Sunday

Assorted film clips:

Linnea Quigley, Night of the Demons. (Three .avis zipped togther)

Sherilyn Fenn, Two Moon Junction. (Zipped .avi). If we ever do a Top 20 nude scenes of all time, this will probably be on the list.

Julie Warner, Doc Hollywood. (Two .avis zipped together)

 

 

THE BELIEVERS (1987):

Pretty strange horror film. It starts out with Martin Sheen crying over spilt milk.

Literally.

Of course that makes a lot more sense when you realize that his wife stepped in the milk as she was touching a shorted-out Mr. Coffee, causing her to get fried like a moth in a bug zapper. The film doesn't waste any time before getting to this. First, Martin Sheen jogs a bit through the opening credits. We hear some eerie music, although nothing eerie happens. It's just the milkman making his morning rounds. We wonder what the eerie music is for. Soon we realize that the seemingly benevolent milkman has delivered the instrument of death, the dreaded carton of half-and-half. Hey, everyone knows that stuff is dangerous. That's why I only drink 5/8ths-and-3/8ths. Anyway, the credits stop rolling, and  ... zap ...  the wife buys the farm.

A dairy farm, to be specific.

After this horrifying death, which is completely irrelevant to the rest of the film, Sheen does what I think any of us would do when confronted with agonizing grief. He moves himself and his son from Minneapolis to New York City. Mind you, he's a police psychologist. Maybe he thinks that mentally disturbed New York cops will make the wife's macabre death seem positively festive in comparison. I would have thought that the young son would be better off in tranquil Minneapolis, among his friends and familiar teachers and relatives, but I'm not a psychologist and Sheen is. Apparently there is no better therapy for a traumatized kid than to move him to The Big Apple and expose him to the stresses and terrors of policemen haunted by their very existence.

It'll help toughen the kid up.

Yeah, I know, it doesn't make a lot of sense. And I wasn't kidding about the irrelevance of that death. Neither the late wife nor the Minneapolis origin was ever used in the plot in any way. If the film had simply started with Sheen as a single parent living in New York, it would have been exactly the same film. Well, it would have been the same film without a woman getting bug-zapped, which I guess was an element of "foreboding." Personally, I advocate less foreboding and more afterboding. Maybe even some actual real-time boding.

Anyway, the film centers around Santerķa, the Cuban-African spirit religion. Santerķa has kind of an interesting background in that it started as kind of a secret code used by certain slaves to continue their indigenous religion. They would pretend to be accepting Catholicism, thus pleasing their masters, and would seem to be devoutly inspired by the Catholic saints. In fact, the masters were amused that the simple Africans seemed to be more interested in the saints than in God. ("Santerķa" essentially means "saint-worship.") It turns out that the Africans weren't so simple. In fact, they were some cagey-ass motherfuckers who had figured out a way to  worship their polygamous gods in the guise of Catholic saints, with each saint acting as a secret symbol for a specific god. That way the Africans were able to keep their own beliefs while mollifying their masters with their ostensible conversion to Catholicism. The bric-a-bric of the Santerķa mythology is quite cinematic, since it combines the colorful Catholic imagery of statues, candles, incense and rituals with all sorts of voodoo-type exotica involving colored beads, drums, tropical fruit, mysterious rituals, painted faces, sea shells, and animal sacrifice.

Santerķa is exotic, but essentially benign unless you're a goat or a chicken, so the film's association with it was fundamentally window-dressing, designed to provide a colorful backdrop for the film and to show how the white people misunderstand and fear anything different. The real evil in the film comes from a secret "brujerķa" (witchcraft) cult spun off from Santerķa. These people are to Santerķa as satanists are to Christians. Yeah, I know that's kind of obscure and will not be grasped immediately, but that's the film's gimmick, for better or worse. The brujerķa advocates are into some bad-ass stuff like sacrificing humans, and watching Jeopardy re-runs when they already know all the questions. Apparently they worship both JoBu and Alex Trebek. One of their most powerful spells requires three young boys to be sacrificed by their own parents. They've already rubbed out two youngsters, but they're coming up empty-handed on number three. Say, guess who has just moved to town with his son. Be sure to word your guess in the form of a question.

I'm pretty sure you can take it from there.

It would seem that the sole power of this form of brujerķa is the Jedi mind trick. I'm not kidding. Not even a little bit. In a scene which seems to pay direct homage to Star Wars, the brujo smuggles a suitcase full of evil paraphernalia through U.S. customs with the following technique:

Customs Agent: So, Mr. ... (looks at passport) Voodoo?

Evil Caribbean Dude: That's FATHER Voodoo. I earned that title with seven years in the evil seminary.

Customs Agent:  So you're an evil priest?

Evil Caribbean Dude: I beg your pardon? I am most certainly not an evil priest, sir. I am an evil HIGH priest.

