From the Bike: Movie Reviews from a wounded runner. Dead All Night and Driller Killer

OK so admittedly I have done a lot of binge series watching, in particular.. Hannibal. I watched the first two seasons. I highly recommend it as a good show.

But, I also watched two really bad short films on a private Roku Channel.. Dead All Night and Driller Killer.

They are remarkable. Truly truly absolutely, um, noteworthy.

Dead All Night 

My guess is some dudes wanted to make an homage to Escape from New York. But, they didn't want to make it interesting. Also, they didn't have a budget. And, they didn't know anyone who could act. On the plus side it was shot in Canada so maybe Tax Dollars paid for it.

To be fair to the lead Ry Barrett, I had to stop hating him once he said something and I realized by his vocal inflection that he was Canadian. Such a nice young man. I bet he is real polite and courteous. Also he was hung out to dry in so many scenes. You can see it happen and it's fairly amusing. He says his lines menacingly at the bad guy and then.. the camera stays on him.. and then, the camera stays on him... and as the camera remains fixated on him his expression changes from fury (acting) over to when-will-they-cut-away-from-me? terror (real life).

The fight scenes are sort of like what would happen if you took 2 beefy guys to an all you can eat buffet and had them see exactly how much they could eat.. then give them horse tranquilizers, then set them outside in 95 degree heat with 70% humidity and say "pretend to fight." I have seen less lumbering and more enthusiasm in an elephant laying down for his final nap in the elephant graveyard.

Did I mention the music?! It is horrible. Did I mention the plot? Well I don't really need to, for details see Escape From New York and instead of having it make sense and be well executed, pretend a bunch of drunks tried to copy it.

I am a champion of zero budget cinema and this one made me laugh, loudly! I would give these guys a pass on this one if they learned from this and made a better movie later.. I wouldn't be up for watching two of these movies from these guys unless they got better.. but on pure entertainment ratings.. this one was worth my 25 mins or so on the stationary bike. And, it was short! No way could anyone deal with 60-90 minutes of this thing.

Driller Killer

I heard a really terrible (IMHO) punk song in the 80's called Driller Killer. I hated It! Ug! Undisciplined  badly executed bursts of noise. The band was called Disorder. I was/am/will never be a fan.

True story, my buddy and I obtained the single, if memory serves me right Marty bought it.. and we listened to it and we HATED IT! So, we scratched on the single with a knife to wreck it and wrote things like  "worship satan!!" in marker on the record itself and slipped it, inside the sleeve back into the record store bin. I am not sure why we did that but I remember both of us laughing and laughing about it later like we had committed some brave act of music rebellion.

I later found out that the song was based on a movie and made plans to see the movie. And it only took about 30 or so years for me to get around to it. Kinda.

I only watched some of Driller Killer on the bike before other plans came up but.. I am admittedly kind of spellbound. It's so.. dirty, nasty, grimy, unclean, soiled, it makes me want to wash my hands. I don't know why. Basically some guy is an asshole artists and he lives with two asshole artist hotty lesbians and, I think he ends up drilling people with a power drill.

I will tell you what I know. The one girl makes so many long distance calls from their apt that go unpaid that the phone is going to be shut off. The driller guy has awful teeth and a real mean facial expression. He likes to whine and yell. He went to sell a painting to a rich guy and I swear a naked woman was just standing in the corner of the room.

Later, the guy sees an ad on tv for a "portapack" which is a battery powered outlet of some sort.. so I know where this is heading. See this was in the 70's, before battery powered drills. So this guy is going to buy a portapack and hook his electric drill up to it and go driller killing!

This movie left a lasting impression in my mind but I am not sure if its a good one or a bad one. The movie just seems so slimy and evil! I don't know if I can bring myself to finish watching it.Holy crap wiki says it is 96 minutes, my Roku channel had bad info. I wonder how far into it I got.

This guy is wondering if you will watch it.

From the Bike: Movie Reviews from a wounded runner - The Adventures of Ford Fairlane

A lot of people have asked me, why is this blog called "It's a Podcast" when it's not a podcast? Let me say thank you! I love your feedback, and pay attention to every comment. Keep them coming, it's you the audience that me the writer is writing to.

"I'm so terrific I have my own toll-free number: 1-800-UNBELIEVABLE." - Ford Fairlane

Let's get right to the topic: The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. I got on a stationary bike and rode my way through this masterpiece. Starring the walking, talking cartoonish persona created by Andrew Clay Silverstein, known and reviled by many as 'Andrew -Dice- Clay.'

