Lip Service (1999) is a Skinemax straight to vid version of Charlies Angels. It stars Michelle Turner (AKA Susan Featherly) as the owner of a detective agency that specializes in divorce cases. Her assistants are played by Zoe Paul and Elina Madison. The trio are to investigate a famous hard core star, played by Vanessa Blaire, because her fiancee suspects she is cheating on him off set. Don't even try to follow the muddled plot, which isn't the point of this thing at all. All four of the above mentioned women, and Stacey Howell, show everything twice, either in girl/girl. or girl/guy sex scenes.

IMDb readers have it at 1.2 of 10, which would be a little harsh based on the amount of nudity, but the sex scenes fizzle rather than sizzle, and the DVD presents a wide screen compressed to 4/3 aspect ration. I did correct the aspect ration and ended up with decent images, but don't expect to see anything that looks nearly this good from the DVD. Susan Featherly, with 26 credits, is the only reason to watch this, and, in my opinion, is not reason enough. Were the DVD in the correct aspect ration, this would be a C-, but, since its only value is eye candy, and the transfer has destroyed that, it is an F.

Art of Revenge (2003)

There are only two key elements that kept this film from being a good erotic thriller:

1. It's not erotic

2. It's not thrilling

OK, I'll admit those are quite major factors in the scheme of things, but the film might have worked with only a few changes.

On the thriller side, it started with a pretty decent script, and a plot twist that fooled me. The basic premise is that a husband divorces his wife out of nowhere, for no very good reason, and the wife concocts a  scheme of revenge, manipulating various elements of his life like an unseen puppeteer, all while pretending to stay friends with him.

I think this same script could be punched up a bit and made into a pretty solid, interesting movie if ... and this is a BIG "if" ... it were performed by real actors. It's basically a five character play with lots of twists in the alliances and plots between those characters. The female performers were kinda sorta competent, but the two males were not at all. One of them was a son of Dom DeLuise, the other one is a rock star turned actor named Stephen Jenkins, the lead singer of Third Eye Blind. This is the first time he's played anything other than "rock singer", and I'm guessing it will probably be the last. In real life, he must be quite the stud-boy, having dated some major babes like Charlize Theron. His on-screen persona, however, is  ... well, let's just say there's no way you'll believe he's heterosexual. His hysterical outbursts, stressing all the wrong words in a flamboyant way, coupled with his unfortunate lisp, make him the very caricature of a "you" (young outed urban). This guy makes Andy Dick seem as rugged and manly as Lee Marvin. If he were playing a gay guy, I would be complaining that his performance was too stereotyped, yet he is supposed to be a studly young man on the make.

His wife was played by Joyce Hyser, who did a respectable job in her role, but seemed miscast. I say that because Hyser is hot on the trail to 50 (she'll be 47 this year), and looks it, while rock-boy is 39 and looks younger, so it seemed that she could easily have been playing his mom. You'll remember Hyser from "Just One of The Guys" about 20 years ago, as the girl who switched schools and pretended to be a boy to prove that she lost an essay contest because of her gender. She had a few other decent-sized movie roles in 1983-1985, then appeared on L.A. Law in the late 80s, then virtually disappeared. In her IMDb filmography, she only has one credit between 1991 and 2002. I don't think she should count on this film to launch a comeback.

On the erotic side ... well, it has sex scenes, but no T&A at all. The Dazzling Nichole Hiltz, playing the husband's new love interest, would have been a good candidate for some nudity, but she never came close. I have seen beekeepers with less of their body covered. Hyser did one of those PG movie sex scenes where the lovers press their chests together so all possible nipples are hidden.

The modesty of this film doesn't make sense to me. It is a straight-to-vid erotic-themed thriller with an R rating. Scoop's First Unity of Time and Space and Movie Shit says - once you know you will be awarded an R rating for language, load up on the breast count, because the tits are free. The MPAA doesn't assign an NC-17 just for showing breasts, so the worst they will give is an R. If you already have an R ... well, to repeat my essential hypothesis, the tits are free.

That's an important marketing point to remember with any film, but it's an absolutely critical issue with a straight-to-vid thriller. If this had some sexy nudity, ala Basic Instinct, I'd be telling you that you should rent it if you like a sexy thriller, because it has a decent plot and you can ignore some of the bad acting. Without the T&A, I just can't give you any reason to spend your time on this film.

And that's kind of a shame, because one could take this same script, add some erotic elements, hire some real actors, and make a very respectable STV movie.

