Author: Puppy

Semper Puppy

It’s Not Goth Til The Fat Lady Wears Black

That was a joke.  Again, I’m not making fun of overweight people.  I mean, I’m overweight and ugly.
ANYWAYS…

“The Appeal of Graveyards – A Study of Gothic Subculture”
Direct quote from a goth subculture website-
“It is a convenient place, when warm enough outside, to go talk, drink, socialize, party, make out, and so forth.“

Party and make out in a graveyard?  Really?  Do you dance on the tombstones like Trash from ‘Return’ or do you just drop your empty absinthe containers on the topsoil?

Show a little respect for the dead, huh?

“Fcken goths…” – Adapted from R. DeNiro

-Puppy >.< Yip!

Hobo With A Shotgun (2011)

This is a rarity.

As completely, amazingly, and unwaveringly awful and tasteless movies go, this is a complete…success?  It keeps on suckin’ right to the end.

Most of these type of movies actually make the mistake of trying to slip in a random bit of intelligence or sentimentality or sense or character development or humor at at least one point in the film…but this resists all those urges throughout.

As Joel Hodgson said of ‘Manos: The Hands of Fate’ this movie was “filmed on location in a vacant lot.”

Suggestion for sequel: ‘Hobo With A Shotgun 2: Double-Barrelled’

Inspirational Job: Lawn-mowing

Grade: I can’t grade this…it’s a complete success at being a stinking pile of cr@p.  Make up your own grade based on your taste for stinking piles of cr@p.

Same-Day Edit: Must…give…grade…so I’ll give this the same grade I’d give a completely successful attempt at making a garbage movie.  ‘Manos: The Hands of Fate’, for example, or ‘Fight Club’.
Grade: C

The Butcher (2005)

You know how, sometimes, just a few minutes into a movie you’ll know it’s going to be good?

And how, some other times, you really can’t tell for a while?

And then, some other times, you get 30 seconds in and realize that to sit through the pathetic sh1t-for-brains attempt at filmmaking it surely is would be not only a waste of your time but an insult to your intelligence?

Grade: F-

Nirvana: Nevermind (2005)

It’s a must-see for Nirvana fans…if you’re not a Nirvana fan, don’t bother.  I am.

Some of the commentary is redundant/irrelevant/boring.  And Courtney Love’s name in the credits is a lowlight.

But Butch Vig’s commentary about the making, actually showing/explaining how different tracks were made/mixed makes it worth watching.  And by definition the soundtrack is good.

Inspirational Quote:  “I don’t think it was cynical, and you know the media had it all like “cynical grungy despair uhhh” but it wasn’t, it was like a shot of life.”

Grade: A-

8/3/12: Sure, it’s worth watching.  But it’s flawed enough that you could get by without.  Grade: B

1/17/13: See ‘Pupdate: Documentary Grade Edits’.  Grade: B-

Donnie Darko (2001)

I find it kinda funny.

I find it kinda sad.

I find it kinda moving.

I find it kinda weird.

I find it kinda dull and pretentious when it goes for social commentary.

I find it kinda laughable that it is actually seriously analyzed by the cult surrounding it.

Grade: B

2/12/16:

Here’s why Donnie Darko’s “explanation” sucks:

It takes a great idea, great emotion; gut-wrenching perhaps for some…and throws it away on some nonsense time-sh1t cr@p.

How about the simple (and believable, and metaphysical, and EMOTIONAL) explanation of Darko’s visions as this: In the moment right before the “end” (in the beginning) he is asleep. In that moment, right before the event, he experiences a dream that lasts a moment but seems to last a month, everything finally coalescing – just as soon, time-wise, as it started – right before he wakes up and realizes it was a dream. And in that moment, EVERYTHING happens and comes together, and EVERYONE is faintly touched by the sheer power of the dream and emotion within, so powerful that it intrudes slightly into reality in a way people can’t quite explain. And they never will…THAT, is tragically beautiful.

If you’re going for emotion and mystical and metaphysical and…pick 20 more adjectives that apply…and this movie ABSOLUTELY is…it makes a HELL of a lot more sense to make the MEANING, the EXPLANATION be of the same nature as the actual movie. Or, to quote a wise man on the “explanation”: “What a load of cr@p!”

Thank God for subjectivity.

Nevertheless, because of the emotional (and despite the sh1t plot) potential, I feel I should add this:

Quote on ‘Donnie Darko’: (This applies to ‘Lo’. It could certainly apply to this as well.)

“it could take you to a deeply emotional place lying dormant in your soul.”

