Month: August 2015

I have beard envy. So one of the main reasons I find myself willing to watch a movie is if a main character, male or female, has excellent facial hair. I barely know how to shave, let alone make my beard grow to any great and professional level.

It is why I wanted to even see Mortdecai, damn it.

So if you show me a movie poster of Cop Car with Kevin Bacon‘s head, with the most glorious of stereotypical cop mustaches, I will drop whatever I am doing (no not my baby) and see it as soon as I can. Plot, other actors, director be damned. I just want to see the mustache.

Aww, they gave the mustache little aviators, a badge, and everything.

You have never seen two kids more badass than Travis (James Freedson-Jackson) and Harrison (Hays Wellford). They are just 10, but they ran away from home. Even have some beef jerky in order to have food for their trip. Shit, they’ve been gone for hours, saying curse words, they are probably 50 miles away from home now.

And then they find a fucking cop car! How badass! They are brave enough to throw rocks at it and touch it. But no one comes to yell at them. Strange. Shit, it is unlocked too. And the keys are inside. Should they? No… Then they’d get in real trouble.

BUT WAIT! They have already ran away from home. So fuck it. Who cares if they don’t know what all the buttons do. Who cares if they don’t know to drive. Once they get to the road, there are no limits. They can do anything. There are even guns in the vehicle. GUNS! YEAH! GUNS!

Of course, the car belongs to an actual cop. Sheriff Kretzer (Bacon). He was out in the middle of nowhere for a reason. Not a good, honest to goodness cop reason. And he needs to rectify the situation immediately, no matter who gets hurt along the way.

Also featuring Shea Whigham as a dude and Camryn Manheim as a woman.

“GUNS! YEAH! GUNS!” – Me, 10 seconds ago.

For a movie about a guy trying to murder a couple of kids, it was overall pretty tame. It isn’t that long (86 minutes) because it doesn’t have a lot of anything to work with. I expected our cop to be a bit more crazier and a lot more vicious. I mean. Cocaine was involved? Where is the kiddy torture? I don’t condone kids getting tortured, I just expect movies with simple plots to go to the expected dark areas!

Just like there isn’t a ton of plot to talk about, there isn’t a lot more to say about the film. The kids are stupid and probably act just like 10 year olds. The cop is pretty damn smart, I am surprised he found a way to find the kids at all given how big the world can be.

But the film just didn’t give enough. It was tame when a viewer would want more. More shenanigans!

More. Shenanigans.

I feel like I am constantly fighting a losing battle. Right now I only go to one pre-screening a week (two if a special occasion) and rarely see new things in theaters, unless I have a super strong desire. It seems like when given a choice every week, I will end up picking the serious drama or action movie, skipping the comedy. I have actually skipped a lot of comedies. They just don’t have the same strong pull from them to see them on the big screen. They are things that I can easily wait for a DVD release to rent at home and watch alone with ice cream.

Anyways, every time I think I am about to catch up on the last few comedies, a few more come out. I skip those in theaters and this endless cycle continues as always.

Hot Pursuit is not the end of my journey. Since then this summer, there are at least two other major comedies that came out that I am waiting to be released. Oh well, I will sally forth and hopefully giggle a bit.

A movie with two female leads and they aren’t shoving sexuality in my face? I’m not mad, just surprised really!

Rose Cooper (Reese Witherspoon) is the kind of person everyone will collectively hate. She is focused on only one thing, her career, and it enters all aspects of her life. You see, her dad used to be a cop and was the best on the force. So she grew up with just him and went on a lot of ride alongs. She learned the lingo, learned everything, she just didn’t learn how to be social. Now she is an adult and in the evidence room because she is apparently also slightly retarded despite the fact that she should be a super cop.

But now she has a field mission! Her and a US Marshall (Richard T. Jones) have to head down to South Texas to pick up two people for the witness protection program. Felipe (Vincent Laresca) and Daniella Riva (Sofia Vergara) are going to witness against the cartel leader Vincente Cortez (Joaquin Cosio)! Scary! It is very time sensative, they need to be at the courthouse the next day to testify. If they go too early, they might get hitmen after them or something! Cooper gets to go, because if there is a female witness, there needs to be a female officer. Oh well, she will take anything.

