Chooga-Chooga, Indeed.

Y'all are gonna hate me for this.  Just remember that I love you and I never meant to hurt you.

I absolutely adore the Frank Oz 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives.

Now, this is NOT to say that I didn't love the original.  Paula Prentiss is an unsung goddess and her work as Bobbie in the ultimate feminist horror-fantasy is timeless.  No one will ever forget Bobbie Marlowe and her Android Karenina meltdown.  "Oh Joanna... I thought we were friends... I thought we were friends... friends... coffee... how could you do a thing like that? Like that? Like that? Like that? Friends... friends... "

The thing is, though, that I think that people were, and are, just tired of remakes and that, coupled with the infighting on the set among pretty much ALL of the principles and Frank Oz, made for a film that did not do well.  Frankly, when taken on its own, divorced from the original, this movie is still poignant as a feminist fairy tale and, most importantly of all, it's HILARIOUS.

It's like Mean Girls without the Mean.

For those of you who aren't aware of the story, basically, it's this little town in Connecticut where the women are being replaced by extra-perfect, extra-docile, extra-wifey versions of themselves because their husbands are sexist pigs that are threatened by their wives' collective success outside of the home.  Because men are wusses.

This is played for pure horror in the original, although because it was filmed in the 70s and every woman went to the same elocution coach, it ends up being an unintentional side-splitter.  Oz decided to take it all the way to Happy Town.  The remake veers directly into Scooby-Doo Mysteries territory with Joanna, Bobbie and the new gay guy, Roger peering over each other's shoulders around corners but the basic fears are still there.  

Nobody wants to be replaced.  Nobody wants to live solely for the purposes of being someone's fantasy.  When those things are real, it doesn't matter how colorful the landscape is, it's still overshadowed by dread.  Both movies were played to be "thrillers in sunlight" in order to contrast the dark secret the town holds.

Callista Gingrich: Hopefully not our supreme robot overlord.

This is one of those "Town With a Secret" movies where you KNOW what the secret is and you KNOW that it's easily escapable but the strong woman just has to remove the villain's mask and she can't escape without her family but her family is part of the problem.  Her husband is, anyway.  

The fact that most of the remake is played out like a bubblegum pop song is probably what most people hated about it but I appreciated what Oz was trying to do.  Plus, even though you can kind of see the tension between the actors, they still pull through with great performances.  Glenn Close is fucking brilliant, as always.

I really suggest that everybody give this one another chance.  It may not be the cult favorite that the original is but the remake is really not as bad as people make it out to be.  Give it another chance.

Hell, maybe you can watch it while scrap-booking or making a pine cone centerpiece for the holidays!  Or maybe you can watch it with the book club while reviewing a new catalogue of Christmas and Chanukah decorations.  Or maybe you can watch it while working out!  

Washing machine, ladies!  Chooga-Chooga-Chooga-Chooga!  Chooga-Chooga-Chooga-Chooga!

Also?  Do-si-do.

Clap Your Hands If You Believe

The Apparition has problems.

SO many problems.

You know, it really doesn't say a lot for a film when the best actor in it is Tom Felton.  I mean, he was great as Draco Malfoy and I know he's got the chops but when everyone around you falls flat, your performance has to suffer, as well.  And WOW did it suffer.

Sorry, kids, but this movie isn't even bad enough to be ironically good.

See, I do like a decent haunting film but there are no words for the lameness that is The Apparition.  None.  This is the white bread and mayonnaise sandwich of horror films.  It LOOKS slick and the effects are decent but until they create special effects that can cure bad acting, this movie is sunk.

Much like the money spent to watch this film.

OK, so, the premise of this is a college scientist (Felton) is trying to be Egon Spengler (minus the fascination with spores, molds and fungi) and, in the process of conducting an experiment, brings out this vague thing that either is or is not an actual ghost and only exists physically because they enhanced the power of belief with SCIENCE!!  Fast forward to the young couple in the brand new house where, now, weird shit's goin' down.

Are you fucking kidding me? 

I half expected the house to be built on an ancient Native American cemetary.  Oooooh.  Spooky mold. Doors open.  Oooooh. 

And spooooooky gummie bears!

Bitch, please.  And if I hear ONE MORE MOVIE say "The house isn't haunted, you are," I'm gonna kick a scriptwriter's ass from here to Poughkeepsie.  That shit should have died with Paranormal Activity.

On top of that, this guy tells the young couple that he can get rid of it by rerouting the entire town's electricity to their house.  Wait, what?  That just makes no fucking sense.  Suffice it to say that this movie only ends in tears.  Well-deserved tears. 

