90-Min Netflix: Survivor - And Parenting to be Social - 2 More Bad Ideas

Who to curse today:

• The American culture of traveling youth summer sports?
• The Champaign and/or Urbana Chamber(s) of Commerce?
• The hotel's owners sending someone to see if we are staying on our feet and off our phones?
• Well, the fucking parent who just whipped out the acoustic guitar for starts.

Is it that we have to live with our neighbors the reason why kids younger than twelve have to travel to play baseball? I am not an advocate for AAU ball, but at least you know those kids are trying to physically earn a discounted education. Kids that lack teen in their age, can they be focused enough? Do they care about being better than anyone else in the state?

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Insert rant about youth sports and "The Karate Kid". Go on about children traveling teams being nothing but drunken parent social clubs. Check out the satire at MainEventoftheDead.com

I have not eaten anything today. Might be a wise thing to stick to. It is that or eat healthy.

My body is finally rebelling against me for a 24-hour Wednesday. 15 hours of sleep over three days, so I am overdue. The soul is willing, but the body is week. Despite the lack of stomach content, the back end is emptying and I think a popcorn hull in my gum ruptured something in there.

You might not dig my satire pieces, but you gotta respect my movie reviews. Popcorn abscess to watch a dry Milla Jovovich movie, please honor my sacrifice.

Survivor - A Title You Earn from Watching This

If you followed this blog, you know I will check out any Milla Jovovich film that did not seem to get a wide release. It is probably just an old crush from my sophomore year (better her that Chun Li from "Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior" right?), so I get protective of her when she is used in mainstream films. She is kind of an oddball, which is her charm, and how many directors know how to use that? I would rather she stick to films that will be lost before they make the Best Buy $3.99 bin than see her in a theater.

When I saw the cover for "Survivor", Pierce Brosnan scared me off. This guy was James Bond who earned a little more respect than Alice from "Resident Evil". Could Brosnan be as evil as his W. Bush adjacent character in "The Ghost Writer" without a wide audience to appeal to? It was not a drama like "Stone" where I am not expecting Edward Norton or Robert de Niro to kick ass, so this title just seemed like it was going to be all cliches and nothing noteworthy let alone possibly groundbreaking (like "Stone" attempted for Jovovich). And of course, I was right.

After a new update to the immigration paperwork, buying US work visas on the black market is next to impossible. Kate Abbot has been called to America's London embassy to assure that they will not be issuing new visas to potential terrorists. Some think she is being too harsh on applicants with compressed gas knowledge and the British authorities think she lacks compassion toward innocent, widowed physicians like Emil Balan.

Balan seems to be one to hold a grudge as he brought his frustrations up to a shadowy figure in a high tower to fix this issue. The evil one decides to assign the task of cutting through the red tape to The Watchmaker. His title is a front, but he does like to tinker with precise gadgets, like the bomb he uses to wipe out those in Abbot's chain of command. Kate was supposed to join them, but is only wounded in the blast.

The Watchmaker has never been identified, so Abbot is a hindrance that needs to be eliminated. Not knowing that she is running from an assassin, British police and her superiors are suspecting she may be involved in the bombing. It is up to her and her new keeper, Sam Parker, to find out the conspiracy before her diplomatic immunity will be revoked, perhaps permanently.

This week, I was able to check out Rifftrax's presentation of "Star Raiders: The Adventures of Saber Raine", so when "Survivor" opens with similar special effects, you suspect trouble. Fortunately, the effects only come out at night. 4K HDR may be bad for them, but most viewers will ignore this issue. James McTeigue is a clever enough director to make up for this short coming, but sadly the dull script cannot be saved.

If you cast Lelu from "The Fifth Element" in an action movie, you expect her to be a supreme being and kick ass. She is constantly on the run and shows no physicality until the third act. Brosnan is either James Bond or arrogant to his own shortcomings. Either way clever. There are no quips in the entire film.

