The Last Movie You Watched

[Angrboda]

I am Groot.

[Angrboda]

Seems Like Old Times.

[Angrboda]

Star Wars: A New Hope

[Gwaithmir]

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Tales from the Quadead Zone. It was made by Chester Novell Turner, who may well be one of the first black independent filmmakers to specialise in . This would probably be laudable if not for the fact that his two films are dogshit.

• JESUS GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT NOISE? Oh, it's just the logo. And the intro, which seems to be referencing Black Devil Doll From Hell in a bizarrely shrill voice. And the score is absolute dogshit. Also, why the fuck is Fat Albert rapping?
  
• I'm sorry, I can't hear you, your dishes are too loud.
  
• That's a mug, not a glass.
  
• Well, it's nice to know the soundtrack (that's actually the woman's dead/invisible son) has the same opinion of itself that I do.
  
• There was a point where I seriously wondered whether if this could be worse than A Certain Sacrifice. Fortunately, at least he knows how to create the illusion of an invisible person affecting their surroundings well enough. At least that's something.
  
• I think she's supposed to be telling a story, but everybody's talking over everybody else.
  
• So, I think the first tale of this quad involves a family of 8. They only have enough food for four of them, in the form of four sandwiches. And since they evidently can't afford to cut the damn things, they have this weird ritual where they re-enact the Ecstasy of the Gold scene from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, then they each try to grab one.  
  
  
  
• And, somehow, it's the fat one with no shirt who never gets the sandwiches, so he shoots three of his family members. And then, in the "Where are they now" epilogue,two more of them are killed a few days later, he gets sent to the "Gas Chair"  which I can only assume is supposed to be the electric chair or the gas chamber, and his parents are "Living high off the hog in witness protection."
  
• Yeah, it's a strange tale in that it's barely even much of a tale.
  
• And the second story in this quad is called "The Brothers." It involves a man who sneaks into the morgue where his brother's being prepared for his wake. I'm sure there's some reason he's doing this, but whenever the narration comes in, you can't hear a fucking thing over the music and whatever random ambient noise Turner's camcorder picked up. 
  
• Does Turner even know what a glass is? Does he even know that there's a difference between glass and creamic?
  
• So, why did he even go to the funeral home? What's the payoff? 
  
• So, he's just airing his grievances to his dead brother, who I think is being represented by a vaguely man-shaped object in a burlap sack. And if we saw the sort of shit happening instead of letting him just say it, we might actually care. Funny thing, I can remember a story by, of all people, Ben Shapiro, that somehow managed to do this better.
  
  
  How do you fuck this up so bad that Ben Fucking Shapiro is running circles around your storytelling ability?
• So, he was going to kill the brother himself? And his revenge after all this time is dressing him in a clown suit? 
  
• And he's suddenly alive? So, how did this get past everyone else? And how does he develop superpowers from this? And why does this give him some ring modulation voice that makes him even less intelligible than everyone else, which is really saying something? 
  
• And it's even irritating the narrator.
  
• Did they include several takes of the "Oh my God, here comes Darryl" line? 
  
• And, instead of a third tale to this Quad, we have Darryl abusing (read: some shit wrestling with) his wife for talking to ghosts and her killing him.
  
• I think that if I ever get around to updating the Deep Hurting Awards, this is a shoo-in for "Least believable spousal abuse in cinema".
  
• I think this was an obvious stage knife like the one from Harold and Maude, especially since the "stab wound" is clear and not even red.
  
  
  RIP Harold and Maude on Criterion.
• So, is there going to be a fourth story to this quad? 
  
• You know, I'd mock this movie for having the cops read the Miranda Rights from a card, but I've seen enough footage of police interrogations to know that a lot of times, the cops actually do that. But I can fault the cops for looking fuck-all like cops. Except maybe the one who might have been from a timeline where Ed Kemper actually joined the LAPD.
  
• Also, somehow, the cops decided to just let her go to the bathroom where she can slit her throat.
  
• And somehow-er, this takes up an ectremely long time for her to actially get to it. Maybe pad the runtime so we can see her playing with her dead son and I think stimming so we can get this to just over an hour.
  
• Also, I think the movie's doing a medley of the theme from Rosemary's Baby and "Da Da Da."
  
• You know, you'd think the cops would just bust down that bedroom door.
  
• Man, she must have been drinking a lot of tomato juice. 
  
• Why 21 hours later?
  
• And why does the son have a semi-visible form now? What the fuck rules did Turner put for this shit?
  
• Tales from the Quadead Zone will actually not return because Turner decided to retire and he apparently didn't even find that there was an audience to his movies for another 25 years.
  I'd like to be able to say Tales from the Quadead Zone crawled so Get Out could run, but we all know that there wasn't much historical continuity between Chester Novell Turner and Jordan Peale. Turner's works had a niche audience at best, and if it took Turner himself a fucking quarter century before even he discovered that there even was one. And next week, the Wheel of Pain has selected: Game Therapy, a movie so bad that the only reason it even got a DVD release in its native Italy was because some fans of an Italian YouTuber demanded it so he could review it.