Grade: B+

I love Denzel

Eli: It doesn’t have to make sense.  It’s faith, it’s faith.  It’s the flower of light in the field of darkness that’s giving me the strength to carry on.  You understand?
Solara: Is that from your book?
Eli: No, it’s, uh, Johnny Cash, ‘Live at Folsom Prison’.

– The Book Of Eli

Puppy (2005)

Come on, I HAD to watch it…

If I were to take a Psychology 101 swing at it, I’d say the director has a LOT of issues with rejection and women in general.  Or maybe he’s just weird.  Cuz this is.  It’s also amateurish.

But despite all this, there’s a certain sly intelligence running just under the surface as well as enough of a level of interest and the unexpected to allow me to have a guest review, courtesy of Spock-

“Fascinating…”

Grade: B-

5/3/14: Portions are fascinating.  Others, not so much.  Grade: C+

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

It was a lot more disturbing the first time I saw it.  That was maybe 20 years ago.

Is that because it’s dated, because it takes a lot more to make a disturbing movie nowadays since things have gone more and more to sh1t in the world, or because I was just a kid then?

Probably a little of 2 and 3.  It’s not really dated…

It’s just really sad that 2 is applicable.

It’s certainly bleak and since it’s based off an autobiography I won’t question the “reality” of it.  But it won’t convert anyone from either side to the other, and it has absolutely no light moments.

As Dillon’s character might have said of it, it’s a real bummer.

Grade: B-

Creepshow 2 (1987)

‘George A. Romero’s ‘Stephen King’s Even Worse Leftovers”

Notable only as a then-rare source for a horny, virginal 13-year-old boy to see a bare breast, even if it did belong to a woman named Jeremy and only briefly before she was consumed.  In my day, we didn’t have the “internet”…we had to watch sh1t movies like this and hope for a boob shot.  Get over it, I was 13.  Upped a notch for nostalgia.

Grade: D-

Creepshow (1982)

Cheezeshow.

Or, ‘George A. Romero’s ‘Stephen King’s Leftovers”

Only “They’re Creeping Up On You!” is creepy.

Grade: D-

12/5/12: It’s not good, but I admit I do enjoy parts in a cheezy, nostalgic sort of way.  Grade: D

9/13/23: Upon further review, ‘Creepshow 2’ still sucks, but I havta admit I kinda enjoy ‘The Crate’ as well as ‘They’re Creeping Up On You!’. Nice Carpenter references. And very “creepy”. And the last one (‘Creeping’) is even creepier. Skip the rest. Grade: C-

Counterpoint

While I admittedly can’t provide any empirical “evidence” as to the existence or non-existence of God, as an Agnostic (yes, I know the difference between Atheist and Agnostic) and a fervent Anti-Anti-Theist, here is some conclusive and indisputable evidence of the existence of ill effects of mandated Atheism…

“Hundreds of thousands of the new people, and later the depositees, were taken out in shackles to dig their own mass graves.
Then the Khmer Rouge soldiers beat them to death with iron bars
and hoes, or buried them alive. A Khmer Rouge extermination prison directive ordered, “Bullets are not to be wasted.” These mass
graves are often referred to as “The Killing Fields”…
The Khmer Rouge also classified people by religion and ethnic
group. They banned all religion and dispersed minority groups,
forbidding them to speak their languages or to practice their customs. They especially targeted Buddhist monks, Muslims, Christians, Western-educated intellectuals, educated people in general, people who had contact with Western countries or with Vietnam, disabled people…

Confessions forced at S-21 were extracted from prisoners through
such methods as raising prisoners by their arms tied behind and
dislocating shoulders, removing toenails with pliers, suffocating a prisoner repeatedly and skinning a person while alive.” – Wikipedia
on Pol Pot, Atheist.

“Mussolini was an admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Denis Mack Smith, “In Nietzsche he found justification for his crusade against the Christian virtues of humility, resignation, charity, and goodness.” He valued Nietzsche’s concept of the superman, “The supreme egoist who defied both God and the masses, who despised egalitarianism and democracy, who believed in the weakest going to the wall and pushing them if they did not go fast enough.”
He believed that socialists who were Christian or who accepted religious marriage should be expelled from the party. He denounced the Catholic Church for “its authoritarianism and refusal to allow freedom of thought…”” – Wikipedia on Benito Mussolini, Atheist.

I find the comments about “freedom of thought” particularly ironic given Mussolini’s fascist ideology.

“Although raised in the Georgian Orthodox faith, Stalin was an atheist. Stalin followed the position adopted by Lenin that religion was an opiate that needed to be removed in order to construct the ideal communist society. His government promoted
atheism through special atheistic education in schools, anti-religious propaganda, the antireligious work of public institutions…
discriminatory laws, and a terror campaign against religious
believers. By the late 1930s it had become dangerous to be publicly associated with religion. Stalin’s role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction as a public institution: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges of 1937–1938” – Wikipedia on Joseph Stalin, Atheist.

