sillstaw

"Betty White's Off Their Rockers." (Get it? Because they're old! And old people like rocking chairs!) I recently saw an ad for an episode where the "prank" they were showcasing was that an old guy was serving concessions at the movies, and his dentures ended up in the popcorn. Yeah, nothing like a prank that makes me want to throw up.

Yeah, "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" is actually quite a fun action flick. No real WTF moments. "Jack Reacher" was pretty similar. Say what you will about Tom Cruise's beliefs (and I do have strong opinions on them), but he does know how to choose good popcorn movies to star in.

Likely part of the reason the trailer makes it look like a grindhouse-style movie is because that was Biehn's intent with the film. (You didn't mention it, but he also co-wrote and directed the movie.) After working on the "Planet Terror" segment of "Grindhouse," he decided to make his own grindhouse-style movie, hence the fairly lurid subject matter. As for "The Perfect Host," I have it on my instant queue, but have yet to watch it.

I don't think his drawing power is necessarily decreasing (just a few months after this, "Hotel Transylvania" did quite well for itself), so much as it is that the segment of his fans that would most appreciate this movie couldn't buy a ticket without a legal guardian, all of whom knew better. And yeah, the idea of pedophilia, child abuse, incest, and (near the climax, so SPOILERS, if you care) violence against women are the subject of jokes is pretty appalling. I suppose there are ways to make those subjects darkly funny, but Adam Sandler seemed to just think they were funny all on their own. (PS: It depresses me to no end that the creator of "Happy Endings" is the credited writer on this.)

Fun fact about this movie: The credited director, Thomas Lee, doesn't exist. This was originally directed by Walter Hill (maker of "48 Hrs.," "Red Heat" and "Bullet to the Head"), but was shelved for a long while. During that time, the director of "A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge" (AKA the single most homoerotic horror movie to get a mainstream release) did reshoots and Francis Ford Coppola re-edited the movie, apparently still weaning himself from taking on projects to pay off "One from the Heart." According to an unsourced claim on Wikipedia, people believe little of Hill's work is left in the film. The end result displeased Walter Hill, and he would've used the Director's Guild's pseudonym Alan Smithee, except that this was happening after "An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn," and they had abandoned the name, likely because it couldn't be taken seriously after being involved with a Joe Eszterhas movie. Thusly, this is the first movie to have a pseudonymous director not credited as Alan Smithee. Jeez, that took a while to write. And man, there are a lot of HDTGM-worthy movies I mentioned up there.

Not to mention the whole "evil critic who gets killed off" bit. What's so terrible about that plot is that it ends with someone asking who would do such a terrible thing as... um... assigning people roles? I don't remember much about this movie. But anyway, the movie tries to place all the blame on this mistake on the critic... but, IIRC, it was the main character who really did the deed, and he goes completely unpunished. Honestly, I think this movie may have marked the one time audiences have sided with the critics on a controversy about them. Usually it's "oh, they just get paid to be contrary!" But this was just too much.

The great thing about Nuclear Man? As pointed out on the Agony Booth, he's supposed to be the embodiment of all that's evil about nuclear energy, but he immediately loses all his power if he is taken out of sunlight. In other words, he's solar-powered.

Does that mean that, in effect, this is basically "Nothing But Trouble" for kids?

Yeah, I'm kind of disappointed they dropped that plot thread. Not that it seemed to help too much; I heard the movie was going overbudget because Gore Verbinski insisted on having the trains featured in the movie custom-built instead of using older ones or just CGI-ing them. From what I've heard, Johnny Depp wanted the movie to be more focused on Tonto. On one hand, it does make more sense to try and pitch the movie to audiences as "starring Johnny Depp" than it would to say, "Starring the male lead from 'Mirror Mirror!' Co-starring Johnny Depp!" On the other, it's not like he insisted on playing the Indian guy in that other Western he was in.

I know. It's almost like movies can't do anything to make the concept of "numbers" scary.

No need to overreact. Just wait until you find something so truly insane that you have to suggest it.

I assume the sudden interest is based on My World of Flops covering this movie. Rightfully so. (You know a movie is completely misguided when Nathan Rabin takes two pages to talk about it, and only starts describing the actual plot of it halfway in.) For what it's worth, I watched the trailer out of morbid curiosity a while ago. I barely remember the awful animation, but that's only because the trailer decided the best way to sell a kid's movie was to set it to a parody of "Copacabana." "At the Copa, Copabanana..." I watched it last summer and it's still stuck in my head. Help!

I don't think it qualifies. It's insane and weird, but it's intentionally so, so it's not as fun to dissect.

This movie wasn't awful. I didn't find it great, but there's just nothing about it that's really WTF-worthy. (Also, people who hate Maggie Gyllenhaal hate love and happiness.)

According to this review, it rips off "Terminator," "Aliens," "Battlestar Galactica," "Star Wars," "Blade Runner" and "V." Also, it's The Asylum, so of course it's garbage.

The great thing about that movie is that around the time it came out was when she released the "Sex" book, so all the public sex and candle wax is barely a step up from that. To quote My Year of Flops, "By the time Evidence flopped in theaters, Madonna nudity was a wildly degraded commodity due to overexposure." (Yes, I tend to reference the same five things when I bother to cite my sources.)

"Sin City" was in production around the same time as this. As for "300," that's really more credit/blame to, well, "Sin City."

Bob Dylan doesn't seem to have a great track record with acting. He can appear in documentaries, no problem. He can write songs for them, nothing doing. They can even base movies off of him and it's fine. But when he actually gets a lead role in a movie, it never seems to work. Which describes a lot of singers-turned-actors, really. Guys like Wahlberg, Smtih and Timberlake seem to be exceptions to the rule.

What better reason do you need? I have a guy like that on call.

Which is a shame, because at the time, you just know "The Dark Knight" would have made twice as much money from people who wanted to see her die.

I'm not sure if the two "Twilight" movies should count as being separate movies. I mean, putting aside how they're one overstretched story, you sign on for one movie that's incredibly successful and you're almost certainly going to sign on for the sequels; it's not like they had two lapses of judgment in choosing their movies.

My two problems with this movie: 1. Zack Snyder does not know the word "subtlety." The Comedian specifically says that he killed Woodward and Bernstein, out loud, around people who logically would not know who they were, just so the audience will get the (really irrelevant) point. 2. Zack Snyder doesn't get why certain things were in the book. After the climactic New York attack, we see "The Outer Limits" on TV (and, tying in with point 1, it's shown in close-up instead of being in the background, just so You'll Get It). The reference in the book was to a specific episode echoing the alien-attack-decoy* story, something which is significantly less applicable with the changed ending. Not that it matters, because all it shows is the intro, which basically comes across as "Hey, this was on the TV! It's not relevant, but let's throw it in anyway!" * Great name for a rock band.

He had a decent-sized supporting role in "Last Night" (the 1998 Canadian movie about the end of the world, not that forgotten 2010 Keira Knightley movie), playing a fairly normal guy. I'm mostly sharing this just because it's a great film.

You HAVE to explain that.

Fun fact: The original title for this movie was "Oh No She Didn't." Really. I read a review that pointed out how revealing the last shot is. Basically, it's a shot of Idris Elba and Beyonce... where the top half of Elba's head is out of frame, with Beyonce's face perfectly framed. Apparently, the fact that the plot revolves around his supposed infidelity doesn't mean that he's actually the lead star.