Instinct to Kill (2001) seems to have had a release of some sort in the US under the title "The Perfect Husband." Policeman Tim Abell courts and marries cheerleader Missy Crider, but life is not rosy. He is abusive, then she discovers that he is a serial killer. She manages to get her husband's partner to save her from being killed by the husband, and the husband is jailed. When the husband escapes, the real story starts. Crider is sent to Tucson to learn self-protection at the hands of an ex cop her age who quit the force when his wife died in a traffic accident.

Spoilers Ahead

The entire remainder of the story is predictable.

End Spoilers

The script was clearly written expecting nudity from the female lead, as it has a shower scene and two sex scenes with her, but she has sex with her clothes on, and shower cams only show from the neck up in her shower. Tracy Ryan, who plays one of her girlfriends, shows all three Bs, when Abell seduces then kills her trying to learn where Crider is. Ryan holds what must be a record. She has appeared in 20 films according to IMDB, and has been credited as Tracy Ryan, Tracy Angeles, Tracy Voyek, Dalia Avalon, Jennifer Avalon, Allison Dark and Tracy Leah Ryan.

IMDB readers score this 3.8 of 10. The only on-line review is Dutch, and awards 2 of 5 stars. The film has nothing going for it, other than a very bad villain. Most of the fighting was badly choreographed, and the eventual outcome was telegraphed in the first few minutes. This is a D.

Deadly Species (2003)

My kinda movie!

A college professor requests a grant to search for a lost tribe of Native Americans in the Everglades. A mysterious philanthropist agrees to fund the expedition, but insists on going along. Well, it turns out that the sponsor is not just a guy interested in science. He has reason to believe that the Fountain of Youth has been found, and he fully intends to use its waters to become a trillionaire. His major obstacle is that the fountain is guarded by some flesh-devouring Sasquatch creatures with long, poisonous claws that can kill humans almost instantly.

Do you need to know any more?

Needless to say, while they are deep in the Everglades, they find everything that has ever been lost in Florida, and some things which were lost elsewhere but moved to Florida to retire: the fountain of youth, Ponce de Leon, Mercury Morris, the missing Indian tribe, Sasquatch, the Yeti, Amelia Earhart, Dr Livingstone, several other scientists from earlier expeditions, a Honus Wagner baseball card, Glenn Miller, Judge Crater, the keys to a 1955 Studebaker convertible, some golf balls that Ch-Chi lost while playing the Blue Monster at Doral, all your missing socks, and Bobby Bonilla's home run swing.

At one point, one of the Sasquatch dudes attacks the scientist but does not kill him. This works the same as a non-fatal vampire/werewolf attack, and the scientist starts to turn into a Sasquatch. Luckily, the Fountain of Youth is also the Fountain of Sasquatch Venom Antidote, and a quick glass of its restorative waters, mixed with some Schweppes Bitter Lemon, leaves the professor both fully human and curiously refreshed.

Now here's something crazy about the lost Indian tribe:

1. They have not been seen since 1850, so they've had 150 years to multiply.

2. They have found the Fountain of Youth, and a 300 year old Spanish explorer is living with them, so we know that they live pretty much forever.

3. Among them, there is a mother with a newborn baby, so we know they are not sterile.

4. Despite all the above, the tribe only consists of about ten people.

Look how many people are on the planet now, even though we die! If we stayed young forever like these Indians, there would be twice as many people. Obviously we need to go back to this tribe and find their ancient secret of population control.

Speaking of Bobby Bonilla, the cast of this film also comes out of left field:

• The star, Pete Penuel, was last credited by IMDb in 1996, in the challenging role of "man in parade". You think DeNiro had to prepare to do Jake LaMotta? That was nothing compared to learning how to hang on to the Underdog float while staying in step with a Sousa tune. This guy had to practice his marching for ... well, who knows how long? Now that I think about it, I guess his parading couldn't really have been that good if it took him seven years to get another job. Maybe he was out of step.
• A cast member named Britt George has appeared in minor roles in several similar "B" projects in the past three years. He's run the full gamut of characterizations, playing everything from "Cop #1" in The Falkland Man to "Policeman #2" in Quigley. He's also played "party husband", "marine", and "delivery guy".
• Those two guys are the only members of the cast with any other IMDB credits at all.

