San Diego cop Michael (Jaleel White, yes, Urkel) goes off to announce his engagement to Ashley (Jennia Fredrique) to her family. It does not go well. Father Jake (Clifton Powell) was a Black Panther who went to jail for killing a job; brother June Bug (DeRay Davis) is a gangster who also hates the police; Uncle Ray Ray (Mark Chalant Pfiefer) is a garbageman who also despises law enforcement officials; Mookie (Daphne Bloomer) is only concerned about potato salad. At least Ashley’s mom (Ella Joyce) is somewhat understanding that her daughter is in love.
Coke Daniels also made My Baby’s Daddy. He directed and wrote this, somehow managing to get Tiny Lister and Eddie Griffin to play cameos. If you’re elated by humor where old people smoke marijuana and are horny, well, good news. This movie is for you.
Why did they spell the title wrong? It never pays off. I need to know, as someone who truly loves potato salad.
There’s also a scene where the dad repeatedly calls Michael a pig and tells him that he will murder him if he marries his daughter. It is a comedy, but it is not played for laughs.
Premiering on CBS on September 21, 1998, The King of Queens was one of those shows that always seemed to be on. I had never watched it, and all I knew about Kevin James was that he was Mick Foley’s high school wrestling teammate. But when I showed the box set on our weekly “What Came In the Mail” segment on the Drive-In Asylum Double Feature, people were excited and told me that I needed to watch it soon.
It’s a simple set-up. Doug (Kevin James) and Carrie Heffernan (Leah Remini) are pretty much The Honeymooners, a middle-class couple living in Queens, except that her father Arthur (Jerry Stiller) has lost his latest, much younger wife and burned his house down, so now he has to live with them. That’s all there is to it, as it’s about them, their weird friend, and Doug’s schemes to get ahead.
There’s Doug’s straight man, Deacon Palmer (Victor Williams), nerdy mommy’s boy Spencer “Spence” Olchin (Patton Oswalt), cousin Daniel Heffernan (Gary Valentine), dog walker Holly Shumpert (Nicole Sullivan) and even Lou Ferrigno, playing himself. Plus, as you know, I love crossovers; there are four with Everyone Loves Raymond.
The leads are fun, everyone knows their role, and this feels like the kind of show you can just put on and veg out to. I love sitcoms and feel like they’re kind of lost art, so it was fun getting into this for a few episodes. I didn’t like the last season, where Doug and Carrie split, but I could see myself watching more of it.
What fascinates me is that when James started his second show, Kevin Can Wait, his wife, Donna Gable, was portrayed by Erinn Hayes. Yet in the second season, she died off camera and was replaced by Vanessa Cellucci (played by Leah Remini), Kevin’s former rival from the police who becomes his partner in life and at a security company, Monkey Fist Security. Donna’s death is off-handedly mentioned by someone saying, “Ye, it’s been over a year since she died.”
This is where it gets meta.
On the AMC TV show Kevin Can F**k Himself, Allison McRoberts (Annie Murphy) has a man-child of a husband, Kevin (Eric Petersen), who sees life as a sitcom while hers is a drama. Kevin becomes so horrible to her that she begins to plan his death. When people find out, she fakes her passing, and he soon gets another girlfriend who looks and acts exactly like Allison.
She’s played by Erinn Hayes.
I’ve always wondered how we got the beautiful, capable wife and immature husband dynamic ingrained in us and how many relationships it has harmed. It makes me think about how I behave. Then again, as I write this, I am in a basement surrounded by movies and action figures. Hmm.
Mill Creek has released every episode in one gigantic box set. It has extras such as James doing commentary on the pilot with show creator Michael Weithorn; a laughs montage; behind the scenes; a writers featurette; a salute to the fans and the 200th episode celebration. You can get it from Deep Discount.
I just want holiday movies to be an escape because I’ll be frank, I’m head in the sand about the next few years and I’m trying to use the power of film to hide in my own world until I feel like this one is safe again. Then again, it never was safe and you should avoid any echo chamber, but yeah. I don’t need to put on a Christmas movie and remember how Jenny McCarthy normalized stopping vaccines and look where we are, as polio shots are being on the list of things stopped and people are going to remember what the measles were like again.
