Ten Mainstream Movies I’ve Shamelessly Fapped To

Celebrating Valentine’s Day in the most romantic way imaginable — by reminiscing on all of the PG-13 and R-rated movies we’ve jerked it to over the last 60 years

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Double Review - "Disobedience" / "Vampire Clay"

One's a movie about Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz playing lesbians that hock loogies in each other's mouth for sexual gratification and the other's about demonically-possessed Play-Doh eating art students in rural Japan ... don't ever say we don't give you variety, folks.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I'm not the first person to say this, but a good goddamn, is going to the movies EXPENSIVE these days.

You wonder why Hollywood revenue keeps dropping? Maybe it has something to do with the fact it takes $80 fuckin' dollars to go see a flick at the multiplex nowadays. Seriously, I took my woman to go see the newest Avengers movie and those fuckers charged us $50 dollars ... no shit, $50 U.S. dollars ... for a pair of movie tickets. And this wasn't even that big-ass, 3D, surround-sound, IMAX shit either, it was a regular two-dimensional screening on a normal-sized projector, with a tinny-ass audio system that kept making that weird scrubbing sound every two-to-three minutes. Then they had the audacity to charge us ANOTHER $20 for a large bucket of popcorn and some Snow Caps, and and additional $10 for two SMALL sodas with no refill privileges.

Granted, I've come to expect inflation with everything in this, post-Obama's America, but good lord, how did going to the movies become THIS expensive over the course of just five years? And furthermore, just how in the hell does Hollywood expect regular Americans to be able to afford to go to the movies more than a handful a' times a year if its going to cost $80 smackers a visit?

You see, Hollywood's just about thrown in the towel. They know the only thing people are going to spend money on is Disney-shit, superhero movies and the occasional "sociopolitically-charged" genre movie that finds a new-ish way to blame whitey for everything. You might get a little return on investment with shitty horror movies around Halloween and crappy biopics and family features around Christmas, but that's still not enough to cover their losses from the latest $80 million dollar box office turd starring Amy Schumer and Melissa McCarthy and whichever unfunny bitch El Lay has convinced itself honest, decent, hard-workin' people of the soil are willing to spend money on even though their entire shtick revolves around mocking Middle America's most cherished values and ideals.

It's not even cool to go the movies anymore. For that matter, people don't even talk about movies themselves that much anymore. It's all about Netflix and HBO and whatever bullshit they're binge-watching that week. Kids today already see movie theaters as passe, and we're probably only 20 years — if that long — away from cinemas having about as much economic import as video stores. This is Hollywood's last, desperate cash grab before getting completely replaced by the vastly superior, subscription-based, internet-driven movie-watching model. As a matter of fact, as soon as this capeshit/Star Wars bull crap falls out of fashion, the American movie industry is kaput. Outside of sperging out with a bunch of fanboy NEETS on opening night so you can look at Rocket Raccoon's ballsack on a 30-foot screen, there's practically no social utility for the modern movie theater. Why spend $80 for one night out when you can just spend $15 a month and get a literally unlimited amount of cinematic entertainment across ALL of your multimedia devices, wherever you are in the world? 

The writing isn't just on the wall, it's practically welded onto it with big, blinking neon letters. At no point in consumer history have Americans EVER chosen a more expensive, less mobile option over a less expensive, more mobile one. Never, ever, in history. The boombox got supplanted by the iPod, the CRT monitor got supplanted by the plasma screen tablet and the fact your city probably has 78 McDonald's and zero sit-down, family-style diners tells you everything you need to know about the American consumer's need (not want) for high-speed, low-cost delivery models. 

Hell, at this point CHINA's communist, godless movie industry will probably start raking in more moolah than Hollywood by 2022, 2023 at the absolute latest. The common folk don't have the time, nor the patience, nor the desire to shell out $100 for two and a half hours of "entertainment" and oil-slicked popcorn no more; and the industry's awe-inspiring hubris that "event movies" like Infinity War are going to safeguard it from going the way of one-hour photo and VCR repair diplomas is just going to make its inevitable downfall all the more enjoyable to watch from afar. 

And after emptying my wallet this last go at-it, all I can do is reiterate the nearly 30-year-old verbiage of that sage prophet, Chuck D. — burn, Hollywood burn, indeed.

...and saliva fetishism. Lots of it.

Speaking of wishful thinking, here's to hoping that Disobedience inspires an entire generation of filmgoers to consider spit-kissing a mainstream activity. Yep, thanks to director Sebastian Lelio, we might just be on the verge of saliva-swapping transforming from a niche weirdo porno perversion into a bona-fide, culturally accepted display of affection, considering the marquee moment of his new flick is when lesbo lovers Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams take turns hocking loogies in one another's mouths for sexual gratification. Sure, we've seen mainstream-ish directors trudge this territory before, like in The Neon Demon, but considering THAT movie featured spit-kissing between one living actor and a cadaver, well, let's just say Disobedience has a better chance of making ooky-mouth go legit than the oeuvre of Nicholas Winding Refn. I can see it now — lovelorn couples taking turns dripping goobers down each other's esophagi in amorous embraces at the airport. Middle schoolers getting written up for coughing phlegm into one another's mouths in-between classes. Hell, instead of the traditional wedding buss, mayhap we'll start seeing spouses slobbering sputum all over each other like porn stars now, and if it ever does, we'll probably have this movie right here to thank.

The movie starts off with this rabbi talking about the differences between beasts and humans before dropping dead on the floor of the synagogue. Then we cut to Rachel Weisz (who looks like a middle age Lordes, know that I think about it) taking pictures of old dudes covered in tattoos. Then she goes to a bar and lets some random guy shag her in the bathroom, then she ice skates for a bit looking all disappointed in herself. So — not that you really needed me to tell you this — yes, this is indeed one of those pretentious, "arthouse"-type movies. Then she goes to a house party hosted by another rabbi and she drinks tea and smokes in the kitchen and she busts this one dude's balls by making fun of the woman he married and then Rachel McAdams shows up in a brown wig and dressed like a 19-year-old bible college student. Then Weisz goes downstairs and listens to some Jew-singing, then Addams lets Weiss spend the night at her place and she starts kvetching about whether or not she loved the old dead rabbi as much as everybody else did. Then she starts asking McAdams if she and her yarmulke-sporting husband are happy being married and they say "of course" so you KNOW they're having some major relationship difficulties going on. Then Weisz goes to her old rabbi's grave and we find out the dead dude is actually her father, which is a surprise to me because I didn't know rabbis were allowed to have sex with anything but 12-year-old boys.

Then McAdams resumes teaching singing classes at an all-girl school while Weiss goes out and buys some apple strudel. Then McAdams goes home and takes her wig off and shows us her buttcheeks and her tit-tays for about two seconds and then she and her husband do the nasty. Then they go to dinner and talk about feminism for a bit and how women "erase their own histories" by taking their husbands' last names  and Weisz said she wants to sell her dad's old house and all the old Jews are agog and she criticizes them for forcing her into "institutional obligation" or some other shit and apparently, all this fierce independent womanhood makes McAdams a bit moist in her panties so she just sits there staring lovingly at her throughout the rest of the dinner.

