The Cup Of Quarters, part I

With everything I've had going on you're going to think I'm kidding, but I'm so serious when I say that for the last two months, the single most important thing in my life has been filling up this cup with quarters. Not watching movies about clown puppets. Not poppin’ and lockin’. Not even hilariously defacing my office's guestbook:



Nope. It’s been filling up this cup with quarters.



I chose this particular cup because there ain’t nothing like that Jacket pride. I chose quarters because every time I say their name it reminds me of football and I really like video games about football. Especially Super Tecmo Bowl. Anyway, filling up this cup has become an obsession, to the point where I’ll buy shit I don’t need just so I could get the change in quarters. I promised myself I wouldn't count it until it was completely full. Well guess what? SUNDAY WAS THE MOMENT OF TRUTH! I can’t really describe what it felt like seeing that cup finally full, but I imagine it probably felt a lot like what it must feel like to see Rebecca Rojmin naked. I even thought about pouring them out on my bed and having sex on them like Woody Harleson and Demi Moore did in Indecent Proposal, but three hours later, after that idea had completely passed, I decided to just count them instead.

When I first began, I predicted the cup would hold about $50 worth of quarters. Oh sweet Jim Caveziel I was wrong. When I hit $50 the cup was still half-full. The grand total—$150.00—almost half the budget of The Feeding.

So what did I do with all this money? Stop by Thursday to see what happened when Homemade Fireworks invaded Carolina Place mall with the unstoppable combination of $150.00 and me. You see that, bitches? My Blog posts have teasers.

*Speaking of Jacket pride, we had a cheer that went "Jack-et pride. Jack…Jacket pride." So during a pep rally my Junior Year, this guy named Jack Draper runs into the middle of the gym out of nowhere and starts looking at his watch and scratching his head. We had no idea what was going on until about fifty guys started yelling, "Jack…you late! Jack….Jack you late!" Get it? So then he starts taking off his letter jacket, and the same guys yell, "Jack-et off! Jack, Jacket off!" I swear to God. I even more swear to God that later that day, all fifty of those kids got called to the principle’s office, one by one. And it wasn’t until the end of this paragraph that I realized for the first time that I spent nine years of my life at schools best known for the sexual innuendos you can make with their mascot's names.

MORE THE FEEDING!!

I was in a made-for-cable movie called "The Feeding." Here's part two of the wildly erotic photo recap.


You'd think that after blowing up the Death Star he'd at least get a planet or two named after him, but all he got was a street in South Carolina. Even Buzz Aldren got an elementary school named after him, and all he did was walk on the moon. He didn't even use the Millenium Falcon to get there.


For the second take, director Jet Eller asks if I can do it again, except try to make my ass look just a little less luscious this time. He always asked the impossible.


The owner of the general store where we shot set up this room like an authentic '50s diner. That pinball machine is older than I am. Here, I show my respect by eating fried chicken on it.


Wow! That's almost as much latex as my friend Chad used to carry around in his wallet.



This guy is not baked. This scene called for him to appear medicated and docile. He is acting.



This is the reason why "The Feeding" is going to be your girlfriend's favorite horror movie.

THE FEEDING!!

I've spent the last 8 weekends of my life filming a made-for-cable movie called The Feeding. I think mankind owes me a pretty big thanks since at least 7 of those weekends were spent with me inserting various guns into various aliens' mouths and pulling the trigger, and yes, it was the coolest thing I've ever done in my life. I can't even tell you how fun this shoot was--to use the cliche it was a dream come true. What's more, I got to play the badass of the group, which basically amounted to me imitating George Clooney from Dusk Till Dawn. The vibe on the set was awesome. The cast and crew were the coolest group I've ever worked with and every day was a blast. Plus, our two effects guys were pretty big time. This movie is going to absolutely rock your face off, but until then, here's the (very) brief pictoral review.


The slate from the first day of filming. I don't know why those bottom few lines are blacked out, but I'm sure the government has their reasons. Perhaps they reference communisim.


One of these guys lives in the backwoods of North Carolina with his hounds and owns a pork rind business. The other is a loose cannon pretty boy who likes bench pressing volkswagens and killing aliens. You decide which is which.


Pictured Above: Alien buffet, me. What you can't make out is all the rusty torture devices that were hanging from the canopy of this general store, making this place look about one woman skin suit away from being a Silence Of The Lambs set.


The effects guy's continuity card. You didn't have to get your masters from the university of the obvious to see that the guy in the lower left gets his shit rocked.