But anyways.
She’s Mary Class in this, daughter of Santa, who is played by George Wendt. Why did Santa and Mrs. Claus (Lynne Griffin!) wait so long to have kids? And why did she go into marketing? Why would this bring the real world in to have Santa have a heart attack and why is this a Hallmark movie where Mary has a lost love named Luke (Ivan Sergei) at home in the North Pole?
Somehow, this has Michael Moriarty in it and I wonder, did I cast this movie?
The sequel has Dean McDermott as Luke and Paul Sorvino as Santa. Lynn Griffith was back and that’s really all I care about.
Director Ron Underwood made Tremors. Yes, he also made City Slickers and Hearts and Souls, but The Adventures of Pluto Nash is the reason why he made ABC Family Christmas movies, including Holiday In Handcuffs, Deck the Halls and this movie and its sequel.
Directed and written by Katrina Irawati Graham, this uses the ghost known as the Kuntil Anak to tell the story of an artist named Raesita. This supernatural entity is often a pregnant long-haired woman dressed in white that gets her revenge from men by drinking their blood and eating their organs. You can tell that one is close when you hear a baby cry and smell either a corpse or a plumeria flower. She is the ghost of women who have died in childbirth.
After the death of her husband, Raesita meets and makes love to the Kuntil Anak, who wants to take her away from the pain of life. This is what Raesita wants as well, as her grief has become too much for her. However, her unborn baby wants to live and that’s something neither human woman or vampire-like creature dreamt of.
How often does one get to have a sapphic interlude with a demonic force, after all?
Man-Eater Mountain is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2.
This film took 13 years for Christiane Cegavske to make and it was worth every second.
The White Mice have commissioned a doll from the Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak, but once she is created, the artists have fallen in love with her. They place an egg inside her body and have put her into a place of worship. The mice return and steal her away, sending the creatures on a journey to get her back.
Excited at having the doll, the mice become besotted on blood tea. The egg hatches and a bird with the face of the doll emerges, flying away but soon becoming trapped in a web and dying. The artist dwellers take her back and rebuild the dead body, but it’s stolen again by the mice. The battle between them causes it to be torn to pieces, which leads to the creatures giving the mice the doll parts and sending the body of the bird downstream.
Shot on 16mm in stop motion style that had to take forever — or 13 years, but it had to feel like forever to create — the description above will not prepare you for what you are about to experience. With no dialogue, you are free to imagine who these characters are and what they represent. I can’t even explain the vibe of this, as it looks like something for children while feeling occult and forbidden. A must see.
Blood Tea and Red String is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including an introduction director Christiane Cegavske, a Q & A with Cegavske, production stills, concept illustrations, a trailer and a trailer for Seed In the Sand, Cegavske’s work-in-progress.
7. LITTLE DEVILS, BIG SHRIEKS: How much terror can a child really wreak?
Look, sometimes I end up watching devil child movies directed by the same guy who made Wild Things 2. He uses the name Jake Johnson in the credits, but that’s Jack Perez, who was also Ace Hannah when he directed Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. Benjamin Harvey, who wrote this, also made 666: The Beast, which is the sequel where Donald — the child in this one — becomes an adult Antichrist, getting to where Damien Thorn was in three movies in just two.
Scott (Adam Vincent) and Erika (Sarah Lieving) Lawson get to adopt Donald (Booboo Stewart, who was Seth Clearwater in The Twilight Saga) after his parents die in a plane crash. Donald just walked away. And then I realized, oh man, this is The Asylum version of The Omen, released at the same time as the remake.
The flight number? Pacific Airlines Flight 7666.
Erika is the only reporter at the scene, so it just makes sense that she and her husband get Donald. In days, he’s hit by a baseball by Scott’s bad, which sends him to the dentist, who sees the Mark of the Beast on his tongue. He then shoves the drill into the dentist’s face and kills his assistant, then kills the grandfather the next day. No one suspects anything, even after when he was in the hospital earlier, a nurse had sex in the same room as him and died from mushing her head into a pipe.
A crazy nun shows up, as they do.
