Best Nude Scenes of 2006:

Balloting has begun: vote and/or check the results, as well as last year's results, here.

 

SNAKES ON A TRAIN (2006):

The story goes something like this.

The female lead rejected a rich suitor back in her village and ran away with her true love. To punish her for shaming them, her family cursed her with the dreaded Mayan Snake Curse which, as near as I can tell, means she will hatch snakes inside of her and they will devour her from within.  Except when they get out.  Her only hope is to find a shaman who lives where all Mayan shamans eventually go, Los Angeles. In fact, L.A. has an entire mini-city filled with them, kinda like a Mayan Shaman version of Chinatown. That's were Mel Gibson went to recruit the cast of Apocalypto. So the accursed one and her companion sneak across the border, and stowaway on a westbound passenger train. Reptilarity ensues.

It's hard to supply any more detail because in order to do so I would have to pretend that this held my attention for long enough periods to make an impression. It didn't. In the early 1970s this would have been a third feature at a drive-in. The concept had the potential to create a high camp romp, a sort of lower budgeted knock-off of its inspiration, Snakes on a Plane. But it isn't that. Not only is it altogether too serious, but long stretches of it are just plain boring ... just one-shots and two-shots of people sitting and talking on a train. One of the more interesting facets is that the film's main characters are illegal Mexicans in the United States who start out unable to understand English. They stow away with some gringos on the titular train for a few hours, and are soon speaking with a sophistication Norman Mailer would envy.

The filmmakers managed to come up with about ten snakes, probably from their gardens. In order to make the harmless little snakes seem scary, the sound guy added rattlesnake sounds for all of them. When the film finally does get moving, with about three minutes left in the film, the little snakes morph into one gigantic snake big enough to swallow the entire passenger train.  That would probably be dumb in a movie with a James Cameron budget, so you can't even imagine how silly it looks in this no-budgeter.

Special effects by Lionel. Check out the bright green bushes on the hill.

After the train-eating scene, the final scene seems to show the giant snake ascending into heaven or something - featuring the snake's body double, which looks like a regular ol' fishing worm. Suddenly darkness becomes daylight and all the surviving humans just shrug their shoulders and walk away from the tracks while the credits roll.

Entertainment at its best.

I guess you won't be surprised to hear that  it's rated 2.3 at IMDb, but that score actually gives an unfair picture.

Too high.

The top voters score it in the ones.

If the rest of the film had been as downright silly as the last three minutes, it might have been an entertainingly bad movie,  but those few minutes are all it has. The firm before that point, if marketed properly, could put Sominex out of business.

 

Amelia Jackson-Gray

THIRD PARTY VIDEOS:

* Here are all of LC's caps from Pledge This,  the latest film from National Lampoon's. His companion collages can be found in yesterday's edition.

Angela Dodson, Shamron Moore, Brooke Newton, Camille Langfield, and unknowns.  (Five .avis zipped together.)

* Fernanda Torres in House of Sand (Zipped .avi)

 

 

OTHER CRAP:

The Other Crap site has simply become too big and detailed to fit into my Fun House column. It contains far too much info, too many graphics, too many news feeds, and too many embedded videos to include here. Plus the scoopy.net version was always a day out of synch. You fans please catch the deluxe version of Other Crap in real time, with all the bells and whistles, here.

MOVIE REVIEWS:

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

Little Odessa (1994)

Little Odessa (1994) is a crime/drama about a dysfunctional Russian Jewish family in Little Odessa. Tim Roth is a cold blooded hit man estranged from his family, which includes his little brother, Edward Furlong, his abusive philandering father, Maximillian Schell, and his dying mother, Vanessa Redgrave. When he is ordered to perform a hit in Little Odessa, he protests for two reasons. First, he has enemies there, second, his father had disowned him. The ending of the film is fitting to the brooding mood.

The film features strong performances, but the pace was entirely too deliberate for my taste, and I didn't much care about any of the characters. The brightest spot in this dark, deliberate film is Moira Kelly, who decides for some reason to have a sexual relationship with the hit man. Moira shows breasts in a sex scene with Tim Roth that is more aggression on his part than love or even hot sex.

This is a C.

• IMDb readers say 6.5.
• Ebert was unimpressed at two stars. Berardinelli liked it at 3.5 stars.
• It was buried by the studio, and only earned $1.1M against a $2.3M budget.

Moira Kelly

Karen Elkin in Psychopath

Pamela Anderson, Oh, sure, the Lohans and the Hiltons come and go, and they may think they're in bad taste, but they still have plenty to learn about public exposure and crass taste from Pammy.

Salma Hayek. She always had large breasts, but they now seem to be growing faster than Pinocchio's nose. Unlike Pammy's, they are completely real. (As far as I know.)

After an exhaustive, three year investigation costing $5 million and involving 400 interviews, and the testing and rejection of every conspiracy theory, Britain's former Metropolitan Police Commissioner will release a 400-page report today finding that Princess Diana died because her drunken driver crashed her car at high speed and she wasn't wearing a seat belt.  Polls show 40 percent of the British public still refuses to believe that.

*  That percentage will go even higher after Oliver Stone releases his next movie.



The London Sun reports that in Stockton-on-Tees, England, there is a penis big enough to be seen from space.  Police suspect that two former pupils at Yarm School were the pranksters who climbed over the school fence on a weekend, slipped past guards, and painted a giant penis on the roof of one of the buildings.  They suspect the motive was to surprise people looking at satellite photos on Google.

*  I think if you have a penis big enough to be seen from space, you should have the decency to wear pants, like I do.


The London Daily Telegraph reports that organizers of a children's Christmas service at Chelmsford Cathedral decreed that for the first time, children will not carry candles set in oranges but instead will carry fluorescent glow sticks.  It came after some parents expressed worries that their children's hair might catch on fire.  One local politician said nanny staters are taking all the fun out of Christmas by banning everything, adding, "I would be kind of interested to hear when was the last time an orange and a candle set fire to a child's hair." Actually, there are no records of that ever happening, but the cathedral's records only go back to 1747.

*  And 1746 was the year of the Great Chelmsford Hair Fire...God, the smell lingered for years.



Due to a computer typo at the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde clinic in Scotland, smokers who were supposed to get the anti-smoking pill Zyban were mistakenly prescribed Viagra.  Doctors said it's not known how many people were affected, but there have been only two complaints.  One doctor said, "Thankfully, the side effects of taking Viagra in error are not too serious."

*  The two complaints came from men who keep having sex and then wanting a cigarette.


                                                    
Us Weekly quoted an anonymous "pal" of Nicole Richie who explained away her DUI incident.  The source said Nicole is telling friends that she only occasionally takes Vicodin, and just for menstrual cramps.  She's also upset that the arrest report listed her weight as 85 pounds when she's proud to have bulked back up to a healthy 95 pounds.

*  The downside of that: she's started menstruating again.