Jeffrey:

Phew. Boy oh boy, did we just take a long hiatus from the movie challenge. A lot has happened since we last talked. Segretto had a baby and I finally became a man, officially, in a tribal ceremony that involved a lot of painful tweezing and embarrassing obstacle courses. Being a man is harder work than I imagined. There's a lot of construction and swearing involved.

But now we're back, and we're ready to "sink our teeth" into an 80s classic, The Lost Boys. Ha ha ha, that's a joke, because The Lost Boys is a movie about vampires, and one thing about vampires is that they like to put their teeth in things. Another thing about them is that they all look like members of Aerosmith during Aerosmith's very bad period. These are the kinds of lessons we learn from watching The Lost Boys.

Let me get this out of the way right off the bat: I love this movie. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but when I was a kid, I watched it many, many times. I was not aware how many times I had watched it until I rewatched it last night. Every line of dialogue is ingrained in my brain. I know every song inside and out because my sister would listen to the soundtrack over and over again. If you know the soundtrack, actually, you already know half the movie, because it is basically a music video with occasional dialogue. And unexpected special guests!

Hi David Cross!

Hi Bill S. Preston, Esquire!

The Lost Boys tells the story of Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim), two brothers who move with their recently-divorced mother to a beach town that just happens to be the murder capital of the world. Soon after settling in, they go to a gay biker convention on the beach where Michael spots the beautiful and beguiling Star (Jami Gertz). Michael chases her through the streets, making terrible small talk, until she introduces him to her gay biker friends, the titular Lost Boys. Led by the dangerously sexy Keifer Sutherland, the Lost Boys have a secret … and they're not telling!

First you have to purify yourself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.

So what's their big secret? If you guessed "they're transvestites," you're WRONG! They're quite open about that. The secret is ... brace yourself ... the Lost Boys are vampires! Shocker! Soon, Michael succumbs to peer pressure and becomes a vampire himself. Or, half-a-vampire, I guess … you have to kill someone with your teeth to become a full-fledged vampire, or something. I didn't quite get that part.

If your new friends party with jewel-encrusted wine bottles, be very, very wary.

Meanwhile, Sam meets the fabulous furry Frog brothers, Edger and Alan (Corey Feldman and some other dude), at a local comic shop. The Frogs love killing vampires. Or at least they love talking about killing vampires. One assumes they've never killed a vampire before, because they are twelve-years old.

Hi Vic Thrill!

Once Michael turns into a vampire, he starts behaving strangely. He behaves exactly like someone who has a serious drug habit. Luckily, he has the most checked-out mother in the history of cinema (Dianne Wiest). She assumes he's waking up at 3 in the afternoon and wearing sunglasses all day and speaking in a creepy whisper because of a girl. Good guess! No wonder your marriage ended in failure.

Hi Molly!

Her children's lives might be falling apart, but Mom has other things on her mind … namely, boning the friendly local video store clerk. We can't understand why they're devoting so much time to this supposed subplot, but then, surprise! It turns out the friendly local video store clerk is not so friendly after all. Vampires die, surprises occur, and in the end we all learn a little something about why you should never invite anyone into your house again. The end.

Is The Lost Boys dated? Yes and no. Yes, it is a product of its time period. The hairstyles and the fashions are ludicrous by today's standards. It doesn't help that at several points in the movie the characters talk about how cool and fashionable the other characters look. But fashions come and go … everything looks stupid after awhile. I can't really fault a movie for adhering to the zeitgeist.

A very 80s wall.

By far the most dated aspect of The Lost Boys is its total inability to recognize homoeroticism. I'm sure the 80s was not a great time to be gay, what with Ronald Reagan and AIDs and what-not. But what a fabulous time to be in the closet! You didn't even need to work at it … people just assumed you were straight until you put your cock in their hands, and even then, you were often okay. (When I grew up, many people did not realize fucking Boy George was gay. Boy George! He was essentially a giant cock in the hands of America.)

NOT HOMOEROTIC

A VERY STRAIGHT BAND FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT HOMOSEXUALS

A TOTALLY NOT HOMOEROTIC POSTER FOR A TEENAGE BOY TO HAVE ON HIS CLOSET

A QUITE NORMAL THING FOR TWO BROTHERS TO BE DOING

Despite its lack of gay self-awareness, The Lost Boys is massively, retardedly entertaining. It is consistently inventive and rarely dull. The dialogue is frequently clever and the performances are fun and campy across the board. The Coreys eventually became a Hollywood joke, but at this stage of their careers they really did show a lot of promise. They're both a lot of fun to watch. The script occasionally makes no sense … how the Hell does the Grandpa know his house is being invaded by vampires, anyway? … but where it fails in plot it more than makes up for with style, wit, and a killer final punchline. It made me long for the days before irony took over everything … I can't remember the last time I saw a big budget movie with this much silly charm, especially a big budget horror movie aimed at teenage girls. No, Grown Ups doesn't count. That movie was not charming.

On the Awkward Scale of Pizzas, I give The Lost Boys ... 5 pizzas!

Next: Segretto pulls down Dinsmore's critical pants and laughs at his tiny weiner in a non-homoerotic fashion!

According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their ongoing feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs.

Mike:

Most of the time, I couldn’t care less about sitting outside of pop culture obsessions. I have no more desire to understand the appeal of Twilight or Lady Gaga or “American Idol” or sports than I care to understand the appeal of sticking a chopstick in ones peehole. But there are a few beloved pop items that really irk me because I don’t get them. One is Some Like It Hot, which has so much going for it—Billy Wilder and Jack Lemon and Marilyn Monroe and a reputation as the greatest comedy ever made—but never fails to bore me. Another is The Big Lebowski.

The Big Lebowski (1998) stars Jeff Bridges as Jeff Lebowski, aka: The Dude, a middle-aged hippie stoner who wants nothing more than to bowl with his crazy Vietnam Vet buddy Walter (John Goodman) but gets caught up in a scheme to deliver ransom money to the kidnappers of the wife (Tara Reid) of a millionaire (David Huddleston), also named Jeffrey Lebowski. Being that this is a movie by Joel and Ethan Coen, greed inevitably fouls the plan when Walter decides that he and The Dude should keep the ransom money for themselves.

When I first saw The Big Lebowski I was shocked that the Coen Brothers chose to follow up a film as masterful and hilarious as Fargo with one that struck me as flimsy and directionless. I was even more shocked to discover that The Big Lebowski had attracted a cult following with greater potency than any other Coen Brothers movie. Fans throw an annual “Lebowski Fest” in which they dress up as their favorite characters, bowl, drink, and presumably, watch the movie. There are Big Lebowski drinking games and a line of Big Lebowski toys.

The merchandise abides.

Tara Reid: Not even funny as a punchline.

John Goodman sez: "Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!!"

But, of course, I’m in the minority here. Somewhere a Lebowski Head is reading this review and plotting my bloody, bloody, bloody murder. Fortunately, that person will most likely opt to get stoned and watch The Big Lebowski for the 300th time instead.

Mike gives The Big Lebowski… Twenty-Two Turturro Tongues!

Let the hate mail commence...

Next page: ...but first, some contrary words of praise from Dude Jeffrey Dinsmore...

According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their weekly feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs.

Jeffrey:

The summer before my junior year at the University of Michigan, I got a job at Record Town in the Briarwood Mall. As record stores go, it was not one. We didn’t sell records. CDs and cassettes only. And cassingles, of course. Hahaha. Cassingles!

