The best of the worst: Drei Teil
Finally, I got to the conclusion of the bad movie round-up. This crop focuses on paragons of poorness from more recent times. Christ, is it long.
"The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre"
(aka "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation," 1994)
My annual "so-bad-it's good" award is named after this movie, as it was released the year I started doing that bit. It deserves inclusion not only for its unprecedented balancing of the bizarre and the boring, then, but also for its historical significance. Kim Henkel made it about 20 years after the original, his claim to legitimacy being that he co-wrote Tobe Hooper's 1974 masterpiece and that he wanted to remake it with his own vision. Mind you, at the time, Jeff Burr's "Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III" had already pretty much been a remake with a bitchin' thrash metal soundtrack, although that film was a famous victim of the late '80s/early '90s blight of horror movie censorship. It was also redone again a decade after "Return" as a Hollywood production starring Jessica Biel, and of course, its distillation of rural danger's been ripped off by everything from the original "The Hills Have Eyes" to the recent disappointment "Wolf Creek." "Return" is the craziest and most slapdash version of the tale, destined to endure as a camp classic due to its pre-fame casting of Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey. Its first mistake comes during the opening text, where the previous sequels are alluded to as "minor incidents," implying that you're about to see a true Texas-sized spectacular of chainsaw massacring. The resulting trainwreck ultimately feels more like a made-for-TV version of "Eaten Alive", the 1977 Hooper/Henkel "Massacre" follow-up which sported such horrors as a killer crocodile living under a bayou motel and Robert Englund hopping around in tightie whities. I give Henkel credit in that his movie is pretty creepy. Not "scary" creepy, as its dingy cheapness lacks the original's famously stark aesthetic and methodical pacing, but more like catching your elderly neighbor staring at your sister's training bra strap: it's probably nothing worth getting too worked up over, but will sure make you queasy the next time you think about him. Maybe my deep-seated dislike for the dopey McConaughey began here?
Young Zellweger, already skilled at pouting and scrunching up her face, is not a bit player as might be expected, but actually has the lead role of Jenny. She's a mousy, mumbling nerd, the only one in a group of Texas "high school" students who shows a twinge of a Southern accent. Wearing tacky threads to a tacky mid-'90s prom, Jenny is the kind of movie character painted as a prude because she wears glasses and someone says she is. That someone is a greasy alpha male named Barry, who's ostensibly going out with Jenny's skanky friend Heather. Barry's such a dick to everyone about everything, you almost feel bad for Heather. That is, until she opens her trap, especially to admit she fell for Barry's patented opening line about his dad being a doctor and her needing a breast exam. It must have been this type of average slasher movie humor that confused some ignorant critics into labeling this film a "horror-comedy." Lisa Newmyer plays Heather, and while she's recently appeared in good movies like "Sin City" and "A Scanner Darkly," she's totally the worst actor here, which is saying something when McConaughey gets going. Heather catches Barry tongue wrestling with some other hoochie at the dance, but she doesn't seem that upset (it's the bad acting), and although she speeds off with his dad's car, she lets him get in before she leaves. Jenny and her date were hiding in the back, so everybody's around when Heather crashes the car and sends them wandering through the Texas backwoods in search of assistance. For her part, Heather worries that they'll end up on "A Current Affair", begs Barry to carry her piggyback - he refuses because he's all pissy about not getting laid by someone - and true to the original movie, gets hung on a meathook by Leatherface. Speaking of the old skin-masked inbred, Robert Jacks' shrieking performance presents the wussiest Leatherface to date, and I'm not saying that because Henkel decided to give Leathie boobs and a colorful house frock (he plays up the gender-bending angle of the Ed Gein case, which inspired not only this character but Norman Bates as well). It's because he never chainsaws anyone. I believe the original "Texas Chainsaw" is one of the few horror flicks where the old "implied rather than shown" routine actually works, since its atmosphere remains unnerving although you never actually see saw meet skin. The only thing the Leatherface in "Return" ever saws up is his own front door after Jenny locks him out. And when he gets inside, he just starts attacking his own furniture. During the restaging of the climactic dinner scene - the traditional sequence in every "Texas Chainsaw" movie where the homicidal hillbillies sequester the heroine at a table and crazily menace her - Jenny actually tells Leatherface to shut up, and he does it.
This is the whole problem with Leatherface's nutty "family," too - they're just not threatening. They have bones all over the house, but they also have take-out pizza. If they're cannibals, it's never addressed. McConaughey, saddled with a remote-controlled mechanical leg brace for bonus "quirk," tries the hardest as Vilmer: yelling, leering, rolling his eyes, clutching at his head, running over Jenny's date in his pickup while blasting the Skatenigs and spouting cheesy pop culture lines to himself ("Okay, racing fans, let's go!"). Matthew's attempts to be unhinged here are as convincing as his attempts to be interesting anywhere else, but at least the bland blonde's trying. All Vilmer's insurance agent girlfriend does is talk about and flash her fake knockers, while his brother W.E. just spouts quotations from Ulysses S. Grant, Baudelaire, Macchiavelli and "Billy" Shakespeare at random moments. When they kill someone, it's by breaking their neck, setting them on fire... anything but chainsaw. I was half expecting these losers to pull some other PG-style murders like drowning or defenestration. But no, they just keep returning Jenny to the ho-hum madness of the dinner table for so long that she's eventually giggling with the insurance lady. At last, a weird Judd Nelson-looking guy in a suit shows up, interrupting the substandard freak parade and scolding Vilmer. "This is appalling. I want these people to know the meaning of horror." The suit's solution? Opening his shirt to reveal a pattern of ritual scars and piercings, licking Jenny's face, picking up a slice of pizza, setting it down and leaving. Whaaa? The funniest moment comes near the end: when our heroine finally busts out of the house with Leatherface on her heels, she comes across an old couple driving a camper and pounds on it, asking them to let her in. The guy doesn't put down his Bloody Mary and stop until his wife says in a matter of-fact-voice, "There's a monster chasing her with a chainsaw." That line reading gets me every time. The film ends after Jenny gets a ride to the hospital from the weird suit guy, who is obviously supposed to connote an opportunistic "X-Files" sort of conspiracy/secret society angle. Jenny sees Marilyn Burns, the heroine of the original "Texas Chainsaw," being pushed on a gurney by Paul Partain, the guy who played her brother, just as the movie fades out and a cop says "What the hell is going on around here?" The performances are embarassing. The continuity errors are bountiful. McConaughey's last name is spelled "McConnaughey" during the end credits (which also label the film "Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre," despite the "Next Generation" title appearing at the beginning). Yessir, this picture is a mess. But if you've ever wanted to see Academy Award-winner Renée Zellweger stuffed into a garbage bag and attacked with cattle prods, here's your chance. View the lame trailer here.
