Quiz time! Fireworks or Justified?

Once again Independence Day is upon us, which means that it’s time for our annual fireworks quiz. This year’s challenge: fireworks or episode of Justified?

For those unfamiliar with the latter, Justified is a crime drama on FX. The 8sails staff got started watching it mostly because of the star, Timothy Olyphant. Who of course pretty much guaranteed that the show is known informally around the office as Not Deadwood.

The series follows the exploits of federal marshal Raylan Givens, a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-if-he-feels-like-it lawman who brings his particular brand of justice to Harlan County, Kentucky (locale of a famous documentary about the hard lives of coal miners). This testosterone festival is based on a short story by Elmore Leonard, who is also one of the show’s executive producers.

So it should surprise precisely nobody that the names of the episodes are typically bite-sized chunks of machismo that would be right at home on T-shirts from Labor Day in Sturgis. Or a Bob Seger greatest hits collection. Or fireworks.

Good luck!


1. Fire in the Hole

2. Missouri Kicker

3. Bad to the Bone

4. The Lord of War and Thunder

5. Shock and Awe

6. The Hammer

7. Cottonmouth

8. Total Blowout

9. Midnight Rider

10. Blaze of Glory

11. All Jacked Up

12. The Gunfighter

Review – Prometheus

I’ve gotta confess to a fair amount of disappointment with this movie. Clearly the original Alien thread had dead-ended. Hiring back the original director, throwing a ton of money into the effects budget and assembling a decent cast were all serious steps in the right direction. But then the writing kills it all. This must have gone through so many revisions that they lost all track of where they were going or what they were doing. The characters are cardboard cut-outs operating from motives that are at best obscure and at worst completely nonexistent. The plot also has serious gaps, as if scenes were cut or rewritten with no sense of the overall story in mind. Either the inevitable director’s cut disc version will be five hours long, or they deliberately made a storytelling mess and hoped the flashy visuals would carry it. Even a straight bootmake (a combination of “remake” and “reboot” that absolves us of worrying about the proper term to use) would have been better than this. Mildly amusing

Review – The Legend of Awesomest Maximus

Awhile back, a lost child showed up out of nowhere. It turned out he was 12 years old and had miraculously time traveled from 1980. Out of sync with the 21st century, he had no idea that being gay no longer makes people the object of ridicule and images of women with their shirts off are easily available on the internet. In order to help him feel less disoriented, National Lampoon designed this movie with the kid’s sense of humor specifically in mind. It also helped the poor child get caught up on key plot points from 300, Troy and Gladiator, the pictures parodied in this stinker. The next time I’m overcome by the mood for a witless comedy, I hope it’s at least a trifle less witless than this. Wish I’d skipped it

Review - The Fields

How long has it been since I actually liked a low budget horror movie? But then, how long has it been since I saw one that employed any amount of subtlety? Further, this picture seems custom designed to appeal to those of us who were kids back in the early 70s when the nation went paranoid nuts over the Manson murders. In this tale, a boy is sent to live on his grandparents’ farm while his parents take some time to “work it out.” Though cautioned to stay out of the corn field, he goes exploring. Soon thereafter a sinister, invisible presence begins to threaten the family. The picture combines childhood anxiety, nightmares and actual threat with still unmatched by most expensive productions. The picture also features Chloris Leachman and Tara Reid, both of whom do good jobs despite not exactly sporting résumés with “subtle” written all over them. Worth seeing

Review – Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

Yeah, it kinda figures that the guys who made Jonah Hex would do this to the Ghost Rider franchise. They bet the flaming skull farm on the power of the effects, which fail more often than they succeed. The occasional clever concepts get buried under an avalanche of bad acting, crappy music and fidgety editing. And not for the first time this summer, I found myself wondering why the makers of superhero movies don’t seem to know what the word “vengeance” means. Still, if the title had been the worst problem ... See if desperate

Review – Children of the Corn: Genesis

A film studies program could make an entire course out of the various entries in this series. At one point or another the children have taken just about every possible approach to mid-budget horror, from slasher to monster, all different levels of acting, writing and production values. This sequel falls somewhere in the middle ground. The technical quality is okay, but the script relies too heavily on the bickering that passes for dialogue. As in the first entry, a married couple gets stranded in the middle of nowhere, though the peril takes a slightly different form this time around. Mildly amusing

