The 2016 Annie's

Time again for the golden phallic symbols.

Best Movie of 2016:
The Witch

I are Devil Bunneh.

The Crucible + The Exorcist x the seven deadly sins = An animated woodcut of colonial New England, where the woods were dark and deep, The Devil is real and baby fat smeared along a broom handle enables a witch to fly by the light of the full moon. Interestingly, a similar scene was cut from the 1982 film E.T. The Extraterrestrial in which E.T. kills Gertie and smears her body fat all over Elliott's bicycle, thus enabling them to take their Halloween full moon flight through the woods. I totally just made that shit up. Also, the human performances in this movie are totally sideswiped by the animal actors. Namely, Black Phillip, aka Charlie the billy goat, and a severely creepy bunny rabbit.Wow, I say "totally" a lot.

Also Best Movie of 2016:
Neon Demon

A pretty straightforward, thinly plotted Cinderella story of a teenage girl with a mysterious past who breaks into the modeling business and becomes instantly famous due to her super amazing virginally pure and pristine beauty. Except there's also necrophilia and mountain lions and a rapey Keanu Reeves and so much blood, smeared the fuck all over everything and spewing from orifices and filling bath tubs and running down the nubile, nakedy nude with no clothes on girls in a blood shower. It's a two hour long nail polish commercial, lit by hot white lights, slick with jewel colored clothing, wet with pink pussy lipstick and smolderingly sickening, as the real plot festers just beneath the ivory bisque foundations of our flawlessly gorgeous cast like maggots squirming just beneath the skin of a corpse beginning to bloat and stink.

The Please-Stop-Making-These-Fucking-Movies Award:
The Conjuring 2

This is an In-Name-Only sequel as it has absolutely nothing at all to do with the film The Conjuring, except that it stars the two paranormal investigators from that film - Vera Farmiga as psychic mom with a penchant for Elizabethan lace collars Lorraine Warren, and that guy whose name I can never remember who was in Hard Candy and Watchmen before he inexplicably accepted the offer to play now-deceased bullshit artist Ed Warren. Another haunted house, another tormented tot, a dead demon nun who looks like Marilyn Manson and a lot of cheap jump scares that can be seen coming a month in advance. But hey, it takes place in London this time, not Rhode Island, so it's totally new and different, see?

Best & Only Movie About A Killer Shark of 2016:
The Shallows

Not gonna lie, I enjoyed this splashy summer flick starring Blake Everett as a hesitant medical student who is knocked off her path through life by the untimely death of her mother. So she takes a break from doctor school to go surfing in Mexico, at a small, secret beach where her mother once surfed. It is at this point that the real stars of the film are introduced: Blake's bikini-clad butt, a seagull named Steven and the humungous, rotting corpse of a whale which has attracted an almost-as-humungous man-eating shark, which proceeds to trap Blake and her Booty on a buoy. Spoiler: Steven Seagull lives to the end. And there was much rejoicing.

Best Movie of 2016 That I Didn't See, but My Friend Erik Loved It:
Green Room

I know I know, I really need to watch this movie. Hey man, it's been a busy year. But I've heard nothing but good things about it, so I'm sure it's every bit as hardcore, brutally awesome as everyone tells me it is. It is also one of the last performances by Anton Yelchin who tragically died in a freak car accident just a few months after the films release.



The Biggest "Meh" Award:
10 Cloverfield Lane
I was very, very, very, very bored watching this flick. So bored that I basically 2xed my way through it just to see what happened at the end. Which was mostly nothing. Shame really, because I like Mary Elizabeth Winstead, I love John Goodman and I own the original Cloverfield. I wanted to like it. I respected it for being made in secret and all that, and it was by no means a bad movie. I was just underwhelmed.



A Movie of 2016 That Was Filmed in the City I Live(d) In:
The Purge: Election Year

I haven't seen this one either. I saw the first Purge and liked it. I never got around to the sequel. And one day, while visiting a friend of mine in Providence, who had just moved into an apartment on a small side street near campus, I found a flyer crammed in her door frame announcing that filming would begin in the early morning hours of whatever the hell day it was, and that fake weapons and simulated gunfire would be present, so don't be alarmed - it's just a movie. It rained something fierce that day, and I remember seeing the trailer, recognizing the street and seeing the downpour captured on film. But I haven't seen the film itself yet. The flyer itself was entertaining enough, really. 


Best Movie of 2016 That I Haven't Seen Yet, but Will See Because Mads Mikkelsen & Diego Luna Are In It:
Star Wars: Rogue One

Not a scene from Star Wars: Rogue One.

