The Mayans, the wise race of ancients who created hot cocoa, set December 21st, 2012 as the end date of their Calendar, which the intelligent and logical amongst us know signifies the day the world will end, presumably at 12:21:12am, Mountain Time. From now until zero date, we will explore the 50 films you need to watch before the entire world perishes. We don’t have much time, so be content, be prepared, be entertained.

The Film: Idiocracy (2006)

The Plot: Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), a private in the United States Army, is the quintessential average joe. He’s not smart, but he’s not dumb. He’s not handsome or ugly, physically gifted or deficient. He is, by all accounts, the exactly average American. As such, he’s selected to be a guinea pig in a top secret hibernation experiment for one year. However, when the commanding officer of the experiment is busted for running a prostitution ring, Joe and fellow guinea pig prostitute Rita (Maya Rudolph) awaken 500 years in the future where America is really, really dum. (Get it, I spelled dumb wrong on purpose?)

The Review: Idiocracy, from writer/director Mike Judge is scathingly hilarious. It’s one of my all time favorite comedies, one of the few movies that makes me laugh out loud on a frequent basis. It perfectly balances smart observational humor with the occasional nut shot. It’s the only time I haven’t wanted to punch Dax Shephard in the face (okay, second, he’s alright in Zathura.)

It feels almost elitist to like Idiocracy as much as I do, since I see it somewhat as a realistic roadmap to the future, a future where the ambiguously named Fuddruckers could eventually become Buttfuckers. A time when politics has sold out so completely and marketing has overwhelmed us to the point that the Presidency of the United States is presented by Pepsi and plants are watered with sports drinks, which obviously kill them. The film explains how the world gets really stupid – dumb people breed at a higher rate than smart people, eventually outpacing them by a large margin and breeding a nation of idiots. What does it say about me that this came off as a warning?

In the future, the completely average Joe is, by their standards, a genius with an abnormally large brain. The fact that he can express himself in complete sentences means that he’s viewed as someone who “talks like a fag” and his “shit’s all retarded.” As the new supreme intellect of the land, he soon finds himself appointed to a seat in the government under former wrestler President Camacho (Terry Crews) and burdened with solving the agricultural crisis.

Idiocracy is a hilariously bleak look at a potential future gone full retard. While I doubt the nation will fall to such levels, it does raise some salient points about our culture. The number one show in the future is OW! My Balls, which bears a striking similarity to Jackass or Ridiculousness. Advertisments are everywhere – much like today – and there is very little in the way of class. News and World Report has been replaced by Hot Naked Chicks & World Report and it’s acceptable that a restaurant is called Buttfuckers. Considering today you can watch the Naked News and billboards in Los Angeles have giant condoms on them, how far are we really from this future?

This film is 85% utter hilarity and 15% scary prediction. Luke Wilson is spot on on as the average guy and everyone cast to play a moron is perfect. One aspect that I really respect in terms of story telling is that Wilson’s Joe never really changes – he never gets smarter and doesn’t really change much, and I find that utterly realistic. If you look at most movies the protagonist usually undergoes some radical change, like an architect becoming the world’s most effect vigilante overnight. Not here. Average Joe Bauers stays true to himself and his mediocre intellect, but manages to solve the problems regardless.

But why spend 84 minutes watching this film when you only have 453,367 minutes left to live?

First and foremost, the film is hilarious. You’ll have a great time and forget that you’re going to die in a raging global inferno for almost an hour and a half. Second, after watching this movie and seeing the direction humanity could travel, you’ll welcome the thought of a cleansing fireball erasing our stupid and idiotic existence off the face of the Earth.

Director Lucky McKee’s most recent film, The Woman, garnered a lot of critical praise at Sundance in 2011 but gained the most publicity when some old codger decided to have a freak out that was caught on tape where he said the film was degrading to women and demanded it be burned. Luckily for the sake of art and free speech, the negative was not burned and the film has indeed been released on DVD and Blu-ray.

The film follows the Cleek family and their zany adventures trying to ‘civilize’ a wild woman the patriarch finds in the woods. I put civilize in quotes back there because that’s how the film is officially described, but in my book giving someone a bath and making them wear clothes doesn’t actually amount to trying to civilize them. No, for that, one must teach them proper dining etiquette. Obviously, as this is branded a horror film, the titular woman chained up in the basement must cause some havoc, though she’s not the true villain in this story.

Kills

It takes awhile for us to get our first death, but we’re eventually treated to four of them, all clumped together.

Ills

Much like the kills, most of the ills come at the end of the film. As we’re dealing with cannibalism, we get a lot of biting and some eating of human flesh. Someone is cut in half, a heart is ripped out, but yeah, mostly just chomp-chomp-chomping here. Oh, with a side of rape. Can’t forget the rape and molestation, though it’s not shot graphically so grandma doesn’t have to leave the room.

Lust

First we see The Woman all dirty and nasty with her boobs out and it’s gross. Then later she gets a power washer bath and she cleans up nice, showing off some bare breasts and some bush.

Learning

Women are actually good for three things, and one of those things is eating people’s faces.

Review

The Woman threatened to lose it immediately during its too-long raised by wolves Woman in the woods opening. It feels completely unrelated to the rest of the film. When things get started for real, the film is actually hilarious. It’s not clear why people where so upset at the movie or how anyone could call it misogynistic. Sure, Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers) and his son are total male assholes, but saying that makes the film misogynistic is like saying Saw is pro-murdering people in elaborate games. Chris is clearly the bad guy here.

Some people were apparently troubled or disturbed by the film, but Bridgers’ performance was over the top sunshine in an effort to show how normal this dark character tried to be. It was tough to take anything in the movie seriously, which means I may have had a drastically different experience from everyone else. The cinematography is bright and cheery – the film takes place mostly during daylight, and the musical choices are all pop songs. In trying to have a stark contrast between the images and the music, it sort of played like circus music over a massacre. Granted the film does manage to get a little gross here and there and abandon the pop music, but overall the film was darkly comic and not overly graphic, scary, or overtly demented.

Viewed through that lens, the movie isn’t bad, though the hype doesn’t make sense. It wasn’t offensive or shocking. I’d say I half-way enjoyed it. I don’t think Lucky McKee shoots violence and gore very well – there are plenty of opportunities to really hammer home the horror of the situation, though we never see it. That aspect of the film was underwhelming. Further, speaking of the violence, I’m not entirely certain how a piece of wood was used to chop someone in half, nor do I really understand the decision to have the 125lb Woman be able to toss another 100lb+ person through the air like a rag doll.

The Woman is best described as a Lucky McKee film. If you like his work, you’ll probably like this. If you don’t, you won’t. It features Angela Bettis as Belle Cleek, who has been in all of McKee’s films, and the movie, intentionally or not, bears his off kilter style. Again, I don’t really see the horror in this movie as it plays out in a fairly comedic way. McKee’s friend Sean Spillane wrote, composed, and performed a pretty awesome soundtrack for the film though, which should definitely be checked out.

When all is said and done, The Woman is not a great film. It’s a bit goofy at times, which may not have been intentional, and doesn’t handle the horror and violence in a way that would make a true impact. It does have some good moments within it and if you approach it with tempered expectations you might enjoy it. It’s also important that the film comes from the brain of Jack Ketchum, who wrote The Offspring, a semi-prequel to this flick. Ketchum is a dude that doesn’t mind having a ton of kids die in his stories, which I totally respect.

Anyway, I’m torn on this flick. I don’t get the hype or horror around it, but ultimately I enjoyed bits and pieces of it, even though it’s oddly comedic and goes awry in shooting the violence. The Blu-ray is presented well though, with a song from the soundtrack, deleted scenes, and a making of featurette.

I’ve got a bit of an obsessive compulsive issue when it comes to DVDs and Blu-rays. I’m one of those suckers who will get caught every so often in a double-dip if I’m not paying attention. If I am being observant, I’m the guy who waits four extra months to get a disc with some special features attached. I really dug Transformers 3 and wanted to watch it again, but I’ll be damned if I was going to buy a disc with no extras on it!

The issue that has my panties all aflame this week is all about special features and the lack thereof. Oh, most discs today come with some special features on them, but the “featurette” has become the bane of my existence. It used to just be what they called small extras on the disc, but now they’ve really emphasized the -ette, meaning mini, small, or useless.

I recently popped in The Thing (2011) for a viewing. I enjoyed the movie, mostly because of the grotesque creature designs and my undying love for Carpenter’s film. So, enjoying the movie, I was pretty excited to revisit and take a look at some of the special features. There were two “featurettes” included, The Thing Evolves and Fire & Ice. 

The latter feature came first for me, because I do what I want, and let me tell you it was an interesting four minutes (and by that I mean it was a short four minutes). The Thing Evolves was actually pretty decent, closer to fourteen or fifteen minutes, but why even have Fire & Ice as a separate feature? When it’s that short, just push them together and make a cool 20 minute little feature.

There is a lot of this going around, you get a disc and read the back of the packaging and think you’re in for a treat because there are like 10 featurettes listed! Cool! Wait, why are they only ninety seconds long? This is bullshit!

