Tuesday

Tuna
"Dracula"

Dracula (AKA, Bram Stoker's Dracula) (1992) is a critical and popular favorite by Francis Ford Coppola. It is rated 7.1 at IMDB, and won three Oscars. Dracula tries to seduce the reincarnation of his lost love, Winona Ryder, and fails. So much for plot. So what fills the 130 minutes of running time if it isn't plot? Pretentious but dark and overly artsy imagery. To giv eyou an idea, Ryder and her boyfriend kiss before he leaves for Transylvania. Peacock feathers are waved in front of the camera, then the eye of one of the feathers fades into a train tunnel, and the boyfriend is in Transylvania. Why the peacock feathers? I have no idea whatsoever, but then I saw nothing of merit in this entire snooze-fest, except breast exposure from Monica Bellucci, Sadie Frost, Michaela Bercu and Florina Kendrick, full frontal from Honey Lauren and Judi Diamond, and clear see through breasts from Winona Ryder.

I have to believe the reviews and ratings were based on a lifetime achievement award for Coppola rather than an honest look at this film. Ed Wood's worst effort was more entertaining than this one. I suppose it qualifies as a marginally acceptable Gothic horror, hence C-.

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  • Florina Kendrick (1, 2, 3)
  • Lauren Diamond (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
  • Mchaela Bercu (1, 2, 3)
  • Monica Bellucci (1, 2, 3)
  • Sadie Frost (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27)
  • Winona Ryder (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11)

    "Bikini Med School"

    Bikini Med School (1994) is a terrible Skinemax effort. It takes place on two sets, a strip club and a bedroom. Supposedly, there is a party, and coed med students are dancing in their skimpies, and some of the coeds go to the bedroom with male students for sex. It is undercut with B & W doctor footage and corny announcements.

    There were credits, including:
    Kim Dawson
    Tamara Landry
    Anastasia Alexander
    Leigh Ann Waynes
    Lisa Sutton
    Diana Cuevas
    Victoria Plumb
    Michelle Trongone
    Jacqueline Ann Finch

    But none of the characters were identified in the credits, despite the fact that all the naked women had character names, so this is a co-operative project for everyone. Below are the 7 women with appreciable nudity in this stinker. Anyone who can identify one or more of them, let me know, and I will create proper images.

    The DVD transfer is as bad as the film, and this succeeds in making even naked women a chore to watch. D-.

  • Help identify this girl
  • Help identify this girl
  • Help identify this girl
  • Help identify this girl
  • Help identify this girl
  • Help identify this girl
  • Help identify this girl

  • Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)

    Eureka (1982 or 1983 or 1986 or something):

    Scoop's comments in white.

    I don't know if any movie ever had a better real-life story as its source material.

    Harry Oakes was a young man from New England who followed the classic dream of riches. After graduating from the university and attending medical school for a couple of years, Harry dropped out to make his fortune as a gold prospector in the 1890s. He followed the possibilities around the globe: to the Klondike, to Australia and New Zealand, to Death Valley, and back to Alaska, living in poverty and hardship, narrowly avoiding death for twenty years. A lesser man might have given up. Almost any other college man would have given up after two decades of a miserable, hardscrabble existence among ruthless uneducated men and prostitutes. Harry was not any other man. He set his sights on achievement, and was not afraid to pay for it with his own death, if necessary.

    His determination paid off. Following rumors and opportunities, he figured out a way to work an unworkable claim underneath a frozen lake in Canada. He raised enough money to do what was necessary, and found one of the largest mother lodes in North America in the caves under that lake. In 1917 he had arrived in the area with $2.65 to his name. In 1918 he was earning $60,000 per day.

    He soon found out that there were drawbacks to achieving his dreams. His entire life had been based on aspiration, and he was lost without something to work towards. He was not psychologically suited to be idle. Nor was he socially prepared to join the life of the leisure class. Twenty years of survival existence, living alone or with roughnecks, had left him socially unpolished, distrustful, ill-mannered and irascible. And he was alone.

    He then began a new stage of his life, gadding about the world in search of inspiration. On a cruise he met a cultured, attractive young woman. Mankind's most common bond, that between powerful men and beautiful women, occurred. When they married, Harry was 48, short and ugly, ill-tempered but rich. Eunice was 24, cultured and lovely. The match worked. Harry and his wife raised three sons and two daughters. Harry soon took his young family to the Bahamas, where the tax laws were most favorable to someone in his position. Within a fairly short time, his real estate holdings included more than half of the island of Nassau. Harry and Eunice became integrated into the Nassau social set, which centered around the Duke of Windsor, the former king of England. Harry was still cantankerous, but generous to excess, and he was much loved by the poor of the island.

