Film Review: Ex Machina (2015, dir. Alex Garland)

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Valerie Troutman

I know this was already reviewed by Leon last year. I watched it for the first time this March. It has bothered me ever since, so I decided to purge it from my system by writing my own review of the film. Can you tell I didn’t really like it?

The movie opens up and we meet our main character Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson). He just won the “Staff Lottery”.

Whatever gets him out of having to program a search algorithm in C++ is a good thing. C++ is not the most fun language to program in, which is why I assume he switches to using Python later on in the film. If you think that’s going to lead to Caleb asking the robot about non-computable functions such as The Halting Problem, then you’re going to be very disappointed. These are functions that to a computer cannot be evaluated to obtain their result. That means there are problems that cannot be solved by machine intelligence. This of course leads to a debate about what exactly does natural intelligence have that machine intelligence doesn’t, and what does that say about whether a machine has consciousness. All things that will not be brought up. These are things I learned in a course I took before a basic ground level Computer Science course. A remedial CS course. Caleb not knowing these things is like making a movie about racing when the main character, who is a mechanic, can’t change a tire.

Now we are off to where Oscar Isaac’s character lives.

I know his name is Nathan, but I just kept referring to him as Beard while watching the film. When Caleb shows up to enter his place I had to pause the movie.

I love watching movies on the iPad with the Amazon Prime app because it not only tells you the characters, but it also drops in trivia about the current scene. This is how I know that this takes place at the Juvet Landscape Hotel in Alstad, Valldal, Norway. Beard has a pretty nice place. It comes with it’s own Kubrickian hallways…

The Shining (1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

and Oldboy (2003) prison rooms.

Oldboy (2003, dir. Chan-wook Park)

Beard gives Caleb a key that will only open rooms and let him use devices that he is allowed to use. It’s kind of like a computer game. In fact, that’s how you could describe the whole movie in a nutshell. It’s a game composed of cutscenes with the robot and Beard, except you don’t get to run around in between, and there are no dialog trees.

After showing Caleb into his room, he tells him he needs to sign an Non-Disclosure Agreement. Again, I had to pause the movie here cause I was taking care of my dog while a new ceiling fan was being put in.

Okay, if you say so, then Beard saying his home is his research facility is a reference to It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). Now we get the Ex Machina definition of what a Turing Test is that isn’t what a Turing Test actually is. Caleb says:

“I know what the Turing Test is. It’s when a human interacts with a computer. And if the human doesn’t know they’re interacting with a computer, the test is passed”

Actually, the Turing Test is when you have a “Human interrogator” that is separated by a barrier with an isolated interface that let’s the interrogator interact with two sources that are both separated from each other and the interface. One source is a human being who has never met the interrogator. The other source is a machine that is being tested. If the interrogator cannot distinguish the two sources from each other than robot has passed the test.

Such a test is never really performed in this film unless you think that the point when Caleb cuts himself, he believes he might be a robot because he thinks he is indistinguishable from the robot. It’s not the same, but it may have been stuck in there to allude to that. Regardless, it means that it would be literally impossible for the Turing Test to even be performed since it would require three humans (a source, an interrogator, and someone setting up the experiment), and there are only two humans at Beard’s home. Here’s a nice diagram from the Second Edition of Introduction to Artificial Intelligence by Philip C. Jackson Jr.

It doesn’t really prove that the computer has “artificial intelligence” either, but that a human being can’t tell the difference. That simply means it can pass for human in this controlled environment. That’s of course why the film will unceremoniously toss it aside in favor of a setup that will allow for a lot of engagement between actors that is done face-to-face.

Thus begins the “test”.

We see Beard’s office first which is covered with post-it notes. I haven’t seen that since I think either the remake of Oldboy or that episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 where Brandon covered a professor’s office with them. Caleb also sees foreshadowing about previous robots who got a little cabin fever when he enters the interrogation room.

Yes, that is glass. Does he turn right around and walk out because he has obviously been lied to about taking part in a Turing Test? Nope. We just meet Ava played by Alicia Vikander.

I have to admit that I feel a little sorry for her. She really was cast in some terrible movies in 2015. You have this movie of course. You have her in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. where she is just there to make a reference to Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita (1959) by standing in a fountain while the male leads all but start making out. She was in The Danish Girl (2015) that will have more people asking children about their genitals since it makes being transgender all about bottom surgery. I loved how it didn’t tell you she had a uterus transplant at the end. Probably because leaving it in would mean the movie is actually equating having babies with identifying oneself as a woman like people think Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) did. Then she was also in Burnt (2015), but I’ll be damned if I could find her in it while watching it.

No, I’m not kidding about The Danish Girl having that effect. People ask transgender children all the time about whether they plan to have surgery when they get older and that movie doesn’t help. Neither do other things, but I refuse to review that movie right now.

After some initial pleasantries, he asks how she learned to speak. She says she “always knew how to speak.” She also says she thinks she is clever since “language is something that people acquire” but she can apparently do it out of the box. He responds about language being inborn in the human mind, and that it is only attachment of words to this built-in stuff that allows us to speak. You could say it’s an explanation for why everyone gets a free language. This confuses Ava, but I’m more confused why rebooting Tomb Raider in 2018 with her as Lara Croft is a thing that’s happening. This is also a conversation of foreshadowing because we will get an explanation later that, surprise, surprise, shows again that Caleb really doesn’t know about Computer Science.

Now you’d think they would leave the Turing Test thing behind here, but no. They feel the need to rub their nose in it some more.

He says that “if I hid Ava from you, so you just heard her voice, she would pass for human.” Maybe, except the Turing Test uses terminals, not voices, since that really wouldn’t be a test of human intelligence, but speech synthesis. Take for example talking to Siri or a similar intelligent agent. The very fact that it speaks instantly makes people start to think of it as human. That’s an example of Weak AI rather than Strong AI, which is what Ava is supposed to be. They’ll bring up Strong AI later, but will conveniently leave out Weak AI because it would open up holes in the film.

He wants to show him Ava, then see if he feels she has consciousness. What he is actually saying is whether he has effectively recreated superficial aspects of a humanoid robot with a reasonably passable intelligent agent controlling those parts. That’s not even close to the same thing. That would be like saying you have proven somebody actually works for immigration because illegal immigrants run when they see someone in pressed pants, a white shirt, and holding a clipboard enter a factory. You’ve simply proven that you can make something that can socially engineer a person. This is why the separation factor is so important to not have in a movie like this that can’t have its ending if it doesn’t ignore these things.

I don’t know why he couldn’t just say that he already had some people test her in a proper Turing Test, but now he wants him to do what he is asking him rather than just claiming that of course she would pass. Oh, well.

Since this movie isn’t very well written, they now have Caleb spout some jargon about her language abilities. Beard quickly shuts this down by saying he isn’t going to explain how she works. By that, he means until later when he decides to do just that in order to remind us of a real world event that happened a few years ago. The power soon goes out after this too for the purposes of foreshadowing that somebody is doing it, and it changes where and what Caleb is able to do with his keycard.

Caleb is now woken up by some speechless Asian lady robot.

That makes two female robots. There must be a male one around here somewhere, right? Of course not. This would lead any reasonable person to wonder if he is building a brothel for straight men. The actual reason the movie tries to subtly slip in is that part of them being human is sexuality and gender. I’m assuming that means he has to test to make sure their vaginas work, and since they are both straight, then the robots must be women. Nope, still comes across like he is building a brothel.

Now Beard and Caleb have another conversation about how to test her. He basically breaks out more jargon, which Beard says isn’t important because too much thinking gets in the way of the drama and building of tension. Seriously, before it cuts to the image below, he says: “How does she feel about you?”

It starts off with Ava showing him a picture, but they already want to turn the tables and have Ava ask Caleb questions as if we really are interested in him. But first we find out that Caleb works for Beard’s own version of Google. Then the funniest thing in the movie happens.

He says that he is an advanced programmer. Sure, Caleb. Sure, and the majority of people knew what a race condition was when they started up Steve Jobs (2015).

Ava goes on to brag about how Beard wrote the code for not-Google when he was 13. She then asks him if he likes Mozart to which he responds that he likes Depeche Mode. What are you trying to say here, Garland? Maybe that people are people? Doesn’t matter because she doesn’t want to listen. She has other priorities like setting up the ending. The movie actually has very little to with robots. It’s about a woman who is imprisoned and uses the dumbest guy she can find to manipulate in order to get out. That’s the real movie in a nutshell. You won’t be asking yourself interesting questions here. It’s all kind of sleight of hand with what appears to be intelligent writing. Then the power goes out again and she takes credit for it before trying to drive a wedge between Caleb and Beard.

Then the power comes back online.

I have an idea. Ask her if on a hot summer night would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses. It’s totally random. No matter what she says, you respond that you bet she says that to all the boys. See how she responds. Of course not. This game has you on strict rails and doesn’t give you a dialog tree.

Blah, blah, blah. Now Beard says he is going to show Caleb where he created Ava even though he said he wasn’t going to tell him how she works earlier because it would ruin the test. Remember that they have established that Caleb is an advanced programmer, and at least as a degree in Computer Science. Beard asks him if he knows how he got her to “read and duplicate facial expressions.” That’s easy, you simply get a lot of training data and use it train something like a neural network or some other statistical model. Basic stuff for someone with a Computer Science degree that people use and interact with everyday in the form of a spam filter.

Moving onward, Beard reminds us of that incident a few years back when it was discovered that Apple was using people’s iPhones to do war driving in order to improve their location services. In Beard’s specific case, he simple turned on the camera and microphone on cellphones to get a bunch of data and used it to train whatever he is using. He says the search engine itself, but that doesn’t make sense unless you want to say that his Google can search by image and sound bite, thus allowing for him to build a language of sorts between the collected data and the meanings humans assign them. That actually is probably what they were going for given the explanation of language earlier. It still doesn’t explain why they just had Caleb throw up his hands to say he has no idea how it was done.

Next we find out that writer/director Alex Garland is probably a fan of Quantum Leap. I say that because that is Ava’s brain, which Beard refers to as wetware. What that means is that it should be a combination of physical aspects of the human brain interconnected with mechanical parts to create an artificial intelligence. This is what Ziggy on the show Quantum Leap has as its’ “brain”. That’s why they refer to her as a hybrid computer, and as having aspects of Sam in her since the brain cells are his. We also find out that the software running on it is his version of Google’s search engine.

After showing Caleb another picture, she decides to manipulate him more by putting on hair and clothes. I had to pause the movie again here.

In other words, they told her to just walk rather than walk while swinging her hips. I’m not sure why that was a thing they bothered with honestly. Without that bit of trivia popping up it would have just come across as someone who was shy rather than someone who was starting to conform to the gender forced upon them by form and/or programming.

Now we get Caleb explaining that AI doesn’t need a gender, so that they can get into a conversation that amounts to explaining how things such as neural networks work by using sexual preference as an analogy. A neural network is a graph formed of vertices and lines that is based on the way the human brain works. The vertices have some sort of function that acts on the inputs that are sent into it in order to spit out a value either as a final result or as inputs to other vertices. The lines have a weight that is assigned to them, which is then multiplied by the value being sent along it in order to create the value that enters the vertex it connects to. Here is a very simply example of a neural network taken from AI Application Programming by M. Tim Jones.

What this all means is that using certain techniques such as backwards propagation, you can send information through such a network that in turn adjusts the weights in order to change the way it will operate by changing what it will output. In the context of his explanation, it means that if you pass a bunch of black girls through your brain, and you respond in a certain way, then your brain’s own neural network adjusts to having an attraction to them, or developing a dislike of them sexually. It also depends on the structure of said brain initially and how it is formed during your early years. To go back to the mathematical example, it would mean how many vertices you have, how they are linked, and the functions at each vertex.

Caleb doesn’t seem to understand because he isn’t very good at Computer Science. Beard takes Caleb into a room with a Jackson Pollock painting.

He tries to explain what Automatic Art is to Caleb. It sounds like he is referencing Fuzzy Logic to me, which is when instead of using simple true and false, or 0 and 1, you make decisions based on everything in between 0 and 1. It’s not a fixed algorithmic if this then that, but something more human.

Then Beard references Star Trek by telling Caleb to “Engage intellect”. I’m still thinking he is making a brothel, so I’ll go with Mudd’s Women as the episode of the original series he is referencing. Amazon Prime says it’s a reference to the episode Requiem for Methuselah. I also think of The Measure of a Man from Star Trek: TNG where Data’s designation of being sentient or property is put on trial.

