Future In Porn: Octo-Update

If you'll recall, back at the beginning of the month I made a post about reluctant new celebrity Nadya Suleman, a.k.a. Octomom, and the fact that if she ever needed money, she undoubtedly had a future in porn. Well, I may have a future in porn as well - as a talent scout. It seems that Wednesday, TMZ.com broke the story that Vivid Entertainment, the worlds foremost peddlers of sweet, sweet porn, offered Suleman a $1 Million contract to star in a movie for them. The big carrot, or dildo, they dangled in front of her was the offer of health insurance if she signed on as a contract girl. I guess a standard porn contract doesn't include free shots when you get burned. So if you're out there reading, Mr. Hirsch of Vivid Entertainment, I'm open to offers. I got lots of ideas.

The Great Red Hope

I've been a fan of Conan O'brien for many years, essentially since he came on the late night scene in 1993. I've always enjoyed his odd, self deprecating sense of humor, and despite the fact that many of the jokes on the show get used to extreme repetition, almost to the point of being as repetitive as David Letterman, his show has always managed to entertain me. There were two periods of the show that I consider the high points; between 1996 and 2000 when Andy Richter was still on the show (even Conan admits the first 3 years kinda sucked), and the short period during the writers strike in 2008. They were great for drastically different reasons. The writers strike era was a great, raw format that focused on ridiculous stunts and gimmicks, and some more personal and behind the scenes style segments. The 1996 - 2000 era was so great because Andy Richter and Conan seemed to have a great Carson/Ed McMahon vibe that never got old. So it was with quite a bit of excitement that I learned that Richter would be returning to Conan's side, sort of, when O'brien takes over on June 1st. The reports are that Richter will mostly be announcing and working with the staff on pre-recorded segments, but I have a feeling that it will inevitably lead to him taking a much more familiar role as time goes by. One can only hope.

Awesomely Bad: Transmorphers

Transmorphers. No, not Transformers. It wasn't a typo. And that's really the whole point. It's what they call a mockbuster. A low budget movie that's only intent is to trade of the name of similar, and much more well known movie. Transmorphers' distributor, The Asylum, have made a fairly successful business on mockbusters. Releasing titles such as The Pirates of Treasure Island, and The Da Vinci Treasure straight to video at approximately the same time as their top-tier counterparts are released in theaters. Whether their aim is to make blatantly bad movies with bottom of the barrel acting class cast outs and special effects that look like they were done as part of a tutorial that came with a freeware 3D package, or if they're just misunderstood auteurs is anyone's guess. Regardless, they are a treasure trove for bad movie lovers, even if most of them are just plain old crap.


I'm going to quote the official synopsis from the movie's website, because after watching it, it's really hard to tell what exactly they intended the plot to be, and what it actually ended up being. Here goes:

"A race of alien robots has conquered the Earth and forced humanity underground. After three hundred years of domination, a small group of humans develop a plan to defeat the mechanical invaders in the ultimate battle between man and machine."

Now what I actually got from watching the movie is this: Earth sends out a satellite with a love letter to a newly discovered planet. The robots of said planet feel slighted for no obvious reason and show up at Earth 5 years later, but no one really seems to notice until it's too late. All of a sudden it's 300 years later and humans, all 12 of them as far as I could tell, live in some underground hideout. There are hints at a broader governing body that is never really explained, but we're supposed to just go along with it whenever they get mentioned. They also allude to bunch of criminals frozen, Demolition Man style, even though I would think a group of renegade human resistance fighters might have better things to divert resources to than a complex cryogenic prison system, but I digress. The only person who can save the humans is a criminal who doesn't really seem to posses any special skills, is the ex-lover of the now lesbian commander of the resistance group, and happens to be the least worst actor of the bunch.

