I saw this movie last night on Netflix called The Discovery starring Jason Segal and Robert Redford. It was weird. It wasn’t a great movie. The “discovery” is made by the scientist played by Redford, and it supposedly proves there’s an afterlife so millions of people commit suicide to get to I guess the next level. It really wasn’t a great movie. It was slow and tiresome, but it really made me think after. I don’t want to spoil it but the end of the movie really affected me.
Speaking of movies that affected me … I discovered Popcornflix, free on Roku, they’ve got a ton of grind-house flicks and generally low budget horror and niche stuff in addition to a pretty wide variety of big name movies as well.
I watched a movie about a serial killer who is a church deacon by day, but also somehow can’t keep a job and is your average beer swilling loser. The movie isn’t very thick on story telling. It tries to get suspense flowing but it never quite clicks. For example, there’s a scene where the killer’s cousin comes barging into his apartment looking for some towels, unbeknownst to him that there’s a dead prostitute in the bathtub, but it comes off more comedic that suspenseful.
The conflict comes when he attempts to kill a girl in his van, but it turns out she was one of his old students from Sunday School so he lets her go. He ends up in a relationship with her that he is never able to consummate and he so he tries to kill her too. I don’t feel bad spoilering this for two reasons - A) I can’t remember the name of the movie and 2) I doubt anyone’s going to watch it anyway.
So he drags her out to his favorite dumping place but she gets the drop on him and shoots him leaving him to bleed to death in the desert. The end. It isn’t even a very gory movie but the charm is in it’s true ickiness. The gritty film, the wooden performances, the odd editing/cuts, it’s like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but without the ability to pull it off.
– I just found it … it’s called Murderlust. How do you not watch a movie called Murderlust? In which case, sorry for spoilering it.
But wait … my strange night of movie watching had only just begun.
Moebius.
Where do I even start with this disturbing, weird fucking movie. First of all, I should say I only caught about forty minutes of it before my Roku had a fit and I haven’t been able to catch up with it yet. It is a very stylishly shot South Korean film with absolutely no spoken dialog. All communication is conveyed with actions and looks. It’s pretty jarring, especially considering the shit that goes down. Here’s what I caught so far. Mother catches Father screwing around on her. So Mother sneaks to his bed in the middle of the night and attempts to caught off Father’s penis, but he wakes up and is able to thwart her. So Mother then goes into teen-aged Son’s room and attempts to cut off his penis, this time successfully. Father comes running into the room horrified and tries to subdue Mother and get Son’s penis back but she – get this – shoves it into her mouth and starts chewing it. But don’t worry … it gets worse. When Father brings Son to the hospital they cut back to Mother who is now sticking her fingers down her throat puking up Son’s penis. Oh, this is an arty film.
When I left off it appeared that Father was preparing to sacrifice his own intact penis, surgically, I assume to donate to Son. I can’t wait to see where else this fucking horror show is going.
Crazy Rich Asians: A date movie with a predictable plot. Well acted, with some funny moments. I really loathe the celebration of excessive wealth and the extravagant lifestyles of many who have it. Singapore is an obscene monument to greed on steroids.
Update … I just started watching *Moebius *from where I left off. I misconstrued a scene. I was wrong about the whole Father donating johnson to Son thing. That would have just made the movie weird.
Little further in now. Nope. I was right the first time. Moebius, for sure.
Ok more plot. Most of act II is about Father trying to guide Son through life penis-less. Son gets caught up with bad kids and is involved in a rape, though he has to fake it. He ends up in prison anyway. Meanwhile Father figures out a way for Son to achieve orgasm with out a cock through pain stimuli. Which leads to a disturbing sex scene, a fully clothed one but disturbing nontheless, where Son is now married to the girl who was raped (since he never really raped her) and she gets him off by stabbing a knife into his shoulder and wrenching it around. They get back at one of the real rapists where she seduces him but manages to lull him into a spot where she can cut of his dick. Moebius. Then there’s a sort of three way with the whole crew and more knife in shoulder cumming. Great movie.