"Monstrosity"
(1989)
Let me begin by strongly suggesting you read the book "The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan" by Jimmy McDonough, who is not to be mistaken for former Iced Earth bassist James MacDonough. The biography about the guy who made this nutso Frankenstein variation is a tumultuous, grimy and sad page-turner packed with maverick filmmaking adventures, palpable starving-artist pathos, off-Broadway S&M theater, mother issues, unbelievable dysfunction and the sordid flavors of Times Square grindhouses in their prime. The guy who wrote "Surgikill," the last movie Milligan made before he died of AIDS in 1991, bitches on the IMDB that the book is untrue and unfair. Not knowing any of its protagonists personally, I can't dispute him. Still, there must be a few shreds of truth within its pages, and the rest is a tale that deserves to be remembered, nonfiction or not. According to McDonough, Milligan's run of talky, cheaper-than-cheap period horror movies were the product of a needy misanthrope (he especially hated women) who was forced by a moneyman to grind out cheap shockers, an obsessed aesthete grounded in gut-level art and theater who felt that rote spookery was beneath him. He began his film career with the 16mm short "Vapors," which is basically a one-act play about a guy visiting a bathhouse for the first time, lamenting his dead son and coming out of the closet. While today "Vapors" is mostly valued as a relic of Factory-era underground gay cinema, it also portends the kinds of films Milligan would excel at: tense, uncomfortable, disjointed, tedious, stark and ugly. His most notorious pictures (the house recommends "The Ghastly Ones" and "The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!") are like a team-up of Ted V. Mikels and John Cassavetes, raw and hypnotically boring. The verbal violence is far more convincing than the physical. Before starting on horror flicks, he made a bunch of roughies which are rumored to be exceedingly dark and misogynistic, even within a genre known for treating females in an unacceptable manner. This is sad, because although I've found the few Milligan movies I've seen fascinating, roughies are totally not my thing, and I can only imagine how nasty Milligan's might be. "Monstrosity" is another story.
If McDonough is to be believed, Milligan's films were far more personal than those of many Z-movie racketeers who are unjustly labeled auteurs. He not only wrote and directed, but acted, dressed the sets, made the costumes (he had a dress shop) and so on. "Monstrosity" came late in his career, after he'd supposedly bottomed out, and aside from a few astute modern reviews, it seems like it's largely considered a worthless turkey. Sure, I can see why people who love the grainy, old-timey look of his more famous films would scoff at its garish '80s colors and conventions, not to mention why any sane movie watcher would loathe it. To me, "Monstrosity" is as hideously hilarious as "Tom Goes To the Mayor", but it's only intentionally funny some of the time. The beginning is awful in a bad way, with some noticeably mature thugs killing an old guy and their leader beating and raping a passed-out woman (my stance on this is covered in the "Bloody Apes" entry). This ugliness is brief but played straight. If it were not for the fact that the rapist is clearly slapping his own hand when he's supposed to be hitting the lady, or the hilarious, maddeningly repetitive '80s synth theme, I could in no way justify sitting through the first twenty minutes of "Monstrosity." (This particular bad guy also possesses the magical ability to make horrible guitar wailing spill forth every time he gashes someone's throat.) Once the lady gets to the hospital and the creep disembowels her so she doesn't "finger" him, Milligan pulls his first tone switcheroo. The lady's distraught boyfriend Mark and his preppie pals Scott and Carlos come across the concept of the golem, so they decide to build one out of whatever parts they can scrounge up. They use Scott's garage, maintaining a low profile by hanging a posterboard sign outside which reads, "LAB - DO NOT ENTER OR YOU DIE! - GENIUS AT WORK." Scott is a medical student, obviously a serious one since he flips up the collar on his lab coat, so he nabs some human parts from the morgue, while mulleted Mark gets some scraps from a veterinarian chum. After much preparation and stiff japery, they have a big, dumb, poorly-stitched Creature walking around the garage with an orange afro, a gorilla arm and leg, huge teeth and a bloody, haphazardly glued-on eyeball. They dub the golem Frankie because they're creative types. Played with amateur gusto by Milligan regular Haal Borske (McDonough alleges that Haal long harbored unrequited romantic feelings for Andy), Frankie has the demeanor of a mentally challenged clown. Although the boys train him to kill by showing him posters for "Commando" and "Rambo: First Blood Part II," he's actually a gentle sort who prefers cuddling his teddy bear and holding hands with his girlfriend.
Mm-hmm. Frankie finds a girlfriend in the midst of chopping up the aged toughs, whose addresses were handily turned over to Mark by a sympathetic cop. Jaimie is a squeaky, punky junkie girl who, thanks to doing the homeless drug addict thing for a couple of years, is Frankie's intellectual and emotional equal. She buys Frankie a spiked necklace, a t-shirt reading "I KICK ASS!" and a headband with the Honda logo on it to help sop up the blood his forehead spurts whenever he gets excited. Despite her hideous stretchy pants, gold eyelashes, rotten teeth and alarming drill-like voice, Jaimie manages to be the movie's most sympathetic character, as the childlike courtship she and Frankie share in the garage is kind of cute if you don't think about it as occuring between borderline-retarded adults. This is probably where "Monstrosity" gets its reputation as a "Toxic Avenger" rip-off, although saying so is sacrilege as far as I'm concerned. Toxie never had Angelo, the "Monstrosity" couple's sanguine guardian angel, who suddenly appears late in the film wearing an aviator's cap and goggles. He likens Jaimie's soul to Mother Teresa's and explains why Frankie is such a friendly golem: "Your brain comes from a wonderful man who wrote children's stories. And your left arm and leg come from a nice, kind gorilla, who belonged to Georgette. She used to do a song and dance with him at children's parties. It was a terrible day when a power lawnmower got him! And the rest of you comes from a nice, gentle man who smashed into a utility pole to avoid crashing into a busload full of children on their way to a Mother's Day picnic." In an atypical political statement from an openly homosexual filmmaker (Milligan was anything but a normal gay man), Angelo reveals that he's the result of an abortion, "the lowest of help" who are so numerous that Angelo has to ride a broken-down bike in lieu of limited-supply wings. Anyway, after much further stiff japery, we return to what passes for a plot here. Within about twenty seconds, it's established that Carlos thinks Mark and Scott have become power mad because they play with a cheap-looking semi-automatic they got "from a black dude" and plan to use Frankie as some sort of patchwork urban vigilante. This finally explains why the preceding scene showed Frankie sticking a hatchet in a random carjacker's head. Angelo "marries" Frankie and Jaimie, so Scott slips her a syringe full of tainted meth to get her out of the way. Her death would be sad, but Angelo breaks the mood by popping in to holler at Frankie, "Scott put poison in the crystal!" Frankie takes out Scott and Mark with the "Uzi," which shoots sparks and delivers roughly two bullet holes for every five shots indicated by the soundtrack, and burns down the garage, destroying his stuffed animals and adorable Care Bears alarm clock. In the end, Frankie's speaking perfect English and sitting on a bench with an old bag lady, with whom he shares some hooch and an admiration for the possibilities of living free. We hear Milligan say "Cut! That's a wrap!" People applaud. Then, before the end credits roll, a crowd of cast and crew members walks into the frame and hangs out chatting around the bench, with traffic whizzing by, people in cars staring right into the camera. "Monstrosity" is almost avant-garde in its abrupt, disorienting lack of coherent soundtrack editing, mood, pacing, camerawork and plot, not to mention Milligan's challenging disregard of the 180 degree rule. Although it seems to go on for eternity, there's never a boring moment. The following trailer tries to make it look like a cheesy horror movie, but... my blazes, is it ever more than that.
