Armageddon (1986)

"Armageddon It"!

Fuck yeah! Actually this tape is about the end of the world, which is no laughing matter. Until about ten seconds in, when they get to the psychics. The most famous of these being Nostra-dumbass, the historical cat who could supposedly see the future but actually had the balls to say that when he wrote it down he "deliberately obscured his meaning". How convenient. (Then again, his advocates insist that he did accurately predict the rise of "Hister", whoever the hell that was.) What's particularly hilarious is how all these jokers have a fairly high success rate when they're predicting stuff that occurred up to the point when this documentary was produced, but pretty much a zero percent success rate when they're predicting stuff that's supposed to happened afterwards. Unless Northern Europe and Japan really were destroyed in 1998 and I just missed it. Hey, it's possible. I drink a lot.

China: "Our bad."

In addition to the psychics this documentary also features the ghost of Jesus's mom (who apparently likes to fly around tiny, pissant villages, terrorizing small children), survivalists, Christians, and the Swiss, who have an entire underground city to wait out the end days in that they probably built with all that Jewish gold they wouldn't give back. My absolute favorite though was the "pyramidologist"; these clowns believe that pyramids can do pretty much anything, including sharpen knives and tell the future. They're basically functional retards:

Stupid ducks...

To summarize: all of these clowns are cracked in different, entertaining ways, but the one thing they agree on is that the end is coming soon, so you might want to hit the Sam's Club and stock up on toilet paper now. Any hot chicks who survive, look me up. If it's the end of the world, I want me a harem.

----------
Movies, throttled into submission. The Mr. Satanism Library. Available here.

Arachnoquake (2012)

A year before Sharknado captured our hearts and imaginations there was Arachnoquake, which... didn't. Our movie begins, naturally, with an arachnoquake, one that rates a full 4.5 on the Arachno scale. As any student of seisnoarachmology knows, this almost always results in an influx of poorly-rendered killer spiders that squeak like cartoon chipmunks. Also the spiders are pink, in what I can only assume is an attempt to make this movie appeal more to young girls, one of Syfy's more elusive demographics. Pretty fucking sexist, Syfy Channel. Opposing the spiders: a drunk, barely-employable loser, and Edward Furlong (note: these are two different people). Secondary characters include: Edward Furlong's immanently bangable babe of a daughter, and... no one else of any consequence.

She's listening to Jeremih, but I can let that slide.

Giant spiders are nothing new, of course (at one point, the Syphilis Channel was churning out 3-4 giant spider movies a week), but besides their fabulous color scheme these spiders have a few other attributes that help them stand out from the cluster: they breathe fire (like Godzilla); they can walk on water (like Rik Ocasek); and they have sonar (like Batman) (fuck you, I'm sure he does). There's no plot - just one long, repetitive chase (I'm sure Edward Furlong felt right at home); the cartoon effects are fucking terrible; and, in a slyly racist touch, the two primary black characters are depicted trying to carjack everything in sight, from a trolley to a goddamned boat. Because that's what black people do, right Syfy Channel? They carjack shit. Oh, the producers heard that they rap, too, but they can't confirm this because they never met any black people. Except for Will Smith once. That cat is allight.

What's hairy, pink, and full of poison? What? Jesus Christ, you're disgusting.

----------

Sharks, ghosts, zombies... Mr. Satanism calls them all out, right here.

Pauly Shore is Dead (You'll Never Wiez in This Town Again) (2003)

There are two ways this could have been cool:

1. If Pauly Shore actually faked his own death, and then, after finding out what everyone said about him, revealed he was alive and made a movie about it, exposing their insincerity and hypocrisy
2. If instead of a movie, it was a newspaper headline

Unfortunately, Pauly Shore isn't dead (spoiler warning; and this might be the biggest spoiler of all time because it doesn't just spoil the movie, it spoils your whole day). And he didn't fake his own death either. Instead, this is a movie about what might happen if he faked his own death. So basically it's a bunch of people acting like they think he's dead, except they know he's not, so in reality it's just a parade of pointless horseshit. Talk about fucking lame. In fact, this is more than just fucking lame, or even FUCKING LAME. It's

