Reasons Not To Have Kids #18: The Good Son

Here we are, folks. The final RN2HK for 2009. I'm definately revisiting this again next year. There are plenty more I didn't get to. As for tonight's selection, you have Rachel (or Ra-quel?) from Rachel's Reel Reviews to thank for this one. I didn't know how to end this little blog-a-thon and after throwing up a status on Facebook, she stepped in and said "Hey, Macaulay Culkin was a little shit in 'The Good Son'. After seeing him, I vowed to never have Macaulay Culkin as a son." (Quote might be somewhat paraphrased.)

I seen "The Good Son" when it was released on VHS (Yes, VHS, I'm old) back in 1993 (See?) and that was the last time I seen it. So much of the movie was kinda murky for me. I remember Macaulay saying the F-word and it starring "That kid from 'Radio Flyer'" an equally messed up movie. Unfortuately, it's not a timeless classic.

Movie starts with Mark (Elijah Wood) playing soccer. Then David Morse shows up and he makes the same face I'd make if David Morse suddenly shows up. Cause he more or less killed Bjork and caused an airplane to go backwards in time. I'm scared of David Morse.




And I should be because he's here to tell Mark that his Mom is dying. After Mark promises to not let Mom die, she dies. Good job, kid. Then through some vague thing, David Morse says he has to go somewhere and can't take Mark. Yeah, you're wife just died and your son is messed up. Good time to "go somewhere". Some relatives of Mark's says they can watch him while David Morse does whatever.

So David Morse takes Mark to Susan and Wallace's house. There, Mark meets Connie and Henry (Macauly Culkin). Henry and Mark instantly become friends. Henry shows him all this neat stuff like this homemade gun that shoots nails. And this creepy ass shed where Henry carves up the bodies. And an abandoned warehouse that isn't abandoned cause one guy just randomly shows up and chases them out.

Things try to get dramatic when Mark is sent to see a therapist, Dr. Annie. These scenes are boring. Let's see the "Home Alone" kid kill someone! It starts off slow, with him killing this dog that likes to come out of nowhere (they were walking somewhere when it decided to show up and chase them) and they hide the body down the well Samara is buried in. Then Macauly Calkin lights up a smoke, which is something he probably really did back then. Between the whole Michael Jackson thing, his parents, and Joe Pesci, I'm surprised he didn't turn to meth.

After shocking his "Home Alone" fans, he ramps things up a bit by introducing us to Mr. Highway, a dummy. Guess what happens to Mr. Highway. Mr Highway, meet actual Highway. This causes a 200 car pile-up. The 9-year-old girl that had a crush on Kevin MacCalister is now crying her eyes out.

"BUT KEVIN WOULDN'T DO THAT!!! WAAAAH!!!!"




Mark, naturally, is now scared of Henry and tries to warns people. And by people I mean the fucking adults. God, adults in movies are fucking worthless. The kid could kill someone right in front of them and they'd be like "nope, he's not crazy". Throw in another boring sub-plot about Henry's younger brother drowning in the bathtub, to make Susan a bit off balance, and you're in "My kid's are saints!" territory.

Henry decides to fuck with Mark by giving out hints that he's gonna kill Connie, Henry's younger sister. Mark likes her as a sister and gets super overprotective of her. There's a whole scene where the kids play "hide-and-seek" in the dark house and Mark scrambles to find her. Henry puts Jason Vorhees to shame by teleporting everywhere in the house. Mark keeps Connie away from Henry through the night.

The next day, however, Mark finds out Henry took Connie ice skating. Mark runs to the pond and arrives in time to find Henry throwing Connie onto a patch of thin ice. Connie immedately falls through. Despite there being 2 billion adults (and apparently 19 games of hockey going on), no one does anything. At least until Connie slips under the ice.

Then suddenly the ice can support two grown ass men who have to struggle while chipping away at the ice. Uh-huh. The two grown men save Connie and she's rushed to the hospital. Henry plays more head games with Mark, making all kinds of comments about killing Connie. And of course Henry makes it seem like Mark is the crazy one.

There's a great scene where Henry alludes to poisoning all the food in the fridge, so Mark grabs everything and starts manically shoving it down the garbage disposal. And of course, Mark comes out and tells Susan and Wallace that Henry is fucked in the head but they don't believe him.

Mark calls David Morse, who's currently fighting The Langoliers, and tells him about Henry. David tells him to go see Dr. Annie. But too late, Henry is already talking to her, and making it seem like Mark is the one doing all the killing. Now no one will believe him.

After a scene in the treehouse where Macauly famously says "don't fuck with me" ("MOOOOM!!! KEVIN WOULD NEVER SAY THAT!!!! AHHHHH!!!!!"), Henry now alludes that he's gonna kill Susan. This all starts when she starts poking around Henry's murdering shed and finds a rubber duckie. Susan knows it's the one his baby brother had the night he drowned and she FINALLY pieces it together. Then they both hilariously get into a fight over the rubber duckie, while it's squeaking like crazy. It's a hilarious scene.

