BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)

“If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour... you're gonna see some serious shit.”

1980’s California teenager Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) has a pretty normal life. Drunk mom, airhead dad, nerd siblings, girlfriend who actually seems to care if he’s alive or not, a stack of tardy slips and a rock band that’s just too motherfuckin’ loud. The only thing unusual about his life is his best friend, Emmett "Doc" Brown (Christopher Lloyd), is the smartest man in human history. You see, Doc Brown has invented a time machine. And it works too. As long as you got the 1.21 gigawatts it takes to power that bad boy.

Outside of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, BACK TO THE FUTURE is my most watched film. I still remember the magic of seeing it for the very first time as a child and being so excited and so stressed out over Marty’s predicament. And then the entire idea of time travel just blew my mind up!  Watching it honestly changed my life.  And how I looked at the world and the endless possibilities of storytelling.  So, that said, as hard as I try to focus my handsome noodle on it, it’s very difficult for me to look at BACK TO THE FUTURE objectively. To me, it’s one of the greatest achievements in movie history. But, since I am the world’s highest paid movie critic, I do need to be realistic about it and understand that younger audiences probably don’t give two womp rat farts about BACK TO THE FUTURE and think it’s a dated piece of shit. I saw BTTF in the theater last month and noticed some middle-aged nerds dragging their kids along. By the time the film was over, the kids look like they wanted to commit ritual suicide, seppuku, with a bamboo sword.

Dated or not, it’s hard to top BACK TO THE FUTURE for pure 1980’s American storytelling.  If I had a Happyotter Film School, there would be a class just on the first BACK TO THE FUTURE film.  Easily one of the Top 10 Greatest Films ever made.

Part 2 - Back to the Future Part II (1989)
Part 3 - Back to the Future Part III (1990)

MORITURIS (2011)

Fucking awful.

As with most of the stuff I watch, I went into MORITURIS without knowing anything ahead of time. And goddamn it if I didn’t piss a pickle with this motherfucker. The mental and visual torture starts with a completely unneeded opening scene that darn near made me give up on this turkey altogether. Ninety minutes later, I wish I had watched some German in Venice videos on YouTube instead.

Two female geniuses decide it would be a good idea to take a road trip with three creepy male strangers (who definitely don’t give off rapist vibes literally the first minute they’re on the screen) to an illegal rave in the woods. After thirty minutes of stimulating conversations about how the moon can be drawn by drawing a circle, a bear is not a horse and how “the first thing aboriginals learn are names of genitals”, our heroes arrive at their secluded destination. Eventually, around the 56 minute mark…gladiator zombies attack. Slowly.

The idea of zombie gladiators is okay, I guess. Kinda goofy, but whatever, I’m willing to give it a chance. I mean, hey, the skeletons in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS were awesome. But nope, these dudes suck. There’s literally nothing cool about them. They all move like they’re wearing an invisible 1800's diving suit and look like they’ve been evenly sprayed with some kind of fake dust powder. Plus, the kills were silly.

Cast populated with characters that I hated, night scenes that look like they were filmed inside Satan’s asshole, multiple uses of the n-word that should have gone in the trash can along with the multiple rape scenes, cringe dialogue that made me feel sorry for the future of humanity, extremely slow pace, multiple moving corpses (breathing, toes wiggling, arms moving), many nude scenes but it was all mean-spirited and during rape scenes so I'm not posting any of that shit.

Honestly, I cannot think of a reason why anybody should ever watch this film. I wish I never had.  Skip it with a vengeance and never look back.