Why Cash Isn't the Ideal Gift for the Recovering Meth Addict in Your Life

Sorry I've been so AWOL. Real life intrudes in the most surprising ways.

Take the month of December. I have a dear relative who has a December birthday. A number of well-meaning people gave him money for his birthday and for Christmas. To most people, especially during these hard times, that is a gift of thoughtful trust. Unfortunately to a meth addict, even one in recovery, it is a gift that looks an awful lot like a score. In the case of my relative, whom I'll call Darryl, it proved too great to resist. Darryl is now reining merry havoc on everyone who gave him the cash. Joy to the world. When a meth addict goes on a bender they're not difficult to find, because they tend to find everyone they know and get shouty. They kind of look like the dudes from Scanners, only without a synth soundtrack announcing their imminent tweaking, and not so much with the telekinesis as with the physical throwing of things. Property damage often ensues. Peace on Earth, good will toward men.

So, word to the wise: gift certificates. That's not to say that a determined addict won't find a way to trade that for drugs, but it looks less like a potential hit than the cash does.

What to do when you're feeling icky-poo

I've been down with the dreaded swine flu, and I highly recommend astragalus to anyone who comes down with it. I was diagnosed too late for Tamiflu to do me any good, but once I finally started taking the astragalus I began to improve rapidly.

What better activity for forced bed rest than watching the boob tube? Scariest Places on Earth is a smorgasbord of horror show talent wrapped up in one guilty pleasure package. Like a trashy movie burrito, if you will.

First, Linda Blair slinks out of the shadows of a gothic set to introduce the segment with as many Creepshow-esque puns as the writers could sneak in there. Then, Zelda Rubinstein of Poltergeist fame provides the voice-over history for the spooky location of the episode. To top it all off, Alan Robson shows up to scare the bejeesus out of the credulous American family who are there to spend the night in the haunted mansion. It's like The House on Haunted Hill with scaredy-cat-cam.

They always send the biggest scaredy-cat deep within the bowels of the mansion, alone. Then, the bravest family member is sent way the heck out on the house's grounds, also alone. This is so that when the spooked family member finally has a screaming breakdown, Braveheart has to go on a quest to catch up with the other family members who are stumbling in Spooky's general direction. The whole thing becomes a montage of shaking, yelling faces, which is way more entertaining than it has any right to be, considering the lavish production values have been shrunk down to close-ups of poorly-lit, non-union performers. But never fear! For Alan Robson will soon be back to scare the family one more time into wondering if a ghost will follow them home, and then Linda Blair will deliver the punny coda.

Some people like chicken soup with crackers. I like trashy movies and b TV.

But I hear neon bright clothes are coming back.

The cover of this DVD doesn't do this movie justice. Far from being desaturated, Electric Boogaloo is a candy-coated love letter to Eighties sartorial choices. You only see clothes that bright in anime anymore.

Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo catches up with Turbo, Ozone and Special K (whose nickname is conveniently never explained) who are still breakdancing (natch), but this time with the goal of saving their community center (the go-to plot for Eighties youth market films).

The reason this movie holds a special place in my heart is for the delirious dance sequences, especially the one that takes place when all of Turbo's friends visit him in the hospital. The laws of physics and all common sense are gleefully suspended whenever the cast starts dancing. Nurses abandon their posts to kick up their heels, and people in traction start jumping out of bed. I breakdance in your general direction and hallelujah, you are HEALED! But the best part -- the absolute treat -- is when the hugely pregnant mothers dance out of the maternity ward and start high-kicking down the hall, carrying their bellies in front of them like basketballs. Awesome! They really don't make movies like this anymore. Now I'm feeling all nostalgic. I do hope some of these fashions are really coming back. I miss my jellies.