• Joyce Hyser (I don't think there is anything to see. Close, but no cigar.) (1, 2)

The Big Bounce (2004):

Spoilers

What went wrong here? Start with an Elmore Leonard story, like the ones that drove Get Shorty and Out of Sight. Add a good starring cast: Morgan Freeman, Gary Sinese, Owen Wilson. Layer in some colorful minor characters: Willie Nelson, Harry Dean Stanton, Bebe Neuwirth, Charlie Sheen, Vinnie Jones. Throw in some crazy cameos: remember Have a Little Tea With Goldie from the Smothers Brothers show? Goldie is in this movie. Remember NFL running back Tony Dorsett? He's here as well. Add a little nudity from sexy young Sara Foster. It should result in a frothy and pleasant concoction, right?

You would think so, as I did, and you'd be just as wrong as I was.

Owen Wilson tries to do a Bob Hope - to play one of those characters who is technically part of the movie, but is really apart from it, commenting on it. That doesn't really work. Throughout the film, the audience is left scratching its collective head, wondering how much to take seriously. The movie can't decide. One character gets caught burying a box full of stolen wallets by another character, who is the local judge. Then a cell phone goes off inside the buried box. The judge witnesses the entire scene, hears the phone, but doesn't seem to care. When we find out that the judge is the real criminal mastermind on the island, we can look back on that scene and realize why he ignored the obvious evidence of a felony, but the scene just doesn't work in context. Surely the small time con-man (Wilson) would have to wonder why such an upright citizen as the judge (Freeman) was ignoring his criminality, but he just accepts it, and continues to march blindly forward because, like a Bob Hope character, he knows he's in a crime movie, and he needs to keep moving forward toward the big crime.

The entire film is lacking in both energy and focus. The Charlie Sheen character has way too much screen time, even though he seems unnecessary to the plot. Owen Wilson needs a high-energy foil to balance his laid-back charm, but he is paired up with Freeman, the only actor on the world more laid-back than he is, so their lifeless interaction consists entirely of  indirection and shrugging off things they should take notice of. It is all supposed to come together at the end, when the film leads up to a big caper, but that heist is completely mismanaged and mistimed by the writer and director, so that the twists and revelations in the denouement are both confusing and lacking in tension.

Skip it. Major disappointment.

• Sara Foster (1, 2, 3)

Snapshots (2002):

Here's the premise.

Julie Christie plays a Moroccan woman. With blond hair, blue eyes, and a phoneme-perfect Hungarian accent.

She lives in L.A., where the story begins as she and her daughter (Carmen Chaplin) are planning to attend her ex-husband's re-marriage to a gorgeous young bim. The mother and daughter talk, Daughter is upset at her dad about the whole trophy wife thing, but mom is not fazed in the least. She is thrilled to be out of an arranged marriage to a man she never loved. The daughter wonders if her mom was ever in love. Well, yes, when she lived in North Africa, there was this American boy backpacking through ... but he was only there for a few days, then left, never to return.

The daughter feels that she needs some time away from her familiar circumstances, a chance to explore the world and her own feelings. She heads off to Europe and decides to settle for a while in Amsterdam. A series of events leads her to the bookstore of an elderly American hippie, with whom she forms a deep friendship. He hopes their affection will develop into love, but she doesn't think of him that way.

Now, for you mathematically inclined, here's a word problem. What are the odds that the person the daughter would take in as her #1 friend and confidante would be the one guy her mother ever loved? Remember, that guy could have been in L.A., or Shanghai, or Katmandu or Capetown. Since nobody knew that the guy was in Amsterdam, and the daughter only ended up in Amsterdam on a last-minute whim, I calculate the odds at about one in six or seven billion. That's how many people there are in the world. She went to a random city and befriended a random guy based on random circumstances. (She was being assailed in the streets. She was saved by a hooker. The hooker took the girl to her kindest client - the hippie.)

Of all the gin joints in all the cities in all the world, she had to walk into his!

In other words, at one in six billion or more, this is about as likely as OJ being innocent!

The old geezer ex-lovers do eventually get together, so it has a heart-warming if implausible finale, but I shore 'nuff had to go through a lot of pain to get there.

