SnakeEater (1989)

One of my favorite YouTube videos of the moment is "Eat Like Snake", a supposed Burger King Commercial from Japan. My boyfriend introduced me to the odd and surprisingly racist spoof and a few hours after seeing it, while looking for my next movie to review, the title "SnakeEater" immediately caught my eye. As soon as I read the info on it, I was sold. I don't know that it's considered a horror movie, but it is absolutely necessary that I review it. Watch this trailer and you'll understand:




The movie SnakeEater made its assumably sell-out debut in 1989. I'm not even going to bother with actor names, but will say that the "supporting" actors were reused as different characters often throughout the movie so do watch for that. I'm not really sure why they felt the need to recycle these actors as they are TERRIBLE. While watching the opening scene, I actually reconsidered my movie choice, not knowing if I would make it through. Thank God I waited it out. Not only did this movie feature cheesy catchphrases, feathered hair, and a Harley Sportster made into a jetski, it had more masturbation references than I knew what to do with.

The plot of the movie goes something like this: "Soldier" is an ex-marine that was part of a special ops group called the "SnakeEaters". However, Soldier was too much of a rebel to stick to government protocol and spent the opening scene as an undercover cop on a drug bust.



You'll want to pay attention to this scene as it will feature the only bra in the entire movie.



The drug bust turns into kind of a weird sex scene. Maybe I'm being overly romantic, but being in an abandoned, grimy warehouse with a man about to sell me some crack is not exactly on my list of sexual fantasies. I will give them credit for this gem of a line though:

"What do you think I'm going to hide a wire in my underwear?"
"Honey it looks like you got the whole radio in there."

I think this may have been an illusion though as his underwear looked to be the same make and model as hers.



Ooh la la.

Thankfully they didn't show any down and dirty details, but the sneak peaks they did show made me want to take a shower.

But it's a good thing Soldier rigged the entire area with booby traps both Data and Macaulay Culkin would be envious of because low and behold... the sex was a trap (it always is fellas) and two very handsome characters bust in to steal the drug money!!!

Blah blah...

Ok so cut to a girl in a bikini sunning herself on the front of a boat. In the dark. On a boat that can only be described as a motorhome that floats. And it's floating down a river that just may be the same location filmed on "Swamp Loggers". Exactly where you'd take your family on vacation to right? Ugh.

Suddenly, the boat is overtaken by a wild gang of my ex-boyfriends



who steal the girl and take her back to their shack where they lock her in a shed to be reproduced with later. This really upsets the bandits' sister who is used to being the only hen in their henhouse. The boat scene is also the first (but far from the last) appearance of an unnecessary hard hat.

Now, I'm not sure if this is an extremely overlooked mistake in the movie, but sitting right behind the hillbilly shack is an enormous colonial style house. It's fairly obvious in multiple scenes. I would think that having neighbors would prohibit a kidnapping and later multiple homocides. I found other mistakes throughout the movie too, like someone drinking from a ketchup bottle that was very obviously filled with water, and various sound effects for no actions. I think maybe the editors of the movie saw the errors, thought back to the quality of the movie and just said, "ah, screw it".

Anyway, it turns out that the girl that is kidnapped is Soldier's sister. When he gets word of his family's attack, he sets out to find out who is responsible. Somehwere around this part in the movie is where you meet my favorite character, "King", the local marina owner.



King is my favorite because he is always drinking from a brown paper bag and used the word "fart" twice in one scene. He also comes crashing through the boat house on his harley and flies directly into the river.

Ol' Boy King is who we have to thank for the Harley Jetski...



When King presents this horrible defacing of a great Harley to Soldier, he warns that "You'll thank me later". The foreshadowing of this line kept me in suspense until the bitter end. Actually, I think the director forgot to follow through on this line as the only benefit I saw was that 70 miles of river goes by awfully fast when you're on a Harley jetski.

Now it wouldn't be the 80's without a slow motion shot of a woman running through the water in a white shirt, and this movie did not disappoint. I'm just glad that despite running from a band of hillbillies, participating in hand-to-hand combat, being hung from a sleeping bag cocoon, and bathing in a river, she managed to keep her slip-on flats firmly on her feet.

I absolutely LOVED the last scene where Soldier returns to his job as an undercover cop. In fact, I really enjoyed the whole movie. Despite my heckling, I would own this movie. And if there were a SnakeEater shirt like the one Soldier wears available, I would absolutely rock it with pride.

I gave this movie a 23 for the amount of teeth I think the entire cast put together has and for using the phrase "diddling his fiddle".



Unfortunately, there were only two references to a snake which throroughly disappointed me. And for that I give you... "Eat Like Snake"...

"Contact" with Jodie Foster

So last night I watched the movie Contact (1997).



Oh where do I start...

So the movie stars Jodie Foster, an astromer researching intelligent life on other planets. Using satellite dishes, she searches for radio signals in space. Everyone thinks she's out of her melon, until she finally gets a signal back.

01011001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110110 01101001 01110010 01100111 01101001 01101110

Alright, that's not at all the signal she gets, hers was more of a THUMP THUMP THUMP, but if you can translate that binary code, you deserve what it says.

I was very excited to see that the co-star of the movie was Matthew Mcconaughey and that he was rocking a borderline mullet. I was not excited about the love story, unnecessarily intertwined throughout the plot. Come on, I'm a chick and even I was annoyed with it. Why do movies do that? And not only that, but the star of the movie is Jodie Foster. Witnessing Jodie Foster being intimate with another person really made me consider celibacy.