So now we have a thawed out criminal who brings together a mix of ass kicking girls that look like they should be an porn, but aren't - I checked, and goofy pseudo-tough guys who have a mission to capture a robot, reprogram it, and send it back to the mother ship, or mother-skyscraper to be accurate, and act as a Trojan horse. To add depth and complexity, all the members of this crack pot team of experts have some angsty high school relationship with each other that spirals into a few hokey girl fights, some lesbian tension, and an odd scientist/robot love affair. Most of the conversations and arguments take place in a weird hallway that seems to link every part of the underground base to everything else. It looks like it was lifted from one of the earlier episodes of Babylon 5 and filled up with a fog machine. And then they go off to fight poorly animated CG robots who, despite being from a far advanced civilization are clumsy, poor shots, and not very well designed as the resistance seems to be able to take them out pretty easily, even though they're losing the 300 year battle.

So Transmorphers doesn't really have a coherent, believable story. Neither did it's semi-namesake, Transformers, and it raked in over $300 Million domestic. The amazing thing is that director Leigh Scott and The Asylum make a better movie with a reported $250,00 than dud-mesiter Michael Bay did with $150 Million. Transmorphers even reportedly recouped it's production costs in less than three months. Transmorphers has a very endearing quality to it. It's acting class style of line delivery, including lines that seemed to have been filmed but no audio recorded, pulls off more laughs with the same kind of feel than Saturday Night Light or SCTV. The cheap, bargain basement, maybe even literally just a basement, sets and home grown special effects fit the movie better than the overwrought and no more believable CG of it's mainstream big brother Transformers. Now don't get me wrong, the movie is still an absolute turd, but it's the kind of turd that you have to show your friends because it looks like the Loch Ness monster or just smells so bad that you can't suffer alone.

Final Verdict: Transmorphers does everything wrong in the right way. It has a hilariously thin story with so many problems and holes that you will leave you with no shortage of fodder as you yell at the Actors Studio dropouts. The dialogue, even when delivered semi-believably and without slip ups, is about as soap opera dramatic as it gets. And if nothing else, it's still better than Transformers. 4/5 - Plenty of cheese to keep you entertained.
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Weekly Reamer: 2/20/09

Well folks, it's that time of the week again. No, it's not time for another bailout plan, nor is it time for Bill O'Reilly to try and be a Cassandra and prophecise America's impending Socialist future. It's not even time for your grandmothers weekly enema. Nope, it's time for the Weekly Reamer.

And just what have we learned this week? Animals are still on the downward trend, this time it's just a bad idea to be a monkey, real or cartoon. Hackers are having a minor field day. And submarines don't seem to obey traffic laws. But this week it all really boils down to the new cluster fuck that is California. Suffering from a $42 Billion deficit, California is just fucked. No, not JUST fucked...they're fucking fucked. It looks like people may not have to worry about the state falling off into the ocean, because if things keep up there won't be anyone there to worry about.

Reamer Value: Medium-High - 42,000,000 Reamers. (sadly we invested most of our Reamers in Pesos and Madoff's scheme, so the $42B isn't even close to 42B Reamers)

Breaking News: Nobody Watches G4!

First, read the article on Variety that explains why I would even bother with a post about G4 in the first place. Now, enjoy the show.

It's the classic tale of meteoric rise and subsequent cataclysmic fall.It's the age old scenario; two useless channels merge, the shows from one channel get completely axed negating the merger, not-really-but-sorta-kinda-Frankenstein channel emerges, and still no one watches. The kind of story that Behind the Music would have killed for. It's a twisted and convoluted lineage almost as confusing at the family tree of the House of Plantagenet. It's the sordid, salacious, and even lecherous tale of G4, the channel dedicated to to video games that no one gives a shit about.


Let's hop into our little cardboard transmogrification box and go way back, way way back, into the year 1998. This is the year that Columbus first discovered the internet. In 1998 there were two little companies that had little shows that focused on computers and the internet. Their was CNET, with its little shows CNET Central, The Web, and The Edge. And then their was ZDTV, which I honestly don't have a clue what shows they had other than the eponymous ZDTV. ZDTV got bought out and became TechTV when Ziff-Davis (the ZD in ZDTV) got snagged by CNET. Tech TV had a bunch of shows that ran the gamut from a computer how-to show, The Screen Savers, to other shit nobody watched cause it was pretty much only The Screen Savers. On occasion two or three people watched Robot Wars.

