Pluperfect hell

Provided it's working correctly, you should see my cute new Flash mp3 player embedded on the right, stocked with a semi-random selection of songs I love which were released during 2006. Consider this a preview of my end-of-year missive, which I hope to have out earlier than spring this time. If nothing else, it will give you something to listen to while you're fruitlessly scanning this page for an update of any significance. If you don't like at least one tune on this playlist, there is no hope for you.

I must assert that anyone who loves "The Nightmare Before Christmas" but hasn't seen the current digital 3D re-release needs to get their ass into a theater before Thursday. It looks a little grainy if you stare too hard, but the original movie is 13 years old, after all. There's a cool new intro on it that may raise hopes, but don't expect Zero to perpetually fly out of the screen at you during the flick, as it was not initially created to include such typical 3D trickery. However, the wonders of the digital age have enhanced the depth of the puppets and landscapes. You feel like you're looking into a giant Tim Burton diorama the whole time. The end credits are also enhanced with character sketches and promotional art that take advantage of the 3D technology. If you're paying $10+ to see a movie you could rent for a buck, you might as well leave your glasses on and stay until the final screen.

Here's some more stuff I sat through recently.

"Andre the Butcher": The OnDemand was filthy with "horror" flicks in October. Starz offered this watchable cheapie, in which the beastly Ron Jeremy plays a supernatural serial killer who eats scabs off of his own hands, as well as elaborately prepared parts of his victims. Ron's not in it a whole lot, as the story focuses on three college cheerleaders and their horny trainer dude, as well as some escaped convicts who they meet at a remote house. It's pretty muddled, but the film's saving grace is its attitude. It's really silly most of the time. Like, when two of the cheerleaders go into the requisite softcore makeout scene, one pours a bunch of cold chili on the other's feet and licks it off. There's an old hillbilly coot narrator who constantly pops in and breaks the fourth wall. But then the movie tries to get serious... the butcher guy is some sort of force from Hell who torments his victims with scenes of their sins, which he projects on a magical television set. This kind of killer was was corny two years after "Se7en," and since Andre's been a comical kind of slasher through most of the film, it's really weak when they expect you to take him seriously. It ain't slow, though. I wouldn't go out of my way to see this, there is better low-budget crap to be found. There is also much, much worse.

"The Luau": This interminable "Friday" ripoff is so cheap and brazen, you kind of have to respect it. And I don't know French, but if that image I'm leeching says "the grand party of rape," the French are thankfully lying. "The Luau" is a day in the life of a guy who needs to pay a humorous drug dealer a bunch of cash, hook up with his dream lady (who's dating a musclebound bruiser), avoid his obsessed ex and deal with a bunch of neighborhood oddballs along the way. His crotchety dad keeps saying embarrassing things about his own ass. There's even a fast-talking Jheri curled guy who doubles as the preacher who can't stop ogling women. Yep, this is fucking "Friday," but on a shoestring. More "ghetto," if you will. It's much crasser than its inspiration, which makes up for how slow and incoherent the movie becomes once the title event begins. Not five minutes into the flick, the John Witherspoon stand-in wakes up his son and starts hollering about his ass. He drops his pants, and there is a long close-up of huge, disgusting prosthetic rubber hemorrhoids. Later, one of our hero's friends shows off the result of his recent penis extension surgery, and he whips out the most hilariously long prosthetic weiner ever. He waves it around wildly and hits people with it while he's talking. Those scenes are comedy gold. Otherwise, this thing makes "Grandma's Boy" look like an urbane Albert Brooks comedy.

"Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World": Look, an urbane Albert Brooks comedy! I thought the guy had gone completely soft, not that he was ever that hard in the first place. But he was in that unnecessary remake of "The In-Laws"! Well, that's brought up right at the beginning here, and the movie goes on to reference the rest of his career so often that you'd think it was a feature-length commercial for Albert Brooks. Imagine "Curb Your Enthusiasm" with Brooks in place of Larry David, and you've got the approach of the film - he plays "himself" in a fictional situation. The U.S. government, in an initiative to better understand people with whom they're fighting, drafts him to investigate humor in Islamic culture by going to India and Pakistan. There are a coupla problems here. First, although the average American would probably identify its predominant religious culture as Hindu, India technically has more Muslims than most Middle Eastern nations do because its population is so large. So, making it a joke that the federal morons send Brooks to India so he can study Muslims doesn't really fly. Second, although culture clash vérité is a great hook for a movie, Brooks delivers it in a much safer manner than you'd get from a younger comedian (say, Sacha Baron Cohen). You've got a radical premise, but most of the satiric barbs are directed at the aforementioned benevolently doddering government and "Brooks" himself. He can't get anyone to listen to him until he mentions "Finding Nemo," and his excruciating stand-up act is justly greeted with silence by the Indian audience. The underground Pakistani comics he meets after sneaking over the border, however, think he's hilarious, although they're stoned. Eh, there are some amusing bits and the film's intentions are admirable, but Brooks seems stuffy and a bit out of touch.

"Feast": Finally, a good direct-to-video American monster picture. It's also, as far as I've surmised, the only good movie that came out of "Project Greenlight." It played some festivals and midnight shows, but really found its first distribution at your local rental emporium last month. That's too bad, because it's way better than any of the turds the theaters crapped out this Halloween... if you bothered to see them, try and tell me that "The Grudge 2" or "Saw III" were better than this. The obvious inspiration for "Feast" would be "From Dusk Till Dawn," another snappy, action-packed muckfest where people fight off killer beasties at a drinking establishment. (I think "Shaun of the Dead" was too new - and sentimental, and British - to have influenced this.) "Feast" is definitely a "fun" sort of horror flick, and achieves it by playing around with monster-siege movie clichés. It would be no fun if I detailed them for you here, but let's just say that no character is safe from the toothy terrors. I will talk about the creatures, though, because they are excellent and pleasingly ugly. Real, practical monsters were built, so they're not just a bunch of trumped-up video game graphics. They don't explicitly resemble any previous famous movie monsters. They wear the skins and bones of their prey. They fucking rule. The only issue I have is the ending, where it finally succumbs to one of the most egregious clichés of them all. The alternate ending on the DVD - apparently hated by a lot of test audiences - was more satisfying to me, but I also prefer the alternate ending of "Clerks" where Dante gets shot, so what do I know? Like "Evil Dead II" and "Dead-Alive" before it, expect this theatrically-screwed gore cartoon to find its real audience in the home market, where it can be properly enjoyed with potent potables and whatnot.

"Kiss Kiss Bang Bang": Yeah, the one where Val Kilmer plays a gay private eye. This was the big comeback of Shane Black, known in the industry as the guy who wrote "Lethal Weapon," but probably more recognizable as the guy who kept making pussy jokes in "Predator." He was known for writing dark, violent action blockbusters, but he dropped out of Hollywood for nearly a decade before writing this, his directorial debut. I'll tell you, I never really hated the guy, but after "A Scanner Darkly," I think I developed some real respect for Robert Downey, Jr. He's really entertaining in this, too, as a petty criminal who stumbles into an acting audition and subsequently gets flown to the coast to prepare for his role as a private eye by hanging around with Kilmer. He runs into Michelle Monaghan, a bodacious babe he had the hots for as a kid, and they all end up trying to solve a pair of cases that involve kidnapping, incest, pulp crime novels, switched identites and whatnot. Downey does the hyperactive narrator thing, which at times verges on annoyingly hip, but his personality is ultimately endearing. He's Shane Black's archetypal protagonist in that he repeatedly gets his ass handed to him throughout the film, as did Geena Davis in "The Long Kiss Goodnight" and Bruce Willis in "The Last Boy Scout." But Downey also screws up frequently, and while often admitting he's in over his head, he does the job. Kilmer and Monaghan are also very cool, him bitchily aloof and her personably earthy. The story's nothing amazing, but the characters make this a better-than-average comedic noirish caper.

