July 7-13 Teen Movie Hell Week: From the book description on the Bazillion Points website: All-seeing author Mike “McBeardo” McPadden (Heavy Metal Movies) passes righteous judgment over the entire (teen movie) genre, one boobs-and-boner opus at a time. In more than 350 reviews and sidebars, Teen Movie Hell lays the crucible of coming-of-age comedies bare, from party-hearty farces such as The Pom-Pom Girls, Up the Creek, and Fraternity Vacation to the extreme insanity exploding all over King Frat, Screwballs, The Party Animal, and Surf II: The End of the Trilogy.
Made one after the other with Better Off Dead by director and writer Savage Steve Holland with actor John Cusack, this may not have been a success in theaters, but when it came to video stores and cable TV, it was watched over and over.
Hoops McCann (Cusack) — named for the Steely Dan song “Glamour Profession”– didn’t get a scholarship in basketball, despite his name. However, he wants to attend the Rhode Island School of Design to become an animator. He just needs to put together an illustrated love story to get in, so he does what we all would: he goes to Nantucket with his friends George (Joel Murray) and Squid Calamari (Kristen Goelz).
After they rescue singer Cassandra Eldridge (Demi Moore) from a motorcyle gang, they settle in for a summer of hijnks with twins Egg (Bobcat Goldthwaite) and Clay Stork (Tom Willard) and Ack-Ack Raymond (Curtis Armstrong), much of which is about saving Cassandra’s family home from the Beckersted family (Mark Metcalf, William Hickey, Matt Mulhern). Hoops even gets challenged to a basketball game that he loses horribly, upsetting Cassandra, all while Egg gets stuck in a Godzilla costume.
There’s a regatta, a boat race, an old man bad guy who turns babyface and a radio station blowing up real good. Plus, animated sequences, bunny versions of Siskel and Ebert exploding, Rich Little as a DJ, Joe Flaherty as General Raymond, a young Jeremy Piven as rich kid Ty, Billie Bird as a wacky grandma (of course) and two of my favorite small role players, Rich Hall and Taylor Negron, as gas station attendants. Oh yeah! John Matuszak — Sloth himself — is in this!
July 7-13 Teen Movie Hell Week: From the book description on the Bazillion Points website: All-seeing author Mike “McBeardo” McPadden (Heavy Metal Movies) passes righteous judgment over the entire (teen movie) genre, one boobs-and-boner opus at a time. In more than 350 reviews and sidebars, Teen Movie Hell lays the crucible of coming-of-age comedies bare, from party-hearty farces such as The Pom-Pom Girls, Up the Creek, and Fraternity Vacation to the extreme insanity exploding all over King Frat, Screwballs, The Party Animal, and Surf II: The End of the Trilogy.
Directed by Joan Micklin Silver and written by Robin Schiff, Tom Ropelewski and Leslie Dixon, Loverboy casts future heartthrob Patrick Dempsey as Randy Bodek, a guy slacking through college and living with his girlfriend Jenny (Nancy Valen) when his dad (Robery Ginty!?) calls him home, refusing to pay for school any more.
After getting a job at Senor Pizza, he soon learns that the drivers hook up with customers, which leads to the improbable affair between him and Alex Barnett, played by the angelic Barbara Carrera. All the love notes — and the fact that his son is dressing better — lead Randy’s dad to think he’s gay. 1989, everyone.
Every order for extra anchovies means that Randy will be both sleeping with an older woman and learning how to be a better lover and partner, thanks to them, romancing a series of clients, including Kyoko Bruckner (Kim Miyori), Dr. Joyce Palmer (Kirstie Alley), and Monica Delancy (Carrie Fisher). The husbands soon learn that this is happening and start to hunt down Randy. One of those husbands is Vic Tayback and there’s also a scene where Randy almost sleeps with his mom Diane (Kate Jackson). What a cast — E.G. Daily and Robert Picardo are also in this.
This being 1989, the fact that everyone thinks Randy is gay saves the day. Of course, he has no male clients. What male escorts sleep with other guys? Right?
June 30- July 6 Puke Week!: Throwing up isn’t very funny, but making your internet friends watch a puke movie is!