Review – The Dread

The Snooze. An over-zealous woman discovers that she has a sibling in an insane asylum, a brother she doesn’t remember because they were separated after their parents were slaughtered by an evil skeleton guy. So when one of the misguided therapists at the creepy nuthouse gives him a crappy video game to play, it summons our bony foe to resume his bloodthirsty ways. See if desperate

Review – Prisoners of the Sun

Judging by the size of his head on the poster, you’d think Russell Crowe was the star of the movie. But this was early in his career, and he’s actually barely in it. Most of the screen time goes to Bryan Brown, who plays the lead prosecutor in the war crimes trial of Japanese soldiers accused of torturing and murdering Australian POWs. The story picks up a little in the middle with some flashback sequences, but most of the rest of the picture is uninspiring courtroom intrigue. Mildly amusing

Review – Blue Sunshine

What’s the worst side effect of bad acid: that it comes back to haunt you ten years after you take it, that it turns you into a homicidal maniac, or that it makes your hair fall out? From this movie’s 1978 standpoint, I’m guessing it’s the hair. In the lead role, Zalman King’s acting is as stiff and ridiculous as the pay channel erotica that later made him famous. Overall this is a vaguely entertaining relic from an era when LSD and disco seemed like they would be important to society. See if desperate

Review – The Woman in Black

One of the ways America and England differ is in the quality of our movie rustics. American rubes tend to take after city folk directly with chain saws. On the other side of the Atlantic, a more subtle sense of hostile shunning seems to be the mistreatment of choice. At least in this case the cold shoulder is somewhat justified, as the presence of outsiders in the local haunted mansion re-awakens a vengeful, child-killing spirit. Hammer re-emerges from the netherworld and Daniel Radcliffe makes a bid to start playing adult roles in this dreary, atmospheric ghost story. Mildly amusing

Review – The Slaughter

I actually kinda wanted to like this movie. Sure, the story was standard college-students-in-a-creepy-old-house-accidentally-evoke-evil-forces stuff. But thanks to the special effects, the production came across as more of an homage to Evil Dead than just another rip-off. I honestly can’t say when I last saw stop motion work in a low-budget production, so that was a welcome element. Less so the script, which was packed with that awful species of smart-assery so strongly favored by talentless film students who think they’re being funny. With better writing, this could have earned a higher rating. Mildly amusing

Review – Slaughterhouse-Five

I’ve never read this particular novel, but in my younger years I read enough of Kurt Vonnegut’s other work to appreciate how difficult it must be to bring his writing to the screen. The result here is a Ray-Bradbury-on-bad-acid experience, sentimental and strange in equal measures. Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) comes unstuck in time, hopping back and forth between his experiences in World War Two (including a POW camp and the Dresden bombing), postwar family life and an alien zoo enclosure on the planet Tralfamadore. At least here they’ve got an excuse for randomly ping-ponging around the time stream. Mildly amusing

Review – Jack’s Back

The lighting. The clothes. The bouncy, synth-heavy soundtrack. James Spader. Must have been the 80s. Exactly 100 years later, someone is re-creating Jack the Ripper’s handiwork. When a young doctor (Spader) runs afoul of the killer, his twin brother (also Spader) follows dream leads to solve the crimes. Mildly amusing

Review – Daybreakers

I’ve griped in the past about vampires and rule obsession, but this picture really goes overboard with it. Vampires have taken over the world, and they’ve consumed almost all the humans. Bereft of fresh blood, the masses are beginning to degenerate to monster form. Vampire scientists race to find a blood substitute and/or a cure for the whole vampire thing, and small pockets of human resistance try to survive. They spent a fair amount of money on the production, which made it a little better than it might otherwise have been. Mildly amusing

Review – A Haunting in Salem

Once again a low-budget production serves up mediocre thrills. A family moves into a house in Salem, Mass., and guess what, it’s haunted by the angry ghosts of dead witches. But you pretty much could have guessed that from the four-word title. The 90-minute movie doesn’t add much beyond that. See if desperate