"Pet Sematary II"
(1992)
I have a soft spot for the original "Pet Sematary," which is the best Stephen King film adaptation that wasn't made by George A. Romero or Frank Darabont. For the pop horror-deprived, I'll fill you in: A doctor who looks like a poor man's Harry Hamlin (and that is pretty damned poor) moves to a new home near a rural Maine highway with his wife, Tasha Yar, his grating little daughter and cute littler son. The family cat gets run over by a truck, but Herman Munster lives across the street and shows the doc how to find an old Indian burial ground which can reanimate corpses. Getting there involves cutting through the local pet cemetery, where the sign is misspelled because local children wrote it. So, the cat comes back, but it's all mean and evil. You can imagine what happens when the little boy gets creamed by a semi. The kid reappears stinking of enchanted Indian dirt "gone sour," slashes Herman's Achilles' tendon, stabs Tasha in the eyeball and ultimately gets set on fire by a remorseful Doc Hamlin. It ends with the doc's wife coming back from the dead to kill him. It's a pretty bleak, "Monkey's Paw" type story which bluntly examines the fear of losing one's child, one which supposedly made King's wife very upset when she first read it, yet became famous enough to inspire a Magic: The Gathering card. Mary Lambert's movie version follows the lean (for King) book pretty closely. The cast - except for screechy daughter Blaze Berdahl - is fine. It's effectively creepy in a few instances, and curiously gory considering how tough the MPAA was on horror movies at the time. It ends with a Ramones theme song. What's not to like? And how could a Lambert-helmed sequel be so bad I would include it alongside whack jobs like "Troll 2" and "The Executioner"? This flimsy thing cost $8 million to make, a tiny budget by Hollywood standards but much bigger than that of any flick this list has featured so far. Thus, the adequate budget allows for a few convincing effects, soundtrack involvement by The Jesus and Mary Chain, a genuinely good actor in Clancy Brown and freedom from those charming technical gaffes that humanized so many of our other entries. But "Pet Sematary II" is far from a good movie. Until yesterday, I had not seen it in years, but along with "Children of the Corn II" remembered it as one of the first flicks that caused me to laugh at its idiocy when I saw it in the theater. Having finally tracked down a VHS copy (after much searching, it turned out the movie was easier/cheaper to buy than rent), I am sad to say that its tone is fairly dull. The whole thing, in fact, leans toward the mediocre end of the spectrum, although it still warrants a look if you find the concept of a poorly-conceived sequel amusing. As that evil bastard Jack Valenti ensured was common at the time, the flick is stingy on payoff gore, tending to cut away or simply show the end result of its carnage scenes - everything but the actual killings, which are ostensibly what a horror audience is paying to see. Beyond its middle-of-the-road tendencies, its recipe for unintentional amusement is simple: a combination of greedy sequelitis, hack writing with no involvement from the original storyteller, ridiculous attempts to tweak a winning formula and... Drew.
Drew is the most obnoxious, pathetic movie fat kid I have ever seen. For pure "I can't wait to see that fucker take it in the face with a mallet" annoyance, he outdoes the entire cast of "Cabin Fever" and even Francis from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Jason McGuire, the kid who plays him, only has two other roles listed on the IMDB: Tough Kid in "Leap of Faith" and Fat Teen in "Forrest Gump." I avoided the former and I block out the latter because it sucked so hard, but he's such a lame and mewling turd here, McGuire must have been more convincing as a fat teen than as a tough kid. Drew's not the main character, but he's the catalyst for the events in "Pet Sematary II." It actually stars Edward Furlong - fresh off of "T2," in burgeoning Tiger Beat hearthrob mode - and Anthony Edwards, who was in a career chasm between "Revenge of the Nerds II" and "ER." Jeff (Furlong) happens to be present the day his actress mom is electrocuted on the set. She's filming something called "Castle of Terror," one of those typically cheesy fake horror movies you often see being made in cheesy horror movies which are set in the film world. The Edwardseses go to the town from the first movie to bury her, and dad decides to move there. Anthony "Goose" Edwards' character is named Chase. Now, I know younger people like to name their kids all sorts of stupid things, but this guy's at least in his mid-30s, and I find it hard to believe people were naming their kids after verbs in the late '50s. Anyway, Chaaase lets Jeff keep one of the kittens he finds abandoned in his new office's kennel. The mopey shit thinks it's a reasonable idea to bring the lil' furball with him to his first day of Maine school, and some bad kids naturally ride off with Jeff's pet. He chases them all the way to the Sematary, where they just taunt him about his dead mom and show him the foreboding path leading to the Indian site. Because he's a loser, foodie Drew follows broody Jeff. They become fast pals. Whenever this lousy sack of shit Drew is on screen, whether backing down from every challenge he's confronted with, sulking about his hot alcoholic mom boning ornery sheriff Gus (Brown) or falling off his bike when he sees the feather-haired lead bully (a tangential character who gets billed over him), you want to stuff cupcakes into Drew's maw until he chokes. Drew's dog Zowie likes to mess with Gus' rabbit pen, and one night Gus gets so pissed about it he shoots Zowie, which leads to a sappy scene where the chubster sits with the dying dog and the soundtrack plays something that humorously resembles the opening of "M*A*S*H*" (actually by Jan King). Of course, Drew enlists Jeff to help him carry Zowie to the reanimation zone, ensuring that the pooch will be able to show up whenever and wherever it's convenient for him to attack somebody. Dr. Chase can't figure out why the beast's gunshot wound won't heal (Zowie's color-changing fur is not addressed), and also establishes that he has no problem bringing his kid along on a middle-of-the-night house call.
Jeff and Drew go to a Halloween party at the Sematary, where the bad kids have rigged up an effigy of Jeff's mom to scare him, but after a slight altercation, the fey brutes invite our protagonists to hang out. Drew shows his dork colors in this sequence by wearing a denim jacket over his Dracula outfit. When Gus shows up to beat the crap out of Drew, Zowie magically appears and chews Gus' neck open. The optionless kids bury him at the hot spot (they're already at the Sematary, after all), but when he comes back, Gus is a considerably different dude. He roughly ravages his alarmed wife, he skins all his beloved rabbits to the strains of L7's immortal "Shitlist," he eats dinner straight out of the serving bowls and jauntily shows the kids the chewed-up food in his mouth. Meanwhile, Jeff and Chase are having silly dreams about their dead mom/wife which predictably end with her having Zowie's snarling head. When Jeff wakes up hollering, the dog is actually sitting in his room, watching him with evil-ass glowing eyes, but Jeff just goes back to sleep, since for some reason this doesn't scare him so much. Gus menaces the lead bully with his own motorbike, but when the kid's colorful scarf (the surest sign he's a badass) gets caught in the wheel and causes his demise, we frustratingly don't see it. Likewise, after Jeff inevitably gets undead Gus to exhume his mom and she comes back from beyond the Sematary - despite rotting for several months, she somehow looks in better shape than Gus - she stabs the housekeeper in the face with a broken mirror, but we only see the aftermath. Thankfully, we do get to see Drew and his mom get nailed by a truck when Gus rams their car into it, although the sequence bears out my long-held belief that any horror movie that kills off the best-looking woman is bound to be crap. "Pet Sematary II" takes its sweet fucking time getting to the climax, but after Gus sticks a power drill into Chase's dog bite wound and the lead bully returns from the dead, leaping about like one of those action zombies from the "Dawn of the Dead" remake, Chase and Jeff are the only survivors of a fiery blaze which consumes their house, melting mom as she shrieks the first movie's tagline: "Dead is better!" It ends with the duo driving out of town, accompanied by a voice-over from earlier when Jeff tells Drew how you never get over losing someone who dies and - in a ridiculously sentimental move - slow-motion cameo portraits of all the characters who bit it in the film, including the lame bully kid, who will obviously be missed by no one. Oh, and another Ramones song over the credits, but even here it's diminishing returns... I don't hate "Poison Heart", but it's no "Pet Sematary". I dunno, Lambert's first flick in the franchise was cool, but despite one admittedly well-done sequence where Gus attacks his wife and stepson with a hammer, her sudden infatuation with cheesy zooms here signals that the rest of her filmography is likely littered with half-baked crud. Despite the generic "uncertain" ending where the camera swoops down on the burial ground, there was no "Pet Sematary III," and it should stay that way. This one is kind of hilarious. I can't find a trailer online, and I couldn't rent the DVD to be able to post it myself, but it's no big loss.
