Dude Movies: An American Werewolf In London

What's it about?
Dumb-ass American backpackers fail to heed the advice of drunken British farmfolk only to end up as lycanthrope kibble.

Any chicks in the movie?
Not just any, but Dude Movie goddess Jenny "Logan's Run" Agutter, who here performs a rare Dude Movie hat trick: She's great in the movie, she's hot, and she gets really, really naked. Honestly, that's way more than you deserve.

Awesomeness factor?
Seminal. The career of John Landis has a pretty severe drop-off point* but you can't fault the man's early career. The Kentucky Fried Movie, Animal House, The Blues Brothers - his late 70s / early 80s run reads like a primer for Dude Movies 101**. But Landis' peak is inarguably An American Werewolf In London, a movie so painfully wicked that it made a generation of dudes wonder why Griffin Dunne was never a major star. *** The plot has the grim inevitability of a classic EC comic, but this isn't a movie about plot so much as an excuse to enjoy the gleefully psychotic details Landis pencils in, like how Dunne keeps decomposing throughout the movie or the clever use of moon-themed pop songs. But the true star of this monsteriffic movie is Rick Baker, makeup artist of the gods. The on-screen transformation of David Naughton into a werewolf (set to Sam Cooke's "Blue Moon", for maximum juxtaposed weirdness) blew our collective geek minds like a firecracker stuffed into a Cheez Doodle back in 1981. Rightfully infamous, that scene is such high-octane cinematic badassery that it knocks the rest of the movie off-kilter, as if Landis himself couldn't quite believe how awesome it was. Landis isn't the greatest with endings anyway, but it speaks volumes to the aforementioned badasserythat a last act packed with public nudity, reanimated corpses, triple XXX porn parodies and a fucking decapitation seems like a soft denouement.

Mitigated by?
Last act be damned. I present a bold Dude Movie proclaimation: An American Werewolf In London is the best monster movie of the 80s. Suck it, C.H.U.D.!

* Let's call it about halfway through Coming To America when I, along with the rest of the continent of North America, suddenly noticed Eddie Murphy wasn't funny.

** aka Intro To Dude Movies. It's mostly essays with the occasional multiple-choice. Example: "Comedies are funny, sex is funny, and the French are funny, so why is there no such thing as a funny French sex comedy?"

*** Remember the movie Me And Him? The one where Griffin Dunne's penis suddenly starts talking? That's why.

Dude Movies: Avatar

What's it about?
It's about three hours.

Any chicks in the movie?
Some, but they are either big blue furry space elves, half Sigorney Weaver / half space elf, or Michelle Rodriguez. And let's be honest: Michelle Rodriguez is basically a dude.

Awesomeness factor?
Not nearly high enough, which is also probably what you'll be telling yourself at hour two of this turgid, flabby space epic. By now, you're almost certainly familiar with the basics of Avatar even if you haven't seen the movie (space marines go to Planet Fern Gully to strip mine it but are waylaid by plucky natives - with the help of a white dude first, natch) so let's get the good stuff out of the way first:

1) There's a totally bitchin' sequence involving dragons* at about the halfway point where the movie sort of wakes itself up from it's druggy, New Agey, touchy-feely snoozefest and (for about fifteen minutes, anyway) turns into something that's still stupid but at least fun to watch. It was true when I was twelve and it's true now: Dragons are cool.

2) The last half-hour or so where the marines FINALLY stop whining about Pandora and start tearing it a new asshole. I was supposed to be rooting for the space marines, right? I wasn't? Whoops.