This is the third of Sean Baker’s movies that I’ve watched, and in each, I’ve hated the protagonist throughout, wondering where the movie was even going, but by the end, I had become emotional, invested, and saddened by the plight of the lead. That’s talent.
Mikey “Saber” Davies (Simon Rex) is starting over, 17 years after leaving Texas to be a porn star. He shows up at the home of his ex-wife, Lexi (Bree Elrod), and her mother, Lil (Brenda Deiss), with a black eye and $22, begging for a place to stay. No one will hire him, so he starts selling marijuana for Leondria (Judy Hill) and her daughter June (Brittney Rodriguez), slowly earning back the trust of Lexi and making his way back into her bed. Despite how much she dislikes him, the sex is always good. So good that he turned her into a porn star too, many years ago.
To celebrate their good fortune, they visit a doughnut shop, where Mikey falls for Strawberry (Suzanna Son), a 17-year-old girl working the counter. It’s not love. It’s knowing that he can lead her to massive fame in the adult industry, which will get him back the job that made his entire identity. As she rides around on a child bike and bum rides from Lonnie (Ethan Darbone), he starts his scheme to get her to love him and go to Los Angeles.
Things don’t work out. Lonnie kills several people by accident when he swerves across the highway — puking immediately after — and nearly gets Mikey arrested. His drug sales to clients he was told not to engage with got all his money taken from him, money that was going to pay his way back to California. Naked, with all of his clothes in a trash bag, he barely makes it to Strawberry’s house by dawn. She answers the door, perfection in a bathing suit, as the camera closes in on him. He cries.
Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch also made Starlet and became fascinated by the idea of a suitcase pimp, a term that Lexi says to him at the end of the film, one that makes him shut down all his attitude. It’s a man who is only in porn because he has a girlfriend. He may say he’s a manager, but all he does is carry her bags to the shoot and sit outside while she makes money by having sex with other men.
Rex, being the lead, is interesting, as he did solo gay masturbation videos before becoming a star. Obviously, he had no problem going full frontal in this.
I wonder why I ended up liking Mikey so much. All he does is use people, causes pain and blames everyone else. But maybe in real life, he’d be the same way, that friend who always comes out ahead despite ruining everything he touches.
June 30- July 6 Puke Week!: Throwing up isn’t very funny, but making your internet friends watch a puke movie is!
Named “Best Drive-In Movie of the Year” by Joe Bob Briggs, this was directed by Richard Cramer, who also made Highway Amazon — the story of bodybuilder Christine Fetzer, who made her money driving across the country wrestling men in hotel rooms — and painted, played guitar and created art installations. When you see this film, you’ll quickly realize that it’s about more than just exploitation, even though it is exploitation.
Marcus Templeton works as a security guard and when he isn’t obsessed about his physical appearance, he’s watching porn, hiring escorts or talking to phone sex operators. His father — a face on a TV screen — keeps yelling at him as he tries weight loss creams and contracts STDs from all the sex workers he’s frequenting. He starts audio and video taping them, which ends when one of them catches him and shoots him right in the head.
Andren Scott, the star of the film, is genuinely great in what is essentially a thankless role. He was shot in a convenience store robbery and wasn’t able to be in the sequel, The Hitler Tapes.
There’s definitely an influence — or outright theft — of Aggy Read’s Boobs A Lot — in the beginning. There’s constant nudity and women on display, yet you never get turned on, just like the narrator of this, who can’t get it up despite all of the women who have been in his bed. You don’t feel sexy; you feel filthy and worried and sad. None of it feels like a life you want; you’re glad that you can finally walk away at the end.
June 30- July 6 Puke Week!: Throwing up isn’t very funny, but making your internet friends watch a puke movie is!
The Cavalcade of Perversion is run by Lady Divine (Divine) and Mr. David (David Lochary) and it has everything you’d want to see when it comes to getting grossed out, like a Puke Eater. At the end of every show, Divien robs people, but now she’s moved on to wanting to murder them.
“Yes folks, this isn’t any cheap X-rated movie or any 5th rate porno play, this is the show you want! Lady Divine’s cavalcade of perversions, the sleaziest show on earth! Not actors, not paid impostors, but real, actual filth who have been carefully screened in order to present to you the most flagrant violation of natural law known to man! These assorted sluts, fags, dykes and pimps know no bounds! They have committed acts against God and nature, acts that by their mere existence would make any decent person recoil in disgust.”
