Film is Pwn

Just a reminder, the greatest movie ever made, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus starring Debbie Gibson and Lorenzo Lamas, is on the SyFy Channel tonight.  While I do recommend watching it, you’ll need the DVD to enjoy Film Is Pwn’s iRiff of the film.  So, yeah, you could watch Mega Shark for free tonight, or you could go down to the local Blockbuster, rent a copy, then go to Rifftrax and buy the hi-larious audio commentary Tom and I have up for sale there.  Or, I guess you could like go out on a Saturday night on a date, help feed the homeless, or some other pointless activity that doesn’t involve cheap computer generated sharks biting the Golden Gate Bridge.  Loser.

Updated 8/30/09: For those who missed it, there’s an encore of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus on next Sunday night on SyFy, September 6th.  Mark your calendars!

In the last few weeks, I’ve watched a lot of really, really bad movies, so it is nice to blog on a movie I greatly enjoy and admire for a change. I am writing about a film based on a novel whose author himself considered his material “unfilmable” when he sold the movie rights.

It’s not just a 1950s Los Angeles crime story being told in 1997, it is a complicated, intricate plot that is almost impossible to follow.  The three lead characters the story follows are cops who are loosely connected and are initially unlikeable for different reasons (one smug, the other overly ambitious, the other prone to bursts of violence).  Two of said lead characters are portrayed by virtual unknowns from Australia (both are playing 100% pure bred American police officers).  The only significant female cast member is playing the cliche hooker with a heart of gold.  There’s enough plot and characters (with 80 speaking parts in the cast) to fill an eight hour mini-series, but the film crams it all into a movie at under two hours and fifteen minutes.  Oh, and did I mention Danny Devito has a major supporting role?

if you take all those various elements and put them together, one would expect an absolute mess.  What you get is, against all the odds, a masterpiece. (more…)

As you may or may not know or care, Film is Pwn on the “Screeners list” at our friends at the Asylum — the studio that brought us and the world such classics as Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus and the TerminatorS — which is the ONLY studio we’ve actually contacted to get on the distribution list.  The problem with getting on too many of these lists is that you’re kind of obligated to review the DVDs when you get them, and I don’t want to be stuck reviewing season Season One of Saved By the Bell: The College Years. 

All year, the Asylum has churned out the kind of movie I love — low-budget, fun/bad Sci-Fi/action stuff.  The Film is Pwn staff eagerly anticipates the arrival of these DVDs, and drop everything at a moments notice to assemble at the Pwn Cave when the DVD comes.  But, as I mentioned in my Odds ‘n Ends blog from a few days ago, the latest Asylum release is an exception.  It’s a unrated, unratable stoner comedy called “Sex-Pot” that boasts being a cross between “Harold & Kumar” and “Half-Baked,” but looks more like the worst movie we’ve ever seen, National Lampoon’s Gold DIggers.   *Shudder*  (more…)

After viewing what is sadly not the final film in Jim Carrey’s career, I felt I could not write a review.  A review has many words while only single words were coming to mind: Dreadful, Nauseating, Unforgivable… but I will give it a shot, but where to start…

Jim Carrey basically gives the same performance he gave in many of his early films making faces and acting zany, but he lacks the energy of those older roles and times seems tired.  I would say the plot is laughable, but neither I nor any of the people in the room were laughing.  Anything that happens seems to happen solely to further the action or to provide an awkward moment for Carrey to act out (Such as the hilarious scene where he receives a blow job from an old woman who is kind enough to remove her dentures – wait, that wasn’t funny – well now we are back to nauseating again…), rather than following any logical progression.  I could be totally off on this because the character development was non existent (luckily the characters were kind enough to announce their feelings and the feelings of other characters fairly regularly.

Then there is Jim Carrey’s love interest played by the beautiful and talented Zooey Deschanel.  Why?  Putting aside the fact that the age difference makes Carrey’s performance seem like creepy uncle, I adore Zooey Deschanel and after seeing this abomination all I could say is why Zoeey, why?  This is not a knock on her acting, she did what she could with what she was given.  All in all, this was what felt like hours and hours of my life I will never get back.  Terrible, just terrible.

Christopher Nolan’s next film looks totally awesome. Too bad it doesn’t come out until 2010:

For the first time in my life, there’s a bad movie in my living room and I’m scared . . .