"From Justin To Kelly"
(2003)
(A caveat for longtime readers: I wrote about "From Justin To Kelly" shortly after its release, and I will recycle some of that text here.) Our most recent selection is a different kind of horror movie. This early "American Idol" cash-in is the sort of film that makes Americans claim to be Canadians while traveling abroad. While I'm proud to say I've never seen more than thirty random seconds of the series, the pre-fab phenomenon has, like so many reality television programs, wormed its way into my perception. This movie spin-off was a hastily generated major studio exploitation flick intended to encourage the vaporous cults of personality surrounding the inaugural winner (and runner-up) of a series that, for wee slivers of time, still allows a grieving nation to forget about that whole disconcerting Middle East business. Viewed through the lens of a few years and four more seasons, "American Idol" remains a grab-and-go venture, generating piles of interchangeable plastic discs that many may purchase but few honestly cherish. While Kelly Clarkson, the star of this picture, and country singer Carrie Underwood are doing OK for themselves, the professional lot of other "Idol" winners like Ruben Studdard and Fantasia Barrino only serves to spotlight the fickleness of the general music-consuming public and the ultimate futility of wasting so much money to make this show in the first place. As a die-hard music fan, "Idol" offends me because it allows the traditionally lazy pop industry to be even lazier. Label execs might as well throw up their hands and just ask every fifth Sam Goody customer what flavor of mediocrity they desire this year. The most sickening part is how people buy into the cynical marketing scheme, feeling like they're involved and that their opinion somehow matters. Nobody who watches the show actually thinks Underwood was better than season four's second placer Bo Bice, but they'll continue to drink out of "Idol" coffee mugs, pay to vote for these saps and stay up late to see Clay Aiken warble on Leno. However, fan or not, the movie is something of which everyone can be equally embarrassed. Even turds may have some gold in them if the ingredients are right, and "From Justin To Kelly" is the only "Idol"-related anything I can support due to its astounding miscalculation of its own commercial appeal. I mean, America loved Clarkson and Justin Guarini as singers, so they're bound to be a hit as actors, right?
Patterned after those Frankie and Annette beach party pictures which are so relevant to the "Idol" target audience (old gay men?), "From Justin To Kelly" is the romantic musical tale of a party dude and a non-party dudette who together generate fewer sparks than a boiled carrot rubbing a stale bagel, yet who come to steadfastly believe that they belong 2-gether 4-ever. Clarkson and Guarini play characters named Kelly and Justin, two shallow fucks who intend to cavort with their shallow fuck friends until they see each other warbling the same sanitized pop R&B cut on the beach, and they spend a tumultuous hour and a half almost getting together, getting together, getting mad at each other, getting back together, being driven apart, getting back together, etc. Having hit theaters about a year and a week after FOX aired the first episode of "Idol," one might assume that the movie's screenplay was written as something else and tweaked for the quick turnaround. Nope. The script was especially crafted for this purpose by "Spice World" scribe Kim Fuller, brother of odious "Idol"/Spice Girls/S Club 7 Svengali Simon Fuller. A plot breakdown would be pointless, since I just told you virtually everything that happens, but it does so within such an outrageous Shakespearean tangle of betrayal, text messages and juvenile overreaction, it must be seen to be believed. The couple's first serious flirtation occurs in a public restroom. At one point, Guarini duels a hillbilly who craves Kelly’s affection, a wan and perfunctory rivalry which is, naturally, resolved by a hovercraft race. At another junction, after getting their messages crossed by Kelly's scheming, jealous friend, Justin tells Kelly to buzz off with a hearty, "Game over!" One time-killing subplot concerning Justin's buddy trying to meet up with his internet girlfriend provides cheap laughs for no one, while another involving the film's sole minority characters (Clarkson's black friend and a suave but not rico Latino waiter) embodies the term "token." The lighting, continuity and editing are atrocious, and Kelly keeps forgetting to do her accent like she's Tom Cruise in "Interview With the Vampire." That this is all set against the backdrop of a PG-rated spring break in a curiously dreary and gray Miami just adds to the flick's ugly, opportunistic feel.
Helming the rickety enterprise was a man who had previously directed "She’s All That" and a zillion movies of the week, including something called "Miracle On Interstate 880." Sure, Robert Iscove also choreographed a pair of Dorothy Hamill specials in the late '70s (bless you, IMDB!), but the flaccid dancing in this sexless romp hurts the eyes and kills brain cells. During a few of the musical numbers, the camera just pans turgidly over the assembled bodies, never really spotlighting any particular moves as would be expected. Even as a candy-coated diversion for pre-teen girls, "From Justin To Kelly" fails. It could thankfully never become the early sexual touchstone that, say, "Dirty Dancing" represents for a generation of young women, but I pity any poor girls who might end up gleaning advice about relationship behavior from this bleak affront to the concept of love. My biggest gripe is I had hoped that for as long as the stupid fad lasted, "From Justin To Kelly" would be remade every year with the same script and the new "Idol" winner and runner-up in the leads. Imagine what stupidity "From Clay to Ruben," "From Diana To Fantasia," "From Bo To Carrie" or "From Katharine To Taylor" could bestow upon the world! As it is, we are merely left with the most painfully hilarious pop star vehicle since Mariah Carey's "Glitter" (I hear promisingly good/bad things about Usher's "In the Mix"). Apparently, much of the TV series' appeal lies in the arch sadism of judge Simon Cowell. While I prefer to make fun of shitty movies on my own, I suppose that if the "From Justin To Kelly" DVD came with a commentary track by the bitchy Brit, that might be amusing. Then again, that might just turn out to be a way for the Fuller empire to further capitalize on "Idol" in the mocking manner with which William Hung found his brief infame. The fact remains that at a time when most of the country was reeling from war and recession, twelve million dollars that could have fed and clothed and sheltered and armored and medicated a whole lot of American troops were instead earmarked to create this instant relic. The movie failed to make even half of that back, but Rupert Murdoch laughed all the way to the bank, even if his ultimate plan was to divert our attention from thinking too much about the bombastic events buoying his cable news station. Surely, this film belongs in every 2003 American time capsule, as it would balance all that Saddam footage nicely. You know what the freakiest part of this entire bad movie endeavor was? Finding out that the original promotional web site for "From Justin To Kelly" is still active. Click that link, and for extra laughs, do allow pop-ups, just this once. The hideously upbeat trailer is here.
FYI, this list's honorable mentions include "Dr. Gore", "Diamond Ninja Force", "The Corpse Grinders", "Christmas Evil", "Mob Boss", "The Zodiac Killer", "Gordy", "Succubare", "Three Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain", "Microwave Massacre", "Premutos: Lord of the Living Dead" and "The Human Tornado".
This post's many jams provided by Reverend Bizarre's mountainous "In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend", The Ditty Bops' cute "Moon Over the Freeway", Anekdoten's groovy "Vemod", Gåte's jaunty "Iselilja", Riz Ortolani's classic "Cannibal Holocaust" score, Rain Paint's overblown "Disillusion of Purity", the shocking "Powerslaves: An Elektro Tribute to Iron Maiden", Queensrÿche's disappointing "Operation: Mindcrime II", Gnarls Barkley's ubiquitous "St. Elsewhere", Cronian's forgettable "Terra", Man Man's in-freaking-sane "Six Demon Bag", The Mars Volta's forthcoming "Amputechture", Sig:Ar:Tyr's entrancing "Sailing the Seas of Fate", The Vision Bleak's spooky "The Deathship Has A New Captain", Little Brother's body-rockin' "The Listening", The Adicts' rousing "Songs of Praise", When's evocative "The Black Death", The Chasm's kvlt "Procreation of the Inner Temple" and Bloc Party's expansive "Silent Alarm". Put this bastard to bed, son.