Mimic 2 - 2001

This sequel to the late 90's killer cockroach classic brings back a bit player in the lead role, which is always a good move when creating trashy movie nirvana. Remy, a CDC entomologist in the first flick, is now a teacher in a school building that is on the verge of being condemned. Why she chose to leave the CDC for a high school teaching job is never even mentioned, much less explained, so points for avoiding the usual type of inner conflict torturing a heroine in a trashy horror movie. No, Remy's inner conflict is more of an outer conflict, and it has to do with her love life rather than her career. She just can't seem to find a man she can depend on. Could be because someone keeps killing them and cutting off their faces. Just a theory.

Maybe the bombastic police detective (Bruno Campos) who investigates the killings will have better survival odds. Speaking of whom, watch for the scene where he tells a colleague to "pick up that desk." Funniest 'appeal for an open mind' trick I have ever seen in any movie, ever.

Okay, so this one's not trashy.

I like good movies, too. And sometimes, even really good movies have supremely silly moments in them.

The Uninvited (1944) is a fantastically atmospheric ghost story about a pair of siblings who purchase an estate near the sea for a price that really should have made them wonder, and about the young woman who can't stay away from the place even after it proves hazardous to her health. This one was made when Hollywood had to rely primarily on creating a mood to scare the bejesus out of people, and this film succeeds admirably at doing just that.

But there is one moment that had an opposite effect on me (spoiler).

It's an emotionally charged moment in which our hero (Ray Milland) confronts the specter. He hollers, "From now on, this house is for the living!" And then? He throws a lit candelabra at a pair of very old wooden doors. He's just lucky ectoplasm puts out fires, is all I'm sayin'.

House of the Dead 2 - 2005

Sequel to the stunningly bad House of the Dead, and produced by Sci Fi Original Pictures, this film has something of a trashy movie pedigree. This is also one of those rare sequels that's much better than the original. Of course, that's a relative statement, like saying a pixie stick and potato chip fluffernutter is much healthier on whole wheat than on white. Still, it's gratifying to see the filmmakers just go for broke (because they can). It's not that easy to intentionally make a trashy movie and get the melange just right. Misguided earnestness has to be replaced with snarky self-awareness, but not with too heavy a hand.

House of the Dead 2 follows the nouveau classic "zombies pick off the SWAT team one by one" plot. There are plenty of in-jokes for the dedicated zombie flick fan, but my personal favorite scene makes fun of a romantic actioner trope. (Spoilers).

Fairly early in the film, the hero and heroine are trading bon mots, but they can't just get on with it because they're in denial and on the job; the job in this case being a zombie that needs subduing. The zombie goes splat, and they are both decorated with gore, but they never so much as pause with their verbal foreplay. Even though the zombie's blood is close to their mouths, after it's been established that they could get infected by ingesting it. Can't let anything get in the way of a good zinger.

Spring Break Shark Attack - 2005

Someone was bound to make this picture sooner or later. A Spring Break bikini beach setting and a sharks-run-amok plot: they go together like chocolate and peanut butter. Whoever pitched this thing must have been filled with such confidence, they figured, who needs a script?

Which is why the first half of the movie feels like it was spliced together from several different primetime soap pilots that didn't get picked up. Good girl just wants her dad to trust her, check. Date rape drama, check check. Boy from the wrong side of the tracks meets good girl slumming, ding ding ding!

Way too long into the movie's running time, sharks start going berserk from exposure to an environmentalist subplot that comes out of nowhere. This causes them to do things like leap out of the water next to a pier to grab some poor romantic fool, in much the same manner that a dog jumps after a frisbee, with only slightly more gore (damn CGI). Luckily for the characters, the heroine's brother is a marine biologist, and finds some really fake-looking sea turtle shells that somehow prove as warning against the pending sharkocalypse (they look like green boogie boards with cartoon bites taken out of them). Luckily for the viewers, nobody believes him in time to prevent the sharks from finally appearing in the picture.

This film is the antithesis of what it means to be in the hands of competent storytellers; the very definition of a fine trashy movie. Enjoy!