Beard now asks him to reverse the challenge of doing something not partially deliberate and partially unconscious. He asks Caleb what would happen if Pollock didn’t make a single mark if he didn’t know exactly what he was doing. Caleb says that he wouldn’t have made a single mark. In other words, he is describing the difference between how humans operate with fuzzy logic instead of with a strict rule system. I have a feeling that somebody told Alex Garland about how they tried things like theorem-proving software and knowledge systems in AI before Strong AI research collapsed and we switched to research into Weak AI. Weak AI being what we have been enjoying at an ever-growing rate since the 1980s in the form of speech recognition, image identification, and even programs that can write new songs in the style of Bob Dylan. Those things operate on probabilities, which when attached to incoming examples such as speech, images, and lyrics written by Bob Dylan will spit out another probability that is used to make a decision while also creating something that will make the kind of decisions you want based on the samples you gave it. Thus, it isn’t a strict rule, but something in between structure of the model and the current state of the probabilities in that model being used to generate the result. The Bob Dylan example would be feeding his lyrics into a chain that builds a series of probabilities between words so that if you picked a starting word, then it would generate the rest of the words based on the actual lyrics Bob Dylan wrote. You can do this with music as well. They are called Markov Chains/Hidden Markov Models in both cases.

This is all stuff to make you think that the more information you give to Google, then if the model is built correctly, all that data created by human beings will train that model to operate as a human does by becoming predictive of correct human behavior. Unfortunately, that’s not Strong AI. It’s simply Weak AI used on a large scale that impresses us the way a shiny object does a small child.

Then Caleb comes right out and tells Ava he took a semester in AI. Yeah, sure you did Caleb. I took one and a half of them at Cal. Trust me when I say that if Anastasia Steele from Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) is the worst English major in recent film, then Caleb is the worst Computer Science major in recent movies.

Why does he say this? He says it because the movie wants to get arty by showing black and white shots. No really, there is no other reason. Caleb brings up a famous thought experiment about a person living in a black and white room who has perfect knowledge of color without having ever stepped out of that room. That would mean that the person in question would have never experienced color. However, Caleb screws this up by saying:

Hmmm…you mean like the colors in the image I just posted that would show up on a black and white monitor, Caleb? He breaks the thought experiment simply so the film can show shots like that. He says that it gives her experience, which perfect knowledge about something doesn’t give you. That difference between pure knowledge and how something makes you feel is supposed to be the difference between human and machine intelligence according to Caleb. That’s why she mentions that she wants to go to a busy intersection if she is ever allowed to leave at a point in the movie. Of course the movie realizes that it needs to move the plot along instead of getting too smart so Ava messes with the power again to try and guilt Caleb some more. Boring.

Time for another session with Beard for Caleb. Nothing really happens here of consequence. Then more artsy shots and Beard banging the Asian lady robot. This is followed by Asian lady and Beard disco dancing to Oliver Cheatham’s Get Down It’s Saturday Night. I’m guessing Alex Garland also played Grand Theft Auto: Vice City since it’s on that soundtrack for the Fever 105 station hosted by Oliver “Ladykiller” Biscuit. It’s also there so that Lisa could have a scene from this movie to include as a dance scene that she loves.

Unfortunately, Caleb doesn’t want to cool off on Saturday night, or any other night right now. He’s pissed off because the movie can’t really decide whether it wants to be smart about the technical stuff, or whether it wants to focus on that other boring prison break plot.

There’s numerous questions that are batted back and forth here, but the only one that was important to me is that according to Ava she has an off switch like Data.

So, why do they fight her before the Ms. 45 (1981) backstabbing ending when they could have simply turned her off? No matter. The conversations with her in this movie really aren’t the actual sessions. The sessions are with Beard. It’s time for Beard to think that Strong AI is right around the corner, and misunderstand what the singularity means.

I love how Beard makes sure to mention that the bodies are kept around after he builds the next model. He does this not for any in-movie reason, but for the horror factor of a bunch of bodies and so that Ava has a place to get skin later in the movie.

Beard brings up the singularity now and he seems to be confusing it for Terminator 2 (1991). The singularity is not when robots take over and replace us. The singularity is a point at which progress begins to outstrip our ability to fully comprehend the changes it creates till we essentially can do whatever we want. It’s like the Krell in Forbidden Planet (1956). Another example would be The Ancients in Stargate SG-1 who shed their material form and ascended into the freedom of pure energy. Not exactly something you whip out the Oppenheimer quote about being the destroyer of worlds when discussing. It’s an evolution, but not at the expense of the existence of humans. However, at this point the film is on autopilot towards its very unsatisfying conclusion, so who cares.

With Beard knocked out from drinking, Caleb decides to write a prime number generator.

He is supposedly working to free Ava, but he will not use that prime number generator to keep the power system busy like they did in Real Genius (1985). Also, why the comments? It’s almost as funny as in Blackhat (2015) when they didn’t seem to know that comments disappear when you compile code, which means they wouldn’t be present when you decompile something like a virus.

More boring stuff that has very little to do with anything, but looks semi-impressive and atmosphere maintaining if you haven’t already given up on the film like I had long before this point.

Ava is sitting in a corner to further guilt Caleb along with saying some more stuff and shutting off the power again.

Good session.

Caleb and Beard talk some more before Ava finally breaks out from her prison. Beard is killed in the process.

She locks Caleb up and gets away. I was honestly hoping that it would turn out Caleb was a robot, but they made sure to shoot that down by having him cut open his arm at one point. Then they juxtapose that with scenes later in the movie of the actual robots pulling off their skin.

I am part of a social network called Letterboxd. It isn’t a place where I write proper reviews. That’s what this site is for where I can really think about it, and include screenshots. I believe they are crucial. That’s why I use that network for initial gut reactions to what I watch. I try not to bring that over here, but really step through the film. This film isn’t as bad as I thought it was initially. I’m still not a fan though. The film boils down to somebody trying to socially engineer two people in order to make a prison break while we get pseudo-intellectual stabs at real tech stuff while not bothering to maintain consistency throughout the film. It’s not awful as I thought during and after watching it the first time, but it hardly deserves the ridiculous amount positive critical attention it has been getting since its’ release in 2015.

My ultimate conclusion is this: Watch Sneakers (1992), Real Genius (1985), and WarGames (1983) instead. Also, if this movie sparked an interest in AI for you, then run with it, because it is a fascinating subject that is not done justice by this film. My actual semester at Cal in AI was amazing. I had already read several books on the subject prior to taking the class, and it still was some of the most fun I had while at UC Berkeley.

Side notes: The reason for the race condition at the beginning of Steve Jobs is because a race condition is when two or more things try to operate on the same thing that causes unwanted results. Since the film uses Jobs’ brain as a metaphor for end-to-end control, a race condition is a perfect bug that doesn’t jive with what Jobs wants to achieve.

It is interesting that the film has exactly seven sessions with Ava since a byte is comprised of 8 bits. It makes one wonder whether Garland wants you to think it was cut short, there was a zeroth session prior to the official session since computers begin counting at zero, the 8th session is what happens at the very end, or that the missing session that would make it a byte represents that she is truly human and not really a computer anymore. Just something I thought I would pass on.

Film Review: Gums (1976, dir. Robert J. Kaplan)

Posted on July 29, 2016 by Valerie Troutman

With Deep Jaws (1976) over, I decided to watch the full blown porno spoof of Jaws called Gums. Why did I decide to review these two movies again? Oh, and these movies must have known about each other cause they actually say “Deep Jaws” in this film. It’s somehow better made than Deep Jaws, but that’s not saying much. Also, I’m pretty sure the version I have was censored at some point. I say “at some point” because it’s obvious that whoever did it was in on the whole thing. All the runtime is here as far as I know. They just save me some black boxes by putting humorous things there instead. Let’s take a look at this thing.

The movie opens like a slasher movie by giving us an opening kill.

This time around we have a mermaid that seeks out people, and gives them blow jobs to death. By that, I mean she appears to bite it off after sucking on it for awhile. She also seems to do interpretative dance. I have no idea why, but she does that in this movie on several occasions.

You know the Jaws formula, so let’s introduce this movie’s equivalent of the well-known characters.

That’s our sheriff. Their actual names aren’t important to anything. He finds the severed penis and stock footage of a beaver.

The guy who found it says it looks like it was chewed off by a beaver, so they cut to this shot before going back to the characters.

He takes the severed cock back to his office, which immediately turns on his secretary. She comes over to him, so I can show you what I mean by censorship in this movie.

Definitely censored, but by people who had a sense of humor.

Time to meet the mayor!

He surprises the sheriff…

which really makes me think that actor Paul Styles here played Dracula in Suckula (1973).

Suckula (1973, dir. Anthony Spinelli)

It could be. I mean it turned out that the anchorman from Suckula was Buck in the Back To The Future movies.

Suckula (1973, dir. Anthony Spinelli)

Then a black guy comes in to tell the story of how he was sitting on a small boat while his “twin” brother was sucked to death in the water. I put twin in quotes cause I’m pretty sure it’s the same actor who played both brothers. Here’s what I think of that scene.

Time to call in a sexpert. Unfortunately Susie Bright would have been only 18 when this movie came out, so they go with a Dr. Smegma.

He is played by none other than Robert Kerman. Comic book fans may remember him as the Tugboat Captain in Spider-Man (2002). He also showed up in Debbie Does Dallas (1978), Cannibal Holocaust (1980), and Cannibal Ferox (1981) among many other films.

This begins a sex scene that I’m pretty sure has lifted music seeing as I heard some prior to this. No matter, because we quickly go back to the rest of the characters and the deaths hit the papers.

I love how serious actor Zack Norman takes playing the reporter just before he prints the story. In 1984 he would go on to play Ira in Romancing the Stone. That’s a step up. He could have wound up in Romancing the Bone (1984) instead. He was also in an episode of the 1990’s TV Show The Flash. That means that between him and Robert Kerman, we have both Marvel and DC actors in a Jaws porno spoof.

By the way, “Welcome To Great Head”.

Ready to meet the Robert Shaw equivalent?

That’s Nazi Quint played by none other than Brother Theodore. You might recognize him from several places. The year after this, he did the voice of Gollum in The Hobbit and later in The Return of the King (1980). However, most people probably know him from his last role in The ‘Burbs (1989). He actually got his start in films back in the 1940s doing film noir such as The Third Man (1949).

This scene goes on forever with him talking. On the upside, he is the best actor in the film next to Robert Kerman. During this scene I’m even more sure that Paul Styles is Dracula from Suckula.

Suckula (1973, dir. Anthony Spinelli)

Makes even more sense when you notice that Terri Hall who plays the mermaid was in one of the movies that is on the same box set as Suckula.

Let’s move on because what the hell is this thing it cuts to next?

My only guess is that they felt the need to foreshadow that they will use puppets to get the mermaid at the end. I agree with Brother Theodore: “Absolutely disgusting.”

After a bunch of stock footage and nonsense scenes that were maybe longer originally, we are at the beach and we finally meet our mermaid.

You might be wondering about now, and the answer is yes. Yes, they do play the actual Jaws theme. That is till the blow job starts, then who knows where this crazy music that starts playing came from.

Dr. Smegma eventually shows up after the mermaid attack and I have to give it to Robert Kerman…

because he is the only one in the cast who at all resembles a member of the original cast in appearance and acting.

A bunch of weird sex things happen now that aren’t important. You don’t want to hear about Porno Dreyfuss and his sex doll that he insists on bringing over to the sheriff’s place. I mean involving animals weird. It gets really bizarre.

It eventually gets back to the plot, but not before it makes a mermaid joke.

That’s the famous “Chicken of the Sea” as Porno Dreyfuss says. Somebody gets attacked, and the next day it’s time for Brother Theodore to monologue again like he did at the town hall meeting before they set off to get her.

Porno Dreyfuss is happy cause he spots the sheriff’s secretary in a boat mostly naked. This is when we find out that not only does the mermaid dance, but I’m pretty sure she eats out the secretary to death. How does that work? In the end, the mermaid dances off into the water and the secretary looks dead on the beach.

Now the mermaid attacks the boat, and we get the dumbest peace of censorship in the movie.

This happens when the mermaid attacks Porno Dreyfuss through the toilet. I’m not showing the shot of her head popping out of the toilet. It might give you nightmares.

The rest is just a really lame recreation of the ending of Jaws till they just throw out the people, replace them with small puppets, and then she sucks on something that explodes. Roll credits!

