Movies Schmovies

If I had started this list two years ago, there’s no question that this post would be solely devoted to Paris Hilton’s “Stars are Blind.” Let that run through your mind for a minute: Paris Hilton’s reggae song got bumped. What the fuck happened? I mean, at one point Paris actually sings, “Now tell me who have you been dreaming of?/I and I alone.”

So why can’t a rich white girls’ saccharine tribute to her oneness with Jah make the list? Because in 2008, a great, whiter hope emerged.

Heidi Montag – Higher (2008)

Let’s get this out of the way right up front, because there’s a reason why you have to sift through countless parodies just to find the music video on YouTube. The actual video even looks like a parody video. Heidi moves like a Huntington’s choreia patient, she looks like she learned to dance from a strip aerobics video and when she sings…Ho. Lee. Shit. What started out looking like a coma-induced flashback sequence from someone’s student film takes on a distinct “I filmed my music video at the mall” feel as soon as soon as she starts lip synching.

Maybe it’s the inevitable consequence of having a 90-pound blonde in a bikini miming Luciano Pavarotti, or maybe it’s the continual feel that at any minute this could turn into a celebrity sex tape; but for whatever reason this video is hysterical, and totally deserving of every critical word ever spoken, written, thought or made up out of a random jumble of sounds.

But much of the criticism stops at the video. That’s a shame because the song itself is a real shitshow too. The song begins, inexplicably, with some heavy duty electric noise like Heidi is trying to resurrect the Frankenstein monster. Then we head a synthesizer solo, performed either by Heidi herself, by her husband Spencer, or a blind chicken.

Then we get the first lyrics of the song:

“Here I go now/I’m keeping my eyes open/don't you let me down. /Nothing can stop me now/I know you hear this sound./ Go ahead and let it out/don’t be afraid to fly, fly high/reaches past the sky.”

What the fuck is she trying to say here? This isn’t a coherent thought; it’s a clusterfuck of platitudes. It’s like someone wrote a song based on Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric. The word salad continues:

“Feel the wind on your face/we can frolic or race/we can go at your pace (pace)/the power lifted me/so it set me free.”

Yes, she used the word frolic in a pop song. You can also see the reoccurring theme of liberation, which according to Heidi is about not listening to what other people think, and freeing yourself to do what you want to do. That’s a fine message – and a shitty pop song is a fairly ironic medium for it – but I can’t help but wonder if she takes it a little too far.

“It's like I've been released/there's no chains holdin' me/cause now I finally found the key/let me open the door for you.”

What? You didn't know "Higher" was a black spiritual? Just wait until her next single, "Swing Low, Sweet Escalade." Suddenly Paris Hilton as a Rastafarian seems less of a stretch.

But none of that can top the chorus. Amid reminders that she's only going higher, Heidi drops the deep thought "I dream and that's a fact." No, let me correct that. She drops that deep thought four times. This begs the question: Was her ability to dream ever in doubt? Is she calling out someone who claimed that she lacked the ability to dream? Or perhaps this is a diss track against people without the capacity for long-term planning. Actually, the far more likely scenario is that she stole all her lyrics off inspirational posters of hot air balloons and children of different races holding hands.


Come to think of it, Heidi, if this is where your dreams have got us, maybe you'd best quit that, too.

“Reeeemix…”

Every now and then, you’ll hear a song you recognize, only to be interrupted by that unfamiliar voice. It sounds like a civil alert siren, because it is. The bombings intensified during the 2000s. Lives were lost. Will we ever learn?

Fergie -- Big Girls Don't Cry (Sean Kingston remix)

Why the original sucks: Any song that starts with Fergie crooning “the smell of your skin lingers on me” goes from zero to vomit awfully damn quickly. The reoccurring childish imagery scattered in a song about breaking up with a fuck buddy is pretty disturbing throughout, but nowhere is it worse than when Fergie compares herself to “a little school maid in the school yard.” Suddenly I’m picturing an aging meth addict in a little bo peep costume from Fredericks of Hollywood. Ewwww.

How it got worse: Is it possible to remix a song without actually hearing the original? Sean Kingston sure tried. Because Fergie’s appeals about moving on and growing up are met with stock R&B love song lines like “I’m feeling blue/let’s work things out.” But the worst part of the remix comes when Kingston follows up some of Fergie’s really serious, emotional lines by repeating in his Rasta Muppet voice, because it doesn’t really sound like he’s singing with her. It sounds like he’s making fun of her. Actually, scratch that. That’s a great thing, because it makes me feel like someone hates this awful song as much as I do, and made a horrible remix of it simply to shame her.

Linkin Park -- Enth E Nd (End the End remix, featuring Kutmasta Kurt and Motion Man)

Why the original sucks: The recipe for Linkin Park’s “In the End” is as follows:

1) One part the worst All American Reject song you could ever imagine

2) Mix in one part Moby

3) Water down heavily

4) Bake for three and a half minutes in an angry white boy bowl

5) Add the rapper from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ “Cowabunga” to taste

How it got worse: In 2002, Linkin Park's "Reanimation" introduced some new versions of the same old shit, mixing their Nu Metal with electronica. (That feeling you're experiencing right now is in all likelihood that of your spinal cord dissolving.) Kutmasta Kurt and Motion Man can be commended for making this song sound less like it comes off an early 90s demo tape, but it’s all a cruel joke building up to the realization that once you strip away a lot of the background noise, you can actually hear Mike Shinoda rap.

Avril Lavine -- Girlfriend (Li'l Mama remix)

Why the original sucks: Let’s keep this one simple. This song sucks because the refrain is “Hey, hey, you, you, I don’t like your girlfriend. Hey, hey, you, you, I think you need a new one. Hey, hey, you, you, I can be your girlfriend.” That’s even worse than the awful 1970s Beach Boys knock off she stole it from.

How it got worse: The inane hook is driven home by adding “nope,” “yup” and “Li’l Mama be your girlfriend” after each line, but at least most of Avril’s other lyrics are gone. And somewhere after her line “I’ve been doing this since ‘Hop on Pop,’” I’m pretty sure she compares herself to The Notorious B.I.G. So to avoid any confusion:

“Sometimes your words just hypnotize me.”

