Scarecrow

Movie Postmortems: CATWOMAN

by John S.

Movie Postmortems is a series that reviews certain films which showed promise but misfired, critically and/or commercially, upon release. Join us in our attempt to find out exactly what the hell happened.

THE CASUALTY: Catwoman

THE CASE HISTORY: June 1992. Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, the follow-up to his very successful Batman, opens to the biggest weekend box-office numbers up until that point in time, about $45 million. Although it finishes commercially about $90 million less than Batman’s overall domestic take ($251 million vs. $162 million), critical notices are strong. A near-universal favorite is Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle/Catwoman.

Read More

DANGEROUS MEN: A Dreamer’s Midnight Movie Realized

by Norm Nielsen

Dangerous Men is an 80-minute film with production values so awful it’s impossible to ascertain if they are laughably intentional or laughably naive. Dangerous Men exuberantly showcases bad directing, bad acting, a bad film score, bad songs, bad sound, and bad screenwriting. Scenes feature fat men in ill-fitting white Jockey shorts, knee fetishism, amateurish fight choreography, repulsive nudity, and a female killer who hides a knife in her butt crack. In one memorable scene, a police chief obviously reads from the yellow-highlighted script on his desk while talking on a phone that is not plugged in. Different actors play the same role (presumably due to the years-long shooting schedule) while tangential subplots appear and disappear with no resolution. The film’s poster is poorly punctuated. And this is only a short list of the film’s many OMG details.

Read More

New Releases for September 26!

It’s another Glorious New Release Tuesday!

Read More

Inside I Was Screaming: Cameron and Bay, My Pre-Teen Therapists

by Emalie Soderback

When I was growing up, there were two movies I’d watch over and over again on my tiny cube television set with a built in VCR. Two movies, four VHS tapes—James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) and Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001). These incredible big-budget dramas with their ground-breaking special effects, and casts of young, dashing leading men like Leonardo DiCaprio and Josh Hartnett—not to mention the female leads of equally astounding beauty Kate Winslet and Kate Beckinsale—set against the backdrop of earth-shattering historical tragedies seemed to match up perfectly to my end-of-the-world, overdramatic, tween emotions.

Read More

Great Sketch Comedy Movie Recommendations from SketchFest!

by Randall Cleveland, SketchFest Artistic Director 

When people think of “Sketch Comedy Movies”, they’d usually jump right to the (usually mediocre) sketches that get turned into feature-length films like A Night at the Roxbury, The Ladies Man, or Superstar. It’s really pretty rare that someone sets out to make a feature made up of a series of shorter sketches, and a lot of the ones that do exist don’t age well – often they’re fueled by pop culture references and parodies.

But if you’re looking to scratch your sketch comedy itch, here are some great full-length sketch comedy movies that stand the test of time and are sure to make you laugh.

• Monty Python’s And Now For Something Completely Different – This collection of the “Greatest Hits” of the groundbreaking sketch comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus is one killer joke after another. It really condenses everything that made Monty Python work into one bizarre, madcap package.
• Mel Brooks’s History of the World Part 1 – This is one of Mel Brooks’s funniest and smartest movies. It’s a series of comedic vignettes surrounding Mel getting in trouble at various times and places throughout history. Learn why it’s good to be the king during the French Revolution, or see the second-most famous representation of the Spanish Inquisition in sketch comedy history.
• Kids in the Hall’s Brain Candy – The beloved Canadian sketch comedy group The Kids in the Hall’s only foray into feature length filmmaking still holds up as a funny, weird, somewhat experimental 90s comedy.
• Wet Hot American Summer – Calling this one “sketch” might be a bit of a stretch, but I think it qualifies. You’ll see a lot of recognizable faces (younger than you remember them!) from Stella, The State, UCB, and SNL in this send-up of summer camp movies.
• Coffee and Cigarettes – This is comedy Jim Jarmusch-style. The depressing arthouse filmmaker made this series of vignettes where semi-fictional versions of the celebrities playing them sit in a café and smoke and talk about life with each other. The humor is dry as hell, but it has some funny moments.