I recognized that it was a terrible store for anyone who liked music, but nonetheless, I felt like I'd finally hit the big time. Who wouldn't want to work in a record store? I mean, working in a cool record store that was not in a mall would have been better, let’s face it. But it was still a bit of a dream come true. There weren't a lot of real record fans shopping at the mall, though. The Jock Jams compilations did not leave our top 20 bestseller wall in the entire two years I worked there, and that is not hyperbole.

I’m not trying to make you feel bad about your crappy college job. So you worked in the caf, no big deal. Someone had to refill the soft serve machines. But there is a tie-in between Showgirls and Record Town. A few months before the film came out, we received a promotional video at the store featuring 20 minutes of unrated footage from the movie. Like an extended preview kind of thing. I took it home with me because no one else in the store gave a shit about Showgirls. Because no one in America gave a shit about Showgirls. Contrary to what you may have heard in Bible class, the country did not spend 1995 in the grips of Showgirls fever.

From the moment my roommates and I popped the Showgirls tape in, it was clear that this movie was going to suck. The tape was basically the entire movie condensed into 20 minutes, with the exception of the (spoiler-alert) totally unnecessary brutal rape scene that totally unnecessarily occurs near the end of the full-length feature. It quickly moved into our regular late-night viewing rotation, alongside the underseen Crispin Glover/Howard Hesseman masterpiece Rubin and Ed and a 10 minute extended preview of Alice Cooper’s Monster Dog.

It was probably 10 years before I finally saw Showgirls all the way through. And it was every bit as bad as I had assumed it would be. Watching it for the second time last week did not alter my opinion. This was and remains a bad movie full of bad ideas executed poorly by bad people.

It’s hard to say anything new about Showgirls that hasn’t been said before. A quick recap: the terrible script was written by Joe Eszterhas, the guy who also wrote Basic Instinct and several other films that were exactly like Basic Instinct. He was paid $3 million to write Showgirls. He was paid $3 million to write Showgirls. I’m sorry, I don’t think you heard me properly: HE WAS PAID $3 MILLION TO WRITE SHOWGIRLS.

Joe Eszterhas: All Class, All the Time

It was directed by Paul Verhoeven, director of Robocop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers. And also director of Basic Instinct. “Lightning in a bottle!” thought the studio executives. “Eszterhas and Verhoeven together again! Someone get our checkbook!” The single checkbook that all studio executives share.

Actually, I quite like Paul Verhoeven’s films. Robocop is much smarter than you remember, and I am firmly on the “love it” side of the love-it-or-hate-it debate on Starship Troopers. In those films, at least, he seems to know exactly what he’s doing, with his tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Which is what makes Showgirls such an enduring mystery: how could a filmmaker who’d displayed such a fine understanding of irony in the past unintentionally make such a camp masterpiece? Or is it supposed to be this ridiculous? Eszterhas’s intentions, at least, are clear: he thought he was writing the great American stripper story. That guy’s about as ironic as a crying widow on September 11th. But Verhoeven? What’s his excuse?

Everything in this film is done the wrong way, starting with Elizabeth Berkley’s wildly off-the-mark performance in the role of Nomi Malone. This is where the movie does my head in: her performance is so unbelievably over-the-top, I can’t believe she was not instructed to behave that way. If Elizabeth Berkley came up with this portrayal herself, then Elizabeth Berkley is bat-shit crazy. For example, this:

I mean, what? Why are you so mad at that straw? Berkley starts the film at this level and remains there for two hours straight. Why walk away from a situation at a proper speed when you can storm off, shoving everyone in your path out of the way? Why speak in a normal tone of voice when you can scream? Why dance smoothly when you can flail your arms about like you were drowning in air? Berkley's Nomi Malone is so unlikeable and irritating that I kept hoping she'd be disemboweled by one of the many cars that screech to a halt in front of her during her repeated blind sprints into traffic. There are two things Nomi Malone loves in this world: running into traffic without looking both ways and being naked. Lucky for her, she gets to do both of those things PLENTY throughout the course of the film.

Elizabeth Berkley is very naked in this film. She is naked in ways that no one has been naked before. And just when you think she's reached the limits of her nakedness, she gets nakeder. She is so naked she's practically inside-out. The nudity kind of offended me, actually. Not because I have anything against people being naked on film, but because it was such a waste of good nudity.

So is it intentionally goofy, or did something go horribly wrong? My opinion is based on a single line that comes at the end of the second act. After starting out dancing at a sleazy strip club called the Cheetah, Nomi has managed to “work her way up” to a role in a spectacularly unerotic erotic revue. One day, she receives a visit at work from the Cheetah’s swarthy owner and brash emcee. (The emcee is a sassy fat woman who is supposed to come across as a “tough old broad with a heart of gold” but is possibly the most loathsome actress I have ever seen captured on film.) The owner and the emcee share a wistful moment with Nomi and we get the distinct impression that these people are meant to be her parental figures, which, eww. As they turn to leave, the owner says of Nomi's new job, “Must be weird not having anybody come on you.” This is not played as a gross thing to say. It is played as a poignant moment between Nomi and the guy who's talking about people ejaculating on her. The expression on her face says, "it is weird not having anybody come on me." As the come-guy and the giant, bellowing sea cucumber of an emcee walk away, the strings swell on the soundtrack. Nomi watches them walk away with a wistful expression, thinking about how far she's come in such a short amount of time.

I hate you.

THAT IS NOT REAL. I refuse to believe that is real. That is someone playing a joke on the audience. No one would seriously write that line. And no one would direct it thinking it was a serious line, much less pin the entire emotional arc of a scene on it. It has to be a joke. And if it is meant to be a joke, then the entire film must come crumbling down like a house of cards.

There are so many more issues to address with Showgirls, from its ludicrous, constant-slumber-party view of female interrelationships to that awful, joy-murdering rape scene in the final act. Unfortunately, it would take much more room than I have here to discuss the myriad examples of Showgirls awfulness. There is not a minute of this film that is even accidentally good. But at the same time, it is a riveting two-hour adventure in high camp that must be seen to be believed. I’m going to take away 1 pizza for the rape scene (really, truly shocking and an absolute buzzkill), but give Showgirls a 5 pizza salute for being one of the all-time stinkiest turds in the toilet.

Next page: Mike greases up his stripper pole in preparation for the ride of his life.

According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their weekly feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs.

Mike:

Movie monsters have always been handy vessels for metaphor. Dracula is the embodiment of sexual terror and venereal disease. Frankenstein plays on distrust of science. Dr. Jekyll is a junkie. The Creature from the Black Lagoon symbolizes man’s inherent fear of fish. But no monster is as metaphorically ripe as the werewolf. Werewolves represent the subsumption of the ego by the id… an inarticulate, self-control devoid, hairy-palmed, snarling, drooling, havoc-by-moonlight-raising id. Sound like someone you know? No? Well then you’ve never been or spent time around a teenager. By all accounts, teenagers are pimply, violent, amoral, unhygienic creatures, and no one believed this more than the adults of the 1950s. Before that decade of pre-fab housing and six-martini lunches, teens were essentially societal nonentities. They were only bit players in both everyday life and fiction. Hell, even the fucking Bible totally skips over Jesus’s teen years. This changed in the ‘50s when things like TV-watching, comic book-reading, and record-buying made teens viable demographics to advertisers. In other words: they became actual people. But the programs they watched, the comics they read, and the records they dug convinced a good portion of adults that this once invisible minority was being pumped with a disturbing dose of rebelliousness. Adults imagined a generation of kids hopped up on the dope, filled with murderous impulses by E.C. comics, and driven to unimagined heights of sexual mania by Buddy Holly records. Teenagers became enemies every bit as formidable as Joe Commie. They were all id.

