DOUBLE REVIEW: 'Abacus: Too Small To Jail' / 'Goon: Last of the Enforcers'

How about this for diversity: one flick about Chinese-American bankers getting the screws put to 'em by the feds and another about American actors pretending to be violent, retarded Canadians?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

A couple days back my good biracial buddy DeKeith stopped by my humble abode and started banging on the front door. 

"Jimbo, Jimbo, you gotta' come quick!" he yelled while I finished my morning bowl of Count Chocula and limited time only Halloween-themed Oreos. "There's this new thing you gotta come check out with me - it's called foot golf."

Now, right then and there I shoulda' known better. As we all know, the only kinda golf that means Jack Shit to anybody is the kind where you whack balls inside a giant clown's mouth, and obviously, that wasn't the kind of golf DeKeith was talkin' about. 

Alas, I put on my finest mildly worn Los Angeles Kings jersey and yesterday's cargo shorts and hopped in DeKeith's 1993 turqoise Hyundai Elantra and about an hour later, there I was listening to some spiky-haired fruit basket named Chad telling me the ins and outs of kicking a goddamn soccer ball around a golf course.

Boy, I wish I was being facetious with ya, but honest to goodness, this "foot golf" claptrap DeKeith dragged me outta bed at noon for was exactly what the name implies. It's on a golf course, they give you a regular old soccer ball and then you take turns punting the sumbitch until you make it to this big old bucket underneath a flag. Rinse, repeat and regurgitate 9 times and voila, that's foot golf for ya. 

It was at that point that I began questioning the authenticity of DeKeith's supposed half-black ancestry, 'cause I couldn't think of anything whiter than this shit right here. Being a member of the Ku Klux Klan while drinking a glass of skim milk isn't as white as foot golf. Listening to Perry Como while hockey's on the tube and you're eating a mayonnaise sammich isn't as white as foot golf. The Osmonds and the Romneys discussing the merits of L. Ron Hubbard's bibliography isn't as white as foot golf. Hell, every single albino person in the world getting together and having a gangbang and cumming at the exact same time isn't as white as foot golf. Just saying the name "foot golf" makes your teeth a little bit sparklier and makes you just a smidge more suspicious of the Meskins. It's the figurative embodiment of whiteness, something genetically engineered to only appeal to the most Caucasian of Caucasoids. It's a pastime created for people named Tanner and Madeline who think recreational suburban biking is a little bit too ethnic-sounding for their liking. 

But for whatever reason, DeKeith was all about this waste of time, effort, and greenspace fertilizer. He really thought he was hot shit when he boomed that little rubber ball 10 feet in the air and watched it sail across the field in a 30 yard arc. He was so damned happy, you'd think he just booted a Super Bowl-winning field goal, or finally found out who his real biological father was. But me? The first time I stepped up to the plate, I felt about as excited as a Jew at a broken ATM machine. I barely wrenched back my left leg, took a five-yard step back, jogged for about 1.3 seconds and laid into the soccer ball's hide with the very tip of my Reebok dead goddamn center. The thing went zooming about 30 feet in an upward trajectory, like a Delta jet taking off, before suddenly plummeting out of the sky like God himself gave it the old Macho Man Randy Savage elbow drop. The ball goes straight up, then it goes straight down. And I've got another football field ahead of me before we can move onto the second hole. The shit took three fuckin' hours to finish, and I ain't even yanking your chain. And the worst part? I paid $20 of my own money for such nonsense, and DeKeith didn't even have the common biracial decency to pick me up at least $20 in Taco Bell produce afterward as a repayment.

What's the deal with all these new recreational activities, anyway? Why the hell are 30-year-olds out at the park wearing $200 sweat-resistant, NASA-engineered polymer jerseys playing ultimate frisbee and disc golf instead of doing more adult things, like betting their week's paychecks on the outcomes of real sports played by real athletes? That these tools even have the time on their schedules to put on their fruity Atlanta United jerseys and juice up their Nissan Leafs to spend half a Saturday kicking a soccer ball across a golf course tells you exactly what kind of people you're dealing with. They've got too much money, they've got too much leisure time, and they're way too obsessed with recreational tomfoolery. In other words, they're the new WASPS - white assholes playing stupid sports.

So if any of your pals invited you to a round of "foot golf," I suggest you do the same thing I wished I would've done to DeKeith - invite 'em to play a new activity called "My Foot Up Your Ass Golf," which as the name implies, involves burnin' plenty of calories walloping Millennial keisters up and down the back nine.

Let's see - we've got dragons, people doing kung-fu and guys smoking in front of Buddha figurines; looks like somebody's about to win "Stereotypical Chinese Iconography Bingo!"

Speaking of things everybody ought to do, you really don't have an excuse to not check out Steve James' latest documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. That's primarily because the thing just got picked up by PBS and you can stream it online any damn time you want for free right here.

Never heard of James before? Well, next to Errol Morris or Werner Herzog, he's probably the best documentary filmmaker alive right now, a guy with an uncanny ability to make surprisingly engrossing movies about the blandest sounding subjects. He's prolly best known for making 1994's Hoop Dreams (about poor ass kids from the hood getting bussed into the 'burbs of Chicago to play basketball for rich-ass private schools), but he's also responsible for giving us two of the best documentaries of the decade - The Interrupters (about a bunch of community volunteers trying to convince Chicago's eighth-graders to quit shootin' each other over their sneakers and callin' each other's mamas bad names) and Head Games (about people getting concussions playing football and soccer and the professional sports industrial complex trying to cover it all up.) Hell, even his documentary about Roger Ebert was about 100 times more enjoyable than it prolly had any right to be, and that's coming from a guy that pretty much hates old Egg-bert's guts. The important takeaway here is that this James fella knows how make a damn documentary, and this Abacus movie is no exception.

As the name suggests, it's about the Abacus Federal Savings Bank, this firm in Chinatown that got indicted by the feds for mortgage fraud back in 2015. It starts off with Sung family - led by bank founder Thomas Sung, who gives all his daughters high-level jobs working for his business - watching It's A Wonderful Life and talking about how their dream was to come to America and open up a bank so fellow Chinese people can start restaurants and not pay taxes, either, Well, they buy live crabs on the streets of Chinatown and there's a whole bunch of stock footage from the 1950s showing what banks in New York used to look like and Thomas talks about how much he hates driving from Greenwich, Conn. to NYC every day, and then, we're introduced to this guy named Ken Yu, who alongside two other loan officers tried to take some money from a couple of closers. So the bank hands over their books to the feds, and the prosecutors decide the loan department is corrupt as fuck, so they arrest the whole family and chain 'em together and make 'em walk to the drunk tank in the classic "Gracie Train" formation while shielding their faces from the newspaper people. Then this snaggletoothed journalist talks about how the D.A. wouldn't have done that with black clients and this one Chinese women working for the D.A. gets so pissed about it she turns in her resignation right then and there. Then this guy named Don "Community Activist" Lee does some rabble-rousing, and he's got a James Brown haircut that looks even better than the one Maxine Waters has.

So the formal case begins in Feb. 2015 and the Sungs know what's up so they hire this one Jew lawyer who says calling Fannie Mae a victim is like calling a dog's tail its fifth leg during his opening statements, and then Tom gets mad at him for not emoting enough in front of the jury. Then all of the Sungs get together for some egg foo young and yell at each other, but they're such workaholics that they keep doing their normal paperwork even though they're all on trial for 80 counts of grand larceny and conspiracy. Naturally, this leads to plenty of witness stand dramatizations, complete with jurors from the actual trial being brought in, like this one blonde white girl who's all like "so, uh, how long did you guys KNOW he was doing this shit again?" while the snaggletoothed journalist is all like "well, yeah, what they did WAS wrong, but Chase and CitiBank did WAY worse, so we better just forgive 'em and forget all about it."

Then we get to the scene where I (and prolly everybody else watchin' the movie) got *yay* close to shutting the thing off in disgust; when MATT TAIBBI gets some screentime to flap his big fat gums about Wall Street. Thankfully, he's only in the movie for about 15 seconds, but still, that's 15 seconds too many of Matt Taibbi than it's safe for anyone to be exposed to. Then we get some bar graphs about the big banks costing America $22 trillion in the Great Recession and this one Chinawoman from The New Yorker talks about the seating arrangements at Abacus and then the blonde, white juror that wears too much lip gloss is like "how could you NOT know this shit was going on when you were literally breathing noodle breathe on each other all day?" and then Sung formally gets indicted and he talks about a scandal in 2003 when a banker stole a million dollars from his company and almost got the whole outfit shut down then.