I wish this version hadn’t been censored because I’m sure it would have made more sense, but at least they were trying for something and could actually do things. Deep Jaws just messed around till it dropped a space capsule in a pool, called it good, and ran the credits.

Do I recommend Gums and/or Deep Jaws? NO! If you want a spoof/homage to Jaws, then watch Blades. I reviewed it briefly last October. The movie is still up legally to watch as well. It’s the one to see. These are both terrible films.

Film Review: Deep Jaws (1976, dir. Perry Dell)

Posted on July 25, 2016 by Valerie Troutman

First things first.

If there are any local ordinances or community standards that make it possible for you to not watch this movie, then observe them. Feel free to read my review though. Not only because it will put you off wanting to see this as I know you all do, but you’ll get to see how Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Spider-Man could all end up in a fake porno spoof. The weirdest thing about watching this movie is that along with Water Power (1977), people were so AMERICA! in 1976 that both an enema rape porn and this, prominently featured the Bicentennial and American Flag. Let’s dive into this!

The movie starts off with just what you would expect: sex.

These two are banging in a projection booth while people working for-I kid you not-Uranus studios are trying to watch footage that has been shot for The Night Mt. Rushmore Broke Wind. Ugh! That’s the level of jokes you are in for if you watch this movie. One of the characters soon says: “He’s got the thing upside down and ass backwards.” Bad Girls Behind Bars (2016) with its running joke about burping the worm was more mature than this garbage.

Let’s introduce are main characters:

That’s attacked by spray tan.

That’s a slime ball. His real name is PG as in parental guidance. I’m sorry, but Goldengirl came out in 1979 and had breasts the main character talked to, and it was rated PG. Earlier 90s movies had bare ass all the time, and they were still rated PG. The Odd Couple II came out in 1998 and had them not only calling each other “shitheads”, but had an explicit oral sex joke. It was rated PG-13. Good Burger came out one year prior in 1997. It had tons of sexual innuendo including numerous allusions to oral sex via egg rolls and was rated PG.

Somehow, one year after Deep Jaws, the talking vagina movie Chatterbox! would receive an R-rating. Guess that was more of an honorary rating. This movie is unrated cause it has a few shots of penises. Apparently that was a big deal back in 1976? This was well before Lars Von Trier and Gaspar Noé decided to exploit porn to try and remain relevant. That, and exploit Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Black Love (1971). Why is that a thing? Then again, why is Deep Jaws a thing?

That’s a woman who I’m not sure how they got to be in this.

That’s an old guy who looks like he belongs in an episode of Soap. I never figured out why he is holding a teddy bear. He does it throughout the film.

I’m just going to call him Dumbass even though they always call him Junior. He’s Spray Tan’s kid. It’s courtesy of him that superheroes will appear in the film via his T-Shirts.

You want to see the movie they are looking at onscreen?

I saw this and thought they were watching a 70s version of Space Zombie Bingo!!! (1993).

Here is the appearance of Captain America. Disappointing after seeing Matt Salinger decapitate someone with his shield.

They keep cutting away to the projection booth sex as if we are getting something out of it. We aren’t. That kind of thing will be repeated many times over throughout the film. I can’t tell you how boring it is to hear these people talk on top of constantly cutting away to the sex. The movie only gets worse from here on out. This opening scene just happens to be particularly painful. How painful? This painful.

He gets threatened to have his “ass out of Uranus.” Then it just abruptly cuts to the worst of 1970’s interior design.

This phone call goes on forever. It has something do to with the President of the United States. Who cares? I didn’t. I just kept thinking this guy was reading off of cue cards above him.

Now we get a whining scene between some woman and PG. Again, like most of the film. Who the hell cares? This film adds some running time onto itself here by having some flashbacks to the projection booth sex scene because we need to repeat that footage. Yuck!

Now we meet the guy from the opening sex scene

At least I’m pretty sure. No matter, because TITS!

I will try to spare you the number of times these ladies pop out just to show off their breasts. Just trust me that they wear out their welcome. All six of them. Although, one of them can do the breast equivalent of making one ear pop up and down. That’s something I guess.

Now lady who I can’t believe is in the movie comes in carrying empty toilet paper rolls. He needs TP for Uranus. I would say his bunghole, but the ladies come out and stick something else in there at some point.

I am taking you through this step by step because the stupidity on display is amazing. We haven’t even gotten to the gay guy who runs after Dumbass to measure the length of his penis. That’s a thing that happens in this film.

Now PG sits out by the pool just so they can show more tits and ass. Acting 1; T&A about a 5. Yes, I did put that there because there is a porno spoof of A Chorus Line out there, but sadly my copy doesn’t have subtitles.

Now the lady who shouldn’t be there has a discussion with this guy about how they should make a porno like Deep Throat (1971). Apparently, this means cutting away to a very fake blow job scene that I guess is a recreation of something from Deep Throat. I haven’t watched it yet. Then it cuts back to them to see him eating her out while she’s upside down against a window. Cause of course she is.

If you are thinking this movie is a bunch of bull when it comes to being a porno/sexploitation film, then it agrees with you because a literal bull’s head shows up now.

Where does this lead? To a third rate Giancarlo Giannini from Seven Beauties (1975) for another random sex scene.

The only highlight of this scene is that he drinks from a literal bottle of Spanish Flies.

This guy works for the studio and is looking for the next Garbo. By that he means Christina Lindberg. Don’t know who she is? She was in Anita: Swedish Nymphet (1975) with Stellan Skarsgård that was later remade by Lars Von Trier as Nymphomaniac, Vol. 1 & 2 (2013).

There is also a pretty terrible song that plays during this scene, but at least it’s better than the Johnny Wet Pants song that makes the HBO/Cinemax/Showtime circuit. That song is terrible! So is the one about lesbians they play from time to time. If you feel I’m going on and on now, then good. That’s to give you an idea of how long this sex scene drags on.

Once you’ve listened to Guns ‘N Roses’ Paradise City and The End by The Doors, then the scene is over and there’s The Incredible Hulk. “You can’t let them close Uranus. It’s gonna be mine someday,” says Junior to his spray tan mom.

Now they get a call from the State Department to film a “simulated version of the Russian-American outer space hook-up.” No idea what that means, but they are given a million dollars to do it thanks to Kissinger. What do they do? They decide to embezzle the money by simply making a cheap porno. I’m not a fan of gay stereotypes, but I like this guy’s idea to make it a gay porn involving a homosexual shark and mermen. This comes after they agree that a “sexaster” movie is the way to go. They then go off to search for Miss Deep Jaws by not actually doing anything at the moment.

I say that because they cut back to the other guy who is having a fake blow job. Then we come back to put this plan together after watching a lady play the clarinet naked. Their idea is all well and good, but I was really hoping they would address what is clearly a lost painting of Manos behind them.

Some things happen now…sort of…not really. We cut back to the sex from earlier because it was just so interesting that it needed to continue. It’s still better than Love (2015). At least this film tells me it’s garbage rather than shoving Godard onscreen text in my face and telling me it’s a masterpiece.

Back at the studio, the lady that is too good for this movie is reading a script. We get a bizarre underwater sequence as a result.

I think that’s all I can show without having any clue as to what does and does not need black boxing. Anyways, now we get a fine American discussing how he does not want to do something softcore, but maybe they can pretend they will, then actually film a hardcore porn.

Meanwhile, more sex and awful dialog that isn’t necessary to hear or talk about. In fact, the rest of the movie isn’t necessary to exist. That’s the last 45 minutes or so of the movie I’m referring to here.

Oh, yeah. Dumbass comes in dressed as Hamlet.

To watch this, or watch Gums (1976) instead. I’ll find out soon enough whether anyone should watch either of them. Dumbass does get cast in the film as the male lead because what other purpose could he possibly serve in this movie otherwise.

Meanwhile, that foreign guy tries to eat a girl out or something. Then before you know it, he rides off on his bike like he’s Italian Batman.

There’s some mix up about the casting now. At least the film knows we don’t care, so it brings out tits and the ladies attached to them to kill time.

He has a thermometer stuck up his butt here too I think. Now for the long awaiting appearance from Thor.

This is when the movie just goes on autopilot if autopilot was a program written by a grade schooler. It bounces around till it comes literally crashing into a pool at the end. With that in mind, here’s the second appearance of The Hulk.

Yes, there was sex in there too. Moving on. I like this All American’s idea.

He thinks they should take the women’s lib. approach and make the film a lesbian porn. You have to admit that if you’re in his situation, then that’s not a bad solution. It works on late night cable. The girl on girl scenes are obviously much easier to film.

Meanwhile, Mother Goose.

That’s all I have to say about that.

Some construction work goes on now for the space capsule that they are going to splash into the pool to make up for a lack of a cum shot. That’s a sentence I wrote. They clearly needed more American flags on the set.

Dumbass shows up and has a fake big penis in his shorts that the gay stereotype takes notice of before going off to pick up Miss Deep Jaws at the airport. He has some problems here. Let’s just say that Miss Deep Jaws doesn’t get that no means no.

On the plus side, he can assure them they have found the right girl for the role before running off to find Dumbass in order to measure his penis.

During this the movie Gums appears to be going on in the pool, but nothing is ever made of it. Gums being the Jaws porno spoof with a mermaid that gives blow jobs to death. Just more pointless padding in a film that is already pointless. How pointless? This sex scene being inserted in while Miss Deep Jaws harasses the gay stereotype is a fine example.

Also, I lied earlier about the lack of AMERICA! because we find out dumbasses big dick was a Captain America sock all along.

More things happen before we finally get that appearance of Spider-Man who I’m sure is honored to be here.

This walking around and talking by the pool goes on for about another 10 minutes, but then they finally drop the “space capsule” in the pool.

And movie! Or whatever this was before the blood red credits run and an actual theme song using the title plays. Oh, it’s bad as well.

In summary, it’s a horrible movie to have to sit through. In plot summary: they wanted to make a porn, but couldn’t really for some reason, so they thought they would get clever by making a movie about their very situation. It turned out like this movie. However, God bless America because only in the United States could you show this kind of garbage in theaters even in the 1970s.p

Film Review: Fugitive at 17 (2012, dir. Jim Donovan)

Posted on July 20, 2016 by Valerie Troutman

It’s been awhile since I did any of those Amazon Prime Recommendation Worm posts. Anyone who has read them remembers that the posters that are made up for the indie foreign films are often ridiculously misleading. With that in mind, lets look at the disc and menu for this movie.

She does run right at the beginning of the movie. That’s about it. Oh, and there are no explosions in this film. Let’s take a look at the DVD menu.

Again, we have those hilarious explosions that don’t exist in the movie. Also, that isn’t her laptop that she pretends to use in the movie. I love the crosshairs because I’m nearly 100% positive that no one shoots at her. I’m also quite sure that there are never choppers used in pursuit of her.

What can we conclude here? That they put “Fugitive” in the title and tried to sell it as if it were The Fugitive (1993). Yes, there is a comparable scene to the beard cutting one in The Fugitive. At least the DVD and the menu are honest that actor Marie Avgeropoulos is nowhere near 17. She was actually 25 when she made this movie. However, they had a good reason for it that I will explain later, so let’s dive in.

After showing our main character Holly (Marie Avgeropoulos) run away into an alley for the title card, we cut to 24 hours earlier in Philadelphia. This is when we get introduced to Holly and her underwhelming laptop.

She has just installed a new OS so that “this puppy has more processing power than a brand-new computer.” It’s not BackTrack Linux running in a virtual machine that an actual hacker/pen-tester might use. Too bad. I was hoping they would at least have her do some war driving to find a WiFi network to use or set up a WiFi honeypot to capture the network traffic of the bad guy. Nope. She’ll just do bullshit.

Speaking of bullshit. Holly’s friend wants her to hack into the university she has applied to in order to see if she has been accepted. That means it’s time for Holly to show off her ability to look at screenshots inside of a browser and look intently as green text goes by her face.

Yes, it is a screenshot sitting on the computer’s local hard drive of a browser showing a college’s website that she is viewing in another browser. Now that text starts to roll by.

I love that she just instantly installs a backdoor. Not to give Tinfinger…I mean Blackhat (2015) too much credit, but at least Thor did a phishing attack to get the password to the system he wanted to break into. However, I do like this.

Somebody actually knows that deleting things like IDS and firewall logs on your way out is a good idea in order to cover your tracks. Credit where credit is due. Keeping with Accused at 17 and Stalked at 17, Holly’s friend invites her to a college party, which she agrees to attend.

Now we meet who I call Detective Padding (Christina Cox) and her son (Dylan Van Wylick). I call her that because while she is the one chasing Holly and will come to her rescue at the end, she only exists so that when they need to extend the runtime of the movie, they can cut to her.

