Thursday

Tuna
"Pray for Power"

Pray for Power (2000) is one I did a couple of years ago. Here are my thoughts at the time.

"Pray for Power (2000) is a stealth film, in that IMDB has never heard of it even though their parent company, Amazon sold it to me. It is a "B" thriller staring Lisa Boyle, and is somewhat reminiscent of the "B" exploitation films of the late 70's in that it has more nudity than the usual direct-to-video thriller, but not nearly enough to be considered soft core. Lisa plays a recovering alcoholic who just landed a Bunnymag cover, and is having troubles with her current boyfriend. She talks about needing space, but the problem is probably more related to her wanting a drink. She, for some reason that is never explained, goes into a strange room in a hotel to pee, and is trapped in the bathroom when a couple returns and decides to have sex on the bed. After the female half uses a nifty nail gun to "tie" his hands to the bedposts, she lets a friend in to kill him. Lisa, of course, hears all of this. After she leaves the room, the killers see her, but she escapes. So much for the first 4 or 5 minutes.

"The killers are out to kill her, anybody she has talked to, the crooks who tried to double cross them, and anybody else they feel the world would be better off without. The millions everyone is after come from a cybersex website, which ups the breast count to a total of 6. We have Lisa, mostly modeling, Laura Kim as the Cyber-babe, and Sue Hirko as the female assassin.

"On the box, one critic is quoted as saying "Lisa Boyle has never been better." That could mean this is a good performance, or that her acting is always this bad. Not that this is a total loss, One of Lisa's ex boyfriends, who is also a photographer, one of the bad guys, and trying to get Lisa back on the booze, has a classic line to her. "Without me, you are just another slut living off her breast implants." I have an excuse for watching this one -- there were no reviews to read first. You can no longer use that excuse. This will probably eventually make IMDB in the low 4s, and is not bad enough to ever gain cult status. You would do well to avoid this film."

I was somewhat prophetic, but overly optimistic. It has made IMDB now, but at 2.0. One of the votes is a perfect 10, and the same person wrote both personal comments. There are no reviews available. It is now on bargain DVD, and is on one of the 10 movie sets I recently purchased. This copy has far more entertainment value than the previous one, however, as it has a feature length commentary from the producer, the director, and Boyle. They spend the entire track trashing the film. My images from last time were not terrible, but they were rather small. Both the old and new are in the Tuna archives.

Boyle is seen topless modeling, and in a sex scene, where we might see the top of her bush. Kim shows breasts and buns in two different scenes as she creates Web porn behind the main action. Kirko shows buns, breasts, and a little bush in the assassination scene, and again in a sex scene. I have to give this a lofty D-, as it is not technically incompetent, and the transfer quality is very good for bargain video.

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  • Laura Kim (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
  • Lisa Boyle (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11)
  • Sue Hirko (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)

    "Body of Evidence"

    Body of Evidence (1993) -- because of the exposure from Madonna, and Julianne Moore, I took a turn at capping this directors cut. As it was recently reviewed, I won't rehash what you have already been told, except to say that it is, in fact, every bit as bad as previously indicated. Couple that with the fact that I am not a big Madonna fan, and you can guess how much I enjoyed watching it.

    Spoilers Ahead

    To give you an idea of just how poorly made this film was, I would like to run through the last few minutes. Madonna is on the stand, with a presiding judge who is a prude and has ruled over the proceedings with a heavy hand. The DA begins arguing with Madonna, and she argues back, but nobody complains. Then Madonna states that she left her previous rich boyfriend with heart trouble because she caught him in bed with a man. The DA counters with, sure, you can say anything you want, because he is not here to defend himself. She says, "Yes, he is." Pan to gay guy in the back of the courtroom, who testifies from the gallery by nodding his head up and down. I am sure this judge would have permitted this. Right. When the jury comes back in, and the foreman reads the verdict, which he has filed out and signed a few minutes before, he says, "We find the defendant," pauses, opens and reads the verdict form, then continues, "not guilty." Did he forget in 10 minutes which way they had voted?