Then we get a bunch of lib-uh-rul talking heads that blame the borrowers for misleading the bank, with one gal saying "I don't think any of the borrowers think they are really committing a crime, even if some of these loan documents are falsified." Then there's this story about a couple making $24K a year combined getting approved for a half million dollar Abacus loan and that dentally-challenged investigative reporter form earlier gets a solid 10.0 in freestyle mental gymnastics coming up with an excuse for why cultural differences on what constitutes a loan makes it OK for Chinatown workers to not pay federal income tax. 

Then the Sungs eat a big plate of Kung Pao chicken while drafting a "race card" heavy press release in anticipation of being found guilty, and the movie starts to dip for a bit while they keep yammering on and on about how great their default rates are and they kinda' sorta' admit that most of the time they did lie about loans, but even if it is a crime, is it really the type of consumer fraud we ought to be going after? Naturally, this leads to one lib-uh-rul white talking head comparing Abacus employees committing millions in mortgage fraud to jaywalking, because they really gave up on critical thinking about 35 years ago.

Well, considering the Sungs are still around to star in the documentary, I reckon I'm not spoiling too much when I say they DON'T get sent down the creek at the end of the trial. In fact, the movie ends with Tommy Sung telling his wife she can finally start showing emotions again and then an investor says "you had the revenge for us - ha-ha!" while drinking champagne and eating cake in their executive boardroom. Which, naturally, is a segue into the film's concluding quip-cum-moral of the story; when it comes to fighting the feds in court, "you still have a chance, but it'll cost you $10 million."

So yeah, it's a movie with some painfully obvious biases that prolly paints its subjects in far too flattering a light, but there's no denying it's a great procedural courtroom drama and a solid sociocultural analysis of something that seems like it would be about as interesting as watching slugs sleep. That, and it's got a tremendous finale that all modern day action and horror movies could learn a thing or two from; if you want to see some tense-ass story-telling, you definitely need to stay tuned for the final 15 minutes of this flick. 

We've got no dead bodies. No breasts. No car chases. One massive bank run, with pushing, shoving and police harassment. Gratuitous It's A Wonderful Life references. Chopstick fu. Family bickering fu. Perjury fu. Tax Evasion fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place, some serious dramatic recreation fu.

Featuring Thomas Sung as the head honcho of the embattled Chinatown bank, who says "yes, I do need a haircut to make me feel more energetic, especially as I grow older"; Polly Greenberg as the ice queen high priestess of the New York D.A.'s major economic crimes bureau who says "Abacus was not exonerated ... exoneration is when a person is proven innocent"; Ken Yu as the disgraced loan officer who perjures himself about 50 times during his own cross-examination; Jessica Woodby-Denema as the blonde juror that don't buy the Sungs' chop-suey; and David Lindorff as the "investigative journalist" who actually has a monologue explaining why subprime loans are a good thing if you only give 'em to the Chinese.

I give it three stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, because you might as well since your tax dollars are already paying for it to be on Frontline.

It's amazing: how can a country into a sport so violently awesome have the most cucked politics west of the Euro Zone?

Speaking of signs and symptoms of communism, for whatever reason our second feature of the week - Goon: Last of the Enforcers - has been limited to about 20 screens across the U.S. and Canada, and it's a shame, too, because it's easily the best low-budget, blood-soaked comedy about concussion-addled Nova Scotians saying "fuck" a lot and beating each other into temporary comas since, well, the first Goon movie, I suppose. 

I still think the original Goon from 2011 is one of the best sports comedies of the last 25 years and probably the best hockey movie anybody's made since Slap Shot back in '77. While Last of the Enforcers doesn't exactly surpass its predecessor, it's pretty dang close to it, especially when it comes to the on-ice fisticuffs and lines about Slovenians saying "we are brothers, we power fuck your mother" before giving teammates sperm-tainted hoagies.

Once again Seann William Scott turns in a five star performance as probable retard Doug Glatt (who is very loosely based on a real person), quite possible the greatest Jewish defenseman in the history of minor league Halifax hockey. This time around the NHL is on strike so all the hockey-hungry Canucks are anxious to see Glatt and his semi-pro squad pummel the fuck out of teams from Reading, Penn., but on opening night he gets into a brawl with this towering brute named Anders Cain, who roughs up Glatt so bad it forces him into temporary retirement. And since his moon-faced wife from the last movie has a bun in the oven, he really doesn't have much of a choice with his career options and winds up working for this one insurance firm where his boss makes him work out of a storage closet next to a window where homeless people blow each other and piss against the glass all day.

Well, one night Glatt and his buddy Ronnie from the first movie go to this thing called the "Bruised and Battered Hockey Tournament," where retired hockey players punch each other in the teeth for a $400 grand prize. As it turns out, that's how Glatt's old mentor Ross Rhea (played by Liev Schreiber, who, considering he also played the titular character in the comedy biopic Chuck, is apparently the new go-to-guy to play past-their-prime athletes in violent sports comedies) is making his bread nowadays, and it isn't long before Doug is sneaking off in the middle of the night so he can be retrained on how to hit people with only half his tendons in his right arm working anymore.

After that Glatt's old team goes on a losing streak and the owner decides, what the hell, why NOT bring in this Anders Cain kid, but even though his dad owns the squad, he keeps going psycho on the ice and gets suspended. So naturally, Glatt decides to rejoin the team, but only after promising his wife he isn't going to get in any more fights. Without giving away the ending, let's just say Glatt does a pretty good job obeying his wife's wishes ... that is, until Cain gets traded to the team Glatt's team is going to play on the last day of the season, and in the first period Cain decides to take Ross out with a nasty blindside swipe.

All I'm going to say is in the final ten minutes of this movie, we've got more blood sprayin' around than I've ever seen in a flick where somebody doesn't immediately die from plasma loss five seconds later. And you better believe the CGI incisors and bicuspids are gonna' be flyin' at 'ya, fast and furiously.

We've got no dead bodies. No breasts. Thirteen fist fights. One five-on-five battle royale. One broken stick. One atomic wedgie. Teeth roll. Semen-contaminated sandwich eating. Gratuitous headbutting. Gratuitous vomiting. Gratuitous energy drink chugging. Gratuitous autoerotic asphyxiation subplot. Gratuitous slow-mo blood spewing. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place, extremely lax enforcement of instigator penalties fu.

Starring Seann William Scott as Doug Glatt, the hockey-defensemen-turned-insurance-salesman-turned-hockey-defensemen-again, who begins the movie by saying "one time I had a dream I was captain of a monkey ship" and describes hot dogs as "it's like a sausage sandwich, it looks like a penis."; Alison Pill as Eva, the preggers wife who says "me and this baby are going to eat the shit out of this pad thai."; Liev Schreiber as veteran ass kicker Ross Rhea, who remarks "holy shit on Mary's tits" and teaches Glatt how to wallop people one-handed; Kim Coates as Ronnie Hortense, who says "Mazel Tov, in your ass" and "kids today, with their YouTube and their fucking ISIS" and spends literally the whole movie wearing a hat that reads "fuck white people"; and Wyatt Russell as the big bad Anders Cain, whose terrifying battle cry is "anybody here like fucking sunflower seeds?"

Co-written by Jesse Chabot, who probably deserves a Best Screenplay Oscar for simply coming up with lines like "animals don't eat in peace, animals eat pieces of shit," "it's tighter than a nun's cunt in there" and "we're going to stick this power play right up their sphincters, no KY," and directed by first time director Jay Baruchel, who you can tell is going to be a force to be reckoned with in degenerate cinema over the next few years because when he makes his actors say "I got two balls, not two pieces of pussy," and "I suppose there's no rule about drinking the opposing team's Gatorade," you believe them. 

I give it three stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out - it ain't quite as good as the original, but it still knocks the teeth outta' the mouth of just about every other wide release comedy Hollywood's cranked out this year. And it gets bonus points for being the first movie this century to unironically feature the music of both Nazareth and Stan Bush, not out of desperate nostalgia, but because that's probably the kind of music the director actually listens to.