If you have ten 90 second little pieces of shit, that’s 900 seconds. Divide by 60, carry the one, type it into a calculator and that equals 15 minutes. Oh, hey, that’s the size of one cool feature – so again, why are we dividing this into a dozen small sections that I have to keep picking up my remote and hitting “Play” to move on to the next one for? Advertising I guess? For show? To make the back of the package look stacked? Fuck. Makes no sense!

At least those discs have some special features, I just have to use this short paragraph to give the middle finger to discs that are “rushed” to press because people “demand” to see the film again sooner rather than later (Fuck you, James Cameron, Avatar sucked). Put some features on the discs. There is a lot of space there. Use it. Releasing a bare bones disc has become common place, and I want to partly blame Netflix and Redbox and similar services, since those rental copies generally don’t include features. So, since the company is already pressing rental discs, why not try to trick a few consumers into buying a shitty release?

On the subject of special features, let me tell you which ones aren’t special at all: U-Control, BD Live, pocket BLU and anything like that. Pocket BLU is neat because you can unlock content, but that content is often stored on the disc anyways, or just some shitty trailers. Those ‘special features’ all assume for some reason I want to play with my iPhone during the movie or get live weather updates while staring at the menu. No thanks. D-BOX motion doesn’t really shake me up either, who has a fucking D-BOX chair in their house?

Trailers for other movies and photo galleries aren’t shit either. What’s so special about that? You already gave me the option to watch trailers when the disc was first inserted, I’m not going to go back and look at them from the special features menu, especially when I have an internet connection and can call up any trailer on demand at any time. Pretty much the same goes for photo galleries – I have the internet for that, plus I have the movie to watch so I probably just saw all those photos, but as moving pictures.

Don’t get me wrong, a photo gallery of behind the scenes stuff might be neat, as long as it’s part of a bigger collection of special features. When it’s listed on the box as a selling point, you know you’re about to get a shitty set of extras.

What is cool? Making-of featurettes, commentary, deleted and extended scenes, stunt featurettes, documentary stuff. All of that is cool. We like those. Especially if they have some meat to them and aren’t some 90 second internet released piece of shit that you sent out to all the websites two months in advance as advertising. We want original content with some thought behind it. Put the special in special features, not the “special.” (Confused? Read this)

In summation, most discs today are coming equipped with ‘full special’ (that is to say, retarded) special features. They’re either short and disjointed or absent all together and let me tell you, when I come across a movie I enjoy and I want to further experience, this lack of depth in the ‘special’ features pushes me past my boiling point.

Click here for 90 more seconds of extended Boiling Point content

The Mayans, the wise race of ancients who created hot cocoa, set December 21st, 2012 as the end date of their Calendar, which the intelligent and logical amongst us know signifies the day the world will end, presumably at 12:21:12am, Mountain Time. From now until zero date, we will explore the 50 films you need to watch before the entire world perishes. We don’t have much time, so be content, be prepared, be entertained.

The Film: Homeward Bound: The Incredibly Journey (1993)

The Plot: During a family move, a trio of pets are left at the home of a rancher friend to be cared for tempoarily, but animals, not fully capable of understanding the English language, assume they’ve been abandoned. Not ones to go easily into the night and exist happily on a farm, they take it upon themselves to embark upon an incredible journey to find their owners in a tale of inspiring loyalty and hilarious Michael J. Fox hijinks!

The Review: Homeward Bound is a remake of an adaptation of book that plays all the right heartstrings and strikes all the right chords. The first filmed version of the story is excellent as well, though it’s a lot quieter since there are no celebrity voices for the animals.

Our trio here are Sally the cat (Sally Field), Chance the American Bulldog (Michael J. Fox), and Shadow the Golden Retriever (Don Ameche). Their incredible journey spans across the rocky, mountainous wilderness and is filled with dangers ranging from a lack of food to raging rivers and a hungry mountain lion.

The movie, while primarily for children, appeals to all ages because these animals are hella cute, and it’s actually really well written. I still quote this movie nearly twenty years after its release. Who doesn’t remember Sally’s sassy taunt of “cats rule, dogs drool” or Chance’s flapping lips and ears as he does his best imitation of Batdog!

In addition to plenty of cute lines, the film always treats the animals as characters, so you can relate to them and sympathize with them. Sure, if you see a dog in a movie we all want him to be okay, but with these guys there is an extra level of care – you can hear what they’re thinking and you know what motivates them to take these risks. When Sally disappears over the waterfall, you put your head down and pretend your eyes aren’t a bit watery. When the team works together you chuckle as Chance “can’t believe he’s running away from a cat” and cheer when they launch that pussy off a cliff (no tears here though, the mountain lions okay too!).

If you don’t love this movie, you don’t have a heart. Just thinking about it makes me a little emotional. Chance finally learns the value of a home and an owner and Shadow, the old dog, fights every step of the way, no matter how tired or exhausted he gets. The ending toys with your feelings in just the right way, it drops you into a dark place of emotional investment before letting the light come back in.

Homeward Bound really is an incredible journey, as corny as it sounds, but what can I say, I love animals, Michael J. Fox, and this film. It’s solid family fun, teaches you the value of love and trust and the endless loyalty and companionship of animals. Watch this one with your pooch.

But why spend 84 minutes watching this film when you only have 463,338 minutes left to live?

It’s a film that ultimately puts a smile on your face and warms you heart. As the world erupts in flame, you might as well go out smiling with a single tear sneaking out of the corner of your eye. If you’re a family man, or just someone with pets, this is a film you can all enjoy together. Or maybe, and I could be fired for saying this, watching this film will make you appreciate your family, friends, and pets even more to the point you’ll turn off the movie (after it’s over, it’s good!) and go outside for a walk in the park and potentially fight a mountain lion and then come to an understanding with him and you’ll each go your separate ways.

Click here to continue your incredible journey to a fiery death via astronomical destruction.

Opening in select theaters tomorrow and currently available on Video on Demand, Kill List is a clever little film from writer/director Ben Wheatley that’s been garnering a good bit of attention around the ol’ internet. It follows the journey of hitman Jay (Neil Maskell) and his buddy Gal (Michael Smiley) as they take on a contract to kill three men. As you might guess, things don’t go entirely smoothly.

If you haven’t yet seen Kill List, you should probably stop reading, go see it, and then come back. You should watch it. It’s good. Don’t read anything else about it. Ignore everything you’ve heard, just walk into it blind and experience it. If you’ve already seen the movie, read on, or if you need extra convincing, read on, but for best results, see it with as little foreknowledge as possible.

Kills

The film starts slowly on the kill part, focusing more on the list part, but by the end it racks up 17 on-screen deaths at least and a few more probables.

Ills

Kill List delivers the goods when it comes to gore. There’s not a ton of it, but when it’s there, it’s really there. There are plenty of gunshot wounds, some dead animals, some stabbings, a gunshot to the face, cigarette burns, and some beautifully brutal usage of a hammer.

Lust

Jay’s wife Shel (MyAnna Buring) is a super hot Swede, but she keeps her clothes on. We see a little bit of naked here and there, but a lot of it is fairly unappealing.

Learning

The less you know, the worse things get.

Review

I think your mileage varies with how much you about Kill List walking into the theater. If you know next to nothing, it’s probably fucking brilliant. So if you still haven’t spoiled yourself, get out now! Go see it!

I knew perhaps a little bit too much going into the film, in fact, even knowing too much about the genre can be wrong. The film should be approached primarily as a crime thriller. Again, leave now. Because it’s time to get spoilery.

With allusions to a failed mission in Kiev, it becomes apparent early on that some very strange people are very interested in Jay. The film, much like The Descent, starts out as one thing and only later on becomes something almost entirely different. The Descent is basically 45 solid minutes of the best spelunking movie you’ve ever seen, while Kill List perfectly captures the crumbling home life of an out of work assassin struggling to make ends meet. Once he embarks on his crusade, things slowly get weird, to the point you’re a solid hour in before you start even thinking ‘horror movie,’ which is the great tragedy of the advertising surrounding it. I went into this flick thinking it was a horror movie – and it’s not, not really, at least not until the end. I wish, I wish, oh how I wish I walked in thinking it was a crime flick. Because it will fuck your mind.

The performances are all A+ throughout and the directing is excellent. The sound design is sharp, though there is a lack of score throughout much of the film, which is different. During the third act, the score is more like noise than music, and it’s unsettling. Speaking of the third act, it’s probably the coolest “action in a tunnel” this side of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie – but with significantly more killing and guts spilling out.

As exciting as the third act is, I can’t say it’s entirely original. It quickly becomes apparent that we’re heading for an ending that is a mixture of The Wicker Man and A Serbian Film. I figured out pretty far in advance what the ending was going to be, and pretty much nailed it right on. Still, even knowing, the last few minutes of the film left me with questions – was that laughing or crying? It means an entire world of difference, and we’ll never know.

Despite the somewhat predictable nature of the ending, Kill List is a tightly woven thriller with tremendous, gritty, realistic violence, great performances, and a pretty wonderfully exciting third act. It’s a pretty big downer for the most part, as you’ll figure out quickly, but Wheatley interweaves a great mystery throughout so you’re always wondering, always questioning exactly what’s going on. But he doesn’t tell you. No, that’s for you to stew on.