So let's be generous and say that's about forty-five minutes of passably awesome stuff, strikingly similar in shape to James Cameron's previous nerd-boner icepack Titanic. That leaves about TWO HOURS AND FIFTEEN MINUTES of some of the most boring goddamn shit I have ever made myself sit through, somehow made worse because all I could think about is the battalion of computer-animation Poindexters that it clearly took to make it. I salute those Poindexters, because on a technical level Avatar is a freakin' marvel and which, if nothing else, finally convinced me that motion capture isn't just the 21st century version of tracing. But at the conceptual level, it's such an incredible waste. Pandora doesn't come across as an alien landscape so much as an animated Yes album cover with some phosphorescent jellyfish thrown in for good measure, and the Na'vi (the dumb-sounding name for the space elf tribe) comes across as Generic Blue Indigenous Race designed using probably the same process the Itchy & Scratchy writers used to create Poochie.** Of course, if there was a story to go along with the space elves I probably wouldn't care, but what little story Avatar has is told by people who assume their audience is made up of total morons, so anything that might have had some inherent appeal is either ignored or simplified to the point of ridiculousness. So, the final effect is that of a really talented cook, taking really expensive ingredients and utilizing a kitchen full of incredibly talented staff, and then throwing that shit into a blender so he can spoon-feed you the purest, blandest pablum he can. Not my idea of a good time.

Mitigated by?
Dude, I heard you can sync up Avatar to Tales Of Topographic Oceans and it totally works!

* OK, they're not REALLY dragons because it's a different planet but, come on. It's got wings. And a tail. And a serpent head. It's a dragon.

** "Hmmmm, ok, we're at about 50% Native American and 50% space elf. Can we lower the space elf to 35% and maybe add 10% Maori with about 5% what I think Aztecs looked like without bothering to check to see if I'm right first?" "Sure thing, Mr. Cameron!"

Dude Movies: Death Wish 3

(A word of introduction: Death Wish 3 is not available for rent at Gen X. I know, right? And they call themselves a video store. Hopefully this will shame Mike into stocking what is clearly the greatest cinematic achievement of all time. - madkevin.)

What's it about?

The nearly geriatric Charles Bronson, fresh from having literally his entire extended family killed in the previous two Death Wish movies, drifts into Brooklyn only to find it overrun with roving gangs of criminals, hooligans, ne'er do wells, goons, gangsters, thugs, hoods, toughs, mobsters, punks, ruffians, troublemakers, villans, outlaws, ravagers, racketeers, barbarians, vandals, scofflaws, desperados, vandals, hustlers, wrongdoers, and Gavan O'Herlihy.*

Any chicks in the movie?

Not just any chick, but Marina Sirtis, aka Deanna Troy from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Thankfully, her character doesn't speak English in Death Wish 3, so you never have to hear her tell Bronson that she "senses danger".** Good news: You get to see her naked! Bad news: She gets raped to death.

Awesomeness factor?

Unquantifiable. Some movies are bad. Some movies are so bad that they start to become entertaining. Then there's Death Wish 3, a movie so indescribably, painfully dreadful it rips through the very fabric of space-time itself to become possibly the most brilliant movie ever made. There's no sense in treating Death Wish 3 like a normal movie made by sane human people, so I'm just going to break it down into bullet points:

1) The score is done by Jimmy Page. Yes, that Jimmy Page. Which you'd think would be cool, right? Unfortunately, this was Jimmy Page during some weird period in the mid-80s when he said to himself "I wonder what these synthesizer thingimabobs are all about?" So it's a score composed mainly of tone-deaf run-throughs of various Roland patch settings which I'm sure sounded really avant-garde to Jimmy but comes across like Tangerine Dream smashing keyboards with their foreheads while kicking a guitar with their feet.

2) Charles Bronson was sixty-four years old when he made Death Wish 3. Now, don't get me wrong: I love Charles Bronson. Once Upon A Time In The West is the best Western ever, period, end declarative statement. We're talking about a dude who was a Magnificent Seven, a Dirty Dozen and a Great Escaper. But Chuck wasn't exactly spry even in his prime, and by 1985 he was looking and moving like, well, a dude in his 60s. This does not phase Death Wish 3 which, after all, was made at the absolute height of of Reaganism. Most of the crop of revenge pictures made in the wake of the success of the original Death Wish were not-so-lightly veiled racist wish fufillment fantasies - wouldn't those inner cities be awesome if we could get rid of all those unsightly minorities? Death Wish 3, on the other hand, embraces minorites... just as long as they're as old as Chuck. Which brings me to point number three:

3) Death Wish 3 is action movie porn for senior citizens. OK, so Chuck shows up in Brooklyn, which in the weirdo universe of the movie is being over-run by a gang seemingly culled from Pat Benatar's gang in the "Love Is A Battlefield" video: lots of young people wearing bandanas, cut-off sleeve denim vests and that super-gay styling Hollywood gives actors when they want to signify "punk" but the actors don't want to get an actual haircut. For some reason, this gang acts like they're eight years old, openly hassling women and non-gang dudes by throwing rocks at them and other acts better suited to Dennis The Menace. The Warriors they ain't, is what I'm saying. Meanwhile, literally every other character in the movie is either a scared-but-proud minority, a senior citizen, or both***. There's an old Jewish couple in the movie that is so old and so Jewish that you keep expecting Zero Mostel to sell them shares in Springtime For Hitler. When Chuck starts cleaning up the town, it isn't revenge so much as open disgust at the young people of today (of 1985), with their hair and their music and their hipitty-hopping and their potty mouths. Chuck'll wash that mouth out, young man. With bullets.

4) And then there's this:

Note that the bald guy with him? The "I owed you one, dood!" guy? He's supposed to be a cop. Eat it, Miranda rights!

Anyway, this is already the longest review I've ever written and I didn't even talk about Martin Balsalm, Alex "Bill From Bill & Ted" Winter, or Bronson's excellent choice in weaponry. Some things you just owe it to yourself to watch.

Mitigating Factor?

Do not, under any circumstances, watch Death Wish 4. You have been warned.

* Of all the myraid of reasons to watch Death Wish 3, Gavan O'Herlihy should be right at the very top. The dude sports a reverse mohawk with Adam Ant facepaint and a big red stripe down the center of his shaved skull, so that he literally resembles a dickhead. As in, he looks like he has a dick for a head. People talk about fearless actors, but you don't see Philip Seymour Hoffman walking around as Penishead.

** I mean, seriously. The Enterprise is surrounded by fucking Romulan warships or whatever and you sense danger? Well no shit, Kreskin. Way to contribute to the team.

*** OK, not quite. There's also the lawyer played by Deborah Raffin (who, by the way, has the best imdb page ever: Jacqueline Susan's Once Is Not Enough! Larry Cohen's God Told Me To! The Goldie Hawn replacement for the TV series of Foul Play! Scanners II: The New Order! What, American Ninja to good for you?) who exists in the movie as the most perfunctory love interest imaginable for Chuckles. Even Death Wish 3 understands that nobody in the entire known universe wants to see Chuck get it on, no matter how comely the lass, so the love scene tastefully blacks out before you see any of Chuck's, um, folds. Not so tastefully, the very next scene shows Raffin in a car saying something like "Aren't you glad you let me in?" when Chuck turns away for a second, giving O'Herlihy an opening to run up to the car, punch her full in the face and put the car in neutral, causing it roll down a hill, smash into another car and EXPLODE.

Dude Movies: The Box

What's it about?
The fantastically creeptastic Frank Langella, looking like a dude from a Magritte painting who's face had an argument with a meat grinder and lost, presents a money-strapped couple with a box and instructions: press the button and get a million dollars, but somebody you've never met will die. Or, you know, don't.

Any chicks in the movie?
The uniformly terrible Cameron Diaz, sporting an accent better suited to a community theatre production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof instead of a Hollywood movie where, presumably, she was paid in legally tendered bank notes. Also, she has a club foot for no apparent reason. If you ever asked yourself "Is Cameron Diaz a talented enough actress to limp convincingly while speaking with the worst Southern accent since the auditions for the first season of True Blood?"*, then this is the movie for you.