But here’s here it gets weird. Father and Son finally found a doctor that can do a successful penis transplant and Son gets a new willy, but it still won’t work with wifey. Then, what do you know, Mother shows back up and when she gets touchy feely with Son, the ol’ fella rises to the occassion. That’s when Mother freaks out, thinking Son doesn’t have a penis - considering the last time she’d seen it was when she was gnawing on it - so she yanks down Father’s pants to discover it’s his penis that was transplanted and that’s why Mother makes it go up. I swear to God I’m not making any of this up. Still a little while to go in this thing and it have a feeling it might begin to get strange.
Crazy Rich Asians is the most recent movie I’ve seen. I’d read and liked the book, and the movie was quite the rom-com spectacle and a lot of fun.
Agreed. This is why I can’t get myself to drum up an interest in that movie at all.
Based on the first 2 words of the title, you can’t say you weren’t warned. 
MotW: Hearts Beat Loud with Nick Offerman and sort of some other folk.
Nick runs a record store that’s past its prime with a daughter about to go off to college and music ensues.
I can see the elevator pitch for it now: It’s like High Fidelity meets That Thing You Do! Or is it Empire Records meets Chasing Amy? But with the record store set in Red Hook, Brooklyn not Red Bank, NJ and Amy is chasing Amy. All with crappier music.
Let’s face it. This is a good Nick Offerman performance weighed down by crud music. He is carrying the movie. Sure it has Toni Collette, Ted Danson and Blythe Danner but their characters are underdeveloped and underused.
The thing is the father and the daughter make up a two person group. So they use synth loops to fill out the music. Using synth loops for this type (or most types) of music is bad. Using bad synth loops is really awful.
The movie does have it pluses. It’s got a slew of tiny little fun bits. A line or two thrown out here and there that are good. But they are isolated from each other. Not coherently put together.
And, hey. It’s got Nick Offerman in it being Nick Offerman. I might not watch him eat clams like J.K. Simmons, but I would watch him sand oak.
Give it 3 Les Pauls.
I just took a peek at some of my favorite Empire Records scenes. Yeah, that’s how to do a movie about these mythical things of yore called “record stores”.
After something of a drought, a whole raft of movies opened here.
The Predator - A deliberate throwback to the original and the action movies of the 80’s. Unfortunately, it doesn’t capture lightning in a bottle. Despite a capable cast, the characters aren’t sharply defined or very memorable (Yvonne Strahovski is wasted in what is almost just a cameo). The hero isn’t able to fill the boots of Arnold. However, if you are willing to turn your brain off and enjoy the blood (both red and green) flying everywhere, it’s an enjoyable time.
A Simple Favor - I found it surprisingly delightful and twisty. Anna Kendrick makes the perfect protagonist of this black comedy/Gone Girl wannabe (her chirpiness strikes exactly the right tone for a cross-grain character). While the twists are not as surprising as they should be for a dark mystery, they are actually perfect for the winking satire that this movie actually turns out to be (and that’s a twist I didn’t see coming). I expect this movie to make my list of overlooked gems at the end of the year.
Blaze - An outstanding film, but not a great film. Ethan Hawke show he knows how to put a twist on the standard biopic and the cast is uniformly great, with real chemistry between the leads. In the end however, its still a biopic, with all the limitations of the genre. Also, the bio is that of Blaze Foley, an alt-country legend who burned through his career quickly. (At the very least, he inspired this song: Lucinda Williams - Drunken Angel (Live From Austin TX) - YouTube ).
I Think We’re Alone Now - A decent, but not that inventive, dystopian sci-fi flick around the “last man on earth” trope. But it’s got Peter Dinklage and he is always great to watch, and because he’s “the last man on earth” for most of the picture, it’s a meaty part, so in the end it turned out to be an enjoyable little diversion.
I’ve been doing a lot of catching up on old movies that I knew existed, but never saw.
I just watched Mad Love (1935) last night with a surprisingly tolerant Pepper Mill (my wife, who married me, so she’s used to weirdness), Since I grew up reading Forest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland I was familiar with the plot and several images from the film. I knew that it was based on the same story as the 1924 silent [B[ Hands of Orlac**, which is now regarded as a German expressionistic masterpiece, on a par with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and that it starred Peter Lorre. I’d seen the weird shots of Lorre dressed up in the Neck Brace and artificial hands and dark glasses, and I knew the plot.
