THE INNKEEPERS (2011)

Two adults (both with the maturity level of a 11-year-old) are the last two employees of an old hotel that's going out of business. For whatever reason they decide to spend their last few days at work (24 hours a day!) and sleep in empty rooms. There's plenty of empty room because there's only three guests. Nice set-up, I guess, so let's see what happens...

...not a motherfuckin' thing. I've had bowls of Boo Berry cereal that were scarier than this movie. The two hotel workers are both ghost enthusiasts and since the hotel is suppose to be haunted they spend their spare time looking for ghosts. So that means we, the audience, gets to watch them do hair-raising stuff like talking about ghosts, walking down empty hallways, looking at a ghost website and making sound recordings of empty rooms!!!!!! Wow! I hope you can handle that much excitement. Finally some stuff happens near the end, but honestly, it's so goddamn weak it's over before you can even say "This is fucking stupid.".

After the suckfests CABIN FEVER 2 and THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL I can't figure out how writer/director Ti West keeps making movies. Do these turds actually make money?! I like slow-burn movies just as much as the next guy, but goddamn it you eventually have to have something happen! Otherwise it shouldn't even be categorized as a Horror movie, but instead a Drama. A drama about two nerds who sit around talking for 95 minutes and then right when the film is about the end a ghost jumps out. Boo!

Skip it with a vengeance and never look back. If you need me I'll be in my room watching INSIDE or HEREDITARY.

KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL (1952)

[Update 09/27/2021: Need to rewatch and redo this review completely. Just deleted all the screenshots. Going to just restart this whole thing from scratch..as I find time, so expect this disclaimer to disappear around 2037.]

Revenge fueled noir about a police chief forced into an early retirement who nearly gets away with the perfect crime: tricking three wanted men into robbing an armored truck and then "accidentally" spotting them and turning them in for the $300,000 reward. Pretty slick plan and he would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for florist delivery driver John Payne. You see florist delivery driver John Payne is the unsuspecting fall guy in the operation (the crooks use a double of his truck) and immediately after the robbery he's arrested then beaten and tortured for days by the police in an effort to get an confession. It's not until the vehicle double is found that he's released, but by now he's been fired from his job and his reputation drug through the poo-poo in the newspapers. The only thing left for him to do is catch (or kill) the robbers himself...especially since they're sitting on a million clams.

Some of the tough guy scenes are a little dated and cheesy, but the pace is nice, good story, awesome hard-boiled slang and a strong cast: John Payne, Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam, Preston Foster and Coleen Gray. There's also a number uncredited appearances by lesser known actors like Carleton Young, James Conaty, Charles Cane, Lee Phelps (who starred in over 600 movies!!!), William Haade, Howard Negly and Roger Moore...no not that Roger Moore, the other one from the "Three Stooges" shorts and a ton of movies.

Definitely worth a purchase if you’re a noir fan.

HUNGER (2008)

After being so impressed with SHAME I decided to look into the previous Fassbender/McQueen collaboration HUNGER and...

It's alright. The story is about Bobby Sands' hunger strike during imprisonment and his death 66 days later. Interesting premise, but, if like me, you know absolutely nothing about who the hell Bobby Sands is or why he's starving himself to death HUNGER isn't going to clear things up for you. I literally had to pause the film about halfway in and do some quick reading online to figure out what was the story surrounding this film.

HUNGER opens with a cop getting ready for work. He's silent, distant and obviously internally scarred from beating and raping prisoners all day. Next we're introduced to a new prisoner. He's stripped naked, beaten then thrown into his small cell that's been covered from floor to ceiling with human shit by his cellmate. The new guy soon joins in the shit smearing. Finally we're introduced to fellow prisoner Bobby Sands who's is the leader of this cell block full of guys who refuse to wear clothes and like to doody all over the joint.

Stuff happens: cramming things up butts, screaming, spitting, kicking, shit smearing, pissing, maggots, etc., but unfortunately none of it fully explains what all the hubbub is about. All of the performances were powerful (and Fassbender's weight loss was visually shocking), but overall I found the whole thing to be unsatisfactory and slow. HUNGER succeeds in capturing a moment in time, but unfortunately I don't know what the context of that moment is.

CINDERELLA (1977)

[Update 03/02/2021: Need to redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

Absolutely fucking awful. I have no idea why in the 1970's there was a fad of making adult-themed fairy tale musicals, but there was and if CINDERELLA is any indication of what they were like, then I'll never watch another one as long as I live.

We all know the story of Cinderella, so I won't even get into that, it's the same old story...except this time around there's god-awful disco music, a budget of around a thousand dollars, wall-to-wall nightmare-inducing nudity and painfully terrible jokes. Examples: a guy peeling an apple is staring at some females so hard that he cuts his own finger off...ha-ha. Using a corncob as a dildo and when the chick cums, she popcorn shoots out of her snatch...hardy-har-har. A guy says his horse is the most well-trained horse in the kingdom then, as soon as he dismounts, the horse walks off...hee-hee. Or in the most worn out joke of the entire movie: the fairy godmother gives Cinderella a "snapping pussy", so for like the next 40 minutes everybody is making jokes nonstop about "the snapper" or "my snap decision" or "snap, crackle, pop." Good grief.

If you're a mentally disturbed 7-year-old child you might find this adult-themed CINDERELLA to be funny or erotic, but I would hope that the majority of people find the entire thing to be absolute shit and not erotic in the least. I'd have better luck jacking off to a old rerun of "Gilligan's Island".

NSFW images [I will try to update these as well as the ones on this review, when I find the time.]