Awesomeness Factor?
You'd think there would be an easy answer to that question, given that The Box is based on a short-story by legendary twist-meister Richard Matheson which is only, like, ten pages long.** For the first forty minutes or so, The Box is a retelling of that story (albeit padded with lots more backstory and inexplicably set in the 70s), and to my massive surprise it's pretty good. See, director Richard Kelly is the guy that did Donnie Darko and former Dude Movie pick Southland Tales, and if there's one thing I've learned from the commentary track to Donnie Darko, it's that Richard Kelly is fucking nuts. He's like the crazy bipolar version of M. Night Shamalyan, in that he's clearly a extremely talented visual director who, equally clearly, is genetically incapable of telling a coherent story. But the first forty minutes of The Box really play to his strengths (leaving out the atrocious acting from Diaz): fantastic attention to 1970s detail in the art design, good frame composition and pacing that gives everything a slightly dreamlike air, and everything's laced with a sensual undertone of fear and dread. But here's the problem: at the forty minute mark, the original story is pretty much over - Diaz pushes the button, they get a million smackers, and Langella pointedly tells them he's going to give the box to somebody they've never met*** - and there's still seventy minutes left to go. At which point, The Box takes a hard left from creepy Twilight Zone territory into full-blown hardcore Richard Kelly insane what-the-fuckitude: aliens! government conspiracies! trans-dimensional gates! mad science! creepy zombie people! even creepier religious wingnuttery! nose bleeds! near-death experiences! floating cubes of spirit water! No joke, there was at least three separate points in the last half hour where I was convinced my DVD player was fucking up and it skipped over an entire chapter that would have at least tried to explain what the hell was happening, but no. It's just crazy. And not the kind of crazy like, say, Mulholland Dr. or Lost where it intrigues you enough to puzzle out a secret meaning. No, this is the kind of crazy that makes you want to back away slowly from the television and not make eye contact with the disc. It's like the first half was directed by Kelly on the depressive downswing, and the last half on the manic uptick. But, like Southland Tales before it, you can't deny there's a certain perverse fascination with a movie that is so willing - eager, even - to go full-tilt into Loony Town without any consideration of what a potential audience might think. I'm sure the floating water cubes and aliens travelling through lightning bolts must mean something to Richard Kelly, but the movie itself gives you absolutely no indication as to what it might be. It's a maddening, idiotic, frustrating mess of a movie, but on some weird level I'm really glad it exists. Just don't make me watch it again.

Mitigated by?
One more note to Richard Kelly: having a bunch of characters do that head-down, eyes-glaring-from-under-the-brow thing doesn't make you Stanley fucking Kubrick.

* Answer: No.

** Here's how that story goes: Dude gives couple the box. Couple argue for a couple of pages. Wife and husband debate for a bit, and wife hits the button. Hubby gets plowed by a car on the way home, she collects the life insurance money. But, didn't the dude say somebody she didn't know would die? Turns out: She never really knew her husband! DUN-DUN-DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!!!!!!

*** DUN-DUN-DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!!!!!!

Dude Movies: Creepshow

Dude Movies: The Prophecy

What's it about?
Angels secretly fighting a war to usurp humanity from God's grace wind up in Dustytown, USA* to play whack-a-mole with an evil body-bouncing soul of ultimate blackness. This is accomplished mainly by standing around and looking creepy.

Any chicks in the movie?
The disturbingly doe-eyed Virginia Madsen in a rare non-nude appearance as a local school teacher. She's terrible, of course, like she is in everything she's ever been in, but a sad by-product of her not getting naked is realizing just how weird her face is. She has cheekbones that look like they were lumped together by Matisse after a three-day wormwood bender.

Awesomeness factor?
There are two reasons to watch this movie. One: you, like me, have a soft spot for the supernatural-thriller subgenre that involve wacky Catholicisms like renegade archangels, magically enthralled suicide victims and scenes of delicious childhood traumas. The Prophecy never goes fully off-the-rails a la The Omen III: Final Conflict** or God Told Me To***, instead comfortably slotting itself somewhere between Wings Of Desire (from which it shamelessly rips off the now awesomely-dated long-hair-and-trenchcoat look that was apparently de rigeur for angels in the 90s) and Garth Ennis' Preacher comic. Packed with theologically loopy ideas and a very wise understanding of its own budget limitations, it's good fun, especially as the flashes of mordant wit keep it from taking itself too seriously. But what pushes The Prophecy from slightly-above-average 90s b-movie into a slice of grade-A cheeseball entertainment is reason two: the cast. Eric Stolz as a good angel Simon is one thing, but casting Christopher Walken as the crazed archangel Gabriel, leader of the current angelic rebellion, is a masterstroke of awesome. Walken's clearly having a blast, too, chewing through dialog like "I'm an angel, I kill firstborns while their mamas watch" like he was tearing through a particularly juicy Porterhouse. Which makes it even more incredible that he's upstaged right near the end by Viggo Mortensen's spectacularly creeptastic Lucifer in one of the most scene-stealingest scene-steals in scene-stealing history. Viggo's only got like five minutes of screentime but goddamn if he isn't the best cinematic Devil, well, ever. Take that, Robert De Niro in Angel Heart.