Then Weisz gets a haircut and another old Jew man yells at her for not being there when her father died. Then McAdams runs into an old friend that has like 16 kids at a grocery store and she runs into McAdams again and they decide to go back to their place and Weisz turns on the radio until she finds a station playing The Cure and then they just walk around the house for a bit talking about reading the Torah and then all of a sudden McAdams starts squeezing on Weisz's boobies and then they start kissing on the lips and McAdams starts to freak out a little and then they stop smooching and Weisz starts to leave the house but then she goes down stairs and they start making out again and yes, you probably will get a boner at this point.

They go for a walk afterwards and Weisz starts smoking and they say they've never done anything lesbian before and then McAdams starts smoking, too, and they both confess that they have fantasies about doing it with other women. Then they go into a tunnel and make out some more but some people show up so McAdams has to vamoose. Then McAdams goes home and yanks her wig off and takes a shower and you can kinda' see her breasts through the opaque glass but not really. Then her husband barges in the bathroom and you get a shot of her yamboosas, but only from the reflection in the mirror. But hey — as far as I'm concerned, that still counts.

Then McAdams goes back to school and she's giving a lecture to her students about blood sacrifices or something like that and McAdams' husband starts going through the protocols to become a rabbi himself. Then McAdams tells Weisz she just can't do the whole clam-digging thing and Weisz says she's leaving town then they go to a subway (the kind with trains, not hoagies) and wind up in a dark alleyway somewhere in London so they can snog some more. Then they get a hotel room and McAdams starts kissing on Weisz's boobies and goes down on her and they take turns fingering each other while museum elevator music plays and then we arrive at the moment of truth — the scene where they FINALLY start playing ooky-mouth with each other. And yeah, call me kinky, but watching Evelyn Carnahan from The Mummy turn Regina George's mouth into a saliva receptacle is pretty dadgum hot, if I may say so myself.

Anyhoo, they get done munching each other's fish tacos and they smoke cigarettes indoor and Weisz asks McAdams if she can take her picture and then her rabbi husband comes home and tries to get frisky with her because they always do it on a Friday (apparently, it's some sort of Hebrew thing, I think) but this time around she rebuffs his advances, goes to the bathroom sink and starts blowing chunks. Then McAdams tells her husband she kissed Weisz and then he starts shaking her and shoots her a mean look and walks out the door, all stoic-looking and stuff even though you just KNOW he be mad as hell right now.

There's some more Jew-singing (I'm sure there's a technical name for it, but I'm too lazy to look it up) and McAdams' husband just stands there looking like he swallowed a turd the whole time so he goes home and pours himself a stiff drink and by the time he, his wife and Weisz have dinner he's already three sheets to the wind and you kept expecting him to freak out, but he never does and Weisz hops in a cab and gets the heck out of (proverbial) Dodge. Then McAdams socks a toboggan over her head, hops on a bus, goes to a pharmacy, buys a whole bunch of drugs and starts praying up against her closet (get it?) like it was the Wailing Wall. Then Weisz and McAdams' husband (I think they might be siblings, you'll have to double-check Wikipedia on your own time) check out the dead rabbi's cleaned out house and he tells her he wish his wife never met her and then McAdams tells her she's pregnant and gives a speech about fearing her child will grow up in an oppressive Jewish millieu that will deprive her (of course she assumes her child is going to be female) of personal liberty and that she's leaving him and her husband, because he's the world's biggest cuck, just walks out the door like it ain't no thang. Then everybody goes to the formal wake or whatever the Jew-equivalent of a Christian wake is and they all try to avoid making eye contact and Weisz asks McAdams to come to New York with her and McAdams' husband is announced as the new rabbi and he tries to give a speech but his nerves are so jangled he can't read his notes and then he starts going on a rant about what "choice" and "freedom" really means and I think it's supposed to parallel what the dead rabbi was saying about men and women and beasts at the very beginning of the movie and of course the whole diatribe is a big "fuck you" to his wife and then he looks her dead in the eyes and screams "YOU ARE FREE!"  Then all three of them have a group hug outside and McAdams' husband tells Weisz "shalom" and he's not even mad she had an affair with his wife no more and she gets in a cab and McAdams chases after her to give her one last smooch and tells her she will make a great mother and Weisz starts crying and she visits her daddy's grave so she can take a picture of it and yep, that's how the movie ends.

We've got one dead body. Four breasts. Two exposed female buttocks. Multiple lesbian liplocks. Gratuitous Torah reading. Gratuitous kvetching. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place ... some serious spit-swapping fu (expect mono cases to spike coast-to-coast once this thing starts making the rounds on HBO.)

Starring Rachel Weisz as the free-spirited photog that likes to smoke indoors and take pictures of everything; Rachel McAdams as the wig-wearing closeted lesbo that feels iffy about the Jewish patriarchy; Alessandro Nivola as the cucked rabbi who's totally cool with his wife getting her tuna taco licked by another woman; and Nicholas Woodeson as the rabbi who says a bunch of stuff about man and beasts at the beginning of the move then promptly keels over.

Written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (yep, another Catholic screenplay writer, obviously) and Sebastian Lelio, who also directed all this shit.

Call me crazy, but I kind of enjoyed it. It's not a great movie by any stretch, but the acting is pretty good and there's a lot of good atmosphere building up to the grand finale where the rabbi-in-training finally confronts his philandering spouse about all of that snatch-diving she's been doing on the down-low ... although the ending, obviously, is the text-book definition of anticlimactic. I give it a decent two and a half tofu dogs out of four. Jimbo says check it out, but wait until it starts playing on Showtime so you can whack your weasel to it.

Actually, that's one of the better special effects in the movie.

Speaking of shameless, disgusting things, that brings us to our second feature of the week, the new Japaheeno horror-comedy Vampire Clay, which might just be the first zombie movie ever made about the standards being too darned high in Tokyo's art academies.

The movie starts off with this middle-aged hag unearthing a bag of modeling clay in her backyard, and since this is a horror movie, of course it ain't no regular kind of modeling clay ... but we'll get back to that in just a minute. First, we've got to meet all the students at this one countryside art college, which I'm pretty sure is the Japanese equivalent of going to DeVry. Then the new girl in school unties the bag of mystery clay  and starts making facsimiles of starfruit with it and then she thinks she sees it breathing when she spritzes it with water and then their teacher comes in and tells them to not be so goddamned conventional with their designs, which considering they are Japanese, after all, is kinda' like trying to teach a fish to ride a unicycle.

So the students (like Suspiria, they're all predominantly female) get kind of subversively catty with each other and then the clay grows penis-like tendrils and starts stealing their razor blades. Then one of the girls pokes herself on a discarded razor and bleeds all over a ceramic ashtray in the making and this old one dude shows up and just stares at the bike rack and he sees somebody dug a hole in the backyard and he has flashbacks of a giant hot dog monster eating everybody and then he starts running to the hills like a madman. Then the clay escapes at night and starts lurching around the place looking like a sentient dog turd and eating all the school's pet gerbils. 

Then the students kvetch about not being good enough to get into a real art school and their teacher has flashbacks to her husband cheating on her and then — conveniently enough — an earthquake strikes. Then they bicker and argue over the role of "individuality" in modern art some more and then this one girl sneaks into the art room after hours and one of the clay sculptures comes alive and starts eating her hand. Then it barfs out the gerbil it ate later and it sprouts tendrils and jumps in her mouth and she has to poke the possessed clay head with a fork but when she goes to text for help her OWN fingers turn into taffy and next thing you know her hands are melding together into a big old wad of intestinal bubble gum and then one of her arms falls off and then the other arm turns into a Play-Doh whale and eats her entire upper torso.