In her defense however, I learned through this movie that she does in fact possess the ability to look female.



After a brief screen appearance from Hitler, chaos ensues and the fanatics set up camp around the satellites. Enter creepy, albino, religious fanatic from Utah (because where else would he be from?):



Turns out, for being such a man of God, the guy's a real dick.

And now the task of dicphering the mathematical message that they receive from outer space. Luckily for them, Mr. Hadden saves the day. Despite Mr. Hadden's generosity in "Ellie"'s work, if I were her I would definitely look into a restraining order and possible stalking charges. Just sayin.

And another thing I didn't understand is if he's so smart, you would think he would know that the "Six Flags Guy" look is not flattering.





(I had planned to do a side by side of the two so you could see how much he really does look like him, but apparently the guy that decodes the message and saves the whole story isn't important enough to have a screen shot of him on google images. Guess you'll just have to watch the movie).

It all came together though, when I realized that the space travel machine that E.T. instructed them to make looked a lot like a carnival ride.



More flags, more fun!!

(I drew that picture myself)

At some point during the movie I wrote the Aurora blog and so I missed about ten minutes of plot, but let's be honest, I wouldn't have understood it anyway.

And then it happened. After a few scenes of science fiction genius... just as I was about to mark Contact in my top ten... it happened. An epic display of terrible plot twist. I will say that the movie did somewhat redeem itself as it went on, but I never did fully recover from my disappointment.

I have to say that even though I disapproved of the ending, I really liked this movie a lot. I like any movie that combines science and religion and defends alternative sciences. There is a great scene where Ellie is defending her research to a panel of snobby investors who call her work crazy and useless. She comes back at them that almost every major discovery in history was at one time thought a crazy idea. Although I am no expert in the field of paranormal studies, I have found myself defending the field many times to professors, scientists, even religious people, and pointing out to them that at one time everyone swore the Earth was flat.

Another thing I liked about the movie was their discussions of faith. Specifically, faith without proof. A quote that I liked was "Did you love your father? Prove it."

There were some undertones of cheese, but it was bearable. Ooh, but bad green screen alert for sure. It also took me the entire movie to realize that one of the main characters is blind. And the ending left me wondering..

Who's Carl?

I would have to give this movie three and a half stars. Three and a half stars connected by a wormhole of death and disfigurement.

It's The End of the World As We Know It.....

What better time to watch the movie 2012 than during a tornado warning in New England? I know, 2012 came out a year ago now. I'm a little behind on the times. On the upside, that means that I'm probably not spoiling it for anyone.

I think the first few minutes of a movie tell a lot about what's to come, so I made a few observations about my initial impressions. Here are my notes from the scenes previous to the title page:

1. Time moves REALLY fast in this movie. It's only been ten minutes, and I've already aged three years.

2. With the amount of insane special effects and CGI I know will be in the movie, I would've thought they'd do better with the font of the subtitles. I know I'm no spring chicken, but the movie's barely started and I already have a migraine from squinting so hard.

3. According to Dr. So and so and Dr. So and so, something very sciencey is going down and it's kind of a big deal. It's also very hot. Something about the center of the Earth turning into a giant easy bake oven. Wait. Maybe it was a microwave. [After watching the movie, I would like to confirm that it was in fact a microwave because it ended up turning the Earth into a giant hot pocket - bursting into flames in some places, still frozen in others].

4. Kindle's come in WAY bigger sizes than I ever imagined. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any video clip or screen shot of what I'm talkinga about so I guess you'll have to watch the movie again.

5. I think my next post should be on research on the paranormal phenomena that is John Cusack. It has come to my attention that he doesn't age.



(Twenty years. TWENTY YEARS!)

Even though I am probably the last person to have seen this movie, I still refuse to give away any portions of the plot just in case anyone is even further behind in the times than I am.

What I will point out is that there were a lot of product endorsements. Every scene seemed to be a commercial for something, at times it was beyond ridiculous.

Case in point, the last line of the entire movie.... "No more pull-ups."

Really?

The only product endorsement I was excited to see was the adult beverage chosen by Charlie, the crazy conspiracy theorist living in a van in yellowstone park. I didn't put together this montage so it has some extra stuff in it, but does show Charlie in all his whacky, science fiction loving, good beer drinking glory.



There were many parts of this movie that made me laugh. I think most were put there intentionally but I'm not sure that they all were. One part in particular happens at the very peak of all anxiety. I was at the edge of my seat, the fate of the world was within seconds of being destroyed... and then the reaction of one man sent me from anxiey to hysterics. All I will say is, when you start getting to that point, keep your eyes on the guy with the glasses, squishing his head.

I liked the nods to certain Biblical stories. The first scene that hints at that made me smile. It reminded me of a certain song by the Staggers. Unicorn. Download it.

Overall, I loved this movie. I wasn't fully prepared for the amount of times I had to reach for a tissue, but in hindsight, I should've seen it coming with most of the world dying. I really wish that I could've seen it in theaters, especially in 3D if that was an option. I normally hate CGI and tend to scrutinize the hell out of it, ruining the movie for myself and everyone around me. But that wasn't the case with 2012. I actually didn't even notice the parts that were done with special effects (which was most of the movie), and didn't find myself questioning it once.

So if you haven't seen 2012, do it up. It's free on On Demand right now anyway, so the only thing you have to lose is the time. All in all, I give this movie two PBR salutes and a two tissue rating.