Malefic (2003) is half of a two disk self-proclaimed B Movie Theater Drive-In Double Feature. Where do I begin? Hmmm, how about at the beginning. A young couple is parked, hears noises, and decides to go into a cabin. She gets very naked, then he goes outside to check on some noise and is eaten, she naturally goes outside to feed herself to whatever ate him.. Ooops, this wasn't a good way to start, as this has nothing to do with the story.

I'll try again. Our narrator, a female dominatrix and three of her friends are driving down a country road. Seems they are on their way to a country cabin to perpetrate the rest of their crime. Part one was exhuming the body of a recently deceased baby. Part two will be holding the casket for ransom. When they make the call to the bereaved father, who actually killed the baby but had friends in the coroners office, Dawn Duburger is in his bed. She takes off her top to get dressed and leave after hearing the phone call, so he strangles her quick before his wife gets home.

Damn, that really doesn't have much to do with the film either. Ok, these four people are hanging out in a cabin working on this really bizarre blackmail thing, and use an Ouija board to summon up a paper mache catfish head that devours them all. Yup, that's what the plot is. You may wonder why I put the owl in the upper left of the images? Because it looked so much cooler than the paper mache catfish head, and had just as much to do with the plot as two of the three naked actresses.

Speaking of naked actresses, we have Sequoia Rose Fuller as the superfluous gratuitous catfish food in the opening scene. She shows everything, including a major league nipple ring, and a labia stud. Dawn Duburger, as the mistress of the superfluous baby killer, shows breasts and buns. Cynder Moon, as one of the four, shows breasts early in the film, then everything in a bath, death and reincarnation scene.

The entire thing is grainy black and white, lit with flashlights and hand held 100 Watt lightbulbs in aluminum utility reflectors. Voice over portions of the sound are ok, but I found the bad human imitations of bird calls a little distracting. In case you hadn't already figured it out, this is a clear F. I will say, that if the film maker can build up a large body of work this bad, he might achieve an Ed Wood type of fame.

Game of Pleasure (1998):

Four degrees of Suckeration.

You know, the verb "to suck" has taken over the world. When I used to say, a couple of decades ago, "I suck at Asteroids", women actually got offended. Now everyone says it on family shows and "Meet the Press". The only thing they haven't adopted from our old 1960's New York/Jersey slang is the traditional "this" response. Example. The priest says "Dominus vobiscum", and you say "Dominus THIS, Padre", and grab your crotch. This works on all occasions and as a response to any comment. (Or, as an alternative, you can grab your crotch and say "I got your Dominus right here, Padre", but my friends found this variant too verbose.). To relate this to the "suck" verb, one guy would say "your cigar sucks", and the other guy would grab his crotch and say "suck THIS", and there you have plenty of merriment and an instant Algonquin Round Table of witty repartee for all occasions.

Now my point here is that the co-opting of "suck" by the mainstream culture leads to a lack of gradations. Is it fair to say that Cher's singing sucks, when this is the same way you would describe Yoko Ono? Of course not. So I therefore propose four degrees of suckeration. To stay on the musician theme for a minute, here's how it would work.

First degree of suckeration. People who are OK, but not really as good as you might expect from the success they've achieved. An example would be Jewel. If you got all your cousins together, Jewel would sing about as well as the best one. She has a pleasant voice, can carry a tune, knows some guitar chords, looks good. She's OK, you just can't quite figure out why she's a star and 100 million other equally talented women are not.

Second degree of suckeration, people who really aren't good enough to be doing this professionally at all. If you assembled your cousins together and had a karaoke contest, they would finish in the middle of the pack. Cher and Jerry Vale would be in this category.

Third degree of suckeration, people who don't have a clue how to do what they are supposed to be professionals at. Your most incompetent cousin could do it as well. Sid Vicious belongs in this group.

Fourth degree of suckeration, people who are so bad that they not only can't do what they are supposed to be good at, but they cause nausea and/or laughter when they try to do it. If these people were your cousins, you wouldn't even admit it. And if you had a family karaoke contest, you'd have a kindly aunt distract them to another room to look at baby pictures. Examples would include Carol Channing, Yoko Ono, and Shatner.