Then the girl everybody thought got ate by Play-Doh shows up out of the woods and she razor blades another student while she's grabbing a smoke so she can eat her blood, then her face falls off and she starts shoving her big cancer-squid clay hands inside her gizzards. Then she shows up a couple of minutes later looking all normal and stuff, but right before she can attack her teacher with a box cutter the only male student there accidentally bumps it out of her hands. Then she does something truly evil — she eats one of her fellow students' rice lunches without their permission. Then she grabs a butcher knife and cuts his face with it then a set of Kermit the Frog lips pop out of her head and start eating him. Then he's possessed with Play-Doh fever and he's running around waving a butcher knife around like Michael Myers and he ends up hacking off his own hand and then more clay tendrils start chasing after another girl, then he replaces his arm with a triangular ruler and the girl shoves it through his left cheek and then he starts trying to headbutt her like Bam Bam Bigelow and that's when the teacher shows up to shove a lunchbox through his face and knock his head clean off his shoulders. Then the crazy old man from the beginning of the mouth shows up with a portable heater and dries his ass up before stomping him into a million billion pieces.

Then we get the back story on the titular vampire clay. Apparently some autistic sculptor sold his soul to the devil so he could meet the requirements of a big restaurant order or something like that. But apparently he lived on top a toxic waste dump so he had super cancer, so he decided to start making sculptures with his own blood and the restaurant guy Jews him out of his royalties so they get into a kung fu fight and the sculptor keels over and I think his soul entered the sculpture's body or something. Oh, and that restaurant guy is the crazy old man, because apparently, even shitty Japanese movies nowadays need some sort of midway-point plot twist.

Then the surviving two girls, their teacher and the old dude start rounding up all the stray pieces of clay they can find, then one of the zombies shows up with a Mr. Potato Head doll growing out of the left side of her face and she throws a scalpel at them so the old dude has no choice but to blowtorch her. Then there's an earthquake and a bag of dried clay gets ripped open and the old dude breathes in the dust and he gives him autistic sculptor zombie flu, too and he starts coughing up blood and a giant frog-retard sculpture starts growing out of his chest and turns into a herky-jerky stop-motion midget that's ready to eat everybody left in the cast.  Which means you know EXACTLY what to expect in the grand finale:  two girls, one claymation monster, one VERY unreliable homemade blowtorch and a whole hell of a lot of things getting stabbed over and over again ... only for the final 15 minutes of the movie to consist of the sole surviving art student consoling her teacher for not getting into the good arts academy when she was younger and them burying the zombie clay in one of them suicide forests Japan's all famous for.

And yes, there is a sequel hook, of course — so next year, be on the lookout for the follow-up, Vampire Mixed Media.  

We've got seven dead bodies. No breasts. Six zombies. One dead gerbil. Multiple claymation rape attempts. Arms roll. Hands roll. Face slashing. Head stomping. Bloody face picking. Gratuitous slow-motion effect, for no discernible reason whatsoever. Gratuitous business partner battering. Box cutter fu. Fork fu. Plastic ruler fu. Blowtorch fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place ... some heavy duty ceramics fu.

Starring Ena Fujita as the final girl ... or, at least, the final girl who isn't in the clutches of menopause; Asuka Kurosawa as the art school teacher who has to protect her students from zombies using plastic compasses; Kanji Tsuda as the unscrupulous restaurateur who still feels guilty about turning his business partner into a  piece of sentient sculpting clay 20 years later; and Kanji Tsuda as the creator of the titular vampire clay, who probably won't become the next big horror genre icon, no matter how bad the makers of the movie tried.

Written and directed by first time feature film director and special effects maestro Soichi Umezawa, who has to be given a little bit of credit for trying to merge The Thing with Heathers for about 45 yen and almost being halfway successful at it, to boot.

It might be a little too wacky for hardcore horror fans and a little too gross for the normies, and while it's far from being a brilliant, subversive, Gozu or Visitor Q type arthouse J-horror flick, it's still pretty enjoyable for what it is. I give it an OK two and a half tofu dogs out of four. Jimbo says check it out, but only if you've got way too much time to kill one rainy afternoon.

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'The Babysitter' (2017) - A No Frills Review

A brutally honest, no-holds-barred take on the acclaimed Netflix original movie (surprise: I don't like it.)

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

A lot of people have been telling me about this new Netflix movie called The Babysitter and how great it is. Considering I'm kind of a historian of degenerate slasher movies, I'm not really surprised. Everybody keeps saying the same thing. "Jimbo, this is your kind of movie," and "Jimbo, you would love this flick." So after the third or fourth person sung its praises to me, I decided to plug in my ex's old-password and give the movie the old look-see. 

Well, call me crazy, but I just don't see what the big deal is. All in all, I thought it was a pretty mediocre movie, with maybe one or two decent scenes, but on the whole it was a pretty humdrum affair.

I don't know why it's happening, but for whatever reason Hollyweird is all about the tweenspolitation horror these days. You've got It and you've got Stranger Things and now you've got this movie, about some 12-year-old dork caught up in some sort of Satanic ritual massacre, which sounds like something that could result in a pretty decent horror flick, but - yet again - the people who made this movie just didn't want to play it straight. Instead, it's one of those meta horror movies that's all self-reflexive and self-aware, which is meant to make it a comedy hybrid, when all it really does is display the incompetence on the scriptwriter's part.

Yes, it's another tongue-in-cheek, retro-baiting, made-by-fanboys-for-fanboys (un)original, this time helmed by, of all people, the pseudonym that directed the Charlie's Angels remake from 17 years ago. Now there are a couple of really good, nostalgia-rooted movies made over the last couple of years that are clearly meant to mimic the adolescent action-adventure movies of the 1980s. Ping Pong Summer and Cop Car immediately spring to mind. This one fails because, simply put, the "comedy" just don't work. This is the kind of movie where the producers want to pat themselves on the back for flashing onscreen text reading "what the fuck?" during murder scenes, the kind of flick where the writers think just mentioning the names of sci-fi characters is in and of itself hilarious. It's the kind of movie where 40-year-old genre dorks try to make 30-year-old actors playing 17-year-olds sound like the crusty, obese patrons of the local Dungeons & Dragons parlor, the kind of flick that just assumes niche nerd culture is now the dominant culture in the U.S. and we should all chuckle at lengthy, in-joke-laden dialogue exchanges about Star Trek and Predator. And worst of all, it's the kind of movie that thinks just splashing blood everywhere is a substitute for a lack of actual humor, and that watching airhead cheerleaders get stabbed in the titties and then spend the next half hour of the movie complaining about having just one boob left is the funniest shit ever in the universe. Remember that annoying asshole in the third grade who was always being a loudmouth little cocksucker and irritating everybody and disrupting class because he thought everything he was doing was so guldarn funny? Well, if that kid was a Netflix original, he would probably be this movie.

