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grrgoylSome unpleasantness to report. First watch this YouTube video our friend sent us:
Funny stuff. In fact everything done by this guy is pretty freakin' hilarious, with a few minor exceptions. Just search for "original narration by Randall." But the honey badger is our favorite and has inspired quite a few catch phrases in our house.
And a couple of videos of our own (extremely short):
Well, it didn't take long for the trolls to come calling. We got a comment on the first video from "warmaster5128," and I quote verbatim:
He is eating your food thats grose that u eat the food his mouth has been thouching how do u know he hasent eaten shit and he is getting it all over your food u sicko u should eat out of a seprit boul
*Sigh* So many comebacks, so little time.
1) I can't have a conversation with someone who thinks punctuation is optional (to say nothing of proper spelling). Stay in school, sweetheart, you aren't done learning yet.
2) Even if you were right, I'd still rather share a bowl with my ferret than you any day.
3) Ferrets don't eat shit, actually. You know who does? Dogs. As well as lick their junk and sniff each others' asses. Yet people let them lick their faces all the time. Why don't you go preach to 10 million dog owners and get the fuck out of my face?
But I said none of these things, I just deleted him (and turned comment screening on for all my videos). Because I've learned the fastest, easiest way to kill a troll is to not feed it.
EDIT: After 30 seconds of research, it seems "warmaster5128" is a 10-year-old little punk whose YouTube channel consists of his reviews of skateboards and videos of him playing PS3 games. Not funny, entertaining videos with commentary like Toby Turner makes, just recordings of him silently playing "Cod Black Ops." (thought he meant "code" but I guess it's short for "call of duty," because he doesn't want to take precious time away from playing the game to spell it all out.)
I ask you, when you were 10 years old, would you EVER talk to a 40-year-old woman like he did to me? You all have my permission to go harass him mercilessly.
~*~
Some movies, thoughtfully cut for spoilers and for ease of scrolling past on your way to more exciting posts.
Splice, starring my sexy sexy nerdy man Adrien Brody, and a few other people I didn't recognize.
I had high hopes for this, not only because of Adrien but because it's executive produced by Guillermo del Toro, and he makes pretty great movies. That being said, it...wasn't quite what I expected. Not completely a horror movie, but not exactly a Lifetime special, if you know what I mean.
Adrien and his girlfriend? wife? are geneticists who have been experimenting with cross-breeding all kinds of different animal species to come up with...two nondescript blobs, dubbed Fred and Ginger. They are eyeless, limbless, and thoroughly disgusting, but evidently are the key to creating new antibiotics for livestock.
Let me interject here, since there's no really good place anyway, to say that these two, as well as their entire team, are the hippest, rocking rollingest bunch of scientists you'll ever see. In quasi-military surplus clothing and faux-hawks, it makes their facility's acronym N.E.R.D. SO tongue in cheek.
They start to toy with the idea of introducing some human DNA into the equation, to cure cancer, etc. This right around the time their lab is going to be shut down, despite their groundbreaking creation of Fred and Ginger. They sneakily proceed with their plan, promising just to see if they can do it, then destroying the result so they don't go to jail.
We convene to their ultra-stylish home, where they have a long, boring conversation about whether or not to have children, the purpose of which becomes clear very soon. Their talk is interrupted by Adrien's phone, which apparently has an app to alert him when something is amiss back at the lab.
And something is very amiss. Their little illegal specimen has been growing much faster than they expected, and is about to burst out of its water tank. They rush back and save it, sticking it in an incubator. Hang on, what happened to the plan of destroying it? When does that step happen?
They think they'll be spared the decision when it seems to die on its own. Adrien, who let's not forget works in the medical industry in a manner of speaking, determines its status by poking at it with an instrument. Vital signs? Who needs vital signs?
Obviously the thing survives or it wouldn't be much of a movie. It quickly grows to the size of a young girl, in the lab, unnoticed by anyone else on the team. Aren't scientists trained to have observation skills?
She's named Dren (nerd backwards), which unfortunately is the word used for "shit" in the Farscape verse, and actually grows into a surprisingly beautiful, if slightly alien looking, young woman...like...thing. Totally normal except for her backwards bent knees and tail with a deadly stinger at the end.
