Deep Blue Sea (aka The Fin Blue Line)
Director: Renny Harlin
Bug rating out of 5: One-and-a-half.
Go ahead, mako my day....
The blurb-guys behind Deep Blue Sea reckon “your worst
fear is about to surface.”
Perhaps, that is, if your worst fear is being trapped in a movie theatre
with a giant, soggy turkey - and make no mistake, this gobbler squeals for
fresh cranberry.
The Movie Snow's Margaret Pommellhorse said it was “fun”
– a great “B-grade” effort.
On Channel 10's The Panel, Aussie actor Jacqueline McKenzie, who
has a small chomped-to-bits part in this waterlogged wasteland, went to
great lengths to let us know what a ‘fun’ movie it is.
Now, maybe I’m just your garden-variety spoon, but I seem to remember
a time when a monster movie was supposed to be scary
The worst part is, it’s not even bad enough to be amusing.
Perhaps my expectations for animatronics, etc, are probably unreasonable,
but given they supposedly spent the best part of $100 million on toe-nibbling
special effects, I still reckon I’ve seen yabbies at J. C. Slaughter
Falls swim more realistically than the baddies in this bazillion-dollar
flopaganza.
The curse of the unmatchable Jaws lays this yawnfest low as action
uberman Harlin (Cliffhanger, Die Hard 2) directs the beasts indoors
... on a floating research facility, no less.
Some quacks, extracting shark-juice in the fight against Alzheimers, find
they need more juice so they build bigger sharks.
Big-heap storm comes and frees the sharks.
Sharks being what they are - sharks – they just want to, well, eat
fucking everybody!
With their enlarged brains and increased intelligence, they decide that
before swimming off and becoming articled clerks, they'll pick off the crew
one by one, until there's so little special effects money left Harlin finally
puts the audience out of their misery with a totally unbelievable but very
laughable above-water action sequence.
While the rubbery sharks at least get their teeth into their roles, their
human co-stars are flakey at best.
The acting is ... absent, with more eye-rolling and exasperated sighs than
a cookin’ episode of Neighbours.
Samuel L. Jackson – looking for all the world like a man who can’t
wait to get to the ATM to make sure he's been paid – takes the cake,
however, for keeping a straight face as he demands: “Just what the
hell did you do to those sharks?”.
At best, this wet effort conjures up all the terror you would associate
with the release of a pissed-off fox-terrier in a boarding house for geriatrics.
Frankly, there's more terror in a glass of Sydney tapwater.
Now, pass the cranberry...........
- Ewan Yamates
You've heard how good the movie is....
now win the CD soudtrack!
The Bug, courtesy of Village Roadshow Film Distributors (who we hope will still talk to us after they read this review) has 10 copies of the Deep Blue Sea soundtrack to give away. It's got 14 rappy songs on it from some of the biggest names on the album.
Here's how to win!
Be among the first 10 Buggers to answer the following question correctly
by e-mail and we'll mail you a
copy of the CD if you're smart enough to include your address.
The question: I agree with The Bug's excellent panel of fillum reviewers that Hollywood should wait:
A. one year
B. three years
C: Till all our grandchildren have died of old age
before making another shark movie.
So, just e-mail us with what you think is the correct answer - A, B or C - and be among the first 10 to respond correctly and a copy of Deep Blue Sea will be on its way to YOU!
American Pie (M)
Director: Paul Weitz
Bug rating out of 5: 3.5
Score and twenty pies
For 10 long years, this publication has eschewed bad taste.
In fact, it would be fair to say that over that time, The Bug has
bitten off more bad taste than it could possible eschew.
It might come as a surprise, then, that we're giving that tacky, childish,
offensive, lavatory humour excuse of a new US teen flick, American Pie,
not just the big thumbs up, but on the recommendation of a special feature
in the latest issue of that excellent student newspaper, the University
of Queensland Union's Semper Floreat, a damned good fisting as well.
Thanks to Semper, we now know how to do it properly.
Okay, so a number of mainstream reviewers have rated American Pie
poorly, citing excessive fart jokes, excessive headjob jokes and excessive
masturbation jokes for their one-star treatment.
But The Bug asks so what if it's a movie about four young jocks trying
desperately to lose their virginity before their high schools days are over?
And so what if it resorts to scenes of a pimply young man socking it to
his long hose, another lad consulting a textbook while dining at the Y,
a pretty young thing giving head with the expectation that her boyfriend
is going to tap her own head and say when, and the group nerd being given
his comeupance – forced to take a very, very runny and noisy shit in
grossly embarrassing circumstances.
We are indeed a sick little society, are we not.
A movie that depicts activities that were/are part and parcel of our lives
gets a going over by the same stuffy reviewers who will probably laud the
next Arnie Swaggernegger/Bruce Willis mindless Hollywood killfest for its
FX as the good guys blow away thousands with high-tech weaponry.
From our vantage point in the feted backwater of fillum reviewing, The
Bug reckons that while few of us have ever cocked a bolt in anger, a
good half of the adult audience at American Pie screenings have certainly
blown one in pleasure; and while most of the women present and probably
a few of the men wouldn't have the foggiest notion as to how the thrust
of a hardened-steel bayonet in the guts might feel, one of the pork variety
is an entirely different matter.
Perhaps The Bug is getting unshockable in its old age, but we don't
find it all that offensive and in fact damned hilarious to watch a callow
young youth fucking an apple pie to see what a woman might feel like (trust
us, there's no comparison - you don't have to cuddle a pie afterwards) or
another try-hard engaged in a spirited bidding duel at the fish market auctions,
not just to get his girlfriend's rocks off so she might feel more inclined
to go all the way, but so that years down the track he won't be disappointed
if that home-delivery supreme pizza arrives with anchovies.