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DOUBLE REVIEW: 'It' / 'Dark Night'

What better way to usher in the unofficial start of the Halloween movie season than watching lots and lots of preteens getting brutally murdered?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I keep getting these emails from people askin' me what makes a good contemporary slasher movie. I have no idea why, except for the fact that I'm probably the only person in the world who's willing to review modern B-splatter movies in an unironic manner on a regular basis, or maybe it's 'cause my criticism ain't rooted in radical fanboy-ism like everywhere else on the Internet. Anyhoo, I'm sick of having to type up the same responses over and over, so I'm just going to spell it out for you people right here and now. You better bookmark this shit, because I ain't sayin' it again. 

If you want to make a great slasher movie in this, the almost 2020s, here are the ten rules you must follow at all times in the pre-production, production and post-production cycle:

Rule No. 1 - Don't try to be anything other than a slasher movie

If you're gonna' make a slasher movie, make a dadgum slasher movie, not a "supernatural thriller" or a "psychological drama" or - heaven help us - "a culturally cognizant social horror film." The recipe cooks itself: kids are introduced, the kids do stupid things, the psycho killer shows up, the kids get killed in progressively more outrageous ways and then the only kid in the movie that has any horse sense grabs something sharp and does in the murderer. This shit is a time-tested formula that's proved effective since the late 1960s and the further you get away from the central essence of the subgenre the greater the likelihood your movie's going to suck dick.

Rule No. 2 - Embrace the fact your movie is a product of the times

I hate it when modern slasher movies try to "pay homage" to all the stuff from the 1970s and 1980s. I'd venture to guess that a good 70 percent of all slasher movies made this century are nothing more than a bunch of nerds getting together and saying "golly gee, wouldn't it be plain peachy if we spent $500,000 to make a whole bunch of references to Elm Street and Evil Dead for 90 minutes and impress the heck outta' all our message board buddies?" Invariably, when you try to make a movie feel like something that came out 30 or 40 years ago, it sucks. Why? Because the films never recognize their own ephemeral value. Halloween worked because John Carpenter knew the shit was '70s as fuck and rolled with it. Shit, all of the Sleepaway Camp movies absolutely wallowed in their chronological trappings and they all turned out amazing, too. You've got to recognize your movie is going to feel dated in a few years anyway, so forget all about trying to do something "timeless" or imitating a different cinematic decade. Take advantage of all the kitschy idiosyncrasies of the day - the lingo, the fashion, the technology, etc. - and just make the best testament to/indictment of the times you can afford to.

Rule No. 3 - Take your script seriously

Nobody seems to remember how to make a straight slasher movie no more. Granted, horror-comedies have been around for a long time, but that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is all these "neo" slasher movies where the producers, directors and actors look like they're trying to make a shitty movie on purpose. The acting is stilted and stultified, the special effects are hokey, the plot keeps getting self reflexive and self-mocking and the whole flick just feels like it's trying to win the audience over by goading 'em into embracing just how strategically campy and corny everything is. Long story short, if you can't find the wherewithal to make a serious genre movie, you shouldn't be making a genre movie period. A sincerely bad slasher movie can still be entertaining, but an insincerely bad one is just flat out unwatchable.

Rule No. 4 - Hire some people who actually know how to act

While the acting in all those Friday the 13th and Night of the Demons movies were hardly Oscar-worthy, they at least came off as authentic and believable. I can't tell you how many damn neo-slashers I've seen where the actors and actresses sounded like monotone junior high schoolers dead-panning their way through A Midsummer Night's Dream dress rehearsal. Their deliveries always have that artificial intonation that dips and waves, like they're trying to express emotion through these slight changes in the modulation of their voice even though their faces remain stock-still. Again, nobody's expecting anybody in the cast to pull off a Daniel Day Lewis-caliber acting job, but they ought to be able to at least feign basic human emotion ... or at the absolute least, be able to scream like a motherfucker.

Rule No. 5 - Make your characters worthy of a gruesome death

This is a mistake way too many filmmakers make. In a slasher movie, you've got to kill off at least 95 percent of the cast, so there's not really a point in making the characters likable or relatable. In fact, the movie works even better if EVERYBODY in the film is an asshole so stupid you can't wait for them to get knocked off, so be sure to fill the script chock full of dope smoking retards, man-stealing whores, downright imbecilic jocks, one-dimensional goths, punk rockers and/or metal heads and at least one black dude who really, really likes to investigate mysterious noises. The only character in the movie who should have any sort of redeeming qualities, of course, is the final girl, but you can't make her too squeaky clean. Still, that's no excuse to not feature her prominently in at least one shower scene, though...

Rule No. 6 - Nobody wants a damn murder mystery

That shit went out with Prom Night and Terror Train, for Christ's sake. The absolute best slasher movies are the ones where either you know right from the beginning who the psycho murderer is (The Burning, Silent Night, Deadly Night) or the movie doesn't even bother telling you who's the one doing all the killing (Black Christmas.) People don't go to see slasher movies so they can play Clue or Guess Who? in the back of their noggins, they go to see slasher movies so they can watch nekkid women get carved up and stupid assholes named Chad have chainsaws shoved up their buttholes while they're taking a leak. If people want to watch a mystery, they'll go home and watch Monk or something on Netflix; and by golly, if they pay money to see a SLASHER movie, the last thing any of them want to see is a goddamn episode of Poirot.

Rule No. 7 - Knowing how to deliver the goods is far more important than building up suspense

Fuck serial actress-rapist Alfred Hitchcock, any motherfucker off the street can do suspense. I mean, fuck, how difficult is it to make people wait for things to happen, anyway? It's not too difficult to build up tension when there is a character being stalked who doesn't know they're being stalked, but like a bunch of delayed ejaculators, most neo-slasher movies have no idea how to off-ramp from the suspenseful stuff and make good when it comes time for the shit to get real. Invariably, what we wind up with is minutes and minutes of build-up and then a kill/scare that lasts maybe a second or two, if we're lucky. I mean, really, what's the point of making people just sit there for five minutes watching some dude or dudette getting chased only for their onscreen demise to last four or five seconds? If you want to make a successful 21st century slasher flick, you've got to tone down the cat and mouse nonsense and ratchet up the full-on violent impact. As a general rule, the grisly payoff should be at least half as long as the build-up, and the shorter the build-up, the better. I'd recommend the pursuit/stalking stuff never last more than two minutes at any juncture in the movie and that no kill be shorter than 30 seconds, from the initial point of contact to the part where the body stops twitching. And along those same lines, how about coming up with some more inventive ways of killing people, guys? I mean, you can only see people get their throats slit open so many times before it gets boring ...

Rule No. 8 - Once the deaths start rolling, keep 'em rolling

This is a time-tested slasher diktat that hardly anybody brings up - or even recognizes, for that matter. Most old school slasher movies took their sweet time setting everything up, and you'd usually have to wait until the movie was halfway over before people started getting chainsawed and shit. But what you'd notice about the truly great ones is that once the butcher knives started flying, they didn't take their foot off the gas for the remainder of the movie. Once the first major kill was registered, it was just accelerated mayhem from there on out, with people getting decapitated, disembowled and dismembered en masse every five to ten minutes - and the closer we got to the paint-the-room-red grand finale, the higher the kills-per-minute ratio got. Well, if that little formula worked for the old guard, it'll work just as dandy for your production, kiddos; once the shit goes down, you better find a way to keep the mayhem rolling along or else. 

Rule No. 9 - There must be tits

Slasher movies are the ultimate Freudian genre, combining the competing, diametric instincts of man - the urge to fuck and the urge to kill - into one big, fat goulash of sex and violence. Simply put, you can't make a movie about people getting stabbed and sliced up by some slow-moving, phantom-like figure without also filling it with people doing it and young women showing off their perky nips and areolas. For every kill in the movie there should be AT LEAST half as many exposed female breasts and preferably, one fuck scene per five onscreen kills (and one lesbian fuck sceneper every ten onscreen kills.) Again, this is a mathematically proven formula, and only stupid people would ever argue against math, wouldn't they?

