B Monkey

B Monkey (1999) Just when I had given up all hope of finding another gem in the B-movie pile, along came the appropriately titled B movie, B Monkey. Starring the daughter of Euro-horror director extraordinaire Dario Argento (Asia Argento) and Rupert Everett, the film is about B (for Beatrice) an aggressive, sex crazed, armed robber who is looking for a change in her life. In comes a mild mannered school teacher and off we go. There is quite a bit of role reversal in their relationship and you rarely see a movie where the lead male has trouble with sex due to feeling it isn’t right after the first date. Shot in London, Paris, and Cambria, the photography is excellent, the jazzy score perfect for the mood of the movie and you will discover that you are actually watching a cleverly hidden love story. As their relationship develops, it will come as no surprise that her past steps in to cause ripples in their course.

Well acted, with good character development, this was a pleasant surprise. If you want to watch a good movie that will never be shown in the Atlanta area, try and find B Monkey in the DVD racks for an excellent afternoon’s viewing. The movie is rated R for: All of Asia, multiple aardvarking, knee shots, exploding cars, driving on the left, pencil in the cheek, missing fingers, and for excessive piano destruction.

Scream Bloody Murder

Scream Bloody Murder (2003) Run; get out of the video store if you see this one. Promoted as a comedy satire on slasher movies, it has the worst qualities of both types….no slash, no dash. A bunch of nubile females from Cherry Mount Academy (that was about as funny as it got) are enroute to a school dance when they get lost in the desert and run out of gas. A wrecker shows up and the driver is wearing a hockey mask (great laughs for you Jason fans………not) and tows them to a junk yard where the rest of the movie expires along with most of the cast. This is a really low budget flick and generally will put you to sleep pretty fast. There is just not much positive you can say about this movie other than to say the student body is well formed but the entire cast appears to be playing characters with Intelligence Deficit Syndrome (IDS). The most messy but illogical death scene is when one of the students has an air pressure line taped to her mouth and she explodes. The movie is rated R for: sexual situations, gore, short skirts, numbskull characters, coma inducing plot, and for the idiot who thinks taping an air line with duct tape will cause you to explode.

Detour

Detour (2002) Warning…Warning…this is a dead teenager movie! None of the characters are very engaging and one of them you will wish had an early death after listening to him spout off in some form of urban-wannabe language. Unfortunately, he is one of the few survivors and you have to listen to him rant for the whole movie. I just couldn’t tell what the heck he was saying outside of the standard mix of four letter words. Yo, seems to be his word of choice in most of his soliloquies. In addition, the girls are really dumb but at least wear dangerously short shorts at times.

Don’t bother thinking about the plot too much; you’ve seen it hundreds of times before. This time our group of teens attends a ‘rave’ in the desert using an RV as a base. They then go in search of a rumored patch of peyote somewhere out in the desert not realizing there are loonies in the boonies. They run into a bunch of CRAP (Cannibalistic Residents And Pinheads) in the desert who have trouble verbalizing their desires but are real good with sharp implements. Soon the teeners are reduced in number but still dogmatically stay with the RV which conveniently gets stuck near CRAP headquarters. The teens fight back and eventually the CRAP hits the fan and a couple teens get away but who really cares. Luckily, the RV becomes unstuck when the movie ends, a little late for most of the cast. The movie is rated R for: extreme violence, brief ingénudity, really short shorts, characters with walnut sized brains (both CRAP and victims), and for the white rapper wanna-be, the most annoying character I’ve seen in a long time.