In case you don’t, both films are based on a story called “Les Mains d’Orlac” by Maurice Renard. A concert piuanist’s hands are mangled in a train wreck and a brilliant surgeon is able to replace them by grafting on the hands of an executed murderer. (Not remotely possible at the time, of course, although the operation is now safely performed – I know a guy who had it done). He finds that he can’t play the piano well anymore, but his hands can expertly throw knives, and seem to want to kill of their own volition. The story has been stolen numerous times, and even appeared in an episode of The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror”, with Homer getting an Evil Hair Transplant.
Anyway, the story had great potential, as the reputation of the 1924 original makes clear. But this version was made by MGM, which never was as good at horror as Universal. You can clearly see the clumsy hand of studio chiefs at every stage of the production, too scared that audiences won’t accept the story, or have to be cajoled into liking it. The result is a real mess.
You can see the What Might Have Beens – there are some gorgeously cinematic shots, as when the housekeeper answers the phone, and all you see is her grotesquely elongated shadow on the wall. Or the aforementioned shot of Lorre dressed in a pulled-down hat, neck brace, dark glasses, and (false) prosthetic hands.
Begin with the casting. It’s the first American film of Peter Lorre, who came to the Us expecting to play Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. They made him do this film first. He’s bald as a cue ball, and his eyes bug extraordinarily out of his head, giving him an extremely weird appearance. Apparently they urged him to repeat his style from Fritz Lang’s film M, but in that film he was an ordinary man who was secretly a child molester and murderer. In this film, you can’t help thinking the weird Dr, Gogol is up to something.
Colin Clive, the original Henry Frankenstein from the first two Universal Frankenstein films, here plays the pianist Orlac, and he seems as whiney as he was as Frankenstein.
The murderer, Rollo, is made out to be an American who, for some reason, carried out his crimes in France (all the other characters – except one – are supposed to be French, and the story is set in France). He’s played by the guy who would go on to provide the voice for Timothy the Mouse in Walt Disney’s Dumbo.
Finally, there’s to worst piece of casting. Ted Healy plays a reporter named Reagan. Ted Healy is the guy that the Three Stogges were stooges to, originally, before they split from Healy and went on to greater fame and success. Healy plays a particularly annoying and very American reporter. (He and Rollo hit it off very well). He seems to have wandered in from some other movie. Indeed, there’s nothing like him in the other film versions of the story. You get the idea that the Pwers That Be introduced him so that the American audience would have someone they could identify with in the film. Except that I had no interest in identifying with Healy.
The story starts out in a French theater that is obviously supposed to be the Grand Guignol of Paris, with its intentionally creepy and bloody shows. They try to convey a sense of this, but they’re clearly pulling back and not depicting things as the real GG would have shown them. The torture scenes only hinted at in Mad Love would have been explicitly shown in the real GG theater.
Anyway, Lorre’s Dr. Gogol has fallen madly in love with the star of the show, unbelievably unaware that she is married to the pianist Orlac. She knows of his infatuation – everyone does – but not that he doesn’t know she’s married. When he finds out, but persists, the film gets seriously creepy. Gogol consoles himself with buying a wax replica of the actress and serenading it at night in his roms. When Orlac has his accident, she throws herself at Gogol, begging that he operate. He does, without, amazingly, requiring anything of the actress.
This whole obsession subplot seems to be unique to this version of the story. Everybody else was satisfied with the whole “Hands of a Murderer” plot, without the “Doctor has designs on the pianist’s wife” thing.
Anyway, the treatments are expensive, and soon the Orlacs are broke. (You’d think that, since Gogol is obsessed not only with being thought a genius, and with Ms. Orlac, that he’d cut them some slack in financing. Or at least that he’d demand sexual favors from Ms. Orlac. Today, such an operation would be done at reduced cost simply for publicity and to show it could be done. ) Orlac can’t play up to his original level, but, heck, you’d think people would come even to hear him play “Chopsticks”. And what about his vaunted skill as a composer?
But the plot demanded that Orlac be almost destitute, so that he can ask for money from his father, who hate him for becoming a world-famous pianist instead of going into the family business. (There just no pleasing some people.) He refuses. Orlac’s knife-throwing hand throws a knife at his father, but misses. Later, his father turns up dead, stabbed with a knife. Rollo’s fingerprints are on the knife, but they’re also on Orlac’s hands, now.
