Thursday, February 16, 2006

Meet the Creeps - 2005

No IMDB entry, this is a DVD put together to show the "terrorizing tactics" of the following comedians:
Jim Florentine, Don Jamieson, KC Armstrong, Jim Norton, Club Soda Kenny, Artie Lange, Gary Gentile and Chuck Mignanelli

This is a disc of "hidden camera" sort of thing, with the above comedians being wierd, wacky, and gross. The people's reactions are perfect. Pissed off, unbelieving, disgusted. Trust me, this show is not for the easily offended or easily grossed out.

The worst thing about this was that its way too short. Its not even an hour, even with the deleted scenes. The best thing is that there are no "happy endings", like in the original Candid Camera. They never tell the folks they've been hosed. And it costs them sometimes. One skit shows them stealing flowers from a cemetary to give to their girls on Valentime's Day. A week later, they show the tape to their girlfriends. One breaks up over it. In one of the deleted scenes, they dress up as priests and go to a "Girls Gone Wild" party. They get VIOLENTLY thrown out of the club. A drunken Jim Florentine hits the curb like a sack of bricks.

That scene is also the best with lots of nice boobies displayed. That helps to make up for the shortness.

Three beers out of five

The Fog - 2005

I'm a big fan of the John Carpenter original, so I didn't go and see this at the theater, and didn't have very high expectations going into this. And with such "stars" as Tom Welling, Maggie Grace, and Selma Blair, you know its gonna not be the best movie ever made.

Is anyone but me sick of this whole attitude that only young people go to horror movies, so we gotta load up the movie with young, "beautiful" stars. Who can't act. But who cares, they look good, so young people like them, so they'll come. Yeah, right. The producer explicitly says this in a making of featurette, and that attitude really makes me mad. That shows utter contempt for the genre. And if you don't LOVE the horror genre, the movie is not going to be all it can be.

But really, to be fair, this movie was not as bad as I expected. The changes were not bad, and the special affects were not overdone. The "transparent" ghosts was cool, and done just right, I thought. The problem is the performances of the actors.

Selma Blair is good while she's doing the radio schtick. As a mom, she fails miserably. And Tom Welling, the guy from Smallville, cannot act his way out of a paper bag. Its obvious (to this old man, at least) that he's a "star" just because he's easy on the ladies' eyes. The problem is that the director, Rupert Wainwright, is really nothign more than a music video director. Not very skilled at pulling good performances out of lesser actors. And this is the big difference between the original and the remake. John Carpenter is a great director, who can pull wonderful performances out of B-grade actors. No great performances here.

Oh, and no nudity. What's up with that?

Two beers out of five.