So it was only a matter of time before some cagey maker of B-pictures drew the parallel between teens and werewolves. That someone was Herman Cohen of American International Pictures (AIP), the gentleman responsible for such classics as Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and Magnificent Roughnecks. The film: 1957’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf starring that icon of unfettered sexuality and carnal rage, Michael Landon. When I was a kid, the image of Landon with his facial pompadour, bucky fangs, and letterman jacket as Tony the Teen Werewolf glowered back at me from many a library book about monster movies. But that was as close as I could come to seeing the movie because it almost never played on TV. It still remains unissued on DVD, so it has taken me about thirty years to finally see the movie often used to illustrate the junk proliferating drive-ins after the end of horror’s 1930s/1940s golden age. Once again, You Tube is our knight in shining armor:

No one is going to argue that I Was a Teenage Werewolf is a work of monstery art on the level of Bride of Frankenstein or Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but as far as ‘50s drive-in junk goes, it’s top-drawer stuff. Tony is a sullen rebel-without-a-cause getting heavy slabs of jive from his high school peers, his perky blonde girlfriend Arlene (Yvonne Lime), and the fuzz (Barney Phillips, a ubiquitous presence in the ‘50s perhaps best known for playing an alien diner cook on “The Twilight Zone”). A possible cure to Tony’s teenagerness arrives in the form of geeky shrink Dr. Brandon (Whit Bissell, the Olivier of geeky-doctor roles), who employs a radical treatment of hypnotherapy and hypodermic drugs to stop Tony from obsessing about fighting and fucking. But it backfires, and in a nutso departure from the usual mythology, the treatment causes Tony to transform into a murderous teen wolf.

Hey kids, it ain't cool to drool.

Questioning the logic of this is kind of dumb considering how illogical werewolves are in the first place, so let’s just skip to the reasons why I Was a Teenage Werewolf is such a stand-out in its genre. Teenage culture is basically presented as cluelessly here as it is in any other picture of its era. Adults apparently thought their kids all spoke in a non-stop stream of hipster lingo and broke out into spontaneous song-and-dance routines to faux-Rock & Roll tunes way jazzier than the real stuff. But the movie does a good job of capturing the inarticulateness, frustration, and sexual confusion one experiences while slouching toward adulthood, which surely resonated with the teens who were the main audience for this kind of picture. Significantly, adults —not comics, not Rock & Roll— are portrayed as the culprits behind their kids’ waywardness, which probably also appealed to the movie’s young audience. Dr. Brandon is a brain-tinkering quack (read as: your science teacher’s a psycho). Barney Phillips’s Detective Donovan is a stupid flatfoot who paves the way for Tony’s werewolfism by hooking him up with the mad doc in the first place, and the janitor at the police station does a better job of solving the murders than the cops do (read as: the cops that hassle you and your friends are morons). Arlene’s parents spend their nights sitting on opposite ends of their living room (read as: your girlfriend’s parents have intimacy problems); her dad pounding beer and playing solitaire (read as: your girlfriend’s dad drinks while he masturbates). Tony’s dad is a milquetoast too busy obsessing about his late wife to notice his son’s antisocial behavior (read as: your dad’s a necro). The adults in I Was a Teenage Werewolf are uniformly unappealing— notice the cops’ callous self-concern during the grim denouement— while Landon’s wolf is rather sympathetic, even if he is a killer. He brings a disarmingly complex combo of unruly darkness and little-boy vulnerability to the hormonal lycanthrope. The music and daddy-o dialogue are a hoot, and the wolf make-up is memorably cheesy, but the film never dives into the camp deep end as other AIP flicks like The Screaming Skull and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die did. That means I Was a Teenage Werewolf may not be as much fun as these other pictures for some viewers, but I also cared more about Tony than I did about anyone in The Headless Ghost.

Mike gives I Was a Teenage Werewolf… four alien diner cooks!!

Next page: Jeffrey gets his hairy palms all over this teenage werewolf…

Black Christmas

Video World was tucked off into a topiary-barricaded alcove of the Stony Point Shopping Centre, a swift five-minute Schwinn sojourn from my front door.

No bigger than a boutique, this early-80's video store was infinitesimal in comparison to the cancerous sprawl of the Blockbuster Video chain that had begun to malignantly metastasize its way through America’s suburban strip malls, eventually putting all the mom-and-pop operations like Video World out of business. I was fortunate enough to push through my preadolescence before the big blue-and-yellow Blockbuster awnings started cropping up all across my hometown. Walking into Video World was like immersing myself in a Betamax Shangri-La. Every last inch of wall space, from floor-to-ceiling, was lined entirely in video cassettes. At 8 years old, I had officially found my home-away-from home. Each 4 by 7-and-a-half inch VHS cassette contained a different story, just waiting to be told – and I made it my mission to watch them all. Or as many as my allowance would allow.

Hidden at the rear of the store, buried behind comedy, family, drama (but before you reached the “private room” of adult films at the very, very back) – there remained a single row of videos off-limits to children. Little boys and girls were not allowed to rent the videos from back here at the shadowy edge of the forest.

The horror section.

A kid like me couldn’t help but feel a shift in the atmosphere upon entering the aisle, suddenly surrounded by so many R-rated movies. The carpet seemed to darken, stained somehow. Even the air had a miasma of decrepit breath to it, thicker than the air in the childrens section. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be here, which only made me want to explore even more – go deeper, take just another couple steps in, see if I could make my way past the A’s, past the B’s, even the C’s, until I was utterly immersed in the aisle, enveloped in images of terror from all around.

This – this was where fear resided.

Every kind of fear you could think of, or not think of, was right here – captured on magnetic tape and sealed inside its own cardboard box – little gift-wrapped packages presented in a tableau of carnage.

Deadly Spawn. Faces of Death. Def-Con 4. Xtro. The Stepfather. The Driller Killer. The Stuff. Texas Chainsaw Massacre II. I Spit On Your Grave. The Dead Pit. Black Roses. Headless Eyes. Magic. Black Christmas. He Knows You’re Alone. Class of Nuke 'Em High. Cellar Dweller. Mother's Day. The Prowler.

So go ahead, kid – I dare you. Slip a video off the shelf.

Pick any horror film and take the cassette into your hand. Rub your finger over the cardboard cover with its softened edges. Feel how fuzzy and worn the corners are?

Now look at the cover.

Video after video displayed a frozen moment of terror – either a snapshot of a victim caught in that instant just before the axe comes crashing down upon their cranium or of some hideous monstrosity still covered in the gory remains of its last meal. Too many to list – but I can still remember them all. The corpse of a college coed sitting upright in a rocking chair, a clear plastic bag wrapped around her head. A pair of eyeballs slithering away from the very sockets of their owner. The silhouette of a man wielding a butcher knife, only inches away from stabbing his stepdaughter and her defenseless dog.

Most of these movies have long since drifted off into a sea of beta-obscurity, lost forever in a back catalogue of forgettable movies. But somehow, their cover art remains indelibly rooted within my subconscious. Their Photoshopped tentacles have wrapped themselves around the deeper recesses of my brain and refuse to let go. The image of Freddy Krueger from the front cover of Nightmare on Elm Street II. The pool of melted human remains from the front cover of The Stuff.

Even to this day I can conjure up distinct images of grotesqueries from any number of video cassette covers, like photos displayed in a gallery. Your friendly neighborhood video store is presenting its own art show of terror. A monstrosity exhibition.