Based on this description, this film is a D. It doesn't look too bad, and the monsters are not too silly, but the premise is far-fetched and completely uneconomical, the dialogue is probably half improvised (but the scripted lines aren't any more original), most of the cast members were inexperienced amateurs, and some characters serve no purpose at all other than to get naked. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The girls were fairly attractive, and were shot in good light. So it's got that goin' for it. Unga-galunga.

• Heather Patrone (1, 2)
• Samara Ibanez (1, 2)
• Haans Siver
   

The Grifters (1990)

The Grifters is a fine piece of atmospheric filmmaking, with a top-notch cast, but actually not a very tight story. You'd think in a movie about con men, they'd have everybody conning everyone else constantly, but the movie instead concentrated on the characters and the effect of their insane profession on their ability to lead a "normal" life. In a way, everyone does double-cross everyone else, although not with gimmicky capers, but just because that's the attendant professional hazard of the life they have chosen. They have to trick, lie, and steal to survive. Like sharks, they normally eat other game, but they'll eat each other if it is necessary to survive.

Annette Bening isn't too hard on the eyes. Her face was absolutely gorgeous - her smile is just scintillating. In her own way, she has the best smile in film history - just as great a smile as Cameron Diaz's, for example -  Bening's smile is more knowing than Cam's, more seductive, more amused with herself. She did nude scenes here, but she actually looks better with her clothes on, because her legs are great, and clothing hides the flaws in some of her other bits. Maybe because of all that, they kept the nude scenes dark, but she's so pretty and so seductive that you'll never really see any flaws. Before I studied this movie, I wondered why this particular woman was able to bring that ol' lecher Warren Beatty into matrimony, but now I can understand the power of her appeal.

Huston, on the other hand, looked too old for the role. In reality Huston and Cusack were just about the exact age of the characters in the script (Huston was 39, like her character, and Cusack was 24 compared to 25 for the character). The dialogue assures us repeatedly that Huston was not supposed to look old enough to be Cusack's mother, but the problem is that she was not a young looking 39, and she looked plenty old enough to be his mom, so the dialogue sounded loony in context. (Until the last minute, the director was also considering Sissy Spacek or Cher for the role, and Melanie Griffith was actually hired at one point.)

The film does have some flaws. For one, some of the scams and plot details don't make sense.

• At one point, John Cusack is fleecing some sailors into a game with loaded dice. He gets them interested by pretending to find one of the dice on the floor. That much is sensible, but where did he get the second die from? He already told the sailors that the first one wasn't his, so would they be likely to believe that he happened to find a match, or even less likely, happened to have a matching one in his possession?
• Why in the world would Anjelica Huston be stuffing the secret stash of money into her car in public at the track, in full view of the clubhouse? She wouldn't. That was a cheesy plot device to allow Annette Bening to see the cash.
• I'll be damned if I can figure out what finally happened to the money in the car.
• More important, why did Huston leave all the money in the car after her faked death. Since nobody knew how much was in there, nobody would have known if she left a fourth behind and took the rest. It just made no sense that she abandoned 100% of the money. With the majority of that stash, she would have had no need for Cusack's stash.

Those things aren't really important, however. It isn't a sting movie or a caper flick. It's a character study, and a portrayal of how the fight for survival affects people in the criminal life. In those respects, it is a fascinating and entertaining movie.

The Grifters was nominated for four Oscars (including best director), but is rarely discussed among the great films of the 90's. It's a B by our standards. The details of the plot are not tidy, but the characterizations and atmosphere are engrossing.