Now it’s off to the party. That’s where we meet Dan (Daniel Rindress-Kay) over stealing WiFi from the factory next door to the party.

Holly pokes around on her cellphone and tells him to try MillerEmployeeGeneral. It’s not likely that would actually work, but those would be the first kind of passwords that you would try before you’d do more involved things. What I love about this whole thing is that they now show her cellphone screen that says she is on cellular, not WiFi.

Nothing can top “Logan’s Hacking Screen” from the Garage Sale Mystery series or almost every line from the hilariously bad Ex Machina (2015), but this is pretty funny.

Holly’s friend goes backstage with Spencer Oliphant (Casper Van Dien). He slips her some drugs. Unfortunately, she has an allergic reaction of sorts to the drugs that kills her. Fortunately, Holly’s pompadour sense goes off.

One thing leads to another, and we find out why they cast a 25 year-old.

When this film decides it’s time for Van Dien to get rough, he is quite rough with her. I’m sure they figured they’d play it safe by casting a 25 year-old rather than one who was only 18 or 19.

Because plot, she winds up getting accused of this whole thing since there was some sort of history of her stealing drugs using her imaginary hacking skills for her sick grandmother and those drugs winding up in the hands of her dead friend.

Now we get another example of her hacking skills. It just might blow your mind.

Detective Padding gets a call from her son who has dropped his cellphone in the toilet. She actually follows up those lines by asking him how he dropped it in the toilet. I would say that she got her knowledge of boyhood from the film Boyhood (2014), but that was still two years out. Regardless of the fact that she didn’t know her son was masturbating when the phone slipped from his hand, she tells him that they had to confiscate the sorbent along with the rest of the drugs they found. Just kidding, she doesn’t know what to do, so that’s why Holly tells him to remove the battery and the SIM card, clean it off, and then put it in rice, which will act as an absorbent like sorbent does. Of course, that does depend on the phone not having already shorted out. If you want to see a hilarious example of that, then look up the TWiT episode (not sure which show) where Leo Laporte decided to test this stuff you coated your phone in to make it waterproof by dropping it in a glass of water. You could see it short out right away. The best thing about that was that the Apple Genius he took the phone to had seen the episode.

Meanwhile, back in the film, they couldn’t afford a train, so they put her in a van to be transferred. She breaks free when the other prisoners are saved by friends who attack the van. That’s when she decides to recreate the beard cutting scene from The Fugitive. Except Holly doesn’t have a beard to cut, so she dyes her hair instead.

She also changes clothes and gets her fancy laptop. Now she decides that the place to start is to track down Dan from the party. That’s why she goes to the school website and types “Central University, Employee Log in” into the school site’s search box.

That gets her right into the student records. As bad as Blackhat was, at least somebody looked up actual Unix commands that Michael Mann could cut to closeup shots of all the time. Again though, credit where credit is due. Dan comes home and…

finds her in his place already. I love that he asks her how she got in. He got into the “Central University of Pennsylvania” how exactly? Sadly, they will basically say it was due to her ability to pick locks instead of her simply socially engineering someone into letting her in as a girlfriend.

Detective Padding and Holly’s mom try to pretend they are part of the story now before we cut to Dan and Holly as they try to track down Van Dien. It turns out that some guitar players grow out their nails. Van Dien’s long nails are the only thing she remembers strongly about him. When I played, I always kept them short like I do for typing. However, they’ll explain that when you are trying to perform something like Spanish Caravan by The Doors, then having all your fingers on one of your hands as picks is handy.

They figure out the name of a faculty member who teaches music. That means it’s time for Holly to get in contact with Detective Padding so that she can check him out after they are sure he has his nails grown out. It being Lifetime, she interrupts Padding’s son’s near his downward spiral into the world of Internet porn.

She is using something called Cloud Dial. I guess that’s Lifetime’s version of Skype. Holly eventually gets Padding on the line and it’s so cute how they try to have a Harrison Ford/Tommy Lee Jones conversation, but we need to move on.

As always: Of course Holly quickly finds this teacher and he leads her right to Van Dien. Before paying him a visit, she decides to remind us of a scene from Sneakers (1992).

To get to her grandmother in the hospital, she pretends to be a singing telegram. It was better in Sneakers when they used several people to overwhelm the staff till one of them gave in and just buzzed in Robert Redford. This version does has Kate Drummond from the Flower Shop Mystery series at the desk though since this movie was filmed in Canada.

At this point, we can jump over a lot. Basically it’s a bunch of scenes to insure that we get the running time out to a feature film, and make sure Detective Padding and Grandma are still around.

It all comes down to a showdown between Detective Padding, Holly, and Van Dien. Van Dien loses. A quick party for Grandma is held before the movie ends abruptly. Then the first person who is credited is the “Financial Consultant”.

After that, it’s the standard “players” credits for these “at 17” movies.

Out of the four “at 17” movies I have watched recently, I think it’s a tie between Stalked at 17 and this one. That is if you must watch one of them that I have reviewed.

Film Review: Stalked at 17 (2012, dir. Doug Campbell)

Posted on July 14, 2016 by Valerie Troutman

Between 2009 and 2012, Lifetime must have really decided to get behind this “at 17” series of movies. You’ll notice it’s not just Stalked at 17, but Stalked at 17 TM. This time the opening credits tell us that this movie is “Inspired by True Events.” I guess you can say that when your plot is so vague that it must have happened to somebody somewhere.

The movie begins, and we are introduced to our main character played by Taylor Spreitler. I know her character has a name in the movie, but if the script isn’t going to stop making endless references to the show she was on at the time called Melissa & Joey, then I can call her Lennox.

That’s a baby monitor that Lennox is listening to. That’s also most likely a future Lifetime movie when they realize that some Internet of Things baby monitors can be used to look inside other people’s homes. That is if they haven’t already. After Lennox goes to use the microwave, she is grabbed by the last 20 minutes or so of the movie before the film cuts to the title card, and it’s one year earlier.

Lennox and her friend are touring a college when we meet our bad guy for the movie on the left.

It’s also when I realized that the subtitles on the DVD didn’t work and turned on the captions instead. I love that they cast Charles Hittinger as Psycho Dad so he would look really intimidating. It’s probably because if you’ve watched Melissa & Joey, then you know that Taylor Spreitler and vulnerable go together about as much as Bella Thorne and drama.

Psycho Dad invites them to a party, and they of course decide to go. Now, for no good reason whatsoever, a guy wearing a sombrero with a bullseye on his chest.

We learn some very important information at the frat house. No, not that they decided to make him the one who was adopted by a councilwoman instead of Lennox. It’s that they run a very tight ship after Psycho Dad finds puke on the stairs.

Now we meet Lennox’s dad played by none other than whitelighter himself Brian Krause.

I agree, Leo. However, I think Doug Campbell was right to take the title of this movie and start calling the movies “Stalked by”. He’s just jealous because his wife played by Amy Pietz was in Stalked by My Neighbor (2015). This scene exists to tell us that they are having financial difficulties which will play no material role in the film.

Lennox and friend go to the party. As soon as the dialog tells us that Lennox is 16 at present, her and Psycho Dad immediately go upstairs together. After he tells her a sob story, they kiss and it fades to black before going to an establishing shot of her school.

I hope you like establishing shots of her school because you’ll see them 4-5 times in this movie. Heck, later in the movie you’ll get the exact same shot, but only a minute or so before or after the other shot.

Thanks to Lennox texting Psycho Dad, we learn that they did it on February 21st exactly because it is their two month anniversary.

Oh yeah, and his name is Chad. Just like Mister 45 minutes from Accused at 17. Real original there screenwriter Christine Conradt. It looks like Conradt is really passionate about these “at 17” movies seeing as she’s produced five of them. According to her bio on IMDb, she has an “MCJ from Boston University where she focused on cybercrime and juvenile delinquency.” It’s weird that with a focus in cybercrime, she seems to have had nothing to do with Fugitive at 17 (2012) where the girl in question is a hacker.

Now Lennox forgets that this movie is called Stalked at 17 and not Pregnant at 17, but it’s too late. I love how this scene plays out. Lennox is talking to a male friend when she grabs her stomach, and is obviously sick. She makes a mad dash for the bathroom. He quickly follows, but stops at the door, and asks a girl standing nearby to go in to check on her.

The line actually goes like this: “You really need to find a new friend cause that one out there couldn’t even be bothered to make sure you were okay, and sent me inside instead.”

Meanwhile, the film knows it needs to pad itself out.

Lennox is at home and finds out she is indeed pregnant. While that is going on, Psycho Chad is buying jewelry online. Back in Lennox’s bedroom, the movie gives us lines that might as well amount to this: “I don’t know if he was wearing a condom. You know what they say? If you look at it, then you go blind. I just had to take his word for it.” Of course Psycho Chad is happy about the news because it means he’ll have a family of his own now with a child who will love him unconditionally.

Then the two of them go to a restaurant where Psycho Chad blows up at a waiter. That’s basically the rest of the film. Chad gets nuttier, he gets in a fight with Leo, his biological mom he lied about being dead gets out of prison, and they finally get around to where the film started. At least it was fun to see Leo fighting with Psycho Chad along the way.

Lennox, baby, Psycho Chad, and Psycho Mom all end up at a convenience store where things go wrong and Psycho Chad is shot. Then it shows Lennox with the kid, and fades to black. I think this movie has earned the Godfrey Ho red screen end card for how abrupt the ending occurs.

Thus ends the classic tale of girl meets boy, girl gets herself knocked up, boy turns out to want a family, boy turns out to be crazy, everyone does their best to pad out the film, boy is shot, and the credits role. I have to admit that aside from this and Accused at 17, I have never seen credits that start by referring to the cast as “the players.”

At least this one had some kind of a story. That’s way more than I can say for Accused at 17. I have Fugitive at 17 coming soon, then that will be my last “at 17” movie for now.

Film Review: Accused at 17 (2009, dir. Doug Campbell)

Posted on July 13, 2016 by Valerie Troutman

I know Lisa would normally be the one to tackle these movies, but she just finished writing 40 reviews in about the span of a month. I think it goes without saying that she probably looks like this right now.

I also think it goes without saying that shot doesn’t exist in this movie.

Before the title card appears, we are treated to credits over shots that make us think we are about to watch a crime TV Show. I wish. Something might actually happen if that were the case.

Now we cut to five days earlier where we can tell things are going well because the captions tell us so.

We see some kids at school before we are introduced briefly to Cynthia Gibb at her job. Not sure what she does, and like most things in this movie, I don’t care. We then go back to the school to be introduced to obviously bad girl (Janet Montgomery) and low-rent Miriam McDonald (Stella Maeve) before cutting back to Gibb.

Some guy shows up to remind us he exists in the movie, but not to me. The school returns so we can meet Chad (Reiley McClendon) and obviously good girl who will be “accused”, even though that barely has anything to do with the movie.

Chad is here to tell her that she needs to cancel her plans and come to the best party of the year. I know this not only because the movie says so, but because when have you ever watched a movie where it isn’t supposed to be the greatest party of the year?

The guy who decided to exist for a bit brought along a pair of earrings so we can learn that the good girl is named Bianca (Nicole Gale Anderson). Already this movie is full of lies. Nicole Gale Anderson was 18 when she did this movie. She had long passed the age of 17 when you could be accused, stalked, betrayed, missing, pregnant, and become a fugitive all in the same year. It’s a long tradition going back at least as far as 1931 when Marian Marsh was in Under 18. She actually made that one when she was 17-18 years-old. When you turn 18, life just becomes one long snooze fest.

Bad girl shows up to make sure we know she’s very comfortable lying about people or animals dying before we can go to the party. That, and that her mother will totally back her lies up later in the movie. Fortunately, Bianca doesn’t make it to the party so Chad and another girl can have sex in a bathroom.

The one whose hands those belong to is Dory (Lindsay Taylor). She’s named that because the movie isn’t very well written. Also, her last name in the movie is Holland which goes right along with Cynthia Gibb’s character’s first name Jacqui to create the name of porn/B-Movie star Jacqui Holland. I’ve reviewed several of her films on this site.

All you need to know now is that things don’t go well for Bianca in several ways. Bianca and her friends sit next to a pool in bikinis to talk about boys because they aren’t guys. Otherwise, they would be doing this same scene while playing basketball. We get to see Bianca leave a nice little voicemail for Chad.

However, that’s not really what sets her off. This is what gets her riled up.

