It's a double shot of leftover Halloween movie crap as we take a look at 'Jigsaw' and 'Boo 2!' Huh - would it be improper of me to call the double feature Jig-Boo?
By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX
Hey kids, remember back in August when that James Fields fella' at the Charlottesville Unite the Right protests plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters and one morbidly obese white woman died on the scene from a heart attack and nobody in the media floated the idea that maybe, he wasn't intentionally trying to kill anybody but just trying to escape the mob of people who surrounded his car, bashed out his windows and we're trying to literally yank him out of the vehicle and beat the shit out of him, possibly to the point he died?
Well, for a whole month, the media wept. This was proof positive that Nazism and the KKK were back in action, even though the people who actually put together the protest are neither Nazis or Klansmen. Nor was the problem that state investigations have since found that the counter protesters who outnumbered the first wave of protesters nearly 100 to one where indeed the ones who instigated the bulk of the violence at the event, and that the city of Charlottesville is MOST at fault for the violence because they LITERALLY threw the protesters off public property and FORCED them headlong into a wave of pro-diversity jihadists who were champing at the bit to beat them into submission with blunt objects and the occasional homemade blowtorch. And of course, worst of all was President Donald Trump getting up there on stage and bemoaning the violence perpetrated by both the protesters and the counter-protesters, which is a 100 percent true statement for anybody with even halfway decent vision but was nonetheless roundly condemned as "white supremacist apologia." Indeed, so irked by Trump's brazen refusal to say that just one side of the conflict is evil incarnate and responsible for all the bad things happening in the world that a whole slew of congress-people, Republican and Democrat, drew up a proclamation condemning racists and ethno-supremacists and forced him to sign it or else they were going to keep calling him a "Nazi doo-doo head" until he finally capitulated.
Indeed, so caught up in the culture war against the alt-right - which, if you're going to be a stickler for details, simply means you're a conservative with the social views of Pat Buchanan and the economic policies of Ron Paul - that Hollywood and Silicon Valley both hopped on the bandwagon to non-ironically exterminate all alleged "white racists" from the face of the earth. MTV's entire awards show gala in August was more or less a three hour "fuck whitey" hootenanny interspersed with Taco Bell commercials and anti-smoking ads, while servers like Go Daddy and Google did their part to ensure Andrew Anglin's The Daily Stormer would never, ever be allowed to spew its hateful rhetoric ever again - this, despite the U.N. declaring two different edicts in 2011 and 2012 condemning ISP censorship of non-illegal Internet postings as a human rights violation.
And then, on Oct. 31, it happened again. Only this time, the devastation was quantitatively and qualitatively worse. This time around there were eight people run over and killed by a murderous, ethnocentric ideologue, including five whom were Hispanic. Except this time, the media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley didn't go into full-fledged culture warrior mode. Why? Because - despite doing the EXACT same thing that James Fields did at the "alt-right" protest, only producing a body count that was eight times deadlier - the mass vehicular murderer was doing it for Allah.
There was no condemning or criticizing of Islamofascism the same way there was seemingly universal condemnation and criticism of "white supremacy" in the wake of Charlottesville. MTV didn't air a special concert to virtue signal against Islamic supremacist violence. Nobody in congress demanded the president sign a special proclamation slamming Muslim extremists. Those squawking vaginas on The View didn't spend two whole weeks bemoaning rising Islamic ideological violence or criticizing legislators who refused to describe Islamofascism as a grave, existential threat to civility and democracy itself.
Indeed, NBC News legitimately declared the Oct. 31 truck-o-caust in New York to be a "success" since it proved Muslim extremists here couldn't kill 100 people at once with a truck like they do in Europe. Rather than mull the fact that militant Islamists are responsible for more than 13,000 murders a year (including door-to-door ethnic cleansing of Christians in the Middle East and exploding more than 200 black people in Africa with truck bombs, which effectively make them everything American liberals are afraid so-called "white supremacists" might become in these United States), the academia-entertainment-Silicon Valley hydra instead turns its focus towards fighting stereotypes and protecting Muslims from retaliatory - if not flatout justified - criticism and condemnation. That a radical Muslim runs over eight people in New York or another one shoots up 49 people in a gay club in Orlando or a fugly-ass couple in San Bernardino tag team their way to a dozen-plus bodycount at an office Christmas party doesn't mean a goddamn thing to them, what's REALLY stressing them is people on the Internet calling 'em "rag heads" and "camel jockies." Let's make no bones about it; in the eyes of today's demented liberals, non-violent racism and ethnocentrism is considered an EQUAL sin to violent Islamofascist bloodshed, if not considerably worse. To them, mass violence is only worth calling out and combating if the perpetrators are white, and if there isn't an explicit "racist" angle to their violence, rest assured, these assholes will find a way to wedge one in there.