“My lip gloss be poppin’”

Rihanna -- Umbrella (Chris Brown remix)

Why the original sucks: McCartney’s Law: Nonsense syllables make for the catchiest lyrics. “Umbrella” is exhibit A. It’s probably the catchiest hook of the decade, but only because 80 percent of the song consists simply of “ella” and “eh.” The words that are in English are little better. Two people are shielded from the tempests of life by their love, represented by an umbrella. Sound familiar? Could someone just once write a catchy pop chorus that actually says something of substance? How about this:

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity

May have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention

Than either the power of ideas

Or the errors of autocracy.

Throw some synthesizers over that; kick in a drum machine. You can even add some “do do dos” at the end to help the radio play. Top 40 potential, perhaps?

But a lousy chorus may be forgivable if Rihanna didn’t sound like a fucking harpy singing it. It’s like she’s trying to give me a migraine.

How it got worse: Ironically, it’s Chris Brown’s attempt to inject some originality into the chorus only makes things worse. When it was just “Umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh” the monotony became almost hypnotic, but when Brown changes “Umbrella” to “Cinderella” your minds is suddenly free to explore millions of other awful ideas.

“I would like my cheeseburger with mozzarella, ella, ella, eh, eh.”

“Ray Liotta rocks the shit in ‘Goodfellas’ ella, ella, eh, eh.”

“‘Twilight’ is a novel about Ed and Bella, ella, ella, eh, eh.”

“Don’t eat that raw chicken you’ll get salmonella, ella, ella, eh, eh.”

“Where is Crete? It’s near the Gulf of Mirabella, ella, ella, eh, eh.”

“Carmen Sandiego’s band was Rockapella, ella, ella, eh, eh.”

It’s hard to believe that Chris Brown actually thought he had anything to add to this song. He isn’t really remaining the song like Li’l Mama is trying to do; he isn’t really trying to turn the song into a two-sided conversation like Sean Kingston tries to do (and fails miserably). Judging by the output, I can only guess that Chris Brown is deeply competitive, and he once overheard someone saying how whiney and annoying Rihanna sounds, and he went to work, singing for hours into his vocoder until he could finally top her, and, just to prove it to the world, he released this remix.

This is, without a doubt, the worst thing Chris Brown has ever done to Rihanna.

You can't run from it. It will find you.

Hear that? That’s the sound of hip hop dying.
Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em – Crank That (Soulja Boy) (2007)

There are lyrics, and then there are lyrics. Take Sean Kingston’s 2007 hit “Beautiful Girls,” for example. (By the way, Kingston, I loved your collaboration with Sisqo) There’s a line in the chorus that sounds for all the world like “All these beautiful girls/they only want to do the durb.” It sounds incredibly dirty and hilarious, but eventually you come across the real lyrics and see that he’s actually saying “do you dirt” which unfortunately can’t measure up to the awesome line you hoped it was.

Then you listen to a song like “Crank That” which would succeed “Beautiful Girls” at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 later that same year. There’s this line in “Crank That” that is totally incomprehensible, and all you can make from it, even after listening to it again and again and again, is “I got me some bathin’ apes.” How did anyone come up with a phrase like that? What, if anything, does it mean? Is it ok for white people to repeat in front of black people? Who the fuck knows? Part of you doesn’t even want to think about it too much, for fear that it will drive you insane, and you’ll be reduced to a Dickenson hobo, staggering around town with a three-foot beard and pigeons nesting in it, dressed only in an overcoat covered in five different kinds of shit, grabbing young women at random and shouting at them “I got me some bathin’ apes.” But the part of your mind that demands reason and consistency keeps pushing you to figure out some meaning, until the inside of your head starts to look like John Nash’s tool shed.

Then you finally hear Soulja Boy’s full album – souljaboytellem.com – and you realize, not only is the line actually “I got me some bathin’ apes,” but Soulja Boy has recorded another song, entirely built around that line. Both sides of your mind start going crazy in their own special way, but they can agree on one thing: It’s time to kill yourself.

Understand, “Crank That” isn’t just one of the worst songs ever. It’s one of the worst songs ever, which directly inspired at least three other songs on Soulja Boy’s appalling debut album. And lest you think it’s just the album that is bad, you can listen to his follow up – iSouljaboytellem – and realize that Soulja Boy is, in fact, the worst thing to happen to music. Ever.

As “Crank That” was the debut of the Soulja Boy dance, there of course had to be a sequel song, “Soulja Girl.” Then, because Soulja Boy thought he was such a clever wordsmith, he added the song “Bapes” where he simply shouts “I got me some bathin’ apes” over and over. He must have also felt that the “Crank That” line “I pass it to Arab” deserved its own four minute loop, because the album also includes a song answering to that description, aptly titled “Pass it to Arab.”

Imagine you sit down at a blackjack table, next to a person who is clearly mentally retarded. I’m not being facetious; we’re talking helmet and all. The deal comes, and the retarded person gets two kings against the dealer’s ten. The player splits his kings. “That will never work,” you might be heard to remark. “Everyone knows you don’t split your tens, especially when the dealer has a ten up.” But the cards come; two more tens. What does he do? He splits those too. “Now he’s going to get it,” you say. And he sure does, four aces come down, and he lands blackjack on all four hands. The retarded player looks at you and asks, “Whose retarded now?” That’s just about the best way I can describe Soulja Boy. Everything about the asshole screams “failure;” his songs strive to be irritating, his lyrics are at best meaningless and at worst completely incoherent, the quality of his sound and video production is so poor that it must be intentional, and he looks like he just stepped out of fucking Kris Kross. All this, and yet he’s remarkably popular.

How popular is he? So popular that old ladies are doing his dance on YouTube. Do they know what “Superman that hoe” means? How about “Super Soak that bitch?” I’ve got one good guess... Ok, time to kill myself.

