's a tad different.

For starters, it's one of the more politically incorrect horror movies to come down the pipes in quite some time. We've got the head sorority bitch literally making fun of retards and calling black girls fat to their faces, and we've got not one but TWO bang-up jobs depicting Asians as the most stereotypical "bananas" in the history of film. Secondly, pretty much everybody in the movie is some kind of asshole, and therefore deserving of a grisly demise - which, of course, is one of the most hallowed of Jimbo's Ten Golden Rules for All Neo-Slasher Movies. And the horror to comedy ratio here is done surprisingly well, with the goofy stuff never really detracting from the power of the scary shit (and vice versa.)

So we've got this one sorority girl. She begins the movie waking up in the bed of some random frat boy, but she's too hung over to remember if he raped her or not. So naturally, she just asks for a couple of Advils, heads back to the sorority house, rebuffs her probably lesbo mixed-race roommate's birthday cupcake offering and oops, winds up getting her intestines ripped out of her bellybutton by some freak-of-nature in a hoody who's wearing a plastic baby doll mask (by the way, the fictitious college's name is Bayfield ... which, I suppose, is a portmanteau of Bayside High School from Saved by the Bell and he rape-tastic, real-world Baylor University.) Oh, and if you're wondering if this movie lays the Dear Colleague "rape culture" stuff on too thick, you might be pleasantly surprised by the film's glorious lack of identity politics propaganda.

So she wakes up in the same guy's bed again and slowly realizes she's reliving the same day over again. This time around she takes extra precautions to not get killed, but whoops, she still ends up getting dissected during a surprise birthday party. Well, by the third time she's reincarnated, she finally starts to get the drift of things, and starts making a shortlist of all the people she thinks might have it out for her, and yeah, it's pretty much everybody in the movie.

From there it's her basically running down all of the people who don't like her and fishing for red herrings until we found out there's this one escaped psychopath on the loose who just butchered an entire hospital wing and after killing her a couple of times, she realizes "oh, I get it, this guy HAS to be the guy I'm supposed to stop to get out of this time loop" so she resolves herself to finally put a pickax through his brain to end the movie and eventually she does but the next morning when she wakes up ... oh shit, she's still caught in the chronological doughnut. Anyhoo, she uses the extra time to, what else, make herself a better person and start talking to her estranged dad again and telling closeted jocks to go out there and get them some "man ass" and standing up for all the fat black girls in the sorority who just want to eat Twinkies and chocolate milk and THEN we find out who the real psycho killer is and ... well, it's pretty much the most obvious thing in the world, but I won't spoil it for you here. 

Nah, just kidding - it's her roommate, who's been jealous 'cause she's been fucking a professor she's obsessed with and has been trying to feed her poisoned pastries the whole dang time. Of course, it's not knowing who the killer is that makes the movie worthwhile, it's knowing how the killer gets dispatched, and I must say - this thing ends with one of the best paint-the-sorority-walls-red denouement bitch-fights in recent memory. Oh, you better believe these girls are going to  have to do a lot of fundraisers to pay off the property damage on this one; we're talking maybe a solid month of weekend bake sales and car washes, on both Saturdays and Sundays.

We've got 18 dead bodies (including one character who dies 11 times.) No breasts. One exploding police car. One hanging. Neck snapping. Multiple stabbings. Multiple bullet wounds. Gratuitous Teen Mom. Gratuitous "Ophelia." Gratuitous farting. Kung fu. Bong fu. Defenestration fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place - some serious cupcake fu.

Starring Jessica Rothe as Theresa "Tree" Gelbman, the snarky sorority sister stuck in a space-time loop who says lines like "don't look at me like I just took a dump on your mom's head" and "who takes their date to Subway? Besides, it's not like you have a footlong"; Israel Broussard as Carter, the obligatory sensitive love interest who finds date rape morally reprehensible and is more than willing to take a knife wound or two, even if it doesn't get him a blow job later that night; Ruby Modine as the Puerto Rican roommate who we think is all nice at first but actually wants the main character to puke her guts up after eating rat poison-laced comestibles; and Rachel Matthews as the bitchy sorority head honcho, who says "earth to Theresa, space retard" and even pantomimes the facial expressions of somebody with Down syndrome when she does it.

Written by Scott Lobdell - yep, the comic book writer from the 1990s who gave us Generation X - and directed by Christopher B. Landon, who also helmed Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse and that one Paranormal Activity movie where everybody's Meskin.

I'll give it two and a half stars out of four. Of course, once you figger out the whole murder mystery thing it ain't nowhere near as enjoyable, but it's got enough decent stuff in the middle to keep you mostly entertained, even on repeat viewings. Jimbo says check it out, but only if the local multiplex ain't playing the next movie on our double bill.

Not since the heyday of Charles Durning have we seen hyper-patriotic vigilante action THIS awesome.

All I'm going to say is that if there's a theater within 100 miles of you playing Brawl in Cell Block 99, you better catch the next screening ASAP. Not only is this the best vigilante action movie to come down the pipes in years, it might just be the first TRULY great movie of Donald Trump's America. This thing is already guaranteeing Vince Vaughn's enshrinement in the degenerate cinema hall of fame (I think it's in New Jersey somewhere), and it's only a matter of time until this thing becomes THE midnight movie of our generation.

The very first shot of the movie is a truck running over a Miller Lite can, so you just KNOW it's going to be manly as fuck. We've got Vince Vaughn playing this bald-headed guy with a Celtic cross tattooed on the back of his skull and he gets laid off from his tow trucking job and he comes home and finds his bony-ass wife sitting in the driveway trying to cover up a big-ass hickey on her neck. He reacts, as any of us would, by ordering her to go back into the duplex and having a boxing match with her car. I mean, he goes full bonus stage in Street Fighter II on that motherfucker, and it is glorious.

