The Last Movie You Watched

[Gawdzilla Sama]

"Heavy Metal" - 1981 animated

Did you like "Heavy Metal 2000"?

[Rev. Rye]

So, before I watch Show Dogs for this week's entry in the Deep Hurting Project, I should point out that yesterday, I watched Midsommar. It's a great horror film, one that's managed to effect me in ways that very few horror films often do (the moaning [whose symbolism could easily fill pages] probably had something to do with that), the one thing that disturbed me the most about it was the ending:





Specifically, the fact that an alarming number of viewers actually see this, a scene where Christian, who is admittedly a psychologically abusive boyfriend, is paralysed, and not only burned to death, but given that the screenplay confirms that the bear suit (Bear meat is notoriously greasy, by the way) he's stuffed into still had blood and guts inside, is DEEP FRYING WHILE STILL ALIVE, by a pagan cult (implied to be white supremacist by the director) that had raped him beforehand, is somehow a happy ending. Yes, a lot of people can see all that shit and think “YAS QUEEN! YOU GO GIRL! LET THAT JERK DEEP FRY WHILE HE’S STILL ALIVE!”

Is this a sign that there's something fundamentally wrong with humanity or just our culture?

[For the record, I watched The Chaplin Revue as a palate cleanser last night after watching this, but before I watch Show Dogs, because in this case, the only bothersome thing is that some idiot failed to future-proof the disks and the entire Chaplin Collection is designed to zoom in on widescreen TVs in such a way that it becomes impossible to actually watch them in their original aspect ratio, no matter how you fiddle with the display on your TV.]

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Show Dogs. Funny thing about this is, the thing that truly pushed the movie into the "So Bad It's Horrible" category (besides looking like a shitty Direct-to-DVD movie that somehow got a cinema release) was removed from the movie after the first week or so in theaters. Fortunately, this YouTube video has preserved them in admittedly less-than-stellar quality.



Somehow, there have to have been hundreds of people involved in making this scene, and until a Mommy Vlogger raised concerns about this little character arc, not one seemed concerned that maybe having an arc where the protagonist of this kid's movie learns to lie back and think of Will Arnett re-enacting Dirty Dancing while a strange man fondles his bollocks so he can be rewarded for it is a bad idea, especially when, during post-production, Harvey Weinstein was outed as a rapist of Biblical proportions, and this (and the massive number of celebrities who got #MeTooed in its wake) led to a massive reckoning within Hollywood and its attitudes towards sexual assault. It's enough that maybe you would have been better off sending your kids to watch Deadpool 2. To be fair, it was removed from the US versions after about a week in theaters (apparently, the UK release STILL HAS THE SCENES), and the film's head writer apparently disavowed it (not helped by the fact that his original script was re-written by a baker's dozen other writers.)

• The first lines from the movie are delivered by pigeons who are A) somehow close enough to the main dog Max, a doberman voiced by Ludacris, that they act like a Greek chorus that narrates this police operation), B) are clearly shitty CGI, and C) Won't shut the fuck up. Good signs, I guess.
  
• Well, at least the panda smuggled by the baddies is called Ling Li, and not full-on Ling Ling.
  
  
  On a lighter note, at least it looks like the Drawn Together movie was not bad enough for the Deep Hurting Project, since it was removed from TVTropes' So Bad It's Horrible/Animated Film list.
• So, why is Max acting like a normal police officer and not just help like in real life? Why does he have no handler? And why doesn't he at least have the courtesy to let the Feds do their jobs when they do it?
  
• Goddammit, I think subscribing to Jim Can't Swim has ruined my ability to enjoy police interrogations in movies. And why the fuck are G.O.B., Bojack Horseman, and Lego Batman in this movie?
  
• Nobody's been making Talking Dog movies for a while... maybe it's because we figured out they were crap and this attempt at trying to revive it's hampered by, among other things, having the talking effects look just a shade above Clutch Cargo levels.
  
• And the film is aware of how absurd the whole "huge dog show being used as a front for rare animal smuggling" plot is.
  