Ok, partner. You know what time it is.

Limp Bizkit – Rollin’ (2000)


The 2000s saw the rise of Nu Metal, also known as rapcore, also known as atonal shit that sodomizes your ears. Its troubadours were a bunch of doughy white guys from Florida, known as Limp Bizkit.

It’s hard to find a song that exudes more utter contempt for its listeners than “Rollin,’” the second single off Limp’s 2000 release – come on, do I really have to write this? Fuck my life – “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water.” (Chocolate Starfish, by the way, is used interchangeably throughout various songs on the album as both a euphemism for the anus, and a nickname for lead yeller Fred Durst. I’m sure this is not a coincidence.) This song sounds like it wants to kick your ass, but the tough-guy exterior and ‘roid rage induced threats can’t hide the fact that it’s basically the Hokey Pokey:

"Move in now move out/Hands up now hands down/Back up back up/
Tell me what you're gonna do now/Keep rollin' rollin' rollin' rollin’"

Fred Durst makes DJ Casper look like Jackson Browne. One listen to “Rollin’” and suddenly Ice Cube’s “You Can Do It (Put Your Back Into It)” sounds divinely inspired.

Ok, I’m going to say something you’ll probably never see on this site again: This is a waste of my time. “Rollin’” is not only one of the worst songs of the 2000s, it’s a strong competitor for the worst thing of the 2000s. Fuck, the video for this was filmed in the fall of 2000 at the World Trade Center, and that’s still the worst day in the history of Lower Manhattan. To fully articulate what a chode Fred Durst is, and the sheer inanity of a song with lyrics like “One two three time zoom to the 6/Jonesin’ for you picks of the Limp Bizkit mix” would only be transcribing the rage already boiling over in the mind of any conscience person unfortunate enough to hear “Rollin.’”

Here’s my suggestion. Play the video again, but this time mute it. Without the song raping your soul, you realize that watching Durst dance around like an Adderall-fueled spider monkey is fucking hilarious. I mean the guy does a jig, he steals disco moves from “Saturday Night Fever” and he throws a punch like a 5-year-old girl. It’s kind of what I imagine the Humpty Hump would look like, if it were being performed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But we can’t discount the song entirely, or we’d miss Durst’s lyrical gem “shut the fuck up and back the fuck up while I fuck this track up.” Couldn’t have written it better myself.

Welcome to the second circle of our Dante-esque musical journey through the worst decade ever. The second circle of Dante’s hell is where the lustful are punished, so it’s only fitting that the second installment in our series do the same. But fear not; an angel approaches:

Hinder -- Lips of an Angel (2006)

Fuck.

In 2006, Hinder gave us this feeble attempt at the most stomach-turning ode to the love triangle since David Crosby’s “Triad.” It climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, and lifted their year-old album “Extreme Behavior” to platinum status. Wait “Extreme Behavior?” Not “Mundane Conversation” or “Ornery Whining?”

Anyway, in “Lips of an Angel” Hinder’s singer Austin Winkler – yes, honest to god, his name is Austin Winkler – belches out one end of a phone conversation with an ex-girlfriend, while his unsuspecting cuckquean girlfriend poses and rubs herself in the background. In case lyrics like “My girl’s in the next room/sometimes I wish she was you/I guess we never really moved on,” didn’t get the message across, the video pretty much spells it out. Winkler on the phone, his girlfriend – as might be expected – is in the next room, and just in case you still don’t get it, Winkler pulls a picture of his ex from under the thin pile of papers on his desk. The fact that he keeps a picture of his ex-girlfriend under his notebook of lyrics and that day’s mail makes the statement “I guess we never really moved on” a huge understatement, but also begs the question of why he’s still treating this like some big fucking secret. Either the girl already knows, and doesn’t care, or she can unknowingly share a studio apartment with a guy who keeps a picture of his ex-girlfriend within arm’s reach, in which case she’s so fucking stupid that he could sing “and yes, I’ve dreamt of you too,” at the top of his lungs and she would still be clueless.

Now, if it sounds like the Winkler is constipated, that’s only because he is, in fact, constipated. Seriously, though, the look of this guy trying to pass a tennis-ball size dook while signing into the phone is pretty hard to top.

Hard, but not impossible. Here’s what he looks like signing into a mic.

Wow. This guy has all the stage presence of Trig Palin. He also has this weird habit of tugging on his neckerchief

when he gets to the emotional parts, but that really only serves to remind viewers that he’s wearing a fucking neckerchief. EXTREME BEHAVIOR!

But let’s not get sidetracked by the video, because even if they hadn’t decided to act out the song spliced with clips of beefy men rocking out in a candlelit living room, the song itself would be enough to earn it recognition in the darkest chapter in pop music history. I mean lines like “It’s really good to hear your voice saying my name/it sounds so sweet/coming from the lips of an angel/hearing those words it makes me weak;” that’s some Lonestar-grade sap right there. Then they add in the crap about “girl you make it hard to be faithful.” EXTREME BEHAVIOR!

Need I remind you, Hinder is supposed to be a metal band. Maybe the complete lack of other power ballads bemoaning monogamy is more than simply an oversight by every hard rock band, ever. Fuck, even Cat Stevens wouldn’t write about this shit. Nevertheless, the problem of having to choose between two smoking hotties, is exactly the kind of problem that the teenagers inclined to listen to post-grunge shit like Hinder can relate to. Not so much because it’s a problem they’ve had, but because it’s a problem they’d like to have. It’s the allure of being wanted that allows people to overlook the fact that the guy in the story is a douchebag.

I just can’t say enough bad things about this song. Winkler’s singing voice sounds like a hippopotamus being strangled to death. This song is a bastard love child of "Bad Day” and “With Arms Wide Open.” Every time they pronounce “and” as a two syllable word, I feel like I’ve been infected with herpes. I honestly can’t imagine how this song could be worse.

Fuck.

