Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema: we will not meet you halfway. This is the internet column that, weekly, finds itself on the losing end of a wrestling match with good taste. Every Friday I shovel a truckload of terrible into your eye sockets in the form of a terrifically bad film. I cut the hulking turkey down to size by noting exactly what makes it so bad, but then raise it’s arm victoriously by confessing my all-consuming love for it. To really drive the disaster home, I will then pair the film with an appropriately inappropriate snack food item to execute a perfect takedown of your girlish figure. Since the inception of this column, there have been a few old standards whose perpetual schlockyness has made them easy, if consistently hilarious, targets. In an effort to spread the mockery around and not unfairly single out a select few, I promised myself that I would avoid roasting Sylvester Stallone for as much of 2011 as I possibly could…I made it to the last week of January. You’re welcome Sly! Today’s Snack: Over the Top

Welcome back to that thing the title line said it is! Well another year has passed and you’ve wasted dozens of Fridays scarfing down bad movies until your eyeballs cry out for mercy. Good for you! When Master Chief Neil Miller asked me to a be a part of the Film School Rejects 2010 Year in Review, I cursed him for making me put forth some modicum of effort. I mean honestly, how could I possibly choose my 10 favorite Junkfood Cinema entries when I don’t feel any of them are worth celebrating? So instead, I’ve decidedly to launch what will surely not become a yearly tradition: The Junkfood Cinema Awards. Prepare yourselves…for The Junkies!

Terry Crews is a bit of a renaissance man. He’s the type of guy you don’t want standing next to you at a party in fear that he’ll easily make you look bad. An art major at Western Michigan University, a former NFL defensive end and linebacker, and someone that is undeniably hilarious but also has the capability of beating you to a pulp in a matter of seconds. A man who once starred in White Chicks and Norbit isn’t the type of actor you’d think be tearing up the screen as a crew member of The Expendables. But lately, President Camacho (which I desperately wanted to call him, at least once) has been playing in the action arena. Crews took a nice over-the-top turn in Gamer and his Hail Caesar was a highlight in Stallone’s ’80s throwback, especially with his notable weapon of choice. 10 years ago he started off in action with the The 6th Day, and now he’s going further under, thankfully, better circumstances. I recently had a short amount of time with Crews to discuss the blu-ray release of The Expendables, and he was basically what you’d expect Terry Crews to be like: overwhelming charismatic. It was a loose, small conversation starting off with talking about the character names in the film. An odd topic to start off with, but keep in mind this is a film with names like, ‘Hail Caesar’ and ‘Lee Christmas’.

If the purpose of a teaser trailer is to bring you slightly forward in your chair, raise your eyebrow and get you interested in a film, the new teaser for Zookeeper is what it might be to see a strip tease from that lazy janitor that never empties your trash can and eats hot pockets while he buffs the floor. The voice casting is already blatantly bad. Sylvester Stallone sounds like he’s doing his best Sylvester Stallone impression, and it appears as if they’re attempting to make the animal mouths correspond with the speech to disastrous results. Mr. Ed did it better with peanut butter. Long live middling comedy. What’s the over/under on how many times Kevin James falls down in this?

So the news cycle has already moved on to chirping about The Hobbit (making it feel like January again) and about Steven Spielberg making a robot movie (making it feel like 2005 and 2001 again), but that won’t stop us from going all the way back to last week and continuing the conversation about Halo. With renewed efforts being made to bring it to the screen, the question continues to be who the best director would be for the job. We don’t know the answer to that, but we do know who would make the most interesting version of Master Chief blasting the slaughter dew right out of some alien hordes. That’s why we gathered together the bold (sometimes twisted) minds of the Rejects to answer the call and deliver a list of a few directors who would look outside the box to turn something incredibly commercial into something either brilliant or completely inaccessible. Without further ado, here’s the list:

Every so often, a film emerges from the fray to prove its popularity and warrant a sequel. More and more, franchises are planned out in advance, but when one film turns into a franchise, a cash register sound goes off in the ears of the studio. Even though the kid stays in the picture, sometimes the director does not. Maybe the director is done working with the material. Maybe the producers want a more seasoned hand. Maybe a simple schedule conflict keeps him or her out of the chair for the next round up. But the show must go on, so the producers find another director to fill the slot – a director who ostensibly inherits all the strengths and weaknesses of a franchise birthed by someone else. Cinematic sloppy seconds that could have easily turned into sloppy sequels if it weren’t for a steady, talented director guiding the ship. Here’s a list of the ten best.

With a dominant weekend opening knocking girly films all over the place with its testosterone fueled hyper-aggression, there are about 35 million reasons why The Expendables will get a sequel. Stallone is already said to be plotting out the story and, if rumor is to be believed, has talked to more than one actor about joining the team on their next adventure. While we trust Sly (with everything but CGI) to cast a fantastic team, once our peanut brains get rolling we can’t stop. Personally I’ve been thinking non-stop about who I’d like to see join the team – or fight against them – in the next installment. Enough bull, let’s talk team! The current poster for the team included nine action stars, at least one of whom probably isn’t returning. So we figured that means we have to come up with at least 10 new members, and possibly a villain. Because we’re ridiculous.

Dear Mr. Sylvester Stallone, Long time fan, first time letter writer. I recently had the pleasure of watching your film, The Expendables, in theaters. Congratulations on an impressive opening weekend, virtually guaranteeing the green light to proceed with a sequel. I welcome another entry into this celebration of action heroes, past and present. Brutal action fun is missing from theaters these days and The Expendables looks to be the cure, much as Marion ‘Cobra’ Cobretti was the cure for the disease of crime.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr takes a gander at the demographically delineated movie selection this weekend. The ladies have Julia Roberts finding herself in Eat Pray Love. The dudes have Sly and the action family Stallone with the much anticipated The Expendables. And the fanboys fresh from Comic-Con have the high-concept slug-fest Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Sorry to all the teenage girls out there. You’ll just have to go see Eclipse at the dollar theater this weekend.