• More strange casting: Burt Reynolds played the hippie. I spent the first half of the movie thinking he was supposed to be brain-damaged, but I guess that was not so. Burt himself contributed something to my impression, but the main offender was the doofus who played Burt in the Moroccan flashbacks, who seemed to be on a permanent acid trip. It turns out that Burt wasn't supposed to be retarded or on an acid flashback. He was merely "wounded", and stoned most of the time
• I didn't even like the cinematography that Tuna praised. I found every scene except the father's wedding to be underlit, to the point where I was sometimes straining my eyes to see what was going on, especially in the bookstore and on the boat. There were some excellent outdoor shots of Amsterdam, but those also seemed underlit.
• The bad guy, the evil Dutch dude who was trying to force the hippie to sell his bookstore, was a total caricature who thought the film was a farce rather than a sentimental romantic comedy. He may also be the only person I've ever seen with sillier hair than Donald Trump.
• More strange casting: Carmen Chaplin seemed too old and too foreign (she speaks with one of those over-enunciated pretending-to-be-American accents, ala Marina Sirtis and Claire Forlani) for the barely post-adolescent American role, so I tried to look up her age. It is a deep, dark secret! She did her first nude scene in 1993, so I suppose she must be about 30.

All in all, it is a mediocre, mis-cast film which rambles to an implausible conclusion. It's not a totally bad film, though. It has a warm heart to atone partially for its complete lack of a brain, and genre fans may like it, as Tuna did, and Chaplin got naked quite a bit. C-.

Here is what Tuna said about this film:

Snapshots (2002) is enjoying its US premier direct to video this week. It is a romantic comedy with some unlikely casting choices that, for me, worked. This joint Dutch English co-production stars Burt Reynolds as an aging hippy living and running a book store in Amsterdam. He is pretty much a loner, and has a gruff exterior, but has a heart of gold. A would-be developer is trying to get him to sell the store, hoping to build a sex superstore, and Reynolds is the last holdout.

Meanwhile, Moroccan Julie Christie and her daughter Carmen Chaplin are living in LA, and the two are arguing over attendance at the wedding of Chaplin's father to a young woman. Mom threatens to keep Chaplin from taking an extended trip to Europe if she doesn't attend. Mom tells her not to go to Amsterdam, as it is not a good place for a young girl to be alone, but to try Venice instead. Naturally, Chaplin goes to Amsterdam, and ends up meeting, then working for, Reynolds. We slowly learn that Reynolds had one great love in his life, a woman in Morocco, who was already married. It becomes pretty obvious that Christy is that woman, and she has also been thinking about Reynolds all those years. Meanwhile, Chaplin is trying to "find herself." When Reynolds tells her to look in a mirror to find herself, she starts taking nude photos of herself to try and understand how people see her, and starts a romance with a young man who owns a photography store.

I had a little trouble with the concept of Reynolds as an aging hippy, mostly due to the parts I have seen him play, but he actually developed a character for this film. Christie was phenomenal as a Moroccan, and Carmen Chaplin looks great, has fantastic eyes, and has talent to spare. Of course, you could expect as much from Charles Chaplin's granddaughter. The film was shot mainly in Amsterdam, with some flashbacks in Morocco, and a few scenes in LA, so much of the scenery was fantastic. Gábor Szabó did the cinematography, so it was very nicely photographed.

14 people at IMDB have this at 6.2 of 10, which is not a bad score for a direct to vid. There are no on line reviews in English. Chaplin shows breasts, buns, and a hint of bush during her photo sessions. Granted, Reynolds as a bohemian ex hippy was a stretch, and the outcome is predictable, but getting there was a lot of fun, and I was rooting for the happy ending. This film is a good solid C. Fans of romantic comedy will enjoy it.

• Carmen Chaplin(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

OTHER CRAP:

• Rachel Hunter, 35, has been seeing Sean Avery, 24, a forward with the Los Angeles Kings.
• The critics hated it, but Van Helsing opened with the 25th best opening day of all time! It took in more than all the other films added together, which tells you as much about the choices as about Van Helsing.
• Europeans Like Bush Even Less Than Before: "In France, the poll found, the president had an 85 percent negative rating; in Britain, 57 percent; in Germany 85 percent; and in Russia, 60 percent." In England, where Bush has his best ratings of those four countries, the British polling company Populus found support for Senator John Kerry over President Bush by a margin of 56 to 22 percent. You can imagine what the results would look like in the other countries.
• Masturbate-A-Thon 2004: Come for a Cause!
• "I will never eat poop again thanks to this product!!"
• Kobe Bryant trial open to cameras: "Cameras will be in the courtroom when Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant is arraigned next week and during his rape trial"
• BUSH: IRAQI PRISON SCANDAL RAISES NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT KERRY'S WAR RECORD
• Dave Barry: Hey, even humor is being outsourced
• The Pink Panther begins production
• Oregon man's fingerprint tied to bombings in Madrid, Very confusing connection. (??!!) His attorney and relatives say they are baffled by his alleged connection to Madrid plot, noting that he has not been out of the country in more than 10 years. The accused told his attorney that he had never been to Spain, his passport had expired in October of last year, and he had never met anyone from Morocco.
• Sasser Worm suspect in German custody - 18 year old high school student
• Counterbias: Leaked White House Email Shows Campaign Concerns (Satire)
• Craziest Feud in TinselTown: nutbag neighbors James Belushi and Julie Newmar!
• Presidential Rochambeau: Kerry throws the best "Paper" ever.
• Emily, Jacob Continue To Dominate Baby Names. Neither John nor Mary appears in the top 10.
• Here's the one you're waiting for The trailer from The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.
• Spectacular lunar eclipse over Sydney, Australia.

