From Hollywood to Hollywood (2010)

He would have smelled the beer, then he would have fired me for sure!

— Dempster Pierson

One of the stars Jeff Bushaw of From Hollywood to Hollywood contacted me on Facebook a month ago to offer me a chance to view their movie. I was like, “Okay, I’ll watch your movie.” I finally watched the movie this past weekend and I was like, “What the fuck is this?”

The Pierson brothers are trying to find some kind of success that is not in their little town of Hollywood, Florida. Skylar (writer/director Scott Bushaw) is a reluctant gay-for-pay pornstar that wants to be a real actor and not been known for man-on-man action. His doofus of an older brother, Dempster (Jeff Bushaw) wants to drive out to Hollywood, California to be rich and famous. The trouble is that they have almost no money.

Driving out to Hollywood, California in a beat up Ford pick-up, they have a rude awakening that they hit a man, Fernando (Fernando Olivares). Miraculously, they don’t get into trouble. They end up crashing at his place, while they go to Skylar’s agent, Pat Masters (Jonathan St. Clair), who sleeps in his office with pages of screenplay as his sheet.

The brothers want to write, produce and star in their own movie. Things are not what they seem when Pat books Skylar on an audition for a ultra-low budget gay porn flick. Dempster tries to find odd jobs to help pay Fernando for rent that is due.

I almost didn’t want to review this movie, because I thought it was a huge waste of time. Jeff said it had a “unique sense of humor.” You got that right. It had none. I wasn’t expecting much from it, but come on. The acting was not good. You have a bunch of non-actors come in with their monotone, emotionless delivery of lines would make you want to kill yourself.

It was said on the IMDb page that the movie was 92 minutes long. I called bullshit. It was more like two hours of agony. It tried not to be clichéd, but it had stupid plot developments.

The only saving grace with this flick was Scott Bushaw as Skylar. At least, he did something with his character.

Judgment: This movie was painful to watch like Chinese water torture.

Rating: *1/2

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey.

— The Criminologist

The cult classic musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been entrenched in American culture since it bombed at the box office in 1975. I always wanted to go to the midnight showings of this movie, but I didn’t want to feel like a noob going there. I am familiar with the music seeing that I have the soundtrack to the 2001 Broadway revival. I get a kick out of going back into a time warp to visit Dr. Frank-N-Furter and his cretins of the night.

Nostalgia floods back when the first thing you see is those flame red lips singing the opening number about this tale of an uptight couple; Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon) getting stranded one fateful night in a rainstorm. The Criminologist (Charles Gray) that recalls the events of that night narrates the tale.

They arrive at the castle of Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) with his band of misfits, abused manservant Riff-Raff (Richard O’Brien), maid Magenta (Patricia Quinn) and groupie Columbia (Little Nell). Brad wants to use the telephone to get the car fixed, but the Doctor has other plans for the twosome.

He wants them to witness the birth of his perfect companion, Rocky Horror (Peter Hinwood). As the night progress, the Transylvanians’ influence corrupts the good couple.

Everybody knows that the acting is not good bordering on soap opera melodrama. The music is spastic like the cast sucked helium before recording the soundtrack. Is it bad or is it so bad that it’s good?

Judgment: There is something enjoyable about this trainwreck of a movie.

Rating: ***1/2

The Spirit (2008)

My city, I can not deny her. My city screams. She is my mother. She is my lover, and I am her Spirit.

— The Spirit

Universally panned by critics and the word mouths of the entire internet, The Spirit was unfortunately brought to us by writer/director Frank Miller who tried to parlay his successful collaboration of Sin City into this movie. It delivered on the pure suckage that it was promised.

The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) is a crime fighter and notorious womanizer that lives in the fictional Central City. He is constantly fighting the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) that gets into his mind about why he could withstand a lot of punishment and is able to heal himself. Octopus and his partner in crime, Silken Floss (Scarlett Johannson) and his team of idiotic goons Pathos, Ethos, Logos (all played by Louis Lombardi) look for a vase filled with blood of Heracles to make him immortal like a god.