Mark witnesses Henry going off into the woods with Susan and tries to stop them. But Wallace, having enough of Psycho Mark, locks him in a room. Mark breaks open a window and escapes. Out in the woods, Henry comes clean about killing his baby brother and then shoves Susan off a cliff. Luckily she grabs onto the rocks and is hanging on. Henry is about to throw a rock at her when Mark comes flying out of nowhere and the two kids start wrasslin'.

This gives Susan enough time to climb back up to the top (Ain't about how fast I get there Ain't about what's waiting on the other side It's the climb!!) and get back on top. But now both Mark and Henry fall over the cliff. Susan grabs them both, one in each hand. Henry seriously pleads to let her drop Mark and save him. Susan looks at Henry and says "Have a nice drop...in hell!!" (again, might have been paraphrased) and I shit you not a woman lets her own son fall off a cliff and get crushed by rocks. We even get an unneeded scene of Henry's ripped to shred's body lying all bloodied on the rocks.





(At this point all the 9-year-old girls left the theater. If the parents seen this, many lawsuits would've ensued.)

We get a stupid tacked on ending with Elijah Wood standing in the desert and he voice overs about wondering if Susan would've done it again, would she make the same decision. I'm gonna say no because I'm sure once she got back to Wallace, the following conversation happened:

Susan: So yeah I dropped our son but saved this kid we barely know.
Wallace: WHAT???
Susan: Well, Henry killed the baby.
Wallace: BUT HE WAS MY SON ALSO!!! YOU BITCH!!!
(Divorce. Lawsuits. Susan now lives in a cardboard box.)
Susan: DAMN YOU FRODO!!!!!!!!!!

So better not question things too much, kid.





Holy fuck this movie is wacked. I dunno what Macauly Calkin was thinkin' taking this role. Well, more like his dad was thinking. This was somewhat in the middle of the Home Alone crazy. He then went on to play Richie Rich (which a scene was filmed in Gary, Indiana) and "Getting Even With Dad". But as for the movie itself, it's not good. It's not horrible but it's laughably bad. During the highway pile up, you clearly see a car window break BEFORE anything hits it. TWICE! The dialouge is hokey. And overall it's frustrating because adults are fucking idiots. Which is why, again, I refuse to grow up. So kids, if something is happening, let it be an alien or a ghost or even a fucked up kid killing people, just tell me. I'll know what to do.


SUPER SPECIAL THANKS:
To everybody reading this
Adam, Rachael M., Maria, and Devon for sending in reviews of movies
To The LAMB for featuring one of the reviews
For fellow LAMB's for either suggestion movies or simply inspiring me to review movies
And to kids everywhere. Stay fucked up, yo!
-Jason

One of My Favorite Music Videos In Awhle

Movie posts coming later. Promise.
-Jason

Reasons Not To Have Kids #17: It's Alive 3: Island of The Alive

To finish off the "It's Alive" trilogy, Adam returns. I didn't know Michael Moriarty was in this, since he is my favorite b-movie actor. I'm gonna have to look into this movie. And sorry, there's not gonna be any images from this movie for this review. I'll just be posting pictures of Michael Moriarty and Karen Black.



Like the other movies in the trilogy, It's Alive 3: Island of the Alive delivers pertinent social commentary in the guise of a schlocky horror movie. This movie, released in 1987, isn't so much about mutant babies as it is about the paranoia surrounding the AIDS epidemic in those early years. If you lived through that time, you may recall a small but vocal minority who wanted to quarantine people with AIDS on an island. You may also recall people disseminating misinformation about how the disease was spread, as well as AIDS jokes that made everyone terribly uncomfortable. This movie captures all those fears AND gives us severed limbs, explosions, Communists, and Karen Black!

The movie opens with a woman (horror icon Karen Black as Ellen Jarvis) giving birth in a cab. The cab driver flags down a policeman, and the cop helps the woman through labor, only to be killed by the mutant baby moments after it was born.



The next thing you know, we're in a courtroom, where a slick-talking lawyer is trying to convince a judge that there needs to be a law mandating these mutant babies be killed. The opposing attorney mentions the Death Squads patrolling the hospitals, and we get a chilling look into our future if Obama's health care bill goes through. The evil lawyer brings one of the mutant babies into the courtroom (in a cage, of course), and calls the father (Michael Moriarty as Steven Jarvis) as a witness. Sort of like the incident with O.J.'s glove, the asshole lawyer wants to prove that even the father won't go near his own baby. Much like the glove incident, it backfires, and the father cradles the nasty little baby in his arms after it breaks out of the cage. The judge rules that the babies should be quarantined, and they're secretly sent to an uninhabited island.



