Many of you reading this blog will be attending LoneStarCon 3, the San Antonio Worldcon this year.
Many of you reading this blog have also watched the SyFy Channel’s film Chupacabra Vs. The Alamo.
I know it may come as a shock to some, given the painstaking technical accuracy evident in other SyFy films like Mansquito and Arachaquake, but Chupacabra Vs. The Alamo does, in fact, take certain liberties. As such, to avoid disappointment among those visiting San Antonio for the first time, and given that it’s Cinco de Mayo, which plays an important role in the film, I want to offer up some clarifications on errors made in the film.
The Mexican border is southwest of San Antonio, not southeast. Southeast is the Gulf of Mexico.
There are no green mountains near San Antonio. Unlike, say, Vancouver.
Many people in Texas ride motorcycles, but they do so on roads, not against badly-composited bluescreens.
DEA Agents in Texas do not typically ride motorcycles with unsecured shotguns.
DEA Agents generally drive to crime scenes in cars, not motorcycles.
Especially not riding on the back of another DEA agent’s motorcycle.
People do not typically need to wear jackets in San Antonio in May. Unlike, say, Vancouver. (Though this year may be an exception…)
Animals the size of a Scottish Terrier are not typically capable of dragging away 200 pound police offers in full SWAT gear.
As the seventh largest city in the United States, San Antonio has a large, modern police force. They would not need a random assortment of DEA agents and rogue gang members to take out a few hundred wild dogs.
While many San Antonians are bilingual in both English and Spanish, seldom do they pepper their English with the very most common Spanish words, as though to say “Look, ese, I speak Spanish!”
Police interrogation rooms do not generally look like small business conference rooms.
Most Hispanic gang members in San Antonio don’t look vaguely Asian, and don’t speak with a slight Brooklyn accent.
It is very doubtful that repeating long rifles can be found in display cases at the Alamo, as the Spencer Repeating Rifle was not invented until 1860.
Even if they were in said display cases, it is very unlikely that they would be stored with live ammunition, ready to be used by anyone who broke open the case.
Even if the gunpowder hadn’t gone bad after almost two centuries.
There is no basement in the Alamo. (A point that I think has already been definitively established.)
There is no secret escape tunnel underneath the Alamo. If there was, I’m pretty sure 177 years of urban infrastructure development would have found it.
Especially if it was wide enough for 10 people to walk abreast.
Especially if it lead to a giant metal hatch in a parking lot near the Alamo. (Or, more specifically, a stage in front of a bad bluescreen projection of a parking lot near the Alamo.)
Chupacabras or not, DEA agent or not, if you blow up the Alamo, expect to spend a lot of time in jail.
As the 7th largest city in the U.S., San Antonio also has a large, modern Fire Department, so if you did blow up the Alamo, it would not still be giving off a plume of digital smoke well into the next day.
I hope this has cleared up any confusion anyone might have about San Antonio or the Alamo. Happy con-going!
So sayeth Roger Ebert about the latest movie from Peter Farrelly. When Ebert says a movie is worse than Freddy Got Fingered, you know that all lower bounds of the barrel have been breached.
More nuggets:
Farrelly was going for a 21st century version of “The Groove Tube” and “Kentucky Fried Movie,” two very funny, very raunchy and very influential sketch-comedy flicks of the mid-1970s.
The only thing “Movie 43″ has in common with those movies is it’s in color.
Also:
Academy Award winner Halle Berry no longer can cite “Catwoman” as the low point of her career.
Ebert gave it Zero Stars. Yet, for some reason, his readers have given it four. Go figure.
Here’s a film I’ve never heard of, that never got a U.S. theatrical release, that cost some €25 million to make, that sounds not just like a train wreck, but like horrifying, misconceived, epic train wreck.
The premise, from IMDB:
Cheyenne, a wealthy former rock star, now bored and jaded in his retirement embarks on a quest to find his father’s persecutor, an ex-Nazi war criminal now hiding out in the U.S.