Which raises another good question: how come the media and academia don't raise a stink whenever black supremacists commit acts of mass, anti-honky violence?
Just a few weeks ago a black identitarian killed just as many people as James Fields, only this time around he left police explicit proof that his homicidal shooting spree at a Tennessee church was a.) planned and b.) motivated by racial hatred. But the New York Times doesn't declare open season on black power groups in the wake of the murderous hate crime - instead, they spend the entirety of their news write-ups regarding the incident talking about how Dylann Roof's shooting spree was so much worse.
Why wasn't there rampant condemnation and criticism of black supremacist ideology after Fredrick Demond Scott shot and killed five Caucasians around Kansas City, leaving behind such cryptic social media messages as threats to "kill all white people?"
Why wasn't Congress and all those daytime TV talk shows demanding people disavow Black Lives Matter after Kori Ali Muhammad shot and killed a motel security guard in a mad scramble to kill as many white people as he could earlier this year?
And come to think of it, why did the media turn Adam Lanza, James Holmes and Stephen Paddock into Internet folk heroes while completely glossing over black mass murderers like Alexis Aaron, George Emil Banks, James Edward Pough, John Allen Muhammad, Omar Sheriff Thornton and Cedric Larry Ford? Indeed, it's rather interesting that the media posits "mass murder" as a white man's hobby, seeing as how black men account for 75 percent of all mass shooting perpetrators (and victims) in these United States.
And considering the handiwork of Seung-Hui Cho, Jiverly Wong, Elliot Rodgers, and One L. Goh, doesn't it make just as much sense to frame mass shootings as the aftermath of "Asian privilege" as it does "white privilege?" Actually, it makes more sense to do exactly that, since Asians are the most overrepresented ethnic group among mass shooters in the U.S. Hell, even the Jews have their fair share of mass shooters to call their own, including an American-born spree killer who wiped out 29 Muslims in 1994 and a guy who opened fire on commuters in Houston last year while wearing, of all things, a full-on Nazi uniform.
Funny how every time a white dude goes on a shooting spree, the perpetrator's whiteness is ALWAYS drudged up as a factor, but whenever a black dude, or a Muslim dude, or an Asian guy or a Jew opens fire in public, their ethnoracial qualifiers are just coincidental, even when they explicitly leave behind evidence that their crimes were borne out of group tribalism and rabid, radical, hatred of the racial other.
Because in that case, we know EXACTLY what to blame for their identitarian, ethno-supremacist homicidal actions: all those guns being too damn easy to get, that's what.
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| Yep - it's pretty much the same as the last movie. Which was the same as the last movie before that ... which was the same as the one before that, which was the same as the one before that, which was the same as the one before ... |
Speaking of things that'll make you wanna' pull all yer hair out 'til you look like Sinead O'Connor's crazy ass, we've got a double shot of Halloween leftovers to drudge through this week, startin' with Jigsaw, which I think is the 17th movie in the long, long running horror franchise. Believe it or not, I've only seen the first movie that came out in 2004, so if there's a whole bunch of plot that happened in parts two through 28, it's stuff I definitely ain't privy to - just a heads up before any of you cantankerous assholes start sending me angry emails about those pivotal story details I missed out on in Saw 3D.
We start off with a high speed chase. The crook fleas the police, runs into an abandoned warehouse, pulls out a remote control device and says five people will die unless ... well, he's not really clear about it. So he gets his hand shot off by the po-po and then he says "the game, it's started" and then we cut to a buncha' people holed up in a room with these high-tech slop buckets chained to their heads. Jigsaw comes in over a P.A. system and gives them the old rundown and then a whole bunch of buzzsaws start yanking the people towards 'em. Basically, the victims have to cut themselves on the blades to free themselves, except for this one guy who's stoned or something - he gets chewed up by the gear works. Apparently.
