Just finished watching Voodoo Man from RiffTrax, the 1944 ... uh ... classic? What, exactly, makes a movie a "classic", anyway? Aren't all films from 1955 and earlier automatically categorized as "classic"? Anyway, I digress. The film is available from RiffTrax for $9.99 as a video-on-demand download (no need to bother with synchronizing an mp3 to your DVD), and definitely deserves a healthy seven out of ten stars. Lots of good Bela Lugosi mugging, and plenty of old-school "camp" to keep things funny. Click on the image above to order.

Because I think it's fun to over-geek something already geeked, I've included a few footnotes to some of the riffs more obscure references. I know, I know, a joke isn't usually funny if it has to be explained, but that's not the point here. The point is to broaden your cultural horizons, using the time-tested method of ... y'know ... watching bad movies and listening to some guys make fun of it. You know exactly what I mean.

So here goes.


Movie: Credit for "Sam Katzman" appears
Kevin: (singing) Sam is the Katzman, yeah he's the Katzmaaaan

That would be The Beatles song "Taxman" that Kevin is parodying, from their Revolver album.

Movie: Credit for "William Beaudine" appears
Bill: William Beaudine - Jethro's stage name

For the youngsters (like me), Bill is talking about Jethro Bodine, Jed Clampett's nephew in Beverly Hillbilies.

Movie: You're a stranger in this part of the country, aren't you?
Bill: In a Camus-ey way

Extra points to Bill for injecting an artsy-fartsy tip-of-the hat to French author Albert Camus, and his 1940s novel, The Stranger.

Movie: Nicholas picks up old-looking phone
Kevin: Wow, he can contact anyone in Mayberry on that

Another one for the kids. Mayberry is that wonderful, folksy little town that was home to Andy, Barney, Opie, Aunt Bee, and the rest of the cast of The Andy Griffith Show.

Movie: Toby approaches the car
Kevin: Hey, it's the ghost of Tom Joad's buddy

As Kevin remarks later, this joke is "complicated". Tom Joad is the character played by Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath, and there is a slight resemblance here.

Movie: Sign reads "Banner Motion Picture Company"
Bill: The Hulk started his own movie company

Any true comic book fan knows that The Hulk, when he's not being all green and emotional, goes by the name of Bruce Banner.

Movie: (movie producer) Skip it, I'll get one of the other boys to tackle it
Mike: Give it to that Bruckheimer kid

Yeah, Mike, why not give the new movie to Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer responsible for National Treasure, Pirates of the Caribbean, Armageddon, Top Gun, and about a bazillion other films?

Movie: Close-up shot of Bela Lugosi's face
Mike: SLEEEEEEEP!

Most MST3K fans will get this one. The "Sleeeeep!" riff was a running gag on the show for a long time, and the film in which it appears - Bela Lugosi's Bride of the Monster - was given the MST3K treatment in Season 4. I would bet money you can find clips on YouTube.

Movie: Stella! Stella!
Mike: That's how he orders his favorite, watered down hipster beer

I don't drink that beer. It always comes served in a fruity-looking glass. I am, of course, talking about Stella Artois.

Movie: We're gonna have another pretty ceremony
Mike: That's an odd way to describe a Bris

Ouch. A Bris is a Jewish circumcision ceremony.

Movie: It's a pain in the neck!
Kevin: Not to mention that I look like Charlie Bucket's Grandpa Joe

You remember Grandpa Joe from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, don't you? DON'T YOU?! You can get that film's RiffTrax commentary, too.

Movie: Dr. Marlowe picks up telephone, dials operator
Mike: Sara, get me Thelma Lou

Love the Andy Griffith Show references! That would be Barney Fife's voice that Mike is imitating, talking to Mayberry operator "Sara", trying to get in touch with his girlfriend "Thelma Lou".

I've been watching RiffTrax for a couple of years now. I laughed till I wept as Messrs Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett (late of MST3K) added their hilarious commentary to the various red-headed stepchildren of modern cinema: Wickerman; Firewall; Transformers; Beowulf; the Star Wars prequels, etc.

But this week, the RiffTrax crew has unveiled a completely different kind of strategy: riffing on the classics. As the ad copy explains, "Sure, it's easy enough to make hay out of a bear-suited Nicholas Cage, but what really tests one's mettle is to see how he reacts when he's staring down the business end of THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER MADE." The new campaign is being branded "RiffTrax Challenges", the plural noun ominously suggesting that there will be several classic movies subjected to the riffing treatment in the near future.

The first test case: Casablanca. I was skeptical at first. Well, ok, more than skeptical. I wept openly, threw a lot of dishes at the wall, called several radio DJs in the Bible Belt to coordinate the public torching of RiffTrax mp3s and other memorabilia, and sent Joel Hodgson a personal telegram letting him know that he has always been better than Mike Nelson. I regret those things now (except for the dish-hurling - they were dirty anyway).