In addition to providing health tips, Fitness and Film will occasionally shine a spotlight on the actors and actresses who embody fitness on the big (and small) screen. With the imminent release of The Expendables, we have reason to cover any number of action heroes, past and present, but our first spot in the Fit Hall of Fame is going to the man who’s making it all happen: Sylvester Stallone. From his first truly notable appearance on-screen as Rocky Balboa (a film that saw him nominated for two Oscars), Stallone carved a name for himself through chiseled abs and athletic performances. How many people in the word can claim to have been in such shape that a statue was carved of them and prominently displayed for decades?

It’s not a done deal yet. The ball has begun rolling on a sequel to The Expendables, and the box office will determine whether it continues its path or stops dead in its tracks. This isn’t exactly a surprise, and neither is the idea that producer Avi Lerner would be eying even more muscle-bound, walking versions of nostalgia. Imagine all the posters you’ve seen for the grand return to action and add Van Damme, Norris, and Pee Wee Herman to it (I imagine the sequel’s plot will revolve around a stolen bicycle). It’s good to know that all the steroids in baseball made it to the box office. [Cinema Blend]

No doubt you’ve read about it if you haven’t seen it. The Other Guys, the latest collaboration between masters of the sophomoric Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, concludes with an animated chart-and-graph sequence over its end credits detailing the inner workings of Ponzi schemes, the exponential disparity between the wages of corporate CEOs and their average worker, and the rather comical eventual release date of currently imprisoned white-collar criminal Bernie Madoff. It seems startling at first, for one of the most hilariously dumb comedies of the summer (I certainly don’t mean this as an insult, as true silliness is hard to come by and McKay/Ferrell routinely pull it off masterfully) to conclude with something of a visual lecture. It’s confounding for a film that asks the bare minimum of its viewer to conclude with what seems to be a message built from populist outrage, a message for which there seemed, on the surface, little if any buildup toward. The best course of action – for most critics, anyway – has been to read and enjoy The Other Guys wholly separate from its end credits (films, after all, are often misread as ending before their credits; we’re conditioned not to any pay attention to them). I find this reading of The Other Guys too selective, and its end credits – as didactic and ill-placed as they may seem at first to be – paint a rather different film in hindsight to the one we think we have been seeing.

I’m apt to employ the term temple when describing Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse. It is a place of holy reverence for cinema of all genres and visible levels of technical proficiency. The people who own and operate this glorious shrine to film are tried-and-true movie geeks and they know how to put together events that allow for communal worship and celebration of our passion. Last year they unleashed an event that, by its close, had graduated to force of nature: Cinemapocalypse. The premise was that Quentin Tarantino wanted to premier Inglourious Basterds in Austin and the epic epicness of that film called for something a bit more grandiose than a simple screening. So along with Basterds, QT brought two other films; personal favorites of his that inspired the main attraction. Veteran character actor, and all-around badass Robert Forster then introduced a film of his own and the evening concluded with two more films; six in total. The event ran all through the night and well into the next day. The first Cinemapocalypse was so loaded to the gills with pure awesome that its aforementioned awesomeness could not be contained within or quelled by just one event. It was a cinch that a second Cinemapocalypse would follow, but the anchor film would have to be something unbelievably amazing to match the power of Nazi killing and Hitler exploding. Luckily, Sylvester Stallone reached into his most manly of chests, ripped out a bloody rib, and gave birth to the ensemble of testosterone that [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

In the best piece of film marketing of the year so far, The Expendables have decided to pull out all the pretense. In its place, they’ve aimed a .50 caliber M2 at your testicles and lightly squeezed the trigger. Obviously, this advertisement is only aimed at the movie-goers of the male persuasion. There’s no need for fluffy words to get in the way here. You just have to watch the damned trailer for yourself.

Lionsgate has released a new 60-second trailer for Sly Stallone’s The Expendables. And despite its brief runtime, it may be the best trailer they’ve released for the name-heavy actioner yet. It accurately captures the promised tone of the film, one filled with bullets and bravado. A mountain of machismo. Oh, and they’ve improved their choice of music a bit — I can’t stand that metal song they used in the first full trailer.

Strap yourself in and call your hot babe navigator because we’re hitting the road with the Blu-ray release of the cult classic Death Race 2000.

As many a writer for Ain’t It Cool News likes to point out, Sylvester Stallone likes to call them on weekends and remind them that The Expendables is “crazy hard-R.” But while that may be true for the moment, we’re getting some interesting news this week that indicates potential studio pressure to take the Stallone, Statham, Li, and everyone else with a reputation actioner down a notch for a PG-13 rating.

Sorry. No. It’s not an On Demand channel featuring all of John McClane’s greatest hits and quips from over the years. That would, indeed, be a thing of beauty. I personally would have the terrorist getting sliced in half by a tow cable near the end of Die Hard With a Vengeance on loop. No, Die Hard 24/7 is the rumored title for the new film, the fifth installment in a franchise that began with what some believe to be the greatest action film of all time.

You’re looking forward to The Expendables, I’m looking forward to The Expendables, we’re all looking forward to The Expendables. Why? Because based on our most recent reader demographic survey, more than half of the people reading this are males.

Over the weekend, FSR reader Josh L. dropped me a link to what he called “a very cool animated mashup” that paired the upcoming action barrage The Expendables with some of the most beloved animated characters of the modern era.