B Plus Movies

Modern art often baffles me. I look at finished work and my eyes flow over the canvas without finding anything to hold my attention while the voice in my head says “nice background, but when will it be done?” I can’t deny the value of modern art or that it is a legitimate movement or even that there is value in pushing boundaries and breaking rules to make people redefine their perspectives of what art is and can be.

Some of that rhetoric is in place in the 1996 movie Basquiat.

The title character of this biopic, Jean-Michel Basquiat, was an influential artist in the 1980’s and a contemporary of Andy Warhol. He started as a graffiti artist, then went on to be a musician and then later became not only a notable painter, but an influence to other artists for years to come and likely years into the future.

Julian Schnabel directed this movie, a fan of Basquiat’s work, and attempted to tell the story of this figure’s work.  The tale is a fairly classic “poor boy makes good” tale, starting with Basquiat living on the streets in New York and rising quickly to the status of the art elite. Jeffery Wright plays the artist, his performance making Basquiat seem an etherial character, two seconds out of sync with the rest of the world and because of that distance, he’s granted magnificent perspective. The character is not without faults, appearing selfish one minute and tragically naive the next, but for the most part he comes across as a haunted genius, a waif and tortured visionary.

The problem is that this is apparently not the Basquiat that his friends and family knew.

I normally don’t read reviews before I write them, but I did go looking for comparisons between Basquiat and the movie’s namesake. From critics to Jeffery Wright, there is a consensus that this movie is less history and more interpretation with just a bit of the director’s ego thrown in. This doesn’t rob the film of entertainment value but it does mean that one should not take it as the source of all truth about Jean-Michael Basquiat. Basquiat’s actual paintings aren’t even in the film, as his family would not give the director license to use them.

The film is largely pushed along by the fantastic characters such as David Bowie portraying Andy Warhol and Michael Wincott playing a flamingly gay art critic named Renee Ricard.  There is a great deal of powerful acting in this movie though the story lags in places. When we get to the predictable descent portion of the film, the director wants us to feel sorry for Basquiat which in some ways seems to contradict the feel of triumph and innovation we’re presented with in the beginning.

Whether you like modern art or not, Basquiat is a film worth watching though it must be taken as a seperate animal from the person upon which it is based. Basquiat gets a C from me. The art, however, gets a lightning bolt and tab from a soda can. The fish.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the queen mother of all midnight/cult/b movies. Combining the elements of sci-fi, kinky sex and rock and roll, watching this movie is a religious experience for some, a point of self discovery for others. The addition of audience participation rose it to a new level, but even on its own, RHPS is a gem of bizarre cinema. Reviewing it would be like reviewing the Bible as literature: praise it and I’m preaching to the choir, rag on it and I rankle the fanatics and get agreement only from those who already do not hold the work as sacred.

But did you know it had… a sequel? It’s called Shock Treatment, and that’s what I’m reviewing today.

Richard O’Brien wrote a couple of sequels to The Rocky Horror Picture Show that never got made, due to some of the original cast not being available. My guess is also that the studios involved were reluctant to try to market O’Brien’s mind onto the general public. This is probably why Shock Treatment was released straight to the “midnight movie” circuit in 1981.

The cast of Shock Treatment has a lot in common with the RHPS even if the roster of characters doesn’t. Richard O’Brien (Riff Raff of the first film) plays a demented doctor and Patricia Quinn (Magenta) plays his assistant while Nell Campbell (Columbia) plays a nurse. Charles Gray (The Criminologist and bond villain Blofeld) plays a Judge. The characters that do return include Brad and Janet, but they are played by different actors, Cliff de Young and Jessica Harper, respectively.