45 minutes? Chad’s a 10 minute man, 15 at the most. That’s why the girls decide to pick up Dory to take her to where “the hottest frat guys ever” are located.

Of course by that, they mean the set of Mojave (2015).

Sadly, Oscar Isaac is not there to greet them dressed as Antonio das Mortes. This makes Dory think something is up. She’s right. Dory punches Bianca to make sure she has a bruise on her forehead before she leaves the scene. Then obviously bad girl bashes Dory’s head in with a rock. That’s one Dead Dory.

I did forget one thing. On the way over, Dory made sure to leave a hair clip in the car to be used later in the movie.

In between Bianca leaving and Dory’s head getting hit by a rock, Bianca made sure to stop by a gas station so that someone will have seen her. It matters greatly to the plot, and by that I mean next to nothing. A plot I guarantee won’t matter to you if you watch Accused at 17. Things, stuff, and then we are introduced to our buddy cops.

They are clearly the best because they pay attention to every detail. In 2009, nobody was saying “Mackin'” anymore. That’s why they have a discussion as to whether they say “cuttin'”, “tappin’ it”, “hittin’ it”, or “hookin’ up”. They question Chad and we find out they actually aren’t the best cops around.

Officers, come on? Chad doesn’t seem like the type of guy who goes out to a Saturday Night Fish Fry.

However, I do believe that Chad is the kind of guy who takes Louis Jordan’s advice and when Bianca calls to ask if he’s alone, he tells her “no, I got three girls with me.”

Now they turn their attention to Bianca because the stuff in between the interrogations is really boring, so we need to keep moving along. There is a lot of padding in this movie. However, I have to give Janet Montgomery credit. She does a pretty good job of playing the evil girl. I also have to give the movie credit for how funny it was to see Bianca drive back to the scene of the head bashing the next day and call out Dory’s name as if she is just hiding somewhere. Just when the cop may actually be getting to something with his line of questioning, Cynthia Gibb interrupts to remind him that they still have about half a movie left to go so he better leave.

Now a couple of extras they gave hiking equipment find the body. Blah, blah, blah, and confrontation with evil girl’s mom.

The gist of it is that Barbara Niven can play a lesbian in one movie, a nice mom in a Hallmark murder mystery series, and do roles like this. She’s very versatile. Nothing really of consequence happens here except evil girl and evil mom lie because otherwise how are they going to get away with calling this movie “Accused at 17.”

Well, finally the trip to the gas station earlier and the hair clip left in the car pay off when the cops notice there are only about 30 minutes left in the movie.

They arrest her, so they can finally say with confidence that the title isn’t false advertising. More things happen, but it all amounts to Gibb and Bianca trying to prove her innocence till it’s time for bad girl to confront that other girl who only exists to be killed off.

She apparently needs an inhaler, so evil girl takes it away and sprays all the puffs out of it. No big loss. Again, more stuff happens that is of no real consequence until bad girl pulls a gun on her father.

Dad stops her, and everything is good again. That is except for Dory having had her head smashed in and that other girl having suffocated to death. None of that matters because Bianca puts on the earrings I mentioned earlier. The point of that is the guy who barely existed at the beginning of the film is Gibb’s new boyfriend/dad for Bianca so putting them on means she has accepted him.

This movie was terrible. I’m pretty sure more happened in Superdragon vs. Superman. The movies Stalked at 17 and and Betrayed at 17 arrived today. I’m so grateful that Lisa already reviewed Betrayed at 17 back in 2011. That means I only have to watch it, and not attempt to write about it.

Film Review: U.S. Catman: Lethal Track (1990, dir. Godfrey Ho)

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Valerie Troutman

I guess I’ve mentioned director Godfrey Ho enough over the past year that it’s about time I actually reviewed one of his movies. I know I have explained it in other places, but I’ll do it here once more to have it on an actual Godfrey Ho movie review. Godfrey Ho is a director who worked in mainly in Asia during the 1980s and early 1990s. He was famous for the enormous number of films he created in such a short time using the cut-and-paste technique of making movies. What he would do is get together some caucasian actors and film about 15-20 minutes of footage with them. How specific the footage was to the film you’re reviewing is anybodies guess. Sometimes it does feel like he just filmed a bunch of random fights that would insert into several different films. He would then take an old, unreleased, or unfinished film from the region and splice his footage into it with editing done to the whole thing in order to make a new movie. This was a quick and dirty way to make a lot of films very fast. Ho was also known for lifting copyrighted music for his movies. I’ve heard a bit of Pink Floyd’s On The Run and for some reason he chose to use music from A Clockwork Orange (1971) for a touching reunion between a mother and her daughter. That’s the information you need to know before I review this film. Typically people will review Godfrey Ho movies by splitting the two films from each other into the original film (Movie A) and the Ho footage (Movie B), then talk about them separately while bringing up how the two separate movies are linked together. That’s what I am going to do here. Especially because the link barely exists this time around.

Also, Godfrey Ho used many pseudonyms for his films. This time around the role of director Godfrey Ho will be played by Alton Cheung.

Movie A:

Movie A begins with a bus being robbed. They get the bag they need and drive off to the fortress of badly dubbed Asians who have no idea they are in U.S. Catman: Lethal Track. Inside, we meet a guy who I refer to as One Eye.

He’s our villain for Movie A. What his original purpose was…I have no idea. In fact, that can sum up Movie A in a nutshell: I can tell you what happens, but I have no idea why any of it is happening.

One Eye has received a shipment of weapons. Now we cut to party time!

Unfortunately, the party turns sour when this guy pulls a gun out of his drum.

He kidnaps some people. Who knows their identities and who cares?

We now go to a guy driving on the road who is pulled over by a guy in the road. He tells him something that was probably important in the original film. Here it’s nearly incompressible. Also, why was he flagged down in the middle of the road when the next scene is him being shown the guy who was kidnapped? When you watch Godfrey Ho movies, it’s best not to ask questions like that. Unless you are lucky enough to not only find out what the original film was, but get ahold of a copy, your question will go unanswered.

Back with One Eye, they talk for awhile. All you need to know is that they agree they are all brothers.

Meanwhile, some guys fall for the old guy hanging on a tree trick while driving along and get themselves kidnapped too.

One Eye is amassing an impressive collection of people for some reason that has to do with his thin as human hair connection to Movie B.

Now we are introduced to motorcycle girl who is posing as a guy.

I’m sure there was an explanation for her existence or why she seems to have it out for One Eye, but here she just seems to be out for him for no particular reason. She introduces herself as Frederick. Gigi here seems to like what she sees.

Then motorcycle girl sits down to be surrounded by some guys and get into a fight. I’m assuming the director of the original film was a fan of the scene from either Come Drink With Me (1966) and/or Django (1966). They have the same scene in them. It’s just that one uses martial arts and the other a gun. You are probably more familiar with the scene from Come Drink With Me since they recreated it for the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Of course this being a scene in Movie A, it goes absolutely no where. I love the summary on IMDb for Movie A:

“The other half of the movie is a about a whole bunch of Asian people that are just beating each other up for no reason, including a tall guy with an eyepatch and a woman that looks like a man. They have no real purpose in the movie, and seem to just be thrown in.”

That about sums it up.

Motorcycle girl gets a room where some more fighting happens. Also, we get a little comedy bit too. Then something just plain confusing occurs. I mean more confusing than the rest of this film.

And zoom in with love music playing.

Because of the way Ho cut this all together, these two women appear to have just had lesbian sex. Honestly, the shot is so dark, her face kind of looks different, and her chest looks really flat that unless she’s binding, I have a feeling this is a different character that looked similar enough to the motorcycle girl, so Ho had the same woman dub both people and thus they are the same person. I have not been so confused by a Godfrey Ho movie since Ninja Champion (1985). Ninja Champion is a rape revenge movie that I’m quite sure had no rape in the original movie called Poisonous Rose Stripping The Night (1985). I’m also pretty sure the “retarded” character had those stereotypical retarded sounds just to cover up dialog that would otherwise be silent over moving lips. Let’s just assume that Gigi is a lesbian and motorcycle girl must be too, or just went along with it. It’s never really brought up again.

Back with One Eye, he decides to cut down a woman he has kidnapped and rapes her.

I haven’t gotten around to reviewing Troll 3/Quest for the Mighty Sword (1990), but let’s go ahead and play the rape horn.

Now One Eye pays a visit to a general he has kidnapped. He does this so he can mention the name of a character from Movie B that he apparently is working for in order to overthrow the general’s country. A couple lines like that is all you’ll get in this film as a whole. Believe me when I say that Godfrey Ho usually does go to greater extents to make characters from one movie genuinely appear to know characters from the other film. That usually involves a conversation either over the telephone or thru the magic editing technique of cutting back and forth between two people without including a shot that shows them in the same place together. You’ll see none of that here. Just the occasional name drop.

Now motorcycle girl has an action sequence for…um…reasons? I know I ask that in a lot of my movie reviews, but…oh, wait. She has an action sequence so that she can show off her sweet shotgun while on a motorcycle skills.

That’s a good enough reason I’d say. As for who she is fighting, it’s just some random people who stop her in the road. Welcome to Godfrey Ho movies where sense has no place.

Speaking of no sense, this guy shows up with a Molotov Cocktail and saves her life.

Did that makes sense to you and you’re disappointed? Don’t worry. This film has got you covered because it now cuts to random referee guy who is spying on One Eye’s fortress of badly dubbed Asians.

Too bad for him though because he is soon captured by a movie cliche.

One Eye now tells us his origin story to the referee:

“I killed my father when I was 15. That’s right. He was fucking my girl on my bed. I blew his brains out and he took my eye.”

That’s interesting. Not sure how someone takes your eye after you have blown their head off though. I’m sure it’s explained in another part of the story this film is based on by AAV Creative Unit and left out by Godfrey Ho when he developed the story or was removed when Andrew Chan wrote the screenplay.

The next part is rather long. It goes without saying that it is pointless. The guy who rescued her figures out he’s a she. He actually tells her that maybe if she ate a little, then her “tits” would grow. I said it’s never really brought up again, but I’m pretty sure this is the same girl from earlier.

Motorcycle girl smiles at her implying the sex did happen. Also, this girl is happy to see her too. Even other people in the room act like they can see they like each other. That really leads me to believe they had a guy for some, or all of the scenes just dubbed with a woman’s voice.

There’s some escaping, some getting angry, and this guy gets a Rambo trap sprung on him.

Then the movie cuts back to the dumbest thing in Movie B, but we’ll get to that later.

After that, it’s just one long action sequence broken up with Movie B and few lulls in the action. There is one thing to make of note of here. While a guy is just talking to this guy shown below, a sudden music stinger kicks in, it zooms in on his face, and then just cuts back to the other guy talking as if he had just been calmly talking the whole time.

That kind of sudden zoom and music stinger that is out of context with the film seems to be a thing that happens in Godfrey Ho movies as a hazard of splicing two films together.

In the end, One Eye meets his fate.

There’s something weird here too. He shoots him and One Eye appears to fall off the bracing in this barn. We never see his body. It’s just that he fell, and then it cuts to the shooter leaving the barn. I get the feeing that his death didn’t actually happen there in the original film.

End of Movie A!

Movie B:

Now we get to the U.S. Catman part of the movie and how this all links in together.

After One Eye gets his shipment of weapons at the beginning of Movie A, we cut to Movie B to a see a van with a radioactive symbol on it pass Catman and his sidekick.

These guys are so American. The sidekick is wearing a Lowe’s hat, Catman is wearing an “American Sports” jersey, and they just got back from playing baseball. Catman’s sidekick is going to be joining the CIA. At least I think that’s what they said. It’s kind of confusing. Then we hear the car drivers talk about the cat, cat piss, and then that one of the drivers has to take a piss as a result of their discussion.

Time to meet two drug addicts who are nearby to all this.

They can talk all they want about needing a hit, but it’s clearly the full screen aspect ratio that is their real problem. They try to rob the truck with the radioactive cat inside. Catman and his sidekick come to the rescue and we discover why the pause button was invented.

As you already have guessed, he gets scratched by the radioactive cat during the fight. I love that they insert ninja sword sound effects for when the bats are swung around.

Now we cut to a graveyard to find out how Movie A and Movie B have any semblance of a connection.

That’s cult leader Cheever. He is meeting with a guy that must be Russian because of his accent. He talks about previous attempts to take over countries such as Afghanistan that have failed. The gist is that Cheever is supposed to get in touch with the folks from Movie A to support them in order to get the people first to then overthrow the government. This, as opposed to going in with force. They drop a couple of names to make sure we know that they know what is going on over in Movie A. They are planning on starting with Thailand since that’s where Movie A happens to take place.

