Flash Fire (1981) is the US title for an Australian film that might have been called A Dangerous Summer. Tom Skerritt is building a resort hotel in the bush, in what is a serious fire hazard area. When an insurance agent, Wendy Hughes, visits the site after a rash of local fires, he learns that his partner, a rather sleazy investor has insured it for way over its actual value. She is murdered by drowning at the local beach, just when a Lloyds of London investigator, the company that is underwriting the policy, arrives to investigate.

It becomes clear that the sleazy investor also owns most or all of the local insurance company, and that they intend burning it down on Christmas day. The LLoyds of London man and Skerritt join forces to try and prevent the arson. Skerritt's daughter, Kim Deacon, in a minor role, shows breasts getting out of a shower to answer the phone. Hughes shows breasts in the lengthy underwater drowning scene.

The IMDB score is 2.8 of 10, based on 13 votes. The film is hard to follow, is sloppily edited, and not very well acted. What's worse, it is a terrible transfer, looking like a bad VHS copy. E.

Solaris earned the lowest audience ratings in the history of CinemaScore, making such flops as Battlefield Earth seem in comparison to be as popular as Lord of the Fucking Rings. The scores were not only the lowest, but the lowest by far - straight F's from every age group and gender combination. Click the link above and check the info page for details.

The film will open in the number 7 or 8 spot for the weekend, despite being on 2400 screens. Box office info.  That despite the fact that the critics generally liked it!

I saw it. It is downright awful. Completely unendurable babble. My own comments in a nutshell: "Soderbergh creates a brilliant visual appearance, which almost manages to disguise the fact that it is ponderous, soporific, self-indulgent, pompous, tedious, and pretentious pseudo-intellectual crapola leaden with the gravitas of false artistic importance."

There's no nudity except the two much-talked about looks at Clooney's butt. Clooney's body blocks our view of Natascha McElhone.

Lovely & Amazing, like Solaris, got good reviews. Unlike Solaris, it doesn't completely suck, but it is a chick-flick, so look at the frontal nudity and move on.

• Emily Mortimer (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

OTHER CRAP:

• You think your wife gets pissed when you spend too much time on our site? It could be a lot worse. China Orders Death Penalty for Internet Use.
• CBS examines complaints that the federal government is removing accurate scientific information from its web sites if the facts don't support conservative ideology
• No matter how smooth you think you are, picking people up at this bar is always a shot in the dark -- because they never turn on the lights and most of the waiters and waitresses are blind!
• Kielbasa Green is people. People!
• Those Swiss scientists say: Not only is the bin Laden tape false, but those bin Laden nudes are as well. "But experts who have seen them generally support the conclusion by U.S. law enforcement officials that they probably are of bin Laden sunning somewhere in the French Riviera, possibly St. Tropez".
• Canadians change their position. Cooler, more rational heads prevail, and the Toronto Star finds that Bush is not a moron - he's an evil sociopath. I for one am relieved. I was a little worried when I thought our president was Forrest Gump. What a relief to know he's really Ted Bundy.
• Retrocrush looks at offensive product names and icons of the past. This brought back some memories. I can still remember when Pillsbury changed Chinese Cherry and Injun Orange to Choo-Choo Cherry and Jolly-Olly Orange.
• Bikini-clad models won't be air-dropped into Colombia's combat zones, after all. The war-torn Andean nation's first female defense minister, Marta Lucia Ramirez, canceled the army's campaign to seduce Marxist rebel defectors with pictures of near-naked women.

The screen nudity you've been weighting ... um ... waiting ... for . Quoted from Ruthe Stein's column in the San Francisco Chronicle

Kathy Bates would shudder at the idea of herself as a crusader for the rights of full-bodied women. Nonetheless, her nude scene in the forthcoming "About Schmidt" will surely pave the way for large actresses to feel OK about shedding their clothes onscreen.

"We're so body-conscious in this country that it's a shame, really," Bates told us. "I think we live with very unrealistic expectations of what we should look like."

The buzz has Jack Nicholson in line for an Oscar nomination as Schmidt, an emotionally numb widower. But Bates steals the movie as an aging hippie who takes a shine to Schmidt. If justice prevails, Bates, an Oscar winner for "Misery," will be up for best supporting actress in March.  The ease with which she finesses the nude scene is alone worth recognition. To Schmidt's surprise, this woman, whom he barely knows, disrobes and hops into a hot tub with him. Before agreeing to the scene, Bates said she hashed out with director Alexander Payne exactly what part of her anatomy would be shown and what wouldn't. "I battled to make myself comfortable, and he battled to get what he wanted. We met in the middle." To avoid gawkers, a skeleton crew was used to shoot the scene. "I drank a cosmopolitan before I got in that tub, to relax just enough."