The story begins with Brad and Janet getting on a game show called Marriage Maze. Brads nerves are shot because of his experiences from the first movie and very soon, the couple finds out the show is more than they expected. Brad ends up in a padded room wearing a straitjacket while Janet gets whisked away under the promise of stardom, fame and the freedom to be as self centered as she wants to be. Eventually they learn this is all orchestrated by the head of the studio and soon Brad must confront that unseen hand directly.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was written by O’Brien as a result of him questioning his sexual identity. While not always apparent on the surface, the RHPS carries this subtext throughout and has subtle layers to explore behind the music and fishnets. Likewise,  Shock Treatment seems to be a commentary on life in the late 70’s and early 80’s, when shallowness was promoted as lifestyle and suburban sensibilities were starting to butt up against the culture of New York and LA in the hearts and minds of Americans.

Shock Treatment takes a look at topics as varied as celebrity, drug use, traditional gender roles and televangelists, presenting these commentaries to both the audience in the theater and the audience within the movie, the film mostly being set in an expansive TV studio. There’s a lot of surreality to this film and for people expecting an extension of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shock Treatment is a bizarre jolt that is at the same time less controversial yet more challenging.

The film’s music is not quite as infectious as “The Time Warp” or “Sweet Transvestite”, staying more pop than rock and even flirting with country and western. The songs work well to move the narrative along but with a few exceptions, you won’t find yourself humming them afterward the way many did after hearing “Dammit, Janet”.

This movie seemed to be built with the hope that the audience participation that sprung up in front of it’s predecessor would grow in front of this one, too. Pauses are left after easily twistable phrases are spoken and often the actors are framed looking straight at the camera, prompting the audience for a response almost. The problem with that is the live portion of the Rocky experience  started organically and of its own; you can’t force lightning to strike twice.

Shock Treatment  can stand alone, though even if you’ve seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the sequel is a little confusing. While I didn’t think it was a waste of time and I was happy to gain the movie geek status point of being able to say I’ve seen it, Shock Treatment isn’t a must see for the film fanatic but more of an interesting note in the saga of the Midnight Movie phenomenon in general. For a while, it was available in a 2-pack with the RHPS and if you see them together, I definitely suggest picking them up. I’m just not sure I’d tell anyone “Dude, you have to watch this.”

Shock Treatment gets a C from me, which may be slightly lower because of the high standard against which I think it is set. If you lived through the early 80’s, you’ll get more out of it than otherwise and if you’re already the sort that dresses up in fishnets and cries “slut” every time you see Susan Serandon, then you’ll see this flick on another level as well. It may not be your favorite movie, but the only way you’ll walk out of this feeling completely disappointed is if you expect it to be like seeing Rocky all over again.

Because after all, you can only be a virgin once.

When one watches a movie with 2 in the title, one expects there will be some connection to a movie whose title includes an invisible 1. With B movies, it’s sometimes not the case. Like writers of the first millennium after Christ, any book that advertises as “based on a true story” or any soundtrack that says on it’s cover “inspired by”, the substance of a B Movie sequel may bear little to no resemblance to it’s supposed predecessor.

I thought about this a great deal as I found myself mesmerized in my seat by Back to Back: American Yakuza 2.

American Yakuza was a B action movie starring Viggo Mortensen (yes, as in Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings). A movie deserving it’s own review, it was at it’s heart a police action movie/thriller about loyalties and trust, set against a backdrop of gangsters, gunfire and crime. Back to Back: American Yakuza 2 has police, action, gangsters and plenty of gunfire. It even has one of the actors from the first movie, though not playing the same character, unless you wish to reduce his character to “Japanese gangster”. Watching American Yakuza is entirely unrequired for enjoying its sequel and in fact I might recommend watching this one first so that you’re not expecting a better movie.

Back to Back: American Yakuza 2 starts with a number of people going about their rather messed up lives with no knowledge their paths will soon collide. First we have a pair of Japanese gangsters (the Japanese mob is called the Yakuza, if you didn’t know) who are nonchalantly hanging out in an Italian restaurant. We have a cop who just got investigated by internal affairs. We have the cop’s daughter who is going through a bit of teenage rebellion and parent hating. And then there’s a couple of assorted other police officers, a couple of assorted Italian mobsters and a psycho (really, listed in the credits as “psycho”) with an AK-47 and a dislike for the boys in blue.

