Fierce Creatures - 1997

It has come to my attention that the movies I’ve been reviewing lately are a little on the modern side having been shot and released within the last decade and in a few cases movies that are still in theaters.  It has also come to my attention, thanks to my brother(who loaned me The Babysitters insisting I would like it), that I am a cynical hard to please asshole that often takes issue with a movie even when I like it.  Due to these revelations I’ve decided to review I movie I actually love and I’ll try to have as few complaints as possible.

 Don't Pet Them

Normally I'd make fun of the tagline but this one is just weird and I have no idea what it means.  I can say this, pertaining to the movie this tagline makes absolutely no sense and is one of the worst I've ever seen.  I guess it makes sense because usually terrible movies have great taglines.

It’s not often that I review a comedy on my blog.  I just find it hard to praise a good comedy but exceedingly easy to trash a bad one and the same goes for my two favorite genres, Sci Fi and Horror.  I’d hate to sound old but I hardly watch comedies anymore because I just don’t get humor nowadays.  A perfect example is my indifference to The Hangover.  At the same time I laugh hysterically at old Munsters and Addam’s Family episodes.

Fierce Creatures stars one of my all-time favorite comedians John Cleese.  It also stars one of my least favorite actresses Jamie Lee Curtis.  For some reason a majority of the movies she’s in she’s considered desirable by both the director and lead characters(True Lies where she has both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Paxton fighting over her, Trading Places where she played a hooker with a heart of gold, and of course A Fish Called Wanda) and I’ve just never found her all that attractive.  Even before the lesbian tomboy hair cut I thought she looked rather manish.  Still that’s exactly the role she plays in this movie and yet for once it doesn’t bother me.(Before we go any further I did like Halloween(1978) and consider it a classic once again proving a good story can outshine it’s poor casting)

The movie opens at Octopus Inc. headquarters in Atlanta Georgia where Willa Weston(Jamie Lee) is starting her new job as the head of a local TV station.  When she gets there she learns that the president just sold the TV station she was going to manage and just acquired a zoo.  Meanwhile at the zoo an ex-cop and former Chinese TV station manager Rollo Lee(John Cleese), is sent to manage it.  In an effort to please his employers he implements a new policy to keep only fierce animals and to get rid of the rest. 

Willa and the president’s son(both the president and his son are played by Kevin Kline) are sent to oversee the zoo.  While there they implement new policies of their own which include humiliating uniforms for the zookeepers and some rather bizarre marketing gimmicks.  I’m not going to give away much more of the movie so go check it out I’m sure you’ll get a few laughs out of it.

While I do find the movie hilarious the major reason I’m so fond of this movie is because I love animals and it emphasizes man’s connection to nature far better than any movie I’ve ever seen.  In the midst of all the comedy it also makes some important statements about business ethics and greed.  Another reason I really like this movie is it stretches how far you can go in a PG-13 movie.  One character accidently gets shot in the head while the others try to cover it up and it is filled with a great deal of sexual innuendo.  No matter how many times I see this movie it never gets old or annoying and I’m always willing to watch it again. 95/100

The Babysitters - 2007

These girls mean business

Someone really ought to get in touch with the better business bureau... and the local police while you're at it... and Chris Hansen too.

From the very beginning of this movie I was slapping my head at the stupid cynical smartass narration.

"I'm a junior at Alfred E. Groves high school. This is my babysitting service. The answer is no: mom doesn't drink, dad didn't hit me, Uncle Steve never showed me his privates. I don't even have an Uncle Steve. The money is nice, and paid fellatio isn't that much more humiliating than flipping burgers. But that's not why I do it."

This is starting to become a trend in modern story telling.  Make the person relating the story as repellant as possible from the very fucking beginning!  My first job was at a fast food restaurant and I can't tell you how many times I said to myself, the customers, my managers, friends, and anyone who would listen that working there was just like sucking dicks for 8 hours a day. 

Ever wonder what “Risky Business” would be like if it weren't funny or entertaining and was a hell of a lot more awkward?  "The Babysitters" reminds me of Rob Zombie's "Halloween" remake.  The actresses look close enough to be teenagers so anytime you're forced to endure a makeout or sex scene you just end up feeling uncomfortable and disgusted.  Even more so by the fact that they're all performed by middle aged men.  So if you got it in your head that a movie about suburban high school prostitutes was going to be at least sexy and have a lot of nudity you're wrong on both counts.

What's worse John Leguizamo trying to act funny or John Leguizamo trying to act dramatically?  Better yet which is more unintentionally funny or can you even tell?  To add insult to injury he's also listed as producer.  You'd be hard pressed to find another actor that has been in as many bombs as him and this one might very well be the worst I've ever seen him in.  Cynthia Nixon is just as bad and is likewise no stranger to bombs.  Katerine Waterston plays the lead character.  Even though I haven't seen her in anything else she does okay.  She's not terrible but at the same time she's not very good either.  At best I feel a little meh about her performance in this movie.  In the beginning she plays a timid overachiever with OCD and they attempt to turn her character into a more easy going party girl and later into a heavy handed pimp, but no matter which role she's playing she's not very emotive.  She just drones on in monotone throughout this entire movie.  She's attractive enough and I can imagine these men wanting to have sex with her but at the same time she's taller than everyone else in the cast forcing her to stare down at other characters while reciting dialogue.