She's moved to the abandoned barn near her "mother's" deserted childhood home. Because Adrien's wife/girlfriend undoubtedly has assumed a maternal role. Adrien himself is a bit more ambivalent, in fact almost carries out their plan to euthanize her under the guise of trying to save her life.
Dren accidentally walks in on Adrien with "mother," which awakens her own sex drive. Which unfortunately she turns on Adrien (well, she really has precious few other options, and I'm not in any position to point fingers. Boy is HAWT). Unfortunately he succumbs to her advances, proving that guys will screw just about anything. Normally I'd be all about seeing Adrien get it on, there's a full-on shot of his gorgeous naked ass and everything, but I could hardly bear to watch. I mean -- not only is she his daughter...sort of. But she's also part animal! Ewwww! I will read the raunchiest gay slash fic, the bar is pretty low, but THIS crossed a line.
Not that this was the last line crossed. I'll just say there are a few quite surprising developments at the end of this movie, all bombarding you in rapid succession. All leaving me too shellshocked to decide how I really felt about it, other than the belief that Canadians are certainly twisted fucks. I don't blame Guillermo, the creature effects seemed more his influence than the story. And they set up a sequel, so that ought to be a barrel of laughs.
The Haunting of Molly Hartley: This one will be much shorter. Not that it was a bad movie, just not terribly original.
Molly Hartley is about to turn 18, and is haunted (well, it says it right in the title) by visions of her mother, who is in an asylum after stabbing her in the chest a few years earlier.
Molly is one of many 17-year-old girls whose religious nutjob family members are trying to kill them, because of the vague threat of "darkness taking them" when they turn 18 (the prologue of the movie showed us another, less fortunate 17-year-old girl killed by her father). Everywhere Molly turns she's confronted by Jesus freaks who can see what she's about to become.
She takes comfort in her new boyfriend and the school therapist, who seem completely unaware of any bad supernatural mojo brewing. And of course the operative word in that sentence is "seem." Anyone who has watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer will be intimately familiar with the twist of wholesome-appearing, well-meaning folk turning out to be Satan worshippers, which of course they are. They ambush her and encourage her to fulfill her diabolical destiny. Which I could almost forgive if we were given some sort of glimpse of any actual demons at all. But we're not. Just a blah, anticlimactic, thoroughly predictable ending. Meh.
Lost Boys: The Thirst: Ahhh. This is what I wanted to talk about.
This is the third in the franchise. Refer here for a reminder of how disappointed I was in its predecessor, The Tribe. Don't ask me why I rented #3 after #2 lowered expectations so dramatically. I was fully prepared to hate it. But perhaps this is what made #3 kind of a pleasant surprise.
Edgar Frog (Corey Feldman) is back AGAIN (this franchise is his bread and butter, it seems), still fighting vamps, only business ain't so good and he's about to be evicted from his trashy trailer in the middle of the desert somewhere. But in this movie his brother Alan is back (played by the original actor, Jamison Newlander). We see a flashback where Alan gets Turned during a raid, which was kind of cool.
Edgar is hired by a prissy author of a hugely popular bestselling series about sexy vampires -- three guesses who she was based on. She needs Edgar to save her brother, who has been captured by a coven of vamps led by "DJ X," who hosts underground raves where vampire blood is dispensed to the crowd who thinks it's a designer drug, "The Thirst." Which is pretty brilliant, actually. If all you need to Turn is drink the blood (which the previous two movies established), tell kids it's a drug; they'll put any dubious substance into their bodies.
Edgar is lured in by the chance of killing the "head vamp" this time and possibly saving his own brother, except didn't they kill the "head vamp" in the first one? And apparently vamps are still alive and well, so I don't know.
What's funny about this movie is the two recurring things that seem to happen in every scene: The majority of Edgar's lines seem to be growls, which he uses to respond to nearly every attempt to communicate with him. And nearly every scene ends with a shot on something with The Frog Brothers logo on it. Even though Alan lives in seclusion and has no interest in helping Edgar.
Blah, blah, blah. A lot of time is spent gathering weapons and planning their attack on the rave, the location of which is never known until the last possible second beforehand since it's illegal. Edgar is forced to pair up with an ex-reality TV star, who is sort of the Gilderoy Lockhart of this movie: In love with himself and his abilities, while lacking any actual experience to qualify him to do anything. He fortunately is the first to die when they infiltrate the club.