Mitigated by?
The dawning realization that, as hilariously goofball as this movie's take on Christianity is, there are like one hundred million Americans who probably think it's a documentary.

* Main export: grit.

** A movie unafraid to use the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to get out of a sticky plot resolution.

*** Ibid.

Dude Movies: Night Of The Creeps

What’s it about?
Just another one of those teen sex Animal House clones that feature alien parasitic larvae which turn the living and the dead into zombie hosts, one of which is the reanimated corpses of a serial axe murderer from the 50s who mysteriously disappeared 27 years before the beginning of the movie but had been secretly Walt Disneyfied by a shadowy government science project. You know - one of those.

Any chicks in the movie?
80s sexpot Jill Whitlow who, back in 1986, had sort of a WASPy Sarah Silverman thing going on. She does however get nekkid in this, which normally would be enough for a positive review in and of itself but, seriously, it's like for one second. Honestly, go big or go home.

Awesomeness Factor?
Night Of The Creeps is the kind of movie they just don't make anymore*, a knowingly cheeseball semi-serious monster movie, replete with unrealistic blood effects, squishy latex masks and a general air of charmingly amateurish enthusiasm. Creeps is like a trip through the more disreputable backwaters of a Blockbuster Video circa 1986 - aliens**, clones, weird science, serial killers, EC comics, zombies, 50s hardboiled parody and teen sex comedies and a penchant for showing off sorority girls in lingerie that seems closer in spirit to Penthouse than House Of Horror all percolate hotly together to make a veritable cinematic gumbo, suitable for late-nite viewing with your equally-socially-retarded teenage buddies and the artificial stimulant of your choice. Trouble is, spinning the Giant Genre Wheel O' Funsies like that requires either the deft touch of a (then) Joe Dante or a (now) Robert Rodriguez, or the cold calculation of a (then) John Carpenter or a (now) Quentin Tarantino. Creeps' Fred Dekker is, sadly, neither - he never finds a good overall tone, and his direction rarely rises above pedestrian. Not that the cast is much help, although Jill Whitlow is suitably perky and Wally Taylor (who looks like the love child of Kurt Russell and Stacy Keach) tosses out a campily entertaining performance as the suicidal Detective Landis.*** And yet, there's something shaggy and adorable about Night Of The Creeps' pathological desire to be liked, and slathering the cut 'n' paste cop-sex-rom-zom-com in a campy pastel 80s neon glow at the very least regulates Creeps to that decade's list of movies that nostalgically tickle me well beyond its objective worth. So short version: not as good as Tremors, but way fucking better than Ghoulies.

Mitigated by?
From this moment on, I think we should all agree to answer the phone by stiffly yanking it off the receiver and barking "Thrill me" like we're constipated, because that's the kind of attitude that gets results. I'd also like to point out that Night Of The Creeps in inexplicably available in Blu-Ray. I knew that player would pay off eventually.

* Unless your name is James Gunn, in which case you do indeed make it and call it Slither.

** And also Aliens, as Jill Whitlow gets her Ripley with a flamethrower at the climax.

*** Yeah, Landis. One of the more distracting Creeps elements is how all the characters are named after famous movie directors - sort of the directorial equivalent of eating the heart of your enemies to gain their strength.

Top Five Dude Movies Of 2009

Taken

Liam Neeson goes Charles Bronson on a bunch of French dudes dumb enough to kidnap his daughter. Schlock revenge picture elevated to immense watchability by Neeson's hilariously controlled performance and the movie's callous indifference to maiming and torture. Also: best phone conversation of the year.