Without a damn thing worth watching, TechTV entered a period of flux where shows came on, sucked, and went off. They tried a 9-hour live show, ingeniously titled TechLive, which sucked, and got cut into smaller and smaller itterations until getting canceled. Then in 2004 some genius at the Comcast owned G4 Media thought "Hey! This channel is absolute crap. Let's buy it!" and they did. They briefly called the mutant channel G4techTV, effectively lined all the shows and hosts up and shot them one by one, smiling a bit more each time they pulled the trigger, and dropped the techTV moniker and pretty much ended up with exactly what they started with.

G4's origins are a little more straight forward. They came on the air in 2002 showing nothing but a never ending game of pong for a few weeks, and then launched a bunch of shows that either don't exist anymore, or have changed drastically. They whored themselves out pretty early, selling product placement into their shows. After the TechTV/G4 merger, G4 also did away with a majority of their programming and began to adopt the MTV concept of being a channel for gamers, but not really showing a whole lot of gaming shows. Leaving G4 to pretty much be a show dedicated to endless reruns of Ninja Warrior, interupted only by the occasional syndicated show (like the high class Cheaters) and reruns of Lost and Heroes. Leaving the only gaming shows to be Xplay and Attack of the Show, and really people only give a shit about Attack of the Show, and even then if Olivia Munn takes the day off I don't even watch that. Now with the newly announced cutbacks of the only game related shows on the network, the only thing that is likely to be left by the end of the year game related will be the commercials.
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Rapid Review: Call of Duty: World at War

I figured there was no better way to celebrate Valentines Day, that sweet, sensitive, romantic holiday that brings out the best and happiest in all of us - especially the single ones, than to kill a bunch of Nazi bastards, and kamikaze SOB's. So I picked up a copy of Call of Duty: World at War for the Xbox 360 and went back, yet again, into the breach of WWII shooters. The short of it is that it's basically everything you loved or hated about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare with that nice World War II shine. Short-short single player, well honed and known multiplayer mechanics, and not a damn thing new. It's a solid but so-so 6 out 10.

If you want some specifics, hit the jump and we'll go into detail.


The single player is short, really short. It took me just a little bit longer to finish Modern Warfare than this. Just like the previous, it jumps back and forth between multiple characters. In this case you play a U.S. Marine Private in the Pacific theater and a Soviet Red Army Private in the European theater. The Pacific missions were the more enjoyable of the two, but neither provided a whole lot of meat. The story was pretty weak and jumped around from one scenario to another, often being many years in between the end of one characters mission and their next. The bad guys were pretty much retarded. When they ducked, they rarely ducked to the point you couldn't still get a head shot, and when you picked one off, they were replaced seconds later. Instead you gained ground by just charging from one cover point to the next, supposedly driving them back when your comrades charged with you.

The Soviet missions made me want to pound my balls with the controller on so many occasions. There was a maddening sniper scenario that pitted you against a Nazi sharpshooter hiding in a building across the road. It pretty much boiled down to luck because you had to find, anticipate, and then steady your aim at just the right moment to even have a chance of hitting something other than the wall. Then just to make things more fun, they threw in a second sniper scenario, only this time you had a counter-sniper, machine gun fire, a running and ducking target, and a getaway car. I got pissed off and was trying to take out my anger by killing the getaway driver and ACCIDENTALLY killed my mark. If you still had a TV left after the sniper scenarios you were treated to more bombed out cities where you had to run in the direction of the people trying to kill you to make any progress. Sadly, the most fun I had in the Soviet missions was a tank driving mission where you got to drive around blowing shit up, but had to be carefully because the other tanks and anti-tank guns had amazing aim, vision, and maybe a bit of bullshit cheating.

The more fun of the two story lines, and the only reason I put up with the Soviet side, was when you got to go back to the jungle and kill some more Japanese guys hiding up on top of palm trees. Luckily there weren't and ridiculous Marine sniper missions, but probably the low point of that end of the game was it's vehicle mission in which you ran back and forth between mounted guns in an an airplane. I really enjoyed the one that was in Modern Warfare, but this one was boring and provided absolutely no challenge. Once back in the jungles and armed with a flame thrower, I was feeling much happier. I usually don't get much out of flame throwers and bazookas in these games, but the flame thrower was actually really useful for clearing out those gunner nests and little tunnels full of ambushing Japs.