I stopped making New Years resolutions when I was 12. I had resolved to make myself less cynical. A resounding success, don't you think? That was when I realized that the annual passage from one year to the next was no more significant than the passage of May into June, Monday into Tuesday, 8:50 and 8:51, and more importantly, none of those changes had any impact on my deeply ingrained mental reflex to clap sarcastically when a friend falls down the stairs. But in spite of my general antipathy for New Years, I do want to pay tribute to our bygone decade for leaving us some of the worst pop music ever. I can't help being a cynic. Now that I realize that, it's time to put it to good use, because we can stop making steaming piles of fetid shit into Top 40 hits. So for the next ten days, we're going to relive the worst decade ever, in hopes that we may never speak of it again.

We started doing Movies Schmovies five years ago, so we've been around the block a few times when it comes to bad movies. Over that time, we've assembled a pretty consistent assortment of truisms. Among them: local video rental places are endless fonts of awful movies, large budgets and commercial success can produce low-quality shit just as readily as teenagers with camcorders, and vignette movies are always good for a laugh.

I've lost count of all the vignette movies we've rented, watched, and suffered through over the last few years. Off the top of my head, there's Tales from the Hood, Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror, Nite Tales, Creepshow 1-3, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Campfire Tales, Campfire Stories, Ghost Stories¹, Quicksilver Highway, and I'm sure there are several more. The vast majority of them have been really, really stupid--though there are some notable moments of stupidity--such as Buster Poindexter's Ranger Bill in Campfire Stories (the source of the blog's title quote), or Flavor Flav apparently being unaware that this genre existed prior to Nite Tales (or that he, as the film's host, should have some kind of personality).

So when a horror anthology actually turns out to be good...well, we don't know how to feel about that, really. With the possible exception of Twilight Zone, that hasn't really happened before (and even that's stretching a bit). It'd be like a Michael Bay movie without explosions, a Tim Burton flick that didn't extol the weird and decry normalcy, a video game movie worth watching, collard greens that don't taste good, or a tree that's not made out of wood!

This is the dilemma we found ourselves in when watching Trick 'r Treat. Direct-to-DVD horror vignette movies are always cause for celebration around the Movies Schmovies compound, so we were pretty excited about it long before we'd actually heard anything. And then we started hearing things, things like "it's really good." This, naturally, intrigued us--such a thing surely wasn't possible. And let's face it, people said Paranormal Activity was going to be good too.

So we decided that this past weekend's soiree would begin with Paranormal Activity and end with a rental of Trick 'r Treat. This plan hit a snag when I actually tried to rent the movie, and found that there was a waiting list. Another nearby video store was similarly devoid of the film, so I resorted to the purchasing option. Here, too, I was met with defeat: every DVD store I visited on this side of the Mississippi had sold out. We finally managed to pick up the last copy at a Wal-Mart in Iowa on the night of the festivities, shortly before our ill-fated visit to one couple's sprawling San Diego estate.

So perhaps it was just the lingering stupor of shaky-cam garbage, but we actually really enjoyed Trick 'r Treat. The stories were clever and fun, never taking themselves too seriously. We've seen attempts to intertwine vignettes in films like this before, and such attempts rarely work. Here, the storylines weave in and out of one another, jumping back and forth in time, and doing so with a natural fluidity. The real benefit of this method was that it allowed for multiple twists in each story, and tied up different plot and character threads in unexpected ways.

The cast is largely drawn from recent superhero movies, boasting one X-Man, one X-Man villain, and Spider-Man's professor. The presence of real actors--as opposed to rappers--already set this film above the bar set by its contemporaries. Some of the characters are certainly more developed than others, and I'm not sure Dylan Baker's character quite worked in all the ways they used him, but overall the stories were pretty good. Overall, the whole movie is a celebration of Halloween, at times creepy and at times goofy and reveling in both.

I could go into more detail, but you'd be better off finding out for yourselves. Netflix or Blockbuster or whatever, you might as well give Trick 'r Treat a try. You could do a lot worse.

---

1. I hesitate to include this one, since it barely met the qualifications of "movie." It was more like a tape of community theater monologues.

Every now and then, a movie comes along that I can't bring myself to pay to see. There are some movies you just shouldn't have to tell another human being that you would like to watch. But after hearing from multiple sources what otherworldly shit Lars Von Treir's Antichrist is, I knew I had to see it. Online. Alone. In the privacy of my own home. For free.

Truly frightening horror movies scare people by creating a familiar situation that the audience can relate to, putting characters in positions of vulnerability, building suspense and delivering.
There is a short list of movies people people have, from time to time, considered the most frightening:
-- Halloween: Great movie, not particularly frightening, but easily one of the most innovative horror flicks. The original Halloween was particularly good at establishing familiar surroundings and playing on common real-life fears.
-- Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Basically a more raw, visceral version of Halloween. It had the added element of being set in Texas, which is terrifying in and of itself. By pioneering the low-budget horror film, TCM is in many ways the grandfather of Blair Witch Project and, ultimately, Paranormal Activity.
-- The Blair Witch Project: This movie did many things right: it put viewers directly into a situation they could relate to, built a ton of suspense, and like Halloween, played on common fears (though not as common). But it never delivered. You don't see the witch, you don't see anything, and that's the problem. Anything from feet running past the camera to a full on witch sighting in the final frames would have made this movie great--or at least moderately satisfying. As is, it's just stupid. Ultimately, Blair Witch Project is remembered more for the hype that surrounded it and the disappointment that inevitably followed it than anything actually in the movie.
-- The Exorcist: Do you believe that the devil can and would possess the body of a 13-year-old girl? If so, then you might think that The Exorcist is deeply disturbing. If not, all you're left with is an image of the devil as a potty-mouthed 13-year-old girl whose most pronounced power is to beat a priest at the dozens.

Over the last few weeks, we've been hearing reports of a movie so scary that it has moviegoers rushing from the theater with a combination or shit, piss and vomit flowing from their various orifices. So, colostomy bags in hand, we set out to find Paranormal Activity.