    Life on Nassau was anything but idyllic. Harry found two additional sources of grief.

    1) His eighteen year old daughter met and married an idler, a handsome member of the European titled set, a "Count" whose only known interests were partying, womanizing, and yachting. Harry's daughter could not have picked a man more dissimilar to her father, the ultimate rough and ready self-made man, so the two men despised each other, as evidenced by loud public rows.

    2) Some very powerful men in Miami wanted to turn Nassau into a Caribbean Vegas, complete with slick hotels and lavish casinos. Harry and the former English king opposed their development plans. These were not the kind of men who take "no" for an answer. The Miami group was headed by the notorious mobsters, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, the childhood friends who had assembled the modern mob, the most cohesive organized crime enterprise in American history.

    In 1943, Harry was found murdered, beaten to death, his body burned to a crisp.

    Killed by the mob? Killed by his son-in-law?

    Harry's son-in-law was arrested and tried, but even Harry's daughter, who knew him better than anyone, thought him incapable of such an action. The evidence against him was circumstantial, the investigation was bungled (some say deliberately, to cover up mob involvement), and the Count was set free.

    Court TV did an elaborate and detailed report on the background behind the Oakes murder trial.

    The murder remains unsolved to this day. Harry's daughter, now known as Nancy Tritton, is still alive as far as I know. "The fabulously rich and difficult Nancy Oakes", as one critic called her, seems to have spent her entire life replaying the same mistakes over and over again. She had her marriage to the Count annulled in 1949, and some years later married another seedy aristocrat, this time a German Baron. Having made herself a countess and a baroness as well as an heiress, she soon separated from the German and married another famous playboy, the fun-loving Patrick Tritton, upon whom is based Dickey Umfraville, a character in Anthony Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time". That marriage failed as well, and her matrimonial inclinations seem to have stopped there.

    The Oakes family estate still seems to hold vast amounts of wealth and property in the area of Lake Ontario. HOCO Enterprises (formerly Welland Securities) is today one of the largest owners of real estate property on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. "HOCO" is the acronym for the Harry Oakes Company.

    What a story, right?

    In concept, tt seemed like a no-brainer that should have proceeded directly to the Oscar Night stage, and the casting was perfect. Joe Pesci played Meyer Lansky, and Mickey Rourke played the soft-spoken but lethal Luciano. Gene Hackman played crusty old Harry Oakes, and the parts of his spoiled daughter and her handsome, amoral Count were played by Theresa Russell and Rutger Hauer.

    Although the script changed everyone's names, (would you want Lucky Luciano's friends mad at you?), the story was Harry's, almost down to the last detail. There were only two changes of any significance.

    1. For some reason, the part of Harry's wife was re-imagined. Instead of the beautiful and cultured young woman who met Harry after his ascent into wealth, the script chose to make her a bored alcoholic.

    2. Instead of staying with the Nancy Oakes character for six years after the trial, the Count made love to her once more, discussed their infinite future with her, then rowed out to his yacht and sailed off. That was an excellent embellishment, in my estimation, allowing the director and his team to layer in a heavy dose of romanticism, and to come up with a brilliant closing image (see movie house page), which capped off some exquisitely imagined photography throughout the film.

    I know what you must be thinking. "With a great story like this, magnificent cinematography, and a perfect cast, why have I never heard of this movie, and why is it rated a bottom-scraping 5.4 at IMDb?".

    For you experts, the answer is "Nick Roeg". For the rest of you, the short answer is "because it isn't that good", but those words will just prompt you to ask "why?", so let's get to the meat of it.

    • The first problem is that the stories of Harry Oakes and Nancy Oakes are too much for one movie. They are really two separate stories that intersected briefly, when Nancy's husband was accused of killing Harry. Since the Count was exonerated, that intersection was of minimal importance. By combining the two stories into one, the screenwriter and director painted themselves into a cinematic corner. There they were painting a portrait of Harry Oakes, absorbing the audience into his Citizen Kane existence, when Harry was suddenly dead, and the movie still had a lot of running time left. That drained all the energy from the film, not just because we were into Harry's story and it was suddenly over, but because Gene Hackman was the only actor in the film who truly had the gift to breathe life into the pretentious dialogue and make it sound like human speech instead of human speeches. Once Hackman was gone, the damned movie seemed like one of those hollow European art films where people deliver sonorous speeches while looking out of the window. The post-murder story of Nancy Oakes was an anti-climax in the story of Harry Oakes. It was particularly irritating since nobody knows to this day who really killed Harry Oakes, either in real life or in the script, so everything after the murder was essentially hogwash except for the one great romantic moment pictured above.