Now I need to make a quick admission here before you take too much credence in my review. I don't really get much out of multi-player beyond co-op. I'll play a few rounds of whatever they call deathmatch and whatever flavor of domination or capture the flag is currently hot, but beyond that I don't spend much time sitting around letting 12 year old kids kick my ass and teabag me. That said, the multiplayer is pretty much the same as Modern Warfare, just with Nazi's and WWII weapons. Once again you get experience points, and for achievement whores there are a couple gamer points with your name on them. Otherwise, if you played CoD: Modern Warfare, you've essentially played World at War...in so many ways.

Oddly enough, the real shining point of this game is a completely useless hidden game mode that you unlock once you beat the game (on any difficulty). It's a little Survival mission where you're in a wreck of a building and you have to fight your way through wave after wave of zombies. You get points for killing each zombie, and a bonus for head shots, and then in between rounds you can do repairs on the barricades that help keep the zombies out, buy new weapons (all of which are the standard game weapons), and clear out rubble in the building to gain access to new areas. The novelty of this wears off rather quick though, especially since it's really no rival to Left 4 Dead and doesn't make the rest of the game worth $60.

Final Verdict: Unless you're just a softy for WWII shooters and feel an uncontrollable urge to collect every Call of Duty game, I'd stick with playing Modern Warfare for multiplayer, or just about any other shooter out right now for your single player fix. This one doesn't break the streak of weak Treyarch developed CoD games. Again, it's a 6 out of 10, but it's a pretty weak 6.
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Awesomely Bad: Gymkata

The year is 1985 and the world needs a hero, a gymnastics hero. There's valuable land in the tiny, non-existent, country of Parmistan, which is run by a guy that looks like a body double for Mel Brooks, that the U.S. government wants to build a Star Wars defense system base on. The only way to secure that land is to win "The Game", a deadly survival course that no foreigner, including our hero's father, has ever won. Enter champion gymnast John Cabot who, with a rare and deadly blend of gymnastic and ninja skills known as gymkata and a sweet mullet, will make the dangerous trip to Parmistan, win The Game, and make the world a better place...somehow. And that's how the action-fest known as Gymkata starts.


There was a lot of hype for me as I went into the movie. I had seen it on Maxim's 50 Worst Movies of All Time list, and with it earning an admirable #17 on the list I was really expecting some world-class cheese. However, nearly an hour into the movie and it was really only kinda boring. It didn't seem to be the kind of movie that gets a Worst nod from anyone, and then it happened. The Game started and things started getting weird. Things like a 3 minute slow motion scene, which was in slow-mo for absolutely no damn reason, of our hero John Cabot running away from a town full of insane transvestite cannibals. Or how about an absolutely awesome scene in the center of crazy town where there JUST HAPPENS to be an ancient stone pommel horse in which our Gymkata Master hops on to aid in his masterful ass kicking. The movie finally started living up to it's full, awful potential. I'm not sure I would ever add this movie to my personal Worst Ever list, because honestly it's not that bad, but it is awesomely bad. Awesomely bad enough to garner enough cult following to win a Warner Bros./Amazon poll back in 2006 where Gymkata won the right to finally be released on DVD.

It's really sad that this movie was Kurt Thomas', playing the role of John Cabot, only foray into the acting world. It seems to fit his bad luck though, as he was a world champion gold medalist but never got to be in the Olympics because President Carter boycotted the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics where Thomas was supposed to represent the US on the gymnastics team. Equally sad was that fact that 12 years later in 1992 he completely failed to make the Olympic team when he tried to stage a comeback. Another sad surprise is that this mediocre movie is directed by the same man who did the classic kung-fu movies Enter the Dragon and Game of Death, Robert Clouse. And lets just top it off with another surprise, this is actually based on a novel called The Terrible Game. Obviously the book wasn't that great either because I can find absolutely nothing on the book other than a few used book auctions.

