THE WEIRDO (1989)

Well, this movie definitely lives up to it's title. It's weird as shit!!! Imagine if Forrest Gump and Karl from SLING BLADE had a love child. His name would be Donnie and this is his story...

Donnie is dumb as a bag of mentally disabled hamsters and he lives with a nice old lady who takes care of him. He spends a lot of time walking around in the woods collecting crap. There's also a gang of local tough guy's who beat him up every once and a while. One day while out wandering around, a teenage girl wearing leg braces comes up to him and starts talking. Her name is Jenny (just like Gump's girlfriend) and soon they are inseparable. Nothing really happens for a long time, just your standard soap opera stuff (mentally disabled philosophy, clumsy sexual fumbling, priest copping a feel of Jenny, etc.), but yet I couldn't stop watching. The entire time I felt there was something sinister lurking just below the surface...and I was right! During the third act the movie goes from zero to Fucking Nutz in the blink of an eye and it just gets wilder and wilder until finally at the end it blows it's mentally disabled load all over the place! It was awesome! I was laughing so hard my sides hurt. Especially his final act with his girlfriend. Holy fook.

THE WEIRDO drinking game: take a shot every time somebody gets slapped.

THE WILLIES (1990)

[Update 07/19/2022: Need rewatch this film and redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

Three kids are spending the night in a tent, so they start telling stories and they all suck. One story has a woman drying her dog off in the microwave. Another has a fat chick biting into a deep fried rat...wow. Another is about a monster that lives in a school bathroom. Yawn. Finally we get to the big finale and it's the slowest moving story of the group. It's about a kid has an unnatural obsession to flies. Wow.

Skip this turd. If you saw it as a kid back in the day, you might have a nostalgic place for it in your heart, but trust me: this movie did not age well. The only reason to even trudge through this piece of duckbill platypus shit is the small appearance by James Karen.

WHEELS OF TERROR (1990)

[Update 07/19/2022: Need rewatch this film and redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

Despite the fact that I found this on the shelf in the Horror section, WHEELS OF TERROR is not a horror movie. It's actually a made-for-TV movie about a person in a creepy looking car who goes around a small desert town kidnapping and raping little girls and sometimes killing them.

The build-up is entertaining enough (for a TV movie), but then the main character, a female school bus driver, sees her daughter snatched up by the creepy car and she chases the dude for like 50 goddamn minutes!!! It has to be the longest car chase in movie history! Sadly though, a lot of it is slow-motion shots.  Still it's pretty entertaining.

That's about it. When the chase ends, the movie ends. I wouldn't say it's worth buying, but if you'd like to see a 2nd rate rip-ff of THE CAR and DUEL then it's worth.

2012 (2009)

Around 666 trillion years ago the Mayans predicted that the world would come to an end on Dec. 21, 2012. They were wrong. It happened a few months earlier than that. Haha! Stupid Mayans.

Struggling writer John Cusack takes his kids on a simple 1,000 mile (one way) road trip from Los Angeles to Yosemite National Park to go camping. They see a fence that says "Stay Out", so naturally they climb over it and get captured by soldiers. By chance the most important scientist in the universe is there and he's a big fan of John Cusack's novel that only sold 400 copies. He lets them go and within 5 minutes Cusack runs into conspiracy theorist radio host Woody Harrelson who tells Cusack about the coming end of the world.

Back in L.A., Cusack is driving a limo for a billionaire and the billionaire's kid starts talkin' shit Cusack about how he's going on a big ship and Cusack is going to die. Cusack freaks out and tells his family to hightail it, so they steal an airplane and fly around all over the joint as the entire planet blows up.

Disaster movies are silly and dumb as Hell, but that's what makes them so much fun! Plus, they all have the same plot: build up, disaster overload, aftermath. The build up in 2012 was enjoyable (but not really long enough) then the shit hits the fan and you would expect it to be a giant rape party, but strangely enough people are pretty calm and noble considering everything and the kitchen sink is being thrown at them...mega-earthquakes, mega-tsunamis, mega-volcanoes. This movie throws it all out there. I'm surprised some asteroids didn't try to get in on the action.

The story about the family on the run was exciting, but some of the other stuff should've ended up on the cutting room floor. I mean, goddamn, this sucker is nearly three hours long!  All the shit about the President? Trashed. The scientist's dad? Trashed. The scientist's dad's friend's son? Double trashed!!! Come on, this is suppose to be an action movie. All this extra bullshit is boring me.

Oh well, I've said too much. 2012 is fun for what it is.

ZINED! (1998)

Kinda interesting (in a time capsule kind of way) interviews with a few various zinesters talking about the standard zine stuff: how/why they started their zine, expressing their opinions without censorship, troubles getting copies made, love of mail and how it's not about the money.

If you know about zine culture then this will probably be boring, but if you know nothing at all about zines then you might find it interesting. Zines are homemade magazines that people made back in the 80's and 90's. They're a lot like blogs, except you would put in a lot more work and get much less in return, but hey, back in the day that's all you had. I had a zine myself during the 90's and out of the 13 issues I put out I probably sold less than 500 copies total, but it was a lot of fun!

ZINED!, just like most actual zines, is not a good looking documentary. It's all jumbled up with no clear narrative, the video effects are all over the place, there's odd movie/TV clips thrown in for no reason, but it all lends to it's charm. This movie is obviously a work of love and I can't knock film maker Marc Moscato for that. If you can find a copy and you have a spare 30 minutes then I say it's worth a watch. The funniest part was towards the end where some of the zinesters were knocking internet zines as being bullshit. Being made in 1998 I can understand where they were coming from, but it was pretty funny.