I was too young to actually watch any of these movies at the time – but I didn't need to. The cover artwork was enough. The shock of the image had a searing effect on my subconscious, imprinting its visual signature on my little boy's brain in far more damaging (and therefore effective) ways. The sleeve activated my imagination by exposing it to images of visceral horror more unnerving than the movies themselves.

This was the true horror here: Not the films and the stories they told, but the preadolescent-mind taking that snippet of information from the front cover (an act of violence, a look of terror, a monster) and letting a narrative develop from there.

For the curious 8 year old who gets lost in the woods of his local video store, entering into the horror section is like being a kid in an anti-candy store. Look – but don’t rent. All a child has are the covers. For an adult in the decision-making process of what-to-rent, the images on the video sleeve are a point of entry into these movies – while for the child, they are the movie.

The images alone are their total and finite experience with the film.

There is nothing else beyond that singular isolated picture.

Viewing these movies becomes completely moot for the underage viewer. It is, within these proposed rules of engagement, totally unnecessary to watch the actual film in order to receive its intended effect. On the contrary, most of the time it’s better not to watch them. The story told by the filmmakers is rendered null and void by the personal interplay between our brimming imagination and the video sleeve itself – taking the raw material of an image and fabricating our personal narrative around it, tailoring them to fit our individual fears. Our imaginations are completely unhampered by hammy acting and sloppy special effects. Budgetary constraints and a lack of talent are no longer an issue. We are absorbing the visual vocabulary of the video's cover art to conjure up a more personalized horror. It is ours, all ours. We created this nightmare. We are making up our own horror movies – and we are the stars now.

Which is all to say: Mission accomplished. As a devout horror fan, I want to lay claim to the idea that the impact of these movies didn't begin and end with the viewing of the movies themselves, but the very ritual of engaging with the tangible aspects of these VHS tapes. The act of entering into the video store and walking down the horror aisle was integral to this ceremony, if not vital – immersing myself in the visual stimulus of over a hundred different horrific images, navigating the aisle until zeroing in on that one video cassette cover and letting it tell its own story within my imagination.

FUTURE-KILL
Written and directed by Ronald W. Moore.

Future-Kill

Designing VHS covers for horror films is a lost art of inducing terror in children too young to watch the movies themselves. As effective salesmanship, these individual images were here to tempt the prospective renter into taking their movie home for the night. The need for an illustration so visually arresting that it convinced us to choose it over all others quickly became a game of graphic design one-upmanship, these sleeves presenting an image that presumably distilled the very essence of the movie onto the front cover – though, more often than not, the cover tended to be the best part of the movie.

Take H.R. Giger's poster for the 1985 film Future-Kill. Writer-director Ronald W. Moore allegedly begged Giger to design the poster art for this sci-fi/horror schlocker. Giger himself had absolutely no involvement in the actual production of the film whatsoever – but his slithery image found its way onto the movie’s cassette sleeve, luring naive renters into watching this fraternity brothers vs. mutant punks yarn. That black and white tendril of a finger stretches over the face of some alien-like mutant, more mechanical than organic, presenting the prospective renter with an unfulfilled vision of horror Future-Kill itself never quite ponies up to. The movie itself had little relation with what its cover promised, much to the dismay of those duped into dropping two bucks for a one-night rental. Future-Kill is often criticized for its cassette cover bait-and-switch – but it does testify to the power of a striking icon. The film itself dissipates from our memories, while Giger's cover design still lingers.

TROLL
Written by Ed Naha. Directed by John Carl Buechler.

The cover for 1986's Troll is one of the more deceptively simple boxes on the horror section shelf. The image on the front cover is a close-up of – yes, a troll, complete with deep-set eyes and pointed ears. Both of its gnarled hands are gripping a child's rubber ball laced in yellow, red, and blue rings. The creature seems to be holding the ball out towards the viewer as a gift.

The tagline, printed alongside the troll's forehead, reads – "Come closer."

The quotation marks are there to indicate that the troll itself is saying this, as if to beckon me to take the ball out from its hands. It's mine. I lost it, it rolled away from me, he found it and now he wants to give it back. But to do so, to take back my ball – first, I must take a strep forward. I must somehow reduce the distance between the two of us and render myself even more vulnerable to this strange little creature. By obeying the troll's invitation, I had to willfully disavow everything my parents taught me: Don't talk to strangers, don't take candy from strangers, don't listen to trolls.

Two individuals, the troll and myself, were now locked in some sort of struggle – his video box in my hands, my ball in his. A decision had to be made: Should I or shouldn't I obey the creature’s innocuous request? What would happen to me if I came just a little bit closer?

Watching the film itself years later was inevitably a letdown. Nothing within the movie even came close to matching that considerable level of dread conjured up by its VHS sleeve. Not a young Julia Louis-Dreyfus, not an elderly June Lockhart – not even a stoned Sonny Bono could strike that same cord of terror within me that I had first felt by merely holding onto the box in the video store, however many years ago, suddenly forced into a life-or-death game of tug-of-war with this runty-looking troll.

According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their weekly feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs.

Mike:

13 year olds don’t have the most discerning taste. After waddling home from Junior High, I vegetated in front of pretty much anything that happened to be on HBO. This means I watched movies like Howard the Duck, The Wraith, Jumping Jack Flash, Regarding Henry, and Troll more times than any human being ever needs to (i.e.: more times than never). Yet, as undeveloped as my tastes were, and as devotedly as I watched and re-watched and re-re-watched these movies, I could still recognize that they were, well, crappy. Really crappy. Take John Carl Buechler’s Troll (1986), which cashed in on the Gremlins craze that included other mini-monster movies like Munchies, Ghoulies, and Look Who’s Talking. Here was a movie about a girl named Wendy who is bitten by a little beastie, which then uses a magical ring to possess her and turn the family apartment into a woodland freak show of singing, havoc-raising trolls. Clearly, not a brilliant premise, but there was also the piss-poor troll puppets, a strangely disturbing sequence in which Wendy’s dad rocks out to Blue Cheer’s “Summertime Blues”, and the presence of Sonny Bono.

A recipe for putridity, for sure, but Troll somehow managed to spawn a couple of sequels. Well, maybe “spawn” is too strong a word. In fact, the first Troll sequel has zip to do with the original. Initially, Claudio Fragasso (aka: "Drago Floyd"!) called his film Goblin, but the title was changed to Troll 2 when released in the U.S. in 1990. To capitalize on the first Troll. Hmm. When your movie needs to be associated with a chicken fart like Troll, chances are it isn’t very good. According to its imdb rating, Troll 2 actually once ranked as “the worst movie of all time.” As such, it has naturally built up something of an ironic cult following and has even inspired a new documentary by Troll 2 star Michael Stephenson called Best Worst Movie. I regard myself as something of a cult movie connoisseur, and though I prefer a really good cult movie like Eraserhead to a “so bad it’s good” one like Plan 9 From Outer Space, I still have to give anything noteworthy enough to be considered “all-time worst” or inspire a documentary a whirl. So, obviously I’m not going to be examining Troll 2 from the same tack I would, say, The Seventh Seal. But a significant question requires answering: does Troll 2 deserve the dubious honor of best worst movie of all time?

