#doug e. doug

[retroness-is-fabulous]

[mannytoodope]

Sanka: Hey! Hey! What you doin'? Derice: This is what the Swiss do to psyche themselves up! Sanka They also make them little pocket knives, too, but I don't see you doing that!

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

Rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence, brief sexuality and language

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/03/review-eight-legged-freaks-2002.html>

Score: 3 out of 5

Eight Legged Freaks is a self-conscious throwback to '50s monster movies that does the job it sets out to do perhaps a little too well. It's the kind of movie you'd imagine American International Pictures themselves (the Blumhouse of the '50s and '60s) would've made back then if they had a big budget and modern CGI technology to spare, a film that gets right up in your face with all manner of icky arachnid goodness that it takes every opportunity it can to throw at the screen, and even though the effects may be dated now, it still works in the context of the lighthearted B-movie that this movie is trying to be. It's a movie where, as gross as it often is, going for an R rating probably would've hurt the campy tone it was going for. Its throwback to old monster movie tropes is a warts-and-all one, admittedly, especially where its paper-thin characters are concerned, such that it starts to wear out its welcome by the end and could've stood to be a bit shorter. That said, it's never not a fun movie, especially if you're not normally into horror, and it's the kind of film that I can easily throw on in the background to improve my mood.

Set in the struggling mining town of Perfection, Arizona, the film opens with an accident involving a truck carrying toxic waste accidentally dumping a barrel of the stuff into a pond that happens to be located right next to the home of a man named Joshua who runs an exotic spider farm. He starts feeding his spiders insects that he sourced from the pond, and before long the spiders start growing to enormous size, eating Joshua and eventually threatening the town, forcing its residents to start banding together for survival. I could go into more detail on the characters, but most of them fall into stock, one-note archetypes and exist mainly to supply the jokes and the yucks, elevated chiefly by the film's surprisingly solid cast. David Arquette's oddly disaffected performance as Chris, the drifter whose father owned the now-shuttered mines and returns to town in order to reopen them, manages to work with the tone the movie is going for, feeling like he doesn't wanna be in this town to begin with and wondering what the hell he got himself into by returning to the dump he grew up in. Kari Wuhrer makes for a compelling action hero as Sam, the hot sheriff who instructs her teenage daughter Ashley (played by a young Scarlett Johansson) how to deal with pervy boys and looks like a badass slaughtering giant spiders throughout the film. Doug E. Doug got some of the funniest moments in the movie as Harlan, a conspiracy radio host who believes that aliens are invading the town. Every one of the actors here knew that they were in a comedy first and a horror movie second, and so they played it broad and had fun with the roles. There are various subplots concerning things like the town's corrupt mayor and his financial schemes, the mayor's douchebag son Bret, and Sam's nerdy son Mike whose interest in spiders winds up saving the day, and they all go in exactly the directions you think, none of them really having much impact on the story but all of them doing their part to make me laugh.

The movie was perhaps a bit too long for its own good, especially in the third act. Normally, this is the part where a movie like this is supposed to "get good" as we have giant monsters running around terrorizing the town, and to the film's credit, the effects still hold up in their own weird way. You can easily tell what's CGI at a glance, but in a movie where the spiders are played as much for a laugh as anything else, especially with the chattering sound they constantly make that makes it sound like they're constantly giggling, it only added to the "live-action cartoon" feel of the movie. The problem is, there are only so many ways you can show people getting merked by giant spiders before they all start to blend together, and the third act is thoroughly devoted to throwing non-stop monster mayhem at the screen even after it started to run out of ideas on that front. There are admittedly a lot of cool spider scenes in this movie, from giant leaping spiders snatching young punks off of dirt bikes to people getting spun up in webs to a tarantula the size of a truck flipping a trailer to a hilarious, Looney Tunes-style fight between a spider and a cat, and the humans themselves also get some good licks in, but towards the end, the film seemed to settle into a routine of just spiders jumping onto people. It was here where the threadbare characters really started to hurt the film. If I had more investment in the people getting killed and fighting to survive, I might have cared more, but eventually, I was just watching a special effects showcase. The poster prominently advertises that this movie is from Dean Devlin, one of the producers and writers of Independence Day and the 1998 American Godzilla adaptation, and while he otherwise had no creative involvement, I did feel that influence in a way that the marketing team probably didn't intend.