    • The second problem - I think I mentioned the rhetorical dialogue a couple of times. This film really called for a no-bullshit director who could tell the story in an interesting way and allow the situations to present their own meanings. I think Clint Eastwood would have been perfect, inasmuch as he was extraordinarily successful with a similarly long and rambling story in The Outlaw Josey Wales. Instead of Clint, we got artsy-fartsy Nick Roeg, a confused story teller with no good sense of a strong campfire tale. The characters kept trying to intellectualize with philosophical musings and long speeches, all of which served to try to reveal points which were already evident (or should have been) in the plot and visuals.

    The film is separated into three acts, like a classical tragedy. In Act One, Harry is in the Yukon prospecting, and this all leads to his strike. In Act Two, Harry and his family are trying to find some meaning to their lives in the Bahamas, and this all leads to his death. Act Three is the trial, and it really leads nowhere, except to an unexpected "not guilty" and an inconclusive ending.

    In the trial scene, with the down-to-earth Hackman already dead and buried, we are left with Hauer and Russell exchanging lofty, philosophical, poetic, dreamy thoughts about their life together, supposedly while she was on the witness stand and he was acting as his own lawyer. (Very realistic court procedure. The judge and lawyers just sat patiently as they made goo-goo eyes at one another.) The director brought this act out of left field and tried to turn this part of the film into something like Murder in the Cathedral. Except for the ricly imagined final minute, all of act three could have been handled better with a word slide telling us the result of the trial.

    The first part of the film was also strange, actually surrealistic, but was so brilliantly filmed that the surrealism worked. It is a nearly wordless portrayal of a frostbitten Harry striking gold underneath the frozen lake, climaxing with Harry being swept away by a river of gold generated by an explosion. This Act One constitutes one of the most impressively filmed and imagined sequences in film history, and is nearly perfect except when Harry and his future wife are speaking. When director Nick Roeg could concentrate on images and poetry, he was brilliant, as he was through most of this sequence. It was in the natural interaction of people and the simple logic of storytelling that Roeg was overmatched. Roeg was a classic example of the Peter Principle, a brilliant cinematographer who worked his way up to a directing job, and settled in there, at his level of incompetence.

    Actually, the second part of Eureka also suffered from a multitude of oddball digressions. The Count was into some kind of native pagan rituals as well as Kabbalah, and this generates plenty of pseudo-mystical baloney and hifalutin' conversations which serve little purpose.

    This should have been a brilliant movie, but wasn't. Instead of a disjointed three act play, it could have been a focused story about their life in the Bahamas, and their inability to make it work for them despite infinite riches. The surreal portion in the Klondike, trimmed of some dialogue, would have made a beautiful prologue.

    Ultimately, it should have been Harry's story, and it should have ended with Harry's death, a sad commentary on a man who achieved everything he dreamt of for the first forty years of his life, then could never find a way to enjoy it, because the process of achieving his dream changed the man who dreamt it in the first place. And the director should have let us see that point for ourselves inside of the story, instead of having the characters deliver soliloquies about it.

    Based on this description, this is a C (Tuna agrees). It is a great movie, and it is a poor movie. Above all, it is a film which always tries to soar into stratospheric heights, sometimes finding an air current and floating majestically through the clouds for we earthbound to admire, and sometimes crashing clumsily and painfully to earth. If you study films, you must see it, if only for what it hoped to be and might have been, if not for what it actually is.

    By the way, Roeg, now 76, is still at it. He will have a new film out in 2004, Adina, "a philosophical horror film that explores love, sex and death across the universe." Well, I guess he's changed his ways. Nothing pretentious about that.

     

     

    .wmv film clips

     

     

    MISCELLANEOUS REQUEST FOR HELP from Celebrity Sleuth:

    If any of you guys have movies or stills of the Grammy red carpet action, please read this.

    Scoop:

    Just back from the Grammys

    I promise to send you all a FULL REPORT -- like those field reports you get from the Film Festivals but featuring real, live PEOPLE -- as soon as I possibly can. We actually got onto the red (well, green for Heineken) carpet this year...and met and mingled with tons of celebs!! Lots to fill your Fun Housers in on.

    But in the meantime, I have something of a urgent personal request...since I know from their collages that many seem to cap the arrivals and especially Joan Rivers' E! special prior to the ceremony, I would be THRILLED if any of your members or contributors taped Joan's pre-Grammy arrivals show and could provide a copy.

    The selfish reason I ask is that, apparently, Mrs. Sleuth and I were seen on Joan's show "about half a dozen times" right behind the celebs she was interviewing--according to my best friend. Somehow he happened to spot us -- even though of course he wasn't expecting it or looking! But, alas, he wasn't taping it at the time...and of course we were there, so we couldn't capture it either. He said we were very clear and recognizable (to people that know us), so it would be a "kick" to have a copy.