• "With those jokes, you will not make any friends." And they're aware of how shitty their reliance on pop culture references makes them look.
  
• Also, it's weird that several of these show dogs are talking about neutering, especially considering that the whole reason dog show judges inspect these dogs' private parts in the first place is to make sure that their gonads are intact, and that, therefore, getting spayed or neutered (while likely a good idea otherwise) is career suicide for a show dog.
  
• Also, there's a scene where Will Arnett's getting an offer to breed Max (Ludacris' dog character) with a Mexican Hairless Dog who's not only voiced by RuPaul, but made up in such a way that it's virtually impossible to not conclude that it's the canine equivalent of a drag queen. Dafuq?
  
• Dafuq? Why are the pigeons in Las Vegas now? And how did they fly 2000 miles in one day? 
  
• And now we have yet another example of the "winning a competition by not giving a shit about the rules" trope.
  
• So, they took out all the stuff surrounding the judge's inspecting Max' genitalia, so the cheering that happened after the judge's inspection seems kind of out of place. 
  
• LOL GEDDIT! THA TIGER MENSHUNS DA LIF O PI BECUZ THE TIGR IS INDN N DA LIF UV PE IS SOMETHIN DAT EXITS! GEDDIT? I BET U DONT U FUCKERS! Seriously, that's the level of comedy the movie's given us.
  

[Silver]

Specifically, the fact that an alarming number of viewers actually see this, a scene where Christian, who is admittedly a psychologically abusive boyfriend, is paralysed, and not only burned to death, but given that the screenplay confirms that the bear suit (Bear meat is notoriously greasy, by the way) he's stuffed into still had blood and guts inside, is DEEP FRYING WHILE STILL ALIVE, by a pagan cult (implied to be white supremacist by the director) that had raped him beforehand, is somehow a happy ending. Yes, a lot of people can see all that shit and think “YAS QUEEN! YOU GO GIRL! LET THAT JERK DEEP FRY WHILE HE’S STILL ALIVE!”

I, for one, did not enjoy the ending. I thought it would have been more realistic that she have chosen the Hargan to be stuffed into the bear suit instead of the boyfriend. At least it was a better watch than Hereditary, which was just plain stupid through and through.

[Rev. Rye]

Specifically, the fact that an alarming number of viewers actually see this, a scene where Christian, who is admittedly a psychologically abusive boyfriend, is paralysed, and not only burned to death, but given that the screenplay confirms that the bear suit (Bear meat is notoriously greasy, by the way) he's stuffed into still had blood and guts inside, is DEEP FRYING WHILE STILL ALIVE, by a pagan cult (implied to be white supremacist by the director) that had raped him beforehand, is somehow a happy ending. Yes, a lot of people can see all that shit and think “YAS QUEEN! YOU GO GIRL! LET THAT JERK DEEP FRY WHILE HE’S STILL ALIVE!”

I, for one, did not enjoy the ending. I thought it would have been more realistic that she have chosen the Hargan to be stuffed into the bear suit instead of the boyfriend. At least it was a better watch than Hereditary, which was just plain stupid through and through.

I do think it's a good ending, at least if you look at it from a perspective of "cautionary tale of how this vulnerable woman became corrupted by a terrifyingly dangerous cult." Just not a happy one.

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Space Chimps 2: Zartog Strikes Back. Well, I watched the first one in preparation for this review (a number of times, actually, but mostly because the movie was just that forgettable.) And it's this sequel that landed its place in the Project, not the original. So, let's have a go at it:

• Why does everything look worse than the original? Did they just expect that 3D would be a good substitute for visuals that were actually passable?
  
• So, it looks like three of the cast members have been replaced, including Andy Samberg (who plays the first film's protagonist Ham III; replaced by an obvious Tom Kenney), Jeff Daniels (who somehow voiced the titular bully/conqueror Zartog and replaced him with John DiMaggio), and Kristin Chenoweth (who played Boobfart alien Kilowatt, replaced by Laura Bailey.) So, on the one hand, it's nice to see a sequel that actually reunites most of the cast, what with all the sequels I've covered that might have a producer or two in common with the original, on the other hand, even the actors who were in the original sound so off that I still had to check and see if they were in the original.
  