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that an endlessly irritating, monkey-fucking, scab-peeling, ass-burrowing, diaper-licking, foot-smelling, jizz-leaking, pole-smoking, corn-inserting, leg-humping, biker-bathing, urine-chugging, panty-stealing, rim-jobbing, ditch-rutting, butt-picking, pit-trimming, peat-eating, anus-huffing, wino-spooning, piss-dribbling, booger-rolling, turd-saving, recycled water-chugging, ball-nuzzling, toilet-dwelling, pus-sucking, urethra-targeting, sewage-dipping, pube-farming, cum-scrubbing, oven-cleaning, snot-slurping, poodle-molesting, zit-hunting, suppository-hoarding, penis-sniffing, scat-scarfing, book-burning, blood-letting, hemorrhoid-inducing, bottom-barreling, dickless, brainless, shitless, drip-ass, talent-deficient, dandruff bag cockwipe like Pauly Shore doesn't even get that the number one rule when pulling a prank or a scam is that you actually have to pull the prank or scam. What a sack-lapping, douche-violating... well, you know.

I... I know what all of those words mean, but they make no sense in this context.

What's really astounding is the parade of famous people he convinced to be in this hoax non-hoax cunt ripoff. Sure, a lot of them are addle-fucked has-beens or all-time losers (Rico Suave; that flakey beach bum from the O. J. Simpson trial; the lead limp from Limp Bizkit), but plenty of them are totally normal celebrities, except of course for their decision to be in a Pauly Shore movie that probably didn't even pay scale.

Truly a low point in cinematic history. No, scratch that. It's a low point in everything.
----------
For more Hollywood hate, check out The 100 Best Movies Ever Made ...Mostly Suck, available electronically or in paperback. It's the perfect gift for the person who hates everything.

Starstruck (1979)

One of the most memorable settings in the original Star Wars was the bar on Tattoonine Tatoowien Tat-2-Ween Luke Skywalker's planet, popularly known as the "Creature Cantina" until an entire generation of obsessive-compulsive hypernerds came along and gave it -- and every single goddamned alien drunk in it -- a proper name, while also insisting that every single one of these aliens was of fundamental importance to the central storyline in some harebrained, convoluted way, revealed in one of the 37,487 Star Wars novels (approx. count) published between 1990 and 2010, all of which have been unceremoniously flushed from current continuity by subsequent Star Wars rights holders the Walt Disney Company. Ha ha! Fuck you, nerds.

Eat shit. Eat an entire bucket of shit.

Anyway, the Creature Cantina was so popular that Kenner made a (crappy) toy out of it (it was constructed almost entirely of cardboard and the tears of disappointed children), and it reappeared in the first Star Wars sequel, The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978). (It was official. It was produced. It aired. It was the first sequel. You can't deny this.) What you probably didn't know though is that the Cantina's "bar chock full o' aliens" concept was ripped off wholesale by this show, a goddamned sitcom about a dim-witted space frontier family who runs a space diner/bar/hotel in the far-flung, well-hung future of space, where children eat exploding cereal, tribbles pee in your lap before being accidentally sucked up by the vacuum cleaner, and the main guy forces everyone at his table to say grace, even the aliens, who undoubtedly worship gods of their own and seriously, how insensitive can you get? Of course there's a robot maid (programmed to sound like a British nanny), plus a second robot who looks like the result of a drunken tryst between C-3PO and the short-lived 1970s incarnation of DC's Robotman. And don't be too quick to dismiss the possibility: at one point, Not C-3PO thanks the robot maid for "last night", making it abundantly clear that these robots, at least, are entirely capable of fucking.

And paired off, the two of them are in no way reminiscent of C-3PO
and R2-D2. Who, by the way, I'm also convinced are fucking.