And finally, yeah, that's me covered in dirt and blood, but by this point in the movie my character had broken every horror movie law at least twice, so I kind of deserved it.

Da Ali G. Post

My friend Eric Hill isn’t just Charlotte’s most dangerous man…he’s also a brilliant graphic designer. I hadn’t checked the site in a couple of days, and when I logged on this morning I saw the new logo he put up, which is the bomb. I’m talking Hiroshima.

Since I look exactly like Ali G. in the picture Eric added to my logo, I’ve decided to hire Ali G. himself as a temporary Homemade Fireworks corespondent to review the commercial I filmed on Sunday.

"Allo. It’s da Ali G. Me represent de UK. Big ups Wesside. Today we iz gonna bang about commercials, like the ones they show on the radio. Movies have commercials too but check it, sometimes dey don’t have commercials, like the ones I get from the back room at the video shop. The sign above the room say "adults only" but it don’t really be pacific of the selection, cause some of da films have high school cheerleaders in im and some have animals like sheep and doggies. I don’t like dem particular cause the dogs don’t show respect and wear a connie.

Hear me now check it. Da cinagropher and da protector on dis particular advertisement wiz from Sweden which is a place very far from here, over 100 miles away from Charlotte. Dey wiz behind da camera dis day but I seen em in front of the camera one time else when they took over the plane in dat movie "Die Hard." Carl Weathers BIG UPS!!! [Makes a "W" with his hand].



Bein on da set of commercials iz wickid cause the bitches is da fittest. One even asked da Ali G. if he knew where da talent wiz supposed to sit between takes, and I pointed at me tool. She promptly told da five-oh and dey threw me out even though I told dem over and over dat I wasn’t even supposed to be there.

It took 8 hours to film the commercial which was the longest half-day of my life…or would’ve been if I wasn’t totally mashed. In summary commercials iz aight but as I found out iz a wrecked place to get jiggy with Mr. Biggy. Big ups yasself and keep it real. Booyakasha. Massiv."

Da Ali G. Show comes on HBO. Check it out.

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-Mike

PHANTASM Can Predict The Future

Phantasm is a mystical, mysterious enigma of a movie. I’m not talking about its plot elements or subject matter, I’m talking about the movie itself. It scares you, makes you laugh, grosses you out—it even predicts the future. Of course, a movie this ambitious and clairvoyant can’t be weighed down by things like coherency or continuity, which is why Phantasm, from beginning to end, is a collection of insanity so random that I had to rewind it three different times to see if I accidently missed something. I didn't. Join me as we attempt to unlock the mysteries of Phantasm scene-by-scene in this double-length movie reveiw.

Phantasm opens with Tommy having sex with some chick in a graveyard, which is right up there with the DMV line and while trapped in an oversized garbage compactor as the least romantic places to have sex. The girl, by the way, had the teeth of Tim Curry and the sexuality of a sasquatch, and if that combination doesn’t create some movement down below, it probably won’t help to know that she knifes Tommy in the gut after sex (after he has the most lethargic orgasm in film history, by the way. It's the exact same look I have on my face while I’m grocery shopping, folding my laundry, or doing anything else that doesn’t involve orgasms).

Cut to Tommy’s funeral. Bad-boy-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks-who-only-plays-by-his-own-rules Jody and ice cream man (not kidding) Reggie mourn the loss of their friend and their hairline, respectively, while Jody’s little brother Mike shows his respect for the cemetery where Tommy is buried by riding his motorcycle through it. While he’s doing so, he sees a cloaked, growling midget run through the cemetery. You know how in some horror movies you just see rustling branches or hear a strange noise? Not Phantasm. This kid actually sees these things in all their glory for at least five seconds before they slowly walk behind gravestones. I just assumed that Mike lived in a town that’s populated by both people and cloaked, hooded, snarling midgets, because this doesn’t seem to bother him one bit. After the funeral, though, Mike receives a shock as Phantasm’s franchise villain, THE TALL MAN, single-handedly picks up Tommy’s coffin and flings it in the back of a hearse. In reaction, Mike hilariously mouths "What the fuck." The director must’ve loved this scene as much as I did because he used the exact same scene again ten minutes later and again towards the end.


Oh. Yeah, look, could you like, go hide behind a tombstone or something? I'm trying to ride my bike through this cemetary. Thanks, bro.

Later, Reggie and Jody reminisce about their friend during a groovy guitar jam session. Afterwards, the camera slowly zooms in on the goal-post looking thing Reggie uses to tune his guitar, and gives us an unusually long close-up of it, as if to say, "make sure you see this, because this simple tuning of the guitar is a little more significant that you think and will be of importance in the future*.