The movie starts off with a black, overweight male nurse giving a shot to a scrawny, nerdy white pre-teen. "Come here and take this shot just like you'd take some ass," he says, which I'm pretty sure constitutes a form of sexual harassment against a minor. After that we've got your oh-so-cliched slow-mo walk through the school shot, and we're introduced to the main character's obvious love interest in waiting, whose dad acts just like Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. "NASCAR nation, bitch!" he yells at sixth-graders while blaring gangsta rap. So, yeah, this is one of those movies where instead of having real people in it, everybody's a quirky, one-dimensional caricature of the kinds of people hipsters think reside in suburbia. Trust me - it gets way worse from here.

So, needless to say, this nerdy kid (his name's Cole, by the way) gets bullied quite a bit. There's this one fat black kid, in particular, that likes to give him the business, and he also likes to talk about bedding 16-year-olds. You know, between this and that one cartoon about the talking vaginas of seventh graders, Netflix isn't really doing a whole lot to dispel all those PizzaGate rumors about the company. I mean, at all.

Then Samara Weaving shows up as the titular character and tells Cole "you gotta' punch them in the dick" to solve his bully problem. Oh, the joys of living in a manic pixie fantasy land dreamed up by obviously beta Hillary Clinton supporters. You know, one where high school cheerleaders use video game terminology like "big bad" as if they even give a fuck what kind of lingo the racist nerds on 4Chan use, anyway. 

Then Cole's dad gives him a driving lesson at a race track and promises he'll let him binge watch Mad Men with him when he's older (god, do I hate these Hollywood straw-parents who run around saying "jorts" like its intrinsically hilarious and all post-post-postmodern and shit.)

You know, if she's going to kill the poor sap, she could at least have the decency to slip him a little bit of tongue before he dies.

So obviously Cole is crushing on Bee, but the girl his own age down the street is crushing on him and then he gets jealous because she's fliritng with some gangly dork. Then his parents go away for a holiday and Cole and Bee disco dance and watch Billy Jack on their garage door and talk about which fictitious characters they would take with them on an intergalactic suicide mission (oh, just kill me now, why don't you.) So the girl down the street keeps sending Cole texts about orgies and he gets curious and sneaks down stairs and sees Bee and her gang of suspiciously multicultural best pals playing a game of spin the bottle and SWERVE! The sitter and all her pals are actually part of some Satanic cult that stabs people in the head and eats virgin blood. 

Time to meet the rest of the cast. We've got the token black dude who says stuff like "Carrie would've been better if she was black, she would be covered in Hennessey" and "you know what happens when you kill someone? They lose all their Instagram followers and shit." Then you've got Bella Thorne as the bimbo cheerleader who gets shot in the tit-tays by the police and says "no dude's gonna motorboat these" and "who's gonna' wanna' suck on my nipples?" Then there's the jock Chad boyfriend, who runs around without a shirt on the whole movie and this one Asian chick who wears too much eye shadow. And they all decide it's probably a good idea to sacrifice the kid, so just like that the movie turns into Clive Barker's Home Alone, with all the demonic teens trying to capture Cole and our wee-sized hero trying to off 'em one by one with firecrackers and mouse traps.

The cops show up pretty early, but naturally, they all get killed off by the devil worshiping high schoolers. The black dude is the first to die (genre law mandates it, after all, but let's face it - after ten minutes of screen-time, the writers ran out of high-larious "black things" for him to say, anyway) and then the Asian broad gets blown up after a loooooong crawlspace chase sequence. Then the shirtless Chad almost strangles the kid to death, but then the fat black bully from earlier shows up to egg his house and the would-be strangler tells the kid "this is America, you need to wreck his ass." So Cole challenges the fat black bully to a fight, and of course, gets his ass promptly kicked. There's a chase up and through the abandoned treehouse (complete with the most unbelievable "accidental" hanging mishap in movie history) and the kid runs across the street to his not-canonical-yet-girlfriend's place and Bee chases after him with a shotgun en tow (this stuff takes forever, by the way.)

So Cole goes back into his own house to stare down Bee, but the cheerleader from earlier ain't quite dead yet, but rest assured she'll be dead enough in just a few minutes. Eventually, Cole and Bee do have their climactic showdown, which comes in the form of Cole stealing Bee's ride and driving it through his kitchen window while "We Are the Champions" plays for no real reason other than "lol, random-ness." After that we get a wholly inauthentic, pseudo-syrupy finale with the demonic babysitter giving a mea culpa while trapped underneath the axle of a Chevy Blazer and she appears to die, but come on - you KNOW what's going to happen in the post-credits stinger and you don't even need me to tell you, neither.

So for those of you keeping score at home, we've got eight dead bodies. No breasts (what's the deal there?) One lesbian tongue lock. Fire poker through the eyeball. Throat slitting. Awards placard through the jugular. One exploding head. One exploding basement. One flipped car, with totally demolished dining room area. One unintentional hanging. Up-close needle poking. Cookie force-feeding. Gratuitous slow-motion disco dancing. Gratuitous Friday the 13th references. Gratuitous titty punching. Gratuitous Billy Jack re-enactments. Pocket knife fu. Hand job fu. Firecracker fu. Mousetrap fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place ... some serious contributing to the delinquency of a minor fu.

Starring Samara Weaving as Bee, the Satanic babysitter who drive daggers through the skulls of high school nerds and steals blood from 12-year-olds so she can conjure up the the forces of darkness; Judah Lewis as Cole, the 12-year-old needlephobe who doesn't know the differences between prostitutes and Protestants and has to Google search what an "orgy" is; Bella Thorne as the bisexual cheerleader super-slut who sold her soul to the devil so she could be an MSNBC host; Andrew "King Bach" Bachelor as the unfunny black guy who keeps saying things black people only say in the minds of white democrats; and Robbie Amell as the guy who's really, really opposed to wearing shirts.

Written by Brian Duffield, the same guy who wrote Insurgent and Jane Got a Gun and directed by McG, whose first movie in four years isn't exactly a happy return to form. Then again, considering the guy's creative apex was making music videos for Sugar Ray, maybe the he never really had that much of a form to return to in the first place.

I'll give it a ho-hum two stars out of four. It has its moments, but all in all it's just another soulless genre movie that thinks making offhanded references to other movies constitutes "comedy," and that with enough arterial explosions, none of us will pick up on how plastic and unnatural all of the dialogue sounds. Which, as we all know by now, can only be offset by lots and lots of ample female nudity ... something The Babysitter, unfortunately, is all but devoid of.

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DOUBLE REVIEW: 'Atomic Blonde' / 'Chuck'

One's about a chick in a white wig who kicks everybody's ass and the other's about a dude who knocks down Muhammad Ali and does a lot of cocaine - and both are probably better than you'd expect them to be.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Alright kids, I need your help settling a dispute me and an acquaintance got into recently: is it morally OK for white people to use the word "nigger" while being robbed by people who just so happen to be black? 

Now, I've written about the complexities of the dreaded "n-word" plenty of times for this wonderful little site of ours, and the general contemporary U.S. societal consensus is that white people can't say "nigger" or its myriad permutations for any reason other than to reflect on how terrible a word it is and how everybody who uses it ought to feel plumb ashamed of themselves.

But what if a white person has to use the word "nigger" as a survival mechanism - is it still verboten for the slur to pass through a Caucasian person's lips, even if their very lives may hinge on the utterance? 