Months pass and Steven Jarvis is a reluctant celebrity. His wife wants nothing to do with him, and he's not handling the media attention well. So he goes to the local carnival and picks up a cheap floozie. After they have sex, she realizes that Steven Jarvis looked familiar because he was the father of the mutant baby and she freaks out like he just gave her AIDS, going on and on about how nobody knows how contagious it really is and how he owed it to her to tell her about this before they had sex.



Meanwhile, a group of scientists or poachers or some group of people with guns decide to see how the babies are doing on the island. They're all killed really quickly in gory fashion. One guy's arm is ripped off while he tries to board the rescue helicopter. The helicopter pilot thinks he escaped danger, but he is killed by a stowaway baby. For some reason, the helicopter EXPLODES in midair!

Back in America, Steven Jarvis is at a fundraiser for preventing mutant baby syndrome. He's still trying to cope with being famous, and he seems drunk. He cracks sick jokes about mutant babies and the other partygoers are appalled. Sort of like if he were making jokes about AIDS.

Five years later, he's selling children's' shoes and dealing with obnoxious kids and their asshole parents. One day at work, he's met by Lt. Perkins (the same guy from the previous movies), who tells him that the judge who sent the mutants to the island has died, and the new judge wants to send some scientists to the island to see how the kids are doing. Lt. Perkins wants Jarvis to go with the scientists to the island. Since he hates selling shoes, he agrees.

Some of the scientists think the children are the next step in human evolution, and they want to bring one of them back to study. But the babies are all grown up and they don't want to be studied. Soon after the crew arrives at the island, they're all killed, except for Jarvis. He makes it back to the boat safely, but the mutants HIJACK THE BOAT and start heading back to the U.S. After being kept alive for a few days, Jarvis (and a flotation device) are tossed overboard by the mutant he thinks is his son. Jarvis is eventually picked up by the Cuban Navy and taken to a heavily guarded hospital as the mutants come ashore in Florida, looking for their mommies.



Can Jarvis escape communist captivity? Will the mutants destroy the world? I won't spoil the ending, but I will say that the movie slows down considerably at this point. All the interesting nuances, social commentary and plain ol' fun are abandoned in the last third of the movie. It becomes your typical "mutants attack beach town" scenario with predictable results. That isn't to say that the rest of the movie is bad, just nothing special.

It's Alive 3: Island of the Alive is just as good as the other two movies in the trilogy. Steven Jarvis is the most interesting of all the fathers of mutant babies. His descent into near-madness mixed with his attempts to do the right thing for his child make him a sympathetic hero and keeps the movie from becoming boring. The social commentary may be lost on younger viewers, but even without it, this is a fairly solid movie.


OOH! One more day left! What movie am I gonna finish with? I bet you can't wait!
-Jason

Reasons Not To Have Kids #15 and 16: It's Alive & It's Alive 2

Tonight's double header is bought to you by Devon, a fellow Mass Invader. She too was kind enough to go all over the place with us in L.A, telling us neat stuff and showing us the fucking kick ass place she works at: the coolest video store in existance. Anyway, she takes on two Larry Cohen classics "It's Alive" and "It's Alive 2". Enjoy.



CAST OF CHARACTERS:
Frank Davis - A rather oily-looking public relations man who likes to fire his gun and also has a really neat wine cellar. "A many-faceted man."

Lenore Davis - Frank's wife. Totally losing her shit over this whole homicidal freakbaby thing.

Chris Davis - The original, non-mutant offspring of Frank and Lenore. Somehow doesn't have any fucking clue what's going on throughout most of the film, even though the Davis family has apparently become totally internationally famous for all the fucked up shit that's been happening with their baby.

Lieutenant Perkins - There's some stuff with him that I think is supposed to be like a counterpoint to the stuff with the Davis family, like to make you care more that the baby is going around killing people and stuff, but mostly the scenes with the police are boring.

After a goofy experimental opening sequence with a bunch of disembodied flashlight beams roaming shiftlessly around a black screen, we are launched immediately into a subdued, middle-of-the-night hospital excursion by Lenore and Frank Davis, who are clearly preggers and going into labor. Their young son, Chris, is also introduced.

After some revolting and unmentionable dialogue from Frank outside the maternity ward about "wee cuddies and wee cubs" or something, Lenore is shown getting strapped into the maternity chair and then gives birth off-screen. Frank and the rest of the hospital staff are alerted that something is amiss when a doctor staggers out of the delivery room and collapses in the hall. Closer investigation reveals that his face and throat have been chewed and clawed apart, and even closer investigation reveals a chaos of gore and carnage in the delivery room, where a bloodspattered, screaming, and hysterical Lenore remains strapped to the delivery table, surrounded by the ravaged corpses of about six or eight medical staff members.

Nobody is very clear initially on what has happened, and Frank seems to assume that the hospital was infiltrated by some maniac who killed all the doctors and kidnapped his baby. Some other people ask heavy questions about radiation exposure and prod the Davises about their hospital records, which indicate they had briefly considered aborting their pregnancy early on. Shit really escalates when a big-haired, go-go-boot-wearing lady in some remote locale gets attacked by the side of the road and is found clawed to death by the police, who now correctly suspect that the Davis baby is mobile, and on a homicidal rampage.