One night, when she gets home to her daughter Cookie (Cookie Mueller) and her Weatherman Underground boyfriend Steve (Paul Swift), she learns — from Edith Massey! — that Mr. David is cheating on her with Bonnie (Mary Vivian Pearce). Divine races out to confront them, but gets assaulted by glue sniffers. Then, Bonnie joins the show.
Then, the Infant of Prague (Michael Renner Jr.) leads Divine to a church, where she has a religious experience, during which Mink Stole describes the Stations of the Cross while inserting a rosary into her. This leads to a war between Mr. David and Bonnie versus Divine and Mink, which ends with Divine being overcome by bloodlust and killing everyone in her way. She’s assaulted again, this time by a giant lobster, and like a kaiju herself, Divine battles all of Baltimore before being shot in the streets by the National Guard.
Hope you aren’t offended easily!
Inspired by Two Thousand Maniacs!, this ends with Divine seizing. her power, shouting “I’m a maniac! A maniac that cannot be cured! O Divine, I am Divine!”
Throughout the movie, Divine taunts Mr. David with the idea that he is responsible for the Manson murders. At one stage of filming, this was to end with Divine being responsible.
June 30- July 6 Puke Week!: Throwing up isn’t very funny, but making your internet friends watch a puke movie is!
I always say the one line — well, many of the lines, but this one line — when Gary Johnston throws up non-stop after he hits rock bottom. Someone yells, “You threw away your life!” and for some reason, it’s the way it’s said — more yelled — that always makes me laugh.
Directed by Trey Parker, who wrote it with Matt Stone and Pam Brady, this takes the creator of South Park into the world of Supermarionation. After watching Thunderbirds, they wondered if an adult movie could be made of it. There was one getting made, which surprised them, and they were even more weirded out that it was live action. There was a rumor that they wanted to make the script from The Day After Tomorrow, got turned down and ended up making this.
This movie took 270 puppets, which were made by the Chiodo Brothers, the same guys we all know and love from Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Critters. Stone would call this time — working with more than thirty marionette operators at a time — as the “worst time of my life” and Parker agreed, saying it was “the hardest thing they’d ever done.”
Team America polices the world. Made up of psychologist Lisa, Carson, the psychic Sarah, Joe and martial artist actor hater Chris, they are led by Spottswoode. After a mission gone wrong costs Carson — Lisa’s fiancee — his life, they have to add a new member, Broadway actor Gary. As they work to defeat Kim Jong Il and his army of terrorists, they are also opposed by Alec Baldwin and the Film Actors Guild.
Sure, that’s a basic description. There’s so much in this movie, like George Clooney being the enemy when he was the man who helped get South Park on the air. A puppet sex scene so intense that it got the movie an NC-17 (Parker said of dealing with the MPAA, “They said it can’t be as many positions, so we cut out a couple of them. We love the golden shower, but I guess they said no to that. But I just love that they have to watch it. Seriously, can you imagine getting a videotape with just a close-up of a puppet asshole, and you have to watch it?”). Celebrities being abused — Sean Penn wrote a letter signed “a sincere fuck you, Sean Penn.” — and murdered. 37 uses of the word fuck. Bill Pope shooting this with anthromorphic lenses. A Michael Moore puppet stuffed with ham and blown up. A cockroach in the body of a dictator. Man, just writing about it makes me want to watch it all over again.
June 30- July 6 Puke Week!: Throwing up isn’t very funny, but making your internet friends watch a puke movie is!
Brandy Klark (Aubrey Plaza) is the valedictorian of her class but everyone knows she’s a virgin. Someone yells it out during her commencement speech. Her friends Wendy (Sarah Steele) and Fiona (Alia Shawkat) take her to a party where she meets and falls for college boy Rusty Waters (Scott Porter), even though her friend Cameron Mitchell (Johnny Simmons) has been in love with her for years. She almost sleeps with Rusty by accident and he leaves, which she attributes to the fact that she’s a virgin. As she usually makes lists, she makes one of all the sexual things that she wants to do to prepare to give her virginity to Rusty.