Rule No. 10 - End on a high note, not a sequel hook

Look guys, it ain't 1985 anymore. Odds are, your movie won't even recoup half its production costs, so if you're thinking you're going to be able to finagle some producer into giving you an advance for another movie simply because the ending of your last flick left the door open for a sequel, you're S.O.L. Your shit ain't Saw or Elm Street and it certainly ins't the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so you better do what you can to make this one-and-done slasher flick as entertaining and memorable as possible, and if your movie doesn't have an especially well-down final five minutes, you might as well just say "fuck it" right now. All of the really good jump scare finales (i.e., the grand finale of Friday the 13th) have already been done and NOTHING is shittier than ending a slasher flick on a comedic non-sequitur (see: every fucking thing Eli Roth has ever done.) So my advice is either end the movie right after the big bad gets dispatched (preferably, in a manner that entails a bare minimum of 20 gallons of blood sprayed all over the set) or with a last-second swerve so out of left field, it royally fucks up everybody who watches it for life (i.e., Bay of Blood, Deranged and the first Sleepaway Camp movie.) Really, your whole movie is just an excuse to make it to the final five minutes - and if you don't have some truly awesome shit in store for the reservoir tip end of your movie, you might as well not even bother renting a camera, cabron.

So there you have it, aspiring filmmakers of tomorrow. Either adhere to blueprint I just laid out for 'ya and make a great neo-slasher or eschew 'em and spit out another turdy one. The choice is yours, kids - and don't you dare say I didn't do my part to help all ya'll jackoffs. Don't you even.

It is a horror movie? Seriously, this is the most I've laughed at the movie theater all year round. 

Speaking of movies that could've benefited from following Jimbo's Ten Golden Rules of Slasher Flicks, the newfangled It movie nails about half of 'em despite most people thinkin' it's something more refined than just another psycho killer movie. Granted, it's a movie about a psycho killer with reality-warping metaphysical powers, but at heart, there's really nothing thematically different about it than Halloween or The Prowler. Hey, a movie about stupid kids getting killed off for not having manners and doing stupid shit is still a slasher movie, no matter how bad you want to church it up into something more ... sigh ... dignified.

In a lot of ways, this is the best Freddy Krueger movie that never got made. You've got a bunch of distressed and depressed kids whose daddies try to rape 'em and have overbearing mamas and have a lot of guilt about their dead brothers and there's this supernatural force that tries to kill 'em by turning into their worst fears, and it's always shape-shifting and making wisecracks and toyin' around with its victims before growing three thousand teeth and peeling the skin off their bones like an original recipe KFC drumstick. In fact, the big paint-the-walls-red finale might as well be a scene by scene remake of the denouement from Elm Street 3, right down to the monster getting a metal rod jammed down its esophagus and trying to trick one of the kids by turning into a dead family member. Hell, even the cast is similar: just like in the third and best Freddy movie, the protagonists include this wimpola nerd in glasses, this one take-no-shit tomboy, this scraggly haired dork who don't talk too much and even an angry black kid wearing a grey sweatshirt.

Now, for those of you that actually read Stephen King's 1,200-page cinder block of a novel, you prolly assumed a couple of things wouldn't have made it into this adaptation. We knew they weren't going to include the scene where a bunch of fifth graders run a train on a 12-year-old in the sewer. We knew they weren't going to include the scene where a bunch of sociopathic middle school bullies jerk each off in a junk yard and have their faces eaten off by flying leeches. And we knew they weren't going to include the scene where Pennywise the Clown pops up and starts doing a minstrel show performance and calling everybody the "n-word." But would they have the guts to include the scene where a first grader gets his arm bitten off, or the part where the mullet-headed juvenile delinquent psycho jabs a switchblade into his daddy's throat? Well, rest assured there's a lot more stuff from the novel that made into the movie than you'd probably imagined, and if you're wondering whether or not they pussed out on us, well, less than ten minutes into the movie we've already got kindergartners getting turned into bloody mud puddles and lambs having their brains blasted out with nail guns and a scene where a girl has a garbage bag of dookie dumped on her head. And for that, these filmmakers ought to be commended. 

By now we all know the gist of the story. It's a small New England town, circa 1989 (yeah, I know in the novel it was set in 1958, but get over it.) We've got this rag tag group of hypochondriacs and Jews and negro farmhands and fat kids that get tortured at school and have parents that abuse 'em and they all start having these weird hallucinations about this bucktoothed mime who sounds like a French Canadian turning into syphilitic hobos and Edward Munch paintings and trying to chew their faces off. So naturally, they all band together one day and start doing their town history research, and as it turns out every 27 years or so some really bad shit always goes down, and eventually they figger out it's all the doing of that Ronald McDonald lookalike in a frilly dress so they do they only thing that makes any sense: they decide to waltz on in to the monster's lair and kill him with bolt guns and broken beer bottles. After they all nearly get killed by the demon, though, they reckon they need to reconfigure their strategy heading into the final battle, and they definitely learned their lessons from last time; now they're bringing more sharp metal rods with 'em, and they know EXACTLY which intestine they need to puncture to make this grease-painted asshole go down for good.

Considering the movie's already made more than $200 million after just one week - in tandem with the surprising financial success of stuff like Split and Get Out - we can only hope that this spells the end of Hollywood's infatuation with super heroes and the beginning of a new golden era of big-budget splatter and slasher movies. Watching God-men save millions of people from CGI explosions is such an outdated holdover from the Obama years; this is Trump's America now, and by golly, the masses don't want to see people getting saved, they want to see 'em getting their guts scrambled on the pavement - and the younger and whiter the victims, the better. 

We've got 24 dead bodies. No breasts (and if you're looking for 'em in a movie like this, it's only a matter of time 'til somebody puts you on a government watch list.) Heads roll. Arms roll. Knife to the jugular. Fireplace poker through the skull. Stomach carving. Face eating. One bathroom blood explosion (which I'm pretty sure is meant to be a metaphor for having a period, but I'll let those hippie-dippy media studies grads at UCLA do their own goddamn term papers.) One rock fight, set to Anthrax's "Antisocial." Zombie children. One leper. One reanimated headless corpse. Gratuitous New Kids on the Block. One blood ritual, with preteen palm slicing. Cattle gun fu. Abstract art fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place ... some serious coulrophobia fu.

Starring Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise the Clown, who doesn't blink once and sometimes trails off into Swedish for no real reason whatsoever but because it sounds so damned creepy they decided to keep it in the movie; Jaeden Lieberher as the stuttering kid who can't quite get over his brother being chewed to death by a subterranean jester; Finn Wolfhard as the practical joker who has the movie's best line - "he's leaking motherfucking Hamburger Helper!"; Sophia Lillis as the redheaded girl who chops her mane off so her dad will stop molestin' her; Chosen Jacobs as the black kid who has to murder barnyard animals on his grandpa's farm because his parents got firebombed by the Klan; Wyatt Oleff as the Jewish kid who's always kvetching because he can't remember passages from the Torah; Jack Dylan Grazer as the asthmatic kid who's afraid of catching AIDS with an overprotective mom I'd like to call a helicopter parent, if it wasn't for the fact she was closer in size to a jumbo jet; Jeremy Ray Taylor as the fat kid (and you can tell it's the late 1980s because there's only one fat person in the whole movie); and Nicholas Hamilton as preteen psychopath Henry Bowers, who decides to go on a mass-stabbing spree because Lamb Chop's Play-Along told him to.

Writing credits are split between Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga (whose original draft had a scene where a kid jacks off on a birthday cake, among other NC-17-caliber larfs), and horror movie re-writer extraordinaire Gary Dauberman, who also wrote all those damn Annabelle movies. Directed by Andy Muschitetti,  whose only major film credit before this one was that 2013 Jessica Chastain snoozer Mama.

Anyhoo, I'm giving this one three stars out of four. It's a hoot from start-to-finish, even if there's a bit too much syrupy bonding going on - boy, you PizzaGaters are going to have a field day with the sequence where all the kids go swimming in their tighty whities - and just not enough per capita slaughter to truly excel as a post-Charlottesville, neo-neo-neo-slasher flick. That, and I don't think it was necessarily all that frightening, neither; even compared to Tim by-God Curry, this newfangled killer clown is such a pantywaist he makes Marcel Marceau look like John Wayne Gacy. 

People getting massacred during a Batman movie? Geez, where do these filmmakers come up with such wacky ideas!

If you're looking for a way scarier outing at the local cineplex, though, I'd advise you to scour the local arthouse theaters and see if they're playing Dark Night in your neck of the woods. It's a movie that technically was released last year, but it didn't pick up any decent distribution until a couple of months back (and since I live in the pop cultural arsehole of the United States, naturally, the flick is just now getting around to us.)