A couple other people get killed and there's a really awesome scene where a gun-toting SWAT team surrounds a normal, non-mutant baby that's just hanging out in somebody's back yard. Frank, meanwhile, gets fired from his job at a PR firm because his boss believes that people will be skeeved out by the knowledge that Frank's wife basically gave birth to the Antichrist. The Davises start to become more and more socially isolated and Lenore starts going crazy and popping pills and swilling booze all the time. Frank keeps gruffly asserting that the baby is not really his, and making swaggering overtures about how he plans to kill it.



The baby shows up at Chris's school at night when nobody is there and Frank has to go help the cops try to capture it. It wounds a police officer and escapes, then turns up again later at the Davis's actual house. Frank confronts it in their basement and shoots it, wounding it severely, but it escapes again. Finally a vast squadron of police and government agents are able to locate and surround the baby. Frank suddenly decides that he's been wrong all along, and that the baby should be cared for and allowed to live. He makes a last ditch effort to rescue it from the feds, pointing out that it's incapacitated and harmless, and begging them not to kill it, but they do anyway. Because they're jerks.



It's Alive functions very well as pure cheese if that's to your taste, but beneath its cheap FX, thin plot, and occasionally hammy performances lies a solid emotional core which contributes a genuine feeling of unease, and keeps the film compelling upon repeat viewing.




CAST OF CHARACTERS

Eugene Scott - A kind of wormy guy with a weird mustache.

Jody Scott - Eugene's wife. She gives birth to a mutant baby and ends up falling in with a bunch of crazies who want to rescue it from certain death at the hands of the proper authorities.

Frank Davis - Back for round two, Frank has totally reversed all his opinions from the first movie and now believes that the mutant babies are okay and people need to leave them alone and quit killing them.

Dr. Forrest - A really angry guy who hates the mutant babies and thinks they should all be exterminated.

Dr. Perry - A large-foreheaded geneticist who believes the mutants may in fact represent a race of hyper-intelligent, evolutionarily advanced "superhumans." He's also really obsessed with getting them to someday have sex with each other and reproduce.

Detective Perkins - Also back for round two. Tragically, he survives.

So the first It's Alive movie was about what would happen if some hapless people popped out a deformed baby which subsequently freaked out and ran around killing people. It Lives Again expands on these same themes by exploring what might happen if -- stay with me here -- SEVERAL DIFFERENT deformed babies were ALL running around killing people. All at the same time! Think of it!

So it starts out with Frank, from the first movie, showing up at these peoples' house in Tucson. (We know it's Tucson because, after the opening credits sequence -- which, like the one from the first movie, is intensely avant garde, this time involving a murky shadow image of a baby carriage fading slowly into relief against a backdrop of rippling water -- we immediately cut to a huge road sign which says "TUCSON!" Maybe without the exclamation point, I don't remember.) The Tucson people are having a baby shower, and Mrs. Tucson is enormously, conspicuously pregnant. After everyone else except for Frank has left the baby shower, Mr. and Mrs. Tucson realize that Frank is no one that either of them has ever met. Instead of getting totally freaked out by the realization that some strange, greasy man has invaded their baby shower, Mr. and Mrs. Tucson calmly and cheerfully ask Mr. Frank who the hell he is and where he came from. Frank explains that he is Frank Davis, the father of the Davis Baby, and Mr. Tucson is all like "oh yeah I think I remember that" like yeah, really? You remember that a little? Frank basically tells them that he has come to Tucson to warn Mr. and Mrs. Tucson that their baby is probably a mutant baby. He rattles off a lot of reasons why this is probably true, and then he tells them that people from the government are surveilling their house, and points out some weird old man who is wandering around in their backyard, and who I guess they never noticed before Frank got there and pointed him out. Mr. Tucson, whose name is Eugene, is sort of dismissive and wants Frank to leave. Mrs. Tucson seems more receptive, smiling encouragingly and allowing Frank to touch her big preggers belly. Before he leaves, Frank gives Mr. and Mrs. Tucson his card, and entreats them to call him when Mrs. Tucson goes into labor. He warns that if they call the hospital or the police, their baby will be killed as soon as it is delivered.




Later, after Frank is gone, Mrs. Tucson starts going into labor. Frank, it has been revealed, is involved in an elaborate conspiracy with several other sympathetic wackos to rescue all the mutant babies from extermination and hide them somewhere so they can be raised in captivity and studied. Mr. Tucson calls Frank, but he is unable to get ahold of him. Instead, the Tucsons go to the hospital, and Eugene is immediately separated from his wife, who is hustled inside the building and converged upon by a large and shady assortment of doctors, medical staff, and government agents. The Tucsons realize they have made a huge mistake. At the last minute, Frank busts into the hospital with a gun and spirits the Tucsons away in a big, crazy truck with a little medical thing set up in the back, sort of like in that X-Files episode where they pull over that truck on the highway and realize that people have been doing alien autopsies in there. Remember that one?