As a young man I had heard of the Dice Man. He made me smirk a bit, his stand-up shtick seemed funny enough to listen for a few minutes but then got old fast. In his defense this is my take on most comics who develop a particular set-in-stone persona, for example Gilbert Gottfried. I get bored by comedians who set such rock-solid parameters around themselves. And, of course if the persona is one that makes me cringe like Gilbert Gottfried... I just want to destroy the comic.. redrum redrum murder death kill.

I knew this movie existed, and I knew he made women mad when he hosted Saturday Night Live, but I sort of blamed the women for bothering to be mad at this cartoon character. Demeaning to women? I thought to myself "this guy is demeaning to HIMSELF." But, people can be offended by different things and if he shaved his head and ripped up a picture of the pope, he could have done even more damage I guess. The 'dice man' character is so silly that even when he spouts gross demeaning stuff I always took it as him poking fun at actual dudes who act like that... as opposed to him seriously having anything at all against women. I have never met the guy so who knows. But in my opinion if he was actually trying to put down women in his act it was an Epic Fail (tm), to me he was putting down moronic dudes who thought they were being funny when they said stupid things.

I popped the DVD in and got on the bike, not sure what to expect.And I am still not sure what I got. It's hard for me to even explain. It's kind of like if a few stunted 15 year olds (who liked to get laughs in the classroom by being rude and gross and upsetting those who were easily offended) were suddenly given the titles of Writer, Director and Editor and then given a decent budget to make a movie.

Where to start. The dialogue? The story? The women?

Let's ease in. Yes, tons of hot women in this movie and yes, all treated like meat. What was kind of amazing though is, I ended up respecting them more than the guys. These women all were dressed in skin tight outfits and worked their goods, sure, but for the most part, they didn't seem as dumb and pathetic as the guys. Except for Zu Zu Petals but even she had moments of brain activity... while the guys in this movie..guys were all portrayed as total buffoons. Tough, brainless, and .. yea nothing else. Brutish cartoon characters. Bluto from Popeye could have been seemlessly engrained into this movie.

When Dice was hiding out in a soritity for some reason (production value), and they kept just showing endless T&A shots, it was almost like they were just seeing how many women viewers would sigh in exasperation and get up and walk out of the movie theater leaving their boyfriends behind. It was an endurance test!

Let me talk about the plot. Plot? Let me start at the beginning. On the first day God Created the Dice Man. And all was good, HEY! Hickory Dickory Flambe', the man is a walking Cliche' OH!

So we see him get up, and strut his stuff around his place and I got one laugh. His stereo system was loud enough that the dancing hulu girl on the speakers started shaking.

It's all a blur from that moment till the final credits so I will just share random memories. For some reason they cast Gilbert Gottfried as, well...the annoying Gilbert Gottfried character that people want to kill. This is where the movie delivers. Someone kills Gilbert Gottfried!!!  In perhaps the best joke in the movie, they electrocuted him, Get it? Gilbert Gottfried. Got Fried! HEY-O!

So, now that something clever was done, let's mark that box as checked. Something clever will not happen again in this movie.

Dice is a "rock and roll detective" and struts around like a Fonzie-wannabee. Dumpier, ruder, and with one liners that simply are not funny. And, he does voice over narration which is even less funny, but tries a lot harder to be funny. A for effort? I don't see any reason to be insulted or offended, this was Dice light, not his raunchier stage stuff designed to make women shake with rage. I almost would have preferred that, this version was watered down. When you add water to urine, does it make the urine better? Who knows. The only true gross-out the movie went for was when Dice ate a... something.. (shrimp? sushi? who knows) at a party and didn't want to spit it out so he kissed his secretary and during the kiss transferred the food to her mouth. I know what you're not saying, that this was hilarious on paper and just didn't transfer to the screen properly. This kinda grossed me out. More than that, the sheer stupidity of that concept just stood out.

Kudos to this movie for employing Robert Englund (Freddy Kruger) as a deranged Australian hitman who likes to giggle and prance around joyously. Kudos for casting Ed O'Neil from Married with Children (Al Bundy) as a square white cop with a secret past as a... failed soul singer? I gotta admit.. didn't see that coming! Kudos for Wayne Newton for devouring all the scenery from this movie effortlessly as, the bad guy who, ah.. oh hell who knows.He was up to something, who cares what it was.I was rooting for him. He's Wayne Newton!

For some reason everyone is chasing a groupie named Zu Zu Petals and, Ford goes from scene to scene spouting one liners and ogling women in tight dresses while his faithful secretary assists (she secretly but not at all secretly wants to bone him.  I believe in real life she at one point married Jim Carrey.. so she went from wanting to bone an offensive American comic in a movie to boning a superior Canadian comic in real life.. I like the story arc of her life in this regard).

