Saturday

Tuna
"After the Storm"

After the Storm (2001) is a made for TV crime adventure inspired by a Hemingway short story. It is a standard plot line, with a good guy vs. an evil guy each trying to salvage the wreckage of a luxury yacht. As is usual, they each have girlfriends, one good, the other evil and scheming. Naturally, they end up having to work together in an uneasy alliance to stay a step ahead of the really evil guys. That being said. it is beautifully filmed and well acted, and has plenty of double crosses, and a superb ending. It won best feature film at both of the festivals where it was shown.

Mili Avital as the good girl shows breasts behind a flimsy curtain in difficult light. Other leads included Benjamin Bratt, Armand Assante and Simone-Elise Girard. While the film was a little show as it established characters, and introduced some minor players that were unnecessary to the plot, it had great pace once it got started. This is a C+ as a very good genre effort.

  • Thumbnails

  • Mili Avital (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

  • Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)

    Updates:

    • There are about 200 new pics added to the existing volumes in the A, B,  and C sections of the encyclopedia.

    • Note: Charlie is swamped in real life and did not add any new pictures this week.

     

    Perdita Durango (1997):

    One time I was walking through a somewhat disreputable part of Amsterdam with my girlfriend and her ten year old daughter.  No, I wasn't corrupting children. It was in the middle of the day, and the area was filled with families. Avoiding the sex trade in Amsterdam is not as easy as you might think. The X-rated stuff is integrated into the warp and woof of the city.

    At any rate, the clubs have sex shows around the clock, and they post barkers outside to hawk the shows to passers-by. One particularly aggressive guy said to me, "C'mon in buddy. Hot action. We have real fucking, not fake fucking like those other clubs." I indicated wordlessly that Linda's child was with us, and the guy said, without skipping a beat, "Hey, pal, people of all ages like REAL fucking. It's fun for the whole family."

    Well, if you find the family that he had in mind, this is their family movie!

    Even if you're a major movie buff, you've probably never heard of Barry Gifford, although he has indirectly contributed quite a bit to the movies of the 90s. David Lynch has made two of his books into the films Lost Highway and Wild at Heart. He wrote some noir novels about the sleazy underbelly of border life: "Wild at Heart", "Baby Cat-Face", and "59 Degrees and Raining". The books all include the same basic cast of characters, so any movie about those characters (including Perdita Durango herself) is most likely based on all three books in one way or another. David Lynch stuck closest to "Wild at Heart" in his eponymous 1990 film, while the Perdita Durango movie is closest to "59 Degrees and Raining". Perdita Durango may share some characters and a pedigree with Wild at Heart, but it is not stylish surrealism like a Lynch movie. Nor is it smart tongue-in-cheek satire like Pulp Fiction, nor a creatively sociopathic romp like A Clockwork Orange. Instead, it is a farcical, over-the-top gore-fest in the modern Grand Guignol tradition. The most similar movie I can name is Natural Born Killers.

    Rosie Perez plays Perdita Durango in this film (Isabella Rossellini played the part in Wild at Heart), as a cynical hooker who finally meets her love match in the form of a voodoo priest, bank robber and grave robber all rolled into one, a guy who does a hokey Santeria act where he hacks up dead bodies and finishes by ripping out the body's heart. Most women are scared of him, as well they might be, but not ol' Perdita. She knows he's a con man, and suggests that his act is way too tame, and that the only way to make it more authentic and pep it up a bit is to kill live human sacrifices.

    They propose to do this to an incredibly "white bread" chick played by Rollergirl's sister, first by ripping out her heart while she's still alive (ala the Aztecs), then eating her. Perdita gets a trifle hacked off, however, when voodoo-boy decides to start eating Rollergirl's sister while she's still alive and naked, if you catch my drift.

    After a substantial amount of rape and other physical and mental abuse, Rollergirl's sister and her boyfriend,  are finally ready for the human sacrifice and cannibalism, so they are stripped naked and covered with feathers. Only one of them needs to die, so they have a vote to see which one. The Wonder Bread twins get really ticked off at each other because each voted for the other to be killed. Finally, Graham gets chosen in the tiebreaker, and is about to get her heart cut out when some other bad guys show up at the voodoo ceremony with machine guns and start blasting away.

    Perdita and Voodoo-boy and our teens manage to escape, only to get into another bloody shoot-out with some DEA guys hewaded up by Tony Soprano. No problem. After they escape again, they get to drive a hijacked truck of human fetuses to Vegas, where the fetuses will be essential in testing some new cosmetics. More bad guys double cross each other, more blood spills, and  ... well, I'm sure you know that the various bad guys and Feds all have to figure it out somehow, using the Socratic method, and especially automatic weapons. 