Basically, it's a thinly veiled dramatization of the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting, even though there's a scene early in on the movie that actually shows James Holmes on trial on CNN, so canonically, I guess you really can't call it a re-enactment. Taking their cues from Gus Van Sant's outstanding Columbine-influenced Elephant, it's not so much a movie about the massacre as it is a day in the life of a whole bunch of disparate characters just hours before they all get gunned down in a hail of autism-powered gunfire. But Dark Night differs from that movie in at least two major respects; number one, the movie doesn't actually show the massacre take place ... we see the guy walk into the theater with a garbage bag filled with ammunition and then it's time for the end credits. While that'll probably piss off some of your morbid motherfuckers, in a way that actually benefits the movie because it's basically an old-school, early 1980s-style whodunit slasher movie (albeit, one without any actual slashing.) Whereas in similar mass shooting pseudo-documentaries like Elephant and the absolutely amazing Zero Day you know who the killers are going to be from the get-go, in Dark Night pretty much anybody in the cast could be the guy who FINALLY goes off the deep end and starts filling preteens full of hot lead.

Will the mass killer wind up being the skinhead Counterstrike addict who wears Freddy Krueger sweaters and has hallucinations about the paparazzi following him around and beats his pet turtle to death for no real reason? Or will it be the mop-headed guy who drives a rusted out Volvo who pops pills like Sweet Tarts and has to count the exact number of steps from the mall parking lot to the food court every time he visits Hot Topics? Or maybe it's the jarheaded Iraq War vet who doesn't say a single line of dialogue throughout the movie, even when he's got Operation: Enduring Freedom vets crying on his shoulder and pulling off suspiciously accurate head shots on the paper targets down at the shooting range? And hey, don't sleep on those skateboarding teens who color their hair the same hue as V-8 and vape like the world's supply of douche is gonna' run out tomorrow - especially that one that likes to look somberly off a bridge for some peculiar reason.

So basically, we've got your classic dead teenager movie a'la Massacre at Central High where pretty much anybody in the cast can get killed or start killing everybody else at any minute, and you wait the whole movie for the shit to go down because come on - it's a movie about a real life mass shooting - except it never happens. But it's kinda' like Waiting For Godot in a sense that the fact nothing happens is kinda' the whole point of the movie. It's all about tension and building-up suspense, and a good goddamn, will this movie have you on edge all the way up until the very last scene. As a matter of fact, this movie has what I consider to be the single greatest jump scare since the "nurse scene" in The Exorcist III ... and the whole thing happens in broad daylight. If you want to see minimalism par excellence, the guys who made this movie deserve a fucking medal for it. 

Of course, it's not a perfect movie. This is one of those flicks were the director is really big on symbolism and masking narrative red herrings as social commentary (and vice versa.) The problem is, the imagery is just way too blunt. We've got kids playing shoot-em-up video games in the lobby of the theater before the massacre begins and the victims showing up for the screening literally dressed as skeletons. And then there's this one part where a girl is walking through the woods and she sees a traffic sign obfuscated by a tree limb that kinda sorta resembles a heart. Even now I have trouble figuring out what that has to do with the rest of movie, so I'm just guessing the director literally spotted it out of the blue and said "well, might as well add this one for artistic effect while we're here" and nobody had the gall to tell him the whole sequence didn't make a lick of sense. And while some of the red herring bits are pretty good - all of those passages where wayward youths take selfies over and over again and and describe how their only voluntary human interaction comes in the form of World of Warcraft dialogue boxes makes for some rye commentary on how digital communications is making Gen Z more antisocial in real life - some of them are just bamboozling. I mean, why is there an entire sequence where a girl goes to a cancer survivor support group, or the scene where an overweight Hispanic Costco employee wades back and forth in a swimming pool to sad-sack indie acoustic rock for five minutes? 

But by and large, this is a really, really good movie, and probably the most nerve-wracking I've seen all year. Your tolerance for pretentious art-house snobbery will determine how much you enjoy it, but as a connoisseur of esoteric, no-budget cinema, I can soundly say this one is WAY above par for its ilk ... and the fact it doesn't wedge any gun politics drivel into it (nor try to blame mass shootings on homophobia, as does Gus Van Sant) is prolly reason enough to check it out.

We've got no dead bodies. No breasts. Two exposed female buttocks. Gratuitous juicing. Gratuitous vaping. Gratuitous hair dyeing. Gratuitous hair styling. Gratuitous "You Are My Sunshine." Gratuitous selfie-taking. Gratuitous gun-polishing. Gratuitous turtle fondling. Gratuitous slo-mo skateboarding. Gratuitous twerking. Gratuitous unrequited love sketching. Google map fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place - subplot overdose fu.

Starring Robert Jumper as the bushy headed guy who screams the names of random people while driving and periodically has to pull his car over so he can puke for no discernible reason; Eddie Cacciola as the veteran guy who stares vacantly into space a lot and spends his free time waxing up his collection of AR-15s; Aaron Purvis as the bald-headed social isolate who says "when people die for real, they don't respawn" and likes to point his finger like a gun at random pedestrians; and Anna Rose Hopkins as that one girl who wears really bright red lipstick and is supposed to be playing a teenager even though I'm pretty sure she's in her late 30s.

Written and directed by Tim Sutton, who is basically a poor man's Gus Van Sant - except his movies are better than anything Gus Van Sant has crapped out over the last 15 years, so I'm not really sure if it even constitutes a back-handed compliment anymore.

I give it three and a half stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, 'cause I guarantee it'll be the tensest experience you'll have in a movie theater all year round. Well, unless a dude really does go into the theater and start shooting at 'ya for real. And in that case - well, I hope they at least give you a refund, or extra butter on your go-home box of popcorn.

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DVD Review: 'Batman and Harley Quinn' (2017)

We've been waiting a long time for an adult-oriented follow-up to Batman: The Animated Series. And after the release of this straight-to-Redbox offering, it looks like we'll be waiting even longer... 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

The old school Fox Batman cartoon is easily one of the best comic book adaptations in any kind of media, and that's no small accolade coming from a biased Spider-Man fanboy such as myself. Indeed, B:TAS at its apex was some of the best TV that's ever been on the air; I'd put Heart of Ice and I Am The Night up against the absolute best episodes of whatever en vogue live action "prestige" show is hot right now and I guarantee you the old cartoon episodes will hold up better 20 years down the line.

A lot of that success you have to attribute to producer Bruce Timm, who is pretty much the Colonel Sanders of the D.C. Animated Universe. By and large he's been involved with just about every D.C. cartoon that's come down the line since Batman: The Animated Series, and - for the most part - his work has been excellent to un-fucking-believably outstanding. 

It's no secret that the censors at Fox (and later, the W.B.) were pretty hard on Timm, and for years we've wondered just how great the already pretty freakin' great B:TAS franchise could've been had standards and practices given him a little more free reign to do whatever he wanted. We saw glimmers of that expanded creativity in the full-length B:TAS movies Mask of the Phantasm and Sub-Zero, and since those were rated PG, we could only fathom the sort of fascinating, adult-oriented storytelling Timm and pals could've worked under the Bat-umbrella with a hard PG-13 or soft R rating. And in that, the recent Batman and Harley Quinn straight-to-DVD cartoon is - theoretically - our prayers from 20 years ago finally getting answered.

Batman and Harley Quinn is undoubtedly a promising little arrangement. You've got a story by Bruce Timm, the guys who voiced Batman and Robin are returning to reprise their roles, and the PG-13-equivalent rating gives 'em ample opportunities to drop four-letter words and show all sorts of risque and brutally violent activity. On paper, this thing is an absolute can't lose prospect, but in execution, does it royally screw the pooch? Well, how about we stick this sumbitch in our disc player and see for ourselves, why don't we?

The movie starts off with some cops at the S.T.A.R. Labs fighting this giant vegetable monster who isn't Swamp Thing. His mucus-like skin absorbs all the bullets while Poison Ivy hacks a computer - apparently, they're trying to gather some top-secret intel on Dr. Alec Holland. 

Following a campy-ass into with paper cut-out characters getting into wacky and whimsical hi-jinks, Batman and Nightwing investigate the break-in and give the viewers some exposition on Swamp Thing. Batman tells the po-po the vegetable-monster they're looking for is Jason Woodrue, the Floronic Man and the Dynamic Duo decides its time to ping Harley Quinn for some details on Ivy's whereabouts.