Now, making a bad movie is no tough task. Get a bunch of non-actors, kick your budget down the elevator shaft, and ask a three-year old to write your script. There you go: instant bad movie. But anything so contrived isn’t really worthy of evaluation. Rather, a truly noteworthy bad movie is made by a filmmaker who did not set out to make a bad movie. This is why Ed Wood’s films are so charmingly watchable. He thought he was doing good work, or at least, he didn’t think he was doing bad work. As a result, there’s still a whiff of craftsmanship in his movies. Wood managed to score a well-known (if obviously past his prime) star like Bela Lugosi to act in several of his films. He went to the trouble of building actual sets and procuring professional props. And though Ed Wood’s films can be criticized on a multitude of levels, you can’t call them insincere. No one puts their most private secrets on screen, as Wood did in his fascinating transvestite-confessional Glen or Glenda, in the hope that audiences are going to laugh at them. Consequently, there is also an unfortunate element of schadenfreude in watching bad movies: the dull thrill of seeing a film-crew fall on its collective face. But let’s not think about that too much lest we allow our meanness to soil the joy of seeing a filmmaker pour his heart, soul, and dollars into something we enjoy because it’s hilariously shitty.

Troll 2 finds the brain-dead Waits family leaving suburbia for a vacation in the rusticated burg of Nilbog (which is “inept” spelled backwards). At their holiday farm, the Waits are basically grub for Nilbog’s dominant goblin community. The creatures scheme to gorge the Waits family on slimy green gruel before gorging themselves on the Waits family. Only little Joshua Waits (Stephenson) is aware of the grim fate facing his dumb parents (Margo Prey and dentist George Hardy) and dumber older sister, Holly (Connie McFarland). Joshua’s dead grandpa (Robert Ormsby) gives him the skinny about Nilbog and its nefarious nature. Along the way we meet a crazed cult of vegetarians (which sets the stage for some weird anti-veggie propaganda), a Winnebago full of teenage boneheads, and the nutso troll goddess, Creedence Leonore Gielgud (Deborah Reed).

Like its nominal predecessor, Troll 2 has a dumb plot, but it triumphantly trumps the first Troll for sheer incompetence in terms of special effects, make-up, dialogue, and acting. This may be the most dead-eyed cast in cinema history. The one grand exception is Deborah Reed, who overcompensates for her somnambulant cast-mates by gnawing the scenery and rolling her peepers like an escaped mental patient.

Deborah Reed: redefining acting since 1990.

So, Troll 2 sounds pretty bad, eh? One to miss? An unwatchable stinker? No, no, no, and no. Michael Stephenson's claim isn't far off the mark: if this isn't the best worst movie (Glen or Glenda and DePalma's Scarface are top contenders, too), it's certainly in the running. Why? Well, it is jam-loaded with scenes of such excruciating terribleness, such confounding stupidity, such quotable idiocy, that it never ceases to be utterly entertaining. These scenes include, but are not limited to:
• The Waits’s cacophonous round of “Row Row Row Your Boat” as they drive to Nilbog.
• Joshua pissing on his family’s dinner to prevent them from becoming food for the peckish goblins.

" I must do it!"

• The sad dance routine Holly performs in her Garfield nightshirt.
• The bonehead who finds himself trapped in a flowerpot, then giggles like a doofus while getting chainsawed to death.
• The insane caveman musical one of the other boneheads watches on TV.
• Creedence’s seduction of that same bonehead using some corn on the cob.
• The dementedly cheerful “la-la-laing” of the vegetarian cult.
• Joshua defeating the goblins by eating a seven-inch-thick boloney sandwich.

And even with its audacious awfulness, Troll 2 is still somewhat recognizable as a movie made with a degree of love and sincerity. The editing and framing are enjoyably inventive at times, and the excessive use of distorted lenses is fun. Ideally, it should be watched in a theater full of like-minded ironists, stoned out of their minds at midnight... although I watched it straight and alone in the afternoon and still had a blast.

Mike gives Troll 2… 12 inches of boloney!

Next up: Jeffrey pees on your dinner and saves your life!

According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their ongoing feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs. This week, they take a break from their usual shenanigans to help you win big money in your Oscar pools.

Jeffrey:

True fact: I have never missed an Oscar ceremony. Oh, I'm sure there were a few years before I came of thinking age that it wasn't high on my priority list, but as long as I've loved movies, the Academy Awards has been appointment viewing. I was watching when Sally Field said, "You like me, you really like me!" I was there when Rob Lowe performed his infamous duet with Snow White. (Well, not there, but you know what I mean.) I've sat through Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Martin, David Letterman, Chris Rock, lots and lots of Billy Crystal, and more horrendous musical numbers than I can count.

I was a little bit of a late bloomer; I didn't start to become cynical about what the Oscars represent until I was, oh, 32 or so. I mean, I recognize that in any given year, there are always great films that go completely unrecognized by the Academy. But of all the major entertainment awards, the Oscars are still the most consistent in recognizing works and performances of actual artistic merit. The Emmys are hit-or-miss, and any award show that gives prizes to Two and a Half Men is automatically disqualified from relevance. The Golden Globes are an also-ran. Winning a Grammy is practically an insult. And the Tonys? Please. As if Denis O' Hare in Take Me Out could even hold a candle to Thomas Jefferson Byrd in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. You might as well give a Tony to Tom Wopat!

Having said that, this year I am less interested in seeing who wins than I have ever been before. As everyone who knows anything about anything knows, this year there are 10 best picture nominees instead of 5. Why? I don't know. Every year there are at least two films that don't have a chance in hell; this year there are 8. My favorite of the nominees -- A Serious Man -- doesn't stand a chance. I quite liked Inglorious Bastards , Up in the Air, and An Education, but none of them are going to get it, either. The race to watch is between The Hurt Locker and Avatar. My views on Avatar are pretty well known to anyone who reads this website (no one reads this website), and I thought The Hurt Locker was well-made but ultimately unengaging.

But, it doesn't really matter what the actual better film was, because there is a difference between good and Oscar good. And for some reason, this doesn't bother me. The Oscar does not always (or ever) go to the best film of the year, but I think the Academy has a pretty damn good track record of recognizing the best films that are geared toward a mass audience. Was Crash a better film than Brokeback Mountain? Of course not. But was Crash a movie that might have a good chance of reaching a mass audience and possibly turning a percentage of that audience on to better films? I say it was. And that's what an Oscar is: it is an award that goes to the film that has the best chance of teaching the most people that movies can be more than just chase sequences and explosions.

With all that having been said, here are my picks for the winners this year. I've included all the categories just to be a completist, but please be aware that I have no clue on things like Best Animated Short ... for these categories, I've just taken Moviefone's predictions, mostly because it's the first thing that came up when I did a Google search for "Complete Oscar Predictions." I've starred the categories that I did not really pick myself - if you're going to a party, please feel free to ignore this advice. For the rest of the categories, I am, without question, 100% correct, even if Segretto contradicts me, which he most assuredly will, because he's a contradictory bastard. Also, please note that I am listing these awards in the order in which they're laid out on the Official Oscar Ballot ... I'm not certain if this is the order in which they'll actually be presented. Are we ready, then? Here we go!

Leading Actor
Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart. Didn't see it, but it seems to be Bridges' year. Jeremy Renner could be a dark horse ... if he wins, look for a Hurt Locker sweep.

Cinematography
Avatar. Avatar's going to sweep the visual awards. This one could go to the Hurt Locker, though, if voters decide to be traditionalists.

Foreign Language Film
The White Ribbon. The only nominee I've seen. It's boring. I love Michael Haneke, though, so I'm rooting for him. And if his films are any indication, he's a crazy bastard ... I can't wait to hear his speech. Expect to see at least one audience member stabbed in the eye with an icepick.

Sound Editing
Inglorious Basterds. No one makes better sounding films than Quentin Tarantino. No one.

Supporting Actor
Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Basterds. Have you seen this dude's performance? Fuck acting; he should've been nominated for Best Picture!