First, a note on the marketing of Paranormal Activity. Regardless of the quality of the film, the marketing is a clear success. The TV campaign shows little to no footage from the movie itself, instead relying on night-vision shots of a shocked audience, and the promise that it's so frightening that it might not even be at a theater near you, unless you go to their website and "demand" it. It's all a throwback to the William Castle-era horror movies which made outlandish claims that "doctors trained in the treatment of fear will be present in the lobby during all showings." The fact that this movie went from being independently released in 2007, to topping the box office in 2009 is a success.

So after all the hype and stories of people unable to watch the end, "Paranormal Activity" had built some lofty expectations. What we got was evidence of how -- without the suspenseful music and jump cuts -- ghost stories are pretty mundane. But we'll come back to that.

We meet Micah and Katie, the young couple who make up half of the cast (and 90% of the screen time). Actually, perhaps that's unfair: Katie's cleavage spends enough time on screen that it might as well get billed on the marquee. Micah has decided that it would be fun to bring a camera into the bedroom; sounds good so far. Oh, he wants to film the ghost his girlfriend thinks has been haunting her since she was eight? Okay, we're here anyway, we may as well keep watching. The preceding paragraph accounts for the first 40 minutes of the movie.

Micah, we soon find out, is a deeply unsympathetic douchebag. Not that either character is particularly relatable, living opulently in a palatial San Diego mansion without any visible means of income. Micah claims to be a day-trader, who spent half of what he made in one day on a high quality movie camera to film the supposed paranormal events happening in the vast upstairs. He sincerely believes that filming his girlfriend's encounters will be fun, and openly taunts the demon, in hopes of capturing some cool video. He does all this despite Katie's growing fright, and the escalating intensity of the encounters. In fact, he regularly takes steps to get Katie to draw out the ghosts--which she refuses--and to ensure that the events will continue happening with greater theatricality. It's reasonably assumed that he plans to sell his footage, which may explain his repeated attempts to get Katie to have sex with him on film. One way or another, he would cash in--either on the public's fascination with lame ghost hunting videos, or on the increasingly expansive definition of "celebrity" in the term "celebrity sex tape." Katie is apparently on to his schemes, and so never sleeps in fewer than two shirts and an underwire.

Katie looks a bit like the love child of Zooey Deschanel and Rachel Dratch, and claims to be an English major. Despite a supposed literary background, the only book we ever see her reading is a "For Dummies" book with a blurred-out cover, which she treats like a textbook. Micah claims to be a day trader, though he never actually day trades anything, or appears to have any kind of job or friends outside of the house. This is probably an accurate depiction of life for a day trader. Katie has one friend, who comes over to lend a credulous ear and make bead jewelry with her (the main source of income of most English majors). A psychic who dresses like Carl Sagan rounds out the cast.

The demon joins, seemingly gladly, in an arms race of douchebaggery with Micah, escalating from stomping around the couple's stately four-bedroom Xanadu-esque pleasure dome, loudly thumping up the far too many stairs, slamming and knocking on their bedroom door, flipping lights on and off, and turning on their TV, all in the middle of the night, whenever the 3:00 a.m. freight train passes through their backyard.

As circumstances dictate, Micah is either an enthusiastic ghost hunter, or an avowed skeptic. He taunts Katie for her attempts to call in a demonologist and generally makes fun of the psychic, while he himself runs around the house experimenting with Electronic Voice Phenomena and spends his days dissecting the previous night's ghost videos like an even dopier John Madden.

"See Katie, the demon is going to send his cornerback on a zone blitz from the hallway. He's been beating our left tackle all night and when that happens you're going that leaves you vulnerable on the blind side. Boom! We need to shift our strong-side set if we're going to give you enough time in the pocket to not get possessed. The demon is going after the girl, because the only way he's going to get possession of the girls' soul is by going after the girl. What? Maybe I should sleep by the door? Yeah, I don't think that's going to help."

The movie bravely tries to eschew typical horror movie character archetypes. Our heroine, rather than being tough-as-nails and pure as the driven snow, is emotionally abused and utterly powerless. Our hero, rather than being a dashing crusader who rushes in to save his girl from mortal peril, instead always takes two steps toward rushing in to save her, then stops, returns for the camera, and meanders toward our intrepid heroine. And our psychic, who in any other film would be an endless font of information about the spirit world and how to combat its inhabitants, is more like a marriage counselor who exists primarily as a reason for the couple to relate their backstory. His only useful contribution to the story is the explanation that the haunting is due not to a ghost, but to a demon. Demons being outside his "expertise," he refers them to a Demonologist, then leaves. Later on, when it turns out his recommended Demonologist is out of the country (something he was apparently aware of), and since there are apparently no other Demonologists or Psychics or Exorcists within driving distance of San Diego, he returns. It's a short-lived return, wherein he gets really scared and runs away.

The demon and the douchebag's war of attrition continues throughout the film. The demon indecisively moves the door a few inches, so the douchebag conducts an EVP interview where he asks the Bridgekeeper's questions from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The douchebag gets a Ouija Board to communicate with the demon, so the demon spells out "Diane" then starts a fire that it looks like the planchette is hitting 88 miles per hour. The douchebag spreads baby powder on the floor so that the demon's chicken-like footprints show up, so the demon punches a portrait of the douchebag that's hanging on the wall. At that point, we decided to side with the demon.

During all this, the demon is continuing his assault on Katie, which includes such terrible torment as "making her stand staring at the bed for an hour, then making her go outside and sleep on a swing" and "pulling the sheet off her foot." If this had gone on much longer, we'd expect him to resort to drawing on her face in permanent marker and putting her hand in a dish of warm water. Perhaps she's just being haunted by the ghost of her douchebag boyfriend.

Ultimately, the demon has had enough (which shows a lot of patience, we'd had more than enough by the time the movie was half an hour over). He drags Katie out of bed and down the hall, where he bites her in the side, demonstrating (among other things) that he needs some serious dental work. Things ramp quickly up to the conclusion--and by quickly, I mean mind-numbingly slowly. Micah finally wants to leave the house and tries to convince Katie, but she strangely thinks everything is going to be fine, and (in an auto-tuned voice) says "I think I'd rather stay here, shaw-ty-ee." T-Pain would be proud.

