Yonkers Joe (2008)

I was getting desperate for a 'Y' movie, so I settled on the first one I could find. I've been on a Chazz Palminteri kick, and this one places him as a gambler trying to scam the casinos for a big win with the help from his wife.

Now things take a more personal/domestic turn when Chazz's son drops by, having been kicked out of his group home because he's a down syndrome guy with violent/inappropriate tendencies. So the movie is Chazz trying to reconcile things with this son of his, who can range from tolerable to asshole.

Now, I've dealt with special-needs before, and I don't have much patience with them. But with that said, this guy doesn't seem totally unbearable, though he does have a potty-mouth and some rapist tendencies. 😦

So I started wondering if this guy was actually retarded or not. It appears as though he is not retarded, so I guess that means he did a great job. This movie would be canceled if it were made today. Some snowflake would bitch that this movie is taking acting jobs away from the real 'tards who want to work ^{don't know the difference either way}.

There's not a whole hell of a lot to say about this movie otherwise, but I liked it.

#Review

UHF (1989)

Weird Al gets his own TV station, which he fills with ridiculous programming.

This movie is pure trash. This shit had me crying.



#Review

Stranger in Our House (1978)

Does anyone know if there is a way to tell when the second showing of Stranger in Our House was? This was the made for TV witch movie with Linda Blair and directed by Wes Craven. It premiered on October 31, 1978 (same night as Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell on a different network). I didn't see it then, but it was rerun some time later, I think probably in the summer or fall of '79. That's when I saw it. I'm trying to determine the exact date because it was the same day as soemthing else that happened to me that I'm including in a written work.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006)

This is a good mid-80s NYC period piece following a bunch of juvenile delinquents. It switches between 1986 and the present, as recollected by Robert Downey Jr.

The setting is wonderful. The whole thing is beautifully made and the cast nails it. The crude teens harrassing everybody in town is a lot of fun to me. It's like Kids, where the teens are getting drunk and suffering adolescent melodrama. Shia LeBeauf is among the teens, mostly a spectator rather than instigator to the gang violence that Channing Tatum's bad attitude keeps egging on. The girls are eye candy, everybody's got issues, and people get fucked up. These teens are trash, and I love it.

What's funny to me is that Shia LeBeauf becomes Robert Downey Jr., and Channing Tatum becomes Eric Roberts. This movie needed levity, after all.

It could have been a trash epic if it added some nudity and shown more of the suggested violence. Instead, it's just a really good movie, which is good enough, made better by its level of trash. Like the scene where they beat a small child with a trash can. Fun times for the whole family.

#Review

Alien Romulus

When I heard this was to be set between the first two movies, I wondered how the hell that was going to work. So here's the setup: The company sends a ship to gather some space junk from the Nostromo wreckage. Guess what kind of space junk they find?

But we're not dealing with them. We're dealing with a group of young people on a mining colony planet, and like most young people, they don't want to work. They form a plan to steal some cryo tubes from the wreckage of the ship that went out to get the wreckage from the Nostromo, and... are you still following me?

With the help of a special-ed android, they infiltrate the ship, and then it all goes to shit for them. It's not a bad setup, but it took me a moment to wrap my head around what was going on. Then I got even more confused when I saw a damaged android that looked and dressed like Ash from the original film. Eventually, we confirm that it's a different synthetic that merely looks like him.

This movie relies a lot on nostalgia and doing the same thing over and over again. The atmosphere is good, though, and it has some cool scenes. They do some cool stuff with the facehuggers and the acid, and I liked that ringed planet setting. The movie acknowledges Prometheus pretty readily, and it also homages Alien: Resurrection with a weird hybrid type, who's really stupid and gross.

One part I thought was stupid is how they try to guilt trip the android for not opening the door to save what's-her-face, even though doing so would have guaranteed all of their deaths. I hate that morality shit. It's like that train-track thing where you decide whether to kill the one guy on the tracks or the 5 guys on the tracks, which apparently is a huge moral conundrum for some people.

You'll get a lot of fan service. I read some review say it works best when it's not trying to copy the original so much, and I'd agree. The new ideas were cool, the old ideas are just franchise tropes at this point. Not a great movie, but I don't really hate any of the movies in this series. It's at least better than Covenant.

#Review

50 years of Texas Chainsaw

Released 50 years ago in October.

I first saw the '74 original when it was around 30 years old. It always seemed so old back then, almost like it was part of Texas culture. Before I moved to TX, I'd often imagine that any farmland or field probably had a hidden chainsaw psycho in there, like ol' Bubba. The film's title alone is enough to tell you that this movie is going to be different than anything you've seen before. And none of the sequels since can even top it.

I actually like all the movies in this series. Even the shitty ones. They know which ones they are. The series has awful continuity, but it somehow earns its place among the other iconic horror franchises.



