Friday

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To see and use all the Funhouse features, you need Netscape 6.+ or MSIE 5.+.

• Netscape 6.2.2 is available free for download or on CD.
• MSIE 6.0 is available free.

Vampire's Kiss (1989) is a truly awful film. Nicolas Cage, who had had a fairly big success with Moonstruck, was set to play the lead, and his agent advised him that this role was not good for his career. He dropped out, as did the actor they hired to replace him, and he decided to do the film after all. As the film opens, we see him pick up Kasi Lemmons, and take her home to bed. Lemmons is now much better known as a director, and her credits include Eve's Bayou and Caveman's Valentine. She shows nipples in this scene, before their tryst is interrupted by a bat in the apartment.

The film degenerated rapidly from here, as we learn that Cage sees a shrink regularly, and is an executive at a literary agency, who spends most of his time speaking in a gawdawful affected accent, and terrorizing his secretary, Maria Conchita Alonso. Then he takes Jennifer Beals home, and imagines that she bit him on the neck in what was advertised as a hot sex scene with breast exposure. What was actually exposed was a huge adhesive breast patch. So, Cage thinks he is a Vampire, and becomes even sillier, and I fast forwarded to the end quickly, on the off chance there was additional nudity.

Cage should have listened to his agent, but appeared with the director in a feature length commentary, and claimed to be proud of the film. He mentioned the accent, that it was based on an affected fake accent his dad assumed that had always irritated him, and that the producers hated it, but the director loved it. IMDB readers have it at 5.1 0f 10. I say D-. It is not funny, is not scarry, and Cage is irritating every moment he is on screen.

The Accidental Spy is an international thriller starring Jackie Chan. it is, in many ways, quite similar to The Bourne Identity . Not a bad flick, but not the kind of Jackie Chan movie I like - not funny, and without any wildly innovative fight scenes. (The best fight scene is one in which Jackie is stark naked for many minutes!) Don't be fooled by reports of nudity. There is as much nudity as any film this year, to be sure, but none of it involves females. All of it is a certain rather famous martial arts star who is approaching 50.

Showtime is a comedy starring Robert DeNiro, Eddie Murphy and Bill Shatner. Well, the first 50 minutes amount to that, anyway, and I liked that part. Shatner plays Shatner, and he's hired to show real cops how to act like TV cops, based upon his years as T.J. Hooker. Pretty funny. The last half was a bloated, overbudgeted, formulaic cop/buddy pic - exactly the kind of trite Hollywood bullshit they made fun of in the first half. Some critics, in fact many critics, thought it was a suckfest, but I think that tells you as much about their expectations as about the movie. I'd sum it up as a major disappointment - a movie that should have been terrific entertainment, showed signs of being able to deliver, then ended up average or below average. I liked it more than the critics did, but that isn't saying much

• Naked women appease the rain god (sorry, no pics, not even a pic of Chipper, the rain god)
• Saddam to Run for Another Term as Iraq President. His support seemed a little soft when he only got 99.96% of the votes in the previous election, but he expects to improve this time because he had the other .04% killed.
• Five presidents with heads made of granite
• The top 100 newspapers in the world based upon circulation. The Sun tops the English language group.
• Families of 9/11 victims sue Saudi officials, institutions. Are you ready for this? They are suing for 100 trillion dollars. If you aren't that good at math, let me 'splain it to you. The value of all goods and services produced everywhere in the world is about 35 trillion dollars per year. That's everything from every grain of rice in the Far East to the Space Shuttle. Everything in the world. So all they are asking for is this - they want the value of everything produced by the entire world in the next three years!  The annual GDP of France is about 2 trillion dollars. France has one of the world's largest economies. The amount they are asking for is about equivalent to the total value of everything produced by France since the beginning of time. Even Johnny Cochran would have a hard time keeping a straight face over that one. It sounds like something Dr Evil would demand.
• VHI picks the 100 greatest women of Rock 'n Roll. Actually it's kind of a dumb list because they ran out of rockers after about #25, and started including people like Barbara "Soul Sister" Streisand and Bessie Smith and Dolly Parton and Margaret Thatcher - any famous woman they could think of.. Yup, that Babs was one fine rockin' mama. I understand that in her version of Louie, Lou-eye, she pronounces it "Louis, Louis", as in St Louis. Get down, girl.
• Tuna and I were discussing this subject today : the Top 10 Musicals of all time, as based on IMDb votes. Singin' in the Rain, a staple of every all-time top 10 list, and a movie loved even by people who hate musicals, was NOT nominated as best picture in its eligible year. Same goes for Duck Soup.