Dark Shadows (2012)

The last third is an exercise in cliche and waiting for the credits to roll.

Until then, Depp/Burton/Elfman create the marvelously beautiful, dark, and surreal vision that is every “goth” auteur’s ultimate and most fervent desire/dream, and then proceed to slam it into the ground.  Repeatedly.

In short, it’s goth without pretension.  Bravo.

Grade: B+

7/7/13: The last third, especially the “fight scene”, is too dull and/or stupid.  Grade: B

Three O’Clock High (1987)

Dark comedy that just happens to take place during a high school day.

Casey Siemaszko is brilliant, especially during the teacher-seduction sequence that is a variant on every hetero high school boy’s dream at one point or another. How do I know that? Experience.

I wonder if ‘The Mummy’ stole the library sequence?

Ending: Yes! Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry! (He’s a pugilist).

Inspirational Quote: “Now that’s what I call a book report!”

Grade: B+

Demon Knight (1995)

Billy Zane makes a great demon here.

He’s suave, sophisticated, intelligent, cunning, physically attractive, a brilliant liar, and he preys on people’s deepest pains and weaknesses as if they were objects to be manipulated as easily as possible and then discarded when they ceased being useful.

Why does that sound familiar?

Zane is great here, and Jada Pinkett (later -Smith) is the second-best character, IMPO.

It could use more depth to the flashbacks (you know, more than two time periods in 2000 years), but otherwise this is a good supernatural horror flick.  Meaning, it has humor and intelligence with the gore.

Inspirational Quote: “I lied.”

Grade: B-

Sphere (1998)

This movie’s pretty deep…must be, oh I don’t know, 20,000 leagues deep.

Grade: D+

5/3/14: The reason I usually give one-liners as reviews is because I don’t particularly care for the movie, even if I am forced to admit it’s of a decent grade.  But this isn’t of a decent grade…it’s just boring, for the most part.  Grade: D

The A List – Movies/Long Subject

Airplane!
Aliens
American Beauty
American History X
Babe
A Beautiful Mind
The Book Of Eli
Braveheart
The Cabin In The Woods
Carlito’s Way
A Civil Action
Clear And Present Danger
A Clockwork Orange
The Crow
Dances With Wolves
Falling Down
The Fugitive
Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai
Glory
Goodfellas
Joker
Let Me In
Lethal Weapon
Men In Black
Minority Report
Monty Python And The Holy Grail
Nineteen Eighty-Four
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Platoon
The Princess Bride
Pulp Fiction
Raiders Of The Lost Ark
R.E.M. – Parallel
RoboCop
Rowan Atkinson Live!
Saturday Night Live: The Best Of Commercial Parodies
Saving Private Ryan
Schindler’s List
Seven
Shadow Of The Vampire
The Shawshank Redemption
The Shining
Shrek
The Silence Of The Lambs
A Simple Plan
The Sixth Sense
Sling Blade
Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan
Swimming With Sharks
This Is Spinal Tap
Three Kings
Traffic
28 Days Later
Unforgiven
Witness

Last Updated: 7/20/24

Masters Of Horror: Imprint (2006)

A “serious” attempt at ‘How To Get Ahead In Advertising’??!!

“It’s dull. Dull, dull, My God it’s dull, it’s so desperately dull and tedious and stuffy and boring and des-per-ate-ly DULL.” – Michael Palin

Oh, and pointless gore.

Why would anyone make this film?  Because the world is sprinkled with closet sadists.  Dull ones.

Talk to the hand…

HAIKIBA!

Grade: F-

Excerpts from FB’s “Anti-Theists. Pro Active Atheists. Opposing Religion.”

“If you’re religious you’re probably a mentally ill supporter of child rape”

“God is a monster”

“Catholicism: The belief that homosexual intercourse is disgusting and immoral once the child has turned 16.”

I’m assuming they’re saying all Catholics are Homophobic Homosexual Child Rapists.

Pictures insinuating all Priests are pedophiles and all umm…Rabbis or Muslims (I’m not good at picking up stereotypical racist drawings) are also pedophiles.

Israel spelled with a Swaztika, I’m assuming they’re saying Israel = Nazi Germany.

Liked “Weed-Smoking Atheists”…isn’t that illegal?

“Drugs are not good…some are superb”…isn’t that illegal?