"The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre"
(aka "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation," 1994)
My annual "so-bad-it's good" award is named after this movie, as it was released the year I started doing that bit. It deserves inclusion not only for its unprecedented balancing of the bizarre and the boring, then, but also for its historical significance. Kim Henkel made it about 20 years after the original, his claim to legitimacy being that he co-wrote Tobe Hooper's 1974 masterpiece and that he wanted to remake it with his own vision. Mind you, at the time, Jeff Burr's "Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III" had already pretty much been a remake with a bitchin' thrash metal soundtrack, although that film was a famous victim of the late '80s/early '90s blight of horror movie censorship. It was also redone again a decade after "Return" as a Hollywood production starring Jessica Biel, and of course, its distillation of rural danger's been ripped off by everything from the original "The Hills Have Eyes" to the recent disappointment "Wolf Creek." "Return" is the craziest and most slapdash version of the tale, destined to endure as a camp classic due to its pre-fame casting of Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey. Its first mistake comes during the opening text, where the previous sequels are alluded to as "minor incidents," implying that you're about to see a true Texas-sized spectacular of chainsaw massacring. The resulting trainwreck ultimately feels more like a made-for-TV version of "Eaten Alive", the 1977 Hooper/Henkel "Massacre" follow-up which sported such horrors as a killer crocodile living under a bayou motel and Robert Englund hopping around in tightie whities. I give Henkel credit in that his movie is pretty creepy. Not "scary" creepy, as its dingy cheapness lacks the original's famously stark aesthetic and methodical pacing, but more like catching your elderly neighbor staring at your sister's training bra strap: it's probably nothing worth getting too worked up over, but will sure make you queasy the next time you think about him. Maybe my deep-seated dislike for the dopey McConaughey began here?
Young Zellweger, already skilled at pouting and scrunching up her face, is not a bit player as might be expected, but actually has the lead role of Jenny. She's a mousy, mumbling nerd, the only one in a group of Texas "high school" students who shows a twinge of a Southern accent. Wearing tacky threads to a tacky mid-'90s prom, Jenny is the kind of movie character painted as a prude because she wears glasses and someone says she is. That someone is a greasy alpha male named Barry, who's ostensibly going out with Jenny's skanky friend Heather. Barry's such a dick to everyone about everything, you almost feel bad for Heather. That is, until she opens her trap, especially to admit she fell for Barry's patented opening line about his dad being a doctor and her needing a breast exam. It must have been this type of average slasher movie humor that confused some ignorant critics into labeling this film a "horror-comedy." Lisa Newmyer plays Heather, and while she's recently appeared in good movies like "Sin City" and "A Scanner Darkly," she's totally the worst actor here, which is saying something when McConaughey gets going. Heather catches Barry tongue wrestling with some other hoochie at the dance, but she doesn't seem that upset (it's the bad acting), and although she speeds off with his dad's car, she lets him get in before she leaves. Jenny and her date were hiding in the back, so everybody's around when Heather crashes the car and sends them wandering through the Texas backwoods in search of assistance. For her part, Heather worries that they'll end up on "A Current Affair", begs Barry to carry her piggyback - he refuses because he's all pissy about not getting laid by someone - and true to the original movie, gets hung on a meathook by Leatherface. Speaking of the old skin-masked inbred, Robert Jacks' shrieking performance presents the wussiest Leatherface to date, and I'm not saying that because Henkel decided to give Leathie boobs and a colorful house frock (he plays up the gender-bending angle of the Ed Gein case, which inspired not only this character but Norman Bates as well). It's because he never chainsaws anyone. I believe the original "Texas Chainsaw" is one of the few horror flicks where the old "implied rather than shown" routine actually works, since its atmosphere remains unnerving although you never actually see saw meet skin. The only thing the Leatherface in "Return" ever saws up is his own front door after Jenny locks him out. And when he gets inside, he just starts attacking his own furniture. During the restaging of the climactic dinner scene - the traditional sequence in every "Texas Chainsaw" movie where the homicidal hillbillies sequester the heroine at a table and crazily menace her - Jenny actually tells Leatherface to shut up, and he does it.
This is the whole problem with Leatherface's nutty "family," too - they're just not threatening. They have bones all over the house, but they also have take-out pizza. If they're cannibals, it's never addressed. McConaughey, saddled with a remote-controlled mechanical leg brace for bonus "quirk," tries the hardest as Vilmer: yelling, leering, rolling his eyes, clutching at his head, running over Jenny's date in his pickup while blasting the Skatenigs and spouting cheesy pop culture lines to himself ("Okay, racing fans, let's go!"). Matthew's attempts to be unhinged here are as convincing as his attempts to be interesting anywhere else, but at least the bland blonde's trying. All Vilmer's insurance agent girlfriend does is talk about and flash her fake knockers, while his brother W.E. just spouts quotations from Ulysses S. Grant, Baudelaire, Macchiavelli and "Billy" Shakespeare at random moments. When they kill someone, it's by breaking their neck, setting them on fire... anything but chainsaw. I was half expecting these losers to pull some other PG-style murders like drowning or defenestration. But no, they just keep returning Jenny to the ho-hum madness of the dinner table for so long that she's eventually giggling with the insurance lady. At last, a weird Judd Nelson-looking guy in a suit shows up, interrupting the substandard freak parade and scolding Vilmer. "This is appalling. I want these people to know the meaning of horror." The suit's solution? Opening his shirt to reveal a pattern of ritual scars and piercings, licking Jenny's face, picking up a slice of pizza, setting it down and leaving. Whaaa? The funniest moment comes near the end: when our heroine finally busts out of the house with Leatherface on her heels, she comes across an old couple driving a camper and pounds on it, asking them to let her in. The guy doesn't put down his Bloody Mary and stop until his wife says in a matter of-fact-voice, "There's a monster chasing her with a chainsaw." That line reading gets me every time. The film ends after Jenny gets a ride to the hospital from the weird suit guy, who is obviously supposed to connote an opportunistic "X-Files" sort of conspiracy/secret society angle. Jenny sees Marilyn Burns, the heroine of the original "Texas Chainsaw," being pushed on a gurney by Paul Partain, the guy who played her brother, just as the movie fades out and a cop says "What the hell is going on around here?" The performances are embarassing. The continuity errors are bountiful. McConaughey's last name is spelled "McConnaughey" during the end credits (which also label the film "Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre," despite the "Next Generation" title appearing at the beginning). Yessir, this picture is a mess. But if you've ever wanted to see Academy Award-winner Renée Zellweger stuffed into a garbage bag and attacked with cattle prods, here's your chance. View the lame trailer here.
"Monstrosity"
(1989)
Let me begin by strongly suggesting you read the book "The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan" by Jimmy McDonough, who is not to be mistaken for former Iced Earth bassist James MacDonough. The biography about the guy who made this nutso Frankenstein variation is a tumultuous, grimy and sad page-turner packed with maverick filmmaking adventures, palpable starving-artist pathos, off-Broadway S&M theater, mother issues, unbelievable dysfunction and the sordid flavors of Times Square grindhouses in their prime. The guy who wrote "Surgikill," the last movie Milligan made before he died of AIDS in 1991, bitches on the IMDB that the book is untrue and unfair. Not knowing any of its protagonists personally, I can't dispute him. Still, there must be a few shreds of truth within its pages, and the rest is a tale that deserves to be remembered, nonfiction or not. According to McDonough, Milligan's run of talky, cheaper-than-cheap period horror movies were the product of a needy misanthrope (he especially hated women) who was forced by a moneyman to grind out cheap shockers, an obsessed aesthete grounded in gut-level art and theater who felt that rote spookery was beneath him. He began his film career with the 16mm short "Vapors," which is basically a one-act play about a guy visiting a bathhouse for the first time, lamenting his dead son and coming out of the closet. While today "Vapors" is mostly valued as a relic of Factory-era underground gay cinema, it also portends the kinds of films Milligan would excel at: tense, uncomfortable, disjointed, tedious, stark and ugly. His most notorious pictures (the house recommends "The Ghastly Ones" and "The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!") are like a team-up of Ted V. Mikels and John Cassavetes, raw and hypnotically boring. The verbal violence is far more convincing than the physical. Before starting on horror flicks, he made a bunch of roughies which are rumored to be exceedingly dark and misogynistic, even within a genre known for treating females in an unacceptable manner. This is sad, because although I've found the few Milligan movies I've seen fascinating, roughies are totally not my thing, and I can only imagine how nasty Milligan's might be. "Monstrosity" is another story.
