Jason watches the death of Bad Movie Night with RED DAWN and RED DAWN

Yeah, both of them. But I was really there just to make sure Bad Movie Night was really, really finished.

RED DAWN (1984): It sucked. And I've seen it too many times.

RED DAWN (2012): It sucked. I've only seen it once now, and that's too many times.

Bad Movie Night: It's over!!!!

Total Running Time: 392,508

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night and watches MISSION TO MARS

Brian De Palma took a break from imitating Hitchcock to make this imitation of Stanley Kubrick. And his result is absolutely Kubrickian--if 2001 had been sentimental claptrap. He tries so hard to recapture the style of 2001, and in many ways he does and I actually want to like MISSION TO MARS. But he hangs it all on this ridiculously maudlin story which boils down to 'get your ass to Mars because your wife is dead.'

Running Time: 114 minutes
My Total Minutes: 323,800

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night and watches RED DAWN

That would be the original. Not just the original version of RED DAWN, but the original Bad Movie Night movie. This is the eighth time they've done this, but mercifully only the third time I've been there for it. Which means I've already written about it twice before. So fuck it, it doesn't deserve any more words. Not even these words...or these...or these....

Running Time: 114 minutes
My Total Minutes: 323,427

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night and watches ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER

So I started out watching the Oscars at the Roxie. Then I remembered buying, sharing, and drinking waaaayyy too much champagne. Then somehow I ended up at the Dark Room watching ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER. Which was dumb of me, because I already paid good money to see it.

This is simply the worst thing to happen to Lincoln in a theater, ever. Which is a joke I've overused, so I'm officially retiring it.

Total Running Time: 105 minutes
My Total Minutes: 317,386

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night and Watches SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine describes the treatment of Clostridium difficile via fecal transplant (MSNBC article for the layperson.) The next step in the research is replacing donor feces with ground up DVD's of SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN, on the hypothesis that they're basically the same thing.

Okay, that's not actually true, but if you do come across a DVD of this movie, I advise you go ahead and shove it up your ass. Under no circumstances should you let it get anywhere near a DVD player. I am not a doctor, but I do work in the medical field, so I know something of what I'm talking about.

Charlize Theron plays a queen who is so evil, she's made entirely out of crows. No kidding, multiple times she bursts into a murder of crows (did you know the word for multiple crows is a "murder?"), flies away, and then reassembles as some sort of crow-Voltron.

The queen destroys all nature. Except, I guess, crows. I guess they're not part of nature because they're black (shit, this movie is more racist than...me.) But the nature she destroyed is full of creepy trees made of snakes, turtles covered in moss, and fairies that jump out of birds' chests. This did not fill me with whimsy, unless whimsy takes the form of screaming, "Aaaaagh! Kill it! Kill it with fire!" I guess the queen is supposed to be evil because she killed it with magic instead. Or is she evil because she didn't kill all of it?

Snow White is locked in the tower for her entire childhood, where the queen could kill her whenever she wanted. Instead she waits for Snow White to escape.

The magic "mirror" looks like a giant gong, and is not that reflective. It sucks as a mirror, and is not actually hung on the wall. Are they just trolling us at this point?

The huntsman is played by Thor. He was cast so that when he picks up an axe we could make jokes about his Thorax. That got old way too fast.

The dwarves are played by full-size actors either cropped or CGI'd to look small. Bob Hoskins is their leader, and he always looks really sad. I'm not sure if his character is supposed to be sad, or if he's just sad that he's in this movie.

Incidentally, one dwarf dies in battle, but in the final scene there are still seven dwarves. I don't know (or care) if there were originally eight or if Snow White brings him back to life with magic (apparently she has the magic of prettiness that can reverse all the queen's evil. Maybe that includes being shot through by an arrow.)

Snow White is played by Kirsten Stewart. I know it's "fashionable" to make fun of her blank, expressionless face. Wait, did I say "fashionable?" I meant to say "absolutely spot on accurate." I cannot tell from her face whether she's sad, orgasmic, or comatose.

Speaking of comatose, she briefly falls into a coma when she bites the poisoned apple. If she'd taken my advice and shoved it up her hoo-ha and shot it across the forest to the delight of the dwarves, huntsman, and gathered freak-animals she would've been fine. Call me a pervert, but who's got the survival skills here?

I think that's a good note to end on.

Running Time: 127 minutes
My Total Minutes: 311,153

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night and watches TOTAL RECALL (2012)

What the fuck was that!?

Okay, it kept the three-boobed prostitute, but it was just a random cameo that simultaneously made no sense and made more sense than anything else in the movie.

