Cheerleader Camp (1987) is a comedy/Horror Cheerleader slasher film. The foreign title, Bloody Pompoms, was the title the producer and director wanted, but the powers that be thought 'bloody" would hurt their chances of TV sales. The setup is a team on their way to Camp Harrah for a workshop ending in a competition. Shortly after they arrive, the most obvious competition for the "queen title," Krista Pflanzer, is found with her wrists cut. Lead Betsy Russell has been having nightmares about slashing and has a lot of self-doubt. Her boyfriend is pressuring her for sex, which doesn't help. Another member of her squad, Teri Weigel, is serious about winning the queen title.

There were many other red herrings, including a sheriff, a handyman, the cook and the camp director (Vickie Tipton). Tipton shows breasts in a humorous sex scene. Both Pflanzer and Weigel show breasts in a topless sunbathing scene. I loved the first half of the film, but when the horror element kicked into high gear, I thought the film lost some of its charm. Still in all, it is one of the better teen slasher films. None of the performances were too over the top, there was some actual character development, and Anchir Bay came up with a new transfer that is probably better than the theatrical release prints.

IMDb readers have this at 3.6 of 10, but the mean score is a more appropriate 5.3. This is a solid C to C+, as a well made and acted slasher with more than a little humor.

How in the hell does crap like this get made? It is a French film about a one-night stand between an English woman and a French boy on the ferry from Le Havre to Portsmouth. It was directed by the woman who directed the controversial Romance X, a "mainstream" film with on-screen penetration and gyno shots. Brief Crossing is not so explicit sexually as Romance, but it certainly has its share of shock value, since the women is in her thirties, and the boy is 16.

Now I don't care about the pedophilia aspect, mind you, but I do care about the boredom. You remember on Seinfeld how Jerry and George pitched their TV show as a show about nothing. As it turns out, nothing was a lot better than what they had in the script for Brief Crossing. In fact, I have already spoiled the entire film for you, because when I say it is about their one-night stand, I'm not summarizing or condensing. That is the entire movie.

Get this:

• In the first 6:12, the camera follows the boy around the ferry as he looks for a good place to set his suitcase.

• The next four minutes show him in a cafeteria line, then looking for a place to sit in the lunch room.

  (In that entire ten minute period there is no dialogue except the necessary stuff like "where are the trays?"

• The boy ends up at the woman's table. The next nine minutes consists of them getting to know one another in a series of facial close-ups. The direction consists of a close up of the boy while he talks, followed by a close-up of the woman as she talks. Nine minutes of that! Back-and-forth, back-and-forth in facial close-ups.

• The next five minutes consist of duty-free shopping.

• Then there are 30 minutes in the ship's nightclub, as they get drunk together. Once more, almost all of this scene consists of facial close ups of them as they sit at a table. Making up for the laconic beginning, there is a great deal of dialogue in this section. In fact, these characters are now so chatty that they make Eric Rohmer's characters seem as tight-lipped as Lee Marvin. The kid pretends to be cool, and the woman generalizes her feelings about all males in the world. This is the "character development".

• This is followed by 5-6 minutes of the most boring sex scene ever filmed, missionary style, her on the bottom, shot almost entirely over her shoulder. She again offers a running commentary on how all men are the same or some such twaddle.

• Then they go to sleep, awake, shower off and get dressed in her cabin. (The nudity in the sex scene is minimal, but there is full frontal nudity from both of them in the apres-sex scene or the shower/dressing scene.).

• He goes to get his suitcase, which is not in her cabin. She promises to wait, but does not. She runs off to meet her husband and child.

• The young man, smitten by love and expecting to see her again, goes through customs, then sees her  - with her family. His eyes mist over. He walks into the sunset or sunrise or something.

Judging from a couple of reader comments at IMDb, I think it was supposed to be a great epiphany that she was using and discarding him, despite some dialogue which would lead the audience to assume the opposite. That interpretation is not reasonable. Frankly, it is not possible for anyone paying attention to think that he took the lead in the seduction.  He basically minded his own business in the cafeteria, didn't want to sit with her, made no attempt to talk to her. She invited him to the table, then would not let him sit there and eat his meal quietly. Clearly she was orchestrating all of the time they spent together, and just as clearly, she was an emotionally distant person (she never really even talks about him personally, but only about how he is a metaphor for "the others"), so there was really no surprise that she was simply using him.