The psycho comes to the restaurant and prevents the assorted gangsters from getting lunch there. This apparently disrupts the plans of the Japanese gangsters one of who takes it into his own hands to resolve the situation. This leads to an arrest, an escape and the Yakuza taking the cop under investigation and his daughter hostage. Soon, they find out they have enemies in common and a path towards clearing this mess up becomes clear.

With the diverse elements and situations of the characters and the strange weaving together of their fates, this movie starts off very much like a bargain basement Quentin Tarantino movie. I kept trying to turn the channel, but the question of “what does all of this have to do with everything else” was enough to make me pay attention long enough for me to get to the place where the Yakuza and the disgraced cop have to work together. And it was at that moment that I had the horrible realization I was no longer watching a slick, gritty crime drama.

“My god,” I thought to myself. “I’m watching a buddy film!”

While this should have been enough to send it sliding down my ratings scale like a kid with a trash can lid on a snowy hill, the shooting began in earnest about that time and I continued to sit and watch.  And I’m kind of glad I did, for while this movie may not have been Oscar worthy, it did have some very redeeming qualities. For one, there is a liberal sprinkling of cameos and bit parts in this movie, most of which are by traditionally comedic actors. The aforementioned psycho is played by Bobcat Goldthwait. There’s also Tim Thomerson (the Trancers series and a yard long B-List pedigree),  Vincent Schiavelli (deceased character actor that you’ll know when you see), Stephen Furst (Flounder from Animal House) and Fred Willard (Wall-E, MadTV and about a 190 other movies and TV shows). Between shootouts, there are scenes that range from weird to funny to all to familiar family drama, causing the movie to constantly teeter on the bridge between the warm hot tubs of awesome and the deep, muddy pits of suckitude without ever really falling into either.

I’m not going to say your life is incomplete without seeing this movie, but it’s worth checking for on cable and while you may not want to hold anyone down and force them to watch it, if you’re an action movie fan or have any working knowledge of comedians in the late 80’s, you’ll have a good time with this one. The movie has some issues with cliches and direction here and there, but not enough to rob it of entertainment value completely.

Back to Back: American Yakuza 2 gets a C from me. It’s a decent time waster and cute little ride that won’t change your life, but might make you smile. If you watch this one, keep your eyes out for some of the best last words ever written on a strip club napkin, the best thing that could ever happen to Bobcat Goldthwait and another demonstration of why if you have kidnapped someone and have them in your car, you really should wear your seat belt.

Cult classics are hard to manufacture because they require something genuine. It usually takes a movie with no money behind it but passion to catch an audience, a fringe that resonates with the message as if they’ve been there all along, just waiting for someone to help them say what was in them from the start. Like a chance encounter that leads to a sweaty night in the back seat of your Celica or a fine meal whose only recipe was “take everything left in the refrigerator and throw it in a pot”, you can’t so much plan a cult classic as let it happen.

When you try, you get The Crow: City of Angels.

The Crow: City of Angels starts many years after the original, in which Sarah, the young girl championed by The Crow’s Eric Draven, finds and aids Ashe Corvin, who is the newest victim of a crime so heinous he must seek vengence before he can return to the grave, in this case the murder of his self and his son. The villian is Judah, a sadomasochist who leads a band of colorful villians and keeps company with a modern day witch.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a pretty straight forward rehash of the first movie. This is sad, because the director originally said that he’d wanted to distance the sequel from it’s predecessor. Despite whatever effort he made towards that desire, the only really evident difference between the two was green lighting instead of gray lighting.

