Syd (Chris Evans) learns that his ex-girlfriend London (Jessica Biel) is having a going-away party by her friend Rebecca (Isla Fisher) as she’s going to California with her new boyfriend. London destroyed Syd when she broke things off and he refuses to let her escape without telling her how he feels, so he brings along his coke buddy Bateman (Jason Statham) and pretty much gets destroyed and does lines in a bathroom while confessing everything that got him to this point in his life.

Directed and written by Hunter Richards, this is very 2005 in that Dane Cook has a role. Its leads were also dating, which makes sense as to why they’d both do this and hey, at least The Crystal Method soundtrack is pretty good.

Really, if you want to watch 90 minutes of Evans and Statham in a wig doing blow while women come in, urinate and also do blow while those two go off on life, love and urinating on folks, this is on blu ray and looks nice, I guess. This feels like a one room play and at least the leads get to put it all in and go for it. Maybe it’s your favorite movie and you saw it back in the mid 2000s and remember a time when you could randomly go to parties and not deal with a plague and the worst thing was some post-nasal drip and the need to apologize to some people you offended.

You can buy the Mill Creek blu ray of London from Deep Discount.

This was shot in Málaga, Andalucía, Spain but it’s supposed to be an Old West tourist town in the American Southwest, a place where a journalist named Alice Brown (Lina Romay) has come to track down a man named Doctor Spencer (Steve Barrymore). It looks really arty getting there, Lina’s face lit by dashboard as rain slices against the night on an endless drive, but then you find out the town is called Shit City and this is another late Jess Franco movie shot in a hotel room.

The town has been taken over by vampires and yet again, you hope that this has some level of story and not just video effects and women writhing on beds and well, this also has brightly haired lesbian vampires writhing on beds, shaving each other and, yes, video effects.

There’s also the idea that the lead vampire is Father Flannigan — we never get to meet him — and sometimes he’s evil and others he’s divine and that’s an intriguing concept. I’m sure Jess was going to get around to it but first, could you ladies please groom one another’s pudendums, please?

The scene where the two female vampires spider walk Lina into bed is good. The idea of cowboy vampires is worth exploring. In fact, that’s all that’s here, a bunch of ideas that are set up and then it goes on and on and somehow, this is a movie that has transformed acts of Sappho into boredom and if you told 16-year-old me that this was possible, he’d be amazed.

Sometimes, I get the feeling on these late Jess movies similar to the feeling of when I hear a song like “Unforgiven” and remember that the very same Metallica did “Trapped Under Ice.” Except that I’m not irrationally enraged at Jess. It should have been Lars, both with Cliff and Soledad.

Countess Edna Luise Von Stein (Pamela Stanford, Lorna the Exorcist, Cannibal Terror) once had a stud in bed that was surprised by her sister Millicent (Karine Gambier, but you can also call her Simone Samson like they did in Caged Women and Secrets of a French Maid). That man ended up assaulting Millicent while Edna watched and now, Edna keeps her all tied and drugged up with the help of Dr. Barrios (Jack Taylor) all in the hopes that if she can get the lawyers to say that Millicent is legally insane, then she’ll get everything.

Milly has one hope. Her sister has brought many men to her room — and watched — but only Joe (Kurt Meinicke) ever gave her pleasure. He’s in love with her, but can he rescue her? Is there anything left? And will Edna let her go, seeing as how her pleasure is dependent on seeing her sister remain unfulfilled?

This also has the much better title Satanic Sisters even if there are no occult things happening. Just weird sex, the kind of stuff that Erwin C. Dietrich wrote and there’s no Lina around but there’s Jess, shooting things through curtains and that’s about all we can hope for at this stage.

As a kid, I read and re-read Marvel Premiere #47, which showed how Scott Lang became Ant-Man. Written by David Michelinie and drawn by X-Men team of teams John Byrne and Terry Austin, it was a story I read and re-read and if you have ever seen the way I draw comic books, so much of it comes from this issue.