Shatner is an excellent illustration of this principle, because you might casually say "Bill Shatner sucks as an actor" and/or "Bill Shatner sucks as a singer", but the word "suck" doesn't really mean the same thing in both sentences, does it? As an actor he's only a first degree suck. As a singer, he's not only guilty of fourth degree suckeration, but he could actually be in the fifth degree, since he pretty much sucks deeper and harder than anybody has ever sucked in the history of music. In fact, if Shatner had lived before the age of recording, and your great grandpa told you how bad he was, you would think the old boy was exaggerating. Even if you believed your gramps, you would not be capable of imaging how bad it was, because there is nothing else as bad to compare it to. If the recordings of Shatner did not exist, we could not conceive of anything that bad. In a sense, ol' Kirk, as much as Newton and Freud, stretched the very boundaries of human conceptualization.

We owe him so much.

All of that brings us around to the topic of Game of Pleasure, which not merely sucks, but sucks in the fourth degree and beyond. It is up there in Shatner territory, in that I can't really describe how bad it sucks, because it is not possible to find something to compare it to.

It is sort of a horror/thriller thing, I guess. It's one of those deals where a guy has a dream, and we think that is real until he wakes up. Then we think that is real, until he wakes up again, and we realize that his previous waking was only part of the dream. And we think that is real until he wakes up again, and we realize that all previous wakings were only part of the dream. This happens a few times until the story finally jumps back to the same scene we saw 40 minutes earlier, where Our Hero sits mesmerized by a computer, and we realize that none of it was a dream at all, but rather a particularly hypnotic virtual reality game.

 And ... (here is the big kicker) ...

 .... he may still be playing it.

Or he may still be dreaming about playing it.

Or the dream about playing the game might actually be part of the game.

Or it might not.

Hard to say.

The director is somebody called Dale E. Franz, who doesn't seem to have done anything else in show business before or after this video. I assume that Dale, wherever he is now, presumably plus-selling French Fries, does not admit that he was involved in this. One can only hope that if he decides to make another amateurish camcorder film, he will read all the instructions on the camera box, and not just the one about removing the lens cap. If he can clear that hurdle, perhaps he can hire some actors to make his next movie, instead of making it with his fellow workers at the drive-through window.

I'm pretty sure that Dale is still alive, because exactly one IMDb voter scored this film higher than five, and that voter scored it a 10 out of 10. It's a fairly safe conclusion that the voter in question was none other than Dale E. Frantz.

The film does have some plusses, of a kind:

1. I finally got so see Mandy Leigh in something. Our old pal Celebrity Sleuth has featured Mandy several times in his magazine, and I've always wanted to see some evidence that Mandy is, in fact, a celebrity, somebody famous for something other than posing in that magazine. Of course, I don't mind looking at the pictures of her. She is very pretty, has a great tush, a beautiful head of hair, and lovely a-cup breasts. Given her good looks, one might wonder why she doesn't have any other career. Unless one has seen this film. She's in this movie, and her performance here shows why she hasn't been in anything since. I don't know if she's the worst actress I've ever seen, because I've seen a bunch of them, but no worse performance comes immediately to mind.

2. If you're a fan of Queen-B Tammy Parks, here's another chance to see her naked.

3. The film is only about 60 minutes long. I would normally complain that a film that short is a rip-off, but some things are better when shorter, like time spent in Purgatory, and time spent watching this film.

• Mandy Leigh
• Tammy Parks (1, 2)
• Kim Penn
• Danielle Summer

Various stuff:

• Kristi Frank is one of the contestants on the red-hot new reality show, The Apprentice. Earlier in her career, she was in an episode of Red Shoe Diaries. I personally did some caps from this episode many years ago. I looked around for that DVD, but I don't have it, so you'll have to make do with my old caps, (which are not bad, but are clumsy), and some from an old-time contributor from the earliest days of the site - The Anonymous Guy. If you remember The Anonymous Guy, you've really been hangin' around here for a while. (1, 2, 3) Between the three collages, you have all three B's.

• This has been passed around the web as a cap of Chloe Sevigny in The Brown Bunny. Of course, it is obviously not Chloe. To the best of our knowledge, it is Elisabetta Cavallotti in a movie called Guardami. a 1999 Italian movie which is loosely based on the life of porn star Moana Pozzi.

