Split Splat Splut

"So, the girl who uses Splat is gonna review Split?" ---> my mom, upon learning of my intention to write an "as-it-happens" review of the newest M. Night Shyamalalalalawhatever flick, starring that girl from The VVitch and James McAvoy, a man who is either really sexy and fuckable, or who really is not. I can't decide. Also, I recently ruined half the bathroom towels and a good section of tile flooring with my most recent reapplication of Splat's Midnight Rubies. So yeah: Mom: 1, Me, 0.

Ugh. God I hate M. Night Shyamaladingdong. Almost as much as I hate James Wan. James Wan tries too hard. M. Night doesn't try at all. He directs like he's got a severe Nyquil hangover. I've never seen such halfhearted directing. I can almost hear him saying: "Yeah, okay, so, do something for a bit and then maybe, I dunno, mumble for a while. We'll just keep the camera rolling."

Well, I'm just going to go ahead and assume that skirt length = mortality rates. The higher the hemline, the sooner the death.

Is it wrong that I'm hoping that one of James McAvoy's personalities turns out to be Mr. Tumnus?

Do we really need an upskirt shot on Betty there? I mean, she's got nice legs, but it creeps me out to think that the director might have a Gramma fetish.

Okay, so the scene where McAvoy's nine year old personality clumsily kisses our doe-like star and then says "You might be pregnant now" made me laugh. Well, maybe a smirk with an audible exhale. I'll take what I can get.

And the score is currently at Mom: 2, Me, 0 as mom refers to the three kidnap victims as Spluts.

Oh, he's a Kanye fan. That explains everything. 

I'm getting bored. Again. I mean, I'm nowhere near as suicidally bored as I was with Lady In The Water, but fuck, yeah, is something - anything - ever gonna happen?

Okay, mom has been banished from the living room for saying "Well thanks a Splot!" 

These are the calmest kidnap victims I have ever seen. Why is it that all of the characters in every single M. Night film act as though they've just emerged from major surgery and the tranquilizer hasn't had time to wear off yet? Nighty-poo, you've been making films for what, 30 years give or take? Are you ever going to allow your characters to wake up and react the way normal people do?

Nobody reacts this exaggeratedly slowly when when they sense that a violent stranger has just gotten into the car beside them. No girl runs this slowly away from a man who has threatened to kill her. No one ever stops to read a note left on the kitchen table in the house of a serial killer when one has finally escaped their cell. No sane person EVER FOLLOWS THE SLOWLY-BEING-DRAGGED-OFF CORPSE OF THEIR FRIEND AROUND A CORNER IN A DARK ROOM. None of this is scary. All of it is irritating.

I suppose this film would have made more sense if I'd ever bothered to watch Unbreakable. But I'm not curious enough to do so now. And even though I haven't seen it, did anyone else find Bruce Willis' one line cameo at films end just a little "post-credit-sequence-Ash-in-the-Evil-Dead-remake-saying Groovy" too cheesy-esque to be taken seriously? 

Nice to see that her traumatic experience hasn't changed our heroine. At all. Or roused her from the stupor she's been in for the last ten years. Honey, you survived. You're supposed to be all strong and confident now. Anything to say? No? Just gonna stare at us blankly with your glassy eyes until the scene finally cuts away? Okay. I'm just saying, it's a little anticlimactic, considering all you've apparently been through. And I know it's not you, because you had emotional responses aplenty in The VVitch - screaming, laughing, etc. I know you're capable. So tell us...or maybe just show us, on the doll, how M. Night directed you: "Okay Anna, in this scene, I want you to act like you're reading a James Michener novel in a beige room without windows, and you've just had, like, the biggest turkey dinner ever and washed it all down with Dilaudid. Good. Now, hold that for the rest of the film. No matter what happens, don't react in any way. Pretend you're a department store mannequin listening to Kenny G. on an eternal loop. Perfect!"

"Are you as bored as I am?"

Nevertheless, I persist.

