NETFLIX Review: “Miss Americana” (2020)

Unfortunately, Taylor Swift’s cult-of-personality documentary is a little light on the “personality” part

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I Tried Beyond Meats’ Beyond Sausage!

And no, I really can’t say they’re worth the $8.99 asking price, folks.

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DOUBLE REVIEW: Unplanned / Us (2019)

Jimbo returns to the drive-in with two flicks proving once and for all that neither godless, honky-hatin’ liberals or Planned Parenthood-despisin’, evangelical conservatives know how to do “social commentary” worth a damn

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Double Review - 'The Florida Project' / 'Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle'

In which we take a look back at one of 2017's most brilliantly inventive movies - and one of its most soulless. 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Yeah, this time of year pickins' are quite slim at the local multiplex, ain't they?

Let's take a quick gander at the sheer shit they're playing at the local multiplex. Let's see - there's Downsizing, a movie that's pretty much destined to go in the Hall of Fame of High Concept Movies That Nobody In Their Right Goddamned Minds Ever Wanted To See In The First Place, which you can tell is catered specifically to the white yuppie asshole demographic 'cause the trailers for the flick uses "Once in a Lifetime" by the Talking Heads, which is pretty much the unofficial national anthem for white yuppie assholes. 

Then you've got Pitch Perfect 3, which is about the worst beating of a dead horse my eyes have laid upon since these angry Indian fellows decided to swing a piece of lumber at this poor, poor pony. And then there are those movies so indistinguishable from one another that I honestly have a hard time telling which is supposed to be which. I mean, if you get a ticket for The Star and accidentally waltz on in to Ferdinand or pay money to see Father Figures and watch Daddy's Home 2 by mistake, would you even really notice?

How about that, one local theater is still showing Greatest Showman and another is still screening Coco. But considering the alternatives is actually doing more than one showing a day of Insidious: The Last Key or - God have mercy on your mortal soul - The Commuter, maybe it's not such a negative after all. 

Now I know January has usually been regarded as a theatrical black hole, but hot shit on a Duralog, is this year's slog one of the worst I've encountered in my lifetime. Proud Mary? Maze Runner? Arctic Justice? No, that's OK, I'd rather pay $10 to watch rats fuck down at the dump, thank you very much. And I'll just let you check out the rest of the mainstream docket for yourself - whatever the literary opposite of a "banner year" is supposed to be, it looks like 2018's going to be precisely that for big budget Hollywood movies.

You know, I'm starting to think - maybe this means movie theaters, as a cultural institution - are probably less than 20 years away from becoming obsolete. I mean, think about it - what's the point of spending $40 for two tickets, two Mr. Pibbs and half a box of Raisinettes to watch something that ain't gonna' be worth a toot, no way? With all of these 4K TVs and shit, we've got to be getting pretty close to having IMAX quality shit in our own living rooms, and when that happens there won't even be a point to go to a movie theater no more to even watch those big ass capeshit "event" movies. That's pretty much the only thing keeping Hollywood trucking along these days - those huge franchise tent-pole movies where nerds dress up like Iron Man and Luke Skywalker and spend an outrageous amount of money to watch the same old shit they've seen a million times already, only this time it's while they're surrounded by other nerds who have spent outrageous amounts of money to watch the same old shit they've seen a million times already. It's a group catharsis thing, I think - nothing says "21st century living" quite like the willful desire to amass one's self into a giant, amorphous blob of halfhearted pop cultural mania.

Besides, movie theaters are more of a third world thing nowadays anyway. Here in the States, we've got Netflix and thanks to the wonders of the Internet, we can pretty much stream any and every fucking movie ever FOR FREE just as long as we know which sites to use (and more importantly, not use.) That's why you're already seeing Hollywood trying to make inroads in China, India and Africa, where the locals are just now getting disposable income. To us, watching God Particle and Peter Rabbit sounds about as much fun as sorting out our sock drawers, but if you're some 28-year-old in Rwanda or Bombay, you'll gladly fork over the moolah to watch whatever the hell's showing just so you get to experience air conditioning for an hour and a half. The big-time studios have certainly figured this out; they don't need to make movies anymore, just something they can project on a white screen as vivid foreground imagery while guys named Jean Baptiste and Amit try to figure out what sort of sorcery makes the Coca Cola Freestyle machine work.