Political correctness is the bane of the artistic community, or so it would seem. It appears as though you can’t do anything in this world without upsetting anyone, and once they’re upset you must do backflips to appease them. Well, I’m here to say: fuck the blind.

Just kidding, I’ve got nothing against the blind. But a recent news articledoes have me up in a furor. Aardman Animation, the company behind Wallace and Gromit and the upcoming feature The Pirates! Band of Misfits, are ditching already completed work on a joke about lepers because some people might feel bad. Are you serious?

The ‘claymated’ film features the acting chops of Hugh Grant, David Tennant, Jeremy Piven, and hottie Salma Hayek and is the story of ‘Pirate Captain’ as he attempts to win the coveted “Pirate of the Year” award. The challenge? He must compete with several other, seemingly more impressive pirates with more competent crews.

In the trailer, Pirate Captain boards a boat he intends to pillage, demanding their gold. A man replies “Afraid we don’t have any gold old man, this is a leper boat. See?” Then his arm falls off.

Hold the presses, apparently.

Leprosy is a disease caused by bacteria that has been around since biblical times. Surely you’ve heard of “leper colonies,” places where lepers were sent to live and die out of sight. Leprosy is a disfiguring disease, categorized by skin lesions, which led to the ostracization of sufferers throughout history.

It’s understandable that two leprosy groups, Lepra Health In Action and the International Federation of Anti-Leprosy Associations, would object to a negative portrayal of leprosy. After all, we don’t want people blindly hating those with leprosy or laughing at their expense.

Which might actually be true if this were the 12th century. Leprosy may have been a big problem for some of the past 4,000 years, but today leprosy is almost non-existent in much of the world. It’s present in some quantity in around 120 countries, but basically only a small handful of countries have a ‘problem’ with leprosy, and that problem is rapidly declining thanks to effective treatment.

So on one hand, we have a small percentage of the entire population of the world suffering from leprosy, while on the other hand we have the vast majority of those suffering from leprosy in areas that don’t watch a ton of movies. Who is going to get offended here? Also, is the scene even offensive? All we see is a goddamn clay cartoon man have his arm drop cleanly off. It’s not a disgusting gag or even a mean spirited slight. Further, it’s a period-correct gag! While leprosy isn’t much in the public conscience today, hundreds of years ago lepers were still treated poorly and put on ships and sent off to go deal with it somewhere else.

It’s dumbfounding why a studio, who spent time, money, and effort making this scene, thought it was funny enough to put into the trailer, and is now going to fold in and remove it based on the objections of two tiny groups representing a small amount of people.

That’s all reasonable justification for keeping the scene. Very few people who could even remotely be offended by it are even going to see it, and the pool of people who would find it offensive is very small. But here’s the thing – I don’t even need that justification. It’s a fucking movie. Movies can say and do whatever they want. Movies can offend people. Call me a bastard, but I’d take the hit of losing the leper crowd and keep the joke in the film. Bowing to political correctness is always bullshit, whether you’re talking about going Full Special or including a ten second scene with a minor leprosy punchline.

The groups think that this joke could create more stigma against people who suffer from leprosy. I really don’t think the target audience for this movie, kids, are going to grow up hating lepers. They probably won’t even remember the joke after a few minutes. They’ll probably only think “Haha, his arm fell off!” and move on to the next flashing colors and sounds.

It’s hard to believe in most of the world people are going to have a lowered view of leprosy sufferers because of a kid’s movie. Sure, in places where people already hate lepers (it’s a problem in India), it’s not going to help, but again, I don’t think a 10 second gag in a cartoon is going to dictate how people behave.

Aardman Animation, you’re acting like a bunch of pussies, and I’m past my boiling point on this one. Stick to your cannons. Keep the joke.

Lend a hand and read more Boiling Point

The upcoming Relativity Media release Act of Valor looks like it could be a pretty balls-out fun time in terms of action film, but I’m sure everyone has some hesitation about one of the film’s biggest selling points: it uses active duty Navy SEALs as the cast. While that sounds badass because it is, it also sounds like a risky gamble since these guys are warriors and not necessarily actors.

That fear may be allayed however, the more we get to see of the film, which looks like it’s going to be a non-stop ass kicking ride of guys killing people and blowing stuff up. When there isn’t much call for acting, only action, can you do any better than hiring real soldiers?

Showing just how vital the use of actual SEALs is to the product, we were sent this featurette which illustrates something very few movies are willing to partake in: the use of live ammunition. On almost any other set, this would be an insurance and logistics nightmare, but when you’re dealing with real Navy SEALs who train with live ammunition and actually blow things up for real, rather than using flashy smoke bombs, all you have to do is point the camera in the right spot and remember to put your flak jacket on.

Check out the footage and see for yourself how awesome practical bullets look on screen.

What can you say other than “wow.” That looks awesome. We Rejects always value practical effects over CGI work, and it doesn’t get more real than real bullets. Just compare the awesome look of the muzzle flash and the utter destruction of the vehicles to the crappy digital blasts of other movies or even the somewhat decent but still lacking blank-firing rounds.

With each little bit I see of Act of Valor I get more and more excited about it. My hesitation over non-actors in acting roles fades with each burst of real bullets tearing through metal and actual Navy SEALs putting their skills on display. Count me in.

Act of Valor is in theaters starting February 24th. Visit the official site here.

The Mayans, the wise race of ancients who created hot cocoa, set December 21st, 2012 as the end date of their Calendar, which the intelligent and logical amongst us know signifies the day the world will end, presumably at 12:21:12am, Mountain Time. From now until zero date, we will explore the 50 films you need to watch before the entire world perishes. We don’t have much time, so be content, be prepared, be entertained.

The Film: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

The Plot: When the Nazis threaten to find and unleash the power within the Ark of the Covenant, the US Government turns to the only place that can save them: Academia. Back in the 1930s, Professors and Archaeologists were made of a lot tougher stuff, and were far more attractive to co-eds than they are today. The manliest among them, Indiana Jones, fresh off a disastrous trip to a South American jungle, embarks on a global quest to find the Ark first.

The Review: I mean, come on people, it’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Our first introduction to Indiana Jones! The only man in our galaxy with enough swagger to go toe to toe with Han Solo and come out the other side. The mid-1970s to early 1980s represented a true shift in cinema – the blockbuster was born. Action was redefined. A whole new class of hero emerged.

Sadly, as the years move away from this film, it seems there are more and more people who have never seen it. They know who Indiana Jones is and they’ve probably seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on USA or maybe they’ve had the misfortune of seeing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which case they’ve probably never bothered to see another Jones movie. Tragedy.

Raiders is the effective birthplace of the fun adventurer. It’s never too silly, but never too dark, even when dealing with death, Nazis, and face melting. It has been the role model for films like The Rocketeer and Captain America: The First Avenger, as well as much closer clones like Sahara and other adventuring movies, with good reason. You can argue all day over which Harrison Ford character is better – Han Solo or Indiana Jones – and you’ll stick with your answer for more than 30 minutes.

With epic, fun action, tremendous set design, a razor sharp, quotable script, and Spielberg directing at the top of his game, Raiders of the Lost Ark is pure entertainment joy. It manages to be a roller coaster ride of fun without relying on an actual roller coaster gimmick.

The film was written by Lawrence Kasdan (The Empire Strikes Back) based on a story from George Lucas (Star Wars) and is directed by Steven Spielberg (Jaws). These are big names even now, but this is back when they were still making great movies! It’s breath taking, comforting, and contains one of the coolest and most iconic outfits in history. Who doesn’t want to wear a fedora and a leather jacket still to this day? Has a whip ever been cooler?

Few films truly stand the test of time and subpar sequels, but Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of them. No matter how many times you’ve already seen it, there’s always time for one more visit.

But why spend 115 minutes watching this film when you only have 473,640 minutes left to live?

No one wants to be sad before they die. Well, maybe some weirdos do, but not me. I plan on going out with a smile on my face and Raiders of the Lost Ark is the right prescription. It also serves the purpose of wiping a lot of unpleasant memories from your mind before you leave this mortal coil. Want to forget about the new Star Wars trilogy and remember George Lucas fondly? Need to wipe Spielberg’s poor performance over the last decade out of your mind? Begging for death after watching The Crystal Skull? Greet death with a grin and forget that terrible movie by watching this one!

Click here for more must-see movies for your final year, Humanity

By now, you should probably have realized that we will never reach the final destination, since we’re already a destination past that with more on the way. Likewise, you should probably have a pretty good handle on how these things happen. A kid gets a vision of a totally awesome and very lethal disaster, which prompts him and several others to leave the danger zone, abandoning hundreds of others to die. Death, not liking the idea of being cheated, then kills all of the survivors through an elaborate series of accidents. And for the most part, it’s all good.

So recognizing all that, for the fifth installment of the franchise you can just plug in all the new names and faces with the scenario suspension bridge collapse. While there isn’t much new, Final Destination 5 manages to be an entertaining entry in the series, providing plenty of gruesome kills – in three dimensions!! OOoOoOoOoOoooOOOooOoOOOo

Kills

The Final Destination franchise is well known for massive body counts and for showing most of them twice. This is no exception. One would assume the bridge collapse kills several hundred people and we see at least 8 specific deaths. Throughout the rest of the film there are at least 10 individual deaths. Conservatively you’d have to put the overall death total somewhere near 400, though that includes disaster.