"The Land of College Prophets": This is the weirdest movie I've seen in a long time. It's not exactly good, but I'll give it points for quirk. At first, it seems to be some sort of "Fight Club" knockoff, because it's a bunch of nihilistic guys roaming around at a community college, brooding and getting into brawls. There are these two friends who spout philosophy on the campus and are hot for the same woman - one dresses like a soldier all the time and works at a military-themed restaurant, the other wears a priest shirt with the sleeves ripped off and works in the school's A/V department. They fight the campus security, an Irish guy who puts cigarette packs and playing cards in his armbands, his rain slicker-clad lackey, some other dudes and, eventually, each other. Then some stuff happens with a possessed well and some sort of glowing rainbow portal through which ultimate evil will rampage the world unless someone plants a tree on the campus. There's a huge German bodybuilder named Third Reich Jones who wears a metal mask and turns blue due to diabetic complications. There are a lot of literary quotations to establish the filmmakers as smart. Oh, it's pretentious, but I'll admit their universe is well thought out. Some of the humor works as intended, and it's got its own internal logic, even if it's too student/LARP-ish to actually be a good film. The fights are obviously given a lot of attention, but as far as amateur violence goes, they aren't very exciting in a world where you can watch idiots seriously injuring themselves on YouTube. Still, the guys who put this bizarro thing together are pretty creative. Oh, and Carmine Capobianco, star of Gorman Bechard's Entartete Kunst favorite "Psychos In Love," has a small, yet pivotal role. That's cool.

"Sie Tötete in Ekstase" (aka "She Killed In Ecstasy"): My run-ins with the vaunted Jesus Franco have been few and far between. He's one of those guys like Frank Zappa - he has such a huge and diverse catalog that you really don't know where to start. The IMDB lists 187 films under his director's credits, but I think that's a conservative estimate. My first Franco movie was "Greta - Haus ohne Männer," an unpleasant women-in-prison starring Dyanne Thorne and retitled "Ilsa the Wicked Warden," although Thorne's not actually playing the infamous She-Wolf of the SS/Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks/Tigress of Siberia. Along with "Oasis of the Zombies" and "A Virgin Among the Living Dead," both outrageously cut American versions of already-shitty horror films, I feel I had a poor introduction to Franco's brand of Eurosleaze until I saw "Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden," aka "Succubus." Glamorous naked European girls, colorful psychedelic atmosphere and cheesy violence abound in that one, so I was very pleased to see "She Killed In Ecstasy" on the OnDemand. It stars Soledad Miranda, one of several comely brunettes who have achieved cult status due to Franco's cinematic adulation of their nude frames. Soledad's husband is a doctor working on a controversial project, and when the other doctors ostracize him for unusual practices, he kills himself. She's driven insane by the loss and sets out to seduce and kill all four of the docs. That's all there is, and all that happens, but is it ever tripped out. Soledad spends a lot of the film vamping about in an incredibly sexy purple crocheted cape - often only the cape - and it's the scenes where she's moping around the shoreline rocks outside her lonely mansion that really stuck with me. Miranda, the groovy music, the classy cinematography and the lush production design all create an enveloping mood of erotic melancholy. Not sure if that was the intention, but this was much better than your average boobs n' blood bash. I intend to catch "Vampyros Lesbos" while it's still up; I've avoided it so far because like with Frank Zappa, I assumed the Franco stuff that's most famous or widely available isn't necessarily the best or most characteristic. But now I think I was wrong about that.

A look ahead at tomorrow's Riot Fest is here, along with a review of the new Mouse on Mars CD, part of my ongoing effort to write about music I know nothing about. Oh, and if you missed my Halloween costume, thanks to Jorge there is a visual document up on my MySpace profile. King Spiderman is dead... long live RoboHobo!