Gosh, I hope no-one from the University of Queensland campus has made it
this far!
Here's the button, just in case.
American Pie has its charms; the four jocks and their girls are varied
in character enough and all likable enough to enjoy their company as they
move towards that first slapping together of genitals in what is likely
to be a rather messy and one-sided moment of pleasure and mental relief.
And Eugene Levy as one of the lads' dad is a delight as he stumbles over
his birds and bees.
This cheeky film maintains momentum throughout and even the ending - with
each jock losing his virginity in quite different ways - is not quite as
repulsive in its American moralising as some reviewers had led us to believe.
American Pie does pose some interesting questions though,
namely:
1. Has the New Moral Right taken over American educational institutions
much in the same way as has happened at the University of Queensland, to
the point where teenagers can get to the age of our American Pie
cast and still be virgins.
2. How can senior male students raised on US porn videos be so oblivious
to one of life's cruel realitities: while it might be fun to be the inexperienced
driver of the pork bus as it hurtles largely out of control through tuna
town, at some stage of the voyage you've got to step down from the controls
and pay more than just lip service to the demands of the passengers if you
want to be paid;
and
3. Do Hollywood moguls go out of their way to find actor lookalikes? Pieman
Jim (Jason Biggs) is the latest in the line of Ben Stiller/Adam Sandler
clones while sports jock Oz (Chris Klein) is Canoe Reeves on steroids with
an acting ability.
The one criticism of a movie about spanking the monkey, yodeling up the
valley and 40 lashes with the Robert Young is the scene where writer Adam
Herz goes out of his way to outgross There's Something About Mary.
Mary's hair gel scene was hilarious; the contrived situation in American
Pie when one of our college jokes ends up drinking a half a cup of Budweiser
turned into a Harp lager with an extra frothy head-job is, well, just too
hard to swallow.
Considering that the shit-drinking scene in Austin Powers Reshot With
More Publicity had audiences either squirming or in stitches, the silence
- almost indifferent - with which the audience at our screening greeted
the poor bastard about to graduate cum laude can be put down to a number
of factors.
1. At least half the adults in the audience obviously do not regard drinking
cum as a stomach-turning event.
2. It was totally unbelievable that a guy about to dump his load could defy
both gravity and hydraulics in time to make a deposit in a beer cup –
even if he wanted to; and
3. These youngsters are going to a public school, not some fancy private
establishment, so it's inconceivable that a sweet young thing taking an
oral statement from her boyfriend wouldn't do the right thing and swallow
all the evidence as well.
- Don Gordon-Brown
Wild Wild West (PG)
Director:
Bug rating out of 5: 1.5
Mecanno Bill
Salma Hayek (above) are the only two good things Wild Wild West
has got going for it.
Shit, what's the chances that intro will get us into trouble with the
word police out at Queensland University?
I'll come back to this review later when I think of a far more politically
correct lead-in.
- Don Gordon-Brown
Big Daddy (PG)
Director: Dennis Dugan
Bug rating out of 5: 1.5
Daddy Fool
Has Adam Sandler's man-child character with the blunt talking, violence-prone
ways and a heart of gold reached its used-by date?
Or was it just the ill-conceived storyline behind Big Daddy that
has caused America's leading film comic to miss the mark so badly this time
round.
While Sandler's pet character - with his anti-social ways, tactless comments
and line delivery as if he's reading them off a cue card at best or making
them up as he goes along at worst - can always garner a giggle or two under
most circumstances, it's not quite the same when he's trying to impart the
same characteristics to an impressionable young boy in his charge.
Sandler is lazy sonovabitch Sonny Koufax, an apparently bright but rather
obnoxious lawyer type (is that tautology?) who can't be bothered getting
out of bed early enough to take his final bar exams.
When five-year-old Julian is dropped off at his door, Sonny decides to adopt
him to show his doubting girlfriend he can make a commitment to something
more taxing than eating his daily pizza home delivery.
A large wack of Big Daddy centres around Sonny teaching Julian how
to piss against brick walls, dress like a plastic-collecting hobo, derail
rollerbladers in Central Park with sticks, try some new chick pickup lines,
smash up food cans to get a supermarket discount and get through school
without ever studying or taking a bath.
Anarchy rules okay, until Julian's pre-school teacher tells Sonny that the
lad's not fitting in too well.
Being intelligent enough to be able to advise all his legal eagle mates
on serious matters of law, Sonny manages an instantaneous 180 degree backflip
and immediately starts doing the right thing by the kid.
To think that Sandler and his co-writers successfully pitched this to some
Hollywood producers!
It all ends up in a schmaltzy, corny, ridiculous courtroom custody scene
involving the most lenient judge in the history of the US legal system.
Among the hooter jokes you'll find Steve Buscemi doing his regular Sandler
vehicle cameo and Joey Lauren Adams, brought in late to play the love interest
when Renee Zellweger wasn't available.
- Don Gordon-Brown
The Haunting (M)
Director: Jan De Bont
Bug rating out of 5: 2
If you've got it, haunt it
The Haunting is one of the scariest movies of the last decade.
It's really scary to think that so much money could be spent mounting
such a lavish, visually enriching and stylist production, yet the end product
wouldn't scare the pants of an ex-Prime Minister.
And there's nothing more frightening than sitting in the dark for two hours
following the antics up at spooky Hill House and slowly coming to the realisation
that:
1. Catherine Zeta-Jones simply can't act outside her vampy, sex kitten,
action type role.
2. Actor Owen Wilson needs a nose job even worse than Liam Neeson does;
and
3. The computer nerds behind modern film FX have this amazing ability to
rescue a struggling film and sink it all at the same time.
You get goosebumps just thinking there might be a sequel.
- Don Gordon-Brown