I couldn't possibly give a shit less about Star Wars anymore these days. Look, I was there in 1977. I saw the originals, without CGI, each two years apart, uphill, both ways, barefoot, in five feet of Tauntaun shit. But I will watch Rogue One, because I am shallow AF and will watch anything with Mads Mikkelsen and his razor blade lips and his sleepy lizard eyes in it. Also, Diego Luna, who I first spotted in Elysium, a totally silly retelling of Jesus Christ as played by Matt Damon in futuristic, poverty stricken warzone L.A. but who cares, Luna looked totally hot in his ponytail and gun holster draped over his muscly biceps, all sweaty and bloody, yum.

Best Movie of 2016 That I Haven't Seen Yet, but Will See Because Jeremy Renner Is In It:
The Arrival

Not a scene from from The Arrival.

Something about aliens, tentacles, spaceships, linguistics, the meaning of life, the circle of time, sounds kind of like Contact by way of Lovecraft and without John Hurt to make it amusing... oh, and Jeremy Renner. I've loved Jeremy Renner since 28 Weeks Later. I sleep with a copy of Hurt Locker under my pillow. I would have fucked him as Jeffrey Dahmer  with his geeky glasses and his slicked 70s shaggy do. My buddy Erik said he was a bag of human tears by the end of this movie. All I had to ask was "Does Renner get naked at all?" I am superficial. Sue me.



Stupidest Piece of Shit I Can't Believe I Sat Through:
Lights Out

"Have you seen my pants?"

I sat down and watched this film in its entirety one day because I was bored and obviously hate myself. I fucking hate James Wan. He's not a filmmaker - he's a rapist of the horror genre. He took a perfectly good and particularly effective short film (also entitled Lights Out) and stretched it out into a 90 minute conveyor belt of cliche, whose plot I don't remember and whose characters I didn't give a shit about. Sadly, I do remember enough of it that I know it is not, in fact, based on the song of the same name by Peter Wolf about two people dancing in the dark to the radio of love.

Best Use of an Ordinary Household Appliance as a Weapon
Don't Breathe - The Turkey Baster

I'm not entirely sure that filling a 40 gallon turkey baster with refrigerated sperm would actually impregnate a woman. I'm also not sure I want to know how often the bad guy in this movie masturbates in order to have so much fucking sperm on hand. I mean, we're talking a BOGO sale of spunk here, generous quart sized containers, Ben & Jerry's Cum As You Are. I'm also also not sure why - after having the crotch of her leggings slit open in order to provide a pathway for the turkey baster to travel, that we don't see Jane Levy's beef curtains flapping in the breeze a few scenes later when she sticks her ass right in the camera and - ta da! - no slit! Are we supposed to believe that Jane had a mini sewing kit on her person and took a few seconds in between Rottweiler attacks to sew up her split seam?

Glen Was 60 Feet Tall!

It's a wet, gray Saturday afternoon here in New England, and ...yeah, I'm watching MST3k reruns because I have nothing better to do.

Episode #319, War of the Colossal Beast the 1959 sequel to the 1958 wet fart entitled The Amazing Colossal Man.

This film has a few flaws.

New Joyce-y - So, Glenn suddenly has a sister. Even though his fiance Carol quite clearly stated in the first film that Glenn had no family and was all alone in the world except for her. This means either one of two things. Either Carol was a manipulative, abusive gaslighter who went to great lengths to cut Glenn off from his friends and family in an attempt to control and isolate him and make him completely dependent upon her. Or, his sister Joyce - a shrill, demanding, naggy bitch whose every line of dialog ends with a question mark regardless of whether or not the sentence preceding it was, indeed, a question - was abandoned as a shrill, demanding, naggy child by her exasperated family who couldn't stand the mercilessly eternal bandsaw-through-chalk griping for another moment.

Worst. Up-skirt shot. Ever.

The Peculiar Pristine Pampers - Glenn has been missing for...uh, well, long enough for his severe facial scars to have healed up and scabbed over. When last we saw him, he was plunging to his death down into Boulder Dam, sporting a pair of clumsy diapers, wrapped around his colossal whang and beastly buttcrack like a testicular turban. Now surely, the diapers should have been loosened by the rushing waters, if not washed away with the tide out to sea, there to strangle several thousand seagulls, couple of schools of dolphin and finally wind up lodged in the esophagus of a sperm whale. But nope, Glenn shows up with half a face and a brand new pair of sparkling white mummy undies. Are we supposed to believe that this is the same pair, somehow magically kept laundered, bleached and ironed? Or has the brain damaged Glenn (whose entire vocabulary consists of the words "URRRRNNNNGGGGG" and its many variants) somehow managed to find an inexhaustible supply of white linen with which to wrap his man parts? Wouldn't he just be wandering around Mexico with his pilar de la carne flapping in the wind?