So anyway, they try to somehow sedate the baby before it's born, but of course the sedation fails, and the baby lunges directly out of Mrs. Tucson's vagina and onto the face of some poor doctor who gets his throat ripped out. Undeterred, one of the other doctors scoops the baby up off the floor and plops it in a big metal cage, where it sits writhing and growling adorably.

The cops set up a road block and stop the truck, but the only people still in it are Mrs. Tucson, the injured doctor, and Frank. Everyone else has escaped. This scene shows Frank getting arrested, but for some reason in the very next scene he's walking around free again, so I guess kidnapping pregnant ladies at gunpoint isn't considered a very serious crime in Tucson.

Mrs. Tucson's real name is Jody. Back at home, Jody sits at her kitchen table in a bathrobe and looks ashen. She argues with her mother, who is a cunt. Jody's mother thinks this whole situation is somehow the fault of Jody's no-good husband and his poopy genetic material. Jody tells her mom to basically fuck off.

Meanwhile, Eugene has escaped with those other guys from the Maternity Party Van of Awesome and is being shown around their secret compound in like, Valencia. There are three babies total, and they're all living in cages in the basement. In addition to Jody and Eugene's baby (which is a boy), there is one male baby and one female baby, who the doctors have named Adam and Eve. ("It seemed like a good joke at the time," one doctor lamely quips.)

I took copious notes on the next like 30-40 minutes of the movie, but yeah, I'm not recapping all of it. Basically Jody is contacted by the doctors at the secret Mutant Baby Farm and they arrange for her to be brought there. Jody and Eugene argue, people have a lot of heavy conversations about what long-term implications the mutant babies might have for science, etc. Yawn. There's some stuff in there about the police and the government trying to figure out what's going on and locate Jody, Eugene, Frank, and the babies to recapture them. Finally, the main genetic specialist guy, Dr. Perry, stupidly takes one of the babies out of its cage and it kills him. Then it lets the other two babies out of their cage as well and all three of them go on a spree, killing one of the other doctors and attacking Eugene in the pool as he's taking a late night swim. The police, meanwhile, are closing in on the secret location (there was some hoo-ha about how they figured it out, but yeah, fuck that). The po po arrive just in time to hoist Eugene out of the swimming pool and shoot dead the baby that's dangling from his ankle.

Frank rescues one of the remaining babies and runs away with it through the woods, but his fate is sealed when some dumb night watchman shows up and harasses the baby by shining a flashlight in its face. The baby mauls Frank, absconds, and manages to ruin some poor kid's birthday party. There's a dramatic scene where one of the doctors from the hospital scene at the beginning, who has been tagging along with the police ever since, reveals that he is actually the father of the "Seattle baby" alluded to at the end of the first film, and that both the baby and his wife are now dead as a result of the birth. Eugene agrees that the babies are dangerous and says that he and Jody are willing to act as decoys to try to lure their own infant to a location where it can be exterminated.



The cops set Jody and Eugene up in a decoy house. The baby shows up, but when it does, Jody tries to rescue it, begging Eugene not to hurt it. Eventually, Eugene relents, and the happy family of three cozies up next to a roaring fire, just in time for the police to storm the house and blast everything to shit. The final scene shows a now-bespectacled Eugene somberly approaching another pregnant couple in a different city, presumably to deliver the same warning to them that Frank delivered to Jody and Eugene at the start of the film.



It's not as good as the first movie, and the second half in particular gets draggy and meandering, but overall I'd say it's more than half-decent.


Tomorrow, Adam returns with his review of "It's Alive 3: Expect Survivor Jokes Cause It Takes Place on An Island" (Note: Adam probably won't make Survivor, or even Lost, jokes in this review.)
-Jason

In The Cold November Rain

RN2HK is coming to an end (I swear the next three days will have reviews) but I'm already moving onto next month. Here's what I got planned:

1. I decided to sign up for NaNoWrMo or whatever it's called. Basically, you spend the entire month of November writing a novel. I came up with an idea I just hope I can put it down into words. I'll keep you posted about this.

2. I should be able to launch into a new regular review in the first week of November where I'll be taking on "I Was A Teenage Zombie" a movie I forgot to mention when I was talking about zombies with the LAMBcast gang. I'll admit that the reason I sound like an idiot and/or an asshole was because I was nervous. I never really talked to these guys before like with my voice, you know. And I already made an idiot of myself prior to recording cause the headset mic I used I just bought the day before so I didn't know how to use it and apparently they were hearing me munching on pizza while I was waiting for someone to say something. So yeah I was nervous and embarrassed. Which is why I sounded rambly. Hopefully the next LAMBcast (see #3) I'll know what the fuck I'm talking about.'
(PS: Will Smith was also in "Hitch".)