As with the original movie bearing the title The Crow, this flick is not something I would normally review. I saw it in a normal theater and it had a budget to speak of, unlike the straight to video pieces that would follow it. I’d originally intended to tack this review onto one of the others. The reason I can’t is that there is one thing this movie has that those others don’t: A rare, impossible to find alternate version.

Alternate versions and director’s cuts are the filet mingon of the movie geek’s DVD collection menu. Having tracked down a copy of a movie with five minutes of never-before-seen footage is the difference between saying you’ve seen the movie everyone else saw and saying to saw what the creators really hoped to show. It’s the whole reason that deleted scenes and outtakes are included in DVD releases these days, to give the ravenous the few extra crumbs that make it worthwhile to bring home the whole cinematic cake.

According to IMDB, Wikipedia and probably some old movie buff telling stories in the back of a seedy bar, the original cut of The Crow: City of Angels was a very different movie before the editors got a hold of it. It took the cookie cutter villians and gave them depth, so that when they get killed we actually care. It ran a romance sub-plot that the theatrical version hints at but never follows through on. It even had a radically different ending and one of the best closing lines I could imagine for such a gothic and downbeat movie.

That cut would have been awesome. At least I think so. I’ve never seen it.

It apparently showed up on German pay per view once and now only exists as a cobbled together piece that you have to track down through torrents and downloads (which we know you don’t do, because that’s illegal). If the studio who did this, Mirimax, has this copy available, they haven’t apparently realized there are people salivating for its release.

But no, they only released a safe and gutted version. What would have been a hard hitting, moving two hours of cinema instead was bad rendition of the first movie with more colorful death scenes but no heart. Despite some passionate performances (most of the scenes with Iggy Pop, who plays chief henchman Curve, are pure genius) The Crow: City of Angels is a hot dog when we were looking for a steak dinner.

As such, I can rate this one no better than a C and it gets that only for being pretty and having Mia Kirshner in it. I just wish that whoever made the editorial choices for this movie had realized that if we’d wanted to see The Crow again, we would have just pulled it off the shelf and rewatched it.

The “Unrated Edition” or “Director’s Cut” used to be a movie geek holy grail, extending the joy brought by a particular movie or more often including some tidbit that made you say “I knew there was more to that”. Now, the “Unrated Edition” means they throw in a scene or two that should have been left out and sell you a second copy. Every once in a while, though, you find one that splices back in a few bits that takes a movie to another level, restoring actual plot points and story back from the cutting room floor.

That’s what I found in unrated edition of Ultraviolet.

I will not attempt to hide that this movie is mostly and excuse for Milla Jovovich to walk about in tight clothes and kill things in eye pleasing fashion. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a story, it’s just kind of convoluted: Milla’s character, Violet, is afflicted with a disease that mimics some external aspects of classic vampirism. The people suffering this, called Hemophages, get longer teeth, a sensitivity (though not flesh burning allergy) to sunlight plus heightened strength, reflexes and senses. Hemophages are feared, shunned and marginalized in society. An organization called the Arch Ministry (something like the SS crossed with the CDC) is in the process of rounding up and eliminating the diseased. But the vampires have formed a resistance.

One part of this resistance effort involves stealing something from their enemies. Enter Violet again who is more than bad ass enough to enter into the Arch Ministry and swipe the item right from under their noses. She does so, but it all goes bad when it turns out that the thing she stole was a little boy.

After this, a lot of bullets get fired and a lot of people get sliced with swords.

All this you will get with the theatrical version; the reason to go to the unrated edition is that what got left on the cutting room floor for this movie was some initial plot establishment and the mention that the reason it’s bad to be a hemophage is it shortens your lifespan dramatically. There’s no extra violence or shots of Mila’s naked behind (the one in the theatrical cut is nice enough on it’s own, thank you) but there is a fair bit of dialogue that makes the movie make far more sense.