• BananaBerry? So, like, an apple as percieved by an African Grey Parrot? 
  
• Why is the interstellar rocket so goddam easy to set off?
  
• So, what does Zartog expect to actually do? If I remember the first film, literally everything in the original that he could use to hold onto power is on his old planet.
  
• And, of course they meddle in the "is Pluto a planet" controversy. Of course.
  
• Wait, I know the chimps managed to make a one-way rocket come back to Earth, but how do they expect them to terraform an entire planet?
  
• Crap, Zartog's subplot is barely going to actually be a plot. It's just him trying and repeatedly failing to actually do anything after the rocket launch frees him from his metallic prison (except that he was the nose cone of the reconstructed rocket in the first movie, so, how does his being further away break his metallic mold?
  
• Oh, look, a porno reference in this kid's movie.
  
• So, why does the planet look like the old wallpaper from Windows XP now?
  
• Well, Titan seems very non-chalant about the whole "Zartog coming back to life" thing.
  
• These scientists seems very nonchalant about the possibility that their work might be used for crimes against humanity.
  
• Well, this may be the worst dance scene I've seen in a movie:
  
  
  
• Didn't Zartog almost kill you a movie ago, Titan? Why aren't you taking this possible threat to the universe seriously?
  
• Oh, I'm being departiclized and my DNA's being transmogrified. Even the characters in Death Bed weren't this bored by the threat.
  
  
  
• Is it weird that I actually want to watch G-Force now?
  
• So, Ham magicks the departiclizer into his hands, and then magicks it into Zartog's hand?
  
  
  
• And, something that carries on from the original film: why is a flatbed truck the best place to land a spaceship?
  
• If only we didn't have a three-video-per-post limit, that way, I could play "Lascia Ch'io Pianga."
  
• And why can the departiclizer reparticle all the people who were departicleized, except for Zartog? And why does it change up their voices?
  
• Wait, did Kilowatt actually do anything except make loud noises during the trip?
  

Well, in conclusion, both movies were crap, but at least the original one had a fucking plot. And it didn't send the studio that made it into dormancy for five years.

So, I expect that this is going to be the last movie I check out of the library for the Project (at least until the first and third films in the Atlas Shrugged trilogy return to the library and/or The Littlest Light on the Christmas Tree comes out of storage with the rest of the Christmas movies), and, while I said I planned to go into the wells of Amazon Prime's library, since it turns out I can actually use their streaming service now, Netflix just dropped a strange piece of shit called Pets United that's basically (The Secret Life of Pets meets Robots with a plot outline based on an obscure novel my Erich Kästner that the director made into a movie a decade ago). And hopefully, the week after, I'll be taking on Steven Segal's Attack Force on Amazon Prime.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Finally got round to Knives Out.  Terrific from start to finish, an old-fashioned whodunit in the grand style. Benoit Blanc is easily the most interesting original film character I’ve seen in years. 9/10.

Boru

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Finally got round to Knives Out.  Terrific from start to finish, an old-fashioned whodunit in the grand style. Benoit Blanc is easily the most interesting original film character I’ve seen in years. 9/10.

Boru

We saw it in the theater. All through the movie Boss Lady was muttering "It can't be him, too obvious."

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Finally got round to Knives Out.  Terrific from start to finish, an old-fashioned whodunit in the grand style. Benoit Blanc is easily the most interesting original film character I’ve seen in years. 9/10.

Boru

We saw it in the theater. All through the movie Boss Lady was muttering "It can't be him, too obvious."  

Assuming that Chris Evans is always going to be the bad guy in ANY film he’s in is my default position. I suspect he was secretly working with Thanos all along.

Boru

[Gawdzilla Sama]

We saw it in the theater. All through the movie Boss Lady was muttering "It can't be him, too obvious."  

Assuming that Chris Evans is always going to be the bad guy in ANY film he’s in is my default position. I suspect he was secretly working with Thanos all along.

Boru

You realize that's America's Ass you're talking about, right?