Back to the movie. It actually seems more like a series of scenes strung together for the purpose of showing us how desirable Dice is.. ladies he is forceful! He is, um, in leather! His hair is, um.. solid... he can strike rebel poses and make a huge show of lighting his cigarette with his cool lighter. He has a car. Um.. did I mention he poses. Oh! He says things like "Clint Eastwood.. I f*cked him, OH!" and, my theory is that this is supposed to be funny. not that Dice Man is gay. No, really.  He goes from scene to scene, on location, being Dice Man. The scene where he grabs a  mic and does rockabilly and thrusts his crotch at the camera is.. a horror many would never recover from. He's like Elvis! If Elvis was a jerk, short, kinda dumpy and.. wanted to make everyone uncomfortable. Did Elvis ever f*ck Clinto Eastwood? Check IMDB and report back to me.

So, um Zu Zu acts like a developmentally challenged special needs teen but in a cute way. Dice acts like an emotionally stunted thuggish lout but in dull moronic way. His secretary looks great in a tight dress and, remember, later she gets to marry a Canadian so everything works out for her, don't worry, she does OK. it is painful to see her pine away for Dice Man though. Al Bundy gets to chew scenery as a cop who hates Dice. He has a great time with it. And I bet he was paid well. Gilbert Gottfried.. dies. High Five! Wayne Newton gets to ooze sleaze and chew through bad dialogue.  Oh! And they threw in a kid who idolizes Dice, so that we the audience can realize that yes, there is no hope for our children and all is lost. Seriously, I am putting out a bounty on all writers who add precocious kids to movie plots.. bring their severed heads to me and you shall be paid handsomely. The writers' heads not the kids' head! You sickos!

I have to admit I DID enjoyed this movie, some of the dialogue was so bad I laughed out loud. The movie was so cartoonish moronic and cheesy that I wonder.. is this an early example of a movie trying to be so bad that it would be good or, my preferred theory.. is this a movie that 300 lines of coke in the writing room caused to happen?

I still can't quite wrap my head around it. How it happened, why. Who was supposed to like it? Who was talked into funding this? How did the actors make it through the entire movie shoot without coming to their senses and bowing out? How could someone sit down and edit this together without feeling like they just scooped a particularly pungent turd out of the punch bowl and packaged it for sale?

Trivia time. The movie was directed by Renny Harlin, who apparently did NOT take his own life as a result. And made many more movies, that were nothing like this one. Good for you Renny for shaking this Dice Monkey off your back.  Renny Harlin? Dice f*cked him OH!

I will close this review by saying I am glad I finally saw this, it was OK to sit through once as long as you were also doing something productive. And here and there I did laugh, there were some diamonds in the rough. And, did I mention they kill Gilbert Gottfried. More movies should have done this!! Such a great concept.

I also laughed hard on how they had a subplot with the little kid and the search for his dad and, they seemingly forgot all about it and resolved it in such a lame way that I had to laugh.

The Amazing Death of Gilbert Gottfried makes me give this movie 5 stars out of 5 but admittedly that says more about my vendetta against Gottfried than about anything else.

Finally, a quote from the movie that I will modify for my summation.

Ford Fairlane: Conversation with Zuzu Petals was like masturbating with a cheese grater: slightly amusing, but mostly painful.

Me: Watching The Adventures of Ford Fairlane was like masturbating with a cheese grater: slightly amusing, but mostly painful.On the plus side Gilbert Gottfried GOT FRIED! OH!

From the Bike: Movie Reviews from a wounded runner - White House Down

Day two of my rehab mission, better health through cinematic sickness... and I got brave. Real brave. I looked through the stack of unwatchables and selected me a prime cut of beefcake. Channing Tatum in.. White House Down. With Jamie Foxx as president and James Woods as the High Blood Pressured Vitriolic .. well, he kind of plays himself in every movie he is in. James Woods as, the James Woods guy.

I suited up, threw on my Great White Sneaks and fired up the stationary bike's diesel motors, Kidding! That wouldn't make any sense. Obviously the whole point is to power the bike myself! With my muscles and, as I would find out, the rage that courses through me from a truly bad movie.

I was in for 131 minutes of pure fist pumping man-among-men chest beating slimjim snapping-into testosterone fueled.. detonation.  Just think back to when you were watching ID4 and there is that cool part where the White House blows up. Somewhere, in some strip bar, a sweaty twitching head looks up from the line after line of cocaine that was being snorted, sees that scene on the bar TV and with a voice that sounds a lot like, but wasn't, Jesse the Body Ventura, yells "HELL YEA! THAT'S A WHOLE MOVIE, SON! RIGHT FUGGIN THERE!"  This guy had tried to make Top Gun 2 and failed and here was his dream ticket!