Here's the scenario me and a buddy cooked up. Let's say you're a white person, and one day you're walking through a parking lot at night and some black fellow decides he wants to carjack you or wallet-jack you or just plain jack you up as atonement for years of perceived racial oppression. In the moment of aggression, would it be socially and ethically permissible for the white victim to use the term "nigger" as a non-physical form of linguistic self-defense? 

We've all read The Gift of Fear and recognize how important "posturing" is as a form of circumventing violent conflict. Furthermore, we've all read The 48 Laws of Power and recognize how important appearing unfazed and emotionless are in gaining the upper-hand in physical confrontations. So wouldn't it at least seem somewhat practical for a white victim of black aggression to attempt to protect himself from further harm by using the term "nigger" as a form of defensive posturing?

Imagine this, dear reader. The scene - the dark, nearly empty parking lot of Walgreens, 3:45 a.m. 34-year-old Chad Robinson, experiencing torrential bouts of diarrhea in the middle of the night, decides to pick up an emergency bucket of Imodium and an extra large bag of pumpkin-shaped Reese's peanut butter cups, because fuck it, they were right there next to the cash register. After making his purchase, he ambles back to his car when - out of the stillness of the night - he's immediately assailed by one 23-year-old Jethro Abraham Washington, a local low-level Oxycontin pusher high on Purple Drank who needs $100 right then and there so he can upgrade his T-Mobile plan. 

"Gimme yo wallet, yo may-naze-skinned mudda-fuggah!" Jethro screams, waving what appears to be a box cutter (or maybe a really big screwdriver, it's kinda hard to tell sometimes.) At this point, Mr. Robinson has four options; he can fork over the wallet (not that it would prevent the robber from still hurting him with the weapon, or even killing him), he can attempt to flee the scene (not smart, especially when you don't know if the other guy has a gun on him), he can attempt to physically attack the robber (definitely not smart, since he might have AIDS-tainted needles underneath his Washington Wizards baseball cap or his second-cousin once removed LeAndrew waiting in the wings with homemade shiv) or he can try to linguistically diffuse the situation. 

Power dynamics aren't difficult to understand. People tend to attack people they perceive as weaker than them, especially those who refrain from defending themselves. Since Chad would be risking life and limb by literally fighting his attacker, perchance there's a way he can stop the robber dead in his tracks without throwing one punch, firing one bullet or swinging one tactical army knife - that's right, he can employ nigger fu. 

Yep, that's right, nigger fu - from the Latin, "fu" meaning "to attack with" and the Roman "nigger," meaning "wait 'til Jesse Jackson hears about this." My thesis is simple. By using the word "nigger" against his attacker, Chad can exemplify a sense of fearlessness and dyadic superiority, which in turn would perhaps scare off the would-be robber (or, at the very least, make him second guess whether or not his target might be a Klansman or a neo-Confederate with a concealed Luger duck-taped to his butthole.) So with that in mind, let's revisit that scenario I put in your head earlier, and see what happens when Chad breaks out his fifth-degree black belt nigger fu skills:

Jethro: "Gimme yo wallet, yo may-naze-skinned mudda-fuggah!"

Chad: "Buzz off, nigger, I've got to get home and do white people things, like listen to Paul Simon's 'You Can Call Me Al.'" 

Jethro: "...whut? How dare yo, honky! Yo know yo ain't spozed to be sayin' dat! If I had my phone on me I'd take yo picture and put it on Instagram and make yo lose yo job!"

Chad: "You heard me, nigger. Part like the Red Sea and let me go back to my birthright, listening to 'The Boy in the Bubble," then skipping straight over 'Graceland' and 'I Know What I Know' so I can thumb dance to 'Gumboots.'" 

Jethro: "Well I never! You can keep yo personal belongings, I wuddn't want noze money from a RAY-CYST no how!"

And ... scene. By simply defensively using two syllables, not only did Chad avert an armed robbery, potential bodily harm and even his own demise, he was able to nonviolently disable his attacker and go on his merry way, preventing any further physical harm to himself or his attacker. Now, I think such a strategy is perfectly reasonable and justified, but don't try telling that to my mixed race amigo DeKeith (I met him at a local slam dance open mic performance, where his 37-line poem "Black Eyes, White Eyes, I's Eyes" positively tore the house down") who told me he thought the idea was both ineffective and problematic.

"Jimbo, saying 'nigger' is never, ever OK, for a white person, even if he is getting robbed," he tried to tell me. "Besides, what if hearing the word 'nigger' just makes the robber even angrier, and more likely to use physical violence to get what he wants?" 

Well, he had me there, I must admit. If there's one thing I don't want happening, it's offending the feelings of someone committing an armed robbery against an innocent victim. After all, we here in the States are A-OK with people getting the shit beat out of them and gunned down in the street like sewer rats for $20 dollars ... but don't you even think about tainting the experience with racial prejudice and bigotry.

I'm sorry, but if they're going to charge me $15 damn dollars for a movie ticket, it's my god-given consumer right to jack off right then and there in the theater.

Speaking of things that are whiter than a Ku Klux Klan snowball fight, our first flick of the week, Atomic Blonde, might just be the only major studio Hollywood movie you'll see this year that's devoid of a single person of color. Granted, you do have that one half-Algerian broad with the quasi-cleft lip from The Mummy showing up to make lesbianic advances towards Scarlett Jo, but beyond that? We're working with a virtually all-Caucasian cast here, something that in this day and age is rarer than finding a Dairy Queen staff that can speak English above a first-grade level.

This is one of those movies that's all style and no substance, which is precisely what you want out of a dumb, late summer action flick. Unfortunately, it's also one of those "visionary" neo-action movies like The Watchmen and John Wick where the filmmakers try to make it seem more artistic and culturally cognizant than it really is, so we wind up getting these long sequences where the director keeps poking the audience going "see, look at this reference to the work of Tarkovsky I put right here! Golly gee, ain't I smart?"

Subtlety is not this movie's forte. There's this one part where Scarlett Johansson walks into a contact's apartment and the camera literally zooms in on a paperback copy of The Prince on his bookcase to let us know he's not to be trusted. Then there's the part where ScarJo gets chased through a movie house by Russian goons, and what movie is playing? Why, what are the odds, it's Stalker ... you know, because SHE is getting stalked, too? And don't think these people are limiting their on-the-nose allusions to arthouse cinema and Machiavellian literature. Just wait until you get to the part where that aforementioned half-Algerian lesbo whispers a damning secret in ScarJo's ear, and fucking "Voices Carry" starts playing over the soundtrack.

As for the formal plot? Well, it's 1989 in Berlin, but it's an alternate reality where the wall never came down and the Ruskies and the Brits still hate each others' guts and ScarJo plays this one U.K. secret spy who wears half her body weight in eyeliner trying to find this one guy who literally memorized 40 years worth of classified Cold War intel so she has to keep making and breaking deals with the KGB, the CIA, the MI6, the BND, the DGSE and I'm pretty sure even AOL and KFC to find him and smuggle him across the English Channel. But the whole thing is told in flashback as John Goodman and Toby Jones grill her on why the mission was all fucked up, and you literally have no idea who's supposed to be the good guys or the bad guys because every 10 minutes some new plot twist is introduced that reveals character X is actually working for character Y, but you really don't notice it because there's also another chop socky knife fight happening every 9 minutes. And to be fair, the kung fu in this one is pretty good, even if it's yet another movie that demands we suspend our disbelief and just roll with the idea that some 110 pound skirt can fight off 13 armed Russian soldiers in a pair of stiletto heels using only an extension cord and a Hello Kitty key ring.