X-Men Wolverine: Origins

Convoluted and unnecessary origin story that not only ignores comic continuity but also manages to ignore the continuity of the previous X-Men movies. That said, Deadpool! Gambit! Blob! Will.i.am for some reason! Wolverine and Sabertooth fighting Weapon XI on top of Three Mile Island! It's like the reason Saturday afternoons were made.

Crank 2: High Voltage

Really, all five of these entries should be Crank 2: High Voltage. Takes what was already the most gloriously retarded action movie franchise concept in the English language and frees it from the bourgeois bonds of logic and narrative, creating an addled attention-deficit masterpiece of sleaze, boobs, guns, cocks and electrocutions. Makes the avant-garde scene look like a bunch of girls.

Inglourious Basterds

Tarantino's best joke yet, a wildly clever cinematic prank disguised as a Dirty Dozen style actioner, with the best opening twenty minutes of any movie since Once Upon A Time In The West. If you haven't seen it yet, then whatever you think you know about this movie is almost certainly wrong.

Ninja Assassin

Winner of 2009 Truth In Advertising Award, because truly Ninja Assassin is chock full o' ninjas what do themselves up a pile o' assassinatering. Korean pop sensation Rain's performance of a ninja who like to stand around shirtless and expressionless in the rain will no doubt go ignored by the Academy. Finally answers the age-old question: Who would win a tank vs. ninja fight? Answer: the audience.

Dude Movies, Christmas 2009 Edition: Gremlins

What’s it about?

Idiot Americans can't follow three simple instructions and end up infesting Smalltown U.S.A. with murderous Gremlins, which look like a cross between Yoda and Anne Coulter.

Any chicks in the movie?

A sadly non-naked Phoebe Cates, because she wanted to be a serious actress around this time instead of her previous career incarnation as grade-A spank material.*

Awesomeness Factor?

Classic. Gremlins is the timeless tale of what Christmas is really all about: utterly boorish behaviour. The basic story behind Gremlins is as well-known as the movie is: Cute little Mogwais are cute, but they hate direct sunlight, and if you feed 'em after midnight or get them wet** they turn into nasty little Gremlins who will drink you out of house and home, smoke your cigarettes, and at least try to stab your wife. That's pretty much it, movie-wise: Mogwai gets wet, Gremlins pop out, Phoebe and "Whatever Happened To?" Zach Galligan put a stop to it, wise old indiscriminately Asian man tells stupid Americans to smarten up and takes the Mogawi back to Asian Land, the end. The story was written by Chris Columbus, and you can tell because like all Chris Colombus movies there's about 30 minutes worth of plot for a 90 minute movie. Luckily, God saw fit to not have Columbus direct it, instead handing the reins to then-recent Roger Corman grad Joe Dante, who uses the film as a wild excuse to free-associate through his personal childhood obsessions. Dante packs the corners of the screen with throwaway gags and references to Forbidden Planet, The Time Machine, EC Comics, It's A Wonderful Life, and The Twilight Zone***, filtering a 50s geek childhood through a then-current 80s lens. Unlike Columbus' mentor Spielberg, Dante knows that the idyllic veneer of smalltown America is only there to hide the nasty grubbiness beneath, so the Gremlins become a clever subtextual stand-in for the townfolk's outward charade of kindness and decency. Sure, the Gremlins are dicks, and sure they kill a couple of people, but they ain't trying to destroy your livelihood like that old crone at the bank is or putting moves on your sweetheart like that douchebag Judge Reinhold. Honestly, given the choice between a Gremlin and your average smalltown peabrained citizen, I'd stick with the Gremlin because, when push comes to shove, you can always microwave a Gremlin. Can't do that with your alderman.

Mitigated by?

For a real trip through Joe Dante's id, try the sadly overlooked Gremlins 2: The New Batch, the most brilliant piece of franchise suicide this side of Babe 2: Pig In The City.

* Which explains why she decided to do a movie opposite a cast of crazed puppets, because hello! Oscar!