White House Down. 

Said Dramatically.

Let's go through this by the numbers. The setup. Beefy cheescake/neckless mandroid Channing Tatertots is a divorced dad/ex military dude who is now.. a security guy I guess.. who is trying to get a job as a secret service agent to give him some walking around money for when he isn't on the catwalk with runway models Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller. Important note.. he argues with squirrels. I imagine the sequel will go more into this plot point as it's touched on here but not explored. Anyways! So, he sweet talks a blander looking hottie who works at the White House into getting him an interview for the job with an old girlfriend who happens to be head of secret service, I think. OK I have to call foul right here. One of my ex girlfriends, who is head of NSA, or, let's be fair even my other ex girlfriend who is Ambassador to Chile, wouldn't be able to get me in for an interview for any high level government jobs so I call bullshit on this, just based on personal experience. Go ahead, ask a former lover of yours who is conveniently high up in the US govt working pretty much next to the President of the United States, they will back me on this.  I will wait. See? I am right. This took me right out of the movie. The rest of the movie is like a documentary to me but this part here.. I just didn't buy it.  On the other hand, Jeff Goldblum cough cough ID4 cough cough cable repair guy cough cough knows president. OK FINE! Fine. I guess it's possible.

Um, I forget a lot of stuff at this point, I had turned on the subtitles but the words I was seeing were such .. endless prattle that just reeked of pointless set up and botched character development attempts that I was instead looking at the picture on the wall and thinking I was actually out riding a bike in springtime.. can you smell the scent of of the fresh flowers or is it just me.. wheee...

Sorry! I returned to my corporal body the moment some shit blew up. Let's rejoin the movie there. Guys dressed as repairmen sneak into the white house and blow some shit up.. BOOM goes the dynamite.Or thermals or whatever Hollywood now calls the stuff makes stuff go BOOM.

I gotta stop right there. Based on the 45 Die Hards and Lethal Weapons and , Ocean's Thirteens and.. what else? Anyways.. if I am White House security, anyone who approaches me in repairman garb.. I am just going to gun them down. Double tap 'em too. And I think the White House would have my back on this. "yea, he had on a repair guy uniform, so I shot him. You're welcome. A commendation and a raise? Thank you sir!" 

How many times is this repairman trick going to work? Are they going to wheel up a trojan Comcast Truck to Fort Knox in the next Die Hard? "Yea, you as Syfy signal be snowy, we's, how to say (because all bad guys are European), for us to fix with bullet."

Back to the movie. Someone does indeed do something sneaky, admittedly it's fuzzy, and as they say "the shit it starts blowing up good."

Me, I am exploding too, with rage at the idiocy of this film. "You Idiots!" "Come on! No way!" etc etc.

There is no truth to the rumor that I paused this movie to go off and kill myself so that I did not have to watch any more. But I did have to step away Mid-Explosion (so, somewhere between 0:20:00 and 2:20:00) to go outside and live. But when I got back, I just plugged back in and shit resumed exploding.

So what did this movie give us that no other movie (and by that I mean, every other action movie) has given us before? Hero with stain on record, supposedly nonredeemable, trying to change, no one will let him. Former lovers dumping on the guy who every woman in audience would drop panties for in a red hot minute. Scenery chewing bad guy who you initially thought was a good guy.  Oh the hero of course has a young kid who initially doesn't respect him but when he saves planet earth she loves him again. Hero is divorced. Ladies! You can openly drool for him AND fawn over his precocious young girl. It's all good! And a random side character who is wimpy but says the most clever hilarious things and isn't scared when he should be! Ah comic relief, the salsa on the side of the scrambled eggs of my discontent.

However I have a lot of respect for Channing Tatum. When Michael Keaton was in the Batman costume for the first Batman movie and couldn't turn his neck, it limited his performance as Batman, made him appear stilted. But Channing, who has no neck, was able to seamlessly appear like a block of wood (not to be confused with a seamless block of James Woods) that was thrown through the air by explosions/bullets/bullet explosions/exploding bullets/exploding explosions with no problems. He made it look so natural! A lot of actors would break character during many of the scenes of this movie, and act, but Channing held onto his craft with both beefy arms and managed to avoid acting for the entire duration of this movie.Side Note: it was a  trick of the camera probably but I swear to God it seemed like he turned his head once.. I know! Brilliant. Only he could have sold it with that body of his. It's all in the nuances. Sometimes less is more. So, sometimes nothing whatsoever is everything? If so, Tatum = Everything. Everything = Tatum.

