Deviant Obsession (2002) is a skinemax effort now available on DVD. It stars Brick Randall in her second role. Her first, Scarlet Countess from 2001 is rated 1.5 at IMDB, and this effort scores 2.6. At this rate of improvement, look for a watchable film from her on DVD in 2007.

Brick, as the film opens, is representing the female half of a divorce, and is presenting a video of the husband cheating in opposing council's office. One of the partners follows her to her car, and tries to get a lunch date with her, but she declines. Cut to her in bed with the other partner. They are interrupted by a call from his wife. He goes home to find her in possession of incriminating pictures of him with Brick. He leaves, calls Brick, who chooses not to answer the phone, then his partner, who also doesn't answer. He leaves a message on his partner's machine, telling him that he will be in a strip bar, and would like some company for a drink.

Someone phones a woman in the strip bar, talks about him, and she goes over and seduces him, but on the condition that they don't learn each others names. He wakes up in the morning, and goes home to find his wife murdered, and he is the most popular suspect. When nobody will corroborate his alibi, he is charged with murder.

STOP!!! Lets play detective at this point. He is a hot shot lawyer, and so is supposedly bright, right? Someone has clearly framed him for murder, and the woman who picked him up was part of the plan. So he would start thinking about motive and opportunity, and clearly only one person not at the strip club knew he was there -- his partner.

Ok, we just solved this thriller, or suspense yarn, or whatever it is meant to be, so we can sit back and watch the bouncing boobies. Brick goes to work undercover in the strip club as a stripper. She does overhear one of the strippers and the bar manager saying incriminating things, after the woman (hard core star Venus) demonstrates a lapdance with her. Then, both of them die in an auto accident. Then brick seduces the motel night manager. He is shot shortly after her visit. Finally, the second partner does an entire confession to Brick just before he intends to kill her, like any of us needed the help figuring it out.

As far as nudity, Venus shows breasts and buns, hard core star Lauren Montgomery shows breasts, Brick shows everything, although her wisp of bush is only briefly visible, one stripper shows everything, and another keeps her g-string on. I suppose this is a C-. Lots of acceptable looking naked women doing simulated sex fulfills the minimum requirements for a soft core. The plot attempt, however, is pathetic.

American Nightmare (2002):

Tuna liked this slasher film when he reviewed it two years ago, and I kinda liked it as well. It's no masterpiece, and the ending was disappointing, but it's a helluva production for 52 grand.

I just finished watching Jon Keeyes's second movie, Hallow's End, the one that takes place entirely in a Halloween Haunted House, so I thought I'd go back and catch this one as well. Both films happen on Halloween, and both films feature a lot of "young adults just chatting" scenes, so Keeyes has got a whole career theme going here. In fact the themes are pretty similar in that each teen met a designer fate. In Hallow's End, each teen turned into the character he portrayed for Halloween. In this movie, each teen was confronted with his or her greatest fear.

I was much more impressed with this film than I was with Hallow's End.

• I enjoyed the teen talk more in this one, since it was basically movie-geek talk. Keeyes is obviously a major fan of horror films in general, and 80s-style slasher/horror in particular.
• The characters in this film were more realistic than in the other. In fact, I thought that every character in the film could have been a real person, saying real things, whereas some of the characters in Hallow's End seemed to come from another planet.
• Colored lights and/or filtered shots are usually to be dreaded, but Keeyes made excellent use of some blue lighting in American Nightmare to enhance the creepy world of the slasher's mind and contrast it to the homey feel created by the warm golden hues that often bathed the kids when they were not threatened.
• Hallow's End had no real capable star to anchor the cast, but Debbie Rochon is in this film, and she is probably the best and most versatile actress in the entire grade-B world, now that Jillian McWhirter, the Streep of Shit, is basically retired. (Only one movie appearance since 1999).
• American Nightmare has a great, stylish, opening credits sequence, and some beautiful, tightly-storyboarded editing throughout. Robert Castaldo, in addition to Keeyes's films, also edited Andy Anderson's excellent little indy film, Learning Curve.

In both cases, I have to compliment the director for his ability to stretch a buck. Hallow's End also got a tremendous amount of mileage out of one very appropriate set. If there are any producers out there who want to make some films economically, you could do much worse than to hire this guy.

• Debbie Rochon (1, 2, 3, 4)
• Rebecca Stacey (1, 2)

They Live (1987):

I came here to chew bubble gum and kick some ass. And I'm all out of bubble gum.

 -- Rowdy Roddy Piper as Nada in They Live

One of the most fascinating topics for movie buffs is the body of films upon which people simply cannot agree. The most famous example, as brought into the spotlight by an episode of Seinfeld, is The English Patient, which is both one of the most beloved and one of the most reviled films ever made, and about which its supporters and detractors cannot even find common ground for argument.