Long story short, filmmaking - as both an art form and a lucrative business - is getting pretty close to buying the farm. Sure, it sounds a little outlandish to say movie theaters will be extinct in two decades, but you know what else sounded absurd at the time? Telling the folks at Blockbuster circa 1996 they were just ten years away from becoming technologically obsolete, too. 

The local cinema is dead, folks - it just don't know it yet, even though the stench of putrid movies ought to be the first giveaway for anybody with a working set of olfactory glands and too much damn sense to shell out $14 for a jumbo bag of popcorn.

You know - this trailer may or may not give you the wrong impression of just how upbeat the film actually is.

Still, as long as you don't mind slummin' your way through some of the indie theaters in the hipster part of town, you might actually be able to watch a movie halfway worth a damn every now and then. Take The Florida Project, for example, which isn't just one of the most unique and aesthetically intriguing flicks of 2017, it's easily one of the five best movies of any variety that came out last year.

Now, the name Sean Baker might not ring a bell to most of you, but he's one of the best up-and-coming directors out there. His last movie was called Tangerine, and it's easily the best pseudo-documentary ever made about trannies in L.A. who give blow jobs to Armenian cab drivers at car washes filmed entirely on an iPhone. Well, with The Florida Project, Baker finally got his hands on some REAL equipment, and the end result is one of the most aesthetically amazing independent movies I've seen in quite some time. This motherfucker absolutely NAILS the kitschy ephemera of Orlando - the strip mall parking lots, the gaudy souvenir shops, the beautiful sunsets and especially the pastel sleaze of the motel industry in the outer Kissimmee, Florida area. As soon as we get that lovely close-up of the anti-abortion billboard - overlooking a Sam's Club, naturally - you just know you're in the hands of a filmmaker who knows his stuff.

This is pretty much the best neo-neo-neorealism flick since Gummo, and probably the best insight into post-Obama America I've yet encountered in narrative fiction form. Basically, it's about all of these unsupervised six-year-olds whose mamas turn tricks for a living and have to stay in crappy motels running around getting into wacky shenanigans and slowly coming to grips with the way the adult world works. Now, I know that makes it sound like some pretentious, hoity-toity class warfare liberal propaganda, but hear me out - this thing is pretty much devoid of any political agenda, and mayhap even reinforce the necessity for traditional family values the same way Spring Breakers subversively did.

So we start off with these feral children spitting off motel balconies on fat Hispanic women smoking cigs and calling her "rat shit" and "a stupid THOT." So motel landlord Willem Dafoe has to go up to their mama's room and tell 'em to clean that shit up and stop getting weed smoke in the curtains. Then the kids get some free pancakes and bacon because their mama will take one of the drive-thru girls out clubbin', and they take turns flipping off helicopters. Then the green-haired mom buys the fast food ratchet some food truck grub then she goes to Family and Children Services and complains about not getting enough TANF gibs. Then the kids talk about what they like and don't like about oranges as they walk across about 20 different gift shops and ice cream stands. Then the kids talk about all their neighbors getting arrested and the elevator smelling like pee and shut off the electricity to the whole complex and then Dafoe (who sounds JUST like Al Pacino in this movie) replays the security monitor footage and realizes the kids are the ones that messed with the power switch.

Then this foreign couple shows up at the scummy hotel because they got scammed out of a Magic Kingdom room online. Then a bunch of church people start handing out free bread and Dafoe tells them to move it to the back because he don't want the tourists to know his motel is ground zero for tramps, whores and indigents. Then there's this great scene where Dafoe lights up a cigarette at dusk and all the lights on the complex come on. In a just world this movie would've gotten a Best Cinematography Oscar nod, but unfortunately, we all know what kinda world we live in here. 

So after that Dafoe has to chastize an old woman for sunbathing nekkid in the pool and drinking margarita juice right out of a blender. Then the green haired mom buys a bunch of Justin Beiber knockoff cologne from a Chinese wholesaler and she and her kid go to better hotels and try to sell the shit. Then Dafoe evicts a hooker and the kids steal a lighter with a nekkid cartoon woman on it. Then Dafoe has to stop an elderly paedo from trying to kidnap some kids at the park, then the kids decide to throw some rocks through the windows of some abandoned rental units and go spelunking through a buncha' shuttered condominiums and start throwing toilets out of windows and setting entire vacant properties on fire. Naturally, this drives a rift between the green haired mom and the chick at the waffle place. So the green haired mom and her kid do the most adult thing imaginable to solve the problem - they go down to what's her name's place of business, order $50 worth of waffles and have a burping contest right in front of God and everybody. Then they go back to their room and eat cheese pizza and watch potato peeler infomercials. Then Dafoe has to evict them and they go to this motel down the street that charges $45 a night instead of $35 and they can't afford it so they have to couch surf for awhile. 