I'm technically going to get spoiler-y here, but I don't care because you can't spoil shit. They never get their ass to Mars. Instead, Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell, stepping into the Arnold Schwarzenegger role for some reason) lives in "the colony" (Australia) and works in "U.F.B." (United Federation of Britain, i.e., the U.K. Or just Ultra Fucking Boring.) To commute every day, he (and thousands of other workers from The Colony) travel through "The Fall." That's a giant tunnel through the center of the earth, with a building-sized transport vessel and a fancy-shmancy zero-gravity part near the center of the Earth.

Blah blah blah...shit happens. U.F.B president/meth chemist Heisenberg plans an invasion of The Colony. But Quaid/Hauser/Bullseye/whoever stops him by...blowing up The Fall. Which destroys the ability for thousands, if not millions of colonists to commute to work, plunging their economy into chaos. But at least he thwarted the invasion, because in the future there's no way to get from the U.K. to Australia without going through the center of the fucking earth!?

Running Time: 118 minutes
My Total Minutes: 310,755

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night--SNAKES ON A PLANE

I want this motherfucking flick out of my motherfucking brain!!!

That is all...or at least it would be. But I have to ask, why were there so many people there?! Were there a lot of people who really wanted to see this? Were they all there ironically? It's the Mission District, but there's a point where hipsterism goes way too far. And this is it.

Running Time: 105 minutes
My Total Minutes: 310,316

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night and watches THE NUTCRACKER 3D in glorious 2D

It doesn't lose anything with that missing dimension, unless the third dimension isn't depth, but competent filmmaking.

Apparently I didn't learn my lesson last year. To make things worse, as part of my 'I-won't-be-a-total-ass-(just-a-half-ass)-at-Bad-Movie-Night' pledge, I watched it sober this time. That was a mistake.

So let me continue to harp on the fact that Nathan Lane...plays Albert Einstein...in THE NUTCRACKER. This is empirically a worse career move than voicing a cartoon animal from Africa that most Americans have never heard of.

Consider this. In an alternate universe Nathan Lane never got famous for voicing the meerkat in THE LION KING. He is basically still a struggling actor, getting enough work to make a living but never being in high demand. This movie is in fact the biggest thing on his resume. He meets with a lot of casting directors and the conversation goes something like this.

Nathan Lane: Hi, I'm Nathan Lane, here's my resume [hands resume to casting director]
Casting Director: Interesting...[scans down the page, then stops] Oh! I see you were in a film version of THE NUTCRACKER, a delightful holiday classic! One of my favorites!
NL: Yes, I'm very proud of that one.
CD: What role did you play?
NL: Ummm...[whisper-mumbles] Albert Einstein.
CD: I'm sorry, I didn't catch that.
NL: Albert Einstein.
CD: Get the fuck out of my office!

Running Time: 110 minutes
My Total Minutes: 308,400

Jason hosts Bad Movie Night--KISS MEETS THE PHANTOM OF THE PARK

Last Sunday night, I had the option of staying at Docfest or heading to Cinema By The Bay for CXL. But like an idiot, I chose Bad Movie Night and KISS MEETS THE PHANTOM OF THE PARK (aka KISS in ATTACK OF THE PHANTOMS) just because they let me sit in the front row and put a microphone in my hand. I repeat--like an idiot.

At least some of the KISS army were there. Apparently the three hosts were the only ones there as Anthony Zerbe fans. Zerbe is, of course, a well respected character actor who plays the villain Abner Devereaux, ride designer and animatronic genius. In fact, he's such a genius he can turn real people into his animatronic slaves just by soldering a single resistor on his neck. And for the record, the stupid part of the movie is that KISS has super powers. The Demon (Gene Simmons) breathes fire. Star Child (Paul Stanley) can...hear what people are saying far away by looking with his star eye? Space Ace (Ace Frehley) can teleport. And Cat Man (Peter Criss) has the power of being a giant pussy.

So that made for a pretty weird night. But I'm proud that I could be mildly funny without being drunk, and I don't think I was a complete asshole. I even refrained from making a racist comment about Ace Frehley's obviously African-American stunt double (for the record, the joke I was thinking but didn't say was, "Look! It's a Hershey's KISS!")

Running Time: 96 minutes
My Total Minutes: 303,669

Jason goes to a special Halloween Bad Movie Night--PIRANHA 3-D

I went out last Wednesday (aka Halloween, aka my birthday) evening. Wanted to see a film that was good. Instead I ended up at the Aquarium of the Bay, the people there were...actually pretty friendly.

