DANGEROUS MEN (2005)

"There's nothing I'd rather see than your balls wrapped around your tonsils."

Ehhh, I ain't feeling this shit.  While I do love good bad action movies like DEADLY PREY or  NINJA III: THE DOMINATION, DANGEROUS MEN wasn't cheesy enough to be good bad and it wasn't bad enough to be good bad...it was just plain bad.

Rumored to have taken around 20 years to complete, DANGEROUS MEN is the horribly told story of a woman, Mina, who is attacked on the beach by two bikers.  The bad guys kill her fiancee.  She leaves with one of the bad guys and then begins a MS. 45-style life of killing random men that may (or may not) be sexual predators.  Now remember, this is all told with the filmmaking skills of a middle schooler.  At the same time, the fiancees brother (who's a police officer) is looking for Mina.  He follows and beats up a would-be rapist on the beach.  He later beats up and kidnaps the same dude and forces him to take him to somebody named Black Pepper.  What the hell?  Where already an hour into the movie!  Who the hell is Black Pepper?!  Anyway, so the detective confronts Black Pepper and gets beat up.  Black Pepper runs off, only to attack a blind woman.  As he's assaulting the blind woman, an elderly cop runs up and points a gun at Black Pepper.  The End.

As a teenager, I enjoyed the novels of Harry Stephen Keeler.  The story in DANGEROUS MEN kinda reminds me of Keeler's bizarre storytelling style...except that Keeler was entertaining and this movie is just dumb.  Pointless story, acting that can't even be properly defined as "acting", fight scenes that are simply people pointing body parts at each other, ear-destroyingly terrible music that sounds like an child smashing keys on a keyboard, poor lighting, non-existent camerawork, a guy reading from the script that's sitting on his desk with his lines highlighted, long scenes that served zero purpose, unwanted nudity, a bizarre knee fetish, a naked woman hiding a knife in her buttcrack.

I can see why some people love this film and openly praise it's bad qualities, but, to me, it was just too amateurish, slow-paced and the confusing outweighed the crazy.  Worth a watch for bad movie fans, but honestly it's not that bad.

GHOST WORLD (2001)

"I just - I can't relate to 99% of humanity."

I loved GHOST WORLD. I loved it the very first time I saw it back in 2001 and I think I love it even more now.

After a smile inducing opening credits (that perfectly sets the tone for movie), we are introduced to best friends, Enid and Rebecca, at their high school graduation. Both hate school and all the brain dead conformists that go there. Rebecca is excited about getting an apartment with Enid, but Enid (depressed about life and that she still has to go to summer school for art class to get her diploma) is still clinging (maybe subconsciously) to her childhood and keeps coming up with excuses to not get (or keep) a job. At the same time, Enid and Rebecca jokingly respond to a "missed connection" ad in the newspaper.  The ad was placed by the sad and lonely Steve Buscemi, who is absolutely fantastic in this role.

For the longest time I thought that the first half of GHOST WORLD was one of the best things I'd ever seen and the last act kinda fizzled out, but now, after many viewings and me getting older (and hopefully wiser) I've come to the conclusion that the ending is great also.  It's purposefully vague and open to interpretation (I'm not going to ruin it for anybody who hasn't seen it), but I think that the story takes a very dark turn at the end.

Perfect acting by all of the leads, some of the best supporting acting of all time, amazing set design and wardrobe, a cynical script that still cracks me up, Brad Renfro, masterful direction by Terry Zwigoff, six beef jerkys, many quotable lines, excellent use of "found footage", mirror, father, mirror, a Federico Fellini joke, The Mutilator, great music, nunchucks vs. mop fu, Satanists and quite possibly the single greatest post-end credit scene of all-time.

GHOST WORLD is one of the better things in my life.