And to pay rent, she has to start hooking, naturally, and selling counterfeit DisneyWorld tickets. Then they go on a $400 shopping spree at Dollar Tree, which I know sounds absurd, but trust me - I've seen this shit with my own eyes before IRL. And then the mom beats up the waffle place woman and Children's Protective Services gets called on her and they break into a Best Western so they can score a free breakfast. Then the cops book her mom for prostitutin' and the kid is about to be taken away to a foster home, so she and her bestie instead break into DisneyWorld. And then - the end credits doth roll.

Of course, this is one of those movies academic snobs are going to just LOVE deconstructing and analyzing for its subtle undertones about the death of the American dream and how pop culture sells children an unrealistic worldview (but good luck finding one that'll say anything about the film's lack of father figures being the chief driver of the characters' miseries), but really, all that stuff is beside the point. This is just a damn entertaining movie from start to finish, with great acting, a great story and excellent visuals - you know, all the stuff you used to get from the big Hollywood productions. 

Anyhoo, we've got zero dead bodies. Two exposed female breasts. Forced soda chugging. One flaming condo. One subplot about the removal of a cum-splattered mattress. One street fight, with attempted vehicular homicide. One cat fight, with brutal beatdown and uncontrollable vomiting. Gratuitous take-home box kicking. Gratuitous ice cream sharing. Gratuitous peanut butter and jelly sandwich making. Gratuitous spliff smoking. Multiple evictions. Panhandling fu. Bloody tampon fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place, some truly atrocious parenting skills fu.

Starring Willem Defoe as Bobby the landlord, who has to occasionally put child predators in headlocks and do his darnedest to comfort five-year-olds after their mamas get arrested for prostituting themselves online (seriously, he deserves an Oscar for his work in this one); Bria Vinaite as the green-haired single mom who makes her daughter listen to hip-hop while she's getting boned by customers from Backpage.com; Mela Murder as the Waffle House waitress who gives the kids free sausage and maple syrup and winds up getting her left eye socket smashed in because she doesn't want her kid playing with a confirmed arsonist; Rosa Medina Perez as Bertha, the overweight Hispanic single mama who says "I need to lighten up, light up and get laid"; and Brooklyn Prince as Moonee, the ringleader of the kindergarten gang that, among other wholesome activities, pester tourists for free ice cream cones and cause millions of dollars in rental property vandalism.

Written by Chris Beroch and Sean Baker - the latter who also directed the film, who SHOULD at least get a nominee for his work here, but probably won't because the Academy thinks some black dude or white woman who made a film of lesser quality deserves it more because Trump is still president.

Regardless, this is a movie WELL worth going out of your way to catch. It's one of the most innovative flicks in a year filled to the brim with rehashes, in addition to featuring one of the year's best acting performances and what may very well be the best cinematography you'll see in any film from '17. I can easily afford this one four stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, even if it means actually paying for a ticket instead of just bootlegging it online like you do everything else. 

Fun fact: the working title was actually Autism: The Motion Picture.

Changing gears considerably, let's head back to the regular movie theaters for a moment, why don't we? All I can say is that the marketers at Sony really dropped the ball when it came to this newfangled Jumanji movie. Considering the main character is named "Gilpan" and he literally cries "oh vey" when under duress, there's really no excuse for 'em to NOT have named the movie Jew-Manji and released a bunch of branded tie-in yarmulkes to coincide with the Hanukkah season.

Now, believe it or not, this Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle movie isn't a remake of the 1996 Robin Williams vehicle, it's a direct sequel ... kinda'. It does sorta' pick up where that movie left off, with this one metalhead retard scooping up the titular board game but shucking it aside so he can play more Twisted Metal on his Sony Playstation. But the board game is apparently cognizant of its own existence now, so it morphs overnight into an old ass Atari 2600 cartridge that glows neon green. And since the kid in question wears a Metallica shirt, it's pretty much a given he's too stupid to not plug it into his retro-looking console conveniently laying unused next to a pile of soiled socks and get sucked into the living, breathing virtual world, which effectively makes this the inversion of the 1996 movie, where the game enters the kids' real world and ... eh, like you (or anybody else, for that matter) gives a shit.