"Survivor" is a game of cat an mouse, but neither animal has any obstacles to truly overcome. There are hardly and twists and the rare side stories are immediately abandoned. That is disappointing because that may actually give you a character with motivations towards their decision. I think McTeigue knew he was stuck with a bad film and just wanted to get the audience through it as quickly as possible.

There is nothing clever, crazy or comedic to make for a good PG-13 rated action flick and there is nothing extremely stupid to laugh your way through it. This is background noise that you may accidentally rewatch because it lacks anything memorable in it. A waste of time and talent, I might ask Netflix for the $0.02 "Survivor" took from me.

Bitch Slap: An ATTEMPT to Emasculate B-Movies

*Movie review from 2010.

*Blog post started on June 16, 2020.

We are back to eight-hour days in the Illinois-banking scene. Has much happened in my life that is worth writing about becomes the question for me.

Since I would like to get out a blog post tomorrow, the best course of action might just be to attach this to the front of my "Bitch Slap" movie review that I hinted at a couple of weeks ago. But I have five and a half hours left in my shift, thus, that is a lot of time to write. That amount is longer than it seems because our clientele does not seem to have the gotten the news that the lobby is now open.

I am not complaining about the lack of traffic. That is because, being a customer of this bank by default, it is good to know they are not flooding inboxes with how we appreciate people in masks coming up to our teller lanes. Or, my attentive nature made sure I did not sign up for promotional email when I filled out the paperwork. They cannot offer daily deals like my retail job, so aside from announcing the lobby is open, what would I be missing?

COD and IRA rates? For someone who might be cutting out a sixth of his income to venture the Second City for improv, it does not seem to be in the cards.

As mentioned three paragraphs (Two before this, so yes I proofread.) prior, I do have my review for 2009's "reinvention" of the B-movie, "Bitch Slap". The title of the feature gave me some inspiration of what I should be doing with the extra time. Women's wrestling is the only certain division that I have not tried to express the "Disgruntled Fan's Real World Championship" history for, so getting to work on that sounds amusing. 

There is no way I will be able to finish that by June 17, but I at least get to tease it. Until then, here is a movie review for a flick that perhaps all aspiring Joshis should watch for character inspiration. Guess that is essentially a thumbs up, so below will be the caution of what you will have to deal with for the prospective creativity from "Bitch Slap".

Read the rest of this blog and other stories at Main Event of the Dead.com and determine if this thought process can be translated into a B-movie comedy about pro-wrestling 

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90 min Red Box: "Snatchers" - Diablo Cody with a "Gremlins" Twist

*Blog entry started on March 16, 2020.

And now the virus has left us without any opportunities for fun. That is a bit of hyperbole of course. With 14 video game libraries, two streaming devises, a region-free DVD player, a UHD Blu-ray player, and a VCR, there are plenty of means to have fun in my living room.

Provided you can deal with the company of a hard-to-read former better quarter. (Eva the Cat will always get half). Ironically, I think I have become the cat in the relationship. She just loves having living things around her. If they do not come up to her for pets and snuggling, their activities do not matter to her. Perhaps I should find a dead mouse to tell her to get involved with the environment. At least that will provide me with a chance to get in trouble, if only for a few minutes.

Thank the gods the liquor stores are still open. That may be able to numb the loneliness further enhanced by my ex's nature. Then again, I might just go on a seeming endless YouTube dive as I wait for her to go to bed like she says she will. She was nearly asleep by the end of the "Westworld" season premiere, but the lights go on, and her crafting catalogues are then opened. If you are just bored, let me know. I want to get to bed at a decent hour, so I will be more than happy to move to another room to watch the pregnancy-horror comedy that I suspect you will lack the stomach for. Fifty five cents is all I want to give Red Box at a time.

Snatchers - Overly Clever Title and Story

Sara seems to have everything going for her way to start her junior year of high school. Being in the popular clique has secured that. It only cost her relationship with her mom and best friend Haley. The only thing that could make things better was if her ex-boyfriend Skyler would take her back, but since he returned from a trip to the Mayan settlements in Mexico, sex is the only thing on his mind. If she was willing to alienate those closest to her for status, why hold on to virginity?