Ills

Here is where the film really delivered for me – gruesome kills. There are several impalements, some delicious rebar through the face, bodies are cut in half, heads are smashed, people are crushed, eyeballs are popped and squished, guts and limbs go flying, a wrench gets embedded in someone’s face, and there are gun shots and a rotisserie spiking. All of that pales to my personal favorite death though – gymnastics accident. BOOM. STUCK THE LANDING.

Lust

A big, fat, disappointing zero. Seriously, film, what the efffff?

Learning

You can’t escape death. Duh.

Review

It’s not a great movie, in fact, as a film, it’s probably like a C-level average, but once you factor in the gore and the amazing opening credits sequence, it gets a significant bump. The ending was also a clever and satisfying surprise. You see it coming maybe two minutes in advance, but it still tastes just as sweet.

If there is one thing this movie, and the franchise as a whole, have really gotten a handle on, it’s false foreshadowing. We all know someone is about to die, the only question is – how? Director Steven Quale does an effective job of building tension right before the deaths, especially in the gymnastics sequence. There are, as SpikeTV says, a thousand ways to die, and in some of these scenarios, you can identify all one thousand. Every loose bolt, exposed wire, or creaking piece of lattice could strike the fatal blow. Once death has reared its head, you’re on edge. Trying to out-guess him. Sometimes you do, often you don’t and it’s splattertastic.

For those of you looking for something smart or new, look elsewhere. For those of you that have fun with the Final Destination movies, gear up and give this one a shot. It’s definitely not the worst installment, and based on a pure fun level, it’s probably second or third.

As much fun as it would be to pick on SOPA/PIPA some more and make some jokes about how “SOPA,” when said aloud, is Spanish for soup, this is something entirely different. Oh, it still has to deal with censorship, but this is some self-imposed completely idiotic and maddening censorship.

On air, movies and television have to play by a set of rules. These rules aren’t totally set in stone, but basically there are some words you can say and some you can’t say. Then there are some you can sort of say, but mostly only in the right context. An example? Pretty much any show on at any time could say “bitch” meaning female dog, because that’s just the definition of the word. If you want to call someone a bitch, generally that’s kept to after 8pm.

Cable gets a bigger break than network, as it’s a paid service, but that doesn’t mean they’re immune to fines and more importantly, advertiser backlash, so everyone kind of plays with kid gloves.

Of course, it’s parents who should be responsible for policing the television. If a show wants to say bad words, let them. Put it on after 8pm, put a “Language” notice on it, and parents can set their TVs to block it. Easy cakes. I mean, I still don’t understand why HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax won’t show hardcore porn, because why not, amirite? But I’m getting distracted by the thoughts of boobies. This boiling point is specifically about language. One bad word and one not-at-all bad word, both needlessly censored on cable television.

If you’re offended by words, you can still probably read this. After all, one of the words I’ve already used in the title because I do what I want. Retard. There I said it.

Retard is not a nice word.

It is an actual word, with a real definition, but when used to talk about someone who has mental retardation, it’s a not nice thing to say. Words like that are often co-opted out of context to make fun of people without a real disability. If you call someone with a mental handicap a retard, you’re a dick. If you call someone a bastard and they are one, you’re also kind of a dick. However, if you’re just trying to hurt someone’s feelings on the opposing dodgeball team, who is neither mentally retarded or a kid from an illegitimate partnering, and you call him a “retarded bastard,” you’re not that big of a dick. Kind of unsportsmanlike, but whatever.

So yeah, there are probably tens of hundreds of people (at most), who want the word retard treated with the same severity as “cunt,” but I’m not one of them. Further, when talking about arts and entertainment, a writer carefully crafts his words to reflect his characters. If a character uses the term retard, it reveals at least something about his character. In the case of Tropic Thunder, an entire joke is based on the idea of “going full retard.” It is one of the funniest bits of the movie and it made some stuffy old ladies mad. Boo hoo. Unfortunately, these same stuffy old ladies must have written in to FX, as when Tropic Thunder aired recently, Simple Jack was no longer retarded. He was special. Tugg Speedman no longer went full retard, he went “full special.”

What the retarded fucking fuck? Retard is not a curse word. It shouldn’t be treated like one. People can hear bad words. People can choose not to support whatever the fuck they want to not support. But killing that joke entirely to avoid upsetting a small subset of people? That’s bullshit. That’s… retarded. Tropic Thunder was airing on FX, which is part of expanded cable, and can definitely get away with saying retard. The fact that they edited out is frustratingly stupid.

Now, AMC’s Hell on Wheels dealt with a much more sensitive word. I’m not a child or a politician, so I’m not going to play around with you. How can I get mad at censorship and then censor myself? Set in the west shortly after the Civil War, Hell on Wheels obviously must dip its toes into racism – and you can’t have racism without some dirty-toothed cracker (racism) calling some black man a nigger (more racism, a white guy didn’t say ‘n-word!’).

Hell on Wheels smartly does the right thing when they’re trying to show you that an asshole military veteran (or three) is racist – the guy calls black workers niggers. Why? Because, primarily, that’s realistic as to what the character would have said and second, because a modern audience knows that’s a vile thing to call another person. So the show establishes two things with that exchange: a sense of realism and the alienation of that character from the audience. We know this guy is an asshole and we start to dislike him. Remember what I said about writers carefully choosing words? This is why. That one word, as opposed to “blackie” or whatever other less risky term they could come up with, sells the scene a lot better.

So wait – why am I mad then? Because of the closed captions. I normally don’t watch shows with the closed captioning on – I just turn that motherfucker way up. However, this instance I was watching with someone who likes to have the closed captioning on so I went with it. And that’s when I saw it. That’s when I read it. N.

N. Not “n-word.” Not “negro.” Definitely not “nigger.” But “N.” That’s what the closed captioning put in place of the word nigger.

This is offensively stupid. Almost as offensively stupid as editing Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” so that Nigger Jim becomes Slave Jim. You know what would be easier? If you just erased slavery and racism from the encyclopedia and history, so it was like it never happened! Also, let’s modify all works of art to be in no way offensive and also to not accurately reflect what the creator intended! Fuck art! Fuck history! Fuck it all, we’re dumb pussies!

It’s blatant censorship to remove the word nigger from the closed captioning. The television show writers made a choice to put the word in there. An artistically important choice. The producers, or whoever, and probably someone at AMC along the line, made the choice to let the word be in the show. There was no dictum to change it. So why then censor it on the closed captioning? It’s okay to hear it but not read it? Is it a typo on the screen now? What is happening? Why do that? What does N mean!?

Imagine, if you will, a viewer who is deaf. What are they to think? They can’t hear the word. Maybe in that scene they can’t read the lips of the actor, too. That character is now shed in a completely different light, against the intent of the author, or you’ve confused the deaf viewer.

That’s what this is all about – the intent of the author. As a writer myself, we choose words very specifically to make points or provide depth to a character. A show could have a character say “Man, that Greg sure is a racist” and that would be an example of bad writing, but it gets the information across. Or, the show could make the decision to have Greg act and speak like a racist – which is more effective; which is better?

Words hurt. Words offend. No shit, that’s why we came up with all sorts of nasty words – to hurt people. But these are works of fiction. Television, books, and movies are not authors reading their personal thoughts through a screen directed at a viewer. They’re creating a world, a realistic and deep world, full of characters with flaws, traits, and dirty vocabularies.

If you’re such a sensitive wee lass that you can’t handle even hearing these words in a fictional context, I feel bad for you son. That stick is way up your ass, jammed right into your cerebellum.

Hearing vile, or not so vile words, in a fictional context, is part of the experience. That’s the purpose. The words aren’t there to offend you, they’re not there to hurt your feelings, or your neighbor’s feelings. They are words coming from one fake character aimed at another fake character. Those two fake characters are at loggerheads and one is trying to make the other feel bad – so he’s using bad words. Every time I hear (or read) needless censorship, I rage past my boiling point.

R_ _ _   Mo_ _  Boiling  P_ _ _ _

Genre buddy and fellow root canal survivor Rob Hunter came to my aid this week when it was time for title selection. I was stupidly about to put in The Wild Hunt, which has something to do with LARPing and virgins or something, when the Foreign Objects author suggested I try something a little more sub-titled.

Dream Home is the story about the American dream taking place in Hong Kong. Young Cheng Lai-sheung (Josie Ho) is a phone representative for a bank in Hong Kong and all she wants out of life is a nice flat with a view of the ocean for her ailing grandfather to live in. She’ll stop at nothing to get that home, from scraping together every penny and working two extra jobs. After raising enough capital to buy into the flat, the sellers decide to ask for more money and Cheng reacts completely reasonably. For a psychopath.

Kills

If you thought people made a killing in real estate, you’ve had no idea until you’ve seen this film! Puns are fun! No but seriously a lot of people die in this movie. Like thirteen of them.