So, I guess the only thing left to say is:  y'all fuckin' owe me for takin' one for the team. You don't gotta watch this steaming pile because I did it for you.   Skip it.

No Glove, No Love

Quick!  What's the first thing you think of when you hear "Alien Pregnancy"?

I bet it's Ridley Scott's "Alien", right?

Yeah, same here, but in doing research for today's post, it turns out that the "face full of extraterrestrial wang" trope has been around for quite a while.  H. P. Lovecraft toyed with the idea in The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Dunwich Horror although he kept the squick factor on the low side so his works... you know... actually got published.  We also see it in A. E. van Vogt's 1939 short story Discord in Scarlet (later included in Voyage of the Space Beagle).  Apparently, intestines work just as well as uteri.

In case you're wondering, Alien is NOT the first movie to use this trope.  Roger Corman's 1958 B-Movie Night of the Blood Beast has Michael Emmet carrying a whole LOT of alien embryos in his shambling corpse.

Now, our most prevalent image of this trope is, obviously, Alien and it's sequels and spin-offs (and the odd Mel Brooks reference) wherein it's seen as a rape metaphor (and with H. R. Giger at the design helm all we're missing is a handful of roofies).  That's where we fall flat as a society because there are quite a few movies that take this and run with it in directions we don't expect.

Alien is the rape metaphor.  From there, Breeders and Feast remove "metaphor" from the equation.  Demon Seed is an odd duck because it's an artificial intelligence rather than a true alien.  While there's no sexual aspect OTHER than pregnancy in Village of the Damned, it's assumed that the creepy kids are the result of alien breeding.  Species, another H. R. Giger vision, has pregnancy being the primary goal of these aliens and even the one male example sets off to impregnate as many women as possible (with the women coming to term in minutes...).  Xtro gives us a woman implanted with an alien embryo that gives birth to a fully grown man.

And then?  Her pussy exploded.

And then there's MY favorite, Giant, Swollen Boob-Monster from Slither.


That being said, it doesn't get used a LOT in movies, but it still leaves a noticeable imprint on pop culture.

Wanna know why?

Sorry.  Couldn't help it.  Had to be done.

Because most media that contains this imagery is created by MEN and pregnancy is the last great mystery to us.  We know how it works, but we don't know how it feels and all we have to work with are Bill-Cosby-esque comedy routines wherein our female companions loudly and sharply blame us for the pain of childbirth (regardless of whether or not we were responsible for said pregnancy) and make dire promises of extreme genital torture whilst demanding the epidural.  FOR GOD'S SAKE, GIVE HER THE DRUGS!

As a straight friend once told me, occasionally, vagina looks like a grenade went off in a roast beef sandwich.  It scares us.  We, as men, don't have a uterus, don't know what it feels like to carry a life inside us unless we've been exposed to a tropical parasite on some kind of EXTREME HIKING TRIP, and, frankly, if we DID, abortion centers would be the new Starbucks. Men are wusses.

This is not to say that Rule 34 is not in effect, here.  M-Preg fan-fiction DOES exist.  I will not provide links.  I'm kinky but not THAT kinky.  If you want to subject yourself to it, that's totally on you.

A Different Word For EVERYTHING!

The French are a fucked up people.  Not only is the 2006 Kim Shapiron film Sheitan one of the strangest films I've seen recently but it stars Vincent Cassel who is either entirely brilliant or completely bugfuck crazy.

For those of you who don't recognize Vincent Cassel's name right away, he played Gilles De Rais in The Messenger with Milla Jovovich, Francois Toulour in Ocean's Twelve/Thirteen, Thomas Leroy in Black Swan and Marcus in Irréversible.  In my opinion?  NOT an attractive man.  Something about his REALLY WIDE five-head, the spacing of his eyes and his itty-bitty chin.  He looks like a bird.  Monica Belucci must be extremely happy in the sack, though, because they've been married for about 10 years, now.

Here you go, straight boys.  Cleavage you will never have access to.

I digress. 

ANYWAY, so in Sheitan, the French version of The Jersey Shore cast gets thrown out of a nightclub (conveniently called "STYXX") on Christmas Eve and decide, "Oh, hey, I'm not done partying, yet.  Let's go with this girl we just met, whose name, coincidentally, is Eve, to her remote village and get wasted because French filmmakers are never subtle in their use of symbolism, particularly of the religious variety."

Is this EVER a good plan?