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Something Funny

I miss seeing the print publication at the checkout stand, but the website is still with us (and still funny).

Dolly Dearest - 1992

As Child's Play ripoffs go, this one's nowhere near as terrible as it could have been in the special effects department. The shots of creepy little doll legs running behind furniture work pretty well for building suspense. At least, up until the doll finally attacks someone in a long shot. It's not the puppeteering that brings the suspense to a grinding halt, though. No, it's the actor playing the dad, who braces himself before the doll even raises the scissors to stab him. In my book, telegraphing a stabbing is almost as golden as jumping into the monster's mouth in a low budget creature feature, so there's one point in this movie's favor.

Here's another point: an archaeologist behaving unbecomingly to the profession (a fairly common occurrence in trashy movies, especially when an animate doll is involved). In this case, the scientist has been trying to quash superstitious rumors that his crypt-opening ways will awaken the ghost of a devil child and bring destruction upon the community. So when he finally opens the crypt and finds the skeleton of an infant with both human and goat-like features, what does he do? Would you guess that he:

a) theorizes that the body has been tampered with postmortem to make it look like a devil child, and then carefully takes samples to be analyzed in a lab.

or:

b) immediately abandons every precept of his training to run off and blow up the doll factory.

If you guessed a, congratulations, you possess sound reasoning skills and understand the scientific method. If you guessed b, congratulations to you too, because you understand the goofy logic of trashy movies (also, you are right). To be fair, the tomb's lid blowing off by itself, complete with ghost light, might have been a little difficult to rationalize. Not impossible, though. If Scully could come up with a logical explanation for liver-eating monsters on a weekly basis during The X-Files, surely this dude could have come up with something about phosphorescence and trapped gasses. Just because a devil-possessed doll is on the loose is no reason to start getting sloppy with your methodology.

Speaking of the devil child, though: here's another trashy movie which offers an explanation for events that makes no sense at all (spoilers ahead). The backstory reveals that the devil child was created in the distant past by some evil shamans, and that the shamans fed it children from the village. Okay. What on earth would the shamans want with a devil child? Did they need it to intimidate their people into blind obedience? If that were the case, wouldn't it have been much simpler to have a pit of jaguars to throw people into? Why go to so much trouble creating something that's surely going to cause your messy death someday when you lose control over it (because you know they did)?

It is the paradox of trashy movies that occasionally something profound seems to be lurking just under the surface, like that crazy neighbor who waits to jump out of a trashcan and scare your ass every Halloween.

Mr. Murder - 1999

I read the book this movie was based on years ago. I don't remember a great deal about where the movie diverges from the book, but I'm pretty sure the book's action arises from a less silly situation than that which launches this movie: juggled lab tests. And by juggled, I mean the evil doctor's assistant throws them in the air and catches them in a vain effort to impress a female colleague. The samples get mixed up, wacky hijinks ensue. I'm willing to look past the fact that the chances of a real hospital employing this goofball are slim to none, because this is a trashy movie. What really sends the incident over the top are the following items:

1. The evil doctor, whom we are supposed to take for some kind of genius, entrusted this goofball with very important samples.

2. This evil doctor, who has presumably met the goofball before and therefore knows what to expect, did not even leave a keeper in charge to thwack the goofball upside the head if he started to look like he might want to juggle with the samples.

3. This is apparently taking place in a regular hospital where the evil doctor works. That's a heck of a risk of discovery for an evil genius to take. Besides, what's wrong with the traditional evil lair with tricked-out lab? And smoke machines? And lightning flashing outside even when it adds nothing to the plot? Although, the evil industrial complex which figures into the middle third of the movie almost makes up for the lack of smoking lab beakers in the beginning.