Lucy (Nora Jesse) shows up as the Satanic Sitter and gets Scott to comply by sneak sucking him off, which only works so long because it’s kind of hard to ignore that your adopted son is the Antichrist.
Does a cop kill the father before he can kill the son? Have you seen this before too? Or have we all seen the same movie?
At the end, Donald is now living with Erika’s sister Mary Lou (Kim Little), who is Martha Stewart and plans on raising the devil child all alone. If you ask your grandmother for The Omen for Christmas, you may get this movie. She still loves you, but she doesn’t know the difference.
June 22: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 2000s Action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
Kurt Wimmer directed the Brian Bosworth movie One Tough Bastard and wrote the remake of The Thomas Crowne Affair and Sphere before he directed Equilibrium, the first movie of his I took notice of. He created a style of fighting, Gun Kata, for the film and it just stands out from so many of the 2000s science fiction action movies. I was beyond excited for Ultraviolet, but wow it had so many problems that I was sure I’d never see it.
Shot digitally on high-definition video, this movie was Wimmer’s attempt at making a comic book movie. There are even tons of Ultraviolet comic covers to give the idea that we’re in the middle of a much longer story. The basic idea is sometime in the near-future, a super soldier experiment leads to the creation of hemophages, vampiric humans that are stronger and smarter than normal humans. Like mutants…keep that in mind.
The war between humans and vampires leads to the end of civilization. There is now only the ArchMinistry, a powerful corporation and joint world government. There’s a resistance that is fighting back and one of their soldiers is Violet Song Jat Shariff (Milla Jovovich). Her latest mission is to break into a blood bank and steal a weapon that can kill her kind. It ends up being a child named Six (Cameron Bright) who is a clone of Vice-Cardinal Ferdinand Daxus (Nick Chinlund) and filled with a virus that can destroy the hemophages. Despite this, Violet is sentimental and allows him to live despite hating all of humanity.
By the end of the movie, it’s revealed that Daxus and the hemophages are working together to create a new virus that will allow them to control even more of the world. William Fichtner also shows up and if I ever make a movie, that guy has to be in it.
Not a lot of it makes sense, but really, we’re here to watch large battles and gun fights. In the post Matrix world, everyone was making movies like this. I just happen to like this one because, well, it’s fun. Who cares that Six spends most of the movie living in a briefcase? Do I need to know motivations? Rotten Tomatoes said, “An incomprehensible and forgettable sci-fi thriller, Ultraviolet is inept in every regard.”
Um…this is a movie where you watch Milla Jovovich in various cool outfits, she has color changing hair and she shoots a whole bunch of religious zealots when she isn’t racing around on a motorcycle. I mean, you tell me that’s what I’m going to see and I’m going to see it.
Anyways…
Wimmer and Jovovich were locked out of the edit by Sony, who said that the movie was too emotional and it needed to be PG-13. They cut it from 120 minutes to 88 minutes. Because of this, the visual effects are visibly unfinished and use incomplete temp-renders that were never meant to be seen outside of the editing room.
Everywhere in the world, this didn’t do well. Well, Japan loved it. They even made an anime sequel, Ultraviolet: Code 044.
In the very same year, Cameron Bright played Leech in X-Men: The Last Stand. His role is to cure mutants, which is just like this movie. He would play a vampire again once he got older. He’s Volturi vampire Alec in Twilight New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn Part 2.
An aside: Gun Kata was taken from Gun Fu. Wikipedia refers to it as a “style of sophisticated close-quarters gunfight resembling a martial arts combat that combines firearms with hand-to-hand combat and traditional melee weapons in an approximately 50/50 ratio.” This martial art first shows up in A Better Tomorrow, directed by John Woo, and gives guns the same style that open hand combat and wuxia movies had within Hong Kong cinema. In the 1990s, it came to America in movies like Desperado, The Replacement Killers (which had Woo’s star Chow Yun-fat in it) and The Matrix. Today, John Wick has taken Gun Fu as far as it can go, but in 2002, Wimmer would use it in Equilibrium.
After the failure of this movie, Wimmer didn’t direct for years until he made Children of the Corn. While he was recovering from this, he wrote Street Kings, Law Abiding Citizen, Salt, the remakes of Total Recall and Point Break, Spell, The Misfits, Expend4bles and The Beekeeper. I hope he gets the opportunity to make another movie and prove his talent to his detractors.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.