Review – The Caller

Mary has two problems. First, her psycho ex-husband is stalking her. And worse, a crazy dead person keeps calling her from 1979. The whole getting-into-a-phone-fight-with-someone-from-1979-who-can-seriously-mess-with-your-past thing is clever in a Twilight Zone kinda way. I also liked the twist at the end and the fact that the protagonist’s dog makes it the whole way through without incident. However, in a world where movies could be whatever length they needed to be rather than shooting for the hour and a half minimum, some of the developments along the way could probably have been omitted. Mildly amusing

Review – Haywire

Every once in awhile something floats to the top of my Netflix queue that I have no memory of adding. Sometimes I can’t even figure out why I might have added it to begin with. Perhaps with this one it was a desire to see something like Hitman or the Bourne series only with a female protagonist. The director does a reasonably good job with hand-to-hand combat sequences, which is a good thing because there are a lot of them. The plot, on the other hand, is weak, standard fare. They should have cut back the budget for Hollywood B-list stars in the supporting cast and spent a little more on the screenwriter. Mildly amusing

Review – The Theatre Bizarre

Here’s a moviemaking lesson: if you’re assembling six short horror movies and a bracket into an anthology piece, the segments need to follow a particular order. You should lead off with your second best piece, mix in the weaker segments, then end with the best you have to offer. This assembly leads off with its best effort – a Lovecraft pastiche with some nasty sexual overtones – and goes steadily downhill from there. Before the credits roll, we’ve been treated to some serious castration anxiety from Tom Savini, the most awful grief counseling movie ever made (complete with graphic animal death) and three other less memorable bits. Though I’d like to support the producers of independent short horror movies, I’d also like for them to be better than this. See if desperate

Review – The Devil Inside

I admit I got suckered in by “The movie the Vatican doesn’t want you to see” ad line. Of course any student of film history knows there are a lot of movies the Vatican doesn’t want people to see. But in this case, perhaps the Holy See was just trying to save us from another piece of camcorder crap about exorcisms. The first dozen times someone tried this, it might have been bush leagues clever. But we’re well beyond that now. Honestly, this one doesn’t even have any good booga-booga moments (it has a few boogas, but they aren’t good). A video crew shoots footage in the Vatican’s school for exorcists, latches onto a couple of students who freelance on the side, and things go downhill (yes, downhill) from there. See if desperate

Review – Rambo: First Blood Part 2

This picture is hard to watch outside its Reagan 80s context. At the time it was something of a cultural phenomenon. Sullen super-soldier Rambo muddles around Southeast Asia looking for POWs the evil government doesn’t actually want him to find while Col. Tweety Bird hops back and forth spouting homilies and threats. So naturally it fit perfectly with the jingoistic conservative paranoia of 1985. Now big chunks of it just look silly, especially given the radical departure this makes from the first movie in the set. It doesn’t even hold up that well when compared to other Vietnam POW rescue movies. And when a production seems cartoonish when compared to the work of Chuck Norris and Patrick Swayze ... See if desperate

Review – Stormhouse

The premise has promise: the military has captured some sort of supernatural being and imprisoned it in a complicated electrical device deep underground. And of course it gets out and goes to work on its captors. Though the story is strong enough, this suffers from an overdose of indie production values. Mildly amusing

Review – After Midnight

This started out looking like a slasher movie about a professor teaching a class about the psychology of fear. But then it turned out to be an anthology piece. Sadly, it was an anthology of exceptionally lame stories. Of course even a brilliant script and excellent acting wouldn’t have been a match for the sheer weight of such a huge pile of clichés. In particular, the whole just-kidding-it-was-only-a-practical-joke thing is a risk if you try it once, and after you’ve repeated the mistake you’ve ruined any chance you have at getting the audience to trust your storytelling. See if desperate