“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

I fell in love with Margaret Atwood when I was seventeen years old. I don't remember why I picked up a copy of The Handmaid's Tale - had I heard my friends talking about it? Was it the drawing of a blood red nun on the cover that intrigued me? It's been too long, and I'm not going to lie. I don't remember. Somehow, it ended up in my possession and I read it. And I do remember foolishly thinking: "Well thank god nothing like this could possibly happen now."

(insert cringe here)

After reading that book, I plundered the library for anything and everything with her name on it. I discovered Lady Oracle. Poor, fat little Joan, denied her butterfly wings, fleeing to London, losing her virginity to a Polish count, finding success as an authoress of bodice-rippers, faking her death and sacrificing her long, red hair to a box of mud brown dye. I wanted a lime green car coat with toggles down the front. I wondered what might have happened if Joan had agreed to marry the Italian cook who'd fed her breaded shrimp and promised her lots of babies. Would she have been happier? 

I snatched Cat's Eye off the shelf the second it was published. I already knew Elaine - the weird, slightly socially awkward girl, bullied by a group of elementary school chums who pretended to be her friends. She was me. She was every humiliating moment I'd ever had, walking home from school with my head down, hoping the popular girls would leave me alone for once, wouldn't make fun of me, wouldn't try and get me to fight. I was meat like you like it. Every time I dropped a glass or a dish henceforth, I would think of the term "shatter patterns."

The Robber Bride thrilled me endlessly. I identified strongly with Charis, the Piscean nincompoop who worked in a New Age store selling tapes of whale songs and sparkly geodes. I loved Roz with her tight, tacky clothes in loud colors, and Toni with her too big dress and her ability to speak backwards fluently. And Zenia, the man stealer, the widowmaker, the liar. Most of all, I wanted to have lunch at The Toxique, served by a dandelion haired waitress.

And so I was stoked - stoked, my friends - when I learned that Hulu would be making a brand new miniseries based on that first book I'd encountered: The Handmaid's Tale. But now, instead of being seventeen, I am forty seven. The year is 2017. The world is rapidly becoming an ugly, frightening place, ruled by hatred, steered by fear, fueled by paranoia and greed. I am afraid every day. I have been blackly depressed for three solid months. My ability to hope is shrinking. In this frame of mind, I sat down and watched the first episode.

OB-ject, or ob-JECT?

Oh gorgeousness. Everything is just as I pictured it whilst reading the book. It was beautiful, it was perfection, it was fucking horrifying. The Republic of Gilead, so quaint and well manicured and outwardly serene. Silent sisters walking two by two to select oranges and poultry. The long cotton dresses, the baking of bread and the quilting of fabrics. Had we remained outside of the houses and stores, we might have thought "Oh, how perfect. A simpler time, a return to values, a Kodak moment." 

But we don't. We've already seen our protagonist's husband shot, her daughter taken away by force, herself hauled into a detention center, forced into a red habit with white wimple, viciously reprogrammed by a stern group of stocky prison matrons with cattle prods. They have no names, no property, no rights anymore. They are assigned to men. Their only purpose in life is to bear children sired from a government approved program of ritualistic rape. If they fail to conceive, they are punished. If they speak out against the regime, they are punished. If they are caught having relations with anyone other than their assigned male, they are punished. If they are lesbians, they are punished. 

I had a massive panic attack at 2:30 am after watching the first episode. I woke from a dream about Gilead, sweating, heart racing. I felt like hundreds of rough hands were trying to pull me back down into the dark. "Sleep. Conform. Obey." 

I made it through the second episode relatively unscathed. I could handle this. I'd sat through The Red Wedding, hadn't I? It's just a show, based on just a book. Except it wasn't, and it isn't, and I knew it. 

Episode 3. I made it to the first commercial break. I sat staring at inane ads for cars and products in open-mouthed horror. It wasn't even the impending doom that was troubling me, it was the flashbacks, the events leading up to and how it had all happened so quickly, so easily. 

