Obviously, the big news in DVD land this week is the release of The FP. Buy it now and you can be the proud owner of a FilmDrunk sticker! Or at least as sticker that has the FilmDrunk logo on it. Besides that ‘Beautifully Absurd!‘ (Vince Mancini, FilmDrunk) flick, there’s the latest Paul Rudd comedy, a high school party that got out of hand, Jason Segel, Ed Helms, Nic Cage, a bag of hammers, Father Tom Arnold, a sexy film about boney French people boning sexily, and an evil ventriloquist’s dummy. As if there were any other kind.
Vince’s Note: I haven’t talked about The FP much lately because I figured you were sick of it by now, but now’s your chance to see it! I’ve got TWO FREE DVDS to give away in honor of the release, and since I don’t feel like doing a contest, they’re going to the first two people to email me. [UPDATE: CLOSED]
The DVDs:
The FP
Wanderlust
Project X
Jeff Who Lives At Home
Seeking Justice
Big Miracle
Cat Run
A Bag Of Hammers
Keyhole
Exit Humanity
The Legend Of Hell’s Gate
The Jerk Theory
Four Lovers
Snow On Tha Bluff
P.O.E.: Poetry Of Eerie
Grave Danger
As always, the real fun begins on the next page. Click on that big green “CONTINUE READING…”, you know you want to. If you’re feeling contrary, at least click here for this week’s Netflix streaming suggestions.
The FP
If you’re reading these words, chances are you already know what this movie is; Vince had been giving it a lot of enthusiastic coverage even before he officially blessed it with his ‘A’ review. If, somehow, you don’t know what this is, I offer up the following quote from Vince’s review:
The best way I can describe it is that it’s like watching sheer genius and utter retardation tongue kiss for 82 minutes.
I think it’s safe to say that most of us haven’t gotten to see The FP yet, but now’s our chance. Will it live up to Vince’s hype? Can it? I hope so; Vince so rarely gets this excited about things (except for reality cooking shows and limited edition plaid prints, of course) and if there’s one area in which Vince has a lot of experience, it’s tongue-kissing retards.
David Wain (The State, Stella, Childrens Hospital) directs this comedy about a hippie commune. In Vince’s ‘B’ review he ponders the influence that studio executives and test audiences had on this film. While funny, he thought it might be trying too hard to please too many people, and as a result, it ended up not being as good as it could have been. Still, there’s a lot to recommend the flick; Vince’s review singles out a scene with Paul Rudd giving himself a dirty pep-talk in a mirror that Vince describes as ‘pinch-your-dick-so-you-don’t-piss-yourself funny’. Take that with a grain of salt, though. Paul Rudd was on screen and talking dirty; Vince’s hands were already touching his dick, I assure you.
When the first trailers came out for this ‘top secret’ low-budget film produced by Todd Phillips, I was wholly underwhelmed. High school kids throw the biggest, baddest, craziest party ever! “That’s it?” I wondered. It looked (and still looks) like a louder, more obnoxious version of dozens of other films. I figured, as someone who’s well past his high school party days -let alone past the junior high days of fantasizing about such parties, that the movie just wasn’t for me. So be it, oh well. I therefore found it surprising when I read Vince’s ‘B’ review for this movie. He doesn’t really sell the film at all; in fact he points out every criticism you might make about it, but he respected the shamelessness with which the film owned its baser traits. Now I kinda want to see it. If nothing else, if there are as many breasts in the film as Vince’s review promises, it’s worth a look-see.
Jason Segel and Ed Helms star in this flick about a directionless slacker spending the day with his brother, who is following his possibly adulterous wife. I haven’t seen it, but I’m guessing that the brothers make a connection with one another and end the film as changed-for-the-better men. Jeff is probably ready to head out into the real world and find out who he really is when he’s not hiding from his fear of failure, and Pat, his brother, learns to accept that life isn’t his to control and relaxes his grip a little. Even if the movie is that obviously predictable, I might see it. With comedic actors such as Segel and Helms it isn’t so much the plot that matters, but what they do around it. In other words, it isn’t the end of the story that really matters; it’s the journey we take to get there. Wow, I guess Jeff and Pat aren’t the only people stumbling upon hackneyed platitudes today.