    It's basically an attempt to out-Tarantino the master, but gets strangely trapped between very broad satire and straight-out gore for the sake of gore. It gets funny, then it gets sentimental. Some scenes are icily serious, as if no farce had preceded them. The movie ends, for example, with Rosie in tears, walking down a Vegas street with the sad music signaling the movie's end.

    Overall, the whole show is an anarchistic adolescent jerk-off fantasy movie designed for the young male market. The film is sometimes racist, and generally glorifies rape and violence. I guess this was meant as satire.

    Fun for the whole family.

    RIP-OFF WARNING.  AVOID the Region 1 DVD.

    As seen below, there was quite a bit of flesh in the uncut version, but the so-called "unrated" Region 1 version called Dance With The Devil has been censored for tiny bits of bare flesh, even though the film is disgustingly and gratuitously violent, and is unrated! The cuts have nothing to do with the different aspect ratio. In the censored scenes, the action as been snipped prior to the the part with exposed flesh. So why is it cut if it's unrated?

    If you want to obtain an uncut DVD, there is a fully licensed copy available in Australia with the following features

    • Region 4 encoding
    • full screen 4:3 aspect ratio (full 35 mm frame, not a pan 'n scan)
    • no significant extra features

    The DVD info can be found here. The distributor's home page can be found here. If you are thinking of buying DVDs from outside your region, read this first.

    Nudity:

    • Rosie Perez somehow manages to appear in this sleazebag shock and gore fest without ever baring her breasts in the "unrated" Region 1 version. These caps are from the Region 4 version. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
    • Aimee Graham shows her breasts in two scenes, one having sex with her boyfriend, and the other being raped by Bardem. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
    • Jessie Faller is a bank clerk with no lines, but she gets to show some big firm breasts.
    • There is also an incredibly ugly fat woman who shows her breasts and buns (1, 2)

     

     

    Tattoo (1981):

    Tattoo is the classic Bruce Dern film, in which Dern gets the ideal opportunity to do his obsessive, wound-too-tight 70s kind of Bruce Dern psycho thing.

    The Bruceman plays a lonely, reclusive, humorless man whose only distinguishing characteristic is that he is a magnificent artist in his own field - body tattoos. He became obsessed with the art of full body tattooing when he was stationed with the military in Asia, learned as much as he could, and then took his obsession to the next two steps, first by covering his own body with tats, then by learning to do it to other people. Around the urban Jersey slums, he is known as the top creator of the ornate and colorful skin patterns of the Orient.

    As you can guess, such a refined talent doesn't actually have much value in North Jersey, where the regular guys just want a basic anchor and the word "mom". The average joes in his clientele basically think that Tattoo Guy is polite and talented, but a really strange guy. Indeed, it seems that he might be a bit lacking in social skills, which is to say he makes Travis Bickle seem to have the wit and élan of Cole Porter.

    At any rate, Mr Creepy Tattoo Guy seems to have some kind of long-distance crush on a supermodel, so his ultimate dream comes true when an assistant magazine editor shows up in his tattoo parlor one day and asks him to come to their offices to create body art for a swimsuit layout. Best of all, the models will include his favorite dream girl. Sweet! He gets to bring his two favorite obsessions, tats and supermodels, together under the same roof. It's a day to remember, tantamount for him to the glorious day when peanut better and chocolate first met. This puts him on the psycho-nutbag equivalent of Cloud Nine. Unfortunately, the magazine job will be done with removable paint rather than permanent tattoos, but the opportunity to paint on his favorite supermodel's titties just sets his psychotic heart all in a tizzy!

    Amazingly enough, he starts off on a good foot with the model but in the due course of time, his psychotic personality manages to emerge, so he is forced to kidnap her. Hey, you were expecting something different? He imprisons her for carnal purposes, but unfortunately for him, he can't make love to her because her body has not yet been ritually purified, which is to say that she isn't covered with tats. In his mind, skin decoration equals purity while naked skin is the mark of a slut. Thus, if he were to meet Mother Theresa, he would have to purify her until she looked like the offspring of Dennis Rodman and Pam Anderson.

    Makes good sense.

    Well, to him anyway.