    So if any of your FH people still have a copy I'd greatly appreciate if they could mail it to you...for passing on to me.  We are looking especially for the footage of Alicia Keys, the Osbournes, Reuben Studdard and Matthew Perry. Sorry to ask for something so mundane, but I figure you guys are the best bet on having taped and retained it.

    Thanks...and I'll tell you all about it in a few days,

    Sleuth

     

    OTHER CRAP:

     

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

    Click here to submit a URL for inclusion in 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.

    Shiloh

    Words from Scoop.

    .avi's from Shiloh.

    .wmv files made by Scoop from Shiloh's .avi's.

     

     

    • SOMETHING NEW: Mia Kirshner in Sunday's episode of The L-Word. The L-Word cooled off the nudity after the first episode, but this gets it back on track. The lighting is a a bit funky, but ya have to feel forgiving when they show you Mia Kirshner strolling around topless for a while. I know it improves my mood. (.avi version, .wmv version)

    • SOMETHING OLD, BUT RARELY SEEN: Cindy Crawford, taking a bath in The Simian Line. This 2000 film has never been made available on any home media format. (.avi version, .wmv version)

     

     

    Perhaps these tips will help if you have trouble with the codecs for these movies:

    Shiloh says:

    FYI when I hypercam vids to make the file size smaller I use DivX MPEG-4 Fast-Motion for the video compressor, then I use virtualdub to compress the audio. The properties for the vids says the video codec:  DivX Decoder Filter & audio codec:  Morgan Stream Switcher which I'm not familiar with. When I compress the audio with virtualdub I use MPEG Layer-3.  A friend of mine told me about compressing the audio about (6) mos. ago. Like I said previously, only been capping for a year & a half & I'm no expert. Hopefully this info will help members with the proper codecs for my vids.
     
    When I cap big brother's I use hypercam mostly & sdp & asfrecorder if the set up allows me. I stopped using camtasia cause the file sizes were always too big, could never figure out the process, over my head lol, plus it cost too much to buy in my opinion.

    A reader says:

    You mentioned that some users were having trouble with the videos on your site. There is a tool designed to determine what codec is needed for a video. http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ Hope this is useful to you or your users.

    Scoop says:

    I made the .wmv versions of each video. The codecs for these: Windows Video V8, Windows Audio 9. The upside of these is that you know the codecs, and they'll play in the Windows Media Player. The downside is that they are slightly larger, and slightly lower quality.

    Graphic Response

    Be sure to pay Graphic Response a visit at his website. www.graphic-barry.com.

    Crimson Ghost
    The Ghost's tribute to Lana Clarkson continues....

    Today Lana is joined by Dawn Dunlap and both are topless in several scenes from the 1985 flick "Barbarian Queen".


    Next up, a few .wmvs from The Ghost.

    "Eurotrip"
    Special thanks to LC for some bootleg 'caps from the new movie "Eurotrip".

    • Jessica Böhrs, the young German actress and singer in the techno-pop act Novaspace goes topless.

    • Molly Schade, hot tub toplessness in her one and only IMDb credit.

    • Some topless unknowns


      A little bonus...

    • Michelle Trachtenberg...A bigger and better look at the former "Buffy" co-star's impressive cleavage on the poster for her new movie "Eurotrip".

    Variety
    Beyoncé Knowles
    (1, 2, 3)

    'Caps and comments by Brainscan:
    Beyoncé jess 'bout fell out of her dress at some NBA thing. I did some quick editing, and she looks.. how to put this delicately..."bootylicious".

    Melissa George
    (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11)

    The Aussie actress stipping down to a black bra and showing some nice cleavage on Sunday night's episode of "Alias".

    Chloe Webb
    (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

    Topless 'caps by Señor Skin from her film debut, "Sid and Nancy" (1986).

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

    WHERE DID MIKE TYSON'S MONEY GO?
    Why The Economy Turned Around - Mike Tyson can't remember how he managed to blow $300 million, but his bankruptcy paperwork provides some clues. Some expenses include: five houses, one of which had 38 bathrooms...a $375,000 bill for gardening at one house alone...110 luxury cars...tens of millions in divorce settlements and legal fees...visits to his favorite jewelry shop at up to $1.8 million a pop...$180,000 for two white Bengal tigers...and over $1 million in gifts for hangers-on who have scattered and Mike can't recall who they were. In 2003, he spent just $85 on Christmas gifts.

  • For his bankruptcy attorney...The only hanger-on he has left.
  • On the bright side, he should have one hell of a garage sale!
  • He knew it was a bad idea to go shopping with Elton John...And to hire MC Hammer as his financial planner.
  • He needed 38 bathrooms to flush that much money down the toilet.