What's important for you to know this time around is that we've got an all new crop of precocious teens monkeying around the local high school, committing all sorts of misdeeds to garner themselves some detention time. For example, we've got this one stuck up blonde ho that's always taking selfies and doing FaceTime chats during quizzes and this dorky introverted girl who thinks football is stupid and makes fun of the gym coach for only making $32,000 a year and this one big black jock named Fridge who makes the aforementioned nebbish Jew nerd do his homework for him - so yeah, it's pretty much the EXACT same cast from that atrocious Power Rangers redux, only with slightly less autism and implied Muslim lesbianism. So eventually the wannabe Breakfast Club gets locked inside a basement where they're forced to tear staples out of a ten foot tall mound of U.S. Weeklies and hey, what do you know, they just so happen to find the same retro console from the beginning of the movie and sure as sugar, they get zapped into video game world just like that Megadeth-worshippin' dunderhead at the beginning of the movie.

Except now, all the kids have been transformed into larger than life superhero video game characters. The nerdy Jew kid is now The Rock playing the main character from Uncharted, the dorky girl is now a Lara Croft stand-in, the narcissistic blonde ho is now a fat cartographer played by Jack Black (who is REALLY fascinated by how "his" newfound penis works) and the big angry black jock has been transformed into (what else?) Kevin Hart. After all the usual exposition, the kids eventually figure out they have to place a jewel in the eye of a giant jaguar statue, but of course, there's this one evil dude who can control the game world's animal life who wants the gemstone all for himself, and eventually, they meet up with the kid from 1996 who got sucked into the game (who says stuff like "getting Jiggy with it" even though that song didn't actually come out until 1999) and they make a coordinated, concentrated effort to escape the virtual island without using up all of their lives.

There's pretty much no plot beyond that. It's just the kids learning the power of teamwork and micro-managing their fledgling romances and a whole bunch of crappy looking CGI alligators and cobras attack them for the next hour. Oh, and the final 30 minutes are filmed almost entirely in computer generated darkness, so good luck making out half the shit you see onscreen. 

Anyhoo, we've got 30 dead bodies (virtually, anyway.) One dead snake. One helicopter chase. Multiple karate fights. One exploding character actor. Several deaths by plunging. Gratuitous urination jokes. Gratuitous Peter Frampton cover. Gratuitous '90s slang. Kung fu. Rhinoceros fu. Hippo fu. Cheetah fu. Elephant fu. Cake fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place - shameless PlayStation4 product placement fu.

Starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as Dr. Smolder Bravestone, who is pretty much an expy of Nathan Drake from the Uncharted games, except, you know, brown; Jack Black as Professor Sheldon Oberon, a fat, Jack Black-shaped pile of goo possessed by the spirit of a 16-year-old Snapchat skank; Karen Gillan as a very Tomb Raider like character who can only kick people's asses while "Baby I Love Your Way" plays on the radio; Kevin Hart as "Mouse" Finbar, a zoologist who spontaneously combusts if he comes in contact with pastries; and Nick Jonas as "Seaplane" McDonough, the avatar of the Metallica fan who's been stuck in the virtual world since 1996. 

Written by no less than four writers (including Chris McKenna, the same guy who fucked up Spider-Man: Homecoming) and directed by Jake Kasdan, who I think we all believe would be better suited making a Dewey Cox sequel instead of this stuff.

Eh, the best I can give it is a meager two stars out of four. It's not as bad as I was expecting, but it's still a VERY predictable, paint-by-numbers big budget cash grab. Jimbo says check it out, but only if you do so in a manner that doesn't cost you any money (wink, wink.)

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DOUBLE REVIEW: 'Blade Runner 2049 / 'Circus Kane'

Forget about the return of Blade Runner - what we REALLY ought to be pumped about is Chris Olen Ray carrying on his dad's sleazoid cinema legacy.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I don't know if you folks know about it or not, but we're just a few years away from Cookout taking over the world.

Never heard of Cookout before? Well, that's probably because you're a Yankee who lives in some third world country like California or Oregon. Down here in the South, these things are popping up like fungi on cow pies, and I for one, couldn't be happier. 

