THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER OVER THE SEPTIC TANK (1978)

I've gotta be the wrong audience for this one. For as much as I love old made-for-TV movies (especially from the late 1970's / early 1980's) and enjoy both Carol Burnett and Charles Grodin, I never even laughed once during this "comedy".  Or even came close to smiling.  The entire story is fucking ridiculous and makes no sense.  A single income family (working husband, stay-at-home mother and three children) live in a small apartment in New York City, so, to make their lives better, they move to the suburbs.  Alright, nothing wrong with that, that happens all the time.  Problem is once these idiots move into the house that they had built to their specifications, they automatically somehow still don't have enough room!  And now, the mom (and aspiring writer), who is left home alone during the day time, is forced to set up her small foldout table and typewriter in the garage!  Dude, you have an entire two-floor, multiple bedroom house all to yourself...why are you out typing in the garage?  At the same time, the father complains non-stop about how far away he is from the office and how the commute is killing him.  Well, fuckface, why did you move so far away?  Naturally, to simplify their lives, they adopt a large dog.

There's tons of other anti-funny things going on in this movie like the hilarious moment when the garbage disposal kicks up something and Carol runs across the kitchen and jumps up on the counter or the whole side-splitting subplot about Carol's emotional support relationship with a local stay-at-home dad or the disturbing (I mean knee-slapping) time when the youngest child puts a sign in the back window of the station wagon saying he's being kidnapped! Good times.

Vintage cars, wacky dog montage, a long drawn out scene about the importance of life insurance, Eric Stoltz underused, that one kid from AIRPLANE!, dead script, average acting, unsatisfying ending that didn't resolve anything!  As negative as this review is (and it damn sure is), I'm actually fascinated by this entire movie and why it was even made.  Like what was the point?  Who knows.  I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that love it and laugh their testicles off watching Charles Grodin dump fertilizer on Carol Burnett's typewriter.  I'm not one of them.  

Also, did houses in the suburbs back in 1978 actually have septic tanks?  And in the front yard of all places!  This movie is set in a large, planned suburb outside of NYC (although it looks suspiciously like a pre-POLTERGEIST Simi Valley, California to me), you'd think it would have the infrastructure for a combined sewage system.

TWISTED ISSUES (1988)

"Hey...hey, you got something to say limp dick?!"

"Yeah, fuck you!!!"

A skater is murdered in a parking lot.  Then he comes back to life and starts killing people.

For a homemade movie, TWISTED ISSUES isn't too bad.  Trim off around 30 minutes worth of filler and it would have been much better.  But as it is, there are definitely some interesting moments to be enjoyed.  Unfortunately, to get to those moments, you gotta slog through some dead scenes that add nothing to the film itself...just the runtime.  And considering that most of the vintage advertisement for this film hyped it as an "80-minute movie!!!", that was probably the point of these scenes.

Uneven pace, bizarre lighting techniques that I actually liked a lot (shining a flashlight directly into the actors faces!), tons of distorted random clips of everything from slaughterhouse cow murders to John Waters' POLYESTER, solid acting, a dude using a backwards Chipping Hammer as a surgical device, multiple interesting time-capsule like moments (the inside of an old 7/11; the house party, etc.), old televisions, mediocre rock soundtrack by a bunch of unknown bands that I cannot imagine ever did anything, zero nudity, a little blood, eyeball removing, surrealist storytelling...and one genuinely creepy scene that I loved: a young woman is home alone flipping channels when she sees a channel showing a masked psychopath staring at the camera while standing in her own back hallway!!!  She understandable freaks the fuck out and goes running out the front door only to find him standing there.  Before she can even move, he stabs her all the way through with a sword and then walks through the house and down the back hallway, where he stops and turns towards the camera.  Welp, that fucked me up.  Going to read the Bible extra hard tonight!

Is TWISTED ISSUES worth watching?  Guess that depends on how curious you are about the lower end of low budget filmmaking.  I definitely don't regret watching it.  I mean, it's no THE ABOMINATION or anything, but then again few things are as rad as that.