Arthur & Lori - Who the fuck are these kids? I mean, it's bad enough that Bert I. Gordon never knew when to end a fucking shot, dragging out such riveting, dialog-less scenes of people dialing phones, starting cars and/or toying with Erlenmeyer flasks for a full minute. Worse still that he wrote exposition the way some lonely, terminally single, middle aged man with a preference for khakis and an abundance of body oil writes instruction manuals for toasters. But for damn near full on five fucking minutes, at the climax of the film, just as the promised War of the title is about to begin, Bertie decides to aim the camera at Arthur - a scrawny shrimp of a kid who will undoubtedly grow up to be a lonely, terminally single, middle aged man with a preference for khakis and an abundance of body oil writing instruction manuals for toasters - tries desperately to impress the 6th grade version of Gina Lollabrigida, ignoring the calls of their frantic spinster teacher to return to the bus immediately, it's time for a field trip to the steak and martini ranch! Perhaps sensing the tedium of teenage hormones, Bert intercuts this scene with even more annoying scenes, featuring Lori's Xanax addicted mother providing Stepford Wife exposition in a tone of voice that speaks of the recently lobotomized. Are these the producers kids? Who gives a fuck about these people? If this was an attempt to build up sympathy for the soon-to-be-endangered kids, it failed horribly. I was personally hoping that Glenn would crumple up the bus like a fucking harmonica and use it to clean his toenails.

ThE aMiTyViLle bOrER

I don't know why I click these stupid things on Facebook. Scrolling through my feed, hoping for something - anything - that doesn't involve football or politics. Hey man, I'm only human. I cannot be expected to resist the temptation of clicking on headlines like 21 Restaurant Employees Reveal The Most Horrific Customer They've Ever Had To Serve and/or 15 Inmates Reveal Shocking Aspects Of What It's Really Like To Be Locked Up, and/or 17 Radical Islamic Grizzly Bears Recount How They Plotted the Bowling Green Massacre.


So yeah, being a lifelong, diehard horror fan, of course I'm gonna click on a title blaring: The Truth of What Actually Happened at Amityville! Oh boy! 23 Things I Already Knew But Fuck It, I'm Bored! So I clicked. And started reading. And who the fuck wrote this shit? And how drunk was he when he wrote this? And please tell me he didn't get paid for it. And why am I still reading this? And he's an editor, are you fucking kidding me? And a published author? You know, my faith in the human race has been on a serious and rapid decline since a talking rutabaga got his dumb ass inaugurated, and it improved not a single iota after getting halfway through this roll of used toilet paper passing itself off as journalism. This is shit writing. Shittily researched, shitfuckingly stupid, shitclown grammar, fuckshittingly glaring errors... this is unacceptable.

So, Jacob Shelton, here - I fixed it for you.
You're welcome.

 Yeah, you're absolutely right, Jake. 

Flies shouldn't be in New Jersey in the winter. 

Especially when Amityville is in New York.

 Again, it's New York.

And his name was George, not Paul. Or John, or Ringo.

And "why would anyone have a room like this?" Like what? You mean a basement? Maybe because this is New England and basements are pretty standard issue here?

Uh, I think you meant "The Lutz's" not "The DeFeo's. Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey.

Take your own advice, Jakey.

Oh good for you, you finally, correctly remembered in which state Amityville is located!
Stop saying "Natch." It's just really fucking annoying.

Actually, just stop writing until you enroll in a remedial grammar course and graduate with honors. Because dude, you cannot write. Your sentences run on longer than Usain Bolt with a bottle rocket up his ass. I'd accuse Punctuation of abandoning you, but I somehow doubt you two have ever even met. Your writing is clunky: seriously, I tripped over enough holes in your narrative to fill the fucking Albert Hall twice. Your writing is so clumsy, it desperately needs Life Alert. Your tenses are drunk and should go home. You writing is like a giant tortoise wearing concrete tap shoes, dancing atop a typewriter. I could write a better article with my ass duct taped to my face and all of my fingers chewed off by ferrets. I don't even know what the fuck that means. But your article is an insult to actual journalists. Shit, I'm not even an actual journalist. But I know shit writing when I read it.

And you write shit.