Things look grim for him, now, but Gogol starts to go really mad now, botching an operation that his subordinate has to finish (the subordinate is played by actor Keye Luke. It’s heartening to see an actor of Asian ancestry playing a skilled surgeon, but we never see him without his surgical mask on.) He’s hearing voices. Gogol sends an anonymous message to Orlac that he has something to tell him. Orlac meets Gogol (not knowing it’s him) in a room in a bar. Gogol whispers that he knows about Orlac’s hands, using a whispering voice so he doesn’t reveal his identity. He says that he is himself Rollo, who had been executed on the guillotine, and that Orlac now has his hands. He shows him (false) prosthetic hands, then opens his coat to reveal a neck brace that is keeping his tyransplanted head on its torso. Orlac is seriously freaked, and now believes that HE unknowingly killed his father.
Things get even worse when Ms. Orlac discovers that Gogol has been keeping a wax figure of her in his room. She takes the place of the figure, and Gogol confesses his crime to his wax dummy. When she moves, he believes that she has, like Galatea, come to life. But his voices tell him he must “Kill the Thing he Loves”, and he starts to strangle her with her own hair. Orlac and others hear her scream and try to break in, but the door is locked. Orlac kills Gogol with a thrown knife (the one time in this film when a knife, thrown by what are supposed to be expert hands,actually hits what it was thrown at)
A real mess of a film. There were at least three screenwriters, the last of them being John Balderston, the guy who rewrote Hamilton Deane’s “Dracula” for Broadway, and later did the movie script. He also wrote “THe Mummy” for Universal and had a hand in “Frankenstein” But he couldn’t save this mess.
Pepper Mill’s comment was the same as for an earlier MGm release (made back when they were First National) – Doctor X. “They had no idea what kind of film they were making”. Just so. Is it a horror film about transplanted hands with a mind of their own? Or a film about a conflicted surgeon saving the hands of a man whose woman had spurned him? Or is it a Ted Healy comedy?
Oh, yeah – I’ve always had an odd feeling about the story. When I was a kid, I took piano lessons. My teacher’s name was Mrs. Orlac.
Whoa, that’s quite a coincidence. Although if I played the piano I’d be tempted to change my name to Orlac.
My contribution is the recent remake of Murder on the Orient Express. I give it a big “glad I saw it for free on HBO”.
Director/star Kenneth Branagh goes heavy on artsy-for-no-reason camera placement. But my complaints are really with Agatha Christie, rather than Branagh’s adaptation. I love the genre, but this was a really weak example.
Seriously? They all did it? Weak. And Poirot’s unraveling of everyone’s cover story, to deduce that everyone on the train had a connection to the victim and the victim’s past unpunished crime…bordered on magic and telepathy.
The final scene looks longingly towards a sequel based on “Death on the Nile” but given the tepid reaction to this one, I’d say that’s not likely.
I caught the flick last night - I’m not quite so critical of it. I thought it was fun enough. I liked that the characters weren’t just straight up clones of their original counterparts and the effects were pretty cool, for the type of movie it was. I bought The Ghostbusters video game on a lark a few years ago, and this movie reminded me of that style and vibe.
Eh, it was ok. I’ll probably watch it again sometime.
Seriously? They all did it? Weak. And Poirot’s unraveling of everyone’s cover story, to deduce that everyone on the train had a connection to the victim and the victim’s past unpunished crime…bordered on magic and telepathy.
When I was watching this with Pepper Mill we imagined the stabbing scene with the recent cast, but played out as if in the 1974 version. Each person comes up to stab Johnny Depp
“That is for The Lone Ranger… and THAT is for The Mad Hatter – TWICE! … And THIS is for Willy Wonka!..THIS (stabbing four times) is for Captain Jack Sparrow!.. and This is for FRom Hell. I Wish I WERE Jack the Ripper!”
Finally Kenneth Branaugh takes up the knife as Hercule Poirot
“And THIS is for Mortdecai! Whoever told you that you could play a character with a RIDICULOUS mustache?”
My most recent five:
What’s Up, Tiger Lily?
Woody Allen’s mashup of Japanese spy movies, with silly dialogue substituted for the original words. Sixties Japan’s answer to 007 goes hunting for the world’s greatest egg salad recipe. Pretty funny.