Liked “Neil DeGrasse Tyson” and “Bill Maher”…

“I’m saying that doubt is the only appropriate response for human beings.” – Bill Maher

“…Doubt brings into question some notion of a perceived “reality”,
and may involve delaying or rejecting relevant action out of
concerns for mistakes or faults or appropriateness. Some
definitions of doubt emphasize the state in which the mind remains suspended between two contradictory propositions and unable to
assent to either of them…” – Wikipedia

“We don’t know what’s driving 96 percent of the Universe.” – Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Oh yeah, the vast human intellect can explain everything.

Exchange of the Day

Gee, the lack of humility before nature that’s being displayed here, uh… staggers me.

Well thank you, Dr. Malcolm, but I think things are a little bit different than you and I had feared…

Yeah, I know. They’re a lot worse.

Now, wait a second, we haven’t even seen the park…

No, Donald, let him talk. There’s no reason… I want to hear every viewpoint, I really do.

Don’t you see the danger, John, inherent in what you’re doing here?
Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet’s ever seen,
but you wield it like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun.

It’s hardly appropriate to start hurling generalizations…

I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power you’re using
here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what
others had done, and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the
knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for
it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something
as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you,
you’ve patented it, and packaged it, you’ve slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now

[pounds table with fists]
you’re selling it.
[pounds table again]
You want to sell it, well…

I don’t think you’re giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody’s ever done before…

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Condors! Condors are on the verge of extinction…

No…

If I was to create a flock of condors on this island, you wouldn’t have anything to say.

No. Hold on. This isn’t some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or, or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.

I simply don’t understand this Luddite attitude, especially from a
scientist! I mean, how can we stand in the light of discovery, and
not act?

What’s so great about discovery? It’s a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.”

– Jurassic Park (the movie…the book is a lot better)

The Thing (1982)

John Carpenter has made exactly three good films in his 40+ year career.  And it’s not like the guy’s Stanley Kubrick, who was a perfectionist and only put out a film when he had made absolutely sure it was completely the vision he wanted it to be.  Carpenter churns out movie after movie, most of which are cheezy and/or mediocre.  So Carpenter’s success ratio is pretty wretched.

This is one of the three…probably the best, too, although that’s more indicative of Carpenter’s body of work than how good this is just taken by itself.  The special effects and “horror” imagery are just as good if not better than when he regurgitates them 13 years later for a similarly flawed but entertaining movie (‘In The Mouth of Madness’), not to mention much more fresh.  But there aren’t really any likeable characters here…there aren’t really any characters at all.  Just a bunch of last names to differentiate man A from man B from man Z.  Which makes it a lot easier to see them being killed one by one…you tend to feel more sympathy for a character when he’s more different from the next one than just “smokes weed” vs. “loves dogs”.

It gets a little hokey near the end…the guesswork is a lot of the fun, and the fewer contestants there are the fewer guesses there are to be made.  But for those who care, here is J.C.’s “best”, preserved from 30 years ago for a whole new generation of horror fans who probably couldn’t care less about it since it’s thought-not-gore based.  At least, somewhat.

Inspirational Ignorance: Sweden = Norway

Grade: B

7/19/12: It’s D@MN good for a movie without characters…D@MN good… Grade: B+

Con Air (1997)

‘The Flying Rock’.

Differences that matter: Not as dumb, not as macho, more accepting of what it is (escapist action).

Also: Nic Cage plays a better hillbilly than special agent (Wow!) and J. Malkovich > S. Connery.

Differences that don’t matter: Setting, “plot”, the usual…

It’s a huge fun pile of steaming meaninglessness and one-liners.

Inspirational Quote: “I despise rapists. For me, you’re somewhere between a cockroach and that white stuff that accumulates at the corner of your mouth when you’re really thirsty.”

Grade: B-

4/1/14: MAN I was feeling generous…BARELY: Grade: C+

2/18/18: I dare you not to either laugh, snort, make that “yeah right…” noise or shake your head in revulsion at the stupidity that occurs in the beginning with the indescribably ridiculously bad and stupid and irrepressibly drab and awful letter exchange sequence.

Guest Re-View: “Hold it, hold it, what the Hell is that sh1t?!” Grade: D-

The Silence Of The Lambs (1991)

To get the actual movie quality review dispensed with, here it is…

The “action” sequences are almost as cheezy as the quasi-60’s “epic” film score.

At all other points, it’s very well-made and it is certainly as disturbing as it is intelligent.  A fictional documentary of perhaps the absolute height of parasitical development – The infestation in human form.