Of course, after they show up, some armed intruders break in and kill Felipe and the Marshall, leaving Cooper all alone with Daniella. She can’t trust anyone, because who knows who is on Cortez’s payroll. So she has to figure out how to get her to the trial on her own, in one piece, with multiple sides now coming against us. Basically, a great first real field assignment.

Also featuring a bunch more dudes, including: Matthew Del Negro, Michael Mosley, Robert Kazinsky, Jim Gaffigan, John Carroll Lynch, Michael Ray Escamilla, and Benny Nieves.

Oh good. Slightly better outfits for the pervs out there.

To continue with the trend I mentioned earlier, unsurprisingly, Hot Pursuit was not that funny. Honestly. One actually great scene, which is the main reason the review gets a 1. It involved cocaine and characters on said drug. Fantastic. Comedy gold. Everything else was just a slow, dull bore.

There were plot twists! They weren’t good. There were jokes in English and Spanish! They weren’t good. Witherspoon’s character was so uptight, by the book, and yet dumb! That wasn’t funny. Vergara kept trying to run away! Wasn’t funny. Maybe a scene where they badly try to act like lesbians to get out of a jam? Nope, still not funny.

Sorry for spoiling most of the movie.

But damn. If I had to give the movie any credit, Witherspoon was definitely acting like a different person. She had a strange accent and everything.

Hot Pursuit is a hot mess from start to finish and is not worthy of anyone’s time or attention.

I miss Chris Farley. I don’t know a single person, outside of future review comment trolls, who hated the guy. He had some of the best sketches on SNL, was always full of energy.

Sure, his movies are hit and miss. Sometimes terrible. But they helped elevate David Spade way more than he could on his own. Sure, he mostly wasted it after the fact, but he tried, damn it.

I wanted to see I Am Chris Farley, which yeah, is a made for TV documentary. It aired on Spike TV. I was curious about Farley before he was big on SNL, and since they interviewed tons of his former friends and coworkers, it would feel great to hear some behind the scenes stories of some of the bigger sketches.

Shit, they were even able to get Lorne Michaels to do an interview, and I assume that dude is super busy.

Maybe it isn’t a “traditional documentary” on a “respected channel” that is worthy of a “Review” but I am “writing” it anyways.

This is a short post because there isn’t a lot to talk about. I learned about Farley’s earlier life. I learned about how he played Rugby in college, how he got into sketch comedy and eventually SNL.

The highlight of course would be the stories about and dealing with Matt Foley: Motivational Speaker. And the stories we hear are told by Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, Dan Aykroid, David Spade obviously, Bob Odenkirk, Bob Saget, Christina Applegate, his brother Kevin P. Farley, Pat Finn a college friend, and more actors of course.

As a suggestion, you might want to have a copy of the SNL: Best of Chris Farley on hand, because you are going to want a lot more Farley than the documentary can give you and want to see the sketches without tons of interruptions from his friends telling stories. Pure. Unadulterated. Farley.

But if you are cheap, just watch Tommy Boy instead. It will get you through the urges I suspect, but not fully satisfy them.

Owen Wilson. Action Thriller. Owen Wilson. Action Thriller.

No matter how many times I say it, I cannot picture this man seriously in an action thriller. My mind cannot wrap itself around that concept. It just doesn’t make sense.

Owen Wilson and comedy? Sure, that is pretty standard. Owen Wilson and slightly dramatic/romantic roles? He has been making those now, especially with Woody Allen. Owen Wilson and action comedy? Yeah, he did Shanghai Noon!

But I feel like I can’t ever take just his face seriously. I can’t imagine him running from people trying to kill him and it not be an amusing situation. I can’t imagine him trying to protect loved ones in a real life or death situation.

So, honestly, I am expecting No Escape to be a satire of some sort. Or a secret parody of the action thriller genre. That is the only way I can go through my day without breaking down, knowing that this movie is coming out.

He never listened, but eventually his face really did freeze in place like that.

Economy is tough, so sometimes even the most qualified of people can find themselves with a family to support but no job. That is why Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) is taking his wife, Annie (Lake Bell), and two daughters (Sterling Jerins, Claire Geare) to Asia. Where in Asia? Eh, South East Asia. Not important.

They meet Hammond (Pierce Brosnan), who is Australian, or British. Basically someone who speaks English from not-America. He offers them a ride to the hotel and is just a fun guy, if not too inappropriate for their family.

Well, things don’t work well in the hotel. TV is out. Phone is out. No cell phone signal. Shit.

