HANDS ON A HARD BODY (1997)

I enjoy quirky, little slice of life documentaries like this.  This time around, the slice of life featured is a "hands on a hard body" contest staged by a car dealership in Longview, Texas in 1995.  Now a hands on a hard body competition (as far as this film goes) is where a group of contestants (24 in this case) all start out at the same time with one hand placed on a vehicle.  There's certain rules on how you must stand, regulated bathroom breaks, etc., but the main objective is: whoever can stand there the longest, without taking their hand off the vehicle..wins the whip.  It's honestly a fascinating idea.  Standing there is obviously boring and sucks, but the main thing that fucks people up is the lack of sleep!  These motherfuckers all started out at the beginning of the film talking about their grand ideas and full-proof plans of how they're going to win, but then fast-forward 30+ hours later and they're dropping like flies.  It was awesome.

 

Another thing that makes this film stand out (in a good way) is how amateurish and rough around the edges it looks.  I have no idea what the story is behind this film (I would love to see a full-length documentary about HANDS ON A HARD BODY itself), but it appears to have been filmed for about the cost of a camera or two, some sound equipment and then editing.  It's rough as hell, but that only adds to the reality and desperation of the characters in the film.  I really don't understand why there hasn't been a follow-up to this movie.  Hell, I want a 6-hour documentary about that dude with the industrial air condition unit on his house!

 

Could it have been better?  Oh god yeah.  But is it still worth watching?  Most definitely!  The only real drawback I found to HANDS ON A HARD BODY is it leaves you with more questions than answers and you'll end up finding yourself wasting numerous hours doing online searches and literally daydreaming about the film!  I found myself recently trying to figure out a way to write a fiction story about a hands on a hard body contest, like the one in this film, but one of the characters was actually an assassin using the competition as a cover to kill somebody at the car dealership!

TRASH HUMPERS (2009)

Four yutes, wearing what look to be the Grandpa masks from the original TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, film themselves going around dry humping trash cans and mailboxes and trees and concrete walls and refrigerators and dumpsters and anything else they can clamp onto. They also dance around and destroy shit. At 30 minutes this would have been hilarious, but at 78 minutes it gets old. Especially the scenes where everybody is just standing around doing nothing. There is no real plot or story and the entire thing is made to look like it was filmed on a 300 year-old VHS camera from the 1800's. 

 

I like the bizarre concept and I'm a fan of Harmony Korine, but TRASH HUMPERS comes off as if he's trying too hard to be different. But hey, it is different and that's something. I just wish there had been more substance. Like maybe a bleak underlying darkness running throughout the film. Stuff going on in the back ground that is silently telling a really, really fucked up story and the viewer doesn't notice it until the end of the movie. Or ever. That's just my worthless opinion. 

 

If you like weird cinema, then TRASH HUMPERS is worth checking out.

JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK (2010)

Did you know that Joan Rivers was the narrator of 'The Adventures of Letterman' on "The Electric Company"? Or that she wrote and directed Billy Crystal's debut film, RABBIT TEST? Or that she used to be a writer for "Candid Camera"? Me neither, I just learned all that on IMDb, not in this movie. Outside of the fact that she appears every once and a while on Howard Stern I know very little about Joan Rivers. Her interviews with Howard are always interesting and her commentary about showbiz is engaging, but it seems like she's always promoting something, which is fine. I wanted to learn more about her, so I rented this movie and it's interesting, but I don't think I learned anything outside of the fact that she's a workaholic that seems to be going 50 different directions at once just to support her lavish lifestyle. It was kinda depressing.

The structure of the film is they're just following Joan around for a year. There's up's (winning contest on a reality TV show; still doing stand up comedy) and down's (her play bombed; she fired her longtime manager) and it's all very interesting, but I would have much rather had a straightforward documentary about her career up to this point filled with vintage footage and interviews of her peers and people she used to work with. The highlight of the movie to me was when she spoke about her husband committing suicide! That's crazy. It was a quick mention, but I found that to be completely fascinating and wish they talked about it more.

Joan was complaining a few days ago on Howard about how this movie got snubbed by the Academy for an Oscar nomination nod, but I can easily see why: it's not that interested. I liked it, but I didn't learn anything new and it honestly seemed like it was filmed to be a reality show or something. Worth watching if you're like Joan, but it's not all that great. I was hoping for something more informative and maybe even shocking.

CLASS OF NUKE 'EM HIGH (1986)

"God bless America...limp dick!"

 

Whenever I watch a Troma movie (and thank Satan that's not very often) the only thing that I can think of the entire movie is "Somebody got paid actual money to write this shit?!".  I'm obviously not the target audience for whatever this movie is.

CLASS OF NUKE 'EM HIGH is about a high school next to a leaky nuclear plant in New Jersey. The ooze and radiation causes the students to start mutating with the expected results. For such an promising set up, the movie is a massive letdown mainly due to the fact it looks so goddamn shitty!  It'd probably make a better novel. Also there's way too much time wasted on the normal crappy Troma one-liners and corny humor.

CONEH is better than the stuff Troma would make later on, but it's still shit. The acting is over the top, the violence is silly, the nudity is lame, the special effects are terrible.

Skip it.

Part 2 - Class of Nuke 'em High Part II: Subhumanoid Meltdown (1991)
Part 3 - Class of Nuke 'em High Part 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid (1994)
Part 4 - Return to Nuke 'em High Volume 1 (2013)
Part 5 - Return to Return to Nuke 'em High aka Vol. 2 (2017)