Not since Chick-Fil-A has there been a fast food place with so much market upswing. You see, not only do these guys LOVE being heterosexual and being married to their first wives, they're patriotic in addition to being Christian. Every Styrofoam cup you get there has both Proverbs 1:7 and God Bless America printed on 'em, and if you don't know what Proverbs 1:7 says, basically it says being fearful of Jesus is the start of being smart, but as we all know, there's a lot of Democrats out there who just plain despise wisdom and the truth and will prolly be protestin' the place outta' spite soon enough. Of course, Proverbs 1:7 is no 2 Kings 18:27 - for all you heathens out there, it's one about making your enemies eat their own doo-doo and drink their own piss - but it ain't too bad a bible verse to build your burger joint around, regardless.

But loving the Judeo-Christian God and the U.S of A is just the tip of the iceberg (lettuce.) What really makes Cookout a blue chip prospect is that you can get an entire day's worth of food there for less than $5 Americano, AND the food tastes like real backyard barbecue instead of stuff a Mexican rancher probably spit in before being stuck in the deep freeze for 200 days at a time.

You kinda' have to wonder why nobody thought of selling charcoal-cooked hamburgers en masse for a fast food concept before. Yeah, Burger King likes to brag about having charbroiled hamburgers, but that's bullshit compared to what Cookout offers you. These things are fat and plump and charred blacker than a whore's conscious and they taste wonderful. You eat a hamburger from McDonald's or Wendy's, you know you're not really eating a hamburger, but when you eat at Cookout, you feel like you're eating something that might actually be 100 percent real food. And even if you don't like hamburgers for some stupid ass reason, check out this menu. 

Just look at all that shit. They've got hot dogs. They've got GENUINE barbecue. They've got three different kinds of chicken, plus quesadillas, plus chicken nuggets, plus corn dogs, plus hush puppies PLUS bacon wraps. That means you can have a double-patty burger, onion rings, chicken wraps AND a Cheerwine float for just $3.99. You just can't beat those prices, and once word spreads about how good a deal they offer, it's fucking over. Nobody can compete against a strategy like that. What Cookout has isn't just a license to print money, it's a license to take the damn dollar bills out of the cash registers in every other fast food place in town. 

And we haven't even gotten to their milkshakes yet. All I'm going to say is that the executives at Sonic are prolly shooting up Oxycotin into their eyelids right about now, 'cause their time as kings of the cream has about as much life left in it as Harry Dean Stanton (and he's dead, btw.) And Dairy Queen would be getting ready to suck on a bag of helium, too, if it weren't for the fact nobody working at DQ has been able to speak a lick of English since 1996. 

I've honestly been thinking about applying for a Cookout franchisee license myself. Of course, my credit score may not be high enough for that $1.3 million loan I was contemplating, and my previous arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct and imitating a police officer (a two-for-one special, actually) may not make the Cookout people too happy, but trust me; if you folks give me the keys to the kingdom, I'll have you guys rolling in so much green you can cosplay as Montana Max from Tiny Toons. 

I mean, you folks have to send me a couple of coupons for praising you, at the very least. It's not everyday I use my award-winning publication for the sole purpose of garnering free chicken nuggets and hamburgers, and for that, you higher-ups at Cookout ought to be mighty thankful.

Yeah right. Like Harrison Ford's old ass will still be alive in 2049.

Speaking of shameless whoring, this newfangled Blade Runner 2049 movie is the biggest ripoff since Mr. Pibb - or the last Alien flick, at least. Now, to be fair I was never really that big an admirer of Ridley Scott's original movie. Even back then, it was filled with too much pretentious claptrap about the meaning of life for my liking, but compared to the heavy-handed techno-existentialism of this movie, it was practically a Roger Corman blood-and-titties sci-fi cheap-o.

The big problem here is that we don't even get Ridley Scott calling the android-blasting action no more. Instead, we've got this French Canadian froth named Denis Villenueve. Now, I'm actually a pretty big admirer of his work - in fact, I thought 2009's Polytechnique and 2011's Incendies were two of the very best movies from their respective years - but this guy is so clearly not cut out for directing sci-fi action opuses. He's too busy trying to get the cinematography just right, with all of these lingering shots of giant CGI ash heaps and dirt-smeared child faces, when the audience just wants to see The Goose blast away robo-hookers while synth-wave music plays in the background. Instead, this Denis fruit keeps trying to hammer us with questions about our inert mortality and what it means to be truly human, as if THAT and not Joanna Cassidy running around with her tits hanging out and Daryl Hanna trying to smother Harrison Ford with her coochie was what people really liked about the original movie. 