Even with the extra depth, the director’s cut still has some of the same issues as the theatrical cut.  The opening voiceover is kind of lame. Also, there are a lot of techobabble you have to be willing to overlook in Ultraviolet to fully enjoy it: The Hemophages have access to technology that allows them to walk on walls and carry around a metric buttload of weaponry loaded into “flatspace” braclets,  which for no reason is specific to them and is miles ahead of anything else in society. The disease itself seems more of a plot device than a threat.

If you can look past these, I think you’ll find an enjoyable popcorn flick with some good one liners underneath.

Ultraviolet was directed by Kurt Wimmer who also directed B+ favorite Equilibrium. I’ve read in places that the studio took the movie away from him at one point and that what we see on the screen isn’t exactly his vision. Whether that means it came out the better or the worse for it, I’m not sure. The theatrical verison of Ultraviolet gets a C from me, but the unrated edition bumps up to a B. I’m sad I can’t give either a B+, but still I recommend this movie to anyone who is a fan of flying bullets and comic book brawls.

And for that matter, anyone who’s a fan of Milla Jovovich’s butt. And isn’t that something we can all get behind?

Some movies, one watches for the plot. Others, one watches for the characters or the acting. Still others are enjoyed based on dialogue. But most movies, one watches for the imagery.

And that is the best reason to watch MirrorMask.

MirrorMask was written and co-produced by Neil Gaiman, who wrote the comic book Sandman and a number of novels including Neverwhere and American Gods. It begins with a young girl whose desire is to run away from the circus, full into the throws of adolecent angst while working as a juggler in her father’s big top. When her mother falls ill, the girl finds herself transported to a strange and suprising world full of living books, masked people and fish swimming in the air.

As one might expect, soon she finds that her presence there may determine the fate of that world and perhaps much more.

If you were to watch this movie with the sound off, you’d get much the same experience as if you’d kept it audible. The art and detail in this piece is amazing. Even though it primarily takes place in a world of imagination and dreams, the scenery, whether CGI, drawn or born of stagecraft is captivating and engaging, often dipping into the creepy and bizzare. Every time I felt the movie losing me, the visuals were enough to bring me back and keep me engaged.

But that said, in places, the movie almost lost me.

MirrorMask is a fairy tale and it’s plot progression follows a fairly familar footpath. There are twists from it, such as the main character is certainly not a princess and early on, she begins to understand her relationship to this world, but beyond that there’s little to suprise you if you’ve seen Labyrinth or The Neverending Story.

I was glad that I saw MirrorMask, for the performace of the lead actress alone, but I wanted this to be something I was dragging people into dark rooms and duct taping them to a couch so that they didn’t miss it. I’m glad it exists, if for no other reason there are people who would find other movies of it’s kind corny or dated that will be hard pressed to make the same judgement about this one. But that said, where MirrorMask made me hope it would be an explosion of insightful fantasy, it turned out to be more of a puff of nostalgia and homage to it’s inspirations.

Mirrormask gets a C on my scale, though it pains me to say it. I love Gaiman’s other work and for that reason high hopes. Alas, high hopes sometimes result in substantial disappointment, and such was my reaction to this beautiful (if predictable) film.

By the same bit of wisdom by which you cannot judge a book by its cover, you cannot judge a movie by its poster. If you were, for instance, to take the Quantum of Solace poster at first glance, you’d assume that it was a movie about people stranded in the desert after a fancy dinner party. Saw would be about poor manicures. But sometimes, there’s a movie so different than what its advertising suggests that you simply feel swindled for considering it.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the poster for the 1999 film Black Male.

If you just go by the title, you’d assume that Black Male was a movie focusing on race issues. You’d also be completely off. Gazing at the bulging forearms and fierce look of Bokeem Woodbine, you’d come to the conclusion that this was an action film. You’d be wrong. The lady curled around him might suggest that there was a great deal of sex in the film. You’d be wrong again. And the tag line about the guns and money, you’d assume it was a crime drama.

There, you might be hitting on some truth.