Skyler is not exactly bright enough to be ready with protection, but if anything unplanned for occurred, Sara will have at least a couple months to deal with it. After morning sickness and mood swings the next day at school, she suspects something is wrong. 24 hours later, she is nine months pregnant. Being the daughter of a teen pregnancy, she cannot let her mom find out. Her boyfriend is a little too dim and way too horny to turn to. Her clique status will be lost if they find out. Only Haley has enough concern for her to be trusted with this problem.

This problem escalates when Sara gives such an explosive birth that it immediately kills the OBGYN who was prepped for the delivery. The two escape the monster at the free clinic, but it appears that there is another fetus in Sarah. Our protagonist cannot wait in the pelvic exam position by a blender all night to solve this dilemma, so they decide to seek out a veterinarian to help them out. But the little alien's ability to hijack human host bodies and Skyler prepping to attend the big welcome back house party. Can two teenage girls stop what they surmise to be the end times the Mayan's promised?

"Snatchers" is a fun take on eighties horror tropes that only suffers from the current social restrictions on horror. These prevent the feature from being the chaotic and unapologetic comedy that its inspirations were allowed to be. I mean, why can we not hilariously kill douchebag popular kids like we use to?

The structure of the story requires too many acts. Once the creature is presented, we should focus on the hilarious means of battling it and have a more immediate method to multiply it. In the end, the film barely qualifies for pluralization in the title. Act two's first half is fun as the girls work on preventing the spread of the monsters, but the chaos from the second inciting incident is lost. If you were going to focus so much on the science of the fiction, perhaps introducing immediate horror is ill advised.

Focusing on the dealing with the unplanned pregnancy makes for an entirely different movie. The dialogue and performances are solid, but once we get the monster, we want to see the monster. So until we get to the climax after the creatures are reintroduced, the picture drags. There has to be a way to have both a tale of a strained sisterhood and a monster movie with strong special and gore effects at the same time. With "Snatchers" implying there will be a sequel, I hope there is a chance that we will get to see it.

"Snatchers" is only a few tweaks away from being a classic horror comedy, so watching the second act will be a bit frustrating. When the feature commits to laughs and gores, it makes the annoyances worth it. Olde Money Boyz (Directors/writers Stephen Cedars, Benji Kleiman and writer Scott Yacyshin) prove they are up-and-coming auteurs in the genre and it will be fun to see what they come up with next. Lets just hope they take the critiques from their 100% on the Tomatometer seriously.

IMDb: Snatchers (2019)

"Ninja III: The Domination" - A Cannon Film/The Good Kind of Bank Fraud

I suppose I should have been paying more attention to the movies "How Did This Get Made" had been riffing about since the pandemic occurred. Surely besides the recently release "Bloodshot", their producers must have been making an extra effort to find free movies from streaming services instead of just lousy ones.

Five minutes later...

There was no rhyme or reason as far as I could tell. It appears they are not in league with Shout! Factory which is kind of sad. Are the downloads lower when they cover a Roger Corman classic or a product of the Cannon Group? I am just saying that those films are comedy home runs while "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets", "Underworld: Blood Wars", and "Space Jam" tend to be horrid ideas that only The Asylum would try to knock off.

Films with at least 10's of millions of dollars as a minimum budget have to consider the concept of shame. If they fail, they will be remembered in infamy. This is why "Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films" was necessary. These films can be fondly remembered for solely being escapism and not art. It is basically mental porn, a break from your day or much needed relief.

Historians do not like to bring up porn when there is art to discuss, so there is a greater chance that we will lose films like "Ninja III: The Domination" from our collective consciousness. If this film (or most Cannon flicks not featuring Chuck Norris) had a plot that made as much sense as "Deep Throat", perhaps the conversation would be different.