    Madonna then whispers in her attorney's ear, "Thanks. You almost convinced me." What could she possibly have had to gain by admitting her guilt to him? Then, it gets even worse. Following the old rating rule that criminals always had to be punished, Madonna, her attorney, and the doctor who helped her commit the murder are in a confrontation in her apartment. Madonna and the doctor struggle with her gun, it goes off, and she falls to the floor. The white blouse she is wearing is still completely white. The attorney struggles with the doctor, knocking him down a flight of stairs, then notices that Madonna has been shot in the neck. I am sorry, but a gun shot to the neck from 3 or 4 inches away would have put at least one drop of blood on that white blouse. And come to think of it, who did they decide to switch to action film from courtroom drama/erotic thriller for the exciting conclusion?

    End Spoilers

    As a thriller, this is terrible. Even as an erotic thriller, most of the nude scenes were dark, and sometimes shot with strangle lighting and through curtains. I am a fan of courtroom dramas, and this could have interested me where the courtroom developments not nearly as dramatic.For me, this is a D- at best.

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  • Julianne Moore (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
  • Madonna (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21)

  • Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)
    MOVIES:

    I was pumped for Buying the Cow. The female stars are gorgeous (Annabeth Gish, Alyssa Milano, and Brigitte Wilson), and it was said to have extensive nudity. Sounds promising? I thought so.

    It did have extensive nudity, all right, but it's a freakin' wienerwald.  It was that Van Wilder guy walking around naked and doing the Oscar Meyer Mambo for about five minutes of screen time. No female flesh, but it was a pretty funny comedy, especially the Van Wilder guy, who is establishing himself as possibly the top comic actor among the twentysomethings. (Well, at least among the "macho" types. Seth Green (Scotty Evil) is still pretty strong among the character actor types.)

    By the way, Wienerwald sounds like it should be something dirty, but wacking the Wienerwald actually means chopping down the forest outside of Vienna, as in Strauss's "Tales of the Vienna Woods" (Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald).

     

     

    Jack of Hearts is basically an episode of Vega$ with a tacked-on sex scene, but I watched it without the FF. I'm not sure why, but it was oddly compelling for a shoddy STV release. (The DVD doesn't even have a menu!)

    • Tawnya Richardson. (1, 2, 3) She has a nice figure, but the sex scene is lame. Fast cuts, dark, blurry, too much movement, and half of the scene shot through a frosted ceiling mirror instead of pointing the camera directly at the people.

    UPDATES:

    • A massive amount of additions today. The following new volumes were added to the Encyclopedia: Jacqueline McKenzie, Kimberly McArthur, Shae Marks, Chesty Morgan, Luisa Moritz, Carrie Ann Moss, Linda Blair, Selma Blair, Jenna Bodnar, Marianne Basler, Senta Berger, Katya Berger, Bonnie Bedelia, Debra Beatty, and Lee Anne Beaman


    Shameless Propaganda, Part 9:

    Pat Reeder is a guy whose name is not familiar to you, but who touches your life almost every day. He's the guy who writes the jokes that your DJ tells every morning during your drive to work.  He's also the guy who writes those Comedy Wire things that you see on the bottom of this page from time to time. If you wonder why your DJ and the Fun House tell the same jokes, Pat's the reason. At the moment, Pat has a new book out called "Nine Hallmarks of Highly Incompetent Losers."  It's a "reverse self-help" book that helps the reader attain success by avoiding nine stupid mistakes made by failures and idiots.  He illustrates his points with more than 200 hilarious-but-true stories from his syndicated radio service, "The Comedy Wire."

    If you like weird news and dumb criminal stories, or if you've ever been forced to suffer through a boring business/self-help book like "Who Moved My Cheese?", you'll love "Nine Hallmarks of Highly Incompetent Losers."  It earned four stars from Wireless Flash News, and will be in bookstores nationwide next spring, but you can get the jump on the rest of America and get it now through Pat's website.  Cheaper than Amazon and every copy is personally autographed! 

    Click here (http://www.comedy-wire.com/bookorderpage.html) for a book excerpt, Real Audio updates on "Losers In The News," samples of the Comedy Wire and more. 
     

    NINE HALLMARKS OF HIGHLY INCOMPETENT LOSERS

    Chapter Nine: Bend Over Too Far Backwards

    ...Let's examine just one aspect of zero tolerance, the attempt to keep guns out of schools.  Sounds like a reasonably laudable objective.  Most of us would prefer not to be shot at school, or anywhere else, for that matter.  But let's see how far away from the goal we can get by careening overboard like an elephant on roller skates...