Ills

Hunter promised me gore and director Ho-Cheung Pang delivers the gory stuff. The first kill is an uncomfortable, harrowing death by zip-tie strangulation and a razor blood. It’s bloody and intense and sets the movie off in the right direction immediately. Later we get a broken nose, a screwdriver through the eye, some disgusting miscarriage fluids, a couple of suffocations, some severed fingers, an amazing disembowelment, gun shots, and a lot of stabby-stabby.

Lust

We’re initially teased with a little pornography on television and things look bleak – until we get to see some passed out sweater puppies, some doggy-style banging, male and female butts, a lesbian kiss, an unseen blowjob, and a lady who is kind of enough to be on screen naked for like three minutes solid.

Learning

Real estate is serious business.

Review

Dream Home had its hooks in me right from the start with a fantastic kill. It’s so good you wonder how the film will ever top it and the next few kills are good, but not nearly as good as the first. You’re pretty sure they blew their horror load right up front, but then the movie decides to just go guts-out dicks-off crazy for the climax.

The gore in the flick is pretty fantastic – there are tons of great practical effects, from guts to prosthetics, blood and stabbings. There are some CGI sweeteners here and there, which are noticeable but not too bad. There is one bit of CGI towards the end that sticks out in a negative way – but only compared to the rest of the film. It’s good as far as CGI goes, but definitely sticks out after we see so many great practical effects.

Visually, the film is beautiful, the colors are mostly bright and vibrant and it looks great. Pang does play with focus a few times throughout the film and it felt pretty distracting. It may have been digital focus shifts inserted for variety at least a few of the times. It didn’t really work, but it by no means ruins the experience.

Cheng’s character is very well done. She handles a lot of emotion in the film, from being sad to being stabby. Really stabby. She gets to play coy most of the film, but after a little psychotic break she turns into a dedicated terminator of renters and it’s awesome. Her transformation at the climax of the film is pretty phenomenal. The look of contentment on her face makes you want to kiss her, except that what’s brought great joy to her life involved a whole lot of knives and zip-ties.

Dream Home drags for a touch when exploring Cheng’s younger life, but it ultimately is a very satisfying and very bloody experience. Well shot, with a strong central performance, and tons of excellent gore, this is one Netflix Instant title you should check out.

Also that German DVD cover image I used has almost nothing to do with the film but would you look at that for crying out loud? That is awesome!

This article has changed three times since I even started thinking about it. It began as a simple rant about prequels, but when my first example focused on Star Wars ran several hundred words, I then decided to focus on that. When that ran for over a thousand words before moving even half-way into my second point, I decided to scale that back a bit too and just focus on what I call the “timeline crunch” of the prequels.

The movies are coming back to theaters in 3D, so it’s kind of topical and I’m allowed to write whatever the hell I want, so how about you spend a few minutes listening to me rant about perhaps one of the smallest flaws of the prequels, but a flaw that has bothered me to no end for years.

The Timeline Crunch

You know, there are fourteen thousand things wrong with the Star Wars prequels. It would take several volumes to document their failures but for some reason the Timeline Crunch bothers me pretty badly.

Revenge of the Sith basically sees the birth of two things: The Galactic Empire and the Skywalker twins. To be clear, the Empire as we know it, the one that strikes back, does not exist until part-way through this film. Until this point, everyone is kind of a good guy, protecting Naboo and all that jazz. The entire Universal Government is a unified happy place, more or less. When A New Hope starts its title crawl, we know there is a period of galactic civil war and the Empire is this big scary monster, with a tight grip on the galaxy. They have soldiers and garrisons and bases everywhere. Tattooine is an admitted shit hole and yet there are Stormtroopers based there, complete with local Dewback mounts. They have new spacecraft that we’ve never seen before, like TIE Fighters and Imperial Star Destroyers (as opposed to Victory-Class Star Destroyers in the prequels), the Death Star has been built, and there are presumably hundreds of thousands of enlisted Stormtroopers, not just clones, because they have different voices.

Here is the problem for me – all of that happened in about 19 or 20 years. Luke is born at the end of Revenge of the Sith and he’s either 19 or 20 at the start of A New Hope. You’re telling me that all of that happened in just 20 years? I mean, we’re not even talking about something simple like rebuilding Germany or Japan after World War II, those are just countries on a world. We’re talking about multiple solar systems with multiple planets. The entire currency of the galaxy has been unified to Imperial Credits.  The Empire, which we’re to think is this horrible, domineering presence, has only existed for 19 years and yet they’ve accomplished all of these things, including coming up with new armor for their soldiers and equipping the millions of soldiers with it. Darth Vader is feared everywhere, yet what has he done for the past 20 years? Apparently a lot, and everywhere.

If you’re talking about a section of a world, sure, maybe someone can become a well known figure. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, these guys did a lot in 20 years, but their reach never extended beyond their neighborhood. The Emperor and Darth Vader extended their reach from known universe to known universe. In 20 years. When did the Empire become evil anyways? I mean, we see they’re kind of douchey at the end of ROTS and Obi-Wan and Yoda both flee into hiding for some reason, but again, 20 years of progress happens. New ships, new troops, new technology, new armor. One would think that Universally, this would become a problem at some point when people are like “Wait the Empire is dicks.” If you look at Germany, sure, they made a lot of technological advancements during World War II while being assholes, but after just a few years they had problems arming their troops and building their equipment. They basically designed the TIE Interceptor but had no way of actually producing it. But throughout the three good Star Wars movies, the Empire is turning out new equipment every installment. Different TIE variations. A second Death Star. A Super Star Destroyer.

When you really think about it, the Galactic Empire might have been the most amazing group of people ever assembled. They set some semblance of order in the galaxy, had enough manpower to police the whole thing, instituted a galactic currency, pioneered new technologies, and apparently had enough support to produce two Death Stars and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fighters, bombers, and capital ships. You just can’t do that if you’re non-stop being evil as shit. I mean, again, twenty years! It takes twenty years for a modern aviation company to design and test an airplane, much less put 600 of them in a Star Destroyer and send it across the universe.

Call me crazy, but it seems like 20 years is far too short of a time period for all of this to have happened. We haven’t even talked about the “aging equipment” of the Rebel Alliance. How old can it be if it wasn’t old enough to be in the prequels, set between 20 and 40 years before A New Hope? The Rebels famously use X-Wings and Y-Wings against the Death Star and these craft have seen better days – but where do they come from?

There is nothing in the prequel trilogies that look anything like the X-,Y-,B-, or A-Wings we see in the original trilogy. Okay, actually one of them looks a bit like an A-Wing, which is strange, since the A-Wing doesn’t appear until Return of the Jedi, which would make it, presumably, one of the newer craft. If the Rebel Alliance is using old hand-me-down vehicles, why aren’t they what we saw in the prequels? After all, the Empire has abandoned all of those junkers because they’ve switched exclusively to the TIE line of craft. Where are those shitty Naboo fighters? Where are all these vehicles and why are none of them X-Wings?

The only logical answer would have to be that the X-Wings and Y-Wings are even OLDER than the prequels…or they were created and somehow became obsolete in that same 20 year period between trilogies.

Somehow, technology movies both backwards and forwards in this time period. Obviously it moves forward, as the Empire has created some hot new stuff, but then again, even the most brilliant and advanced military officers in the Imperial Navy (the guys serving with Darth Vader must be presumed to be the best) point out that no ship as small as the Millennium Falcon can have a cloaking device. Well, except that Darth Maul, a servant of the EMPEROR OF THE EMPIRE had a cloaking device on his even smaller ship. I mean, it’s kind of strange to think that the Emperor personally knew about cloaking devices and yet somehow that technology, which is probably pretty badass, not only never appears again, but is functionally forgotten, even from the Imperial “West Point Level” graduates.

I just don’t see why the movies had to be set so closely together. The original films always talked about these events like they were so long ago. Why did Anakin have to be like 18 during the Clone Wars? Why couldn’t the films have been set even further back? Jedi are pretty robust people, Obi-Wan could easily live to be more than a hundred years old. Same goes for the Emperor and Darth Vader. You could easily shift the films back at least 20 or 30 more years. The Clone Wars should have been ages ago, the way people talk about them. Yet, Anakin serves for a few years before going totally evil on us and then dying at what, age 50?

In designing the vehicles of the films, did they forget the original movies existed? Wouldn’t it have been cool to see the evolution of the X-Wing? Or to see Y-Wings appear as cutting edge bombers back then? You know, like having the movies be smartly connected and unified rather than whatever it is we got? Sigh.

Bonus Brief: Characters Have Shitty Memories

R2-D2 excluded, since he remembers Obi-Wan Kenobi, or so it would seem. Obi-Wan, on the other hand, must have smoked plenty of that space weed, since he doesn’t remember either R2 or C-3PO, despite going on many adventures with the pair, spending dozens of hours with each, and basically witnessing the birth of 3PO at the hands of Anakin, something he’d probably remember considering how, oh I don’t know, his entire life revolved around Anakin Skywalker for almost two decades.