Review – XIII: The Conspiracy

Though this is based on a French-Belgian comic book from the mid 1980s, it nonetheless comes across as a half-baked blend of 24 and the Bourne series. In particular, Stephen Dorff is to Kiefer Sutherland as RC is to Coke. Sadly, with just two hours to work with, the plot tries to run so fast that it trips over its own feet. The maze of false identities and dueling conspiracies never gets the chance to unravel itself adequately. As a result, it’s hard to care who the protagonist really is or why anyone does what he or she is doing. On the plus side, at least it wasn’t as broom-intensive as the video game. Mildly amusing

Review – Episode 50

Ghost hunters from high-band cable tackle a haunted asylum. The trick here is that it’s two shows rather than one. The first is a band of skeptics dedicated to debunking ghostly presences, and the second is a pack of true believers led by a religious fanatic. Do I even have to tell you that most of the plot revolves around disputes between the opposing “ideologies”? Oddly, the production had a couple of strong points. It was set in a modern-looking hospital rather than the wrecked-out Danvers Asylum or reasonable facsimile thereof. And it packed a few genuinely spooky ghosts. But by the end the foolish storyline drove it into more familiar, bad territory. See if desperate

Review – Playback

This movie actually took me by surprise. Judging by the description, I was expecting another “idiot with a camcorder” production. It turned out to have a bigger budget, better production values and even a star or two (assuming Christian Slater counts as a star at this point in his career). The story, on the other hand, is pure leftovers. A murderer returns from the grave and resumes his strange MO of using a camcorder to suck out souls (mostly from teenagers). Mildly amusing

Review - Fear Island

A group of people trapped on an isolated island start dying one by one. Who’s killing them, and why? This worked well for Agatha Christie (title notwithstanding). But wow does it not work here. The sole survivor of the island massacre struggles to regain her memory, telling the tale of slaughter in drawn-out chunks. Personally, my chief suspect for most of the movie was the lost chihuahua. See if desperate

Review – The Confession

This is actually a series of short segments originally produced for the Web but edited together into movie form. A confessional priest (John Hurt) finds himself confronted by a hit man (Kiefer Sutherland) who wants to argue theology. The result is a lot of bickering back and forth, punctuated occasionally by violent flashbacks. Though I could see how this might work as a series of shorts, as a single viewing experience it gets a little tedious. Mildly amusing

Bad movies on my mind

Pauline Kael has been on my mind lately. She came up recently in a conversation with one of my former students. More than that, a trio of strangely related movies I watched last week reminded me that Kael used to write reviews exploring thematic connections between three or four pictures. So out of respect for her excellent work, here’s my poor attempt to follow in her footsteps.

Statistically speaking, the 1899 Cleveland Spiders were the worst team in Major League Baseball history. In the last season of the 19th century, they got off to an 8 - 30 start, lost 40 of their last 41 games and finished the season at 20 - 134. Thanks to changes in the rules, some of the Spiders’ records – such as their 101 road losses – can never be broken. Thus they will forever stand as a shadowy counter-argument against any fan who thinks her team is doing particularly poorly. No matter how bad the Kansas City Royals are, no matter how many times they finish in the cellar of the American League, they’ll never have the honor of being the worst ever.

The word “honor” in that last sentence is only partially ironic. There’s a certain distinction in being the worst ever, in setting the standard for terribleness against which all other awful efforts will be measured. Because if you can’t excel at excellence, at least maybe you can excel at sucking.

The creators of Best Worst Movie recognize the value of being awful; even the documentary’s title sets up the apparent contradiction. When he was 12, director Michael Stephenson appeared in Troll 2, one of those terrible little indie horror pictures that were somewhat common back in 1990 and now clog the “horror” catalogs of outlets from Netflix to whatever remains of local video rental stores. As noted in the review, this is a bad movie. However, its degree of badness isn’t distinct from the legion of other poorly acted, poorly scripted, poorly directed horror movies before or since.

But movies aren’t baseball teams. They don’t have offensive and defensive numbers that admit mathematical evidence into disputes. Even stats such as Rotten Tomatoes ratings quantify subjective opinion and thus don’t measure by objective standards. Enter the connoisseurs, the folks who always know where the best coffee beans come from, which trendy shops stock them for “special customers” and which baristas know just the right proportions for perfect lattés. In movie world, these cineastes know not only the best films by the greatest directors but also what dwells at the opposite end of the scale. They may have seen every movie Werner Herzog ever made. They may have walls bedecked with Jim Jarmusch posters. But they savor low budget horror junk food like Dublin Dr Pepper and Mexican Coke.