We start the movie with this scrolling text prologue about global warming (of course!) causing a whole bunch of famines in the 2020s, then we learn about this rich guy who invented some farm bots that saved the world. But a lot of the older replicants are still around, and there are still plenty of Blade Runners running around trying to catch 'em, too. Ryan Gosling (who, by the way, is so good at portraying socially maladjusted, subconsciously violent retards) plays K, our lead Blade Runner, who this time around is clearly depicted as a robot. Anyway, he gets the flick off to a rollicking start by shutting down Dave Bautista's illegal maggot ranch, but not before multiple walls get broken and at least one party exits the scene with one fewer eyeballs.

Anyway, L.A. circa '49 is a bombed-out, Brazilian looking shit hole, but it still has Atari ads everywhere, for whatever reason. K lives in a scmmy 80-story apartment with opium smoking Chinese people but he doesn't really care because he has a hologram wife that makes him Minute Rice and suggests to him which Nabokov novels to read after every shift. But the next day at work, his boss chews him out for not deleting enough zetabytes from his memory-stealing USB drive, and they tell him for his next assignment he has to off a real person. So he goes to that aforementioned billionaire farm bot mogul's basement (which is a literal memory bank), but there ain't a whole lot of shit left 'cause there was a big EMP blast in 2022 or something like that. Oh, and the owner of FarmBot, Inc. is this one hipster-looking asshole with weird eyes who literally squeezes robot people out of slimy Ziploc bags and stabs them in the stomach for having too many stretchmarks. And (I think) he's actually a cyborg Anti-Christ who wants slave replicants to take over the world so nobody has to work no more and we can all live in a Bernie Sanders multicultural commie utopia. So yeah, you know this is one evil motherfucker we're dealing with right here.

Then Ryan Gosling turns down some human hookers and tells his boss about all these implanted childhood memories and this one time he dreamed a bunch of skinhead third graders beat him up over a wooden horse. So he goes to a dump, which is actually just the entire city of San Diego turned into a scrapheap, which I think we can all agree is an upgrade from what it is today. Then he takes a nap in his car and some homeless Russians start banging on the windshield so he's gotta' shoot about four or five of them in the head at point blank range and then a mysterious missile strike wipes out half of Little Stalingrad.

Then he accidentally stumbles upon a sweatshop for elementary schoolers and the slavemaster is a black dude so he roughs him up for a bit (a side note, but apparently cigarette smoking comes back into vogue big time 33 years from now.) Then Gosling spends 20 minutes rummaging through ashes, and holy shit, he FINDS that wooden horse from his implanted childhood memories. So now it's the inverse of the original Blade Runner's shtick, where the guy is a robot who starts thinking he might be human after all.

Then his hologram wife tells him he's a real boy now and that she probably would've called him Joe if he was her son, so yes, they ARE going to go full retard with the Pinocchio references. So he takes his wooden horse to this Somalian dirt merchant who runs a Geiger counter over it and he tells him that shit is practically glowing green with radiation so he goes on the 2049 version of Google Maps and starts combing through the hitherto unmentioned nuclear wasteland where Vegas used to be and he decides to visit the irradiated desert, but thankfully its the kind of irradiated desert that still has fully intact public libraries and casinos in it.

And at the hour and half mark, Harrison Ford's 80-year-old ass *finally* shows up. And he makes Gosling watch a holographic Elvis revue at gunpoint and then it's time to kung fu for a little while then they get tired of slugging each other in the puss so they decide to throw back a couple of brewskies and discuss Deckard's kid he gave up for adoption and ... well, you can figure this one out, can't you?

Anyhoo, somebody calls in a drone strike and here come the Blade Runners to put the kibosh on Deckard. Now, I ain't gonna tell you if they get him or not, but I assure you there's STILL another hour worth of movie left, somehow. In fact, I don't even really know how to explain the last 30 minutes of the movie to you, but I will say this: it involves a lot of water, a lot of stabbing and a whole lot of robots getting strangled to death. But there's STILL about 20 more minutes of movie after that, and trust me - it's definitely 20 more minutes than should've been kept in the final print.