Also, God Bless the NRA for supplying what amounts to the entire arsenal of a medium sized third world country for this movie. I don't mind seeing stuff blow up and, well, everything else might have sucked but I did see just about everything I could think of blow up real good. Mostly just bullet-riddled actually. Except for Tatum and Fox. Who managed to avoid all but one bullet and, of course, that bullet was deflected by a pocket watch. Because as we all know, everyone has a pocket-watch in their breast pocket. Duh!

A special shout out to James Woods. I admit I am a huge James Woods fan and if, when he got pissed, he would have started to just punch his way through solid walls while screaming in rage, I would have been on board. In retrospect I am bummed I didn't see that.  A maniacal James Woods punching through steel reinforced White House Walls like a terminator robot.. now that's good moviemakin! Hollywood, listen up. I would order up that movie ticket right now. 

OK just to remind myself, I went to IMDB and, there are movie quotes. So, there was dialogue in this movie. For a moment I wasn't sure. A shout out to IMDB for being my resource! 

Here is a stellar quote from this opus:

"President Sawyer: [while fighting a terrorist] Get your hands off my Jordans!"

So, recap. Lots of things blew up and I got over two hours of cardio in.

I give this movie * out of 10. Because you can find a ton of different movies with exploding stuff and think "yep, better than White House Down." 

From the Bike: Movie Reviews from a wounded runner - Hangover III

This is the first in my series of rants about the movies I am watching from an exercise bike.

My game plan is to use the rowing machine and the elliptical at the gym as well as the life circuit machines, do light running sometimes and hunker down at home on the awesome stationary bike while I watch bad movies that I have been meaning to suffer through for some time but just haven't gotten around to it because I have a life. Or did, now I have to flail along in my home on a stationary bike! OK that's not so bad but my soul aches for my soles to hit the streets. But enough about irrational addicted-runner angst. And back to my rehab project.

Today's Shoe Du Jour: the K-Swiss Canadian classic. I had a pair of these and they rocked! I am Canadian so, I rocked! They wore out due to my rocking. I bought a new pair. They.. suck to run in but for this.. they are perfect.

OK that covers the bases, let's get to the bad movies.

Oh wait, first of all.. do not read these reviews unless you have either (a) seen the movies or (b) don't care if you read spoilers. Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert. Kirk to bridge, Spock! Tell Bones we have a spoiler alert in bay 5.. tell everyone at the Satellite of Love that this is not a drill! Set your Blu-Ray on stun!

Here we go.

HANGOVER III

"This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!" - Walter Sobchak, from a happier time in a much much MUCH MUCH better movie

Yes, I saw The Hangover and I laughed myself sillier. Then I saw Hangover II and, I remember laughing but couldn't tell you a thing about it. There was a monkey in there somewhere?

Which brings us to Hangover III. It definitely has everything a third chapter of a franchise that should have just been a single movie could offer: Shameless callbacks to earlier events. Deliberately over the top nonsense that is so over the top that this movies should have been called HangOVERTHETOP III.  Blatant scenery nibbling by the cast. Lots of chaos, little writing, great camera work, fabulous outfits and crisp audio. Threadbare plot and humor that is too forced. And a 34 minute plot carefully compacted into a 100 minute movie.

I must admit the premise is good. Why would these guys all get together again? It's logically set up. The giraffe decapitation was.. beyond funny.  I was lovin it....then unfortunately I was subjected to a lot of over the top nonsense which has one redeeming factor: apparently Walter (as chewed on by John Goodman), on leave from the set of the Big Lebowski, is part-timing it as a crime lord over in this movie. He needs our heroes to help him. Don't worry about the logistics of it, how things unfold makes less sense than anything Walter ever told Lebowski. Shabbas or no shabbas  heads roll.  Sadly, no toe in a towel, that would have been a great little Easter egg!

Finally after it felt like I biked 400,000 miles, I arrived at the ending... which has a nice nod to the first 2 Hangover movies. It of course is embedded in the credits.

I have to cut this movie some slack, the only thing I have against it is the fact that it exists.. and that 98% of the movie is total garbage. But, if you can watch the first 10 mins and then eject the DVD and snap it in two aggressively with a pair of angry pliers, go for it. I left my copy at a Halloween party under a beer bottle. And I feel pretty good about this.

For my first 100 minutes on a stationary bike, this movie didn't make my ass hurt as much as I thought it might. No thanks to Walter.

I give this movie a whopping *** out of 10. If you had to make a part III, I guess this is what you should do but I would lean HEAVILY on.."Hangover needed no sequels." The dudes should have abided.