As for the cast, it's pretty much the most formulaic assortment of cannon fodder ever assembled for a movie like this. You've got the tough brown-haired girl, the meek and frail blonde girl, the black dude who says things only white people think black people say and the Chad-bro asshole that tries to be tough all the time. Then we cut to the police finding one of Jigsaw's victims hanging from a bridge with his face carved out like a punch bowl, with an MP3 hidden inside it for the coroners to find. We cut back to the cannon fodder and the asshole guy makes jokes while being yanked by the chains into certain death while the black dude "confesses" to selling a crappy motorcycle to a clueless customer. Next trap up, Jigsaw says he injected one of them with a lethal poison, but there's an antidote mixed in with a saline solution and a really, really nasty acid. As it turns out, the blonde girl is a drug addict and a thief and yep, she got the hot dose and she keels over with blood leaking out of her ear like a busted ketchup packet. Then they go into this room where piano wire wraps all around 'em and then they find another tape recorder and Jigsaw drops another corpse off and all the autopsy people keep calling the victims "bucket heads."
The the asshole dude is trapped in a different room while everybody else is getting buried alive by Bran Flakes, and he has to get up while his leg is all fucked up and pull a handle to free 'em. Cut to the detective asking the autopsy chick about her sexual fetishes and alibis. The detective says they ran a "dark web IP trace" and found out one of the doctor's proteges is uploading autopsy footage to a Jigsaw fan site. We go back to the grain silo and pitchforks and knifes and nails and shit start falling out of the ceiling. The guy pulls the handle, and sure enough, his leg gets yanked off.
The lead mortician guy goes to his protege's "studio," which has this huge assortment of death trap "replicas" THAT ARE CERTAINLY JUST PROPS AND NOT THE REAL THING, FOR SURE. They find another tape, and the black dude finally tells the whole story about the motorcycle and LOL he sold Jigsaw's nephew a bike with faulty brakes and he got hit by a truck. So he gets dropped into some death funnel contraption that's powered by ... what else ... a motorcycle on a treadmill. Anyway, he ends up getting Cuisinarted to death, but they cut away from the gore so you really can't see HOW he dies, precisely. Then the guy who voices Jigsaw shows up and he says the asshole Chad was responsible for a car wreck that killed three people back in high school. Oh, and the brunette chick was Jigsaw's next door neighbor and he knows she suffocated their infant and put it under her husband's flab and framed him for crushing it to death then he went to a loony bin and hung himself. So the detective and his mortician Jigsaw fangirl buddy go to the farm where Jigsaw trapped everybody (apparently, it got shuttered because of a nasty pig virus outbreak) and Jigsaw lays a shotgun on a table with one shell in it and walks out of the room. But LOL, he rigged the gun so it fires backwards, so the brunette chick blows her own brains out.
Then the detective and the mortician guy from earlier wake up in a room with laser cutter necklaces wrapped around their neck. The doctor confesses to messing up Jigsaw's X-rays on purpose, and then the contraption slices his jugular open. But the doctor's not really dead, you see. He gets up, 'cause his contraption was a fake. Then we learn the doctor WAS the stoned guy who got yanked through the machinery at the beginning of the movie and he's working with Jigsaw and he's trying to get vigilante revenge on the detective for letting a criminal walk free after killing his wife and that Jigsaw helped him with his PTSD when he got back from the Iraq War.
And sure enough, the detective gets his head lasered open like a blooming onion, and that, folks, is the movie.
We've got six dead bodies. No breasts. Two hangings. Multiple autopsies. One fiery head-on collision. Legs roll. Two exploding heads. Drag strip fu. Hydrofloric acid fu. Piano wire fu. Saw blade fu. Grain engulfment fu (perhaps the first time we've seen that at the multiplexes since Witness.) Giant blender fu. Laser death ray fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place ... way too much backstory fu.
Starring Matt Passmore as the Iraqi vet mortician who cooks up the most convoluted revenge scheme this side of Oldboy; Callum Keith Rennie as the detective who thinks it's a good idea to sexually harass witnesses; Paul Braunstein as the Chad-bro who says "I confess that this is fucked up!"; Mandela Van Peebles (yep, the seed of Mario Van Peebles) as the black dude who gets Hamilton Beached to death; and Tobin Bell as the psycho cancer patient who just won't die.
Written by Peter Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg (the latter of whom penned the screenplay for that Academy Award winning opus The Hungover Games) and directed by the German-Australian duo of Peter and Michael Spierig, who also helmed Daybreakers and Premonition, two movies I guarantee NOBODY reading this have ever heard of before.
Sorry, guys, but you're not just beating a dead horse, you're practically committing necro-beastiality on the corpse of this franchise. Sheesh, even the people who made fuckin' Jason Voorhees decided to give it a rest after nine movies - it's long past time this series got put out to pasture, too. The best I can give it is one and a half tofu dogs out of four. Jimbo says - well, in this case, I'd say don't check it out.