Customs Agent: Oh, sorry, your eminence. And is the reason for your trip evil business or evil pleasure?

Evil Caribbean Dude: Well, heh-heh, a little of both. I'm really here to do some evil work for my boss, but I hope to catch some evil sights while I'm here as well. You know there are so many in New York. Trump Tower. Trump World Tower. Trump Place. And as long as I'm here, maybe I'll catch an evil show, something with Nathan Lane or ... hey, does Jeopardy tape here or in L.A.?

Customs Agent (shrugging shoulders amiably): Well, let's see what you have in this suitcase. Open it please.

Evil Caribbean Dude, now with no eyeballs, menacingly: You don't want to look in there. There's nothing of interest.

Customs Agent: I don't want to look in there. There's obviously nothing of interest.  Enjoy your stay in New York, Father Voodoo.

Structurally, The Believers is very similar to Rosemary's Baby, probably too similar in several ways which become more and more apparent as the plot unfolds. Apart from its obviously derivative nature, it is a moderately interesting "urban horror" film with a decent cast (Martin Sheen, Robert Loggia, Helen Shaver, Jimmy Smits) and some agreeably gaudy symbology. It earns its horror stripes less from tension or "jump" scares than from creepiness. It lingers on images like autopsies, or worms and bugs crawling out of people's skin and vital organs, or guys who can make their eyeballs disappear. It's tame, bland fare by today's jaded, post-Tarantino standards, but was probably considered fairly graphic in its day. To tell ya the truth, I don't remember how it was received in 1987.

Rather surprisingly, two major talents were behind this movie. The Believers was directed by John Schlesinger of Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man fame. The screenplay was written by Mark Frost, who also wrote what is probably my favorite sports book, The Greatest Game Ever Played. Those guys have each mastered other genres, but neither one of them seemed to be very comfortable in the horror milieu. With so much high-powered talent behind it, the film is certainly not incompetent, but it is nothing more than an OK time-killer. Most frustratingly it has one of those ambiguous post-resolution epilogues where you can't really figure out what it is all supposed to mean because it seems to be leaving room for a sequel which never materialized. Apart from that frustrating ending, it's the kind of film you can watch if it comes up on cable when you're in the mood for a movie, but not the kind of film you plan your schedule around.

  • IMDb: 5.7
  • Critics: 29% positive
  • Ebert: 1.5/4
  • Gross: $18.8m
  • Our scale: C-

Film clips: Helen Shaver, two short .wmv files zipped together.  Helen shows all three Bs and even poses briefly for the procto-cam.

Helen Shaver

Note: I am lukewarm toward The Believers, but Tuna likes this film substantially less.

Here are his comments:

The Believers (1987) is a supernatural thriller set in that hotbed of the occult, New York City, starring Helen Shaver and Martin Sheen. Sheen loses his wife due to a freak electrical accident. He and his son move to New York, and their new landlady, Helen Shaver,  finds them a housekeeper. Sheen and Shaver become an item. Turns out Sheen and his son are the target of a voodoo cult that believes in child sacrifice, and have selected Sheen's son for the honors.

I can't give you many more plot details, because I found it totally unwatchable, and fast forwarded from one nude scene to the next.  If you are a fan of "Cuban voodoo cults trying to sacrifice son of New York psychiatrist" films, you might enjoy it. Otherwise, avoid it. D.
 

 

OTHER CRAP:

The Saints quarterback was taken out of a game after being injured by the Titan's mascot

Slashdot | Defeating Google's Perpetual Search Logging
  • "Google's policy of storing everyone's search histories forever is causing concern amongst many, especially since Google stores a cookie on everyone's PC expiring in 2038. But at least one user is fighting back. His short and simple guide tells you how to set up any decent web browser so that it routes Google requests through an anonymous proxy, while sending everything else direct to the net for full-speed surfing. Follow these steps and get Google's nose out of your business once and for all.'"

RIAA Wants to Depose Dead Defendant's Children; But Will Allow them 60 Days to "Grieve"

If You Build It, They Will Come Again
  • About five thousand fans joined Kevin Costner in a famous Iowa cornfield for a special screening of the movie classic 'Field of Dreams.'

Clean but mean electric car is creator's dream come true

Lieberman appears likely to retain his seat as an independent.

The Worst music videos of the 80s

Daily Box Office for Friday, August 11, 2006
  • To call this a surprise would be a severe understatement. Talladega Nights and World Trade Center performed as expected, but neither of them won the day. Step Up, the dancing film, took in 8.5 million dollars on its opening day, despite being in only 2400 theaters. It came close to tripling its estimate, and took in $3400 per screen, nearly twice as much as Talladega Nights.
  • Pulse, a new horror film, also did better than its expectations to pull into fourth place.
  • Both Pulse and Step Up succeeded without positive reviews. Pulse was totally unseen by critics, and Step Up was almost universally panned, although Variety liked it.
  • Zoom, the new Tim Allen superhero comedy, another one withheld from critics, bombed.
  • Little Miss Sunshine again had excellent revenues in limited distribution. It will pick up another 400-500 theaters next week.