Hitler’s Hollywood
Interesting documentary about Goebbels’s cinematic propaganda machine, which churned out anti-Semitic films, romances, military adventures and costume dramas until just weeks before the fall of Berlin.
First Reformed
A dark, powerful drama about the priest of a failing parish whose faith is shaken when an environmental activist he is counseling commits suicide. Ethan Hawke is outstanding as the priest.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Saw a beautifully crisp, clear 4K restoration of Kubrick’s 1968 classic sf film. Still a remarkable movie, and it holds up remarkably well.
The Shape of Water
A mute cleaning lady in a 1962 top-secret U.S. military lab begins a romance with the amphibious humanoid held captive for experiments there. Not as good as its most rapturous reviews, I thought, but worth a look.
I’d like to revisit that *Moebius *dick eating movie I went on about previously. In my attempt to be humorous, I gave it short shrift; it really is an excellent film despite it’s odd plot. The themes are much deeper than, “oh no I lost my penis,” it is beautifully filmed, directed and performed. The very fact that the entire movie is performed with no audible, verbal communication, through scenes of violence and rape as well as more subtle and tender scenes, makes it pretty remarkable.
If you can get past the weirdness of it, and you like arty movies, you really should give it a try.
I’ve been trying to keep up with *Unspooled *lately (it’s a podcast in which Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson review a different movie each week, chosen at random from the AFI Top 100 list). Last week I watched E.T. - I hadn’t watched it in a long time and to be honest, I watched it kind of distractedly, but it brought back the requisite memories. I remember being fascinated with California life as depicted in this and other films involving suburban California sprawl.
Last night I watched *High Noon *with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. Yep, it’s a good 'un. I don’t believe I’d ever watched it before - maybe a scene or two here or there. Impressive photography within a pretty standard oater. Well, above standard. Great score to keep the suspense up when required. I really was in the dark as to how the showdown would wind up, or even if there would be a showdown. I really enjoyed it.
I just finished watching another Old Horror Movie that I’d never seen – The Old Dark House. This one, at least, was from Universal. It was never included in the “Shock Theater” package of films released to syndication in the late 1950s-60s, so I never got to see it, although I saw plenty of stills from it in Famous Monsters of Filmland. Then it was declared a “lost film”, until it surfaced again, and has been restored. I was expecting much better things of this than of Doctor X and Mad Love. Besides being by Universal, it has a stellar cast – Boris Karloff (playing a hulking mute brutish butler – think “Lurch” without the charm --, so he reminds you of the Frankenstein monster), Raymond Massey in his first American film, Charles Laughton in his first American film. Ernest Thesiger (before he was Dr. Pretorius), a young Melvyn Douglas, and Gloria Stuart (eons before Titanic). The whole thing was directed by James Whale, who did Frankenstein and would go on to do Bride of Frankenstein. Shoulda been great.
Only it’s not. It’s the classic idea of strangers forced in to take shelter at the titular Old Dark House by a raging thunderstorm (to my knowledge, this is the first appearance of this Rocky Horror Show theme, but it might have appeared earlier). There’s the Sinister Butler, the foppish Master, his Shrewish Religious, condemning sister in the house. Later we learn that there’s the older than dirst patriarch in a bed upstairs, and also the Crazy Family Member Chained Up in the Attic. Among the wanderers we have the Young Couple, their Bachelor Friend, and (in a separate group) a nouveau riche English Sir and his chorus girl companion. It’s as if they wanted to get together as many clichers as possible to see what would happen.
Unfortunately, not much does. There are scenes that give us pairs of these characters interacting with each other. There’s a Dinner scene with everyone sitting together at table and trying to act normal. There are intimations that someone is crazy, or acts scary when they’re drunk, or they’re terrified of what’s upstairs. There are some gorgeous camera shots. There are some beautiful ones of reflections in warped mirrors, and they stole the best image from the Universal silent horror film The Cat and the Canary – the hallway with curtain being blown in by the wind. But there’s not much there there. There are a few unconvincing fight scenes and a lot of locked doors and much running around, but there’s nothing to tie it all together, no single theme, no Great Revelation. It’s a Tale Told by an Idiot, Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing.