The film ends with another bout of Katie's Ambien-induced sleep-standing-and-staring. She walks down the hall and screams, and Micah comes to her rescue. After some distant screaming and shouting, there's silence, until Micah's body is thrown against the camera by a blood-stained Katie, who crouches down to sniff at him, then looks at the camera and smiles with teeth taken from Jennifer's Body.

There are a couple of unimportant subplots we ignored, like the fire which consumed Katie's old house and the girl named Diane that this demon apparently haunted in the '60s, but if the movie didn't care enough to tie those up, then neither do we.

Did you think "Groundhog Day" was scary? If so, then maybe you'd find Paranormal Activity's habit of showing a ghost scene, then replaying the scene on Micah's computer the next morning absolutely terrifying. The rest of us realize why the trailer didn't show any scenes from the movie. The only two scenes the filmmakers could have shown would have shot their load before anyone bought a ticket, and why demand the cow when you get the milk for free. The filmmakers seemingly couldn't decide whether they wanted a shaky-cam "real footage" film like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, or a polished horror movie. Consequently, there are obvious cuts that somehow fail to interrupt the flow of scripted dialogue, and quite a bit of editing that makes one wonder who--since our principal characters are dead and missing respectively at the end--bothered to try to pare it down to a moderately dramatic narrative. Despite some kind of professional editing, a good 50% of the movie is spent on shots of two people sleeping with very little happening. The other 50% is spent on shots of two people arguing with very little happening.

By the end, "something happening" would have been a godsend. There aren't many movies that would benefit from someone in a big, fake, rubbery demon costume walking through a doorway and saying "hey, um...boo," but this is one of them. A horned devil, a creepy clown, a long-haired Japanese girl--basically any Tim Curry character would have been effective. When the footsteps were ascending the (far too many) stairs at the end, there were people in the audience who were quivering; they could have literally revealed anything and people would have screamed. Instead, they forgot the principal rule established by Blair Witch: the unseen is only scary if eventually it becomes the seen. Being a visual medium, movies require a visual payoff. Lacking that, you're left with a weak stage play, or a 1940s radio drama.

Don't get us wrong, we're glad to see a movie that values suspense over shock, but if the work of Rob Zombie and Eli Roth is waterboarding, this movie is solitary confinement. Sure, it's a different kind of torture, but it's still torture, and while it may qualify us to be Republican Presidential candidates, it's not enjoyable.

The Cold War spawned horror movies about invasions of outsiders and the threats of military science. Suburban anxiety in the '70s and '80s spawned horror movies about the dangers at home--psychos calling from inside the house, escaped mental patients on Halloween, Satanic cults everywhere. The '90s and early 2000s brought us J-horror and torture porn, an extreme dichotomy between bizarre and possibly symbolic, and bloody but mindless. Paranormal Activity is the inevitable result of a culture that supports innumerable shows like "Ghost Hunters," "Paranormal State," "A Haunting," and so forth, making mountains of ratings out of the molehills of mundane "paranormal" encounters. PA tries to skirt a line between "realistic"--inasmuch as any of these series about plumbers exploring hypnagogic hallucinations with EMF meters is realistic--and theatrical, but never commits to either one.

See, what this really shows is that, if these "real-life" hauntings were real, and if they could be documented, they'd be boring as all hell. The reason people watch shows like "A Haunting" is not (just) because of the "true" stories of ghostly encounters, but because of all the mood-setting music, dramatizations, jump-cuts and creative editing, and other elements designed to dress up otherwise boring night-vision and people telling stories. Remember, most of these events are the sort of things that reasonable people sleep through. That doesn't make for good drama or excitement.

All told, Paranormal Activity is very much the spiritual successor to The Blair Witch Project, and consequently it's a lot like the paranormal events it's meant to explore: talked about by many, scary to those inclined to believe, but in the light of day and reason, completely without scare or substance.

In two weeks, The Fourth Kind will hit theaters, apparently exchanging aliens for ghosts. It seems like it'll be four times as scary as Paranormal Activity...what's four times zero again?

Join us next time when we review the award-winning shaky-cam exploration of oft-unexplored pleasure centers, Perineal Activity. Damned if it taint the best film we've seen all year.

Dear Screenwriters: How many different adaptations of "A Christmas Carol" do we need? I mean, really, another one? I hope these are really easy to write.

The "Saw" series is approaching its sixth installment. There's a large part of me that wonders why the series continues limping along, dripping copious amounts of blood as it shuffles onward, apparently unaware that it died several films ago. The last one I watched was the third one, and that was at least one too many.

But as often (and justifiably) maligned as the films are, I don't think we should just throw the gory baby out with the bathwater. The series really started to lose me sometime during the first sequel, but I still think that "Saw"--sans roman numerals of any sort--is a good movie.

There's a lot going on in "Saw." You've got the police investigation into a killer who borrows a lot from "Seven," you've got the increasingly panicked banter of Cary Elwes and...that other guy as they try to figure out what's going on, you've got the stalking of Cary's family, and you've got Danny Glover stalking Cary's stalker. The core of the movie is the kind of clever dilemma that gets proposed in a philosophy textbook, with a twist ending that I thought was actually quite well done.

For that matter, I like Jigsaw's motivation. In a very bizarre way, it's kind of like "It's a Wonderful Life," where he's changing people's perceptions and making them appreciate what they have by putting them through incredibly terrible experiences. He's forcing a motivational speaker's background on his targets--new perspective through trauma and adversity.

It's also worth noting, I think, that the first "Saw" is relatively light on gore. Sure, there's the disgusting settings that permeate the film, but as far as blood, guts, and violence go, the sequels really ramp that up--much to their detriment. There were a couple of scenes in the second one that really made me squirm, chiefly the pit of needles, but I didn't think the first one had anything along those lines.