Granted, the final act kinda' falls apart, but at least it keeps the identity politicking to a minimum and it does a pretty good job of following the number one rule of ALL action movies halfway worth a shit - at any juncture in the film, you're never more than five minutes removed from somebody getting shot, stabbed, immolated, garroted, defenestrated or pummeled to death while "Der Kommisar" ironically plays in the background. 

We've got 24 dead bodies. Six breasts. Two exposed female buttocks. Two motor vehicle chases. Six totaled cars, with one underwater submersion. Spike to the eyeball. Knife to the throat. Multiple people getting shot in the head at point blank range. Gratuitous vodka sipping. Gratuitous ice cube baths. Gratuitous Til' Tuesday. Gratuitous "99 Luftballoons." Kung fu. Strangulation fu. Skateboard fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place ... Cold War nostalgia fu.

Starring ScarJo as the eponymous quadruple-agent who somehow musters the cardio to regularly judo toss 300 pound assassins around like potato sacks even though she lights up a Marlboro every five minutes; James McAvoy as the guy we think is Russian who has a nasty habit of beating teenagers to death to Eurotrash pop music; Eddie Marsan as the walking Encyclopedia whose life must be protected at all costs (so you KNOW he's going to get offed sooner or later); Sofia Boutello as the French agent provocateur who spends the whole movie trying to dig into ScarJo's fish taco; Toby Jones as the huge-foreheaded CIA interrogator who almost creams his jeans when ScarJo starts recounting her Sapphic exploits in Deutschland; and John Goodman as the CIA operative with the best line in the whole movie - "the Brits got us in a royal goat fuck."

Directed by stuntman turned action movie auteur David Leitch (whose next movie is the Deadpool sequel) and written by Kurt Johnstad, who adapted the screenplay from the comic book The Coldest City, which - like every other acclaimed graphic novel - was written by some bald English fruit. 

I give it two and a half stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, especially if you prefer your senseless, stylized movie violence without any caramel-colored people in it.

Liev Schreiber, seen here when he isn't forcing his kids to wear nail polish and kiss each other on the mouth for retweets.

But if you do like senseless, stylized movie violence with caramel-colored people in it, boy, do I have a great second bill feature for you. It only took about seven months, but they finally started showing Chuck in my neck of the woods and I've got to say this is a really, really good movie, even if it does star Liev Schreiber - you know, that washed up guy from Scream who started dressing his son up like Harley Quinn and telling him to suck on bicycle handles whenever the paparazzi sprouted up.

It's a biopic focusing on the life and times of one Chuck Wepner, the New Jersey boxer who got called up as a tomato can opponent for Muhammad Ali and shocked the shit out of everybody by not only knocking the loud and proud segregationist and Ku Klux Klan guest speaker down, but making it all the way to the last 19 seconds of the 15th and final round before the refs waved it off. 

This is one of those high-speed biopic movies that cuts right to the chase. By the half-hour mark we've already got the Ali fight and it's over and done with in six minutes. Now, in most boxing movies that would be a huge problem, but there's so much interesting shit happening before and after Chuck gets famous that you don't even really feel short-changed. 

We start off with the movie recapping Wepner's clash with Terry "The Stormin' Mormon" Hinkey and how as a kid, Chuck would just let the bullies pound on his skull Homer Simpson style until they got tired and then he'd turn their lights out. Then he tries to fuck his mailman wife, goes to a bar and hands out those novelty ink pens where the woman flashes her tits when you turn it upside down and quotes Requiem for a Heavyweight a lot. After Muhammad Ali beats George Foreman (strangely enough, though, the movie never acknowledges Chuck's third round TKO loss to George six years earlier), Wepner gets a call from his trainer (played by Hellboy, who somehow looks more intimidating without 20 pounds of latex on his face) who tells him Don King wants him a whitey for Ali's next opponent, and since Chuck's the only honky ranked in the top ten, guess who's next in line for a heavyweight title shot?

Then we've got a lot of press conference scenes, even though the guy they got to play Ali looks nothing like him, and this one reporter asks Chuck if his strategy is to "bleed into his mouth until he drowns." So he goes to the Catskills and trains harder than he's ever trained in his life and watches himself on Mike Douglas and starts having second thoughts about taking the fight. By now everybody knows how the fight turned out, so I won't tell you what you already know, but rest assured the in-ring action is surprisingly decent and realistic-looking.

From there the flick centers on Chuck dealing with his 15 minutes of fame. He goes to see Rocky and starts living up the gimmick, just ambling into discos wearing fur coats and pimp hats and doing line after line of the Bolivian booger sugar in the bathroom while "Gonna' Fly Now" plays in the background. But he starts hitting the Colombian nose candy a little too hard and starts running into money problems so he finagles Sylvester Stallone's agent into a meeting so he can try and get a few bucks from him and when he finally does run into him at a cafe the guy playing Rocky sounds just like him but has a body type closer to Paul Reiser than Rambo. While Stallone doesn't give him any pity dollars, he does give him a role in Rocky 2, but - of course - Wepner gets liquored up and dives into a pool stark-raving naked the night before his big screen test and bombs the audition like it was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After he shows up at his daughter's parent-teacher conference coked out of his mind, you just know the next 30 minutes are going to be brutal, as Chuck spends the rest of the flick crying in bars and trying to get random skanks in the sack, only to wind up in the slammer for possession with intent to sale for 26 months, where, naturally, he gets a standing ovation from the other inmates as soon as he enters his jail cell. But there is something of a happy ending - after turning down a cameo in Stallone's prison epic Lock Up, Chuck gets paroled for good behavior and marries this one broad who dresses just like Peg Bundy and they walk around taking pictures of crappy Rocky statues at Planet Hollywood and the postscript tells us they're still happily wed to this very day.

Sure, it's a movie that borrows heavily from stuff like American Hustle and Goodfellas in terms of editing, aesthetics and overall atmosphere, but all in all it's a pretty damn solid character dramedy with a great cast, some punchy dialogue and a pace that isn't too slow or too fast. A better movie could've been made about Wepner's life, but for what it's worth, this is still one of the better sports biopics to come down the pipe in quite a while. Raging Bull, it most definitely ain't, but it's still better than a good 75 percent of stuff that's showed up at cineplexes this year - and yes, I did enjoy it more than Creed, in case you were wonderin'. 

We've got no dead bodies. No breasts. Two exposed male buttocks. One dead career (Wepner's.) Three boxing matches (including one against a bear). One wrestling match (against Andre the Giant.) Gratuitous bar crawling. Gratuitous disco. Gratuitous cocaine snorting. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place ... some serious fall from grace fu. 