[Gwaithmir]

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project, Game Therapy. It's a movie from Italy that managed to bomb so hard on its official release that it was denied a DVD release at first and only got one because fans of an Italian YouTuber named Mighty Pirate started a petition demanding they release it so he can review it. What's surprising is that someone took the time to give it an English dub so schmucks like me can look at it and not have to bother looking at subtitles.

• Well, that lip-sync is absolute shit. I can totally believe Italian T.J. Kincaid sounds like he has an old baritone voice.
  
• I make video games because I want to control the world?
  
• No dictatatorship of the masses. Just a dictatorship of a guy who looks like T.J. Kincaid.
  
• Johnny? I'm back from a long day of... I'm sorry, it's been over a decade since I saw Crystal Skull and I don't remember what Cate Blanchett did in that movie, only she looks a Hell of a lot like the mom in this movie.
  
• You haven't gone to work in two days and that's supposed to be a sign of a deep depression? Damn, Italian bosses must be slave drivers.
  
• ADHD isn't a disease, it's just a disorder according to the DSM.
  
• L-R is Real Life? I can only assume that this is just something lost in translation from the original Italian. Like literally all the emotion in these dub voices.
  
• She took her top off, went on the roof and swum in the pool? Man, I wish I was watching that movie.
  
• Oh, look, it's another movie about virtual reality that's so good playing it looks and feels like living real life. Lemme guess, he has to get inside the game to save his friend and beat the bad guy? It's not like this is a plot that's been done to death. 
  
• The game works in one dimension at a time?
  
• The game can not onlu BURN YOUR FUCKING SYNAPSES, but doesn't give you another fucking life?
  
• It's much better than the real world. The ancient world doesn't look like the Middle East.
  
• You can feel the dirt with the fingers you don't even have?
  
• Is it weird that these video game moves don't really look that impressive? 
  
• This kid really hates his friend. Introducing him to this video game world that's supposed to be this amazing and then giving him the catch that if he fails, he can never get back, and then thrusting him into a world where he has to stay alive in a sniper fight for two minutes when he can barely concentrate, not to mention giving him almost no time to prepare.
  
• Why are we talking about our parents' sex lives? Because there's not much to these characters and literally everything else would be more interesting. 
  
• "It's all about the bitches, it's all about the bitches." What a hugely successful rap song this must be. 
  
• Wait, isn't this supposed to be therapy? Why is he slagging off reality when he's supposed to be his de facto therapist?
  
• Why do you need the console? Because the plot says so. 
  
• You use superheroes so you don't feel? Someone's clearly never read All-Star Superman.
  
• At least you can control the game? Not all the time. Sometimes, the AI's smarter than you. 
  
• You want to focus on your own lifeshit?
  
• Your last opportunity to take the test? They limit you to a certain number of attempts to  pass that important test?
  
• Americans don't turn their back on you when you need help? I'm going to go out on a limb and say you don't know jack shit about the Republican Party. It's sort of like Berlusconi, except that when they say something patently absurd, you know they're dead serious.
  
• Whaddaya know, the story about therapy was bullshit after all.
  
• And so he ends up hooked to the game system for the rest of his life.
  
• The universe can surprise itself? I don't think that's what the uncertainty principle means, dude.
  

And next week in the Project, Tentacolino, the third (and, as far as I know, last animated film about the Titanic) and probably the most batshit.

[Angrboda]

Jungle Cruise.

[Gwaithmir]

[Rev. Rye]

I don't often talk about films that aren't part of the Deep Hurting Project in this thread, but the most recent movie I saw in full was Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, and the last scene had a huge effect on me. Maybe it's just because my grandma died less than a month ago.





For context, Akira Kurosawa's Dreams is a movie about, well, Akira Kurosawa's dreams. There's eight segments, and after two separate dreams dealing with nuclear holocaust, the movie ends with a scene where a man comes across a quaint village. How quaint? There's no electricity, and, indeed, no technology more advanced than a water mill. And, as a result, these villagers live in accordance with nature. And they live long lives. This parade? It's a funeral. Why does it seem so joyous? The old man explains "But a funeral is actually a joyous occasion. It's good to live well and work hard and then be congratulated on a job well done. We have no temple or priest, so all the villagers gather and carry the deceased to the cemetery on the hill." Admittedly, it's different on the off chance that a younger person dies, but that doesn't happen often. In this case, the dead person is a woman of 99 who died peacefully. The old man, on the other hand, is 103. "A pretty good age to leave the human race." And now I find myself wishing that when I went to the wake, I'd went up and talked about that scene, and put Grandma's passing at the age of 91 into perspective. Maybe if I remember this when Grandpa passes on, I will.

There's no subtitles on this video, but here's what the old man said (transcribed from a srt track of the subtitles on the Blu-Ray): "Listen, people go on about how hard life is, but that's just a lot of talk. Honestly, it's good to be alive. It's quite exciting." For the record, I checked five or six English subtitle tracks for the film, and not one translated the chanting during the funeral parade.