|
Tuna
|
"Turkey Shoot"
Turkey Shoot (1981) is an Australian exploitation originally film released in the US in a heavily edited (12 minutes cut) R rated version called escape 2000. It is now available uncut for the first time here on DVD. At some time in the future, the government demands absolute loyalty and mindless obedience, and deviants are sent to retraining facilities. We travel with three of them, hooker Lynda Stoner, innocent Olivia Hussey, and free radio militant Steve Railsback, who are being sent to the toughest of these retraining camps.
The camp director has a unique way of keeping his population down. He organizes hunts for top officials, and our three are picked as victims. The film's claim to fame is extreme violence, but it does have one very nice nude group shower scene, where we see a bunch of hippies recruited for the scene showing full frontal. Both Hussey and Stoner had no nudity agreements, but were arm-twisted into some exposure. Hussey shows breasts, but her face in not in the shot. Stoner compromised, and did a nude shot from the back, showing buns. She claims to regret giving in, and both women wish they had not made this film. Stoner did hold the line when she was asked to clean fish in one scene. The staunch animal activist forced them to create fake fish.
The mutilation effects were rather strong, including one guard having both his hands chopped off with a machete, one of the prisoners shot time after time with a crossbow, at least two people burned alive, etc.Australian critics united in their condemnation of the film, and most of the cast and crew would rather forget it. IMDB readers have it at 4.0 of 10, but most of those are likely for the 80 minute R version. The transfer is a rather nice widescreen, some of the jungle footage is attractive, and there are several commentaries, shorts, etc, making it a rather nice DVD package. Unfortunately, the film is derivative, over the top, and, other than the extreme mutilation shots, nothing special. I didn't mind the time spent watching it, but then I am an exploitation fanatic. This is a low C-.
Thumbnails
Thumbnails
Thumbnails
Lynda Stoner
(1,
2,
3,
4,
5)
Olivia Hussey
(1,
2)
Unknown
(1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13)
|
Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)
|
Owning Mahowny (2003)
Brian Molony is a real person. He was a rising star in the
Canadian banking business in the early 1980s. At the age of only 24,
the workaholic was a senior loan officer at the Canadian Imperial
Bank of Commerce. Straight laced and frugal, he never spent a dollar
he didn't have to, wore modest suits, drove a modest car. The
perfect employee. Except for one thing. He loved to gamble on sports
and horses. He owed his bookie $10,000 and could not pay. The bookie
was not unreasonable about a payment plan, but insisted on cutting
off Molony's action unless he could pay cash.
So Molony figured out a way to get $10,000 by defrauding his
employer. He paid the bookie, placed a few more bets, lost, then
needed to cover $30,000. More fraud. Then he stole a hundred grand
and went to Atlantic City. The casino loved him and starting comping
him with chartered jets, limos, expensive meals, hookers, and
palatial suites. The casino started making it easier and easier for
him to bet. He kept coming back with more stolen money. He became
famous enough that other casinos started vying for his business.
Molony accepted the percs without any pleasure, without even seeming
to notice them. He even sent the complimentary hooker home. He was a
gambleholic, just as he was a workaholic. Molony wouldn't have
minded riding the public bus and staying at a Motel 6. He would
scarcely have noticed the difference. He didn't really care about
anything else except the games of chance and risk. Over the next
year and a half, he ended up swindling his bank out of more than ten
million dollars, and had nothing to show for it.
In the movie version of Molony's life, his psychiatrist asked
him, "On a scale of 1 to 100, how would you rank the thrill you get
from high-risk gambling?" Molony responded with a perfect 100. The
next question was, "How would you rank the biggest thrill in your
life outside of gambling?" Molony estimated that the correct
response was 20.
Molony's story was told in a 1984
book called "Stung:The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony" by Gary
Stephen Ross, and is now re-told in a film named Owning Mahowny. The
names have been changed for the movie version of the story (Brian
Molony has been renamed Dan Mahowny, for example), but very little
else has been altered for the film, which stars Philip Seymour
Hoffman, who is moviedom's official go-to guy for losers on a
descending spiral further into Loserville. Minnie Driver is on hand
as the requisite sensible and long-suffering girlfriend, but the
only other main character in the film is a sleazy, oily buttchasm of
a casino manager (John Hurt), who seemed to take great pleasure in
making a fortune from encouraging a man to destroy his own life. (In
real life, the casino and the bank were in litigation over how much
the casino knew, and how much they chose not to know. They settled.)
It is an effective movie, but it's an unusual one in that it
really doesn't make any real effort to develop any characters, not
even the lead. It concentrates only on what happens to Mahowny from
the time he steals his first ten grand to the time he is caught. His
life before that is unimportant. His life after that is mentioned
only in the obligatory pre-credit word slides. The cinematic allure
of the movie is that it tries, with substantial success, to put the
viewer into Mahowny's obsessive head, to see how he got hooked, and
to experience the emotions involved in his self-entrapment.