If McDonough is to be believed, Milligan's films were far more personal than those of many Z-movie racketeers who are unjustly labeled auteurs. He not only wrote and directed, but acted, dressed the sets, made the costumes (he had a dress shop) and so on. "Monstrosity" came late in his career, after he'd supposedly bottomed out, and aside from a few astute modern reviews, it seems like it's largely considered a worthless turkey. Sure, I can see why people who love the grainy, old-timey look of his more famous films would scoff at its garish '80s colors and conventions, not to mention why any sane movie watcher would loathe it. To me, "Monstrosity" is as hideously hilarious as "Tom Goes To the Mayor", but it's only intentionally funny some of the time. The beginning is awful in a bad way, with some noticeably mature thugs killing an old guy and their leader beating and raping a passed-out woman (my stance on this is covered in the "Bloody Apes" entry). This ugliness is brief but played straight. If it were not for the fact that the rapist is clearly slapping his own hand when he's supposed to be hitting the lady, or the hilarious, maddeningly repetitive '80s synth theme, I could in no way justify sitting through the first twenty minutes of "Monstrosity." (This particular bad guy also possesses the magical ability to make horrible guitar wailing spill forth every time he gashes someone's throat.) Once the lady gets to the hospital and the creep disembowels her so she doesn't "finger" him, Milligan pulls his first tone switcheroo. The lady's distraught boyfriend Mark and his preppie pals Scott and Carlos come across the concept of the golem, so they decide to build one out of whatever parts they can scrounge up. They use Scott's garage, maintaining a low profile by hanging a posterboard sign outside which reads, "LAB - DO NOT ENTER OR YOU DIE! - GENIUS AT WORK." Scott is a medical student, obviously a serious one since he flips up the collar on his lab coat, so he nabs some human parts from the morgue, while mulleted Mark gets some scraps from a veterinarian chum. After much preparation and stiff japery, they have a big, dumb, poorly-stitched Creature walking around the garage with an orange afro, a gorilla arm and leg, huge teeth and a bloody, haphazardly glued-on eyeball. They dub the golem Frankie because they're creative types. Played with amateur gusto by Milligan regular Haal Borske (McDonough alleges that Haal long harbored unrequited romantic feelings for Andy), Frankie has the demeanor of a mentally challenged clown. Although the boys train him to kill by showing him posters for "Commando" and "Rambo: First Blood Part II," he's actually a gentle sort who prefers cuddling his teddy bear and holding hands with his girlfriend.
Mm-hmm. Frankie finds a girlfriend in the midst of chopping up the aged toughs, whose addresses were handily turned over to Mark by a sympathetic cop. Jaimie is a squeaky, punky junkie girl who, thanks to doing the homeless drug addict thing for a couple of years, is Frankie's intellectual and emotional equal. She buys Frankie a spiked necklace, a t-shirt reading "I KICK ASS!" and a headband with the Honda logo on it to help sop up the blood his forehead spurts whenever he gets excited. Despite her hideous stretchy pants, gold eyelashes, rotten teeth and alarming drill-like voice, Jaimie manages to be the movie's most sympathetic character, as the childlike courtship she and Frankie share in the garage is kind of cute if you don't think about it as occuring between borderline-retarded adults. This is probably where "Monstrosity" gets its reputation as a "Toxic Avenger" rip-off, although saying so is sacrilege as far as I'm concerned. Toxie never had Angelo, the "Monstrosity" couple's sanguine guardian angel, who suddenly appears late in the film wearing an aviator's cap and goggles. He likens Jaimie's soul to Mother Teresa's and explains why Frankie is such a friendly golem: "Your brain comes from a wonderful man who wrote children's stories. And your left arm and leg come from a nice, kind gorilla, who belonged to Georgette. She used to do a song and dance with him at children's parties. It was a terrible day when a power lawnmower got him! And the rest of you comes from a nice, gentle man who smashed into a utility pole to avoid crashing into a busload full of children on their way to a Mother's Day picnic." In an atypical political statement from an openly homosexual filmmaker (Milligan was anything but a normal gay man), Angelo reveals that he's the result of an abortion, "the lowest of help" who are so numerous that Angelo has to ride a broken-down bike in lieu of limited-supply wings. Anyway, after much further stiff japery, we return to what passes for a plot here. Within about twenty seconds, it's established that Carlos thinks Mark and Scott have become power mad because they play with a cheap-looking semi-automatic they got "from a black dude" and plan to use Frankie as some sort of patchwork urban vigilante. This finally explains why the preceding scene showed Frankie sticking a hatchet in a random carjacker's head. Angelo "marries" Frankie and Jaimie, so Scott slips her a syringe full of tainted meth to get her out of the way. Her death would be sad, but Angelo breaks the mood by popping in to holler at Frankie, "Scott put poison in the crystal!" Frankie takes out Scott and Mark with the "Uzi," which shoots sparks and delivers roughly two bullet holes for every five shots indicated by the soundtrack, and burns down the garage, destroying his stuffed animals and adorable Care Bears alarm clock. In the end, Frankie's speaking perfect English and sitting on a bench with an old bag lady, with whom he shares some hooch and an admiration for the possibilities of living free. We hear Milligan say "Cut! That's a wrap!" People applaud. Then, before the end credits roll, a crowd of cast and crew members walks into the frame and hangs out chatting around the bench, with traffic whizzing by, people in cars staring right into the camera. "Monstrosity" is almost avant-garde in its abrupt, disorienting lack of coherent soundtrack editing, mood, pacing, camerawork and plot, not to mention Milligan's challenging disregard of the 180 degree rule. Although it seems to go on for eternity, there's never a boring moment. The following trailer tries to make it look like a cheesy horror movie, but... my blazes, is it ever more than that.