Then we cut to two guys talking about this whole Cheever situation. The one on the left tells the one on the right to check out the Holy Cheever Church. You’ll never see him again. Unless he is somehow Catman’s sidekick even though said sidekick has no idea what the Holy Cheever Church is later on.

Now Catman is woken up from sleep feeling funny. He discovers that he can touch or seemingly point at electronics and they will turn on. You’ll see him use that power…never in this movie. We do see CNN on TV during this scene, which appears to be talking about Winston Churchill.

Then just as he is getting really happy, his friend walks right in. They’re only working with about 15 minutes of footage here so they have to keep it moving. His friend decides that if he can make electronics turn on, then maybe he can light a cigarette by looking at it. It works of course.

With that out of the way we get: “I feel so strong. I feel I could punch a hole in a fucking wall!”

Clearly he has some sort of super strength. There’s one last thing that needs to be checked.

I’m not kidding when I say they look down wondering if his penis also has super strength too before staring at the hole in the wall again. I guess there is a guy out there who meets up to the standards the girl from Real Genius (1985) has about men she sees. That being a guy who can hammer a six-inch spike through a board with his penis, as she says in that movie. Again, super strength and all are powers that will not really be brought up again.

Time to see Catman in action! The drug addicts from earlier try to rob Catman’s sidekick who is disguised as a road construction worker when Catman shows up to save the day.

No, I didn’t leave anything out. No explanation is ever given about his uniform. Nor is any explanation given how he can deflect bullets with his wrists.

He beats them up and recovers some tube. Not sure what this tube is, but he does mention checking it out using their Cat Computer. You’ll never see it, but they will say it has given them a clue called HCC, which stands for the Holy Cheever Church.

Coming out of church they see a guy just lying around, which means he might know something.

He wants coffee and a hamburger first. Luckily, a neighbourhood 7-Eleven store is nearby.

Now we cut to the Holy Cheever Church. It’s the best part of the movie.

We’ve got our woman strung up onstage.

Then we have a guy juggling, a guy playing with hairspray, a guy hand banging, and a guy training with a punching bag.

They’re the best, or something. Cheever seems pleased which is why he points to something with his cane, it lights on fire, and then it immediately cuts to a woman shampooing her hair. Oh, and the girl onstage was raped by Cheever when she was 13 and has been had by the other guys. I guess that includes the shampooing girl too? She sure seems happy that the woman onstage has been sentenced to death for giving away secrets in what must have been lost footage. She even says, “Kill that bitch!” She’s even chosen to do the decapitation. She really gets into things when her hair is covered with soap. Seriously, what is this?

Then Catman shows up. In comes either the sidekick or the guy undercover. Doesn’t matter. They let tied up woman loose and she sprays them both with something that knocks them out. They wake up on the “Don’t Fuck With Cheever” bullseye.

I have to admit that I didn’t notice any of this sidekick and/or undercover agent confusion while watching this movie. Probably because I was trying to make some sense out of Movie A.

Then we are back at Catman’s apartment where he is drawing sketches of the bad guys when Cheever comes on TV to be interviewed. Catman is surprised.

I would be too. He just spent all that time making sketches of the bad guys and then Cheever ruins it all by just coming on TV to announce where he’ll be. I love that Cheever says his special event called “Everybody Go To God” is going to have more than 200,000 in attendance. Catman calls up to get the details. Either this event never exactly happens, or only a couple of people show up.

At this point, One Eye is dead. The movie has 5 minutes left to wrap up the Catman plot line now. Now Catman and his sidekick stumble upon the guy from earlier on their way to the Cheever event, which they are having trouble finding. That’s why they decide this guy probably knows where it is located.

He tries to get away, but there’s no running from Catman and his sidekick. Especially not his sidekick who punches him several times in the stomach. He tells them where the event is, so they split up.

Catman springs into action by running through the camera to change into his outfit.

They arrive and I guess the drug addicts are working for Cheever? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that Cheever says, “I’m gonna burn you alive. I always liked hot pussy.” Then some fighting happens that kills the sidekick guy. Catman pulls a Batarang style thing from his visor and throws it into the chest of Cheever that kills him. Since it is a Godfrey Ho movie, the second that actor lies down and turns his head slightly, it cuts to “The End.” No time to waste.

Clearly there was just too much mystery here, which is why there is a sequel called U.S. Catman 2: Boxer Blow (1993).

I’m not kidding that there was too much mystery. Apparently his sidekick is back in the sequel. Does he look like he’s alive here?

Again, is he the guy from the beginning? Is he someone else? What happened to the other cult members? They weren’t at the miniature over 200,000 people meeting at the end. What was this “Lethal Track” the title spoke of? This was a real mess.

My final thoughts are that I did like the Catman parts just for how goofy they are, but that the rest worthless. I am looking forward to watching the sequel. However, if you are new to Godfrey Ho, then I recommend one of the Pierre Kirby movies. He’s the best actor he worked with that I have seen so far. They are also less confusing for the most part. Go with something like Thunder of Gigantic Serpent (1988).

Late Night Cable Movie Review: Wicked Deeds (2016, dir. Seth Kieffer)

Posted on June 29, 2016 by Valerie Troutman

Wicked Deeds is much like Carnal Wishes (2015) in that it takes a familiar film noir and/or noirish elements and adds explicit sex. However, unlike Carnal Wishes, it screws up in my opinion. Also, I doubt that my review of Wicked Deeds will end up being a part of a political scandal like it was when Ted Cruz pulled that attack ad of his. She didn’t even have a sex scene in the movie, but only made a cameo appearance at the end of the film. That didn’t stop the law firm Rick Santorum once worked for from paying a visit to my review.

I’m not really surprised that somebody at K&L Gates looked at my review. What I am surprised at is that I didn’t do any hacking to get that image. I was looking at our site’s stat section when I saw a weird URL so I clicked on it. What should have just been an internal network message from some sort of edge router to the person coming to my review from a computer at the firm was actually at a publicly accessible URL. I’ve seen this one other time on another one of my late night cable reviews. I don’t know why ScanSafe thought this was a good idea.

I also don’t know why the filmmakers of Wicked Deeds thought it was a good idea to take an otherwise decent porno noir and extend the sex scenes so long that any pacing is broken. At least they were kind enough to give me a title card that I didn’t have to black box in any way.

The movie begins like slasher movies do. Except instead of someone getting killed, two people have sex. The two people are a married couple. She is named Kira (Anna Morna). Luckily, we are getting An Erotic Tale of Ms. Dracula (2014) Anna Morna rather than Lolita from Interstellar Space (2014) Anna Morna. The husband is Roy (Chad White). He too was in both An Erotic Tale of Ms. Dracula and Lolita from Interstellar Space. You may remember him as playing Van Helsing. I will give the sex scenes in this movie one thing. They tend to be more intimate and erotic, then the usual stuff you see. That’s why I don’t mind this opening sex scene so much, but them reusing the length of this scene for all of them, becomes a problem. This sex scene should have been the longest to establish intimacy between the married couple, while the later sex scenes should have gotten shorter and shorter to go along with the building of suspense in the film.

Something else to mention here is that this is another one of these that was shot by Lex Lynne Smith. So, no matter what, it is well shot for these movies. Usually that’s something you say almost as an insult to a film, but after seeing some of these shot on video sex late night cable movies like Monster of the Nudist Colony (2013), I mean it genuinely.

After they are finished, we get a scene almost like the one from Carnal Wishes. At the end of the married couple’s sex scene he just got up and left for a late night meeting. Here, we find out that he is going out of town to do some survey work. She kind of wants to come along, but he tells her that they both know she doesn’t like the jungle heat. She brings up that the hotel probably has a nice spa so that he has an excuse to bring up that he finally heard back from the handyman who is going to fix their spa. It’s not only part of the setup for the film, but also an obvious reference to the stereotype that all porn begins with a woman inviting over a pizza deliveryman for sex. She also mentions that she would feel more comfortable if she had a gun in the house also as a setup for something later in the film. He says absolutely not, and that having guns in the house means it’s just an accident waiting to happen. Funny how some these porno films seem to have more progressive politics than a lot of mainstream cinema.

Anyways, you can see that there is a gun in the house. It’s in his night table, but even having watched the whole film, I still don’t know if it was a gun he or she was keeping in secret. She wakes up to find that not only has her husband left a rose on his pillow for her, but the handyman named Derrick (Ryan McLane) has arrived. You may remember Ryan McLane as the toughest scientist to convert in Vixens from Venus (2016).

She goes back inside the house and receives a mysterious phone call asking her who the killer was in the first Friday the 13th movie. That, or something about telling her that her husband needs to stay out of Mexico. She tries to get in touch with him, but no such luck. She calls her sister-in-law Rose (Chanel Preston). She comes over to try and calm her down. I don’t know where you might know Chanel Preston from, but she did play Marilyn Chambers in Night at the Erotic Museum (2015). That reminds me that I will have to get around to reviewing Behind the Green Door (1972). Not because it was a landmark film of the genre, but because an early childhood friend of mine was the daughter of parents who managed the Mitchell brother’s empire. Neither of us was told by our parents till we were older.

Kira goes to take a shower or something and comes back to find this.

It’s another joke about the whole pizza deliveryman cliche. This is also where the film starts to get strange because Kira talks with her sister shortly afterwards and she denies it ever happened. At this point, Kira just chalks it up to her sister being embarrassed to have hooked up with a handyman she has never met before. But the weirdness doesn’t stop here. It only grows. I think it’s safe to say that the film is going for the Gaslight (1944) type thing here. It’s not really a spoiler because I am going to explain the whole thing anyways.

After talking with her sister, Kira lies down and appears to go to sleep. Then we are treated to a sex scene between her and the handyman. Interestingly, she wakes up suddenly from it in her bed rather than on the couch where she was lying down before the scene started or at the pool where the scene occurred. It goes without saying that she still can’t reach her husband.

Sis continues to try and calm her down, which is precisely why she invites her friend Tracy over so that actress Silvia Saige can get her fifth acting credit on IMDb. Once again, it’s a sex scene that goes on way too long. It’s there because it’s another thing that Kira needs to witness to further push her into a perceived insanity when everyone acts like it didn’t happen.

Even the pictures/video she takes with her not-iPhone will end up magically disappearing later on. After that scene finally ends, we get a reappearance of Mister New Jersey Show Me State from Scared Topless (2015). That being Billy Chappell making an appearance as another handyman there to fix the spa. He even has a text that he claims was sent by Kira to him.

Kira finds that the pictures are missing and everyone denies anything she has seen. She goes up to bed, which apparently means the couch where her husband appears out of nowhere.

The scene of course goes on too long again. The next morning she finds the rose on his pillow, but when she gets Roy on the phone he says he’s still in Mexico. Kira’s sister is very concerned and brings in a doctor played by Robert Baldwin.

It’s not likely, but you may have seen Baldwin in something like the Fred Olen Ray film Illicit Dreams 2 (1998). As you can see, he is very concerned for Kira. Again, she goes to sleep and again, she is visited for another sexual encounter. This time it’s the original handyman.

This is when things really start to spin out of control. I say that because even my iPad decided this scene needed a Dutch tilt.

Kira confronts the handyman about taking advantage of her while she was drugged by the doctor. She cuts him with a knife and he flees. She then tells her sister that she thinks she might have been raped. Then the handyman comes downstairs and doesn’t remember any of it. In fact, he’s not even cut.

Kira kicks both her sister and the handyman out of the house, but finds blood on the floor. She comes into her living room to head upstairs and sees the other handyman with Tracy.

This is a perfect example of why this film ultimately doesn’t work. This should immediately lead to her going upstairs to discover this.

This scene should also be followed immediately by her passing out and falling down the stairs, which then leads us to our dramatic reveal and ending. But in both cases, they lead to long sex scenes. It completely ruins the suspenseful atmosphere that should be present in this part of the film. It leads me to believe that on the one hand they wanted to do this Gaslight style story, but on the other hand they were obligated to have a certain number of sex scenes that were required to be of a certain length. It’s like watching an action movie where foot or car chases go on so long that you are no longer caught up in the moment. Too bad cause I like the ending.

It turns out that the husband and the sister-in-law arranged this whole thing to drive Kira crazy. The doctor even performed ECT on her. The idea was that the only way Roy could get around the prenup that Kira’s brother had him sign was to get her committed.

But what about that gun from earlier?