The Bottom Line

Eight Legged Freaks is a great movie with which to introduce somebody young or squeamish to horror, especially monster movies. It's shallow and doesn't have much to offer beyond a good cast, a great sense of humor, and a whole lot of CGI spider mayhem without a lot of graphic violence. Overall, it's a fun throwback to old-school monster movies.

[camyfilms]

SHARK TALE 2004

It's true, it's true! And the other thing is, my sister had a baby, and I took it over after she passed away, and the baby lost all its legs and arms and now it's just a stump, but I take care of it with my wife and... and it's growing and it's fairly happy... and it's difficult because I'm working a second shift at the factory to put food on the table, but all the love that I see in that little guy's face it makes it worth it in the end. True story.

[eruptedinlight]

These two.

[todayinhiphophistory]

Today in Hip Hop History:

Doug E. Fresh was born September 17, 1966

[soupy-sez]

N.W.A. in 1989, © Doug R. Burrows

[comicarthistory]

King Conan #10 cover. 1981. Art by Ernie Chan.

[retroness-is-fabulous]

[mannytoodope]

Sanka: Ready?

Junior: Ready.

Yul: Ready.

Sanka:

 Feel the rhythm: Feel the ride - Get on Up - It's Bobsled time. Cool Runnings!!

[tv-moments]

Presumed Innocent

Season 1, “The Burden”

Director: Greg Yaitanes

DoP: Doug Emmett

[realnyhiphop101]

Doug E. Fresh & The Get Fresh Crew "All The Way To Heaven" Era

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Cool Runnings (1993)

Cool Runnings (1993)

Rated PG for mild language and brief violence

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/04/review-cool-runnings-1993.html>

Score: 3 out of 5

Based (very loosely) on the true story of the Jamaican bobsled team that competed at the 1988 Winter Olympics, Cool Runnings is, together with The Mighty Ducks and Air Bud, one of the first movies most people think of when they think of Disney's live-action offerings in the '90s, especially their sports movies. It takes the rules of a real-life sport and, in service to making a family comedy, asks how many giggles it can get out of the rules and quirks of that sport, typically by dropping in a weird twist like, say, a dog playing basketball, or in this case, a bunch of guys from a tropical island nation competing in a quintessential cold-weather sporting event. It's a charming movie that still holds up thirty years later, thanks to a very solid cast led by Leon Robinson and the late John Candy in his final film released during his lifetime, as well as a lighthearted sense of humor that knows it's corny and doesn't care. It's kinda shallow and makes mincemeat of the actual history in order to manufacture drama for its heroes to overcome (there's a reason why "Disneyfication" has been a joke for decades now), but it's a fun, funny sports movie with an interesting hook and some great moments to back it up.

Our protagonists Derice Bannock, Yul Brenner (no relation to the actor), Junior Bevin, and Sanka Coffie are four Jamaican guys who, thanks to some comic mishaps, wind up forming the first Jamaican Olympic bobsled team. Specifically, Derice, Yul, and Junior all dreamed of becoming track stars, but during tryouts for the Olympic national team, Junior tripped and took down Derice and Yul with him, sabotaging all their hopes for the next four years. Derice's friend Sanka, meanwhile, is the best pushcart derby driver in Jamaica, and don't you forget it. Derice, the son of the Olympic champion Ben Bannock, still wants to follow in his father's footsteps, and when he sees a photo of his late father with the former American bobsledder Irving "Irv" Blitzer, who has since retired to Jamaica, he gets the idea to recruit Sanka to form a bobsled team to compete in the upcoming winter games in Calgary, with help from a reluctant Irv (who only agrees because he knew Derice's father) to show them the ropes. Yul and Junior join soon after in order to round out the four-man team, as everybody else at the tryout was scared off by Irv telling them in graphic detail how dangerous the sport was. Up in Calgary, the Jamaicans have to contend with not only the harsh winter weather but also the skepticism and hostility of the other teams and the officials wondering what these four tropical dudes are doing here, while Irv has to grapple with the circumstances that forced him to retire from bobsledding in disgrace back in 1972, circumstances that do nothing to lessen the suspicion that the rest of the Olympic Village (not least of all his former American teammates) has of him and his team.