3. The next LAMBcast is happening soon and it's gonna be all about "The Room". At least if I turn into a rambling idiot I can just say I'm doing an impression of Tommy Wiseau.

4. I have a fun game planned for the month of November. And I'm gonna tell you about it now but you won't be able to participate until November 1st. Basically it's a Savanger Hunt/Trivia Questions regarding me, the website, the blog, and bad movies in general. I wrote out a list of 30 things to do and questions to answer and doing each task on that list earns you whatever set amount of points I assigned to each task. They range from super easy to really really difficult. Why should I do this, you're probably thinking? Cause there's a real prize! Worth money! The person with the highest points wins a $25 dollar gift card! Yay!! Just in time for the holidays! I'll post the offical rules and how to obtain the list on November 1st.
-Jason

Reasons Not To Have Kids #14: Woodchipper Massacre

Oh Netflix. I blame you for making me watch this.

See, I was putting together what movies I was gonna watch for RN2HK Month and while searching "horror" I found a movie titled "Woodchipper Massacre". I checked the plot and it said this, word for word:

"Three suburban youngsters are stuck at home in the care of their horrid imperious Aunt Tess while their father is out of town on business. Next thing you know, the youngest boy unintentionally kills Tess with a huge knife, and the siblings must find a way to dispose of her corpse. But before the trio can finish the job, their unhinged fugitive cousin shows up and puts a crimp in their plans in this 1988 cult classic"

Perfect, I said outloud to nobody. Three youngsters. One of them, the youngest kills an adult. The other two work together to hide the body. It's called MASSACRE, which means there's probably more Netflix isn't telling me. They probably accidently drink Aunt Tess's blood and go on a murderous rampage. This should be SWEEEEEET!!

Turns out Netflix fucking reviewed the movie for me already cause THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS IN THIS MOVIE!!! This movie is exactly one hour and 20 minutes and that's all that happens. And just so you know what I'm working with, here are what the kids look like:




This is what the Aunt looks like:


And these are what the opening credits look like:



HEY! HEY!!! Where you goin'? Naw, we're gonna work through this TOGETHER! Sit back down. Here, have a beer. It'll help.

Before what I like to call the "public access" font opening credits, we get the "Star Wars" opening crawl that talks about how 1 in 10 households deal with woodchipper fatalities and it could happen to anyone. It could, in fact, happen to you!!! Mu-hahahaha!!!!

The movie proper starts and we see the oldest Jon working with the titular woodchipper. Dad sneaks up and Jon immedately throws him in the woodchipper. Ok, not really. Dad tells us everything we need to know: he's going away on a business trip for the weekend and Aunt Tess is coming over to watch the kids. I never got a feel for how old Jon was suppose to be. Dad don't trust him alone with the kids, but he mentions college, but again he looks like he's 30. Maybe he just develops slow.

And also as it turns out Jon is our writer/director/producer. Man, what is it with guys who write/produce/direct their own stuff that turns it into crap? Oh, hi Woodchipper. Anyway, while Tom and Denise is walking home from school they lay on the backstory and exposition pretty thick by saying the following things:
1. Their Aunt Tess is a bitch.
2. Nobody likes her.
3. She has a crazy ex-con son.
4. Tom ordered a big ass Rambo knife.

Dad picks up Tess and she starts going on about how skinny the kids are and kids dont' eat nowaways. I'm gonna tell you right now you will at first cheer the character of Aunt Tess but eventually she gets annoying. You think she'll get killed right away but they drag it out for so fucking long. Dad leaves and Aunt Tess makes some kind of omlet lasagna with bacon or something. Then Jon wants to go out and fuck some girl but Aunt Tess would rather he fuck her. Ok, not really. And I just grossed myself out. You finish writing the review on your own.


Oh ok fine. At least let me keep a bucket nearby.

Tess bitches and bitches and bitches and bitches and bitches about everything from kids not respecting old people to the types of movies out nowadays to loud rock and the roll music and food and taking guts out of chickens and argh die already.

Thankfully, at the 30 minute mark, Tom's Rambo knife comes in and instead of hiding it (apparently Tom has the memory of a goldfish) he waves it in front of Aunt Tess, singing West Side Story. Once you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way!!!! Aunt Tess think knives are the devil and fights with Tom to get it back.

Guess what happens. Yup.

So Tess is dead and suddenly it's a murderous version of "Don't Tell Mom, The Babysitter's Dead". That was pretty much the same thing in that movie, right? Annoying old lady. Died suddenly. Christina Applegate acts with her face.





So these fucktards spend 10 minutes figuring out what to do. Yes, they discuss calling the police but they don't want to cause (these are seriously the reasons they give): they don't want to spend the rest of their lives in jail, they don't wanna get kicked out of the Girl Scouts, no boys will talk to Denise if she's got a brother that's a murderer, and Jon don't wanna ruin his perty hair.