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So, I’ve been waiting for what seems like forever for District 9 to come out, and I think it was well worth the wait. The premise of the film is that an extremely large space ship comes to earth and hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa. The ship remains there with no contact with anyone on earth for 3 months, when the humans decide to cut their way into the massive ship to see what’s inside. What they find are thousands of 7 foot tall insect-like aliens. These aliens are malnourished and a rescue operation is mounted by the people of South Africa to help them. The aliens are sent to an area called District 9 which over time becomes a militarized slum reminiscent of the slums of India with huge towers of rotten garbage. There, a thriving black market is created for alien weapons (they only work when aliens operate them), and cat food, which is apparently ambrosia to the aliens.  A large corporation called MNU is responsible for the “welfare” of the aliens and decides to evict them from the slums to move them 200 miles away from Johannesburg in what is little more than a concentration camp. (more…)

I entered Lost Treasure with considerably low expectations.  Scratch that.  I entered Lost Treasure without expectations, exceeding what I’d expect from spending 80 minutes staring at my wallpaper.  As I glance around my abode, I realize I have no wallpaper, I have that stuccoish stuff everywhere, which is why I couldn’t put up those cool, Chicago Cubs/Bears fatheads my brother bought me a couple years ago.  But that’s not the point, though I suppose if I said I’d stare at my walls, which are covered in stucco, it would be the same as watching Lost Treasure, which I don’t think was my initial point, which related to my expectations.  Still with me?

Simply put (too late, I know), I only watched Lost Treasure because: 1) it was on TV, 2) it starred Stephen Baldwin and future Desperate Housewife Nicollette Sheridan, 3) and it had a stupid description under Program Info: “Brian’s brother Carl is abducted after they find a map to a legendary treasure on a Caribbean Island.”  Come on, try and tell me you’re not sold already.  There’s the link to buy the movie, so what are you waiting for?
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Just a brief recap of last night’s live Rifftrax show simulcast in theaters nationwide, which I attended at Regal at Crownpoint, Charlotte, NC:

The program for the evening began with the stars (Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett) said a few words about how they were live, and anything could go wrong.  I was hoping the audio difficulty we had in the theater, where the audio lagged about a second behind the video, was a gag, but that wasn’t the case, and it was rather distracting for the first half hour.  Luckily the first event was a heretofore unrifffed short on “Flying Stewardesses,” which featured no speaking parts, just a narrator, so the audio-visual problem didn’t come into play.  It was a great short, plenty of terrific lines, as in when Bill as the pilot, thanked the passengers for keeping the plane “snake free.”
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I’m totally psyched about the Rifftrax live event that will be simulcast in theaters nationwide this Thursday — I’ve already got my tickets. Below is the “official” promo, which is actually pretty lame and devoid of a single riff, but, to make it up to you, past that you’ll find a few “Best of Rifftrax” clips on youtube that should give you a good idea why you ought to find a theater near you:

When the fourth and (pretty please, Hollywood!) LAST sequel to the Fast and the Furious came into theaters earlier this year, I was mildly aware of its existence due to the robust advertising, but indifferent in general.  All the F&F films are mindless, bloated action movies with tough guys, hot chicks, fist fights, and car chases.  At the heart of the movies lies a love story — a love story about filmmakers and glamorous, expensive cars.

I’ll always remember seeing the first Fast and the Furious with Tom Stephens and his brother Steve, who spent the whole film saying things like, “Ooooh!!! Is that a BMW Blah Blah Blah?” “No, that’s a Blah Car Blah Blah!” “You can only get that Blah Blah Car Blah Blah in Norway from a guy named Sven!”  Seeing as how I’m not a car guy, this proved a wee bit tedious.

What was worse is there was nothing else on the screen to draw their attention away from the nigh pornographic, exotic automobile display that would shame the programming director of Cinemax.  I couldn’t change the subject from cars to plot, because there was no plot to speak of.  The story was just an excuse to talk cars, race cars, and massage cars. (more…)

Arnold Schwarzenegger has many skills — lifting weights, reading, lifting weights, traveling through time naked, lifting weights, etc. — but predicting the future is not one of them.  The first time Arnold foretold the future (the Terminator), we saw a robot apocalypse.  Despite a near successful coup of the Clinton administration by Gobots wherein Leader One attempted to “transform” into Leader One of the Free World, this did not come true.  In End of Days, prognosticator Arnold predicted the anti-Christ would rise in 1999.  This is woefully inaccurate, as Pauly Shore is still biding his time before revealing his true nature, so this is strike two.

(In the mid-80s, Arnold’s film the Running Man predicted that in the near future America’s most popular TV show would be a reality show where we watched people get hunted down and killed for our entertainment; I believe that is the basic premise of American Idol, which only goes to show even a blind squirrel can get a nut.)

The 6th Day isn’t just strike three, this is striking out 500 times in a season with 501 at bats (the 501st at bat saw Arnold ground into a double play).  The 6th Day takes place, according to the text at the beginning, “IN THE NEAR FUTURE . . . SOONER THAN YOU THINK.”
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