We've got 23 dead bodies. Five dead robots. Four breasts. Three fist fights. Four exploding vehicles. One hobo encampment bombardment. One crash landing, with underwater submersion. Eyeball plucking. Stomach slicing. Hand crushing. Gratuitous Elvis. Gratuitous Frank Sinatra. Hologram fu. Drone fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place - some major league waifu fu.

Starring Ryan Gosling as the autism-bot who dreams of electronic sheep horses who thinks he might be a real human being but won't nobody tell him, for some reason; Harrison Ford as Deckard, who still isn't quite over his dead robo-wife from the first movie and is convinced he managed to have the world's first half person-half robot lovechild and drops gems like "sometimes, to love someone, you've gotta' be a strangers"; Ana da Armas as Ryan Gosling's virtual reality girlfriend; Jared Leto as the Billy Mitchell-looking evil cyborg industrialist with goofball eyeballs; and Dave Bautista as the first replicant on the "to-kill" list, who looks like Steve Jobs jacked out of his mind on steroids.

Co-written by Hampton Fancher (whose biggest screenwriting credit prior to this was 1989's The Mighty Quinn) and Michael Greene, who also wrote the screenplay for Logan and Alien: Covenant, and directed by the aforementioned Denis Villeneuve, whose talents are apparently better suited for movies about drug cartels and deciphering alien languages than cyber-punk neo-noir shoot-a-thons.

I'll give it a just OK two stars out of four. It's got some decent scenes, but by and large, it's hardly anything more than just another big budget sci-fi opus with a couple of good ideas it has no clue how to properly execute. Which, yeah - is pretty much all of 'em Hollywood makes nowadays.

And before you ask - no, it isn't about the professional wrestler.

As a free (and vital) public service, I feel it is my duty - no, obligation - to highlight at least one no-budget, straight-to-the-bottom-row-of-the-new-release-section-at-Walmart micro-horror indie movie every month, and one look at the DVD box art of Circus Kane would suggest the whole thing is nothing more than a halfhearted ripoff meant to capitalize on the success of It. But you can't judge a book by its cover, though, and I assure you, this Circus Kane is no ripoff of It - rather, it's a ripoff of House on Haunted Hill and Saw, which depending on your perspective, is either a minor improvement or a massive downgrade.

But that's not to say this movie ain't important. No sir. As soon as the name of the director flashes onscreen the first time, you just know you're witnessing a major milestone in American degenerate cinema history. Why? Because it's the first slasher movie ever directed by Christopher Olen Ray, and if that last name rings a bell, it should, 'cause he's the son of legendary B-movie king FRED Olen Ray, who's responsible for such all time masterpieces as Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Evil Toons and Scream Queen Hot Tub Party. And although this Chris kid's been kicking the tires for awhile now, making movies like 2-Headed Shark Attack and Asteroid vs. Earth, we here at TIIIA can't tell you how thrilled we are to watch him follow in his daddy's illustrious footsteps. And yep, Circus Kane is precisely the kind of loving homage to Freddy O. Ray's filmography that you'd expect - meaning the movie as a whole sucks, but at least it's got a lot of blood and guts everywhere.

What we've got here is a movie where eight disparate people whose only common characteristic is that they're assholes on Twitter (no, that's a real plot point) get text messages telling 'em if they survive one night in a haunted house this old circus freak named Balthazar Kane will give 'em $250,000. So we've got your usual assortment of genre fodder; some nerd collector with a bum ticker, this fat black dude who plays Xbox all day, this one guy who argues with his wife a lot, some washed up indie actress who goes to punk rock shows with five foot tall spikes in her hair, a drug dealer and perhaps most terrifying of all, an all grown up Jonathan Lipnicki, who is now sporting a downright fash-tastic alt-right haircut. And there are these two brunette chicks who look really alike, but the director fucks it all up by letting us know that only one character survives the whole ordeal upfront, so it loses the numbero uno aspect of all great slasher movies: knowing that any character can die a bloody, horrific death at any point in the movie.

So these guys in clown masks toting assault rifles force 'em into the back of a S.W.A.T van and they spend the next 15 minutes talking about how many Instagram followers they have and how they think the whole think is some viral marketing stunt, even though they've just been kidnapped at gunpoint and knocked out with goofy gas (and you know we're dealing with some bottom of the rung acting when nobody in the movie can even act like they're falling asleep.)