Not knowing what else to do, they travel about 8 years into the future and see a movie called "Fargo" and get an idea. After coming back to 1988, they start chopping up Aunt Tess. See, it's funny cause just earlier, Denise was going "ew gross" to chicken guts and now here she is cutting up her aunt. Jon worries the flesh is gonna get jammed in the woodchipper so Tom comes up with the idea to stick the chopped up parts in the freezer. While they do this, they talk like the fucking Brady Bunch. Cause it's funny.



They take the frozen bits of Aunt Tess and throw her in the chipper and wow, there's no bloody mess everywhere. Imagine that. They finish and go on with their day. Now it's Sunday and our second plot point is on it's way to the house. See, plots don't happen in this movie, they get delievered. You know that crazy ex-con son Tess had? Well, his name is Kim and he's driving around. This happens for 20 minutes.

Meantime Dad calls (twice) and the kids lie about the whereabouts of Aunt Tess. They finally settle on the story of her leaving early and not knowing why. Yeah, sure. Why not. Also Jon has to get the yard cleaned up. Uh-oh! I hope nothing wacky happens.

That's another thing. There's way too much set up in this movie. Every other line of dialouge is "What else could go wrong?" or "What could happen?" or "I hope nothing else goes wrong!" This happens during the entire movie. I want to slap Jon really hard.

Ok so Jon leaves and Kim arrives looking for Tess. The kids try the leaving story on him and sure enough it works. But Kim won't leave until he gets some money cause he owes somebody some money for something that we should never know about. I'm gonna say he bought too much illegal porn and now owes somebody. Why not? It fits, cause he tried to grab Denise's tit. Oh and Kim looks like this:


Hey! Don't make me strap you in! We're almost done. Here, have another beer.

Kim finds Tess's ring, which was the focus of a way too long shot. I'm surprised this movie didn't turn all "Student Bodies" on us and start flashing PLOT POINT!!!



Kim decides to sell the ring but wants the kids to cough up more money. Realizing there's only one way out of this, and they're in a movie called "Woodchipper MASSACRE" (You can't consider one killing a massacre) they lure Kim outside and more or less shove him into the woodchipper. This time there's a mess. Why this time I don't know but whatever.

The kids get all "Dexter" on us and start cleaning up the mess, and the yard, before Dad gets home. Not to ruin the ending but they do. The end.

Before I wrap this up, I had to share this. I found this image in the background. I have no idea why the fuck it was there.



I guess there's a picture of Dad groping Mom's tits and he hung it right out in the open for the kids to see. No wonder they turned into woodchipper murderers.

Despite every single thing wrong with this movie, from the acting to the "acting" to Denise's inclination to SHOUT EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HER FUCKING LINES LIKE THIS YEAH JUST LIKE THIS!!!!!!!, to the public access feel, to the fact it's NOT a horror movie but more like a black comedy, I kinda sorta in a strange way like it? I would only watch this again to show friends. Cause I must spread the horror. Speaking of, you are now free to go. Don't tell anyone I tortured you like this, ok?

-Jason

Now You Can HEAR Me Ramble On About Nothing!

Last week, LAMB Master Fletch said I could join in on the latest episode of the LAMBcast and so I did, cause they needed a zombie expert. Thankfully, that guy wasn't available so they got me instead. Give it a listen!


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-Jason

Reasons Not To Have Kids #13: 666: The Child/Links

This lovely movie is bought to us by our good friends The Asylum, whom I'm starting to hate more and more. At first, the idea of these movies ripping off good (or not so good) movies was a fun novel idea. But when you sit down to watch them, you just want to jab a pencil in your eyes and be content with being blind for the rest of your life.

Tonight's faire is their version of "The Omen", which as this company is known to do, released this movie on the same day the remake hit theaters. So we're watching a rip off movie of a remake. I'm surprised a black hole didn't open somewhere.

The movie starts with a plane crashing into some mountains. A camera crew "just happens" to be there to film the entire thing and they spot a kid crawling out of the wreckage and collapsing. The camera crew, composed of Tony and Scott. Scott is married and/or banging on air news anchor Erica, who looked super familar to me. Looking up her resume on imdb, I noticed that she was in...every OTHER The Asylum movie, including "the 9/11 Commission Report". Boy, they'll turn anything into a movie.

While the credits are rolling, we learn that the kid playing Fake Damien is named "Boo Boo Stewart". Yes. Boo Boo. I'm guessing the following exchange took place prior to this movie being released:
Producer: Ok, kid you're hired.
"Boo Boo": I'm ashamed to be in this movie. I want to go under a fake name.
Producer: Fine. What do you wanna be called?
Boo Boo: Boo Boo!
Producer: ....

Whatever, kid.