The Spirit teams up with a local detective that loves the word “goddamn” Dolan (Dan Lauria) and a rookie with high pitched voice, Morgenstern (Stana Katic) to uncover any connection between the random crimes to the Octopus, and a beautiful jewel thief named Sand Saref (Eva Mendes). She wants to attain the ultimate prize, a lost artifact from the Argonauts, Jason’s Golden Fleece.

The movie is classic style over substance. Having a comic book writer, as film director does not go hand and hand with Miller being more interested in the visual look of the film that he forgets to realize that the actors need to be on the same page with the look. The actors struggle to make this movie make any semblance of coherent sense, but they fail because Miller dropped the ball actually directing them.

Macht throws on his “I’m Batman” Christian Bale voice having long conversations with himself and loving his pussycat. Jackson is like a chicken with its head cut off talking about eggs for some reason. Johansson is so wooden; you believe that her soul was missing. Mendes’s character is obsessed with shiny anything and her ass that wants to be a femme fatale, but it makes you want to kill yourself. Sarah Paulson as The Spirit’s love interest, Ellen Dolan acted like she was in a bad soap opera. It’s a damn shame.

The movie is hallow. The action is over the top and cartoonish. It’s laughable. The plot is non-existent and filled with plot holes. You don’t have any idea what the fuck is going on. Who are these people? Are they living in the 1940s? Present day? The dialogue is atrocious with such gems as “Shut up and bleed,” “I’m gonna kill you all kinds of dead,” and “All the enemy has is gun to knives. I have the entire city as my weapon.” Are you serious?

Please, Frank Miller, I implore you. If you want to direct another movie, stop and think. Take some classes about the art of filmmaking. With this movie, it looked like you were mocking it. You didn’t care about the joy and satisfaction of making a competent movie. Collaborate with other directors. Stick your feet in with short films to gain some experience. Something.

Judgment: If you are a person that enjoys shitty movies, this one is the Holy Grail for you.

Rating: *

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009)

Nash out!

— Charlie Nash

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li was a movie that I would not pay any money to see in theaters. It is widely known that anything based on a video game would suck major donkey balls. This movie is continuing that trend.

This is the origin story of Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk) whose life is in shambles when Bison (Neal McDonaugh) kidnaps her father, Xiang (Edmund Chen). Bison inexplicably imprisons her father for over seventeen years so he could seize control of Shadaloo crime syndicate and slums of his Bison’s old neighborhood. Side note: am I the one that realizing that Bison’s voice sounds exactly like Lawrence Fishburne’s?

Chun-Li receives an ancient scroll to seek a person named Gen (Robin Shou) in Bangkok. Meeting Gen, he and Chun-Li begin her training in order to defeat Bison.

At the same time, an Interpol agent named Charlie Nash (Chris Klein) teams up with Det. Maya Sunee(Moon Bloodgood) to stop Bison dead in his tracks.

The story is generic. There are some glaring plot holes. It makes no logical sense. The action scenes looked like a twelve-year-old choreographed them. The acting is lackluster especially Klein’s character. It is like Nicolas Cage in the last five years levels of horrendous.

The dialogue is hysterically bad with lines like “[Bison] walks through the raindrops” or Chun-Li’s mantra “Sometimes you have to stand up, when standing easy. Wow! Give screenwriter Justin Marks an Oscar… or rather a Razzie for that shitty dialogue.

This abysmal movie shifts in tone with its computer-generated blood, the vanity of Vega played by Black Eye Peas member, Taboo, the WTF moments of gory, despicable violence and the ridiculously obvious wirework.

Judgment: This ridiculous movie should enjoyed Mystery Science Theater style.

Rating: *

Dragonball Evolution (2009)

Now the signs have appeared again, the evil has returned. Only one chosen warrior has the power to defeat this threat.

— Master Roshi

Universally panned by critics and industry insiders before it was released, Dragonball Evolution is a movie that is a prime example of the bastardization of a beloved property.

Familiar with the original source material, the anime series Dragonball Z, nothing could get me excited for this live action feature with Goku played by Justin Chatwin. This is as atrocious as it gets like Speed Racer.

The paper-thin plot involves Goku (Chatwin) as a teenager being raised by his grandfather Gohan (Randall Duk Kim) to learn the ways of inner strength. On his birthday, Goku receives a gift. It is a magical orb called a dragonball, which holds mystical powers that combine together with six others can grant the person one wish.

Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) is an evil space alien that was sealed away in the bowels of the Earth for two thousand years breaks out, which was not explained. He seeks to gather all of the dragonballs to exact his revenge on the Earth.

Piccolo will go to any means necessary to get his hands on the dragonballs. He kills Goku’s grandfather in the process.

Goku teams up with Bulma (Emmy Rossum), a tough biker chick that looked like broken down harajuku girl, to recover a dragonball that was taken from her. Before his grandfather dies, he tells Goku to seek Master Roshi (Chow Yun-Fat) to learn how to harness his power from the universe to defeat Piccolo.

This movie was laughably bad. Some sequences had me laughing aloud. The dialogue was awful. The side gags were painful to watch. The bad guy was barely in the movie for anybody to be in real peril.

It was a joke. After the movie bombed at the box office, the news came that a sequel in the works. Why?

Judgment: If you want to laugh your ass off with shitty dialogue, crappy characters and awful CG, by all means, check this movie out.

Rating: *1/2

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

I don’t wanna die here.

— Ana

Here is another hang up of mine: the remake. Hollywood is trying to cash in on familiar properities by slapping a new coat of paint on the same generic story. I wanted to bite the bullet and watch Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead.

To preface this, I have not seen George Romero’s 1978 original. I knew the gist of the story about a bunch of survivors are trapped in a mall while zombies want to eat their flesh.

Ana (Sarah Polley) is a an ordinary nurse that is getting off of her shift to be with her family. The next morning, she realizes that the entire city of Milwaukee is under attack by zombies. Her family has turned and they want to eat her flesh.

She escapes to find the entire city in chaos. She plows her car into a tree. She wakes up unscathed to have a shotgun pointed in her face by Kenneth (Ving Rhames), a cop.

They meet up with three more survivors Michael (Jake Weber), Andre (Mekhi Phifer) and his pregnant wife, Luda (Inna Korobkina). Then, Michael suggests that they should go to mall. No chase, not them surrounded by the undead. They just going there.

Upon arriving, they encountered some of the zombies and quickly disposed of them. They want to go to the second floor of the mall, but a trio of douchey security guards points their guns at them. They make them their slaves.

I don’t know those secuirty guards took me out of the movie. I was done. I hate the film so much that I turned it off. I didn’t care if all of the survivors. I didn’t give a damn.

Judgment: If you want to see stupid, douchey people getting attacked by zombies, by all means see this movie.

Rating: **

Starships Troopers (1997)

You’re some sort of big, fat, smart-bug, aren’t you?

— Johnny Rico

Starship Troopers is a movie that I wanted to see for a long time, because it has become a cult classic to sci-fi geeks since its release in 1997. People said that when it was released that it was terrible. I would not say that it’s terrible. I have some huge issues with the movie, but it was fun.

The film is based on the 1959 novel by Robert Heinlein. The plot revolves around Bueno Aires in the near future where a trio of friends, Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien), Carmen (Denise Richards) and Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) are preparing to graduate from high school that think about what they are going to do with their lives.

They want to enroll in the Federal Service for different reasons. Carmen wants to be a pilot. Carl wants to understand alien species and Rico wants to be there just for Carmen.

After they leave for the Federal Service, the Arachnids attack Earth and thus starts the intergalactic war.

There is so much blood in this movie. It was like a slasher film. Decapitated, mangled, split-apart bodies strewn all over the place.

Watch out for a lot of explosions of red, green, and orange.

The movie was kick ass, but I have some problems with it.

• The teenagers were from Buenos Aires, but they were played by white actors.
• When Carmen gets punctured in the shoulder by an arachnid, ten minutes later she is holding a gun blowing the away.
• The dialogue was too campy for my taste. I had to laugh.
• The romantics rivals Dizzy and Zander (Dina Mayer, Patrick Muldoon) were outrageous.

Judgment: It was a fun ride, but you have to let a lot things go to enjoy it.

Rating: ***1/2

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

Did Doogie Houser just steal my fucking car?

— Harold

I was bored on Saturday that I wanted to see a mindless form of entertainment. I thought why not a Harold and Kumar movie? I was going to get the one that was released last year, but I didn’t see the first movie, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. I decided to make it a double feature.