And now I should quickly introduce the Awesomely Bad rating system before I give my final verdict. The rating basically breaks down into an "out of 5" scale.
1/5 - which means this is just the bad kind of bad. There's no awesome in sight.
2/5 - it's got some cheese, probably had potential for greatness, but ends up being just a mediocre movie.
3/5 - Now we're starting to get somewhere. A movie of this caliber starts to show real camp and cheese, but doesn't quite make it.
4/5 - The cheese is starting to get a bit gooey, the laughs are coming more from inadequacy than one-liners. There's no shame in being a 4.
5/5 = The Cheese de la Cheese, the Awesomely Bad King of the Moment, a true gem and work of art.

Final Verdict: While Gymkata does pack in a lot of cheese in the last half of the movie, you have to get through a lot of boring and uninteresting setup before you get to any pay dirt, and it just doesn't seem like the payoff is worth the windup. So I give Gymkata a 3/5 - its got the cheese, but just not enough.
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Weekly Reamer : 2/13/09

What has this week shown us? What lessons can we take away from the last week? What was the biggest fuck up of the last seven days? If nothing else we've learned that the entire state of New York is a bad place to be airborne. How about the fact that Washington D.C. is a great place to be if you don't like paying taxes? Maybe we should just be happy that we're not a cute little animal.

Despite all the quality fodder for this weeks Reamer, the winner is an easy choice for me. Without a doubt the Weekly Reamer is President Obama. It's not because he can't seem to keep a cabinet nominee, or that he had to put up a hard fight to pass his stimulus bill, or that he hypnotized me into voting for him. Nope, it's because his first primetime press conference preempted Chuck. That's right, I'm pissed off at the most powerful man in the nation because he ruined my Monday night TV viewing. The problem is that I'm a big fan of Chuck. I really like Chuck. I think Chuck is hilarious. Press conferences, however, I am not a big fan of, nor do I really like them, or find them particularly hilarious. I find them even less appealing when they interrupt things that I find much more appealing. So it is with all that in mind that I honor our 44th president, Barack H. Obama, as the Reamer of the week.

Reamer Value: Low - 15,277 Reamers.

Awesomely Bad: An Introduction

It's well into awards season and a lot of fuss is being made about the top movies of the year. Every year, however, countless crappy movies get overlooked and ignored. Just because a movie makes you cringe at the thought of watching it doesn't mean it is unworthy of attention. Not all bad movies, however, are created equal. Some movies are just bad. There's really nothing spectacular about them. They don't rank amongst the worst, and there's really no good reason to watch it. These are the kinds of movies like Cobra, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, and Junior that were a staple of Sunday afternoon matinee movies you'd see on your local networks. The kinds of movies that were sadly better than most of the other crap on TV on a Sunday afternoon. The kinds of movies that, during your childhood, signified that the weekend was truly coming to an end and all the fun was now over.


The truly bad movies are a sort of rare art. It's hard to make a straight up, pure piece of shit of a movie. Not everyone can be a Uwe Boll or Ed Wood so it really takes an auteur of shit, a shiteur, to pull off some of the worst pieces of cinema to grace screens around the world like Catwoman, Postal, or Alexander. As such, I won't spend too much time on the truly bad, especially since just about anyone can spot a real shitter. The best and most fun kind of bad movies are the awesomely bad ones. They're movies that end up being unintentionally hilarious despite, or because of, how bad they are. They're movies with plot holes so glaring it's impossible to understand how they ever got greenlit, or acting so limp and unbelievable that it becomes comedic, or action and effects so cheap that they seem more like gags than explosions.

Starting on Monday, and continuing each Monday for the foreseeable future, I will review a choice pick of truly awesome awfulness. These movies will be cult classics, foreign gems, and low budget masterpieces that are suitable for group viewing with your own Mystery Science Theater treatment. Our first foray into the world of cheese will be the 1985 martial arts masterpiece Gymkata. Stay tuned...
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What's In A Name?

I've always enjoyed things that take advantage of my repository of useless knowledge. No single entity seems to be better at that than pub trivia. It's rarely about winning or losing, though the free bar tab comes in handy sometimes, and even though it's in a bar it's not even always about the beer. No, what pub trivia is really all about is who can come up with the funniest or most clever team name. The best are usually puns or turns of phrase that could be innocent, but are actually quite filthy.


