Evil Bong (2006)
I find pot humor to be the anthesis of funny when it pops up in comedies, so imagine 83 minutes of it. And I do mean imagine, because you shouldn’t waste your time on Charles Band’s Evil Bong, unless you’re 13 years old and just looking for some quick nudity for masturbation purposes. What was Band smoking when he came up with this bargain-basement Full Moon production?
That was rhetorical. Alistair (David Weidoff, looking like Matt Damon with a butt cut) is a college chem major and resident square among a bunch of frat stoner dudes who always say “bro.” According to one of them, the pad they share lacks “a killer bong,” so they order one advertised in High Times that’s “shaped like a woman, bro: tits and a vag.”
When each guy smokes it — only Alistair doesn’t partake — he’s transported to the Club Bong strip club, where the fake-breasted dancers sport carnivorous chests that kill the dudes in real life. (All the movie is set either here — with animated ganja smoke around the edges of the frame — or at their home, which looks like the set of a sitcom threatening to burst into a porno.) Tommy Chong saves the day and runs toy cars up and down said man-made mammaries.
Highlights includes a cheerleader insulting the jive-talking bong (“It looks like an old molden dick. I ain’t suckin’ that shit”), a grandmother type being referred to as a “dusty old vaginal scab,” the phrase “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about” uttered thrice within three minutes. Hey, I didn’t say they were good highlights. You also get cameos from fellow Full Moon characters The Gingerdead Man, Jack-in-the-Box from Demonic Toys, Trancers cop Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) and more, not to mention an end-credit embedded trailer for Evil Bong II: King Bong. I’ll pass. —Rod Lott
After the Thin Man (1936)
The sequel to 1934’s The Thin Man features the return of William Powell’s hard-quipping and even harder-drinking detective Nick Charles and his hot, extremely understanding wife, Nora (Myrna Loy). Like in the first movie, Nick spends the entirety of After the Thin Man smashed while still running investigative circles around the police. To be fair, the story does take place at New Year.
This time, the murder is a family affair when one of Nora’s cousins is accused of murdering her no-good, philandering bum of a husband. The death doesn’t occur until about halfway through the movie, however. The first half is all about re-establishing Nick and Nora’s relationship as they move back to San Francisco after their New York adventure in the first movie. Not that that’s at all dull.
No matter how good your own relationship is, Powell and Loy will still make you jealous of theirs. That’s even more remarkable once the movie reveals just how far their individual sides of the tracks are from each other. The Thin Man hinted at it by showing Nick’s getting reacquainted with old crooks he’d put away, but it really comes into focus in the sequel. As Nick and Nora ride home from the train station, she greets people with big hats and monocles; Nick says “hello” to a pickpocket and the guy who delivers his booze.
That makes it all the more fun when their two worlds collide, and Nora’s stuffy aunt has to ask “Nicholas” (as she insists on calling him) to quietly help the family out. Hilarity ensues (especially in a scene where Nick carries a conversation all by himself in a smoking room full of snoring, old codgers), but like The Thin Man, there’s also a great mystery with plenty of diverse suspects, one of whom is a very young Jimmy Stewart as the Nice Guy in love with Nora’s newly widowed cousin. —Michael May
8213: Gacy House (2010)
A wannabe Blair Witch Project sharted by the hacks in charge of The Asylum, 8213: Gacy House purports to be footage found by the Del Plains Police Department near the remains of the six people who shot it in the abandoned, supposedly haunted home of notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy. They were out to capture, in one’s words, “hokey-pokey usual ‘Ghost Hunter‘ shit.”
It appears to have been made by a fraternity and a sorority during a moment of relative lucidness, featuring half a dozen douche bags who take time out to fuck. There’s also a busty psychic with a trout pout (Diana Terranova, which sounds like a readymade stripper name) who, while performing a spell, conveniently gets bitten on her very large and presumably surgically enhanced breast, which she has to unbutton her shirt to reveal. (Fear not, fake-tit fans: Gacy Ghost later rips her top and bra clean off.)
The paranormal activity here amounts to flickering light bulbs, closing doors, billowing curtains, strange noises, moving bedsheets and EVP instances of “kiss my ass.” Ooh, dat’s spooky! Speaking of speech, Boobs Psychic says, “Put it near your root chakra. … It’s two inches above the groin area.” Some Douche says, “We are gettin’ some kick-ass shit, knowwhatI’msayin’?” Another Douche, Maybe Even the Same Douche says, “Holy shit! Something just caressed my back!” And Yet Another Douche, Quite Possibly That One reasons, “The problem is not that there’s a demon scratching. The problem is that we’re overly tired.”
No, the problem is boredom — so much that 8213 rates a zero. At the 57-minute mark, there’s a scene in the basement where the entirety of the dialogue is: “Shit. Oh, fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Oh, you fucking piece of shit. Come on. Fuck. Frank! Hello, turn the fuck on, shit, come on. This is not a good time. Come on. What the fuck! Oh. What the fuck. Okay! Hey! Fuck. Come on. Aw, fuck this shit. Gaw, fuck. Got it, come on. Why is this — shit. Fuck, man. Fuckin’. Shit. Oh, fuck! Franklin, Franklin, Franklin! Franklin!” Throw some sniffles in there, too.
It could really use a pedophile clown. —Rod Lott
The Last Godfather (2010)
The Last Godfather is intended to be a comedy. It stars and is written and directed by Hyung-rae Shim, who, by all accounts, is quite popular in his native South Korea, even if there’s no real evidence of such here.
See, it’s about this … well, you see, there’s this … ah, to hell with it. I’ll let screencaps from the movie say it all.
You get the picture. —Rod Lott