    *  School administrators in Jonesboro, Arkansas, suspended a first-grader for three days for violating the zero tolerance policy on weapons because he pointed a breaded chicken finger in the cafeteria and said, "Pow, pow, pow!"  His mother argued that while school cafeteria food might be lethal, it is not a lethal weapon, and his "gun" was "just a piece of chicken."  But the principal replied, "It's not the object in the hand, it's the thought in the mind.  Is a plastic fork worse than a metal fork?  Is a pencil a weapon?"... 

    Perhaps a pencil is a weapon, when you use it to write antigun policies that bend over so far backward, they actually make kids want to shoot school officials...

    But you don't have to assume that everyone around you is a homicidal maniac, just one chicken finger away from flipping out, to go overboard and become a first class noodge and an A-1 laughingstock.  You can also achieve  that goal by overindulging your low opinion of other people's intelligence and assuming that everyone but you is so mentally-deficient that without your constant protection, he might poke his eye out with a fork while trying to eat soup...

    *  The county council in Carmarthenshire County, England, wanted to prevent any confusion about their new road safety rules, so their official rule booklets included definitions of various words which the poor, stupid public might not understand.  Among them were "children," "pedestrian" and "daylight," helpfully defined as "all times other than darkness."  As opposed to "living daylights," defined as "what will be beaten out of you if you keep talking down to people"...


    OTHER CRAP:

    • Shakira falls out of her clothes twice in one night

    • The top toy this Christmas? The Dick Cheney secret lair play set. By the way, have you noticed that with each passing week Dick Cheney looks more and more like Mr Burns from The Simpsons?

    • bin Laden's diary - most of the entries seem to be about Jennifer Aniston

    • Esquire magazine poll finds Reagan to be the "Greatest living American"

    • Your dream is about to become a reality. Provided your dream involves combining Wagnerian Opera with the Jerry Springer show.

    • You know how comics say "that material killed". Well, here's a mafia hitman who always kills with his jokes, Guido "The Goofball" Martinelli. One time Guido had to do a guy at a Chinese restaurant. He stuffed a fortune cookie with a message saying 'Man who shoot off mouth must expect to lose face.' When the guy opened the cookie, he busted out laughing, then Guido splattered his brains like egg foo yung all over the wall. If you believe that story, Weekly World News has plenty more just as credible. Quentin Tarantino should hire their reporters as script consultants.

    • Ethan Hawke loses again. He was nominated for another award - this time for his latest novel, but once again he is the bridesmaid, not the bride. "The prize recognizes writers of the worst descriptions of a sex act in a contemporary novel" Bad writing, bad directing, bad acting, bad fashion. Is there no limit to his versatility?

    • Scoopy Holiday Cheer - the worst Christmas Carol EVER . This guy makes Bill Shatner seem like Pavarotti

    • Ain't it Cool says: New biopic to be made about Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat. Angelina Jolie will "head" the cast.

    • Oh, those crazy Russkies - their latest tourist attraction - experience life in a Stalinist Gulag. Why stop at one little attraction? Why not turn the whole thing into a Stalin theme park? Stalinland. When you come into the park, the guards separate you from your family and send everyone to separate parts of the park.

    Quote of the day, from Mariah Carey:

    MARIAH CAREY blames OSAMA BIN LADEN for the failure of her GLITTER soundtrack.
         The singer insists the record was cursed because it was released on 11 September (01) - the day Bin Laden's terrorists flew planes into New York's Twin Towers and the Pentagon. She says, "The powers that be wanted to gear it towards young kids, and parents weren't taking their nine and 10-year-old kids out of the house the week after September 11 to go to a movie let alone to buy a record. "The soundtrack came out on September 11 and it was a lot to deal with."
     


    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.

    Brainscan
    'Caps and comments by Brainscan:

    Cleaning up after the Thanksgiving Hefmate flood of '02, we got four babes in three movies.

    Tall, angular Christina Kludgeon, playing a clothing-removal engineer in "Good Cop, Bad Cop". Robo-hooters in sight.

    • Christina Kludgeon (1, 2)


    The very last, ultimate, final caps from "Model Solution". Really. I promise. I saved the most revealing for last. Holly Hollywood in the shower, pleasuring herself, and in bed, pleasuring someone else. I know we bandy about the term, gyno-cam, but the first four collages provide a whole new definition.

    • Holly Hollywood (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)


    The incredible, edible Jill Terashita in "Sleepaway Camp III". Were the first two soooo good that they just had to make a third? We get to see Jill's robohooties in the obligatory clothes-changing scene. She is, IMHO, a real babe.