    At any rate, after he finishes purifyin' the livin' daylights out of her by covering her skin with pretty purple dragons, majestic blue and gold eagles, pink hearts, and green clovers, he is then able to eat a hearty Irish breakfast, but more important also to maintain an erection, so he rapes her. By this time, as you might expect, she's pretty darned upset with the whole pesky imprisonment and disfigurement thing so, just as he climaxes, she grabs his tattoo needle and kills him with it.

    When he comes, he goes

    So to speak.

    Although it was made in the early 80s, it's a leftover piece of typical 70s alienation fare, all arty and symbolic, and filled with disenfranchised characters who are tortured by their pasts and can't communicate with one another, kind of like an Edward Albee play, except with the added bonuses of hot babes and tattoos. Just imagine Albee writing for a biker mag, and you'll have the general picture.

    It's not a good movie at all. In addition to its heavy handed rendering of familiar 70s themes, its plodding pace and its self-consciously arty approach, the film suffers from a complete lack of audience identification. The supermodel is a shallow bitch, Dern is mentally ill, and neither has a sense of humor.

    Amazingly enough, I can give you some reasons why you might like some things about this project.

    • It's the classic career role for Laura Dern's odd dad.

    • Maud "The Bod" Adams, a supermodel, two-time Bond girl, and all-around babe, gets naked a lot, and shows everything there is to show.

    • The sex scene between Dern and Adams, with both of them completely covered in colorful body tats, is erotic just because it is so different from what one normally sees. You tend to watch the rather elegant movement of the dragons and eagles rather than their routinely grinding naughty bits. This scene has the same kind of unique appeal as the Kari Wuhrer "paint sex" scene in Vivid. There were rumors at the time that Dern and Adams might have been engaged in honest to goodness, non-simulated copulation. Maud Adams once "admitted" that Dern did want to do the nasty on camera for real, but she refused. Dern denied the entire charge, but I'm not sure exactly what he was denying. The fact that they did it for real? The fact that he wanted to? The fact that Maud refused? Anyway, it's still an erotic scene, whether real or simulated. Personally, I don't care about anything but the result on film, and I'm not convinced that real sex on camera would actually be better than great actors faking sex.

     

    Nudity:

     

    Other Crap:

    Other Crap archives. May also include newer material than the links above, since it's sorta in real time.

    Click here to submit a URL for Other Crap

     

     

    MOVIE REVIEWS:

    Here are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.

     

    • The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
    • If there is a white asterisk, it means that there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined there might be something else of interest.
    • A blue asterisk indicates the review is written by Tuna (or Junior or Brainscan, or somebody else besides me)
    • If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

    Jr's Polls
    Here are the final results and comments for last week's poll Which actress has been the most convincing playing a stripper.


    This week's poll...
    Who has the best Bum in Hollywood?

    For each nominee I've included a movie or two that features a great, rear nude performance.

    Here are the results of our most recent other polls...
    The Top 20 Nude Scenes of 2004

    The Best Nude Film Debuts of the 80s

    The Best Nude Film Debuts of the 90s

    Please Email Scoopy Jr. with more nominees, comments or suggestions.


    Crimson Ghost
    NOTE: We currently have to do all of our movie files in zip format. Instead of viewing them online, save the zip files to your hard drive in the directory of your choice, un-zip and play from there.


    Today from the Ghost, a few assorted video clips. Zipped .wmvs as usual.

    • Holly Hunter, fully nude with excellent rear and topless views in scenes from "The Piano" (1993). Hunter won the Best Actress Oscar for this role.

    • Jayne Brook topless in a shower scene from the 1998 movie "Into My Heart".

    • Helen Brodie topless in a scene from the direct-to-vid movie "Monsoon" (2001).

    Johnny Moronic
    Heather Graham
    (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

    Sorry gang, Rollergirl doesn't give up any goods in "Blessed" (2004). We do she some pokies and tight tops, but that's about it.

    Katherine Lang
    (1, 2)

    Topless in a love scene with one of the least likely dudes to still have any kind of career, Skeet Ulrich aka the grade B wannabe Johnny Depp. Scenes from the the direct-to-vid flick "Soul Assassin" (2001).

    Robin Tunney Tunney showing some cleavage and doing her best Classic Hollywood Diva impression in scenes from "The Secret Lives of Dentists" (2002).

    Helen Mirren
    (1, 2, 3, 4)

    Mirren baring all in scenes from the 1989 movie "The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover".

    Variety
    Bai Ling Here is the always curiously dressed actress exposing a bit of nipple while attending the Berlin Film Festival.

    Maria Kooistra
    (1, 2)

    The Dutch actress showing some cleavage (link #1) and baring breasts and a hint of pubes in link #2. Scenes from the 2002 short film, "Tonino".