Cut to black, and we hear gunshots.

If they had just trimmed down the sex scenes so that they moved from long and intimate to short almost glimpses as her mind spiraled more out of control, then this could have been one of the best of these I’ve seen so far. Sadly, it doesn’t do that. It’s one of these films that I call a missed opportunity.

Hallmark Review: Karen Kingsbury’s The Bridge, Part 2 (2016, dir. Mike Rohl)

Posted on June 12, 2016 by Valerie Troutman

I did say I would write this a few days after I watched part 1, but obviously that didn’t happen. My health problems hit me hard. That’s why I greatly appreciated the person who thanked me for providing instructions on how to find songs used in Hallmark movies in my review of Valentine Ever After. I also found it hilarious to receive a comment by someone who I believe thinks they know quite a bit about Hallmark movies seeing as they wanted to lecture me about them bundled together with personal attacks. They must have missed the recent Hallmark movie Hearts of Spring. It covered leaving nasty comments with personal attacks about how you know better than someone about something on that person’s blog when you disagree with their opinion and the damage it can cause. It was also about mint chocolate chip milkshakes.

But we aren’t here to discuss the wonderful world of writing movie reviews. We’re here to discuss this film, and hopefully have a little fun doing it. Especially with what happened today. Right, Ted?

Karen Kingsbury’s The Bridge, Part 1 (2015, dir. Mike Rohl)

The movie begins not quite where the first film left off. The first film had two kids named Ryan and Molly who go to college, meet, and fall in love before going their separate ways basically because there was a second part to the movie. The actual reasons are that there was an extra guy and girl along with Molly’s dad who came in between the two of them. It also had the story of Charlie and Donna who come together after a personal tragedy to create a bookstore whose main mission isn’t so much to sell books, but act as a place where people can bond over their love of reading. They called it The Bridge. The movie ended with Donna turning down Charlie to go back to church with him and standing at the checkout counter with “to be continued…” below her.

This film begins by treating us to that conversation between Molly (Katie Findlay) and Ryan (Wyatt Nash) from the end of the first film. That one where the phones were sometimes lit up near the character’s ear, and sometimes not.

I’m still not sure why that was a thing. To my knowledge, all cellphones turn the screen black so that you don’t accidentally hit buttons with your face when you are talking on them next to your ear. I’ve seen other Hallmark movies do this right sometimes and other times incorrectly.

After that we cut to Seattle, Washington 7 years later. Seeing as the first film started in 2009 and took them to Christmas of that year, it would mean that this film takes place in 2016 during the holidays. I guess that’s why they originally planned to air this at that time. I can’t imagine what a disaster that would have been considering the plot of this film. Then they cut to this shot that immediately follows the title card, which told us when and where we are.

I know A Christmas Detour had a litany of ridiculously photoshopped in Christmas stuff at the very beginning of the film. However, not only does director Ron Oliver have a sense of humor, but his movie was supposed to be a comedy. These two movies on the other hand are supposed to be rather serious. Plus, the movie then cuts inside to show us Molly and her dad (Steve Bacic) who-along with the sets-announce clearly that we are at his business. The establishing shot didn’t need to be there. Particularly if this was how it was going to look. While not needing to be there, I can’t say I’m shocked that it ended up there after seeing 170+ Hallmark films at the time of writing this review. Just like I’m not shocked that the dialog between Molly and her dad is there establish that she is on the brink of marrying the guy who wasn’t worth mentioning in my first review and becoming CEO of her dad’s company just before fate will intervene to bring her back to Ryan. That’s her Hallmark movie within this Hallmark movie.

Now we are reintroduced to Ryan who has just arrived home for the holidays. They decided to age Wyatt by having him grow a little facial hair.

I’m sorry, but there’s just something about the pattern of his mustache hair that says Frollo Gaston from The Secret of the Hunchback (1996) to me.

The Secret of the Hunchback (1996, dir. Mike Joens & Ken C. Johnson)

While I really did think it was going to happen, Charlie does not sprout wings in this like Quasimodo does in that film to reveal he’s an angel.

If there’s anything they did to Molly to age her, then it’s so superficial that I didn’t even notice. Still, she does actually look like an adult instead of Emilia Clarke in Terminator Genisys (2015) who really looked like a teenager.

Then we are re-introduced to Charlie (Ted McGinley) as he goes around town saying the bookstore will be rebuilt and open for business soon. It’s at times like this in the film that I wonder if it was purely budget or if Hallmark trimmed a few scenes to make this fit the runtime they had for this early airing of the film. We never really see the storm except for a weird scene. Charlie enters The Bridge after talking to people on the street and then looks up at a hole in his ceiling when we get a flashback to the storm. It’s very short, but at first I honestly thought Donna (Faith Ford) had been struck by lightning.

It’s a very short scene. I didn’t try to catch a screenshot like that. It’s how it came out. It’s also the only one I have that illustrates the lightning part of things.

In the first film, Charlie had a character who was thin as a playing card. In this second film, McGinley actually gets to do some acting as we see him trying to deal with the destruction of the bookstore. Of course good acting for Charlie is not meant to be here for some reason so he winds up getting attacked by a pole in his car and is out in a coma for the remainder of the film. That’s too bad cause for a brief period there, you really do get a glimpse of McGinley adding some depth to Charlie.

Then Molly comes back to town and discovers this whole situation with The Bridge along with Ryan. By the way, that’s the whole movie. Charlie ends up in a coma because he shouldn’t have been behind the wheel in his state and hit a pole. Molly comes back to town and with Ryan’s help, rallies the community and leverages the Internet to rebuild The Bridge. Then we get Charlie waking up from his coma to find that all is well thanks to the bonds he formed with and between the people the bookstore touched. I would think Hallmark viewers would be expecting something more substantial seeing as they were being asked to wait a whole year for this second film.

There are a couple of little subplots if you can even call them that. It’s really just the film tying up a few loose ends/removing a few roadblocks concerning Molly and Ryan to make sure they can end the film on a kiss between them.

There is one thing I found unintentionally funny about this movie.

I get why there are no last names. I mean I have seen Hallmark movies populate lists of names like this with crew members, but I understand. What’s funny is the one on the bottom. I wouldn’t think it was worth mentioning the obvious thing people associate with the name Slim if not for something that happened while I was watching the film. I mean other than this obvious association with the name Slim.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

I’m going to mention it because there is an actor in this movie that I kept mistaking for Wyatt Nash.

It really took till this scene for me to know for sure that I was seeing a different character when the guy in the blue shirt was onscreen. So, of course I’m thinking “will the real Wyatt Nash please stand up” when I see the name Slim.

My final thoughts on this one are that they basically took a single Hallmark film and divided it in two. If this had been condensed to a single film, then it still wouldn’t have been that good honestly, but it would have been an actual Hallmark movie. To give Karen Kingsbury the benefit of the doubt again, I have to imagine that her book didn’t divide the story with a seven year gap. I’m guessing there was more time to develop their relationship and flesh out Donna and Charlie that builds to all the connections that developed through the bookstore ultimately allowing them all to survive the literal and metaphorical storm. With obvious religious stuff that I’m sure is more pronounced in the book thrown in.

Long story short, don’t bother with either of these movies. There are far better films Hallmark has made. Even their usual average B-Movies are also often enjoyable on some level. Even if that is just the enjoyment of riffing on them and noticing goofs they make. Even the screenwriter of Hello, It’s Me told me on Twitter she was enjoying my reactions to the dialog she had written. People have a lot of fun doing live tweets of Hallmark movies and the cast and crew will sometimes hop onboard to have fun with the audience too. At the end of the day, these reviews are to give you my opinion on the film and to hopefully guide you to ones you’ll enjoy. Even if that’s just because I’ve talked about it enough that regardless of what I thought about it, you decide it sounds like something you might enjoy.

As always if they list them, here are the songs:

It seems to be a regular thing for me when I write these reviews to listen to a single song on an endless repeat. Might as well mention it as a little footnote for people. The song for this review was Holding Back the Years by Simply Red.

In retrospect, I probably should have been listening to Culture Club’s Do You Really Want To Hurt Me.

Film Review: Shadows in the Distance (2015, dir. Orlando Bosch)

Posted on May 18, 2016 by Valerie Troutman

I know I already wrote about this film in one of my Amazon Prime experiment posts. For reasons that aren’t important, I am writing a long form review of this film. A bit of a fresh look.

Before anything, the movie starts with a title card saying something I’ve never seen on a movie. It says “Deposito Legal: V1912-2012”. From what I can gather online, this seems to essentially be a cultural preservation program by the Spanish government. Regardless, I’m not sure why it was necessary for it to be there at the beginning of the film along with the normal opening credits that you’d expect. Then again, this is a foreign indie movie from Amazon Prime so I guess I should be thankful there are even credits on this thing.

During the opening credits we get a kind of cool jazz sound that you might expect in a 90s late night cable movie or TV Show. Spicy City had one of these. Then we cut to a beach and meet one of our leads named Piero (Andrea Bruschi).

If you like that shot, then you might actually enjoy this movie because he and the female lead will often stare at things. Sometimes they will even stare right at you. Cut to title card, then we find out where Piero works.

I must admit that after the late night cable soundtrack over the credits followed by a guy on the radio, I was having flashbacks to Zalman King’s Pleasure or Pain.

Pleasure or Pain (2013, dir. Zalman King)

However, this movie won’t be assaulting you with endless erotica. Instead, it will be assaulting you with endless art film cliches. Also, he really reminded me of DJ Fernando Martinez from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. You can take a listen below if the video is still up.

He also mentions that he is broadcasting from Berlin before cutting to some empty places to make sure we know some Antonioni things are going to be happening in this movie. Then we meet our female lead Andrea (Katrin Bühring).

This should ring some French New Wave bells for me, but I just can’t think of any. No worries! I have plenty more. She’s on her way to the bookstore. She works there with her friend Marianne (Katharina Rivilis) that is most likely a lesbian and likes to stare and rub up against Andrea.

This is when we find out she is involved with a guy named Oliver who is too busy to go and see French movies with her. You can’t really blame Oliver. She could be going to see Nouvelle Vague (1990). Apparently, someone ordered a book by Wilhelm Genazino because any movie with a lot of French New Wave references must include books. Now we cut to Piero making a call at a phone booth. He sets up a meeting before walking in front of what appears to be a rundown theater.

After standing there, he turns and goes inside. He happens to show up near the beginning of Shoot The Piano Player (1960).

Shoot The Piano Player (1960, dir. François Truffaut)

That was François Truffaut’s second feature film. It’s the first scene between Charlie and Léna. A large part of the movie is Charlie trying to get over his past and open up to her. It’s also about pulp fiction gangsters riding around with a kid, which contains one of the most awesome insert shots of all time. One of the gangsters says, “If I’m lying, may my mother keel over this instant!”

Shoot The Piano Player (1960, dir. François Truffaut)

No one else is in the theater except our two leads.

I’m just going to assume that the ghosts from Good Bye, Dragon Inn (2003)…

Good Bye, Dragon Inn (2003, dir. Min-liang Tsai)

Good Bye, Dragon Inn (2003, dir. Ming-liang Tsai)

migrated to Germany in the past decade or so to haunt this theater. The two of them of course take notice of each other, but don’t say anything. By that, I mean they stare at each other before cutting to the final scene of Shoot The Piano Player after Charlie is back at the bar, finds a new barmaid working there since Léna was gunned down, and somewhat solemnly plays the piano while looking off into the space behind the camera.

We see them briefly on a bus before going home with Piero where he seems to have just records, some lights, and a mattress on the floor.

Nice to know the Alain Delon spartan bedroom design caught on after Le Samouraï (1967).

Le Samouraï (1967, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville)

Okay, to be fair, Bosch was probably thinking of the bedroom from The Mother and the Whore (1973).

The Mother and the Whore (1973, dir. Jean Eustache)

Especially since that is considered to be the last film of the French New Wave, and we see a clip from the film that is considered to have given birth to the French New Wave later on in this movie.

He looks up to see a crack in his ceiling.

Doctor Who

We now cut to more empty spaces to remind us of Antonioni before going to a park. Andrea is talking about how she needs to go and take photos of an abandoned building so the movie can reference Red Desert (1964) and Blow-Up (1966) before it is turned into a shopping mall. They also complain about development in the city, which is followed by people doing annoying things in the park.

Would have made my day if it were some people re-enacting Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968). Instead, it’s just some street performers waiting around for the ending of Nights of Cabiria (1957).

