Seven Movies I Recently Watched on TV

by Katie Bruggeman

Meatballs 4

Ho hum.  It’s your typical summer camp snoozefest, starring Corey Feldman as he food fights his way through the cafeteria and waterskis his way into the big-boobed nurse’s arms. The inevitable motocross race happens implausibly in some forest, and then someone jumps their motorbike over the lake and everyone is saved because somehow they won the camp back from the Big City corporation that’s going to turn it into a dog food factory and turn all of the campers into dog food.  I fell asleep halfway through.

One lousy star.

Star Wars

This seasoned classic is clunky and old-fashioned, like an old horse that is forced to drag carriages full of fat tourists around Central Park.  It just sort of plods along for a while, until some wacky creature or cyborg jumps out of the bushes, and then you laugh and laugh.  Or is that just me?  Anyway, this musty old robot drama is big on laughs and small on story.  The most scintillating situations occur between 2 Live Crew’s Luke Skywalker, some lady that taped cinnamon buns to her ears, and Hands Solo, a hunky bi-sexual bounty hunter that holds captive a hairy sex slave from another planet or something.  It’s the kind of smut that will send me right to bed, if you know what I mean.

Five stars!

Simon Birch

Simon Birch is a movie about some little creature that lives in the basement of Ashley Judd’s house, and, to her horror, she finds him rummaging around in her junk one day, and then he says some clever line and she decides that she loves him.  They get married and move into the woods and have a baby that they named Jessica, who fell into a well, never to be seen again.  Documentary.

Three stars.

Dancer in the Dark

Bjork is blind and sings about it.  Everything bad happens.  A cat dies.

One star.

The Beastmaster 2:  Beastmaster Returns

So, the thing about this movie is that you can’t drink liquor while watching it and you there can’t be any animals in the room.  My cousin Tony saw this shit when he was house sitting for a lady that had five ferrets, which is technically against most animal control ordinances.  Anyway, he’s sitting there, drinking a rum and coke or two, and he’s playing with the ferrets and shit like that. The Beastmaster 2:  Beastmaster Returns comes on USA, and he’s sort of angry at this point, because he gets just furious when he drinks any hard liquor, ESPECIALLY rum, and the movie gets him all riled up and the ferrets pick up on his weird, aggressive vibes, and then they freak out and attack him!  They bit him on the neck and the ankles, mainly.  Long story short, he killed all the ferrets with a butcher knife and then drove himself to the hospital.  He had to get a bunch of rabies shots.  Be careful with this movie.

Three stars.

Home Alone 4

Someone needs to call the Child Protection Agency on these people.  I know that having eight kids must be crazy, a lot of work, whatever, but you simply cannot keep leaving your youngest child in bus stations, shopping malls, foreign countries, whatever.  The fourth installment of this glorified public service announcement takes place at an Afghani terrorist training camp in 1982.  Kevin McAllister has wandered away from his family at an airport in Egypt and was lured with candy to a minivan full of dark men with turbans and bombs.  Kevin ends up blowing up a US embassy in Libya by the time they finally get around to tracking him down, and, in the last moments of the film, his mother runs desperately towards him as Special Forces blow him up with a grenade.  Directed by Sam Peckinpaw.

Four and a half stars.

Annie!

This was my favorite movie when I was a child, because the main character has red hair like me!  It’s about a little orphan girl and her mangy dog, after they’re sold into the white slave trade by some corrupt, drunken woman that lives on the outskirts of town.  Annie lands herself into the lucrative and strident arms of Daddy Warbucks, and she gets to tap dance around in a mansion, a movie theater, a swimming pool and the top of the Chrysler building!  There’s a also a huge Indian man that gives her opium one night and they cruise into a vibrant dreamscape, until he puts his hand up her dress and then snakes fly out of a basket and she runs out of the room, screaming.  Wait, maybe that was in Annie 2:  On the Rocks.  Or maybe it actually happened to me, on that Girl Scout retreat in third grade.  I can’t remember.  Anyway, it’s a good movie, and also a great Halloween costume when you’re a seven year old girl.

Five stars.