Costume Design
Coco before Chanel. I've never even heard of this movie, but it's clearly about fashion. Ergo, an award for Costume Design. The Young Victoria may win because Oscar voters looooove movies about queens, even though I saw it and it was a piece of garbage.

Makeup
Star Trek? Because there's monsters? Your guess is as good as mine.

Sound Mixing
Inglorious Basterds. See above.

Leading Actress
Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side. Carey Mulligan was amazing, and Meryl Streep single-handedly made Julie & Julia worth a rental, but Sandra Bullock played a Southern white woman who was really nice to a black kid. Clearly she had the biggest stretch.

Directing
Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker. My theory is that people in Hollywood think James Cameron is a giant prick, because he obviously is. A win for Kathryn makes a better story. Who doesn't love an underdog?

Original Score
Up. Could be Avatar. But Up had that amazing wordless sequence in which the score took center stage, so I say it noses out the Na'vi.

Visual Effects
Avatar. Also known as the "duh award" for "no shit."

Supporting Actress
Mo'Nique for Precious. Haven't seen it yet, but this is the acting lock of the night.

Documentary Feature
The Cove. It's about saving dolphins! And who doesn't love dolphins?

Original Song
"The Weary Kind" from Crazy Heart. The Princess and the Frog songs cancel each other out, and no one's ever heard the other two.

Visual Effects
Avatar. Also known as the "you deserve to be shot in the face if you don't get this one right" award.

Animated Feature
Up. This is the real best picture race in my opinion, because Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox were better than almost all of the Best Picture nominees, The Princess and the Frog was a worthy entry into the Disney canon, and I hear excellent things about The Secret of Kells. Still, if it's up for Best Picture, it's Up for Best Animated Feature. (See what I did there?)

Documentary Short
"The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant". I was going to go with Moviefone on this one, but then I saw the list of nominees. Anyone who doesn't vote for the anti-GM movie in this economic climate doesn't deserve to call hisself an American.

Animated Short Film *
"A Matter of Loaf and Death". Why not?

Original Screenplay
Inglorious Basterds. Not just a great script, it was great in 4 languages.

Art Direction
Avatar. No contest.

Film Editing
The Hurt Locker. I didn't love The Hurt Locker, but it was definitely a tense film, and much of that tension came from the editing.

Live Action Short Film *
"Kavi". If it can't be the Na'vi, it must be the Kavi.

Best Picture
The Hurt Locker. For my money, A Serious Man was the best film of the year and the Coen Brothers are the greatest living American filmmakers, but the Academy already gave them their "shut up and stop bothering us with your artistry" award for No Country (an exceptional movie in its own right). Ultimately, I believe the voters will pick serious war drama over action film. Also, sci-fi movies have a poor track record with the Oscars.

And that's it! As succinct as I can possibly be. What say you, Mr. Segretto?

Next page: Mike shows Jeffrey the life of the mind!

According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their weekly feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs.

Jeffrey Dinsmore is one of those people I’ve always expected big things from and from whom I’ve always expected big things. As a novelist, he has written one of the funniest books of the ‘00s, a metaphysical sci-fi detective story called Johnny Astronaut. Well, he claims he wrote it. The author credit on the cover reads “Rory Carmichael”, but I am told there is some question regarding whether or not this person actually exists. I personally choose to believe he doesn’t, if only because he has never been photographed alongside Jeffrey. I’m told that photos of Carmichael by himself are fairly scarce too.

As a biographer, Dinsmore co-wrote I, an Actress: The Autobiography of Karen Jamey, the memoirs of a movie star who has not aged well. I am told Karen Jamey, like Carmichael, may only exist in Jeffrey’s head. I saw a movie the other night and thought I saw Karen Jamey’s name in the credits, but a visit to imdb revealed that the last name of the actress is actually “Janney”. And her first name is actually “Allison”. The movie was American Beauty. Like Karen Jamey, it has not aged well either.

Jamey… Janney… Jamey… Janney

As a publisher, Dinsmore published the two aforementioned novels with a small press called Contemporary Press. This should not deter anyone from reading them. He has also put out a collection of short stories with his own Awkward Press, the site of which you are reading now. I am told there is another on the way, but as you may have already gleaned from the first three paragraphs of this article, I am told many things.

Dinsmore has also distinguished himself on stage as both a singer of songs and a one-manner of one-man shows. As a friend, he and I used to spend hours and hours watching movies together when we lived in New York. Sometimes I’d fall asleep during the boring ones only to discover him tenderly stroking my hair when I awoke. I’d then pretend I was still asleep because I didn’t want to make him self-conscious and I didn’t want him to stop.

With such credentials, I couldn’t help but anticipate Jeffrey Dinsmore’s first foray into the cinematic world with a fervor bordering on the mentally insane. When I heard he was to collaborate on his debut film with his officemate, Brendan Hughes, that fervor grew to mentally and physically insane proportions, partially because I knew virtually nothing about Mr. Hughes and partially because I didn’t.

Having finally seen Suite 208 does David Lynch, I must confess that my expectations of big things from Jeffrey Dinsmore have been completely fulfilled in some respects… and completely dashed in others. My love of David Lynch is a pretty open secret. I’ve had David Lynch film-marathons— complete with coffee, donuts, and cherry pie— in which I was the only person in attendance. Regardless of that fact, I can say with utter confidence that the lengthy introductory speeches I gave before each movie were informative, witty, and rippling with insight. Except for the one I gave before Dune. That one sucked. I have also written articles about David Lynch…

Yes, that is my name on the cover, thank you very much.

…I’ve painted portraits of David Lynch. I’ve given portraits of David Lynch I painted as wedding presents…

Jeffrey Dinsmore and wife Sarah Cole celebrate their nuptials in front of my painting of Mr. Lynch.

…I’ve mailed perfumed mash notes to David Lynch. So, when I heard that Dinsmore and Hughes’s film would be a tribute to my #1 idol, my anticipatory fervor became so intense that I started bleeding out of my tear ducts.

In a nutshell, Suite 208 does David Lynch is the story of an Unnamed Man (Brendan Hughes) who works in a rather indistinct office and keeps a small basketball in his mouth. Brimming with inquisitive fervor, he removes the basketball from his oral clutches, pivots in his office chair, and says, “Jeffrey, I have a question for you” as Lynchian white-noise bristles on the soundtrack. Jeffrey (Jeffrey Dinsmore) turns slowly toward the man and responds “Yes?” in an oddly unsettling, high-pitched voice, which brings to mind Freddie Jones’s similar turn as George Kovich in Lynch’s 1990 Palm d’Or-winning film Wild at Heart, which you can see in the deleted scene below (starting at 3:38):

We are next treated/subjected to extreme close-ups of the Unnamed Man and Jeffrey as they stare at each other. The aggressive punk song “Planet of Ass” by the band Scissorfight rises on the soundtrack, indicating that there is some unnamed aggression between the two characters and that the guys in Scissorfight have every album by The Misfits. Suddenly, the Unnamed Man and Jeffrey’s faces distort in a grotesque manner, recalling the scene in Lynch’s 2006 film Inland Empire where Laura Dern’s face does this:

Then the screen solarizes, and violent images of antler-locked bucks flash across it. I’m not sure which Lynch film this references, but it did remind me of the stock footage of a buffalo stampede superimposed over Bela Lugosi shouting “Pull the string!” in Ed Wood’s 1953 film Glen or Glenda:

With a jarring shudder, the antler fight ceases and the two characters announce in unison, “I’ve forgotten what it was.” Jeffrey (Jeffrey Dinsmore) then shakes his head “No” and the Unnamed Man places the basketball back into his mouth. Fade to black. Thus ends Suite 208 does David Lynch.