There's some more exposition about A.R.G.U.S. getting hacked by the French and Batman blackmails the sarge into giving him info on this one professor who got kidnapped because he was probably looking at porn or something on the clock. Then Nightwing shows photos of Harley to random hobos and senile old people for a couple of minutes before going to this one cafe called Superbabes where all the waitresses are dressed like Catwoman and Supergirl. Of course, Harley's working there and when some dude tries to grab her ass she karate flips him over a table. We get a long tracking shot of Harley walking home while doing a crossword puzzle then Nightwing asks her if she can help him find her BFF Ivy. She declines and Nightwing says he ought to haul her crazy ass to jail and then they have an alley kung fu fight that concludes with Harley subduing him with a Joker Gas ring.

Actually having gay sex isn't as gay as this scene.

Meanwhile, Batman investigates the missing professor's place and finds an alien leaf. Then Nightwing wakes up tied to Harley's bed and she makes fun of him for having a mullet on the old cartoon. Quinn asks if Nightwing and Batman were gay with each other (via a reference to, of all things, Seduction of the Innocent) and then they wind up having OFFSCREEN SEX. 

We learn Ivy has to kiss the kidnapped professor every six hours to keep him under her spell and Floronic Man thinks its gross as shit every time she locks lips (by the way, the dude voicing the Floronic Man is none other than the guy who voiced the Joker in that one Batman cartoon on the WB in the mid-2000s.) Elsewhere, Batman walks in on Quinn tickling Nightwing and he convinces her to join them on a quest to find Ivy. Then Harley makes a wisecrack about calling Nightwing if she ever runs out of batteries ... yep, they just made a joke about a dildo in a Batman cartoon.

So here's Ivy's plan. She's going to synthesize Swamp Thing's DNA and turn it into an airborne virus that'll turn everybody in the world into plant people, which in turn will stop climate change or global warming or industrial pollution or some shit. Then Batman lets us know Floronic Man is actually an "exiled dryad from another dimension" and there's this very long, totally pointless sequence where Harley sees her lawyer walking down the street, chases him down, beats his ass and calls him a douche bag. Then when she gets back in the Batmobile, she keeps farting because Batman won't let her use the restroom. "It's not so bad," Bats quips, "it smells like discipline." Alas, Quinn keeps floating up some air biscuits and the rank stank gets too much for even Batman to bear, so they agree to let her drop a chud at the nearest gas station. 

Naturally, our trio winds up ambling into a bar where all the tertiary henchmen from the original B:TAS series are hanging out, complete with those redheaded twins who used to work for Two-Face doing a karoake version of "Don't Pull Your Love" by Hamilton, Joe Frank and goddamn Reynolds. Then Quinn gets up on stage and does a rendition of Blondie's "Hanging on the Telephone" and of course, a big old donnybrook ensues with a whole bunch of Adam West-ish comic book text - including the phrase "OWW, MY BALLS" - cropping up on an exterior shot while Batman and Nightwing whup the tar outta' everybody offscreen.

Booster Gold calls Batman on his phone and asks if he can help, so he and Nightwing try to make it sound like they're losing reception. Then Floronic Man pours some goop on a rat and it turns into a plant monster for about five seconds, and then it explodes into a puddle of green slime. Batman, Nightwing and Harley finally break into Ivy's secret hideout and we have ourselves a thee-on-two karate fight. Floronic Man kills the professor during the tomfoolery and the building explodes. Ivy and Floronic Man (I'm just going to call him "Flo" from hereon out) decide they should go to Louisiana and use the same water that made Swamp Thing to create a more potent vegetable juice disease. Flo takes out a yam and makes Ivy eat it, and it infects both of them with "the green" - fuck, I'll just let D.C. themselves try to explain what the fuck it is - and they use it to teleport through a random oak tree. Harley Quinn remarks "goddamn" and demands Batman take her to Louisiana with him. It takes a while, but she convinces him, and then she talks about how badly she doesn't want to become a plant monster because she's afraid she'll forget to water herself. 

A giant vine attacks some gun-toting troops and then Harley pushes Batman and Nightwing into a pond so a tree monster can try to eat them. She justifies her sudden heel turn by simply remarking "it's Thursday." Quinn then tries to convince Ivy to change her plans, she refuses, so Harley frees Batman and Nightwing from the tree trap and it's time for a catfight. "Friends don't let friends kill 7 billion people," Harley remarks, adding "your plan is totally bat-shit crazy." Ivy says humans are destroying the planet so what choice does she have, to which Harley ripostes "vote democrat and donate to Greenpeace." 

After a slow-mo double punch puts both of 'em on their asses, Ivy reveals she hasn't actually tested the formula and Quinn starts to cry and that makes Ivy break down, too. Ivy tells Flo they can't carry out the mission, so he attacks her with a giant penis-like vine. And that's our cue for the deus ex machima denoument, as SWAMP THING shows up out of nowhere to prevent Flo from dropping the death juice in the lake. "Your cause is just but your actions have upset the balance in the green," he says before giving a brief lecture about "knowing the unknnowbale nature" and quickly disappering. "Well, that was a big ass bucket of nothing," Harley lampshades.

Quinn then says "well, he is nothing but leaves, anybody got a match?" The credits start to roll as Flo runs flaming through the swamp. The post-credits stinger shows a dude visiting Quinn at her psychiatric office, and then she gets her own TV show that's one part Dr. Phil and one part Family Double Dare and then it's fade to black, muchachos.

Please, somebody help turn "slowly submerging disappointed Swamp Thing face" into a meme sensation...

Well, there's no real genteel way to put it - that thing fucking sucked a huge dick, man. The stylings and homages to B:TAS were cool, but the story was totally lacking and the feeble attempts at humor just torpedoed the whole thing. It couldn't decide if it wanted to be a spoof of the Batman mythos or a full-fledged extension of the B:TAS brand, and those two approaches are completely incompatible. If you want to make a somber, straight-laced Batman cartoon, go for it, and if you want to do something campier and cheesier, nothing's stopping you. But you can't have it both ways, as this disappointing addendum to the DCAU demonstrates. Pickles are great and Kool-Aid are great, but pickles and Kool-Aid together most definitely aren't, and the same holds true for the two totally different tones the producers wanted to cram into the same movie. Instead of getting the best of both worlds, we got an uneasy mixture of styles and atmosphere that gel together about as well as peanut butter and toothpaste. 

I guess it has its merits. Some of the shoutouts to B:TAS are cool, but if nostalgic pandering is literally all you have to offer, what's the point? Furthermore, I wasn't a fan of the allegedly "adult" humor in the story - i.e., all the jokes about Quinn doing porn and using a vibrator and the subplot about her and Nightwing having tickle sex. I'm sure Bruce Timm and pals loved having free reign to do whatever they wanted her, but all of that edginess for the sake of being edgy was at the expense of a decent plot. Say what you will about all the diktats Fox put on B:TAS, but it forced the writers to focus on crafting as good a story as they could within the limitations of standards and practices. Here, however, it feels like they just wanted to get in as much risque shit as they could, and the plot itself was an afterthought.

At this point, the whole Harley Quinn thing is played out as fuck. I've never really thought she was that interesting of a character to begin with and the constant comedic pairing of her and Ivy (which is actually a blatant ripoff of two characters from the 1990s cult movie The Living End, itself inspired by any number of old Warhol arthouse-tranny movies) has long overstayed its welcome. There are so many solid, interesting Bat-villains with a ton of crossover media potential that haven't been shoved down our throats - like Mr. Freeze, The Ventriloquist and Clayface - that D.C. continues to place on the backburner so they can milk this whole Holly-Mania cow dry. Unfortunately, they are totally oblivious to the reality that there's only so much mileage you can get out of a wise-cracking sociopath-cum-perpetual-domestic-abuse-victim, especially one D.C. keeps trying (and failing) to turn face. 

Like everybody else, I'm not going to complain about getting more B:TAS styled content, but the inescapable fact of the matter is that Batman and Harley Quinn just doesn't hold up AT ALL to even the most mediocre episodes of the old cartoon. You're much better off getting your Bat-fix revisiting the old classics on the Daily Motions, or even better, checking out all of the Ty Templeton-helmed Batman Adventures comics that have come down the pipe over the last 25 years.

Because if you're expecting a happy return to form here, you're setting yourself up for nothing but a major disappointment.

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DOUBLE REVIEW: 'Girls Trip' / 'Kuso'

We take a gander at two recent-ish flicks helmed by black directors - and they're both easily candidates for the year's most degenerate motion picture. 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I used to be a real big fan of the heavy metal music back in the day. In a lot of ways, I still am, although I don't listen to bands like Death, Cynic and Carcass anywhere near as much as I used to. 