Brandy is nothing like her sister Amber (Richard Bilson) or mother Jean (Connie Britton). Instead, she’s continually correcting people on grammar. What follows is — point to the sign — a hijinks ensue movie, one where Brandy awkwardly learns how to have sex, making out with Cameron, Duffy (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and Derrick (Donald Glover), all before she has awkward sex with Rusty which, you guessed it, isn’t that great. And her parents are in the car next door at the very same makeout point.
Director and writer Maggie Carey was married to Bill Hader, who plays the lifeguard manager in this. She’s also directed episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, A.P. Bio, Barry, The Last Man on Earth and plenty more. She based a lot of the areas in this movie on her real hometown of Boise, Idaho, including the pool and Big Bun.
I love that Andy Samberg shows up in this as a rock star, plus Adam Pally, Laura Lapkus and Jack McBrayer have fun cameos.
As for the puking, well, it’s bright green alcohol tossed up the next day. My wife and her best friend did that once with one of those alcohols that has glitter in it, Hypnotiq. The toilet bowl was shining.
Anyways, this is way sweeter than you’d expect for a movie that ends with a father walking in on anal sex, the one position that makes his daughter finally orgasm.
June 30- July 6 Puke Week!: Throwing up isn’t very funny, but making your internet friends watch a puke movie is!
The Meaning of Life was the last feature film to star all six Python members before the death of Graham Chapman in 1989 and it’s pretty perfect because it has no interest in a story to connect anything. It’s just life, from the miracle of birth to a Catholic man reminding you that “Every Sperm Is Sacred” in a song that I quote from often, including most of this speech that follows it:
Harry Blackitt: That’s what being a Protestant’s all about. That’s why it’s the church for me. That’s why it’s the church for anyone who respects the individual and the individual’s right to decide for him or herself. When Martin Luther nailed his protest up to the church door in fifteen-seventeen, he may not have realised the full significance of what he was doing, but four hundred years later, thanks to him, my dear, I can wear whatever I want on my John Thomas. And Protestantism doesn’t stop at the simple condom. Oh, no. I can wear French Ticklers if I want.
Mrs. Blackitt: You what?
Harry Blackitt: French Ticklers. Black Mambos. Crocodile Ribs. Sheaths that are designed not only to protect, but also to enhance the stimulation of sexual congress.
Mrs. Blackitt: Have you got one?
Harry Blackitt: Have I got one? Uh, well, no, but I can go down the road any time I want and walk into Harry’s and hold my head up high and say in a loud, steady voice, “Harry, I want you to sell me a condom. In fact, today, I think I’ll have a French Tickler, for I am a Protestant.”
Mrs. Blackitt: Well, why don’t you?
Harry Blackitt: But they – Well, they cannot, ’cause their church never made the great leap out of the Middle Ages and the domination of alien Episcopal supremacy.
School, war, finding an elusive fish, live organ surgery, man’s place in the galaxy — “The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding In all of the directions it can whizz As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know Twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure How amazingly unlikely is your birth And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space ‘Cause there’s buggerall down here on Earth!” — Christmas in Heaven, The Crimson Permanent Assurance, choosing how you wish to die and, of course, Mr. Creosote.
This sketch was filmed at Porchester Hall in Queensway, where hundreds of pounds of fake vomit had to be cleaned due to a wedding being scheduled hours later. There’s so much puke and it’s beyond gross — ribs sticking out of an exploded man — starting with this order:
Maitre d’: Would monsieur care for an apéritif, or would he prefer to order straight away? Today we have, uh, for appetizers: Excuse me. Mhmm. Uh, moules marinières, pâté de foie gras, beluga caviar, eggs Benedictine, tart de poireaux– that’s leek tart,– frogs’ legs amandine, or oeufs de caille Richard Shepherd– c’est à dire, little quails’ eggs on a bed of puréed mushroom. It’s very delicate. Very subtle.
Mr. Creosote: I’ll have the lot.