The new Casablanca riff is very, very good. The riffs are consistently laugh-out-loud funny, and while I won't spoil it for you, there is an exquisite "inside joke" that is so perfectly placed, I almost snorted an entire plate of cookies out my nose (we'll talk later about why I had an entire plate of cookies in my mouth). It was fun to watch Mike, Kevin, and Bill tackle a classic of this magnitude, and they pulled it off with style; the riffing is extremely funny, yet without vandalizing the film in the process.

I'm crossing my fingers for a RiffTrax commentary on It's a Wonderful Life! next ...

If you are at all like me, you often find yourself sitting at home on a weekend night, staring at a 20-foot tall stack of slightly worn Tom Clancy novels and thinking, "Nah, I've read all four of those books already." So you say to yourself (out loud, and in broken French, for some reason), "I think I'd like to see a movie."

You then, of course, fire up any number of BitTorrent clients you have loaded onto your computer, and download whatever pirated movies you want to watch at that given moment.

Ha ha! Of course, I am kidding! You would never dream of doing anything illegal, and since downloading pirated movies is illegal, you are far more likely to sign in to your NetFlix account, select a handful of movies you would like to watch, and move them to the top of your queue. It is at this point that you realize that NetFlix, as good a service as it is (go to hell, Blockbuster Total Access), still has an average movie delivery turnaround time of 2-3 days, and by the time those movies arrive the weekend will be over.

Still wishing to watch a movie or two right now, you would probably (again, if you are like me) jump in the car and drive on over to your local video rental store (not Blockbuster) and just shell out the $8.73 for a couple of new releases off the shelf.

However, this is all predicated on the presupposition that you are like me, which I can almost guarantee you are not. For starters, you do not have a 20-foot tall stack of Tom Clancy novels that comprises precisely four books; you have a 48-foot tall stack consisting of only three books, and they are by Clive Cussler. Also, you don't even know what a BitTorrent client is.

Which is why you are precisely the kind of person who would purchase the DVDs directly, well in advance of the weekend upon which you wished to view them. And, knowing this about you as I do, I came prepared with three recommendations:

Wanted

There is no man on this planet (and barely any women, for that matter) who doesn't sometimes (read: "every 17 minutes") fantasize about Angelina Jolie's snarling smile and deep dark eyes, and in Wanted, she adds to this fantasy by carrying firearms.

If you haven't seen it, the movie is about a secret fraternity of assassins whose targets are carefully and methodically selected by ... giggle ... by ... snicker ... HAHAHA! Ok, seriously, I can't tell you how the assassination targets are selected, because it would be a major plot-spoiler, which, in this case, would be less like spoiling a plot and more like telling the punch-line before the joke is finished. I'll give you a hint, though: it would have been more believable if the fraternity had been choosing their targets by spinning a large, multi-colored Wheel 'O' Death, complete with blinking lights and annoying beeping noises.

This weakness aside, the movie still clips along at good speed, keeps the adrenaline pumping, and lets the viewer step vicariously into the Everyman role so ably played by James McAvoy, wherein a virtual Nobody suddenly becomes a very powerful and important Somebody. If that's not enough to entice you, Angelina also gives the viewer a long look at her dripping wet, tattooed backside about halfway into the film. Granted, her derriere is difficult to differentiate from her lips, and the role of her rumpus may very well have been stunt-doubled by her copious kisser, but I digress (and so does she).

Prince Caspian

The second volume in C.S. Lewis's marvelous Narnia series comes to life on screen with Prince Caspian. Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy return to the magical land of Narnia because they have been summoned by the young prince. With the help of the dwarves, centaurs, mice, et al, the children and the prince have to defeat Caspian's evil uncle Miraz, who has usurped the Narnian throne. It's good entertainment, just don't over-analyze it.

And finally ...

The Dark Knight

The summer blockbuster comes to DVD. Taking its cue from Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales", Heath Ledger plays a young squire with a talent for jousting, who disguises himself as his dead master and -- no, I'm sorry, that's wrong. I'm thinking of the 2001 film, A Knight's Tale.

Christian Bale plays a wounded hero given a second shot at life by a mysterious millionaire, a chance to fight crime and corruption with the help of a technologically-advanced vehicle named "KITT", and together with -- uh, nope, that's wrong too. I have this confused with the 1982 television series Knight Rider.