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| If you thought the first movie tried to get a lot of mileage out of a one-joke premise, just wait 'til they do it again without the joke. |
While we're tossin' out all the seasonal cinematic leftovers, I figured we might as well take a look at the latest Madea movie while it's still playing in non-dollar theaters down here in the exurbs of Atlanta. Now, I was actually a pretty big admirer of the last flick in the LONG running Tyler Perry franchise, but this follow-up - the clumsily titled Boo 2! A Madea Halloween - ain't HALF the B-movie that one was. Instead, we've got a super-rehashed, slight redressing of the first Boo!, which for all we know could actually be leftover clips from their first movie cobbled together and shat out in multiplexes for a quick Halloween cash-grab.
And I assure you, the editing in this one is amazingly bad, with some visible rough cuts and this weird phenomenon where the word "damn" is poorly dubbed out for "darn," and you can practically hear the dead air from the Final Cut Pro edits on the actual soundtrack. Hell, there's even a couple of clearly flubbed lines LEFT in the movie, with some of the worst scene transitions I've seen at a real movie theater in ages. Clearly, this is a movie made by a man who doesn't give a shit if the movie is technically competent, because it only cost about $1,500 to make and they prolly filmed the whole thing in one week two months back and they know they're going to recoup their budget about ten-fold, regardless.
If you've seen any of the Madea movies before, you know what to expect here. The movie starts off with Tyler Perry not in drag playing a lame-ass, overprotective dad who buys his daughter some headphones when she really wanted a new car and then her mama and her new boyfriend pulls up in her 18th birthday gift, which what do you know, is a brand new car. Then she runs off to the fraternity from the first movie and tells everybody she's legal now and she wants to par-tay with 'em and they invite her to a kegger at an abandoned campground where a whole bunch of teenagers got axed to death a couple of years' back. But Tyler wants to give her an old-fashioned birthday party, complete with a petting zoo, and of course she thinks he's goofy as hell and then Madea, Joe and her two elderly friends not played by Tyler Perry show up and crack wise and tell a lot of jokes about "bitch juice" and pimping and stripping and when Tyler's ex-wife shows up, the old man Perry portrays compares her to Candyman and we all share a hearty chuckle.
So we get most of the characters from the last movie returning, so all of those annoying-ass, one-dimensional frat boys are back and so are all the former jail bait and they are ALL some thirsty-ass 18-year-olds and they keep talking about doing the nasty, but wait up, apparently, there's some dude with a chainsaw up there chopping people up entirely offscreen. And also, there's a zombie in the lake and a double pair of The Ring ghost ripoffs, because that shit ain't dated at all. But you see, unlike in the first movie where all of the supernatural tomfoolery was all an elaborate prank, this time around the monsters and psycho killers are REAL, complete with a grim reaper analogue whose face is an astral black hole.
So you've got the elderly people running around talking about drugs and sex and cursing each other out and the kids running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to avoid all of the ghouls and ghosts and at the very, very end, non-drag Tyler Perry shows up and lets them know "LOL, it's all a prank again," except he soon finds out that not all of the macabre figures on the premises are his hired hands and we end with Joe, Perry's crotchety alter ego, trying to make a deal with a Jason Voorhees analogue to off Madea.
Sure, sure, we've seen all this before - as a matter of fact, we saw it just last year - but this time, Perry's given us a hell of a variable. You know who plays his best pal in this one? None other than TITO FREAKIN' ORTIZ, and all I'm gonna' say is that if you thought his takedown defense in the cage was bad, just wait 'til you see this guy try to do comedy.
We've got two dead bodies (both offscreen.) No breasts. One zombie. One grim reaper. Gratuitous The Ring ripoffs. Gratuitous weed references. Gratuitous psycho ex-girlfriend subplot. Chainsaw fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place - some of the most spectacular phoning it in fu I've seen in AGES.
Starring Tyler Perry in a triple role as the uncool daddy, Madea, and Joe; Diamond White (whose birth name is already her porno name) as the hot-to-trot daughter willing to risk dismemberment for some frat boy cock; Taja V. Simpson as Tyler's bitchy ex-wife; and the one and only Tito Ortiz as Victor, which is something he certainly wasn't called a lot during his final years in the UFC.
Written and directed by Tyler Perry, who should be commended for not only having the audacity to make the exact same movie twice, but do it this time around without an actual script.
Yeah, this one is a HUGE step down from the first movie. The best I can give it is a lackluster one and a half tofu dogs out of four - Jimbo says check it out, but only when it's playing on BET a year for now for free.