Even worse, the next day in the streets, Jack overcomes an apparent riot in the streets. A bunch of people going to war against the police. That is extremely inconvenient. He is supposed to start his job today, but this large group of people with bats, machetes, and guns are running around killing white people.

Gosh, this really isn’t a good move for their family.

Also starring Sahajak Boonthanakit as Kenny Rogers!

“It won’t be scary if you just assume you are getting pushed violently into a pool 80 feet below.”

See, now I know why this movie can make sense. It isn’t an action thriller at all. No, it is also not a strange satire. It is a straight up horror film. First scene, very stylized, shows the political assassination happening. Then there is a nice dull bore of the family flying over and getting settled. But once the riots start, my heart never stops racing. The music, the violence, everything was just so terrifying. Maybe more so because I too am white and I too have a family to protect.

It makes sense for it to have such a strong horror action feel. The director is John Erick Dowdle who has also directed Quarantine, Devil, and As Above, So Below. Say what you will about the quality of those films. They are all definitely horror. It was completely unexpected to find myself that scared throughout the film, but it happened and it was extremely effective.

A weird thing about this film is the awkward lengths it went to avoid saying where the hell they were. Any time they attempted to get close, it was always just vague “Asia” instead of a country name. It was annoying and took me out of the film every time they were purposefully vague. It was filmed in Thailand, but eventually we find out that the country is attached to Vietnam (which Thailand is not). That leaves Cambodia or Laos. They apparently tried to make it a made up country, but then used upside-down Cambodian language on text (which they did not like), so Cambodia it is!

Back to the film. Wilson plays an every man type of role who is just doing whatever he can to protect his family. He is extremely relatable in this film. He is able to appropriately pull off the “constant freaking out, while also trying to calm down his kids” speech down. Yes, it is still full of his unique (bad?) whisper calmness, but it seems right.

Bell doesn’t play just a typical screaming mother role. She takes an active part in their escape, putting herself in danger several times, including a quite graphic scene. And Brosnan wasn’t on screen a lot, but he was smooth as fuck and a strange pseudo-hero.

Honestly, this film has some issues. Some strange character decisions, one scene of very shit CGI, some boredom in the beginning, and the awkward country-evasion part. But when it gets going, it never stops and it did what it set off to do really well.

I expected I would hate No Escape but it really felt like I too was in the middle of a country uprising and on the run. It was refreshing to have the USA/UK kind of be the bad guy, while also not getting too preachy about the subject. And shit. It was scary.

It has been awhile since I have seen a film set mostly in Hawaii. Godzilla, Big Eyes, Battleship all had elements in Hawaii. But the last full on Hawaiian film was The Descendants and it was really fucking good. So if I compare all films set in Hawaii, Aloha has to have some pretty big strides to catch up to the top.

And it has to do it with controversy!

What controversy? Well, casting controversy of course. The last films to receive this much internet anger was The Last Airbender and Exodus: Gods and Kings, but to be fair, they received criticism for more than just casting choices. In this film, Emma Stone, a very white woman plays a Hawaiin. Why is that an issue? Because internet people claim white people can’t be Hawaiian of course.

Oh, they mean native Hawaiian. Fair point, sure. But she is also playing someone who is just a quarter Hawaiian, so one of her parents is only half Hawaiian, and fuck everybody she could totally qualify as someone who is a quarter Hawaiian. Saying she doesn’t look it enough is stupid complaint when she is claiming barely any Hawaiian ancestry. Just because she isn’t in real life quarter Hawaiian doesn’t mean she can’t play one on a movie and be believable. It is called mother fucking Acting. Damn it.

This looks like they were photoshopped next to each other, their chemistry is so nonexistent.

Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) used to be a great military person, and then he left! Turns out the military pays close to jack in pay, so he sold his skills to a private contractor, Carson Welch (Bill Murray) who wants to go to outer space! Brian loves space and wants to go one day. I think. Either way, he heads to Hawaii for a few days, where he used to be a big deal. People told stories about him. Blah blah blah.

He is happy to be back. For whatever reason, Allison Ng (Stone) is being assigned to follow him and help him out on his meetings. She is in in the military and young but full of spunk.

Fuck. I am dying typing out this review. The movie was so boring. Here are the only other important plot points.