I must say that I was a bit puzzled by Suite 208 does David Lynch. While it is undoubtedly rife with haunting, haunted images of ennui and violence, I found the plot to be a bit “thin.” The multiple references to David Lynch’s decidedly Lynchian body of work were a joy to behold as I found myself playing a one-man game of “spot that reference,” but as a premise, it is not one that invites multiple viewings. This is a serious flaw in the work, as I think Suite 208 does David Lynch requires multiple viewings in order to unravel its dense layers of meaning. Sadly, I will not be viewing it again.

I must also say that after anticipating Jeffrey Dinsmore’s screen debut for so long, I was more than a little disappointed to discover a labored performance delivered with little of the charisma evident in his stage work and none of the tenderness evident in his hair-stroking work. Brendon Hughes, however, turns in a performance that can only be described as “star making.” If there is an award for acting, he will no doubt get it.

Despite my reservations about Suite 208 does David Lynch, we can consider Jeffrey Dinsmore “down” but hardly “out.” He remains an unsculpted heap of raw talent that I’m sure will one day sculpt himself into a cinematic superstar that may even rival the man to whom he pays tribute in Suite 208 does David Lynch: David Lynch. Until then, I recommend he keep at it, never give up, and apply himself.

Mike gives Suite 208 does David Lynch … 2 ½ Glenn Danzigs!

Next up, Jeffrey Dinsmore explains why he thinks Jeffrey Dinsmore is the next D.W. Griffith... and it ain’t just because he’s an incorrigible racist!

According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their weekly feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs.

Jeffrey:
The first two “adult” books I read when I was a kid were Judy Blume’s Wifey and Stephen King’s short-story collection Night Shift. I’m probably not the only child of the 70’s whose life was permanently changed in an icky way by Wifey. My parents should really have been locked up for keeping that book in the living room instead of hiding it away in their bedroom bookshelf with their Anaïs Nin books. Although I guess it wouldn’t have made much of a difference, since I read the Anaïs Nin books, too. Many, many times.

Night Shift didn’t make me feel icky in the same way that Wifey did, but it did introduce me to the thrill of being terrified. I would read my favorite stories over and over again, astounded that one writer could create so many goose-pimple-inducing scenarios. I’m sure much of it would come across as silly today—I haven’t read it since I was a kid—but at the time, Night Shift was as scary as scary could get.

Ohhh yeah, that's the stuff.

Anyway, down at the bottom of this pile of films dwells a little piece of garbage called The Lawnmower Man (yes, it is even beneath Maximum Overdrive). The original short story was a goofy and somewhat disturbing (for a seven-year-old, anyway) tale of a crazed landscaper who mows a guy down with his killer lawnmower.

Are we not men?

The film starts out promisingly enough with a monkey in a sweet futuristic helmet. Pierce Brosnan plays Larry Angelo, a brilliant computer programmer who’s training the chimpanzee to manipulate objects in a virtual reality program Larry created that is supposed to make people smarter. There are some sinister guys at Larry’s corporation who want to use the program to turn people into really smart soldiers, or something, but Larry’s pretty much just in it for the lulz. So when the monkey goes crazy and gets a gun and starts shooting people, Larry’s bosses ask him to take it easy for awhile.

Am I close enough to the camera?

Uhhhh ... Ohhhhhh ... Wooooowwwww ...

Caroline: You said you were going to take me to the city this weekend. But instead you just hooked up to that machine.
Larry: Why didn’t you remind me?
Caroline: I did.
Larry: This is the future. And you’re afraid of it.
Caroline: Well, it may be the future to you, Larry, but it’s the same old shit to me.

Would you like to see my smoke monster?

My tongue is sticking out. Clearly, I am retarded.

So eventually Jobe decides he’s Jesus, just like his namesake Job from the Bible, only nothing like Job from the Bible whose story was completely different from this. And, like Jesus, he needs to plug himself into the Internet and make everyone’s phones ring so he can enslave them when they answer. Or something, I was a little foggy on the details. Jobe kills a few people, I guess for revenge or whatever, and then he has an epic virtual battle with Larry at Larry’s spooky underground-cave government office while they’re both hooked up to giant gyroscopes. But just in the nick of time, Larry blows up the master computer that Jobe now lives in and escapes, saving the world from Jobe's crazed telemarketing schemes. Or so we think! At the risk of spoiling the ending, this is what happens at the ending: every phone in the world rings at once. Also, Soylent Green is people.

Suck it, James Cameron! Pandora's got nothing on Hexagon World!

The most surprising thing about The Lawnmower Man is that it actually seems to have followers. I always thought it was one of those movies that everyone could agree was a waste of time, but it has somehow developed a cult audience over the years. I can't fathom why. Most cult movies are either overlooked gems or so-bad-they’re-good yuk-fests. The Lawnmower Man is neither. It is a dull, futuristic remake of Charly with dated special effects, an unengaging story, and lackluster acting. The only real reason to see it is if you’re a Lost fan and want to watch Frank Lapidus go full-retard. Yet it is beloved-enough that there is a small army of followers on Netflix complaining that the DVD is not the “director’s cut.” Yeesh. To quote Emily Dickinson, "I think that I shall never see / a poem as sad as a person who gives a shit about The Lawnmower Man director's cut."

On the Awkward Scale of Pizzas, I give The Lawnmower Man: One pizza!

(Please note: I recognize that this image shows 2 pizzas, but I haven't created a 1 pizza graphic yet and I'm not about to spend the next five minutes creating one just for consistency's sake. Take your two pizzas and get the fuck out of here, Fahey.)

Next page: Segretto and his Lawnmower Man fan club buddies tell Jeffrey why his feeble mind cannot comprehend this film's genius!

Probably one of the principle arguments for Paramount dumping the virus road-trip horror film Carriers onto DVD just before Christmas was to capitalize on the newfound fame of leading man Chris Pine, the rejuvenated Captain Kirk of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot. Carriers had less impact in theatres than a common house cold upon its initial release. To be honest – there really wasn’t much of a release to speak of. The film didn’t even play in New York where I’d patiently been anticipating its arrival. Sadly, the film quickly sniffled into obscurity – until fate beamed up and cast Pine as Shatner’s heir to the command chair. It wasn’t until I myself was on a plane coming home from Dubai with fourteen hours to kill that I discovered the film on my roster of in-flight movies and decided to give it a shot. Not like there were many other horror movies to pick and choose from in economy class. This Abercombie & Fitch teen-ensemble shocker was it.

My argument to you for actually watching this film, however – isn’t going to be Pine.

It’s Christopher Meloni.

That’s right. You heard me. Christopher Meloni. As in – Law and Order: Special Victims Unit’s Christopher Meloni. Lantern-jawed, eggplant-foreheaded, switched-at-birth-with-that-other-character-actor-Elias-Koteas Christopher Meloni.

In fact, I’d like to go on record and argue that Christopher Meloni is one of our most underappreciated character actors around today, shackled to a quasi-memorable role in a ubiquitous prime time procedural. And I’m going to use Carriers as a shining example of yet another role in an ever-expanding roster of bit parts for Meloni that continues to testify to his surprisingly diverse range as The Best Thing about Most of the Movies Meloni’s Cast In.

