Daily Archives: March 18, 2011

MOVIES

Craptastic Movie Reviews! – DIEner (Get it?)

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If there is anything I like more than a crappy horror movie, it’s a crappy horror movie title that plays on words. For example, Santa’s Slay portrays a man dressed as Santa, slaying people. Or The Gingerdead Man who is a dead killer resurrected as a gingerbread man who continues to make people dead.

With the movie I am reviewing aptly named DIEner, I expected no less than a diner where people die. Little did I know I was about to be served with zombies as well. Synopsis follows below:

Ken (Josh Grote) is a wandering and unassuming serial killer who enters a forsaken and empty diner during the graveyard shift. After a long conversation with the diner’s lone waitress Rose, (Maria Olsen) Ken kills her and promptly delivers the same fate to the diner’s cook Fred (Jorge Montalvo). As Ken cleans up the bloody mess and deposits Rose and Fred in the walk-in freezer, company arrives. A young, unhappy married couple Rob (Parker Quinn) and Kathy (Liesel Kopp) stop by the diner, only to be followed by the arrival of Sheriff Duke Purdett (Larry Purtell). Ken now finds himself in the middle of a rousing game of cat and mouse which he manages well until the unthinkable happens. Back from the dead, Rose and Fred emerge from the freezer and start walking around! Once an unflappable serial killer, Ken now holds the young couple and wounded sheriff captive, trying frantically to escape the zombie predators!

I was expecting a very low-budget zombie horror film that tried to be a horror movie but failed. It was instead a terrible horror/comedy(?) with no zombies showing up until about 20 minutes in. I suppose I should have watched the trailer first.

Much of the 75-minute piece of refuse was taken up by the first 23 minutes introducing us to characters we couldn’t give a dead moose’s last shit about. I loved how the first five minutes we had to hear the horse-gummed waitress tell the killer her life story before he slow-mo kills her, and owns the cowardly cook with a knife throw to the back. We are also served a couple of nearly five-minute long flashback scenes trying to make us somehow sympathetic to the comic serial killer. I might add, the little serial killer in the flashback is approximately 10 years old and wearing the exact same shirt as the 30 something,  grown up a serial killer. Great wardrobe department.

Ken – Our Killer. “No, I’m serious. I think we should duct tape this Zombie to the kitchen floor.”

When the zombies do show up, they are a complete joke. The three principle characters were able to dodge around them like kids playing freeze tag in elementary school. The young couple, Rob, and Kathy, decide to just go right along with the serial killer’s brilliant plan of detaining the zombies. Tying one to a flimsy coat rack, and duct taping the other one to the floor the greasy kitchen floor. You know, as opposed to trying to kill said zombies, or even just simply leaving.

The actors had about as much life in them as the dead mouse that my cat dropped off at the doorstep this morning. And the soundtrack- oh the glorious soundtrack! – organ music. We were also treated to some tunes during the flashbacks; they sounded like a monkey on LSD trying to play a guitar while kicking bells across the ground and wind chimes flailing about. At this point, Grizzly Park was Academy material compared to this scum sucking piece of garbage paste.

The being said, I highly recommend it to anyone looking to ruin their life for 75 minutes.

  • Bad acting (a given)
  • Bad Music
  • Not many zombies until the end
  • Nothing funny
  • Nothing remotely entertaining

For those reasons I award DIEner with a score of Zero Grizzlies, and may God have mercy on the souls of those who created it.

– Craptastic Bonus Fun Fact: the word diener is derived from the German leichendiener, which literally means corpse servant. Coincidence or DIEner writer genius? I’d put money on coincidence.

TV

Best month in TV ever??

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I’m sure by now everyone has heard about that train wreck Charlie Sheen, and his firing from Dr Kronner’s favorite show Two and a Half Men, placing said show, and its future in limbo. Hopefully it never recovers and is lost forever.

While Charlie Sheen was “winning”, and getting paid close to two million per episode of complete crap, NBC had yet to renew two of television’s best shows. As of Wednesday, the fate of Parks and Recreation and Community were still up in the air, as both shows had yet to be renewed for next season.

Yesterday however, NBC pulled their heads out of their Peacock’s ass, and green lit another season of life for some of the only network shows worth watching. Let’s hope these shows find some better ratings next season.

So in the last month, Two and A Half Men has become doomed, and now NBC has renewed their 2 most under rated shows. That’s good stuff. Now here’s hoping that reality TV suddenly explodes as well.