What I'm trying to say in this rambling post working from old memories is that I think the "Saw" franchise deserves a lot of the abuse it gets. It largely kicked off the "gore over substance" trend that's killing modern horror movies *cough*RobZombie*cough*, and its sequels have spiraled into self-absorption and obsolescence. But let's not judge a movie by its sequels; "Saw" stands on its own as a pretty decent horror flick.

And if they'd stuck with that, instead of getting bogged down in Jigsaw as a character and his henchmen and whatnot, it might have made for a good series.

It has been a very long time since we've seen a movie as ridiculously, hilariously, epically awful as G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra. We scarcely know where to begin in describing it. We'd warn you about spoilers, but the movie kind of spoils itself.

Let's start with the wide view: G.I. Joe is essentially Team America played entirely straight. This makes it either the most brilliant, Kaufmanesque parody of over-the-top patriotic military porn sci-fi action films ever, or the flaming piece of crap-gilded crap that it actually is.

A little less generally, the dialogue sounds like it's trying to parody the Cheat Commandos. Again, this is either metafictional brilliance or complete ineptitude. The fact that Marlon Wayans co-stars suggests the latter. Every significant line of dialogue is either some terribly hackneyed action movie cliché, a line that was written to be used in the trailer, or both. The Baroness in particular speaks almost exclusively in movie trailer lines, while Duke is essentially reading from the "angst-ridden soldier with an unwavering sense of duty" archetype handbook.

By the way, Marlon Wayans? We shouldn't be too hard on him. He was actually one of the best actors in the film.

Let that sink in for a moment: Marlon Wayans, of White Chicks, Little Man, and Norbit, is one of the best--if not the best--actors in the movie.

We'll give you a minute to stop screaming. As with any other aspect of this movie, we could go on for pages about the bad acting, but there's one obvious place to start: Tommy Solomon Joseph Gordon-Levitt's turn as Cobra Commander. Cobra Commander should be a very difficult character to screw up. He's a cartoon supervillain who wears a mask that completely covers his face, thereby eliminating any need to emote facially. Apparently, the guy who has twice failed to get into Alex Mack's pants Gordon-Levitt thought that spending the entire movie in a mask that covered the lower half of his face was a serious hindrance to his acting abilities, so he compensated by constantly moving around and gesturing like a spastic C-3P0. Seriously, it's as though he thought he was being directed by Harold Zoid.

By the way, for being Cobra Commander, he doesn't do much commanding. In fact, he spends the vast majority of the movie allowing viewers to think he's just an updated Dr. Mindbender. If you remember Dr. Mindbender at all, you might recall that he looked something like this:

Bald, giant moustache, monocle, shirtless, cape, purple pants. And yet, between the silly latex-and-oxygen mask costume and Gordon-Levitt's hamminess, they managed to make this doctor even more ridiculous.

Running through the rest of the major actors: Channing Tatum did a good job of playing a soldier who'd experienced one too many concussions, and occasionally mistook the scenery for bubblegum; Sienna Miller certainly was present, two parts of her more than the rest; Christopher Eccleston was fairly competent; Arnold Vosloo's Zartan had the most fake, meandering accent in the movie (he's from South Africa, so maybe it's his natural accent, in which case his natural South African accent sounds like a really fake accent from some other place); and Dennis Quaid can no pretend to be superior to Randy at Quaid family gatherings.

The broad swaths of the story were actually quite promising, very much in line with some of the ridiculous schemes perpetrated by Cobra over the years. The insanely complicated plan involves Destro orchestrating a robbery of weapons he created and sold to the government, so that he can use them to destroy national monuments and attack major world capitals, all as a cover for the installation of Zartan as the President of the United States (presumably, this plot also included a forged birth certificate and a forty-year-old announcement in a Hawaiian newspaper, but those scenes were likely left for the Director's Cut). Really, that could have been cool, but as always the Devil is in the details. So, incidentally, are the shitty parts of the movie.

Let's start with Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, whose appearances feel like they were wandering in and out from a kung-fu flick filming next door. Since the rest of the movie was already a mishmash of every conceivable overused action movie trope, the filmmakers decided that they had to mine every conceivable overused kung-fu movie trope to pad out this overexposed, unnecessary subplot. Snake Eyes is another one of those characters who should be impossible to mess up: he's a badass ninja commando who doesn't talk. Naturally, the costume designers decided that the most important thing for a character who doesn't talk to have was a mouth molded into his rubber mask. This is in addition to his Joel Schumacher-esque muscular rubber outfit, which is all the rage with ninjas these days. After that, they thought it prudent to show us how Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow grew up together in Japan, because as the Star Wars prequelshave demonstrated, nothing enhances a badass character's coolness and intimidation factors quite like intimate glimpses into their awkward childhood years. Following this, the filmmakers apparently got confused about what '80s series they were reviving, and just used the old Splinter/Shredder origin instead.

Then there's the giant cliché web linking Duke, the Baroness, and Cobra Commander. See, Duke and the Baroness were engaged (before she met the Baron de Cobray. Yes, "de Cobray," a name which sounds like an obvious front for Cobra, but this is never remarked upon, and he's a witless patsy. I'd call this a red herring, but that's giving them way too much credit), and her little brother, Rex Lewis, was in Duke's unit in war-torn Waristan. He promised to take care of little Rex (a science officer, apparently those are real), which eventually amounted to sending him into a building alone during a bombing run. Naturally, Rex got blowed to smithereens, leaving Duke and pre-Baroness's relationship in shambles, and making Duke ride around on a motorcycle like he's Lorenzo Lamas.

Naturally, it turns out that Rex survived (though terribly scarred) and became the Doctor, who actually was (or later became) Cobra Commander. We don't know about you, but we're pretty sure that this origin ranks below "former used car salesman" and "disfigured snake-man from an ancient secret society in the Himalayas" origins for Cobra Commander. There aren't many names less threatening than "Lewis."

All this means that Baroness gets to make a Heel Face Turn by the end, breaking her Cobra conditioning to save Duke and yadda yadda. If you didn't see it coming by the cut-and-paste nature of the plot, then her frequent flashbacks to sweet moments with her brain-damaged fiancé were there to hammer the foreshadowing home.