Similarly, Darth Vader, aka Anakin, seems to have forgotten that Tattooine existed or that it was important in any way, since it took so long for the Empire to end up back there, despite Vader presumably wanting to murder Ben Kenobi and what not. It was either brilliance or sheer stupidity that Obi-Wan decided to go hide out at perhaps the most important planet in Darth Vader’s life, one that he lived on and returned to and experienced traumatic losses at. He also boned Padme for the first time there, if I can read between the “I killed them all” slaughter kiss lines. Not only that, but Obi-Wan wasn’t too far away from well known city centers full of scumbags and lowlifes who would definitely turn him in for a few bucks.

Vader also comes mask to robotic face with C-3PO on more than instance in the good movies and never once does he think “Man that guy looks and sounds familiar” or “Hey what the fuck series of events had to have happened for my son to come into ownership of the droid I built and the R2 unit that served by my side for fifteen years during the Clone Wars?” Additionally, Yoda seems to have also forgotten about R2-D2 – though the droid maybe didn’t forget about him, since R2 was a dick to him, even knowing that Yoda was once a wise and respected warrior a scant 30 years ago.

In short, fuck you, George. Fuck you. Almost everything about the Star Wars prequels drives me past my boiling point.

The Mayans, the wise race of ancients who created hot cocoa, set December 21st, 2012 as the end date of their Calendar, which the intelligent and logical amongst us know signifies the day the world will end, presumably at 12:21:12am, Mountain Time. From now until zero date, we will explore the 50 films you need to watch before the entire world perishes. We don’t have much time, so be content, be prepared, be entertained.

The Film: WALL-E (2008)

The Plot: In the distant future, humanity has abandoned Earth (presumably after it got all jacked up in the Mayan Apocalypse), leaving behind a small waste collecting robot, WALL-E, who has faithfully executed his programming by cleaning up all the trash we’ve left behind and crafting it into cute little bundles. His predictable life is turned upside down with the arrival of EVE, a reconnaissance robot he falls in robot love with that leads him on a journey across the stars that will alter the course of humanity.

The Review: For me, WALL-E is one of the few Pixar films that lived up to the tremendous amount of hype surrounding it. It speaks to the powerful nature of the visuals within the film that there is nary a word of dialog for 39 minutes and they’re the best 39 minutes of the film. There’s just something endearing about the spunky little robot, with his tiny arms and sympathetic eyes.

Unlike many other animated films, CGI, drawn, contemporary, or past, WALL-E has a fantastic visual style that emulates a live action film with regards to the lighting and foreground-background focus levels thanks to cinematographer Roger Deakins‘s input. All of the design work and thought to creating the visuals is owed to Andrew Stanton‘s vision of a silent movie in the modern age created with modern computer generated imagery – a novel approach that works flawlessly.

Strangely, this animated movie lit a fire under some asses with its portrayal of the future of humanity – fat, disgusting, lazy slobs who destroyed the Earth with pollution and turned to technology as their savior, taking to space in their reclining hover chairs, taking their sustenance through straws, and living their lives through their touch screen computer interfaces. I say it’s strange because, like Idiocracy, WALL-E doesn’t seem entirely implausible given our current state of laziness and reliance on technology.

Perhaps that’s why I find the film so endearing – you take advanced computer technology and employ a bunch of guys to sit indoors for hours upon hours to craft a movie about the dangers of technology and entice people to get back to nature. It’s a conundrum, almost hypocritical in a way, but really it’s just the responsible use of film to provide a warning without being too preachy about it.

Put simply, WALL-E is a charming film that substitutes a cute as hell robot into the position you’d normally have a cute as hell fuzzy animal. The film makes a strong point about the current trajectory of humanity, which is leading us towards our destruction, whether at the hands of a Mayan sun god angered at our disrespect of nature or our own fat, lazy nature. It’s a movie packed with emotion you wouldn’t expect from robotic leads and the animation is crisp and beautiful.

But why spend 98 minutes watching this film when you only have 494,127 minutes left to live?

If you’re going to die, you should try to find peace and happiness before you do. WALL-E is a tremendously good movie, so there’s that on top of the fact that it can warm your heart a little. It may also end up that this Pixar creation was prophetic, predicting the end of the world at our own hands. Finding a little understanding about why you’re going to die can help put you at ease. Really, though, I just wouldn’t mind seeing that little scamp do his cute little thing one last time and maybe, just maybe, hold out hope that some autonomous and strong willed Roomba will survive the apocalypse and maybe one day make contact with a space fairing race. Further, just because the world is going to be engulfed in flame, it doesn’t mean you should strap yourself to your TV-Food-Combo Hover Chair and ride it out like a slug – get outside and check out a waterfall or something, will ya?

It’s not too late.

Psycho Sleepover is a strange flick. It’s low budget to the point that it was pretty much literally all filmed in one location – the producer’s house. A lot of the people behind the camera end up in front of it. The quality isn’t so great. The plot is non-sense. Basically 30 psycho-slasher killers walk out of an unlocked Asylum and head to a sleepover to get their murder on while a couple of dudes make a ton of dick jokes and masturbate.

In “The Making Of” extra, the co-director says of the film: it’s pretty retarded, but it’s awesome. He was 60% right.

Kills

If the movie doesn’t get an A for technical ability (it doesn’t), it sure gets one for enthusiasm, racking up, by my count, 29 on-screen kills. There are a couple of severe injuries that may have ended up in death, so one could probably assume the actual number of deaths is around 36 or so.

Ills

The blood spills freely, even if it is a bit too syrupy, but again, this is a film made by guys in their friend’s house more or less. A face gets ripped off, there are a ton of stabbings, a bunch of headshots, a face gets blown off, a few necks get slashed, a cock or two gets severed, a guy is sodomized to death by a pool cue, and a hand is stuck in a blender. I’d say two of my favorite ills are when a head gets stomped and explodes and when a girl gets hit in the gut with a sledgehammer so hard she throws up.

Lust

There are a couple of disappointing pairs of tits, a kind of gross pair of tits, and a decent pair of tits. There are some good looking ladies in the film but ultimately the movie is defined by dudes masturbating and talking about blowjobs. One of the opening lines of the film is I don’t know how to say this, but I want you to suck my dick. And you know what, it’s hilarious. Also, dildos. Dildos everywhere.

Learning

Girls, for the love of Christ, suck your man’s dick. This entire massacre could have been avoided with blowjobs.

Review

Surprisingly, Psycho Sleepover is pretty entertaining. I found a lot of the corny dialog about blowjobs and boners pretty hilarious. This is definitely a movie for immature boys – if that’s you, it’s actually a pretty good time for the most part. The litmus test for this flick is probably whether or not you find this line funny: Maybe I’ll get that boner I’ve always wanted. Is that funny? If you clicked Yes, you should watch this movie. If you clicked No, avoid it like the plague.

Psycho Sleepover is a horror movie made while on drugs. Now, I know about some drugs, but I can’t even begin to tell you what you’d have to be on to create this film. Chingy has a cameo in a film-within-a-film called Murder Pizza and he proudly announces, after promising free pizza, that It’s murder pizza, bitch! Oh, and his victims are two Suicide Girl looking lesbians.

While the film is only 84 minutes long or so, it still does start to drag on about three quarters of the way through. It’s silly through-out and the production value, again, is pretty low, but it has got some strange, acid trip balls hanging out. Some of the acting is actually okay, though it’s always over the top, and the variety of shitty psycho slashers is mildly amusing. Sometimes there is even a 16-bit style score going on. The film is all over the place and you’re either with it or you hate. Personally, I was with it most of the time and found myself pleasantly surprised. This film isn’t for everyone, not even close, but if you’re alright with low production values and insanely immature humor (dick blowjob dick cum fart cunt blowjob boner boner boner), then you owe it to yourself to experience this mindfuck of a film. Oh, and in addition to Chingy, Felissa Rose (Sleepaway Camp) and Lloyd Kaufman have cameos.

The Devil Inside is the talk of the town for two reasons: number one, it made around $35 million in its opening weekend, which is big no matter what qualifier you tack on, but when that qualifier is a reported $1 million acquisition cost, it’s gigantic. Number two (heheh), it sucks. It sucks bad.

That’s nothing new, really, as everything about The Devil Inside screams shitty movie. First of all, it’s from the team that brought you Stay Alive. Second, it’s found footage. Third, it’s an exorcism movie. I’m surprised that people went to see it, because you list those three qualities and I am about as far from interested as possible.

But rather than just throw another voice on the “what the fuck” bonfire, I wanted to take a few minutes and examine what we can learn from this situation.

First, CinemaScore is apparently both useless and broken. For those of you that don’t know, CinemaScore is market research firm that uses test audiences to grade movies and then predict their box office. The Devil Inside accomplished the rare feat of being granted a CinemaScore of F. CinemaScore says that any film getting a C is generally going to be a failure, while films that achieve the F rating are disasters that shouldn’t even be released. The Devil Inside marks only the sixth time a film has been given an F rating.

Clearly, we can see that the CinemaScore is not always accurate; you don’t finish first with over $34 million if your film is a failure that shouldn’t have been released in the first place. Further, when the grade breakdown was revealed, mathematically speaking The Devil Inside seemed that it should have been ranked somewhere around a C. Now, what exactly goes into the decision of the final grade we don’t know, but it would seem that this system is far from perfect.

