Last Five Movies

Been a while since I did one of these.

Wedding Crashers (2005)
You'd think a movie with Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn and Christopher Walken would be some seriously funny shit, wouldn't you? I mean, these guys don't even have to do anything and they're funny. That's why it's astounding that Wedding Crashers isn't funny. Oh, it is funny at times, but, just when it's like five seconds away from becoming absolutely fucking hilarious, that dude who played Will on Alias beats someone up, or one of the girls speaks, and the movie comes to a screeching halt. Seriously, get rid of all the excess plot, and just let these guys riff. Now that would be a movie.

The Hunger (1983)
An absolute trainwreck of a movie that is essential viewing for two reasons: Dick Smith's awesome old-age makeup on David Bowie, and the lesbian sex scene between Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. There's a reason why no one knew who Tony Scott was before he directed Top Gun, and this is it.

Premature Burial (1962)
It's funny that Roger Corman is seen as a hack director. Let's take a movie like, let's say, Guess Who. Probably had a budget of about $40 million, has boring, uninspired sets, a screenplay probably written by a preschooler, and probably took a month or two to film. Then, you look at Corman's Premature Burial, which had a budget of less than $100,000, has beautiful Victorian sets, a story by Edgar Allen Poe, and took 10 days to film. And it's the better movie by at least a factor of 10,000,000. This guy was literally throwing together films that are better than 95% of the movies made today. Hack, my ass; this guy's a fucking genius.

The Wolf Man (1941)
One of the All-Time Classic Horror Movies. Also the movie that launched Lon Chaney Jr.'s attempt to take over his father's moniker of "The Man of 1000 Faces." (The fact that Lon Jr. had no talent whatsoever kinda killed that, but who else can say they played Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, and the Wolf Man in their career?) A great film, with an (at the time) all-star cast, and some of the funniest transformation scenes ever.

Wolf Man is great, but the winner is...

Used Cars (1980)
Bob Zemeckis' first venture into "big budget" filmmaking, this is the movie that Wedding Crashers should've been. Sure, there's a plot here, but not enough to get in the way of these guys being the biggest assholes in the used car business. Mean spirited and played from the hip, this is one of the funniest movies of the early 80's. Gerrit Graham coming inches from being hit by a car and not breaking character for a second is one of the classic bits in film history. Check it out. "Fifty bucks never killed anybody."