Least surprising fact about Hillary Clinton? She isn't interested in Dick.

Tiny Tim covers Rod Stewart's "Do You Think I'm Sexy?" on Tonight, December 11, 1979.

President Bush reads Camus's 'The Stranger' on ranch vacation
  • That's only to relax his mind a little when he's taking a break from Finnegans Wake, Critique of Pure Reason, A Brief History of Time, and The Best of Little Lulu

Best street murals ever!

Third baseman B.J. Upton throws out a runner at first while lying on his back.

The Deathbed Confessions of Fidel Castro
  • Original plan to defend The Bay Of Pigs: put a Canadian Flag on the shore, making invaders think they had reached the wrong country.

Beautiful high-definition trailer for Brian DePalma's new film, The Black Dahlia

Richie Valens arrested, jailed

 

 

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

 

Twisted Sisters (2006)

Twisted Sisters (2006) is a direct-to-vid from writer/director/producer Wolfgang Büld. As the title suggests, the story contains the surprise evil twin, but it can be forgiven because is not the plot device used as the last minute solution to a mystery. In fact, we know about the evil twin less than half way into the film, as do the police.

Men start turning up very dead with holes where their genitals used to be, and witnesses identify Jennifer (Fiona Horsey) as the murderer. She seems like an unlikely candidate. She's had a perfect life, and is now pregnant and with a perfect man. It isn't until her parents confess that she is adopted and that she may have a twin sister that we learn about Norah (also played by Fiona Horsey). Norah had a very different life from her twin, having been raised by an uncle who raped her early and often, and later having spent time in a hospital for the criminally insane after having removed the same uncle's objectionable bits. Norah is insanely jealous of Jennifer's happiness, and is bent on evening up the score.

Since the evil twin bit is revealed mid-film, there are clearly many plot twists to come after. The strength of this film, however, is not the plot but the inventive murders, the most creative of which was accomplished by a large fireworks apparatus in a man's asshole.

Comments and reviews tend toward the positive, and I would agree. It's a solid straight-to-vid. Fiona Horsey played the two characters well, the murders were clever, and the motivations were believable.

This is a C.

IMDb readers say 5.6.

 

Fiona Horsey shows breasts and buns in several scenes as both Jennifer and Sarah.

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

Dann reports on Side Effects:

If you have even a mild feeling of good will towards the pharmaceutical industry, you won't after you view this 2005 drug company expose which also doubles as a romantic comedy. Must people already know this, but the people running the drug business are such scum-sucking vermin that they make the worst criminals look like choirboys in comparison. In any society that wasn't run by corruption, greed, crooked on-the-take politicians, low-life completely unethical businessmen, and dirty money, like ours is today, they'd all be serving life sentences in jail.

The story follows the adventures of Karly, a young drug representative for a major drug company. Karly struggles with ethics and love as she tries to create a career for herself while still being able to look herself in the mirror each morning.

During the course of the movie, which is both funny and a good romance, director/writer Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau brings out some of the industry's dirty little secrets like diabetes drugs which costs only ten cents per pill to make, but wholesale for 12 dollars per pill, giving the manufacturer an obscene and disgustingly large profit, then retail for nineteen dollars per pill, creating another huge and inexcusable profit, while prohibiting the poor and uninsured from getting the drugs they need.

For Karly, love and ethics triumph in the end, but this movie is most important for the information it provides. Considering that the movie cost only one hundred and ninety thousand dollars to make, while the drug industry spends over 25 BILLION dollars to promote their outrageously inflated drugs, the producers may be fighting a losing battle against a legal criminal activity, but they're trying, at least, and EVERYONE should see this movie!

Katherine Heigl

 

 

 

 

Scarlett Johansson shows more areola in this version of the famous picture than in the actual Vanity Fair cover

Here's Franka Potente in the immortal German classic, The Three Gas Station Chicks. (Rated a sterling 2.4 at IMDb). Franka became an instant international legend with Run, Lola, Run, but her previous career was ordinary. Her subsequent career has been in some higher-profile films, but she herself hasn't made any special contribution.

Geno Lechner had a memorable topless scene in 1994's Immortal Beloved. Here is what she's shown since then.

(l) Corps plonges, 1998 (c) Seerosenteich, 2003 (r) Charlotte, 2004

Before Immortal Beloved, Geno offered her only lower body exposure in her screen debut in Love at First Sight (1991)