Sextette is the cruelest motion picture I’ve seen, both to its leading lady and to its audience, neither of whom come away unscathed. In retrospect, the entire movie feels like a pre-cursor to Bobcat Goldthwait’s Windy City Heat, in which the victim is a poor, deluded old woman too feeble to understand how foolish she is being made to seem. It’s a massive assault on our collective dignity that could have been avoided if only one person at the time had the balls to speak the plain truth.

Based on a play she wrote decades earlier, the legendary Mae West portrays Marlo Manners, the world’s most celebrated movie star, who has famously married every man she slept with. Her latest hubby is a pre-007 Timothy Dalton, who has taken her to a very prestigious hotel to celebrate their honeymoon. Before they can consummate their marriage, the two are constantly interrupted by terrible musical numbers (including one with Alice Cooper!) and a legion of Marlo’s ex-husbands, all of whom are desperate to have her back.

Looking at least two decades older than her 84 years, neither West, her castmates nor the filmmakers ever acknowledge the absurdity of the film’s premise, which only makes it that much more pathetic and sad. It also doesn’t help that the thought of she and Dalton actually fucking is so repellent, the viewer cannot help but get anxious every time they embrace — making the film scarier and more tension-provoking than any horror movie ever made. —Allan Mott

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For all of its cultural infamy, Allan Carr’s disco fiasco Can’t Stop the Music reminds us of one important thing: Valerie Perrine really hated to wear clothes. I say this because even though the film was rated PG and she spends most of her onscreen time surrounded by gay dudes, she still manages to somehow flash her moneymakers in front of the camera.

For many heterosexual male viewers, this probably amounts to the film’s lone highlight, but count me amongst the minority who are willing to defend Carr’s folly. For all of its faults (supreme tackiness, nonsensical scripting, Bruce Jenner in cut-offs and a half-shirt, the fact that none of the gay dudes are actually portrayed as being gay dudes, Steve Guttenberg), the film has a cheerful innocence and lack of cynicism that harks back to the old “Let’s put on a show in the barn!” musicals of the ’30s and ’40s.

A fictional look at the creation of The Village People, the film features Perrine as a retired supermodel who decides to use her industry connections to propel her composer roommate, Guttenberg, to the top of the charts. The two of them decide to throw together a group of colorful locals — a collection of “village people,” if you will — and happily discover that they combine to make sweet, if bland, danceable pop.

And somehow the future stepfather of those Kardashian babes gets involved. I’m still not sure why, but it probably has something to do with those cut-offs. —Allan Mott

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Despite spending much of the ’70s at the top of Hollywood’s A-list, you don’t hear much about Ryan O’Neal these days. His great work in such films as What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon and Barry Lyndon seems to have been completely undone by the string of lackluster failures that followed them, as well the fact that all evidence points to his being an utterly worthless human being.

Yet as big of a hitting-on-his-own-daughter-at-his-famous-girlfriend’s-funeral sleazeball he may be, there’s no denying that he once possessed a certain charm that made him a compelling and likeable onscreen presence. Evidence of which can be found in So Fine, one of the early ’80s flops that marked the beginning of his slow decline into tabloid obscurity. The directorial debut of once-promising comedy director/screenwriter Andrew Bergman (whose own career was sidelined by the one-two disasters of Striptease and Isn’t She Great), So Fine is an often funny contemporary evocation of ’40s screwball comedy.

O’Neal plays Bobby Fine, an English professor at a stuffy New England college who is literally kidnapped to work for his father’s (a hilarious Jack Warden) struggling clothing company at the behest of a behemoth loan shark named Big Eddie (Richard Kiel). When Bobby is introduced to Eddie’s hot Italian wife (Lina Wertmüller regular Mariangela Melato), it’s lust at first sight and many amusing complications — including the invention of a revolutionary new fashion style — ensue.

While nowhere up to the level of His Girl Friday or Bringing Up Baby, So Fine is a fun, refreshing return to the screwball formula that promises the sight of Jaws in blackface singing Verdi’s Otello, a brilliantly droll performance by Ed Gwynne as O’Neal’s stuffy academic boss, and lots of pretty girl in assless jeans. What’s not to like? Besides O’Neal being such an epic douchebag offscreen, of course. —Allan Mott

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I fear Out Cold was made just because some Hollywood exec read an article about how “the kids dig snowboarding.” Even worse, I fear that somewhere, out there, one of those snowboarding kids thinks Out Cold is, like, “the funniest fuckin’ movie ever made, brah.”

It’s certainly one of the stupidest, making Extreme Ops look like high art. Destroying the last shred of credibility he had left from Dazed and Confused, Jason London stars as ski resort worker in Alaska. He has a perpetually stoned look, a ridiculous soul patch (redundant) and a torch in his heart for some girl he balled on spring break. London and his friends — any of whom, Zach Galifianakis excepted, could be played by Ashton Kutcher — treat work like a playground and play pranks on each other, like salting up one passed-out guy’s penis so that he can awake to getting blown by a polar bear.

Enter Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors, now with a marquee value of about six cents (give or take). He’s the stereotypical evil rich guy who wants to buy the resort and turn it into a highly commercial tourist attraction. But the boys aren’t going to stand for that! No, they’re going to tell him off, destroy his property, shred powder, smoke weed, listen to Sum 41 and poop in a cup intended for a urine sample! Kids be so slammin’!

I hated everyone in this movie, except maybe Playboy Playmate Victoria Silvstedt. Every ski movie must have a Playmate, but I ended up not liking her either, because she never gets naked. Why? This is a teen comedy set at a ski resort. Have we learned nothing from Hot Dog?

The best part of the movie is the footage during the end credits, where many cast members are shown wiping out violently in the snow. I hope many ribs and hips were fractured. —Rod Lott

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I’ve spent far too much time trying to come up with reasons why I enjoy Grease 2 so much more than its overrated originator. Sometimes I think it’s because I like Michelle Pfeiffer a lot more than Olivia Newton-John, but then I compare Adrian Zmed to John Travolta and that theory goes out the window.

Sometimes I think it’s because I prefer the music, but then I realize I can name so many more songs from the first film than I can from the second. Sometimes I think it’s because Maxwell Caulfield was so dreamy back then, but then I remember that I’m a totally macho heterosexual he-man who likes girls and boobs and stuff like that.

The film itself isn’t that much different than the first one, except in Grease 2, the innocent foreign exchange student is a dude (Caulfield) and the tough-but-sexy greaser is a chick (Pfeiffer). Like his cousin Sandy, Caulfield decides he has to slut it up to get the romantic attention he desires, so he buys a motorcycle and some tight leather clothes. Getting in his way is Zmed, Pfeiffer’s ex-boyfriend and current leader of the T-Birds.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve always been a fan of the underdog and resent how much Grease 2 has gotten picked on since it was first released. Sure, it kinda sucks, but it kinda sucks for all the same reasons Grease kinda sucks, and I’m pretty certain that Grease kinda sucks just that little bit more. —Allan Mott

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