Brian and Tracy (Rachel McAdams) used to have a thing like 12 years ago. They make it VERY obvious that her oldest daughter is his kid. But she is married now to Woody (John Krasinski) and they have at least one more kid. So hopefully they don’t rekindle anything, would be dickish. At the same time, Allison starts to like Brian. There is also a big controversy over the native Hawaiians and using their land to send rockets into space, as they are worried it will end badly.

Also featuring Alec Baldwin and Danny McBride is a full fledged military men!

The sexual tension is high when Cooper looks apathetic while coding.

What the hell happened to you Cameron Crowe? Seriously? What in the fuck? He gave us Say Anything…, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous! These are good to great movies right? Because the last thing before this one was We Bought A Zoo which was incredibly average in every single way.

And now? Now we have Aloha. Which sure had controversy which I gave no cares about. What I care about is a good entertaining movie, but Aloha is neither good nor entertaining. While watching, I couldn’t help but wait for the point of the movie to come across. Are the military supposed to be bad? Are private contractors? They sort of answer it by the end, but it almost seems like that was an after thought despite allegedly being the main plot line. What is more annoying is that most of the conflict in the end also seemingly comes out of nowhere. And it is resolved with a couple lines of dialogue, again, as an after thought.

As for the relationship angle, one never really goes anywhere and the other is also extremely forced. It is like all of the actors involved are just uncomfortable the whole movie. No one has a desire to be great in this film, it is probably just a quick paycheck for everyone and a free trip to Hawaii. You know, the Adam Sandler reason for acting. Not even Kenny Fucking Powers can save this movie, because he might be in 3 scenes. Maybe. Everything is wasted in this film that is technically quite full of talent and entertaining people. I’m going to go watch The Descendants again.

Back in 2012, there were a lot of shitty horror movies. In fact, The Apparition, The Possession, and The Devil Inside would have all made my worst of the year lists if I did them back then.

But there was some hope. We received Sinister. Sure I only gave it a 3 out of 4, but in reality, I think what they did with it was very innovative. It featured Ethan Hawke, who I tend to love or hate (this time was a love). The cinematography was wonderful. The world they built was just overall eerie, and it didn’t feature a lot of jump scares. Just everything in general was scary and creepy as fuck. It was my favorite horror film of the year obviously and I was totally ready for a sequel.

However, maybe the filmmakers or studios weren’t ready for a sequel? Sure, they didn’t rush it out, as they waited 3 years for the next film. I am happy they didn’t try and make this a yearly affair. Those wither up and die rather quickly. Despite my own excitement for Sinister 2, it received barely any pre-screenings for the public or press, which is generally a sign that they know they are releasing a terrible film and just want to get it over with.

The PR company probably just wanted everyone to show the film in small kid focus groups instead. That must be it!

Given what happened in the first film, we don’t expect a direct follow up from our last family. Obviously. So less star power. But hey, we do have our Deputy (James Ransone), who still doesn’t have a real name. But we can call him Ex-Deputy now. He left the police force after the awkwardness of the first film and is getting obsessed with Bughuul and his myths. He is burning down houses to prevent more families from being killed. If no one new can live there, he can protect them! He heads to a farm in Springfield Illinois that had a bad church based accident, but wouldn’t you know it, a family is squatting there. Fuck.

Courtney Collins (Shannyn Sossamon) is living there with her two kids, Dylan (Robert Daniel Sloan) and Zach (Dartanian Sloan). They are hiding from the husband/dad (Lea Coco), who of course was an angry man and slightly abusive. Of course Bughuul and his posse of kid ghosts are trying to get the smallest kid, Dylan, into turning slowly evil. He is being peer pressured into watching creepy videos of death scenes, a few of them a lot more graphic and fucked up than the first film.

Now Ex-Deputy really doesn’t know what to do. He wants to protect the family, but weird stuff will happen while they are in the house, but if they leave, the real tragedy will take place. Fuck. While dealing with that, he is also interacting with Dr. Stomberg (Tate Ellington), who has information on potential Bughuul sightings in Norway with Ham radios. Weird. Also Lucas Jade Zumann plays head kid ghost, Milo.

The power of motion capture compels you!

Sinister 2 is not as good as Sinister. Everyone anywhere will agree with this fact. But just because it is technically worse on every level does not make itself a bad film.