** Which, not coincidentally, is also how I made it through university.

*** Not to mention some great character actors: Harey Carey Jr., Chuck Jones, Dick Miller, Hoyt Axton and Polly Holliday (aka Flo from TV's Alice).

Dude Movies: Star Trek (2009)

What’s it about?
Alternate-universe Star Trek: The College Years crew team up to fight the evil Romulan evil plan of evil to destroy the universe out of spite, pretty much.

Any chicks in the movie?
Zoe Saldaña as Lt. Uhuru, who looks like Nichelle Nichols run through a Beyoncé brand hottifying machine.

Awesomeness Factor?
Warp 10. By all rights, the ancient and wheezing Star Trek franchise should have been hung out to dry a couple of decades ago, were it not for the life support granted by fandom’s most irritating dweebs.* Director and geek saviour J.J. Abrams, who can apparently do no wrong, wisely moves away from the dramatic inertia that’s plagued the series since The Next Generation days and replaces it with what Trek should have been all along: crazy-ass spaceman adventures in space. Abrams and his screenwriters understand that, at it’s core, Trek is really fucking stupid, so whenever the story calls for some patented Star Trek sci-fi twaddle like “I have opened the control valves to the matter-anti-matter nacelles”***, Abrams wisely decides to have the cast speak it as possible in order to get to more of the good stuff, like Kirk and Sulu swordfighting Romulans**** or watching entire planets blow up. They also make the indescribably wise decision to move away from the absolute dominance of the Kirk/Spock/McCoy dynamic to up the badass quotient for the rest of the crew, making it a more organic ensemble piece than the source material ever felt. The movie also looks great, too, positing a bright utopian future where spaceship bridge decks can be mistaken for an Apple Genius Bars and green-skinned chicks from Orion can really party. Given Abrams’ propensity for coating every corner of the screen in lens flare, watching this new, revitalized Star Trek is not unlike the feeling of being a baby and having a kindly uncle shake his keys at you. Sure, it’s juvenile, but you gotta admit those keys are shiny.

Mitigated by?
But speaking of the script: time-travelling through wormholes? Really? Ooooooh, I bet the next movie will have a holodeck mishap.

* Seriously, I’ve been a hardcore geek nerdboy my entire life and even I can’t stand Trekkies. They have this weird sense of both entitlement and superiority, which is ludicrous because Star Trek has the intellectual depth of Teenage Mutant Ninja** Turtles comic. They’re kind of like the nerdverse’s version of Republicans.

** I just wanted to write the word “ninja” again.

*** Original series, season 2, episode 22, “By Any Other Name”. Because even though I hate Star Trek, I also seem to have it memorized.

**** Not sure what the deal was with the Romulans, who aren’t styled as wild rage-o-nauts so much as slightly perturbed Tool fans. Also, note to Hollywood: face tats do not make people look edgy, it makes them look like gay bikers.

Dude Movies: NINJA ASSASSIN

What’s it about?
Korean pop sensation Rain is Raizo*, former member of a super secret ninja clan that is now trying to kill him because he accidentally showed weakness for like a second, except he's also trying to kill them because he's... NINJA ASSASSIN!!!

Any chicks in the movie?
Naomie Harris from 28 Days Later plays a Europol agent who believes ninjas are, like, totally real. No skin, because I guess between all of that shuriken sharpening and training montages ninjas don't have time for the nasty.

Awesomeness Factor?
Deadly high. Director James McTeigue, who previously made a miss-the-point adaptation of V For Vendetta, makes the smart decision to shoot NINJA ASSASSIN** like a horror movie, with the role of the monster replaced by an army of semi-supernatural ninjutsu who don't tend to stealth kill their enemies so much as eviscerate them from the shadows like a Ginsu knife demonstration gone horribly, horribly wrong. We are talking about a philosophically profound level of violence here - if you have a problem with the sight of flesh getting cut, sliced, diced, puréed, whipped, chained, beaten, shot, stabbed, gouged, and then cut some more just in case, then you have made a very poor movie-watching decision. NINJA ASSASSIN is to the cutting of human flesh as the Twilight series is to making 12-year old boys suddenly realize they're gay, by which I mean it happens about once every twelve seconds of the movie's runtime. The structure*** and the plot**** of the movie is laughable, and the acting from Korean pop sensation Rain is negligible.***** But quite frankly, anybody who goes to see this for anything other than watching ninjas fight the shit out of each other must clearly represent an epic marketing fail. Where it counts, NINJA ASSASSIN delivers the kind of ridiculously violent sword-fighting, shuriken-flinging, limb-lopping good time that I haven't seen since the heyday of NINJA III: THE DOMINATION. Just maybe pass on the popcorn for this one.