So when it comes to that whole “Are comics cinema?” back and forth argument, I think you can figure out what side I’m on. Are there too many comic book movies? Were there too many giallo from 1970-1975? Did Italy make too many Westerns? Were there too many slashers in 1981? Can there be too much of something that you love?

Alright, now that I have gotten past the legally required nod to serious criticism, let me tell you why I enjoyed this movie about humanoid broccoli.

After the Avengers save everything from Thanos, former criminal and current Avenger Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) has settled down from being Ant-Man, instead enjoying life as a writer, husband of Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) and father of Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton), who is upset that her father isn’t fighting for people any longer, instead enjoying the fruits of his hard work and resting on his laurels. There’s a moment that’s interesting here, as she discusses all the people who were displaced in the time where Thanos killed half of reality and now are homeless. Yes, it’d be great to explore this but this is a popcorn movie that soon moves past that; I’m not suggesting a popcorn movie delve into that, but hey, if there ends up being a Disney+ D-Man series that does, I’d watch that. Also, the fact that I just casually namedropped D-Man should explain why I never went to the prom.

Anyways, Cassie has been working with her stepmother Hope and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) to communicate with the Quantum Realm, the place where Hank’s wife Janey Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) spent thirty years of her life and has no interest in going back, particularly when it comes to explaining her past or unleashing new Marvel Cinematic Universe big bad Kang the Conquerer (Jonathan Majors, who is quite frankly amazing in this movie and brings a real sense of big drama to his role, not to mention all the various — oh yeah, SPOILER WARNING, I forgot that legal disclaimer –versions of Kang that he shows off, including Immortus, Rama-Tut, Scarlet Centurion and Victor Timely).

Everyone soon gets pulled into that Quantum Realm and becomes part of the war between its inhabitants, with good rebels Jentorra (Katy O’Brian, who was already part of the MCU as Kimball in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., as well as Major Sarah Grey in the DC superhero TV series Black Lightning and a comms officer on The Mandalorian; if you really want me to go full geek, she’s a member of former Micronauts leader Commander Arcturus Rann’s Enigma Force alongside other non-Mego owned characters Marionette and Bug; one more semicolon but man, this movie is as close as we’re ever getting to a Michael Golden-era Micronauts movie), telepathic Quaz (William Jackson Harper; he’s not Quasar, as many Marvel fans thought, but when he does pull a password out of someone’s mind at one point, it’s 18147, which would be Avengers #181, Scott Lang’s first appearance, and a shout out to the aforementioned Marvel Premiere #47), the slime creature with no holes named Veb (David Dastmalchian, who was Kurt in the last two Ant-Man movies, Abra Kadabra on The Flash and Polka Dot Man in Suicide Squad), the flashlight head Xolum (James Cutler) and oh yeah, there’s Bill Murray as Lando Calrissian (I kid, he’s Lord Krylar, another of the characters like Jentorra who come from K’ai, the microplanet where the Hulk met one of the loves of his life Jarella) battling Kang and his Tron: Legacy-looking soldiers like he’s Baron Karza or something.

Anyways, yes, this all feels rather like Star Wars but then again — I invite you to check out this piece I wrote about where that movie’s influences came from — isn’t Star Wars influenced if not ripped off from Jack Kirby’s Fourth World? Kirby invented most of the MCU and rebelling against a dark authority is pretty much an archetype. Where this gets kind of operatic is that Ant-Man is, well, an ant against space god Kang and that’s a battle that I never saw coming.

I also never thought I’d see MODOK (Machine Organism Designed Only for Killing) in a movie, much less one that fully embraces the absolutely goofy idea of a giant head in a chair with weapons and baby legs. Also, this ends up being former Yellowjacket Darren Cross from the first movie and every time his real face shows up, it breaks the movie but it’s a welcome break in the movie.

You can imagine — and you’d be right — that the good guys win but this movie brings up an interesting idea that you can’t just punch Kang, who lives his life across multiple timelines that are not linear and that this Kang may not be the worst of the many Kangs. Then Scott brushes it off and tries to enjoy some Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake (the fact that the ice cream chain has no tie-in flavor and yet had a Condorman flavor back in the 80s is kind of upsetting; you can see a list of even more movie flavors here).