I think the worst part of this movie is that it doesn't set itself apart from any other movie about prostitution.  "Babysitters" strives to have depth and realism but rather than show the negative repercussions of a dangerous and often times addictive career they choose to glorify it.  There are no repercussions for their actions.  None of the girls or their johns get arrested.  No one even gets pregnant or even catches a mild STD.  It's almost as if the movie is saying prostitution is cool.  It'll get you paid and laid.  And it's less humiliating that a job at Burger King.   

The movie is not paced very well either.  For a movie that doesn't even clock in at 90 minutes including credits it's dreadfully boring and a task to complete.  In fact I paused the movie a few times to write this review.    I feel nothing but shame and embarrassment for Leguizamo who's reduced to knocking on his whore's window late at night like some lovelorn teenager and later to hide quickly as her father bursts into her room.  It's full of one stupid cliche' after another including a hallway walking montage scene played to the movie's stupid soundtrack while the girls hold their heads high and walk confidently.  Words can't express how pissed this movie made me.  I really hate to play up the angry reviewer sterotype but when this movie wasn't making me feel sleazy and uncomfortable it was just really freaking irritating.  The only good thing I can say about it is at least it didn't have a rape.* 20/100

*Spoke too soon.  Wrote that before I finished watching the movie and guess what a creep rapes a girl while she's in the bathroom tripping on XTC.

Marketing Cenorship

I realize it's contradictory to say this but I'm a huge Philip K. Dick fan and I just read We Can Remember It for You Wholesale last week.  I don't know how they managed to make a movie out of that the first time around but they did and even though they made a lot of stuff up it was really good.  Unlike the adaptation of The Running Man.  After watching the 2012 trailer it looks nothing like the story I just read.  Its like a remake of the movie only with toned downed sex and violence.  I don't know if I'd go so far to say Total Recall is a cult film since it is so popular but I think it deserved better treatment than this.  If you were going to water it down to a PG13 for a wider audience why not make it less action packed and more cerebral?  I'm tired of seeing movies were Wolverine slashes at everything that moves but doesn't have a drop of blood on his claws to prove it.

Does anybody else remember the action movies of the 80's where someone got shot a squib would explode out their chest or back?  Why doesn't that happen anymore?  I think I'm going to start calling it Jason Bourne Syndrome.  The reason why action flicks, dumb as they were, were almost always rated r was because they catered to adults.  The kids got their cutesy cartoons and we got blood, guts, explosions, and sex.  It seems like movies nowadays censor themselves in order to cater to an audience they are inappropriate for and I'm guessing for the most part aren't even interested in seeing.  When Terminator 2 came out my aunt took me to it and I was just about as old as John Conner in the movie, maybe less.  Don't ask me why she just did stuff like that she just did and to this day I adore her for it.  Back then they didn't card or even ask for permission.  If you took a kid with you to the theater to see an rated R movie all they cared about is that you paid for your ticket.  Actually I thought it was pretty cool because I got to play adult for a day.  I remember seeing news bites that summer talking about how violent movies were getting and about how their audience was getting younger and they used clips from T2 to illustrate this.  I grew up in the days of premium movie channels, no v chip, and no way to block mature content so I watched whatever the hell I wanted and for the most part my parents didn't care.  If it had boobies in it well that was one more thing they didn't have to explain to me later on.  While other kids were more interested in Disney films I was watching Hellraiser and Freddy Kruger.  Now somewhere down the line someone said that material wasn't appropriate for me.  My parents didn't care and its not like I was so stupid and impressionable I went to school and repeated the things I saw and heard.  But my point is part of what makes such material appealing to kids is the same thing that makes it appealing to adults and when you water it down both audiences lose interest in it and now no one wants to see your movie.  When a character points a gun or knife at another one and then it cuts or pans away and we see said victim fall down you aren't eliminating the violence you're merely muting it.  It's like going to a heavy metal concert with earplugs.  You might not hear all the satanism and obscenities but they're still there.  Or better yet it's like watching Japanese porn or as I like to call it porn without the porn.

360 = White People with Problems The Movie.  It's another one of those movies with an ensemble cast none of which have a dilemma interesting enough to care about.  Does this movie remind anyone else of Babel?  Yeah that movie sucked too.

If you've seen this somewhere else or you think I'm ripping off Geek Juice you're right and you're wrong.  This started off as trailer park comment but then turned into a really long rant so I decided to post it here.  If you haven't heard of Geek Juice go here and see what they have to say about these movies.

Geek Juice Trailer Park