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?