Specifically on what is worse, the cinematography is just completely average. A regular movie. What really built the tension in the first film involved these sleek sexy shots. The fear didn’t involve jump scares, but appropriately creepy scenes and the occasional movement, sure. Outside of creepy videos in the sequel, the only scares came from very expected jump scares.

Not just jump scares, but a lot of them were audio based jump scares, where my ears were blasted with terrible sounds. Their way of doing eerie music during the kill videos was just a scratchy record player attached to the olde fashioned camera. Maybe my theater just made everything stupid loud, but regular objects being freakishly loud to attempt scares got really old, really quick.

In terms of plot, it was interesting to have the abuse plot. It was good to have something not focused on the evil spirit, but halfway through it made me wonder if it would have better if they still stayed in the abusive house. You know. Cause demons. It was also enjoyable to have a link to the first film, in regards to the deputy, although I definitely forgot about his character completely. Another good note is they didn’t try to go into the backstory of the demon. No, we focused on the dead kids and a point of view of a kid instead of one of the adults. It was a nice change, just still not as good as the first.

Also, the last scene was stupid. Setting up for a future movie with a different twist. It was just dumb. True fact.

I don’t know a lot about American Ultra. I do know that it has some nice buzz words to get more butts in the seats though.

A lot of big movies have American in the title now. American Sniper destroyed the box office, so people really love American shit. Then we have American Beauty, American Psycho, American Pie, you name it! American to start off your movie is like a golden ticket.

And then of course whe have Ultra. That puts it at the top tier, and it sounds a lot like Ultron. Maybe they want people who love America and love the Avengers to see their film. If they can bring in those two demographics, they would be walking their way over to the billionaire club.

Again, knowing nothing about the movie, this has to be their plan right?

“And bring in an established couple from other movies! Like those kids from Adventureland!” – Movie Exec

Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) is a small town, do nothing, stoner. He has never left his West Virginian town and any time he attempts to leave he ends up having a panic idea. The thought of going places just freaks him the fuck out.

Thankfully he has weed. And the love of his life, Phoebe Larson (Kristen Stewart). She is basically perfect and deserves someone way better than him, as he is a constant screw up. But for whatever reason, she loves him back. Even when he kills two men outside of the convenience store that he works.

Shit. Shit shit fuck. He didn’t even know he could kill a man, and technically they attacked him first. He already has enough trouble with the law, weed smoker and all. It has something to do with the strange lady (Connie Britton) who came to his shop and basically said just gibberish. Next thing Mike knows, other strangers are trying to assassinate him and wouldn’t you know it? He can fight back! Magical Stoner Powers activate! Sometimes it can be good to be a government sleeper agent.

Also starring Tony Hale as a CIA employee, Topher Grace as a mean CIA dude, Walton Goggins as a hitman, John Leguizamo as a dealer, Stuart Greer as a sheriff and Bill Pullman as “mysterious CIA man.”

To John Leguizamo, Thanks For The Drugs, Jesse Eisenberg.

One exciting fact about American Ultra is that it written by Max Landis, who also wrote Chronicle. Huh. Chronicle. The great movie that was directed by Josh Trank, who recently directed a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Fantastic Four movie as his next main project. So weird that two guys who worked on an indie movie both got much bigger movies that were released in the same month three years later.

One thing I hate as a movie watcher is hearing other people echo commonly held complaints that they just regurgitate from the internet, without realizing they never gave it any thought. For example, a very popular “opinion” is that Stewart is terrible and cannot show emotion. People of course got confused with her real self and playing a hated character. For those that think that, they will be happy to know that Stewart shows a lot of emotion in this film: fear, sadness, extreme happiness. She is all over the place. And she also does a fine job.

As for the rest of the movie, American Ultra is a very strange film. Not fully comedy, not fully action, and not really a normal action comedy. And don’t even think it, because it is definitely not a stoner action comedy either, like Pineapple Express. It is a strange mash of all of these genres, and not in a normal or bad way. It reminds me of Red State. Red State was a hard movie to describe, clashing together different genres and keeping you on your toes. This film is of course nothing like the actual Red State, but I think you get my meaning.

American Ultra almost perfectly embodies the 2 out of 4 rating on this website. It is an enjoyable movie yes. Sometimes the jokes work really really well, thanks in a lot to the chaotic nature of a few scenes. And sometimes the movie feels like it drags and you just want to get to the next scene. We call that pacing issues in the biz, and it can make or break or apparently average out a film. But it did have some nice acting from our leads and some pretty slick shots at the same time. It can be worth a watch eventually. I think the people who love it are going to just really love it.

