Karate Kid part 3 (1989)

  Man, this movie defines craptacular. It's like they weren't even trying any more. Part 1? Awesome. Part 2? Serene. Part 3? Eh, fuck it. This movie was so bad the executives stuck Ralph Macchio in suspended animation.

Seriously, he hasn't aged. Maybe he should reboot the Highlander series.

Besides recycling the plot of the first one, they didn't even try to pretend to give him a love interest in this movie. Oh, there was a spunky redhead but she tells Danny up front that he's a permanent member of the Friend Zone. They might as well as had him come out to Mr. Miyagi.

If you were somehow fortunate enough to miss this one, here's the rundown:

Instead of going to college, Daniel opens a bonsai store with Mr. Miyagi. The spunky redhead makes custom pots. Meanwhile, the disgraced master of Cobra Kai has been basically living on the streets after being humiliated in the first movie. He goes to visit his Green Beret buddy, who is like the black market Daddy Warbucks, and sobs out his sad, sad tale. Daddy Warbucks immediately sends him on an all-expense-paid trip to Tahiti and sets about orchestrating the downfall of Miyagi and Daniel-San.

Instead of hiring a couple of people to whack Daniel's knees with a lead pipe and calling it a day, he forms this elaborate plot to turn Daniel against his mentor and accept Evil Daddy Warbucks' brand of kung-fu instead, then have a ringer come in to the All-Valley Karate Tournament and publicly beat the shit out of Daniel.

If you're thinking that it sounds like the kind of shit Wile E. Coyote would turn down as being overwrought, congratulations! You are more discerning than the writer, director, and producers combined.

Frankly, it's a terrible film that's only watchable for the parts where Ralph Macchio is beating the crap out of himself under Wario Warbucks' tutelage. The only reason I even own it is because it's part of a boxed set.

Warlock (1989)

Just so you know, I'm doing two posts today because yesterday I had to go underwear shopping for my date. Don't judge.

 This is such an awesome piece of 80's dreck and I love it so. I don't remember when I saw it for the first time. It was before I left home so either middle school or high school. It was on TV and I found myself fascinated by it. I had just started to become interested in the occult and this movie captured my youthful imagination.

Now, of course, as I re-watch all I can think is how hilariously over-acted it is.

I'm a practicing pagan and I have tried to familiarize myself with different cultures' approaches to magic. They actually did a fairly good job in this movie of conforming to early American claims of witchcraft. It was a bit of a stretch but they even worked in some Pennsylvania Dutch folklore, as well. I have to give them credit for that.

For the record, no, you cannot fly if you drink the boiled fat of an unbaptized male child. Can't speak from personal experience but I'm 99.9999% certain that if you tried, you would be violently ill right up until the cops arrested you for murder.

I'm pagan, not retarded. You shouldn't be either. It's just a movie, people.

Although if anybody could do it, it'd probably be this guy:  

Innocent Blood (1992)

  Oh, yes, my friends. This is a vampire mob movie. It's like Goodfellas got bitten by Dracula and this was the misshapen Renfield-esque result.

Anne Parillaud (the original La Femme Nikita) plays the vampire, Marie, who decides to target the Mob after her lover leaves her. Not really specified why her relationship ended but since she has a sexy accent, seems to be allergic to clothing, and likes bondage, I'm going to guess that the problem was on his end. Anthony LaPaglia plays the eponymous character, an undercover cop who is basically good.

Yeah, I had trouble suspending disbelief on that one, too.

Robert Loggia is the mob boss that Vampire Marie tries to take out for dinner. She gets interrupted before she can sever the spinal cord and (in accordance with established vampire canon) Loggia becomes a creature of the night. So does Don Rickles, but he was a lawyer so that's more of a lateral move.

I would definitely recommend this to fans of traditional vampire movies. It's a low-budget film that John Landis made, probably on a weekend in between directing Michael Jackson music videos.

Now that I think about it, it does remind me a lot of Thriller.

Anyway, it's fairly craptacular but entertaining in a WTF kind of way.

Juno (2007)

By now, everyone has seen Juno. If, for some reason, you've been living under a rock or in the penal system for the last five years, congratulations on your good behavior! Now go see Juno.

Ellen Page is one of the best actresses to come out of Hollywood in recent years. She's like a tiny Meryl Streep. Michael Cera I couldn't give less of a damn about, but everyone else in the movie is great. I think it helps that no one looks perfect; they actually look like they characters they're supposed to be playing.

Seriously, Cera plays the exact same character in everything he does. He needs to shake it up a little bit, maybe get fat or something.

I digress. A hitherto-unknown woman named Diablo Cody wrote the screenplay and won an Oscar for it. It was one of the few times the Academy and the public were on the same page. I haven't seen her follow-up attempt, Jennifer's Body, but I heard it fell a little short of Oscar material. It's hard to get lightning to strike twice.

