Bay-stardization: An increasingly common occurrence in the film industry in which beloved films, television series, cartoons, video games, toys etc have their storylines "re-imagined" or in some cases reinvented wholesale with the sole purpose of introducing a new golden tit for greed-driven studio executives to suckle from.

A film-maker interested in performing the process of Bay-stardization should adhere to the following steps:

First, harvest the original idea, then formally announce the project during a forum such as this year's Comic-Con and crank out as much hi-gloss promotional material, conceptual art, and/or teaser footage as is physically possible to be fed to the crazed fans of the original film at next year's Comic-Con.

Next, strip away any worrisome substance or insight contained in the original and substitute with equal parts cliche and fecal matter during the screenwriting and production phases.

Arrange for a mega-release of the movie and stand back as devoted fans leaving the cinema complex either ponder your violent death or strain to convince themselves that "it really wasn't that bad."

Finally, reflect upon said fan base's grief as you drunkenly laugh all the way to your palatial beach house with two of the filthiest sluts money can buy in the passenger seat stripped naked and oiling themselves as a fat young Philippine boy cradles a magnum of champagne in one arm and the biggest bag of gerbil food that could be acquired at this hour in the other.

Everything you ever loved will be sodomized by Michael Bay,
Joey

Posted by Patrick at 08:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

So I did it. I did something really dirty. I took the advice of an American. Despite my better judgement, that's what I did. That's the logical equivalent of having a stranger shit in my pants on my behalf.

But I relented nonetheless.

I watched Spartacus: Blood and Sand, all 13 gory, carefully waxed episodes of the Sam Raimi produced historical fuck-fest. And holy shit what a ride. How to sum it up? The Yanks took Gladiator to pieces, in fear of it being too heavy and intellectual, hammered it down to its component parts, added a lashing or two of pungent homosexuality, shook it up, and let it loose.

I studied Roman history back in the day. It turns out, thanks to this epic little show, that everything I knew was wrong. Turns out that everybody just walked around naked, rubbed oil into each other's shoulders, brooded dramatically in the shadows, wore leather skirts to show off their massive, hairy, muscular thighs, and fucked each other's armpits.

It wasn't just my knowledge of history that was lacking. My knowledge of anatomy got a kicking too. Did you know that if you whack someone gently on the back with the flat, blunt edge of a sword they will literally explode in a tidal wave of blood? I do now. Thank you American TV for teaching me this. Now I shall be more careful in life, wrapped forever in the fearful knowledge that if I ever stub my toe I risk exploding like a retarded suicide victim leaping off the Empire State.

There was also that cowardly chap from The Mummy in it too. And he did some rather good acting. Not that anybody noticed. Because he was surrounded by massive, shiny men beating each other to death with their
wooden blades. They may as well have cast Gary fucking Coleman.





I loved it. I really did. It turns out the inmates have not only escaped, but are running the asylum. It's as if Lost confused too many people, causing a Poll Pott style uproar in which all the smart people were culled, leaving nothing but a trail of ADD-ridden miscreants to run the show. These misfits then did what we all, deep-down, love best - they turned up the volume to 11, killed everything in sight (twice) and paid all the actors extra to yell the word "cunt" at random intervals, for no apparent reason.

I was very pleased with this show - for the above, and for two additional reasons:

1.) I learned a new phrase by watching this show. At some point in this series a conversation takes place that actually allows the actor to say "you'll survive, but you'll be uglier than a whore's gash". "Uglier than a whore's gash" is officially the greatest thing I've ever heard. I laughed so hard at that my friends thought I was having a stroke. I hear season 2 has a whole episode dedicated to one of the gladiators farting, and the rest of them pointing and laughing about it for a whole hour. Magic.

2.) This show is a metaphor of all that we know and love of America. They took the most culturally advanced race in the history of all mankind, stripped it down of all intelligable merit, and pumped it to the gills with tits, blood, inappropriate heavy metal soundtracks and such homo-eroticism that the whole Gay section of extremetube.com has been instantly rendered obsolete.

In years to come, future generations will wonder as to the cultural impact of America upon the world. They need but see Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Just like anything American, it has all the subtlety of a large nuclear war.

Oh, and that bitch from Zena gets her tits out a lot too.

And she has really, really big nipples.

Hamlin Grade: 10


Part-time Ninja

Posted by Patrick at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

War Wolves. Get it? War Wolves? Cuz. Cuz, see their soldiers... in a war, and they come home as something approximating werewolves... War Wolves!

Man you people are thick.

I have something I need to confess. I like the SciFi -um- SyFy channel. At least a couple days out of the week anyway, when they're not showing idiots running around condemned prisons in night vision and jizzing themselves because one of their flashlights flickered. "Oh shit! Did you just see that?! Tell me we're getting this!" No I'm talking about that time of the week when I could be out having a life but instead I find myself feasting on such fine cinematic fare as Wyvern, Megashark vs. Giant Octopus, or the incomparable Dracula 3000 starring Coolio. (as an aside if this site expanded it's all time worst list to ten - or for that matter six - Dracula 3000 is a solid contender.)

