Admit it : Jason Bateman has been playing smug, insincere assholes for so long now (am I the only one old enough to remember him as Derek on Silver Spoons?) that you just sort of assume he must be one in real life himself. Which isn’t to say that he’s been a “one-note Johnny” his entire career, but —oh, who the hell are we kidding? Of course he has. But he does it so damn well that I honestly don’t hold the fact that he’s never exactly “branched out” against him.

Here’s the thing though — for whatever reason, he’s pretty much always confined his shtick to the comedy genre (specifically the TV sitcom), and as a result, his characters have always been relatively redeemable. Yeah, he’s gonna stab you in the back, get one over on you, and generally fuck up your life, but gosh — he just…

Satire ran rampant in the 70s. Magazines like MAD and NATIONAL LAMPOON were eagerly devoured by hungry youth disillusioned with the status quo, while SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS kept us glued to our TV sets for must-watch comic nonsense. Moviegoers were treated to such farcical fare as THE GROOVE TUBE (1974), TUNNELVISION (1976), and LOOSE SHOES (1980). But without question, the side-splittingly funniest of them all was THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE.

KFM (as I’ll pretensiously call it) was the brainchild of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker, those geniuses behind AIRPLANE! The trio of comic terrorists first got together as college chums in a theatrical troupe known as The Kentucky Fried Theater. Making a name for themselves as unbridled smart-alecs taking potshots at everything in sight, they developed this hilarious gumbo of outrageous skits with the help of a young director named John Landis, whose only previous credit in the director’s chair was the horror spoof SCHLOCK!…

Having finished a re-read of Alan Moore and Gabriel Andrade’s six-issue run on Crossed + One Hundred (which I just reviewed, as well) earlier in the day, I was still in the mood for more “post-zombie-apocalypse” stuff, and what do you know? Right now the Netflix instant streaming queue is full to bursting with “living dead” flicks I’ve never even heard of , much less seen, so I did a bit of legwork, cross-referencing various titles against their IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes entries, and eventually settled on a 2015 (hey! that’s this year!) low-budget indie effort from Australia called Plague, featuring not a single name with which I was previously familiar.

That’s never a bad place to start in my book, and given that I was hoping for something that offered a bit of a new and unique take on the well-worn tropes involved, this one sounded like…

Fair warning : there are a few key “spoilers” ahead — not just for Crossed + One Hundred, but for Southern Bastards and The Wicked + The Divine, as well — so if you’re not completely caught up on any of these books, skip the seventh paragraph following this one, pick up again at the tenth, and you’ll be in good shape. Got that? Okay, my conscience is clear.

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A little while back, I reviewed the first issue of Alan Moore and Gabriel Andrade’s Crossed + One Hundred from Avatar Press, and I’m not sure how many of you took my advice and jumped on-board with it, but I’m guessing it must not have been a very big number because my inbox hasn’t been flooded with emails from random strangers thanking me for turning them onto this series (although I did receive one, which I appreciate) and…

TMZ (and others) have reported actor/wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper has passed away from heart failure at age 61. Besides classic film, pro wrestling has long been one of my obsessions. Yeah, I know, it’s phony as a three-dollar bill, but so what? So are some of the Grade B (and lower) movies I look at here on Cracked Rear Viewer and Through the Shattered Lens. I got into the so-called “exhibition sport” at age 12, going with my grandmother (who was a true believer) to see the matches at the old Lincoln Park Ballroom in Dartmouth, MA. Later, my friends and I would travel to Boston Garden to watch Bruno Sammartino and company tear it up, usually followed by a trip to the Combat Zone for some exotic dancers (hey, we were young!) and pizza and Little Stevie’s in Back Bay. Ah, youth!

Roddy Piper was unique in the “sport of kings”…

What’s the next line in that song? Oh, yeah — “what the hell am I doing here?”

Spoiler alert : I kinda wondered that myself for the last two minutes or so of Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass’s 2014 indie horror (now streaming on Netflix even before it hits Blu-ray and DVD) Creep, but that was only after thoroughly digging the first 80-or-so  minutes a lot more.

Yes, folks, we’re back on the “found footage” train here, and with a distinctly limited cast of characters, at that — in fact, just two. Brice (who co-wrote the script) stars as “millenial looking for a buck” freelance cameraman Aaron, while Duplass (who not only co-wrote, but directs here) is Josef, who has enticed him with a $1,000 cash offer to come to his cabin up north in order to , he says, document an average day in his life for his…

Jeb Bush has a plan to save America from our supposed economic crisis — according to statements that have issued forth from his own mouth, we all need to work an unspecified number of longer hours, we shouldn’t expect to retire until we’re 67 or 68, and we’d better not look forward to Medicare being there to take care of our health insurance needs once we finally do get to stop working because he wants to “phase it out.” Apparently, if we enact all of these austerity measures (let’s just call ’em what they are, even if Jeb and his corporate sponsors think we’re stupid enough to think of them as “reforms”), then — and only then — will we get ourselves out of this mess he insists we’re in.

In short, then, poor, working-class, and even middle-class Americans should just buckle down and get ready to have a shittier…