Six bodyguards were not enough to protect a yuppie scientist as an evil ninja makes short work of them on a fairway. This is not your traditional Japanese assassin because stealth is quickly abandoned, which leads to the police easily finding him on the golf course and quickly dispatch the entire force to stop this threat, green fees be damned. Perchance, the ninja may just be respecting the sanctity of the course. Regardless, he seems to not only mean to take no prisoners, but goes out of his way to maximize his kill count.

Eventually, the police shoot him enough times that he retreats to die in seclusion. Thanks to being discovered by phone lineswomen, Chrissy, he gets a break. When she goes to assist, he gives her his sword, and along with it, his spirit. Also being an aerobics instructor, she is the perfect weapon for the ultimate killer. His ability to take over her body assures that he will kill the remainder of the police force that is responsible for his death because only a ninja can destroy another ninja's spirit.

"Ninja III: The Domination" provides the audience with everything that was accepted as cool in the early 80's. The generally considered nonsensical story (Maybe I am overly observant. I was the excuse a bunch of my high school classmates used to rewatch "Donnie Darko". Russ will make sense of it.) allows for anything to happen like possessed arcade machines and V8 as an aphrodisiac. Every kind of ploy to keep the viewer's interest seems to lead them being forgiving of a ninja film with no exterior night scenes.

I hate to say it, but there is nothing great about the production of the film. The editing is poor, the visual effects outside of creepy laser and doll on string effects are bad or nonexistent, we see that our female lead's nipples have been taped down, and it seemed designed for HBO airings. F.W. Murnau (per John Malkovich) said, "If it isn't in frame, it doesn't exist!" Making sure to get all those TV replays, director Sam Firstenberg crams all the action into the 3x4 perspective. That results in shooting a ninja while forming a circle to attack more ridiculous.

The acting is all passable and you cannot help but enjoy "Big Trouble in Little China's" James Hong (Lo Pan) as an exorcist. What makes the feature work is that is so over-the-top with its premise(s) and set pieces, you want to see how it resolves. It is like the creative forces knew that this film could only be so bad that it's good, and they were just careful enough for it to stay at that level. No risks were taken to try and deliver art, so it does not insult the audience's intelligence.

When I left "Ninja III: The Domination", my only thought was that we need a cheesy version of this film every decade. Its charm is that captures everything we look back shamefully on in terms of trends to ground a ridiculous story. This is what we should have started seeing when the parody film genre had played itself out.

"Ninja III" is fun for fun sake. It will not turn you away with being too violent, too sexualized, or too mean spirited. You are suppose to just sit back and forget about your troubles. I was thinking about how I wished it could have mixed some "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" elements when they had a battle in a dilapidated home. Who would not rather do that than thing about moving to a place where the police may have dug out a bullet from the bedroom floor? This is one of the best Cannon Films because it is an absolute escape.

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90 min Netflix DVD - "The Lure." All You Need to Know About Mermaids and Eastern Euro Pop

*Blog post started on June 2, 2020.

This week has started by just being awkward. We are given schedules with our regular hours only to be told that we are not yet ready to start them. Yes, it is because of the riots that happened Sunday and availability needs to be adjusted accordingly. No need to be open for white nationalist to point out where funds might be easily accessible.

With that said, maybe we need to skip expressing our anger with destruction and petty looting and skip to robbing banks. Everyone loves a charismatic bank robber.

It is good to joke about the civil disobedience and the morons who do not or refuse to understand it. Humor is my coping mechanism. Too bad it takes a hell of a lot of work to get to a point where I can talk to my family about it. Thus, I do not have anyone to talk to about it. The ex girlfriend is getting antsy to move on to living with her ex fiance who only lived with her for one year compared to the near four that I have. My cat(s) are great company, but tough to converse with. Never mind that it would be redundant. Their opinion is obvious about humanity. Burn it down.

So I woke up early on Monday to be three hours early. The bank closed for the day two and a half hours into my shift. This left me with way too much time. I did not know what to do with myself, so I was in bed before 11 pm. Noon was when I got out of bed and started the day, so at least I was finally able to hibernate. Hence, the biggest frustration for having a busy work shift was forgetting to document which blog posts needed to be published yesterday.

