The Screengrab : fascination

Unwatchable Recap: 71-80

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

It’s time for part three of the Unwatchable Halftime Report. As you must know by now, I am watching and reviewing every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Last week I hit #51, which means I’m halfway home. Next week we’ll get started on the 50 worst movies, but I’m putting that off as long as I possibly can so that we can enjoy the fruits of my labor so far. We’ve been tackling the Unwatchables to date in groups of ten, and today it’s time for # 71-80.

80. The Smokers. “They smoke. They smoke a lot. They smoke the cigarettes and they smoke the pot. Also, they have boy troubles.”

79. Anus Magillicutty. “When it was over, I found myself actively wishing harm on those who made it, any loved ones who encouraged them to make it, and their employers (should they exist) who wittingly or not subsidized its making.”

78. The Quick and the Undead. “What we have here is your basic meat-and-potatoes (but mostly meat) post-apocalyptic zombie western.”

77. BloodRayne 2: Deliverance. “Sure, in her leather cowgirl outfit she looks like she should be pouring Jager shots and dancing on the bar at Coyote Ugly, but she’s handy with swords and guns that fire silver bullets rubbed in garlic and blessed with holy water. Her showdown with Billy the Kid is one for the ages, assuming the ages were between 9 and 9:30 last night.”

76. Kickboxer 3: The Art of War. “The high point of Kickboxer 3 arrives with a montage of wise Xian’s efforts to heal Sloane in time for the fight. He collects various roots and mouse tails and the venom from a snake to prepare a healing elixir, then smears Sloane’s body with some sort of fungal poultice. Hey, it works!”

75. The Last Sign. “I’m immediately suspicious of any movie that opens with a shitload of logos for companies I’ve never heard of. This makes me think what I’m about to watch is more of a tax shelter than a motion picture.”

74. You Got Served. “Can David and Elgin squash their beef in time to bring home the big prize? And did it really, really embarrass me to type the phrase ‘squash their beef’ just now? The answer to both questions is the same.”

73. Fascination. “The first liaison between Scott and Kelly takes place on a slanted corrugated tin roof in a photogenic rainstorm that comes out of nowhere. Just when you’re thinking, ‘Gee, looks like fun, but also a good way to fall to your death,’ Scott and Kelly slip and nearly fall to their deaths.”

72. Meet the Spartans. “Really, it’s not like I’m looking for some explanation for Britney Spears being in ancient Sparta. I realize it’s all part of the free-wheeling zaniness. But you can’t just have her shaving her head and flashing her girl parts. We’ve already seen that.”

71. Gigli. “J-Lo is also stuck with a sub-Tarantino soliloquy on the subtleties of ripping someone’s eyeball out of its socket. It’s almost harder to listen to than ‘Jenny From the Block’.”

81-90
91-100

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 24-30, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

My fellow Americans, I am here to humbly accept your nomination of Recapper of the Week in Screengrab! I think we all know it is time for a change. No longer can we sit by, complacent, while the screenwriter of Showgirls turns to Jesus. No longer can we allow Robert Downey Jr. to badmouth The Dark Knight. No longer can we stand by while good men like Phil Nugent and Andrew Osborne face-off over Judd Apatow and Pineapple Express!

No, my friends, this is a time for unity. A time for us to gather together and marvel at the World’s Greatest Animated Shorts – Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five! We must respect the Screengrab Fall Preview Picks of Andrew Osborne and Leonard Pierce, as different as they may be, as equal planks in our broad platform.

Some will tell you Guy Ritchie is caught up in the zeitgeist of slaggery. Some will insist that Fascination and Meet the Spartans are actually watchable movies. Some will wonder when Robert Zemeckis went bad, or why Terrence Howard would record an album, or under what circumstances David Lynch met Devo.

We don’t have all the answers! But we do know that That Guy is Bob Hoskins! We do know that Sukiyaki Western Django is some fucked-up shit! We do know that An American Carol is coming out whether we like it or not! And if we all stick together we can survive anything, even RocknRolla or a sequel to The Strangers !