When I started to watch the film, I was bewildered by the
director's choice to shoot it in a super-widescreen 2.35:1 aspect
ratio. After all, I was thinking, it's a story that takes place in
small spaces and in a man's head. There aren't any fucking chariot
races. Hell, there's basically no action at all. I'm not sure what
the director's original plans were, but the widescreen
cinematography produced a few surprisingly appropriate scenes. One
that stands out in my mind is the first complimentary room that
Mahowny and his naive buddy got from the casino. The establishment
sent down a few members of the hotel crew to escort them,
safari-style, from a basic Interstate Holiday Inn room to a room
that would have floored The Sun King. The first ultra-widescreen
glimpse of that room, seen through the POV of Mahowny's wide-eyed
friend, justified the entire decision to use that particular aspect
ratio.
It's not a mass audience movie because it is totally lacking in
joy, and surprisingly lacking in entertainment.
Don't expect anything like Catch Me If You Can.
It's more like Requiem for a {Gambling} Dream.
The man was an addict, and the film details the destructive
properties of his addiction. The Mahowny character did not enjoy
what he was doing. He was simply addicted to the rush brought on by
the risk. As one character said, "he only wants to win so has enough
left to come back and lose some more."
In the Cut (2003)
I have spent WAY too much time on this project. I have now seen
it at a theater, watched a bootleg, and read the book! My complete
steaming pile of comments can be found
here. (I would have
liked the book a lot if I had not seen the movie first. Since the
movie follows the book so closely until the final four words, I knew
all the details. I just had to guess about whether it would have
intrigued me if I hadn't already known all the surprises. It is a
good book, however. It's not without flaws, but it's literate and
has a powerful ending.)
- Here are some new pics of Meg Ryan. (1,
2,
3,
4) These breast shots aren't
such bad quality for bootlegs, but the brief crotch and butt shots
were way too dark to see anything until the DVD appears.
- The Meg Ryan volume of the Encyclopedia now also includes all
the pictures we have from In the Cut
Dogville (2003)
Dogville is the new Lars van Trier film. I
haven't seen it, and probably never will, because although Nicole
Kidman gets raped constantly, there is no female nudity, and it's a
three hour film shot with a hand-held camera, using pretend
chalk-outline doors
for the entire set, like Les Nessman's office on WKRP.
If you're not familiar with Lars van Trier, he has a unique approach to filmmaking. Instead of
learning the technical and artistic skills necessary to make movies
well, he has decided instead to try to redefine what "good" is, ala
George Orwell's newspeak, or perhaps like Captain Kirk reprogramming
the Kobayashi Maru. For example, his concept of social satire is to
retain all the patronizing negativism, without any of that pesky
humor! He is much better as a salesman than as a filmmaker
(although, to be honest, he couldn't be much worse), and has
actually managed to convince many people that he knows what he's
talking about. This film is rated 8.2 at IMDb!
One thing for sure. His motives must be pure. He
sure ain't in it for the money, because there's no way people are
gonna pay to see stuff like this.
Just for fun, here is Rex Reed's scathing review of Dogville:
"Finally there is the abominable Dogville,
a mindless three-hour avant-garde experiment by Lars von Trier
that schematically crosses Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and
Bertolt Brecht’s Mahagonny with all the disadvantages of
the proscenium stage and none of the limitless possibilities of
cinema. A gang of baffled, miscast thespians, including Nicole
Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzarra, Harriet Andersson, Patricia
Clarkson, James Caan, Stellan Skarsgård and the ubiquitous Chloë
Sevigny, all work their asses off trying to inject some kind of
remote coherence into a pretentious, paralyzing bore. Nine
chapters and a prologue played out on a Monopoly board with chalk
marks for doors give Mr. von Trier a chance to exercise a rampant
misogyny and pound home some ridiculous ideas about an America
he’s never seen. Dogville is a metaphor for American greed,
avarice, suspicion and intolerance, and Ms. Kidman’s beautiful
fugitive from gangsters symbolizes the way Americans insult,
enslave and spit on whatever they don’t understand. Under the
guise of kindness and offers of freedom, the town lets her stay
but makes her work longer hours for less pay (like America’s
immigration policy?) By Chapter 6, Dogville turns vicious and
repays her unselfish goodness with rape, betrayal, extortion and
an iron wheel chained to her neck, replacing trust with revenge
because the town can’t live up to its false promises (America’s
foreign policy in action?). Instead of intelligence and
compassion, Dogville reacts to honesty and truth by eliminating
all detractors before their accusations spread (the Bush
administration’s reaction to the idealism of the liberal
Democrats?). In the end, the criminals and capitalists win out
over the oppressed masses, babies are massacred with machine guns,
and shots of American poverty are intercut with air-brushed 8 by
10’s of Richard Nixon. If you make it through three hours of this
naïve bilge without a barf bag, you deserve what you get.
Dogville is like climbing the Matterhorn with a cement block
tied to your back."
Anyway, many thanks to TomKru for giving us our and possibly the
internet's first look at Nicole Kidman in this movie. TomKru reports
that Kidman looked and performed spectacularly.
- thumbnails
- Kidman. No nudity, but sometimes sexy and always atmospheric
collages! (1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17,
18)
Loveblind (2000)
This is a softcore which I have not seen. The captures were done
by The Crimson Ghost.