This might not necessarily be a bad thing. I might want to avoid releasing my latest political blog with how things are going. Only because it just does not involve the George Floyd situation directly. You will get the assholes I will call out saying that I am making it all about myself. It would be better for all of us if I just posted my "Bitch Slap" review from nine years prior. But now is the time to call out all the lousy cocksuckers (to just say cocksucker would not be an insult), and you know what side anyone who has a library of memes about the race card will be on.

It would not be fair to call them out without giving them notice that I will be calling them out. They would have to stick around for this post to know that. Good thing it is not the time to be fair. Here is to hoping that they will at least enjoy a review for a Polish mermaid rock musical. These fuckers will probably refer to that nations current political scene on how to handle the godless, so the "The Lure" might be right up their alley.

"The Lure"

Gold and Silver a two aquatic sister of the siren variety. They swam up to try and draw in a family that makes a living as the Warsaw club band "Figs n' Dates" with their song, but they seemingly are met with a counter offer. Instead of eating the prey, why not be the biggest sensation in Poland by joining the music scene of the land? Approving the proposal leads to the formation of "The Lure".

Success is immediately found, but the sisters quickly start growing apart. Gold knows she has got to eat, so trying to feed on the audience takes up her spare time while also resisting overtures to join a merman-lead punk band. Silver on the other hand has fallen in love with band mate Mietek, and her situation seems more dire.

Mietek has no interest in a girl that he cannot have traditional coitus with. To get legs and a vagina, it will cost Silver her voice. If she fails to win his affections, she will end up turning into sea foam. Ursula did not seem this cruel. But who has the time to recognize cruelty, especially when you obviously know more than your big sister?

"The Lure" does seem to lack substance, but what musical does not. No, I have not seen "Hamilton". Is that show touring? Have I wasted my shot?

The feature does deliver on everything a somewhat low-key show should. There is enough spectacle to amuse true fans of the genre. It has a music video feel at many points for those who yearn for the nineties and MTV's Weekly Top 20. Most importantly, "The Lure" seems to give every mermaid legend/myth/fable some recognition. This film is a love story to the tales that created the Disney Princess franchise and Jasmine Beckett Griffin's art.

It may have been tough for the acting to have an international appeal. There is the language barrier of course, but musicals are about two types of performances so it maybe a greater challenge for the actors. Marta Mazurek character of Gold is written well that a reserved portrayal works, but Michalina Olszanska's Silver is written as a very layered character and she does not capture the emotional range to praise her performance.

The rest of the characters are accessories to the story, and aside from one musical number, they do not need to shine and none of them try to eat of the scenery. That would have at least livened things up when the musical elements takes a step back to melodrama.

Despite its shortcomings, which also include the effects, the film is a bit of fun. Its effects are adequate and enough for the story, but it does not give us horror fans enough. The music is more enjoyable than what I find the American top 40 to be. You will want to dance. You will want to rock. It is the closest thing to an industrial rock concert I will get to for a while. It does not bombard you too much with the spectacle.

More importantly, if you have any degree of knowledge of what Ariel's adventures should have been, "The Lure" provides you that fan service. For a fan of pop culture juggernauts that people complain about, it is great to walk into mermaid fiction that is not beholden to any past story. It is for nerdy know it alls, and that is why it works on at least some level for any fan of strange cinema.

"The Lure" is a film for cinema fans who want to further expand their horizons in story possibilities. It is by no means perfect, but how would you expect a horror/comedy musical about man-eating mermaids to end up. The fun music, the knowledge of subject matter, and ridiculous premise and spectacle alone is guaranteed to provide some enjoyment for all oddball cinema fans.

This is the closest to Hans Christian Andersen we have gotten since Danny Kay. It is best to appreciate "The Lure" if only for that.

The Lure - by Jamie Dylan