I bought it a while ago but hadn't actually watched it since the theatrical release. I think I was worried that it wouldn't be as good, that I had hyped it up in my mind in the intervening two years. It was extremely popular for a while there and most things that are that popular tend to be worth very little in the long run. Happily, it is an excellent film on its own merits and well worth multiple viewings.

Jezebel (1938)

  This is a pretty old movie and I'd like to be able to say it stands the test of time. It kinda does. At least the first half.

Bette Davis plays a spoiled Antebellum debutante who lives for disrupting her fiance's life. I can relate to that. Going to a dress fitting is WAY more important than some board of director's meeting at your bank. More like bored of directors, amiright?!

Ahem. Anyway, Henry Fonda tells her she's a spoiled brat and in retaliation she wears a red dress to a society event where unmarried women wear white only. This would probably make more of an impact if the movie weren't in black and white. It's hard to feel scandalized when the dress in question is more of a sober gray than a slutty scarlet. The snubbing she gets at the ball, though, rings through loud and clear. As does the grim humiliation on Henry Fonda's face. Brr! So he dumps her ass and moves to New York. Like a good Southern woman, she retreats from society to live in isolation and oversee the running of her house to an obsessive degree.

She finds out that her beloved is coming home to deal with a yellow fever epidemic and decides the most effective way to show him she's a more mature person is to throw a huge soiree at her plantation, away from the city and it's plague-infested people. Surprise! He shows up with a wife. This is where the movie gets really good.

Bette Davis is superb as a bitch and she's so good here, they gave her an Oscar. She flirts with her ex's rival, spurs anti-Yankee commentary just to rile him, and sweetly dismisses the new bride, a mostly inoffensive young lady named Amy who obviously didn't get the memo about her husband's past flame.

If she had stayed completely unrepentant, think Scarlett O'Hara before the poverty, this movie would have been awesome. But no. Henry Fonda gets yellow fever and she decides that she must sacrifice herself to care for him until he dies, on the grounds that Amy is too weak to do it properly. That's where it lost me. There's nothing inherently noble in shoving someone's spouse out of the way just so you can be the last face they ever see. It's staking a claim in stalker territory. Like the next step is stealing the hair from their shower drain so you can make a little doll of them, dressing it in a tux, and tucking it in with you at night. That's just a no.

Jaws (1975)

  I think everyone loves Jaws. There would be something terribly wrong with you if you didn't. I like to watch it while eating tomato soup. I take my crackers and run them through like salted fins every time the theme music plays. Maybe that's just me.

This movie ruined my summer vacation the first time I saw it. My grandmother let me check it out of the local library when I came down for a visit. I refused to get in the pool after dark from that point forward. And we're not talking some sort of cove where you could get an influx of sea water, we're talking white-sided, in-ground, chlorinated, in the middle of Orlando, over twenty miles inland kind of pool. Did not matter. I was convinced that somehow a shark was transported into it as soon as the sun went down. Even the lights in the pool didn't assuage me. There were two, one on either side, purplish and bubble-shaped.

You know that bit in the movie where Quint is talking about the USS Indianapolis and how the sharks come up and their eyes have no pupils, they're more like a doll's eyes, flat and black, so that you don't know it's even alive until it bites you? That turned my skin cold at six-years-old and I could not look at those pool lights without thinking of that description. Fucked me up but good.

Of course, I had an extremely over-active imagination at the time especially for things of a catastrophic nature. This movie cured me of swimming about as fast as the Challenger disaster convinced me that I didn't want to be an astronaut.

As an adult, I realize that shark attacks and space shuttle explosions are extremely rare occurrences statistically and that you are more likely to be struck by lightning while winning the lottery but that's a bit of cold comfort when something brushes the back of your calf on the other side of the sandbar. There might as well be a full string section scoring your sprint to dry land.....before you realize that it was just a piece of seaweed.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984)

  My parents are so lucky I never saw this movie as a kid. I was already weird enough. Giving me the idea that I could be a neurosurgeon/rock star/astrophysicist/action hero would have been a nightmare for them.

Not to mention the wardrobe decisions. I didn't know you could even put those colors together. (Ed. note: you can't.)

The story itself is fairly interesting. Buckaroo Banzai and his friend, Professor Hikita, develop technology that allows a solid object to pass through another solid object by way of traversing into the eighth dimension. Professor Hikita had attempted to do this 50 years ago under Dr. Emilio Lazardo but was only partially successful. Dr. Lazardo got trapped in the eighth dimension, was taken over by an evil alien named John Whorfin, and subsequently locked in a prison for the criminally insane. He escapes upon hearing that Banzai has succeeded and steals the device. There's good aliens, Cold War paranoia, and the long-lost twin sister of Buckaroo's dead princess wife. Don't. Ask. The good guys win and the bad guys get blown up.

The movie has achieved the status of cult classic and for good reason. You could probably watch it a half dozen times before you caught on to all the pop culture references and inside jokes. I don't have the patience for that kind of thing, but I know there are plenty of obsessives out there.

Plus, since the 80's have come back to haunt fashion once again, you might be able to get some couture tips from Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers. (Ed. note: Please do not try this at home.)