There were a couple of years, though, where ALL I listened to was some variation of death, black or grindcore metal. Cryptopsy, Anal Cunt, Pig Destroyer, Venom, Gorgoroth, Bloodbath - I loved all of it. The weirder, the more offensive and the harder to understand, the better; eventually, I developed such a tolerance of sonic brutality that before long, even the heaviest and fastest shit out there didn't do nothing for me no more. At that point, the only thing I had left was Merzbow's Venereology, and after I got sick of that pretty much the only way to get my fill of audio heaviness was by listening to ACTUAL heavy metal - i.e., the sounds of artillery shells going off and buildings collapsing. And trust me, there's only so many recordings of nuclear test explosions, and really, once you've heard one H-bomb go off, you've pretty much heard 'em all. 

So one day, out of the blue, I just stopped listening to metal music altogether. I think it was around 2009 where I just stopped giving a shit and stopped following the scene. Since then, I think I may have heard maybe ten metal albums, and as a nonscientific estimate, I'm pretty sure I hated the ever-loving shit out of at least eight of them. 

I've tried getting back into the music, but I just can't do it. Maybe it's the fact that I'm in my 30s now and the idea of having some Norwegian pagan screaming at me about elves and devil worship just doesn't have the same appeal it used to. I used to LOVE stuff like Vader and Testament, but if I hear one note of all that crap kids are into today - here's a quick taste, if you're curious - it just makes me want to rip the headphones off my ears and get a damn haircut. 

I can still appreciates the grand lions of the genre for their technical talent, but the final product nowadays leaves a LOT to be desired. Yeah, it's cool that you can play fast and you know how to do blast beats and cookie monster vocals, but so does every other band in the genre. All of you corpse-painted fucks sound exactly the same, and your lyrics are completely interchangeable. And for fuck's sake, would it kill you turds to learn how to sing about shit other than the devil and fantasy/sci-fi bullshit? Yeah, yeah, we get it, you hate Christianity and like to sing about blood and guts - now can you write something a real-life, tax-paying consumer who DOESN'T live in his mommy's basement might actually be able to relate to?

That's one of the reasons why I've gotten on such a synthwave/vaporwave kick as of late. The music feels modern but longing for the past. It feels part of contemporary society but nonetheless alienated from it. It's music for people who feel as if their individuality has been smothered to death by the mass drumbeat of social-media collectivism. It's romantic and wispy yet pessimistic and detached. At the end of the day, it feels a bajillion times more countercultural than modern metal, primarily because the music itself is rooted in an understanding, acknowledgement and logical revulsion of the real world rigors of 21st century life. I love modern synthwave because it's a reaction to the times - and by that same token, I continue to despise contemporary metal for trudging out the same old fantastical bullshit over and over.

So if you're thinking about starting a metal band in this, the year of our lord 2017, here are ten things you ought to keep in mind before glutting the market with yet another E.P. nobody wants nor needs:

001. If nobody can understand what you're saying, nobody will give a fuck what you're saying, no matter how poignant or noble your refrigerator magnet poetry about Dungeons and Dragons may be. 

002. I know we're running low on band names, but try to be a little bit more creative than naming your act after an obscure Lovecraftian monster or something out of The Elder Scrolls. 

003. It's OK to enunciate. In a market where everybody's trying to sound like Angela's burp-voice from Night of the Demons, actually having a decipherable frontman helps you stand out. 

004. If you're more concerned about what your costumes are going to look like than what your music is going to sound like, hit the self-destruct button now.

005. Whatever your band name is, try to make the logo look like anything besides a bunch of scribbles made by an autistic psycho killer on an Etch-a-Sketch.

006. It's OK to not wear black sometimes, and it's even more OK to NOT wear pancake makeup. 

007. Here's a novel idea: unless it's something you've actually experienced, don't write a fucking song about it. Motherfucker, your day job is at Best Buy - you've never raped and pillaged nothing, you poser. 

008. Does anybody in the band have a beard, a beer belly or a Legend of Zelda tattoo? Kick their asses out, it's time to start from square one.

009. Before you learn how to play fast and heavy, learn how to play, period.

010. And last - but certainly not least - if you're in it for the pussy, all I can say is boy howdy, are you in store for a sore disappointment. 

So there you have it, kids. Adhere to those ten rules and maybe - just maybe - you might be on the path to creating a modern metal masterpiece instead of just another At the Gates ripoff. Or even better yet, how about this for some career advice: sell your guitar, learn a real skill and do something that's actually productive for a change, you long-haired-having pussy.

No, she's not pantomiming eating a Popsicle, in case you were wondering.

Speaking of things that that'll make most white peoples' heads explode, we've got an Afro-centric double header on tap for this week, starting with the Nubian-themed sex comedy Girls Trip. 

One of the things I really liked about this movie was that it kept the honky hating to a minimum. Outside of a scene where the prim-and-proper-but-still-keeping-it-real, successful-beyond-words-self-help guru light-skinned lead actress chews out her lily white manager for co-opting the black vernacular, there's practically zero identity politicking going on in the movie, which allows ample opportunities for the cast to do what black women do best; get rip-roaring drunk and threaten to kill one another while trying to quell their insatiable hunger for big black cock. 

Sure, the genders and skin tones may have been swapped out, but this is pretty much the modern equivalent of Porky's or Loose Screws. Half the jokes are about getting drunk or high and the other half are about crude sexual activity and/or excretory functions. And if you're wondering if this stuff might be a bit too high brow for 'ya, rest assured, before this movie is over we get to witness not one but two members of the cast drench a New Orleans crowd in a torrent of hot piss.

The premise is pretty straightforward. We've got Regina Hall playing a version of Oprah you'd actually fuck traveling to Nawlins so she can give the keynote address at Essence's annual "Hooray for Black Women" conference, and she decides to bring her old FAMU buddies with her. One's a struggling clickbait writer played by Queen Latifah, who's apparently on shaky terms with Regina's character form the get-go; Jada Pinkett Smith plays a nurse with two kids and no husband who still lives with her mama who is super timid and gets made fun of by her friends because she doesn't dress like a hoochie; and then there's Tiffany Haddish, who plays a loudmouth, super-aggressive, chronic Chlamydia recipient that hides weed in her butthole and is such a nymphomaniac, she at one point contemplates having sex with a hobo. 

The first 45 minutes are pretty good, but the thing starts to drag considerably once the second act gets going. You see, the people who made it couldn't be content with an hour and a half of dick and urination jokes, they had to wedge in a major subplot about Regina's retired football player husband having an affair on her with an Instagram ho, which gets REALLY convoluted because Queen Latifah is thinking about selling some photos of her friend's hubby cheating on her to TMZ to make rent, but then it gets even MORE convoluted because apparently Regina's known about it for some time but she's afraid to say anything about it because she thinks it might cost her a big contract with K-Mart. 

So naturally, the rest of the movie is about her learning to stand up for herself, so by the time she makes it to the podium at the Super Dome, the big question is will she stick to her handler's script or will she tell her husband to sit his bitch ass down in front of 20,000 professional black women? Not that you'll really care - after the part where the girls learn how to jerk a dude off with a melon and they all get shit-faced on thujone, don Lil' Kim wigs and get into kung-fu battles with a bunch of Grambling State co-eds, your attention span will have long since petered out. 

We've got no dead bodies. No breasts. One exposed penis (and oddly enough, it's a flaccid Caucasian one.) One four-on-four all-girl barroom brawl. Gratuitous Indian co-worker beating. Gratuitous P. Diddy. Gratuitous unhip white manager. Gratuitous sausage hammering. Gratuitous public urination. Broken wine bottle fu. Absinthe fu. Grapefruit hand-job fu. And the thing that more or less is responsible for the movie existing in the first place ... coming to terms with your husband committing adultery fu. 

Starring Regina Hall as the golden brown domestic goddess who has to keep weighing whether or not her hubby's philandering ways are worth losing a national QVC deal over; Jada Pinkett Smith as the way-too-buttoned down single mom who gets high and tries to give a LCD TV a blow job; Queen Latifah as the cash-strapped blogger who might leak her best friend's embarrassing photos for the TMZ money; and Tiffany Hadish as the posse's uber-slut, who says lines like "I've got drugs in my booty hole" and "If she's getting all that NBA dick, why is she sucking some baseball player?"  

