FDR: American Badass!

2012 historical comedy

Rating: 7/20

Plot: Roosevelt fights Nazi werewolves, straight from the history books.

This movie has its moments, and Brian Bostwick and Ray Wise are good as the titular president and MacArthur respectively. Unfortunately, this thing is just so cheap. And I mean "cheap" in every single sense of the word. The effects are cheap--CGI explosions that I bet my son could make and pasted-on werewolf fur. The humor is cheap, a lot of dick jokes and polio jokes that are the sort of thing I hate the television show Family Guy for. And cheap puns. Marco Polio and a play on "debriefing" somebody. This was written by the guy behind that wiffleball movie  I watched earlier this year. Ross Patterson is his name, and he has a small part in this one, too. I think this guy's got some potential as both an actor and a writer, but he's got to learn to channel things and probably mature a bit. He's probably a little too South Park-inspired for his own good. He could also, of course, use a little more money to work with. There's a whole lot of ugliness here, definitely more than laughs. One scene probably typifies this most:

FDR has just had an affair in which his mistress squirted ketchup and mustard on his "tiny little polio legs" because, I guess, they resemble hot dogs. Eleanor pops in and says, "What the shit?" There's a bit of an argument which ends in Eleanor saying, "Tell them a rainbow took a shit on your legs." Now, I could be completely wrong. That might be historically accurate. Or it could just be completely tasteless. Either way, it makes me wonder why I watched this.

Monster Dog

1984 werewolf movie

Rating: 7/20

Plot: Vince Raven returns to his childhood home to record a rock 'n' roll video with his entourage. Monster dogs happen!

Well, I couldn't pass up an Italian horror movie with a very-badly-dubbed Alice Cooper. The monster dog action is bookended with a pretty bitchin' song where Cooper rhymes "Billy the Kid" with "Jack the Rip-per" which, while at the time, I thought was pretty silly is something that I now realize is pure genius. I was really thrown off every time the characters called their van a camper. It must be an Italian thing. The dubbing is terrible in this. It has this weird cadence but perfectly matches the actors' lips, so it must be their actual off-rhythm. At one point, I wondered if the dubbing was making this movie worse than it actually was, but then I remembered what the monster dog looked like. Yeah, it's kind of like how it looks on the poster. There's also a random bloody guy running around who delivers these ominous but vague and ultimately befuddling threats on behalf of the monster dog. I laughed during a scene where he wonders off after talking to Vince Raven and his pals and shakes the bushes a little before Vince casually says, "The dogs must have attacked him." I also liked these giggling werewolf hunters, one who says, "I'm going to shoot him through the heart. . .with this silver bullet. . .that's how you kill werewolves." But that's not my favorite line. No, that would be the excited "Wow whee!" a guy yelps after spotting a tray of sandwiches. Warren Zevon is also in this movie and plays a character who is made sick to his stomach by queers and eventually gets it when he somehow manages to catch himself on fire. One thing I really have come to appreciate in movies is artwork created for the film, and this has a couple good ones:

I've got no clue what's going on in this last one, but if I saw that hanging on the wall of somebody's house, I'd either leave or ask to move in. Or look out for a monster dog!