Thursday

Mystery Team

Odd little comedy.

What if Pee-Wee Herman decided to become a detective? What if Encyclopedia Brown was still looking for missing homework long after after he reached voting age? What if The Adventures of Pete and Pete had been rated NC-17? Somewhere in that imaginary universe resides The Mystery Team, a trio of 18-year-old nerds who were once lauded as adorable geniuses when they ran their detective agency in second grade. Other kids would give them a dime, and they would try to determine who put the gum in Janie's bike spokes or swiped the Pez dispenser. Unfortunately, they are now high-school seniors and have not changed a single bit. They still talk and dress like second graders and they still solve mysteries for a dime. Their only dependable client is a senile woman who bakes a hundred inedible pies per day. The three virgins are a source of disappointment for their parents and a source of ridicule for their classmates. Until ...

One day a sad little girl comes to them and offers them their usual fee (ten cents) to solve the murder of her parents.

They accept the case and find themselves in a word they don't understand, a world filled with druggies, drifters, strippers, murderers and - worst of all - people who get them angry enough to use bad language. (Normally they say things like "Jeepers, creepers!" and "Oh, fiddlesticks!")

I give a thumb up to the young men who created this. While it is not a comic masterpiece, it is original and consistent, and gave me a lot of good laughs. They did a better job of sustaining a short skit premise for 90 minutes than any SNL writers have done in my memory. If the film has any weakness, it's that such an unbelievable premise can't work in a real world populated by genuine characters, so all of the characters are required to be props rather than genuine people with recognizable motivations. In essence, the fourth wall is completely collapsed. No characters seem like real people, and no situation seems like it could really happen. That sort of thing can work well in a short sketch, ala Monty Python, but is difficult to prolong without becoming monotonous. The first time they used a silly kiddie disguise to follow some clue, it was funny. One of the kids dressed up like Freddie the Freeloader, complete with a sack on a stick, in order to get some info from a fellow "hobo." Before leaving the "hobo camp" (the back of a convenience store), the three detectives blessed and thanked the drifter to prevent him from placing a dreaded gypsy hobo curse on them. Since the man was in a heroin daze at the time, he wasn't much interested in their discourse, so they just kissed his forehead and moved on.

That was funny enough once, but the "kiddie disguise" gag kept getting repeated, and it kept succeeding in the face of all logic. In order to get into a "gentleman's club," for example, the mystery team members donned tuxes, monocles and stovepipe hats, and affected British accents, whereupon the club doorman admitted them, although their only IDs were hand-written. Of course the handwriting never really mattered because those particular documents were school IDs anyway, thus proving the lads too young to enter. No problem, they were able to gain entry with their masterful disguises and a handful of filthy lucre. (Maybe five bucks between them.) It was essentially a repeat of the hobo joke - and by then the concept was getting tired.

You can get a few laughs here, and it's some oddly inventive and seriously twisted material. Unfortunately it seems to be the same joke repeated again and again, MacGruber style, and you'll have to suspend all disbelief to accept the juxtaposition of the silly humor with a semi-serious murder mystery. If you can do that, you just may find that the 90 minutes have passed fairly quickly. I don't regret watching it.

Some people must like it. It's rated above 8 at IMDb!

There's quite a bit of nudity - a five minute scene in a strip club - but only one of the women is identified in the credits. That would be Megan Fuller. Anyway, here's Megan and the others.

 

 

  • * Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe).

  • * White asterisk: expanded format.

  • * Blue asterisk: not mine.

  • No asterisk: it probably sucks.

OTHER CRAP:

Catch the deluxe version of Other Crap in real time, with all the bells and whistles, here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lost Highway

1997

Patricia Arquette film clips (samples below)

Lisa Boyle film clip (samples below)

Natasha Gregson Wagner film clip (samples below)

 

 

The Vintner's Luck

(2009)

Johnny's comments:

In the early 1800s France, a young man is working at the local vineyard but dreams of making his own wine. After marrying Celeste (Keisha Castle-Hughes), he receives land and gets a visit from an angel who will guide him to his goal. He suffers much hardship before the death of the local wine maker, who asks his baroness niece (Vera Farmiga) to employ the man as the vineyard's winemaker. There's not that many films about winemaking, although there's been a few lately like Bottle Shock and A Good Year (Sideways is more about wine tasting). This one was much more interesting than I thought it would be, although the angel angle is a bit strange, particularly the direction it takes, but it doesn't weigh the film down. One thing I did find intriguing though is that the film takes place over about 20+ years, but Keisha Castle-Hughes doesn't seem to age a day, in fact she looks younger than her daughter when the daughter gets married. It's quite bizarre.

And there's a nice smattering of nudity throughout.

Here are the film clips of Keisha Castle-Hughes

The collages are below:

Here are the film clips of Vera Farmiga

The collages are below:

 

 

PICS

Kate Graham in Poultrygeist in HD

 

Kate Graham in the special features from the Poultrygeist Blu-Ray

Allyson Sereboff in Poultrygeist in HD

Allyson Sereboff in the special features from the Poultrygeist Blu-Ray

 

Clips

Tanja Reichert and Crystal Lowe in Sanctimony

Natacha Lindinger in Le Repenti in 720p (sample below)

Excerpts from Kendra's sex tape. (Basically all of her solo acts; sample below)