Another film I saw has virtually disappeared. I heard nothing about it when it was released, and the reviews I’ve found of it panned it. I would never even have heard of it, had I not gone on a tour of the heavy cruiser USS Salem, which is tied up in Quincy, MA (Not Salem, MA). I learned that the engine room was used in the shooting of a film starring Chris Pine. That told me that it was a recent film, but I hadn’t heard of it. Months later, I found a copy being sold cheaply at a 7-11 and bought it.
The film is ** The Finest Hours**. It tells the true story of the Coast Guard rescue of the crew of the SS Pendleton, a crude carrier that broke in half in a storm off Nantucket in 1952. Amazingly, the film story takes few liberties with the true story (told in the book The Finest Hours: The True Story of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Most Daring Sea Rescue by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman, the b asis for the film). The reviewers objected to this by-the-numbers straightforward rescue story, and seemed to think that Chris Pine was just too model-pretty to be believable.
Pepper Mill and I found the story riveting. Chris Pine is great as the commander of the only (but inadequately equipped and manned) Coast Guard vessel to go to find the stricken ship (there were too many other disasters in that stormy night, including (unbelievably, but true) another crude carrier that also broke in half), but Casey Affleck pretty much steals the show as Ray Sybert, the engineer of the Pendleton who, as the highest-ranking officer on board what’s left of the ship (the ship’s officers were on the other half, which broke off and sank), leads the crew in saving themselves, despite the fact that most of them hate him, and half of them want to jump ship into the lifeboats. Sybert succeeds mainly through knowing more about the ship and its physical realities than anyone else, although he can take Julius-Caesar-like bridge-burning measures when necessary.
It’s a Disney film, so you know it’s going to succeed, and that most of them are going to make it, but if the reality was anything like the depiction, that end was by no means certain. )One of the real-life participants, upon seeing the film, reportedly said something like “I had no idea it was that dangerous.”) Damn the critics, I highly recommend this film. It sure beats the 1930s horror films I’ve seen recently.
Got some nice things to say about The Children Act with Emma Thompson and Stanley Tucci.
Good acting, good story. Actually, that would be “stories” as it is two interconnected tales in one.
Thompson is a family court judge married to Tucci and one of cases involves an almost-18 year-old Jehovah’s Witness refusing a transfusion. A fairly easy decision it would seem, esp. based on the first case shown in the movie, but Thompson gets a bit into it which leads to trouble later. So actually “the case” in the movie is done with fairly early. It’s the rest of the movie that gets interesting.
Fionn Whitehead plays the JW kid. There’s a bit of overdoing it going on there but I’m not sure if it’s the actor or the writing. (And “Fionn” is a male name? Contrast to Thompson’s character name: “Fiona”. Could have led to confusion on the set.)
Thomson is a gem, as she almost always is. She sings and (appears to) play the piano. Tucci doesn’t do a British accent and that’s fine.
Oh, and Jason Watkins as Thompsons clerk does a great job as a somewhat background character. Watch him carefully.
This is based on a novel by Ian McEwan who also wrote the screenplay. I think that explains why the story was (nicely) more involved. Turning it over to someone else would have resulted in a simpler, poorer, story.
Give it 4.5 Yeatses. (Yeati?)
Time for another edition of Jack’s Weird Movie Corner.
On Popcornflix, The Blackout (2013). Now you may think by the cover art alone that I was surfing around for a decent titty-flick - and you’d be right - but that’s not what I got. It’s about a rock band on the cusp of stardom, about to sign a big contract and go out on tour. The neurotic guitar player/songwriter is in the middle of losing his girlfriend, the drug-addled drummer is just trying to have a good time, the omnisexual singer just wants to fuck everyone and the trying hard to remain sober bass player is just hoping for one last shot. The problem is that they can’t find the contract; in fact they can’t remember anything about the night before. The only solution - because science - is to reinstitute a blackout to remember the blackout. A method proven valid in Beerfest.
After I realized it wasn’t your typical skin-flick, I was pleasantly surprised. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t going to win any awards but it’s pretty damn funny. The story holds up just enough to get in some decent gags and some legitimately funny lines. It stars no one I’ve ever heard of, but a lot who look familiar. And they’re all really funny. No really horrible drama school dropout stuff.
Think Airheads meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but on a shoestring budget.