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 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.

Words from Scoop.

.avi's from Shiloh.

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

Twentynine Palms (2003)

A darling of the pretentious crowd, this two person film in the desert was scorned by far more people than those who loved it. Featuring real sex scenes, and people driving around while doing nothing, followed by extreme violence, it evoked these comments:

• "[Brown Bunny] sports the narrative complexity of War and Peace compared with Twentynine Palms."

• "Dumont's taste for the elemental has always flirted with the moronic. But this time, he's dozed off at the wheel and drifted well over the line."

• I have seen 321 films in 10 trips to the Toronto Film Festival. This is the first one that I've heard boos at the end of a film. They were deserved. The film consists of 1 hour and 40 minutes of sheer boredom followed by 20 minutes of ugly violence.

• Rotten Tomatoes

• Metacritic

• Yekaterina Golubeva  (.avi, .wmv)

• Yekaterina Golubeva  (.avi, .wmv)

• Yekaterina Golubeva  (.avi, .wmv). Long clip, non-stop nudity

• Yekaterina Golubeva  (.avi, .wmv) Obviously real sex scene.

• Yekaterina Golubeva  (.avi, .wmv)

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.

"Wisdom of Crocodiles"
Starting off with some brief breast exposure by Elina Löwensohn in The Wisdom of Crocodiles. No exposure by Kerry Fox but we see her partially undressed.

• Elina Löwensohn (1, 2)
• Kerry Fox (1, 2)

"Harvard Man"
The full frontal nudity in Harvard Man comes from an unnamed girl who comes out of a wall painting. Polly Shannon is also seen topless but the view is dark and brief. There are also some sexy scenes by Joey Lauren Adams and Sarah Michelle Gellar.

• Polly Shannon (1, 2)
• Joey Lauren Adams (1, 2)
• Sarah Michelle Gellar
• Unknown

"Men with Brooms"
Some more sexy caps of Polly Shannon in Men with Brooms when her body becomes a curling rink.

• Polly Shannon (1, 2)

"The Fluffer"
We see the briefest view of Roxanne Day's nipple in the Fluffer.

• Roxanne Day (1, 2, 3)

"Elephant Juice"
Kimberly Williams and Kate Gartside are topless in Elephant Juice and we see a bit of thigh by Rebecca Palmer as she's about to give a hand job.

• Kimberly Williams (1, 2)
• Kate Gartside (1, 2)
• Rebecca Palmer

"Parting Shots"
No nudity in Parting Shots but some nice caps of the actresses. Felicity Kendall was voted the sexiest bum on UK TV about 25 years ago and she's still not bad looking. Ruby Snape and Nicola Bryant play prostitutes and are down to their underwear. Nicola's name would be familiar to fans of Dr Who and you'll see a former Dr Who, Peter Davison, in Ruby's caps.

• Felicity Kendall (1, 2)
• Ruby Snape
• Nicola Bryant

"The Enemy"
No nudity by Olivia D'Abo in the very lame The Enemy, but there is a terrific upskirt.

• Olivia D'Abo (1, 2)

"The One and Only"
Patsy Kensit is seen topless briefly in The One and Only.

• Patsy Kensit (1, 2, 3)

"The Business of Strangers"
The nudity in The Business of Strangers comes from a porn film shown on TV. We also see some awful tattoos on Julia Stiles, and Stockard Channing takes a sauna.

• Julia Stiles (1, 2)
• Stockard Channing

Here are a few comments by Sick Joey:
This dvd was so much fun to watch and it brought back alot of 80's memories! All the big scream queens were here: Brinke Stevens, Monique Gabrielle, Kelli Maroney, Michelle Bauer, Roxanne Kernohan, Linnea Quigley & others . It had a great commentary, plus the bonus movie "One Million Heels B.C" was also very funny.

Two movies and a commentary for only $20!. All 80's scream queen fans should pick this up.