Bates is pleased with the results. "I'm as self-conscious as anybody, which is why I wanted to make sure what we shot was something I was comfortable with."
 

Updates:

• updated encyclopedia volumes for Marilyn Monroe, Laure Marsac, Lorissa McComas, Elizabeth Berkley

Shameless Propaganda, part 6:

Pat Reeder is a guy whose name is not familiar to you, but who touches your life almost every day. He's the guy who writes the jokes that your DJ tells every morning during your drive to work.  He's also the guy who writes those Comedy Wire things that you see on the bottom of this page from time to time. If you wonder why your DJ and the Fun House tell the same jokes, Pat's the reason. At the moment, Pat has a new book out called "Nine Hallmarks of Highly Incompetent Losers."  It's a "reverse self-help" book that helps the reader attain success by avoiding nine stupid mistakes made by failures and idiots.  He illustrates his points with over 200 hilarious-but-true stories from his syndicated radio service, "The Comedy Wire."

If you like weird news and dumb criminal stories, or if you've ever been forced to suffer through a boring business/self-help book like "Who Moved My Cheese?", you'll love "Nine Hallmarks of Highly Incompetent Losers."  It earned four stars from Wireless Flash News, and will be in bookstores nationwide next spring, but you can get the jump on the rest of America and get it now through Pat's website.  Cheaper than Amazon and every copy is personally autographed! 

Click here (http://www.comedy-wire.com/bookorderpage.html) for a book excerpt, Real Audio updates on "Losers In The News," samples of the Comedy Wire and more. 

NINE HALLMARKS OF HIGHLY INCOMPETENT LOSERS

Excerpt from Chapter Six: Call Undue Attention To Yourself

President Ronald Reagan used to keep a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that read, "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit."  I don't know who said this originally, but many people gave the credit to Reagan, and he never turned it down...

...No matter how tempting it may be to invite the world's notice, sometimes it's just plain counterproductive... 
                                       
*  A registered sex offender wanted for walking away from a halfway house was captured in San Diego after he was noticed walking in a park, wearing an orange shirt with the word "FUGITIVE" printed on it in large block letters.  A police spokesman said it was just a shirt he had, so he wore it.  Probably because his "REGISTERED SEX OFFENDER" T-shirt was in the wash.

*   Members of an antique rifle club in Yorkshire, England, certainly chose an attention-getting name: "The Cock, Ball, Nipple and Touchhole Club."  Actually, those are all parts on an antique rifle.  But the gimmick backfired when the local bank closed their checking account for being just 32 pence overdrawn.  A bank spokesman claimed the account closure was not due to the club's filthy-sounding name.  Nor to his keen disappointment after he subscribed to their newsletter...

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.

Heffermania...Day 4!

• May 1996 Hefmate, Shauna Sand, in DVD caps of "Good Cop, Bad Cop" (2000). This one I was real proud of, mainly for finding the mofo to begin with. 'Caps show Shauna as a stripper who gets down to her lacey teddy before walking off stage and into the dressing room. Sorta see-through views of Shauna's jumbo jacks in all of them and a rear upskirt view in 3. Best collage is probably the last. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

• July 1977 Hefmate, Sondra Theodore, pokies only in "Stingray".

• Jan 1977 Hefmate Susan Lynn Kiger in Andy Sidaris' second movie, "Seven" (1979). A house favorite. She did the first of the topless-girl-pours-a-cup-of-coffee routines that became a staple of Sidaris movies.

• January 1992 Hefmate Suzi Simpson in DVD caps of "Enemy Gold". This is another collaboration between Tuna and me. I grouped together the frames he had previously submitted to the Funhouse and those he grabbed but saved for me. These are fantastic frames, that I managed not to screw up too badly, and Suzi looks shaggable and edible, perhaps not in that order. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)

• Octoher 1983 Hefmate Tracy Vaccaro in a silly-ass movie entitled "Candy the Stripper" (1993). Shot on videotape, this was a hard-to-find treasure that I finally found. It is a romantic drama, in which the drama consisted of people yelling at one another, and the romance included some of the most juvenile dialogue ever recorded in a commercial project. But who the f*** cares? It has Tracy Vaccaro and a couple of other babes nekkid and THAT is why I capped this puppy. Tracy is topless in 1-4, 6 & 7, and in bikini underwear in 6. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

• March 1992 Hefmate Tylyn John in DVD caps from "Rising Sun". Combination of distant shots and close-ups of hooters in 1-5, bum in 6, almost gynocam in 7 and bum again in 8. What ya gotta call complete exposure. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

Today we go back in time to 1968 for a look at "The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo & Juliet". We have a "Babe in Bondage" Karen Thomas , who is stark naked and receives a whipping. These sexplotation movies from that era were not at all bashful about showing nudity.

• Karen Thomas (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14)