So yeah.  When a goat directly out of a medieval satanic woodcut blocks your path TURN AROUND!  Of course, they don't because jovial, yet creepy, farmhand Joseph (Cassel) comes to remove the goat from the path and get them unstuck from the mud with his weirdly strong legs.  He also follows them around like a puppy, gets them to go swimming at a hot spring and tries to pimp out his niece.

By the way, if'n you don't want to see some supremely ugly nekkid people, this movie probably ain't for you.  I'm all about the beauty of the human form but there's a difference between a skinny person and a toast rack.  Just sayin'.

Toast rack.  Es no sexy.  Es no bueno.

After all of this, there's an extremely awkward discussion about sex over dinner (which happens to be goat... yes, goat).  I say it's awkward because Joseph, yet again, has inserted himself into their evening.  I'm wondering by this point how the hell you get this guy to go the fuck away.  "I'm sorry, dude.  You are more than twice our age, you look like the standard definition of "child molester" and I could SWEAR I saw a windowless white van over there so if you don't mind leaving us alone and going to hang out with the very pregnant wife you're currently bitching about upstairs, that would be awesome, k?"

The rest of the evening is all "kids trying to get laid while figuring out that there is something supremely wrong going on" but, you know, they're kids.  It takes a while.

From a character standpoint, Joseph is obviously the best developed but the character of Bart (who started the whole mess by getting into the bar fight to begin with) kind of intrigued me, too.  He wants to pull of a brave front but he's highly insecure and, although nothing is said directly, I'm pretty sure that the character is supposed to be in the closet.  All of the others are fairly throw-away, including the one who's there cheating on his wife.

So, the movie itself... Overall, I liked it but your mileage may vary.  It most definitely has a gross-out quality to it that, oddly, doesn't detract from the film as much as some of the actors do.  The script is a little vague and it's even more vague when you realize you have to read subtitles.  (Don't get me wrong.  I LOVE subtitles.  Dubbing is usually just awful.  They just make my brian hurt from trying to concentrate on the dialogue AND the movie at the same time.)  Even this, though, isn't necessarily bad because the movie seems INTENTIONALLY vague.  And when you add in Frenchy McCrazypants, it ends up being this creepy thrill ride that sends slimey shivers into places you really don't want them. 

I'm not sure penicillin will cure this one.  I'm pretty sure the only way to get rid of it is to pass it on to your friends.

Hitchhikers Are Still Bad, Right?

OK, I'll totally admit that I watched Vile out of a Face-Off fanboy moment.  I saw McKenzie Westmore's name and I said, "Oh, hey.  We know she's kinda stiff as a presenter.  Let's see if her acting is as wooden as those fashionable wedges she wears."

Well?  Fortunately, she doesn't show up a lot and, for what it's worth, she's actually funny in this one but they gave her close to top billing for a part that lasts less than ten minutes.  YAY, marketing.

Anyway, I can tell you that the people who hate torture porn will ABHOR this movie because that's all it is from start to finish.  The story goes like this:  Kids are on the way back home from a camping trip when they pick up a hitchhiker (Westmore) who gasses them.  They wake up in a cabin whereupon scary mad scientist lady shows up on a screen and tells them that they have vials attached to the back of their heads that must be filled with a certain chemical that the brain produces in 22 hours.  This chemical is produced when the human body is subjected to extreme pain.

Science is MAAAAAAAAAgiiiiic!

Right there, this told me that this flick is gonna be more wince-incuding than a towel-whip to the gonads.  I didn't know if it was gonna hit or not but, damn, if I didn't flinch.

I was pleasantly surprised, though.  The film had a little bite to it.  It's more along that whole "man's inhumanity to man" thing, but it wasn't forced.  It flowed smoothly between "we HAVE to do this" to a few characters that were "we WANT to do this" and one character that was just too hot to handle.  Every cast has to have a douchebag. 

And some casts consist ONLY of douchebags.

There's some genuine tenderness between a few of the cast members, though and this is what brings Vile a few notches above your standard low-budget torture porn.  And there are a few twists along the way, as well.  One of the characters is pregnant so they have to figure out how to harvest from her without hurting her TOO badly, for example.

Ultimately, though, this movie is enjoyable but it's only a notch or two above "I just graduated from Tom Savini's School of Special Effects and my mommy bought me a camera".  Vile is so full of burns, punctures, slashes, missing fingernails, black eyes and cauliflower ears that it may as well have been filmed at a wife beaters convention.  That, on top of the fairly ludicrous "black market brain chemicals" angle, makes it ostensibly silly.  I enjoyed it but we all know I'm a sick motherfucker, don't we?

If anything, I say give it a try.  Hearing an attractive SyFy reality show presenter yelling "fucking rednecks" should make you chuckle.