Afterwards they have a long talk about the dairy section at the local 7-Eleven (seriously, it goes on for almost ten minutes) and then they agree "you know, maybe getting a part time job as a drug runner ain't the worst idea for part-time employment." So flash forward 18 months and Vince's got a big old house and his wife's preggers. He gets called up by this one drug dealer who asks him if white people can say "nigga" and he puts Vince on a job working with these Meskins, but he's a bit hesitant because one of them looks like a meth addict on steroids but he agrees after his boss man promises him three months paid paternity leave. So the Meskins go scuba divin' for crack for about 20 minutes, then they turn on Vince and there's a big shootout with the police and one of the Meskins yells "get ready for 9/11 part two" and starts lobbing grenades everywhere and Vince ain't going to stand for it so he waltzes on over there and starts shooting the drug runners and he gets arrested and the judge puts him behind bars for seven years and we get this long sequence which shows Vince getting processed on the first day. This old black dude who shot two dudes in the head 28 years ago while he was on heroin gives him the lowdown on prison life and this one guard keeps trying to get him to join the prison's boxing program, but we never get Penitentiary IV because these goons break into Vince's house and kidnap his wife and the next day this Russian dude representing the Mexican drug kingpin Vince screwed over shows up and tells him they've got his girl and they're going to give her a black market abortion unless he repays his debt by killing another dude at another prison facility.

So that means he has to cause a ruckus at this medium-security facility so they'll take him to the prison where the assassination target is imprisoned. We get a pretty long (and shockingly realistic) scene showing the monotony of medium-security prison life, and then Vince decides to pick a fight with the boxing guard, and he snaps his arm in half and fights three more guards, eats some mace and billy club and gets carted off to a max security prison where the warden says the place is really more of a "minimum freedom" facility and his cell is literally a stone cavern. And there's a broken toilet with overflowing shit in it, so he can't eat nothing.

But you see, the guy Vince is supposed to be killed is held in the most secure part of the entire facility, so to be sent there he has to get into a prison yard brawl with these Meskin gang members, but since Vince is about a foot and half taller than all of 'em it ain't much of a fight. But just when they're about to start swinging bar bells at each others, the guards start firing shots in the air and Vince literally breaks another dude's spine with a bear hug and he roughs up some more guards and he's dragged into the titular cell block 99 with a burlap sack over his head and they toss him into the basement where there are literal torture devices everywhere. They strap an electro-shock belt around his waist and deep fry his kidneys every time he steps out of line and make him sleep on busted glass, and the warden gets sick of his shit and tosses him into a room with the four Meskins he beat up earlier and apparently they're in good with the drug lord who kidnapped Vince's wife, but he easily dispatches all of 'em and puts down a couple more guards for good measure. 

Then he gets the master key to all the inmate cells and it's officially time to make some Meskins pay. We've got a dude LITERALLY having his face grinded off on a concrete floor. We've got another guy's skull getting punted until it looks like a Jack O Lantern thrown out of a helicopter. And just you WAIT until Vince gets his hands on the big bad who ordered his unborn child's execution - having his leg bent 90 degrees the other way and having his head flushed down a septic tank are two of the nicer things Vaughn does to the poor sumbitch. 

Of course, there's more meat to the movie than this, but I don't want to spoil it for you. All I'm going to say is that the Russian goon and his Japanese abortionist buddy do indeed make it to the appointment, but since Vince's wife found herself a semi-automatic rifle, there's no guarantee the procedure ever takes place. And considering how irked the warden is over Vince's behavior, it's probably no surprise that he doesn't greet Vaughn with a warm cup of cocoa and a hearty handshake at the very, very tail-end of the movie. But again, I ain't spoilin' nothing for you - this movie is so damn good, it might actually be worth paying money to see it. 

We've got ten dead bodies. No breasts. Two exposed buttocks (unfortunately, they're Vince's.) Multiple kung fu scenes, including a battle to the death against a Mitsubishi. Eye gouging. Pistol whipping. Heads roll. One face literally sanded off. One head stomped open like a pinata. Gratuitous tire punching. Gratuitous bloody feet. Grenade fu. Caseworker fu. Night stick fu. Compound fracture fu. Full body cavity inspection fu. Electro-shock belt fu. Broken glass torture fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place ... some SERIOUS registered Republican fu.

Starring Vince Vaughn as protagonist Bradley Thomas, the principled drug runner turned prison assassin who says lines like "I'm sick of getting the skim milk and hoping love brings us the cream, because it won't" and "I didn't know H20 had a sexual orientation"; Jennifer Carpenter as his anorexic-looking wife who's too sick to hold an Uzi correctly when Meskin drug trafficker lay siege to her home; THE Don Johnson as Warden Tuggs, the constantly-cigar smoking prison head honcho who makes Vince take a dump in a hole in the floor and makes it a philosophical effort to allow his tenants the most minimal amount of freedom allowed by U.N. convention; and Udo Kier as the Russian messenger, who only shows emotion when he gets all giddy about the prospects of amputating Vince's daughter's legs while she's still in utero. 

Written and directed by S. Craig Zahler, who deserves an Academy Award just for thinking up the line "don't call me a foreigner - last time I checked, the flag wasn't red, white and burrito."

There ain't no question about it - this thing is an instant classic, kind of a combination of Ichi the Killer and Drive, with a hearty amount of Death Wish and The Story of Ricky thrown in for good measure. No surprise, but I have no reservations about giving this one a full four stars out of four rating. Jimbo not only says check it out, he says see it about three or four times and get it on DVD, too. 

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