In the same way that politics — nice socialism shoutout with the ants in this — just leads to people not listening to one another, a lot of folks have their minds made up about comic book movies which are really just mythology and should be seen as such. That said, this movie did what all popcorn films should: it entertained me. I think it’s hilarious that one of the film’s writers, Jeff Loveness, said that this movie is “Jodorowsky’s Dune within Marvel” and there are not enough drugs in the world to show you what Alejandro Jodorowsky would do with a Marvel film but hey, he also did The Incal in comics form, so when you denigrate comics, keep in mind that a hero of cinema spent so much of his time there.

I explained to my wife tonight that as a kid, there I never really wanted to get involved in human drama or how stressful some extended family members could be, so I just filled my life with comic books. Often when we talk on the phone, my mom will say, “Do you remember this person,” and the answer is no, I do not remember this person. However, if she asked, “Was Wolverine really in World War 2?” I could give her several anecdotes and explain how Black Widow could be young and yet still saved by Logan and Captain America in 1941.

So yeah, I liked this movie.

Three students — Juanita (Michele Hermet), Juan (Leonardo da Costa) and Hans (Jérôme Foulon) — have grown listless with life in Paris and go to Brazil in search of adventure. Seeing as how Jess Franco directed and wrote this, well, they find it. A coming of age film from Jess? Yes. After all, he had aleady made Tenemos 18 años 22 years before.

Of course, the three are in the midst of a love triangle, even if they may not understand that, but at a young age our hormones always confuse what is really going on. This trip to Rio is actually a few hotel rooms and a clever use of stock footage but this film has some slapstick and good humor and perhaps I was in the right mood to look back on teen sex comedies — from more than just America — with fondness on the day that I watched this.

I also enjoyed that Hans would rather read Voltaire than get all of the women coming his way for some time.

So yeah, a Lemon Popsicle from the same man who brought us the sex and death at once that is Venus In Furs and Lina Romay demanding a prisoner clean her culo in Ilsa The Wicked Warden. Speaking of Lina, she shows up in a small role here, as does Nadine Pascal.

What an incredible idea for a film. Matthew Bauer, who directed this and co-wrote it with Rene van Pannevis, went around the world to learn what it’s like to actually have the name James Bond. The title for this movie comes from George Lazenby’s line in his lone appearance as 007: “This never happened to the other fellow.”

James Bonds appear — from an inmate to a theater director, a man who runs a Bond museum in Sweden to even a woman who took the name to keep a violent ex-lover from finding where she’s gone — and even the story of how Ian Fleming took the name from the ornithology author who wrote the definitive book on the birds of West Indies is told in this exploration of what’s in a name, particularly when that name is so famous.

Is it a blessing or a curse to be named after — or have the same name — as MI6’s top agent? That’s what this film gets to the bottom of, yet Bauer does it in an exciting way that lets you know the people behind the names, several of whom have stories that rival anything Fleming wrote.

It also tells how Mary Bond, the wife of the namesake of Bond, wrote to Fleming regarding the use of her husband’s name. The author wrote back saying, “I must confess that your husband has every reason to sue me. In return, I can only offer your James Bond unlimited use of the name Ian Fleming for any purpose he may think fit. Perhaps one day your husband will discover a particularly horrible species of bird which he would like to christen in an insulting fashion by calling it Ian Fleming.” She replied by writing the books How 007 Got His Name and To James Bond With Love, both of which feature very spy action-looking covers.

Perhaps the wildest story in this is about Gunnar Schaefer, who changed his name in 2007 to Gunnar James Bond Schäfer. After having a childhood with a father who escaped Germany at the end of World War II, he found a new father figure in Ian Fleming and his creation. Today, he runs a museum out of his auto parts store that houses many Bond props.

Bauer spent a decade on this and had the goal that none of these people would just be the name Bond, but instead you would see them as individuals. He has succeeded beyond measure.

Also: If you have a problem with a black James Bond, there already is one in this. Get over it.