I’d like to think I can keep a secret. Unless it is any form of gossip. If I hear about gossip, I will most definitely pass it on to somebody. Everyone knows that if you tell something to a married person, their spouse gets auto-dibs on the secret anyways.

Best Kept Secret is a documentary not even about a real secret. So I guess I can talk to you all about it and not feel like a dick for betraying its trust.

Best Kept Secret is actually about a teacher, in Newark, New Jersey, who just wants to do what is best for her kids and help them get jobs after they graduate high school. It is hard for her, even though her class is only four guys and she has over a year left to do it, because the kids are all very autistic.

And you will get to meet each and every one of the kids and their families and their struggles. They aren’t on even playing field of course. One guy can talk a lot more than the rest, some can barely say a thing, but damn it, they are working on it.

The hardest part about all of this is making sure they have a job after they finish high school. Most of them want to work (and honestly, apparently they all want to work at Burger King). They want to keep learning and get better at communication. They don’t want to live at home or in a home for the rest of their lives where they live only to exist and never do anything great.

Normally a joke statement, the struggle is actually real here.

So yes, the stakes are indeed very high for these individuals. But the issue this documentary brings up is that the tend to lack support and it can be frustrating. For the case of this teacher, she probably works 100 hours a week, planning, teaching, and coming up with leads for these kids to make their lives better. She is awesome for that fact.

But what this documentary does NOT talk about is overall increasing funding for people with special needs to increase their quality of life. It doesn’t ask for any sort of law reform to stop budget cuts anywhere. It does none of these things. It just showcases the reality of the situation in one of the poorest areas of the country with a higher than average number of special needs children.

And frankly, I think that did a disservice to the situation. Maybe I have been watching too many grand scale documentaries lately, but the small focus of this documentary just didn’t feel right. I got a personal look onto the lives of five people, and that was it. It feels like the documentary should be part of a series, going into different people’s lives, instead of a standalone feature. At the end of this one I am left wondering, “Well, yeah, now what?” It doesn’t really make any claims at all, so it just feels a bit pointless. Sure, there are some interesting things in here. But usually documentaries just do something more for their given topic.

Also, the ending felt like a kick in the nuts. The part where they update you on where everyone is now after all the filming. That part sucked a lot. Reality blows.

I don’t think we need a fucking introduction for Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!

But if I did, I would probably just point you towards Sharknado, Sharknado 2: The Second One, and remake the same joke about Cory Monteith’s last two tweets.

That is, if I was doing an intro, of course.

If this review had pictures, I’d maybe make a joke about patriotic violence here.

Now that LA and NYC have been filled with disaster, Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering) finds himself in the nation’s capital to receive a biggest honor a civilian can have from the POTUS (Mark Cuban) himself! Big deal! Then a sharknado happens of course. Don’t worry, we don’t have anything super drastic happen, like the president dying. Because Fin is there and he can protect the president!

But DC was just the start. Sharknados are starting to pop up all down the east coast, as a big…storm…thing begins to develop. Out of nowhere! So Fin has to get down to Orlando, where his wife, April, (Tara Reid), daughter (Ryan Newman), and mother-in-law (Bo Derek) are at for vacation. April is of course now pregnant, because that makes action movies more fun. Because if Fin doesn’t get down to Florida, clearly they won’t be able to survive on their own.

Thankfully, Fin runs into Nova (Cassie Scerbo) from the first film! She is with some dude, Lucas (Frankie Muniz), in a super armored RV, tracking where the storms will appear so they can fuck them up. Now he has a way to get down south.

Flashforward a bit, the only way they are going to stop the giant storm wall about to take out all of the East coast, involves going into space. That is how serious this film gets. And David Hasselhoff plays Fin’s father, an astronaut, which for some reason April also goes, regardless of her pregnancy.

There is also Blair Fowler, Jack Griffo, and Chris Jericho with notable smaller roles. And like, one fucking scene with Mark McGrath, the best part of the second movie.

Frankie Muniz should have been my McGrath in this movie. But he also was barely in it. 🙁

I feel annoyed at SyFy channel. They are intentionally making half-assed bad movies to achieve some sort of cult status. They have made tons of these, and unfortunately, for whatever reason, the Sharknado franchise has reached cult status. Probably due to good PR, I am guessing. But the franchise is not in the so bad it is good category, it is literally just in the so bad it is bad area. I feel like they don’t put effort into their film, so why should I put effort into the review?