Since the F13 video game looked pretty clunky, I never bothered playing the TCM game. I've only played that shitty old Atari one, and what a great fucking idea that game was. You actually play as the villain and your goal is to gas up and kill people. Sure, the new one looks fine, but I'm just not into gaming so much.

And of course, you have a new movie allegedly in the works, rumored to be the "Texas Chainsaw Legacy", which will probably be a direct sequel to part 1. They should have made a sequel to the 2013 movie and had Alexandria Daddario get naked in it.



Share some thoughts on anything TCM related.

Dee Snider's Strangeland (1998)

I haven't seen this film in nearly 20 years, so it was time to re-evaluate.

Dee Snider plays Carlton Hendricks, who goes by the username "CaptHowdy". He's a sadist and online predator luring teen girls to his lair where he sews their mouths shut and puts them in weird sex/trap devices.

What sets him apart from others is that his aim isn't to kill people. He just loves to torture them. What a fucking asshole, but Dee makes it work.

Captain Howdy lures detective Gage's daughter Genevieve (Linda Cardellini) into one of his weird fetish torture traps, and this act gives him a hard-on for Howdy to get his due justice.

About halfway through, the movie takes a different direction. There's a whole subplot about reforming this evil bastard (damn that insanity plea), and it's a great way to introduce Robert Englund into the movie. He plays Jack, part of a lynch mob out to end Howdy, whether he's reformed or not. It's a fun parallel to Freddy getting killed by an angry mob, and Robert got to be on both ends now.

On a side note, when they reform Carlton, he looks like such a lame ugly fucking square. I know Dee was probably trying to make him look as uncool as possible, even admitting that it was one of the hardest parts to film in the movie because of how much he hated his lame aesthetic so much.

And did I mention how ugly he looks? I find him more frightening than when he's pierced & tatted!

The movie then resumes its original course and has a pretty decent ending. This includes a house of bodily horrors, and a theme that's always disturbed me. It's when someone goes through something traumatic, but gets out of that situation... only to find themselves back in an even worse situation.


The movie isn't great. I hated it when I first saw it, but it does have a good cast and a decent story, albeit so-so execution. What I'll never understand is how Dee Snider kept the rumors alive for a sequel for like 15 years, given that ending.

And since we're talking about flesh here, I remember Bill Hinzman kept rumors going for a sequel to FleshEater for about 20 years. I'd buy that for a dollar!

#Review

Riding the Bullet (2004)

I'd just like to say, this film has a VERY strong opening. Very, very strong. Basically the first five or ten seconds after the opening credits and montage, immediately after the Zombies classic song Time of the Season for Loving finishes playing. It's just one hell of a solid scene. That's all I'm saying.

Stephen King stuck his father in The Stand!

Some of us here must know this already, but if I ever knew it I had completely forgotten about it. In chapter 50, on page 650 of my copy of the expanded edition of The Stand, there is a scene where Mother Abagail (that's how she spells it) reminisces about a vacuum cleaner salesman named Donald King! It says she met him back in the 1930s. That is definitely a reference to SKs dad, Donald King, who sold vacuum cleaners. So cool. Had to share.

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

A weird thing happened in the world lately. And by the world, I mean what goes on in my head. Kristen Stewart, the chick from Twilight, who I've never found attractive previously, suddenly became hot. And not in the usual way. She became hot when she became... dykey. She used to be awkwardly gawky and lean in a bad way; the kind of lame faux-punk chick that losers who listen to Green Day go for. Now she's pooning women all over the place, got a hardass "men are scum" look in her eye and is really leaning into the lesbo look, and it works wonders for her. Ironically, the more she looks like she wouldn't fuck me, the more keen I am on fucking her.

Love Lies Bleeding is her at peak-dyke aesthetic and it's hot as fuck. She plays a singlet-wearing, mullet-sporting rugmuncher, who meets a beefcake muscle mommy. They smash clams and - lesbians being lesbians - decide to live together the next day. Which is all good, except Kristen's dad is a douchey gun smuggler, her brother-in-law is a wifebashing piece of shit and her new GF starts getting serious bouts of roid-rage.

Admittedly, there's some dumb shit in this movie. But it works because there's a welcome streak of exploitation throughout. Maybe not a Trash Epic per se, but it ticks some trash boxes. Nasty gore, dirty sex, sweaty neo-noir aesthetics and both of our leading femme-fatales get their tits out. Plus there's Ed Harris rocking a skullet. And Kristen Stewart. And her tits.

I was hesitant about checking this out, because modern 'female empowerment' flicks tend to have a bombardment of social commentary in place of a plot (looking at you Promising Young Woman). Not so here. Just a bunch of good (although sparsely drawn) characters played well by committed actors in a powder-keg scenario that's destined to damage all involved, with some pleasing dykesploitation thrown in. Good times.