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