They Live is in the same category. The entire debate may place this movie on a lower overall level than The English Patient, but the gap between its defenders and detractors is similarly wide. On the one hand, it is covered by many of the most popular web sites that specialize in awful movies: Bad Movie Night; Oh, the Humanity, It's a Bad Bad Bad Bad Movie; etc. On the other hand, Rotten Tomatoes shows that 93% of mainstream critics gave They Live a positive review - a higher rating than Fargo, The Lion King, The English Patient, The Usual Suspects, or the Oscar-winning all time box office champ, Titanic.

There you have it. A film in the same company as Fargo and The Usual Suspects which is also in the same company as Plan 9 and Godzilla vs Mothra. How can that be?

Two reasons:

1. It is a film with great concepts and bad execution. Your opinion of the film will depend on how heavily you weigh those components. If you like a cerebral and thought-provoking movie, with the kind of incisive social commentary that only the best S/F can provide, you'll find that this movie is on the ball. On the other hand, you'll find it very much off the ball if you are bothered by bad acting, cheap effects, silly-looking aliens, and a pointless seven minute fist-fight that drags the film to a completely forward halt. (You can't even get emotionally involved in the fight- it's between the two good guys!) If you walked past the TV while this movie was on and caught a minute of it, your impression would be that it was a hopeless cheesefest.

2. It is a film with a controversial, highly political point of view. If you agree with that point of view, you'll probably love it. If you are offended by that point of view, you'll fall back on the fact that it has poor production values, and dump on it.

They Live is fundamentally a low-budget version of The Matrix, without the spiritual/mystical elements.

In The Matrix, a bunch of machines are enslaving humans without their knowledge, by placing them all in a permanent dream-state and letting them live out a contented but delusional life inside a machine-induced computer program. A small group of humans finds out about the deception and battles the machines.

In They Live, a bunch of aliens are enslaving humans without their knowledge, by placing them all in a permanent dream-state and letting them live out a contented but delusional life inside a machine-induced form of mass hypnosis and subliminal suggestion. A small group of humans finds out about the deception and battles the aliens.

They Live doesn't start out as a science fiction film at all. In fact, the beginning of the film most resembles Bound for Glory, the Woody Guthrie biopic, updated to the 80s. A jobless, homeless drifter named Nada grabs a freight train, disembarks in Los Angeles, and tries to make himself a new life. He gets a construction job, and sleeps temporarily in a squatter's camp filled with other homeless people. They discuss the hard economic times, but many still have faith in America, and their ability to rebuild a new life. In the evening, the homeless man gets near the crowd around the burning fires, plays his harmonica, listens to people talk, and thinks.

Slowly, he becomes perplexed by a church near his Hooverville. He hears the choir rehearsing until four in the morning, and sees people skulking in and out mysteriously. Overcome by his curiosity, he creeps into the basement, only to find that there is no choir at all, just a tape recording of people singing hymns. There is nothing of significance in the Church basement except boxes and boxes of sunglasses.

It turns out that the sunglasses are de-cloaking devices invented by the human underground. When Nada puts on the glasses, the wave-induced hypnosis no longer works on him, and he can see things as they are. TV, magazines, and advertising are all seen as facades - clever artifices designed to carry subliminal messages to humans. "Work hard, don't complain", "Marry and Reproduce", "Obey", "Be happy with what you have". More important than that, Nada realizes that not all humans are human. A small but powerful minority consists of aliens with faces that resemble stripped skulls. The aliens use their mass-hypnosis device to blend in with humans. Without the anti-hypnotic glasses, aliens and humans look alike.

The brilliant element of the film is that it presents the alien colonization of Earth in a manner completely consistent with actual human colonization in the past. The aliens are not presented as murderous or barbaric. They are not significantly different from humans, except in appearance, and even in appearance they are essentially humans without facial skin. They are simply doing to Earth what the English did to much of the world in its Imperial days - viewing a new territory as an opportunity for economic expansion. The Aliens do not use force any more than any human colonials ever used force to subdue native populations. In fact, they actually use less force than humans, and more persuasion or deception. Aided by human collaborators, they gradually get all the best jobs and the biggest fortunes on our planet, and they allow the unenlightened humans to continue functioning in their everyday lives, creating the wealth that the aliens and collaborators exploit. In essence, they are absolutely no different from any class of plutocrats which has come to dominate a society for their own benefit, except that they happen to be from another planet instead of another country. One of the more controversial elements of the film is that Ronald Reagan, with his simple, optimistic bromides, was actually revealed to be one of the aliens!