We also learn from this experience that audiences love horror, but more narrowly, audiences love original or new horror. It doesn’t matter that The Devil Inside is just another in a long line of shitty exorcism movies because it is, at least, not a sequel, prequel, or remake. Horror movies traditionally make good money at the box office, especially original movies which tend to be lower budget, as their margin for success is considerably lower. If you look at the career of Rob Zombie, his small films come in under $10 million and generally make more than $12 million domestically. I find this relevant as his small films don’t have wide audiences and are a bit off kilter, yet people want original horror. You can contrast this with a bigger budget prequel/remake from 2011, The Thing, which opened around $8 million and finished near $16 million with a production budget of almost $40 million.

I think it would be smart to take away from this that original movies fare better than remakes or sequels and that smaller budgets can generate good returns. In the case of The Devil Inside, the minuscule budget is unknown, but it’s said that it was acquired for a price of $1 million. If I were a gambling man, I’d say that puts the filming costs of the film below $250,000. Obviously a fair bit of money was spent in the advertising, which paid off to the tune of $34 million. No matter what accounting method you use, this film is in the black already.

Unfortunately, another lesson that we learned is that for some reason found footage movies are not shooing away audiences. This one I don’t get as I’m not a fan of a single one. I dug Cloverfield, but think it would have been far better as a regular movie. The Blair Witch Project didn’t blow me away, but it was pretty effective and among the best of the genre would probably be [REC]. Still, I generally think “found footage” is a gimmick that no one falls for – no one thinks this is real, so why do? I’m not just a fan of the method of story telling, I think it looks shitty and doesn’t make sense. In a movie like Cloverfield, why the fuck would anyone spend time getting reaction shots or point the camera away from the giant awesome monster tearing up the city? Found footage blows, but apparently it still earns.

I guess congratulations are in order to those involved with the movie – they pulled one off here, against all odds, this pile of shit won the weekend and made a lot of cash. There are valuable lessons to be learned from failure and success and the success of failures. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of films that are more deserving of an audience this wide and the fact that those films don’t get the support they need and the exposure causes me to projectile vomit my  boiling point all over a holy man.

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The Mayans, the wise race of ancients who created hot cocoa, set December 21st, 2012 as the end date of their Calendar, which the intelligent and logical amongst us know signifies the day the world will end, presumably at 12:21:12am, Mountain Time. From now until zero date, we will explore the 50 films you need to watch before the entire world perishes. We don’t have much time, so be content, be prepared, be entertained.

The Film: A Boy and His Dog (1975)

The Plot: Vic (Don Johnson) and his telepathic dog Blood scavenge the ruins of America, eking out a simple life while hunting for food, sex, and the new American dream of not dying a horrible death after World War IV. Their journey soon leads Vic to a seemingly perfect underground society, complete with food, picnics, Americana, and ladies that don’t need to be struck on the face to sleep with you, but Blood smells something is amiss.

The Review: A Boy and his Dog is based on a short novella by Harlan Ellison and, as a film, it wasn’t all that well received, but in later years it developed a strong cult following. There are plenty of reasons to hate the film, namely that it’s alarmingly misogynistic, but much of the stuff one might hate can be loved in another light. This isn’t Schindler’s List or a serious drama meant to challenge your brain, rather it’s a smart, sarcastic look at a potential future. If you try to take this film seriously, you might be offended, but if you view it as a parody of society, it works very well.

The film is hilarious and unpredictable, one of the wackiest apocalyptic movies I can think of. Every bit of gritty grimness of Mad Max is present here, but presented in such a way that shocks and awes you while making you chuckle where you shouldn’t. Vic’s entire life is spent learning valuable life lessons from the incredibly mature Blood, while using his canine friend to hunt down females for copulation. Blood is most definitely the leader of the group and Don Johnson portrays a convincingly idiotic 18-year-old kid, lost in a lost world, but one content to live amongst the chaos. Blood, however, wants more – the Promised Land, a paradise he heard of from a police dog.

Like many post-apocalyptic films, the new world is a dangerous place, but perhaps more dangerous still are the people who want to create a safe, “new” world that clings to the ideology of the past, at any cost, which is in many ways worse than being thrown to the wild. You could easily read the 50s Americana subterranean community that clings to parades, flags, and ice cream, as some statement on conservative Americanism. Would that mean then the liberals are the above ground mutants? I don’t know.

Check your serious shoes at the door and give A Boy and his Dog a shot. It features a handsome young Don Johnson and Blood sounds like a concerned Mr. Feeny. It’s a ridiculous look at the apocalypse with one hell of an ending – just like you’ll have, on 12/21/12.

The Life Lesson: I’m going to reveal this caveat early in our Countdown to the End list – you might not actually die on December 12th. It may take several days or weeks for you to die after the world most definitely ends, during which time you may be thrust into an apocalyptic setting where dogs communicate telepathically, robots patrol the underground, and rape is the new national past time.

This is the one film that can prepare you for all of that, all while teaching you an even more important survival lesson: true friendship is one of the most important things in life. A good friend will always be there for you, will wait for you, and the woman you lust after can’t hold a candle to that.

But why spend 91 minutes watching this film when you only have 505,000 minutes left alive?

Precisely because you’re going to die in an absurd manner. I’m pretty sure the world ends when a giant dragon bird descends from space, so you might as well watch a movie about a telepathic dog that teaches you a few survival skills and teaches you that a true friend is more valuable than any brief love interest in a surprisingly poignant way.

I’m not certain why, but when Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale played during the one Fantastic Fest I was present at, I missed it. I was probably drunk on Peanut Butter Milkshakes and also whiskey and Rob Hunter had yet to convince me to start watching movies with subtitles. Over the recent Christmas season (it’s over now, take down your decorations), I caught up with the film in the comfort of my own home all while being mostly sober.

Rare Exports is a Finnish import about the havoc created when the truth about Santa Claus is quite literally unearthed. You think you know all about this jolly fat man, but brother, you ain’t seen nothing yet. If you watch this film though, you’ll see plenty of old man dicks, so there’s that, in addition to a pretty pleasing film.

Kills

Overall there are about nine kills in the film, but at least seven of them are off-screen. If you’ve got a bloodlust, this isn’t the film for you.

Ills

We see tons of dead reindeer, an old man is impaled, an ear is bit off, and a pick-axe finds an unlikely home in someone’s head.

Lust

My notes, verbatim: dirty old man dick, naked old men, old men dick. So yeah this film is sexy.

Learning

The real Santa Claus is a lot cooler than that chubby Coca-Cola swilling bastard.

Review

Rare Exports is one of those rare films that scores close to zero on the normal criteria for being awesome, but it is in fact quite awesome. The film started on the right note as it illustrated the Finnish relationship with guns, which is basically give everyone over the age of five a gun. Recipe for disaster? Only to your naive liberal ears.

If there is a problem, it’s with the speed of the plot. The entire film moves fast with a run time of under 90 minutes, but our pint sized hero Pietari jumps pretty much from “what was that loud noise” to “do you think they unearthed the real Santa Claus and he is not a nice man but is actually a kidnapper of children?” It’s a bit of a stretch. Maybe the St. Nicholas mythos in Finland is very much alive and well, as even the adults are pretty much on board with this old man actually being Santa Claus after about four minutes of examination.

Overall, Rare Exports is a strange film, but that may just be some level of culture shock. To be honest, I was left wanting something a little bit bigger, but the film is constrained by a modest budget.  The film starts off being fairly creepy and you almost expect a Santa Slasher, though it switches gears into full on ridiculous mode half-way through and the action kicks up a few notches. This is perhaps due to the parent’s willingness to believe the children. No one here questions the idea that Santa is real, so there is no need for Santa to hunt the children. Once everyone believes that Santa is indeed out there, they decide to take the hunt to him.

Rare Exports is a good holiday flick with the right balance of creepy imagery and childhood wonderment. It’s kind of like Super 8 but with Santa Claus and lots of penises. Go in expecting something more akin to a family adventure than a Santa’s Slay and you’ll be well rewarded. It’s also worth noting that the Blu-ray is pretty well stacked with features, including Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

Anyway, let’s take a look back at my look forward and see how things panned out.

10. Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon Criticisms. Yup, hated the anti-Michael Bay, anti-Transformers criticisms, but they were nowhere near as bad as those that surrounded Revenge of the Fallen. Aided a lot by the fact that TF3 was actually a good movie, there were still some stubborn people who refuse to have fun at the movies and want to poo-poo on Bay.

9. X-Men: First Class. I was wrong about this one – loved the movie. It was on the list because I really do not like any installment of the X-Men franchise, this one is easily my favorite.

8. Beastly. Easy choice, of course this piece of shit movie was a predictable piece of shit that should have been sent to Lifetime.

7. The Smurfs. There were no surprises here as The Smurfs gave everyone critical blue balls. There are two types of kids movies – ones that kids enjoy but are secretly just good movies, and then there are piles like this and the Chipmunks that are just mindless kid drivel.

6. Straw Dogs Remake. This isn’t really worthy of my hate, but only because it wasn’t really worth of any attention.

5. Mother’s Day. Boy did I hate this movie when I saw it in late 2010, but it wasn’t released in 2011. Whatever year it will get released, that is the year I will hate it again.

