"What's the Use of Getting Sober (When You Gonna Get Drunk Again)?"

Saturday night I found myself in the eye of a very surreal hurricane. A friend of mine had come for a visit, and after several hours and an unmeasurable amount of alcohol, he was hammered, shit faced, blotto, 3 sheets to the wind, and every other conceivable expression for being drunk off your ass. This particular friend is already prone to outrageous, crude, and off-color remarks, even when he is sober, but get him worked up, and watch his ability to internalize comments play out like the little Dutch boy. What better activity to engage him in than making him watch The Villain, that 1979 ode to live action pratfalls and stiffer acting than one would have thought humanly possible. Featuring an all-star cast of Kirk Douglas, Ann-Margaret, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, this "comedy"-western really only has one redeeming quality, and that is the cleavage of Ann-Margaret. To call this movie a tragedy would be a disservice to movies that actually aspire to be so. You know when Paul Lynde is playing a Native American chief, you're in trouble. (I should add a caveat here. It is possible that this movie was made for a younger audience, as it plays like a Roadrunner-Coyote live-action cartoon, only with less plausibility. If that is the case, perhaps the movie works on some base level, although it does not explain the constant close-ups of Ann-Margaret's barely contained breasts.)



Anyway, my friend quickly lost interest in the plot (admittedly easy to do), and simply became transfixed by Ann-Margaret's heaving bosom. With his eyes swimming in booze, he repeatedly inquired as to when she would be disrobing and showing her "tits." I tried to explain to him that it was rated PG, but his altered state allowed for no explanations. Finally, in an attempt to get him to possibly switch gears, I pointed out that she also had very pretty hair, to which he simply replied, "You can't fuck hair." His focus remained unchanged.

At some point during the movie, he did mention 'Nanerpuss, an inexplicably bizarre character from a Denny's commercial that likely sends druggies who witness it while tripping the light fantastic to hurl themselves from atop the tallest building they can find. We spent a good thirty minutes watching this video on youtube, as well as many of its remixes. Through it all, my friend would alternate between shouting "'Nanerpuss!" and "I wanna see some tits!"



Nothing quite says Saturday night like an evening with a socially unabashed individual drunk out of his mind, a singing banana, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a powder blue cowboy outfit. On a side note, "Nanerpuss reminded me of an album cover I came across a few months ago. The band is called Head East, and the album was called Flat as a Pancake. There are no words for the back cover.



Transmission out.

On Top of Spaghetti

Last night I gave my brain a vacation and watched Meatballs 4. I have no real excuse other than the fact I happen to enjoy summer camp movies, probably because camp always looked like fun and I never got to go as a kid. This movie, however, was as removed from other summer camp movies as possible. In fact, the camp is actually a ski resort camp, not a traditional summer camp. All of this is made moot by the incredibly bad acting, wretched dialog, and extremely tired plot. Here is an example of the dialog: Woman clearly not a teenager but playing a teenager asks the old man running the camp - "Are you checking IDs?" Old man probably 3 times her age responds while gazing at her breasts - "No." Woman clearly not a teenager but playing a teenager replies - "Good, because all I brought was my IUD." I'm pretty sure Quentin Tarantino wrote that witty piece of dialog.

Now I will fully admit that I don't mind female nudity in a movie, no matter how gratuitous. That teenage boy in me has never quite completely gone away. Yet when that is all your movie has going for it, you're in trouble, unless of course you are making porn. There are numerous scenes where flimsy excuses require several of the female campers to be topless, and without these scenes, the movie is probably 35 minutes long, tops. If this were a sitcom, there would be no laugh track, because there are no discernible funny cues in the entire movie.

Corey Feldman is the "star" of the movie, and many would say that should be the first clue to the craptasticness of the film. While I certainly do not think he is a great actor, I did really enjoy him in The Goonies, Gremlins, and The burbs. Not so much in this movie. I don't know what was worse, watching him dance to a terrible instrumental version of Michael Jackson's Black or White, or trying to emote. Here is an example of the latter.



I could go on, but I will leave it to you to discover the other subtle nuances of Meatballs 4. If you do watch, try explaining to me why Feldman's character is in love with the ugliest girl at camp, or why the villain of the movie would accept a wager to pay off the debt of the camp when all she had to do was wait a few more days and buy the camp when it foreclosed. Surely we can get some stimulus money for a commission to explain these things. As a side note, Feldman breaks the fourth wall at the end of the movie, mentioning that he was in The Goonies. That's more self-awareness than this movie can handle.

Transmission out.

Lick My Love Pump

One of the funniest movies of all-time has to be This is Spinal Tap. This faux documentary follows the tour of Spinal Tap, a heavy metal band whose members never seem to be able to distinguish the line between "clever and stupid." Despite its outlandish situations and inconceivably bad songs, it is ackingly close to home for many of the real metal bands it mocks. Let's take a look at a few of the songs.

First up we have Sex Farm, with lyrics like "Scratching in your hen house, Sniffing at your feedbag, Slipping out your back door, Leaving my spray." Now lets compare this to Let Me Put My Love Into You, by AC/DC. An excerpt from this song, "Let me put my love into you, babe. Let me cut your cake with my knife." Ah, terrible double entendres abound.



Next we have Big Bottom, containing the oh so sensitive line "My baby fits me like a flesh tuxedo. I'd like to sink her with my pink torpedo." Kiss released the song Fits Me Like a Glove the same year, containing such gems as "My snake's alive and it's ready to bite," and "Oh baby, babe, fits like a glove...Cause when I go through her it's just like a hot knife through butter." Fantastically bad.





Finally we have Stonehenge, Spinal Tap's attempt at grandeur. This song holds some very thought-provoking and mind bending lyrics, such as "Stonehenge...where the banshees live, and they do live well," and "We'll go back in time to that mystic land, where the dew drops cry and the cat's meow." Iron Maiden set brains ablaze with Quest For Fire, which begins with "In a time when dinosaurs walked the earth, when the land was swamp and caves were home, in an age where prize possession was fire, to search for landscapes men would roam."

Apparently many of the events of the film also hit close to home for real heavy metal bands. Several bands acknowledged getting lost in the concourses of arenas, complaining unreasonably about backstage provisions, and receiving critical reviews which may have been more clever than the works they were covering. In particular, a scene in the movie depicts a mistake during Spinal Tap's performance of Stonehenge, in which a life size model is supposed to descend from the ceiling, and be danced around by a group of dwarves representing Druid children. The model turns out to only be a foot and a half tall, because the dimwitted guitarist didn't know the difference between feet and inches. Apparently this really happened to Black Sabbath, except their model was converted into meters, and so was three times too large. Magnificent.





Anyway, check out this film, but don't laugh too hard, because if you choke they can't dust for vomit.

Transmission out.