Nicolas Cage, Guy Pearce, and January Jones star in this thriller. Jones gets assaulted, the cops won’t help, Pearce offers to help, Cage accepts and then Pearce and his shadowy cabal of vigilantes demand Cage commit some criminal acts as payment. OR ELSE. (Or something, you watch the trailer and tell me you’re paying attention to anything besides Cage’s mesmerizing hairline.) Here’s hoping this movie has a healthy life on DVD, or else Nicolas Cage will never recover from his financial woes. Seeking Justice has only made $12.4 million (world-wide) against a $17 mil budget. In the U.S., it only made $400K. Somebody’s getting fired over this movie, and it ought to be the guy who picked this sh*tty, generic title. The working title was The Hungry Rabbit Jumps. Put Nic Cage’s name above that title and who wouldn’t want to see the movie?
Drew Barrymore and that smug mother*cker from The Office save some whales trapped in the ice. My god, did this movie look terrible. ‘True story’ or no, it’s simply moronic. Nobody cares about these whales, until Drew Barrymore and her annoying lisp tells everyone that whales are really neat, and then suddenly everybody cares about the whales. Because three whales are the most important thing in the world. (So f*ck off, starving children in third world countries, you selfish assholes.) Rather than watch this movie, you should check out a far better family film from the same director: Follow That Bird. Have you seen that Sesame Street flick? Sh*t gets dark! Big Bird gets yanked from Sesame Street and is forced to live with some Dodo birds. Living in the foster system sucks Muppet-dick, so Big Bird runs away, only to get captured by an evil carnival, where he is painted blue and caged up. I’ve seen snuff films that were less intense. Plus, they would never make this movie today. Its big message is essentially don’t trust the government, live on the streets, and make friends with the fringes of society: trash fetishists, obsessive compulsive vampires, gay couples, furries, and deaf ladies named Linda.
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Cat Run
Paz Vega (who isn’t the bat-sh*t crazy Paz de la Huerta) plays Cat, a hooker on the run in this action comedy. If the IMDb synopsis is to be believed, Cat is part of an orgy with Shooter McGavin and when the orgy goes bad, all the whores are killed –except for Cat, who escapes with a hard drive full of sensitive information. A professional assassin is called in to eliminate Cat, and a couple of amateur private detectives decide to help the friendly call girl. First of all, how does an orgy go bad? Did nobody reach orgasm? Did somebody’s mom walk in on the proceedings? Was the f*ck-fest preceded by a taco bar buffet dinner, which led to McGavin sharting all over everyone? Second, who flees an orgy-turned-murder scene, but has the presence of mind to steal a hard drive? Third, what the hell is the deal with these amateur detectives; where do they figure into all this? Lastly, was D.L. Hughley missing an arm in the trailer? Will I ever get the answer to these questions? If it means watching this movie, then no, no I will not. I was interested when I thought it starred Paz de la Huerta; she’s crazy enough to make this type of thing watchable. Paz Vega was the maid in Spanglish, and the only thing watchable about that flick was that one sandwich Adam Sandler made with the fried egg. That looked delicious.
Go here and re-watch the trailer for this that Vince posted back in April. As Vince said then, it doesn’t look half bad. Now watch the full-length trailer below, and see what a difference an extra minute and a half can make. The teaser is just a string of non-sequiturs, each little bit is kind of funny and it makes you think the movie will be the same way. The full trailer shows the film’s true colors. It’s an over-wrought dramedy about slackers ‘adopting’ a kid. I’m about to write a sentence that I never thought I would: Adam Sandler already made this movie, and his version looks better. For f*ck’s sake, they used futura for the title font. Wes Anderson owns that font! Nobody else gets to use it. Speaking of that title, it isn’t clever or intriguing. If anything, it should be the title for a horror movie. Using it as a title for a twentysomething dramedy is just stupid, just like the metaphor it references. A bag of hammers isn’t a burden; it’s at best a fun afternoon and at worst a useful tool supply. Who couldn’t use some extra hammers, am I right?
Jason Patric and Isabella Rossellini star in this weird flick from weirdo Canadian director Guy Maddin. The plot, as much as there is one, is that Patric is a gangster who has returned home after being gone a long time. He must journey through the house, room by room, to reach his wife (Rossellini) in her bedroom upstairs. Meanwhile, the police are closing in on Patric and his gang. I’m sure many people will watch this trailer and think that it looks boring and stupid, but I’m not one of them. For whatever reason, I’m a sucker for arty-weird sh*t like this. I don’t know why, but I find this type of movie fascinating. It’s probably because my cinematic vocabulary is so high; I don’t need a coherent plot to appreciate the artistry at work. Simply put, I engage with cinema on a higher level -a more visceral, instinctual level. Of course it could be that whenever I watch a movie like this I make sure to do so while taking prescription pain killers, but we all have our movie night rituals, don’t we?