The plot of the movie is very simple. Harold (John Cho) is a stock analyst that has a bunch of new paperwork thrust upon him by his co-worker, Billy (Ethan Embry) so he could party with another co-worker, JD (Robert Tinkler). Harold tries to woo his sexy neighbor, Maria (Paula Garcés), but fails miserably in the process.

Harold and his roommate, Kumar (Kal Penn) get stoned and they watch an enticing commercial for the restaurant chain, White Castle. They decided to have their perfect meal at White Castle.

What happens over the next ten hours take the boys on a wild rise that includes a wild college party, an ugly repairman (Christopher Meloni) and his hot wife (Malin Ackerman), also a run-in with Neil Patrick Harris that is high on E.

There were some bathroom humor that I did not like, the “Battleshits” scene, some of the jokes fell flat. It seemed that Kumar looked more like his was stoned then Harold. The best part of the movie was the end and NPH.

Judgment: I would suggest this movie when you are bored and you want to make fun of two stoners for an hour and a half.

Rating: ***

Mamma Mia! (2008)

It’s my last night of freedom… which is what some might see it, but for me it’s the last night before the greatest adventure of my life.

— Sky

I was bored yesterday and I wanted to see a dumb movie. I heard that people hated Mamma Mia! I had a morbid curiosity to see if it was as atrocious as everyone thinks. The movie is not schlock, but it’s not Moulin Rouge! quality either. I’m sorry, Hugh Jackman, but the musical is not all the way back.

First, I heard about the Broadway production on the 2002 Tony Awards. It was nominated for Best Musical and all that. It seemed like a fun ride. It had the music of ABBA, which is always nice.

I heard that they were turning this into a film with Meryl Streep in the lead as Donna, I was scared. Yes, she did sing in Postcards from the Edge and A Prairie Home Companion, but this was a much beloved musical for last couple of years.

The plot is pretty thin. It centers around a weekend in the Greek Islands in the late 1980s. Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is getting married to Sky (Dominic Cooper). She wants to have her father give her away at her wedding. The problem is that she doesn’t know who her father is. She reads her mother, Donna’s diary and finds out that she has three possible fathers: Bill Anderson (Stellan Skarsgård), Sam Carmichael (Pierce Bronsan) and Harry Bright (Colin Firth). Hilarity ensues.

The movie was okay. The scenery was gorgeous. The editing was horrible. Some of the performances had me scratching my head.

Everybody is talking about how Pierce Bronsan’s singing would kill his career. I don’t think that. At the beginning, he sounded like Lurch trying to carrying a tune. In the uptempo selections, he was not good, but the slower ballads were better for his voice.

Judgment: If you want to see a slow moving train wreck, then this movie is for you.

Rating: **

Spirited Away (2002)

The tunnel led Chichiro to a mysterious town.

I wanted to see Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away for awhile ever since it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2002. It is currently on number 60 of Top 250 on IMDB. I can understand why people think that this is a great movie, but I have some problems with some of the voices in the English dubbed version that I had.

This movie centers around a mousy ten-year-old girl, named Chichiro (English voice by Daveigh Chase) is moving with her parents (Lauren Holly, Michael Chiklis) when her father decides to make a shortcut through a deep forest. On the other side, they see a tunnel. Curious the family walks through the tunnel to find an abandoned amusement park.

In instance, they follow curiously looks around until the father smells some food. The parents gorge on the free food until they are turned into pigs, literally.

Chichiro tries to find somebody to help her parents. She meets Haku (Jason Marsden), a spirit guide that helps her try to find a way to save her parents.

Chichiro has to work for the bathhouse that is for the spirits residing in the land.

She meets wacky characters like Kamajii (David Ogden Stiers), Lin (Susan Egan), Yubaba (Suzanne Pleshette), and No Face (Bob Bergen).

I have a problem with the leads girl’s voice. It was so screechy that I wanted to turn the movie off. Also, the first thirty minutes of the film moved at the pace of snails having sex. So slow. I was up and down with this movie.

Judgment: If you are into anime movie with effed up looking character, I would suggest this movie.

Rating: ***1/2