    • Jill Terashita (1, 2, 3, 4)


    Last up is a petite cutie, Kashina Kessler, also in "Sleepaway Camp III".

    This movie really blows, by the way. Example? It starts with Kashina waking, getting undressed (these collages), walking outside in downtown Manhatten and getting her assed chased down an alley and then run over by a garbage truck. And no one else notices. Street's over-run with folk but no one follows the babe and the truck into the alley. You might say, "Isn't that just like a bunch of New Yorkers?" Well, no, it is not. Just about anything else can happen and each will go his own way but since most of us have near-about had our own asses run over by garbage trucks...accidentally... we have a lot of empathy for someone who is being flat-out chased by one. Mofo behind the wheel woulda been dragged out of the cab and set on fire. Director shoulda known that.

    By the way, the tatoo on Kashina's chest becomes important after a while. Why? Don't ask.

    You do get to see Miss Kessler's upper goodies and if small ones are your bag, you are going to be very happy.

    • Kashina Kessler (1, 2, 3, 4)

    Hankster
    'Caps and comments by Hankster:

    Okay, back to the turkeys, today a look at "Summer Catch". This bomb starred Jessica Biel from "7th Heaven". Jessica shows her body in a bikini and a little leg in somewhat of an upskirt. Brittany Murphy (a better actress than Jessica) gives us some decent downblouse. Then Beverly D'Angelo in an uncredited scene (I guess she probably wanted to forget she was associated with this bomb) gives us a little cleavage & leg in lingerie enticing a young teenager. Total nudity = none, too bad, it would have made it more watchable.

    • Jessica Biel (1, 2, 3, 4)
    • Brittany Murphy (1, 2, 3, 4)
    • Beverly D'Angelo (1, 2)

    Variety
    Debra Winger
    (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

    Lisa Blount
    (1, 2, 3)


    Great 'caps by Mr. Nude Celeb from "An Officer and a Gentleman". Winger is topless in her Oscar nominated role, and Blount shows some serious pokies.


    Victoria Silvstedt
    (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13)

    The tall, blonde, Swedish mega-model's complete 2003 calendar. Plenty of topless poses, and lots of leg too.

    Ruth Miller
    (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

    A whole mess o' breast exposure in scenes from something called "Solid Geometry". Links 7 and 9 show us that she's not too shaby below the waist either.

    Rebecca Romijn-Stamos Becca's very sexy strip tease from "Femme Fatale".

    Pat Reeder www.comedy-wire.com
    Pat's comments in yellow...

    "BAD SEX IN FICTION" AWARD WINNER NAMED
    Undress For Success - Tuesday, Britain's Literary Review named novelist Wendy Perriam winner of its annual "Bad Sex In Fiction Award" for the worst-written sex scene. She beat such finalists as actor/novelist Ethan Hawke. A sample of her erotic prose: "She closed her eyes, saw his dark-as-treacle-toffee eyes gazing down at her. Weirdly, he was clad in pinstripes at the same time as being naked. Pinstripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers." The judges said the idea of pinstriped genitalia was original, although they had no idea what it means.

  • It means that character needs to start wearing underwear under his pinstriped suit.
  • The sex was over so fast, maybe those were racing stripes.
  • Compared to her prose, pinstripes ARE erotic.
  • Wearing pinstripes, yet naked...Sounds like Playboy's spread on the "Women of World Com."
  • Ethan Hawke sleeps with Uma Thurman, and he can't write an interesting sex scene?!


    NEWS NOTES

  • In an interview with Diane Sawyer, Whitney Houston admitted using pills, marijuana, alcohol and cocaine "at times," but denied that she is addicted to anything...Other than self-delusion...By "at times," she means "all at the same time."

  • Michael Jackson arrived back in court on crutches and with one shoe. He said he was bitten on the foot by a spider, and it was so bad, "if I showed it to you, you'd be shocked"...They've seen his face: nothing shocks them anymore...It may even rot away and fall off, like when that spider bit his nose!...It was either a spider or a lady bug. Either one would REALLY HURT!

  • Director Guy Ritchie is helping a charity by auctioning off roles in his next movie to the highest bidder...That's how Madonna ended up starring in "Swept Away."

  • An 18-year-old man in Lisbon, New York, went on a family hunting trip, mistook his mother for a deer, and shot her...Somewhere, Bambi must be laughing his head off.