The Onion Movie

 

2008 satirical news movie

 

Rating: 10/20

 

Plot: America's finest news source with anchorman Norm Archer gives us the news. But Archer becomes increasingly frustrated with their corporate sponsor and its cartoon penguin. Meanwhile, terrorists.

 

I love The Onion, but this came across as a slightly-more-intelligent Not Another Teen Movie which I don't mean as praise. On the one hand, you've got some biting satire (my personal favorite kind of satire), some no-holds-barred envelope pushing that is clever enough to make me want to use all kinds of cliches. And then you've got Steven Seagal punching cocks. Sure, "Taffy? Fucking blacks!" is something that I'm likely to repeat and the most inappropriate time imaginable, and a blue teddy bear nearly converted me into a plushsexual after years of sketchy heterosexuality. And then there's Rodney Dangerfield rolled out to say exactly what you think he'd say. There's clever stuff in here, and I'll always be more willing than most people to support a movie that features scenes with people having sexual relations with a library book return slot, but the whole thing is so poorly paced and clumsily strung together that it's not a surprise at all to find out that this had no theatrical release and was shelved for a few years. Bits went on for far too long, and the attempt to tie it all together with the Archer vs. cartoon penguin subplot never really worked. A wild ending synthesized the chaos a bit, but there was just far too much stupid involved to make it work. And Rodney Dangerfield. 

Werewolf

1996 movie

Rating: 3/20

Plot: Some archaeologists digging around in the desert sands of Arizona discover an odd half-man/half-something-else skeleton. Immediately, they start brawling. One of the men scrapes his leg on the skull of their discovery, and while recuperating in the hospital, he transforms into a werewolf. Later, other characters who already sort of look like werewolves being to show signs of lycanthropy. An evil archaeologist might be responsible.


False advertising! I was so ready to watch Joe Estevez in another award-worthy performance, but he only a minor character in the first quarter of the movie. Oh well. This still qualifies as a really good bad movie. I was really confused by the nationalities of some of these people. What I initially thought was just extremely awkward, stilted acting turned out to be the result of casting the inhabitants of some unidentifiable foreign land, most likely a land where emoting or facial expressions have been outlawed. The woman archaeologist seems either bored out of her mind or confused throughout the movie, and, like Jimmy Stewart or Vincent Price, the simplest tasks seem difficult for her to pull off in a way that makes her look like a normal person. The evil archaeologist not only has a thick accent but also has this strange intensity that makes nearly everything he says laughable. My favorite character is a Santa Claus militia man who gets all the best lines and nearly steals the movie. The wolfman special effects range from mildly humorous to uproariously abysmal. The wolves sometimes look like tiny Sasquatch, sometimes like bears, and sometimes like dollar store Halloween masks fashioned into a kind of filthy puppet. There's also a really weird soundtrack, odd cello music that never really seems to fit right. It's all awfully silly stuff. Just don't watch it expecting to see a lot of Joe Estevez.