Freddy Got Fingered: Rare & Under Appreciated #7

It's a bit wrong to describe Freddy Got Fingered as under appreciated. Universally hated might be a more appropriate phrase. But it's a film that, if you're in the right mindset...if you can tune into director/actor Tom Green's twisted sense of humour...it's a minor comedy classic with no equals.

It centres around Gordy, a twenty something slacker with an innocent little brother, a doting Mom and a grumpy Dad who can't wait for his eldest son get a responsible job and leave home. But Gordy just wants to get a job making animated cartoons...

There's no way to put this other than to say Freddy Got Fingered is fucked up. Big time. And if you get the humour, which travels beyond 'bad taste', then there's serious laughing to be had. Sequences that contain masturbating a horse, chewing a newborn's umbilical cord, the cheese helmet scene, the backwards man, "daddy do you want some sausages", masturbating an elephant, and the bizarre animation Zebra's In America are so outrageously in your face you'll probably want to turn it off.

But if you find yourself grinning with shock, stunned by the lack of subtlety of Tom Green's and Rip Torn's unhinged performances, you might just enjoy a very unique and funny sitcom of a movie. Just don't recommend it at the next PTA meeting.

Never Go Ass To Mouth (The First Sequence)

Ho. Le. Crap.

There's not many films that fall into the category of 'disgusting'. The latter half of Cronenberg's The Fly? Yep. Meet The Feebles? Uh huh. Martyrs? Hell yeah. But I've never quite seen anything like The Human Centipede - First Sequence.

Take the usual horror movie set up; two ditsy American girls break down in the middle of nowhere and find an isolated house where they find a complete nutter. Oh, and they can't get a signal on their mobiles (no bar). What sets the nutter aside from the usual cannibalistic band of rednecks is the fact he's a mad scientist. A renowned surgeon who specialised in separating Siamese twins, he's now intent on reverse engineering the process using the hapless tourists digestive systems. Nice, huh?

Human Centipede is bizarre, making it both darkly funny and cover-your-eyes gross. It's quite tense too as we mostly see the action from one of the American girls. Will he ensnare her? Can she escape? Will the police locate her and her friend? How will she feed (er, let's not go there)?

Low on budget but big on balls this is a fantastic little gem of a body horror movie. It's a effectively engrossing (as well as gross) take on the mad scientist story. Cronenberg would be proud.

Whalberg Is A Peacock - Let Him Fly!

There are two ways to predict a Mark Whalberg performance. As a leading man, he will be shit. In an ensemble, he will be good. In The Other Guys, the latest comedy from Anchorman's Adam McKay...he is, as predicted just fine. He plays the straight man, opposite Will Ferrell (doing his slightly demented routine) in a light buddy cop flick.

It might as well be a spin off from Kevin Smith's Cop Out (Cop Out: NY?) as it's very similar in tone, pace and the amount of laughs you get in between the usual police procedural stuff. The leads are fine in classic buddy mode, hating each other at first before learning to get along. There's some nice supporting work from Michael Keaton, Eva Mendes as Ferrell's wife (in a cool running gag about the affect that the dorkish Elf star has on hot women) and Sam Jackson and Dwayne Johnson in short but memorable cameos.

Like Cop Out, its amusing but not funny, interesting but not gripping, and action packed but not exciting. It's a little long winded and not nearly as funny as it should be (this is clearly a case of the best bits appearing in the trailer) but it's an inoffensive couple of hours with some sniggersom moments scattered evenly throughout.

Dependably Expendable

What can I say. The Expendables is just what I expected. Indestructible blokes having fights and blowing shit up. Anyone disappointed by shallow plotting, credibility defying logic and one dimensional characterisation should only blame themselves for not embracing this nostalgic bullshit action movie. The story is simple. Stallone's Barney Ross and his team of (mostly) aging mercenaries take a job to topple an evil dictator on a small Gulf island. Easy. The simplistic script (essentially a Wild Bunch style western) adds a slight emotional arc for Sly, and co-star Jason Statham, and some quirks for the rest of the team but that's about it.

