Johnny Moronic made some caps and a (zipped
.avi) film clip of Essence Atkins
in XCU: Extreme Close-Up. (She's Dee Dee on Half & Half)
This week's STV releases: Seven
Mummies (2006)
Six escaped convicts and their female hostage are
trying to reach the Mexican border through the desert. They take a
detour from their flight when they run into an Apache shaman who is
filled with knowledge that is possessed only by those still close
enough to the land to act with the strength of the panther, the
courage of the eagle, and the cunning of the ... um .. salamander.
Whatever. This is the function provided by all old Indian holy men
here in the Southwest. Whenever we white folks need any important
mystical information, we round up an ancient Native American, and they
point us in the right direction. Just last week I stopped an old man
outside an Indian casino and he told me in words both wondrous and
wise of the true secret to happiness - that being to double down on
eleven when the dealer has a five showing.
In the case of this movie, the holy man spins a
tale of lost Spanish wealth, of a city so rich that the people
consider gold to be suitable only for toilet paper, because the
streets are paved with rubies, the children play with platinum
marbles, and the rabbits shit out malted milk balls. It seems that the
Spanish Conquistadors enslaved 10,000 indigenous people and used 2,500
burros to strip the Guachapa Mountains of all its precious metals,
hiding it all the booty in the desert until they could arrange to transport it back
to Spain. Seven Jesuit priests vowed to protect the treasure until the
Spanish returned, but nobody ever came back for the loot and as the
priests aged and died, they were mummified and buried with the
treasure to protect it for all eternity. There is no explanation for
how the last priest to die managed to mummify himself, or how we could
possibly have this info. Perhaps the Jesuit mummies had some
secretaries who recorded it all, and also worked the mummification
process on the last priest.
At any rate, nobody came to the burial place for
hundreds of years until some Western settlers and prospectors built a
town atop the buried treasure in the 19th century. When the
townspeople discovered the riches, they awoke the seven mummified
Jesuit priests from their sleep, and the mummies attacked the humans,
turning them all into zombies or vampires (it says vampires in the
credits, so let's go with that) by using some mysterious power now
lost to time but once known by the legendary elite cadre of
vampire-creating Jesuit mummy kung-fu priests. Throughout the
subsequent years, the town has continued to exist at night, albeit
frozen in time, but it and all of its bloodsucking denizens disappear
during the day, kind of like Brigadoon, and the area appears to be
open desert.
Of course, the convicts can't
pass up the fabled Ciudad de Bolas Malteadas de la Leche, so they
decide to postpone their run for the border in order to take on all
the vampires and kung-fu Jesuit mummies for the chance at all the
candy. And all the marbles.
The film goes for a vibe
similar to From Dusk Till Dawn, except that it is the "straight to
bargain bin" version. You can draw your own conclusions about the
merit of the plot. It
is supported by dreadful execution:
The film is consistently underlit.
I wasn't even sure whether there was any nudity until I captured and
photoshopped the images.
The action scenes are mishandled.
People fall out of camera, and punches obviously miss.
The background score is not
properly balanced with the dialogue. Of course, considering the
dialogue, that wouldn't be so bad except that the music is usually
some irritatingly inappropriate hip-hop. Or maybe hip-hop is the right
music to accompany kung-fu Jesuit mummies in Old West towns. I'm not
really sure there is a better choice, to tell you the truth.
Frankly, the acting and
special effects aren't so hot either.
The only good news: the film
is only about 70 minutes long, excluding the opening and closing
credits.
Seven Mummies is currently
rated 1.7 at IMDb. The worst film of all time is rated 1.8, so this
baby could be a contender when it amasses enough votes.
The trailer from Climates, a Turkish drama which won the Fipresci Award at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, an award presented annually to the most outlandishly pretentious and pseudo-intellectual film in the world.
"From DreamWorks Animation and Aardman Features, the teams behind the worldwide hit 'Wallace & Gromit - The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,' comes the computer-animated comedy 'Flushed Away.' Blending Aardman's trademark style and characterizations with DreamWorks' state-of-the-art computer animation, 'Flushed Away' is a madcap comedy set on and beneath the streets of London."
Excepting my own essays, this must be the longest analysis of a film to be written by someone who hasn't actually watched it. And even I will at least watch a film in fast forward before leaping into a pool of ignorance.
"In The Reaping, Hilary Swank plays a former Christian missionary who lost her faith after her family was tragically killed, and has since become a world renowned expert in disproving religious phenomena. But when she investigates a small Louisiana town that is suffering from what appear to be the Biblical plagues, she realizes that science cannot explain what is happening and she must regain her faith to combat the dark forces threatening the community."
Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format.
Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.
Carnivale Season 2 (2005) - Part 2
Episodes 5 through 8 ...
Those who didn't watch the series and will be ordering the DVD set will
want to skip down to the nudity.
Billy is learning now about what fate has in store for him. We now know how
the preacher, the man Billy has been looking for, Billy and The Management are
related. Billy has killed Management, which he insists was part of his
destiny. The preacher has saved Iris by framing someone else for the arson,
Sophie has left the Carnivale, and Libby has married Jonesy. Stumpy is still
in debt, especially after losing a huge bet on the Schmelling/Lewis fight.
I will summarize the entire series after finishing the last four episodes.
Thus far, it seems to be in some script trouble a little over half way into
the second and final season, with the final confrontation looming closer.
There has been some attempt to remove less interesting characters, and add new
ones, but that hasn't helped.
The design quality has not lessoned an iota, however, as can be seen from
the two color images included tonight (bottom images below).
Carla Gallo shows breasts in
the cooch show, and again having sex with Jonesy.
Cynthia
Ettinger shows breasts in the cooch, doing a solo after Gallo
married Jonesy.
Sample images
Xtina in Paris
Tiffany Kristensen in The Butcher, a new
straight-to-vid