Black Male starts with a couple of hustlers who are trying to make a little cash through home invasion and blackmail (get the pun? Ha!). Things get all out of sorts when it turns out the mark isn’t what he seems it suddenly becomes a question of who exactly is in danger here.

The reason to track down this movie on DVD or cable is not because its anything that the poster suggests, though. Watch it because it is so… bloody… weird. An inventory of the film’s moments include things like crack cocaine where you least expect it, a severed thumb, a cat chewing on said thumb, not to mention murder, twists and mayhem. Oh, and a little necrophilia.

The reason you might not be too bad off if you never see this is that the weird is so intense that the movie kind of gets lost underneath. It’s not what I’d call a satisfying movie by a long shot, even with the intense and intriguing accoutrements that the movie intersperses throughout its telling. The actors deliver their lines well (especially Justin Pierce) and the direction is passable, but overall this movie is a wonderful surprise to stumble upon but nothing I’d break an ankle running to the movie store over.

Black Male falls in the C slot on my scale. Check it out if you have the opportunity but to enjoy this movie best, walk in with no expectations.

Finding myself making my first post in days at the end of the Yuletide season, I am tempted to dip into the deep well that is bad, Christmas/Winter themed horror movies. There is certainly a plethora to choose from, from the seminal and protested Silent Night to the more recent and less probable Jack Frost. Almost all of them fall into B+ territory.

But I haven’t seen any of them. I have, however, seen The Breed.

If I were to boil The Breed down to its essentials, I think I could make a case for this being a solid and underated picture: A genetic offshoot of humanity, vampires, has revealed itself in secret to the government, just as a single vampire serial killer threatens to destroy the fragile peace. A pair of cops attempt to get to the bottom of the killings before things spiral out of control. One cop is a cynical wisecracker, played by Bokeem Woodbine, who lost his partner to the vampire serial killer. The other is a vampire, played by Highlander: The Series star Adrian Paul.

Where the problems start for this picture is in the bucket of details that aren’t essential. For instance, the fact that it’s the near future. For a second, that there’s an oppressive, dictatorial one-world government which apparently forces everyone to wear jack boots and use 1960’s technology. There’s the interspersed head shots of various vampires stating their political afflilation (taken from a database of the world’s vampires that is the one nod to the fact the movie isn’t set in modern day). Don’t get me started on the vampire panther.

The Breed is ambitious in that it attempts to make vampires the more sympathetic of the two branches of human evolution, asking questions about what it means to be a monster and sheding new light on the subject of racism. With better writing and a bigger budget, they might have effectively told that story but instead ended up spinning a pretentious yarn in which one moment our vampiric hero/sidekick is worldly wise from having survived WWII and the next is unaware of what the adjective phrase “big ass” means.

If there is any saving grace in this film, it comes from the acting of Adrian Paul and Bai Ling (who plays a Dominatrix/Vampire/Plot Device/Love Interest). They both avoid camping up their characters, delivering their lines with conviction and playing it completely straight despite a weak script and regretable costuming decisions. It’s through their acting that we see the glimmers of what this movie could have been.

Which is a shame, because The Breed ended up only getting a C from me. As vampire movies go, I’m sad to say this one sucks.

I apologize for the un-announced vacation. This week, B+ Movies will be getting new installments Teusday (today) and Thursday Jan. 1st. You’ll be seeing the blog back to it’s regular MWF schedule beginning next week. Thanks for reading.

When you think post-apocalyptic action movie hero, your mind doesn’t usually jump immediately to Patrick Swayze. Dancing with girls who can’t be kept in a corner, yes. Messily making pottery while making out, yes. Swinging a sword at guys in biker leathers in a hellish future of our own making, not so much.

But then agian, that’s because you’ve never seen Steel Dawn.