The scene in the coffee shop, when Moira and June attempt to purchase coffee, only to find that their credit cards have been shut down. The usual female barista is gone. A male barista has taken her place. My stomach began to sink at the first sign of his scorn and contempt for his customers, whom he clearly has no wish to serve. They are inferior, good for nothing but having babies, too uppity and proud in their tight yoga pants, too secure in their careers, too blatantly sexual with sweat running down their necks and into their cleavage. I knew this man. I've met him before. Many times. 

He tells them to get the fuck out. He calls them sluts. Their faces are bemused, their smiles expectant, as if waiting for the punchline. Because this has to be a joke right? Right? But it's not. Their smiles fade. They thought they were safe. They're realizing they're not and never will be again. Their expressions, slowly filling with horror, are also resigned: you know this is not the first time they've been called whores by a complete stranger. But now, he's within his legal rights to do so, without fear of repercussion. They back out of the shop, where only men sit now, and leave, bewildered. What is happening?

Then, June is fired from her job for being female. Every female employee in her building are told to gather up their stuff and leave. And it's not the stunned looks of confusion and growing fear on the faces of the women that horrified me, it was the reaction of her male supervisor: he is terrified. He apologizes. He repeats "I have no choice, I have no choice!" He too has lost his power. It's a terrible feeling: weak and powerless. But we know his will be restored eventually, in some capacity, because he has a penis. He knows the women will never be seen again. He knows this is the beginning of something horrible, and he cannot stop it from happening. He is almost crying. I was shaken down to my toenails. My stomach roiled. 

I haven't yet finished episode 3. I'm too sickened and dismayed and crippled by a multitude of panic attacks. I've had three so far this week, one walloping blow after another. Primarily because of this show. And that's exactly why I'm going to force myself to finish it, see it through to the end. Because I'm awake. I know this can't be ignored. Anyone who doesn't watch this show with a growing sense of disquiet and unease is either in a coma, or still stubbornly insists that Trump was the only good choice for America. The premise of The Handmaid's Tale is no longer farfetched. Actually, it never was. I was a sleeping seventeen year old, but thirty years of being female tends to kick you rudely out of your dreams.

Force yourself to watch it. Whether you're male, female, Republican, liberal, white, black, Jewish, whatever... you're not immune. You are not exempt. You have no right to remain asleep anymore. Wake up, now.

Invisible Nosedive

^ NOT to be Idolized.

Sigh.

Two more months to go until Game of Thrones returns. The Dead Files is on hiatus. I already blew through all of the new episodes of MST3k: The Return. I'm BOOORED. I need a new show to become obsessed with. NOW. A task made especially difficult because I am ridiculously picky. I hate most TV shows with their infantile humor, sugar-coated realities, or worse...reality TV shows that worship ignorance, arrogance and glamorize stupidity. I had no idea what "Cash me ousside, how bow dah?" even meant until I googled it. I wish I hadn't. I didn't need to know that, and I feel dumber for having looked it up. I could have spent that wasted five minutes listening to Kanye West talk about how wonderful he seems to believe he is and felt more entertained.

After eavesdropping on my coworkers conversations, I decided to give Black Mirror a shot. I'd heard them talking about Westworld and wasn't interested because #1 - Westerns, yuck and #2 - Uh, Yul Brynner, hello? I'd listened to them squeal over Orphan Black, Orange is the New Black (what is with the color black lately?) and some other shit that didn't interest me in the least. But Black Mirror sounded try-worthy, reeking of The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. And hey, it was streaming on Netflix so fuck it.

There was only one season available, so I clicked on episode numero uno and waited to be impressed.

Ugh, god. Why don't I like Bryce Dallas Howard? I really don't know. Maybe because Jurassic World made me want to scour out my vagina with Borax and a steel brush and then lobotomize myself? Perhaps because Lady in the Water was about as thrilling as watching grandma fold socks for an hour and a half? I mean, she may be a very nice person in real life, I don't know. But the sight of her perky, eternally beaming face makes me want to squirt her with a bottle of weed killer until she goes away.