• Here's another picture of pop star Billie Piper, who was caught by a paparazzo while she was sunbathing topless.

• Callie Thorne in The Wire, as captured by Señor Piel (1, 2)

OTHER CRAP:

You might want to look at this one first (hint-hint):

• Fourth Annual Weblog Awards Nominate your favorite weblogs for the Bloggie awards to be presented at SXSW Interactive. You could nominate, for example, Other Crap (OtherCrap.com), in five or ten categories, and/or you could nominate sites that actually deserve to win.

We now return to our broadcast:

• Deep Thoughts by kids. "From an actual newspaper contest where entrants ages 4 to 15 were asked to imitate 'Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey.'". Frankly. I'm not buyin' it, but they are cute. "It would be terrible if the Red Cross Bloodmobile got into an accident. No, wait. That would be good because if anyone needed it, the blood would be right there." (They claim that was created by a five year old. Yeah, right.)
• A British dog owner spends about 981 pounds a year to maintain his pet. The living wage in Russia is 480 pounds per year. Pravda says (and I quote them exactly) "Is not it funny?" Yes, komrade, it is being very hilarity.
• Through the use of video, we have been experimenting with ways to portray the different aspects of feminine sexuality. "Before viewing, please be advised that these videos contain fine art nude photography." Or, to word it another way, view naked chicks without guilt.
• Worried that you can't understand opera? Embarrassed that you have to read the sub-titles? Don't worry, nobody else understands it either. Here's why.
• The French power brokers may have bad qualities, but stupidity is not one of them. Here is a complex story about the imperviousness of the French elite to investigation and exposure.
• As a Consumer Thinketh... should neuromarketing be banned? Advertisers are testing magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to see how people's brains react to certain products and pitches. Interestingly, they have found that sex sells beer. Who would have dreamed?
• URL says it all: Yarmulkebra.com
• This is pretty cool. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire has an official online home game.
• For sale, one ranch with built-in amusement park. $50 million or best offer.
• Insight into one of our favorite movies, Better Off Dead. An interview with Dan "Ricky" Schneider.
• Diana Driver's Blood Sample Questioned. British police have doubts about the authenticity of the blood sample that led French investigators to conclude drunk driving caused the car crash that killed Princess Diana. Oh, yeah, the driver was drunk enough, but the sample seems to indicate he might have been a drunken 14 year old chimpanzee. The French response: "We are very serious people and no errors are allowed". (I didn't make that quote up). Serious, and perfect. Quite a combination.
• Here are the outtakes from the Mouseketeer's In-Style shoot.
• Trivia. Which has been chosen as the Most Stressful U.S. City? I think you'll be surprised. Sorry, Detroit, you have the most crime and obesity, but you only finished 9th overall.
• Top 25 Westerns of all time. The list fails my common sense litmus test. If someone picks a list of the greatest writers and doesn't list Shakespeare, I don't read on. Same with a list of the best Westerns that omits The Outlaw Josey Wales, which is many levels better than some of the films on this list. The rest of the list, however, makes a lot of sense.
• The closing credits for Lord of the Rings are long enough to be a fourth film.
• Gallery of the art of the mentally disturbed.
• Resource: The OSSwin project: Open Source software for Windows!
• The Bush Administration began laying plans for an invasion of Iraq including the use of American troops within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001, not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks as has been previously reported. That is what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider.
• Actress Christina Applegate (Kelly Bundy) Among Potential Blake Jurors. Actor Harry Shearer (The Simpsons, This is Spinal Tap) was cut from the list because of his contractual obligations.
• Jacko's modest new home. He seems to be living very well for a guy who's supposed to be broke.
• Humanities professors say "you know" and "uh" 4.85 times per minute, social scientists 3.84 and natural science professors only 1.39 times.
• Free videos of comedy routines - George Carlin
• Spongebob Barbie ?????
• Ferret Fans Riled Up Over Stiller, Aniston Flick: "Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston have an easy chemistry in the romantic comedy 'Along Came Polly' -- but no love was lost between Stiller and his ferret co-star. Despite the ferret's reputation for difficult on-set behavior, his showbiz career is not over. He was signed to a personal services contract by Richard Gere.

Other Crap archives. May also include newer material than the ones above, since it's sorta in real time.

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