This first (and, thankfully, only) episode begins with auditions for the bar's new band, and it's easy to imagine the famous Star Wars "Cantina Band" landing their own gig in much the same fashion, although for some reason I picture the Cantina Band doing a lot more coke. And who knows, maybe they passed through this place, as it tries its non-infringing best to look like it exists in the Star Wars universe proper: there's a second cousin to Return of the Jedi's Ree-Yees milling around (Christ, just look him up, I had to), plus aliens that look like the Cantina's Rat-Face and Fetus-Head. (I'm sure those are the names Kenner would have come up with, if they'd thought to make toys out of them.)

Ree-Yees' cousin, Rick-Dees.

Later in the episode (the content may have sucked, but these old shows managed to pack a lot of it into 26 minutes) a shady businessdude shows up and tries to steal the family's apple pie recipe (Star Wars!), leading to a clumsy sci-fi fight, but as you can imagine the special effects here aren't exactly impressive, about on par with the music video for Billy Ocean's "Loverboy". Which, come to think of it, made considerably better use of this concept overall. Ultimately, there's little here that Earthlings would consider "humor", although the laugh track, clearly inserted at random, tries its best to convince us otherwise. Starstruck is a horrible, detestable footnote in Star Wars's history and influence, but it's one that's worth seeing, just so future writers and directors will know what NOT to do. Or they could just watch The Phantom Menace.

----------

I know everything there is to know about movies, and I write books so you can too.

Behind the Green Door (1972)

I don't want to drift into "too much information" territory here, but the truth of the matter is that if you could watch my sexual fantasies like a movie, you would claw your own eyeballs out while puking and then, probably, kill yourself. That's why I generally don't watch porn; even the craziest Japanese shit out there is nothing compared to what I can come up with using my very own imagination. Just like they taught us in grade school! Still, if you're really into movies there are a handful (heh) of pornos out there that you have to see. You know, the classics, most of which were made during the 1970s when porn was actually trendy for a while and therethus producers had no choice but to deliver more-or-less real movies that just happen to have hardcore sex in them, rather than a succession of boring sex scenes that last just long enough to get some lonely drunk off before he passes out right there on the couch, dick still in hand, and we come home from the bars and catch him and he never, ever, ever lives it down, not even twenty years later (Rich). The most essential of the classic-era pornos is probably Deep Throat (1972), but Behind the Green Door is a close second and is supposedly infinitely weirder, so I added a roll of paper towels to this week's expense report and decided to check it out.

"I rubbed soap into my eyes until I went blind and I can still see Mr.
Satanism's ghastly, unholy fantasies... My God, so many spiders..."

So, the flick begins with a short order cook taking a dig at the wops before he asks these two cats to tell him the story they promised, the one about about the green door. It seems said cats once went to an exclusive, live-action sex show, that, shockingly, featured, as part of the set design, a green door! Trè tacky. Oh, and the "star" of the show is apparently a girl they saw being abducted earlier that very same evening, that's probably worth mentioning too. It's definitely a creepy setup, but while the chick in question is absolutely beautiful and has an undeniably rockin' bod, she's sporting a truly awful hairdo and frankly I found that pretty distracting. You see? Even white slavery rape porn isn't enough to hold my interest. Another major problem: the live sex show also involves a clown at one point, and that is completely unacceptable, because whether you see them as delightful children's entertainers (wrong) or nightmarish ambassadors from Hell (closer), a clown should be the last thing you're thinking about when you're trying to enjoy porn. Unless you're a child molester, I suppose, or the kind of serial killer who thinks that a demon speaking to him through the neighbor's dog is clearly a unassailable defense for his actions. In fact, I've only seen one good porno featuring clowns, and it involves a whole anus of clowns (it's a flock of seagulls, a murder of crows, and an anus of clowns) cock-blocking a guy and clown gang-banging his girl (you can come up with your own clown-car joke here), who then leaves with them, after which the guy laments "I hate clowns!" See, that's funny. Which is important, because if you can't laugh while you're watching porn, you may very well cry. Trust me, I know.

----------
For (somewhat) more mainstream fare, check out my film review books, available on Amazon and elsewhere, conveniently formatted for your Kindle or vaguely Kindle-like device.