The part of Nada - how's that for a name you can drop in your Existentialist Literature course? It means "nothing" in Spanish - is played by the famous wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper. Hot Rod had a strange movie career. In his first important part, he was engagingly befuddled and angry in one of my favorite bad movies, Hell Comes to Frogtown. He followed that up with his role as Nada in They Live. He was well on his way to making a solid career as a B-movie anti-hero with real humanity, kind of a Joe Lunchpail version of Snake Plisskin. But it never happened. That was basically it for his career. Since then he has taken increasingly smaller, ever less colorful roles in increasingly bad movies. 15 years have slid by, and he is no longer famous as a wrestler or an actor. I liked the guy in both of his careers. He wasn't a good wrestler technically, and he had one of the puniest bodies in that profession, but he was one my favorite wrestling stars ever. He was able to demonstrate completely uncontrolled anger as a heel, and become one of the greatest fan favorites when he converted his energy to righteous anger and became a babyface. The great thing about Piper's transition to the role of fan favorite was that he never really compromised his obnoxious, angry personality. He didn't try to become Mr. Dignified and Soft-Spoken. He just seethed about things the fans hated. His acting career was similar to his wrestling career. He didn't have much talent, and in a way he couldn't act worth beans. Yet I really enjoyed the hell out of his performances in the two movies I mentioned. As in wrestling, he overcame a lack of talent with some kind of crazy anti-charisma.

Grossing $13 million dollars on a $4 million budget, They Live made money and developed a cult following, but never generated a sequel. I don't know why. Because of the way the film ended, it could have generated a beautiful sequel, but the sequel would have been a very different film, because Nada was out of the picture, and the alien's hypnosis machine had been broken, so humans were able to see them as they were. But, hell, wouldn't you like to see how that played out? Not only would I go to a sequel, but I would go to a big-budget re-make of They Live. I'd love to see what Ridley Scott or Spielberg could do with the concept, keeping all the good things about the film, eliminating the dead spots, and making the effects believable.

Writer/director John Carpenter took the basic concept of They Live from a very short story (five pages) called Eight O'Clock in the Morning by an obscure S/F writer named Ray Nelson.. To avoid paying an outrageous price because of who he was, Carpenter bought the rights under an assumed name. The internet being what it is, and the story being as short as it is, you can real the entire thing online in five or ten minutes, if you've a mind to. Here it is.

• And here's Cibby Danyla, in the film's only nudity.

OTHER CRAP:

• Banderas in talks to make another Zorro movie

• HOT YOUNG GIRLS IN TOASTER ACTION! SEE HOT YOUNG GIRLS BEGGING FOR YOUR TOASTER!

• FDR didn't have polio. I guess he just used the wheelchair for sympathy and respect, ala Guy Caballero on SCTV.

• The 'cheesy movie' list, UK style

• Professor explores the "science" of scary films , builds projector out of cocoanuts, instructs Skipper and Gilligan.

• The White House is haunted. Hey, I thought we wouldn't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more.

• The Internet Is Littered With Dead Web Sites.

• United States voted #2 threat to world peace. Hey, maybe we're only number two this year, but wait until Bin Laden files for free agency.

• Only in Philadelphia. Day 1: FBI announces criminal probe of mayor. Day 2: mayor's poll numbers improve. OK, maybe not ONLY in Philadelphia. I forgot about Louisiana there for a minute.

• URL says it all: JeffGoldblumIs WatchingYouPoop.com URL says WHAT it is, but I'll be damned if I know WHY.

• Catherine Keener, the co-star of "Being John Malkovich", "8MM" and "Death to Smoochy" topless in scenes from the indie flick, "Living in Oblivion" (1995).

Be sure to pay Graphic Response a visit at his website. www.graphic-barry.com.

"Net Games"
This movie tries to be a first-rate thriller/stalker/horror movie, but it doesn't quite make it, despite a decent cast and a promising plot.

With his wife unable to enjoy sex because she's recovering from the trauma of rape, a happily married man turns to the net for some relief via on-line sex. What he winds up with is a serial killer.

The possibilities are there, but the movie simply falls short, and while there's plenty of nudity, they did the nude scenes in a way that it's not even a good titillating B-movie. It's worth watching, but only if you don't expect too much.

• Lala Sloatman
• Monique Demers

The final installment of the Matrix movies opens this week doing something that no other movie has ever done....it will be opening at the same time all over the world! Wednesday/Thursday depending on where you live. Here in the states that means 10am Wednesday morning on the East Coast. Overseas the first show is 4pm Wednesday Afternoon in London, and 1 am Thursday morning in Sydney.

Charlotte Alexandra
(1, 2)