Swayze plays a wandering swordsman named who walks the deserts of what’s left of world after World War III. World weary, he takes up the mission of a fallen mentor who was going to a small town with a lot of trouble brewing in it. He hires on with a lady farmer named Kasha who has a secret that makes her farm very valuable, attracting the attention of a local bully/landowner who wants her land. When she won’t sell, he hires someone to persuade her, a nasty, death dealing  piece of work named Sho, the man who made Swayze’s mentor “fallen”, and who sports a hairdo that makes you wonder if World War III wasn’t justified.

If this  plot line sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the plot of about every third western in existence.

If anything can be said for Steel Dawn’s story its that while it lacks anything resembling complexity, it uses it’s cliches as well as it can. In addition to the aformenetioned excuse for a end of the movie showdown, we also get Kasha’s son helping to soften up Swayze’s world weary exterior and adding some humanity to the movie. There’s also a bit of conflict with Kasha’s right hand man, played by the late B movie virtuoso Brion James,  who feels replaced by the new man in his boss’s life. Without watching this movie, I’m guessing you can guess which one of these guys gets kidnapped and which one gets stabbed.

This movie is a bit of a Frankenstien’s monster, a film cobbled together from existing movie plots and sewn together in a working if not terribly pretty package. While not the worst post apocalypse film to come out of the 80’s, there’s not alot to distinguish it besides having the star of Dirty Dancing in it.

Steel Dawn gets a C as it walks off into the sunset. It’s worth renting or even purchusing if you find it on the second half of a double feature DVD. Even without  going MST3K on it, it’s an interesting film.

Just please, somebody explain the hair to me.

When I was but a lad of six years old, my babysitter wanted to take me to a movie. I was very okay with this and we shuffled off to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Alas, Close Encounters wasn’t quite out yet, so we decided to watch the movie that was playing.

This is how I ended up seeing, in the theatre, The Kentucky Fried Movie.

Besides being an argument for expanded parental guidance warnings, The Kentucky Fried Movie is a series of short bits, most of which have nothing to do with one another. The film hit on themes of the day and 70’s pop culture references, including the energy crisis, kung fu movies and cheesy porn. The humor is driven by puns, sexual innuendo and weird sight gags.

The movie was under-financed and this may be both part of its charm as well as it’s downfall. Watching it thirty years later (pause for a moment while I cry a little) the humor is still there, but is a little stale in the 21st century. The pacing of the film is a few degrees off, something a little extra editing might have fixed. The actors, pretty much anyone the could grab to work for next to nothing, do a respectable job but the lack of Oscar nods to this pictures stars is not without reason.

If I were to do this movie justice, I’d rate each skit on it’s own, but as I’m not trying to write a novel here, I’ll just mention the hightlights:

• Fistful of Yen- The center of the film is a spoof of Enter the Dragon. This is the best bit in the film and if you’ve seen Bruce Lee’s classic, you’ll laugh. If not, you’ll still laugh.
• Catholic High School Girls in Trouble- A trailer for a fake porn movie, it has genuine giggle generating moments even if it’s not really that far off from a real porno ad.
•  The News Bulletins- If anything ties this picture together, it’s the news announcer coming on and saying “Film at 11″. If anything dates this picture, it’s the bad suit that the announcer wears.

Is this movie worth renting? Yes.

Is it worth watching all at once? Not so much.

The reason this format wouldn’t fly post Y2K is that we have YouTube now. Admittedly, you can’t show boobs on YouTube but if you overlook that, The Kentucky Fried Movie is like a prototype of the internet’s best time waster. Funny video clips are visual equivalent of a bag of Reese’s cups: one or two and you’re satisfied, three or four seems indulgent, but more than that and you start feeling a little sick.

Despite fond memories of my babysitter trying to shield my eyes with a popcorn box once she realised what it was we were watching, I have to give the Kentucky Fried Movie a C. If you find this one on special it might be worth having, but I wouldn’t consider one’s life unfulfilled if you miss it.

(Unless you’re me. Then you’d be sad for not having had gone out with a really pretty 18 year old girl, even if you were only six.)