- Catalina Larranaga (1,
2,
3)
- Kim Yates (1,
2,
3)
- Catalina and Kim together (1,
2,
3,
4)
- Nancy O'Brien (aka Brenda O'Neil, aka Nancy O'Neil) (1,
2,
3)
OTHER CRAP:
-
Defense lawyers tried to convince jurors Friday
that Walter Alexander Sorto should not be executed for raping
and killing two women because he fell on his head from a
coconut tree. Wow - he
saw my favorite episode of Gilligan, the one where Gilligan
fell from the coconut tree, hit his head, and then went on a
murder spree against Ginger and Maryanne. What a bloody mess!
The rest of them held a cute little trial and found him
guilty. Then the professor was able to synthesize a lethal
injection from the juices of mangos. But when they found out
about the fall from the tree, they took Gilligan back up the
tree, pushed him off again, and the second blow to his head
cured him. Meanwhile the professor figured out how to bring
Ginger and Maryanne back to life with a special chemical found
in pineapples. Hey, maybe the same would work for this guy.
Let's push him out of a second tree.
-
McDonald's Corporation isn't amused with
Merriam-Webster's decision to include ''McJob'' as a word in
its dictionary.
According to Webster's, a McJob is a low-paying, dead-end job.
-
what are your dumbest state laws? --
DumbLaws.com has the answers
-
The Big Cartoon DataBase
-
Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics.
How well do movies follow the natural laws of the universe?
-
A little-known government agency: FVZA (The
Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency).
-
Julia Schultz was
the Playmate in February 1998. Here is her free, nude
Playmate Gallery Courtesy of PlayboyPlus.com!
-
Ozzfest 98 - The Crowd
-
Random Insult Generator
-
This is scary. This week, the Defense
Department placed a notice on its Web site asking for 'men and
women in the community who might be willing to serve as
members of a local draft board.
"If a military draft becomes necessary, approximately 2,000
Local and Appeal Boards throughout America would decide which
young men, who submit a claim, receive deferments,
postponements or exemptions from military service, based on
Federal guidelines. Positions are available in many
communities across the Nation." When asked, the Pentagon
wouldn't comment on the notice, and by yesterday it had been
pulled from the Web site without explanation.
-
How Maxim alters photographs
-
Jessica Simpson tapped to develop a series for
ABC. She asked if she
could just work with her brother and sister, Bart and Lisa.
-
Saturday Night Live Transcripts.
This site has 2072 verbatim transcripts of skits from 1975
until last week.
-
The World's Worst Websites
Other crap
archives. May also include newer material than the ones above,
since it's sorta in real time.
Click
here
to submit a URL for inclusion in Other Crap
MOVIE REVIEWS:
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.
|
Oz
|
'Caps and comments by Oz:
"Foul Play"
Foul Play is an enjoyable movie with Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase. No nudity although it looks a bit see-through when Goldie becomes very wet. There's also an upskirt by Rachel Roberts.
"Deeply"
Another wet scene sees a bit of a nipple flash by Julia Brendler in Deeply.
- Julia Brendler
(1,
2,
3,
4)
"Fletch"
Another enjoyable Chevy Chase movie is Fletch and some sexy caps of Dana Wheeler-Nicholson.
- Dana Wheeler-Nicholson
(1,
2)
"L A Story"
The nudity in L A story is a topless Cheryl Baker and there's pokies (and maybe a bit more) by Sarah Jessica Parker.
"Four Play"
The briefest of nipple shown by Mariel Hemingway and Irene Jacob in Four Play, known as Londinium in the IMDB.
- Mariel Hemingway
(1,
2)
- Irene Jacob
(1,
2,
3)
"Sade"
Isild Le Bosco is not the most beautiful of actresses (she reminds me of a young Princess Anne!) but she has a lovely naked body in the French film Sade. Marianne Denicourt takes her top off.
- Isild Le Bosco
(1,
2,
3,
4)
- Marianne Denicourt
(1,
2)
"Scream and Scream Again"
Scream and Scream Again is one of those English horror films and unfortunately the naked ladies are not identified.
"Dracula"
Yet another Dracula movie, this time very sexy caps of Stefania Rocco, Muriel Baumeister and some unknowns.
- Stefania Rocco
(1,
2)
- Muriel Baumeister
(1,
2,
3)
- Unknowns
(1,
2)
"How High"
The topless nudity in How High comes from an unknown sleeper. Pokies by Lark Voorhies and Essence Atkins, cleavage by Amber Smith and sexy caps of some others.
|
Variety
|
Ann Sidney
Michele Breton
Anita Pallenberg
(1,
2)
|
All 3 ladies bare breasts (and Sidney also bares bum) in scenes from the 1970 movie "Performance". Vidcaps by PAL.
|
Lisa Eichhorn
(1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11)
|
Señor Skin 'caps of Eichhorn topless and baring her bum in scenes from the movie "Opposing Force" (1986). To our knowledge, this movie is not available anywhere on DVD.
|
|
|
|