Grandma's Boy (2006)

Something funny happened to Grandma's Boy on the way to obscurity. At first, things seemed to be progressing in an orderly fashion:

• The critics reviled it. Among the "cream of the crop" critics at IMDb, it received only 6% positive reviews. The studio, using a tactic which is becoming increasingly more common for certain types of youth-oriented genre films which are almost certain to receive bad reviews, did not pre-screen the film for critics. The studios are starting to do this with nearly every lowbrow comedy, video game adaptation, and splatter film. I have a feeling that such a tack makes the eventual reviews even worse, since it forces the critic to pay to get in and sit with the hoi-polloi in a crowded theater full of people who could be his grandchildren.
• It bombed at the box office. If hiding it from the critics was designed to help the gross, the tactic seems to have failed. The film took in a tepid three million on its opening weekend, but it dropped 60% in the second weekend, and it had virtually disappeared by the third, having been retained on only 200 screens out of the original 2000. Most theaters offered perfunctory compliance with the obligatory two weeks of screenings, thence couldn't nuke it fast enough.

That should be the recipe for an IMDb score in the range of 2.5-3.5, right? Very wrong. It is rated a respectable 6.4 at IMDb by more than a thousand voters, and that score is no fluke. It is also scored B- at Yahoo, and that's an average derived from more than two thousand voters.

What the ... ?

Well, I suppose the explanation is not so complicated. The audience for this lowbrow, R-rated comedy is bakers and gamers aged 12-16. Think about that for a moment. Can any movie so described get good reviews from a bunch of 50ish film critics who would rather be watching a Chaplin retrospective while sipping white wine between screenings? And you can't expect any theatrical box office. The R rating means that the target audience can't get into the movie. From the very beginning, this film was doomed to fail theatrically, with the producers' only hope being some profit from the video aftermarket. Will it succeed? Well, the kids have already supported it with their votes and comments online, but it remains to be seen whether the target audience will support the DVD with their pocketbooks.

I think that this film probably would have benefited from critical screenings. First of all, the critics would have been in a better mood when they reviewed the film, but more important, their reviews would have offered good marketing coverage to reach those people who know they have to read between the lines of reviews because they don't like the kinds of films that critics like. I'm such a reader myself. If a critic declares a film to be a "tone poem," he means to say "possessing a masterful control of atmosphere," but I read it as "pretentious crapola," and look elsewhere. I'm allergic to tone poetry. Now look at it from the kids' perspective. Let's assume that an important print reviewer says, "It's nothing but a bunch of stoners and slackers ragging on one another while they play video games and get wasted. Topping it all off is a kung-fu monkey."  The critic thinks that is a negative review, but when a family's stern paterfamilias reads that to the kids over breakfast, meaning to offer them edification and guidance toward the path of enlightenment and maturity, the members of the film's potential audience hear that comment and think, "A kung-fu monkey? Cool." This thought is followed by plenty of giggling.

I am not in this film's target audience. I'm nearly 60 and can't remember the last time I got high on any substance, legal or illegal. Yet I got some good laughs out of this film, and found it easy to sit through. Oh sure, some parts of the film made me cringe, especially the irritating "villain," but I enjoyed the interplay between the characters, and I liked the fact that the characters were played as real people who have fun and generally respect one another. I think the story works better with an "average Joe" in the lead than it would have worked with another irritatingly mannered performance from Adam Sandler, complete with the dreaded baby voice. In fact, the two worst scenes in the film are the two cameos from established "names" Rob Schneider and David Spade, because those two guys were doing Catskills-style comedy schtick rather than letting the humor flow naturally from having the dialogue delivered by a credible character.

Unfortunately, this guilty pleasure film fails to deliver enough guilty pleasures. The DVD contains the R-rated theatrical version and an unrated version, but the nudity maxes out at one topless woman and a man's bum. How realistic is that in a film that includes a party in which various bikers and bakers are so wasted that they can barely speak? This film could have benefited from an application of the Scoopy Principle, which is that once a film is rated R for other things (foul language, sex jokes, and sympathetic drug use), the tits are free. You can then basically have every woman in the film topless, and the rating will remain "R" unless you add some other nastiness. The unrated version of this film has no more female nudity than the R-rated version, and that has kind of a "rip-off" feel to it.