But frankly, that's all you need.

The Expendables has been touted as an ensemble but in reality it's more of a buddy movie. It works in layers. On the top tier you have Stallone and Statham, trading jibes and wrestling with girlfriend issues. On the next tier you have the love hate squabbling/scrapping of Lungren and Li...well matched as poor actors rather than in height. And on the bottom tier of the team Randy Couture and Terry Crews have one characteristic to define them and to separate them from random beefcakes. Not really an ensemble but a structure and dynamic that works well within the confines of the story. Eric Roberts and Steve Stone Cold Austin play slimy bad guy and henchman respectively while Micky Rourke gets the wordy emotional stuff in a couple of scenes as a retired Merc.

The infamous onscreen meeting of Arnie, Stallone and Willis is as under written as everything else in the movie and disappointingly brief. But it sure is bloody marvelous to behold. All three are playing to their strengths; Willis wisecracking and smirking, Stallone the understated underdog and Arnie awkward, lumbering and charismatic. It's such a shame it only last a few minutes.

With so little meat on it's bones The Expendables has to rely on the quality of it's action to support itself. And in this respect it doesn't disappoint. After an initial scuffle at the film's beginning there are three major set pieces spread throughout the runtime. The first, an extended hand to hand fight, car chase and aircraft sequence is the best of the bunch, being beautifully staged, paced and executed. The second, a city bound car chase followed by a frantic one-on-one is great too (although the editing is bordering on, but not succumbing to, epilepsy). And then finally you have the Rambo/Commando assault on the enemy's headquarters, with all the massive explosions, rescues, and face offs that you'd expect from that scenario.

It's not the smartest thing you'll see this year nor the slickest action movie either (The Losers is wittier and The A-Team is far bigger in scale) but it is the bone crunchingly exciting action movie that I always hoped it would be. Great banter, delivered by enduringly cool action stars...all while beating the living crap out of each other. War...it's fantastic.

MacGruber Does An Upper Decker In Your Mind

What in the name of John Belushi's Spinning Corpse made some one think that adapting the Saturday Night Live sketch, MacGruber, into a full length feature was a good idea? If you're not familiar with the concept, it's basically a spoof of long running 80's actionfest MacGuyver...a show that was so dumb it really didn't need anyone taking the piss out of it in the first place.

Will Forte stars as the title character, a Frank Drebin/Inspector Clouseau wannabe, who bumbles incompetently through his mission of nation importance, and succeeds, despite his over-confidence. So far so bad. But it's worse than that as pretty much nothing works. The director can't judge comic timing in the slightest meaning this so called comedy is virtually laugh free. Still, to be fair, he is working with a script that has very little amusing in it and a cast that's mainly playing it straight (Val Kilmer, Powers Booth and Ryan Phillippe)...or in Forte's case, playing comedy very very badly. Too much time has been spent making this low budget movie look like a gritty action movie rather than composing the shots and editing the scenes so they'll be funny. MacGruber is nice to look at but abysmal as a work of humour.

Kristen Wigg is the only performer in the piece that understands comic delivery and there's only a couple of gags in the entire film that raise a chuckle. Number one is the fact the baddie Val Kilmer is called Cunth (that joke will never get old) and the description of what MacGruber calls an upper decker (shitting in the cistern rather than the bowl). Otherwise it's 80's themed gags and MacGuyver references fall completely flat. Avoid.

All Hope Has Been Eclipsed

After surviving the near insufferable boredom that is Twilight and New Moon, I was ready to call it a day on the popular teen vampire/werewolf franchise. But then hope appeared in the form of 30 Days Of Night director David Slade and the fact that many reviewers had been kinder to the latest installment. And while the new movie, Eclipse, is better than the previous two movies...I can confidently say that The Twilight Saga irredeemably sucks.