So anyhoo, thy go inside the haunted house and there are plasma screen TVs everywhere with Kane (who looks like Rob Zombie cosplaying as pro 'rasslin great The Undertaker) telling them to livestream everything as they make their way through his house o' death traps. Early on we've got the mixed-race guy getting bifurcated by chainsaw-lugging zombie jesters, but nobody thinks its real until he makes them hop across a fire pit with axes swinging on a pendulum back and forth and crawl under barbed wire.

From there, it's your usual no-budget horror hokum. We've got guys having heart attacks and hitting metal grates so hard their heads explode (yeah, we all know that's scientifically impossible, but like they're gonna' waste all those blood bags they bought at Spirit Halloween last year), a clown chomping off a fat black dude's fingers and this one broad getting sliced up in a barbed wire kill lifted right outta the first fuckin' Saw movie. But like a whole lot of modern indie horror movies, the folks who made this one just don't got no idea how to end the movie. We've got too many flashbacks, too much monologuing, too many intelligence-insulting plot twists (at one point, the survivors call 911 and are told they'd have to wait two hours before the po-po got there) and a final girl vs. main psycho killer grand finale that just drags on forever. 

And even worse? The movie commits the ULTIMATE post-post-post-postmodern slasher movie sin: it hits us with a totally nonsensical "twist ending" that serves only to set up a sequel don't nobody want to see and won't ever get made no how. How many times do I have to keep telling you people this? If your movie don't end with the final girl turning the bad guy's intestines into a Picasso painting or the bad guys grabbing the final girl and eating her or raping her two seconds after the screen fades to black, you might as well just toss the whole damn movie into a Dempster Dumpster and say a buncha Puerto Ricans stole the reels so you can get a little bit of insurance money out of it. 

Still, I'll give it some credit. I mean, for a movie that was apparently filmed in one of those "escape room" attractions with all the props on loan from Party City's Halloween discount section, it ain't too shabby an effort, I suppose.

We've got 19 dead bodies. One severed zombie head. Eyeballs roll. Fingers roll. Legs roll. arms roll. One jugular sliced open. One suicide by cop. One Nazi cannibal 'rasslin match. Gratuitous skeletons. Gratuitous crapola punk rock music. Gratuitous Marky Mark impersonations. Blacklight fu. Chainsaw fu. Barbed wire fu. Meathook fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place - some serious influencer marketing fu.

Starring Jonathan Lipnicki as the guy you think is probably going to survive the movie because he's the only guy anybody in the audience might recognize; Tim Abell as big bad Balthazar Kane, who says lines like "I am the hunter who eats the flesh of his prey" and "death is the one true god, and I'm her angel spreading her harsh, cold words one soul at a time" while looking like a combination of Jeff Bridges and Royal Dano's zombie cowboy character in House 2; Ted Monte as the scummy baseball card shop owner who says "this was totally worth being drugged or gassed or whatever he did to us"; Cameron Jebo as the guy who says "Shalom, motherfucker" after snapping an S.S. zombie's neck; and Victoria Konefal as the final girl, who really shouldn't keep her hopes up about getting the lead in Circus Kane 2 anytime soon. 

Written by James Cullen Bressack, Sean Sellers and Zack Ward (who played Scut Farkus in A Christmas Story, believe it or not), whom all did an outstanding job ripping off Five Nights at Freddy's obliquely enough to probably not get sued; and directed, of course, by the one and only Chris Olen Ray, who doesn't even care that his actresses' makeup keeps changing mid-scene, because that's stuff viewers of the soil wouldn't even notice, anyway. 

We'll give 'em credit for adhering to about four or five of Jimbo's Ten Commandments for all Modern Slasher Movies, but again, it's a movie that just lays on the self-referential shit too thick. Which we could've overlooked had the director distracted us with some titties here and there, but the zero breast count alone is worth bumping off half a star. As such, I have no choice but to give it a ho-hum two stars out of four simply out of principle. Jimbo says check it out, but this Chris O. Ray kid definitely needs to rewatch some of his daddy's old movies (we'd wholeheartedly recommend The Alien Dead and Beverly Hills Vamp as starting points) to learn how to make these things the right dadgum way.

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

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

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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