Speaking of Canadian flicks, this one’s about a zombie outbreak during the Civil War. So, yes, it’s basically Abraham Lincoln Vs. Zombies (which was basically Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) minus the famous historical figure. You know what, though? This kind of looks good to me. (Maybe I’m just a sucker for Canadian cinema.) The trailer isn’t too hokey and it looks like there are some possibly cool-looking animated sequences, so if nothing else, the movie wasn’t entirely half-assed. The only obvious flaw is the accents. They sound like Canadians trying to sound like 19th Century Southerners. Which is what they are, and I’m feeling generous, so I’ll look past it. Plus there’s the exciting cast using those terrible accents. It has my man Bill Moseley who, I admit, will appear in anything, but I still love him. Dee Wallace is in it, so it could make a good E.T. double feature with Big Miracle. (She was Drew Barrymore’s mom in E.T.) Also the film is narrated by Brian Cox, and yes, I mean the character actor from Coriolanus, Zodiac, 25th Hour, Adaptation, Rushmore, and dozens of other awesome flicks. I don’t know how they got him, but they got him. It probably had something to do with a big check and an easy day’s work. I can’t blame him.
Why are there so many indie westerns being made? As a genre, westerns aren’t all that popular these days, plus they’re really hard to pull off on a low budget. You need costumes, horses, sets, stunts, etc. This movie represents several current trends in sh*tty straight-to-DVD cinema: It’s based on a ‘true story’, it stars a C-list actor mostly known for TV work (this time it’s Eric Balfour, who is my personal pick for ‘celebrity’ you’d most like to fight), and it even throws in Abraham Lincoln for good measure. He doesn’t make an appearance (as far as I know) but one of the characters is John Wilkes Booth. In fact, he’s played by Henry Thomas, who played Elliott in E.T., making this an ideal pick for a triple feature with Big Miracle and Exit Humanity. Now, I know what you’re thinking, and no, there won’t be a fourth film starring Robert MacNaughton, the final member of the E.T. family. His last acting credit was in 1987. He’s a mail handler in New Jersey now, and as recently as 2002 looked like this.
You know about the jerk theory, right? Basically, it states that as nice guys finish last, the only way to get girls to notice you is to be a jerk. Jerks get laid and nice guys jerk off. In this movie, a rad dude with awesome style and sweet guitar licks puts this theory to the test, and it works. The ladies are falling at his feet. The problem is, the one girl he wants only likes nice guys. Oh how will it all turn out? Will the characters learn that you can only find love by being the real you and that being a jerk is no way to treat people…or yourself? Look, you should’ve already dismissed this film the second you glanced at the box cover; it has Tom Arnold on it -as a priest. There’s no scenario where that makes for a good movie. Plus, the trailer has a cameo from Danny Bonaduce. That ugly troll manages to make gingers look worse than the god-forsaken jokes of genetic misfortune we already know them to be.
I was going to give this spot to a movie called Down For The Count, a Muay Thai flick that looks awful to me. I know a lot of FilmDrunkards like MMA and stuff like that, but I don’t know the first thing about it. So feel free to seek that one out on your own, daddy’s writing about something he does know about: wife-swapping. I got the chance to see this French film last weekend, and it is chock-full of useful tips for the would-be wife swapper. For example, make sure to eat your wife’s pussy as soon as possible after eating out the other woman’s pussy, that way, your wife won’t be put off by the smell. Also, make sure to put the furniture back in place after a wild sex session, so as to not anger your partner’s husband when he arrives back at home. I won’t lie, it isn’t all fun and f*ck-games; sh*t gets complicated emotionally, but it’s still a surprisingly compelling sex-centric flick for not being a porno. You know what though, I have to come clean: I’ve never wife-swapped. (Yet.) I’ve mentioned it to my wife, but she claims she’s not interested. I bet she would do it, but she’s convinced no man can satisfy her as well as I can. She’s never said anything like that, but she doesn’t have to. A husband just knows.
Michael K. Williams executive produces this ‘documentary’ about Curtis Snow, an Atlanta drug dealer. Researching this movie, there seems to be a good bit of debate as to whether or not the film is real. According to Wikipedia, a melee broke out at the Atlanta Film Festival due to a scene in which a child puts their hand into a pile of crack with a razor blade in it. Also, the police have been in contact with the filmmakers in regards to some scenes that resembled some real life home invasions under investigation. I don’t know for certain, but I’m guessing that if the crimes depicted were real, some judge would prevent the film from getting a DVD release, so they can’t profit from the crimes committed or something like that. Either way, it could make for an interesting watch, in an Exit Through The Gift Shop, is-it-real-or-staged kind of way. If your tastes run to less ‘urban’ topics, this week also sees the release of Holy Rollers, a doc about a team of Christian professional black jack players. As loud and proud Christians, they seem like total hypocrites, but what’s new about that?
