His Tale, Her Tale is the fifth episode of the short lived Cinemax series Pleasure Zone. The series is a matchmaking Website run by a woman named Serena, and, based on two episodes, they have a predictable formula. They open with the two leads having sex. Then they take a short break for a plot point or two, and the two leads have sex again. Then the lead guy has sex with someone else, and, finally, the two leads have sex again. Even given the very short amount of screen time given to plot, the require astronomically unlikely coincidences for this one, not once, but twice.

After the opening sex scene, we see Catalina and her boyfriend (Morgan Daniel) having friends over to watch a game. Catalina is telling the woman how the two got together in the kitchen, while Daniel is telling the other guy his version of the same story. Usually, when I hear two sides of a story, I have some idea where the truth lies, but not in this case. At any rate, Daniel was to meet his computer date at a bar, and the only thing he knows about her is that they attended the same Florida college. Although we never learn what sate they are in, we know it isn't Florida. He spies Catalina wearing a Florida Gator hat, assumes she is his date, and they end up together. Meanwhile, his real date shows up with the same Florida Gator hat. So, three people in the same bar at the same time with the same college baseball cap from another state? Anyway, Serena makes a second date for Daniel and Seana Ryan. They are to meet for lunch in a French restaurant. Daniel intends to have the lunch and get rid of her, until he sees ... may I have the envelope please ... Catalina eating in the same restaurant with another guy. He takes Ryan home, and Catalina catches him. Of course, they must get back together for the ending sex scene.

These are almost certainly digital video, and don't use the tricky camera work, lighting, and transition effects that mar many softcore films. In this case, Catalina shows everything, while Ryan only shows breasts and buns. Those who enjoy this stuff, which is kind of couples erotica, aren't really looking for plot anyway, so I suppose this is a C.

Cabin Fever (2002 or 2003)

Cabin Fever was the hottest property at the Toronto Film festival in 2002. Several studios got into a bidding war, which Lions Gate won with a deal that was said to involve high seven figures for the film rights, plus a commitment to at least low eight figures on the marketing and promotional end.

It's a horror movie of a fairly traditional kind. Five college kids, consisting of the usual suspects, head out to a remote cabin in the woods to chill out before they have to face life. They have the usual foreboding experiences with the locals, who seem to be leftovers from the cast of Deliverance.

Things progress quietly until the kids encounter a hermit covered with pustules, obviously the victim of some new and horrible viral disease. The first encounter of the hermit with the entire group of kids gives us our first strong indication that this is not a movie about real people, but about movie characters. In real life, if someone comes to your door and says, "I'm hurt, I need a ride to the doctor", you say, "OK, but you may be infectious, so just don't touch anything here, and climb into the open flatbed of our vehicle. We'll get you to town. These kids don't behave like that because they must know they are in a horror movie. They recoil in horror, close the door on the poor sap, and eventually end up shooting him, beating him, and setting him on fire. The kids do not unanimously agree on this course of action, but that's what they end up doing.

The infected guy tries to douse the fire by jumping into the reservoir, thus poisoning the water supply. Plague ensues. The locals turn on the kids, the kids turn on one another, things get ugly.

Critical reaction has been generally favorable, but not without dissents:

• The critics who love the horror genre have really taken this one to heart, so it must be a C+ on our scale - good fare for genre fans.
• Mainstream critics most typically said that it's an OK 70s or 80s style horror movie, but nothing special. Ebert said one and a half stars, Gleibermann said C+, no review from James Berardinelli. I had about the same reaction, although I thought it above average in one way: the widescreen cinematography was often very effective.

Nudity report:

• Cerina Vincent. She also played the exchange student in Not Another Teen Movie, in which she was constantly naked. She got topless a lot in this movie as well. She looked great. (1, 2, 3)
• Jordan Ladd: bikini and braless views (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

La Curée  (1966)

La Curée (aka The Game is Over) is one of those shallow Roger Vadim movies from the 60s in which he tries to make his then-new wife (Jane Fonda) act and look like his old wife (Brigitte Bardot).

The basic story isn't bad at all, although it should be pretty good since it was written by Emile Zola. Vadim took Zola's second Rougon-Macquart volume and transposed the story to the 1960s, weighing it down with a lot of trendy 60s baggage that must have seamed like High Style at the time, but seems like High Camp today. The set design looks like it might have been done by Peter Max, and there is sitar music in the background score. One of the main characters is actually studying Chinese. Ah, the cultural enlightenment of the 60s!

