A serial killer is murdering women — with Kung Fu!

What sounds like a perfect Blaxploitation movie splits the difference and goes with two buddy cops of alternate shades who find themselves infiltrating a gay bar and getting nuthin’ but shade from the regulars.

They should’ve just asked if they wanted hips or lips first.

Ryan O’Neal — Hollywood manslut, Methhead, and Father of The Century — giving what can easily be ranked as one of the worst performances by an actor outside of a porn flick in Tough Guys Don’t Dance.

Chin up, RyRy — you did actually succeed in making Love Story merely awful in comparison to this turn.

A late-’70s Glamorpuss-In-Peril entry (Lauren Hutton was busy, but she’d get her chance two years later in Someone’s Watching Me!), Lipstick somehow manages to be both a harrowing portrayal of acquaintance rape and a delirious slice of Dino De Laurentiis-produced Rape ‘n’ Revenge cheese.

Top Model Margaux Hemingway is Top Model Chris McCormick — gorgeous lipstick spokeswoman covered in seaweed for her latest campaign. A girl in the spotlight. A girl at the top — but cruel fate, like carbs, can destroy it all, and a chance encounter with her little sis’s music teacher (Chris Sarandon, fresh off playing Al Pacino’s lover in Dog Day Afternoon) turns violent. We know he’s evil because he composes cacophonous Tangerine Dream-style experimental ambient synth music and has Charlie Sheen mood swings, but will the jury — even with the help of D.A. Anne Bancroft — believe Chris? Fuck no! — so this wronged woman is done with playing by the rules! If the courts can’t protect her, then it’s time for Lady Clairol to become Lady Vengeance! (read the full article)

I hardly ever go the movies anymore.

It just doesn’t really do it for me like it used to, and I don’t particularly miss it. Maybe it’s the idiots who can’t stay off cell phones for a whole ninety minutes. It could be that home theaters have made the movie viewing experience much more pleasurable in terms of controlling content and ambiance.

Or it might be that I just don’t really get excited by actors anymore.

I’m finding that I can’t really distinguish the latest discovery-of-the-moment from the incarnation who preceded him. Young actors are starting to all look alike to me — I’m not confident that I could pick James McAvoy, Robert Pattinson, Cillian Murphy, or Orlando Bloom out in a line-up even if one of them attacked me on the street — and there’s always some new Brit, Irish, or Australian import (sultry vamp and nekkid-ass werewolf from Being Human, you get a pass) who seems to miss the boat to stardom before I can manage to get acquainted with him. Stateside, the crop of sloe-eyed domestic actors are all like hypertrophic twelve-year-olds, forever “in search of the right girl” and apparently quoting from a callow ’50s pop ballad. Hollywood comes off, like so many formerly great American institutions, as more desultory and phoned-in than ever; just as I haven’t been buying much in the way of new music because everything is Auto-Tuned to death, I find I’m turning to cultier, more obscure movie fare from previous decades and other countries. (read the full article)

If you A) hate Disney, and B) would skim through Reader’s Digest or Cat Fancy before you would even think of touching People, then you can’t be blamed for missing Jake Gyllenhaal‘s self-stroking, content-free interview which officially takes the tiara as the most unintenionally homoerotic “I didn’t get juiced for a part I was ethnically miscast for in the first place!” deflection ever put on record: (read the full article)

“I’m a dancer!”

Such is is the defiant, armored response of Showgirls‘s vituperative Nomi Malone, her all-purpose deflection that she’s something – anything – more than a fifty dollar whore, a skid row stripper, a trailer trash refugee, and a girl born into the gutter.

This is a chick whose life fuel is teeth-gnashing, acrylic nail-brandishing desperation channeled to claw herself out of a hell not of her own making, and if anyone deserves to roundhouse her way up from the pavement to the penthouse, it’s her.

Nomi is your Venus.

Common sentiment is that you can’t really succeed in intending to create a cult film. Bad is just bad, but BAD – as in “Ja-mon! You know!” (to quote Michael Jackson by way of Trash Goddess Elvira) is like a solar eclipse: we may technically understand the phenomenon, but there remains something otherworldly and unknowable about it. Cult movies and figures aren’t born so much as they are adopted like the least pet shop window-presentable member of a litter, which makes Showgirls with its amped-on-all-cylinders heroine the unruly, in-heat kitty bent on biting the hand that feeds it and slinking off to the alleys as the hackle-raising Queen of The Night. (read the full article)

It’s that time again when our focus drifts away from the flotsam and jetsam of Jersey Shore, Ben Shalom Bernanke and Russian douche knobs like Evgeni Plushenko, and lands like a sharp beam of light on more critical, substantial issues. Like the Academy Awards.

Because going to the movies, for me, is held in the same light as a religious ceremony (or tribunal), the Academy Awards is a particularly exciting event. I often resort to benzos the night before the awards, much like a nominee (or Barbara Parkins in Valley of the Dolls), because I can’t sleep due to nerves and ‘voices’ in my head. This year there were some genuinely stellar films and performances. Here are my winners and (sigh) predictions for winners — two notations that rarely mirror each other. Please, dear readers, add your predictions and favorites at the end of this celebration.

Disclaimer: When I take a disinterest in a film it’s for visceral, irrational reasons. The movie Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire is such a film. Wouldn’t see it. Never will see it. The obnoxious structure of the title alone was a huge turnoff. Too, the Oprah touch pushed it instantly into a kind of Hallmark meets Human Horror category, and then there were other reasons having to do with what I call ‘the emotional cow being milked’ syndrome. But I’m getting sidetracked, so here are my winners and predictions: (read the full article)