Most straight-to-DVD horror flicks look like they could’ve used more time and money, but in this instance, that’s the point. 15 directors are each given one of 13 Edgar Allen Poe stories to adapt, but they only have three days -and no money- to shoot their films. (Along with 11 individual artists, there are two directing teams, hence the 15/13 discrepancy.) The trailer makes this look like it could be interesting, but I do wonder if the Poe-after-Poe-after-Poe content would get tedious after a while. Basically I wanted to include this because one of the short films is clay animated, and I can’t imagine how much work that took to pull off in only three days. If I may, however, I’d like to question the title. P.O.E.: Poetry Of Eerie. Not everything has to be an acronym. They are so rarely as clever as people wish they were. In fact, they come off as forced and stupid. Plus, shouldn’t it be P.O.E.: Poetry Of Eerieness? A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.: Assholes Can’t Resist Obfuscating Normal, Yielding Morphemes. See? That was terrible.
There are too many new sh*tty horror flicks this week to each mention individually, so I’m showcasing this one because it’s the sh*ttiest. Just like that awesome box cover, the trailer is a thing of beauty. Keep your hand on the volume while you watch, though; the screams can be a bit obnoxious. The rest of the trailer’s top-notch, though, assuming your top-notch is truly horrible acting and cinematography. There are a lot of almost naked women in the trailer, but to be perfectly frank, I kind of feel bad for these ladies. They aren’t ugly or anything, but they aren’t in naked-on-camera shape either, and I suspect they were goaded into stripping against their better judgment. The whole thing reminded me of Is This A Joke?, a movie I featured back in February. Guess what? It’s from the same folks. I honestly wonder what any of these people are thinking. They all look like they should know better. Anyhow, the other new horror flicks are The Awakened, The Disco Exorcist, Kids Go To The Woods…Kids Get Dead (great title, awful trailer), Family Demons, Below Ground: Demon Holocaust, Mother’s Day Evil (a month too late), The Way He Makes Them Feel (a fan-made doc about Michael Jackson fans), and 1313: Billy The Kid. You may say that those last two aren’t horror films, but you haven’t watched their trailers, so who here is the better judge?
If you can stomach Eric Balfour’s stupid rat-face (seriously, I would pay good money to break my hand against his greasy, sneering mouth), check out The Legend Of Hell’s Gate via Netflix instant streaming. There’s also that documentary about Christian gamblers, Holy Rollers. Additionally, the previously featured DVDs getting added this week include The Mighty Macs, 5 Star Day, and the kind of awesome looking Alien Opponent. Otherwise, here are the suggestions inspired by this week’s DVDs:
Between Wet Hot American Summer and Wanderlust, David Wain and his The State cohorts made this relatively under-seen gem. Paul Rudd takes us through the Ten Commandments, each with a vignette exploring the sin in question. To be honest, I like this better than Wet Hot, but it could just be that after a lifetime of parochial schooling, the subject matter really hits home for me. Or maybe it’s because I lost my taste for summer camp films when I was molested at band camp.
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Project X
I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about this 1987 flick starring Matthew Broderick, Helen Hunt, and a chimp, but it has the same title as one of this week’s new DVDs, so it gets a mention. As near as I can tell, Broderick and the chimp are in the Air Force Academy while Helen Hunt tries to lose her baby fat. I’m not that interested in this movie, but that’s probably because it was a tuba-playing chimp that molested me at band camp.
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Species
Nic Cage isn’t the only one experiencing a career dip with Seeking Justice; so is director Roger Donaldson. In better times he directed this far more successful -if just as cheesy- alien-sex film. Fun fact: a pretty young Michelle Williams played the younger version of the sex alien. Ben Kingsley plays a character named Xavier Fitch, which is really weird, because that was also the name of that chimp at band camp. I’m not making this up.
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Follow That Bird
I mentioned this film earlier in my Big Miracle write-up, but it bears mentioning again. If you haven’t already, check out this awesome yet terrifying film. It has all the Muppet charm you’d expect –the celebrity cameos, the pop culture references aimed at adults, etc. – but with a seething undercurrent of dread. Big Bird goes through some serious sh*t in this flick. I’d even go so far as to say it was more traumatic than my time with Xavier behind the arts-and-crafts corral.