Starring Liev Schreiber as the eponymous character who tells the press "the sweet science ain't so sweet when you've got a piledriver in your nuts"; Elizabeth Moss as Wepner's second wife, who keeps warning waitresses about how her husband "just falls in love with the freckles on your ass"; Ron Perlman as Chuck's trainer Al Braverman, who keeps calling him a "Polack" and refers to Muhammad Ali as "Muck Luck"; Pooch Hall as the former Cassius Clay, who asks if "they're going to lay feminine napkins in his corner" during a press conference with Chuck; and Morgan Spector as Sly Stallone, who has the absolute perfect voice for the role even though he looks more like Adam Driver than the dude from Cobra.

Written by Jeff Feuerzeig (who also directed The Devil and Daniel Johnston) and former heroin addict/ALF scribe Jerry Stahl and directed by Philippe Falardeau, some Canuck-Froth who did that one movie about Reese Witherspoon helping Sudanese war refugees get bagger jobs at Safeway.

I give it three stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, despite it putting more money in Liev Schreiber's bank account.

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Comic Review: Poison Ivy - Cycle of Life and Death (2016)

The fan favorite floral femme fatale finally got her own limited-run series, but does the six-parter give the Vixen of Vines the spotlight she deserves? 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

Although I am, was and always will be a Marvel fanboy, I've always had a peculiar fondness for Poison Ivy. She's easily my favorite female villain in any medium, ever since I was introduced to her in her first B:TAS appearance where he made out with Batman while he was tied up by a vagina-looking plant monster. 

Over the years, the character has been rewritten from a huge-haired Batman fan girl in a leafy swimsuit into a hardcore feminist (and possibly lesbian) eco-terrorist into some sort of demi-goddess with the same skin hue as the Jolly Green Giant. Although the plant-based motif and a lot of the tried and true pheromone powers have remained consistent - whether the character was retconned into a teenager with hair shaped like a tulip or was transformed into a melodramatic drag queen who kinda sorta resembled Uma Thurman - Poison Ivy doesn't really seem to have the same consistent core identity and personality that a lot of the other Batman heavies share. Pretty much every time a writer gets a hold of her, they tend to rebuild her background, motivations and even powers from the ground-up; as a result, Ivy winds up being transformed into a totally new character seemingly every two or three years. 

Personally, my favorite incarnation of the character was in the early 1980s, when she was just a bitchy brown-haired man-hater who wanted to seduce all the men in town so she could mutate them into plant monsters or feed them to whatever genetic experiment she was working on at the time. Really, it wasn't until they tried to turn her into an eco-conscious vigilante that things started going off the rails with the character; the same way Marvel fucked up Venom by turning him face, DC really hunched the pooch by turning Ivy - a sociopathic misandrist - into an Earth Firster tweener. 

So enter the latest take on the long running Bat-foe, a six-part miniseries that ran from January to June of this year titled Poison Ivy: Cycle of Life and Death. It was written by Amy Chu, an MIT, Wellsley AND Harvard Business School-trained funny book scribe who started her own imprint called Alpha Girl Comics (yeah, in case you couldn't tell from the namesake of her company, the identity politics is strong with this one.) Pulling primary art duties is Clay Mann, an industry journeyman who probably has the most supervillain-sounding name of any artist in the industry. So, with their powers combined, what did they manage to accomplish with the villainous vixen of vines? Well, let's hit up the stack and find out for ourselves, why don't we? 

All right, so issue one opens with Ivy in Southern Angola, in hot pursuit of some kind of "living fossil." This being Africa and whatnot, she and her tour guide are soon attacked by diamond mine guards, whom are easily dispatched by our anti-heroine and her ability to make gigantic vines pop out of the Sub-Saharan soil out of nowhere.

We tail Ivy back to Gotham, where she is now a researcher at the local botanical gardens, working on genetically modified plant-animal hybrids (considering her background, you REALLY have to wonder what kind of judge would sign off on such a work-release program.) From the get-go, we get a stern talking to about sexism, as one of Ivy's colleagues yammers on and on about how "misogynistic" her boss is.

And that's our cue for Harley Quinn to show up, incognito. She convinces Ivy to join her to a girls night out at, of all things, a rough and tough biker bar, and begrudgingly, she accepts her invitation, if only to avoid being hit on by an overly-flirtatious male coworker.

There, Harley has switched out into her finest Margot Robbie duds (a surreptitious ad for the Suicide Squad movie? Surely you jest!) They talk about Ivy being rich as fuck because of her bio-tech patents and Harley asks Ivy is she is more plant or human these days. Ivy responds by saying something about the Green - just read the Wikipedia page, it's too convoluted for me to give you a summary - and what do you know, a barroom brawl breaks out. While Harley wallops a few burly bikers, Ivy nonchalantly goes after them with a special spray that appears to turn people into homosexuals. What? Didn't anybody every tell Amy Chu that homosexuality is an INGRAINED GENETIC TRAIT THAT YOU ARE BORN WITH AND CAN NEVER, EVER BE REVERSED OR SYNTHESIZED? Oh goodness, it's only the first issue, and the staggering amount of Asian woman-spawned homophobia has me triggered something fierce.

After the melee, Harley criticizes Ivy for being too cold and distant. She responds by going home to her palatial apartment complex, walking around naked and bemoaning the simple-mindedness of humanity before saying some abstract stuff about CRISPRS. Ivy makes reference to an off-panel "project," which she assures us has grown faster than she thought. She then arrives back at the botanical gardens, and holy shit, somebody has brutally murdered her mentor!

The cliffhanger provides a natural segue to issue two. Here, we learn that Ivy's research has been stolen by ... well, somebody. We're introduced to the purple mohawked Darshan Bapna, who tells investigators the dead scientist may have accidentally poisoned herself. Ivy ripostes by saying her mentor was a consummate pro who never would have botched her job like that, but then she remembers her alibi is "hanging out with Harley Quinn" so she quickly shuts her yap. That's when sexist coworker Winston cuts in and says he took Ivy to the movies and "did" her, which gets the guy who kinda sorta runs the lab to say, damn it, he KNEW women weren't nothing but distractions in the work place.

For some reason, nobody can figure out that Pamela Isley is Poison Ivy, not even the homicide detectives. Shit, the guys who run Webutation ought to hire her as a consultant! So, Ivy and Darshan are working on creating a community garden to memorialize the dead scientist, and Ivy starts getting suspicious about her colleague. Then, they are attacked by pit bulls (the whole time, Ivy has an internal monologue about the dogs being conditioned into vicious killers by man) and then she kills the owner by making sentient vines ... well, explode inside her, I guess?

Then it's revealed that the recruiter knows she's Poison Ivy. Then we get Darshan's backstory - basically, he's a dude that became a scientist because both his parents are scientists, his siblings are biochemists and wasn't good enough to make it on Gotham's Got Talent. Then he tells Ivy about his Jainist upbringing (technically, he is not even supposed to eat potatoes because they have roots) and she rebuffs his offer to grab a coffee sometime. So he follows her back to her apartment (not creepy, at all) and finds the corpse of one of the lab higher-ups AND Ivy cradling a bunch of mutant plant-spawned babies she calls "sporelings." And from there: issue three. 

So the police are investigating the murder of Eric Grimley, world-class chauvinist pig and chairman of the plant sciences department at Gotham Botanical Gardens. Darshan tells them what he knows and then we check in n Ivy, who is admiring her self-engineered Cabbage Patch babies. One is named Rose and the other is Hazel because ... uh, the material demands groan-inducing plant puns, I suppose?