With precious little exception, the "films" offered to us by the SyFy channel could suck a planet out of orbit. They're that bad. And any Bad Movie fly buzzing around the tube on a given weekend would be a fool not to hone in on their foul stench. I like to think that if Ed Wood were alive today he'd be president of the network or at least in charge of programming. Maybe "Dr. Ackula" would've actually seen the light of day. But hey we got War Wolves. The thing about War Wolves is that it actually has some decently constructed, reasonably well-acted scenes and it makes some fairly interesting, quirky choices. But just about the time you're starting to think the movie's not that bad you get hit with a flaming turd right in the eye.

Things get rolling with the bible verse that admonishes us to "walk in the light lest darkness come upon you." This is followed by a brief sequence in which a seemingly ordinary soldier pens a letter of some sort before calmy unholstering his pistol and splattering his brains on the wall. Pause for a second. This scene is actually well-paced, well-composed and the special effect work is practical and pretty believable. Right now if you'd stumbled upon the movie by accident you might think you were in for a decent flick. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on whether or not you're a member of the brotherhood here) there's about an hour and a half of movie left. Cue the shitty, generic Incubus rip-off music - as if the genuine Incubus wasn't bad enough - for the next scene which introduces us to the major players and soon to be war wolves as they clumsily attempt to act like they're playing football in the desert. Here we meet our hero Jake Gabriel and his sexy love interest Erika Moore along with their brothers and sisters in arms. Soon it's off to battle and we find the group in the midst of an ambush in some shithole Middle Eastern village. Everything goes slow-mo and we're presumably expected to be terrified as crazed villagers attack the soldiers and snatch them from the streets, dragging them into their lil mud-brick house things. Jake and the wounder Erika are holed up in one such dump and one of those rascally natives comes snarling into the doorway on all fours as Ave Maria plays over the action. Cut to Jake back home in the good ole' USA holding down a shit-job in a small town grocery store drinking lots of vodka and eating lots of steak tartar and having a genuinely tough go at readjusting to civilian life. And there's the lycanthropy.

Jake goes to AA meetings in an effort to find some sort of solace and to help him cope with the urge to kill the living shit out of everything he sees. (Do you really need to be a werewolf for that?) Unlike Jake the majority of his friends including his old girlfriend Erika have come to terms with their new nature and are tracking him down for the purposes of having him join or lead the pack. Apparently the womenfolk aren't satisfied with the Manny Pacquiao look-alike who's in charge at the moment.

Enter John Saxon of Enter the Dragon and Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Saxon plays Tony Ford, an old general who is aware of the war wolve phenomenon and with the help of his grizzled old war buddie Frank attempts to track them down in LA. They manage to apprehend Jake who's been summoned there as well by one of the survivors he's remained in contact with. Said contact is subsequently killed in a less than spectacular firefight with the Manny Pacquiao guy. From here everybody travels to Seattle or wherever the hell Jake had been holed up for some reason I forgot. (I'll be damned if i'm gonna watch this movie again to find out.) But whatever it is, it will be here in the peaceful Pacific Northwest were the final showdown will occur as Jake faces off against the buxome she-wolf threesome and that little latin guy who is presumably Jakes only rival for leadership of "the pack" as it were. The showdown is anything but memorable and as they approach the climax of their transformation into total beasts the combatants end up with silly black shaggy dog noses and that whole generic Underworldesque makeup that causes them to resemble what Klingons would look like if they mated with Mumm-Ra from Thundercats. It's fairly ridiculous.

Still the movie has moments that would approach a level of quality that is, with the possible exception of Splinter (which I maintain is the finest thing the network has ever produced) wholly unheard of on SyFy. Were it not for the ham-handedness of the production or the stilted performances we get from most of the actors the thing might just work on a moderate level. The acting of the chicks is particularly noteworthy in it's crappiness. The three female warwolves (uuugggghhh that title again) all look and act like the kind of women that have given the idea of a career in the adult film industry more than just a passing consideration. As a matter of fact I recently learned that Natasha Alam, who plays Jake's love interest, is a former Playboy model. Note to self...

Despite this fact there are no tits in the movie, not even the DVD version, which i downl-i mean purchased. And this transgression will not be forgiven by the giver of the Hamlin.

War Wolves shamelessly attempts to use the curse of the werewolf as a metaphor for what a lot of service men and women undergo when they come back from war. It might work if it weren't so obvious or if the film makers made the decision to go for an all out political satire or a horror comedy in the vein of Evil Dead. Unfortunately they decided to split the difference and we're left with the skid-marks of this stinky miscarriage that's not good enough to be held in any kind of critical esteem and not bad enough to be revered in the halls of the Bad Movie Knights. Not even a cameo from Martin "Sweep the leg" Kove can save War Wolves from Bad Movie mediocrity.

Hamlin Grade:3


Everything you ever loved will be sodomized by Michael Bay,
Joey

Posted by Patrick at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)