The Jamaicans all fit into recognizable "family movie hero" archetypes. Derice is the straightforward hero, the team leader out on the track who wants to live up to his father's legacy. Junior, meanwhile, is a rich kid who, as his name suggests, lives in the shadow of his own father, a proud self-made man who has planned out a life for him as an investment banker in America, and wants to forge his own destiny for himself. Yul is the tough guy who blames Junior for dashing his dream of becoming a runner and has to learn how to work as part of a team with the rest of the group. Finally, Sanka is the comic relief, about as stereotypical a "Jamaican dreadlocked rasta" as you can get without getting into the kinds of drug humor that, in the '90s especially, would've bumped this movie's rating past a PG. Their individual arcs are all fairly predictable once you realize what each of their conflicts is, as is their conflict as a group about proving themselves in the top-flight world of winter sports, in which the racial subtext is only explicitly stated in one line but is heavily alluded to in how the Jamaicans are seen as outsiders in the Winter Olympics. (A lot of this was largely invented for the movie, as in real life the Jamaicans were actually welcomed by the other teams simply for having what it took to get there in the first place, not least of all by the East German team, who in this film are presented as antagonists because, well, it was the early '90s and we were still celebrating the fall of communism.) Irv, meanwhile, has to confront how his past obsession with winning at all costs set him up for his greatest failure in a cheating scandal that took his teammates down with him, with Derice especially showing him how there can be dignity in walking away as something other than Number One.

It's all pretty basic afterschool special stuff that you'd expect from Disney, but I can't deny that this movie does it well, thanks largely to how good the cast is. Leon Robinson as Derice, Doug E. Doug as Sanka, Rawle D. Lewis as Junior, and Malik Yoba as Yul made the four bobsledders feel disjointed at the start of the film, a divided team that you feel is about to walk into a meat grinder in Calgary, making their growing camaraderie over the course of the film feel earned until they end the film looking and feeling like champions. John Candy, meanwhile, brought both his brand of humor and a surprising amount of gravitas to Irv, a former champion who failed his team once before and, in the course of training the Jamaicans, learns a thing or two from them along the way. The film's sense of humor was a good-natured mix of physical/slapstick comedy and dad jokes, from the Jamaicans' first reaction to Canadian winter weather at the airport to a running gag where Derice asks Sanka if he's still alive ("nah, man"), and much of it works thanks to how game the entire cast is for all of it. I watched this movie with my father on my birthday as a nostalgic throwback, to my childhood for me and to his "dad years" for him, and even without any children around, this movie did a very good job of making me feel like a kid again.

The Bottom Line

Cool Runnings is quintessential '90s Disney, a bit too shallow for me to call it one of their best films but still a solid, workmanlike family sports comedy that's elevated by its cast. Whether you're an aging, nostalgic millennial like me, a parent with kids of your own, or both, I recommend checking it out.

[deathvortexofdeath]

the first time Eiffel hears Lovelace’s voice he doesnt know what he’s hearing. Her voice echoes throughout the station on repeat. It’s her last outgoing message and she has no idea if it’ll even reach anyone. She’s sending it to someone she hopes never hears it. She’s warning of a terrible danger.

the (almost) last time that Lovelace hears Eiffel’s voice she doesn’t know what shes hearing at first. Its muffled through a door. Eiffel is sending his last outgoing message to Earth. He desperately hopes it will be received. He’s reminding the recipient that he loves them.

[ourladyofomega]

Hip-Hop Culture turns 51 today.

[todayinhiphophistory]

Today in Hip Hop History:

Doug E. Fresh was born September 17, 1966