A cult of such people developed around Troll 2, clogging art house revival screenings and hosting Troll 2 parties. The documentary makes the whole phenomenon look like a response-line-free version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And at the center of this ersatz adulation is Stephenson’s former co-star, actor-slash-small-town-dentist George Hardy. This guy seems never to have developed beyond a credulous inability to tell when he’s the butt of a joke, a problem compounded by his fans’ inability to figure out whether they love something because it’s genuinely lovable or only because their hipster self-image depends on their ability to savor garbage.

This would seem like the same condescending bad taste that turns the kid with cerebral palsy into the high school football team’s “mascot” except for one part of the picture: Claudio Fragasso, Troll 2’s director. Despite all evidence to the contrary, this guy seems to genuinely believe that he made a good movie. He regards himself as an artist. He regards Troll 2 as a work of art, not in an ironic, poseur way but as something that’s genuinely worth watching.

This takes us to the heart of what we mean by “bad art.” It also takes us across the Atlantic and around 50 years backward in time. In 1940 German director Viet Harlan created one of the most notorious propaganda movies ever made: Jüd Süss. I’ve never seen this vicious piece of anti-Semitic filth, nor do I intend to. But I did recently watch Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss, a documentary about the director. Or to be more precise, it was a documentary about the director’s family (in much the same way that Best Worst Movie was about the cult response rather than the picture itself).

Harlan’s case raises serious questions about the responsibility artists bear for their art. It also forces us to think a little harder about what we mean by “bad movie.” Troll 2 and Jüd Süss are both bad movies. But while the Troll picture was a matter of simple incompetence, Nazi propaganda is infected with a moral rottenness that isn’t likely to amass a cult of ironic fans.

This says nothing good about us as connoisseurs of bad movies. In Fragasso’s case, it shows that we’re not too good to pick on someone for being weak, behavior we should probably have grown out of back in elementary school. Nazis are far more worthy of our scorn. Yet six decades later, we still find ourselves whistling past Harlan’s graveyard.

Review – The Avengers

This was marginally better than I thought it would be. The writers did a reasonably good job of meshing the various franchises and franchises-to-be into a single, cohesive story. In particular, Robert Downey Jr. is easier to take when he isn’t the sole protagonist. Of course the special effects go a long way toward smoothing over weak points in the plot (such as the remarkable ineffectiveness of bad guys who should logically have been a great deal more powerful than they turn out to be). Overall this should prove satisfying to anyone looking for an entertaining superhero movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Terminator: Salvation

The Terminator thing hit its high point with number two (Edward Furlong notwithstanding), and it’s been all downhill ever since. This entry escapes SyFy-worthiness solely by “virtue” of the cash lavished on the cast and special effects. Grown to adulthood, John Connor (Christian Bale) seeks Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) so he can save his past/future father from termination. Sam Worthington comes along for the ride as a tough stranger with a secret (given away early in the picture by a tip fans may recall from the beginning of the second one). Though some of the action sequences are above par, the story isn’t interesting enough to effectively glue the fighting and explosions together. Mildly amusing

Review – Moon Over Parador

Yeesh. Richard Dreyfus plays an actor roped into substituting for a dead dictator. How many times has this been done, and how many of the other versions are way better than this sitcommy crap? When I was a kid, I thought the characters Dreyfus usually plays were the awesomest. In retrospect, that might have had some connection to why nobody in high school liked me. See if desperate

Review – The Key

The only reason I watched this all the way through is that I got it on DVD from Netflix and I hate sending stuff back unwatched. And the only reason I added it to my queue to begin with was that it was made in my home state. Add this to the “Things Kansans Have to Be Ashamed Of” list next to Fred Phelps and Creationists on the state school board. Yet again a squad of witless young people spend more time bickering among themselves about petty crap than they do fighting the forces of darkness. Wish I’d skipped it