God bless the Screengrab, and let’s make it a Wet Hot American Summer!

Unwatchable #73: “Fascination”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

It’s time for another Unwatchable substitution. As regular readers of this column may recall, occasionally there is an entry on the IMDb Bottom 100 that I am unable to lay my eyes on. Usually it’s a foreign film despised in its own country but unknown and unavailable in mine. That’s the case with number 73 on the list – that is, the list I’m working from, which I downloaded back in April – the 2004 German film Daniel - Der Zauberer. I do wish I could have found this one, the plot of which is described thusly on IMDb: “Evil assassins want to kill Daniel Kublbock, the third runner up for the German Idols.” Alas, my efforts fell short, but we can at least enjoy the trailer together:

Anyway, in the event a film from my version of the list is unavailable, I go to the current version of the Bottom 100 list and select the first available entry that does not appear on my version. In this case it’s the erotic thriller Fascination, which many of you may have missed, given its $9,018 opening weekend in January 2005. No decimal points are missing there – the movie took in a little over nine grand on its way to a robust final tally of $16,066. It’s become a hacky staple of film criticism to note that most erotic thrillers are neither erotic nor thrilling, but hackery is definitely called for in this case. Fascination plays like something Joe Eszterhas would come up with if he was writing for Skinemax instead of Jesus Christ.

Wealthy Patrick Doherty (David Naughton) lives with wife Maureen (Jacqueline Bisset) on an exotic island paradise. It’s an idyllic existence until the day he goes for a swim and gashes his head open on a reef. Son Scott (played by a plank of driftwood called Adam Garcia) returns for Patrick’s funeral, and learns he and his mother have inherited the estate. Only a few weeks later, Maureen returns from a cruise engaged to the Euro-sleazy Oliver Vance (Stuart Wilson). Scott isn’t thrilled with this development, but he is happy to meet Vance’s daughter Kelly (Alice Evans), a British Gina Gershon with whom he is soon having acrobatic sex.

Oh, the sex. Your Screengrab pals recently participated in the Nerve/IFC 50 Worst Sex Scenes in Cinema list, and if only one of us had seen Fascination at the time, it would have qualified twice over. The first liaison between Scott and Kelly takes place on a slanted corrugated tin roof in a photogenic rainstorm that comes out of nowhere. Just when you’re thinking, “Gee, looks like fun, but also a good way to fall to your death,” Scott and Kelly slip and nearly fall to their deaths. Their next session takes a place alongside Showgirls and The Color of Night in the pantheon of laughable pool sex, as Kelly nearly drowns Scott between her legs while entertaining visions of an underwater car accident. Hey kids, how about taking that action somewhere safer, like a bedroom or the deck of an aircraft carrier? There’s also some icky father-daughter stuff between Vance and Kelly, but most of that is mercifully left to our imagination.

Well, so much for the eroticism – onto the thrills. It turns out that Scott’s saintly pop Patrick had a Chappaquiddick in his past, and as becomes clear long before it is tortuously revealed onscreen, the secretary who drowned in his car was Kelly’s mother. It also happens that Patrick’s death was no accident, as a toxicology report confirms he had Maureen’s sleep medication in his system. So who is behind Patrick’s death? Maureen? Vance? Kelly? All three?

To find out the truth, you have to get through the scene where Vance tries to blow up Maureen in a cabin and gets himself trapped inside. Then the scene where Kelly goes to his hospital bed and kills him by disconnecting his breathing tube. Then the scene where Scott goes to his hospital room to find out the truth about Kelly, and the nurse shows up just in time to catch him with the disconnected tube in his hands, and the cops arrest him for murder. Then the scene where Kelly confesses that she’s not really Vance’s daughter and Scott is, for some reason, released from custody. I did make it through all these scenes, and was rewarded with Kelly and Scott enjoying one more sweaty fuck, this one immediately following a car crash she causes. Honestly, this dumbass deserves her.

Previously on Unwatchable:
74. You Got Served
75. The Last Sign
76. Kickboxer 3: The Art of War
77. BloodRayne 2: Deliverance
78. The Quick and the Undead