*It wasn’t.

Continuing his mourning, Jody retreats to a bar, where the only people in it are conveniently him and some woman. Now I’ll be the first to admit that Jody looks awfully dreamy in those acid-wash jeans, but I had no idea how much of a lady killer this guy was until I saw him in action. From the time he sat down next to this girl to the time they left together it took, and I rewound and counted, less then ten seconds. When they left I noticed that it was the same girl Tommy was shagging in the beginning, but no matter how many times I yelled, "Watch out, Jody!" he didn’t respond, so I guess he didn’t mind. I didn’t either, because it lead to one of the funniest scenes in horror movie history:

Mike is spying on his older brother from the woods and smiles when the girl takes off her shirt. Since he’s standing behind about ten feet of woods and is a hundred yards away, I just assumed he was smiling because he thought of that scene in Blazing Saddles when everyone's farting at that exact same moment. Anyway, he hears a noise behind him, and as Mike hightails it out of there and sprints past his brother, Jody looks up, panties in mouth, and in a close-up shot says, I swear to God,

"What the heck?!"

Now take a few seconds to soak that in. Have you ever said, or known anyone who’s ever said, "what the heck?" Is this really the sentence that would jump out of your mouth if you were in the middle of a cemetery with panties in your mouth and your little brother ran by out of nowhere? I was glad to see that a movie that had already given us two tit shots, half a dozen "fucks," and a future death-by-embalming was language-conscious. This wasn't the first time Phantasm's insanity rocked my mind, and it wouldn't be the last. I barely had time to recover from "what the heck?!" before:

PHANTASM PREDICTED THE FUTURE (PART ONE):
While trying to convince Jody that the midgets from the graveyard are trying to kill him, Jody says, "Are you sure? Maybe it was just that retarded kid Timmy from up the street." Until then I thought I was the god of pop-culture references. However, my delusions of granduer were vanquished as soon as I heard Jody make a South Park reference 20 years before South Park even came out.

By now Mike expects that strange things are afoot at the town’s mortuary, so he’s watching The Tall Man with an eagle eye. One day in town, Mike notices The Tall Man go into convulsions as he passes by the unusually heavy and lingering amount of cold mist coming out of Reggie’s ice cream truck. He seems to be bothered by the cold! After a five-minute close-up of The Tall Man shakin’ and twitchin’ kind of like he was smokin,’ we get a close-up of Mike’s ruffled brow, deep in thought, as if he’s thinking, "This guy seems to have an adverse reaction to cold. Maybe this knowledge will come in useful later if we ever need to stop him.*

* It doesn’t.

So Mike decides to investigate the funeral home, where he doesn’t really see anything out of the ordinary. Oh…except for this:



Pictured above is another cornerstone of the Phantasm lore: the silver sphere. It’s the most laid-back weapon in horror movie history--what’s notable about this thing how much it procrastinates before it actually gets around to killing you: first it uses blades to stick to your head. Then it kind of disrespects you by making you wait as this drill slowly rotates towards your skull. Then, and oh yeah I think this would probably be the worst part, it embalms you. By the way, I have no idea who the guy in the above picture is. He just showed up in the movie literally ten seconds earlier.

Wrapping things up, Jody, Mike, and Reggie invade the mortuary, where:

PHANTASM PREDICTS THE FUTURE, PART 2:
As Tall Man is chasing Mike, he says, "You play a good game boy, but now the game is over!" Earlier in the movie I saw the Tall Man lift a fucking coffin on his own (three times), so it didn’t really surprise me to hear him compliment Mike’s Gameboy skills, even though Gameboy wouldn’t come out for another fifteen years. This entire article was written while I was kneeling, by the way, and chanting praises to my new god. Which goes by the name of Phantasm.

Anyway, check this out: Reggie is knifed in the stomach and killed. I know he’s dead because he’s shown dying. And because he has a knife in his stomach. So Jody and Mike escape and get the idea that the only way to kill The Tall Man is to throw him down an old mine shaft. As Mike lures him in, Jody pushes a boulder on top of the mineshaft from a hill above, and is shown raising his arms in victory as Mike smiles. And this Mike smiled, too, because I thought the insanity was over, until one second later, when:

The movie instantly cuts to Mike crying as him and Reggie (what the fuck?!) mourn Jody’s death (Oh holy what the fuck?!). No, I didn’t leave anything out. We learn that a week or so has passed and Jody died in a car wreck. The movie ends with Reggie and Mike hitting the open road in Reggie’s ice cream truck. And that’s Phantasm.