I can't tell you whether the poor visual quality of the DVD was created by the transfer or by the original print, or both, but I can certify that it is quite poor, and the DVD presents a letterboxed widescreen version rather than the almost universally standard anamorphic type.

In other words, you really do not want to see this film. It has nothing at all to offer.

• Although the quality is rough and the lighting poor, Sarah Pratt does do full frontal and rear nudity, including a nearly gynecological shot when she gets out of bed. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17)

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 Other Crap

MOVIE REVIEWS:

Words from Scoop.

.avi's from Shiloh.

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

NOTE: because of a unique combination of circumstances with the Windows media player and some substantial bandwidth theft, we will have to do all of our movie files in zip format. Left click on the files as you normally would to view a picture. When you get a choice, click on "save", and put it on your hard drive in the directory of your choice. UnZIP and play from there.

I know this is not especially convenient, but it allows the film clips to continue. I can protect .zip files from hot-linking in the same way I can protect still images. For some reason, if I protect .avis and .wmvs from hot-linking, they will not play in the Windows media player, and I can't get a satisfactory work-around. Perhaps I will find a better solution, but for now this new policy allows you to continue getting the movie clips you want to see, which is much preferable to my abandoning the clips altogether.

Breathless (1983) - Day 1

Valerie Kaprisky in Breathless, or as the French call it "A bout de souffle". Kaprisky was one of the sexiest women ever - until she opened her mouth and delivered her lines like Robby the Robot. (I wonder if she was just speaking English phonetically). I can still remember when she said that she would stay in acting, but not do any more nude scenes. I wonder why she thought she was ever in the acting profession to begin with! To be fair, her English language acting more or less ended twenty years ago, but she's still acting today in French.

• Kaprisky ( .avi- zip) (.wmv - zip)

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.

Human Nature (2001) is quirky. All the details are in back issues of the Funhouse, with both Tuna and JohnnyWeb offering insightful comments... which lead me to watch it in the first place. Me? I liked it a lot. Maybe it is a hazard of looking at so many movies, this tendency to like those that do things differently, but Human Nature does well those things it does differently. So I liked it. A lot.

What about the babes, you ask?

Well, by now you know that Patricia Arquette gives up goodies but there are problems: 1) a good bit of the time she's covered in artificial body hair; 2) at other times her arms or her real hair (the stuff on her head) or digitally applied leafy objects cover up the critical stuff; 3) even when you get a clear shot it occurs when Patricia is in California and the camera is in Tierra del Fuego. But damn the torpedoes. Grabbed a bunch of frames and stuck em together in eight collages. All of em show something. The last one is from the climbing-thru-the-trees full-frontal sequence. I blew it up as big as it should go.

• Patricia Arquette (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

Miranda Otto is wonderful. Looks great, too. This is a single frame where she's lolling about in her nightie, giving us some pokie action. She did such a terrific job with her character that I'd watch the movie again just to pick up things I know I missed the first couple of times.

• Miranda Otto

Deborah Ferrari plays the default stripper, required of all films. Nice bum in a thong and the upper goodies are not bad at all.

• Deborah Ferrari

And Angela Little, former Hefmate, plays a waitress at a Hooters clone called Chesters. Nothing showing in a tight t-shirt. This depresses me. Former Hefmates are in movies to get their kitts off. When they stay clothed it makes the world seem too bizarre to endure.

• Angela Little

Thar ya go, pards. I recommend you watch it for the style and the substance, though, because the nekkid babes are just not around for very long.

Today the Ghost serves up a few video clips of the petite, yet quite busty babe Elizabeth Berridge. Everyone knows her best of course as Mozart's wife from the multi-oscar winning Milos Forman movie "Amadeus" (1984).

Recently she played Annie Oakley in "Hidalgo" (2004).

• Elizabeth Berridge (zipped .wmv) topless in a deleted scene found on the director's cut DVD of "Amadeus".

• Here are two more vids (zipped .wmvs) of Elizabeth Berridge topless in a shower scene from the 1981 horror movie "The Funhouse". (1, 2)

MARTHA OFFERS TO GO TO HER ROOM
No Call Waiting? It's Hell! - Martha Stewart is appealing her five months in prison and five months home confinement, but she offered to start serving it right away, on one condition. She wants to do the entire 10 months in home confinement on her 153-acre estate in Connecticut. She could only leave for 48 hours a week for work, church, grocery shopping and medical appointments, and would have to eliminate all but one phone and get rid of call-waiting and call-forwarding. Prosecutors do not approve.