Setting that aside, I found the film to be a watchable lowbrow comedy cut from the Sandler/Spade/Schneider cloth. As the Hollywood Reporter stated, "The film doesn't have much in the way of genuine laughs despite a plethora of attempted gags, but it does have a geniality that makes it hard to entirely dislike."

 

 

Heidi Hawking

Other Crap:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

"Evils of the Night"

Evils of the Night (1985) is a grade Z teen slasher film. College students are camping, aliens are harvesting them for the blood with the help of two local garage grease monkeys, and the horny kids get caught first. Much of the film is too dark to see what is going on, and the college student scenes and the alien scenes don't even look like they are in the same film. The most interesting thing about this film is the cast list, which includes hard core stars Amber Lynn and Crystal Breeze, and mainstream players like Aldo Ray, Tina Louise and Julie Newmar.

The film opens with sex between Crystal Breeze and her boyfriend, after which they are taken. The next day, one of the characters spies on Jody Swafford and an unknown spreading sun screen on each other's breasts, then his girlfriend, Amber Lynn, shows him hers, and wants sex immediately. Her persuades her to wait until that night, when they break into an abandoned house to do it. We all know the rule about sex and slasher films by now.

The final exposure comes from Bridget Holloman, and only amounts to good pokies, but as she is one of the last survivors, we get many looks at them. Amber Lynn and Crystal Breeze both do full frontal and rear nudity in very bad light.

IMDb readers say 2.5. The plot is silly, there is a minimum of action, much of the nudity is nearly obscured by the darkness, and there really isn't much in the way of gore effects. Giving the benefit of the doubt that the darkness is the fault of the transfer, I will be generous, and award D-.

Amber Lynn Bridget Holloman Crystal Breeze Jody Swafford

ORIGINAL "STAR WARS" FINALLY COMING TO DVD
A Long Time Ago... - George Lucas is finally yielding to "Star Wars" fans and will release the first three movies on DVD as they originally appeared in theaters. That means no digital retouching, no computer-created characters inserted into scenes, no Hayden Christensen appearing as Anakin at the end of "Return of the Jedi," and Han Solo once again shooting a bounty hunter without having the hunter draw on him first. But they'll be available only from September to December, and a Lucasfilm spokesman warned that the video quality is state-of-the-art for 1993, not state-of-the-art for 2006 like Lucas' revised versions.

* ...which should be dropped into a black hole.
* In 2006, the state of the art must be "craptabulous."
* Carrie Fisher does wish he could digitally give her a new hairdo.
* It's nice to have them back, but I'm going to miss that Britney Spears production number during the cantina scene.

KATIE AND TOM AGREE ON PRENUP
Slave Wages - Katie Holmes may not have lost her entire mind after meeting Tom Cruise: London's Daily Mail newspaper reports that the couple have finalized a prenuptial agreement that will give Katie $15 million whether they marry or not. Then, if they do marry and later divorce, she gets another $25 million. The deal was said to comfort Holmes' skeptical parents, who now know she and her baby will be financially secure. And Cruise, who is worth an estimated $460 million, reportedly wanted to show that his love for her is sincere.

* Okay, then marry her without a prenuptial agreement.
* And he sincerely would not even miss $40 million.
* When his lawyer told him the most he'd be out is $40 million, he jumped up and down on the sofa.

TEACHER FIRED FOR MAKING PORN MOVIE A DECADE AGO
At Least She Didn't Do It With Any Students! - Tericka Dye, a science teacher and volleyball coach at Reidland High School in Paducah, Kentucky, was suspended and her contract won't be renewed after school officials learned she'd appeared in an adult movie 10 years ago. Dye said she was then suffering from untreated bipolar disorder, had no home or income, and she worked on the movie for one day. Since then, she got treatment, joined the army and graduated college. One student's mom who supports her said, "We've all done things that we regret, except hers is on tape." The suspension might be appealed.

* But the school board will need to examine that porn movie very, very closely.
* If the movie contains hot lesbian action, it just proves she's qualified to be a girls' volleyball coach.
* See, kids, there really IS a permanent record!