So the kid is an orphan and Erica and Scott want to adopt him cause him literally WALKING AWAY from a plane crash isn't suspecious at all. While Boo Boo is in the hospital, a nurse and a doctor start fucking and Boo Boo gets all Fake Damien on them, causing a pipe to burst (not that one), killing both nurse and doctor.

I guess I should mention that Boo Boo's name in the movie is Donald, but I perfer Boo Boo so that's what I'm calling him, dammit! Anyway, Erica and Scott talk to a priest who is a hard ass about adopting Boo Boo and since Erica's sister is a Fake Martha Stewart, he lets them have Boo Boo.



Also moving in with Erica and Scott is Scott's father Jake. Jake agrees to watch Boo Boo while Erica and Scott go somewhere. Jake throws a baseball at Boo Boo and ends up taking one right in the kisser. Jake takes Boo Boo to the hospital (the same one with the dead doctor and nurse, were they ever found?) and the doctor (another one, he kinda looked like Chris Parnell) pretty much acts like an asshole to Boo Boo, which is a bad idea. Boo Boo uses his Satan powers to make Asshole Doctor ram a drill into his face.

What I love about this movie so far are the sets. It's clearing a house, a rented office, or a warehouse. So to make it look like a "hospital" or a "TV studio" they just hang stuff to represent those things. Like the TV studio just has a desk from Staples and a green screen taped to the wall and that's it. The hospital has a bunch of pictures of people's organs and diagrams about the intestines. Classic.

Erica and Scott are mad at Jake, but they won't be for long. Boo Boo shows up in Jake's room that night and causes the ceiling fan to become sharp blades that'll slice open an old man's neck. Someone needs to tell The Asylum that ceiling fans aren't actually made of blades.



Scott finds his dad dead and immedately forgets about it and parties with Tony and Boo Boo. Erica throws a bitch fit about nothing in particular and orders a nanny. Oh and she has to go out of town. While out of town, the Nanny shows up and this is the point I wanted to give my eyeballs lead poisoning. The Nanny's name, I am NOT FUCKING joking, is Lucy Fir.

I...ugh.

So LUCY obviously takes a liking to Boo Boo and wants to his "his real drawings", which she loves. Scott for no real reason thinks something is up with Boo Boo and decides to look into his past. Boy, this movie doesn't waste any time. Scott talks to a buddy online through a webcam, only to tell us he has a webcam set up, and then Scott finds out that the orphanage Boo Boo use to live in was burned to the ground and only one guy survived, a priest.

So...if Boo Boo is an orphan, why was he on that plane? Did he just feel like flying around? Any thought put into this movie? Whatever.

Scott goes looking for this priest while Tony and Lucy watches Boo Boo. Tony finds "the real drawings" in Boo Boo's room and freaks out. Boo Boo and Lucy then sic lawn mowers, hand saws, and other tools after Tony, killing him. It's not even revealed what happened to Tony's body. Oh well.




Scott talks to the priest and he tells him that Boo Boo is Satan's son, and he'll have the mark. Oh yeah. Fuckin' 666 is EVERYWHERE. The number of the flight was 7666. The room the priest is staying in at first is 966 but then suddenly it's 666. Yeah, I noticed that, movie.




Scott has to kill Boo Boo but has to get around Lucy. Lucy decides to seduce Scott by giving him a blow job IN FRONT OF HIS WEBCAM (yeah, this WON'T come into play later). The next day, Scott kicks Lucy out. Whereever Erica is, she recieves a message from Scott but it's the blow job video. Erica gets upset, finds a message from Boo Boo written on the mirror, and immedately falls backwards into the shower door. Most normal people would just be slightly injured. Erica however is cut to shreds and dies.

Scott faces Boo Boo, who turns into a demon. Scott finds the 666 on Boo Boo's tongue and tries to kill him. Lucy shows up and shoots Scott. Scott grabs a fire poker and jams it in Lucy's face. Now her being LUCY FIR you'd think she wouldn't die but whatever.




Now Scott has to defeat Boo Boo. He's about to shoot him when the stupidest fucking ending in the history of ever happens. Just out of nowhere, a cop shows up and blows Scott's brains out. No warning, no "FREEZE" just BAM!! dead. And where the fuck did the cop come from?

So now Boo Boo is sent to live with Fake Martha Stewart where he must perform on her god awful TV show in Christmas sweaters. The kid gives an evil stare into the camera and the slowest movie credits I've ever seen starts crawling.

I shouldn't have to say anything else. All The Asylum movies are the same. Lame, horribly put together, and makes me wanna punch my monitor. Just skip this movie and put on "The Omen" or "Omen 2: Electric Satan-oo".


With that out of the way, I got some links for ya!

Fletch at Blog Cabins sent me his take of "Joshua", which is pretty much another "Omen" rip off that became mainstream.

Scott over at He Shot Cyrus takes a look at a segment in the "Twilight Zone: The Movie" with the kid freaking everyone out in a house.

Mucho thanks to both of them for submitting their links!
-Jason