Oh, yeah, and Annette Bening got naked as a jaybird.

• Bening (1, 2, 3, 4)

Miscellaneous

• Some old, rare, Marilyn Monroe nudes to add to your collection. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

Other crap:

• New Iraqi ruler to be determined by a Fox Reality show, Appointed by America. Good stuff from The Onion. I love the picture of the candidates.
• Long trailer for The Hulk
• a new trailer for T3
• There is a new magazine, Radar, which has some interesting polls: -- 68 percent of those polled say Ben Affleck is a "wussy."  -- 67 percent want Congress to pass a law banning Madonna from ever acting again. I want to know what is wrong with the other 32-33%!
• The Madness of King George Dubya is a mini-hit on the London stage
• Competing with the King George Dubya play, a full-frontal assault of sexual excesses based on the Marquis de Sade's writings hits the London stage on Tuesday with a play featuring scenes of sodomy, rape, incest and genital mutilation. Spanish theater group La Fura dels Baus opens a four-week run of ''XXX'' at the Riverside Studios, a graphic multi-media show advertised as ''beyond hardcore'' and described as the most sexually explicit show to be staged in Britain.
• Maybe nobody is really named Peter Gozinya or Heywood Jablowme, but there are real people with some mighty weird names.
• The mystery of Deep Throat, as solved by some college guys. They make a fairly good case.
• O.J. Simpson is preparing for his debut as the star of his own "Osbournes"-esque reality show.  They don't seem to be kidding.

Here are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.

• The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
• If there is a white asterisk, it means that there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined there might be something else of interest.
• A blue asterisk indicates the review is written by Tuna (or Lawdog or Junior or C2000 or Realist or ICMS or Mick Locke, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

Coup de Torchon (1981), marketed as Clean Slate, is a first-rate movie. I am willing to bet that most folk could watch it without a working knowledge of French and with subtitles turned off, and still they would find the movie interesting. Briefest of synopses: sex-murder farce set in French equatorial Africa just before the beginning of WWII. White folks behave badly, particularly one local official who kills folks for any good reason and boffs just about every woman in the area. That character and all others are played extremely well. A real winner, this one.

Two women give up the goodies. The luminous Isabelle Huppert gives a triple B performance. Would love to play connect the dots with that woman's freckles; probably has a million of them. Or maybe not because she has to be the smallest actress of modern times.. excluding maybe Linda Hunt. I figure she can't be any more than 5 feet tall and probably 90 pounds soaking wet. Anywho, six collages of the divine Isabelle: topless in 1, 4 and 6; topless and bum view in 2, topless and bush view in 5, see-thru action in 3.

• Isabelle Huppert (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

Second woman to strut her stuff in Coup de Torchon is Irene Skobline. Miss Skobline is terrific in the role of the local school marm, the only one of the male protagonist's women who knows about all the others. She appears topless in a shower scene as she is spied upon by the local perv (see the last collage). Irene is truly scrawny but attractive in ways that ring my chimes, at least.

Bottom line on this one: it's worth every penny you'll spend to rent it, every minute you'll spend to watch it.

• Irène Skobline (1, 2, 3, 4)

I have an idea: let's come up with a really neat werewolf script about a werewolf searching for a "purebred female werewolf" in order to mate and make lots of babies. It'll be very different than standard werewolf stuff.

Then, let's really screw up the movie with lame acting and really bad CGI special effects.

Well, someone did that, and they called it "Darkwolf".

Even with the bad stuff, the story concept is great and there's some neat nudity throughout which makes this worth watching, if only to laugh at the bad stuff. The scene where the models dance together painted up as wolves is one of the hottest scenes I've seen in an R rated movie. If you don't agree, please check your pulse, you may well be dead. :-)

• Sasha Williams, topless.
• Andrea Bogart and Sasha Williams, painted up as wolves, baring breasts and bu, and even doing a little kissing.
• Katie Lohman, showing off a very nice pair of robo-hooters.

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