Oh well, at least her merciless cuteitude is put to good use here. Brycie is Lacie, a vacuous, terribly insecure and phonyass get-along girl, thrust into a not too distant future where Facebook and Instagram have merged into one universal website where you can rate your friends, your family, strangers on the street, etc. instantly and with disastrous results. Most people cruise along with 3.5 averages, living amiably and quietly, satisfied with their mediocrity. But then there's people like Lacie, who currently enjoys a 4.2 and has gotten a taste of the power it can bring and the doors it can open.

Lacie's world is a pastel perfect dessert shop window, everyone dressed in soft focus spring colors, floating through their Stepford Lives in pleasant, superficial stupors. Everyone seems happy and well-adjusted. Lacie, desperate to rent an apartment in an exclusive housing community where a rating of 4.5 or higher will get you a significant break on your rent, is trying too hard. She shoves her niceness down people's throats, forces her generosity onto anyone unlucky enough to step inside her pink plastic bubble, trying so hard to be perfect that she makes people choke on her artificial sweetness. She's cloying, to say the least.

For some reason, her uploaded photograph of a disfigured doll makes her rating shoot higher and wins her the friendship of some blonde bitch with fake tits who rests on her lofty 4.9 laurels and flashes a diamond engagement ring the size of Andre the Giant's worst hemorrhoid. And oh goody and Lordy Lou, she wants Lacie to be her MAID OF HONOR!!!

Ugh. In the never-to-be-forgotten words of the porn shop clerk in the 1991 British sitcom Bottom - "No thank you sir, I'd rather have a pineapple inserted violently into my rectum." If I never attend another bridal shower/baby shower/bachelorette party in my life, I will shed this mortal coil happier than the most obnoxiously happy asshole ever to be slapped with the happy stick in Happydale.

But anyway, it was about this time I completely lost interest and turned the show off. I knew where it was headed: Lacie will fuck up somehow and lose all her points and learn a lesson about the true meaning of life and blah blah blahdee blah, I don't give a twopenny fuck what happens to any of these meat mannequins. Wait, no, that's a lie - I hope they all die horribly and spend an eternity in a Hell without Wifi, Starbucks or pom key charms.

Back in Ye Olden Days of 1986, the then revamped version of The Twilight Zone aired an episode called "Too See the Invisible Man." It starred a guy who, for some reason, my memory insists was Steve Gutenberg, but wasn't. Not Steve Gutenberg played the part of a typical corporate douchebag tool. The year is 2104 or something, and all human activity is surveilled by drones. Thanks, Obama. Anyway, he gets caught being a giant douche to everyone and is sentenced to a year of invisibility. He has a nickel sized implant inserted in his forehead for all to see, and it's no good trying to disguise that shit with a jaunty cap good chap, because it's got a laser that burns through anything that tries to conceal it, so haha all over THAT smartass fucker. Although I do have to feel sorry for anyone in this futuristic metropolis who has really bad acne and constantly gets shunned by accident until the Oxy can do its job.

At first, Not Steve Gutenberg is pumped. He can walk into a bank and help himself to big handfuls of cash. He can elbow his way to the front of the line at the all you can eat buffet. He can walk down the street, calling everyone an asshole without fear of retaliation. But he also can't call for assistance when he's deliberately hit by a car. No one is allowed to talk to him, or acknowledge his existence in any way, not even other Invisibles. Punishment for acknowledging an Invisible is a year of Invisibility. But by the end of the year, NSG has learned his lesson and becomes so ridiculously compassionate that he gets sentenced to another year of Invisibility for acknowledging a sobbing Invisible woman.

Please eat his face off, please.

Okay yeah, they're far from identical, but close enough for Black Mirror to feel like recycling. I tried the next episode - something about a slovenly, neckbeardy loser who needs money quick and ends up screaming for 40 long, irritating minutes as he imagines giant spiders in a VR haunted house. I got so tired of listening to him scream that I turned that one off too. Friends told me to try the Christmas episode, which I did, and shut off 20 minutes in. Because I just didn't give a shit about any of these people, or the selfish plights that landed them in their current kerfuffle, or their stubborn refusal to accept responsibility for all of the shit things they've done and are still doing. I can see that shit on Jerry Springer. I want a fucking escape, where sociopathic actions have severe consequences.