At any rate, this here Dark Knight masterpiece thingy, surely the Holy Grail of all movies ever made or ever to be made, runs for a solid two-and-a-half hours - so if nothing else, it's got a good bang-to-buck ratio. Plus, once you've finished watching it and - 152 minutes later - suddenly need a nicotine fix, you can go to the convenience store for a pack of Kool lights, and when the clerk can't find them on the shelf, you can grab him by the collar and repeatedly smash his head into the front window while yelling "WHERE ARE THEY? WHERE ARE THEY?" (I often do this to Google Maps, in fact, when trying to find all of the McDonald's locations closest to my residence).



If you do end up buying The Dark Knight Rider Tale, or even if you already own it, you should also consider purchasing this hilarious audio commentary on the film, produced by the crew at RiffTrax. The jokes come fast and furious, making fun of Batman's costume (part of which seems to include the inexplicable and affected Deep Gravel Voice), The Joker's insanity, the scenery, the sound effects, Nick Nolte and Gary Busey (who seem to get burned in every RiffTrax commentary), and pretty much everything else in the film. It's very well done, and my sides hurt from laughing for nearly 152 minutes straight.

Ok? So points to take away: read a little more Tom Clancy, never ever give Blockbuster your business, purchase these DVDs and the Dark Knight audio commentary, and above all else, find out what a BitTorrent client is/does/smells like (hint: they might be responsible for choosing assassination targets).

Title: The Happening
MPAA: R
Runtime: 91 minutes
Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

M. Night Shyamalan (first name: "Mid") has offered the viewing public a sled-load of steaming crap-cakes, and I would like to offer him a heartfelt "bite me." His latest offering, The Happening, is misleadingly titled; it probably should have been called The Not Happening, Ever. Better yet, it should have been called The Waiting, because that's what the viewer spends most of this film doing: waiting for something to (please, please, dear God) happen.

Let me see if I can summarize the plot, as I understood it by the end of the film:

- In Central Park, people are acting weird - in fact, they're killing themselves (probably in a desperate attempt to get out of being in this movie)
- Obviously, then, something seems to be happening, but no one is sure what it is
- Mark Wahlberg is a science teacher, who has a math teacher with a very large face for a friend, and together they intend to find out what is happening
- Incidents of Escape-the-Movie-by-Suicide begin to spread to the surrounding areas: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, etc.
- Mark Wahlberg does a lot of traveling with his wife, trying to escape from the movie. He also whines a lot while doing it.
- More suicides - really graphic, outlandish, sensational suicides, the details of which are not spared the audience in the slightest by the increasingly-weird M. Night Shyamalan
- Mark Wahlberg continues whining, running, and looking confused and helpless
- Vast amounts of film are wasted on scenes of discussion, in which various theories concerning the happening are explored at length
- More Wahlbergian whining and running, as the suicide rate skyrockets (my theory: the more Marky-Mark sniffles and hyperventilates, the less his traveling companions desire to live, and thus they throw themselves under running lawn mowers, shoot themselves, leap off of buildings, and so forth)
- Wahlberg and his space-eyed wife meet a freaky old farm lady, who must shoulder the very large burden of providing all of the suspense for the film
- The film ends with thinly-disguised commercial probably paid for by Greenpeace

Over the years, we've all come to expect the Shyamalian last-minute plot twists: The Sixth Sense (he's dead?!), Unbreakable (ahhh, he's the villain!), Signs (she wasn't losing her mind, she was predicting the future!), The Village (they're highly-cloistered freaks?! That's the explanation?!). Even Lady in the Water had its redeeming qualities, keeping the audience guessing about which character fit where in the puzzle of the fairy-tale's dramatis personae. The twist came when the script revealed that no one fit in quite where you expected.

But with The Happening, there is none of this. The mystery of the source of the ever-spreading suicides is basically revealed less than halfway into the film, and no plot twist comes along at the end to turn the viewer's world upside down and create that lovely feeling of disorientation. It just ... ends. With a lame save-the-planet lecture, no less.


So here's what you should do: send me the $7.50 you were going to spend on your ticket to see this film, and I'll give you the same content and message in a fraction of the time (so you can get right back to doing more important things, like finding ingenious uses for all that congealed bacon grease you've been saving in a coffee can under the sink). Here it is:

- Recycle
- Respect the Ozone
- Reduce your carbon footprint
- Stop chopping down trees
- Save the planet

There. And you didn't even have to put up with Mark Wahlberg whining and crying at you for 90 minutes. You can thank me later.

UPDATED

This movie was really, really bad. I saw the movie in the theater months ago, and I still have bruises. Therefore, it gives me great pleasure to announce the arrival of the one thing that might stand a chance against this steaming pile of ... well, you get my drift. I am referring, of course, to the RiffTrax audio commentary on The Never Did Manage to Actually Happen.



Get your mp3 download today, and be sure to add "Why're you eyeing my lemon drink?" to your arsenal of bad movie catch-phrases.