Wednesday, March 16, 2011

200 POUNDS BEAUTY (2006)

Hanna has two jobs: a phone sex worker and a ghost singer for a famous pop star, but even worse than her lame jobs is...she weights 200 pounds! Oh the horror. Anyway, because of her tremendous weight, Hanna is extremely depressed and even tries to commit suicide a few times.  Things change though when she falls in love with a music producer and blackmails one of her phone sex clients (who is a plastic surgeon) into giving her a full-body makeover.  Naturally, before going into the hospital (for a year!), she throws her dog off a bridge. Twelve months later, Hanna has now become Jenny.  An attractive woman who weights less than 200 pounds.  Unfortunately, she's even more mentally unhinged than she was at her original weight.

For a light-hearted romantic comedy, 200 POUNDS BEAUTY is alright, but there's some really fucked up shit going on in this movie.  First off, the entire self-worth based off of body weight is straight fucked.  Added onto that, there's zero romantic chemistry between the Hanna / Jenny character and the producer who seems like a violent scumbag.  Multiple scenes where people are randomly punching and abusing one another.  One innocent guy even gets beat up and then falsely accused of attempted rape!  Jenny drives while playing with her phone, then she sees a taxi in her way (stopped at a red light) so she simply closes her eyes and crashes into it!  A stalker (who secretly videotapes Jenny) is smacked around and used as a comedic device.  Three different times Hanna / Jenny's own father gabs her ass.  There's more, but the tossing the dog over the railing thing was too much for me.

Worth a watch, I guess, if you're into this type a movie, but honestly, I would hate to meet any of the characters in this film in real life. What a bunch of self-centered assholes.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

TREMORS 2: AFTERSHOCKS (1996)

Good news: the Graboids are back! Bad news: they only brought along a budget of $4M (the original, 6 years earlier was $11M) and Kevin Bacon is nowhere to be found.  That sucks.

An oil company down in Mexico has a Graboid problem, so they hire Burt Ward, Michael Gross and their new dingleberry assistant/ Andrew Dice Clay impersonator Grady to hunt them down. Thanks to a bunch of heavy firepower, things start off promising enough, but then the worms start mutating into a smaller and more agile land walker that looks like a Chicken McNugget with legs.  After that, things kinda just meander off. Also, the new Graboid mutation don't hunt by vibration, instead they use a heat sensor (much like Predator).

Fun movie, but nothing stands out as being particularly badass. It would have been more fun with a bigger budget, zero crew sightings (instead of, at least, three!), a completely different script and Kevin Bacon still onboard, but you can't have everything. So instead, let's just enjoy it for what it is and be thankful they made a sequel that didn't piss all over the original.

Part 6 - Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell (2018)
Part 7 - Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020)
 

CRISIS (1946)

[Update 03/15/2022: Deleting review. Need to rewatch this film and redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]