So far, all of these new shows have lacked one critical element: a conscience. Can we please stop glamorizing sociopaths?

45 Has Arrived

A review of the film The Arrival

by 45

as portrayed by Alec Baldwin

(but not really)

So, after a long day of playing golf in Mar-A-Lago, there's nothing I like better than to plop my fat, khaki clad ass down in a golden velvet recliner in my private movie theater. I get all the best movies, lots of movies, I have them, I get them before anyone else does because I'm president and you're not. Okay so, my son Eric runs the projector because my tiny hands can't navigate the remote, and anyway why should I have to do it when I'm president and you're not?I have a great big tub of buttered popcorn balanced on my ample gut. Man, I love all that butter. It's thick and yellow and runs down over the popcorn and drips onto my hands, it's like a rich, golden shower of deliciousness. I love it so much I actually had my water supply replaced with premium butter so I can have a golden shower every morning.

We had to watch this movie called The Arrival today because I accidentally sat on my copy of Happy Gilmore and broke it. Actually, I think Killary broke it. But I figured "Hey, this movie oughta be good, nobody loves aliens more than me, I love them so much I marry them." But this movie was dumb, it was stupid, it made no sense and Amy Adams walks around in a big puffy suit with no makeup on, clearly she's a 3.5 because Jeremy Renner never once tries to grab her pussy.

These aliens land on Earth and it's way too easy so clearly we need to build a wall around our entire planet to stop these refugees from coming in from the sky. They look like calamari and talk in coffee rings, it makes no sense. This bad black hombre from Chicago just walks into Amy Adams house and starts ordering her around. Clearly he's from Hate Street where everybody is black and he's telling everyone what to do because he has no respect for superior white people. He's obviously the bad guy, I'm sure at some point in the movie he'll rape Amy, loot the alien craft and vote for Obama. Nobody is less racist than me though, so I'll keep watching just to prove me right.

So Amy had a hot daughter at some point, a 10 even when she was 5. But she gets sick and dies because her dumb mom didn't save up her money for her pre-existing condition and it's totally her fault because she can see the future and should have known this was going to happen, but she went out and bought iPhones anyway. Sad.

Actual scene from the movie.

Nobody tries to shoot at the aliens at all. If I had been president in this movie, I would have made the aliens pay for the guns and the bullets to kill them and fed all of the hungry people in the world on the smoking remains of their calamari because I'm the best humanitarian ever. But our military is depleted because this is the future that Liberals want: gay, coffee-ring talking Muslim squids. They're clearly a gay couple, they both have boy names and no visible pussies, just long squirty dick-things. Sad.

Finally some Republican hero gets it right and tries to blow up the immigrants aliens because clearly they want our jobs and to rape our women. That black guy from before tells his people to start looting and burning down the cities. I didn't actually see him do it, but he did, because that's all black people do. Sad. The alien homos back off about 40 paces and then Amy calls some Japanese dude and tells him she voted for Killary and loves sushi, even alien walking sushi from a gay planet, and he decides not to kill them. Nobody asks America what they want so this movie is totally dumb, I'm president and Japan isn't, APOLOGIZE!!!

Then Jeremy Renner - who is totally not a real man because he hasn't groped Amy once or pointed out her obvious 3.5 status - falls in love with Amy though you couldn't even tell because he doesn't even slip her the tongue or offer to shower her with his manly golden fluids. She starts dressing nicer, but she doesn't have much in the way of boobies and it's real hard for a flat chested woman to be hot.