My admiration for this man began with the surreal display of his (unbeknownst to me and most) comic chops as Gene, head cook at Camp Firewood in the cult fave Wet Hot American Summer. His off-the-wall performance seemed to be in direct opposition to the melodramatic broad-strokes of Law and Order, as if Meloni himself were subtly expressing his own frustrations with being pigeon-holed in a role that has carried him through two decades of prime time television. Compact that with the one-two punch of Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle and Harold and Kumar Escape Guantanamo Bay, where Meloni provides a pair of bit parts so completely bizarre, so utterly out-of-sorts with his weekly gig solving crimes of rapists raping rapists raped by rapists for NBC – suddenly it became clear to me that, below the imposing shadow of Detective Stabler, there lies an actor who clearly loves his comedy. Who can improv alongside the likes of The State’s David Wain and Michael Showalter and never flinch. Who can just about steal nearly every scene he hams it up in.

Such is the case with Carriers. But rather than add another bizarro-buffoon to his growing list of offbeat comic roles, Meloni goes off in an yet another completely different direction, offering up a restrained portrait of a father struggling to save his infected daughter at whatever cost from a virus that sadly leaves no survivors. Meloni’s performance is, by far, the best element of this otherwise interesting (if not ultimately flawed) horror film – and it is, by far, yet another reason why this man deserves our props as an unappreciated actor overshadowed by his most immediate and noticeable role.

Carriers itself is a chunky stew imbalanced by its niche ingredients. Blend certain disparate elements of the horror genre together, such as the attractive-teens-in-peril ensemble films of the ‘90s (Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend), alongside the trendy epidemic scare films of the ‘00s (28 Days Later, Quarantine), with a dash of post-apocalyptic survival horror (a la Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) thrown in for good measure – and suddenly you’ll slowly begin to gain a taste for the strange flavor combinations of Carriers. Pathos to pubescence is the name of the game here. Proving that even philosopher Joseph Campbell theories can look hot in a tank top, Carriers is a hero’s journey for the Greek system, a frat-style road trip movie where our hot undergrads encounter a cross-section of quirky (and infected) characters along the way.

One of the more surprising elements to Carriers is that the majority of horror has come and gone before the film (rather slyly) opens. What we are witnessing onscreen are the after-effects of an anonymous plague that has already wiped out the majority of mankind – all well before the opening credits. Infection spreads through the usual modes of bacterial-transport – saliva, blood. Breath. Those (un)lucky few left behind, like our four clean-cut college coeds (Pine, Lou Taylor Pucci, Emily VanCamp, and cutie-pie Piper Perabo), stay alive by distancing themselves from any or all survivors at whatever cost. Anyone is a potential “carrier” of this highly contagious bug, so better to avoid company at all costs. The ensuing loss of humanity amongst those pockets of survivors will be familiar to anyone who’s seen an epidemic/survival horror film from The Road Warrior on. Looting, lynching, and shooting-first are all common practices between fellow travelers nowadays. How our quartet of travelers has miraculously survived in the face of every-man-for-themselves marshal law, let alone near-extinction, is beyond the point. These kids are just about the hottest things this side of the apocalypse. Consider Carriers as the teenie-bopper antecedent to The Road, where the underlying question our hapless baby-faced travelers ask themselves, just as Viggo Mortenson did on his own walkabout through post-apocalyptic hell – Are we willing to lose our own humanity in the name of survival, dude?

One thing to admire about Carriers, oddly enough, is its own sense of restraint. What horror there is to witness in this film is through its survivors’ eyes. What violence finds its way onscreen is minimal at best. Innocently pinned with a PG-13 rating, this film prefers to display its terror in the passing tableaus of death, providing numerous drive-bys of ravaged neighborhoods – eerily reminiscent of those despoiled New Orleans quarters left behind in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Writer/director/brother-team Alex and David Pastor use our recent visual vocabulary of boarded up homes spray-painted with the tallies of dead left inside to find an immediate corollary to our present-tense sense of dread, successfully imbuing their movie with a level of unease that ultimately trumps the more immediate shock-tactics favored by most modern day horror films.

In fact, Carriers wisely chooses to strip away the familiar zombie-metaphor from its plaque-upon-humanity storyline in order to draw a clearer connection between the horror onscreen and our current horrors of the everyday. This plague doesn’t turn its victims into mindless rabid monsters. It simply kills them. And in a media driven culture that spouts the horrors of Ebola, SARS, swine flu, and the West Nile virus nearly every night on the six o’clock news, Carriers has something of a leg-up on its rivals in virus-based horror purely in its simplicity. Get the bug, get sick, get dead quick. Simple as that.

And yet – the one film Carriers most strangely apes is the bacteria-saturated 28 Days Later. Not on the zombie-end of the narrative-spectrum, mind you – but the final third of Danny Boyle’s film, where man’s-inhumanity-to-man overtakes the storyline and survivors are left to fend themselves off from none other than other survivors. Carriers chooses to isolate that section of Boyle’s superior film and extrapolate on its possibilities for a full 84 minutes, hoping to have 28 Days’ cake and devour it too… Sans the hordes. One scene could even be faulted for nearly replicating 28 Days’ rape-by-horny-military-men set-piece, the two films uncomfortably crossing cinematic paths for a brief moment.

But back to Christopher Meloni. Relegated to Carriers’ first third, Meloni’s subdued role offers a level of pathos uncommon for any film of the teen horror genre. Not that there’s much competition between him and his youthful cast-mates. Our gang finds Meloni’s character blocking the highway before them, the two groups suddenly stuck in a standstill. What we as the audience find is a father desperate for help, willing to do anything to save his infected daughter – an obvious fool’s errand, hopeless from the get-go, which only adds to the heartbreak of his self-imposed mission. The level of tragedy in Meloni’s final scene is almost unfair (and totally unexpected) for a film like this. I defy you not to feel for the man as he reaches the forgone conclusion of his character’s arc – one that arguably we could see coming, but feel affected by nonetheless. Or at least I did – which is much more than I can say about the rest of the cast. Carriers’ four nubile leads never achieve the sincerity accomplished by Meloni, regardless of whether or not they have the rest of the film to pout and whine over their need to survive. We as the audience not only mourn the loss of Meloni’s character, but the loss of Meloni from the film itself.

Ultimately, however – and here’s a little soap-boxing, so forgive me – the shortcomings of Carriers do not compare to the lack of faith Paramount had for its own film.

Hell, if you’re a studio head who just-so-happened to have some micro-budgeted horror flick collecting dust on the shelf that just-so-happened to share the same baby-faced star as one of the year’s biggest summer blockbusters – well, you’d be pleased to discover you finally had a chance at recouping some of your costs on said no-budget horror flick. Why even bother giving the film much of a release when you can simply sit on it and pray that one of its leads becomes famous in some other movie, quietly slipping it onto the video store shelf without as much as even a whimper of promotion?

It’s becoming increasingly aggravating how most major film studios have lost faith in their horror films. Originality is being sacrificed for repetition. Somewhere along the way between green-lighting a unique project and its release, executives tend to cut ties with their fledgling film (Carriers, A Perfect Getaway) by barely giving the film any distribution, only to watch it die on the vine before it even has the slightest chance of finding its own audience. They continue to play it safe by offering us up the same sequels year-after-year (the Saw franchise), recycling past horror classics (Friday the 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween) without even attempting to offer us up a new classic.

The true heartbreaker here isn’t that Carriers is a flawed film – but more that studios are choosing to dump such like-minded movies onto DVD, with barely a big screen release to speak of, while continuing to mass produce the run-of-the-mill remakes and sequels that bog down the genre and soften our expectations.

I’d take a flawed movie like Carriers that attempts to take risks and partially succeed than yet another rehash of Saw any day.