4. Twilight Saga Hatred. I’ve previously defended Twilight fans as they’ve bared the brunt of a lot of undue hatred. While everyone still mocks this franchise openly, it seems as though the fans have gotten a reprieve and the bile spilled in 2011 wasn’t all that acidic.

3. Big Mommas. I don’t want to live on this planet anymore. This deserves all of my hate and all of yours too.

2. Glee. Does this show still exist? I’m blinded by my hatred for it. I hate this show and most of the people who watch it. Except the hot ones. But Glee still sucks.

1. Celebrity Death Reactions. It annoys me when people lose their shit over celebrity deaths. I didn’t know Heath Ledger, so I didn’t shed any tears or build a statue of him out of butter. In 2011, the public at large didn’t make a big deal out of most celebrity deaths, so this didn’t register on my radar, possibly because most movie star deaths were overshadowed by big ticket political deaths.

I guess the big surprise is actually that a lot of the things I thought I would hate ended up just not being an issue. Otherwise, X-Men: First Class was the only thing that really went against expectations and blew me away. Glee still sucks.

Get angry and read more Boiling Point

It seems like every year I find myself disappointed in the horror offerings of the preceding twelve months. Especially if you think of widely released theatrical flicks, few of which ever make the lists. If it weren’t for DVDs and VODs, I don’t even know if I could in good conscience pretend that 10 (or 11) horror films were good.

That said, I did manage to find some enjoyment in theaters and at home this year, but it wasn’t the easiest task in the world. In a good year, it’ll be hard to eliminate films from the list, but when it comes to horror most years, its scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with a full list.

Quickly, in terms of eligibility, I write my lists a little differently than many others – for me, a film has to be widely available in this year, either in theaters or DVD or VOD. So films that only show at festivals generally aren’t eligible for my lists until they’re released on DVD. For example, Ti West’s The Innkeepers has made several lists, but it’s not widely available until 12/30 so most people won’t see it until 2012, so that’s that.

11. Fright Night

Fright Night makes the list only because we’re doing eleven films this year instead of ten. I wasn’t a huge fan of this Craig Gillespie remake, which pales in comparison to the campy fun of the original, but it was at least a competent film with some good moments. Colin Farrell turned in a good performance, while I was a little disappointed in David Tennant’s character. I think the film would have been wiser to go with practical effects, rather than the lame CGI teeth.

10. We Are the Night

Vampires are everywhere these days and mostly in shitty and depressing ways. I’m pretty tired of vampires who are either whiny bitches or who don’t realize that being a vampire is actually kind of awesome. Thankfully there are these four smoking hot lady vamps who embrace the fun that comes from basically being immortal, rich, and sexy as hell. Toss in explosions, car crashes, and gun play and this film embraces all the fun that’s been missing in most other vampire flicks.

9. Black Death

This was one of those films that I went into with unbelievably high expectations due to the reviews of my peers and the fact that I’m a sucker for anything Sean Bean. I wanted a gory horror fest full of witches and death set against the bubonic plague, but rather found a film rife with mystery and violence. While it’s not what I expected, the film packs a punch.

8. Cold Fish

Inspired by true events, Sion Sono‘s story of a timid fish shop owner has more in common with smarter films like Se7en than the typical 80s horror films I embrace. The slick and beautiful cinematography amplifies the realism of the gore and violence, creating a memorable and disturbing experience.

7. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

As a sucker for monster movies, I take what I can get, even if it’s just a few dozen little tooth fairy gremlins. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark has a pretty ballsy ending and a great performance from little Bailee Madison, and I was a fan of the pacing. The real menace of the tiny little creatures builds slowly – first they seem innocent and almost cute or playful, but over time they reveal themselves to be cruel, ugly little things.

6. A Serbian Film

I have a pretty sick mind so when I was told this was one of the most vile movies in existence, I went nuts. Turns out my sick self had made it far worse in my head, but what I didn’t expect from this film was at least the small amount of intelligence behind it. It’s not a film created just to gross you out like The Human Centipede, and it does have a point, though it does want to relentlessly depress you. Check your iron levels and view this film at your own risk, it’s probably too much for most people.

Some other sites or site runners may look down on lists, but those people are what are known as no-fun douche bags, because really, lists are awesome. They are short, easy to digest little morsels that you can wash down with a carbonated beverage, argue about, and take recommendations from. If you don’t like lists, you are worse than Hitler.

You know what’s better than Hitler? Lots of stuff, like peanut butter cookies with little peanut butter cups pressed into them. That, and also these ten action movies, which are my favorite for the year. Yeah, you’ll probably disagree, so comment below or get your own damn website.

11. Hanna

Eric Bana is a secret action star with a few good turns in a couple of flicks, but in Hanna he really gets to shine as an ass kicking secret agent. That being said, it’s the young Saoirse Ronan who really brings home the bacon and drop kicks it through a door. There are several very good fight scenes in the movie, but it doesn’t rank higher because I don’t understand how Bana’s character never decides to just get a gun and kill these assholes. Still, the movie is worth a watch if just to see what happens when Hanna thinks she has her target within reach the first time.

10. Captain America: The First Avenger

This was by no means a perfect film, but the story really resonates. Chris Evans did a fantastic job as both Steve Rogers and Captain America, plus his transformation was kick-ass and inspiring. The middle of the movie was an action montage extravaganza that brought back fond memories of The Rocketeer and Indiana Jones flicks. The action is good, but it’s the heart that lands this film on the list.

9. Battle: Los Angeles

Sure, it might be kind of a silly film with some laughable dialog, but in terms of action, the film is on overdrive pretty much the whole way through. In a year absent the really guilty pleasures of shoot-em ups like The Expendables, this was the gun violence choice of the year, with thousands of rounds expended and plenty of explosions to be had by all.

8. Real Steel

Action just isn’t about killing people, it’s also about boxing robots. Real Steel had a charming performance from Hugh Jackman, an entertaining enough kid, great action pieces in the ring, and a surprising amount of heart delivered from the vacant stare of Atom. This film got to me for some reason, possibly because I get a boner for robots, but probably because it was just good action entertainment, especially when a robot fights a bull.

7. Kung Fu Panda 2

This movie was so good, it made me mad enough to write a boiling point asking why a children’s cartoon was the best action movie I’d seen thus far in the year. KFP is a lot of fun with a great cast and some excellent action. It’ll please the kids in your family and keep everyone else entertained. Thumbs up.

6. Drive Angry

It just wouldn’t be a Robert Fure list without some violence and nudity on it some where. Drive Angry could be a contender for horror lists thanks to its supernatural elements, but I think the film does better as an action movie. It has car chases that rival or exceed those in Fast Five and enough blood and guts to satisfy even my warped tastes. Plus Amber Heard. Amber Heard. Amber Heard. Ya heard?

5. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Is it an action movie or something smarter? Does it have to be one or the other? Rise was a surprise to many, a film that managed to be both smart and entertaining, intelligent without being overly preachy. Plus, once the monkeys decide it’s time to fuck shit up, things get exciting really fast.

4. 13 Assassins

There was nothing but praise for this Takashi Miike flick, so it was hard not to have high expectations going in. The film starts off by giving you all the plot and back story you can handle for about an hour. They just need to set you up so there are no more questions once the battle begins, because it rages and doesn’t stop for the last hour. The entire affair wasn’t overwhelming, with many undeveloped characters, but in the end when 13 guys with 50 swords slash and murder their way through 200 people, it gets a spot on any action list.

3. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

A worthy successor to the fun and exciting M:I:III or whatever they called it, Brad Bird’s first foray into live action brought plenty of action and a good bit of comedy along for the ride. With some truly breathtaking sequences in IMAX and lively action sequences, this film would have been at home opening up in the middle of Summer.

2. Transformers: Dark of the Moon

We can argue all day over the merits of Michael Bay or the Transformers franchise, but to be honest with you, if you don’t at least acknowledge these films for the jaw-dropping action, you’re just being a stubborn dick. Transformers 3 overstays its welcome a little bit in length, but makes up for it by including some of the best CGI of the year and some of the most frenetic, ass-kicking action sequences of the year. With tons of military goodness and rampaging robots, this is an adrenaline fueled pre-teen wet dream of mashed up metal.

1. Ironclad

With a similar death toll to 13 Assassins, Ironclad decided to intersperse the violent action and story a bit more and ultimately created a more satisfying experience. The film follows a troubled Templar Knight, a Magna Carta loving Baron and his men as they defend the Castle of Rochester against King John, the King of England who decided to give up considerable power to stop a rebellion only to not actually give up said power. King John recruits an army of Danes and lays siege to Rochester, but few hold out against many for an absurdly long time resulting in an absurdly high number of deaths. Ironclad is extremely violent, with dozens of gruesome injuries, fractured faces, and removed limbs, but it never dwells too obsessively long on the gore. It is most likely the most accurate portrayal of the brutality of medieval warfare ever recorded.

Honorable Mentions: Fast Five almost made the list, but a lackluster fight between Vin Diesel and The Rock coupled with stale car chases leave it off. Warrior was also a strong contender, but ultimately this sports movie suffered just a few too many cliches to make the final list.

We’re just getting started with our 2011 Year in Review.