After Hurricane Xiora, the empowered Florida militia shoots a looter who has run into the swamps after he kills two of their men. Sergeant Barnes (Todd Terry) shoots him and learns that he was stealing diapers and baby food, just in time for the man’s voodoo grandmother (Yvone Williamson) to snap his neck.
Lieutenant Hutchinson (J. Todd Smith) and his unit are sent to find Barnes. He’s conflicted, as he joined to honor the memory of his father, who died in Desert Storm. He’s also not so sure that as a black man he should be ordering white men to shoot black people no matter what they’re doing.
Joined by weather reporter Lisa Hicks (Karin Justman) — yes, that happens in this movie — the unit finds two survivors who just so happens to be voodoo slaves to the grandmother.
Directed and written by Bob Cook (Rock-A-Die Baby, Animals), this has people wandering a swamp for most of the movie and delivers its one zombie quite late in the film. My favorite character was Corporal Dani Stevens (Debra Cassano), who ends up tongue kissing one of the privates by force in the bar and laughing at him. She got kicked out of the Marines for attacking her commander and is only in the militia to make her dad happy. Cassano is really good in the part and stands out.
This has an interesting anti-military, pro-looting message that you may not expect and some nice scenery. If you aren’t into movies where people wander aimlessly — I am kind of comforted by it — you will probably not enjoy yourself.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.
Imani (Shatara Curry) has a boyfriend she’s putting through college while she works a job and is in school herself. After giving everything to her man, she feels like he doesn’t care, so after advice from her girlfriends — who are all getting abortions at the same time from the same doctor — she gets rid of him and goes to the club, where she meets Flip (Esteban Lastra) who takes her away for the weekend.
The problem is one of his friends watches her ex grab her behind and they assume she’s a gold digger. She’s drugged and assaulted several times, including after they leave by a hotel worker who she follows and murders. She finds herself hunting down all of the men who raped her before realizing that she may never run out of victims.
This is a movie that somehow combines live performances of spoken word with an abortion and a castration. It’s intense and at the same time quite cheap in the best possible sense of the word, feeling real and messy and I love that. Directed by Roderick Giles and written by Jeff Carroll (Holla If I Kill You), it’s in no way perfect but who needs that? It’s instead a film that looks at the war between the sexes and responds with bullets to the head and knives to dicks.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.
Remember when there were a whole bunch of Brendan Fraser mummy movies? What if Bruno Mattei made his own version of those movies — using the name David Hunt — and filled it with all of the wonderful things that his movies are known for? Well, he did. He sure did.
The amazing thing is that now that Bruno has moved on to digital video, he’s able to completely not just rip off movies — this is The Mummy right down to the bad guy who looks kinda sorta like Arnold Vosloo — he’s now able to even more easily copy and paste footage from other films directly into his own. Now, when a major Hollywood film takes a plot point, I get apoplectic. Yet when Matti outright takes entire scenes from other movies, I get overjoyed. Such are the weird ways of how I enjoy film.
That means that while Bruno takes the Titty Twister scenes that were a major part of From Dusk Till Dawn and films his own version, he is just as comfortable with directly taking footage from Army of Darkness and The Mummy and inserting them into The Tomb.
Somehow, the guide that a group of students is using to get through the Aztec pyramids is the reincarnation of an evil priestess and one of those students is the reincarnation of the girl who her lover never got to sacrifice because movie logic demands these things occur. Again, in any other movie, I’d roll my eyes, but I kind of demand these kinds of things from the Italian masters of beyond basement value movies.
Then, to show us all that Mattei does not care at all about the world of Hollywood, he outright takes footage from Raiders of the Lost Ark. I doubt Spielberg had any idea who Bruno Mattei was, but just the sheer “Che palle!” of Mattei brings a tear to my eye. Then, to top that, he also ripped off footage from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom!
This isn’t the best movie Bruno ever made — I cannot and will not answer that impossible inquiry — but damn if it isn’t a million times better than any mummy movie Hollywood has made said the black and white Universal days.
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