The low budget of this movie is revealed when there's a shot of a queue of excited kids ducking through a chainlink fence, the one closest to the camera wearing very distinctive red-and-black striped stockings. Several scenes later there's the same shot, same stockings, only slightly darker outside. How many times do they have to go through the fence? For god's sake, if you have to reuse scenes, tell your extras not to wear such noticeably unique clothing.
The movies are pretty formulaic. In this one, as in the others, we're led to believe that DJ X is the head vamp, only you'd have to be pretty foolish to think that after watching the first two. Actually the novelist's "brother," the baby-faced little blond being held, is. DJ X was weakening him in order to steal his power. The good news is the novelist is killed in the fracas, good news because, as I said, she's obviously Stephenie Meyer.
And Edgar's brother Alan shows up at the last minute to help, so I guess all those lingering shots on their logo were rather heavyhanded attempts at foreshadowing.
There are some bad things about the movie. Like why do all DJ X's spawn have red vamp eyes but Alan has white? Is this a generational thing? Also DJ X has a big monologue about how he's lived for centuries and mastered fighting techniques the Frogs haven't even heard of. Well it's too bad in all that time he couldn't squeeze in one acting lesson, because he delivers every single line with a grandiose, halting, weighty tone like he's announcing the end of the world.
One tiny quibble. This is the first movie where Foley effects were glaringly obvious -- namely when Edgar's footsteps are loud clops despite him clearly wearing Chuck's All-Stars. A titch distracting.
Oh, and Corey Feldman is sporting this ghastly shoulder-length bowl cut, all split ends and fly-aways, that just looks gross.
There is good though. Edgar is selling a box of comics to try to make rent, only refuses to part with one special one (which begs the question why he put it in the box, but I guess there was no other graceful way to get it in the scene). It's a Batman #14, and I'll admit I missed the significance of it until they helpfully included a flashback to movie #1, when Corey Haim's character first meets the Frogs in their comic store and asks for it, "always on the lookout for the other three." Edgar leaves the book on Sam's grave (the last movie established he had Turned), and Corey Haim's real life death made it a bit more touching than it otherwise would have been. We'll ignore the fact that it most likely will get stolen by the end of the day, because it was still a nice addition to the movie.
Surprisingly, a second sequel that surpassed the first. Enough to make you believe in miracles.
Funny stuff. In fact everything done by this guy is pretty freakin' hilarious, with a few minor exceptions. Just search for "original narration by Randall." But the honey badger is our favorite and has inspired quite a few catch phrases in our house.
And a couple of videos of our own (extremely short):
Well, it didn't take long for the trolls to come calling. We got a comment on the first video from "warmaster5128," and I quote verbatim:
He is eating your food thats grose that u eat the food his mouth has been thouching how do u know he hasent eaten shit and he is getting it all over your food u sicko u should eat out of a seprit boul
*Sigh* So many comebacks, so little time.
1) I can't have a conversation with someone who thinks punctuation is optional (to say nothing of proper spelling). Stay in school, sweetheart, you aren't done learning yet.
2) Even if you were right, I'd still rather share a bowl with my ferret than you any day.
3) Ferrets don't eat shit, actually. You know who does? Dogs. As well as lick their junk and sniff each others' asses. Yet people let them lick their faces all the time. Why don't you go preach to 10 million dog owners and get the fuck out of my face?
But I said none of these things, I just deleted him (and turned comment screening on for all my videos). Because I've learned the fastest, easiest way to kill a troll is to not feed it.
EDIT: After 30 seconds of research, it seems "warmaster5128" is a 10-year-old little punk whose YouTube channel consists of his reviews of skateboards and videos of him playing PS3 games. Not funny, entertaining videos with commentary like Toby Turner makes, just recordings of him silently playing "Cod Black Ops." (thought he meant "code" but I guess it's short for "call of duty," because he doesn't want to take precious time away from playing the game to spell it all out.)
I ask you, when you were 10 years old, would you EVER talk to a 40-year-old woman like he did to me? You all have my permission to go harass him mercilessly.
~*~
Some movies, thoughtfully cut for spoilers and for ease of scrolling past on your way to more exciting posts.
Splice, starring my sexy sexy nerdy man Adrien Brody, and a few other people I didn't recognize.
I had high hopes for this, not only because of Adrien but because it's executive produced by Guillermo del Toro, and he makes pretty great movies. That being said, it...wasn't quite what I expected. Not completely a horror movie, but not exactly a Lifetime special, if you know what I mean.