I didn't get all of that time travel stuff because it was hard and I don't like to think, and after my third gallon tub of popcorn I was getting sleepy. There wasn't any sex in this movie, just one blowie-up part with explodey things and no part where I played myself, the president, and beat up all of those terrorist aliens with Ted Nugent and Sean Spicer backing me up. And why did the alien spaceship look like a segment of a Toblerone chocolate covered orange? Man I love those things. Orange is almost as good as gold, it's in the same color spectrum, I've seen orange pee, those Russian prostitutes love their asparagus.

I give this movie a 4, which is still more than Amy Adams.

The One Dark Night of the Autopsy of Jane Doe

~~~spoilers all up in this bitch...

The Autopsy of Jane Doe

2016

A private residence.
A pile of dead bodies.
The aftermath of a murder has been discovered by police. As news crews begin to arrive like vultures drawn to the scent of a particularly ripe slaughterhouse rejection pile festering beneath the summer sun, dumbfounded cops try to piece together what the hell happened, helpfully establishing a plot foundation as they go along.

Officer Roose Bolton wanders about a tidy two story in Suburban Somewhere, VA. You'd think he'd be used to the sight of mass carnage (insert Red Wedding joke here). You'd also think this role should rightly have gone to Larry Cedar, but it didn't. However, the two actors bear enough of an uncanny resemblance that I remained stubbornly distracted in every scene that actor Michael McElhatton appeared in, trying to convince myself that it was Larry Cedar, even though I knew it wasn't. I'm still not 100% convinced, no offense to Michael McElhatton.

Anyway, in the meanwhile, a team of cops/excavators have discovered a fourth body in the cellar. Unlike the murder victims upstairs, this one has no sign of trauma to mar her perfect, porcelain beauty. Nary a single drop of blood has dared to smear her Ivory Pure complexion. This is Olwen Kelly, a slightly buck-toothed, totally beautiful yoga queen who is shortly due to make my best friend Erik's short list of Girls To Fuck Before He Dies.

The corpse of the girl is removed from the crime scene and transported to the closest morgue. 

One Dark Night
1988

A private residence.
A pile of dead bodies.
The aftermath of a murder has been discovered by police. As news crews begin to arrive like buzzards attracted to a particularly ripe dumpster parked behind the KFC, dumbfounded cops try to piece together what the hell happened, helpfully establishing a plot foundation as they go along.

Wait...is that Peter Lorre and Betty White in the upper lefthand there?

Anyway, the corpse of a sinister Russian psychic vampire named Raymar is removed from the scene and transported to the nearest morgue. Batman is informed, but fails to see the imminent danger, despite the fact that he is married to Raymar's daughter, Olivia.

Fast Forward to 2016...

Not Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Emile Hirsh and Not Larry Cedar.

Meet our main protagonsists: mortician Brian Cox, his son and heir to the embalming empire Austin, played by Emile Hirsh who, when last I saw him, was starving to death on a bus in Alaska. Austin doesn't really want to take dad's place as the Mayberry Meat Carver and is planning to blow town with his girlfriend Emma, a girl who could have been Mary Elizabeth Winstead if she'd just tried a bit harder.

Now, Austin hasn't told his dad that he's blowing town, because he won't admit that he feels a little honor bound to stick around and hang with the old man ever since mom died. And when Sheriff Not Larry Cedar shows up with the pretty corpse of the half buried girl, Austin ditches Emma to help dad. Inexplicably, none of the other bodies from the crime scene are delivered to the same morgue, and Dr. Original Hannibal Lecter is only asked to autopsy Jane Doe, hence the title. The procedure begins, with Emma slated to return later that night to rescue Austin from boredom.

Rewind to 1988...

Lavender Ladies: Superbitch, ToothbrushFace and E.G. Daily!

Meet our main protagonists: sweet virgin Julie, her boyfriend Steve and Steve's ex girlfriend Superbitch. Superbitch is also the leader of the coolest clique in Generic High School, The Sisters, a 80s version of The Pink Ladies complete with satin jackets but seriously lacking in the catchy tunes and hickey department. For reasons indecipherable, Julie desperately wants to be a member of The Sisters and agrees to spend a night in the local mausoleum as initiation. 