I thought that with all the dull character relationship stuff and backstory exposed in the last movies that would free up Eclipse to explore new ground in terms of the characters, story and mythology. But no. The best that can be said is that all the characters have evolved into something more mature and responsible. Their relationships are exactly the same but they've learnt to talk about their feelings rather than mope about and sulk. This is most noticeable in Kristen Stewart's Bella, a character in New Moon I could have quite easily throttled, if I had the ability to reach through the screen and grab her selfish, whimpering throat. Thankfully Bella's grown up and treated all around her with more respect...meaning I no longer hate her (a major step up for a movie's central character).

Storywise nothing much has changed either. Victoria still wants revenge on Bella and still runs about the woods a lot. The only new elements are the introduction of Newborn vampires and the fact that the local werewolves and vampire reluctantly team up to protect Bella. Oh and we get to see some flashbacks of the Cullen clan, a story device that was used to infinitely better effect in Buffy and Angel. What this adds up to is a plot that is far more diverse and faster paced than the rest of the franchise, but one that is still sleep inducing predictable enough to have you reaching for the crossword instead.

The big name actors (Bryce Dallas Howard as Victoria and Dakota Fanning as one of the ruling vampire clan) are utterly wasted with minimal dialogue and limited screen time. The action is effective but extremely brief, however the CGI effects haven't improved since New Moon, with the werewolves being completely obvious in their fakery. And Taylor Lautner is still shockingly wooden.

Slade does a decent job, but then that can be said of his fellow directors in the franchise. He's saddled with an uninteresting script and inherited the bland photography and locations of the franchise. But he's managed to get the strongest performances out of the central cast to date and has injected some viciousness into the action (there's at least two decapitations that I can recall).

So, overall, it is a step up in terms of quality. But that's like saying you've climbed over a boulder in an attempt to scale the mountain.

A Terminator Walks In To A Gay Bar, The Barman Says...

Terminator 3 - Rise Of The Machines is far better than it had any right to be. It perhaps shouldn't have got made. It's practically a retread of the other two movies, making it a pure case of sequelitus; an assassination robot is sent back in time to kill John Connor (and his subordinates) who is protected by another, less sophisticated Terminator robot. Cue car chases, fights and lots of running away.
Despite my sarcasm it's a great premise and it plays very well as a non stop chase movie.

Making the aggressive Terminator a female (the feline Kristanna Loken) is a cool move although the android's new arsenal isn't as awe inspiring as Robert Patrick's shape shifter in T2. It's great to see Arnie back in his most iconic role although he's not as well directed here (being a bit stiff and awkward...and not in that cool, robotic sence) than in the first two movies. Claire Danes steps up to the challenge, in what is effectively the Linda Hamilton role from T1, being both feisty, resiliant and vulnerable.

Apart from it's over-familiar plotting, it falls down in two areas. The first is one of tone. No longer allowed an R rating in the US of A due to it's gigantic budget, T3 is noticeably lighter and sillier in tone throughout. (A gay bar? I mean, really?)Then there's the recasting of John Conner. Since Edward Furlong was now a happy, smackhead, Z-list actor, the producer cast the usually dependable Nick Stahl as the future leader of the resistance. Stahl completely gets his performance wrong. Instead of a highly trained, heroic, commander of men we get a weedy, whiny wreck of a man. Admittedly the character goes on a learning process throughout the film but he's still a quivering mess by the film's climax.

Talking of which, if T3 has one triumphant moment it's the decision to let Judgement Day happen and nuke the planet. It's bold, it's surprising and it's spine tinglingly brave in such a huge budgeted blockbuster where the heroes are meant to save the day.
It's also aided by some cool effects from ILM and some entertaining (if a little silly) action sequences. T3 might be daft but you can't help but be impressed when the film makers build an entire city street and then destroy it by driving a massive crane through it. Like Arnie, it might be a bit dumb and lumbering, but it's always entertaining to watch.