Movie Reviews

I love bad movies.

Give me poor production values, inconsistencies, flawed storyline. bad acting, etc., and I'm a happy camper. In the other direction, my standards for a good movie are rather high, but luckily, I react the same to most movies that tickle my fancy.

In the past, I've had some friends that would indulge my love for B-movies, and I even had one thickly-browed friend who loved teeny-bopper rom-coms, so that filled a big section of the bad movie category, but there are few people out there who are willing to watch whatever I want.

Lately, my bassoonist friend has indulge me in watching a bunch of bad movies from the new releases wall. Here are some reviews (If you want real details and names, look them up on imdb or something - these are truly michael-style reviews and you better bet there's gonna be spoiling):

Tenure

This was about and English prof who has twice been denied tenure at various universities; surprise surprise, he's up for tenure again... Long story short, he doesn't get it the third time around. I'm glad they didn't go the Hollywood route of realizing his unseen brilliance at the end and getting offered a position at Harvard, etc.; instead, he realized that his passion was for teaching of any kind and that he didn't need to be in a university to do it. In short, they glamorized a huge wage-decrease and basically demotion!

There was a love story involved, but it only really appeared and resolved in the last few scenes, so I wasn't nauseated. The secondary storyline involved the main character's best friend who was searching for Bigfoot - you can't go wrong there! Both of these guys seemed vaguely familiar. I think the main guy was Dewey from Scream, and his best friend often plays a sidekick character.

In short, this movie was better than it should have been!

Visioneers

Starring Zackafanakagakas or something. This was a about a bizarre world where people lead seemingly vacant existences and where dreams are a symptom of the growing epidemic of spontaneous explosions.

This rental was worth it only for the opening 15 minute segment at the main character's workplace. He walks in, gives the finger to a poster - as his coworkers come in, they all flip each other off and say, 'Jeffers morning'. Jeffers is the huge company they work for, which is the self-proclaimed most profitable company in the world. Every minute, a voice announces the time, and how many productive minutes until the weekend. There are also buzzings and beepings and ringings from different sources. I can't do it justice in words, but the opening sequence is like clockwork in it's intriguing and elaborate counterpoint of events.

In the end, the movie falls short, lacking in real character development or a compelling story. I get it that that's the point of the movie, but the point of the movie also seems to be what holds it back.

Confessions of a Porn Addict

This movie stars Spenny from Kenny versus Spenny, for those of you who are familiar with terrible Jackass-style Canadian comedy. This movie is a mockumentary; it doesn't matter what the topic is, the genre is guaranteed to be fantastic. [There's one about a parking-meter attendant that I highly suggest!]

It's about a porn addict whose wife left him as a result. He joins a support group and changes his life, only to realize that his wife has gone into the porn industry - hijinks ensue.

Despite the gratuitous use of pornography, I don't actually recall seeing genitals. Nevertheless, I wouldn't say it was done tastefully. At the end, when he confronts his wife in the middle of a Bukkake filming, the reunion kiss is both heart-warming and stomach-turning!

All in all, the movie is fairly entertaining.

Taxidermia

Weird.

I can barely describe it.

Basically, three short movies in one that were connected by generational lineage, but I still didn't quite get the connection of the first and second sections' main characters. It was foreign - I'm gonna go with Hungarian. Contrasting the last one, this movie has gratuitous genitals, as one should expect from any artsy foreign film.

The first section featured a military assistant or something... he has a fire/candle fetish and he caresses, licks, and nipples the flame. There is an impressive scene where he is jerking off his flame-throwing penis. There's a graphic sex scene but it keeps changing between his partner - the variables are his boss's obese wife, another random lady, and a pig carcass that had been slaughtered earlier that day. The next morning, when his boss finds him asleep with his pants down on top of the carcass, he shoots him in the head and then it pans to a scene where the boss's wife gives birth to a baby boy.

In the second section, the baby boy is now grown up - a Hungarian national speed-eating champion (well, second place). Apparently this is a profession and they train hardcore. The gratuitous obese vomiting was almost too much to handle. Long story short, he and the female speed-eating champion have a baby who ends up being the focus of section three.

Contrary to his gene pool, the son grows up to be an emaciated taxidermist who has to take care of his now incredibly obese father - imagine the Monty Python fat guy right before he explodes. After a fight, the father tries to leave his chair, he dies and his guts spill out all over the floor. The son comes back, cleans out his father's carcass and taxidermifies. He then hooks himself up to a machine that taxiderms himself and also slices off his head and right arm - resulting in the image for the movie cover.

The movie is grotesque to the extreme. While I wouldn't say there was what I would think of as traditional beauty in it, it had a rich tapestry and powerful imagery. Strangely compelling. Also, slightly disturbing.