Mitigated by?
I forgot to mention the presence of Sho Kosugi, aka Bad-Ass Ninja Man Who Was In Every Ninja Movie Ever, as the leader of the evil ninja clan. Remember how he fights Rutger Hauer at the end of Blind Fury? Oh, Blind Fury. Where's your collector's edition DVD?

* Which is Japanese for "Korean pop sensation Rain".

** The title is too awesome to not type in all-caps every time.

*** Which is basically exposition, then ninja attack, then FLASHBACK! repeated ad infinitum.

**** OK, seriously: these ninjas show up and literally slaughter whole buildings full of people, lopping off their limbs and skulls like a knife going through really bloody butter and leaving every available wood surface impaled with throwing stars, and you're telling me Europol CSI can't do shit with that? Ninjas showed up in Vegas and William Peterson would have had those dudes on ice in like half an episode. Also, just a quick pointer for the next secret ninja clan that builds their secret hidden base on the secret side of a secret mountain: might want to block the only fucking road up there so that the ATVs full of soldiers can't just drive up.

***** Lucky for him the movie basically only really asks him to look brooding in the rain, which I gotta admit he's pretty good at. Maybe he can star in the Twilight spin-off about ninjas that twinkle.

Dude Movies: Crank 2: High Voltage

What's it about?
In the best sequel idea since Chow Yun Fat played his own previously unmentioned twin brother in A Better Tomorrow II, Jason "Chev Chelios" Statham wakes up on an operating table (after having survived a fall that would have liquefied any non-Statham) to find his heart being replaced with a big-ass battery.* Hey, we've all been there, right?

Any chicks in the movie?
Amy Smart returns as his girlfriend, and the deeply unpleasant Bai Ling shows up as the World's Most Irritating Prostitute. How Bai Ling gets work in movies is beyond me. She's got a body that looks like somebody stapled her head on top of a rubber novelty chicken.

Awesomeness Factor?
Stratospheric. Crank 2 is like the Platonic ideal of an action movie, profoundly unconcerned with the pedestrian narrative concerns that plague other sadder, lesser movies that don't have the balls to be Crank 2**. It's a movie that is more than willing - eager, you might say - to cut away from a scene to show you a ferret's ball-sack or the massive man-shaft of a thoroughbred racehorse for no real reason. It's a movie that gets real-life Bible-thumpin' moron Corey "I'm Still Alive?" Haim to not only play a mulleted loser pimp but then has Amy Smart beat the ever-living shit out of him for laughs. Technically, it has the elements of what would constitute a normal motion picture, like a plot and characters, but then tosses them away so that Chev Chelios can jack himself with a power grid transformer or shoot up a strip club full of people who had the extreme misfortune of not being Jason Statham. Meanwhile the insane perverts behind the camera throw enough avant-garde film treatments and camera trickery at you to fuel a thousand student film festivals, unable to focus their attention on anything for longer than a few seconds without trying to either blow it up, fuck it, or both. If DVD rental places had any balls at all, they would replace all the Criterion Collection discs with burned copies of Crank 2 instead and, when you opened the case, Statham's fist would jump through time and space and punch you in the face.

Mitigated by?
The only mitigating factor is that maybe Crank 2 didn't make enough money for there to be a Crank 3, but I refuse to live in a universe where there is no Crank 3. My guess for the next one: He's just, like, on fire all the time. TRADEMARKED!

* In this incredible ability to resurrect himself Statham is like Jesus, if Jesus wasn't such a fucking pussy.

** Like, I don't know, Schindler's List. That movie would have been like twenty seconds long if Statham was Liam Neeson.