Adrien and his girlfriend? wife? are geneticists who have been experimenting with cross-breeding all kinds of different animal species to come up with...two nondescript blobs, dubbed Fred and Ginger. They are eyeless, limbless, and thoroughly disgusting, but evidently are the key to creating new antibiotics for livestock.
Let me interject here, since there's no really good place anyway, to say that these two, as well as their entire team, are the hippest, rocking rollingest bunch of scientists you'll ever see. In quasi-military surplus clothing and faux-hawks, it makes their facility's acronym N.E.R.D. SO tongue in cheek.
They start to toy with the idea of introducing some human DNA into the equation, to cure cancer, etc. This right around the time their lab is going to be shut down, despite their groundbreaking creation of Fred and Ginger. They sneakily proceed with their plan, promising just to see if they can do it, then destroying the result so they don't go to jail.
We convene to their ultra-stylish home, where they have a long, boring conversation about whether or not to have children, the purpose of which becomes clear very soon. Their talk is interrupted by Adrien's phone, which apparently has an app to alert him when something is amiss back at the lab.
And something is very amiss. Their little illegal specimen has been growing much faster than they expected, and is about to burst out of its water tank. They rush back and save it, sticking it in an incubator. Hang on, what happened to the plan of destroying it? When does that step happen?
They think they'll be spared the decision when it seems to die on its own. Adrien, who let's not forget works in the medical industry in a manner of speaking, determines its status by poking at it with an instrument. Vital signs? Who needs vital signs?
Obviously the thing survives or it wouldn't be much of a movie. It quickly grows to the size of a young girl, in the lab, unnoticed by anyone else on the team. Aren't scientists trained to have observation skills?
She's named Dren (nerd backwards), which unfortunately is the word used for "shit" in the Farscape verse, and actually grows into a surprisingly beautiful, if slightly alien looking, young woman...like...thing. Totally normal except for her backwards bent knees and tail with a deadly stinger at the end.
She's moved to the abandoned barn near her "mother's" deserted childhood home. Because Adrien's wife/girlfriend undoubtedly has assumed a maternal role. Adrien himself is a bit more ambivalent, in fact almost carries out their plan to euthanize her under the guise of trying to save her life.
Dren accidentally walks in on Adrien with "mother," which awakens her own sex drive. Which unfortunately she turns on Adrien (well, she really has precious few other options, and I'm not in any position to point fingers. Boy is HAWT). Unfortunately he succumbs to her advances, proving that guys will screw just about anything. Normally I'd be all about seeing Adrien get it on, there's a full-on shot of his gorgeous naked ass and everything, but I could hardly bear to watch. I mean -- not only is she his daughter...sort of. But she's also part animal! Ewwww! I will read the raunchiest gay slash fic, the bar is pretty low, but THIS crossed a line.
Not that this was the last line crossed. I'll just say there are a few quite surprising developments at the end of this movie, all bombarding you in rapid succession. All leaving me too shellshocked to decide how I really felt about it, other than the belief that Canadians are certainly twisted fucks. I don't blame Guillermo, the creature effects seemed more his influence than the story. And they set up a sequel, so that ought to be a barrel of laughs.
The Haunting of Molly Hartley: This one will be much shorter. Not that it was a bad movie, just not terribly original.
Molly Hartley is about to turn 18, and is haunted (well, it says it right in the title) by visions of her mother, who is in an asylum after stabbing her in the chest a few years earlier.
Molly is one of many 17-year-old girls whose religious nutjob family members are trying to kill them, because of the vague threat of "darkness taking them" when they turn 18 (the prologue of the movie showed us another, less fortunate 17-year-old girl killed by her father). Everywhere Molly turns she's confronted by Jesus freaks who can see what she's about to become.
She takes comfort in her new boyfriend and the school therapist, who seem completely unaware of any bad supernatural mojo brewing. And of course the operative word in that sentence is "seem." Anyone who has watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer will be intimately familiar with the twist of wholesome-appearing, well-meaning folk turning out to be Satan worshippers, which of course they are. They ambush her and encourage her to fulfill her diabolical destiny. Which I could almost forgive if we were given some sort of glimpse of any actual demons at all. But we're not. Just a blah, anticlimactic, thoroughly predictable ending. Meh.