We then go to the title card with the camera panned left of the tower before we are back in the radio booth with Piero. He’s here to tell us that he has become obsessed by a guitarist that he hopes to get into the studio.

More scenes of outside including a shot to remind us this was probably shot in 2012.

That, and multiplexes are destroying single screen theaters with disposable films like The Hunger Games (2012). We should be returning to get more and more out of films like Shoot The Piano Player. Or simply buy the DVD like I did, and save yourself the trouble of a theater. After convincing his boss that he should go and interview this guitarist, we cut to every conversation an art film like this must include. Luckily they remember to leave dialogue heavy conversations to Éric Rohmer films by ending it short so we can get back to Antonioni.

Also, more of Andrea’s co-worker staring at her.

Now Piero’s girlfriend breaks up with him via a shot through glass into a restaurant. Not sure of why they weren’t filming in the restaurant, but I think this screenshot sums up this whole girlfriend thing.

We get the same scene with Andrea and her boyfriend, but they don’t breakup. Some more things happen, which has Andrea assaulted by jump cuts before she stares at the movie ticket. Then more outside Antonioni shots.

Just assume that if I don’t show it, then you’re getting shots like the ending of L’Eclisee (1962).

L’Eclisse (1962, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

Back in the plot of the film, Piero goes to the bookstore where she works. He’s looking for a book on the sea and Andrea brings him one that happens to be written by Marguerite Duras. That way I can show a screenshot of her film India Song (1975).

India Song (1975, dir. Marguerite Duras)

It juxtaposed cool imagery with sound that was played from a separate soundtrack which didn’t match what was onscreen even when people spoke to each other. I recall it being about trying to create a cultural island while trapped in another countries’ sea. Ties in with this film. They don’t actually acknowledge that they saw each other in the theater, but he makes note of her name before leaving. Then we cut so the movie can do a mini-version of Wavelength (1967) by zooming in on a picture of the sea, but this time with a platform at the center of it.

Wavelength (1967, dir. Michael Snow)

Piero stares at the crack wishing Matt Smith would come and fix it for him before walking past some red neon lights to pose, then goes back to the mysterious cinema.

Back at the bookstore, an annoying customer comes in so that Andrea will also have a reason to return to the theater. First, she kindly lets them shoot some handheld camerawork on her while she walks to get on a bus. Sadly, she goes from one annoyance to another.

That’s right, they are playing that movie.

Breathless (1960, dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

However, he’s not there now probably because he thought they were going to be playing a better French New Wave film like The 400 Blows (1959). That’s why after more DJ and Antonioni, we cut to a tracking shot. You didn’t think you’d get away watching a movie comprised of art film cliches from the 1960s that built on and fought cliches of Old Hollywood to tie in with the film’s ambivalence about the interconnections of the modern world while fighting against the destruction of local culture without one of these, did you?

I’m sure if they had held this shot a little longer than Jean-Pierre Léaud would have walked by Piero. It could have happened! He was waiting around on a bench in What Time Is It There? (2001).

What Time Is It There? (2001, dir. Ming-liang Tsai)

Then Piero goes and stands against a wall.

There isn’t even a clean white Antonioni wall to lean against anymore.

L’Avventura (1960, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

Also, he stands there so that I can embed Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal.

Cut to more buildings, then we see Andrea run into a telephone booth. Not for any real reason other than so Piero can also run in there like in Old Hollywood movies and they can have a moment. They are also there because in movies the rain conveniently stops after the scene has finished. Just like in Bicycle Thieves (1948).

Bicycle Thieves (1948, dir. Vittorio De Sica)

The rain started so we could get this great scene with these guys. Then they turned off the rain machine so Antonio could spot the original international title of the movie and begin to chase him.

He tells her he has a radio program, they acknowledge each other’s existence, and their meeting in the cinema before parting ways. They are both not happy with it. He even takes a video of her walking away from him with his cellphone.

This is as good a time as any to mention that they keep switching languages in this movie to further the mish mash of cultures.

She goes home and we apparently need to see a shot of her head in the shower for a few seconds before she broods on the couch. Then we cut to Orlando Bosch’s Instagram feed…

to tell us that Piero has finally decided to “travel” to see the musician he was obsessed with before meeting Andrea. He sees the musician playing and goes to sit on a fountain. If the ghost of Anita Ekberg isn’t in it, then I don’t care about this part of the film.

Back home, Andrea is smoking, like they both do in this movie, before she notices that Piero is on the radio.

Now Piero runs down the street because he’ll be damned if Andrea is the only one who will do the Jean Seberg run at the end of Breathless in this movie.

Oh, and immediately after posting that picture of Piero, I realized that actor Andrea Bruschi has the same first name as the female character his character falls in love with. Well played, Orlando. Well played. He should go on one of those movie game shows like the one in We All Loved Each Other So Much (1974) where one of the main characters lost because of a technicality over whether the question was asking about the character or the actor. It’s probably an easter egg about their interconnectedness. It fits since the next scene has Andrea staring at a candle before we are transported to the white dimension! Here they have sex before staring at us naked.

I’m sorry, but I took one look at this and instantly thought of Black Love (1971).

Black Love (1971, dir. Herschell Gordon Lewis)

Piero then talks more on the radio and I don’t care. We now go to Andrea walking across the streets before she goes into fast-motion. She does this so that I can include Kylie Minogue’s The Loco-motion.

During this fast-motion she appears to cross the same crosswalk twice. Could just be a similar looking one. I guess she is really out there hoping to run into him. She should have known that he would be standing in front of street art of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.

Luckily he then walks by a building that says “Luka” on the side of it now.

Lucky for me because I never have a good excuse to include a Suzanne Vega song in a review.

Or it’s supposed to be a reference to Luka from ER seeing as the character was from Croatia, ER is one of the most important TV Shows of all time, and Germany and Croatia have a history of relations so important that there’s even a Wikipedia article on it. Nah, I’m going with Suzanne Vega.

Then we cut to him at a record shop before settling on him at a bar. He meets some girl, there’s bad singing while they are drunk, he sleeps with her, and off he goes. I have no idea why that scene exists other than that it looks like they stumble onto the set of Before Sunset (2004) at one point. Doesn’t have anything to do with the movie either as far as I can tell, so onward.

Andrea now goes to abandoned buildings to take photographs…

because there were no colorful looking factories to take pictures of.

Red Desert (1964, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

Meanwhile, David Hemmings is back in the park from earlier taking photographs.

Blow-Up (1966, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

There is something noteworthy here because this film does love to use art film cliches. When she walks through the entrance of the globe I’m quite sure it does a temporal overlap twice so we see her enter it three times from three different angles. Also…

Hemmings clearly beat Andrea to taking pictures here and left his calling card. I love how during that shot you can hear sound that I swear is like music Goblin would compose for one of Argento’s films. I only mention that since Hemmings was in Deep Red (1975).

We then go back to her place. We can see she uses a Sony Vaio computer. She uploads her photos to Facebook. The ghost theater has it’s own Facebook page. Most likely because Kino Intimes is an actual theater in Berlin that has been around since 1909. The scene is there so that she can notice a picture of the theater and remember the chance encounter.

She now turns to her creepy co-worker. She says she knows he hosts a radio show at midnight. She also gets a call from that long forgotten boyfriend of hers. She tells him she’s too busy for him. That’s when it’s time to go club dancing.

Dancing and kissing your co-worker. She goes to the bathroom to try and cool off, but the jump cuts aren’t helping matters. Then suddenly we are back at the bookstore to find out that Angela was so drunk she didn’t know she had kissed Marianne, which as we all know is when to make your move.

She’s says no thanks, but is clearly not happy. The jump cuts make matters worse for her though so after more Antonioni and Piero talking on the radio, she goes and has sex with her boyfriend. Then she immediately breaks up with him. She takes a bath and dunks her head underneath the water. This time we are transported to the black dimension for more of the living art exhibit.

Realizing how stupid the shots were, she pulls her head out of the water and proceeds to start drinking. Once again, the jump cuts only make matters worse for her. Then it’s off to walking for Andrea. She walks through a tilt shift shot before settling on a bench.

The Passenger (1962, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

The Passenger (1975, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

Back at the bookstore, Piero returns. He finally asks her out. They are going to meet on a bridge. It’s difficult to get dressed when jump cuts keep interfering. Anyways, as she is going to the bridge she is attacked by the Clockwork Orange gang because…

Leos Carax already struck a claim on lovers meeting on a bridge many years ago.

The Lovers on the Bridge (1991, dir. Leos Carax)

As a result, they miss their meeting. Think he’s simply going to return to the bookstore under the assumption that something must have come up like a normal person would do? Are you crazy? When someone misses a meeting with you, then it’s time to brood in public and drive out into the middle of nowhere to stare into the distance naked.

Andrea decides to stare into the candle, which in the past transported her to the white dimension. It doesn’t work this time so she runs back to the phone booth to feel it up. After Piero stares at the crack in his ceiling some more, he decides to not go back to the bookstore, but to also go and mope in the phone booth. Honestly, this is where the film should have quit while it was ahead. We could have just chalked him not sticking around, not returning to the bookstore, and her not looking up the radio station to two people who had a sudden connection, but were easily scared back into isolation. They had both returned to the place they shared a meeting, and would have never seen each other again. People do that kind of thing in real life. It’s not unrealistic. Unfortunately, the movie goes on for another 10 minutes.

We cut to Andrea and she tries calling the radio station where he works, but they moved. More jump cuts ultimately make this task impossible for her. She also has the painting of the sea the editing gave us the impression was at his place earlier.

After she has a conversation with her creepy co-worker about love, we cut to what could have been, as they have a meeting on the bridge that never happened. We get some of that sweet 80’s music video black and white like in Simply Red’s If You Don’t Know Me By Now.

Or if you can forgive some of the grain, then the black and white from Debbie Gibson’s Only In My Dreams. Black and white took the place of color in the 80s for dream sequences.

Again, it could stop here too, but it continues. Piero goes on the radio to say more dialog that probably ties in with the story, but I don’t care about. Both Andrea and Piero go to a train station and miss each other there because what would a movie like this be without a train scene with the characters missing each other?

The big problem here is that the longer this missing each other and trying to find each other stuff goes on, you just keep wondering more and more why he doesn’t go back to the bookstore. He even returns to the movie theater, but apparently the bookstore is off limits.

Andrea is now bothered at the bookstore by a little kid and out of focus camera obstructions at the bottom of the frame…

so she returns to the park from earlier. Those street performers finally have their time to shine, which culminates in tossing her a glass globe before running away. She goes home because that’s where the jump cuts live. They help her this time because she gets a call with an address of where Piero resides. Then it’s time for her to do the Seberg run.

Breathless (1960, dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

She arrives at his place and stands in his doorway staring. It cuts to the white dimension to show her naked, then back to him naked looking out his window. Then cut to the beach from the start of the film where he says, “I once dreamed she was coming to me and looked at me.” End of movie.

So, what part was real? Any of it? Was this one of those movies with an unreliable narrator like this one.

Last Year at Marienbad (1961, dir. Alain Resnais)

Maybe he’ll return to the bookstore in a year to try and convince her they had a thing once while playing a symbolic game with her creepy co-worker.

If you feel like Monica Vitti looks here…

L’Avventura (1960, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

then I don’t blame you.

It’s obvious that Orlando Bosch put a lot of thought into making this movie, but he forgot a few things. The first is that it was 2015 when he released this movie. These art film cliches were old by the time The Lovers on the Bridge came out in the 90s after being filtered through MTV. I don’t care if they were metaphors for something else as one user review I read somewhere says. They are endless and really grate on the nerves. You stop caring what they could possibly be there for, and just want them to stop.

He also couldn’t have picked a worse 60’s art film director to focus on than Antonioni. Ingmar Bergman is even quoted on IMDb as not liking him, which of course is somewhat hilarious since he died on the same day as him. Even my first film class book makes special note about the criticism about his work: “All his characters live lives that are boring and empty, meaningless and sterile and that his films are accordingly boring, sterile and abstract.” A view I do not share. Antonioni just seems to be the trend these days so I’m guessing that’s why he went with it. I’ve seen it show up in many films of the past 25 years that cover similar themes to this film. You can even say that The Time Machine (I Found at a Yard Sale) (2011) tried to do the Antonioni thing.

It’s annoying and it has holes in the script when it doesn’t end at the right time. Just let this stuff go. All of these films are readily available if people want to revisit them. There’s no need to compile a best of collection. Leave them in the past, and move on. They are perfectly captured and preserved. I hope Bosch takes the talent he seems to have, and puts it into his own work, with his own style.