As long as we're on the subject of the Baroness, it seems prudent to mention that while the movie gave just about every other character some goofy accent (or in Cobra Commander's case, three different goofy voices), they decided to take the Baroness's away. Perhaps it's because it didn't fit with her inane new backstory, or perhaps it's because they felt that they were already taxing Sienna Miller's talents (both of them) by having her traipse around the Arctic with her catsuit unzipped.

Speaking of the Arctic, it's worth mentioning that the film claims to take place "In the not too distant future" (though it's unclear if it's Next Sunday, A.D.), but the Arctic ice sheet is still ten stories thick. Take that, Al Gore!

Which brings us to the science and technology content of the movie. Now, it's a sci-fi action flick based on a cartoon, we're not expecting Apollo 13. That being said, it's fair to say that the filmmakers have learned everything they know about science from other action movies. Scarlett starts things off by telling Ripcord that she doesn't find him attractive because that would be emotional, and science can't study or quantify emotions. Straw Vulcan is absolutely right; scientists are totally unemotional, and there's no way that science can study things like emotions. Not more than ten minutes after this particular idiocy, the Joes encounter a dead Neo-Viper, from whom they need to extract some information. Thankfully, as our stoic redhead notes, the brain lives for a couple of minutes after death, so they can shove some giant spikes into the brain and find out where Cobra's headquarters is. What's that, you say? Brain death is one of the ways that we determine whether or not someone is actually dead? Well, I can't imagine that being an important thing to know.

Also, we're pretty confused as to what particle accelerators have to do with weaponizing nanobots. We're also pretty sure that the writers were pretty confused about what particle accelerators do, only having some vague notion that they spin something around. And they even got that part wrong.

The technology has some similar issues. Part of the problem is with the special effects, which often look like they come from some late-90s Saturday-morning cartoon. Consequently, the undersea dogfights, Duke and Ripcord running around in their Halo suits, and various other points of painfully obvious CGI lead the viewer to wonder why they didn't just animate the movie in the first place. But even if we excuse the animation that someone apparently did on a ColecoVision, there are some things that just don't quite make sense.

We can start with those Halo-style bionic suits, which really served no purpose except to allow Duke and Ripcord to jump around like Spider-Man and run really fast even when stopped. There were times when the suits seemed to weigh quite a bit, and there were more times when they seemed to be completely massless. Strangely enough, this largely corresponded to when the suits were real, and when they were computer animation.

For some reason, though he goes to ridiculous extremes to keep his involvement in the terror plot a secret (though slack-jawed Duke managed to implicate him with minimal mental effort--the maximum amount he could provide), Destro slaps his company's logo onto every piece of equipment in the film--including, of course, the various doomsday devices and weapons that he's sold to the villains. Now, if Bill Gates were trying to take over the world, do you think he would slap the Microsoft logo onto everything?

Okay, bad example. Point being, Destro's kind of dumb, but it's probably genetic. Turns out that he's descended from a long line of weapons dealers who got caught. We can only assume that his 17th century ancestor had engraved "M.A.R.S." into all the gunpowder barrels and crossbow bolts he was selling. As punishment, he was forced to dress as Kilroy; modern Destro got the updated punishment of looking like Max Headroom.

One other technology moment that really sticks out is during one of the underwater chase/dogfight scenes. While Duke and Baroness are escaping in their stolen Cobra vessel, her cannon runs out of...lasers. They're passing through a trench (but don't compare this battle to the Death Star or anything!), so Duke launches something out behind the craft. The mine, or whatever, separates out into several pieces, which attach to the walls of the chasm, connected by deadly laser beams like a hallway in a robbery flick. While this is effective in shredding their pursuer, one has to wonder what kind of utility such a device would have in the open ocean, where this ship would presumably be doing most of its fighting. I guess Cobra plans for everything, except inevitable betrayal.

We've touched on aspects of the direction tangentially, but it's worth mentioning that even for a cotton candy action movie, the explosions sometimes seem really random. The flashbacks were even more random, popping up every time it seemed like there might be a coherent story thread going on. Thankfully, they put those little X-Files style setting captions in the bottom of the screen when they transitioned scenes, so the viewer knew when and where each event was happening. Apparently the caption writer suffered from the same attention deficit disorder as the rest of the crew, because the captions typically lagged far behind the scene transition.

There was an obligatory training montage, set to a song that sampled "Get it On (Bang a Gong)," which really only heightened the comparison between this and "Team America." Baroness's "promise my brother will never die" line dovetails nicely with that, and one expects Dennis Quaid's "I'm-a break all the rules" speech to end with a description of how he tested Duke's loyalty through fellatio.

The movie ends triumphantly, with Destro and Cobra Commander locked in giant soup cans in Magneto's cell. Marlon Wayans' movie-long attempt at finding out if Scarlett is a natural redhead kind of peters out without resolution, but he and Duke get offered full positions on the G.I. Joe team. The team boards a plane toward their next mission, and Dennis Quaid wishes them all good luck. Then, he gets on the plane with them. I guess Joe regulations require goodbyes to be said on the ground.

We could go on and on--why would the White House farm out their security bunker to an international arms dealer, then use it after he's been exposed as part of an international terrorist plot? How did Dr. Mindbender get access to cutting-edge nanotechnology in the middle of backwards Waristan?--but we'd be here all night. To sum everything up, G.I. Joe is a terrible movie. It took some real effort to out-awful a movie about Sgt. Slaughter leading the fight against sci-fi snake people from the Himalayas, but this movie manages to suck considerably more than the original G.I. Joe film. That being said, it's not terrible the way Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was terrible. The movie was hilarious; it was a real treat to watch for people who like watching awful movies. So if you're looking to get your Joel Hodgson or Mike Nelson on, The Rise of Cobra is a nice diversion. If you'd rather save your money for good movies, then we hear better things about G-Force.

Join us next time when we review that critically-acclaimed pornographic classic, The Bi-Curious Case of Benjamin's Butthole.