Anvil and Sprocket Movie Review

I just want to document that we tried to watch Comic Book: The Movie, Mark Hamill’s mockumentary about comic books and fandom. But after about ten minutes we were too bored to continue. And with so many entertainment options, who has ten minutes to spare?

I can has cheezburger?

A good while back I reviewed a little movie called “Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.” I found it tired, derivative, and generally only interesting in regards to how bad it is.

Then something interesting happened. I actually found myself forcing friends to sit through it. And I realized that every time I was making them sit through it, I was sitting through it, too.

About the time I found myself clearing out every copy of it I could find in dollar bins so that I could give copies to my friends, I realized that I had made a mistake on the review.

No, the movie is still bad. Just about everything that I said previously about the quality I still consider to be pretty accurate.

My mistake was in branding the movie a “renter.”

Clearly, this movie is so deliriously bad that it belongs in many, many collections.

And so the court has heard Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla’s appeal and has commuted its sentence to “Keeper.”

Yeah, the 80’s were hard on all of us.

The modern landscape of DVD releases – in addition to true treasures of nostalgia – features a vast wasteland of broken childhood memories. Movies and shows that are nowhere near as good as the viewers’ memories of them still sell by the truckload. For every “Muppet Show” that actually lives up to (or surpasses) the memories, there is a Saturday morning “Dungeons & Dragons” cartoon (or other such show) that proves to be stunningly worse than remembered. Or, at least, worse than I remembered.

See, if we all kneel down, we don’t have to hire midgets.

With this review we welcome Conundrum, another recruit to the Anvil and Sprocket Movie Review ranks. She’s agreed to take on another Misty Mundae film because — let’s face it — Sprocket and I have reviewed far too many of them. Anvil

You know what I like to do for fun? Go to the Ren Faire with a bunch of hot chicks and some not-so-hot guys, then head out to the woods afterwards, have everyone take off their clothes, and mock LOTR while pretending to have sex with each other. Okay, maybe not. But I get the impression that that’s what happened in this particular case.

“I concur, Dr. Hellfire. eBay is sweet.”

One of the emerging short-term results of digital video technology is a punk, DIY aesthetic that populates small indie films – particularly small indie comedies. What was once an expensive proposition involving specialized technology and education has become something that a regular consumer can now pull off with only a few hundred dollars of investment and fifteen minutes to learn the equipment. It also leads to a world where content is rarely an issue. At a time when every National Lampoon wannabe (and even the most recent National Lampoon movies, themselves) contains at least one erupting toilet or uncontrollable diarrhea gag, mainstream comedy still censors its content to remain marketable. When you shot on a budget of under $1000, however, it’s not really that much of an issue.

Um, Guys? I’m fairly certain the smoke from that is toxic.

In the opening moments of Jürgen Vsych’s campaign video for Ralph Nader, the rules for the Kerry/Bush debates are thrown onto a charcoal grill and burnt to a crisp. It’s nice when a movie is willing to admit exactly where it’s coming from. In the thirty-minute video, Ralph Nader is flanked by two dolls representing President Bush and Senator Kerry. Bush and Kerry’s responses to questions are reduced to soundbites, while Ralph Nader is held to no discernable time limit. One could also point out that Bush and Kerry are not given a chance to rebut Nader’s statements – but that’s more a fault of Nader not being on the stage to debate Kerry and Bush than it is a fault of the filmmakers’.

I think we’ve all wound up knee-deep in a fountain before.

How The Rosebud Beach Hotel wound up in my Netflix queue is a bizarre enough story. Let’s face it. It’s not a particularly well-known movie. The IMDB entry contains no trivia, an empty FAQ, and shows no awards or nominations – and none of this is particularly surprising. Rosebud Beach came up in a discussion of 80’s exploitation cinema. It’s part of a subgenre of films in which an unlikely hero is given control of a failing business and learns that hiring scantily-clad women is the key to financial success.

It’s not a genre of exploitation cinema that I’ve ever paid particular attention to, and Rosebud Beach would probably have slipped from my consciousness under normal circumstances – the title erased to preserve long-term memory for more important things. After all, if you’ve seen one of these movies, you’ve really seen them all. But Rosebud Beach had something that the others didn’t. Actually, two somethings.

It starred featured players in popular sitcoms. And it starred Christopher Lee. What, what two things did you think I was talking about?

Death in miniskirts.

I was trying to explain this movie to a friend of mine and he said “oh, Anime.” What a brilliant observation. The plot is classic yuri, just live action and American.

So: the S.A.T. hides a secret test the government uses to identify young women they can groom for superspydom and initiate into the DEBS. The DEBS (the acronym stands for “Discipline, Energy, Beauty, Strength”) go to school at an all-women spy academy, where they undergo rigorous training and take on the odd mission. Our DEBS are Dominique (Devon Aoki, also of Sin City), Max (Meagan Good, You Got Served), Janet (Jill Ritchie, Herbie Fully Loaded), and the “Perfect Score” DEBS prodigy Amy (Sara Foster, almost nothing). Dominique, Max, Janet, and Amy are close to “Endgame” — that’s graduation — and they’ve been given a vital mission: spy on secretive super-criminal Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster, Annapolis) as she meets with former KGB assassin Ninotchka Kaprova. “What does a reclusive criminal mastermind want with a Russian trained killer?”, asks one of the DEBS.

Having re-watched it this last weekend, I’m pretty sure So I Married an Axe Murderer is one of the most underrated romantic comedies of the nineties. What I really want to say here is SIMAM is the underrated romantic comedy, which would imply that it is impossible under normal circumstances to underrate a romantic comedy, a film genre I loathe. But that would be hyperbole, and we’re all about the reasoned discourse here at Anvil and Sprocket.

It’s light fare to be sure (romantic comedy) and the plot falls apart if you look at it a sideways (romantic comedy), but Mike Meyers’ Stuart MacKenzie, the aging scottish LaRouchie, is funny enough to make you shoot haggis out your nose. SIMAM eschews the meet-cute for an unusual first date, as Charlie (also Meyers) helps Harriet (Nancy Travis)out in her busy butcher shop. Under director Thomas Schlamme, the movie flirts briefly with cloying, but cloying never even makes to to first base.

Unlike most romantic comedies, So I Married an Axe Murderer at no point glorifies stalking.

There are lots of great skit-like moments in the film as well. Phil Hartman is a barely stable Alcatraz tour guide (“My name is John Johnson but everyone here calls me Vicki”) and Alan Arkin is a sensitive, soft-spoken police chief. Steven Wright and Michael Richards have less memorable cameos, but Tony- and Emmy-winning Ammanda Plummer is excellent as Harriet’s slightly creepy sister Rose.

Considering it’s available new in the bargain rack at many places for under $10, it’s hard not to call this one a keeper.