Okay, if you don't know the Bad Movie Night theme song, you don't get the joke. No matter, the important thing is for one special night they had a much larger theater, a different kind of audience, and made fun of a 3-D movie with actual polarized 3-D glasses (instead of the blue/red ones, which has been done at least once at the Dark Room.) And that movie was PIRANHA 3-D.

I've actually reviewed PIRANHA 3-D before, and thought I did a pretty good job. But this time I saw it as a post-modern feminism story. The main hero is a woman (Elisabeth Shue.) Nearly all men are either reprehensible (Jerry O'Connell and his crew,) weird (Christopher Lloyd) or a minority (Ving Rhames.) Of Elisabeth Shue's children, her daughter is the preternaturally smart and responsible one, even making fun of her older brother for staring at a chick's boobs.

And that, of course, is the tricky point with calling this a feminist movie--all the boobs. A typical reading would say this is a juvenile male fantasy where women are sexually promiscuous and then get punished for it. But clearly, the audience is punished more than the women (who get to leave the movie.) In fact, it has reversed and subverted expectations by punishing the men in the audience for wanting to look at boobs.

Either that or it's just so bad that I didn't even enjoy looking at boobs by well before the midpoint.

Running Time: 88 minutes
My Total Minutes: 302,170

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night and watches DRACULA 2000...or something similar

I'm not sure how this qualifies as a vampire movie. It's a story of a young man who is bitten by a strange creature and then develops weird powers. And it seems to be a metaphor for puberty, as there are a lot of sight gags about white stuff shooting out of him.

Also, the disk of DRACULA 2000 was bad--we couldn't turn off the director's commentary. And you know how we hate hearing people talk over the movie. So we turned it off and watched SPIDER-MAN instead. Vampire month is off to an even less auspicious start than usual.

Running Time: 121 minutes (note: just counting the running time of SPIDER-MAN, not the ~30 or so minutes we spent trying to watch DRACULA 2000. I don't give myself minutes for movies I don't finish.)
My Total Minutes: 299,525

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night: THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING part 2

And finally, at well past way-too-late-o'clock last night, Bored of the Rings Month mercifully came to an end.

Lots of people commented/joked when the movie first came out about how long Peter Jackson took to end the movie. False ending after false ending after false ending. And that's just the regular theatrical version, not the extended editions which we (like a bunch of dumb-ass hobbits) watched all month (okay, I wasn't there every week, but it still felt like forever. Here's the thing, not only are there about 100 endings in ROTK, but nearly half the movie is in slow-motion. If they just played every scene at regular speed and ended at the first logical ending, it's like a 20 minute short. But no, we need a scene of hobbits jumping on Frodo's recovery bed in slow motion. Because it's...just...that...important.

Running Time: 118 minutes and 15 seconds--I timed it. And that's just for the second half of the movie. And we stopped halfway through the credits, otherwise it would've been another half hour.
My Total Minutes: 298,615

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night--THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS Part 2

Yeah, we all know the movie. No need to rehash it. Instead, I'd just like to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone I offended last Sunday night. I will be good from now on.

Running Time (approximate): 117 minutes (the important thing here is part 1 and part 2 add up to 235 minutes)
My Total Minutes: 298,190

Jason hosts Bad Movie Night: THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (Part 1)

So this month at Bad Movie Night is BORED OF THE RINGS month. All of Peter Jackson's LOTR movies, all in the extended edition. For the rest of the month we're breaking THE TWO TOWERS and RETURN OF THE KING into two parts (like on the two disk DVD set.) I missed last week, when they did the full extended version of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING. Of course, I saw it when it came out and more than once on DVD, so here's what I remember: People walk around, talk about danger, walk some more, talk some more, can't walk there so walk somewhere else...all while wearing silly costumes.

THE TWO TOWERS is a lot more of the same. But now there are two or three groups of characters walking around in different places, plus a dwarf running while talking to himself (as if talking will help him keep his breath.) Snore. And I was pretty drunk while hosting, so I know I said a lot of inappropriate things. But I still maintain that everything sounds sexier in Gollum's voice.

Okay, maybe I was drunker than I thought.

Running Time (approx): 118 minutes
My Total Minutes: 297,953

Jason hosts Bad Movie Night--IMMORTALS

Ummm...so hosting means I get to sit in the front row with a microphone and riff on the movie. It means I pay extra close attention so I don't miss any possible opportunity for humor. And I still have no fucking clue what happened in this movie. While Mickey Rourke's old scarred face was one of the ugliest things in the movie, the whole damn thing was pretty unwatchable. All I'm sure is I'm glad I'm not immortal, because this movie made me want to die.