SPOILERS:

Fonda plays a beautiful trophy wife who is living in an elegant Parisian mansion, enjoying her husband's money and her stepson's dick. She thinks that she may be able to swing away with the money and the stepson, thus cutting the old fella out of the picture, but her husband is no fool. He earned his fortune with a brilliant, scheming mind. He deduces Fonda's relationship with his son, and out-guesses her plan. He first cuts her off from her half of their money by making her believe that everything is tied up in his businesses. He offers her a choice - wait a couple years and double or triple her investment, or leave now with nothing. She chooses to leave. Then, by pretending to be on the brink of ruin and in desperate need of his son's help, the father maneuvers his son into an engagement with the daughter of an investor.

Voila! Fonda is divorced without a penny of her own, and is also cut off from the son's share of the fortune. Game over.

The morality of the story is actually quite complex. Although the father was a scheming industrialist, he gave Fonda two chances to make amends. When he first discovered her infidelity, he said nothing, but tried to reignite her passion for himself. Fonda slept with him a couple times, but she then asked for a divorce, and never told him the truth, or offered even a shaky pretext for her request. Failing that ploy, the industrialist offered Fonda a chance to triple her money if she'd simply wait a few years before divorcing, all the while being able to continue her elegant life-style. Once again, she refused his offer, thinking she would get the son immediately. Only after offering these two chances, and finding her neither co-operative nor forthcoming, did he destroy her completely. In a sense, she was destroyed by her own lies and greed.

It might have been a brilliant little movie filled with scathing humor if the project had been placed in the hands of a top filmmaker, but under Vadim's clumsy direction it is nothing more than a bagatelle. Vadim is the French John Derek, a man who seduced many beautiful women, married a bunch of them, and placed them in many films, but never really made anything worth watching. (Vadim had a child by DeNeuve, as well as marriages to Fonda, Bardot, and two others. He had children with at least four different women). In 48 years of filmmaking (1950-97), he was unable to create a single film rated higher than 6.2 at IMDb. Here are the twelve that are remembered by enough people to earn a score in the database:

• (6.19) - Histoires extraordinaires (1968)
• (5.93) - Et Dieu... créa la femme (1956)
• (5.71) - Liaisons dangereuses, Les (1959)
• (5.54) - Sept péchés capitaux, Les (1962)
• (5.50) - Barbarella (1968)
• (5.32) - Bijoutiers du clair de lune, Les (1957)
• (5.27) - Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971)
• (5.25) - Et mourir de plaisir (1960)
• (5.07) - Curée, La (1966)
• (4.68) - Night Games (1980)
• (4.27) - Don Juan 73 (1973)
• (4.10) - And God Created Woman (1988)

Vadim wastes the first half of the film on Fonda's non-nude nude scenes - teasing the viewer with devices like having her pass behind a screen at the exact instant she drops her towel, or having her dance behind a gauze curtain while wrapped in another gauze curtain, this maker her naked on camera with absolutely nothing visible tot the audience. One begins to wonder if Fonda actually had any nipples. Vadim even goes so far as to shoot a sex scene with Fonda and her lover in which the camera is pointed not at the lovers, but at their reflection in a conveniently juxtaposed distorting mirror - the kind used in a carnival fun house. And this is not a fleeting image. The mirror loving is embraced by the camera, turning the lens, hence the viewer's eye, into a kaleidoscope. (Talk about 60s!)

The second half of the film is better, but that is not because of Vadim's direction, which actually gets worse. Between every scene and the next, he inserts a picture of a shifting liquid image like a lava lamp, backed by sitar music! The reason the second half is watchable is because the story is Zola's, and the photography is Claude Renoir's. The respected cinematographer Renoir is the nephew of the great filmmaker Jean Renoir, and the grandson of THE Renoir, the impressionist painter.

Based on this description, this is a C-. It is a watchable movie because of an excellent basic story and some beautiful color cinematography. The faddish direction, enslaved to 60s chic, kept it from being a better film.

Nudity:

• Jane Fonda (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

MAILBOX:

Scoop,

For what it's worth, Adrienne Barbeau has a partial nude scene in this week's episode of HBO's "Carnivale." She's about 58, and it's a
medium-shot, but it's pretty good. And give her balls for doing nudity at her "advanced" age, but if she still looks good, why not?

3Finger

OTHER CRAP:

• Ben Boyer Shatters World Masturbation Record!

• Israel Blames Arafat For J. Lo-Affleck Split

• Oh, no-o-o-o-o-, Mr Sluggo. Star Magazine says Ben Affleck & Jennifer Lopez Are Back Together Again. Arafat forgiven.