Lost Boys: The Thirst: Ahhh. This is what I wanted to talk about.
This is the third in the franchise. Refer here for a reminder of how disappointed I was in its predecessor, The Tribe. Don't ask me why I rented #3 after #2 lowered expectations so dramatically. I was fully prepared to hate it. But perhaps this is what made #3 kind of a pleasant surprise.
Edgar Frog (Corey Feldman) is back AGAIN (this franchise is his bread and butter, it seems), still fighting vamps, only business ain't so good and he's about to be evicted from his trashy trailer in the middle of the desert somewhere. But in this movie his brother Alan is back (played by the original actor, Jamison Newlander). We see a flashback where Alan gets Turned during a raid, which was kind of cool.
Edgar is hired by a prissy author of a hugely popular bestselling series about sexy vampires -- three guesses who she was based on. She needs Edgar to save her brother, who has been captured by a coven of vamps led by "DJ X," who hosts underground raves where vampire blood is dispensed to the crowd who thinks it's a designer drug, "The Thirst." Which is pretty brilliant, actually. If all you need to Turn is drink the blood (which the previous two movies established), tell kids it's a drug; they'll put any dubious substance into their bodies.
Edgar is lured in by the chance of killing the "head vamp" this time and possibly saving his own brother, except didn't they kill the "head vamp" in the first one? And apparently vamps are still alive and well, so I don't know.
What's funny about this movie is the two recurring things that seem to happen in every scene: The majority of Edgar's lines seem to be growls, which he uses to respond to nearly every attempt to communicate with him. And nearly every scene ends with a shot on something with The Frog Brothers logo on it. Even though Alan lives in seclusion and has no interest in helping Edgar.
Blah, blah, blah. A lot of time is spent gathering weapons and planning their attack on the rave, the location of which is never known until the last possible second beforehand since it's illegal. Edgar is forced to pair up with an ex-reality TV star, who is sort of the Gilderoy Lockhart of this movie: In love with himself and his abilities, while lacking any actual experience to qualify him to do anything. He fortunately is the first to die when they infiltrate the club.
The low budget of this movie is revealed when there's a shot of a queue of excited kids ducking through a chainlink fence, the one closest to the camera wearing very distinctive red-and-black striped stockings. Several scenes later there's the same shot, same stockings, only slightly darker outside. How many times do they have to go through the fence? For god's sake, if you have to reuse scenes, tell your extras not to wear such noticeably unique clothing.
The movies are pretty formulaic. In this one, as in the others, we're led to believe that DJ X is the head vamp, only you'd have to be pretty foolish to think that after watching the first two. Actually the novelist's "brother," the baby-faced little blond being held, is. DJ X was weakening him in order to steal his power. The good news is the novelist is killed in the fracas, good news because, as I said, she's obviously Stephenie Meyer.
And Edgar's brother Alan shows up at the last minute to help, so I guess all those lingering shots on their logo were rather heavyhanded attempts at foreshadowing.
There are some bad things about the movie. Like why do all DJ X's spawn have red vamp eyes but Alan has white? Is this a generational thing? Also DJ X has a big monologue about how he's lived for centuries and mastered fighting techniques the Frogs haven't even heard of. Well it's too bad in all that time he couldn't squeeze in one acting lesson, because he delivers every single line with a grandiose, halting, weighty tone like he's announcing the end of the world.
One tiny quibble. This is the first movie where Foley effects were glaringly obvious -- namely when Edgar's footsteps are loud clops despite him clearly wearing Chuck's All-Stars. A titch distracting.
Oh, and Corey Feldman is sporting this ghastly shoulder-length bowl cut, all split ends and fly-aways, that just looks gross.
There is good though. Edgar is selling a box of comics to try to make rent, only refuses to part with one special one (which begs the question why he put it in the box, but I guess there was no other graceful way to get it in the scene). It's a Batman #14, and I'll admit I missed the significance of it until they helpfully included a flashback to movie #1, when Corey Haim's character first meets the Frogs in their comic store and asks for it, "always on the lookout for the other three." Edgar leaves the book on Sam's grave (the last movie established he had Turned), and Corey Haim's real life death made it a bit more touching than it otherwise would have been. We'll ignore the fact that it most likely will get stolen by the end of the day, because it was still a nice addition to the movie.
Surprisingly, a second sequel that surpassed the first. Enough to make you believe in miracles.