Running Time: 110 minutes
My Total Minutes: 297,835

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night and watches HARLEY DAVIDSON AND THE MARLBORO MAN

Mickey Rourke month continues, despite all pleas for leniency and appeals to human decency.

The two "heroes" in this nearly action-less action movie are the embodiment of smoking and riding motorcycles--two of the leading causes of premature death. This movie, on the other hand, is a leading cause of wishing you were dead.

Remember when THE WRESTLER came out in 2008 and people talked about how it resurrected Mickey Rourke's career? Like he hadn't made anything in years? Well, check out his IMDb page and it turned out he was routinely getting work the whole time. Granted, he hadn't made a movie that was released in 2007, but other than that he has at least one credit every year dating back to 1979. Many of them small roles, but he was hardly a guy who was lost wandering in the wilderness. I think it was just movies like HARLEY DAVIDSON AND THE MARLBORO MAN that made people prefer to believe he didn't appear in anything.

Running Time: a mercifully brief 98 minutes, although it felt like 98 hours.
My Total Minutes: 297,587

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night and watches NINE 1/2 WEEKS

Mickey Rourke month started last Sunday, and I want to say it started with a "bang," but I'm too sophisticated for a cheap sex joke.

Ah, who am I kidding, this whole movie is a cheap sex joke. Mickey Rourke seduces Kim Basinger, and they have an affair for 9 1/2 weeks. But for them, an affair means blindfolds, tying up, drizzling food, etc. Until maybe about 8 weeks in they finally smoosh their genitals together (on a staircase, like that's comfortable.) Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I'm kind of a fan of the classic interlocking crotches. Maybe that goes back to my childhood and my fondness for jigsaw puzzles. But what am I, a Freudian? All I know is this movie sucked.

Next week, ANGEL HEART.

Running Time: 112 minutes
My Total Minutes: 296,461

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night and watche 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS

Let me begin by saying I never really write about the pre-show at Bad Movie Night, but it featured this, and it was just about the best thing I've ever seen.

As for the film itself, what can you say about this sequel that wasn't made clear by Vin Diesel's refusal to be a part of it? Nothing, that's what.

Running Time: 107 minutes
My Total Minutes: 290,145

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night and watches THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS

And it rapidly made me angry...get it--"fast and furious" = "rapid and angry?"

Ehh...whatever. Here's my impression of 90% of the movie:

Vrrrrrooooom! Vrooom Vrooom ! Vrrrrroooooommmmmm! Screeech!

Then it keeps promising something called "Race Wars," which finally got me interested. But it turns out its still just guys driving cars. Don't tease me like that!!!

Running Time: 106 minutes
My Total Minutes: 289,116

Jason goes to Bad Movie Night and watches ALIEN and ALIENS

Wait a minute, those are good movies! And wait another minute, Bad Movie Night is just one movie, not two!

Well, once a year we do a special birthday night for our hosts, Sherilyn and Rhiannon, who both celebrate birthdays in mid-June. And last night, as part of alien invasion month (and to mock the opening of PROMETHEUS,) we did the classics ALIEN and ALIENS.

Now it can be a problem to make fun of good movies. Luckily, there are many, many long, slow scenes in ALIEN that give you plenty of opportunity to complain about how boring it is. But mostly I was banking on making lots of jokes about "molecular acid." That's right, there's one line in ALIEN where they mention that the alien's blood eats through everything so fast that it's like its made out of..."molecular acid." I've always laughed at that, and I was looking forward to a long 4+ hours of making molecular acid jokes. Sigh....

Fortunately, the nice lady named Rose who was sitting near me made a comment that the chest-burster scene is supposed to be a homophobic nightmare. Now I had thought it was just a scary scene, and maybe a bit about a male fear of pregnancy, but not particularly homophobic. But the chestburster alien is vaguely penis-shaped, and the theory is homophobes are afraid of taking a cock up the ass so far it bursts out of the chest. I...don't really buy that. I think homophobes have enough fear of a cock up the ass without thinking about it coming out their front. And homophobes are generally familiar with the size of a human penis, and know it can't really do that. But then the conversation turned to that guy who died from having sex with a horse, and how you should only be the top when fucking a horse. And then someone made a "pussy" joke about Jonesy the cat, and so we started talking about sex with cats. Anyway, I'd just like to publicly thank Rose for helping me hate that movie.

ALIENS, by the way, is the complete opposite, a testosterone celebration of the phallic might of military power. Guns go bang--a lot! Whatever.

Total Running Time: 270 minutes, because for some reason we had to go with the extended director's cuts of both.
My Total Minutes: 287,943