Superbitch and her best friend Toothbrush Face are planning to slip Julie some potent hallucinogens before dressing up in bedsheets and yelling "BOO!" at her later that night. Their friend E.G. Daily! - whose name must always be followed by an exclamation point because she's supercool and was in Valley Girl and The Devil's Rejects and totally rules and shit - does not approve of the plan and ditches her Sisters. Hijinks ensue, with Steve planning on crashing the party later that night to rescue Julie from Bitchdom.

Jane Doe...

As Cox and his son start cracking bones and peeling skin, they realize that something is horribly wrong with the corpse of the immaculate Jane Doe. She seems to have been the victim of a vicious stabbing, a genital mutilation and a third degree burning, but only inner scarring tells these tales. She's also stuffed like a Cracker Jack box filled with morbid prizes: a tooth wrapped in linen, some jimson weed and a detailed tattoo worn on the inside of her flesh. As the autopsy wears on and the discoveries become more and more disturbing, bizarre phenomena begins to occur: a level 5 Biblical storm is brewing outside. Inside, lights flicker, the radio plays by itself and the corpses currently occupying the other steel drawers in the Slab Lab are not content to lie still any longer. Awakened by some inexplicable psychokinetic force, the bodies start sort of floating about the place, being creepy. Father and son get increasingly freaked out and run around the morgue, hiding in offices and dodging Jane Doe's telekinetic powers.

Raymar...

As Julie settles in for the night, tripping balls in her sleeping bag, Raymar's casket begins to crack and eerie light spills out of his tomb. The other resident corpses occupying the other concrete drawers in the Necropolis are not content to lie still any longer. Awakened by some inexplicable psychokinetic force, the bodies start sort of floating about the place, being creepy. Julie, along with the unwitting Superbitch and Toothbrush Face, get increasingly freaked out and run around the morgue, hiding in bathrooms and dodging Raymar's telekinetic powers.


Emma...

"Oops, my bad."

Emma returns to the morgue as promised and fails to properly announce herself, causing Brian Cox to do his best imitation of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, with Emma in the Scat Crothers role. Mistaken for the floating corpse of Mary Elizabeth Winstead, he kills her with one blow and immediately pretends to be sorry about it because Austin is standing right there and apparently not very happy about the fact that he is single again.


Steve...

Steve is tipped off by E.G. Daily! that Julie is being tormented by Superbitch in the spooky mausoleum and teams up with Batman's wife to rescue her from the army of sluggish floating corpses.

From there on out, it's pretty standard stuff, with Raymar's daughter saving the day with her Avon compact mirror and Steve and Julie leaving the mausoleum together, traumatized and shaken but undoubtedly destined for college, marriage, kids, a dog, a white picket fence and a 20 year mortgage. The original ending suggested that Julie had not been saved in time and ending up absorbing Raymar's powers, giving his Svengali spirit a brand new virginal vessel in which to pilot himself around. One wonders how Raymar would look in a lavender satin jacket, bopping around the mall. But test viewings of this downer ending were negative and it was changed at the last minute, allowing Julie to escape intact, and both Superbitch and Toothbrush Face are buried beneath a squishy mound of rotting bodies who gang-rubbed them to death some 20 minutes earlier.

Autopsied...

Jane Doe, which has a fantastic, riveting build up, sort of peters out in its final moments. It's nowhere near as lame as One Dark Night, but it resolves nothing and leaves itself as wide open as a rib-cracked chest cavity. Cox offers himself to Jane Doe, who turns out to be an unnamed, centuries old witch, to save his son's life. Austin dies anyway and Not Larry Cedar shows up again, still not being Larry Cedar and insisting that the body of the girl be transported to a different county because the paperwork on this case is already a bitch and a half. Total bummer.

I can highly recommend the first hour or so of Jane Doe. It's spooky and puzzling, like Silence of the Lambs meets The VVitch. I just thought the ending could have been stronger, neater, more... resolved, I guess? But it's still definitely one of the better horror films I've seen in a while: well-casted, goodly acted, bigly-scary, smart and stuff. And Brian Cox is in it - Brian Cox in anything makes anything worth a watch.