• RIP - Gordon Jump - the lovable, bumbling Big Guy on WKRP

• Dick Gephardt launches a website - AMiserableFailure.com. No kidding.

• retro SPICE: tribute to Cindy Crawford

• Kelly Monaco, Playmate of April 1997, who did a nice topless scene in Idle Hands, free nude gallery courtesy of PlayboyPlus.com!

• Who was responsible for the most deaths in the 20th century? Hitler? Stalin? This article says "nope" to those guys. It was Rachel Carson - author of Silent Spring.

• Molester acquitted when Norwegian court rules: "Touching or stroking the breasts without touching the nipple and touching the pelvis near the pubic hairs of the aggrieved party can not be regarded as an act of obscenity" Strange stuff. The district attorney will not appeal the acquittal, because "your bottom is public property". Oh, yeah, did I mention the accused was doing that to 14 year old girls?

• 'All you've heard is wrong' - the French killed JFK

• The Secret Poems of Arnold Schwarzenegger

• Weekly World News: Homeless people turning into mutants

• The hottest new rap star - Posh Spice?

• New York may ban smoking in your own car

• John J. Pitney Jr. on Howard Dean on National Review Online. The article is not especially interesting. It makes the point that Dean fails to excite black voters, who are normally Democratic. It does have one great line: "Dean rallies are whiter than the Stockholm chapter of the Barry Manilow Fan Club."

• Gary Coleman's campaign ad

• Republicans spamming Google. Actually, they are mass-producing "letters to the editor", which are ending up online.

• World GDP Rankings. It is well known that California has a larger economy than France. Not as well known is the fact that three US CITIES have a larger economy than Russia. Interesting to me: if Texas seceded (as it theoretically can) and became a separate country, it would be the second largest economy in North America - it has a larger economy than either Canada or Mexico

• The Ballpark Guys 100 Greatest Players of the 20th Century. As always, a list is a conversation starter. The biggest weakness I saw was in "great defensive players" where they listed Ryne Sandberg and NOT Bill Mazeroski, or maybe in best pitchers, where I had to read the list several times, because I couldn't believe that they left Randy Johnson off.

• How good are computer graphics? Can you tell which are Fakes and which are Fotos?

• pretty sure this guy is rooting for #3. Think #3 might be Robin Williams.

• What Would Jesus Drive? This is an entire site dedicated to that question. I know what God would drive. A Plymouth Fury. And he'd drive crazy to scare people. It is in the Bible. Psalm 2: "then He will terrify them in His Fury".

• A leak in an aircraft sewerage system could have created the 'bomb' of smelly flying shit that hit a house in a rural part of New Zealand.

• How to create a dorm room conducive to sex. Hint: hide the Star Wars toys.

• Tennessee Titans Cheerleaders. They are the only NFL team with some male cheerleaders.

• Woody's World of Penis Euphemisms!

• Celebrity Sleuth tribute to DeDe Lind

• a tribute to Debbie Dutch

• A sick cartoon in which cuddly characters are maimed and decapitated is coming to UK audiences. Happy Tree Friends features a series of happy-go-lucky woodland animals which end up ripped to shreds in pools of blood in each short episode.

• Vince Gallo has cut a half hour out of his critically crushed 'Brown Bunny,' in which Chloe Sevigny has a buzzed-about oral sex scene, in hopes that it will get a better reception.

   

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 Lawdog or Junior or C2000 or Realist or ICMS or Mick Locke, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

In homage to my favorite of the old Republic Pictures serials you can credit me as The Crimson Ghost ("The world shudders before this atomic maniac").

• Three ladies from two Chuck Norris movies.  

  • Karen Carlson (whom readers may remember from Student Nurses) is protected from ninjas by Mr. Norris in the Octagon (1980). 

  • Toni Kalem canoodles with Mr. Norris in Silent Rage

  • Lillette Zoe Raley taunts Stephen Furst (Flounder from Animal House) in Silent Rage (1982).

   

• Some non-nudes of Pamela Hensley from Buck Rogers In The 25th Century. (1, 2)
   

Sheeri Rappaport
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

The pluses:

IDIOT BITTEN BY SHARK ON CAMERA
Doctor Of Thinkology - A Discovery Channel camera crew got the first-ever footage of a shark attacking a human being. Dr. Erich Ritter had convinced himself that he understood shark body language and that yoga breathing exercises would lower his heart rate and convince sharks that he was not prey. To prove it, he waded bare-legged into a group of sharks as cameras filmed above and under water. He was badly bitten and spent six weeks in the hospital. The film will air next Sunday.