"Pet Sematary II"
(1992)
I have a soft spot for the original "Pet Sematary," which is the best Stephen King film adaptation that wasn't made by George A. Romero or Frank Darabont. For the pop horror-deprived, I'll fill you in: A doctor who looks like a poor man's Harry Hamlin (and that is pretty damned poor) moves to a new home near a rural Maine highway with his wife, Tasha Yar, his grating little daughter and cute littler son. The family cat gets run over by a truck, but Herman Munster lives across the street and shows the doc how to find an old Indian burial ground which can reanimate corpses. Getting there involves cutting through the local pet cemetery, where the sign is misspelled because local children wrote it. So, the cat comes back, but it's all mean and evil. You can imagine what happens when the little boy gets creamed by a semi. The kid reappears stinking of enchanted Indian dirt "gone sour," slashes Herman's Achilles' tendon, stabs Tasha in the eyeball and ultimately gets set on fire by a remorseful Doc Hamlin. It ends with the doc's wife coming back from the dead to kill him. It's a pretty bleak, "Monkey's Paw" type story which bluntly examines the fear of losing one's child, one which supposedly made King's wife very upset when she first read it, yet became famous enough to inspire a Magic: The Gathering card. Mary Lambert's movie version follows the lean (for King) book pretty closely. The cast - except for screechy daughter Blaze Berdahl - is fine. It's effectively creepy in a few instances, and curiously gory considering how tough the MPAA was on horror movies at the time. It ends with a Ramones theme song. What's not to like? And how could a Lambert-helmed sequel be so bad I would include it alongside whack jobs like "Troll 2" and "The Executioner"? This flimsy thing cost $8 million to make, a tiny budget by Hollywood standards but much bigger than that of any flick this list has featured so far. Thus, the adequate budget allows for a few convincing effects, soundtrack involvement by The Jesus and Mary Chain, a genuinely good actor in Clancy Brown and freedom from those charming technical gaffes that humanized so many of our other entries. But "Pet Sematary II" is far from a good movie. Until yesterday, I had not seen it in years, but along with "Children of the Corn II" remembered it as one of the first flicks that caused me to laugh at its idiocy when I saw it in the theater. Having finally tracked down a VHS copy (after much searching, it turned out the movie was easier/cheaper to buy than rent), I am sad to say that its tone is fairly dull. The whole thing, in fact, leans toward the mediocre end of the spectrum, although it still warrants a look if you find the concept of a poorly-conceived sequel amusing. As that evil bastard Jack Valenti ensured was common at the time, the flick is stingy on payoff gore, tending to cut away or simply show the end result of its carnage scenes - everything but the actual killings, which are ostensibly what a horror audience is paying to see. Beyond its middle-of-the-road tendencies, its recipe for unintentional amusement is simple: a combination of greedy sequelitis, hack writing with no involvement from the original storyteller, ridiculous attempts to tweak a winning formula and... Drew.
Drew is the most obnoxious, pathetic movie fat kid I have ever seen. For pure "I can't wait to see that fucker take it in the face with a mallet" annoyance, he outdoes the entire cast of "Cabin Fever" and even Francis from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Jason McGuire, the kid who plays him, only has two other roles listed on the IMDB: Tough Kid in "Leap of Faith" and Fat Teen in "Forrest Gump." I avoided the former and I block out the latter because it sucked so hard, but he's such a lame and mewling turd here, McGuire must have been more convincing as a fat teen than as a tough kid. Drew's not the main character, but he's the catalyst for the events in "Pet Sematary II." It actually stars Edward Furlong - fresh off of "T2," in burgeoning Tiger Beat hearthrob mode - and Anthony Edwards, who was in a career chasm between "Revenge of the Nerds II" and "ER." Jeff (Furlong) happens to be present the day his actress mom is electrocuted on the set. She's filming something called "Castle of Terror," one of those typically cheesy fake horror movies you often see being made in cheesy horror movies which are set in the film world. The Edwardseses go to the town from the first movie to bury her, and dad decides to move there. Anthony "Goose" Edwards' character is named Chase. Now, I know younger people like to name their kids all sorts of stupid things, but this guy's at least in his mid-30s, and I find it hard to believe people were naming their kids after verbs in the late '50s. Anyway, Chaaase lets Jeff keep one of the kittens he finds abandoned in his new office's kennel. The mopey shit thinks it's a reasonable idea to bring the lil' furball with him to his first day of Maine school, and some bad kids naturally ride off with Jeff's pet. He chases them all the way to the Sematary, where they just taunt him about his dead mom and show him the foreboding path leading to the Indian site. Because he's a loser, foodie Drew follows broody Jeff. They become fast pals. Whenever this lousy sack of shit Drew is on screen, whether backing down from every challenge he's confronted with, sulking about his hot alcoholic mom boning ornery sheriff Gus (Brown) or falling off his bike when he sees the feather-haired lead bully (a tangential character who gets billed over him), you want to stuff cupcakes into Drew's maw until he chokes. Drew's dog Zowie likes to mess with Gus' rabbit pen, and one night Gus gets so pissed about it he shoots Zowie, which leads to a sappy scene where the chubster sits with the dying dog and the soundtrack plays something that humorously resembles the opening of "M*A*S*H*" (actually by Jan King). Of course, Drew enlists Jeff to help him carry Zowie to the reanimation zone, ensuring that the pooch will be able to show up whenever and wherever it's convenient for him to attack somebody. Dr. Chase can't figure out why the beast's gunshot wound won't heal (Zowie's color-changing fur is not addressed), and also establishes that he has no problem bringing his kid along on a middle-of-the-night house call.
Jeff and Drew go to a Halloween party at the Sematary, where the bad kids have rigged up an effigy of Jeff's mom to scare him, but after a slight altercation, the fey brutes invite our protagonists to hang out. Drew shows his dork colors in this sequence by wearing a denim jacket over his Dracula outfit. When Gus shows up to beat the crap out of Drew, Zowie magically appears and chews Gus' neck open. The optionless kids bury him at the hot spot (they're already at the Sematary, after all), but when he comes back, Gus is a considerably different dude. He roughly ravages his alarmed wife, he skins all his beloved rabbits to the strains of L7's immortal "Shitlist," he eats dinner straight out of the serving bowls and jauntily shows the kids the chewed-up food in his mouth. Meanwhile, Jeff and Chase are having silly dreams about their dead mom/wife which predictably end with her having Zowie's snarling head. When Jeff wakes up hollering, the dog is actually sitting in his room, watching him with evil-ass glowing eyes, but Jeff just goes back to sleep, since for some reason this doesn't scare him so much. Gus menaces the lead bully with his own motorbike, but when the kid's colorful scarf (the surest sign he's a badass) gets caught in the wheel and causes his demise, we frustratingly don't see it. Likewise, after Jeff inevitably gets undead Gus to exhume his mom and she comes back from beyond the Sematary - despite rotting for several months, she somehow looks in better shape than Gus - she stabs the housekeeper in the face with a broken mirror, but we only see the aftermath. Thankfully, we do get to see Drew and his mom get nailed by a truck when Gus rams their car into it, although the sequence bears out my long-held belief that any horror movie that kills off the best-looking woman is bound to be crap. "Pet Sematary II" takes its sweet fucking time getting to the climax, but after Gus sticks a power drill into Chase's dog bite wound and the lead bully returns from the dead, leaping about like one of those action zombies from the "Dawn of the Dead" remake, Chase and Jeff are the only survivors of a fiery blaze which consumes their house, melting mom as she shrieks the first movie's tagline: "Dead is better!" It ends with the duo driving out of town, accompanied by a voice-over from earlier when Jeff tells Drew how you never get over losing someone who dies and - in a ridiculously sentimental move - slow-motion cameo portraits of all the characters who bit it in the film, including the lame bully kid, who will obviously be missed by no one. Oh, and another Ramones song over the credits, but even here it's diminishing returns... I don't hate "Poison Heart", but it's no "Pet Sematary". I dunno, Lambert's first flick in the franchise was cool, but despite one admittedly well-done sequence where Gus attacks his wife and stepson with a hammer, her sudden infatuation with cheesy zooms here signals that the rest of her filmography is likely littered with half-baked crud. Despite the generic "uncertain" ending where the camera swoops down on the burial ground, there was no "Pet Sematary III," and it should stay that way. This one is kind of hilarious. I can't find a trailer online, and I couldn't rent the DVD to be able to post it myself, but it's no big loss.