But still...no Cedar.

"Why am I not Larry Cedar?"

XX

XX. As in the chromosomes, not the parental advisory guide issued by the motion picture association. There's no hardcore porn going on here. Just decaying magic, tucked away in the Victorian attic of the childhood mind: porcelain doll parts, baby teeth and blow flies. And with a nod to both Blood Tea & Red String, and the 1988 Czech film Neco z Alenky, we begin this much talked about and anticipated anthology of four short horror films directed by four women of horror.

 The Box
Based on the short story of the same name by Richard Matheson, which had been previously turned into a feature length film called Button, Button starring Cameron Diaz about a mysterious man with a mysterious box with a mysterious button on it which, when pushed, causes some mysterious stranger to die mysteriously and grants the button pusher a kajillion mysterious dollars.

This version has a mysterious stranger with a mysterious box, but that's where the similarities end. This time out, the box in question is a gaily wrapped gift box clasped in the lap of a disfigured dude in standard issue black trench coat and fedora. A little boy named Danny innocently asks what the box contains and Creepy Man obliges, lifting the lid just far and just long enough to allow Danny a glimpse of what lies within. Whatever it is, the look on Danny's face announces to the audience that childhood is over, raped and dismembered and strewn upon the wasteland like chicken bones.

Danny abruptly stops eating, and suddenly The Box turns into that once scene from A Christmas Story where Randy refuses to eat his Meatloaf Double Beatloaf. Except there's no ensuing game of Show Me How the Piggies Eat to alleviate the possibility of malnutrition.  Danny just stops eating, much to the alarm of his parents. Questions go unanswered. Demands have no effect. A trip to the doctor clears up exactly fuck-all.We never find out what was in the box and it's not supposed to matter, but it does. I need answers.

The Birthday Party

Melanie Lynskey is back, and she's goofy. With genre-twisters like Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners tucked under her voluptuous belt, Melly baby decides that a starring role in a horror version of Weekend At Bernie's is the next logical move. And sure, why not? I mean, it certainly makes The Oregonian seem coherent by comparison. This particular short is a blue steak with a thick vein of black fatty humor running right through the middle of it, except you don't really realize this until after you've chewed and swallowed.

Don't Fall

Pretty standard slasher shortie, sort of an Evil Dead Lite with a camper instead of a cabin and some stick figures smeared on a rock instead of a skin-bound Necronomicon. Apropos of nothing, a demon shows up, possesses everyone and they all die, the end. Oh, and the first girl to get possessy looks a lot like Ellen Sandweiss. The end.



Her Only Living Son
Rosemary's Baby Lite. I mean, the kid's name is even Andy. The end.

My attention dwindled as the shorts played out, hence the increasingly truncated reviews. I wanted to enjoy this a lot more than I did. And I'm not dismissing it as outright awful. It's more like that one Facebook friend you have, who posts pics of their kids every week. The kids look the same, with only slight changes as time goes on, but you respond with a polite smiley face anyway, because you don't hate the kids or their proud parents. You're just bored. Because everyone else is doing the same thing with their kids. And everybody's kids look the same, and you can't remember their names anymore and get them mixed up a lot. XX may be the long awaited daughter of the horror anthology brood, but it looks a lot like V/H/S and Holidays and ABCs and V/H/S/2...  And no matter how stubbornly their parents insist that they are gifted and unique and special in their own snowflakey ways, they're not, and could use some old fashioned discipline. 

Honestly, the best part of the film were the introductory pieces of stop motion animation starring a walking doll house, a rotting apple and a disembodied needle and thread. I would rather have seen a feature length film about that. But then I already have. I saw both Blood Tea & Red String, and the 1988 Czech film Neco z Alenky, the latter of which was entirely created by a woman, and both of which are vastly superior.

I know that, because I'm a female horror fan, I'm supposed to be gaga over XX. But I'm not. sorrynotsorry

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.