The punchline to this entire review: you know how DVDs have deleted scenes? I went back and watched them, and all Phantasm’s mysteries were answered in the deleted scenes! All the subplots actually were resolved, the characters who randomly showed up at the end were introduced earlier, there was even an entire alternate ending where the tall man was killed with a fire extinguisher, playing off his distaste for cold. So why in the hell did the editors of Phantasm cut out the most important scenes in the movie? Perhaps it will always be one of those things we just weren’t meant to understand, like how come Whodini suddenly starts calling out football plays in the middle of "The Freaks Come Out At Night." Congratulations Phantasm. You’re a fucking mess. Four Jason Heads.

So that was the Shocktober Spectacular. Hope you liked it. To re-visit my favorite review click here. We’ll be back to normal format on Thursday. Hope to see you then.

Thanks for reading!

The CHILDREN OF THE CORN Are Ugly As Hell

This movie is average. In fact, it’s the most average movie I’ve ever seen. In even more fact, Children of the Corn actually stands out in how average it is.

Children of the Corn is the story of Sarah Conner and her husband, who was played by the guy who started in Side-Out, the greatest beach volleyball movie ever.* I don’t know his name, so we’ll call him Karch. While driving through Nebraska, Sarah Conner and Karch run over a kid, and after worrying about it for just under zero seconds they decide to toss him in the trunk and look for help. The movie wants us to believe this vehicular homicide was an accident, but judging by the way Karch bitchslaps one of the Children of the Corn later in the movie, I’m starting to think it may have been on purpose.

So we see one average murder and thirty average time-lapse photos of the sky and various average suspenseful things which take place over an average score which averagely tries to hide the fact that it was totally obviously 100% ripped off from the Halloween theme. It’s not until Sarah Conner gets captured by the Children of the Corn that we get our first look at the cornfield-worshipping tykes of the same name. It was here that I made an interesting observation:

The Children of the Corn are ugly as shit. All of them. Even the extras. The main bad guy has teeth that could open a Campbell’s Soup can and a face that could probably stop time. Every time I looked at the prophet kid, it was as if his face was kicking my eyeballs in the groin. Even the bit players were hideous. They all could’ve been wearing Gizmo costumes and holding a kitten in each hand, and they’d still be ugly as sin.


Pictured from left to right: Sarah Conner, Yeti.

Through the course of events we learn that all the kids killed all their parents, but it’s never explained why. No not once never. Maybe they cover it in one of the 7 (seriously) sequels. If this movie doesn’t seem too scary up till now, it’s because it wasn’t, but there was one awesome scene: the fight between Karch and the kid pictured above, whose teeth are each about as big as a coffee table. Karch pretty much vacumms the cornfield with this kid’s face while the rest of the kids watch, and to add insult to injury, Karch sits on the kid after he’s down and bitchslaps him. Again. And again. And again. And again. Not one real punch is thrown in the entire fight, just a series of “get back in the kitchen and warm up my dinner” bitchslaps.

After Karch gives the kid the Tina Turner, the rest of the children instantly convert from their corn-worshipping religion and they join forces to battle the monster who lives in the cornfield. The monster, by the way, looked like this:



The kids decide that the only way to stop the monster is to set the cornfield on fire, although numerous shots of the cornfield show us that it’s on fire already. So they burn it down (again), and after the most uninspired and unnecessary afterthought of a surprise ending to ever make me roll my eyes and say, “that was gay," the movie ends with Sarah Conner, her husband, and a couple of the kids riding off into the sunset, leaving, if I’m reading my Body Count Calculator 5000 correctly, 0 people dead. Hey Hollywood: if you’re going to call your movie a horror movie, you better damn well have someone die in it.

There’s two types of bad movies. Bad movies that know they’re bad, and bad movies that don’t know they’re bad. I don’t know why I just told you that, though, because this movie wasn’t either of them. It was just…average. Two Jason heads. And that’s today’s review, which, honestly, was just kind of okay.

As the Shocktober Spectacular comes to a close, stop by tomorrow for Phantasm…the movie review to end all movie reviews. Literally.

* Side-Out supposedly took place on a pro circuit. In one scene, the guy from COTC aces his opponents with an underhand serve. I played beach volleyball for four years in college and I never once aced anyone with an underhand serve. Not even when I played on Wednesday nights at the YMCA, which, according to the sign on the gym door and the unusual number of players with crutches and respirators, was handicapped night.