I came across this gem on that treasure trove for trashy movies, late night cable. The schedule mistakenly said the movie was called Larva, and I missed the opening credits so I was expecting some kind of grody giant insect birth to come of the unfortunate juggling incident. Instead, Stephen Baldwin is born, which turns out to be kind of awesome, because his character (ominously named Alfie) is a flipped-out marvel of evil clone-dom. And every time you start to feel that maybe Alfie isn't so bad after all, the action shifts to Alfie's donor, a square family man who is obviously in for a really bad day whenever his maladjusted clone finally catches up to him.

Also well worth mentioning: Thomas Hayden Church, chewing the scenery as an evil scientist and barking out lines like, "Alfie is a weapon!"

Yor, Hunter from the Future - 1983

1980's cinema saw a glorious outpouring of cheese in the form of low-budget barbarian flicks. Some of these movies were not incompetently put together (Beastmaster comes to mind). Others were such obviously rushed productions that you could hardly believe they'd be distributed to theaters, but they were (such were the days before direct-to-video). Guess which category Yor falls into? If some gym rats spontaneously decided to put on a show with whatever materials they could get out of people's basements, the result might look something like this movie. Actually, with the kind of special effects available to YouTube posters today, it might be better. Although I'd miss the paper-mache dinosaur.

The very basic plot involves Yor questing to find his long-lost tribe (he knows he belongs to a long-lost tribe because his necklace doesn't look like anyone else's jewelry), all the while trying to dodge the same dozen or so dudes on multiple occasions, who are decked out in different colored body-paint in each skirmish in an attempt to make them look like new antagonists for Yor to vanquish. Also, a love triangle develops that lasts for about a nanosecond. Yor's got a nice bod, but his emoting is not as well developed as his abs. At one point, he is supposed to be portraying love at first sight, which onYor looks like he let a really good one. His main love interest, Kalaa, doesn't fare much better, if only because she's not called on to do much more than glare jealously at the parade of grateful tramps whom Yor rescues from hilariously goofy monsters. Even more hiliarious: the faux-Queen theme music that suddenly bursts onto the soundtrack every time Yor goes into action.

But none of these things are as unintentionally hilarious as the plot twist waiting at the end of this movie like that unidentifiable fruit at the bottom of grandma's jello mold (spoilers ahead). Sooner or later, the hero of a barbarian flick will have to face a smarmy villain who possesses, a) magic, or b) a technological advantage. Usually, this villain has shown up sometime earlier in the film to give the audience (and the hero) a taste of what he's all about. In Yor, he turns up pretty much out of left field, he apparently possesses both of the aforementioned traits, and he looks an awful lot like Darth Vader. Darth Copyright Infringement and his apprenti- er, accomplices have taken over what's left of their society, the cowed majority of whom dress an awful lot like Starfleet crew members. Yor, unbenknownst to himself, is the rightful heir of this place, and his necklace has been recording his life. DCI takes obscene delight in showing Yor how he's been taping his every move, only why is the necklace recording Yor from a distance? Shouldn't it be Yor-cam? Maybe the necklace is a beacon that attracts a satellite camera. What is it about movies like this which compels me to try to make sense out of the ridiculous? And why does the 'Yor learns to hunt' sequence feature Yor looking exactly the same as he does all the time? Wouldn't it have actually been cheaper to hire a teenaged day player for that scene?

Watch! As Yor throws androids over his head like sacks of potatoes! Thrill! As a badly-dubbed, long-lost ancestor saves the day and proceeds to speechify for a really long time! Cringe! Each time Kalaa bellows Yor's name in anguish! Most of all, enjoy this movie for the comedy gold which it truly is.

Because Trashy Movies are the Best Thing Ever

B movies, C movies, Z movies; whatever you want to call them, they're all wonderful to me. I firmly believe that if a filmmaker can incite joy in the viewer, the film has value -- even if the joy is incited for reasons that have nothing to do with what the filmmaker had in mind. Ed Wood, Phil Tucker, whoever is responsible for Bats, I salute you! Thank you for upping the joy quotient on planet Earth.