Directed by Malcolm D. Lee - who, as apparent by his Wikipedia bio, has directed every movie with a predominantly black cast that wasn't a Spike Lee or Tyler Perry production since 1999 - who also co-wrote the movie alongside Will Packer, the same guy that gave us such illustrious, Criterion-worthy outings as Stomp the Yard, Ride Along 2 and Puff, Puff, Pass. 

I give it two and a half stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, especially if you plan on leaving halfway through it.

Not since ReGOREgitated Sacrifice has there been a non-scat movie with THIS much per capita piss, vomit and shit. Your kids will LOVE IT!

Well, if all the juvenile sex and scatological humor of Girls Trip was a bit too subdued for you, our week's second feature Kuso ought to be right up your alley. The debut movie from Flying Lotus (the Google tells me he's some DJ from Los Angeles who does a lot of work for Adult Swim, whose slave name is the far less esoteric "Steven Ellison") stirred a commotion at this year's Sundance, where a large potion of the audience decided they just couldn't handle no more and walked on out of the screening. Even now it's being marketed as the grossest movie ever made, but then again, this is the same Hollywood Industrial Complex that told us The Human Centipede was the grossest movie ever made a couple of years back, so I reckon we ought to take the advertising materials with a gargantuan grain of salt. 

That said, Kuso IS a pretty nasty movie, and it wouldn't surprise me one iota if it ends up being 2017's uncontested cinematic gut-bucket barf-o-rama king. It's a movie that tries real hard to be something of a hip-hop Eraserhead or The Happiness of the Katakuris, but at the end of the day it comes off as more of a Japanese bug-eating-scat porno directed by Tim & Eric than a truly outstanding, puke-your-guts-out subversive social commentary masterpiece like Green Elephant or Vase de Noces ... which, depending on your perspective, could either be extremely lofty praise or the absolute worst piece of criticism you can lob at anything.

The movie starts off with an earthquake hitting California and then this black dude with boils on his face interrupts a newscast and starts singing about God living underground. Then a guy sleeping on a turd-stain-covered pillow has his face sucked on by his zombie girlfriend's ashy lips and then she tries to strangle him to death with her braids and then he pees himself and they start kissing with white pus all over their mouths and she sings him a lullaby and he falls asleep. 

Then this claymation guy who almost looks like a Garbage Pail Kid pulls on his nipple ring and scratches his exposed intestines and farts and says "everything is beautiful now" while poking his guts and talking about how his daddy was a real man. Then a guy with a giant pustule on his cheek eats a bowl of unidentifiable green stuff and prays to a shrine of people with mutilated faces, then his mama splatters a cockroach with her bare hand then he walks through the wilderness while gangbangers run a train on his mom. He watches this CGI cooked turkey in the water grow a snout and it makes this one Mac and Me looking guy get an erection and then a bunch of kids shove vanilla ice cream cones in a black kid's face in slow motion. Then the kid keeps farting in a dilapidated shack that I guess is supposed to be a post-apocalyptic classroom and his teacher slobbers on him so he runs out while all the other kids laugh at him and he finds a giant CGI turd pile in the woodlands and it has a giant maggot for a tongue so he feeds it a hunk of mud. 

Then this mutated hag with four teeth talks in subtitles to a baby doll and rubs more white pus all over herself and eats a giant cockroach. Then a disembodied voice tells her "all her answers are in the hole" and she crawls down a dirty labyrinth and falls down a neon tube. Then there's a pastiche of The Match Game with Richard Dawson and company all turned into droopy-eyed STD demons and the contestants are forced to drink spit donated by the local FFA (needless to say, this bit is probably the highlight of the movie.) Then we see a commercial with GEORGE CLINTON pretty much playing himself as a doctor offering services at something called "the coat hanger clinic," and then we watch some more people spew foamy white vomit all over the place.

Then this woman with whitened out Evil Dead eyes smokes weed with these two furry aliens with TV screens built into their chests who sound like your aggregate WorldStarHipHop user and they throw their own feces at her and begin masturbating on her and, worst of all, tell her she looks 40. Then a guy pops out of a commode while she's peeing on a pregnancy test and he recounts raping her a month ago, stating "it was like having sex with a dead dog - so hot."

Then the movie cuts back to the mutated cheek guy, who's force fed a bowl of maggots before getting zapped by a disfigured face that pops out of the pulsating turd pod from earlier, then he pukes up about a dozen uncooked chicken nuggets and jabs the turd pod face right in the eye with one of 'em. Then the woman who fell down the neon abyss earlier wakes up in a room with a Ninja Turtles mask on her face and her ankles conjoined to this one women who keeps calling her a "bitch" over a TV sitcom laugh track. Then there's a fake ad for a phone sex line called 1-88-Rat-Fuck, then a guy goes to George Clinton's abortion clinic and punches a tranny window worker because she keeps asking him if he's having penile discharge and then it turns into a blow-up doll and he feeds it five dollars in change and then another guy tells him "the sun cries while eating ice cream, futility reigns" and asks him if he's ever "beat a nigga' with another nigga' - no, I mean literally pick up his best friend and use him as a battering ram." Then he finally sees George Clinton and reveals he has a profound fear of female breasts, so naturally the nurse has a mammoth pair of boil-encrusted mammaries. Anyway, this ultimately culminates with George Clinton dropping trou and a giant roach crawling out of his anus which proceeds to spray the "patient" with a big stream of bright green jism.

Then the toilet rapist from earlier has sex with a giant ball of fat with about 20 titties and three vaginas and then his rapee shows up and does an impromptu rap song after pulling a remote out of her hoo-ha, and then the aforementioned furry aliens yank the unborn fetus out of her stomach, complete with sound bites from Mortal Kombat playing in the background and they all decide to put the dead baby in a bong and smoke it. Then that mutated cheek guy shows up again and smears a dog turd on the pulsating turd pod face's forehead, then an armada of frozen turkeys start flying out of a giant spaceship hovering over downtown L.A., then a guy puts on an elephant mask and his girlfriend makes him play a keyboard, then she reveals she has a giant singing tumor on her neck and it pukes all over the floor, and for our grand finale, her boyfriend fucks it and shoots a massive wad in its mouth. 

So yeah, it's all good, clean fun for the whole family - especially if your family is into pretentious music video aesthetics and gross-out humor meant to cover up a complete and total lack of anything even remotely resembling competent storytelling. 

We've got four dead bodies. Six breasts. Two inflatable breasts. 300 computer-generated breasts. One identifiable human penis. Five dead cockroaches. One abortion. Gratuitous fart jokes. Gratuitous stop-motion animation insects. Gratuitous white goop. Gratuitous weed smoking. Gratuitous monster penis. Gratuitous vomit. Gratuitous cartoon sound effects. Gratuitous video game references. Gratuitous shitty CGI (which I'm guessing was intentional ... probably.) Fecal matter fu. Ejaculation fu. And, of course, the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place ... unused Adult Swim bumper fu.

Starring Zach Fox as the guy who goes to an abortion clinic to be cured of his titty-phobia and tells the busty nurse "bitch, I know how to breathe"; Bethany Schmitt as the raping rape victim who wounds up smoking her own fetus; Shane Carpenter as the mutated Mac and Me cheek cancer freak of nature that doesn't utter a single line of dialogue and smears turds all over everything; Tim Heidecker as the rapist who lives in a toilet and has sex with flabby, armless, legless and headless torsos; Hannibal Buress and Donnell Rawlings as the voices of the weed-smoking, inter-dimensional furry costume monsters; and George Clinton as the unlicensed abortion doctor with a phobia-curing cockroach living in his asshole, who utters perhaps the film's greatest sliver of dialogue - "that's the shit, that's the doo doo."

Directed by Steven "Flying Lotus" Ellison, who co-wrote the movie alongside David Firth and Zack Fox, all of whom presumably have their fingers crossed that no one in the audience realizes the plot is one part a ripoff of the video game Bad Day L.A. and one part a ripoff of the graphic novel Black Hole. 

I give it two stars out of four. It's clear they were trying to create some kinda' transcendent, post-postmodern absurdist satire a'la Sweet Movie and The Holy Mountain, but try as they may, they just couldn't pull it off no matter how much cum and green mucus they sprayed all over the set. Jimbo says check it out, but don't blame me if your girlfriend thinks you're a psycho afterwards.

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