This movie is not good. It doesn’t have amusing parts. It just has a lot of cheap parts. Clearly low budget for the sake of laughs, but it is just more of the same. “But wait, this one goes into outer space and terrorizes multiple locations!” Yeah. It does. New doesn’t make it a positive.

The only remotely interesting aspect is the death of Munez. And it was too ridiculous and nonsensical. So at the same time, even that is a disappointment.

And fuck. They of course confirmed the fourth one. Which includes whether or not a character will die at the start of it from the “cliffhanger” ending. So the internet will of course kill them off. And when it comes out, a month or two later I will end up writing what I hope is an even more half-assed review to match their franchise effort.

2015 has been a weak ass year for musicals. Basically we have a film or two that feature Anna Kendrick singing, a shitty terrible no good animated jukebox musical, and a made for TV mess. And the future doesn’t look bright either.

So I was a bit excited to hear about Lucky Stiff, a musical movie based off a real musical that was done in a theater. Because by golly, that means we are going to get something a bit unique with real singing in it. Not some quick to DVD jukebox musical that takes zero effort to produce.

There is still hope that a singing film without Kendrick this year is worth a watch.

This one lacks Kendrick, but its most famous actor in it is this guy so…fuck.

Harry Witherspoon (Dominic Marsh) is a poor, down on his luck, shoe salesman. He is the kind of guy who no one would care about. I don’t even care about him and we just met! But then he gets a telegram. Crazy right? Why would Harry get a telegram? Who would pay money to send him a message? Harry’s Landlady (Jayne Houdyshell) and I agree about this. It is bizarre.

Turns out he had an American uncle, Tony (Don Amendolia), who died and had his hands on some money. He is going to leave Harry, his last surviving relative, 6 million dollars in cash, but only if agrees to a few terms first. You know, like taking Uncle Tony to Monte Carlo and having a very detailed fun week of living life up to the max, which is something Tony always wanted to do. And don’t worry. His body has been prepared nicely by a taxidermist, so he won’t smell or be super gross. He will just be in a wheel chair and ready to party. So he has to Weekend at Bernie’s the whole situation.

But of course there is a catch. If he doesn’t follow the instructions to a letter, all of the money will instead go to a dog charity. For real dogs. Man what a waste! The humans in charge are interested in the money though, so they send Annabel Glick (Nikki M. James) to spy on them and potentially sabotage them to get that sweet cash.

That is still too easy. Which is why we have Rita LaPorta (Pamela Shaw), who claims to be the one who shot Tony accidentally, given that she is legally blind. They had an affair going on and her husband go jealous, but they also embezzled six million dollars of which he hid. So she wants it, and she wants her optometrist brother (Jason Alexander) to go with her.

There. Now we have a proper clusterfuck.

What? You want more? Fine. Let’s throw in Dennis Farina, Kate Shindle, and Kent Avenido, who was totally on like, three episodes of Glee, in which he was excellent.

“I’m too drunk to taste this chicken!” – I assume the Colonel Sanders looking motherfucker said this at least once.

Lucky Stiff was a weird movie. I sincerely hope you got that from the description. Very weird, bizarre at times, and technically because occasionally a character will break out in song makes it even stranger.

The average movie goer would look at this film and potentially quit halfway just because of how awkward it is, but thankfully I like strange films. I cannot say the acting is great. I can’t say all of the songs are enjoyable, nor can I say that any of them really stuck with me after the movie was over. In fact, the musical-ness was an afterthought. Everything was overacted (I believe intentionally) just to give this extreme zany atmosphere, I’d imagine it like a Mad TV sketch gone on too long.

But it was slightly entertaining, in the smallest ways, just because it was weird.

I should also note that the female lead, Nikki M. James, is actually a fantastic singer, and played the main female role in The Book of Mormon, winning the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical. You should see her acceptance speech, because it made me tear up. And then it made me realize how sad it is that someone can win something like a Tony, but not be able to still necessarily make it as a great actress.

Because for what it is worth, this film is technically terrible. The weirdness element could only carry me so far, but by the end I was just waiting for it to end. Oh well. Hopefully some smaller good musicals pop up by the end of the year. Pleaseee.