Well, they doesn’t sound very promising right off the bat. But then you see who’s playing the lead role:
That’s right: Sean Penn, 50-something EMO rocker. That moves it from merely bad to legendarily bad. You look at the IMDB listing and think: “Well, it has David Byrne playing himself. That might be the only thing about this film that doesn’t suck.” And then you watch the trailer:
And think: “Well, it has David Byrne playing himself. That might be the only thing about this film that doesn’t suck.”
This may be the most ill-conceived film involving Auschwitz since Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried.
But unlike The Day the Clown Cried, This Must be The Place was actually released. And I’d be willing to watch either of them once.
Once.
Edited to add: Though it’s played in Europe and Sundance, it doesn’t seem to have had a general U.S. release, so it might still pop up at art houses across the country this year.
It does seem to have gotten mostly good reviews from the kind of people who give films like this good reviews…
The seven words (which may be gleaned from the title of this post) are 100% from Guy Flick titles. And, you know, fair enough. But you could probably come up with a similar list for Chick Flick titles (“Heart” and “Love” both come to mind).
Even by that standard, I bet there are more crappy movies with the “Fighter” than “Ninja” in the title.
Horror movies are insufficiently represented. “Dark” and “Blood” (Blood Simple and a few others excepted) would likely yield a crapload of crap. And don’t get me started on “Shark”. Has there ever been an actual good movie with “Shark” in the title?)
Despite what the article says, any Hong Kong movie with “Cop” in the title starring Jackie Chan is pretty much guaranteed to be awesome.
(Hat tip: Bill Crider, though his link is a little off.)
Even though it’s been on Fark, I feel I would be remiss in not mentioning that a man has found the workprint for Manos: the Hands of Fate. He intends to restore the film to all it’s, um, glory, and sell Blu-Rays of the newly remastered version.
Once again Japan brings us a classic piece of the “What the Fuck?” cinema at which they excel. Noboru Iguchi, the director of The Machine Girl, which was your typical “girl picked on and humiliated, girl gets machine gun grafted onto her arm, girl racks up serious body count” film, is back with a film that makes that one look like an exercise in good taste and restraint.
After an insane beginning of RoboGeisha-on-RoboGisha combat, we jump back to a flashback that, it turns out, will take up the entire rest of the movie. Two sisters, one older, pretty, and working as a geisha, the other younger-and-even-prettier-but-we’re-going-to-pretend-she’s-homely-for-the-sake-of-the-plot who gets bossed around, exhibit the usual sibling rivalry. Then they get kidnapped by your generic evil corporation and are forced to train as geisha assassins. Oh, as you just might possibly be able to surmise from the title, they sport all sorts of deadly robotic devices implanted in their body.
The biggest difference between this and Machine Girl is that that film was (with a few allowances) a reasonably realistic, conventional film until it went all machine gunny in the third act, while RoboGeisha is pure WTF from start to finish. Just in case you were worried that RoboGeisha would be a deep, introspective examination of sibling rivalry in modern Japan, the shurukens flying out of the female penis goblin guard’s asses and the circular saw blade popping out of another robogeisha’s mouth should convince you of the film’s pure over-the-top, mutant cinema goodness. Swords pop out of deeply unlikely places (as in the quote in the title), breasts sport guns, shattered buildings bleed digital blood (albeit more convincing than the digital blood than found in Ugandan action films) and a cyborg geisha tank takes on a giant robot. Add off-balance dubbing, the hilariously maudlin sister story, and a ridiculously small cast (the same guy gets killed at least four or five times), and you have a strong candidate to show at your next party.
Here’s the trailer, which pretty much puts all the virtues of the film (such as they are) on display:
And it beats the hell out of Wild Zero or Kibakichi.
Don Webb alerted me to the existence of Hotel Torgo, a documentary on Manos: The Hands of Fate. It features commentary by El Paso SF fan Richard Brandt (a regular Nova Express reader, back in the day), and memories by cast member Bernie Rosenblum.
Warning: You do have to put up with annoying, intrusive Microsoft ads.