Ivy returns to the Gardens and she learns about Grimley's murder (or, she's pretending to learn about it anyway) and she gets questioned by the police and she almost goes plant-psycho on them but then one of them receives a call telling them to let her off the hook. Apparently, this Pamela Isley character has some powerful friends in high places...

Then, Winston - the pervert from the lab that hit on Pam earlier - rings her doorbell and he hits on her some more so she decides to kill him with one of her patented death kisses. The only problem is, they don't actually SHOW the kiss take place, even though the front cover of the damn comic is Ivy seductively crawling over his lipstick-smudged corpse. And then, a bunch of Petey Piranhas from Super Mario Bros. eat his poisoned remains, because goddamnit, being an obnoxious flirt MANDATES such a grisly demise, it seems.

Then she goes to a coffee shop and talks with Darshan about the blueprints of the botanical gardens. And that's when she calls up an old friend with some expertise in the field of breaking and entering ... Catwoman. 

Issue four begins with Ivy and Catwoman dealing with Darshan, who gets ensnared in one of Ivy's apartment plants. Eventually, they decide to hatch a plan to break into the gardens at night, using the old steam tunnels built in the late 1800s. Then, Ivy starts hearing a "disturbance" in the Green and a whole bunch of scientists start running for their lives and they uncover a worker who has been "treed" a'la the old people in the B:TAS episode "Eternal Youth."  That's when they encounter a THIRD plant child, this one hiding out in the air vents like Newt in Aliens from some unseen menace. Apparently, the lab workers stole Ivy's work and tried to create their own armada of plant people - almost all of which resulted in hideous, aborted plant-people fetus thingies. Ivy goes nuclear, kills the remaining scientist in the lab and then brings the whole damn Botanical Gardens using her plant-control powers.

Issue five begins with Ivy naming the lab specimen "Thorn." Apparently, the Sporelings age at a rapid rate, so at 25 weeks old, they already look like teenagers ... well, teenagers with gold and green skin and needles sticking out of the top of their skulls, anyway. Darshan brings over a karaoke machine and the "girls" bitch and moan about how bad they want to go out and mingle in society, like they were repressed Ninja Turtles or something. 

Ivy has a nightmare about this giant Doomsday-looking motherfucker that's been teased in quick flashes for the last couple of issues and she realizes, oh shit, the kids have shut down the security system and escaped! So they sneak into a club and, whoops, some businessman hits on one of them and has his hand turned into a redwood paperweight. Of course, Ivy has to come bail them out before the shit gets too deep, and for all the carnage they caused - which includes major property destruction and HOMICIDE - Ivy decides to "ground them." Get it? Because they are like, half plant and shit.

Then Ivy enters some sort of metaphysical tree-world in her head where she speaks to a "parliament of trees" and oh shit, she gets attacked by Grimley, who is now like, a 40-foot-tall tree monster! 

Chapter six, here we come. As it turns out, Grimley stole Ivy's research because he thought it would grant him immortality. Granted, it's a form of immortality where he's going to look like the eponymous monster from Pumpkinhead, but hey! It's immortality, nonetheless. 

After explaining why he had to kill Ivy's mentor (she was too close to figuring out he was mutating into Tree Man), Grim tells Ivy he needs a steady supply of Sporelings stem cells to prevent his cancer from coming back. That's when Darshan and the Sporelings come to Ivy's rescue. And before you can say "dues ex machine," MOTHERFUCKING SWAMP THING just shows up out of nowhere to save everybody. Cue an extended battle scene where everybody starts hacking up Grim with rakes and machetes, which concludes with Swampy giving P.I. a pep talk about managing realistic expectations of motherhood. And then, the Sporelings hop aboard a Greyhound headed down South, where one of them proudly proclaims "we're going to change the world."

And ... fin. 

...still a better interpretation of Ivy than the one in this one, though. 

Well, that was - a mixed-bag, so to speak. Frankly, this just isn't the kind of Ivy I want in my nerd books. The whole aloof, semi-lesbian, pro-STEM feminist single mom environmental justice warrior shtick is really annoying and makes the character a boring, lifeless, needlessly political figure whose role isn't so much to engage in bizarre capers that jeopardize the fate of an entire metropolis just 'cause as she is to stand around and make, ugh, socially cognizant remarks about the state of sexism in contemporary U.S. culture. Look, if I wanted to get a lecture about why all men are a bunch of worthless layabouts, I could always spend a few minutes on Tumblr until the ironically indiscriminate hatred makes me want to pluck my own eyeballs out; if I wouldn't voluntarily do such in a medium that's 100 percent free, then why oh why should I be asked to spend my disposable income on the same kind of irritating, hyperbolic propaganda?

Granted, Cycle of Life and Death doesn't exist SOLELY to make some sort of anti-man statement. Rather, the series - a shameless attempt to garner a regularly monthly comic - tries desperately to transform Ivy into some sort of almost-justifiable vigilante, whose M.O. is going after really rich industrialists that hurt the environment and hold women down and all that jazz. The problem with that is evident in this series: that kind of protagonist is supremely boring. Indeed, Cycle itself illustrates just how much this take on Ivy is unable to stand on its own - without the cameos from Catwoman and Harley Quinn (and especially the spin-off bait in the form of the Sporelings), this thing just dragged like an anchor across a wooden floorboard. And hoo-boy, do not even get me started on the last-second addendum of Swamp Thing, and all that abstract crap about the Green, or the inclusion of an American Idol reject as the series' primary comedic foil. Seriously, don't even. 

For me, the ideal Ivy has always been the Bronze Age version, as written and drawn by Gerry Conway and Irv Novick. Forget the voluptuous ginger from the '90s cartoon and definitely forget the Martian-looking version heaped upon the masses by Jim Lee in the mid-2000s - the petite, laurel-crowned, brown-haired P.I. that used her feminine wiles to seduce, trick and scam wealthy business men into their economic (and sometimes, literal) doom is the iteration that I have long felt best expressed who and what Ivy was about. No Warholian lesbian overtones, no mother-complex nonsense, no jibber-jabber about the moral righteousness of eco-terrorism; rather, she was just a super smart, super sly under-the-radar villianess who used her botany background to make herself wealthy and stamp out a few overbearing, old white guys who proved long-term threats to her financial aspirations. I mean, really, what would you rather read, month in and month out - a whole bunch of monologuing about biochemistry and why gonaded-Americans are destroying the planet, or the exploits of a hot '70s looking chick who uses mind control lipsticks on CEOs so she can force them to give up their companies and leave their families and come with her to a facsimile of the garden of Eden where she plans on systematically feeding them to a giant Venus's fly trap? Yeah, that's what I thought - the saga of a woman who dresses up like a cucumber, blow darts people and really, really wants to fuck her arch-nemesis hard is infinitely more intriguing a concept than anything tossed around in Cycle, for sure. 

So yeah, there ain't too much to get excited about in this half-year-long series. And if this is the template for a full-fledged, regular title, I really dread what sort of meandering identity politicking-in-lieu-of-genuine-storytelling-nonsense we're ultimately going to wrench out of the prospect. Sorry Ivy fans - looks like you're going to have to wait a little bit longer before the iconic villainess receives the standalone treatment she rightly deserves.

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