It always seems that the same people that come up with great team names, are the same people that come up with the witty names for porn movies. Pokeahotass, The Soporno's, Ally McFeel. They're equally at home in either setting. They all porn names, and they're all names of trivia teams I've been a part of. So here are a list of some of my favorite team names that I've seen, heard, or been a part of, in no particular order.

Hold Still, I'm Trying to be Friendly
My Girlfriend Can't Fight But You Should See Her Box
The Betty Ford All-Stars
Purple Headed Yogurt Slingers
The Beer Knurd (pronounced nerd, but also happens to be drunk backwards)
I'm Not A Gynaecologist But I'll Take A Look
Cunning Linguists
Beating Chastards
Dyslexic Brians
Children Of The Cornhole
Lawrence Of A Labia
Jam Out With Your Clam Out (was an all girls team)
Rock Out With Your Cock Out (an all guys team in response to the above)
Touched By An Uncle

Have some suggestions? Throw 'em in!
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Barack Obama, Master Hypnotist

I'm beginning to think I may have been fooled. I may have been a witless mark, one of millions, in the greatest con in American history. What is that con? Well, it's the election of our new President. Yes, I voted for Obama, and after watching tonight's press conference I think I may have been hypnotized into doing it. Why do I say that? As I was watching Obama field questions from the members of the press-elite and listening to him go on a 10 minutes speech about jobs, the economy, and Elkhart, Indiana I found myself at the end having no idea what had been asked. It wasn't until the end of the promptly started and precisely an hour press conference that I realized he had ignored half of the questions he had been asked. And this is why I think the entire campaign was one big experiment in suggestion, subliminal messages, and good old chicanery.

...ignore the man behind the curtain...

rssHugger

In the process of trying to publicize this blog and make it into something more than just an obscure and unknown repository of my own delusions and ramblimations I have had to submit to a lot of feed trackers and blog listings. One of those is rssHugger. While most of the other sites have allowed me to be added with absolutely no interaction, or just a simple linkback (which I've hidden in the html so it's not obtrusive and annoying). But rssHugger has one of the oddest stipulations; to get added you have to review their site. Which, by the way, is what this is. I don't like it. I can't review a service that I've yet to be able to use because I've yet to be added because I've yet to review a service I've yet to use. If you followed that sentence, then you realize a Catch-22 when you see one. This in essence, isn't even a review, but a preview. You can't review something you've never viewed in the first place...well unless you're one of the many "journalists" out there who have decided that integrity means make shit up. So my review? Umm..to be determined. There...now add my damn site.

You've Got A Future In Porn

The last week has been swamped by news, speculations, and even an odd interview with Meredith Vieira being abit of a bitch, all pertaining to the new mother of octuplets, dubbed Octomom, Nadya Suleman. It wasn't until the last few days that her identity had become clear, and she finally did an interview with The Today Show. When I first saw her, only one thing went through my mind. It wasn't that she was very brave, that she was the ultimate mom, that she was an idiot, or that she was just seeking glory. Nope. My immediate thought was "You've got a future in porn."

I was pretty surprised when I saw the first picture of her because she wasn't some wide hipped, mule faced, freak show. She was actually kinda cute, and when she loses that baby fat she could even be hot. And then I saw those lips, and her fate was sealed. This single, unemployed, still living at home with mom, mother of 14 has nothing to worry about because she has a future in porn. Maybe she will get that $2 Million she asked for to sit with Oprah, maybe she will get promotional support from Huggies and Infamil, maybe she will be a burden to society and mooch off the government. But that's not because she didn't have an alternative. If she strikes while the iron is hot, maybe she can get a few months of lactating porn in there and earn a few extra bucks. I'm just saying...

Headset Hotties

I really don't know what to say about this one. It seems ridiculous, but then I found myself wasting about 10 minutes browsing through it, so it must be just ridiculous enough for me. It's Headset Hotties, a blog dedicated to pointing out all the stock photos of girls wearing headsets. These images are usually on cheap canned websites and/or the useless customer service websites of some of you favorite, or least favorite, corporate entities.