1. Singin' in the Rain (1952)
2. Duck Soup (1933)
3. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
4. Moulin Rouge! (2001)
5. Fantasia (1940)
6. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
7. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
8. Dancer in the Dark (2000)
9. My Fair Lady (1964)
10. The Producers (1968)

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.

• Kim Basinger in sexy nude scenes from "9 1/2 Weeks".

Be sure to pay Graphic Response a visit at his website. www.graphic-barry.com.

A double-Pet double feature today. Translation: caps of Night of the Living Babes and Dead Boyz Can't Fly, each of which has two nekkid former or future Pets bouncing around.

Night of the Living Babes (1987) is a comedy of sorts, shot on videotape. It has all the production value of an 80's porn movie and was probably shot in a day or two. All or it was shot in the backyard of a nicely appointed home, the comfortable living room of the home and the basement of what I'm betting is the same home, decked out like a medieval dungeon. The Living Babes who get nekkid are six:

• Michelle Bauer, eternal B movie goddess and former Pet. She shows breasts in a few scenes, but all of them are interchangeable, as she stands, chained to a wall. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

• Terri Lynn Peake, who as Terri Lenee Peake, was Pet of the month for Oct. '87. She plays an exotic dancer, whose job is to do something evil to a couple of fellas, but none of it makes sense. Not supposed to. We got impressive hooters in the first two collages, boobs and bum in the third. AND for your veiwing pleasure, PETScan did the honors on four of Terri's Guccimag pics. I scanned some other stuff of hers a long time ago and from them I can tell you, without hesitation, that Terri either had some augmentation work done, or she is a late bloomer. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

• Connie Woods. A real cutie. Plays a dumb blonde. Boobs only. (1, 2)

• Marjorie Miller, aka Blondi and Blondi Bee, former pornobie. Marj plays a Zombie Girl and wears a purple wig for no apparent reason. Robo-hooters and bum. (1, 2)

• The other Zombie Girls, Lisa Devine, Violet Lickness and Ashley Elstad. Don't know which is which. Boobs only.

Today's second movie..."Dead Boyz Can't Fly" (1992). What a gawd-awful, gawd-forsaken waste of time, effort and money. Derivative? Oh yeah. Supposed to be a 90's American version of A Clockwork Orange. But imagine if Ed Wood had written and directed Clockwork. It would be better than Dead Boyz. Two previous reviewers disagreed with one another. One found it hyper-violent and ultra-stupid, whereas the other found it ultra-violent and hyper-stupid. They both have a point. But... we get former Pets Sheila Kennedy and Delia Sheppard showing breasts and bum.

In her last movie, Sheila plays a stripper who dances in a dark and smokey club. As we all suspected from seeing her goodies in the best of all redneck revenge comedies, Elle, Sheila is a natural brunette and plays one in this film. And Delia plays a patient who unwittingly strips down to her panties for a bad guy impersonating a doctor.

• Delia Shepard (1, 2, 3)

• Sheila Kennedy (1, 2, 3)

• Alison Heruth-Waterbury (or possible body double) rear nudity in the Croatian film "Posljednja volja" aka "The Last Will" (2001). (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

• Helen Mirren, toplessness and brief bum and bush views in scenes from "Caligula". (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

• Rachel Weisz bares a bit of bum in "Enemy at the Gates" (1, 2, 3, 4)

In Seattle this movie is causing a bit of controversy. The Spanish lanuguage film won awards at the Seattle Film Festival in June, but local papers think the movie is too much. It is unrated, and contains several explicit sexual scenes. As a result, both the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer have refused to run ads for the film because "It does not fit within our policy on what we consider to be adult entertainment"

"Sex and Lucia" opens Friday in Seattle. So take our advice....if you live in the Northwest, go see it! Or you can also check out C2000's review and more 'caps in the July 29, '02 update in the Back Issues.