After all of this death and destruction and, well, puke, Maria arrives to clean up the dead body and again, all the puke. She reveals to us the meaning of life: “I used to work in the Académie Française, but it didn’t do me any good at all. And I once worked in the library in the Prado in Madrid but it didn’t teach me nothing I recall. And the Library of Congress, you would have thought, would hold some key, but it didn’t, and neither did the Bodleian Library. At the British Museum, I hoped to find a clue. I worked there from nine till six, read every volume through, but it didn’t teach me nothing about life’s mystery. I just kept getting older, and it got more difficult to see. Till eventually my eyes went, and my arthritis got bad. So now I’m cleaning up in here, but I can’t really be sad. You see, I feel that life’s a game. You sometimes win or lose, and though I may be down right now, at least I don’t work for Jews.”
I grew up obsessed with Monty Python in a non-Internet time when you never knew when you would get the chance to watch it again. I love that this won the Grand Prix at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, which suggests that even though this movie is ridiculous, it still has something to say through all the death and vomit.
It all ends with this: “The Producers would like to thank all the fish who have taken part in this film. We hope that other fish will follow the example of those who have participated, so that, in future, fish all over the world will live together in harmony and understanding, and put aside their petty differences, cease pursuing and eating each other and live for a brighter, better future for all fish, and those who love them.”
Directed and written by Ralph Bakshi, and based on Robert Crumb’s comic, this was an attempt by Bakshi to expand cartoons beyond just being for kids, while creating an independent alternative to Disney for animated movies. Crumb and Bakshi met, during which time the animator showed Crumb drawings that had been created as a result of his learning the cartoonist’s style. Crumb gave him a sketchboard for reference. A good start, but by the end, Crumb felt this movie was making fun of hippies and Bakshi would call the comic artist “one of the slickest hustlers you’ll ever see in your life.”
Crumb said of the movie that it was “really a reflection of Ralph Bakshi’s confusion, you know. There’s something real repressed about it. In a way, it’s more twisted than my stuff. It’s really twisted in some kind of weird, unfunny way. … I didn’t like that sex attitude in it very much. It’s like real repressed horniness; he’s kind of letting it out compulsively.”
Animated by several Terrytunes artists and the first cartoon to be rated X, this finds Fritz (Skip Hinnant) on several adventures, from making love to three female cats in a bathtub to a raid by cops, starting a riot, surviving the carpet bombing of Harlem and then getting blown up real good, somehow surviving that to make love to even more ladies on what should be his death bed.
Ralph’s voice is Phil Seuling, who started some of New York City’s first comic conventions and ran an early comic book distributor, Sea Gate.
Crumb killed off Fritz in a comic called Fritz the Cat Superstar to prevent further films from being made, but The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat was still produced, even without Bakshi and Crumb being involved.
Based on the 1984 book, Jim Davis decided to show us all the past lives of Garfield — the one we know is life eight — and also depress us along the way. The book has Vikings, a dinosaur Odie and even a version where he goes primal and kills his elderly owner. On November 22, 1988, this CBS special adapted six of the stories from the book — “Babes and Bullets,” which is also from that book, was its own special — and added a few new stories.
Did you know Garfield was Handel’s cat and that he invented jazz? That he was a stunt cat for Krazy Kat and died when bricks crushed him? Or, if we’re to believe the last story, is Garfield Himself God?
This also has the saddest story ever, Diana’s Piano, all about a young girl who has a cat for her whole life, and it dies. Why is this in a child’s cartoon? Why did I put myself through it when I haven’t gotten past the loss of my best friend, Andy the cat?
However, we do learn how Odie once saved Garfield’s life and discover that someday, a very old Garfield will have children, so that’s kind of cool.
I know that Garfield is a very commercialized character, but I love him. Kennywood here in Pittsburgh used to have a dark ride — a water one, no less — that had Garfield in it, and everyone hated it. They hated it because it went on for years past, and no one cared about Garfield, and people wanted it to be the Old Mill again. Those people are losers. This was an entire ride where you were in Garfield’s head, and I would ride it again and again, yelling things out in Garfield’s voice. I loved it so much that the cover of my writer’s sample book was a picture of me waiting in line to ride it again. I love that Garfield hates human beings so much, that he despises Mondays, and that he loves human food. He is very much an honest cat, one that feels real. People love hi,m and he doesn’t need them.
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