    Karen Allen
    (1, 2)

    Lisa Baur
    (1, 2, 3, 4)

    Sarah Holcomb

    Mary Louise Weller
    (1, 2, 3, 4)

    Señor Skin gets put on Double Secret Probation with this batch of 'caps featuring the babes of "Animal House".

    Pat Reeder www.comedy-wire.com
    Pat's comments in yellow...

    FELDMAN TURNS ON MICHAEL JACKSON
    Beat It! - Cory Feldman told ABC's "20/20" that he hopes Michael Jackson is innocent, but he's rethinking his childhood memories in light of the court case. For instance, he recalls stopping at Jackson's home when he was 13, and he noticed a book on the coffee table with pictures of grown men and women naked, focusing on VD and the genitalia. Michael sat down and explained the book to him. He said he was grossed out but didn't think it was a big deal; but now, if his 13-year-old son went to a 35-year-old man's apartment and that happened, "I would probably beat his ass."

  • He could probably have beaten Michael's ass when he was 13... And Michael would've enjoyed it.
  • Today, we're much more civilized: we SUE his ass.
  • If that's his idea of a coffee table book, remind me never to stop by his house for coffee.


    NAKED KARAOKE COMING TO CONNECTICUT
    How To Improve "American Idol" - A year ago, the Berlin Station Cafe in Berlin, Connecticut, put up a joke sign reading "Naked Karaoke." Neighbors complained to the city, and the owner was threatened with fines or arrest if he hosted a nude musical show without a permit. His business partner who's also an attorney sued, claiming the ordinance was illegal, and won. So tomorrow, the cafe will host its first "Naked Karaoke" night, which they never intended to hold in the first place. 120 people have signed up, but the owner doesn't know how many will actually undress.

  • It'll probably be nothing but men, doing a "follow the bouncing ball" singalong.
  • The bad news: karaoke singers' bodies are even worse than their voices.
  • If I want to see naked karaoke singers, I'll turn on MTV.
  • This will answer the burning question, "Is William Hung?"


    PARIS HILTON: NO DRUGS, NO BOOZE, NO PLAYBOY
    She's Much Too Shy - The next issue of Playboy features Paris Hilton on the cover as "Sex Star of 2004," but she doesn't appear nude inside and didn't even pose especially for the cover shot. Playboy is desperate to shoot her, but her spokeswoman told MSNBC that Paris is afraid people will think she already posed nude for Playboy, "which she did not."

  • Playboy is the only place on Earth where Paris Hilton has yet to appear naked.
  • Playboy will even pay for the breast implants!
  • By now, I think a lot of people are desperate to shoot her.

    Her Face Is Frozen Without Botox - Despite her party lifestyle, Paris Hilton says she doesn't do drugs or drink anything stronger than Red Bull because girls who do that "look haggard and old" and "I like my young face. I don't want to look old."

  • Like, 25!...Ugh!
  • She likes the way her face looks so much, she never changes the expression.
  • Besides, she seems to be on drugs anyway.
  • Once she starts to look old, THEN she'll drink and do a lot of drugs.


    "DESPERATE HOUSEWIFE" NOT A LESBIAN
    She's Just A Spinster! - Marcia Cross, who plays repressed Bree on "Desperate Housewives," denied an Internet rumor that she's a lesbian. Cross said, "I just assumed this is what comes of being 42 and single. I don't know if they just needed to find a reason why I wasn't married."

  • Maybe she's just not that desperate.
  • Bree keeps house more like a gay man.
  • Now the Star headline reads, "Marcia Cross Is A Repressed Lesbian!"


    MAN LIVES IN PLASTIC BUBBLE TO ATTRACT WOMEN
    It Worked For John Travolta - A 29-year-old Sydney, Australia, lifeguard identified only as Luke is tired of single life and can't find the right person. So he made a deal with an Internet dating agency to spend five days living in a clear plastic bubble in a shopping mall to draw attention from potential mates. The bubble has a chair, a table with a bowl of fruit, and a laptop. He said he's gotten about 100 e-mails, "some really nice" and "some really weird." On Valentine's Day, he plans to emerge from the bubble and take the one he's chosen to dinner.

  • ...At the Food Court.
  • Then she'll find out the reason he's still alone is his terrible B.O.
  • He's looking for a woman with a bubble butt.
  • He's not answering the weird ones because when you live in a plastic bubble at the mall, you don't want to date any weirdoes.