Also in case anyone cares it looks as though Outsourced and Perfect Couples weren’t so lucky. With any luck they replace one of those with a spin-off about Ron Swanson, Ahbed, and Troy spin-off, where Ron becomes their butler like on Seinfeld‘s show within the show…

– B. VanGorder

MOVIES

Craptastic Movie Reviews! – Grizzly Park

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First off, let’s not associate any name resemblance between this rancid dog turd of a movie and our beloved Grizzly Bomb.

One is awesome, one is not. Grizzly Bomb is beautiful; Grizzly Park is ugly as sin. Understood? Good, then let’s start, shall we?

*Spoilers like a mother effer – because you shouldn’t care*

Ok, so here is the official synopsis:

Eight troubled young adults are sentenced to a week of community service in a remote California forest range called ‘Grizzly Park’. Under the supervision of the stalwart Ranger Bob, the group is given the opportunity to seek redemption on their journey through the forest. While Ranger Bob seeks to provide guidance to the young adults, an escaped serial killer with an insatiable blood-lust has also found his way into the park with every intention of disposing anyone in his path. But he is not the only predator in these woods; a nine foot tall, thousand pound ravenous Grizzly bear has also set his sights on stalking the group and attacking them one by one, leaving the group to face their ultimate challenge…survival.

Some nights when I’m writing I like to turn on a random, bad horror movie on NetFlix.

Well, tonight it was Grizzly Park and damn was it bad. I usually like to have a laugh during B movies, but this one couldn’t get one chuckle out of me. The most famous person in the movie was Glenn Morshower who starred in minor roles in both Transformer movies, and also played ‘Secret Service Agent Aaron Pierce’ on 24. In Grizzly Park, he plays ‘Park Ranger Bob’, the man in charge of overseeing the group of the young imbeciles who are doing community service. These morons are responsible for misdemeanors ranging from computer hacking to prostitution.

For some integral-to-the-plot reason, they are doing their community service picking up trash in a very remote forest where no other campers or hikers are to be found…so there is a lot of trash.

There is also an incredibly unnecessary subplot about an escaped serial killer being on the loose in the woods. Funny thing is, he doesn’t kill one of the community service kids because he instead tries to have a knife fight with a killer bear. Brilliant,  brilliant man. The bear wins big time eating the serial killer’s face off, much to my delight. The rest of the movie was a ‘paint by numbers’, one-by-one kill fest.

All of the offenders? Eaten by the bear. However, four of them were actually killed off-screen, which needless to say, was quite disappointing.

Actually, take that back, there was one huge twist; the first girl to die was run down and killed…by a wolf. A fricking wolf. I thought this was Grizzly Park?

Other notable kills included…

  •  A guy wearing a sweet bear suit getting the top half of his head knocked off by a real bear.
  • Girl getting the bottom half of her body completely devoured.
  • A guy being pulled out a window by the bear, resulting in the girls trying to pull him back in coming away with his severed arms.
“Excuse me good Sir, can you spare a cup of sugar?”

Probably the most unexpected way of someone dying occurred in the last minutes of the film: One of the girls, Bebe, was questioned in a brilliantly acted scene by the guys if her boobs were real or silicone. She awesomely replies with, “Silly cone?”, and insults women everywhere with her stupidity. So after talking to someone on the phone about how everyone was dead and she didn’t give a rat’s ass or learn anything, she walks outside to find the bear waiting. The bear takes a swat at her hitting her chest, and a bloody “Silly cone” implant flies and hits a tree. She, of course, dies from that.

Thank you Grizzly Park, because the whole movie my only questions were “Are Bebe’s boobs real?” and “Why am I watching this movie?”.

The very last scene reveals that the bear killing everyone is, in fact, anger Bob’s pet and buddy. He takes criminals out to pick trash in the woods hoping they will change, and if they don’t he has his effing bear kill them. CLASSIC! Now I must go vomit.

If this sounds awesome, maybe I described it wrong. I’m not saying don’t watch the movie, by all means, do, you may get plenty more out of it than I did. But you’ve been warned.

I understand what they were aiming for, but they just didn’t get there. This movie gets a well deserved 0.5 of 5 on the Grizzly scale. It earns this dismal score for the uninspired agony it put me through, and the most off-screen deaths I’ve seen in a horror movie! Scandal!