"From Justin To Kelly"
(2003)
(A caveat for longtime readers: I wrote about "From Justin To Kelly" shortly after its release, and I will recycle some of that text here.) Our most recent selection is a different kind of horror movie. This early "American Idol" cash-in is the sort of film that makes Americans claim to be Canadians while traveling abroad. While I'm proud to say I've never seen more than thirty random seconds of the series, the pre-fab phenomenon has, like so many reality television programs, wormed its way into my perception. This movie spin-off was a hastily generated major studio exploitation flick intended to encourage the vaporous cults of personality surrounding the inaugural winner (and runner-up) of a series that, for wee slivers of time, still allows a grieving nation to forget about that whole disconcerting Middle East business. Viewed through the lens of a few years and four more seasons, "American Idol" remains a grab-and-go venture, generating piles of interchangeable plastic discs that many may purchase but few honestly cherish. While Kelly Clarkson, the star of this picture, and country singer Carrie Underwood are doing OK for themselves, the professional lot of other "Idol" winners like Ruben Studdard and Fantasia Barrino only serves to spotlight the fickleness of the general music-consuming public and the ultimate futility of wasting so much money to make this show in the first place. As a die-hard music fan, "Idol" offends me because it allows the traditionally lazy pop industry to be even lazier. Label execs might as well throw up their hands and just ask every fifth Sam Goody customer what flavor of mediocrity they desire this year. The most sickening part is how people buy into the cynical marketing scheme, feeling like they're involved and that their opinion somehow matters. Nobody who watches the show actually thinks Underwood was better than season four's second placer Bo Bice, but they'll continue to drink out of "Idol" coffee mugs, pay to vote for these saps and stay up late to see Clay Aiken warble on Leno. However, fan or not, the movie is something of which everyone can be equally embarrassed. Even turds may have some gold in them if the ingredients are right, and "From Justin To Kelly" is the only "Idol"-related anything I can support due to its astounding miscalculation of its own commercial appeal. I mean, America loved Clarkson and Justin Guarini as singers, so they're bound to be a hit as actors, right?
Patterned after those Frankie and Annette beach party pictures which are so relevant to the "Idol" target audience (old gay men?), "From Justin To Kelly" is the romantic musical tale of a party dude and a non-party dudette who together generate fewer sparks than a boiled carrot rubbing a stale bagel, yet who come to steadfastly believe that they belong 2-gether 4-ever. Clarkson and Guarini play characters named Kelly and Justin, two shallow fucks who intend to cavort with their shallow fuck friends until they see each other warbling the same sanitized pop R&B cut on the beach, and they spend a tumultuous hour and a half almost getting together, getting together, getting mad at each other, getting back together, being driven apart, getting back together, etc. Having hit theaters about a year and a week after FOX aired the first episode of "Idol," one might assume that the movie's screenplay was written as something else and tweaked for the quick turnaround. Nope. The script was especially crafted for this purpose by "Spice World" scribe Kim Fuller, brother of odious "Idol"/Spice Girls/S Club 7 Svengali Simon Fuller. A plot breakdown would be pointless, since I just told you virtually everything that happens, but it does so within such an outrageous Shakespearean tangle of betrayal, text messages and juvenile overreaction, it must be seen to be believed. The couple's first serious flirtation occurs in a public restroom. At one point, Guarini duels a hillbilly who craves Kelly’s affection, a wan and perfunctory rivalry which is, naturally, resolved by a hovercraft race. At another junction, after getting their messages crossed by Kelly's scheming, jealous friend, Justin tells Kelly to buzz off with a hearty, "Game over!" One time-killing subplot concerning Justin's buddy trying to meet up with his internet girlfriend provides cheap laughs for no one, while another involving the film's sole minority characters (Clarkson's black friend and a suave but not rico Latino waiter) embodies the term "token." The lighting, continuity and editing are atrocious, and Kelly keeps forgetting to do her accent like she's Tom Cruise in "Interview With the Vampire." That this is all set against the backdrop of a PG-rated spring break in a curiously dreary and gray Miami just adds to the flick's ugly, opportunistic feel.
Helming the rickety enterprise was a man who had previously directed "She’s All That" and a zillion movies of the week, including something called "Miracle On Interstate 880." Sure, Robert Iscove also choreographed a pair of Dorothy Hamill specials in the late '70s (bless you, IMDB!), but the flaccid dancing in this sexless romp hurts the eyes and kills brain cells. During a few of the musical numbers, the camera just pans turgidly over the assembled bodies, never really spotlighting any particular moves as would be expected. Even as a candy-coated diversion for pre-teen girls, "From Justin To Kelly" fails. It could thankfully never become the early sexual touchstone that, say, "Dirty Dancing" represents for a generation of young women, but I pity any poor girls who might end up gleaning advice about relationship behavior from this bleak affront to the concept of love. My biggest gripe is I had hoped that for as long as the stupid fad lasted, "From Justin To Kelly" would be remade every year with the same script and the new "Idol" winner and runner-up in the leads. Imagine what stupidity "From Clay to Ruben," "From Diana To Fantasia," "From Bo To Carrie" or "From Katharine To Taylor" could bestow upon the world! As it is, we are merely left with the most painfully hilarious pop star vehicle since Mariah Carey's "Glitter" (I hear promisingly good/bad things about Usher's "In the Mix"). Apparently, much of the TV series' appeal lies in the arch sadism of judge Simon Cowell. While I prefer to make fun of shitty movies on my own, I suppose that if the "From Justin To Kelly" DVD came with a commentary track by the bitchy Brit, that might be amusing. Then again, that might just turn out to be a way for the Fuller empire to further capitalize on "Idol" in the mocking manner with which William Hung found his brief infame. The fact remains that at a time when most of the country was reeling from war and recession, twelve million dollars that could have fed and clothed and sheltered and armored and medicated a whole lot of American troops were instead earmarked to create this instant relic. The movie failed to make even half of that back, but Rupert Murdoch laughed all the way to the bank, even if his ultimate plan was to divert our attention from thinking too much about the bombastic events buoying his cable news station. Surely, this film belongs in every 2003 American time capsule, as it would balance all that Saddam footage nicely. You know what the freakiest part of this entire bad movie endeavor was? Finding out that the original promotional web site for "From Justin To Kelly" is still active. Click that link, and for extra laughs, do allow pop-ups, just this once. The hideously upbeat trailer is here.
FYI, this list's honorable mentions include "Dr. Gore", "Diamond Ninja Force", "The Corpse Grinders", "Christmas Evil", "Mob Boss", "The Zodiac Killer", "Gordy", "Succubare", "Three Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain", "Microwave Massacre", "Premutos: Lord of the Living Dead" and "The Human Tornado".
This post's many jams provided by Reverend Bizarre's mountainous "In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend", The Ditty Bops' cute "Moon Over the Freeway", Anekdoten's groovy "Vemod", Gåte's jaunty "Iselilja", Riz Ortolani's classic "Cannibal Holocaust" score, Rain Paint's overblown "Disillusion of Purity", the shocking "Powerslaves: An Elektro Tribute to Iron Maiden", Queensrÿche's disappointing "Operation: Mindcrime II", Gnarls Barkley's ubiquitous "St. Elsewhere", Cronian's forgettable "Terra", Man Man's in-freaking-sane "Six Demon Bag", The Mars Volta's forthcoming "Amputechture", Sig:Ar:Tyr's entrancing "Sailing the Seas of Fate", The Vision Bleak's spooky "The Deathship Has A New Captain", Little Brother's body-rockin' "The Listening", The Adicts' rousing "Songs of Praise", When's evocative "The Black Death", The Chasm's kvlt "Procreation of the Inner Temple" and Bloc Party's expansive "Silent Alarm". Put this bastard to bed, son.
posted by SoulReaper at 12:36 AM
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