For all the morons that worship serial killers for their “Non-Conformity” to banality, here’s the Sterling example of the problem with that…for every person that conforms to societal norms of limits/regulations of acceptable conduct because they’re too stupid and/or afraid to do otherwise, there’s one (hopefully many more) that does so because they accept the fact that without certain simple, basic generally accepted absolute limits on behavior (e.g. you can’t kill and eat someone for sadistic pleasure as Hannibal Lecter does) the world would be even more fcked up than it already is.

Only Pure Anarchists, Lunatics, and Liars would dispute this.

Hannibal Lecter, and any real-life variation thereon = Tremendous and complete waste of vast human potential reducing said person to the equivalent of any other parasite…a mosquito or tick, for example.  That such a trivial thing can be worshipped is a statement on the desperation of some for an escape from the very same banality they supposedly despise.

Grade: A-

Rush Hour (1998)

Chris Tucker is no Eddie Murphy (circa BHC and BHC2…BHC3 sucked).

Nor is he Will Smith (circa Men In Black)

Jackie Chan is no actor (although he’s entertaining and fun to watch in his sincerity, effort, and self-effacing humor(see the outtakes)…and a great martial artist).

But they work up a simply (by that I mean simple, not purely) charming on-screen relationship, aided by a good script, good supporting cast, and good ideas.

Chris Penn is great as a briefly-appearing convincing criminal, and the bad guy’s main henchman is amazingly soft-spoken, cunning and Rabid as a Wombat.

It’s quite entertaining to watch if you don’t demand Master Thespians.

Are you not entertained??!!

Inspirational Quote: “Wipe yourself off, man…you dead.”

Grade: B+

7/19/12: For cop-buddy films that focus more on comedy than violence, this is right up there.  Grade: A-

4/9/18: A-List pruning. Grade: B

The Fugitive (1993)

One of the best chase films I’ve ever seen.

And it has nothing to do with car chases, explosions, or any other generic action-film sh1t.

It’s about one brilliant mind versus another.

Grade: A

8/17/14: Too many parts aren’t up to the intelligence of the whole: too obvious, too dumb, or too cliche. Overall the movie’s good enough to survive this and it has some great parts, but these moments are noticeable and undeniable. Grade: A-

The Rock (1996)

Oh, the Stupidity!

Lots and lots of loud, martial, “inspirational” music, riveting “action”, tons and tons of sh1t blowing the FCK up(!!), tons of other sh1t smashing into more other sh1t, some of that sh1t then BLOWING UP(!!!), oodles of manly man macho “dialogue”, some of it manly male-bonding, some of it manly-man conflict, 99 44/100 percent pure adrenaline, 100 percent overload of testosterone.

In other words, a typical Simpson/Bruckheimer flick.

I cannot use the word “film”, as “flick” is the appropriate term.

Unlike some of their better efforts, especially ‘Crimson Tide’, this does NOT escape the unbelievably absurd formula-muck most of their films/flicks slog through or sink down into.

‘Crimson Tide’ has less bullsh1t, less “action”, less cr@ppy “dialogue”, some decent characters, and the benefit of two great actors(Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman) and a great supporting cast.

This has Nic Cage and Sean Connery.  Scarcely replacement…and the same goes for the supporting cast.

It has its moments…if you can somehow overlook or cringe/laugh through the character/plot “development”, the scenes with Ed Harris/David Morse/The rest of the “bad” guys (especially briefly with Connery) are interesting.  And when you throw this much sh1t on the screen trying for excitement, you’re bound to generate at least SOME.  Caveat Emptor.

Inspirational Quote: “Patriotism…is the Virtue, of the vicious…according to Oscar Wilde.”

Grade: C

7/14/18: The Great Grade Update. Grade: C-

Why The Bruins Should Trade Tim Thomas

Look at Martin Brodeur.  Four time Vezina winner, one of the greatest goalies ever…but look at him now at age 39.  It’s kind of sad.

Thomas is 38.  He plays an unorthodox style that depends on extreme flexibility, athleticism, and pinpoint reactions.  He’s got a year left, maybe two.  Noone defeats age.

Also, his favorite person to have dinner with is Glenn Beck, if you need a personal reason.

Tuukka Rask is 25 years old.  He’s tested in the NHL, including the playoffs.  His numbers the past two seasons have been comparable to Thomas’.  He’s THIRTEEN years younger.

Am I the only one that isn’t blind here?  Trade Thomas while he has value, get a goalie that is used to being a backup, and put Rask in net next year.  In exchange, we get a forward who can actually score, or an upgrade on our (GAG) third defense pair.  I mean, come on…it’s just common sense.

I’m a big B’s fan…but Thomas is nearly done.  Let’s not go the way of the Celtics and have him fade away like the Big Three while getting NOTHING back for him.

-Puppy >.< Yip!